The Roman Market Economy by Peter Temin (review)

The Roman Market Economy offers “a progress report in the process of understanding the nature of ancient economies” (ix), building on Temin’s earlier work in economic history. With the blunt statement that “ancient Rome had a market economy” (2), Temin proceeds in the remainder of the work to test this hypothesis by detailing its implications for how the Roman economy functioned in the early imperial period. Temin’s chief contribution in this book is that, as he points out repeatedly, he was trained as an economist and thus brings an understanding of economic theory, reasoning, and methodology to the study of ancient economic history.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, on prices, contains three chapters testing the hypothesis that Rome was a market economy, concluding unsurprisingly that it was. The novelty here is in Temin’s methodology, for he performs statistical calculations to determine precisely what the few scattered references to prices in our sources reveal, showing that the price of wheat was linked in a statistically significant way to the distance from Rome at which that wheat was sold; in other words, that the wheat market in the Roman Empire was economically integrated (40). Aspects of Temin’s calculations are certainly subject to criticism, notably that the prices put into his model are not uniform (some are from coastal sites, others from inland).¹ Indeed, similar criticisms can be levied against many of the arguments made in the book. What makes the book such an important project, however, is its general approach: exploring an ancient economy through clearly expressed, testable hypotheses based on quantified evidence. Scholars need now to respond to Temin’s arguments on these same terms, and in this way the book marks a significant advance in the way that the Roman economy is to be approached.

Part 2 looks at microeconomic performance and features four chapters dealing with Rome’s four chief markets: in grain, labor, land, and capital. Of particular interest in this part is Temin’s nuanced account of the difficulties involved with participation in long-distance trade and the sophisticated institutions that Romans developed to resolve principal-agent problems and issues of asymmetric information (99, 111, 135). Also noteworthy is chapter 8 on financial intermediation, in which Temin argues that, although formal banking institutions were rare in the Roman world, intermediaries such as collegia, merchant groups, and patronage were able to mitigate some of the risks and difficulties involved in furnishing equity capital to would-be investors, allowing capital to flow in the imperial period at a level comparable to that experienced in several European countries in the early modern period (159–71). Temin further states that, as a result of this Roman capital market, “paper transactions were common” throughout the Empire, thereby making a welcome addition to recent work on the use and availability of non-coin money in antiquity (178).²

In the final part, Temin offers three chapters on macroeconomic issues, specifically concerning whether the Roman economy experienced growth and what the nature of ancient economic growth could be. Temin offers a critique of previous work in this area, arguing that scholars have typically used poor proxy data for economic performance (196) and that past attempts at calculating the Roman gross domestic product (GDP) have carried flawed assumptions (243). Temin offers instead urbanization as the best proxy through which to identify changes in Roman GDP, concluding that the Roman Empire, although it existed in a preindustrial, Malthusian world, still experienced limited but continuous growth as the result of developments in urban infrastructure and minor technological improvements in agriculture that kept GDP slightly ahead of population growth until traumatic events in the late second and third centuries C.E., such as the Antonine Plague, altered this dynamic (237). These quite strong positions challenge recent arguments made about growth and income in antiquity,³ but should help to move the debate forward by providing clear...