This chapter explores the superimposition of Roman law and order on provincial and municipal politics.

The historical discourse of Antioch cannot be divorced from that of its twin-sister Seleucia, founded in the same year and dynamically linked to the city on the Orontes.

This chapter explores the establishemnt of the local mint and its activities from the days of the Seleucid monarchs to the late Roman Empire.

This chapter describes the key changes in terms of money, credit and banking in the 1000 to 1500 period within the various kingdoms. It highlights how after a period of late monetization, each Christian kingdom transitioned to centralized models that were well-articulated with their European counterparts while keeping important distinctive traits. Nevertheless, the demand for means of payment on behalf of kings, merchants and other agents stimulated the development of credit. The need for credit spanned the entire Peninsula and the urban/rural divide. Thus, all countries saw the emergence of lively credit markets for (mostly private) borrowers, buttressed by functioning courts and regulations. These markets involved both specialists and non-specialists, but it was only in the Crown of Aragon where financial agents transitioned to institutionalized banks.

This chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s wealth by examining the sources of his income and his expenditure. In connection to the expenditure, the chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s coinage. The chapter suggests that while Alexander’s campaigns brought tremendous wealth to the king, much of his useable wealth was absorbed by the army necessary for the campaigns.

Chapter 4 concludes the analysis of Julian’s reckoning with Constantine’s propaganda. It focuses on Julian’s strategy to disavow the public persona of the first emperor who had promoted the association between Christian sovereignty and ideals of philosophical leadership. The first section considers the efforts of Constantine’s propaganda to use the events of his (Constantine’s) life to prove that Roman history was guided by Christian providence. The engagement with autobiography in Julian’s final writings appears in this light as the culmination of his response to Christianity’s claims of intellectual dominance over Greco-Roman culture. The second section reconstructs Julian’s joint attempts to project his life as the token of his superior understanding of providential history (Against Heraclius) and to mobilise past Roman history as a source of counter-exempla disproving Constantine’s claims (The Caesars). In the process, Julian repurposed a fundamental element of Constantine’s propaganda – imperial iconography – to his advantage (Caesars; Misopogon).

In 211 BC, the Romans were embroiled in a multi-front war with the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, and despite surviving the disastrous battles of the early years of the war, the Romans continued to face significant setbacks. In the Iberian Peninsula that year, the last-minute defection of Rome’s Celtiberian allies led to the deaths in battle of Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, along with many of their soldiers. This was a disastrous blow to Rome’s war with Carthage, since the campaign in Iberia had been the only successful front in recent years.1 It is perhaps surprising, then, that the Romans minted a coin in Iberia that year that was stamped with symbols of Roman victory (Figure 19.1). The coin shows the Roman god Jupiter on the obverse (front) wearing a laurel wreath on his head, and the goddess Victory standing before a Roman trophy on the reverse (back).

At the beginning of the sixth century BC, the Aphaia sanctuary on the island of Aegina underwent a radical transformation. What until then had been a local open-air cult place in the woody mountains of the western part of the island, where a female deity had been worshipped as early as the second millennium BC, became an architecturally structured sanctuary that conformed to the novel Doric architectural order. At the same time, a cult image made of ivory was set up in the newly built temple. The goddess, who had previously “shown herself” in the open grove that was associated with her presence, was now represented through a man-made image. In addition, a wall was built around the temple that separated the sacred precinct from the “profane” land outside the sanctuary. Around the same time, the island of Aegina became one of the most important trade centers in the Greek world. The book argues that the transformation of the Aphaia sanctuary on Aegina is typical of the larger area in which the Doric order emerged. This transformation was characterized by economic growth, urbanization, land reclamation, and colonization and prompted the Greeks to rethink their relationship with the gods who inhabited the land.

It is generally agreed in social scientific scholarship that federal institutions promote efficiency and economic growth in the modern world. This chapter asks whether the same case can be made for antiquity. Political scientists and economists recognize three major mechanisms by which federal institutions promote economic growth: decentralized fiscal decision-making that incentivizes the adoption of policies enhancing local economies; high redistributive capacity that can direct resources where they are most needed; and reliance on local revenues that encourages local governments to invest in public goods that enhance market activity. Although there is some evidence to suggest that these each of these institutional arrangements existed in antiquity, it is argued that there is simply not enough evidence to demonstrate that they did, in fact, lead to economic growth in the ways that the modern theory of fiscal federalism predicts. The chapter then explores several different ways in which federal institutions may have led to economic growth in the case of Greek antiquity – regional property rights and the pooling of complementary resources, shared currency, and enhanced diplomatic power – while cautioning that there is no evidence to prove that there was a causal link between any of these practices and actual economic growth.

From the late archaic period, all the functions of money – medium of exchange, measure of value, store of value, and medium of payment – were performed by coins, almost always silver, struck by scores of states on a few different weight standards. Market trade, international commerce, and labor were all mediated by money. Finance was an important, and often decisive, factor in statecraft and warfare, and temples were both dependent upon and replete with silver and gold. Agriculture was less monetized; cultural effects are still being debated. Credit was an essential part of both friendship and business: mortgages and eranoi (joint loans by an ad hoc group of lenders) supplied extraordinary personal expenses, while small market loans and larger bottomry loans for overseas expeditions financed both large and small commerce. Banking, in the sense of investing depositors’ money, was a Greek invention. Athenian banks, always family businesses, provided credit, remote payments, money-changing, and a secure place to hide money. Ptolemaic royal banks managed royal revenue and were involved, alongside private bankers, in the local economy; cashless book-transfers were common. The scope of banking was, however, limited by the need for coin reserves, which kept the banks from dominating the economy.

This chapter surveys the major developments in the economic history of the Greek world in the classical period (479–323 BCE). While agricultural practices and productive capacities did not change dramatically, this was a period characterized by a massive increase in the demand for certain commodities, especially timber for the ship-building and monumental-construction efforts of the period and grain to meet the dietary needs of a growing human population. It also considers the major developments in the supply and circulation of coinage in the classical period and the emergence of private banking and the expansion of credit, all of which facilitated both local and long-distance trade. As trade intensified throughout the Aegean and poleis developed more sophisticated institutions for local governance, they developed strategies to derive revenue from trade and imposed regulations on both the production and trade of commodities in which they had a special interest.

Babylonia held a crucial position in a network of overland and naval routes, connecting Arabia, India, and the Graeco-Bactrian empire with the Levant, Syria, and Anatolia via the Fertile Crescent in the west. This network enabled the royal administration to combine the functions of trade and communication with settlement politics, the melioration of agriculture, and the supply of war zones. In this latter role, the Babylonian economy might have played an important part in Seleucid warfare, despite Babylonians never being actively involved in military campaigns. A new Graeco-Babylonian elite with particular demands, the dynamic development of settlements, the network of trade routes, communication, mobility connecting the western parts of the empire in the Aegean with the east, and increased monetization may have provided the conditions for some economic growth in Hellenistic Babylonia. Nevertheless, Babylonia had already been a very productive and economically dynamic region in the Achaemenid period. There were certainly great continuities from the Persian and Seleucid empires, and one may wonder whether the efforts of the early Seleucid kings to improve lines of communication, temple economies, and monetary exchange aimed at regaining the levels of prosperity that had already been achieved before Alexander’s conquests.

Unlike in the West where the Roman municipal model was almost uniformly spread over the various provinces, Greek cities in the East during the Imperial period were very proud of their own centuries-old political traditions and consequently were reluctant to adopt Roman institutions. However, many cities celebrated the emperor as their ‘founder’ or were renamed after a Roman emperor, such as, for example, ‘Kaisareia’. Other cities deliberately chose pictures referring to Roman foundation practices to appear on their coins (e.g. the plowing scene) or took—formally or informally—the title of ‘koloneia’, normally reserved for communities which were part of the Roman State. This chapter aims at examining which cities were ready to comply with the Roman colonial model, why they did so, to what extent, and what the meaning of their claim for Roman origins was. It argues that the issue of the compliance of Greek cities with the Roman constitutional model of a colony was a way for them to negotiate their position within the Roman empire and was an aspect of cultural interaction.

The long transition – often marred by violence – between Tang and Song discerned by Naitō Konan marked the advent of a new world. The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) triggered profound political and military crises that shattered the institutions of the Tang dynasty, but also set in motion the slow progression of the market economy, which the Tang leadership began to see as the necessary means to restore its fiscal authority. With the collapse of the equal-field system of state land allocations in the wake of the rebellion, the Tang abandoned the principle of uniform, in-kind taxation of farming households as the basis of its fiscal and military systems. Urgent necessity prompted the adoption of new and more flexible fiscal strategies to secure revenues from commerce and consumption. The expansion of the market economy mitigated the Confucian elite’s traditional hostility toward commerce and acted as a key catalyst for the mercantilist policies pursued by the southern kingdoms during the first half of the tenth century.

Metallic coinage, markets, and private merchants appeared in China during the Spring and Autumn era (771–453 bce), and they expanded rapidly during the Warring States era (453–221 bce). These periods were marked not only by rapid economic progress, but also by new conceptualizations of money, markets, and merchants. Both in times of political stability such as the Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang dynasties, and in times of political disunion such as the Warring States, the Three Kingdoms, the Jin, and the Northern and Southern Dynasties eras, money, markets, and merchants performed important economic and social roles. Which kinds of goods, then, served a monetary function from the Warring States to the Tang period? How did people use money, and how and where did they buy and sell commodities? What was the relationship between private merchants and governments? In this chapter, these issues will be examined using transmitted documentary records, archaeological materials, numismatic findings, and recently excavated texts.

Unlike in the West where the Roman municipal model was almost uniformly spread over the various provinces, Greek cities in the East during the Imperial period were very proud of their own centuries-old political traditions and consequently were reluctant to adopt Roman institutions. However, many cities celebrated the emperor as their ‘founder’ or were renamed after a Roman emperor, such as, for example, ‘Kaisareia’. Other cities deliberately chose pictures referring to Roman foundation practices to appear on their coins (e.g. the plowing scene) or took—formally or informally—the title of ‘koloneia’, normally reserved for communities which were part of the Roman State. This chapter aims at examining which cities were ready to comply with the Roman colonial model, why they did so, to what extent, and what the meaning of their claim for Roman origins was. It argues that the issue of the compliance of Greek cities with the Roman constitutional model of a colony was a way for them to negotiate their position within the Roman empire and was an aspect of cultural interaction.

The concluding chapter revisits several broader issues regarding the emergence of money in historical societies, drawing conclusions from the historical contexts explored in this book. Emphasis is placed for example on the distance through which objects are constructed as valuables in exchange, making them appropriate as a form of money, and the effect that developing state institutions could have had on the use of money. In the framework of these and other issues connected to the early development of money, several novel insights are outlined, while highlighting the need for additional questions, and pointing to opportunities for future research.