Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome by Neil Coffee (review)
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Marcel Mauss' Essai sur le don (1923–4) grounded the foundations of an inextinguishable and fascinating debate about the functions of gift giving across cultures and its importance as a regulator of human interactions. Mauss' proposed famous triple obligation—giving, receiving, repaying—still fuels prolific discussions around the principle of gratuity, and the mechanisms of reciprocity and obligation created between giver and receiver. Authors like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Alvin Gouldner and Alain Caillé, among others, have discussed the fundamental question of the unconditional or instrumental nature of gift giving. These considerations have also invigorated new debates on Graeco-Roman gift exchange (e.g., Michael Satlow, ed., The Gift in Antiquity, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2013; Filippo Carlà and Maja Gori, eds., Gift Giving and the "Embedded" Economy in the Ancient World, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2014), to which the present monograph is an additional contribution. Coffee's work is an ambitious attempt to analyse the development of gift giving from early Rome to the early Principate. The author's thought-provoking thesis is that gift giving experienced a substantial transformation from a traditional, archaic form of altruistic generosity to a practice led by commodity exchange and self-profit. In the author's view, this transformation began to impact Roman society by the middle Republic, when Rome experienced a progressive growth of wealth, and accelerated towards the late Republic. In this process, members of the elite increasingly engaged in money lending and became growingly dissociated from traditional values of reciprocity.
The book is divided into six parts that break into fourteen chapters. The structure follows a diachronic order that meets the author's thesis. Part I situates the reader within the theoretical framework of "gift studies" and summarises some important anthropological and sociological contributions to the topic. Coffee favours Max Weber's theory of four possible motivations for social action, which he also applies for gift giving: instrumental rationality directed at advantage, value rationality directed at affecting our principles, adherence to tradition, and emotion. In the same section, the author looks at relevant terminology attached to this practice as evidence to detect changes of value. The following parts of the book meet the author's proposed periodization of the Roman culture of gift exchange: (II) an archaic foundation period, (III) a middle Republican adaptation period, (IV) an exploitation period of the late Republic, and a (V) separation period of the early Empire. This division supports Coffee's hypothesis of the progressive mercantilization of gift giving. Part II focuses on the early origins of patronage and of institutions like the depositum, based on fides, as well as on the impact of early coinage. Part III discusses the introduction of gratuitous contracts as a consequence of the growth of wealth and commodity culture. In this regard, regulations such as the Plebiscitum Claudianum (219–218 b.c.e.) and the Lex Cincia (204 b.c.e.) are interpreted as elite reactions against the increase of trade [End Page 525] and economic interest in gift relationships. The author presents Cato's attachment to frugality and his lack of interest in gift giving as a transitional moment in which greed and generosity were still flexible concepts not yet completely separated. Coffee discusses also the evolution of the concept of liberality (liberalitas, liberaliter) in Latin literature (fig. 5.1). Chapter 6, which ends the section, interprets the failed reforms of the Gracchi as an attempt to introduce private generosity as a collective virtue in public life. Part IV expands the terminological analysis and looks at the increasing literary use of words like avaritia, liberalitas, pecunia and aes alienum in line with a progressive generalisation of moneylending among members of the elite towards the end of the Republic. The section is centred on Cicero's and Sallust's critical views of the degradation of generosity and the decline of reciprocity among peers. Caesar's extensive use of liberalitas...
