Research Survey: Ancient Economy - New Studies and Approaches

[Front matter and 1st page of introduction] This edited volume presents a multi-perspectival inquiry into the models that have shaped the study of ancient economies in past decades. The contributions collected here respond to the prevailing tendency to measure ancient Mediterranean economies using methods and techniques designed for assessing the performance of modern economies, considering a range of approaches that might generate a more socially and morally attuned history of the ancient Mediterranean. The volume explores the challenges of quantification and critically examines the ideological assumptions implicit within the models usually applied to the study of ancient economic performance. The chapters advocate for more inclusive alternatives to traditional ideas of ‘growth’ that take factors such as social inequality, fairness, wellbeing and the relationship between humans and the natural environment into consideration. The book examines through a series of different questions the importance of querying the appropriateness of economic methods from an ethical or socially aware position. Rather than condemning older models, methods, and points of view for their inadequacies, this book focuses on leveraging the benefits from existing methods in economics and suggesting new frameworks to reach toward historical approaches that are both methodologically sophisticated and attuned to the moral, ethical, and political concerns of the twenty-first century. This book will be a valuable resource for interdisciplinary researchers in economics, economic history, ancient history and archaeology.

The European Journal of the History of Economic …, 2014

This article reviews ancient texts dedicated to the art of economics, narrating how the master was to manage his wife, slaves and things. The discourse on the economy of things focuses on defining the proper limits of wealth. The economy of the slaves included multiple technologies of classification, management and supervision that were to guide the master and the matron in their ‘use’ of slaves. The wife was a freeborn member of the polis who was doomed to spend her entire life in the economy as a governed subject who partakes in government only within the confines of the oikos.

2007

Sitta von Reden and Kai Ruffing (eds.), Handbuch Antike Wirtschaft. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter: 41-64, 2023

At some point early in the 4 th century BC, a certain Aeschines of Sphettus (not the famous orator but a former pupil of Socrates) was involved in a court case in Athens. 1 The case concerned Aeschines' failure to repay a loan. We only know about it because passages from the speech composed by the orator Lysias for the (unknown) adversary of Aeschines in the case were quoted in a much later source (Ath., Deipn. 13, 611e-612e). Aeschines' adversary stated the following: I would never have expected, gentlemen of the jury, that Aeschines would have dared to become involved in such an embarrassing case, and I believe it would be difficult for him to find another that so blatantly abuses our legal system. For this man, gentlemen of the jury, owed Sosinomus the banker and Aristogiton money, on which he was paying three drachmas per month [per 100 drachmae, that is, 36 % annually]; and he came to me and asked me not to stand by and watch him lose all his property because of the interest. 'I'm setting up a business to make perfume,' he said; 'I need start-up money, and I can offer you nine obols per mina as interest' [i.e. 1.5 drachmae per 100 drachmae per month, or 18 % per annum]. Aeschines, however, failed to pay back this loan. The speaker continues: But the fact is, gentlemen of the jury, it is not just me he treats this way, but everyone who comes in contact with him. Don't the shopkeepers in his neighborhood, from whom he gets goods on credit and then fails to pay for them, lock up their stores and bring him into court? And doesn't he make the people who live near him so miserable that they abandon their own houses and rent others far away? Whenever he gathers contributions for a group dinner, he doesn't return the money that's left over… So many people come to his house at dawn to ask for the money they're owed, that passers-by think he's dead and they've come for his funeral! And the people in the Piraeus have adopted the attitude that it looks much safer to sail to the Adriatic than to get involved with him; because he regards any money he's been loaned as much more his own than what his father left him. 2 Historians studying ancient Greek finance have focused on this passage, considering it key to our understanding of Athenian credit relations. What is interesting, however, is that, having analyzed the passage, they arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions regarding the nature of Athenian financial life.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2019

Verboven, Koenraad, and Paul Erdkamp, eds. Structure and Performance in the Roman Economy. Models, Methods and Case Studies. Collection Latomus 350. Brussels: Latomus, 2015., 2012

The editors of the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World have proposed a research program inspired by what Douglass North saw as the task of economic history: "to explain the structure and performance of economies through time". 1 To achieve this, they have formulated three challenges for the 21 st century: (1) to find ways to document performance more accurately (mainly by using archaeological data), (2) to clarify relationships between structures and performance by building on 20th c. advances in understanding institutions and ideology and (3) to pursue a comparative analysis of why the Greco-Roman economy broke down. 2 When the CEHGRW was published, in 2007, this emphasis on NIE was not entirely new. Its use in ancient economic history had started in the 1990s with scholars like Alain Bresson, Dennis Kehoe or Elio Lo Cascio. Compared to the economic history of preindustrial Europe and the modern world, however, ancient economic history was a late convert. The dominance of the Finley model in the 1970s and 1980s was only partly responsible for this. A more fundamental reason was the limited scope for quantification in ancient economic history, before new technologies and user friendly computer programs changed heuristics and data analysis in the 1990s in archaeology, numismatics, papyrology and epigraphy.

Series of conferences: Oikonomia 2024/25. Research Group on Ancient Economic Thought, 2024

From the Archaic to the Hellenistic period, the Greeks engaged in diverse forms of economic exchanges in a wide variety of modalities and objects, in tight though geographically extended networks (Malkin 2011). Let's mention, among other things, the circulation of gifts and counter-gifts linked to prestige and power in the Homeric world (Finley 1982); the commercial transactions which expanded to such extent that the Greek city could be spoken of as a łmerchant cityž (Bresson 2000); the structuring function of reciprocity in the different dimensions of social relationships: economic, religious, political (Azoulay 2004; Van Berkel 2020); the modalities of the exchange of knowledge, between Socratic gratuity and Sophistic wages (Castelnérac, Gili, Monteils-Laeng 2024); the progressive monetisation of the economy (von Reden 2010), which aroused the interest and concern of many ancient philosophers. The łOikonomiaž 2024-2025 Seminar aims to focus on exchanges considered in their economic dimension, emphasising their objects, forms, and stakes, as well as their relationships with the political, cultural, social, or religious spheres, often intertwined in ancient societies. The 2024-2025 Seminar will favour approaches centred on the philosophical and anthropological understanding and poetic or pictorial representations of the various aspects of economic exchanges. The sessions will take place monthly (online) from September 2024 to June 2025. Oral communications will preferably be delivered in English.

Rome; (2) Roland Boer's model of the economy of ancient Israel; and (3) K. C. Hanson and Douglas Oakman's social-scientific approach in New Testament studies. These models differ significantly from each other and are drawn from what are often treated as three distinct fields: classics, Hebrew Bible, and New Testament studies. It is precisely the differences between the models that are most illuminating, however, and juxtaposing them quickly reveals the emphases-and omissions-that are specific to and that characterize each model.