Ok, then by your definition is communism capitalism then, communism being defined as a system where the workers own the means of production? So a commune, or group of workers, can own businesses and property, and individuals can too if they are an "owner operator" and the only worker for a business, basically being a commune of 1. Because if you're defining communism as capitalist then that word has lost all meaning.

You're definition of capitalism seems to be any system that has property, when all systems of human organization have some idea of property, even communism. The way the systems differ is what things can or can't be property and who / what can own them and for what ends.

For Rome I think you’re making a category error that’s really common in this debate: you’re pointing to the existence of markets, private property, wage payments, and profit-seeking individuals, and then concluding that Rome was capitalist. But the presence of those elements is not the same thing as capitalism as a dominant mode of production.

First, we have to be careful about the sources. What we call “Roman history” was written by literate urban elites—senators, landowners, military officers—about politics, war, and elite economic activity. Naturally, we have documentation about the commercial and financial dealings of those elites. What we largely don’t have are accounts of the daily economic life of the overwhelming majority: subsistence farmers, tenant laborers, and especially slaves.

There were exponentially more people in the Roman world living lives closer to Spartacus than to Pompey, but we know far more about Pompey because people like him were doing the writing. That skews the picture. The economy as experienced by most Romans—agricultural, coercive, local, and oriented around subsistence and tribute—is comparatively underrepresented in elite literary sources.

Second, capitalism isn’t defined by the mere presence of wage labor or profit motive. It’s defined by a system in which production is primarily organized around capital accumulation: owners invest capital, hire wage labor to produce commodities for market exchange, and systematically reinvest profits to expand production. That logic becomes dominant in early modern Europe and fully systemic by the Industrial Revolution.

In Rome, the overwhelming majority of economic output was agricultural. Large estates (latifundia) were worked primarily by slaves. That’s not wage labor organized for profit in a competitive market; it’s coerced labor organized for surplus extraction. The landowner isn’t engaging in capital accumulation through productivity-enhancing investment in hired labor; he is extracting surplus directly through ownership of land and people. That’s a fundamentally different social relation.

Even your centurion example highlights this distinction. Yes, he receives a wage—but he isn’t a wage worker in a capitalist enterprise producing commodities for sale in a market. He is paid by the state to perform military service. States have paid soldiers for thousands of years; that alone does not make a society capitalist.

If that centurion owns land worked by slaves, that also doesn’t make him a capitalist. Owning productive property is not identical to being a capitalist. In a capitalist system, land or capital is typically invested to generate profit through market competition and reinvestment. In Rome, elite landownership was about status and surplus extraction. Slaves were compelled by force to produce agricultural output. The surplus was appropriated directly by the owner. That’s closer to a slave mode of production than to capitalism.

Finally, scale matters. In modern capitalism, the dominant share of production comes from wage labor employed by firms operating for profit in competitive markets. In Rome, the dominant share of production came from agriculture structured around slavery, tenancy, and tribute. Commercial and financial activity certainly existed—but it did not define or structure the system as a whole.

So yes, Rome had markets, private property, profit-seeking individuals, and wage payments. Many premodern societies did. What it did not have was a social system in which capital accumulation through wage labor was the dominant organizing principle of the economy. That’s the key distinction.