Meaning & Analysis
In Rome—taken as the seat of supreme power—everything can be bought; nothing is exempt from sale if money is offered.
Insights
Systemic corruption
Portrays the capital as a market where offices, judgments, and favors have prices, indicting a civic order in which wealth eclipses merit and law.
Commodification of the sacred
Extends beyond goods to values—honor, justice, virtue—suggesting that even what should be priceless is treated as merchandise.
Realpolitik cynicism
Offers a hard-nosed rule of action: in great cities and courts, money moves more surely than arguments or ideals, so actors conform to cash logic.
Metonym of empire
‘Rome’ stands for centralized bureaucracy—imperial or ecclesiastical—where access is scarce and brokerage thrives; the proverb critiques power concentrated enough to monetize gateways.
Latin sententia
The proverb echoes the tag Omnia venalia Romae—‘all things are for sale at Rome’—circulating in sermons and humanist collections as a moral snapshot of venality dressed in classical brevity.
Twin with money’s dominion
It sits beside ‘All things are obedient to money’: one names the marketplace (Rome), the other the master (money). Together they frame a worldview where price disciplines conduct and institutions.
Satire’s target
Moralists wield the line as a satirical whip: by making ‘Rome’ the emblem of sale, they dramatize how patronage, bribery, and sale of offices deform justice into traffic.
Boundary-work of value
The harsh universal—‘all things’—provokes rebuttal: communities insist that some goods must resist pricing (truth, verdicts, bodies). The proverb’s very excess invites the drawing of nonmarket boundaries.
Psychology of incentives
By assuming price governs behavior, the saying anticipates incentive-driven models of action; it warns that when money saturates a system, prosocial motives atrophy and transactional habits harden.
Rhetorical Devices
Hyperbole
The sweep of ‘all things’ overstates to shock, spotlighting the scandal of universal sale even if exceptions exist.
Metonymy
‘Rome’ stands for concentrated power—imperial court, papal curia, or any capital—allowing a local name to carry a general critique.
Sententia
Crisp, aphoristic form gives the claim mnemonic punch and the feel of established wisdom.
Moral antithesis (implied)
By declaring everything ‘sold,’ it implicitly opposes what ought to be beyond sale, sharpening the ethical tension without spelling it out.
Transcription
Quotations
(For then we have the old proverb, Omnia venalia Romae. All things are).
You may pe[r]ceyue, All thing is for mon-ey: For Omnia pecunia effici possunt, as in Tullies sentence is said.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.