Alimenta

[7] According to the French historian Paul Petit, the alimenta should be seen as part of a set of measures aimed towards the economic recovery of Italy.

[8] Finley thinks that the scheme's chief aim was the artificial bolstering of the political weight of Italy, as seen, for example, in the stricture — heartily praised by Pliny — laid down by Trajan that ordered all senators, even when from the provinces, to have at least a third of their landed estates in Italian territory, as it was "unseemly [...] that [they] should treat Rome and Italy not as their native land, but as a mere inn or lodging house".

The senator Pliny had endowed his city of Comum a perpetual and heritable right to an annual levy (vectigal) of thirty thousand sestertii on one of his estates.

Trajan did likewise, but since "willingness is a slippery commodity", Finley suspects that, in order to ensure Italian landowners' acceptance of the burden of borrowing from the alimenta fund, some "moral" pressure was exerted.

[17] In short, the scheme was so limited in scope that it could not have fulfilled a coherent economic or demographic purpose — it was directed, not towards the poor, but to the community (in this case, the Italian cities) as a whole.

Roman prefect Titus Flavius Postumius Quietus was the last known official in charge of the Alimenta in 271 AD, during the reign of Aurelian.