1. travel
2. tourist destinations
3. greece

Chapter Nine: Publicans and Patriarchs: The Rise of Roman Family
Enterprise: 146 BC/BCE -AD /CE 14
The interaction of economic and business cultures took place not only between the
Hellenistic world and far Asia. Further to the west, the seeds planted by the princes of
Tyre and the traders of Euboea germinated into two other military and economic powers.
Carthage, chief colony of Phoenicia, inherited the western half of the Tyrian commercial
empire. Its princes created an African model of naval capitalism that penetrated deep into
the African continent, pioneered trade in the Atlantic and might well have dominated
Europe. Instead, Carthage was supplanted by the citizen-warriors of Rome, who
successfully adapted the Hellenic market revolution to their own needs and laid the
groundwork for the political economy of both medieval and modern Europe.
African Capitalism: The Merchant Princes of Carthage:
Carthage was settled at the end of the ninth century BC, to serve as the Tyrian granary,
shipping wheat to Cyprus and then Canaan itself. The partial conquest of Tyre by
Nebuchadnezzar, the Greek victory of Salamis, and the invasion of Tyre by Alexander
weakened Tyrian seapower and permitted Carthage to assume leadership of the western
half of the Canaanite network. As early as 550 BC, western Phoenician factories, posts,
and realms can be called Punic. Malta, Gozo, Lampedusa, Pantellaria, and the Tyrian
mining and trading investments in North Africa, Sardinia, Sicily, and Spain were directed
from Carthage. Carthage tightened Canaanite rule on Sardinia, expanded the number of
posts on the island. Mt. Sirai, deep in the interior, became a metal-processing factory.
Punic agents spread eastward from Motya in Sicily, founding Maisala and Panormus
(Palermo). The silver of Tartessos was as valuable to Punic merchant-princes as it had
been to Tyrian. Gades and the Iberian mines centered about the Rio Tinto lay at the core
of Carthaginian economic power. The Punic presence would be felt not only in coastal
sites like Abdera, Almuñecar, and Gades, but inland as well.1
The African model of Carthaginian management directly descended that of Tyre, though
the availability of vast tracts of rich farmland modified it. Spreading their estates across
Tunisia, Punic potentates prospered as gentry, generals, sailors, managers, shippers, and
devotees of Baal-Hammon, all at one and the same time. Intensive manorial agriculture
was combined with import-export shipping on a vast scale. The estate-managers of
Carthage often owned their own vessels and specialised in bulk shipments of
commodities: gold, incense, iron, copper, silver, tin, African animals and dates. Mines
and shipyards were run by a hereditary caste with strong state connections, the business
elite one and the same as the political elite. As in Ugarit and Tyre, long-distance
shipments of goods and money between African managers and resident agents in Sicily,
Spain or Sardinia was internalized. A heavily mercantilist strategy of trade was quite
appropriate.2
1
Due to the writings of Aristotle and findings of archaeology, it is possible to learn more
about the African version of Canaanite capitalism than the Tyrian. Aristotle likens the
Carthaginian constitution to that of Sparta and praises its stability:
'Many of the institutions at Carthage are certainly good….It is a proof of a well-ordered
constitution that Carthage, with her large populace, should steadily keep to the same
political system: she has had no civil dissensions worth mentioning, nor any attempt at a
tyranny.'3
Aristotle describes a tightly-knit coterie of princes and traders where membership in a
wealthy family was a prerequisite for political power. The Council of A Hundred and
Four and the Council of Elders were chosen by birth and merit. Monarchs were elected,
not born. Carthage is praiseworthy, says Aristotle, because
'…her kings are not…always drawn from a single family of no more than ordinary
merit….[but] from any family which is outstanding at the time, and they are drawn from
it by election, and not by seniority.' 4 A popular assembly played a management role as
well. Appointed boards of merchant-princes served without pay and decided many
judicial matters. Carthage was thus a meritocracy as well as a progressive oligarchy, and
far more admirable in the eyes of Greek conservatives than the fourth-century Hellenic
tyrants. In spite of its advantages, Aristotle noted the Carthaginian constitution had a few
flaws. Generalships and even the crown were for sale, and often one man held more than
one office.5
Punic enterprise was large and small, public and private. Big industries such as mining
and munitions were managed by royal, temple, and aristocratic networks. A landed
hierarchy managed state and temple property and foreigners, freedmen or slaves could
never hope to do so. Carthage produced no Pasions, and far fewer independent,
competitive entrepeneurs than in Greece. Athenians met competition by becoming leaner
and perhaps meaner; their Punic rivals retreated into guilds under tutelage of a patron
Baal. The productive potential of the royal mines, arms factories and shipyards of
Carthage was formidable, able to launch 120 triremes in two months. While lots of Greek
and Italian entrepeneurs toyed with natural law ideas and inwardly desired to push their
gods and goddesses out of the marketplace, the Carthaginians remained as devout as their
Oriental forbearers. Arms workshops flourished on temple land. Temples were governed
by a royal board, with priests directly related to kings or judicial heads of state (this was
not unknown in Rome, either). Hanno and his father Abdimelkart were both suffetes
(consuls) and high priests. Himilkat, a fourth generation suffete, installed his daughter
Batbaal as priestess. The shrines of Melkart, Baal-Hammon, Eshmun, and Reshef were
rich enough and to own and manage entire communities. Nevertheless, 'the temples’
property was in actual fact in the hands of the Punic aristocracy too…' 6 Carthage was
influenced by the Iron Age and Aegean market revolution, in the form of iron technology,
coined money, and even a touch of republican democracy. In essence, Punic maritime
capitalism nonetheless remained made in Canaan but upgraded for the mature Iron Age.
Carthage adapted very well, well enough to remain a political and commercial
superpower until the second century BC. Punic traders exported their own wares and
2
those of others. Shipbuilding, toolmaking, textiles, ceramics, carpentry and other
handicrafts flourished alongside agribusiness in Tunisia, destined to become the
breadbasket of the Mediterranean. 7
The Greeks posed as deadly a challenge to Carthage in the west as they had to Tyre and
Persia in the east. Hellenic long-distance traders flouted the Eclectic Paradigm in their
overseas transactions, taking their chances with contracts between free individuals
guaranteed by law. The Greek challenge developed slowly at first. Neither the Euboeans
nor the early Hellenic colonies in Italy and Sicily were a serious rival to Tyre or
Carthage. Then Colaeus, a trader from Samos, landed in Tartessos just before 600 BC.
The Iberian king invited the Greeks to challenge the exclusive Tyrian/Punic monopoly. It
was, however, not the Samians but their fellow Ionian neighbours, the Phocaeans, who
put to sea in the pioneering versions of small fifty-oared longships called penteconters.
Fast for their day, hard to detect and easy to manoeuver, these vessels were ideal for
independent merchants who could dash through the Straits of Messina and along the
north coast of the Mediterranean, outrunning their Punic pursuers. Phocaeans were
settling settling Massilia (Marseilles) and other colonies on the French, Italian, and
Spanish Riviera. Rhodian, Corinthian, Attic and Ionian pottery in France testifies that a
Greek attempt to capture the markets of Europe had begun. Greek traders followed the
Ebro to the new settlement of Emporion in Catalonia. A second route connected Massilia
with the heartland of a Celtic Gaul beginning to build its settlements, forge its iron
weapons, and till its rich soil. The future Burgundy was the newest market for Greek
expansion, witnessed by the presence of Greek vases in the region where the Rhône
converged with routes to the English Channel and the North. Phocaean penteconters
darted up the Adriatic, founding the settlement of Adria near Venice, trading pottery,
jewels, and bronze goods for the amber of the Baltic. The mighty Punic navy sought to
monopolize the commerce of the western Mediterranean through controlling Gibraltar
and Gades; the Greeks tried to bypass this control to reach new Celtic, Germanic, and
Illyrian markets via boat or overland caravan along the valleys of the Rhône, Seine, Elbe,
and Danube. The aggressive new traders enticed the northern barbarians with their new
money and luxury goods, seeking to carve out a share of the tin, amber, and iron markets
Carthage sought to dominate. By 550 BC the founding of Massilia and Ampurias in
Catalonia persuaded the Carthaginian establishment they faced strategic encirclement by
the Greeks.8
Carthage's rulers saw an ideological as well as an economic challenge from the new
western poleis arising around their trade routes. A people questioning the rule of Zeus in
human affairs would certainly question the sway of Melqart in both world affairs and
commerce. Hellenic culture posed a long-term as well as an immediate danger to the
relatively closed world of Carthage much as the American model today endangers the
traditional business practices of Asia. Carthage responded by reinforcing bases in
Sardinia, western Sicily and the Balearics and forging alliances with the Elymians of
Sicily. Between 560 and 480 B.C. the Magonid kings of Carthage also sought to exploit
the resentments Gela and Rhegium harboured against Syracuse. Trading partnerships
with the Etruscans were transformed into a military as well as a commercial alliance.
Numerous Punic artifacts and inscriptions honouring Astarte were unearthed at Etruscan
3
ports documenting the cementing of this alliance, directed mainly against the Phocaean
menace. The new Phocaean threat came as much from piracy as from direct commercial
competition, and intensfied after a large portion of the population of Phocaea, driven
from their homes by the armies of Cyrus, temporarily relocated on the island of Corsica.
After 565 Ionian corsairs based here and along the Greek Riviera took a heavy toll of
Punic commerce in the Tyrrhenian Sea and the northwest Mediterranean. The Greek
menace was so strong it required the combined efforts of the Punic and Etrurian war
fleets to defeat it. At the battle of Alalia in 535 B.C. 120 Carthaginian and Etrurian ships
won a costly victory against half that number of Phocaean vessels. Corsica was now
assigned to the Etruscan sphere of influence. Alalia helped consolidate Punic control of
the western Mediterranean, a control sealed not only by alliance with the Etruscans, but
with the rising new Roman Republic 9.
At a time when Rome had formed her Republic, Darius was consolidating the Persian
Empire, and Athens was deposing her tyrants in favor of democracy, Carthage was
reaching the peak of her naval and trading power. French scholars J.G. Demerliac and
J.Meirat have reconstructed the 'vast commercial organisation' of Punic naval capitalism,
a classic model of the Eclectic Paradigm applied in antiquity. The vast distances
separating Carthage from the fringes of her empire increased the importance of ports such
as Gades and Lixus in managing trading voyages. Unlike independent Greek poleis,
Punic centres were integral parts of a centrally-directed system joined together by three
key trade routes.10
Carthaginian Trade Routes
Easterly Route: May: Carthage-Malta-Sidon/Tyre, links to Persian Empire.
September: Return via Egypt Libya. Overland trading connections to Ghana and
Nigeria.
Northerly Route: May: Carthage-Sardinia-Etruria. Connections to Sicily.
September: return.
Westerly Route: May: Carthage-Sardinia-Ibiza in Balerics-Iberian coast- GibraltarGades-Lixus. Connections to Iberian network in British Isles. September: return.
Between May and September of every year commercial flotillas left Carthage bound east,
north and west. Galleys sailed eastward to buy Oriental goods and access the Persian
trading sphere stretching to India. The galleys returned via Egypt and Libya, which
oversaw trading routes which also crossed the Sahara to Ghana and Nigeria. Galleys on
the northerly route headed via Sardinia for Etruria and outposts south to Sicily. The
important westerly route headed to the Balearics and down the Iberian coast to Gibraltar,
Gades, and Lixus.11 An early equivalent of the 'multinational' organisation prescribed by
the Eclectic Paradigm seemed the natural solution for a Carthage lived very much by
trade. No independent merchant in a penteconter could finance bulk trade such as this.
The vast annual convoys carried large shipments of Spanish silver and copper and British
tin, as well as Tunisian wheat and Tyrian luxuries. It is tempting to argue that only the
Carthaginian elite, backed by temple, navy, and state, could afford to put up the capital
and assume the risks needed to maintain the trade of such a large empire. Market failure,
4
especially for voyages into the Atlantic was circumvented through internalized bulk trade
and direction by royal and aristocratic agents living in Spain and Morocco. Long-distance
operations were financed from Carthage. The cost of insuring Mediterranean cargoes
alone amounted to a full third of their value but piracy and war raised the costs to two
thirds or even the full price. Only the crown and the large estates and temples could cover
such potential losses. Oncethe Punic interest rate reached sixty-five per cent, the Greek
overland routes to Europe meanwhile threatened the Punic seaborne trade to Europe
unless piracy and war could be reduced. Piracy itself was a very serious menace and
another reason for Carthage to operate such a vast and complex military trading system 12
Swarms of Greek, Ligurian, and Albanian pirates lurked in the Tyrrhenian, north
Mediterranean, and Ionian Seas lurking in large numbers along Carthagian trading
arteries, provoking a coordinated response. The trading operations of the Punic Silver
Fleet were well organised and planned, with a single trading convoy on each major route
between May and September. Triremes were faster than merchant ships and had large
crews to feed crews of 120 rowers plus marines. This tied warships to their bases, so
Punic merchant ships themselves carried marines. The navy meanwhile used triremes in
mass sweeps against pirates near Sardinia, the Balearics, Cartagena, Malta, Crete, and the
Nile. Cooperation with Etruscan sailors was important. 13
The tempo of Carthaginian life was affected by the annual naval campaign as much as the
tempo of Roman life was affected by the mobilization of the army. Every spring royal
firms in Carthage armed 200 triremes, each of which carried marines and Libyan, Iberian,
Sardinian and other mercenaries. Once the planting was done, 24,000 North African
peasants joined them as rowers, planning to return to their lords for the autumn harvest.
One out of every five Carthaginians took part in this system of naval commerce. The
system worked fine, so long as the need for mobilization was brief. As a result, Carthage
had to win her wars quickly.14
Naval capitalism usually fended off pirates from Greece or Gaul, but the Gelonid tyrants
of Syracuse were a foretaste of the future Roman challenge. Were Syracuse to conquer
the independent poleis of Gela, Megara, and Himera, it would tilt the balance strategic
Sicily against Carthage. Gelon attacked Himera in 480, at the same time Xerxes marched
on Athens. The Carthaginians were led by Hamilcar of the Magonid family. Gelon won,
and the war raged on throughout the fifth century. The tyranny of Gelonid Sicily
challenged both Carthage and Athens as a power in its own right. It joined forces with
Sparta and Corinth to hand Athens her decisive defeat before Syracuse in the
Peloponnesian War. Carthage, though, fought on with increased savagery in the name of
her baalim, whom she beseeched for victory with an intense wave of human sacrifice.15
Himera was recovered. the men of the city were tortured and murdered as blood
sacrifices while the women and children were regarded as booty. The multinational Punic
army of mercenaries, ignorant of sanitation, was decimated by salmonella and typhus. 16
Carthage could not conquer Hellenic Sicily, and in the fourth century determined to seek
new markets in Africa by both land and sea. Berbers in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco
were subjugated, feudal estates erected, and wheat production increased. Military posts
5
were erected every twenty or thirty miles along the Maghreb coast where Greek is
replaced by Punic finds.17 Caravans crossed the Sahara across Ghadames, Fezzan, and
Garamentes to the gold fields and ivory markets of Guinea and Niger. Inland posts and
routes also reached overland to Egypt, well inland from Libyan Cyrenaica. 18
Carthaginian traders based in Lixus reached new African markets via the Atlantic. Prince
Hanno, of the Magonid house, sent a massive fleet of triremes, with 30,000 personnel
down the coast of West Africa around 450 BC. The Periplus of Hanno was probably
doctored to protect valuable market information. The text suggests a possible attempt to
plant Canaanite colonies on the shores of Subsaharan Africa and a voyage that may have
reached as far as the Camerouns. Did Hanno found colonies, or did he turn back,
suggesting that even internalized commerce could not guarantee any profitable largescale investment in African markets this far south? 19
Sailing from Gades, Hanno's brother Himlico, headed up the French Atlantic coast and
probably reached the tin markets of the Celtic tin mines of Brittany and Cornwall.
Carthage hoped to place control over the Iberian tin trade in the hands of her own princes
in Gades, cutting out the middlemen. Tin once bartered from the Celts was now paid for
with Carthaginian horse-head coins. Punic admirals using Gibraltar and Gades were able
to monopolize control of the Atlantic to bar Greeks and others, compelling them to
exploit the overland river routes. 20
A few intrepid European traders broke the Carthaginian blockade. When the Punic navy
in 310 massed against Sicily, Pytheas the Greek slipped through Gibraltar and sailed to
Cornwall. With his crude sextant, Pytheas discovered the North Star and Little Dipper
much higher in the sky, than in Massilia. Within about fifty years this discovery hinted to
both Greek and Punic mathematicians that the earth was curved and maybe even round.
2122
A few brave Roman traders, now beginning to take to the sea, tried industrial
espionage but were less successful than Pytheas. The captain posed as a friend of
Carthage and slipped into Gades where Roman spies told him a Punic vessel was sailing
for Cornwall. The Latin skipper followed the Canaanite at a distance until the latter
discovered him and scuttled his own vessel on the Spanish shore. The Carthaginian crew
made their way overland to Gades and given a hero's welcome by the princely hierarchy
for keeping market knowledge from the intrusive Romans23
The Carthaginian monopoly in the Atlantic held. Punic horsehead and palm-tree coins
can still be dug up in Devon and Dorsetshire, though there is yet no proof of a permanent
Carthaginian establishment in these major Celtic import-export centers for tin, furs and
animal skins. How far did the Canaanites journey into the Atlantic ocean? The notion that
the Phoenicians left an inscription on a rock in Brazil is now dismissed as a hoax.
Nevertheless, there are strong hints of a Carthaginian presence in the New World.
Plutarch discovered a Punic parchment describing lands far to the west. West of Britain
were three groups of islands equally distant from one another. Were these the Orkneys,
Shetlands, and Faroes ? Then there a large island known as Ogygia. Was Ogygia Iceland?
Five thousand stades or 480 miles west of Ogygia was the continent Epiros. Was Epiros
Greenland, Nova Scotia, and New England? Not only the Viking route but the
Columbian route might be traced to antiquity. Diodorus of Sicily talked of Canaanite
6
ships blown westward to very large fertile island many days west of Africa. Was this
Cuba? Horsehead coins of Carthaginian type have been found near navigable rivers all
over North America. If this is true, the royal trading agents in Gades and Morocco may
have enjoyed what one today might call a transatlantic subsidiary mandate.24
Latin Capitalism: The Emergence of Rome:
The Hellenic/Tyrian presence in Ischia accelerated the coming of the Iron Age and
market revolution in Italy. Latins and Etruscans shared a similar culture. The Etruscan
centers Veii, Tarquinia, Populonia, Vulci, and Cerveteri and the Latin centers Lavinium,
Ardea, Antium, Satricum, and Rome grew from small Bronze Age 'Villanovan'
settlements. Etruscan gentry soon found a lucrative market in Ischia for the iron, copper,
and silver mined near Populonia and Vetulonia. Whether the Italians discovered
ironworking on their own or learned it from the Euboeans is unsure. Burials at Veii from
760 BC show increased use of iron helmets, shields, swords, and chariots. What is certain
is that contact with the Greeks accelerated the Iron Age in Italy.25 Other Greeks entered
Italy around 700 BC. Hybrid Etruscan-Greek pottery was made in Campania, and the
work of pottery entrepeneurs such as the 'Bearded Sphinx Painter' can be discerned in
Tarquinia, Caere, and Vulci. By 600 BC Etruscan pottery was more widespread and
uniform. Copper and iron were mined by Etruscans and smelted nearby, as the use of iron
in Italy expanded greatly at this time. The ores of Elba were mined systematically and
shipped to more central sites after 650 BC. The Etruscans soon possessed the most
advanced metalworking techniques in the central and even western Mediterranean. The
Etruscan economy began to specialize with increasing regionalisation and competition
between centers. Tripod and weapons makers concentrated first along the coast, at
Tarquinia and Vetulonia, then at Caere and Vulci.26
Short-and even long-distance trade in Italy was, according to experts Graeme Barker and
Tom Rasmussen, clearly entrepreneurial in nature, operating within a sophisticated barter
economy: 'Etruscan maritime trade was in the hands of enterprising individuals and
families rather than being "state-directed"'.27 Grain consumed in the cities was grown
nearby, for roads were poor and there were few large rivers. The Greeks were Etruria’s
prime overseas customers. Between 625 and 550 B.C. Hellenic pottery entered Etruria
from Corinth and the Aegean. After 550 B.C. the Etrurian market became increasingly
penetrated by Athens. In spite of their newness to long-distance, merchants in southern
Etruscan cities were able to export pottery, bronzes, and amphorae to Spain, France,
Corsica, Sardinia, Greece, North Africa, Egypt, and even the Black Sea.28
Etruscan/ Latin capitalism provided much room for independent enterprise, but was more
family-oriented and differently shaped by geography than its Greek counterpart. The
Appenines permitted Italians better overland communication and political unity than their
Greek counterparts. The rich volcanic plains of Latium and Campania became a prize for
whomever occupied them. The occupant, however, had not only to defend this farmland
but seek additional land for surplus population through overland military expansion. The
basic contours of Roman history were set: live by the sword or face quick extinction.29
7
While Romans and other Latins were slower to embrace entrepeneurial commerce than
their Etruscan neighbours, Rome before 300 B.C was not a total backwater. Rome began
as a trading center at the junction of the Tiber and the Campania-Etruria roads. Few were
rich or poor in the early Latin subsistence economy. Artifacts of the eighth century BC
hinted of the business culture to come. The burials at Osteria dell’Osa and Castel di
Decima show little class distinction save a few spears and swords marking the better-off
in a warrior society. Roman life was even then based upon an powerful gens (extended
family/clan) and a powerful clan or gens system. Rome's power rose slowly at first. By
600 B.C. she was an Italian Sparta, and the largest fortified city in Latium. Romans still
borrowed much from Etruscan and Hellenic economics, institutions, rituals, and religion
while retaining much of their own. Etruscan, Tyrian, and Greek entrepeneurs visited the
growing city, bringing the products of the Iron Age. Tombs only twenty miles from
Rome show evidence of Tyrian goods, but seaborne trade up the silted Tiber was still
unimportant. Latins prior to 500 BC had little to export save wheat and other produce
from the rich volcanic soil of western Italy. As the Greeks expanded into Gaul and Italy
between 600 and 500 BC, Etruscan cities like Veii, Tarquinii, and Caere became
middlemen between the agrarian interior and the foreign traders of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Rome itself could now attract more trade though her craftsmen produced but a few gold
and copper products to offer in return. Latin farmers had no means to sell their grain
abroad, trading it instead to the local mountain tribes.30
Timeline Rome: Monarchy and Early Republic
Monarchy: 775-509 BC
Formation of the Republic: 509-343 BC
Conquest of Italy: 343-265 BC
Punic Wars: 265-146 BC
In 509 BC The Roman landed oligarchy overthrew their monarchy and set up a republic
which better reflected the warlike and familial character of Roman society. Instead of a
single tyrant Rome was governed by a pair of elected magistrates, or consuls, often
soldiers, able to veto one another’s actions. In a crisis, a consul could assume the office
of dictator, exercising unlimited power for six months. The Senate represented the
powerful landed patricians, while elected tribunes represented the plebeian orders of
farmers, labourers, and artisans. A middle stratum or equites emerged among the Roman
knights wealthy enough to own horses and fight on horseback. The Twelve Tables of
450 BC distilled the essence of the Roman Republic: a government similar to the
Hellenic model, limited in scope, unwilling and unable to intervene on behalf of those
who might be injured by the market. Individual self-help was to be nonetheless mitigated
by the all-important patron and familia.31
Roman business operated on the familia, or patriarchal extended family, which included
not only nuclear family but slaves and other subjects and dependants of the paterfamilias.
The Roman familia was defined not just by 'blood relationship' but, according to
Professor A. Drummond, '… the powers exercised for life by the family head over both
the persons and property subject to him.'32 The weak, unable to find protection from the
8
state as in the Orient, sought it via inclusion in the familia. The Twelve Tables helped
enshrine a patronal concept of family property and, by implication, family enterprise, in
the Roman market economy to a much greater extent than it would be in the Greek.33 The
patricians of the early Republic saw little in terms of opportunity to cause them to reverse
their longstanding prejudice against the market and engage themselves in business. On
the other hand, Greek, Etruscan, and Oriental traders in Rome were neither excluded,
regulated, nor taxed when they imported pottery from Attica or plied their trades of
carpenter, smith, tanner, dyer, and potter alongside their Roman counterparts. Most
Roman trade still took place on a small scale. Around 450 BC imports and construction,
moreover, were virtually halted through much of Italy by a trade depression.34
Free markets and family patriarchy were important ingredients in the rise of Roman
capitalism. The catalyst that would ignite the mixture would be Roman militarism.
During its first 150 years the Roman Republic remained a defensive local power, but a
new phase of intensive and almost constant fighting opened around 343 BC which lasted
for several centuries. This warfare provided the demand and the market for the rise of a
real Roman business and managerial class from the ranks of the knights. Roman warfare
was inspired as much by booty as by politics.35 Every spring the legions assembled to
rout one foe after another. By 350 southern Etruria was Roman and Celtic invaders
driven north to the Po. Rome strangled Etruscan commerce by deporting many
inhabitants, expropriating farmland, bypassing cities with new roads, and planting coastal
colonies such as Cosa, future emporium for the Sestii family to isolate Caere, Tarquinia,
Vulci, and Populonia from their markets. From the second century B.C. onwards the west
coast of Etruria was transformed by the same Roman villas and slaveholding estates one
found further south.36 Rome’s Latin rivals accepted subordination after the Latin War of
340-338. The settlement foreshadowed the future structure of the Late Republic and the
Roman Empire. Some states were made Roman territory, others Roman protectorates,
others Roman allies. Citizenship and other rights were granted as well as a share of future
booty if they fought alongside Rome, who added the military power of the states she
dominated to her own. Italians, Iberians, Africans, Greeks, Macedonians, Anatolians,
Syrians, Gauls, Britons, Germans, Illyrians, and others would integrate into this
expanding system.37
Rome next vanquished the Samnites, followed by the Greeks in southern Italy. Over
45,000 square miles of Italian territory and some three million people were now subject
to Roman rule. The Republic could now field 60,000 men, twice the size of Alexander
the Great's army. Fifteen Roman and Latin colonies were planted between 334 and 263
BC, among the conquered peoples of the peninsula, land awarded to 70,000 landless
veterans and their families, with many more to come.38 The economics of plunder were
truly perfected in the context of a growing river of tribute extorted from confiscated
farmland. The face of the Italian countryside was transformed by the new economics of
Mars. Faced with growing population, debt slavery, and social unrest the subsistence
economy of Latium was ready for transformation. With many Latin farmers sinking into
serfdom, the wars of conquest provided a safety valve for many plebs. Many abandoned
their dying farms to settle in a military colony or Rome itself. The patrician landlords
found another source of labour in the thousands of Samnite, Etruscan, and other slaves
9
captured in war. Rome became a slave society well before 300 BC, with family farms
replaced by patrician villas operated by slaves. The new slaves joined the familial
economy, being grafted into the family units enshrined in the Twelve Tables and later
Roman law. War both fed the demand for slaves, and provided slaves to fill the demand,
while the reduction of peasant debt and the rise of slave agriculture freed up a large part
of the rural population for steady military service.39 War effected a continuous exchange
of populations, with Roman plebeians colonizing Italian lands whose former tenants
entered Latium as slaves. Roman Italy as a whole became more urban, and this,
according to Professor T.J. Cornell would help enlarge markets for Roman business:
'The same land was worked by a smaller number of people; since they were slaves they
could be worked harder and organised more effectively so as to produce a greater surplus.
Increased productivity was stimulated by the development of an urban market in the
growing and prosperous city of Rome.'40
Rome grew from 30,000 in 350 to 60,000 in 300 to a major city of almost 100,000 by 264
BC. Water came in via aqueduct and wheat in small boats via the Tiber. Seaborne trade
and a navy became part of Roman life, as exports of black-glaze pottery made in Roman
workshops found their way across Italy and Gaul, northeast Spain, Corsica, Sicily, and
Carthaginian Africa.41 The first coins issued by the Republic circulated in Campania
around 326, stamped with images of Roman militarism: Mars, winged victory, horses, a
laurel-crowned Apollo. These coins financed the Appian Way in 312-308 and more
circulated with the wars against the Greeks of southern Italy. The first coins in Rome
itself were struck in 269, paying legionnaires and temple workers. Roman coinage made
a political statement: Rome was now in the same league with Hellenistic states such as
Seleucia and Egypt, and with Carthage, all of whom she would soon challenge and
ultimately conquer.42
The War of Business Cultures: Round II: The Punic Wars
If the wars between Greece and Persia represented the first round of a war between the
European and Near Eastern models of society and economy, the challenge posed by first
Greece and then Rome to Carthage represents the second. Carthage and Rome were
friendly at first. Rome in the sixth century BC was a local power with little interest in
trade. Polybius preserved the Carthage-Rome Treaty of 509, which shows the managed,
strategic nature of Punic trade. Rome could trade in Carthage, Sardinia, and Sicily, but in
Africa only north of the Fair Promontory (likely Cape Bon in Tunisia). According to
Polybius the Carthaginians 'did not wish them to become acquainted with the coast
around Byzacium or the Lesser Syrtes, which they called Emporia because of the great
fertility of that region.'43 The more laissez-faire Romans allowed Carthaginians to trade
anywhere in Italy, so long as they built no forts in Latium, interfered with Latin cities or
carried weapons on Latin territory. According to Polybius, the treaty showed the
Carthaginians 'consider Sardinia and Africa as belonging absolutely to them' while Sicily
was only partially under their control. The Romans, on the other hand, only made
stipulations concerning Latium, for the rest of Italy was not yet under their control.44
10
By 260 BC Rome was the major power facing Carthage. Two models of economic
enterprise, politics and religion prepared to do battle in a war destined to be even more
ferocious than either the Persian Wars or the Greek fratricide of 150 years earlier.
Carthage mobilized her network of hierarchical management organisations centrally
directed from the capital itself. Her large enterprise remained run by the crown or
hereditary princely families with royal and mutual connections. Smaller enterprises
gathered in guilds dedicated to patron deities. Farming, mining, munitions, shipbuilding,
and shipping actively cooperated crown, temples, and one another. The whole culture of
Carthage conditioned her trading and military strategy along the lines of the Eclectic
Paradigm. African trade was managed from Libya, Atlantic trade from Spain and
Morocco, Mediterranean trade from Sardinia, Sicily, or Carthage herself. The annual
trading expeditions of the Silver Fleet, blessed by priests of Baal, still functioned as naval
campaigns.45
On the other side of the Straits of Messina, the new business managers of a young and
confident citizen-republic ran their firms independently. Many were entrepeneurs and
often foreigners. Some were even slaves. In Rome, a knight, pauper or slave could
become a manager. The Roman state was even less interventionist than the Greek polis.
Private bankers, not temples, lent money and bore risks. The gods, borrowed from the
Greeks, were fine symbols of patriotism and civic virtue, so long as they stayed out of
private markets and private lives. Romans waived the Eclectic Paradigm and let the
market remained the main arbiter of commerce. Liquid cash, high interest rates, and
trading deals were the only insurance against market failure. The contrasts between the
two enterprise models may be shown by these two graphs. The first one illustrates the
Oriental hierarchical model which Carthage embodied:
The 'Embedded Organisation' Perspective of Oriental Enterprise46
Variants:
Mesopotamian: temple capitalism
Canaanite: naval capitalism
Egyptian/Minoan: palace capitalism
Indian: caste-based capitalism
Chinese: state and family capitalism
Rome: Publican and family firms in Late Republic and Empire
Networked Relationships:
Top-down management hierarchies directed from major urban centers.
Interdependence and interlocking of public and private sectors
Little social mobility permitted
Symbiosis:
Enterprises co-ordinated for goals defined by hierarchies.
Co-operative
Royal, feudal and religious relationships cement business alliances.
Positive Sum (win-win): Trust and Reciprocity
Long-term strategic alliances (long term): open, broad, contact
11
The second illustrates the Classical entrepeneurial model which operates in its purest
form in Greece but is compromised in Rome:
The Western 'Discrete Organization' View 47
Variants:
Hellenic 'household' capitalism
Roman family and 'legionary' capitalism
Individualism and Independence versus Networked Relationships:
Free-standing Greek entrepeneurs
Enterprise independent of temples and state but with state contracts in Athens and Rome
Competition:
Business goals set by profit-seeking individuals
Extensive slave and foreign labor but extensive social mobility permitted
Business is 'all against all' with relationships based heavily on impersonal contracts. More
extended family relationships in Rome eventually embrace Eclectic Paradigm
Zero Sum (win-lose) with power negotiation
Short-term tactical alliances (limited, contractual, calculative):
Greek trader cash deals with banks, partners, and customers
Roman partnership tax and military contracts with Republic
Rome marched into Sicily, beginning the first of the three Punic Wars in 264 BC. These
wars would enormously impact Roman power and Roman life. Roman capitalism would
grow and transform itself in tandem with the changes in Roman society. The wars as well
would provide an enormous market for Roman business as the Roman war machine
expanded far beyond its previous size as Rome became a world power.48
In 264 the odds seemed to favor Carthage, with her vast wealth, professional mercenary
armies, tight organization, and the world's leading navy.49 In the first round of warfare
Rome stepped into the place of the Gelonids. Carthage sent her fleet to strangle the
legions in Sicily and land marines in their rear. The Romans quickly moved to play upon
their strengths and remedy their weaknesses. One of Rome's greatest strengths was the
civic spirit of her soldiers and her entrepeneurs.50 Rome needed a navy. When a
Carthaginian warship was captured intact, Roman entrepeneurs set about turning out
Roman copies, complete with Roman innovations. Polybius recorded how independent
innovators quickly produced 120 state-of-the-art warships:
'It was, therefore, because they saw that the war was dragging on that they first applied
themselves to building ships….They faced great difficulties because their shipwrights
were completely inexperienced…since these vessels had never before been employed in
Italy'.51
Polybius saw this as a testimony to the Roman spirit, for the Romans possessed neither
the resources nor the seamanship of their powerful enemy:
12
'But once they had conceived the idea, they embarked on it so boldly that without waiting
to gain any experience in naval warfare they immediately engaged the Carthaginians,
who had for generations enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy at sea.' 52
Rome, formidable on land, equipped her new warships to turn her soldiers into marines.
An iron bridge shaped like a crow's beak, called a corvus was dropped onto the
Carthaginian decks, letting Roman centurions board the enemy ships and turn the war
into a duel of floating armies, and in armies Rome was nearly invincible. By 241 the
naval superiority of Carthage was forever shattered and the war ended with a victorious
Rome annexing Sardinia and Sicily.53
With Sicily and Sardinia gone, Carthage turned to Spain as a source of gold, copper,
iron, and silver, as well as corn, oil, wine, salt, and fish. General Hamilcar Barca (237229 BC) ruled Iberia with regal powers of direct Carthaginian rule. Loyal to Carthage, the
Barcids governed Spain as their personal kingdom, passed on to Hasdrubal, and Hannibal
in 221. Ruling from Novo Carthago (Cartagena) the Barcids continued the tradition of
managed enterprise. Revenues from mines from Rio Tinto in the west to newer mines
Baebelo in the east financed 90,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, and 50 warships with
which Hannibal resumed the war. Many Iberians fought as mercenaries or personal allies
of the Barcids 54 Hannibal boldly marched his new army deep into Italy, smashing one
legion after another, devastating Roman agriculture. The invasion further concentrated
wealth and power in large Italian villas and cities. Rome defeated Hannibal in the end by
choking his supplies and striking his base in Africa. Rome took Spain as the spoils of the
Second Punic War and ended Carthage's great power status. One final round was fought
in 146 BC when Rome conquered Carthage and razed the city to the ground.55
The Roman Revolution: Age of the Publican
Rome emerged from the Punic Wars triumphant in the Mediterranean and beginning to
expand into the Aegean. While the Roman world remained overwhelmingly agrarian, the
centuries of constant and intensifying warfare spawned and fed a full-fledged and
thriving Latin commercial establishment. Roman business culture was mirrored in the
comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus, born around 250 BC.
Plautus found little market for heavy political drama. Romans wanted comedies about
everyday life, and Plautus gave them soap-opera characters that tell much about expected
roles. They are not unlike those of 1950's America The paterfamilias is feared but often
ridiculed as naïve; his strong but submissive wife often rescues him. A rich playboy falls
in love with a girl beneath his station only to find she is really a patrician. The cunning
slave tries to 'freeload' or 'scam' the more productive. In the end, Roman economic values
are upheld, not mocked, as everyone returns to their proper role in society.56 In The Pot of
Gold, a poor man refuses to marry his daughter to a rich one. To do so would be hitching
an ox and an ass. Both asses (the poor) and oxen (the rich) would never tolerate such an
arrangement, for 'an ass with ox ambitions' ran an unacceptable social risk.57 Slaves in the
comedies are harshly treated. The audience laughs, for slavery is a necessary, natural way
of life in which people are investments. Messenio in The Twin Menaechmi wins freedom
13
only to live with his former master to find work. Family and slavery had to be maintained
at all costs.58 In Curculio, however, Plautus shows that business values are now very
much a part of the Roman Way of Life:
'Husbands gambling their fortunes away? Try the Stock Exchange. You'll know it by the
call-girls waiting outside. You can pick up anyone You want to, at a price …
In the lower Forum You’ll find the respectable bourgeoise
taking their daily stroll…Below the old shops are the moneylenders,
The con-men behind the Temple of Castor, The Tuscan Quarter is the red light district
Where you can make a living, one way or the other'.59
Roman legions marched into Macedonia, Greece, and eventually into Anatolia, Syria,
Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, Gaul, Germany, and Britain. The Republic needed to
arm, clothe, and feed its legions and fleets, pay its governors and maintain its roads and
public works, but lacked the bureaucracy to raise the necessary revenue. These functions
were contracted out to the private sector. The creation of a market stretching around the
Mediterranean and the profitable contracts of a garrison state permitted the growth of
enterprises on a much larger scale than in Greece. Roman partners expanded the size of
their partnerships. Chief among these were the publicani, or publican companies, which
figured strongly in Roman commerce in the last two centuries of the Republic.60
Most writing in the 1970's and 1980's continued to maintain that terms such as 'company'
or 'corporation' were inappropriate in relation to ancient business organizations. By
2003 Standford’s Ulrike Malmendier, however, boldly described the publicani of the
Late Republic as the first bona fide business corporations in history. They remained
stable regardless of the departure of individual members. Members represented the firm
without incurring personal liability. Finance and management could be separate.
Shareholders could buy and shell shares depending upon their confidence in the firm. It
may well be that this limited liability marked the Societas republicanorum as the true
ancestor of the modern company.
Roman writers documented the rise of the publicans. Roman contractors were older than
the Twelve Tables. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Antiquities of Rome 6.17.2) recorded
Consul Postumius Comimus in 493 BC/BCE contracting for the construction of several
temples. Over a century later, after the honking geese of Rome saved the city from the
attack of the Gauls, the Republic leased out their perpetual care and feeding to private
contractors (Livy 5.47.4; Pliny, Natural History 10.26.51). The first known societates
publicanorum appeared in Livy's account of the war with Hannibal. Here, in 216
BC/BCE the Republican government leased the supply of the legions in Spain to three
companies of nineteen people. (Ab urbe condita 23.48.10-49.4). Livy's account points to
a great deal of government contracting among the publicans.61
Moreover, Livy (24,18,10 f.) gives us the impression that government-lease holding was
14
a well-established business. The war was expensive for Rome and her senators could ill
afford much in the way of nonmilitary expenses. Nevertheless the publicans still
assembled at the government auctions 'in large numbers' and this 'encouraged the
censores to act as they usually did and to sell the contracts as though the treasury were
full'. In return, none of the contractors 'would ask for repayment before the end of the
war.'62
Malmendier described several types of publican companies. The opera publica et sarta
tecta supplied the legions and built and maintained public works. The second group,
called opera publica facienda et sarta tecta tuenda locare purchased grazing, mining and
fishing rights. The third group, the largest and best known, bid for the right to collect the
taxes of the Republic. These were both direct and indirect. The wealth and power of the
publicans continued to expand along with the Roman Republic. Behind the publicans lay
a class of Roman citizens whose growing power would provide the Late Republic with
many of its business managers. Who would run any big Roman companies? The plebs
lacked the resources, and the patricians were legally barred from doing so… at least
formally and directly. The famous lex Claudia or Claudian Law of 218 BC/BCE banned
Senators from leaseholding and nonagrarian enterprises. Most of these enterprises were
directed by the equites, or Roman knights. These knights controlled a certain share of
wealth which allowed them to own and equip a horse for battle. This wealth also allowed
them to control and operate businesses. The Claudian Law foreshadowed the complete
consolidation of the knights as a business class.
These firms existed as far back as 500 BC, but this form of business organization truly
came into its own during the Punic Wars. The manufacture and distribution of togas,
shields, helmets, and other weapons and provisions for the vast Roman legions was left in
private hands, providing enormous marketing opportunities. Publican companies bidding
in the open market upon military contracts grew enormously along with Roman territory.
Publican firms also bid for the right to collect Roman taxes. Professor E. Badian, a
leading expert on these firms, insists that the publicani were “an integral part of the res
publica as far back as we can observe it or trace it.”63
Rome: The Late Republic
The Gracchan Period: 146-121 BC
Slave Wars and Social Wars: 121-79 BC
Civil War: 79-31 BC
The Roman conquest of Italy and the Mediterranean world earlier wars would have been
impossible without the construction of roads, temples, and aqueducts by the publicani.
Apart from agriculture military contracts were the major business in Rome. Some must
have been enormous. It cost 100 denarii (US $5,000) to clothe one centurion, 420,000
denarii to clothe a legion of 4,200. Four legions meant over 1.5 million denarii, perhaps
$50-75 million. During the Punic Wars the number of legions grew from four to twenty,
returning to a permanent postwar force of eight or nine, still an army of 50,000 and a cost
of 3 million denarii, or $100-150 million to clothe them alone. The sheer volume of these
15
contracts, of which hundreds were let out on an annual basis, ensured a rich market for
the publicani. 64
Many of the 'Roman' managers setting up shop in the Aegean were southern Italians now
incorporated into the Roman realm. When Roman legions temporarily destroyed both
Corinth and Carthage in 146 BC , Delos, once seat of the Delian League, became office
site for their publican firms engaged in tax collection and slave-trading. These Delian
publicans hired Greek agents and attracted merchants from Syria, Asia, Egypt, and
Greece. Delian publican agents flocked into Asia Minor in huge numbers. Valerius
Maximus stated that Mithradites, ruler of Pontus, massacred 80,000 Roman citizens
'scattered about the cities of Asia for the sake of business.' Following this, Roman
publicans presented themselves as Hellenic rather than Roman firms and traders,
speaking, dressing, and acting as Greeks as easily as they had acted as Romans.65
Roman Gaul and Spain attracted central and northern Italian publicans, who, according to
the famous orator Tulius Marius Cicero, dominated commerce in Gaul:
'Gaul is packed with traders, crammed with Roman citizens. No Gaul ever does business
independently of a citizen of Rome; not a penny changes hands without the transaction
being recorded in the books of Roman citizens…Let one single account be produced in
which there is a single hint indicating that money has been given to Fonteius; let them
bring forward the evidence of one single trader, colonist, tax-farmer, agriculturist, or
grazier out of all the inhabitants; and I will grant that the charge is a true one.' 66
The rise of the publicans was linked to the social and political crisis which would
ultimately doom the Roman Republic and transform it from a Roman Republic of
freeholders to a Roman Empire adopting much from the Oriental realms it conquered.
Rome may have subjugated a world, but did not easily digest her conquest. Debtburdened farmers continued to be driven off their land and displaced by vast numbers of
slaves imported from Delos. Rural Italy itself was becoming depopulated of natives. The
city of Rome generated a landless proletariat forced to fend for itself.67
Booty, slaves, war, and debt accelerated the transformation of the Italian countryside
from a landscape of independent Italian farmers to one of manorial villas run for profit
and manned by imported slaves. While most of the Senate's patricians tolerated this, a
few voices sought to denounce and reverse the foundations of the citizen-Republic. A
century of political turmoil began when Senator Tiberius Gracchus attempted to limit the
amount of land one individual could hold. Seeing the very foundation of the patrician
state challenged, the conservative Senate murdered Tiberius. A decade later, his brother
Gaius proposed even more sweeping reforms. The equestrian knights, who produced
most of the publican managers, were given formal legal status and political power. Gaius
Gracchus hoped to use them as a counterweight to the landed patrician wealth he claimed
was strangling the Republic. The fact that this measure of 133 BC coincided with Roman
expansion into Asia Minor enormously increased the power and scope of the publican
companies. Vast markets opened as Gaius gave the right to tax the immense wealth of the
of new Roman province of Asia Minor to the publicani who were ready to reap 45
16
million denarii ($US 22.5 billion) in contracts alone. Gaius, too, however, was murdered
by the Senate, which nevertheless could not stem the revolution of rising expectations
and polarised discontent his reforms had unleashed. Politics in Rome now became
polarized and interest-group instead of citizen-oriented. Instead of 'Romans', one found
peasantry, proletariat, slaves, freedmen, and other polities divided on class, ethnic, and
occupational lines.68
The publicani reached their zenith at this time. They began as large partnerships working
in the free-market milieu of Roman Italy. They were, much as modern conglomerates, not
specialised firms. A firm might make swords or togas but specialize in neither. Publican
management and work force were flexible and disposable. Associations of partners came
together to carry out a contract and then disbanded. Faced with fierce market
competition, publicani simply could not afford much in the way of permanent staff,
which remained lean and flexible, adapting to different markets. What the firms instead
provided, according to Professor E. Badian, was 'capital and top management, based on
general business experience'.69 The small permanent staffs easily adapted to different
kinds of business for both public and private contractors. The companies, says Badian,
'can only have functioned…by taking over existing substructures and superimposing
managing staff .'70 Permanent, organised staffs of skilled miners, tax professionals, arms
makers, shipbuilders, and others offered services to various publican managers as they
shifted from contract to contract. The publicani of the second and first centuries BC
transacted business on a much larger scale than any private firm in the Near East or
Mediterranean before them. Without bureaucracies or business schools they
foreshadowed the first multinational conglomerates and limited liability corporations.
Some had a legal existence of their own, so long as the contract their manceps, or
manager concluded the Republic remained binding. Were the manceps to die, the
publicani could choose another manager to complete the contract. A typical Roman
contract included dates of completion and payment, a clause for inspection of work, and
an indemnity in case of losses due to war.71
The Roman war economy was a dangerous place for large publican firms, let alone
entrepeneurs. War, and now civil war, was frequent and ferocious warfare. Contracts
involved tens of thousands of denarii. Terentius Varro Gibba, for example, was a partner
in a publican firm who was wiped out in trading and forced to turn to law and other
professions to recoup his losses. Internalization within large firms became essential to
working in such a high-risk environment. Greece and early Rome bypassed the Eclectic
Paradigm, only to return as the market economy grew. Publicani were associations or
partnerships, some combining the capital of a score of partners, or socii. The socii,
operating beneath the manceps, represented the shareholders directors of the firm. Real
executive power lay in the hands of the magistii. One Sicilan firm was run by the knight
Vettius and his magistii, Servilius and Antistius, both elected by the socii. Beneath the
chief executives lay the company’s decuria or divisions, headed by other knights.
Familial and personal ties among the knights made even competing publicani part of a
single network, not unlike European business today. A company based in Rome,
Campania, or Tarentium operated through its pro magistro in Delos, Pergamum,
Ephesus, Laodicea, Alexandria, Massilia, Gades, Athens, or Carthage. These officers
17
were not contractors but salaried branch managers in charge of keeping accounts,
collecting taxes, and sending reports to the magistii in Rome. One such agent was
Terentius Hispo, whose huge firm with tens of thousands of employees farmed taxes in
Bithynia and Asia. Pro Magistro like Hispo also held military, postal, and banking
contracts.72
The career of the publicani was reflected in the life of Cicero, who was a very successful
businessman who held an interest in a publican firm, owned several villas, and defended
many publican partners in court. Born into a knightly family near Cassino in 107 BC, he
grew up studying business law under the jurist Quintus Mucius Scaevola. Cicero
witnessed turbulent events rocking the Republic to its foundations. The Consul Gaius
Marius saved Rome from Germanic invaders by politicizing the legions; Lucius
Cornelius Sulla used them to make himself dictator of Rome and slaughter many knights.
Sulla renounced his tyranny, but set a precedent where ambitious politicians, backed by
now-politicized legions and publican money, could aspire to permanent dictatorship.73
As lawyer, administrator in Sicily, public works official and city magistrate Cicero
defended the knights of the Equestrian Order against the patrician Senate. His true goal
appears to be to forge a conservative coalition of the optimates, or defenders of property.
Cicero saw the common enemy of knights and patricians in the populares, whom he saw
as demagogues promising debt relief to the landless masses. This would, he felt, ruin
property rights and social stability. Cicero’s writings and speeches are a key source on
the publicani of the Late Republic, indicating many Roman knights trafficked in Asia.
Cicero viewed them as the bulwark of the Republic. Caius Rabirius Postumus and
Caraeus Plancius, both manceps, were friends of Cicero. Plancius, heir of a long line of
knights, was promoter of many Roman firms. His father was the much respected manceps
of the most influential firm in Asia Minor. Cicero had to defend Caraeus against charges
of bribery and corruption. The Plancius firm meanwhile wield considerable political
influence on behalf of any office-seeker allied to it.74
The Plancii and other firms in the mid-first century BC reached their height when
Cicero's ally Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo crushed their enemies, the rulers of Pergamum and
the organized pirates of the Eastern Mediterranean. Pompey went on to add Syria and
Judaea to the Roman domain. The new Roman provinces and domains promised to triple
revenue for publicani willing and able to invest there. While the mighty Consul awarded
tax contracts directly to eastern municipalities, the latter usually turned to publicani such
as the Plancii who alone had the organization to raise revenue. Stiff competition
persuaded the Plancii to join with other publicani in Bithynia, Asia, and Cilicia to form a
tightly-knit tax cartel. Many reaped windfall fortunes until rampant speculation caused a
financial crash in 61 BC. The socii further internalized their operations between 61 and
59 BC, openly and officially acknowledging the existence of a cartel arrangement. The
Bithynian firm of Terentius Hispo formed an arrangement with an Ephesian firm to farm
the grazing tax of both Asia and Bithynia. Taxes in Cilicia were probably farmed by
another firm also closely linked to Cicero. The agricultural tithes of Bithynia, meanwhile,
were collected by a consortium of companies linked to Pompey himself. At least in the
18
realm of tax collection, Roman cartelization was grafted onto one of the most prosperous
realms of the Hellenistic economy. According to Tenney Frank:
'the companies had got together, formed a joint company for the exploitation of the chief
Bithynian tax, and – as this clearly implies – done away with genuine competition. There
had been organization of a sort before, as we have seen; and publicani had felt loyalty
towards one another as members of the same order. There were at least some who
thought that one publicanus, in a legal case, should never decode against another.'75
Frank went on to reveal how this cartelization internalized this part of the Roman
economy more than ever before:
'But there had nevertheless been competition for the contracts; just as, even though
manufacturers in a modern state will be closely linked in an association and will defend
their joint interests, yet they will normally be in competition with one another where their
products overlap. What we find by 51 [BC}, therefore, was radically different – as
different as a cartel is from a manufacturers’ organization or a Chamber of Commerce.
And. as we saw, the cartel now, after a fashion, must have included the whole upper order
of society and of the State, except for a few traditional aristocrats.' 76
Caius Rabirius Postumus, son of Caius Curius Postumus represented the ideal Roman
manceps, involved in business across many provinces of the Republic's expanding
overseas domain. Caius Rabirius was a philanthropist as well as a manager. Many of his
friends and relatives became his agents in return for commissions, contracts, and credit.
Rabirius lent money to many governments, including Ptolemaic Egypt, an act which
resulted in his arrest and trial for extortion and other crimes. Cicero defended his business
ally and noted in his defense that Roman managers and partners owned private fleets.
Several vessels of Caius Rabirius sailed from Egypt to Puteoli, carrying huge cargoes of
papyrus, linen, and glass. Cicero now battled as defender of the knightly order and its
business interests. If Rabirius was punished under a dubious law no manceps would be
safe from guilt by accusation.77
Cicero hints that evolving Roman capitalism was, informally at least, integrating knights
and patricians. Senators, banned by law from owning ships or firms, nevertheless became
silent partners in the major Roman enterprises. Trading for profit was deemed unsuitable
for high Roman officials, but profit derived from agriculture or productive was
praiseworthy. Still, a senator named L.A. Lepidus erected his own harbor facilities near
the mouth of the Tiber to ship his villa produce to Gaul. By Cicero's time the laws
banning patricians from commerce were totally ineffective as senators traded, owned
vessels and managed informally through contracts and private arrangements with socii.
Senators loaned money to publican allies, including Caius Rabirius and held company
shares. Cicero prosecuted the notorius Vatinius for extorting shares from Julius Caesar,
and from Roman firms. Senators generally bought unregistered, non-voting shares in
companies through which they provided an important part of the firms’ capital. Many of
the senators, moreover, since the time of Sulla were former publican knights who
privately continued their profitable associations. By the time Pompey and Julius Caesar
19
fought for supremacy all Roman politicians had large investments and decisive influence
within Roman firms.78
Cicero himself reflected the tension of patrician ideals and commercial realities.
Denouncing the greed of Carthage and Corinth, he felt Rome, being more inland, was
less guilty. Several generations of senators were already heavily invested in shipping and
commerce. Cato the Elder, patron saint of modern American libertarians, quietly lent
money to agents to form a large firm of fifty partners, owning about four dozen ships,
Cato’s share being held by his former slave Quintio. S. Neavius and C. Quinctius ran a
small partnership operating a grazing farm in Gaul, with P. Quinctius inheriting his share
on the death of his brother. Publicani were seen as partnerships, temporarily existent in
Roman law, that represented a new sophistication in commercial organization. Managers
and partners like L. Aelius Lamia deployed ships and negotia (agents) across the Roman
world while they themselves stayed at home, conducting business via a network of
dependents, associates, and contacts.79 Both the publicani and the Roman laws permitting
them embodied the extended family as expressed in Roman society and law, representing,
according to Professor John H. D’Arms:
'the fundamental Roman social unit, the familia, enlarged and extended to perform
functions far more complex than fulfillment of domestic needs. One such interconnecting
web of relationships, among men of varied levels of rank and status, of varying degrees
of closeness, and involving various types of expectations and obligations, the Romans
knew as clientela….'80
The more patricians such as Cato, Lepidus, Granius, and Lamia took part in business, the
more secretive they had to be. The many former slaves in Capua, Puteoli, Aquilea, Ostia
and other business centers were often not independent traders but visible agents for
hidden patrician managers. The family element cannot be discounted in the operation of
publican firms. The Rupilius family of Praeneste as well as others were related to
senators and sometimes became senators themselves. The Aufidius family produced a
governor of Asia, financiers, and senators. Some knights, like S. Alfenus were also
bankers. All of these family-based firms kept their residence in Rome, sending members
abroad as agents. Knights (and, behind the scenes, patricians) were investing everywhere:
Sicily, Africa, Gaul, and, especially, Asia Minor. The publicani incorporated the
personnel, labor, and capital of the older Oriental business cultures they invested among.
'Roman' vessels were often of Alexandrian, Tyrian, Sidonian, Cypriot, Anatolian,
Rhodian, or Ionian make and manned by Greek or Canaanite crews. Cicero himself noted
that the Roman negotiatores (agents) of Asia employed Greek ships.81
The merging of manceps, Consul, and legion, hastened the transformation of the Roman
Republic into the Roman Empire. Following the Slave Revolt and Social War, Rome was
ruled by the first Triumvirate of three Consuls: Marcus Licinius Crassus, Cnaeus
Pompeius Strabo (Pompey), and Gaius Julius Caesar. Crassus, having suppressed the
slave revolt of Spartacus sought to conquer Parthia. He was defeated and slain. Caesar
was far more successful in Gaul, whereupon he mustered his loyal legions, fleet, and
publican money to vanquish Pompey in Greece in 49 BC. Having first championed and
20
then betrayed the populares, Caesar’s aspirations to a permanent dictatorship quickly
roused the ire of the Senate, whose agent, M. Junius Brutus, assassinated him. The Ides of
March were but prelude to a decisive round of civil war. Caesar’s adopted grand-nephew
Octavian mustered his loyal forces to rout first Brutus in 36 and then the Egyptian forces
of Mark Antony in 31 B.C..82
The Roman world was now under the sole rule of Octavian, who had succeeded where
Sulla and Julius Caesar had failed. Octavian inaugurated an era of power and prosperity
known as the Pax Romana that would last for two centuries and witness the integration
of Roman business into a world economy stretching from Spain to China.
21
Chapter Ten: Roman Imperial Capitalism? 'Ancient' or 'Modern' ?: 27
BC/BCE-AD/CE 180.
Once he conquered Egypt, Octavian became master of the Roman world. A clever
politician, Octavian did not crown himself king or have himself elected dictator. Instead,
he preserved the forms of the Roman Republic, accepting only the new title of princeps,
or 'First Citizen. ' The Senate, meanwhile, elected him to the Consulate and the other
offices of the republic. Octavian arrogated to himself two other titles: imperator or
emperor ('victor') and Caesar Augustus ('Caesar, worthy of veneration or worship'). He
took upon himself the title of Augustus ('worthy of worship'). The principate constituted
an elective, absolute monarchy in republican dress. Created by Augustus in 27 BC/BCE
it would last for almost three centuries until Diocletian shed all the trappings of
republicanism. Augustus ruled over an empire that stretched from Spain to Syria, Judaea
and Egypt, Libya, and North Africa. The firm rule of the principate provided all around
the Mediterranean now gathered the Hellenic, Carthaginian and Oriental trading spheres
under a single authority. A certain level of integration, begun under the last century of the
republic, continued under the empire of the Pax Romana, which lasted until the death of
Marcus Aurelius in AD/CE180.
How 'Capitalist' was Rome?
Historians of the Roman economy have tended to polarize into the same two camps as the
students of the Greeks. The 'modernizers', as in the Greek case, look for evidence of
extensive long-distance trade, integrated markets, technical progress, economic growth
and rising productivity and living standards. They also look for profit-seeking behavior
among Roman merchants. Their original inspirations were Tenney Frank and Mikhail
Rostovtseff. The 'primitivists' look to Moses Finley and have dominated the debate since
1973, although to a lesser degree than in Hellenic Studies. Here once again 'primitivists'
stress the differences between ancient and modern economies. The late Republic and
early Empire was populated by peasants who were largely self-sufficient. Technological
growth in Rome was stagnant, as was economic growth as a whole. The Roman executive
had no concept of investing to maximize profit or in investing money to make more
money. He became rich and then invested his profits in the villa which brought him the
status and security he valued above all else.83
Thirty years after The Ancient Economy was first published, Finley's work remains the
starting-point for discussing Roman business and economics. Attacks have failed to
demolish his thesis, although it has been modified. In the process, Finley's view of Rome
has become distorted. Finley never denied long-distance trade and markets affected the
Roman economy. Finley also provided for economic growth, specialization,
technological progress and rising living standards within major Roman centers. He did
not even reject the use of modern models in describing it, so long as they were pre-1800.
What Finley did reject was the notion of a tightly integrated single imperial market and
22
the relevance of post-Adam Smith economics for Roman Studies. Roman economics was
not conducive to very much innovation or dynamic investment for profit. Even the
shrewdest Roman manceps and socii could track income and expenditures but enjoyed no
knowledge of modern accounting.84
British economic historian Kevin Greene admitted his debt to Finley, but began to rework
Finley's sources in view of growing evidence on Roman technology provided by
archaeologists, knowledge not available in Finley’s day. By 2000 Greene convinced
himself that Finley's conclusions on Roman technology and economic growth needed a
major revision. Greene 's work in the early 2000's painted a picture of a Roman economy
in which technological transfer and even progress were much more important than Finley
believed. Roman agriculture was not static, but Roman estates milled grain, wine, and
olives with animals and water power. Finley, who died in 1986, cited Greek and Roman
sources written by academics and aristocrats, to bolster his static view of Roman
capitalism. Greene and others demanded that these texts be looked at more critically in
view of the mounting archaeological evidence. Finley tended to see Greece and Rome as
economies which changed very little in a thousand years; Greene recognized that the
classical economies did change. The technological and economic worlds of Hesiod,
Pericles, Archimedes, Cicero, Pliny, Dio Cassius, and Ammianus Marcellinus were
different one from another.85
By the first century AD/CE water power was in extensive use from Roman Britain to
Roman Judea and donkey and oxen power were even more extensive. Wagons became
extensively used for city transport. Roman patricians learned more and more in selective
breeding, improvement of plows and sickles, development pumps and water-wheels.
Greene rarely disputed Finley's findings; he instead queried and revised their context and
interpretation. Finley downgraded the importance of Roman capital because so much of
it was squandered on public works. Roman investment could not engender growth
because it was agricultural. Greene took a much more cheerful view of these processes.
Far from retarding productivity and economic growth, Roman investment in farming and
infrastructure served as their stimulants. Roman law, administration and finance
developed and progressed. Markets became more important. Greene also noted that
imperial involvement was often more akin to state capitalist enterprise than palace fiat.
The imperial state owned property, bought and sold land, goods and services…entering
into market exchange. It outsourced and contracted like any private firm. Greene also
revised the conventional Finleyan wisdom on the issue of slavery. Observing the Spanish,
Portuguese, and English economies of the 1500-1800 era, he disputed Finley's contention
that slavery was inconsistent with economic growth. 86
The issue of 'significant' economic growth remains very important and even central in
these discussions. Professor Richard Saller in 2002 sought to formulate a consensus
approach towards how 'primitive ' or 'modern' Roman economics were. Saller asked
'What does one mean by significant growth.' He recognized that 'modernizers' such as
Keith Hopkins pointed out that Roman productivity may have grown by 25 per cent
between 100 BCE and 50 CE. Industrial production reached some four billion sesterces a
year and stimulated the growth of Rome itself and other city centers. The millions of jugs
23
and hundreds of shipwrecks bear silent testimony to this growth. On the other hand, the
'primitivists' reminded Saller that this growth, stretched out over three centuries,
signified a mere 0.1 per cent per year. Rome's minimal productivity growth was but a
part of the many centuries of stagnation of the preindustrial world economy. Saller,
however, qualifies this slow growth as being significant by Roman standards. It made
cities grow and prosper, This productivity growth began around the time of the Punic
Wars and peaked under the Julio-Claudian Emperors, but by the time of Septimus
Severus it began to decline, a decline which accelerated in the political chaos of the third
century.87
Productivity of Roman Republic/Empire : 200BCE-CE 300 [Saller, 260]
Date
GDP per capita productivity
1.0=subsistence level
200 BCE
1.2
100 BCE
1.3
50 BCE
1.4
1 CE
1.45
50 CE
1.45
100 CE
1.4
200 CE
1.3
300 CE
1.2
The most important factor rendering this productivity growth historically important was
its concentration in prosperous urban areas, in a manner perhaps suggestive of the late
medieval cities of Italy. Saller's model does borrow from modern times while taking
account of the limits imposed by the Finley School. Rising productivity and living
standards are produced by trade, investment, technology, education, and a proper
institutional framework. When the Roman legions marched eastward Roman taxes were
levied on the new eastern provinces which forced their peasants and merchants to expand
trade and production. Over 100 million sesterces must have been invested in ships to feed
1 million people living in the city of Rome. This still represented only about one per cent
of the capital owned by Roman senators.88
Roman agriculture accounted for as much as eighty per cent of Gross Domestic Product.
Some patricians such as Remmius Palaemon in the first century AD/CE increased the
productivity and profitability of their villas, but their techniques were rarely copied by
others. Waterpower and animal power spread through the Empire over a period of
centuries but they raised productivity at best by 0.025 per cent a year. Investment in these
energy sources was small compared to medieval times, in which a cumulative series of
inventions paved the way to the modern world. Progress in construction techniques may
have improved living standards by as much as half in the major cities, but spread over
three hundred years, this averaged out to ten per cent for the Empire and 0.1 percent per
year. Most urban Romans remained very poor and lived short lives. Few were educated
and those who were had no technical or scientific training. In spite of imperial unity,
relative peace, probable low taxes, and a body of business law, Roman Italy was able to
lead economic growth only into the first century CE. In essence, says Saller, the Roman
24
economy in the Latin West was to grow to the extent that it matched the urbanization and
living standards of the formerly Hellenistic East. This was, by ancient standards, quite an
achievement, but there was to be no 1800-style takeoff. 89
In spite of the limited growth (by modern standards) in Roman productivity, the
technologies developed in the Late Republic and Julio-Claudian Empire became
indispensable to that productivity. Economic historians for many years ignored or
dismissed the possibility of major advances in productivity during the Roman
Republic/Empire. This is now considered as a 'stagnationist' world view by Professor
Andrew Wilson. Wilson in 2002 insisted it was time to reassess the roles, or, more
accurately, the non-roles of technological progress and transfer in the Roman economy.
Critically reviewing the writings of Plutarch and Seutonius often cited to bolster the
'primitivist' orthodoxy, Wilson discovered that the opinions of the patrician elite towards
commerce and invention did not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Roman populace.
Looking closer, Wilson found multiple olive oil presses in North African locations. In
Roman Italy, Wilson found villas with acqueducts and cisterns. All of this suggested
growing investment and the ever-wider use of water-power in Roman investment
strategies. Roman Egypt employed screw proplellors, bucket chains, and water-mills,
invented in Hellenistic times, around 260-230 BC/BCE , that enabled her peasants to lift
water beyond the reaches of the Nile more than once a year. Use of animals and /or
allowed the lifting of water to irrigate other places.90
Wilson discovered that Europe's first first water-mill operated in Roman Helvetia
(Switzerland) in the reign of Nero. By the time of the Flavian Emperors in the second
century there were mills in Gaul and Germany, and others in Macedonia and Phrygia.
The story of the water-mill also reflected the transfer of technology. A Hellenistic
invention, it only slow spread into Roman Europe following the Roman expansion into
the East. The Pax Romana provided the catalyst for technological diffusion into Italy,
then Gaul and Germania during the first decades of the Empire. The legions acted as
agents for this diffusion, and brought water-power into Britain as well. Setting up water
wheels in the Empire presupposed a large amount of capital, and, more importantly, the
will and the means to invest in such a capital-intensive project. The productivity gains
justified these expenditures. Near Arles in Southern Gaul a complex of sixteen wheels
occupied a building of 7,200 square feet (840 square meters). The millstones ran at 30
rpm and processed almost five tons of flour a day, enough to feed a city of over 12,500
such as Arles. Other mills were built in Rome by Septimus Severus in the third century
AD and were run by the state to process the grain of the annona. To control the water
necessary, the Severans also internalized the operation by merging the management of
grain-milling and water distribution.91
Roman water power served to increase productivity in mining as well as agriculture. The
gold mines of Spain, owned by the Caesars but outsourced to private hands, now used
water from aqueducts to remove the debris hiding the deposits. Similar techniques were
applied in southern Wales. Gold from the mines had to ground and then washed, and this
remained the most labor-intensive step in mining, until the Roman management found a
way to mechanize even this procedure. Instead of anvils, water-driven machines began to
25
hammer the ore in both Wales and in Spain. Other mills ground and then washed it.
According to Wilson Roman mining 'mechanized many of the processes involved' by
using water-power 'on a colossal scale'. He concluded that the Roman mills represented
'advanced technology…applied on a truly industrial scale.'92
Mining or industrial production on such a scale was not attempted until the days of James
Watt and Adam Smith. Roman slavery did not retard this progress, and clear evidence
remains of the efforts of management to maximize the extraction of ore. Any manager
unable to maintain the level of productivity would soon, under the leasehold contracts
dictated by the Empire, stood a very good chance of forfeiting his contract. A strong link
existed between the diffusion of water power and the role played by private enterprise.
The societates that ran the mines under contract had to be big enough to investing in all
of the elaborate machinery described above. Pliny, in his Natural History (33.22.78)
recorded that the government forbade the mining companies in Northern Italy from using
more than five thousand workers. A workforce of five thousand would certainly qualify it
as a considerably sized firm in today’s world, one presumes that if a ruling by the
government was issued, there must have been firms approaching or surpassing this size.
It is likely that many of the rich Spanish Senators of the first century AD/CE invested in
the profits of the mines.93
How important was Roman mining in the history of industrialism? Recent scientific
techniques have permitted historians to examine the ecology of the ancient world via
soundings in the Greenland ice cap. These soundings raised huge questions for the
premise of 'no industry in Antiquity'. The levels of atmospheric pollution from lead
mining spike sharply in the Late Republic in the first century BC/BCE and then continue
at a relatively high level through the first century AD/CE. They then decline before rising
again around AD /CE 700-800. The copper levels were even more astounding, peaking
sharply in the First century BC/BCE and then again in the late first and second centuries
AD/CE, reaching similar levels again only around AD/CE 1500. Wilson could only
interpret this as evidence of a 'colossal output' in which 'hydraulic technology was critical
to the scale of production in gold and silver mining.' In a very real sense, Wilson felt the
Roman economy was 'highly dependent on advanced technology and mechanization to
keep the money supply going.' 94
The Julio-Claudian 'European Union': From Late Republic to High Empire
Augustus and the later Julio-Claudian Caesars, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero
ruled what Professor John Wacher termed a 'vigorous economic community of a size then
hitherto unseen in the lands of the Mediterranean and Europe.'95 This community was in
some ways a primitive European Union, although the level of integration was far lower.
The silver denarius became a common currency. Other forces tended toward integration:
Roman civil and business law and an infrastructure of ports and roads. The Roman
Principate did not pursue a conscious strategy of economic integration, but they did seem
to pursue an unconscious one. The 'European' economy grafted itself onto a much larger
26
traditional one which was eighty percent agrarian and highly localized. The imperial
denarii and sesterces circulated throughout the empire and beyond, carried by legions,
long-distance traders and civil servants. Alongside them, local merchants and farmers
continued to trade in Greek drachmas and the Ptolemiac currency of Egypt. Let us
remember, capital investment in the empire was very small, even by comparison with
medieval Italy.96
Fifty or sixty million people lived within the Roman Empire. In addition to Rome itself ,
much of the urban population, perhaps ten million people, congregated in Southern Italy,
Southern Gaul, the south and Mediterranean regions of Spain, the Aegean, Western Asia
Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Libya. The imperial government, much as the republican
government before it, refrained from efforts to manage the marketplace. In maintaining
the Roman infrastructure of roads, canals, and seaports, the Caesars showed themselves
much more interventionist. Their motives were far more military than economic. It would
seem they were acquainted with the practice but not the theory of Keynesianism.
Legionnaires surveyed networks of roads, along which communities would flourish. Land
transportation was still far too costly for bulk goods, which would travel by sea. In order
to nourish the city of Rome, wharves on the Tiber linked Rome with the port of Ostia,
where huge vessels shipped bulk commodities across the Mediterranean. Barges over a
hundred feet long used the Nile, Rhine, and Danube, with smaller vessels working the
Tiber, Euphrates, Rhône, Seine, Thames, and Garonne.97
The Roman legions helped integrate the local subsistence economies of the Roman
world. Roman officials in Gallic and Anatolian towns and centurions in camps along the
Danube continued to demand clothing, lamps, jugs, and other goods. The Augustan
empire fielded twenty-five legions, over 300,000 men. Four legions were deployed in
Syria against the Parthians, eight along the Rhine and another eight on the Danube, three
were in Spain, one was in Africa, and one probably in Italy.98
The expansion of the Roman economy began to slow as markets became saturated and
Claudius finally abandoned any effort to Romanize most of Germany. The surplus of 37
million sesterces left by Tiberius was dissipated by Caligula, but Claudius expanded the
empire into Britain, Thrace, and Mauretania. Britain became a liability, but the other new
provinces did provide Rome new resources.99
The Julio-Claudian line culminated in the reign of the brutal and profligate Nero
(AD/CE54-68) who spent lavishly, raised taxes and devalued the denarius. One of the
reasons for this devaluation may well have been the adverse trade balance between the
empire and the nations of the East, something familiar to modern Americans and
Europeans. Roman denarii flowed into India and ultimately even China in return for
spices, silks, and precious stones.100
The imperial state played a key role in integrating and expanding the Roman EuropeanMediterranean economy. Wealth was taxed from Iberia, Asia Minor-Syria-Egypt, and
North Africa to Italy, compelling farmers and merchants in those provinces to make up
the taxed money via exports. The tax revenues flowing into Italy then went to Roman
27
centurions stationed in Gaul, Germania, along the Danube and on the Euphrates facing
the Parthians. Businesses would begin to develop in these regions around the markets
created by the legions clustered along the Rhine and Danube. Cities such as Cologne and
Vienna began in this manner. As a result, wealth was distributed from the Roman core to
the Roman periphery. The core, however, enjoyed increased consumption and circulation
of denarii, often paid to urban landlords, pumping even more money into the economy.
The money supply of the Late Republic had already grown from 35 million denarii ($US
1.75 billion) to 500 million ($US 25 billion) between 160 and 50 BC/BCE . The huge rise
in trade and productivity ensured a relative absence of inflation, particularly when the
power struggles of the later First Century BC/BCE exacerbated deflation. With the
coming of the Principate, the denarius became the vehicle for a common imperial
monetary system. The supply of denarii in Italy, Germany, Gaul, the Balkans, and Syria
now rose and fell in harmony. Taxes in the High Empire were still only about ten per
cent of income, more than Europe in the 1500's but less than in the 1800's.101
The Julio-Claudian emperors were able to keep their military expenditures under control.
Because the empire was mostly at peace, they saw little need to build up the legions.
Auxiliaries along the Rhine, Danube, and eastern marches cost less than full-fledged
centurions. The absence of warfare within the empire further reduced the pressure upon
cities and towns in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Asia. Maintaining a standing imperial army
preserved a steady, stable market for the Roman economy.
One may speak of the Roman economy, and the wider international economy of which it
was a part, as a continuation of the 'semi-global,' hemispheric, or 'known world' economy
that took shape in Hellenistic times. A modernizing historian will see not only the first
European Union and the first 'euro', but the first example of globalization. A 'primitivist',
such as Professor Moses Finley, will, however, stress the local and rural nature of the first
century economic world. The infrastructure, business and trading networks described
here were grafted onto an economy that was still eighty or ninety per cent rural and
subsistence. Italian historian Aldo Schiavone carried the primitivist argument even further
in 1996, insisting that the Roman economy was radically different from that of modern
times not only in degree but in its very nature. Two British historians, David J. Mattingly
and John Salmon have more recently taken a middle position: The primitivists are
essentially correct in pointing out the vast differences between the Roman economy of
antiquity and the modern and even the medieval European economy. Nevertheless, there
were some features in the Greek and Roman economies that do point to the future. It is
those features that we will emphasize in this chapter. 102
The imperial peace established by Augustus encouraged the growth of firms geared to
manufacturing and trading. As the first emperors expanded the bureaucracy, preserved a
standing core of legions and improved the trading infrastructure, they encouraged the
manufacturing market. Still, the only direct government intervention came in the
shipment of grain from Egypt and later Africa to Rome. The empire's entrepeneurs,
according to Aubert, were left to pursue profit with little direct assistance from Caesar. 103
28
Roman management thought would remain highly practical throughout both the late
Republic and the empire. Roman writers shunned the abstract philosophizing of both the
Greeks, whom they were acquainted with, and the Chinese, of whom they were ignorant.
The earliest writings on the subject focused exclusively on agriculture. Cato the Elder
wrote in the second century BC/BCE / BC/BCE E; Varro wrote in the first century
BC/BCE ; Columella in the early empire.104 The Roman agronomists described estates
run and organized on a chain of command the hiring of professional managers, or vilici,
to run and organize managerial units, or fundi. They were aware of the division of labor,
and a chain of command made up of domini (landowners ), praefecti (foremen), vilici
(overseers), actores( supervisors ), and other positions. Professor Aubert suggests that
the big Roman estates were run on a hierachical model that 'clearly recalls that of military
units.' 105
Roman Italy remained the prosperous heart of the Julio-Claudian economy. Out of six or
seven million people perhaps one or two million were slaves. About forty per cent of the
urban population was servile. Slave labor was also an integral part of the villas of
Campania, Latium, and Etruria. Wine production lay at the heart of a villa economy
moderately expanding production through improved techniques in crop rotation,
fertilisation, and irrigation, together with greater use of iron spades, hoes, and sickles.
Roman literature of the time included two long treatises on horticulture, De Res Rusticia
(On Agriculture) by Marcus Terentius Varro (116-28 BC/BCE ), composed around 38
BC/BCE and the later, with the same title, by Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella,
written during the first century AD. Varro argued one could prosper in the wine industry
if one grew the right crop and enjoyed access to urban markets: 'A farm is rendered more
profitable by convenience of transportation ; if there are roads on which carts can easily
be driven, or navigable rivers near by.' 106 Varro, an ally of Octavian writing at the very
end of the Republic, included a few recommendations in regard to management. Those
who managed villa slaves needed to manage by positive leadership and not merely force.
Cross-cultural management was important, for it was dangerous to employ slaves of only
one ethnic group or permit them to leave the villa. 107
If the Roman Empire at its peak suggests the United States in the 1940's and 1950's, the
top-down management structure of the Roman villa in the Pax Romana suggests IBM,
General Motors and many other corporations of the Pax Americana of the same era.
A second literary source for Roman management can be found in the published laws of
the Late Republic and empire. Roman entrepeneurs and managers, though, took
advantage of a fairly sophisticated body or Roman business law carried over from the
Late Republic. Much of this statutory law dated from the second century BC/BCE and
was interpreted by the courts in the following century. Societates were partnerships;
negotiationes exercitate per serves communes were joint ventures; actinus adiecticite
qualitatus represented indirect agencies. 108 The laws reveal contractors could sue
managers. Managers could authorize agents act on their behalf and appoint heads of
units under their authority. Agreements, called praepositio, were often contracted with
third parties. Contracts could be verbal or written. Roman jurisprudence also recognized
the legal status of family members or slaves. Roman judges focused in many cases upon
29
issues of managerial control. What were the relationships between managers,
entrepeneurs, and their agents? Some Roman firms micromanaged every transaction of
their manceps. Others gave them or their agents a virtually blanket power of attorney.
Even a slave could exercise it. 109
The prosperity of the Julio-Claudians produced a slightly more favorable attitude to
commerce in the empire than in the republic. Roman aristocrats still distinguished
between productive and selfish types of business. Productive merchants were generous,
patriotic, and eventually retired as landed patricians investing in villas.110 Seaborne
traders were admired for courage, not profits. The epitaph of a Brindisi merchant extolled
his desire to face danger and risk: 'I have reached many lands…nor do I fear that
expenses will outstrip gains.' 111 Flavius Zeuxis of Hierapolis, near Laodicea in Asia
Minor braved the seas to Italy 72 times in the days of Hadrian and was awarded with
membership on a city council that normally shunned petty traders. An arch in another city
praised the local food dealers because they provided the plebs with wheat, oil, meat and
wine.112
The Roman business ethic praised fairness and social responsibility. Nersus Mithres of
Magliano paid his taxes, dealt honestly and fairly and was ready to help the needy. The
frugal Valerius Celer of Rome preferred earning to spending.113 Much was more rhetoric
than reality. It was easier, according to Ovid, to to ask forgiveness than permission.
Merchants prayed to Mercury to pardon past greed and give future success: 'Only grant
me profits, grant me the joy of profit made, and see to it that I enjoy cheating the
buyer!'114 Mercury’s reply, quoted by Plautus, suggests many felt little remorse over raw
profiteering. Many, said Mercury 'all would have me find your business affairs and
speculations happy outcome in foreign lands and here at home, and crown your present
and future undertakings with fine, fat profits for evermore' , for unto him hadthe other
gods 'yielded and granted plenipotence o'er messages and profits'….115 A more flagrant
graffito at Pompeii: 'lucrum gaudium' ('profit is happiness') openly invoked success in
money-making.116
The Satyricon of Gaius Petronius was composed in the reign of Nero, around AD/CE/CE
61. The character of Trimalchio parodies the Julio-Claudian entrepeneur. Trimalchio is
neither a patrician nor an equestrian, but a former slave, a man of new money who has
made it on his own. He is the George Babbitt and Gordon Gekko of his day, a crass,
unapologetic risk-taking hustler who loves to flaunt his new-found wealth. Like a true
Roman, though, he invests his denarii in his villa. Dressed in scarlet, Trimalchio is
carried into his sumptuous hall on piles of pillows. His guests remark he owns 'more
farms than a kite could flap over' and has more silver plate 'in his porter’s lodge than
another man’s got in his safe.' Not one in ten of his slaves has ever seen him , for the
'ordinary rich man is just peanuts compared to him.'117
Petronius shows historians both the 'global' and the 'local' aspects of Roman enterprise.
Trimalchio's villa is a scene of importing, exporting, and production: 'And buy things?
Not him. No sir, he raises everything right on his own estate. Wool, citron, pepper, you
name it.'118 Homegrown wool not being good enough, he imports rams from Tarentum to
30
raise his own. The bees for his Attic honey come directly from Athens; all his pillows are
stuffed with purple or scarlet wool.119 Even the lowly rag-merchant Echion, embraces
Trimachio’s self-help philosophy as fervently as any immigrant in 1880s America: 'Luck
changes. If things are lousy today, there's always tomorrow. That's life, man.' 120 Both
Echion and Trimalchio despise the professor Agamemnon in language fitting an
American radio talk show: 'Well, Agamemnon…You’re the professor here, but I don't
catch you opening your mouth. No, you think you're a cut above us, don’t you, so you
just sit there and smirk at the way we poor men talk. Your learnings made you a snob.' 121
Academics were ivory-tower parasites, 'takers' living off the labor of the enterprising and
disparaging their productive efforts with their impractical ideas of nonsense. Reading
their works insteADof practical study in law, agriculture, a trade, or business was a waste
of time and money. Practical learning enhances the bottom line. The peddler Phileros
studied to become a lawyer: 'there’s a mint of money in books, and learning a trade never
killed a man yet.' 122
Trimalchio's epitaph shows little humility: 'HE DIED A MILLIONAIRE, THOUGH HE
STARTED WITH NOTHING.' 123 He attributes his rise from slavery to riches to his
willingness to take risks in overseas trade: 'Once I used to be like you, but I rose to the
top by my ability. Guts are what makes the man; the rest is garbage.' 124 A short, ugly
former slave from Asia Minor, Trimalchio was his master’s pet for fourteen years, but, as
Pasion in Athens, made himself invaluable through his business sense. Inheriting his
master’s fortune was only a step to entering the wine-export business. Trimalchio built
five ships, stocked them with wine and sent them to Rome, but all sank on their maiden
voyage. Trimalchio, the eternal risk-taker, was undeterred, his loss of thousands of
denarii 'just whetted my appetite as though nothing hadhappened at all'”125 The voyage of
his next fleet, bigger, better and luckier, however, paid off:
'No one could say I didn't have guts,' boasted Trimalchio. On one voyage alone he earned
500,000 denarii trading wine, bacon, beans, perfume and slave. He then bought his
master's villa, built a house and went into slave-trading and cattle-buying. Everything he
grew turned to gold until Trimalchio became the richest man in his home town. Unlike a
modern manager, Trimalchio then retired to his villa and began to lend money to other
Roman freedmen such as himself. 126
The wine trade of the Julio-Claudian Empire resembled that of the Late Republic.
Archaeologists have been able to trace it by means of the large two-handled amphorae or
jugs it was carried in. These jugs were stamped with the name of the shipper, contents,
and a date. German scholar Heinrich Dressel classified the jug styles and permitted the
construction of a Roman pottery chronology. Comparing mineral content in thousands
jug fragments with the soil on villa sites, together with others found on sunken ships
permitted trading patterns to be reconstructed. One 450-ton merchantman sank around
100 BC/BCE , carrying some 10,000 jugs of wine. Another of similar size, destined for
Gaul, sank near Toulon around 50 BC/BCE with between 5000 and 8000 jugs on board
from the villa of P. Vevius Papus in Campania. The dating of the wrecks was quite
significant: 9 for the Early Republic (before 200 BCE/BC), 54 for the Late Republic
(200-27 BCE/BC), and 33 for the High Empire (27 BC/BCE-AD/CE 180). If these finds
31
from mostly Italian ships are indicative, the exporting of wine from Italy to Gaul
increased sharply following the defeat of Hannibal and remained a flourishing industry
through the later years of the Republic and into the reign of Augustus. Most of the wine
could be traced to the villas of Campania, and earned a profit of up to ten per cent. The
industry continued to export at a somewhat reduced volume through the first century
AD/CE until Gaul began producing her own wine on a large enough scale to supplant
Italian imports. The finds highlight the reality that trade from the Italian villas now
played an important role in the Roman economy. The numbers of amphorae unearthed in
Gaul are enormous, 24,000 near Châlon in Burgundy with perhaps 200,000 to 500,000
yet undiscovered. So many are buried near Toulouse as to render the earth infertile, and
even distant Brittany hosted 55 sites. 127
Trimalchio was a fictional character; the Sestii were living Roman patricians whose
family enterprise spanned the Late Republic and the Julio-Claudian Empire. The history
of the Sestii is known through their amphorae and the letters of Cicero, who defended
Publius of wrongdoing in 56 BC/BCE . The winegrower M. Lucius Sestius founded the
firm on his west-coast villa near Cosa, sixty miles north of Rome. His son, M. Publius
Sestius, served as an official and a magistrate in Cilicia between 63 and 48 BC/BCE . A
Roman wreck off Marseilles contained 1700 jugs, most of which bore the initials 'SES' or
'SEST'. Around a hundred of the same jugs, found near Cosa itself, meaning that the
Sestii shipped their wine in their own jugs. The trail led from Cosa across the
Mediterranean to the Gallic shore, then up the Rhône to the heart of Gaul. The Sestii
were very much a family enterprise marketing Italian wine in Gaul via a permanent
establishment of partners or family agents. Publius seems to have dominated the western
export market in wine, with Cicero hinting the Sestii owned their own ships. The thirdgeneration patriarch, L. Sestius Albianus Quirinalis branched from wine into the tile
industry, suggesting that manufacturing was growing in importance in the reign of
Augustus.128
'Hemispherization': Roman business in a Eurafrican/ Eurasian economy:
While it is perhaps childish and inaccurate to speak of globalization in antiquity, what we
might call hemispherization operated, albeit in a primitive and limited form. Two events
helped turn the 'European' Roman economy into a 'global' hemispheric one. The
discovery of the open sea route to India by the Hellenistic mariner Hippalus took place
before 31 BC/BCE. Hippalus observed the patterns of the southwest and northeast
monsoons that blew across the Indian Ocean, and then launched out across the ocean
from the Arabian coast. He reached the mouth of the Indus in forty days. The three-year
round trip by sea from Alexandria to India could now be made in a single year without
the services of Arab middlemen. The second event was the Roman conquest of Egypt
which took place shortly after Hippalus's voyage. Augustus, as well as his immediate
successors, kept hands off Egyptian trade with the east, which remained in the hands of
Greek merchants. Roman publicans, equestrians, and patricians, however, began to
supply both capital, goods, and markets for these investors. Trade between Roman Egypt
and the East grew suddenly and exponentially.129 Strabo, finishing his Geography in
AD/CE17 noted that in the days of Augustus, 'as many as one hundred and twenty vessels
were sailing from Myos Hormos to India,' whereas under the Ptolemies, 'only a very few
32
ventured to undertake the voyage and to carry on traffic to Indian merchandise.' 130 Only
a sailed as far as the Ganges, and 'even these are merely private citizens….' 131 The
geographer also described the locational advantages of Alexandria, now the greatest
emporium in the world and the only place in Egypt well-placed for both overland and
seaborne commerce.132
The first phase of the Greco-Roman Indian Ocean trade peaked in the reigns of Claudius
and Nero. India was divided into several kingdoms. The Kushanas ruled a region
stretching from the northern Indus to the western Ganges; the Sakas, a Scythian tribe,
ruled in the northwest. The Scythian conquest of the northwestern part of the
subcontinent did not eradicate the Greek population, whom the Indians called Yona, or
Yavanas. The Cedis ruled Bengal, and the Shatavahanas much of the central and
southern subcontinent. The all-important southern tip was ruled by the tribes of the Ceras,
Pandyas, and Colas. 133 Ships sailed to northwestern India to the ports of Patala and
Barygaza. Greek merchants from Egypt contacted the Greeks in these parts of India, who
eventually assimilated As the mariners became more confident, they rode the monsoons
to points near Bombay. Soon, they were sailing to the Tamil-Dravidian kingdoms near
the southern tip of the subcontinent.The Kingdom of Keralaputra (Chera)lay on the west
coast and was the easiest for the Greco-Romans to reach. Soon, the Yavanas had erected
a temple to Augustus in the city of Muziris (Muchiri) Tamil poetry of the time noted their
presence:
'Agitating the white foam, the beautifully built ships of the Yavanas came with gold and
returned with pepper, and Muziris resounded with the noise.' 134
Muziris endured as an important Roman market well into the second century AD/CE. The
Tamil princes began to compete for the Yavanas' favor. The Pandya kingdom resented
the control of Kerala over both the pepper trade and the overland passage through the
Ghats Mountains to the east. In order to win Roman favor, the ruler sent an ambassador
to Augustus. It would appear that the Pandya ruler did hold an advantage in pearls, and
loved Italian wine. The Tamil poet Nakkirar exhorted the prince to enjoy the fragrant
wine brought in the sturdy ships or bottles of the Yavanas. The third kingdom, the
Chola, overshadowed the other Tamil states. 135
Kaveripattam and, further north, Arikamedu, dominated the trade on the east coast. All of
these harbored quarters of resident Greco-Roman agents in the service of the faraway
firms of Alexandria, permanent establishments set up in and maybe even before the reign
of Augustus. The Tamil epic Silappadikaram mentions 'the warehouses near the
harbour….and the abodes of the Yavanas, whose prosperity never wanes' in the city of
Kaveripattam.136 The resident agents, living near the warehouses, transferred not only
goods but technology. Greek carpenters built the royal palace, while the lighthouses
along the Coromandel coast were ultimately inspired by the lighthouse of Alexandria.
The poems show merchants in the cities of Chola traded not only with Sri Lanka and
Bengal, but even with Southeast Asia, using their own Tamil ships to do so. 137
33
A comprehensive guide to the Red Sea/India trade was written by an anonymous Greek
mariner who took part in it. The Periplus Maris Erythraei can best be freely translated
as 'Navigation Guide to the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean'. It was written
sometime between AD/CE 45 and AD/CE 70. The Periplus begins with a description of
the 'designated harbors' of Myos Hormos and Berenice on the Egyptian Red Sea
shore(§1). I then describes the Ethiopian port of Adulis, which is the designated trading
post for African ivory(§4).The Periplus then describes the Yemeni port of Musa, chief
port of the Arabs138:
'The whole place teems with Arabs- shipowners or charterers and sailors-and is astir with
commercial activity. For they share in the trade across the water and with Barygaza,
using their own outfits.' (§21)' 139
Beyond Musa, the Red Sea converged into the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb before opening
eastward into the Red Sea at the port of Eudaimon. This Yemeni port served as an
exchange point between Hellenistic and Indian traders. Vessels from India formerly
avoided the Red Sea and vessels from Egypt avoided the Arabian Sea, so that Eudaimon
'used to receive the cargoes of both, just as Alexandria receives cargoes from overseas as
well as from Egypt' (§26). The Kingdom of Eleazos was the next stop, some 450-500
miles further east on the Arabian shore. It was a source of frankincense and swift Arab
traders exported it to India and the Persian and Parthian shores(§27). 140
The traditional trade route then followed the Arabian shore until it reached the Straits of
Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Indian merchants sent out their own large
vessels to the Persian ports. Sailing eastward, one finally came to the shores of India.
The northwestern shore was very fertile and broken by the gulf of Barygaza (Broach).
The mighty tides of the Namadus (Narmada) were very dangerous for the inexperienced
and for small craft (§46) .The author then added a brief description of the city of Ozene
(Ujjain) as a source of onyx and textiles for Barygaza, where a Greek merchant could sell
his Italian wine, Laodicean wool , and Arabian copper. The Indians, with ample supplies
of Chinese silk and pepper, were more than eager to accept the Roman denarius, which
'commands an exchange at some profit against the local currency….'(§49).141
Beyond Barygaza the coast turns north and south, and the Periplus mentions several
inland trading centers (§50-51) and a number of local ports of trade down the pirateinfested western shore until Muziris was reached (§53).142 The author spends a lot of time
on southern India and its valuable markets: 'Ships in these ports of trade carry fuel loads
because of the volume and quantity of pepper and malabathron.' (§56). Pepper and pearls
were key exports of these markets. Most of the ports described in the Periplus lay along
the traditional Hellenistic route: 'The whole coastal route just described…men formerly
used to sail over in smaller vessels, following the curves of the bays.' (§56). The author,
though, was well aware that the direct Indian Ocean route was now much more popular
and cost-effective for his Greco-Roman countrymen: 'The ship captain Hippalos, by
plotting the location of the ports of trade and the configuration of the sea , was the first to
discover the route over open water….'(§57). 143
34
The author spends little time on the east coast. Few Yavana ships at that time risked the
perilous route around Cape Coromandel. Instead they docked at Muziris and shipped
their goods overland to Kerala and Chola. The eastern ports of Kaveripattam and
Arikamedu were the real meeting place of East and West. They received the large ships
from the Ganges and Sri Lanka, plus being a 'market for all the [sc.Western] trade goods
imported by Limyrikê…' All year round, these ports obtained 'both the cash originating
from Egypt and most kinds of all the goods…supplied along this [west]coast. '(§60).144
The Periplus ends with a discussion of the Ganges and a mention of the distant land of
the distant land of This, with its vast inland city called Thinae. This can only refer to Han
China and its capital of Nanjing. Silk was shipped from here via Bactria down to
Barygaza and then via the Indus and Ganges and east coast shippers to the Tamil ports.
(§64).145
Who were the traders who braved the monsoons to sail to India? To begin with, most of
them were Greeks. Even after the Roman conquest, the existing records of the Indian
Ocean shippers show purely Hellenic names. The Greeks possessed the experience,
market knowledge, and sailing expertise. A papyrus document from around 100 BC/BCE
shows a loan agreement to finance a spice-trading venture to Somalia. One borrower
came from Sparta, one from Massilia, but the banker and the five underwriters were
Romans. One was from Massilia, one from Italy, one from Thessalonica. They were all
legionnaires save one roving merchant from Carthage. They were all private traders with
no government connections. A papyrus from Vienna, dated around AD/CE 150 shows an
agreement between two shippers. One would serve as the agent for the other in shipping
goods from Muziris to Egypt:
The shipper would pay the agent's camel driver 170 talents and 50 drachmas to use the
road from the Red Sea to the Nile port of Koptos, from whence they would be shipped
down the Nile to Alexandria:
'I will place [them] under your ownership and seal, or of your representatives … and I
will load them abroad… on a seaworthy boat on the river, and
…convey[them]…downstream to the warehouse that receives the duty of one-fourth at
Alexandria and I will similarly place [them] under the ownership of you or your
representatives .'146
Other records exist of a firm shipping goods between Koptos and the Red Sea ports of
Myos Hormos and Berenice. Families of Greek and other backgrounds in Alexandria,
Koptos, and other Egyptian cities employed agents in those ports to manage their Indain
trade. Gaius Norbanus, a Roman with holdings in Egypt, as well as Marcius Julius
Alexander, the possible nephew of the Platonist phiosopher Philo, also posted agents
there. The Vienna papyrus openly shows private, contractual enterprise. Another
papyrus, a poll-tax register dates from AD/CE 72 or 73 in Arsinoe, south of Cairo. This
register reported that one Gaion or Diodorus was away in India. Was he operating a
permanent establishment in Muziris or Arakamedu? 147
35
Did the Dunning Paradigm come into play in the new expanded Indian Ocean trade? The
Greek traders of Roman Egypt now began to invest in large, study ships in addition to
the smaller boats of the Ptolemaic era. Designed for safety more than speed, they were
almost two hundred feet long with durable hulls fastened together by thousands of joints.
Sailing to India in July, they returned late in the year via the northeast monsoon laden
with as many as three hundred shipments of Asian goods. One shipment alone consisted
of an estimated 600-1,600 pounds of spice, 4,500 pounds of ivory, 600-700 pounds of
textiles, a total of 131 talents worth 2,500 acres of good Egyptian farmland. Transporting
goods between Egypt and India by the oceanic route was done once a year. The risks and
losses involved could be very high. No insurance was available for a summer arrival in
India, and even in September rates hovered around twenty per cent. If vessels reached
India before late September, the winds would smash them against the shore. Once the
winds ceased, rates tumbled to perhaps two per cent. Only large firms or consortia, it
would seem, could operate such vessels, raise large amounts of money and employ
overseas agents.148
The artifacts of India complete the story. Greek jugs filled with oil and wine date from
the time of Eudoxus, but by 50BC/BCE taller Roman-style copies began to replace them.
outnumber the Greek originals. Jars of Spanish oil appear in India at that time. 149 The
major Dravidian sites were first excavated by Sir Roger Mortimer-Wheeler. Later work at
Arikamedu in the early 1990's was accomplished by an Indian/American team led by Dr.
Vimala Begley. The southern quarters of the city were founded by the Tamils, but the
Yavanas set up shop in the the northern half sometime in the first century BC/BCE.
Roman pottery from Italy and Gaul there bore Indian graffiti. Numerous finds of
Phoenician glass indicated another profitable cargo for Greco-Roman traders who
unloaded it at Muziris, from whence it was shipped to Arikamedu to be sold to Tamils,
and Sri Lankan and even Chinese agents. Numerous fragments of Italian pottery were
also discovered, including the stamps of four potters: VIBIE, ITTA, CAMVRI, and C
VIBI OF. 150151 All of this evidence suggests that the finds at Arikamedu and elsewhere
'point', in the words of Lionel Casson, 'to the presence of a foreign colony, a group of
Western merchants permanently established there.' 152
The distribution of Roman coinage is also significant. The Julio-Claudian Empire ran a
consistent trade and payments deficit with India. Wine, textiles, and other Roman goods
at first did not pay for the massive imports of spices, pearls, and other luxuries coveted by
wealthy Romans. The Greco-Roman traders paid the Tamils in silver denarii and other
coins, which the Asians regarded as valuable hard currency. Out of 68 finds of Roman
coins discovered in India, fully 57 of them dated from the first century AD/CE. Most
were hoards. Virtually all dated from the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. 153
A lot of Roman money was flowing into South India. Tiberius, it is said, complained to
the Senate about the drain of Roman money to foreign rulers in the pursuit of trinkets, a
sentiment shared later by Pliny, who estimated fifty million sesterces a year was going to
India. The Roman denarii were respected as stable currency by the Indian rulers, until
AD/CE 63. In that year, Nero debased the denarius, reducing the silver content. From
that time onwards the German and Indian populations preferred trade in older coins.154
36
The Flavian/Antonine Manufacturing and Trading Economy: AD/CE 68-192
Nero's rule deteriorated as he became more and more tyrannical. During the Jewish revolt
of 66-70 the legions deposed him in 68 and a brief civil war ensued. Trade and
economics were a factor in the victory of Vespasian, who seized the Principate by
controlling the capital's source of grain in Egypt. Leaving the capture of Jerusalem to
Titus, Vespasian marched upon Rome and inaugurated a new hereditary line of Flavian
emperors. Under the Flavians the principate became institutionalized. When Vespasian
marched on Rome in AD/CE69-70, the senate passed the Lex de Imperio, which
attempted to base the legal authority of the emperor on custom, precedent, and the Senate
and People of Rome. 'Imperator' became the emperor's first name. Vespasian sought to
restore the empire to fiscal soundness by raising taxes on the Greeks. He also expanded
the meaning of 'Roman' by granting Latin rights to many Spaniards in 350 Iberian cities.
Titus, son of Vespasian, reigned for two years, from AD/CE79-81, and then was
succeeded by Domitian (81-96). Unlike wiser emperors, the insecure and paranoid
Domitian failed to mask the reality of his power in the trappings of Roman legality. His
reign foreshadowed the dominate of the future. He ignored the senate and arrogated to
himself the title of dominus et deus ('lord and god'). The brutal emperor, seen by
Christians and others as a second Nero, nevertheless enjoyed a following, especially in
the capital where his building programs continued to stimulate the economy. 155
Domitian was assassinated in 98, and left no son. The reigns of his successors, Nerva (9698), Trajan (98-117), Hadrian (117-138), Antoninus Pius (138-161) and Marcus Aurelius
(161-180), were pictured by contemporary writers as the most glorious age of Rome, a
judgment shared by Edward Gibbon. These emperors were considered capable and
responsible, the culmination of the Principate. Under Trajan the Roman Empire reached
its greatest extent, with acquisitions in Dacia, Mauretania, and even, temporarily, parts of
Armenia and Iraq. Both markets and political power would follow the permanent
encampments of the legions first to Gaul, and then to the Rhine and Danube. Trajan's
expansion of the Empire would incorporate Arabia and link business activity in Roman
Syria with the Red Sea by overland as well as maritime routes. Business activity in the
Roman Empire in the second century is well documented through inscriptions. These plus
the discovery of rich tombs serve as markers of the commercial prosperity which
stretched through the Pax Romana of Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius. 156
The late twentieth-century scholarship of the Finley school stressed, as shown above, the
essentially agrarian and often reciprocal nature of the Roman economy. Finley, however,
did not radically contradict the monumental 1920's work of the 'modernizing' Mikhail
Rostovtzeff in terms of what Roman enterprise existed and what it actually did.
Rostovtzeff documented the slow shift of business ownership from Italian to provincial
hands. Both the Roman and world economies were changing. Italy remained the political
heart of the empire under the Julio-Claudians and perhaps even the Flavians, as well as a
net exporter of wine and manufactured items. Italian-based companies maintained agents
abroad in the Roman Imperial economy. After AD/CE100 the Roman economy and
polity gradually became less Italian and more European/universal.157
37
Rostovtzeff insisted that much of the wealth in the cities of the second century came from
the sea- and riverborne commerce that flowed along the waterways of the High Empire.
Not only luxury goods but many necessities also moved by the hands of merchants. The
Roman Imperial business community must have been more extensive and diverse than in
the first century. Instead of a few Trimalchios centered in Southern Italy the inscriptions
and burials of the Empire now reveal a number of both wholesale and retail merchants
thriving in the cities. The negotiatores of the wholesalers of Roman Italy, Spain and
Gaul imported grain from Egypt and North Africa. Those of Spain exported the best olive
oil to points east; those of Africa exported cheaper brands of olive oil. Wholesalers
cornered the bulk markets for necessities. Caesar did much to create those markets in the
form of the annona. This was the equivalent of an early government welfare program
consisting of grain for some of the indigent of Rome. The annona provided a market for
the import-export merchants of Rome to whom the government contracted out the
shipping and storage of Egyptain and North African grain. Inscriptions and reliefs
describe the wholesale business of navicularii who owned their own Mediterranean
vessels and of nautae whose vessels plied the lakes and rivers. These contractors were
organized into collegia recognized and protected by the Roman government. Pliny the
Younger (Paneg.29) mentioned the purchase by the Emperor of grain from private
merchants. 158
The collegia was in fact not a Roman but a Hellenistic invention which arose in
Ptolemaic Egypt and eventually spread to Italy and the other Western Roman provinces.
Imperial officials preferred such combinations of merchants as being easier to work with
than individuals. The port of Ostia became the main emporium for the annona as early as
the reign of Claudius (41-54). Most of the commerce in the second century was local, but
interprovincial commerce must have risen sharply. The presence of the bulk of the
legions on the Rhine and the Danube served to reorient Imperial trade away from Italy to
the frontiers. Rome itself certainly needed vast amounts of imported food and other
goods, but so did the cities of Syria, Bithynia, and Asia. While much of the Roman
economy still remained localized, the largest cities needed to import grain and other
foodstuffs from a longer distance. A small city might draw from the surrounding
farmland, but an Ephesus or a Smyrna would have to import some of its goods from afar.
Both long-distance and internal commerce grew between and within provinces. The
infrastructure in the Eastern provinces and the navigable rivers of Gaul encouraged this.
159
The presence of the legions encouraged the 'Europeanization' of much of the Roman
Economy. Something on the order of a Gallo-Germanic 'Common Market' began to
operate even before the first Frankish soldier set foot in Gaul. Merchants in Gaul took
advantages of their long rivers and coastlines to ship products from Lyon and even
Britain to the Roman posts along the Rhine. These same merchants also shipped through
Helvetia to the Danube. Gallo-Roman merchants enjoyed considerable location
advantages in Danubian over those of Southern Italy. Bulk shipments to the Danubian
legions, though, became most profitable for the rising merchants of Northern Italy and
those on the Dalmatian coast. Lyons emerged as the chief distribution center of a thriving
Gallo-Roman economy in grain, wine, oil, and lumber. The resident merchants purchased
38
goods and shipped them to other merchants at Trèves on the Moselle. The Trèves
merchants acted as Imperial purchasers who received goods from Lyons and distributed
them to the legions on the Rhine. The funeral monuments of the region graphically
picture the merchant Secundini trafficking in goods shipped out on riverboats and carts.
160
In the East, the legions concentrated against Parthia and stimulated good markets for the
merchants of Anatolia and Aram. These same merchants also shipped westward to Italy.
Fewer and fewer of the 'Roman' merchants in the East now hailed from Italy. The
merchants of the Levant and especially of Egypt also served as the middlemen in the
Indian Ocean trade. Egypt supplied Rome with grain, linen, papyrus, glass, hemp, and
goods made in Alexandria. The legions were not the main market for Levantine
merchants who traded with urban cultures that thrived for centuries. Business in the
eastern Roman Empire was no longer in the hands of many Italians. According to
Rostovtzeff, the conditions of the Pax Romana permitted Syrian, Canaanite and other
Near Eastern merchants to revive. Italian merchants simply could not compete with two
thousand years of business history and gradually departed for better opportunities in the
West. 161
With Trajan and Hadrian, the first emperors not born in Italy, Rome was becoming an
idea, not just a nation. Italy herself began to host operations of firms headquartered
elsewhere. The balance of trade shifted from Italy to Gaul, Spain, and other provinces.
The one million citizens of Rome itself consumed grain from Africa, wine and fish from
France and Spain, and wore wool from Asia Minor and linen from Egypt. Jewels from
India, silk from China, cosmetics from Arabia, Syrian glasses, Indian ebony, and African
ivory adorned Italian homes. These imports came to Rome first via Puteoli, then the new
port of Ostia built by Claudius and expanded by Trajan. The vast plaza of Ostia served as
chief emporia for agents of the over sixty Italian- and foreign-based companies who set
up permanent establishments there. An inscription lists the North African shippers of
Misua, Hippo, Sabrata, Gummi, Roman Carthage, and Syllecthum along with the agents
of the grain merchants of the colony of Curubis. The Sardinian shippers of Turris and
Carales were also listed as were the Gallic shippers of Narbo. 162
Other agents operated from Puteoli, notably Phoenicians from Tyre. An inscription of in
AD/CE174 written from the Puteoli office of a Tyrian merchant agency to the magistrates
and council of Tyre reveals the decline of commerce in the second century in both Puteoli
and in Italy itself:
'there is many a commercial agency in Puteoli, as most of you know, and ours excels the
others both in adornment and in size. In the past this was cared for by the Tyrians resident
in Puteoli, who were numerous and wealthy; but now this care has devolved on us, who
are few in number. The Tyrian merchants went on to appeal for a subsidy for their office
and other business expenses, for the Puteoli agency : unlike the one in the capital – Rome
– derives no income either from shipowners or from merchants.'163
39
Free trade still prevailed in the empire of the second century. Gallic, Spanish, and
Anatolian firms were free to sell goods or open a permanent establishment in Ostia or
Puteoli. Spain and Gaul sent foodstuffs to Greece; Asian marble went to North Africa;
Egyptian papyrus went everywhere. Greece herself began to stagnate, but the old Ionian
regions of Ephesus and Miletus began to prosper, foreshadowing the wealth of
Byzantium. So did the old Punic ports of Iberia. Grain, of course, remained king in
Africa, feeding not only Italy but Roman Spain as well. 164
Professor Jean-Jacques Aubert of France agrees the primitivists have gone too far in
dismissing the relevance of modern business models for antiquity. Scholars such as
Mattingly and Aubert, as well as ourselves, while accepting much of the primitivist
analysis, prefer to look at what ancient and modern business do have in common. All
management, from Sumer to today, includes the six major functions defined by Professor
Roger E. Allen. Every management enterprise has, first of all, a goal. Next, it provides a
means of organizing its tasks to reach that goal, and motivating and training those
involved. Then, it has a chain of command and a means of communication with its
agents. Finally, it must have a means of measuring and analyzing its operations and
results.165
Jean-Jacques Aubert's Six Functions of Management
Management Objectives
Organizing Production
Motivating Personnel
Training Personnel
Chain of Command and Communication
Means of Measuring and Determining Results
Management existed long before scholars became aware of its existence. In Rome, most
independent traders were faced with long-term strategic decisions, while the managers
and agents of larger publican and family firms often had to make short-term tactical
ones.166 A Roman potter needed to decide what to produce, how many to produce, what
tasks if any should be outsourced, would be making management decisions not too
different from those of modern CEO's. Roman entrepeneurs also hadto decide whether
their enterprises would be integrated vertically or horizontally, and how their goods were
to be transported. Larger Roman firms, such as those in the marble industry, encountered
the task of whether to invest in luxury goods, or mass-market goods. What was the most
efficient way to organize labor, capital, and other assets? 167
Production and distribution of artifacts in Roman Italy originally serviced local markets
through small workshops with little need for specialisation, division of labour or agents.
Farmers would buy tools and clothing from town merchants and artisans. It cost several
times as much to obtain goods from cities such as than to make them locally.168 The
expansion of larger-scale industries producing bricks, tiles, containers, tableware, lamps,
glass-, metal- and stoneware followed as Rome dominated the Western Mediterranean in
the second century BC/BCE. These primitive mass-production industries, due to the
volume of goods they needed to market, especially needed managers and agents. 'In its
40
most extreme form', says Aubert, 'the whole economic process would splinter either
vertically (with marketing gaining independence from manufacturing) or horizontally
(with the opening of branch factories and outlets), or both ways.'169
'When this phenomenon occurred', writes Aubert, 'entrepeneurs had to rely on agents and
middlemen.' 170 The brick and tile industries of the Sestii grew up as part of the villa
economy, employing the same slaves working in the vineyards. The kiln/ workshops
could be managed as either the same or separate businesses, or leased to a manager or
agent. Roman villa firms needed an initial investment in tools and facilities. Partnerships
of potters shared the same kiln, such as a the one near Aveyron in southern Gaul with
over two hundred different potters cooperating. These partnerships hired a joint manager
with authority to close business deals, hire staff, and sell the joint produce. New nearby
markets encouraged some partners to join in spawning branch workshops. A consortium
of Gallic potters from Montans opened a seasonal workshop at nearby Valery. 'Such
workshops', said Roman management expert Jean-Jacques Aubert, 'are called "satellite
workshops", as they always retain their link with the original centre of production.' 171
The markings on lamps found in Gaul or Anatolia show they were made mostly in a few
concentrated centers, but also in numerous small workshops. The larger manufacturers
sought distant markets, middlemen and agents. Names on the lamps may well be those of
managers, not producers. They were probably employing agents as workshop managers,
accodring to Aubert:
'Besides, mass production entailed problems of marketing which could be solved through
decentralization of the production and by opening subsidiary workshops located closer to
new markets. This type of measure hadthe advantage of lowering the costs of
transportation. In addition, the producers were able to respond faster to market
fluctuations by adjusting the quantity and/or the quality of their production.' 172
The brick industry likewise took off in Augustan times, grew in Flavian times and even
produced an emperor, and peaked under the Antonines. Brickmaking concentrated in
villas near Rome. Stamps show a dominus, or lord and his officinatores, (managers)
moving between yards to manage each. Buyers could use the stamps to locate and even
sue the manufacturer or lord in case of fraud. Some lords supervised a management
structure of several dozen yards at a time. Several cases of brick subsidiaries are known
from the time of the Antonines. The knight A. Decius Alpinus made bricks, tiles and
pipes and operated branches in Vindobona (Vienna) and Gaul. His relative Q. Decius
Alpinus ran the Austrian operation while his slave Clarianus ran the French Alpine
operation near Vaison. Clarianus, seems to have won from his master a veritable
subsidary mandate for Roman Gaul. The Rhône valley from the Alps to the sea was
flooded with bricks and other products bearing the stamp 'CLARIANVS/A DECI
ALPINI' .173
The most important brick industry was that of the Domitii, who eventually sired a Caesar,
albeit a very brutal one, of their own. Between AD/CE50 and 150, the Domitian firm held
a virtual monopoly over the Roman brick industry. The fire set by Nero in Rome in
41
AD/CE64 may well have paved the way for Domitian to eventually occupy his throne.
Rebuilding the city provided a ready-made market for the new firm, which employed 53
slaves, 22 freedmen, and 22 others. By AD/CE155 the Domitian brick works employed
46 foremen, and its managing family remained related to the Antonine line of
Caesars.with which they maintained marriage connections. 174
What of the Roman 'world' economy of the late first and early second centuries AD/CE?
Many Julio-Claudian trends continued, but there were some modifications. Trade with
India continued, but it began to diversify. Gone were the vast hoards of denarii. GrecoRoman agents in India were now bartering much more in kind. Instead of wine and
denarii, they paid for their spices and silk with manufactured goods and a few gold coins.
The ships of the Yavanas now began to sail around the tip of India, docking directly at
Arikamedu (Virampatnam) and other east coast ports such as Puhar (Podouke,
Pondicherry). After around AD /CE 50, one finds brick buildings on the site of
Arikamedu. 175
These Indian ports provided access to points east. By the second century CE/AD
Southeast Asia began to enter the world economy. The first evidence of Indian settlement
in Vietnam dates from the second century AD/CE. The site of Oc Eo lies on the
southwest coast of southern Vietnam not far from the Cambodian border. It traded with
Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, and especially India. Indian Merchants from Chola and the
other Dravidian kingdoms set up permanent establishments on Vietnamese soil, although
the region was then inhabited by Khmers of the Kingdom of Funan, not Vietnamese. Not
only did Oc Eo host shrines for Vishnu, Shiva, and the Buddha and Indian wares, but
also Indian goods. Roman imports of the second century AD/CE were also unearthed,
including artifacts mentioning Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. The site was known
to the Romans, and a few intrepid entrepeneurs might have voyaged there. Metals, beads,
and jewellery was produced there. Founded by an Indian named Kaundinya, Funan
exercised jurisdiction over the Kingdom of Tunsun in Malaya, whose west coast ports
traded with India and east coast with Funan. 176
Roman business in the second century AD /CE , still familial and entrepeneurial,
sprouted its own forms of internalization, particularly in the wine, marble, and clay
industries. The legions remained important in locating markets. The Eclectic Paradigm
made little sense in Classical Athens, but was more relevant in Rome with its family
hierarchies and overseas agents:
The Eclectic Paradigm applied to Roman Business
Ownership-Specific Advantages:
Hierarchy more natural in Rome than Greece in culture of patriarchy
and extended family. Roman firms develop under direction of the
paterfamilias and equestrian knight. Partnerhip, family, and
military ties in firms extended to overseas markets.
Locational Advantages:
42
Large sums and intense competition in military contracts.
Resident agents near legion encampments ensure
completion of the contract. African, Anatolian, and Levantine
agricultural, glass, and marble firms needed permanent agencies
in Italy and elsewhere.
Internalization Advantages:
Firms dealing in large sums of money, volume, and overhead
prudently employ resident agents in faraway parts of Empire and
even beyond, as in India. Additional costs and risks of middlemen
might price firm out of a competitive market. Unlike Assyrians and
Phoenicians,Romans still often use middlemen in transportation.
The marble industry of Asia Minor was the most internalized of the Roman Empire.
Building programs of the Caesars in Italy and elsewhere opened a huge market for
Bithynian marble. The marble industry was privately run under the Late Republic and
even Augustus but Tiberius began placing the major mines and quarries under imperial
control. By the time of the Antonines most major quarries were worked by the Empire
but were sometimes leased to private firms. Imperial control ensured the supply of marble
for large-scale building projects.177 The inscriptions on the marble blocks shipped across
the length and breadth of the Empire suggest that the big imperial quarries pioneered in
mass production, prefabrication and standardization of their blocks and columns. In
addition, they employed offices far from the quarries of Egypt and Asia Minor which
processed the marble en route to its destinations in Italy, Gaul, or Syria. Marble was,
according to Professor John Ward-Perkins
'a commerce which can conveniently be summarized in modern technology:
nationalization; mass production and stockpiling; a considerable element of
standardization and prefabrication; the establishment of agencies overseas to handle
specific marbles; and in some cases the availability of specialized craftsmen skilled in the
handling of a particular type of marble'.178
Many smaller quarries, geared to local markets, belonged to municipalities or private
firms. The Eclectic Paradigm is most relevant, though, to the major quarries, set up to
service overseas markets where demand for imported marble was high and the High
Empire 'could afford to invest the large sums of capital needed for the rational,
economical exploitation of sources'. 179 Marble blocks were quarried and stored in bulk in
yards, sometimes for decades. Yards near Rome and Ostia contained Anatolian blocks
quarried around AD/CE100 and used three centuries later. 180 An Egyptian column
quarried in Egypt in AD/CE105 was erected in Rome in 161. This system of mass
production and marketing shows a highly structured state/private enterprise far more
internalized in its trans-Mediterranean operations than it hadbeen in Greek or Hellenistic
times. 'It is hard to imagine a system,' says Ward-Perkins, 'more different from the sort of
43
intimate relationship between quarry and customer which we find embodied in the
building accounts of the Parthenon or of Eleusis'.181
The Roman marble industries pioneered in the practice of prefabrication, with columns
being turned out in standard lengths, many in exact multiples of the Roman foot for
which there was a sure market in Italy or Roman Africa. The casket industry provided an
even better example of prefabrication, with caskets hollowed and shaped prior to
shipment. There were several different models exported from Asia Minor for different
markets.182 A garland sarcophagus was hollowed out in Asia and finished in the
workshops of Alexandria and Phoenicia . Athenian caskets sold well in Greek, Libyan,
Italian, and Balkan markets but faced stiff competition in Asia Minor. Those made in
Asia dominated the market in Egypt and around the Black Sea. The markets of Syria and
most of Anatolia were divided equally. Bithynian caskets were competitive in parts of
Italy, through the importing centre-workshop of Ravenna, a permanent establishment
which added value to them. 183 Value-added production by overseas agents in distant
represent key aspects of a multinational enterprise. Efficient networks, described by
Professor Ward-Perkins linked quarries with particular markets: 184
Export Markets for Roman Marble Industry
Principal Markets
Main Place of Manufacture
Greece, Italy, Balkans,
Attica
Libya
Italy, Ravenna Region
Bithynia
Northern Asia Minor
Egypt, Bithynia
Syria and Southern
Attica, Egypt, Bithynia
Asia Minor
Geography helps explain why markets split up the way they did. The Bithynian quarries
were near to their Asian, Levantine, and Black Sea markets just as the Attican quarries
were near to the Piraeus, gateway to points west. This shipping was 'handled by agencies
which, directly or indirectly, were in very close touch with the sources of supply'.185
Mining and shipping of Bithynian marble and marble goods was probably directed from a
centralized business organisation operating from Nicomedia on the Bithynian shore. Was
this organization public or private? A hundred marble columns ordered by Hadrian for
the Panhellenion of Athens may well have come from the yards of Nicomedia. Professor
Ward-Perkins found it hard to believe that any state enterprise of this size could not have
left a record and found it 'much easier and much more convincing to assume that it was
the work of private initiative.'186
We still have little evidence as to precisely how the marble companies operated in their
heyday from around AD/CE130-230. The manceps of these companies possessed enough
capital to undertake investments 'including', says Ward-Perkins,' the maintenance of
successful agencies in a number of the maritime capitals of the Mediterranean world'.187
Marble could not be moved without a strong business organization. Dokimon marble
mined inland in Anatolia, 180 miles from the sea, hadto be of very high quality to justify
hauling it overland to the docks; marble mined near Nicomedia made bulk shipments
44
cheaper. Internalization may have been only partial, with marble hauled in the ships of
private contractors but coming under the control of their producer's overseas agents when
it reached port.188 Dokimon managers cut their higher shipping costs through further
internalization, making caskets and other products on or near the mining site, aiming,
according to Professor Mabel Dodge, at 'a different section of the market by exporting
products in finished form…thereby increasing the market value of the product on arrival
at its destination.'189
Familiarity with working properties of specific marble was an organisation-specific
advantage. Maunfacturers added value by prefabricating their marble products in
permanent establishments at destination ports, ensuring finished products adapted to local
markets. Overseas agencies channelling marble shipments let certain quarries direct
production to certain niche markets. Marblework in Caesarea and Scythopolis in came
from quarries near Ephesus, but the craftsmen who finished the columns and caskets
there worked out of permanent Palestine workshops. Permanent groups of trained haulers
in the ports of Italy and Asia Minor moved the marble to and from large vessels, stateowned in Egypt and on the Tiber, privately-owned elsewhere.190
In spite of Rome's expansion and the growth of mass production and prefabrication, the
primitivists are correct when they say that a modern economy did not fully emerge.
Roman business was still run in a very personal manner. No new management forms
were created from the second century AD/CE on. Big Roman companies were still
associations of socii who largely invested in land, not stock markets or new factories. The
Roman world lacked advanced credit facilities and a working class capable of high mass
consumption. Finally, the persistence of Roman slavery retarded economic growth by
preventing the need to cut labor costs. Demand existed, but remained relatively stagnant.
The laws of supply and demand operated in Rome, but they tended to work as much
against corporate concentration as in favor. Professor Dunning's model helps explain why
internalization took place in long-distance trade in the marble industry. Can it provide
any answers to what was happening to the other industries in North Italy, Gaul and
Germania? The trend here seems to be one of localization rather than internalization,
although the latter may well have been present. Goods were manufactured on large
estates near legionary encampments.
When Marcus Aurelius died in 161, a series of mostly weak emperors was unable to
maintain stability at home and deter the increasingly aggressive Germans on the frontier.
In 226, the powerful new Sassanid kingdom of Persia declared a sacred war against the
Greeks and Romans. The Empire hadto bolster its legions, becoming even more extended
both militarily and financially. The tax burden became unsustainable and investment
began to dry up within the Roman Empire.
In 284 an Illyrian named Diocletian reestablished authority by dividing the Empire into
East and West. In place of the Principate he reinvented the office Emperor as an allegedly
semidivine crowned monarchy known as the Dominate. The economy became far more
45
regimented with the introduction of wage and price controls. Brutal as the Dominate was,
it eventually helped stabilize the economy for another century.
Historians face difficult challenges in studying the economy, let alone the businesses of
the Dominate. Imperial laws, tax records, and pottery finds remain the major sources for
Roman business. The source material is not only patchy, but it is very difficult to
interpret. As many as one in five Romans lived in cities, one out of three in Italy where
many consumers concentrated in Rome. Romans, Italians, Gauls, Germans all needed
food, clothing, and other goods shipped to them from the countryside. Did these goods
move by market exchange…..or by government decree? 191
In his efforts to halt inflation, Diocletian attempted in 301 what Urukagina and
Hammurabi tried before him: the fixing of wages and prices. The Edict on Maximum
Prices testified both to the existence of a market economy and the continuing operation
of the mechanism of supply and demand. In the preamble the emperor complained of
how 'profiteers insolently and covertly attack the public welfare, not only in villages and
towns , but on every road?' Such profiteers 'charge extortionate prices for
merchandise…on such a scale that human speech cannot find words…' Diocletian was
particularly angry at the extortion aimed at his soldiers, who were sometimes stripped of
their pay in a single retail sale. In order to enforce compliance, Diocletian resorted to the
type of coercion hitherto familiar to Egypt, Assyria, and China: 'experience teaches that
fear is the most effective regulator and guide for the performance of duty.' 192
Reading the maximum price list of Diocletian opens a small window into the workings of
the Roman economy in the late Third Century. Most of the goods and services were
bought and sold in the market. At the head of the list were wheat, wines, and olive oil.
These were staples of the Roman economy. Pork, beef, chickens, venison, pheasant,
butter, and fish were also consumed. Boots, shoes, and timber were also important. Then
came the luxuries. White Silk from China was pegged at 12,000 denarii per pound, but
purple silk dyed in Phoenicia could bring 150,000. Wool, processed at Taranto at the heel
of the Italian boot, Asturia in Spain, or the famous affluent city of Laodicea, could bring
anywhere from 50 to 175 denarii a pound. Shipping charges per mile were quite
expensive: 20 denarii for 1,200 lb.wagon-loads, 8 for 600 lb. camel loads, and 4 for
donkey loads. Seaborne fares were charged by the bushel, not the mile:
Diocletian's Edict on Freight Charges per Bushel (in Denarii)
From Alexandria to: Pamphylia:6, Ephesus: 8: North Africa
or Sicily:10, Nicomedia, Thessalonica or Byzantium: 12,
Rome: 16, Dalmatia:18, Aquileia (near Venice): 24.
From Asia to: Africa: 8, Dalmatia:12, Rome:16.
From Africa to: Gaul: 4, Sicily:6, Spain: 8, Rome and
Achaea:12 , Thessalonica: 18.
46
The edict mentions a number of professions: Farm worker, Carpenter, Baker, Seagoing
Shipper, Riverboat Shipper, Camel Driver, Shepherd, Scribe, Notary, Tailor,
Teachers and
Lawyers. 193
Diocletian reinforced his measures with a reorganized political administration designed to
maximize his power and weaken any countervailing centers.
One trend fairly certain in the Late Empire under Diocletian and Constantine involved a
movement toward more government control and non-market exchange. State ownership
increased, but it tended to rest in the defense industries. Private enterprise continued to
operate but no doubt under a heavy tax burden. Constantinople boasted approximately
180 private bakeries, and only 30 public ones; Rome had 274 public bakeries, but also
plenty of demand for private ones. To some degree, the Roman government adopted a
minimal welfare system in the form of a grain allowance to impoverished children. The
merchants shipping this grain from North Africa were guaranteed a small profit by the
state under Constantine. As with modern welfare systems, the annona, as it was called,
was abused by shippers who sought more profits than the emperor allowed. 194
Eventually the empire would resume its decline. Roman commerce and industry did not
dissolve completely, but continued to operate at a depressed level. The history of the
gold, silver, copper and tin mining industry in the Late Empire illustrates this. Unlike
iron, which could be mined most anywhere in the Empire, these precious metals were
only found in certain places. Under the Dominate the government and army had grown
immensely. More money needed to be coined to finance them. Mining operations
continued, but their management was organized in a very different manner from the
operations of the Principate. The Iberian Peninsula hosted a major concentration of
mining activity in the Augustan Age. The Rio Tinto mines and others that once sold
copper and tin to the Tyrians now provided silver, gold, copper, tin, led, mercury, iron
and zinc to the entire Roman world. The great Spanish mines were administered by the
state. One procurator supervised the gold mines of the Tagus; another, an equestrian
supervised those of Galicia. 195
The overall supervision of the region fell to the procurator of Hispania Tarraconensis, but
the mining operations were too extensive for him to run directly. The big Roman mines,
in the words of C.J. Edmonson, 'required a complex organization of production'. The big
and small mines of Spain overall were 'organized fiscally as one large unit'. 196 The mines
of Spain and Portugal were worked most vigorously from around AD/CE 50 to around
200. The Rio Tinto silver and gold mines began to decline around 160-70 when the
region was attacked by the Moors. A small settlement was rebuilt in the third century.
The Tharsis copper and sulfur mines flourished under Trajan but likewise declined in the
third century. Roman coins and evidence of sporadic mining nonetheless appeared in the
fourth century and continued until the Visigoths came around 410. 197
Most of the big mines continued to be worked in the fourth century but on a much
smaller scale. A lot of smaller mines operated alongside them, though the traces they left
47
were scanty. Edmonson concluded that 'not only the scale, but also the pattern of mining
changed during the third century.' 198 Large scale mining was no longer feasible in the
Late Empire and so 'small-scale mining came to form the dominant mode of production.'
199
With the sharp decline in productivity in her mining industry, Rome could no longer
effectively finance her government and imperial power. The collapse of the Roman
economy was not uniform, however. Archaeological research shows that the economy
would revert to pre-Roman times. Western Europe would become impoverished, paving
the way for the Dark Age economy. In the east, however, Byzantium would continue to
preserve the late Roman model into the sixth and even early seventh centuries. The focus
of economic life in the Roman world would shift between AD/CE400 and 600 to the
Aegean and ultimately to the Near East.200
The economic change is most evident in Britain. In the early fourth century the island
was a flourishing center of the Roman pottery industry. Roman coins circulated freely.
By 500, with the Jutes, Angles and Saxons firmly established on the southern and eastern
shores. The coins, towns, villas, and most trade hadall but vanished. At the same time,
nonetheless, the records and artifacts of Egypt and much of the Byzantine Near East
show taxes paid in money, a dense farming population, and lots of new churches and
buildings made by skilled artisans. In the time of Constantine, both east and west were
relatively prosperous, but by AD/CE 500-520 the economic disparities between the
former Western Roman and the Byzantine world hadvastly widened. Byzantium herself
would enter a sharp decline around 550. Some regions, such as the Jordan Valley, were to
prosper into the time of the Arab conquest of the seventh century.201 The same pattern
that existed in Britain also existed in Roman Italy, as well as Spain and Gaul, although
the economic collapse was less precipitous. Italy hadalready begun to lose its dominant
position in the Roman economy by AD/CE100. By AD/CE200 the farms and towns of
the peninsula were in serious decline and this decline intensified until by AD/CE600
there was little left in terms of production, trade, or rural population. Roman Algeria and
Tunisia fared better than Mediterranean Europe. North Africa was the source of Italy's
grain and the red slip pottery made there carried other important foodstuffs as well.
Roman Carthage and its region haddense population, rich churches, and even a large wall
erected after 420.202 The Vandals arrived around 425 but did little to disrupt commerce,
and the descendants of Punic, Roman, and Berber merchants continued to export olive oil
and red slip pottery until the mid-500's. The record, nevertheless, shows a steady decline
in the volume and extent of trade. By the time the Vandals came, the locus of prosperity
hadshifted to the Aegean and the Levant.203
Not only the Near East but the Greeks made an economic comeback as Rome in the west
collapsed. Carthage, Egypt, Phoenicia, Anatolia and even the Aegean preserved and even
reasserted their prosperity in Late Antiquity. There were more peasants in Greece then,
than in the period before the Roman conquest. The marble industry continued to thrive;its
market now predominately Byzantine. Quarries operated in Proconessus, Thassus,
Thessaly, and Docimium and their managers continued to export columns to
Constantinople, Syria, Egypt, and even Italy. The Greek world, though, would begin to
48
decline in the 7th century, leaving the Near East as the last major bastion of a vanished
Roman prosperity. Unlike Italy, which declined slowly, the Greek economy crashed
suddenly after AD/CE600. 204
The Near East would remain the only remaining arena for business enterprise on any
appreciable scale. The Arab conquest and creation of the powerful seventh- and eighthcentury Caliphate first in Syria and then in Iraq would only ratify this reality. The
economy of seventh century Europe was different in quality as well as quantity from that
of Constantine's time. J.B. Ward -Perkins and his co-authors describe 'a remarkable
qualitative change in economic life, with whole areas of specialisation and exchange
disappearing, and in some regions even very basic technology apparently ceasing to
exist.' 205 All but the smallest of markets died in Britain, and brickmaking, masonry, and
even pottery skills vanished for a time. The early Saxon economy became more primitive
than that of the pre-Roman Britons.
Movement of Centers of Economic Prosperity
100 BC/BCE -AD/CE100: Italy and East.
AD/CE100-AD/CE250: Spain, Gaul, Danube and East.
AD/CE200-400: North Africa, Byzantium, Near East.
AD/CE400-600: Collapse in West, survival in East:
Decline in North Africa, followed by sharper decline in Aegean.
Levant prospers.
AD/CE600-800: Ireland and Armenia join Near East,
which flourishes under Muslim Caliphate.
One of the major factors that distinguished the Roman from other ancient economies and
that of the Dark Ages was the mass production of goods for a large market. Roman
businesses often trafficked in necessities as well as luxuries.206
The story of Rome’s economic decline through inflation, corruption, and loss of market
opportunities is quite extensive and belongs, along with the subsequent business history
of the Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and medieval and modern European worlds in a future
work. Throughout the past two millennia, these and other business cultures applied some
of the lessons perfected in antiquity, better enabling historians to understand more recent
times.
49
Epilogue: From Ancient to Modern
________________________________________________________________________
___
We hope that in this book we have made some contribution to international business
history but as one of us is an executive educator we naturally come to the question, is
there anything that the ancient world has to tell us today? Firstly, we repeat the words of
Solomon, ‘there is nothing new under the sun.’207 Much of what we moderns are very
impressed with ourselves with creating we find evidence of in the times of the Assyrians,
Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans. The second point we make is regarding the ‘best’
form of capitalism, some observers, especially in the U.S. and the U.K. argue that the
world should move to one form of capitalism – their form. We shall return to this
argument shortly but first here is a recapitulation of some of the ‘modern’ phenomenon
which we found in ancient times:
The First MNEs
In chapter four we presented evidence that the first recorded MNEs appeared in the Old
Assyrian Kingdom shortly after 2000 B.C.. Using the eclectic paradigm as a model to
analyze ancient international trade we demonstrated that the major characteristics of
MNEs were a part of the Assyrian business organizations of the time. Characteristics
found in modern MNEs such as: hierarchical organisation, foreign employees, valueadding activities in multiple regions, common stock ownership, resource and market
seeking behaviour, were present in these ancient firms. These early MNEs successfully
operated considerable business empires in multiple foreign locations from their corporate
headquarters in the capital of Ashur. Were there early MNEs or “proto-MNEs” earlier
than the Assyrian Empire? There may well have been. However, practical difficulties
arise due to the lack of archaeological evidence from other nations and empires in earlier
epochs. One looks forward to the work of other scholars to shed light on this interesting
issue. Later we presented evidence of the first transcontinental MNEs in Phoenicia and of
known world straddling Roman MNEs in their day.
Branding and Advertising
One of the hot topics in marketing over the last decade has been branding and building
powerful international and global brands.208 In ancient Greece we saw potters and vasemakers produced for tailored markets, promoted their brand-name wares, and even
publicly ridiculed their competitors with negative advertising. One is reminded of the
Pepsi challenge ads which ‘proved’ that Coke drinkers preferred Pepsi. In Roman times
amphorae often carried stamps on their handles and were inscribed with the name of their
shipper, their contents, and a date. As a modern brand does today, the shipper mark or
brand could be used a way of reducing the risk of a purchase by providing a “guarantee”
of the quality of a product.
Global Economies
50
Admittedly we use the word global here somewhat inaccurately, perhaps it would be
better to say ‘known world’ economies. But we may be forgiven some exaggeration.
Today’s technologies, e-mail, low cost transcontinental phone calls, faxes, jet airplanes,
have shrunk the modern world. The globe is the village marketplace for our modern
businessperson. Today it is almost trivial for the seasoned business traveller to fly
business class from London to Shanghai for a day’s meeting. In ancient times a trip from
one major economic centre to another, from Rome to Athens, from Ashur to Anatolia, or
from Tyre to Carthage, would have typically involved months of arduous travel filled
with danger. Even schoolchildren in many countries are familiar with Marco Polo, in
even relatively modern times, one trip from Europe to China earned him lasting fame.
Today the same trip takes 12 hours from London to Shanghai and thousands of
businesspeople make that trip a year. In ancient times the known world sadly did not
include North America (especially difficult for two Canadian authors to come to terms
with) Australia, Japan, much of Africa and much of Europe and Asia. However, given
the difficulties of travel and communications to the ancient known world209 of southern
and central Europe, North Africa, the Near and Far East, India and China their
international business achievements were probably more impressive than those of modern
businesspeople! Yet with all these difficulties we have shown evidence in this book of
not only multinational firms in ancient Assyria but transcontinental activities in Phoenicia
times and in the Roman empire business activities stretching from Rome to India and
onto China and in the West to what we call today, the United Kingdom.
As one does their Boxing Day sales shopping, you can help but be impressed by the
many places that the clothes, electronics or CDs come from. It seems that our local
department store has become a global emporium, this is certainly different from the
sixties when most goods were still produced in the same country. Yet, in ancient
Phoenicia or Rome, at their peak, were not all that different from today. In the emporium
of the day you would find clothes from India and Phoenicia, wine from France, jewellery
from Africa or Arabia or India, horses from the Near East, carpets from Persia and
pitchers sourced in Greece. Sounds like Cargo Warehouse!
Today the lingua franka of modern international business is primarily English,
governments in France, Germany, Quebec and elsewhere bemoan this fact, they see it as
potentially undermining their languages. We see in the ancient world there was times that
one language became ‘the’ language of business only to be supplanted by another as
powers rose and fell. For example in the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt and the
Kassite kingdom of Babylonia, we find that the major courts210 treated one another as
equals and all corresponded in Akkadian, the language of diplomacy. Later in the time of
the Greeks, Greek became the language of much of international business in the known
world. Still later Latin replaced Greek, and so on.
One of the contentious issues between the U.S. and Japan in the last decade has been nontariff trading barriers. In Phoenician times we find that for foreign merchants, known
asubru in the Canaanite tongue, their activities were strictly regulated by the harbour
master. Aramean, Hittite, Egyptian and Mesopotamian courts and business organisations
51
sent resident foreign merchants into Phoenician territory, where they were still subject to
their own authorities. The regulations imposed by the harbour master, however, presented
them with a primitive version of what would today be described in Japan as non-tariff
barriers. Asubru could not leave the foreign business quarter district of the host country,
enter the residence of native traders, and conduct business in a Phoenician city without
strict supervision from the Cananite harbourmaster.211
Virtual Corporations
In the chapter on the Roman empire we discussed how the Publicani of the later Roman
empire were usually not specialised firms. A given firm might win a contract to make
swords or togas but usually specialised in neither. Publican associations seem to have
been based on a flexible management and work forces. Associations of partners would
come together to carry out a contract and then disband. Faced with fierce market
competition in the letting of contracts, the publicani simply could not afford much in the
way of permanent staff, which remained lean and flexible in adapting to different
markets. What the firms insteADprovided, according to Professor Badian, was “capital
and top management, based on general business experience”.212 The permanent staffs of
the firms were small in numbers and consequently flexible in adapting to different kinds
of business for both public and private contractors. The companies, says Badian, “can
only have functioned…by taking over existing substructures and superimposing
managing staff.”213 Permanent, organised staffs of skilled miners, tax professionals, arms
makers, shipbuilders, and others did exist, and these were likely bought and sold by the
publican managers as they shifted from contract to contract. The new Roman firms
transacted business on a scale undreamed of by their Near Eastern and Hellenic
forerunners. It is interesting to contrast these Roman virtual corporations or networked
firms with today’s virtual firms which are encouraged to ‘stick to their knitting’ or core
competencies rather than act as general managers as these Romans appeared to be.
The Rise of Nations
The most noteworthy of these were the Domitii, who eventually sired a Caesar of their
own. Between AD/CE50 and 150, the Domitian firm held a virtual monopoly over the
Roman brick industry. The fire set by Nero in Rome in AD/CE64 may well have paved
the way for a Domitian to eventually occupy his throne. Rebuilding the city provided a
ready-made market for the new firm, which employed 53 slaves, 22 freedmen, and 22
others. By AD/CE155 the Domitian brick works employed 46 foremen, and its managing
family remained related to the Antonine line of Caesars.with whicch they hadmarriage
connections. 214
There were other large concerns, such as the Fasana amphorae maker Gaius Laekanius
Bassus, who marketed Istrian oil with the aid of his 15 slaves. Neither was Roman
business a purely male affair. A lady of ill repute in Nero's court, Calvia Crispinilla, ran
an export business in oil and wine in northeastern Italy. A large bronze industry
flourished in Capua, and Rome boasted both a papyrus and a leADfactory. In spite of
52
these examples big firms would continue to be very much in the minority in an Imperial
economy still dominated by small, independent traders, artisans, and partners:
By the first century B.C., a single economic order prevailed from the Atlantic to the
Euphrates dominated by Rome. Direct inheritors of the Hellenic market revolution, the
Romans ensured the victory of free-market enterprise over the more vertically-integrated
Oriental model of business management. That victory though, was to be only partial, for
alongside the innumerable numbers of entrepeneurs and contractors trading beneath the
Roman eagle from Iberia to India, large family firms, partnerships, and semipublic
corporations also operated more in accord with the rules of the Eclectic Paradigm.
Organised and even multinational enterprises, both public and private, existed in the
Roman world to a greater extent than in Classical Greece. Even many independent
enterprises in the Republic and Empire which could not be classified as “multinational”
hada familial character unknown in Greece. Some firms, especially the publican
partnerships operated by the Roman equites, or knights, grew to enormous size, engaged
in mass production, and even embodied an early form of limited liability. In the Roman
combination of individual and integrated enterprises one first dimly recognises the forms
of Western business culture as they would exist in medieval and modern times.
Rome: The Late Empire
The Severans: AD/CE197-325
The Period of Barracks Emperors: AD/CE235-284
The Dominate: AD/CE284-361
The Final Crisis: AD/CE361-476
Roman business culture of the High Empire set the stage for the medieval and modern
capitalisms of the Western world. These would inherit from Rome a relatively free
market, large private firms, limited liability, mass production and the perfection of
business agents and partnerships. Business law, European unity through currency and
infrastructure and the role of entrepeneurship in buttressing military power are also part
of the Roman legacy.
The Late Empire: The Decline and Fall of Roman Capitalism:
Ironically, the legions which did so much to create Rome's prosperity would help undo it
in the end. The Roman economy reached its pinnacle under the reign of the Five Good
Emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. Commerce
was secure and road/seaborne communications excellent. Both Dio Chrystosom and
Aelius Aristides celebrated the Roman Peace. In 156 Aristides remarked that 'every
Greek and barbarian can easily travel to whatever destination he chooses' and need fear
neither the pirates of Cilicia nor the bedouin of the desert. The economic policy of the
Antonines was still quite free-trade and private enterprise, although the Caesars
personally owned land, plus textile and brick factories. 215
53
The empire reached its furthest extent under Trajan who annexed Dacia and marched,
unsuccessfully, to the Euphrates. Trajan was followed in 117 by his adopted heir,
Hadrian, who withdrew from Iraq. The Syrian business contacts his invasion stimulated
did not.
Italy, especially southern Italy, continued to decline and wealth and power continued to
shift to the frontiers. to the frontiers. The most important trend in the second and third
century Roman Empire was now the slow decline of Wine and oil production still
flourished in northeastern Italy, as did other industries. Pertinax, who briefly reigned as
emperor after the death of the slain Commodus, ran a textile business. Gaul and
Germany, however, began to grow at the expense of southern Italy. Commerce followed
the soldiers, with the legionary markets and cheap labor of the provinces outstripping the
now-expensive Italian slave labor. The Italian monopoly on lamps was now broken. The
potters of Gaul and glass-blowers of Germany now created their own monopolies. The
chief pottery centers arose in the center of France and in what is now Alsace-Lorraine.
They exported all over western Europe and even the Levant, while Cologne became the
center of glass-blowing.
A similar process took place in the East, where the region's historic prosperity was
sustained by the legions.
The marble industry of Asia Minor was the most internalized Building programs of the
Caesars in Italy and elsewhere opened a huge market for Bithynian marble. The marble
industry was privately run under the Late Republic and even Augustus but Tiberius began
placing the major mines and quarries under imperial control. By the time of the
Antonines most major quarries were worked by the Empire but were sometimes leased to
private firms. Imperial control ensured the supply of marble for large-scale building
projects.216 The inscriptions on the marble blocks shipped across the length and breadth
of the Empire suggest that the big imperial quarries pioneered in mass production,
prefabrication and standardization of their blocks and columns. In addition, they
employed offices far from the quarries of Egypt and Asia Minor which processed the
marble en route to its destinations in Italy, Gaul, or Syria. Marble was, according to
Professor John Ward-Perkins
'a commerce which can conveniently be summarized in modern technology:
nationalization; mass production and stockpiling; a considerable element of
standardization and prefabrication; the establishment of agencies overseas to handle
specific marbles; and in some cases the availability of specialized craftsmen skilled in the
handling of a particular type of marble'.217
Many smaller quarries, geared to local markets, belonged to municipalities or private
firms. The Eclectic Paradigm is most relevant, though, to the major quarries, set up to
service overseas markets where demand for imported marble was high and the High
54
Empire 'could afford to invest the large sums of capital needed for the rational,
economical exploitation of sources'. 218 Marble blocks were quarried and stored in bulk in
yards, sometimes for decades. Yards near Rome and Ostia contained Anatolian blocks
quarried around AD/CE100 and used three centuries later. 219 An Egyptian column
quarried in Egypt in AD/CE105 was erected in Rome in 161. This system of mass
production and marketing shows a highly structured state/private enterprise far more
internalized in its trans-Mediterranean operations than it hadbeen in Greek or Hellenistic
times. 'It is hard to imagine a system,' says Ward-Perkins, 'more different from the sort of
intimate relationship between quarry and customer which we find embodied in the
building accounts of the Parthenon or of Eleusis'.220
The Roman marble industries pioneered in the practice of prefabrication, with columns
being turned out in standard lengths, many in exact multiples of the Roman foot for
which there was a sure market in Italy or Roman Africa. The casket industry provided an
even better example of prefabrication, with caskets hollowed and shaped prior to
shipment. There were several different models exported from Asia Minor for different
markets.221 A garland sarcophagus was hollowed out in Asia and finished in the
workshops of Alexandria and Phoenicia . Athenian caskets sold well in Greek, Libyan,
Italian, and Balkan markets but faced stiff competition in Asia Minor. Those made in
Asia dominated the market in Egypt and around the Black Sea. The markets of Syria and
most of Anatolia were divided equally. Bithynian caskets were competitive in parts of
Italy, through the importing centre-workshop of Ravenna, a permanent establishment
which added value to them. 222 Value-added production by overseas agents in distant
represent key aspects of a multinational enterprise. Efficient networks, described by
Professor Ward-Perkins linked quarries with particular markets: 223
Export Markets for Roman Marble Industry
Principal Markets
Main Place of Manufacture
Greece, Italy, Balkans, Libya
Attica
Italy, Ravenna Region
Bithynia
Northern Asia Minor
Egypt, Bithynia
Syria and Southern Asia Minor
Attica, Egypt, Bithynia
Geography helps explain why markets split up the way they did. The Bithynian quarries
were near to their Asian, Levantine, and Black Sea markets just as the Attican quarries
were near to the Piraeus, gateway to points west. This shipping was 'handled by agencies
which, directly or indirectly, were in very close touch with the sources of supply'.224
Mining and shipping of Bithynian marble and marble goods was probably directed from a
centralized business organisation operating from Nicomedia on the Bithynian shore. Was
this organization public or private? A hundred marble columns ordered by Hadrian for
the Panhellenion of Athens may well have come from the yards of Nicomedia. Professor
Ward-Perkins found it hard to believe that any state enterprise of this size could not have
left a record and found it 'much easier and much more convincing to assume that it was
the work of private initiative.'225
55
We still have little evidence as to precisely how the marble companies operated in their
heyday from around AD/CE130-230. The manceps of these companies possessed enough
capital to undertake investments 'including', says Ward-Perkins,' the maintenance of
successful agencies in a number of the maritime capitals of the Mediterranean world'.226
Marble could not be moved without a strong business organization. Dokimon marble
mined inland in Anatolia, 180 miles from the sea, hadto be of very high quality to justify
hauling it overland to the docks; marble mined near Nicomedia made bulk shipments
cheaper. Internalization may have been only partial, with marble hauled in the ships of
private contractors but coming under the control of their producer's overseas agents when
it reached port.227 Dokimon managers cut their higher shipping costs through further
internalization, making caskets and other products on or near the mining site, aiming,
according to Professor Mabel Dodge, at 'a different section of the market by exporting
products in finished form…thereby increasing the market value of the product on arrival
at its destination.'228
Familiarity with working properties of specific marble was an organisation-specific
advantage. Maunfacturers added value by prefabricating their marble products in
permanent establishments at destination ports, ensuring finished products adapted to local
markets. Overseas agencies channelling marble shipments let certain quarries direct
production to certain niche markets. Marblework in Caesarea and Scythopolis in came
from quarries near Ephesus, but the craftsmen who finished the columns and caskets
there worked out of permanent Palestine workshops. Permanent groups of trained haulers
in the ports of Italy and Asia Minor moved the marble to and from large vessels, stateowned in Egypt and on the Tiber, privately-owned elsewhere.229
In spite of Rome's expansion and the growth of mass production and prefabrication, the
primitivists are correct when they say that a modern economy did not fully emerge.
Roman business was still run in a very personal manner. No new management forms
were created from the second century AD/CEon. Big Roman companies were still
associations of socii who largely invested in land, not stock markets or new factories. The
Roman world lacked advanced credit facilities and a working class capable of high mass
consumption. Finally, the persistence of Roman slavery retarded economic growth by
preventing the need to cut labor costs. Demand existed, but remained relatively stagnant.
The laws of supply and demand operated in Rome, but they tended to work as much
against corporate concentration as in favor. Professor Dunning's model helps explain why
internalization took place in long-distance trade in the marble industry. Can it provide
any answers to what was happening to the other industries in North Italy, Gaul and
Germania? The trend here seems to be one of localization rather than internalization,
although the latter may well have been present. Goods were manufactured on large
estates near legionary encampments.
When Marcus Aurelius died in 161, a series of mostly weak emperors was unable to
maintain stability at home and deter the increasingly aggressive Germans on the frontier.
In 226, the powerful new Sassanid kingdom of Persia declared a sacred war against the
Greeks and Romans. The Empire hadto bolster its legions, becoming even more extended
56
both militarily and financially. The tax burden became unsustainable and investment
began to dry up within the Roman Empire.
In 284 an Illyrian named Diocletian reestablished authority by dividing the Empire into
East and West. In place of the Principate he reinvented the office Emperor as an allegedly
semidivine crowned monarchy known as the Dominate. The economy became far more
regimented with the introduction of wage and price controls. Brutal as the Dominate was,
it eventually helped stabilize the economy for another century.
Historians face difficult challenges in studying the economy, let alone the businesses of
the Dominate. Imperial laws, tax records, and pottery finds remain the major sources for
Roman business. The source material is not only patchy, but it is very difficult to
interpret. As many as one in five Romans lived in cities, one out of three in Italy where
many consumers concentrated in Rome. Romans, Italians, Gauls, Germans all needed
food, clothing, and other goods shipped to them from the countryside. Did these goods
move by market exchange…..or by government decree? 230
In his efforts to halt inflation, Diocletian attempted in 301 what Urukagina and
Hammurabi tried before him: the fixing of wages and prices. The Edict on Maximum
Prices testified both to the existence of a market economy and the continuing operation
of the mechanism of supply and demand. In the preamble the emperor complained of
how 'profiteers insolently and covertly attack the public welfare, not only in villages and
towns , but on every road?' Such profiteers 'charge extortionate prices for
merchandise…on such a scale that human speech cannot find words…' Diocletian was
particularly angry at the extortion aimed at his soldiers, who were sometimes stripped of
their pay in a single retail sale. In order to enforce compliance, Diocletian resorted to the
type of coercion hitherto familiar to Egypt, Assyria, and China: 'experience teaches that
fear is the most effective regulator and guide for the performance of duty.' 231
Reading the maximum price list of Diocletian opens a small window into the workings of
the Roman economy in the late Third Century. Most of the goods and services were
bought and sold in the market. At the heADof the list were wheat, wines, and olive oil.
These were staples of the Roman economy. Pork, beef, chickens, venison, pheasant,
butter, and fish were also consumed. Boots, shoes, and timber were also important. Then
came the luxuries. White Silk from China was pegged at 12,000 denarii per pound, but
purple silk dyed in Phoenicia could bring 150,000. Wool, processed at Taranto at the heel
of the Italian boot, Asturia in Spain, or the famous affluent city of Laodicea, could bring
anywhere from 50 to 175 denarii a pound. Shipping charges per mile were quite
expensive: 20 denarii for 1,200 lb.wagon-loads, 8 for 600 lb. camel loads, and 4 for
donkey loads. Seaborne fares were charged by the bushel, not the mile:
Diocletian's Edict on Freight Charges per Bushel (in Denarii)
From Alexandria to: Pamphylia:6, Ephesus: 8: North Africa or Sicily:10,
Nicomedia, Thessalonica or Byzantium: 12, Rome: 16, Dalmatia:18, Aquileia
(nearVenice): 24.
From Asia to: Africa: 8, Dalmatia:12, Rome:16.
57
From Africa to: Gaul: 4, Sicily:6, Spain: 8, Rome and Achaea:12 ,
Thessalonica: 18.
The edict mentions a number of professions: Farm worker Carpenter Baker Seagoing
Shipper Riverboat Shipper Camel Driver Shepherd Scribe Notary Tailor Teachers and
Lawyers.
Diocletian reinforced his measures with a reorganized political administration designed to
maximize his power and weaken any countervailing centers.
One trend that is fairly certain is that the Late Empire under Diocletian and Constantine
moved toward much more government control and non-market exchange. State
ownership increased, but it tended to rest in the defense industries. Private enterprise
continued to operate but no doubt under a heavy tax burden. Constantinople boasted
approximately 180 private bakeries, and only 30 public ones; Rome had274 public
bakeries, but also plenty of demand for private ones. To some degree, the Roman
government adopted a minimal welfare system in the form of a grain allowance to
impoverished children. The merchants shipping this grain from North Africa were
guaranteed a small profit by the state under Constantine. As with modern welfare
systems, the annona, as it was called, was abused by shippers who sought more profits
than the emperor allowed.
Eventually the empire would resume its decline. The collapse of the Roman economy
was not uniform, however. Archaeological research shows that the economy would revert
to pre-Roman times. Western Europe would become impoverished, paving the way for
the Dark Age economy. In the east, however, Byzantium would continue to preserve the
late Roman model into the 6th and even early 7th centuries. The focus of economic life in
the Roman world would shift between AD/CE400 and 600 to the Aegean and ultimately
to the Near East.232
The economic change is most evident in Britain. In the early fourth century the island
was a flourishing center of the Roman pottery industry. Roman coins circulated freely.
By 500, with the Jutes, Angles and Saxons firmly established on the southern and eastern
shores. The coins, towns, villas, and most trade hadall but vanished. At the same time,
nonetheless, the records and artifacts of Egypt and much of the Byzantine Near East
show taxes paid in money, a dense farming population, and lots of new churches and
buildings made by skilled artisans. In the time of Constantine, both east and west were
relatively prosperous, but by AD/CE500-520 the economic disparities between the
former Western Roman and the Byzantine world hadvastly widened. Byzantium herself
would enter a sharp decline around 550. Some regions, such as the Jordan Valley, were to
58
prosper into the time of the Arab conquest of the 7th century.233 The same pattern that
existed in Britain also existed in Roman Italy, as well as Spain and Gaul, although the
economic collapse was less precipitous. Italy hadalready begun to lose its dominant
position in the Roman economy by AD/CE100. By AD/CE200 the farms and towns of
the peninsula were in serious decline and this decline intensified until by AD/CE600
there was little left in terms of production, trade, or rural population. Roman Algeria and
Tunisia fared better than Mediterranean Europe. North Africa was the source of Italy's
grain and the red slip pottery made there carried other important foodstuffs as well.
Roman Carthage and its region haddense population, rich churches, and even a large wall
erected after 420.234 The Vandals arrived around 425 but did little to disrupt commerce,
and the descendants of Punic, Roman, and Berber merchants continued to export olive oil
and red slip pottery until the mid-500's. The record, nevertheless, shows a steady decline
in the volume and extent of trade. By the time the Vandals came, the locus of prosperity
hadshifted to the Aegean and the Levant.235
Not only the Near East but the Greeks made an economic comeback as Rome in the west
collapsed. Carthage, Egypt, Phoenicia, Anatolia and even the Aegean preserved and even
reasserted their prosperity in Late Antiquity. There were more peasants in Greece then,
than in the period before the Roman conquest. The marble industry continued to thrive;its
market now predominately Byzantine. Quarries operated in Proconessus, Thassus,
Thessaly, and Docimium and their managers continued to export columns to
Constantinople, Syria, Egypt, and even Italy. The Greek world, though, would begin to
decline in the 7th century, leaving the Near East as the last major bastion of a vanished
Roman prosperity. Unlike Italy, which declined slowly, the Greek economy crashed
suddenly after AD/CE600. 236
The Near East would remain the only remaining arena for business enterprise on any
appreciable scale. The Arab conquest and creation of the powerful 7th and 8th century
Caliphate first in Syria and then in Iraq would only ratify this reality. The economy of 7th
century Europe was different in quality as well as quantity from that of Constantine's
time. J.B. Ward -Perkins and his co-authors describe 'a remarkable qualitative change in
economic life, with whole areas of specialisation and exchange disappearing, and in some
regions even very basic technology apparently ceasing to exist.' 237 All but the smallest of
markets died in Britain, and brickmaking, masonry, and even pottery skills vanished for a
time. The early Saxon economy became more primitive than that of the pre-Roman
Britons.
Movement of Centers of Economic Prosperity
100 BC/BCE -AD/CE100: Italy and East.
AD/CE100-AD/CE250: Spain, Gaul, Danube and East.
AD/CE200-400: North Africa, Byzantium, Near East.
AD/CE400-600: Collapse in West, survival in East: Decline in North Africa,
followed by sharper decline in Aegean. Levant prospers.
AD/CE600-800: Ireland and Armenia join Near East, which flourishes under
59
Muslim Caliphate.
One of the major factors that distinguished the Roman from other ancient economies and
that of the Dark Ages was the mass production of goods for a large market. Roman
businesses often trafficked in necessities as well as luxuries.238
The story of Rome’s economic decline through inflation, corruption, and loss of market
opportunities is quite extensive and belongs, along with the subsequent business history
of the Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and medieval and modern European worlds in a future
work. Throughout the past two millennia, these and other business cultures applied some
of the lessons perfected in antiquity, better enabling historians to understand more recent
times.
60
Chapter 11 – Conclusion: One Form of Capitalism?
We hope that in this book we have made some contribution to international business
history but as one of us is an executive educator we naturally come to the question, is
there anything that the ancient world has to tell us today? Firstly, we repeat the words of
Solomon, ‘there is nothing new under the sun.’239 Much of what we moderns are very
impressed with ourselves with creating we find evidence of in the times of the Assyrians,
Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans. The second point we make is regarding the ‘best’
form of capitalism, some observers, especially in the U.S. and the U.K. argue that the
world should move to one form of capitalism – their form. We shall return to this
argument shortly but first here is a recapitulation of some of the ‘modern’ phenomenon
which we found in ancient times:
The First MNEs
In chapter four we presented evidence that the first recorded MNEs appeared in the Old
Assyrian Kingdom shortly after 2000 B.C.. Using the eclectic paradigm as a model to
analyze ancient international trade we demonstrated that the major characteristics of
MNEs were a part of the Assyrian business organizations of the time. Characteristics
found in modern MNEs such as: hierarchical organisation, foreign employees, valueadding activities in multiple regions, common stock ownership, resource and market
seeking behaviour, were present in these ancient firms. These early MNEs successfully
operated considerable business empires in multiple foreign locations from their corporate
headquarters in the capital of Ashur. Were there early MNEs or “proto-MNEs” earlier
than the Assyrian Empire? There may well have been. However, practical difficulties
arise due to the lack of archaeological evidence from other nations and empires in earlier
epochs. One looks forward to the work of other scholars to shed light on this interesting
issue. Later we presented evidence of the first transcontinental MNEs in Phoenicia and of
known world straddling Roman MNEs in their day.
Branding and Advertising
One of the hot topics in marketing over the last decade has been branding and building
powerful international and global brands.240 In ancient Greece we saw potters and vasemakers produced for tailored markets, promoted their brand-name wares, and even
publicly ridiculed their competitors with negative advertising. One is reminded of the
Pepsi challenge ads which ‘proved’ that Coke drinkers preferred Pepsi. In Roman times
amphorae often carried stamps on their handles and were inscribed with the name of their
shipper, their contents, and a date. As a modern brand does today, the shipper mark or
brand could be used a way of reducing the risk of a purchase by providing a “guarantee”
of the quality of a product.
Global Economies
Admittedly we use the word global here somewhat inaccurately, perhaps it would be
better to say ‘known world’ economies. But we may be forgiven some exaggeration.
61
Today’s technologies, e-mail, low cost transcontinental phone calls, faxes, jet airplanes,
have shrunk the modern world. The globe is the village marketplace for our modern
businessperson. Today it is almost trivial for the seasoned business traveller to fly
business class from London to Shanghai for a day’s meeting. In ancient times a trip from
one major economic centre to another, from Rome to Athens, from Ashur to Anatolia, or
from Tyre to Carthage, would have typically involved months of arduous travel filled
with danger. Even schoolchildren in many countries are familiar with Marco Polo, in
even relatively modern times, one trip from Europe to China earned him lasting fame.
Today the same trip takes 12 hours from London to Shanghai and thousands of
businesspeople make that trip a year. In ancient times the known world sadly did not
include North America (especially difficult for two Canadian authors to come to terms
with) Australia, Japan, much of Africa and much of Europe and Asia. However, given
the difficulties of travel and communications to the ancient known world241 of southern
and central Europe, North Africa, the Near and Far East, India and China their
international business achievements were probably more impressive than those of modern
businesspeople! Yet with all these difficulties we have shown evidence in this book of
not only multinational firms in ancient Assyria but transcontinental activities in Phoenicia
times and in the Roman empire business activities stretching from Rome to India and
onto China and in the West to what we call today, the United Kingdom.
As one does their Boxing Day sales shopping, you can help but be impressed by the
many places that the clothes, electronics or CDs come from. It seems that our local
department store has become a global emporium, this is certainly different from the
sixties when most goods were still produced in the same country. Yet, in ancient
Phoenicia or Rome, at their peak, were not all that different from today. In the emporium
of the day you would find clothes from India and Phoenicia, wine from France, jewellery
from Africa or Arabia or India, horses from the Near East, carpets from Persia and
pitchers sourced in Greece. Sounds like Cargo Warehouse!
Today the lingua franka of modern international business is primarily English,
governments in France, Germany, Quebec and elsewhere bemoan this fact, they see it as
potentially undermining their languages. We see in the ancient world there was times that
one language became ‘the’ language of business only to be supplanted by another as
powers rose and fell. For example in the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt and the
Kassite kingdom of Babylonia, we find that the major courts242 treated one another as
equals and all corresponded in Akkadian, the language of diplomacy. Later in the time of
the Greeks, Greek became the language of much of international business in the known
world. Still later Latin replaced Greek, and so on.
One of the contentious issues between the U.S. and Japan in the last decade has been nontariff trading barriers. In Phoenician times we find that for foreign merchants, known
asubru in the Canaanite tongue, their activities were strictly regulated by the harbour
master. Aramean, Hittite, Egyptian and Mesopotamian courts and business organisations
sent resident foreign merchants into Phoenician territory, where they were still subject to
their own authorities. The regulations imposed by the harbour master, however, presented
them with a primitive version of what would today be described in Japan as non-tariff
62
barriers. Asubru could not leave the foreign business quarter district of the host country,
enter the residence of native traders, and conduct business in a Phoenician city without
strict supervision from the Cananite harbourmaster.243
Virtual Corporations
In the chapter on the Roman empire we discussed how the Publicani of the later Roman
empire were usually not specialised firms. A given firm might win a contract to make
swords or togas but usually specialised in neither. Publican associations seem to have
been based on a flexible management and work forces. Associations of partners would
come together to carry out a contract and then disband. Faced with fierce market
competition in the letting of contracts, the publicani simply could not afford much in the
way of permanent staff, which remained lean and flexible in adapting to different
markets. What the firms insteADprovided, according to Professor Badian, was “capital
and top management, based on general business experience”.244 The permanent staffs of
the firms were small in numbers and consequently flexible in adapting to different kinds
of business for both public and private contractors. The companies, says Badian, “can
only have functioned…by taking over existing substructures and superimposing
managing staff.”245 Permanent, organised staffs of skilled miners, tax professionals, arms
makers, shipbuilders, and others did exist, and these were likely bought and sold by the
publican managers as they shifted from contract to contract. The new Roman firms
transacted business on a scale undreamed of by their Near Eastern and Hellenic
forerunners. It is interesting to contrast these Roman virtual corporations or networked
firms with today’s virtual firms which are encouraged to ‘stick to their knitting’ or core
competencies rather than act as general managers as these Romans appeared to be.
The Rise of Nations
The most noteworthy of these were the Domitii, who eventually sired a Caesar of their
own. Between AD/CE50 and 150, the Domitian firm held a virtual monopoly over the
Roman brick industry. The fire set by Nero in Rome in AD/CE64 may well have paved
the way for a Domitian to eventually occupy his throne. Rebuilding the city provided a
ready-made market for the new firm, which employed 53 slaves, 22 freedmen, and 22
others. By AD/CE155 the Domitian brick works employed 46 foremen, and its managing
family remained related to the Antonine line of Caesars.with whicch they hadmarriage
connections. 246
There were other large concerns, such as the Fasana amphorae maker Gaius Laekanius
Bassus, who marketed Istrian oil with the aid of his 15 slaves. Neither was Roman
business a purely male affair. A lady of ill repute in Nero's court, Calvia Crispinilla, ran
an export business in oil and wine in northeastern Italy. A large bronze industry
flourished in Capua, and Rome boasted both a papyrus and a leADfactory. In spite of
these examples big firms would continue to be very much in the minority in an Imperial
economy still dominated by small, independent traders, artisans, and partners:
63
By the first century B.C., a single economic order prevailed from the Atlantic to the
Euphrates dominated by Rome. Direct inheritors of the Hellenic market revolution, the
Romans ensured the victory of free-market enterprise over the more vertically-integrated
Oriental model of business management. That victory though, was to be only partial, for
alongside the innumerable numbers of entrepeneurs and contractors trading beneath the
Roman eagle from Iberia to India, large family firms, partnerships, and semipublic
corporations also operated more in accord with the rules of the Eclectic Paradigm.
Organised and even multinational enterprises, both public and private, existed in the
Roman world to a greater extent than in Classical Greece. Even many independent
enterprises in the Republic and Empire which could not be classified as “multinational”
hada familial character unknown in Greece. Some firms, especially the publican
partnerships operated by the Roman equites, or knights, grew to enormous size, engaged
in mass production, and even embodied an early form of limited liability. In the Roman
combination of individual and integrated enterprises one first dimly recognises the forms
of Western business culture as they would exist in medieval and modern times.
Rome: The Late Empire
The Severans: AD/CE197-325
The Period of Barracks Emperors: AD/CE235-284
The Dominate: AD/CE284-361
The Final Crisis: AD/CE361-476
Roman business culture of the High Empire set the stage for the medieval and modern
capitalisms of the Western world. These would inherit from Rome a relatively free
market, large private firms, limited liability, mass production and the perfection of
business agents and partnerships. Business law, European unity through currency and
infrastructure and the role of entrepeneurship in buttressing military power are also part
of the Roman legacy.
64
1
Salah-Eddine Tlatli, La Carthage punique: étude urbaine: la ville, ses functions, son
rayonnement, preface by Chedli Klibi and Gilbert Charles-Picard, (Paris, Librairie
d'amerique et d'Orient, 1978), pp.234-35. Colonies which once considered Carthage a
second-rate city "were soon obligated to recognise her hegemony and submit to her
orders", [ibid., p.247]. The start of a distinctively Punic, as opposed to a Phoenician,
culture could be detected even before 600 B.C. when statues in the Balerics, Sardinia, and
Sicily show new elements of western Mediterranean origin in the form of exaggerated
sexual organs, [Serge Lancel, Carthage: A History, translated by Antonia Nevill,
(Blackwell, Oxford, 1995), p.82]; Lancel, pp.82-83; Tlatli, pp.236-241.
2
See the character of Hanno of Calidun in Plautus's comedy Poenicus. 'Carthaginian
tradesmen were apparently shipowners at the same time.', [Yuri B. Tsirkin, " The
Economy of Carthage" in E. Lipinski, Studia Phoenicia VI Carthago, Acta Colloqui
Bruxellensis habiti diebus 2 or 3 mensis Maii anni 1986 ,(Louvain , Belgium, Uit giverij
Peeters, 1988), p.131. The economic elite 'was the same time a political elite.', [Tsirkin,
1988, p.132]. 'The trade policies of aristocratic Carthage tellingly reflected the great
interest of the ruling oligarchy (or at least its huge part) in active foreign commerce. As
shown earlier, sometimes the Carthaginian State sought to secure an exclusive zone for
the home traders, but in other cases, when it deemed it profitable, it allowed a free
unrestricted commerce with their trade partners. To frighten and scare away the potential
rivals, the Carthaginians at times spread the most incredible rumors and yarns about
ferocious monsters and shoals in the ocean. It is almost certain that the nobility of
Carthage had in its ownership some mines, too. Pliny (NH XXXIII 96) reports that the pit
of Baebelo in Spain brought Hannibal 300 pounds of silver every day. The daily income
bespeaks the fact that Hannibal was the master andowner of this pit. The silver was his
daily income, not a tax resultant from the subordination of Spain to Carthage.' [Tsirkin,
1988, p.131].
3
Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, translated and edited by Ernest Barker, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1982), §1272b, ibid., 84.
4
Aristotle, Politics, §1272b, ibid., 84.
5
Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, translated and edited by Ernest Barker, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 2.11.1-15, 1272a 21-1273a32, ibid., 83-87.
6
Tsirkin, 133; ibid. 132-134.
7
Ibid.,p. 128-134.
8
Finally, that Greek expansionist phase, specially motivated ...to ensure a route to
metals, reached its peak when the Greeks of Ionia, the Phoceaens, proceded to found
Massilia (Marseilles) in the year 600 and Ampurias, in Catalonia, around the same time.
The whole north of the western [Mediterranean] basin fell, for all practical purposes,
under their control, as well as the tin traffic ...across the valley of the Rhône...of
Cornwall. The maritime and commercial power of Carthage was...placed in jeopardy by
this new rival and by the whole encirclement strategy of Greek imperialism…. , [G.Glotz,
Ancient Greece at Work, (New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 1967),
123.
9
Tlatli, 252-254; That there was 'a real alliance between Carthage and the principality of
southern Etruria' is shown by the very name of the Etruscan port of Punicum, which,
65
according to French archaelogist Serge Lancel, 'gives assurance of the reality of the
commercial [and perhaps also demographic] presence of Carthaginians.' [Lancel,1995:
85]. Recent excavations in the nearby cemetery of Byrsa proved Etruria was exporting
and importing goods to and from Carthage at the end of the sixth century B.C., one of
which was an ivory plaque written in Etruscan boasting that the engraver was Punic and
from Carthage, [Lancel, 1995, 85-86].
10
Demerliac and Meirat, pp.186-90.
11
Demerliac and Meirat, 186-190, 'only Carthage was rich enough to finance such
enterprises.,[ Ibid.,190]. Demerliac and Meirat regard it as certain that Gades and Lixus
'obtained the necessary financial delegations from the capital and also played an
important banking role in the economic system'. Demerliac and Meirat, 1983, pp.190191.
12
Ibid.,p.192.
13
'In order to maximize profits, it was necessary to cut to a minimum the number of long
and unproductive voyages between the bases of departure and the zones of operations.',
[Ibid.,194].Every year the Punic navy began in May by watching the ports of Greek Italy,
then shifting its patrols to Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain all the way to Gibraltar until the
galleys all passed through the Pillars of Hercules. Replenishing in June in North Africa,
the triremes then patrolled the regions near Malta to cover the fleet heading back from
Tyre in July, sometimes in concert with Corinthian and even Syracusan ships when a proCarthaginian party was in power there, [Demerliac and Meirat,194-198].
14
Ibid., pp.202-205; "…as with any organiasation, this system had
its advantages and its inconveniences…. thanks to it the Punic
metropolis was able to mobilise , in a very brief time, in case of
war, a force that was powerful and maintained in a very high
degree of training and cohesion" [ibid., p. 205].
15
“The leadership of the various Phoenician settlements of the west now fell more and
more to Carthage, but there was one huge obstacle constantly blocking all hope of
peaceful trade: the Sicilian Greeks. The battle for Sicily would become a constant and
tragic theme, a leitmotif of the Punic period lasting all the way down to 241 B.C.
Carthage’s prime adversary was the city-state of Syracuse and it allies. Syracuse had to
be stopped-but how?”, [David Soren, Aicha Ben Abed Ben Khader and Hedi Slim,
Carthage : Uncovering the Mysteries and Splendors of Ancient Tunisia (New York,
Simon and Schuster,1990), pp.51-53;
'For a Carthaginian general each campaign was a holy war. A loss was an impiety, and a
failed leader might be expected to sacrifice himself on a pyre or starve himself to death.
The general-king was expected to solicit the good favor of the gods every day through
sacrifice and consultation of the omens.' ,[Ibid., 59-60].
16
Ibid.,pp.60-61, “Carthage was at last a true superpower, standing on the threshold of
controling the trade and manipulating the politics of the entire western Meditrranean. It
was a watershed moment, one that had taken centuries to create, and Hannnibal was
determined to make the most of it.”, [Ibid.,p.60].
17
Lancel, pp.96-98.
18
Lancel, pp.91-95; Tlatli, 241-45.
66
19
The overland Libyan route may have been more profitable after all. See Soren
et al, pp.68-72; Hanno 'may simply have overreached his capabilities. To
establish a far-flung network of colonies required a powerful support system,
which he couldn't deliver.', [Ibid.,72].
20
Soren, 73-74; Himlico's voyage was intended to 'establish major trading connections
with remote centers producing valued raw materials', [Soren, 72]; 'The Punic sources
themselves are silent of any mention of voyages to Britain. Excavations in Cornwall
show the mines being worked by the Britons themselves even in Roman times. More
recent digs qualify this picture by confirming that Punic traders did in fact visit the island
of Britain. Glass beads and other Carthaginian sartifacts have been unearthed at locations
like Castle Dore in Cornwall….', [Barry Fell, Saga America, (New York, Quadrangle,
1980), pp.52-53]. Dr. Fell's work and that of the Epigraphic Society he founded was and
is unorthodox and is still quite controversial. Most of the academic establishment still
rejects his conclusions that Germans, Celts, and Canaanites journeyed to the New World.
'Diffusionism', the belief in migrations of peoples and cultures from continent to
continent in the Bronze and Iron Ages, has been severely mocked since the 1970's.
Nonetheless, Fell's evidence is intriguing.
21
'Never before had any Western navigator been able to sail so far north; Carthaginian
commercial interests would not permit it', [Fell, 60].
22
Fell, p.60.
23
Fell, p.51.
24
Fell, 64-73. See Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo, 'Did the Phoenicians Land in America?'
in Sabatino Moscati, ed., The Phoenicians, (New York: Rizzoli International
Publications, Inc.: 1999), 657-660 on the Phoenician hoax. The existence of Punic
regional trading mandates covering the Atlantic suggests an even more tantalising
possibility, but one dismissed by most historians, [Soren, 73-74]. Fell entertained the
possibility of rather extensive economic ties between Carthage and America, although the
idea is still considered too far-fetched by David Soren and most orthodox archaeologists
studying both Carthage and ancient America. Fell went so far as to see this hypothetical
New World trade as the foundation of Punic world power, with the timber and precious
metals needed to sustain that power in the face of Greece and Rome coming from
American shores: An export trade of Cypro-Phoenician mass-produced bronze art
replicas was carried out by Carthaginian ships visiting America. Substantial gold was
acquired in return, but insufficient to provide adequate ballast. To meet this need, the
Carthaginian ships picked up shipments of large pine logs from the Algonquian tribes of
northeastern North America, to whom they traded adequate stocks of iron-cutting tools,
axes, and other desirable items , including occasional bronze art replicas…and also lowvalue Carthaginian coins of attractive appearence, glass beads, and the like. Such trade,
profitable alike to the Amerindian and the Carthaginian, would result in a steady input of
gold and lumber on the home markets in Carthage, would yield the timbers needed to
build ships, and provide them with straight masts and oars, and in addition would yield
the Carthaginian state the gold ingots required to produce the coinage that apparently
financed the military and naval operations of the Sicilian War, and later of the First Punic
War.', [Fell, 86].
25
Freeman, 301-302.
67
26
Graeme Barker and Tom Rasmussen, The Etruscans (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1998), 203-207.Similarity between Etruscan pottery and vessels 'suggests a close rapport
between different workshops in the same centre, though whether this took the form of
collaboration or competition we cannot tell', [Ibid, 207]. There are as yet many
unanswered questions about the organization and management of Etruscan industries,
[Ibid, 208-210].
27
Ibid, 215.
28
Ibid., 210-214. Even though much of the mining was done in northern places like Elba,
the main export centres lay in southern Etruria 'suggesting that the southern cities
controlled the sea trade.', [Ibid, 214].
29
The geography of the Italian peninsula would help shape a very different history here
than in Greece. While the rugged mountains of Greece almost totally prevented overland
communication and conquest, The mountainous geography of Italy encouraged her
peoples to turn inward, not outward. Italy had few good natural harbours and a somewhat
larger supply of good farmland, especially in the vicinity of Latium. These factors
encouraged the Romans to expand overland instead of overseas prior to the third century
B.C. [Freeman, 307].
30
T.J.Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome, Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic
Wars (c.1000-264 BC), (London, Routledge, 1995), 48-57. The early Latins named
themselves, not after their polis like the Greeks, but after their gens. who took their their
names from their city or polis, such as Plato of Athens, Latins would first give the name
of their clan, followed by their personal praenomen, or first name [Freeman, 302]. The
thirty communities of the Latium plain were more ecumenical than the rather xenophobic
Greek states. Sharing a common Latin culture they permitted any Latin gentile from any
of their clans to share rights of marriage, citizenship and trade with members of any other
other Latin clan, [Freeman, 308-309]; Barker and Rasmussen, 201-215. Tenney Frank,
An Economic History of Rome, 2nd Edition Revised, (New York: Cooper Square
Publishers, 1962), 18-23, 31-33
31
A. Drummond, “Rome in the Fifth Century, I: the Social and Economic Framework”,
in F.W. Walbank, A.E. Astin, M.W. Frederiksen, R.M. Ogilvie, and A. Drummond, eds,
The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed., Vol.VII, Part 2, The Rise of Rome to 220 B.C.,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 144- 45.
32
Ibid, 147.
33
'The power of the family head is notorious, extending even to the right to kill those
subject to him. This presumably reflects a strong collective emphasis on the need for
vigorous discipline in the component elements of the community, not least to regulate the
relations between familiales since the heads of households were responsible to each other
for the private actions of those subject to them.' ,[Ibid, 147-48].
34
Ibid, 125-30.
35
John Rich, “Fear, Greed and Glory: the Causes of Roman War-Making in the Middle
Republic”, in John and Graham Shipley, eds., War and Society in the Roman World
(London: Routledge, 1995), 44-46; “The habit of constant war was as old as the
Republic.” [Ibid, 45].
36
Cosa, a smaller version of Rome itself, was one of many such colonies designed to
control the coastal plains, wrest good farmland from the Etruscans, deprive them of their
68
ports, and dampen their desire to remain a seafaring power with an independent foreign
policy. Etruria after 400 B.C. would no longer be a major force in Mediterranean life.
Veii was destroyed in 396 B.C., Volsinii in 264 B.C., and Falerii in 241 B.C. Inhabitants
of centres like these were resettled at the point of the sword. The Etruscan cities of the
north would last longer and fare better, at least for a while. No Roman settlements were
planted between Vulci and the River Arno before 100 B.C. Treaties were concluded
between Rome and the elites of the northern city-states. After the civil wars of the 80s
B.C., however, many of these northern cities were to be punished for supporting the
losing side. With the exception of a few like Arezzo, most of the southern Etruscan
centres would be abandoned well before the collapse of the Roman Empire, [Ibid, 262275].
37
Cornell, Beginnings of Rome, 348-49.
38
Ibid, 380.
39
Ibid, 333, 394-95.
40
Ibid, 394.
41
Ibid, 385-8.
42
Ibid, 394-8.
43
Polybius, The Histories, 3.22, in idem, The Rise of Roman Empire, translated by Ian
Scott-Kilvert, edited and with introduction by F.W. Walbank (London, Penguin Books,
1979), p. 200.
44
Ibid, iii.23, pp. 200-201. The text as quoted by Polybius read: "There shall be
friendship bbetween the Romans and their allies and the Carthaginians and theirs on these
conditions: The Romans and their allies shall not sail beyond the Far Promontory unless
compelled to do so by storm or by enemy action. If any one of them is carried beyond it
by force, he shall not buy or carry away anything more than is required for the repair of
his ship or for sacrifice , and he shall depart within five days. Those who come to trade
shall not conclude any business except in the presence of a herald or town-clerk. The
price of whatever is sold in the presence of these officials shall be secured to the vendor
by the state, if the sale takes place in Africa or Sardinia.", ." Polybius, Histories, iii.22, in
idem, Rise of the Roman Empire, pp.199-200.
45
Carthage, now a "great common-market trading community extended from Egypt
across North Africa to Spain...under the control of the wealthy financiers who also
comprised the Council of One Hundred", [Fell, pp.74-75].
46
Source: Dr. Karl Moore.
47
Source: Dr. Karl Moore.
One could think of the difference between modern Britain facing a series of colonial
wars and then facing two World Wars as a comparison. Rome may well have lost at least
some 50,000 citizens between 218 and 215 B.C. , about 17% of her young men and 5%
of her whole population. [Rich, pp.44-48].
49
One could think of the difference between modern Britain facing a series of colonial
wars and then facing two World Wars as a comparison. Rome may well have lost at least
some 50,000 citizens between 218 and 215 B.C. , about 17% of her young men and 5%
of her whole population. [Rich, pp.44-48].
48
69
50
Polybius records" so long as the Carthaginians held unchallenged control of the sea, the
issue of the war still hung in the balance" and that "while the Italian coasts were
repeatedly raided and devastated those of Africa suffered no damage", [Polybius,
Histories, i.20, quoted in idem, The Rise of Roman Empire, translated by Ian ScottKilvert, edited and with introduction by F.W. Walbank (London, Penguin Books, 1979),
p.62.
51
Ibid.,p.62.
52
Ibid.,p.62.
53
J.F. Lazenby, The First Punic War: A Military History (Stanford CA, Stanford
University Press, 1996), pp.61-80 tells the story of the Roman triumph at sea.
54
H.H. Scullard, "The Carthaginians in Spain", in A.E. Astin, F.W. Walbank, M.W.
Frederiksen, R.M. Ogilvie, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed., Vol.VIII, Rome
and The Mediterranean to 133 B.C. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989),
pp.20-43.
55
J.F. Lazenby, Hannibal's War: A Military History of the Second Punic War (Norman,
OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp.49-86 tells the story of Hannibal's
devastation of Roman Italy, while the destruction of Carthage is discussed in ibid.,
pp.243-46. See also Polybius, Histories, iii. 20-118, idem, Rise of the Roman Empire,
pp.197-176.
56
Peter Arnott, The Romans and their World, (New York: St. Martin”s Press, 1970), 6996.
57
Plautus, The Pot of Gold, quoted in Arnott, 81.
58
Arnott, 88-92.
59
Plautus, Curculio, ibid, 78. The “Stock Exchange” is Arnott”s free translation of “the
basilica”, ibid, 96, fn .4.
60
E. Badian, “Publicans and Sinners”, Private Enterprise in the Service of the Roman
Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 16.
61
Ulrich Malmendier, 'Roman Shares', http://facultygsb.stanford.edu/malmendier/personal_page/Papers/Shares%20in%20Ancient%20Rome
%20version%2011sep2003embedded.pdf.
62
63
E. Badian, “Publicans and Sinners”, Private Enterprise in the Service of the Roman
Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 16.
64
Badian, 16-25. The annual pay of a Roman soldier was 900 sestertii a year in Augustan
times, or 225 denarii, [Kevin Greene, The Archaeology of the Roman Economy,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 48, 59]. The denarius was equivalent to
a day's pay in the New Testament.
65
Valerius Maximus, ix. 1. 3, quoted in Tenney Frank, Rome and Italy of the Empire,
idem, ed., An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, Vol.V (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
Press, 1940), 278. According to the late Tenney Frank, whose dated but exhaustive study
of Roman economics still contains much valuable and useful material, 'not very many
actual citizens were in Asia, but …the publicans had non-citizen agents there' who
worked along side other 'independent business men'., [Ibid.].
66
Cicero, For Fontiero, 11-12, quoted in Frank, 1940, 281.
70
67
Roman Italy was increasingly depopulated of natives due to the heavy casualties borne
by the urban poor and peasantry in the wars fought in Spain, Gaul, and the terrible civil
conflicts waged within Italy herself at the onset of the first century B.C. The Social War
alone would cost 100,000 casualties on each side , [Frank, 1940, 283, 291].
68
Badian, 52-66
69
Ibid, 37
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid, 67-72.
72
Badian 67-72. According to Badian 'the ties among all the companies were particularly
close, so as to constitute a cartel.', [Ibid, 74]. Roman companies varied greatly in size as
well as profitability, the firm of Hispo being one of the largest. Sadly, historians still have
very few hard statistics on trade and production for the Roman world, [Badian, 75-77].
73
Arnott, 138-47; Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest
Politician ,( New York: Random House, 2001).
74
Arnott, 144-47; Cicero, For King Deiotarius, 26, in Gregory R. Crane, (ed.) The
Perseus Project, March, 1997. Available form http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, December,
1998. Idem, For Plancius, 17,19, 23-24, 32, ibid, December, 1998.
75
Frank, 1940, 107; .'…we find', according to Badian, 'companies getting together into a
cartel…and it seems to have been done quite openly and officially.', [Badian, 106];
Frank, 1940, 344-346. Taxes on grazing and port trade in Sicily were collected not by the
publicans, but by smaller firms that 'nevertheless constituted branches of a larger
company of publicans', [ibid, 345]. The publicans would still make their presence felt in
the dying Republic by lending many strapped municipalities the money with which to
pay the new Roman exactions. Many cities defaulted on their astronomical new debts
between 84 and 70 B.C. and became indebted to the firms. After 70 B.C. Lucullus was
forced to take numerous measure to alleviate these debts, including a twenty-five per cent
tax on crops, [Frank, 1940, 32-33].
76
Frank, 1940, 107.
77
Cicero, For Rabirius Postumus, 3, 4, 7, 11, 13-16, 39-41, Crane, December, 1998.
78
Livy, 21 63. 4 and Polybius, 6.56.1-3,in John H. D'Arms, Commerce and Social
Standing in Ancient Rome (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 20;
D'Arms, 36-37; Badian, 48-53. In his cross-examination of Vatinius, Cicero demanded of
him 'Did you extort shares, which were at their dearest at the time, partly from Cæsar,
partly from the publicani?' ,[Against Vatinius, 29, quoted in Badian, 102].
79
Badian, 38-41; 'L. Aelius Lamia…supported the publicani of Syria, and… may have
had negotia in Bithynia, furthered his negotia in Africa through procuratores, liberti,
familia, and was helped as well by his friendships, in this case by Cicero’s direct
intervention on his behalf with the governor of Africa, Vetus.', [Badian, 42].
80
D'Arms, 36-37.
81
Badian, 42-44, 48-53,94-96. 'The laws designed to bar aristocrats from trade had the
long-term effect of encouraging forms of business organisation which permitted
patricians to become hidden partners in an extended form of family enterprise.', [Badian,
45-46]; Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 2.16.4, referred to in Frank, 1940, 356-57.
82
Casson, The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in
Ancient Times (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 206-208.
71
83
Richard Saller, 'Framing the Debate over Growth in the Ancient Economy', Walter
Scheidel & Sitta von Reden, eds., The Ancient Economy, (New York, Routledge, 2002),
251-269, 251-2.
84
Saller, 253-7.
85
Kevin Greene, 'Technological innovation and economic progress in the ancient world:
M.I. Finley re-considered.', Economic History Review, LIII ,1 (2000), 29-59.
86
Greene, 2000, 45-51.
87
Saller, 257-261.
88
Saller, 262-5.
89
Saller, 262-7.
90
Andrew Wilson, 'Machines, Power, and the Ancient Economy', Journal of Roman
Studies, Volume 92, 2002, 1-32.
91
Wilson, 12-18.
92
Wilson, 23-4.
93
Wilson, 24-5.
94
Wilson, 25-7.
95
John Wacher, The Roman Empire, (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1987), 151.
96
Ibid, 151-53.
97
Ibid, 151-53.
98
Mary T. Boatright, Daniel J. Gargola, and Richard J. Talbert, The Romans: From
Village to Empire, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 338-9.
99
Boatright, et al., 339-40.
100
Boatright, 340.
101
Wacher, 106-120. In Wacher's words, 'the whole Roman Empire was integrated into a
single monetary economy', [Ibid, 112]. The number of shipwrecks found buried in the
western Mediterranean also documented the expansion of European trade. Out of 545
wrecks 20+ dated from before 400B.C; 50+ between 400 and 200 B.C; a peak of 160
between 200 and 1 B.C.and almost as many, 130, between 1 and 200 A.D. The number
fell to 80 between 200 and 400 A.D. and around 30 between 400 and 650 A.D. Some 70
wrecks were of unknown date. [Keith Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire
(200 B.C-A.D. 400)”, Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 70, 1980, 101-25].
102
Aldo Schiavone, The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West, trans.
Margaret J. Schneider, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); David J.
Mattingly and John Salmon,eds., Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society, Vol. 9,
Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World Economies, ( London: Routledge,
2000) .
103
Aubert, 2001, 94.
104
Varro, Marcus Terentius (116-28 BC/BCE ).
Marcus Terentius Varro was one of Republican Rome's most prolific writers and the
leading writer in antiquity on agricultural management. He was born in Reaté in
southern Italy in 116 BC/BCE to an equestrian family. He was trained in literature in
both Rome and Athens. According to William Davis Hooper, Varro served as a tribune,
aedile, and praetor . He was a supporter of Pompey (106-48 BC/BCE ) in the latter's
power struggle with Julius Caesar (100- 44BC/BCE ). Varro fought with Pompey in his
wars against Mediterranean pirates in 67 BC/BCE and commanded Pompey's forces in
72
Spain until he surrendered to Caesar in 49 BC/BCE . Caesar spared Varro and let him
manage his library in Rome. When the Second Triumvirate overthrew Caesar, Varro
went into hiding but he was eventually rescued by Octavian, the future Augustus (63
BC/BCE -AD/CE14).
Varro spent most of his later life writing on his country estates in Italy. He was incredibly
prolific, producing over seventy works, of which only two have survived. One of these
was his Res Rusticia (On Agriculture), written around 38 BC/BCE . It was an extensive
manual on agriculture which would influence generations of Roman farmers and
writers.
The first part of Res Rusticia contained dialogues on how to manage a profitable
agriculture. Despite its overhead, wine could be profitable if one planted the proper kind
of vineyard. Gardening on a large scale was profitable only if one was near the markets
of a city. Access to markets was all important (1.16.4): 'A farm is rendered more
profitable by convenience of transportation; if there are roads on which carts can easily
be driven, or navigable rivers near by' (Varro 1967: 223). As far as management, Varro
counseled manor lords to employ knowledgeable foremen who would work along with
the other slaves and leADby example rather than brute force as much as possible. Slaves,
however, should not be allowed to leave the villa and should not be of the same
nationality. The remainder of Res Rusticia was devoted to raising cattle and other
livestock. Terentius Varro died at the age of ninety in 28 BC/BCE . His treatise became
the foundational text of ancient agribusiness. Varro, Marcus Terentius (1979) 'On
Agriculture' , in Hooper,William Davis, ed., Loeb Classical Library: Cato and Varro on
Agriculture, Lcl, 283, trans., H.B. Ash , Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press 160529. 'Varro, Terentius' (1965) Peck, Harry Thurston, ed., Harper's Dictionary of
Classical Literature and Antiquities, New York, Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1634.
105
Aubert, 2001, 97.
106
Marcus Terentius Varro, On Agriculture, 1.16.4, trans. H.B Ash in W.D. Hooper, ed.,
Cato and Vero on Agriculture, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 160-529,
223.
107
T.W. Potter, Roman Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 152159.
108
Aubert, 2001, 94.
109
Aubert, 2001, 97-8.
110
Andrea Giardina, “The Merchant”, in idem, ed. The Romans , translated by Lydia G.
Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 257-260.
111
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Vol.IX, Nos. 93337, 60 in ibid., 261.
112
Giardina, 262-63.
113
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Vol. IX, No. 4680, Vol. VIII, No.7156, Andrea,
264-265.; Cato the Elder hadlong before advised Roman family patriarchs to “have the
selling habit, not the buying habit.”Cato the Elder, De agri cultura 2.7, Andrea, 264-265.
114
Ovid, Fasti v.674 - 88 in Andrea, 267.
115
Plautus, Amphitruo, Prologue, lines 1-12, in Andrea, 268-69.
116
Ibid, 268-69.
73
117
Petronius, Satyricon, translated by William Arrowsmith, quoted in Nels M. Bailkey,
ed., Readings in Ancient History: Thought and Experience from Gilgamesh to St.
Augustine, 3rd Edition, (Lexington, MA, D.C. Heath and Company, 1987), 378.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid.
120
Ibid, 379.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid, 379-80.
123
Ibid, 381.
124
Ibid, 382.
125
Ibid, 383.
126
Ibid.
127
T.W. Potter, Roman Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 152159; J.H. D”Arms, 'Senator's Involvement in Commerce in the Late Republic: Some
Ciceronian Evidence', in J.H. D'Arms and E.C. Kopff, eds., The Seaborne Commerce of
Ancient Rome: Studies in Archaeology and History (Rome, American Academy at Rome,
1980), 77-89. Archaeologist T.W. Potter sees in this jug trail 'dramatic confirmation that
the agents of P. Sestius were selling his wine in the markets of southern and central
France – and, no doubt doing very well out of it.', [Potter, 158]. David C. Lewis, '
VARRO, Marcus Terentius (116-BC/BCE -28 BC/BCE )', Morgen Witzel, ed.,
Biographical Dictionary of Management, Volume 2, K-Z, 1022-1023.
128
T.W. Potter, Roman Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 152159; J.H. D”Arms, 'Senator's Involvement in Commerce in the Late Republic: Some
Ciceronian Evidence', in J.H. D'Arms and E.C. Kopff, eds., The Seaborne Commerce of
Ancient Rome: Studies in Archaeology and History (Rome, American Academy at Rome,
1980), 77-89. Archaeologist T.W. Potter sees in this jug trail 'dramatic confirmation that
the agents of P. Sestius were selling his wine in the markets of southern and central
France – and, no doubt doing very well out of it.', [Potter, 158]. David C. Lewis, '
VARRO, Marcus Terentius (116-BC/BCE -28 BC/BCE )', Morgen Witzel, ed.,
Biographical Dictionary of Management, Volume 2, K-Z, 1022-1023.
129
Martin P. Charlesworth, 'Roman Trade with India: A Resurvey,' Paul R. ColemanNorton, ed., Studies in Roman Economic and Social History in Honor of Allan Chester
Johnson, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 131-143; George Woodcock,
The Greeks in India, ( London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1966), 140-141.
130
Strabo 2.5.12, The Geography of Strabo, trans., Horace Leonard Jones, Vol. I ,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960),453, 455. Strabo described the
revenues from the Augustan Red Sea/Indian Ocean trade as considerable: '…at the
present time even large fleets are despatched as far as India and the extremities of
Ethiopia, from which the most valuable cargoes are brought to Egypt, and thence sent
forth to the other regions; so that double duties are collected, on both imports and
exports; and on goods that cost heavily the duty is also heavy.' [Strabo,17.1.13, ibid., Vol.
VIII, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 53, 55].
131
Strabo, 15.1.4; ibid., Vol. VII , (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961),
5,7.
74
132
Strabo 17.1.13, ibid., Vol. VIII, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959),
53,55.
133
Hermann Kulke and Dieter Rothermund, History of India, (London: Routledge, 1998),
365.
134
Woodcock, 145.
135
E.H. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, (
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 57-64 in X.S. Thani Nayagam, ed.,
Tamil Culture and Civilization, ( New York: NY Asia Publishing House, 1970), 145-150.
136
Woodcock, 145.
137
E.H. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, (
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 57-64 in X.S. Thani Nayagam, ed.,
Tamil Culture and Civilization, ( New York: NY Asia Publishing House, 1970), 145-150.
138
Lionel Casson, ed. and trans., The Periplus Maris Erythraei, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1989), 51-3.
139
Casson, Periplus, 63.
140
Casson, Periplus, 65, 67.
141
Casson, Periplus, 77, 79, 81.
142
Casson, Periplus, 83, 85.
143
Casson, Periplus, 85, 87.
144
Casson, Periplus, 89. Limyrikê is another of Damirike, the Tamil country.
145
Casson, Periplus, 89.
146
Casson, Periplus, 14.
147
Casson, Periplus, 31-3.
148
Lionel Casson, 'Ancient Naval Technology and the Route to India', in Vimala Begley
and Richard Daniel De Puma, eds., Rome and India, The Ancient Sea Trade (Madison,
WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 8-11. The Periplus has been translated
into English by Professor Lionel Casson. See Lionel Casson, ed.and trans., The Periplus
Maris Erythraei, Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, (Princeton,
NJ:Princeton University Press,1989), hereafter referred to as Periplus. The volume of the
India trade in the days of the early Empire was six times what it hadbeen in Hellenistic
times, [Casson, Mariners, 1964, 228-29]. Casson, 1964, 9-10. Casson argues such trade
'required a formidable amount of capital” and was “open only to large-scale operators.',
[Casson, 1964, 11].
148
Elizabeth Lyding Will, “The Mediterranean Shipping Amphoras from Arikamedu”, in
Begley and De Puma, 151-56. Casson, 1964, 9-10. Casson argues such trade 'required a
formidable amount of capital” and was “open only to large-scale operators.', [Casson,
1964, 11].
149
Elizabeth Lyding Will, 'The Mediterranean Shipping Amphoras from Arikamedu', in
Begley and De Puma, 151-156; Elizabeth Lyding Will, 'Shipping Amphoras as Indicators
of Economic Romanization in Athens', Michael C. Hoff and Susan I. Rotroff, eds., The
Romanization of Athens , (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997), 117-133.
150
R.E. Mortimer-Wheeler, Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers, (London: G. Bell and
Sons, 1954), 138-153 in Nayagam, ibid., 150-162, 158-9.
151
Jars bearing the name 'Kanan' in Arikamedu and on the shores of the Red Sea hint
some Tamil merchants may even have traded in Egypt.. Far away on the shores of the
75
Red Sea a virtually identical vessel with the same name suggests that a Tamil merchant
or possibly his agent sold his wares in or near Roman Egypt. See Vimala Begley, 'New
Investigations at the port of Arikamedu', Journal of Roman Archaeology, vol.6 (1993),
93-107; E. Marianne Stern, “Early Roman Export Glass in India”, in Begley and De
Puma, 113-17. Stern finds the presence of Mediterranean amphorae on the east coast
above Arikamedu along with glassware as showing the possibility that Roman glass
exported there 'was destined for transit trade with China', [Ibid,117]. The possibility of
technology transfer may be indicated in the similarity of blue glassware products in India
with slightly older ones from Rhodes, suggesting the 'technology…must have crossed the
Indian Ocean in the wake of the early Roman sea trade.', [Ibid, 121].
152
Casson, “Ancient Naval Technology”, 10.
153
R.E. Mortimer-Wheeler, Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers, (London: G. Bell and
Sons, 1954), 138-153 in Nayagam, ibid., 150-162, 150-2..
154
Tacitus, Annals, 2.53, Pliny, Natural History, 6.101, in Mortimer-Wheeler, Nagayam,
152; ibid., 152-3.
155
Boatright, Romans, 2004, 354-65.
156
Michael Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Second
Edition, Revised by P.M. Fraser, Volume I, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1957), 157.
157
Rostovtzeff, I, 1957, 157.
158
Rostovtzeff, I, 1957, 157-9.
159
Rostovtzeff, I, 1957, 160-5.
160
Rostovtzeff, I , 1957, 165-6.
161
Ibid., 1957, 169-70.
162
Boatright, 365-6; 'Agents from the towns, big or small, that did business with Rome
set up residence at Ostia. The colonnade behind the theatre was ringed with their offices;
by walking just a few steps along it a buyer could order ivory from the representratives of
Sabratha in North Africa, oil from those of Carthage (refounded by Julius Caesar and
now a flourishing export centre), grain from those of Narbonne…', [Casson, The Ancient
Mariners, 226]; Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Vol. XIV, No. 4549, in Naphtali
Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, eds., Roman Civilization, Sourcebook II: The Empire (New
York, Harper and Row, 1966), 197-98.
163
Inscriptiones Graecae, Vol.XIV, No. 830, in Lewis and Reinhold, ibid., 196-97. The
Tyrian council, in response, voted to continue the practice of subsidising the Puteoli
office from the Tyrian agency in Rome, [Inscriptiones Graecae, XIV, 830, 1966: 19697].
164
Casson, 226-27. According to Tenney Frank 'Rome followed her policy of keeping all
ports open to all trade. There were no monopolies, closed seas, or forbidden goods.' ,
[Frank, 1940, 357].
165
Jean-Jacques Aubert, 'The Fourth Factor: Managing Non-Agricultural Production in
the Roman World,' Mattingly and Salmon, eds., 2001, 90-112, 90-91; See also Roger E.
Allen, Winnie-the-Pooh on Management : in which a very important bear and his friends
are introduced to a very important subject, (New York: Dutton, 1994).
166
Aubert, 2001, 93.
167
Aubert, 2001, 93-94.
76
168
Jean-Jacques Aubert, Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, ed. William V.
Harris, Vol. XXI, Business Managers in Ancient Rome: A Social and Economic Study of
Institores, 200 B.C.-A.D. 250 (Leiden, Netherlands, E. J. Brill, 1994), 201.
169
Ibid, 202. Evidence for such agents remains scarce, and even 1990”s specialists in
Roman business management like Aubert cannot say for certain how much the new
industries relied upon them. Aubert nevertheless seems to feel that some firms did, or at
least could have, relied on some form of agency, [ibid.]
170
Ibid, 202. Evidence for such agents remains scarce, and even 1990”s specialists in
Roman business management like Aubert cannot say for certain how much the new
industries relied upon them. Aubert nevertheless seems to feel that some firms did, or at
least could have, relied on some form of agency, [ibid.]
171
Ibid, 210-11.
172
Ibid, 216-17.
173
Ibid, 220, 227-34, 237-39.
174
Ibid., 74-75.
175
Mortimer-Wheeler, Nayagam, 156-9.
176
Sir Ronald Braddell, 'Malayadvipa: A Study in Early Indianization', Malayan Journal
of Tropical Geography, Volume IX, 1956, (n.p). in Nayagam, 1970, 162-180.
177
John Ward-Perkins, “The Marble Trade and its Organisation: Evidence from
Nicomedia”, in J.H. D”Arms and E.C. Kopff, (eds.) The Seaborne Commerce of Ancient
Rome: Studies in Archaeology and History. (Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1980),
326; Hazel Dodge, “Ancient marble studies: recent research”, Journal of Roman
Archaelogy, Vol.4 (1991), 28-50, 32-35.
178
Ward-Perkins, 327. More recent research by Professor Hazel Dodge suggests that
standardisation and prefabrication were a natural development from the mass production
and stockpiling, and that such standardisation did influence the design of Roman
buildings and columns, [Dodge, 36].
179
Ward-Perkins, 327.
180
The imperial quarries established “an entirely new relationship between the source of
supply, the quarry, and the customer”, [Ward-Perkins, 327].
181
Ibid.
182
Ibid, 328. Dodge concurs that the sarcophagi represent the “other major group of
marble products where standardisation and prefabrication are admirably demonstrated.
Sarcophagi provide hints that certain types were produced for certain markets.” [Dodge,
38].
183
Ravenna 'was also a workshop', [Ward-Perkins, 329].
184
'These networks can only have operated through agencies established in some of the
major importing centres; and although the resulting distributions do to some extent reflect
traditional commercial patterns (as, for example, between Attica and Cyrenaica, or again
between the Propontis and the Black Sea) they also show that the responsible
organizations were powerful and efficient enough to secure a virtual monopoly in many
areas . If we may assume (as I think we may) that such monopolies were based on price
and efficient service, this in turn implies a very substantial investment in technical
equipment and skilled personnel.' , [Ward-Perkins, 329].
185
Ibid.
77
186
Ibid, 334.
Ibid.
188
Ibid, 334-35.
189
Dodge, 38.
190
Dodge, 39-40. It is now disputed that Nicomedia was the handling and export centre
for Anatolian marble. The centre is now believed to have been at the city of Synnada,
from whence materials were sent down the Maender valley, [Dodge, 43].
191
As an example of the problems a business historian of the Late Empire faces, one
historian made an estimate that five percent of the imperial revenues came from trade.
Such an estimate was based upon a trade tax record from Edessa in Syria. Were the
agricultural and non-agricultural taxes equal? If they were unequal, the estimate raises
more questions than answers. Findings of underwater archaeology are also questionable.
Do a large number of wrecks in a given place indicate trade patterns or do they merely
reflect the zeal of the excavators? See Peter Garnsey and C.R .Whittaker, 'Trade,
Industry and the Urban Economy', Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., The
Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 13, The Late Empire, A.D. 337-425, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 312-337, 314-5.
192
Diocletian, 'The Edict on Maximum Prices', Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, III,
801-41, 1055-58, 1909-53, 2208-11, 2328; Transactions of the American Philological
association , LXXI, (1940), 157-74, in Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, Eds., Roman
Civilization, Sourcebook II: The Empire, ( New York: Harper and Row, 1966), #129,
464-73, 465-6.
193
Diocletian, Ibid., 466-72.
194
See Peter Garnsey and C.R .Whittaker, 'Trade, Industry and the Urban Economy',
Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 13,
The Late Empire, A.D. 337-425, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 312337.
195
C.J. Edmonson, 'Mining in the Later Roman Empire and Beyond: Continuity or
Disruption', Journal of Roman Studies, 79, 1999, 84-102.
196
Ibid., 89.
197
Ibid., 90.
198
Ibid., 91.
199
Ibid., 91; Wilson, 2002, 27-9.
200
Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward-Perkins, and Michael Whitby, eds. , The Cambridge
Ancient History: Volume 14, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, A.D. 425-600,
Chapter 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),6 [The page references are
from an unpublished draft manuscript donated by the authors].
201
Ibid.,6-10.
202
Ibid., 10-12.
203
Ibid., 14-15.
204
Ibid.,16-17.
205
Ibid.,18.
206
'What is striking about the Roman period is the large-scale availability of standardised
high-quality goods, many of them imported from afar, for a substantial middle and lower
market well below this extreme upper crust'. [Ibid., 29].
187
78
207
Eccl. 1:9, New King James Version
David Aaker of the University of California at Berkeley and Kevin Lane Keller of
Tuck are two key researchers in the area in North America for example Aaker’s book,
Building Strong Brands, The Free Press, 1996, and Keller’s, “Conceptualizing,
Measuring, and Managing Customer Based Brand Equity”, Journal of Marketing,
January 1992. In Europe Leslie de Chernatony of the U.K.”s Open University and
Malcolm McDonald of Cranfield are two leading edge thinkers, please see their Creating
Powerful Brands, Butterworth Heinemann, 1998.
209
This is undoubtedly an Euro, Middle Eastern and North African-centric view of the
world which may well be overturned by future archelogical discoveries.
210
Egypt, Babylonia, Hatti, Mitanni as the more traditional powers of the day, along with
several new ones, Assyria and Elam in Mesopotamia, the Moschi and Tiberani in Asia
Minor and the Aramean, Canaanite and Hebrew city states and tribal kingdoms of the
Levant.
211
Heltzer, 1978, 135-7.
212
Ibid, 37
213
Ibid.
214
Ibid., 74-75.
215
Aristides 26.K.100 in F. Gertel, 'The Economic Life of the Empire', S.A Cook, F.E.
Adcock, M.P. Charlesworth, N.H Baynes, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History: Volume
12, The Imperial Crisis and Recovery, AD/CE193-324 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1961), 232-281, 233.
216
John Ward-Perkins, “The Marble Trade and its Organisation: Evidence from
Nicomedia”, in J.H. D”Arms and E.C. Kopff, (eds.) The Seaborne Commerce of Ancient
Rome: Studies in Archaeology and History. (Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1980),
326; Hazel Dodge, “Ancient marble studies: recent research”, Journal of Roman
Archaelogy, Vol.4 (1991), 28-50, 32-35.
217
Ward-Perkins, 327. More recent research by Professor Hazel Dodge suggests that
standardisation and prefabrication were a natural development from the mass production
and stockpiling, and that such standardisation did influence the design of Roman
buildings and columns, [Dodge, 36].
218
Ward-Perkins, 327.
219
The imperial quarries established “an entirely new relationship between the source of
supply, the quarry, and the customer”, [Ward-Perkins, 327].
220
Ibid.
221
Ibid, 328. Dodge concurs that the sarcophagi represent the “other major group of
marble products where standardisation and prefabrication are admirably demonstrated.
Sarcophagi provide hints that certain types were produced for certain markets.” [Dodge,
38].
222
Ravenna 'was also a workshop', [Ward-Perkins, 329].
223
'These networks can only have operated through agencies established in some of the
major importing centres; and although the resulting distributions do to some extent reflect
traditional commercial patterns (as, for example, between Attica and Cyrenaica, or again
between the Propontis and the Black Sea) they also show that the responsible
organizations were powerful and efficient enough to secure a virtual monopoly in many
208
79
areas . If we may assume (as I think we may) that such monopolies were based on price
and efficient service, this in turn implies a very substantial investment in technical
equipment and skilled personnel.' , [Ward-Perkins, 329].
224
Ibid.
225
Ibid, 334.
226
Ibid.
227
Ibid, 334-35.
228
Dodge, 38.
229
Dodge, 39-40. It is now disputed that Nicomedia was the handling and export centre
for Anatolian marble. The centre is now believed to have been at the city of Synnada,
from whence materials were sent down the Maender valley, [Dodge, 43].
230
As an example of the problems a business historian of the Late Empire faces, one
historian made an estimate that five percent of the imperial revenues came from trade.
Such an estimate was based upon a trade tax record from Edessa in Syria. Were the
agricultural and non-agricultural taxes equal? If they were unequal, the estimate raises
more questions than answers. Findings of underwater archaeology are also questionable.
Do a large number of wrecks in a given place indicate trade patterns or do they merely
reflect the zeal of the excavators? See Peter Garnsey and C.R .Whittaker, 'Trade,
Industry and the Urban Economy', Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., The
Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 13, The Late Empire, A.D. 337-425, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 312-337, 314-5.
231
Diocletian, 'The Edict on Maximum Prices', Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, III,
801-41, 1055-58, 1909-53, 2208-11, 2328; Transactions of the American Philological
association , LXXI, (1940), 157-74, in Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, Eds., Roman
Civilization, Sourcebook II: The Empire, ( New York: Harper and Row, 1966), #129,
464-73, 465-6.
232
Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward-Perkins, and Michael Whitby, eds. , The Cambridge
Ancient History: Volume 14, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, A.D. 425-600,
Chapter 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),6 [The page references are
from an unpublished draft manuscript donated by the authors].
233
Ibid.,6-10.
234
Ibid., 10-12.
235
Ibid., 14-15.
236
Ibid.,16-17.
237
Ibid.,18.
238
'What is striking about the Roman period is the large-scale availability of standardised
high-quality goods, many of them imported from afar, for a substantial middle and lower
market well below this extreme upper crust'. [Ibid., 29].
239
Eccl. 1:9, New King James Version
240
David Aaker of the University of California at Berkeley and Kevin Lane Keller of
Tuck are two key researchers in the area in North America for example Aaker’s book,
Building Strong Brands, The Free Press, 1996, and Keller’s, “Conceptualizing,
Measuring, and Managing Customer Based Brand Equity”, Journal of Marketing,
January 1992. In Europe Leslie de Chernatony of the U.K.”s Open University and
80
Malcolm McDonald of Cranfield are two leading edge thinkers, please see their Creating
Powerful Brands, Butterworth Heinemann, 1998.
241
This is undoubtedly an Euro, Middle Eastern and North African-centric view of the
world which may well be overturned by future archelogical discoveries.
242
Egypt, Babylonia, Hatti, Mitanni as the more traditional powers of the day, along with
several new ones, Assyria and Elam in Mesopotamia, the Moschi and Tiberani in Asia
Minor and the Aramean, Canaanite and Hebrew city states and tribal kingdoms of the
Levant.
243
Heltzer, 1978, 135-7.
244
Ibid, 37
245
Ibid.
246
Ibid., 74-75.
81