Like do our grocery essentials really differ enough to justify that everyone take their own car to a grocery store? Like I thought during the pandemic there should be centralized food deliveries, but in retrospect there should just be centralized food deliveries.
Rome introduced the grain subsidy in 123 BC, which evolved into a grain dole as the urban poor became a larger population (as they were forced off their farms by slave plantations) and the Senate realized that a food riot could potentially get them all killed.
No no, you see, bread and circuses were a bad thing. The people should have been starved or enslaved into useful labor. This is why Rome fell. Second Century Romans went soft.
Ignore the 200 more years of Rome in the west and the 1000 years of Byzantium.
It just wasn't the same after this, tho
It wasn't the same after a lot of things.