Mendalla
Happy headbanging ape!!
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Too broad a statement. If this was the case, how do you explain the Roman equites? They were the moneyed class in Rome and made money hand over fist through business ventures like shipping, manufacturing, and the slave trade. While they could not hold most offices, they gained influence by bankrolling senators, who were landed aristocrats and often less well-off. Rather like how our billionaires and corporations back political parties. They also gained influence from their management abilities and the distrust that existed between many emperors and the Senate. Emperors often preferred equites for some administrative roles that they could not entrust to senators, even if they had to preserve the fiction that the republic still functioned to some degree and that the senatorial class was the locus of power.
Perhaps what you say is true of some Mediterranean cultures, but you simply cannot make blanket statements about that region. Celtic, Roman, Greek, the various Near Eastern cultures, North Africa were all different, as they are to some degree even today.
Side note:
IMHO, capitalism per se is NOT modern or the source of our problems. Making money from selling your goods and talents has long history in Western (and other) cultures. The problem today is NOT capitalism in and of itself, but the degree to which we have made it the center of our society and allowed it into positions of power. In societies like ancient Rome, ancient China, or medieval Europe, being wealthy did not get you direct power (though you could use it to influence those who had direct power). You generally needed to hold land for that. Once we divorced power from land and made land just another commodity, that opened the door to the modern money = power equation. But it arguably also made for a fairer society since now power was not based on birth or sucking up to the monarch, but on what you actually did.
Modern corporate capitalism (corporatism I like to call it) has broken things to some degree by creating a new aristocracy based on holding economic resources rather than land. But that's not capitalism in a classical sense. You can buy and sell at a profit without creating that kind of system and people did so for centuries. And technically it is possible to join that aristocracy through successfully building your own corporation (cf. Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk) rather than relying on a dispensation of land from a monarch, though investments from existing corporate power holders can certainly play that kind of role.
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