Note 9 — Chapter I · THE FUNCTIONS OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE

If the discovery had then been made that bits of paper could be used as a medium of giving mobility to capital, there would have been a Stock Exchange at Rome eleven centuries before Christ. M. Edmond Guillard’s study of the subject shows that the argentarii (bankers) were then doing business at the imperial city, and that in addition to their central offices they had established branch offices at the Forum, where they gathered daily at a specified hour, together with the merchants, manufacturers, and capitalists, carrying on a business of money-changing in a public market that was, in its essentials, similar to our public financial markets of to-day (“Les Banquiers Atheniens et Romains, trapézites et argentarii,” Paris, 1875 Guillaumin). As the business was introduced into Rome by freed Greek slaves, it is perhaps safe to say that the practice of dealing in public money markets is in reality of still earlier origin. Plautus alludes to the crowd of merchants and bankers in the public square, and many chroniclers record the fact that at the time of Appius Claudius and Publius Sevilius, that is to say, five centuries before Christ, there was a public market in Rome known as the Assembly of Merchants (Collegium mercatorum).