TO study the economic history of a given period is to inquire what were, during that period, the organization of property, agriculture, and industry, the development and main directions of routes and means of transport, the procedure and character of exchanges, and the amount of consumption—in short, to describe economic life in all its forms, in its almost infinite variety and complexity.
In all countries and at all times, economic life has been strictly subject to physical, racial, and social conditions. Also, in any one people, it develops in the course of the ages. It is therefore necessary, when one starts to study that of a particular portion of mankind, to determine the exact setting of the subiect in place and time.
In the ordinary language of European science, ancient life is that which developed chiefly round the Mediterranean basin. Even the civilizations of the ancient East came into some kind of contact with the sea which the Romans afterwards called, with justice, mare nostrum—Our Sea. It is true that there came a time when that life, with its special characteristics, spread over countries whose rivers flowed into other seas, whose climate was unlike that of the Mediterranean lands—Lusitania, Gaul, Britain, and the Rhine valley in the West; the deserts of Syria and Arabia, the banks of the Euphrates, and the shores of the Indian Ocean in the East. But those regions turned round, as it were, to face the Mediterranean, which attracted their economic activity and held it in its own orbit for many centuries. The unity of the Mediterranean, with these annexes on either side of it, was accomplished by the Roman Empire, the only state which has succeeded in bringing together under one authority such distant and unlike countries as Britain and Egypt, Dacia and Mauretania, Gaul and Arabia.
Before arriving at that unity and concentration, Mediterranean life developed in a continuous process which is marked by the progressive reduction of local autonomies and differences. That development did not fail to have a profound influence on economic life. After the works of Messrs. de Morgan, Moret, Delaporte, and Glotz, on Prehistoric Man, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization, Mesopotamia, and The Ægean Civilization, our starting-point can only be the beginning of Greek history properly so called. The first organized society which presents itself to our view and our investigations is that depicted in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems. At that time, the Mediterranean was still divided into compartments, no doubt not separated by watertight barriers, but each keeping its own physiognomy—the Eastern Mediterranean, bordered by the native civilizations of Egypt, Phœnicia and Syria, and Asia Minor; the Greek Mediterranean, confined to the coasts of the southern parts of the Balkan Peninsula and the islands of the Ægean Sea; the Italic and Sicel Mediterranean, the inhabitants of which had not emerged from the stage of prehistory or proto-history; and the Western Mediterranean, whose seaboard was divided between Phœnicians and Carthaginians, Iberians and Ligurians, and Etruscans. As the ages went by, two powers, two civilizations, gradually extended their domain, Hellenism in the East and Rome in the West, until the day when Rome, victorious in war and policy but conquered morally by Greece and, later, by the East, created the unity of the vast sea-basin at the centre of which she stood. That unity lasted four hundred years. When it collapsed under the repeated blows of the barbarians from the long unknown depths of Northern and Eastern Europe, ancient times were at an end.
This outline of general history allows us to define the great periods into which the economic history of antiquity should be divided.
The first period is the Greek period, properly so called, during which Hellenism, while extending its sphere of action from the north of the Euxine to Cyrenaica and from Rhodes and Cyprus to Marseilles and Saguntum, nevertheless remained strictly national in character.
The second period, which opens with Alexander's expedition into the East, is the Hellenistic period. Checked in the West by the advance of Rome, the expansion of Greece found the field free in Asia and in the Nile valley all the way to the Indian Ocean. New routes by land and sea were opened to economic activity. The centre of gravity of the Greek world shifted eastwards and southwards, from Athens, Corinth, and Sparta to Rhodes, Antioch, and Alexandria.
While this centre of intense life was developing in the Eastern Mediterranean, in Italy Rome was growing greater, subjecting all the peoples of the peninsula to her rule, one after the other, triumphing over Carthage, and gathering under her sway all the live forces of the West. The growth of the Roman Republic did not take place without grievous crises. It was accompanied by an evolution which was often disturbed, retarded, or hampered by violent episodes, and the origin of evolution and crises alike must be sought in the economic conditions of public and private life.
Hitherto East and West had followed each its own destiny. No doubt, they were not unaware of each other's existence. They did not stand back to back; commercial relations had already started between the various coasts of the Mediterranean. But the political unity of the Mediterranean world had not yet been effected. This was done in the first century before Christ. It became more and more complete and stable as Rome gradually set up her administration, her Proconsuls, Legates, Procurators, and Prefects, in the place of the old local and regional sovereignties, whether royal lines, federations of cities, or free towns. Henceforward the economic field of action was one single domain, the orbis Romanus, in which all peoples worked and prospered side by side—Orientals, Greeks, Italians, and the barbarous or semi-barbarous peoples of North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Gaul, Britain, and the valleys of the Rhine and Danube. Over every frontier, the Roman world entered into relations with distant markets. There were barriers which could not yet be crossed, the Atlantic in the West, the Rhine and Danube, and the plains of southern Russia; but the Caucasus and Iran in Asia and the sands of the Sahara in Africa were passed, and the Indian Ocean bore mariners to India. This last period, which covers the first four centuries of the Christian era, really closes the economic history of the ancient world. From the fifth century onwards, the successive shocks of Germanic, and then Arab, invasions broke up the Roman unity, subjected economic life to new conditions, destroyed its continuity, and directed it towards quite new destinies.
I shall, therefore, divide this study into four main parts:
In this geographical and chronological setting, what I propose to set forth is, above all, facts, hard, definite facts, with reference to their place and date as far as possible. In order to obtain and establish these facts, we have at our disposal an abundance of evidence of all kinds—works of ancient authors, literary, historical, geographical, and technical, legal texts, inscriptions, papyri, coins, and archæological remains. We shall find plenty of information in poems like the Iliad, Odyssey, Works and Days, and Georgics, in romances like Longinus's famous pastoral Daphnis and Chlo'ë, in histories like those of Herodotos, Thucydides, Polybios, and Livy, in geographical works like those of Strabo, Ptolemy, and the Gcographi Grœci Minores, in technical treatises like some of Xenophon's minor works and those of Cato, Varro, and Columella, and in encyclopædias like that of Pliny the Elder. The Roman Codes and the inscriptions will tell us about the organization of landed property and industrial labour. The papyri are full of facts about the daily life of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. Coins will be our witnesses for trade. What we can still see of the quarries, mines, metal-works, potteries, roads, and harbours of Greek and Roman antiquity will be of the greatest help to us in reconstructing the outward appearance and material equipment of economic life.
To these documents we shall apply a strictly objective method. We shall study them as they have come down to us, without trying to complete them by restorations which are often rash or by hypotheses which may well obscure or distort the true meaning of texts. We shall have the wisdom to stop in the presence of a gap in our information, and sometimes to say, " We do not know." In my opinion, this is the only method which will enable us to give solid foundations to the modest construction which we are attempting to set up.
For, from the facts which I shall have succeeded in assembling, it is my intention to extract general ideas. But I shall be careful not to present in that guise any abstract theories, evolved a priori, which would have no value but that of personal opinions formed irrespective of historical reality. My only ambition is to draw up, so far as it is possible today, a balance-sheet of the economic life of antiquity. This ambition may appear too lofty to some, and too modest to others; but it is in pursuit of it that I would make use both of my own labours and of the teaching and counsels which I have received from my predecessors and masters.