The Baroness Mone-ing about allegations of fraud and bribery no doubt thinks everyone ‘has it in for me’. They do indeed. So would the ancients: it was standard practice to tar Roman merchants with infamia, a reputation that did them no good at all.

The root of the problem for the ancient traders was the saying that ‘Profits in trade can be made only by another’s loss’. It was Aristotle who discussed how this came about. He argued that barter was a transaction that could be seen to be equal, i.e. did not involve profit, but when money came into the situation, everything changed, and transactions became unequal, involving profit for one and loss for another. Cicero regarded as vulgar those little people who bought produce wholesale and retailed it at once ‘because the only way they can make profits is with a great deal of lying’. On the other hand, Cicero did acknowledge that those who imported large quantities of produce worldwide and sold it on honestly had something to be said for them – but then he was just protecting the reputation of wealthy senators, who were not supposed to trade, but did so though second parties (mostly slaves).

As a result of this inbred hostility – one governor blamed the ‘impulsive greed of some’ as his reason for fixing fair prices – traders craved a reputation as honest men, as their funerary inscriptions illustrate. Onesimus, ‘a seller for many years on the Appian way, was beyond all others a very honest man whose reputation is eternal’; his wife added: ‘He was a most worthy and deserving man.’ Praecilius was a banker, ‘a man of wonderfully good faith who always told the truth, courteous and charitable to everyone’. The slave Vitalis, who died aged 16, asked passing travellers to whom he gave short measure to forgive him ‘because I only wanted to enrich my father’, i.e. he did not profit.

In a community that mistrusted, but still needed, their enterprise, traders knew that ‘a good reputation is better than Money’ and ‘impossible to restore once lost’. Infamia, then, for Baroness Mone.