introduction

Conventionally enough, this chapter will attempt to answer questions about economic growth: did per capita GDP grow in the late Republic, and what determined whether it did or not? Which features of the Roman world assisted growth, which impeded it? It should also be our aspiration to recreate the economic lives of flesh-and-blood people, peasants, slaves, craftsmen – and the rich (who bulk so large in the evidence). Economic history should tell us among other things who went hungry, what work was like, and who could afford every amenity (or, as economists say, utility).

Prime topics therefore will be the actual mechanisms of economic life (their degree of technical development) and their capacity for delivering a decent physical existence, and beyond that the standard of living of each social class or group. This is a fairly mainstream approach: when Douglass North set out his agenda, he included in his notion of economic “performance” the question of income distribution. In addition, we should not neglect the field of “public goods”: it may be important to consider the effects of the Roman habit of allocating plentiful resources to some public “goods,” such as foreign wars and the water supply, and few to others, such as mass education.

There can hardly be said to be one single accepted view of the late-republican economy. An experienced archaeologist has written, with quotation marks admittedly, of an “economic miracle,” which may be an Italocentric view. Gelzer once wrote vaguely but not without reason of the “chronic unhealthiness” of the Roman economy in the period before the civil war of 49 bc, a view which is hard to reconcile with the continuation through this whole century of a high volume of Mediterranean trade (cf. Table 19.1).