Production and Public Powers in Classical Antiquity

E. Lo Cascio, D. W. Rathbone, E. Lo Cascio, D. W. Rathbone

• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781913701321
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la antigua Grecia

Twelve papers offer an unusually broad, varied and fresh examination of an issue which remains fundamental to ancient economic history.

I

INTRODUCTION

The theme of these papers, the influence of public powers on production in classical antiquity, has been central to the lively debate between historians since the original publication of The Ancient Economy by Moses Finley in 1973. Earlier historians of antiquity, especially in the interwar period, had with few exceptions persisted in a modernising approach which assumed that ancient states had economic policies, and interpreted them as consciously liberal or dirigiste. Finley denied that it was possible to attribute a deliberate economic policy to any ancient state, although he admitted the existence of ‘an infinite room for state intervention’ due to the overwhelming power of the state over the individual. Hence he made a characteristically rigorous distinction between non-interference and the consistent, conscious, adoption of a theory of laissez-faire, which, in his view, did not exist in antiquity any more than any other theory existed. Indeed, Finley denied that any ancient state had ever taken any measures for reasons of economic policy. His key concept for interpreting the actions of ancient states in the economic sphere was the ‘satisfaction of material wants’, that is the ‘Bedarfsdeckung’ of Sombart and Weber applied to state organisations, and in his view the only field in which there was significant, regular, intervention by the state was the supply of staple foodstuffs to the major urban centres of population.

The influence of The Ancient Economy on the direction of subsequent historical thought can hardly be overstated. In more recent years, however, the Finleyan new orthodoxy has undergone a number of critical re-evaluations. As regards the problem of the role of the state in ancient economies, some of Finley’s more extreme claims have elicited challenges. Furthermore, beyond the question of the existence or not of coherent (and, more or less, coherently followed) economic policies, designed to organise and direct production or to influence it incidentally or structurally through monetary and fiscal instruments or public expenditure, there still remains the problem of assessing the impact of the state on production independently of the specific aims which any political organisation may have set itself. The papers published here are directed precisely to this problem, without being necessarily constrained by the question of the motivation behind the actions of public powers. The original intention was to conduct the investigation on two analytically and thematically distinct tracks, with separate papers for each. The first track would follow specific intervention by the state in production, including regulation of production; that is, direct intervention and the establishment of rules for the functioning of productive forces by fixing their institutional conditions. The second track would traverse the economy as a whole to assess the impact of the mere existence of the political organisation, with its need to finance expenditure for its own survival, on the structural allocation, in geographical and social terms, of resources, and on production in general, including its short- and long-term variations – in other words, it would follow a macro-economic perspective.

Originally the papers of Sallares, van der Spek, Rathbone, Schneider, Ørsted and Bagnali were intended to examine direct intervention in particular periods and areas of ancient history, while indirect influence in these periods and areas was to be covered in the papers of Ampolo, Foraboschi, Andreau, Lo Cascio and Banaji. Inevitably, contributors reacted variously to the brief. Some found the distinction between direct and indirect intervention difficult to implement for their period and area. Some adopted a broad, thematic and long-period approach, while others chose to focus on specific topics as illustrations of general points. In the end, it seemed best to regroup the papers here in chronological order, adding in Austin’s elaboration of the comments he made as one of the rapporteurs at Milan.

The papers do not follow any set formula. The differences between them spring from multiple roots: the evidence available for the particular area, period or topic; the different natures of the societies and political systems under review, and their different geophysical backgrounds; and the different intellectual traditions of studies in each field and the particular interests and approach of each contributor. We see this plurality as an advantage, not a problem. When looking at over a millennium of history across and beyond the Mediterranean basin, it seems more appropriate to think in terms of ‘ancient economies’ rather than one ‘ancient economy’. But all the papers, however different in content and approach, are firmly directed to the same questions. Taking them together, while significant differences and variations emerge, it is possible to identify some structural realities and some trends of development which were common to different societies and periods of the ancient Graeco-Roman world.

All the societies discussed had economies which were based on agriculture, yet while the extent and location of surplus production, non-agricultural production, trade and monetisation varied greatly, all were in some sense ‘dynamic’ economies, open, potentially, to the effects of intervention or influence by public powers. It is suggested that the city-states of archaic and classical Greece lacked sufficient powers, both domestically and in facing external pressures, to have much effect on production (Sallares, Austin). Nonetheless, they did exert influence where they thought it politically essential and possible, above all in trying to ensure some social balance in landownership and some security in the supply of basic foodstuffs (Ampolo, Austin). The extent, however, to which monetisation and taxation in cash can be regarded as indirect stimulants to production of an agricultural surplus is disputed (Sallares, Ampolo, Austin). Although the Finleyan ‘ancient economy’ seems to retain considerable force as a model for the Greek city-state, some areas of activity by public powers, notably regulation of landownership, a certain interest in imports and exports, and the production of coinage, prefigure later more clearly influential developments.

The Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman imperial state (from the mid-Republic to Late Antiquity) could exert greater influence simply in virtue of their much greater size, but arguably also because of their more centralised and bureaucratic forms of administration. They provide some striking cases of direct intervention: the settlement and agrarian development schemes (and urbanisation) of the Hellenistic kingdoms (van der Spek, Foraboschi), notably the Ptolemaic development of the Fayyum (Rathbone), and the colonisation schemes of the Roman Republic (Schneider, Andreau). However, because the motivation was socio-political rather than primarily to do with economic development, such large-scale direct intervention tended to occur in particular political phases, namely the conquest and securing of the Persian empire and of Italy respectively. Continued direct intervention, if on a less dramatic scale, was found more under the Hellenistic monarchies, where the state’s ultimate right to intervene in the tenure and exploitation of land was more carefully maintained, than under the Roman ‘republican’ regimes, in which rights of private ownership were ultimately reckoned paramount over other considerations. Comparison of the cases of Ptolemaic Egypt and Republican Rome shows that this was not a ‘natural’ (e.g. typical of ‘hydraulic’ civilisations) or accidental phenomenon: both states acted consciously to limit or to favour the accumulation of private capital (Rathbone, Schneider, Andreau). However one chooses to allocate the legal systems, forms of military recruitment and methods of dealing with state land which effected these results to the categories of direct and indirect influence, it is clear that privatisation was pursued more enthusiastically under ‘aristocratic’ regimes, whose economic self-interest lay in the expansion, accumulation and protection of private landed wealth, while state intervention is more consistently associated with monarchic regimes, where the prosperity of the kingdom as a whole was as important as the health of the monarch’s ‘private’ resources.

Even, however, in the Hellenistic kingdoms, developments were taking place that diminished direct state involvement in production, evident in Ptolemaic Egypt in the extension of private rights of possession and virtual abandonment of the attempt to prescribe the cultivation of particular crops, developments which continued, in the privatisation of land, under Roman rule through to the fourth century (Bagnali). These developments clearly were related to the cumulative increase of coinage in circulation. Direct intervention decreased at the time when the needs and means of state finance changed. Monetisation, a process initiated with the issuing of coin by the state and connected with the spread of market exchanges, seems to have been the key element in the evolution of the Ptolemaic kingdom and in the transition to Roman Egypt as the importance of taxation in cash became predominant (Rathbone). Parallel developments occurred in Italy in the period of imperial expansion, with the triumviral allotments representing the last, desperate, assault, on private accumulation of Italian land, even if the factors pushing in the direction of increased monetisation in Italy were rather different – huge overseas campaigns, conquest and taxation, ‘professionalisation’ of the army, the increasing role of money in politics. Indeed, the contracting out of tax collection to publicani was another important way in which the Roman Republic ‘privatised’ the state economy to the benefit of the elite (Andreau).

If taxation in cash did not yet under the Republic function as an incentive to monetisation in the provinces, it certainly appears to have had this effect later. Taxation and the imperial financial organisation, along with urbanisation (itself prompted by the state), played a decisive part in the expansion of monetised commercial networks in the provinces, especially in the west and north, even if state finances made up only a fairly modest proportion of what we may define as the Gross National Product of the Roman empire (Ørsted, Lo Cascio). The reduced ‘transaction costs’ of a general imperial coinage were probably also an important factor (Lo Cascio). On the traditional view, there was a tendency in the late antique period to revert to an economy in kind, whether in general or just in the sphere of state finance and expenditure (the annona militarist, which would imply a shift towards dirigisme. However, when specifics, such as the supply of clothing, are examined, direct state intervention in production is not found (Bagnali), and the financial ‘problems’ of the fourth century can be interpreted as reflections of a power struggle between various groups at the top of society (bureaucracy, army, local élites), which culminated in the victory of a tax and payment system in gold coins, whose success made it the fundamental characteristic of the Byzantine monetary economy (Banaji).

In the end, it can be said that the many different situations of the ancient Graeco-Roman world exhibit some common features. Direct state intervention in production tended to decline as the state’s own minting of coinage and reliance on taxation in cash increased, thereby stimulating the development and expansion of a general market economy. There was also a broad trend, growing out of the traditions of the classical city-state which affected even the Hellenistic and Roman monarchies, towards the privatisation of land, reaching a peak in the virtually total privatisation of the Later Roman Empire. Even the economic behaviour of monarchic states tended to mirror that of private individuals. A Hellenistic king, as later a Roman emperor, could achieve a direct impact purely through his patrimonial wealth (van der Spek). This helps to explain one apparently major exception to the rule of growing privatisation, which is the case of mines, especially those of precious metals. Instead, these tended to remain in or to revert to state ownership, and their production was thus kept under state control. This must be connected with the monopoly on the issuing of coinage, which was claimed by all ancient states with a monetary economy. However, the system of exploitation of mines involved considerable participation by private individuals, arranged through various complex and sophisticated mechanisms, like those attested under the Roman Principate, which depended on the legal status of the fiscus as a private entity (Ørsted, cf. Lo Cascio). And finally, the apparent paradox of the climax of privatisation in the Later Roman Empire perhaps finds a neat solution in the argument that it was in practice, despite the historiographical tradition of the ‘Dominate’, more an oligarchic than a monarchic regime (Banaji).

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ELIO LO CASCIO DOMINIC RATHBONE

II

ANCIENT GREECE: SOME GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

Since I subscribe to Finley’s view that there was no concept of ‘the economy’ as such in antiquity, and therefore no possibility of conscious action directed at the economy by governments, I found this topic to be a particularly difficult subject to get to grips with when I was invited to give this paper. The difficulty was compounded by the division of the papers for this conference into two groups, since I found it impossible to distinguish between the spheres to be covered by the two groups of papers. A third problem, when one speaks of public powers taking action to influence the economy in antiquity, is that there must be a question mark not only against the possibility of public officials in antiquity consciously thinking in terms comparable to those of modem economic theory, but also against the concept of ‘public powers’, a very vague term. Clearly by the time of the great Hellenistic kingdoms and the middle to later Roman Republic onwards there were complex and well-differentiated state organisations, capable of organising complicated currency reforms, for example. However, in the early stages of Greek history it is not so obvious that it is appropriate to speak of the existence of a ‘state organisation’ or ‘government’ that could have influenced production, even unconsciously. In the Homeric world, what public powers existed on Ithaca when Laertes had retired to his farm, Odysseus had apparently disappeared, Telemachos lacked the charisma to exercise any great influence, the suitors were gorging themselves, and the assembly of the Ithacans only met occasionally? What public powers were there in Hesiod’s Boiotia? Were the basileis he criticised hereditary monarchs, or merely an oligarchic clique of aristocrats, or people who liked to think of themselves as aristocrats? Even in the sixth century such problems arise. Could we ever say what action public powers might have been taking to influence the process of production when there is no agreement on what public powers existed, on whether, for example, Solon did or did not institute a Council of 400? Even in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, no Greek polis satisfied the Weberian criterion of a monopoly on the use of legitimate force, the main definition of the state available in modem political theory. A discourse on the origin of the state would evidently be out of place in a conference on economic history, and I shall not offer one, but it is a problem which must be kept in mind when considering the thorny subject of these papers.

Given the essential obscurity of the notion of public powers for much of Greek history, I prefer to start with production. It seems to me to be beyond reasonable doubt that there were indeed major fluctuations in the extent of human occupation of the land and so in agricultural production in Greece, and probably in other regions too, in antiquity. Directly correlated with these changes were major fluctuations in population, that is labour, in the course of ancient Greek history. There are several lines of inquiry that lead to these conclusions: the evidence of archaeological field surveys, statements in ancient literary sources such as Polybios’ famous comments on population decline and decreasing agricultural production in Hellenistic Greece (36.17.5–11), the evidence of palynology for fluctuations in the proportion of land devoted to arable farming, evidence for external migration (for example during the period of the Diadochoi, following Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire), and so on. Thus land and labour, two of the three factors of production, were subject to substantial variations. (We must not forget that the land itself was changing, with the erosion and deposition of sediments collectively termed the Younger Fill by the geologist C. Vita-Finzi, even if the question of whether there actually was a true market for land in classical Athens remains controversial.) The case regarding capital, the third factor of production, is much more obscure. It is doubtful if it is even legitimate to speak of the existence in antiquity of a fixed stock of capital in any way comparable to the stock of machinery in modem factories, a question that was once raised by the famous economic historian S. Kuznets. Nevertheless, even if capital in the modem sense can be ruled out of consideration, and even if the factors of production were not integrally related to each other by a unified system of price-making markets, as Finley argued, the empirically attested fluctuations in land and labour are sufficient to establish that the agricultural economy of ancient Greece was extremely dynamic. There were indeed long-term economic cycles in antiquity that are fully comparable to the economic cycles in early modem and modem times which have been studied by Kuznets and other economic historians, and which still affect us today. This conclusion immediately shows that the course of economic history in antiquity was much more complicated than the steady, continuous growth envisaged by K. Hopkins.

At this point it should be made clear that there is no contradiction between arguing that the ancient economy was very dynamic, as I am doing here, and accepting the Finley account of the consumer-based mentality of the Greeks and Romans, because it is possible to explain, as I have done elsewhere, the fluctuations in population, for example, in ways which do not require any deliberate, conscious action or intervention by governments or states to be postulated.¹ Indeed one of my major criticisms of Finley’s book The Ancient Economy is that it makes the agricultural economy of the ancient world seem much more static and homogeneous than it really was. There were not only major quantitative changes in agricultural production over time in antiquity, but also major qualitative changes in the nature of the products, as shown, for example, by the spread of olive cultivation and viticulture around the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC and during the Roman Empire, or by the displacement of emmer by naked wheats in Hellenistic Egypt. I take it for granted by the way, firstly, that agriculture was the foundation of the economy in antiquity, and that most workers were farmers (or at least farm labourers). Secondly, in an agricultural economy whose labour requirements varied greatly from season to season, much non-agricultural production probably occurred in the interstices of the agricultural calendar – that is, farmers may also have been part-time craftsmen, and public works, for example in Athens, were probably performed in the slack periods of the agricultural year when more labour (both human and animal) was available. This is probably also how the pyramids were built in ancient Egypt. Consequently, agricultural production will be the focus of discussion for most of the rest of this paper.

Assuming that the agricultural economy of ancient Greece was in fact subject to economic cycles (it is impossible to present all the evidence in detail here), the question then arises of what role was played by public powers in this process. The archaeological evidence from Attica reveals that after a long period during the Dark Age in which much of the land was largely unoccupied (a situation similar to that in the early and the late Ottoman periods, for example), the countryside of Attica was recolonised from the eighth century BC onwards by a process of internal colonisation. A similar process happened in other parts of Greece, sometimes starting later than in Attica. In the absence of literary sources, it is impossible to decide whether this internal colonisation was organised by public authorities or alternatively was carried out by individuals spreading the frontiers of cultivation on their own. We simply do not know what lies behind the political unity of classical Athens, a polis with an exceptionally large territory by the standards of mainland Greece. In any event, as the population expanded, all areas of good arable land were fully occupied, after which cultivation had to spread fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Ancient Greece: Some General Considerations
• Chapter 3: I Terreni Sacri Nel Mondo Greco in Età Arcaica E Classica
• Chapter 4: Ancient Greece: Some General Points
• Chapter 5: The Seleucid State and the Economy
• Chapter 6: The Hellenistic Economy: Indirect Intervention by the State
• Chapter 7: Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt: The Death of the Dirigiste State?
• Chapter 8: Politisches System und Wirtschaftliche Entwicklung in der Späten Römischen Republik
• Chapter 9: Comment La Res Publica Ne Pouvait Pas Ne Pas Influer Sur La Vie Économique
• Chapter 10: Roman State Intervention? The Case of Mining in the Roman Empire
• Chapter 11: The Roman Principate: The Impact of the Organization of the Empire on Production
• Chapter 12: Governmental Roles in the Economy of Late Antiquity
• Chapter 13: State and Aristocracy in the Economic Evolution of the Late Empire
• Back Cover