C.'s well-received book of 2009, The Commerce of War: Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic, examined the coexistence of generosity and acquisitiveness in Virgil, Lucan and Statius. In this new monograph, C. pushes that analysis both backwards from the principate into the Republican period and outwards from epic into society at large. The central claim of the book is that, prior to the second century bce, gift culture dominated as the primary form of socio-economic interaction at Rome, but that this ethos was steadily eroded as material interactions became more mercantilist, more calculated and more transactional in the late Republic and early Empire. This development also undermined what had been a conception of ‘respectable’ ‘commercial engagements’ (p. 34) and ‘honest business thrift’ (p. 52), so that profitable pursuits became stigmatised, as seen, for example, in the demise of the term lucrum from ethically neutral to pejorative (pp. 64–5).
The volume is structured chronologically around fourteen mostly brief chapters. After an introduction exploring the concepts of gift and exchange, C. offers thirteen more chapters. Chapter 2 presents a reconstruction of gift exchange and commerce in Archaic Rome, Chapter 3 analyses legal change in ‘the age of Cato’, Chapter 6 looks at the Gracchi, Chapter 12 examines the Augustan period as a whole, and the remaining nine are dedicated to various extant authors from Plautus and the elder Cato in the early second century bce to the Augustan authors and Seneca in the first century ce. Heavy use is made of word studies to demonstrate the rise and fall of various terms denoting different parts of the gift/exchange thought world: C. shows, for example, that terms for ‘greed’ (e.g. cupidus and avaritia) increase in the Late Republic and in the Julio-Claudian period; mentions of lucrum similarly rise in the Late Republic, grow rarer in the Augustan years and then re-emerge under the Julio-Claudians. These analyses are a valuable contribution to any study of wealth, profit and the Romans’ own diagnosis of socio-economic (im)morality in their time.
Whether those studies are focused on the world of literature or the actual Roman economy, however, will affect what a reader can take from this volume. Despite the value of much of its analysis, readers will likely grow frustrated with two aspects of the book. The first is depth. C.’s last book dedicated over seventy pages to Virgil alone, whereas in this book he can afford just five for Sallust, an author who determinedly wallows in the language and morality of greed. Such brevity is a necessity in any broad study, but the price is a less nuanced analysis of genre, audience and over-arching narrative than is at some points necessary. Given that a comparison of Terence, the lex Cincia and Ovid is scarcely a comparison of like with like, how should we read the development in expression that C. demonstrates? Are these products of genre or are they indeed reflections of historical development? Similarly, the use of graphs to display word usage is illuminating, but the analysis flattens out distinctions based on these same issues of genre and audience. C. notes that Plautus has a more sympathetic approach to profit than later authors would have, and acknowledges that this may have to do with the thematic material or the presence of traders in his audience (p. 63), yet these complications are given short shrift in claiming that usage changes over time. If C. could show that usage metamorphosed within the one genre and in front of the one audience type, he would be on rock solid ground. But the evidence does not allow anyone to make that claim.
The second challenge for readers is in the transition from a study of texts to a study of broader culture or society. C. is a sure-footed guide to Latin usage, but the book struggles throughout to reconcile itself with history. It makes various statements that will stop historians in their tracks: for example, ‘Rome began issuing its own coinage around 400 bce’ (p. 10, citing Harl and Morel), ‘the underlying causes of the Gracchan conflict seem self-explanatory’ (p. 79), and Crassus was ‘the wealthiest Roman who ever lived’ (p. 89). There is an occasionally disconcerting neglect of chronology. The graphs of word usage deploy curves to trace the data, but with no allowance for the century-long lacuna between Terence and Caesar, or the fact that many texts are being written simultaneously or even out of the order presented in the graphs (C. is more than justified in listing authors by year of death, but there need to be multiple caveats around that). C. rejects the likelihood of senatorial hostility to the lex Claudia of 218 because its principle was reaffirmed in a lex Julia, even though the latter was passed 159 years after the former (p. 39).
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the book will be the way it uses literary texts and some other evidence to reconstruct a Roman reality. At times there is a dangerous circularity to the process. Plautus’ Mercator, for example, is ‘in tune with its times’ (p. 64), while Cato's mindset was ‘the product … of the conceptual world he inhabited’ (p. 52). These are both entirely possible, but C. has relied so heavily on Plautus and Cato to reconstruct those times and that world that resemblance is scarcely surprising. On the whole, C. is a sympathetic reader, and this is frequently justifiable. Even if many will disagree, he makes a good case for the benevolent motives of the Gracchi (Chapter 6) and of the ever-generous Atticus (Chapter 11). The reconstruction of Archaic Rome, however, is more problematic. C. is sure of Dentatus’ parsimonia because of Cicero's presentation of him more than two centuries later (p. 28), despite Dentatus’ own claim that he had conquered so many slaves he needed his vast estates to house them, and so much land that he needed an army of slaves to work it (Dio 8.37). L. Metellus’ ‘big money by good means’ (p. 34) is taken as evidence of commerce's respectability, without asking what ‘good’ (war or bequests?) and ‘bad’ (trade or usury?) might mean in this context. Why, if the underlying phenomenon were not a source of stigma, was the qualification of ‘good’ necessary at all?
Much of this reflects C.’s preference for ancient testimony over the bibliography on how the Roman economy operated beyond the realm of literary texts. The world of profit had always been central to Roman society, as C. knows (pp. 27–8), and as the presence of nexum and the rolling battles over debt attest. Many (though not all) readers would argue that the beneficent gift-givers portrayed by C. were never the norm but were a product of later authors’ imaginations. No reviewer wants to criticise a book for not being the one he or she would have written, but once the leap is made from Latin literature to Roman society, the presence of historical bibliography becomes less a desideratum and more a sine qua non. Yet even fundamental Anglophonic texts – M. Crawford's Coinage and Money under the Roman Republic (1985), W.V. Harris’ ‘A Revisionist View of Roman Money’ (JRS 96 [2006]) and D. Hollander's Money in the Late Roman Republic (2007) – are missing. It is a shame that C. does not grapple with this scholarship more thoroughly, as a deeper engagement with that bibliography would sharpen the analysis of what C.’s texts are describing and how precisely ancient authors made sense of their dynamically changing world. A reading of each in light of the other might lead a reader to conclude that the changes in literature which C. highlights were more about how Romans construed social and political change than how the practices or ideologies of gifting and exchanging evolved.
