The material itself—glass, marble, terra sigillata, amphorae, bricks, terracotta lamps—summons and challenges the researcher, and each category has its own fascination and its own very difficult problems. In the present state of knowledge no one will expect the study of instrumentum domesticum or of the related topics discussed above to provide decisive answers to the macroeconomic questions raised at the outset. The evidence which the contributors have been analysing does not, for instance, prove that the economy of the Roman Empire was by the standards of the pre-industrial world a relatively integrated one; or that Romans of great and of moderate wealth possessed the mechanisms with which they could organize many sectors of the Roman economy to profit from supplying the market with commodities; and it certainly does not settle fully the controversy between the redistributive economy and the market economy. Yet with respect to each of these problems the evidence of instrumentum domesticum does lead in a particular direction.
To take first the market economy versus the redistributive economy (which is not a stark ‘either...or...’ choice): with two exceptions, the papers in this volume refer to commodities which for the most part seem to have been distributed by market mechanisms. (I leave aside here the somewhat changed circumstances which arose once the emperor’s role increased in the later Antonine and Severan periods.) Naturally the central government took thought for supplying the military, and the well-to-do supplied a considerable proportion of the needs of their dependants from their own properties. But it
Is emphatically the market that seems to dominate, at least as far as supplying cities is concerned.
Marble and olive oil are advanced as partial exceptions to this pattern. Fant’s paper [[Fant 1993]]—which is extraordinarily rich and suggestive with respect to patterns of consumption—maintains that the distribution of marble should be seen not only and not primarily as a commercial operation, but rather as part of the system of imperial grandeur and imperial largesse. In some ways this is an appealing argument. But it may seem exaggerated, and it takes too little account of the fact that provident emperors gave thought to their own finances as well as to the beneficia they could bestow. i It was after all the accumulator Tiberius who confiscated many of the quarries (Suetonius, Tib. 49), and it may have been under another accumulator, Vespasian (see Suet. Vesp. 16), that sales of marble outside Rome truly proliferated. We should distinguish between batches of marble columns donated to cities, authorized purchases made by cities, and other commercial transactions. Marble columns made particularly splendid and conspicuous gifts. And marble of course differed from almost all other goods except metals in that most of the sources of supply were owned monopolistically.
Rodriguez-Almeida and some other scholars believe that the imperial government was directly involved in the distribution of olive oil to the civilian population under the early principate.2 However, the instrumentum domes-ticum and the other literary and epigraphical sources are all massively silent on the subject of an imperial role earlier than the reign of Marcus. It is true that there are some interesting developments just before that time. During or shortly after the 140s the olive oil merchants from Baetica had a former | praefectus annonae, M. Petronius Honoratus, as their official patron, and no doubt they received or at least hoped for favours from him.3 But this does not by any means necessarily imply that the praefectus annonae administered the importation of olive oil, even at this date. Nor do the so-called delta graffiti, which (apart from one dubious instance) begin to appear on Baetican amphorae in the year 140,4 give any indication that that was the case.
It will not be disputed that the term annona can in some contexts refer to commodities other than grain. But the positive evidence that the imperial
1 Cf. Fant (1993). In order to establish that ‘Augustus and his successors... were only concerned to provide [marble] for themselves and to make Rome a city pro maiestate imperii ornata, he would need to show that they subsidized the private use of marble in the city, and that their agents neglected the revenues which marble quarries could produce.
2 See Rodriguez-Almeida (1993: 99).
3 CIL VI.1625b = ILS 1340 (with the text improved by Tchernia (1980: 155-6) and Panciera (1980: 243-4). CIL VI.1620 = ILS 1342 is a parallel dedication to a praefectus annonae by the mercatores frumentari et oleari Afrari (but he was not their patron). Cf. Historia Augusta, Pius 8.11. Rome already possessed a portus olearius; see the inscription published by Panciera (1980: 238-41 = AE 1980 no. 84).
4 On these see Rodriguez-Almeida (1984: 235-51).
Power was in charge of importing Rome’s olive oil from Baetica in pre-Antonine times consists of a flowery passage of Pliny’s Panegyric (29) which will not bear any such heavy burden. When Annona is personified on imperial coins, her insignia always have to do with grain. 5
Insofar as the papers in this collection are relevant to the question of the economic integration of the Roman Empire, they seem to hint at relatively integrated markets. This applies to the market in marble, which was hauled remarkably long distances, often for purposes of trade, and to the market in glass [[on which see below, p. 171]]. It has already been argued that the distribution patterns of terracotta firm-lamps may support rather than weaken a notion of the Roman economy as quite integrated. Of course it could be objected that these were only minor sectors of the imperial economy. What really speaks most strongly for a relatively high level of integration in the imperial economy is the long-distance trade which supplied the metropolises of the Empire with wine and oil from afar, and all the cities of the Empire with other major commodities such as metals.
This volume has not revealed much that is new about the ownership of assets or enterprises in the Roman Empire. It has, however, thrown into the relief the figure of the freedman, and in particular it raises once again the question about the relative importance of those whom Garnsey baptized as ‘independent freedmen’.® The problem is to know whether those freedmen who were active in commerce normally represented in one way or another the interests of their patroni. Or were they often among those who were free of obligations to their former owners? It is hard to classify most of the freedmen who can be glimpsed in the instrumentum domesticum, those for instance who produced terracotta lamps in the second century. One thing we can do, however, is to add prosperous provincial freedmen to the Italian ones on whom Garnsey concentrated.
In the realm of commercial organization, two problems in particular require some additional comments. One is the matter of branch workshops. These are, as Pucci emphasizes [[Pucci 1993]], a well-established element in the production of terra sigillata: the branch workshops of Ateius, in particular, amounted to an elaborate system.7 Sternini’s paper [[Sternini 1993]] explores the possibility that branch workshops were also organized by some makers of glass. In an earlier article I hypothesized that a network of branch workshops was the best way of explaining much of the diffusion of Firmalampen in the western Empire.® The argument was that terracotta lamps, being cheap and easy to produce locally,
5 Cf. Rickman (1980: 257-67).
6 Garnsey (1981).
7 In Spain the terra sigillata potters of Tritium Magallum may have had branches at Termantia and Clunia, according to Mayet (1984: 1.237). [[For Gaul, see above, p. 136.]]
8 Harris (1980b) [[above, Chapter 5]].
Could seldom have borne the transport costs of being carried long distances from single central production centres; and that the system of institores allowed the Romans to organize just such a system of branch workshops. Precisely as this model would lead one to expect, a certain number of moulds for making Firmalampen have been found in the provinces, even though the firms in question originated in Italy. I expressed the hope that scientific analysis would determine whether the surviving lamps with | the same firm-names were commonly made at different sites widely separated from each other. The work of Gerwulf Schneider and his collaborators has now shown clearly that this was indeed the case.9 (Incidentally, it looks as if work such as that of Schneider, Olcese, and Pena will fairly soon give some valuable clues about the geographical range of particular centres of terra sigillata and lamps.)
In one significant respect I am inclined to modify what I wrote previously on the subject of branch workshops. Pavolini was right to criticize my remark that most lamps were made ‘in the vicinity’ of the places where they were purchased: 10 we should think rather of production centres selling to areas as much as several hundred miles across. It has also been suggested that I overstated the cost of land transport.11 Perhaps so: the problem is full of unknowns. But the problem cannot be wished out of existence.12 Let us be clear that there is no reason to think that the market for simple terracotta lamps was willing to bear the costs of long-distance land transport when there were sources closer at hand. Much of the phenomenon of very wide Firmalampen distribution (not all of it, of course) is probably to be explained by means of branch workshops.13
Another form of business organization which has appeared several times in these papers [[Harris 1993d]] is the locatio conductio contract. From Spain to Oxyrhynchus, this was an everyday mechanism: Pucci appositely cites the examples that appear in P. Oxy. 50.3595-7.14 it enabled the well-to-do to exploit their assets without the expense or anxiety of direct management. But its overall economic effects are not clear, and deserve a closer examination than they have so far received. The full range of trades regularly involved in locatio conductio operis and locatio conductio rei needs to be catalogued. And
9 Besides Schneider (1993) see Schneider and Wirz (1991).
10 Pavolini (1987: 143). [[See above, p. 130.]]
11 Bailey (1987: 60-61), with most of whose conclusions I disagree (a full discussion would bulk too large in the present essay). Bailey is to be lauded because unlike most ancient lamp scholars he is at least willing to consider the problem of transport costs. More typical in their approach are e. g. Maestripieri and Ceci (1990). I doubt whether much of the diffusion of Firmalampen is to be seen as a result of a need for return cargoes (as argued by e. g. Duncan-Jones 1990: 49): the supposed routes are simply wrong, with the possible exception of Rome to Africa Proconsularis.
12 As by Haley (1990).
13 Thus I disagree with Pavolini. No doubt future work will clarify this matter further.
14 Originally published by Cockle (1981).
What was the effect of this system on artisan conductores, who might in years of economic difficulty find themselves without contracts and without visible means of support?
With regard to labour, nothing in this volume brings comfort to those who attribute small importance to slave labour in the economy of the Roman Empire outside Italy, but neither is there any wealth of evidence about slavery in the instrumentum domesticum. As usual, the frequent appearance of freedmen, as for example in the painted inscriptions on Baetican amphorae (Manacorda and Panella), is suggestive; and it might be considered obvious that a proprietor setting out to exploit vineyards or olive groves anywhere in the western provinces would make sure he had slave workers more or less to the extent recommended by the agronomists. In the conditions of the high Empire, attaining maximum efficiency on an estate (something which many in Baetica, Africa Proconsularis, and Tripolitania manifestly desired) practically required a good measure of reliance on servile labour. |
In spite of its uniqueness, the Roman economy continues to invite comparisons with other periods. Analysing one such period, the economy of early-modern Europe, Braudel wrote as follows:i5
With a few exceptions, the capitalist, that is in this period the ‘important merchant’ with many undifferentiated activities, did not commit himself wholeheartedly to production. He was practically never a farming landowner with feet
Firmly planted in the soil____Capitalism did not invade the production sector until
The industrial revolution, when machines had so transformed the conditions of production that industry had become a profit-making sector.
In some respects—in terms of geographical range especially—the economy he is describing makes the economy of the Roman Empire look old-fashioned. But as we have repeatedly seen, the economy of the Roman Empire also had features that were not at all archaic (however else they should be characterized). Might we not, for instance, be prepared to say that some of the quasicapitalists of the Roman Empire did indeed interest themselves deeply in production, and particularly in the ‘rational’ production of wine, olive oil, bricks, and terra sigillata (to mention only commodities discussed in detail in this book)? That was precisely what gave rise to most of what we describe as instrumentum domesticum.
World History
