Introduction

Non-specialists often regard economic and social history as “history with the politics left out” - the left-overs after the significant events of classical antiquity like the Peloponnesian War, Alexander’s conquests and the struggle for mastery in Rome have been considered. The label encompasses a vast range of apparently miscellaneous subjects - agriculture, trade, health and disease, family life, patronage and friendship, to highlight just the most prominent - providing the background against which the activities of political and military leaders were played out. Studying such topics may increase our store of information, offering a wealth of period detail and an impression of “everyday life,” but it does not affect our basic understanding of events. Ancient economic and social history is merely a supplement to mainstream history, for those who like that sort of thing, not an alternative approach that offers a radically different account.

The majority of historians who actually practice economic and social history would offer a very different account of the importance of their subject. First, economic and social structures are not merely background, but the indispensable basis for political and military activity. In order to understand ancient history in the conventional sense, we need to understand how ancient society produced a surplus of food and other resources that could be devoted to inessential activities like politics and war, and how this surplus was mobilized. Rome’s military adventures depended on the interaction of agricultural production, the demography of the peasant family (supplying surplus young men for the army: Rosenstein 2004) and relationships between the political elite and the masses on whom their power ultimately depended. Everything commonly associated with “classical civilization,” including the leisure that enabled elite authors to describe and analyze it, depended on the unacknowledged work of millions of peasants, slaves, and other workers.

Secondly, this “background” was not unchanging - though change tended to take place over decades, or even centuries. We can for some purposes generalize about

A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6

“ancient” agriculture, slavery or family structures, since there were significant continuities throughout classical antiquity, but there were also significant developments: the abolition of debt-bondage in Athens, so that henceforth only foreign barbarians were enslaved, or the mass influx of slaves into Italy in the later republic and the development of the slave-based, market-oriented villa. This last example emphasizes that such changes could affect or even bring about events in the world of politics and war; the history of the Roman civil wars and the fall of the republic cannot be understood apart from the history of the Roman peasant class and its grievances (see e. g. Hopkins 1978b). Economic and social change set the limits within which individuals had to operate, and it created forces to which they were forced to react, without ever fully comprehending them.

Finally, but no less importantly, economic and social history seeks to redress the balance between the history of the elite, who produced the vast majority of written sources and so have shaped our understanding of antiquity, and the vast, silent, exploited numbers of the rest of the population. We focus on politics, war, and high culture because those were the main interests of the elite, and we study them in a particular way because that is how the elite saw them. Politics and war would surely have looked quite different from the perspective of the ordinary citizen, the slave or the resident foreigner, the conscript, his parents, or his wife; and then there are the aspects of ancient society on which the sources have little to say, like family life, work, health, death, the world of the marketplace and the small farm. In many cases, given the state of the evidence, the historian’s conclusion can only be that we cannot be certain; but it is better to have some idea what we do not know about antiquity rather than to accept the elite account as if it was complete and wholly reliable.