Introduction
For decades the history of money in the classical world was a fairly quiet field. It was almost universally supposed to be synonymous with the study of numismatics, and the most debated questions concerned coinage—why it came into being in the first place, when it spread to the various regions, when and by how much it was debased, whether it was possible to calculate the quantity of it that was produced or in circulation in this period or that.
One might be tempted to say that what has shaken up the study of Greek and Roman money since the beginning of the 1990s has been the intrusion of non-numismatists, in particular of scholars with wider interests in economic or cultural history. But what has happened has been more complicated than that. In the first place, the labels are reductive, and some of those scholars who have ample experience as numismatists would undoubtedly define themselves as ancient historians. And some of those who have widened the debate during these years, Christopher Howgego for instance, have been numismatists de métier.
It is clearly true, however, that important new work on various historical problems—in particular on the possibility of sustained economic growth 1 in the ancient world 2 and on inflation in the later Roman Empire—have attracted the attention of a larger circle of historians. And in the same period, a certain revival of the interest of economists in economic history, which was at one time in definite retreat in a number of countries, has included a degree of inquisitiveness about relatively sophisticated pre-modern economies, including that of the Roman Empire (Marcello de Cecco led the way). This is all the more welcome, since there are still ancient historians who are loyal to the notion that because ancient economies were different from ours they can study antiquity in isolation.
Economists are also at risk. A recent and well-regarded work entitled The Nature of Money takes a historical view of the subject, stretching back to classical times. Good. It is also a work of exceptional lucidity. But the author’s first paragraph on the Romans contains four serious errors, 3 and so it goes on. It is not all his fault, perhaps—Roman history has its share of technicalities and obscure terminology. The author himself laments ‘the division of intellectual labour’ that has affected the study of money. 4 The answer is, I suppose, more dialogue.
The contributors to this volume—a cross-section, it may be said, of those who interest themselves in Greek and Roman money 5—were given a free hand to write about the topics of their choice. My sole suggestion was that they might tell us whether, once coinage had been introduced in the Greek and Roman worlds and had become a common means of exchange, there was also non-coinage money, and if so whether it mattered much.
Not that the editor can lay claim to neutrality. The reader will see that some of the contributors are firmly of the opinion that an understanding of the ancient economy absolutely requires classicists to emerge from their cocoons and pay attention to both economic theory and the economic history of other eras, and that is my opinion. Others disagree.
My colleagues made use of their freedom, and the various topics they covered, some of them familiar, others much less so, may be broken down as follows (I do not, be it noted, describe their conclusions except in a most telegraphic fashion—each chapter speaks for itself).
1. THE USE OF BULLION AS MONEY
Kroll (Ch.1) seeks to establish that the inhabitants of a number of Greek cities in Asia and in Magna Graecia, and the Athenians too, used bullion as money both before the introduction of coinage and even afterwards. There can be no doubt that precious metals served as stores of value, but Kroll goes further, referring to bullion as a ‘transactional medium’. On the Roman side, I argue (Ch. 9) that bullion was very seldom used for making payments during high classical times, except in emergencies and across the borders of the Roman Empire. 6 Andreau (Ch. 10) shows in meticulous detail that the first part of this statement was very probably true of the first-century cities next to Vesuvius.
2. REASONS FOR THE SPREAD OF COINAGE
The reason or reasons why the Lydians invented coinage and the archaic Greeks enthusiastically adopted the invention (to facilitate payments by or to the state? to facilitate exchange?) have been canvassed almost to the point of exhaustion. 7 Kroll (Ch. 1) favours what we may call the Holloway–Wallace solution, 8 based on the variable quantities of gold and silver to be found in natural deposits of electrum, and the consequent usefulness to the Lydians and Ionians of guaranteeing the value of payments made by means of pieces of electrum—which leaves the enthusiasm of the Greeks outside Ionia unaccounted for. The evidentiary basis for the discussion has changed somewhat in recent times, with the realization that the earliest Greek coinage included a large quantity of minute silver coins (down to a range around 0.21 g.), 9 but it may be more profitable now to consider other regions and periods.
Hellenistic Egypt, because of the relative abundance of the evidence, is an instructive case of state initiative: Manning (Ch. 5) argues that the Ptolemaic government’s intention, when it vastly increased the quantity of coinage in circulation, was to facilitate taxation and payments into the state banks.
3. CREDIT-MONEY
It has been one of the main arguments of Finley and his followers against the possibility of economic growth in antiquity that an economy in which the money supply was effectively limited by the state’s supply of coinable metals and in particular of gold and silver was thereby, in most periods, prevented from growing. 10 We might in fact put this question the other way round: would it not argue for a remarkable lack of both ingenuity and mutual trust if the well-to-do in, say, fourth-century Athens, in the larger Hellenistic cities, and in Late Republican Rome had not devised some form of credit-money? Schaps (Ch. 2), concentrating on the Greeks, reduces the phenomenon as much as he is able to. While he (interestingly) admits that Greek credit-money in fact existed, he contends that there was little of it, or at least it was ‘on a scale much more modest than that known to us’ [sc. now] (a formulation with which we might all agree).
The opposing case is mainly in the hands of Cohen (Ch. 4) for Athens, and in mine for Rome (Ch. 9). Fourth-century Athens was full of lending and borrowing, including a perhaps surprising amount of financing provided by sellers large and small. Bank lending too was ‘extensive and varied’, and Cohen explains succinctly— essential reading, in my view, for all who are interested in ancient money—how such lending added to Athens’ money supply. As for my chapter, its most original aspect is that I attempt to define the conditions in which Roman credit can properly be looked upon as money (for not all of it was money).
4. MONEY SUPPLY
Closely related to the previous problem is the question of the elasticity of the money supply. Cohen’s arguments are intended to show that the money supply of Athens in the fourth century BC ‘was in fact strikingly elastic’, since it was ‘substantially’ increased both through credit provided by merchants and through non-coinage money created by bankers. From the first century BC if not earlier, the same applied (so I claim) to the Roman Mediterranean. Some scholars have even hazarded estimates of the volume of credit-money that the Roman economy created; to my mind, however, the most important question here is not the sheer volume of credit-money but the availability of capital (see Ch. 9).
5. PRICES AND GROWTH
And closely related to the question of money supply is the matter of economic growth in the Roman Empire. Hollander (Ch. 6) tries a new approach, via people’s propensity to keep their assets in coin, which he thinks increased in the unstable conditions of the Late Republic. Using the work of A. C. Pigou, he shows how this factor was related to prices, to the money supply, and to the total output of the economy. We cannot, of course, give secure values to any of these factors, but Hollander’s model has at least the advantage of offering for the first time a reasonably plausible explanation of why the probably quite rapid increase in the money supply in the Late Republic was not accompanied by rapid inflation. The difficulty in the argument, in my opinion (see again Ch. 9), is that if we are going to apply the concept ‘money supply’ to the Roman world, we must take into account the ample supply of credit-money.
6. MONEY, ATHENIAN TRAGEDY, AND TYRANTS
The monetization of a community’s economy is always likely to have had effects far beyond the economy itself. No one has shown this more vividly than Richard Seaford, above all in his book Money and the Early Greek Mind. The contribution he offers here (Ch.3) will seem tangential to some, while to others it will well exemplify the way we ought to write the cultural history of money. Seaford suggested earlier that monetization was a ‘crucial factor in the genesis and in the preoccupations’ of Athenian tragedy. This paper connects the monetization of Athens both to the development of festivals under the tyrants and to the form and content of tragedy. The isolation of the tragic tyrant, according to this view, expresses the ‘autonomous power conferred by money on the individual who possesses it’.
7. THE EXTENT OF MONETIZATION
This is a venerable problem but still an essential one. 11 Andreau (Ch. 10) confirms how thoroughly early imperial Italy was monetized. But it is Egypt, with its rich documentation, that is self-evidently the place where the matter can be put to the most thorough tests. For the Hellenistic period, Manning (Ch. 5) concludes that while monetization spread to some of the Egyptian population, it was quite variable according to social class and according to location. For the Roman period, van Minnen (Ch. 11) argues for an increasing monetization of the agrarian economy between the first and the third centuries ad, followed by a ‘significant reduction’ in monetization after the inflation of 275, with a gradual re-monetization of the agrarian economy asserting itself from the fourth century onwards after the introduction of the solidus.
But it is Katsari (Ch. 12) who takes on the most difficult aspect of this problem, the monetization of the frontier provinces. Can we trust the numismatic evidence? What it seems to show, according to Katsari’s rather minute analysis of the finds in the Balkans and in Asia Minor and Syria, is that the monetization of these parts of the Roman Empire depended mainly on levels of urbanization and on the extent of trading activities, while the role of the army, though not negligible, was indirect (urbanization was itself partly a result of the presence of the military).
8. UNIFIED MONETARY INTEGRATION ACROSS THE ROMAN MEDITERRANEAN
The ‘integration’ of the ancient economy or economies is hard to define and harder still to measure. 12 The question, as Kessler and Temin rightly say (Ch. 7), is not a simple ‘either or’, whether the Roman Empire was a single monetary area and an efficient market or was entirely made up of separate local markets. The question is whether the Roman economy was closer to one end of the spectrum or the other. Well, let us find out. Kessler and Temin argue resolutely that there was market integration across the whole Mediterranean in the Late Republic and early Empire, basing their case on a reexamination of known wheat prices. These prices are terribly few, but they seem to reveal that wheat cost less the greater the distance from Rome, which may reasonably be seen as the great centre of demand. Regression analysis shows that it is highly unlikely that this pattern is due to chance. Such a pattern was much favoured by the fact that the Roman Mediterranean was in effect a single currency zone. 13
9. THE CHOICE OF METALS: GOLD, SILVER, OR BRONZE?
The decisions of ancient states to use this metal or that for their coinage, and the economic consequences of these decisions, are often problematic. Scheidel (Ch. 13), in a chapter of extraordinary range, sets out to explain the contrast between the ‘Aegean’ model of coinage (in which precious-metal coinage is dominant), a model which was to spread throughout the ancient world and ultimately over most of the globe, and the traditional Chinese model (in which base metals dominated the coinage system). This involves weighing against each other the sheer availability of metal resources, the diVerent kinds of military service that characterized the ancient Mediterranean and ancient China, political considerations, and finally path dependence 14 (aka mindless conservatism).
Early Rome used bronze money, then around 300 bc added silver coins—it is not altogether clear why, especially as Rome at that point controlled no silver mines. Some 250 years later, under Caesar, the Roman state began the systematic manufacture of gold coinage too— and again it is not entirely clear why it happened at this exact time (the state had long had access to suYcient gold). (In both cases, prestige is, of course, the obvious answer.) What we might expect to be clearer is what the inhabitants of the Roman Empire actually did with their gold coinage. Lo Cascio (Ch. 8) shows that the answer is quite complex. Making use of Duncan-Jones’s demonstration that gold coins show markedly less weight loss than silver coins, 15 he concludes that the former were often used as a slowly circulating store of value. But he also argues, primarily on the basis of the literary evidence, Apuleius especially, that gold coins were widely used to make actual payments. 16 He then reconstructs the story of how the third-century monetary system collapsed, to be succeeded by the new system founded on the regular use of the gold solidus and its fractions.
Andreau (Ch. 10) performs the invaluable service of bringing together and analysing the evidence as to how these two kinds of coins were used in the Vesuvian cities, having Wrst pointed out the various traps that await the incautious user of this evidence. His style is to avoid both hypothetical statistics and sweeping claims. Instead he proceeds as much as possible house-by-house, a technique that is now becoming more and more practicable; and he compares the evidence from the Vesuvian cities with the evidence from othersites. The result, as Andreau says, is somewhat negative. On the one hand, we may say that Pompeii and Herculaneum could scarcely have been more thoroughly monetized; on the other hand, some scholars will undoubtedly Wnd it puzzling that rich houses have not yielded greater quantities of coins.
10. MONEY HISTORICIZED IN A ROMAN PROVINCE
Finally, van Minnen (Ch. 11), oVers the most diachronic analysis in the whole book, Wtting together the development of monetization, price changes, investment, and taxation in Roman Egypt from the Wrst century to the sixth (thus, together with Lo Cascio, he provides this volume’s contribution to the study of the late-antique economy). He also manages to consider how various changes aVected diVerent kinds of people, in particular big landowners, farmer owners, tenants, and ordinary town-dwellers. This is the kind of analysis, conceptually sophisticated but diachronic and human, that we wish we could carry out for the Roman Empire in general, and indeed a great deal of it is instructive for the world outside Egypt. It is good to be reminded that monetary history includes real eVects: ‘after 275, they [the ordinary inhabitants of the cities in Roman Egypt] died in large numbers’.
What else might we proWtably have discussed? Every reader will have views. Further Hellenistic chapters would certainly have helped. But I will merely mention one issue, a matter—as it seems to me—of considerable importance and difficulty.
That issue is fiduciarity. The subject of fiduciary coinage appears from time to time in this volume (Schaps, Cohen, Harris), but is not dealt with systematically. No one, I think, would any longer agree with Finley’s claim that ancient states ‘never created fiduciary money in any form’. 17 The fullest discussion known to me is Seaford’s, 18 which shows that in a certain sense Greeks produced fiduciary coinage from the very beginning. But one of the problems is definition. Clearly there is a big difference between coinage that has been slightly debased but is assumed by most of its users to be made of a particular precious metal and coinage that has a conventional value, its users not caring at all what its bullion value might be. And how can a historian detect fiduciary coinage in any case? I suspect that most Roman silver coinage was fiduciary from the time of the Second Punic War crisis until ad 275, but it remains to be seen whether, with our scanty information about the prices of gold and silver, this can be proved. The only price of gold given in Scheidel’s Roman price catalogue 19—Caesar’s plundering in Gaul drove him to offer gold at a lower-than-usual price, 3,000 sesterces a pound, according to Suetonius, DJ 54, a scarcely trustworthy source on such a point 20—might suggest that the fiduciary value of the denarius at that time was negligible. 21
At the end of an interesting chapter entitled ‘Ancient and Modern: The Invention of the Ancient Economy’, Neville Morley expounds a dichotomy between those whom he labels ‘formalists’, who hold that ‘economic principles . . . provide a better understanding of how the economy actually worked than the limited concepts of the historical participants’ and other historians who ‘insist on the primacy of what are sometimes termed the actors’ categories’. To study ancient money, ‘in purely economic terms’, he goes on, ‘may be intellectually convenient, but it completely misses all the other dimensions, all the other meanings . . . most of which were far more important [sic] to the ancients than the purely economic’. 22 This dichotomy is to be rejected, for, as I hope that this book shows, we simply do not have to choose between economic analysis and understanding the mentalities of the Greeks and Romans. Read the chapters in this book that make most use of modern economics: their authors are at least as attentive to the concepts and behavioural patterns of the ancients as the others. There is no dilemma here. It would be profoundly silly to try to write history without modern concepts, and Morley’s own book is packed with them, quite properly. Of course we always have to be on guard against anachronistic judgements, just like other historians. The real enemies are received ideas and ignorance, in this case ignorance of the history and theory of money.
The purpose of this volume is in any case to stimulate debate about the nature of ancient money in general. Each author puts forward his or her point of view, more or less provocative as the case may be. Best of all, let us admit it, is to convince the informed scholarly public; next best is to elicit well-argued criticism.
Notas
1 For some discussion of the use of this concept in ancient contexts see P. Millett, ‘Productive to Some Purpose? The Problem of Ancient Economic Growth’, in D. Mattingly and J. Salmon (eds.), Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World (London, 2001), 17–48.
2 Once for all, I apologize for writing ‘ancient’ in place of ‘Greek and Roman’. There is no intention to minimize the interest of the monetary history of other ancient states in any part of the world.
3 G. Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge, 2004), 101. ‘The Roman economy was driven by the state’s activity.’ ‘There is evidence to suggest that more coins were issued than were needed for immediate purposes, in order to stimulate production and exchange.’ ‘During the first phase of imperial expansion [he seems to mean the Julio-Claudian era, though this was not of course the first phase of imperial expansion], expenditure released far more coins into the provinces … than were collected back in taxation’ [my italics]. He takes from R. W. Goldsmith the claim that ‘all imperial trade ‘‘was conducted entirely on a cash basis’’’; this opinion has admittedly had many supporters. Classicists and others too will be surprised to read that ‘in all Indo-European languages, words for ‘‘debt’’ are synonymous with those for ‘‘sin’’ or ‘‘guilt’’’ (90).
4 Ibid. 9.
5 This can only, of course, be true in an approximate sense.
6 Thereby contradicting Hollander (Ch. 6), among others.
7 For a brief but up-to-date and illuminating discussion see Seaford, MEG 131–6. In my view, we need further discussion of the kind of ‘government’ that made these minting decisions. S. von Reden seems to be looking in the right direction when she writes that coinage developed ‘in the public political economy of those who held power in the archaic poleis’ (‘Money in the Ancient Economy: A Survey of Recent Research’, Klio 84 (2002), 141–74 at 153).
8 R. R. Holloway, ‘La ricerca attuale sull’origine della moneta’, RIN 80 (1978), 7–14; R. W. Wallace, ‘The Origin of Electrum Coinage’, AJA 91 (1987), 385–97 (the latter develops but differs from the former). Kroll supplies further bibliography.
9 Seaford, MEG 135. For further evidence see J. H. Kagan, ‘Small Change and the Beginning of Coinage at Abdera’, in Agoranomia: Studies in Money and Exchange Presented to John H. Kroll (New York, 2006), 49–60.
10 Finley, AE 196: ‘there can be no doubt that the [money] supply was often inadequate for the ongoing needs of the society, let alone for the prospects of economic growth’.
11 The attentive reader will notice that the contributors use this term in somewhat different senses (see the index); I have not attempted to impose a single definition.
12 Harris, ‘Between Archaic and Modern: Problems in Roman Economic History’, in Harris (ed.), The Inscribed Economy: Production and Distribution in the Roman Empire in the Light of instrumentum domesticum (Ann Arbor, 1993), 11–29 at 18–20. See further C. J. Howgego, ‘Coin Circulation and the Integration of the Roman Economy’, JRA 7 (1994), 5–21 at 9–10.
13 This is at least congruent with the well-known centralization of minting in the high Roman Empire: ‘one or two mints (Rome, and for part of the 1st c. a.d., Lugdunum) provided virtually all the gold coinage . . . a silver coinage which came increasingly to dominate Wrst the west and then the east, and, from early in the Principate, a base metal coinage for the western half of the empire’ (Howgego, 6).
14 For this concept see R. Garud and P. Karnøe (eds.), Path Dependence and Creation (Mahwah, NJ, 2001).
15 MG 191.
16 I will admit that I read the evidence of Apuleius diVerently.
17 AE 141.
18 MEG 136–46. For other recent comments see A. Bresson, ‘Coinage and Money Supply in the Hellenistic Age’, in Z. H. Archibald, J. K. Davies, and V. Gabrielsen, Making, Moving and Managing: The New World of Ancient Economies, 323–31 BC (Oxford, 2005), 44–72 at 65, and J. H. Kagan, ‘Small Change’ [n. 9], 53–4.
19 <http://www.stanford.edu/scheidel/NumIntro.htm>, accessed 7 June 2007.
20 Cf. Crawford, RRC 626 n. 1. But the passage favours the notion that, in Hadrian’s time at least, the gold-market was quite well integrated empire-wide (‘per Italiam provinciasque divenderet’).
21 Suetonius’ figure means that Caesar was willing to part with about 322.8 g of gold (see Duncan-Jones, MG 213, for the Roman pound) for about 2,895 g of silver coins (see Crawford, RRC 594 for the weight of the denarius), a gold : silver ratio of 8.97. At a notionally normal ratio of 12 : 1 (ibid. 626) he would have been able to obtain 3,873.6 g of silver coins, about 1,000 denarii. So if such coins were valued at their bullion value, the glut had (supposedly) brought about a discount of almost exactly 25 per cent.
22 N. Morley, Theories, Models and Concepts in Ancient History (London, 2004), 48–9. He does not specify which dimensions and meanings.
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