In 218BC the plebeian Tribune, Quintus Claudius, pushed a law through the Senate preventing its members or their children from owning ships that could carry more than 300 amphorae. 'Lex Claudia de Senatoribus' was designed to stop patrician families from making profit through overseas trade, thereby influencing their Senatorial decisions when it came to fighting foreign wars. Technically, mercantile activity was already illegal for them, being seen as too low-born a profession for the land-owning classes, but judicious use of loopholes in the law had allowed its circumvention up to this point. The new ruling resulted in many Senators looking inwards, investing in businesses and agriculture within Italy itself. During the war against Hannibal this had the desired effect of focusing everyone's attention upon the very real, looming threat coming to destroy Roman hegemony in the Italian peninsula, if not the city itself.
