Did Romans Have a Banking System?

It is AD 60 (or maybe 61; it's not entirely clear, but stop trying to put me off; this is meant to be dramatic.)

Standing tall before an immense crowd of angry Britons, maybe as many as a quarter of a million of them, is a woman. She is tall. She has long, fire-red, curly hair. She is strong and noble. And she is hopping mad. Her name is Boudica. Or Boudicca. But definitely not Boadecia. If you're Welsh and it's a few hundred years later, she is Buddug. Anyway. Stop it. Back to the drama.

The target of her anger are the jack-booted (well, jack-sandaled) thugs of the Roman Empire. They have stomped all over her lands. They have crushed those who dared to stand before them, forced others into capitulation and made allies with men with weaker spines than hers.

Pretty soon, she will march her people - all of them - on the Romans, and the devastation she will wreak upon them will be terrifying. The Roman Empire itself will quake at the mention of her name, whatever it is, and tens of thousands - hundreds of thousands - of Roman scum will die in hideous ways at their hands. OK, some of them will be Romano-British and wonder what the hell they did wrong, but let's not dwell on that.

Her name will ring down the ages. Queen Victoria will pose as her, 2000 or so years in the future. Statutes will be built to her in London, a city she is about to burn to the ground and whose population she is about to slaughter (yeah, I don't get it either). Plays will be written about her. Books, TV shows, movies. She will become the symbol of the avenging warrior queen. She will become the symbol of the underdog fighting back against tyranny and brutality. Her cause will be noble and righteous. And what was the thing that drove her to this point? The thing that stirred her and her people to come this close to driving the hated Romans out of Britain once and forever?

She owed them money. And she didn't want to pay it back.

Wait a minute. That's not what we learned in school. What about the violated daughters and the rampaging, evil Romans who desecrated the tombs of her ancestors and had her flogged? Not really in the picture, because I'm telling you the version of events as relayed by Cassius Dio. If you want the other stuff, you have to read Tacitus, who tells the story via an entirely different narrative. You might think that ancient history is simply an annalistic roll-call of events, but what you're instead reading is a narrative, often one with a set of biases that need careful unravelling. Tacitus' narrative needs bad Romans against whom the noble but savage Britons can rise up, and good Romans (like his future father-in-law, Julius Agricola, who was there) to come and save the day.

Cassius Dio, on the other hand, doesn't need these elements in his version of events, so he simply looked up what happened in the official records, read a bit of Tacitus, and decided the whole thing was about money.

Money was a factor. Boudica's husband, Prasutagus, had been a client king of the Roman state, and as part of the little protection racket that kept him in power, he borrowed vast amounts of money from the Romans, specifically that old rogue Seneca, Nero's mentor, on the expectation that when he died, the Romans would be given his lands and all their money back.

Boudica didn't have it.

This doesn't mean that all the vile things the Romans did, as described by Tacitus, never happened, of course, just that he plays down the money trouble side, and Cassius Dio plays it up. There is truth in both their version of events. Either way, Boudica and all of her followers end up getting absolutely slaughtered by a Roman force who is vastly numerically inferior to hers (outnumbered maybe 25-1 if you believe the more lurid details) but infinitely superior in terms of tactics and training. It was a catastrophic defeat in which, essentially, she got everyone killed.

But it does raise the question of how the Romans loaned money. Although Seneca was a senator and operated off the shoulder of the emperor himself, he loaned unrepayable amounts of money as a private citizen. That doesn't mean that Seneca dipped into his own pocket to finance all of the loans, but rather that he acted as an agent for them and gathered the money from other sources as well as his own. Prasutagus didn't borrow from the Roman state, or from 'banks', he borrowed it all (or was given loans he didn't really want - another narrative) from individuals. This question, alongside a reader enquiry about how it all worked, leads us to ask the question "Did the Romans Have a Banking System?"

To address whether the Ancient Romans had a banking system, we must begin with clear criteria for what constitutes a bank. Contemporary banking is defined by three primary functions: the safekeeping of deposits, the issuance of loans, and the payment or accrual of interest on those deposits or loans. To a lesser degree, we might also consider the ability to transfer or manage funds on behalf of others through instruments such as promissory notes or recorded accounts.

The three pillars of a modern banking system—centralised deposit safekeeping, interest-bearing accounts, and loan issuance—are not merely commercial conveniences but institutional pillars that imply regulatory oversight, trust networks, and legal standardisation. We must remain cautious in applying these retrospectively. The mere existence of moneylending does not constitute a banking system unless we can verify, through primary material, the fulfilment of these three functional roles.

Let us now examine Roman financial actors and institutions through that lens.

The Romans had a class of professional money-handlers known as argentarii, whose title derives from argentum, Latin for silver. Their activities are attested archaeologically, epigraphically, and literarily, and they constitute the closest analogue to modern bankers in Rome.

In Pompeii, a series of wax tablets recovered from the tabernae argentariae (shops of the argentarii) reveal complex transactions involving loans, repayments, and the maintenance of customer accounts. The Tabulae Pompeianae Sulpiciorum, unearthed from the House of Caecilius Jucundus (CIL IV.3340–3349), provide records of payments made to various parties, some as intermediaries in property transactions. These demonstrate that argentarii kept written accounts and acted as legal witnesses and escrow agents. However, there is no conclusive evidence that they held deposits for safekeeping in the way modern banks do; rather, they recorded financial dealings, held funds temporarily during sales, and sometimes issued short-term credit.

Cicero refers to these agents in several works. In In Verrem (2.1.55), he describes how argentarii facilitated sales through public auctions and recorded prices and names of buyers, sellers, and guarantors. These were public brokers rather than secure custodians. What remains ambiguous is whether argentarii kept long-term deposits that accrued interest. Without archaeological or epigraphic proof of such interest-bearing savings accounts, we cannot affirm this role.

The mensarii were a separate but related category. These were public bankers appointed in times of financial crisis, often by the Senate. Livy (42.1) describes their role during economic emergencies, such as 216 BC, when Rome appointed quinqueviri mensarii to stabilise the economy after the disaster at Cannae. Their principal duty was to reorganise debts and make emergency loans, sometimes using public funds. The Tabula Heracleensis, a bronze inscription dating to the first century BC, refers to legal frameworks governing such financial actors and outlines their legal obligations (CIL I².593). It includes language relating to the settlement of debts and the role of public officials in enforcing them. However, no portion of the text suggests that the mensarii held permanent deposits or paid interest, only that they offered credit and enforced repayment.

Moreover, Suetonius notes in Divus Julius 42 (Suetonius, AD 121) that Julius Caesar, during his reforms, addressed widespread indebtedness by cancelling interest and allowing repayment of principal based on pre-war land values. This reflects the ubiquity of credit and debt in the late Republic but also confirms that interest rates, while present, were subject to political manipulation. Still, Suetonius does not claim that interest accrued on deposits held by institutions like argentarii—only on loans.

Military forts functioned as informal banks for soldiers. Roman legionaries were paid a regular wage (stipendium), and evidence from the Vindolanda tablets suggests that these payments could be saved or requested in advance. The tablets (Tab. Vindol. II 180, II 343) refer to payments and requests for money from officers to soldiers, including requests to “send me the denarii you owe,” and the record of loans and expenditures on necessities.

These tablets show that records of financial transactions existed within the fort and that at least literate officers kept accounts. Yet nothing in these documents supports the idea that there were centralised deposit accounts held by the military or that these sums earned interest. The Roman army was extremely bureaucratised, and it is not unlikely that some officers held funds for their troops. But that is a fiduciary arrangement, not a banking function. No archaeology from Vindolanda or other forts has revealed infrastructure for secure deposit-taking or interest accrual beyond having a safe place or strongroom where money, alongside other valuables, was kept. This, of course, then suggests that there were people in charge of keeping this money, but these are treasurers rather than 'bankers' in any sense.

Private moneylenders—faeneratores—were widespread and often despised. Their role is abundantly attested in Cicero’s writings. In De Officiis (2.89), he ranks professions by moral worth and declares:

"Of all the means of making money, none is better than agriculture... none worse than usury."

What Cicero is suggesting when he talks about 'agriculture' is not some straw-chewing country farmer but people like him, who owned vast villas that sat at the centre of an economic system based on agriculture. To be a "gentleman farmer" is seen as the finest way for an elite, like a senator, to make money, something akin to an Earl or a Lord with a vast country estate and a palatial mansion in the middle of it all. By contrast, handling other people's money, regardless of how profitable it might have been, was seen as a despicable job. So much so that people who engaged in the profession might be seen to have dirty hands from the very act of touching the money they dealt in.

In one of the gloriously catty exchanges between the future emperor Augustus and his enemies, in which they tried to belittle each other's ancestry, Cassius of Parma mocked Augustus, calling him, incorrectly, the grandson of both a baker and a moneylender as well:

"Your mother was a lump of dough from a grubby bakery in Aricia, which a moneylender from Nerulum kneaded into shape with fingers stained from filthy coins."

When Jesus famously rages against the moneylenders in the Temple (Matthew 21. 12-13), it's often portrayed as him being angry at a capitalist system, and whilst there is an element of that, one of the main reasons he is tossing the moneylenders out is that they are seen as such uncouth and debased people.

People like Cicero (and Seneca, as we saw earlier) are perfectly willing to loan money and even make a little money by doing so, but charging interest is not the motivating factor for doing so. Loaning money is a way of influencing people or funding factions, ideas and movements that one might see as beneficial to oneself in the long term. One might expect the money to be repaid at some point, or one might not, but profit is not the driving factor in making the loan.

This reflects not only elite disdain for lending at interest but also the social visibility of individuals who profited from loans. These were not institutions; they operated privately and often harshly, foreclosing on debtors and seizing property. The term usura refers to interest, and such practices were legal but frequently criticised, especially when the rates exceeded what was considered fair (as per the Lex Genucia de feneratione, 342 BC, which attempted to curb excessive interest).

Yet again, faeneratores meet only one of the three banking criteria: they issued loans. They did not receive deposits from others for safekeeping, nor is there archaeological or epigraphic proof that they operated accounts on behalf of third parties. In fact, the very lack of institutional continuity meant that Rome never developed a centralised lending and deposit institution akin to later medieval banks.

One area where the Romans demonstrated sophistication was in the development of financial instruments—contracts, IOUs, and transactional records. The Pompeian wax tablets again provide a window into this. Several tablets found in the ruins of Pompeii include records of loans (mutua), receipts (accepti), and acknowledgements of debt (nomina). These documents include parties’ names, amounts lent, dates, and sometimes collateral conditions.

One example (P. Sulpicius CIL IV.3340) shows a record of 1,000 sesterces lent to a freedman, with repayment to occur by a fixed date. While these function as promissory notes, they were bilateral and not institutionally standardised or transferable in the way modern cheques or bills of exchange are. No part of the transaction involves an institution acting as a middleman—these were private arrangements, recorded and sometimes witnessed by argentarii, but not stored or honoured through any “bank.”

The House of Lucius Caecilius Jucundus in Pompeii yields additional evidence. The family’s archives (CIL IV.3341–3350) show how payments were made via agents and recorded formally, but even here, the presence of a written record does not imply the existence of a bank. These were commercial records, not account balances stored with an institution.

Based on available primary evidence, the Roman world did not possess a banking system that fulfilled all three modern criteria. While loans were common, often at interest, these were issued by individuals (faeneratores) or intermediary agents (argentarii), not by formal institutions that accepted deposits or paid interest on held funds.

Argentarii acted as brokers, scribes, and financial facilitators. They recorded and witnessed transactions, sometimes offering short-term credit, but there is no primary source showing they held long-term deposits for clients that earned interest. The mensarii, as public debt managers, responded to crises but did not operate year-round as deposit banks. Military savings were kept centrally, and while soldiers might delay receiving their stipendium, this was not the result of stored deposits earning compound interest.

Rome had financial sophistication but not a banking system in the institutionalised sense. There were promissory instruments, credit networks, and public financial actors, but the lack of centralised deposit holding, standardised interest-bearing accounts, or fund transfer mechanisms means we must conclude that Rome fell short of modern banking.

What Rome did have was a system of credit-based trust, enforced by law and often adjudicated in courts or public fora. Financial documentation from Pompeii and Vindolanda confirms a literate, transactional culture. But the evidence stops short of showing anything like the proto-banking houses of Renaissance Florence, let alone a regulated financial sector.

Ultimately, of course, a bank was somewhere safe to put one’s money, and when it came to that, the solution, as archaeologists will attest, was simply to dig a hole in a field somewhere and bury it.

References and Further Reading

• Cicero. De Officiis

• Cicero. In Verrem

• Suetonius. Divus Julius 42, Divus Augustus 4

• Livy. Ab Urbe Condita 42.1

• Tabula Heracleensis (CIL I².593).

• Pompeian Wax Tablets (CIL IV.3340–3350).

• Vindolanda Tablets (Tab. Vindol. II 180, II 343).

• Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) volumes cited accordingly.

• The New Testament, Matthew 21. 12-13