In his essay ‘Is There an Artificial God?’ (The Salmon of Doubt (2003), 126–50, at 143–4), science-fiction writer Douglas Adams refers to a study by anthropologist John Reader (in Man on Earth (1988)) of rice cultivation on Bali. Religion suffused Balinese rice-growing practices, which were dictated by the temple calendar and resulted in very productive harvests. The introduction in the 1970s of modern cultivation methods, including the use of pesticides, at first generated bumper harvests, but then, in Adams's words, ‘the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter’ (144), harvests failed, and the Balinese went back to the temple calendar, restoring the balance.
There are several ways to study economy and religion. One is to study economic aspects of religious institutions and practices; another is to focus on the role played by religion in the organisation of production, distribution and consumption. The latter approach particularly, as the Balinese example suggests, might deliver important insights into broader economic life. Yet, as Andrew Wilson writes in the introduction to the present volume, modern discussion of the Roman economy has a religious blind spot: the topic receives little attention among Roman economic historians. Wilson suggests this has to do with ‘a lingering, and certainly erroneous, view that the Romans did not believe, could not really have believed, in their crazy pagan religion’ (3), and that its economic impact was therefore negligible. Greg Woolf, in the volume's concluding chapter, suggests that the neglect originates in the scholarly division of labour since the Enlightenment between those studying the secular and those studying the sacred. The volume aims to set this situation right, and its editors and authors largely succeed in doing so — even if they push much harder in one direction than in another.
Most chapters in the volume deal with the material side of religious activity or with ‘economic behaviour’ by religious institutions. Thus Jörg Rüpke and Javier Domingo estimate the annual cost of the public cults in the city of Rome (between thirty and fifty million sesterces, with c. four million spent on the major priesthoods) and the cost differentials between temple building at Rome and in the provinces (provincial building costs were lower) respectively. David Wigg-Wolf concentrates on temples as financial institutions, concluding that they often functioned as state treasuries and repositories of private valuables, but that evidence for lending by temples is scarce. Marietta Horster, in her survey of sanctuaries in the Roman east, similarly notes that for temples, ‘banking operations seem to have been only occasional activities’ (158), while Marie-Pierre Chaufray, focusing on the temple of the crocodile god Soknopaios at the village of Dime in Roman Egypt, notes how the temple collected licence taxes for the state, but did not lend, in contrast to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in the metropolis of the Fayyum, which drew most of its income from interest on loans. Both Horster and Chaufray deal with the impact of Roman rule on cults and sanctuaries, with Horster noting that Dionysia festivals declined during the period of the Roman civil wars, to be replaced under the empire by festivals for the imperial cult, and that the fortunes of temples became increasingly tied to the fortunes of cities. Chaufray's study of the thriving Dime temple counters the narrative that Roman organisational changes brought decline to Egypt's traditional temples.
Two chapters concentrate on the economics of animal sacrifice. Michael MacKinnon contrasts the abundance of Roman textual and iconographic sources for animal sacrifice with the dearth of zooarchaeological evidence from Roman Italy and the Roman Mediterranean. Possible explanations include lack of archaeological attention, depositional and post-depositional disturbances, and Roman removal and discarding practices that meant that the bone material ended up outside the sacred site. MacKinnon notes that our information on the supply of sacrificial animals is murky. The topic of sacred herds is taken up by Anthony C. King, who argues that many rural temples in Roman Gaul and Britain owned sufficient land to maintain flocks and herds.
Only a few chapters in the volume expressly focus on the broader role of religion in economic life. Charlotte R. Potts, in her chapter on pre-Roman central Italy, notes that in premodern societies, given the lack of effective governmental oversight, religion helped regulate market systems. Thus temples and divinely protected market places formed the nodes of a successful commercial network in the Archaic Mediterranean. Marta García Morcillo's chapter demonstrates how the Roman moral economy of the gift could accommodate economically profitable uses of gifts by distinguishing between the action and aim of the donor and the gift itself: thus a gift to a temple might be recycled or sold without this transfer undermining the original religious value of the donation. Employing a wealth of data on religious aspects of Roman occupational collegia (including the problematic dendrophori), Koenraad Verboven argues in his chapter that religion came naturally to occupational groups (as it did to households and cities) because in a pre-industrial world of existential uncertainties it made sense for group cooperatives to seek divine protection.
Progress in research on the Roman economy would be well served by more of the latter type of study. Scholarly reluctance perhaps stems from association with the now unfashionable substantivism of Karl Polanyi and M. I. Finley, especially the latter's ‘minimalism’, which the Oxford Roman Economy Project, to whose book series the volume belongs, has worked so hard to counter. Yet a focus on the cultural context of Roman economic activity implies no a priori assumption about levels of economic performance. What it might do is help us to understand such performance: to discover, analogously to the example of the rice growers on Bali, what it was, exactly, that made the Roman economy Roman.
