From today's perspective, the fact that Cicero can consider that such a situation would ever present a merchant with a moral dilemma seems to epitomise the distance between ancient and modern economic mentality. His stress on the honesty of the man, given the views that he expresses about traders earlier in the same work (1.150–1), is significant; in so far as this thought experiment relates to actual behaviour, it is that of the young Roman noble rather than any merchant. However, the situation in which such a dilemma ought to exist is intended to be believable: it exemplifies not only the ubiquity of food crisis (not necessarily famine: Garnsey 1988: 17–39) and the reliance on imports of grain, but the slowness of transport, the scarcity of information and the volatility of the market.