It may seem astonishing that such completely different views of antiquity could have arisen, let alone that they should continue to dominate the debate. The explanation lies above all in the nature of the ancient evidence. It is, as ever, only a limited and unrepresentative sample of what once existed, favoring certain sorts of materials and the products of the elite rather than the masses. One of its most striking features, compared with the evidence for political or military history, is the absence of any ancient discussions of their own practices. Quite simply, the Greeks and Romans did not conceptualize “the economy” or discuss “economic activity” in abstract terms (Finley 1999). This has been interpreted by the “primitivists” as a clear indication of the undeveloped nature of the ancient economy - if the economy had been important, surely a philosopher like Aristotle would have engaged with it - but in any case it has the consequence that we cannot ever discuss ancient economic history in the Greeks’ and Romans’ own terms; our frameworks for interpreting it can only be drawn from elsewhere, whether from our own experiences or from the study of other premodern societies. The choice of an appropriate comparison, to help us make sense of the fragmentary surviving evidence, depends on our prior assumptions about what sort of society we are dealing with.
This problem can be illustrated by considering the ways that historians have responded to gaps in the evidence. Many of the kinds of evidence on which more modern economic studies are based simply do not exist: no extensive business archives, no state tax records or customs accounts. Is absence of evidence actually evidence of absence, then, or simply an accident of survival - and if the Greeks did indeed lack proper accounting techniques, is this necessarily a sign of economic primitivism? Where examples of estate records or customs receipts do exist, above all papyrus documents from the Egyptian desert, does this mean that such practices were widespread although few records survive, or are they chance survivals of rare and atypical activities? Do we take at face value the assertion, in Roman upper-class writings, that no respectable member of the elite would ever get involved in trade, or do we point to comparative examples from early modern Europe that such a rule could be flouted and that aristocrats would conceal the true origins of their wealth?
Archaeological evidence can be just as problematic. Tens of thousands of wine amphorae from Italy have been recovered from French rivers, presumably only a sample of the original total (Tchernia 1983). Clear evidence of large-scale trade, one might think - except that goods can be moved through many different mechanisms, most of them entirely outside any market system, and the amphorae themselves cannot indicate whether they were sold, exchanged as gifts or transported by the state to supply the army. The significance even of such substantial finds depends on the historian’s prior beliefs about the context in which the evidence should be interpreted: a predominantly agrarian society in which trade was only a thin “veneer” on a subsistence economy, or a world of large-scale international trade, markets and sophisticated economic institutions?
World History
