Rome's Economic Revolution by Philip Kay

Author:Philip Kay [Kay, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Business & Economics, Economic Conditions, Economic History, History, Ancient, General, Rome, Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9780199681549
Google: v9XQAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-01-15T03:20:00.241000+00:00

Trade, Capital, and Interconnected Markets

191

state reserves and temple treasures, into circulation again and put them to

productive use.

Just as the commercial revolutions of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries ad

seem to have been driven by trade, so the evidence for an increase in trade in the

Roman world in the second half of the second century bc is also very compelling.

We discussed in the previous chapter the export of central Italian wine to western

Europe. The trade that developed in the eastern Mediterranean, which we shall

now examine, was equally striking. Strabo relates that, between the years 166 and

87, the island of Delos was transformed into the most important emporium in the

eastern Mediterranean and more specifically into the centre of a trade in slaves

and luxury goods.13 We can deduce from epigraphic evidence that negotiatores

(‘merchants’ or ‘businessmen’) and trapezitai (‘bankers’) from numerous points

in the Mediterranean installed themselves on Delos and that a large cosmopolitan

community developed.

C I C E R O

As we have repeatedly mentioned, one major problem we immediately face in

attempting to trace the development of the Roman private sector during the

second half of the second century and the beginning of the first century is that

the vast bulk of the source evidence for wealth creation in the Roman world

during the Republican period comes from the years 70 to 40, thanks to the

Ciceronian corpus, in particular his letters, and that no equivalent source is

available for our period. As Hatzfield commented in 1919: ‘Far from being

surprised by finding a quantity of [sc. epigraphic] texts in Asia relating to

Romaioi, on the contrary one must deplore the fact that we possess so little of

them and resign oneself to the fact that they give us only an insufficient idea of the

number of negotiatores and of their activity.’14

This difficulty has been justifiably highlighted, for example by Kallet-Marx,

who, in the context of the province of Asia, argues that the consequences of its

creation as a Roman province have been largely overvalued by historians and that

the real starting point of control and exploitation of the province was the re-

establishment of Roman control by Sulla, followed by its extension under Lucullus

and Pompey.15 Ferrary, on the other hand, sees a reasonably steady progression

from the establishment of the Asian province to the time of Cicero. He believes

that the presence of a magistrate in the province was a guarantee of security and

also made it possible (for Romans, but also for Latins and indeed Italians) to find,

on the spot, a competent magistrate to regulate disputes.16 Be that as it may, we

possess truly precise and abundant information only for the time of Cicero and

the problem is to decide what it is legitimate to infer about private wealth creation

for the decades between the establishment of the province of Asia and the

Mithradatic crisis.

13 Strabo, 10. 5. 2.

14 Hatzfeld 1919: 46.

15 Kallet-Marx 1995a: 125–60.

16 Ferrary 2001, 2002.

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