Envoi

For nearly fifty years scholars have been weighing the respective merits of two models of the economies of classical antiquity - the substantivist and the formalist. The latter model assumes that since the members of all societies past or present have needs, experience scarcities, make choices, and exchange goods and services, if only within the household, their behavior can be analyzed via the normal laws and vocabulary of “formal” economics. The former model challenges their appropriateness, on the grounds that much, if not most, behavior was not profit-oriented but “embedded” within relationships of patronage, reciprocity, and redistribution, price-setting markets not appearing until the fourth century bc. Neither model convinces, the formalist because it underestimates the political and social dimensions of exchange and because the temptation to use language appropriate only to modern commercial firms has not always been resisted, the substantivist because it is overinfluenced by Homeric language, fails to distinguish the various senses of “market,” and unduly marginalizes risk taking and profit seeking: the mosaic inscriptions of Pompeii which proudly proclaim Lucrumgaudium (profit [is] happiness) and Salve lucrum (Hail profit!) send a different message. The alternative model sketched above, which identifies three separable but interlocking “modes” of economic activity, suggests instead that no single analytic formulation can adequately characterize the economies of the 1,500 years of classical antiquity: any area at any time will have shown a complex blend of all three modes, in ratios which underwent perpetual slow change.

Also unhelpful in its effects has been the quest to identify “growth” within ancient economies. Expansion and development as such are palpable, if only from the still

Visible signs of investment in infrastructure and from the artifacts which fill our museums. However, the objection has been that expansion was purely predatory, using violence and repression in order to suck resources of men, money, and materials out of a periphery towards a prosperous exploitative center, whether imperial Athens or Ptolemaic Alexandria or imperial Rome or Constantinople, and was not accompanied by planned or sustainable technological transformations. The objection has some force (though it seriously underrates the degree of continual technological advance), for while, for example, states and regimes gradually adopted the new technology of coinage, such credit systems as can be detected remained marginal: money supply therefore never progressed beyond M1 (the amount of coin in circulation at any one time), so that any interruption to the flow of new silver could threaten the viability of any state that needed to pay coin reliably to its principal employees, the armed forces. However, other objections have less force. Status-boundaries, for example, did indeed discourage the employment of free men by free men, and thereby to some degree impeded the flexibility of labor, but neither freedmen nor monarchs and their employees had such inhibitions, while the widespread recourse to chattel slavery both enhanced the availability of labor, by moving slaves across long distances to where it was needed, and allowed the creation of effective command structures, however brutal they may have been.

The economic life of classical antiquity did not unfold on a distant planet. The industrial and technological revolutions of the last 250 years have interposed a barrier to understanding, but the many long-established rural and craftsman technologies which have been observable till recently (some still are) are as much a window onto the past as are the seascapes and landscapes of Europe and the Mediterranean: when in 1990 H. W. Pleket likened the economy of the second-century Roman empire to that of western Europe in the eighteenth century, it was a just and useful comparison.