Some reflections on ancient Greek attitudes to children as revealed in selected literature of the pre-Christian era
This study examines the ancient Greeks’ attitudes to children during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The investigation is limited to literary sources in selected pre-Christian texts.
Children as Office Holders and Benefactors in the Eastern Part of the Roman Empire
One of the most striking features of euergetism in the Román imperial period was the participation in public Ufe of individuáis belonging to previously «marginal» groups: women, children even -to a certain extent- «freed slaves» and their descendants.
When to say when: wine and drunkenness in Roman society
Not surprisingly, different people offered different opinions on the use of alcohol and the acceptability of drunkenness in Roman society. What certain people said on the subject – and the context they said it in – reveals inherent biases in the authors and the effect of those biases on social structure.
The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world
This paper has two goals. The first one is to improve our understanding of the critical determinants of the large-scale use of slave labor in different sectors of historical economies.
Spartacus Before Marx: Liberty and Servitude
The story of the pre-Marxian ideology of Spartacus is not without its own peculiar interests. It is a strange narrative prompted both by the birth of a modern analytical, and political, interest in slavery, and in parallel debates over the meaning of liberty and servitude.
The Roman slave supply
This survey of the scale and sources of the Roman slave supply will be published in Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (eds.), The Cambridge world history of slavery, 1: The ancient Mediterranean world.
Human capital and the growth of the Roman economy
This paper takes as a starting point Keith Hopkins’ basic article, “Rome, taxes, rents and trade.”1 Walter Scheidel’s introduction to the article described it as “…the only comprehensive attempt to explain the dynamics of the Roman imperial economy currently available….
Making Space for Bicultural Identity: Herodes Atticus Commemorates Regilla
Herodes and Regilla built a number of installations during their marriage, some of which represented their union in spatial terms. After Regilla died, Herodes reconfigured two of these structures, altering their meanings with inscriptions to represent the marriage retrospectively. This paper considers the implications of these commemorative installations for Herodes’ sense of cultural identity.
The size of the economy and the distribution of income in the Roman Empire
Different ways of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century CE produce convergent results that point to total output and consumption equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat or close to 20 billion sesterces per year. It is estimated that elites (around 1.5 per cent of the imperial population) controlled approximately one-fifth of total income while middling households (perhaps 10 percent of the population) consumed another fifth. These findings shed new light on the scale of economic inequality and the distribution of demand in the Roman world.
Real wages in early economies: Evidence for living standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE
In this paper, I present a critical survey of pertinent data from antiquity and the early and high Middle Ages. This broadened perspective expands the chronological scope of the historical study of real incomes of unskilled workers from a few centuries to up to four millennia and at least in a few cases enables us to trace contours of change in the very long run.