Money, Markets, Land, and Contracts

This paper disagrees with a prevailing account of the publicani during the early to high Empire, as reduced in power, relegated to provincial tax collection, and increasingly at odds with the imperial state. It argues that instead we should understand the publicani both as providing indispensable services throughout the empire and generating sizeable earnings in the process, and as legally protected in their position.

Using Horace, Odes 3.16, as a window onto key monetary moments in the late fourth century poems of the radical Christian, Paulinus of Nola, this paper offers a case study in the representation of value in Latin literature. Where Horace uses poetry to establish a personal relationship, with a monetary dimension, with his patron Maecenas (Bowditch 2001, 31-63, 161-210), Paulinus uses money to establish a personal relationship, with a poetic dimension, with his patron, St. Felix (Brown 1981, 54-60; Trout 1999, 160-98).

When the Edict of Maximum Prices was promulgated late in 301 CE, Lactantius tells us that, rather than cap prices and regulate the marketplace, the law resulted in bloodshed and a thriving black market: in short, the law was a dramatic failure. The scholarship discussing the Edict largely agrees with Lactantius that the law could not have succeeded as an economic policy (cf. Duncan-Jones, 1982; Williams, 1985; MacMullen, 1976). However, this position is based on assumptions about the intentions of Diocletian and the Tetrarchs that need to be reexamined.

Nikophon’s “Law on Silver Coinage” of 375/4 is already familiar to most students of Classical Athens and the ancient economy (SEG 26.72; Rhodes-Osborne, GHI 25). The inscription is largely complete and the text’s literal meanings generally well understood, yet despite continuous discussion since Stroud’s editio princeps (1974) the law’s basic motivation remains mysterious. Most previous discussions share two assumptions: that the law is concerned with the quality of the Athenian money supply and that it intends to regulate everyday retail transactions.

This paper argues for a systemic and comparative approach to Roman imperialism during the transition from regional city-state to territorial empire in the late fourth century BCE. Like the Athenians and Syracusans, the Romans were fairly unique in the pre-modern world in how they established the territoriality of their empire. Living in a profoundly agrarian world, members of ancient Mediterranean citizen-city-states often divided up by lot, or “allotted,” confiscated land as a way to share the fruits of conquest.