Economie antique: Prix et formation des prix dons les economies antiques.

• Author: SNELL, DANIEL C.
• Position: Review

Economie antique: Prix et formation des prix dons les economies antiques. Edited by JEAN ANDREAU, PIERRE BRIANT, and RAYMOND DESCAT. Entretiens d'archeologie et d'histoire, vol. 3. Toulouse: SAINT-BERTRAND-DE-COMMINGES, 1997. Pp. 412.

This volume presents papers given in 1996 by scholars working on prices in the first millennium B.C.E. and later. More than half the book considers the Greek and Latin sources and Roman Egypt. One notes with concern that two of the Assyriological contributions represent uncorrected proof--a potential problem in the consideration of prices.

Raymond Descat writes of prices on the market supervisor's inscription from Piraeus in the first century B.C.E. Luigi Gallo considers prices on Attic steles showing low land prices. Leopold Migeotte reveals that most evidence about the Greek cities' control of prices was from years of difficulty and famine and therefore might not be representative. Gary Reger and, separately, Veronique Chankowski-Sable study the prices at Delos in the Hellenistic period; Reger emphasizes "the overwhelmingly local character of almost all economic activity in antiquity ...," even that involving imports.

David Schaps argues that there was no money attested in Greece before coinage. This seems unlikely, and the volume ends with two queries of Schaps' assertion, showing that other classicists can see the absurdity of positing that changes came suddenly and all together. Jean Andreau studies early modern European texts noting market prices in registers and finds nothing similar earlier. He concludes that it was not economic development in ancient Rome that caused change but politics. Jean-Michel Carrie writes that the problem in Roman Egypt was to find buyers for land, and that explains why the price remained cheap, perhaps deriving from a massive privatization of previously public property.

I found Richard Duncan-Jones' study of numerical distortion in the works of Roman writers to be most helpful when considering ancient Near Eastern material; he studies prices quoted in different writers and finds that many were stylized and rounded. He asserts that "the only answers that satisfy us are numerical," while the Romans were rather uninterested in precise numbers. Cicero and Pliny gave less stylized, and therefore potentially more real, figures, but others, even from apparently archival sources, were found to be untrustworthy.

Elio L.o Cascio writes of prices expressed in gold and prices in...