The first proposition that Peter Temin attempts to prove in his new book is that economics can contribute to the study of ancient history. To those unversed in the literature on the ancient economy, this claim will sound quite modest—but classical historians have been slow to embrace the tools of economics and many have simply rejected their applicability to the ancient world. That has already begun to change, thanks in part to Temin’s own efforts. Although the evidence is scarce, there is enough to strongly suggest that the Roman economy did not function in a completely alien manner. Temin’s other claims are somewhat less controversial: that Rome had a market economy; that the Pax Romana stimulated trade; and that in the early Empire “ordinary Romans” were better off “than any other large group … before the Industrial Revolution” (p. 2).

The Roman Market Economy consists of eleven chapters, divided into an introduction and three parts. The first part, “Prices,” begins with a consideration of wheat prices in the early Roman Empire (Chapter 2) and detours into a discussion of price behavior in Babylon (Chapter 3), before concluding with an examination of Roman price behavior (Chapter 4). Temin uses the scanty data for Roman wheat prices to argue that under the Empire there probably was “a unified wheat market that extended from one end to the other of the Mediterranean Sea” (p. 46). The excursion into Babylonian price data (for barley, dates, “mustard,” cress, sesame, and wool) from the fifth to the first century BCE employs a relatively large data set (by ancient standards, at least) to show that those prices were market driven rather than administered. Temin concedes that some Roman prices were administered but suggests that most, like the Babylonian ones, fluctuated by means of supply and demand. The Romans enjoyed long-term price stability from the late Republic into the early Empire; Part 1 ends with an attempt to explain that stability and why inflation became more prevalent beginning in the late second century C.E. Temin suggests that the Antonine Plague was a major factor.

Part 2 consists of four chapters devoted to specific markets. Temin discusses grain again in Chapter 5, here focusing on the institutions that facilitated its transport and trade. He suggests that “Roman merchants … had a system that was as good as any existing before industrialization and perhaps not equaled for another millennium and a half” (p. 113). Chapter 6 turns to the labor market and argues that, despite possessing a substantial slave population, “Rome had a functioning labor market and a unified labor force” (p. 114). Next, Temin examines real estate (Chapter 7) and again finds evidence for a “functioning market” (p. 140). The last chapter in this section considers financial markets. Temin reviews the evidence for financial intermediation in the Roman world—which ranged from informal lending to fairly sophisticated banks—and concludes that Roman financial institutions were “better than those of eighteenth-century France and Holland” and “similar to those in eighteenth-century London” (p. 189).

The final section is devoted to the question of growth in the Roman economy. Chapter 9 reviews theories of economic growth, and Chapter 10 explains how some growth is possible even in a “Malthusian Empire,” at least in the short term. In the last chapter, Temin reviews previous attempts to estimate Roman GDP before proposing his own. He suggests that per capita GDP in Roman Italy around 150 CE was roughly the same as that enjoyed by the Netherlands in 1600.

Perhaps because they derive from articles published in several different journals, individual chapters offer varying levels of background information. Explanations of supply and demand curves and regression analysis in the opening chapters will be very helpful for those with little training in economics, but such readers may well be perplexed at times in subsequent chapters when, for example, Temin mentions in passing that he “regressed the logarithm of per capita GDP on the proportion of the population in urban areas and several regional dummies” (p. 253). The placement of figures in relation to the accompanying discussion and the somewhat austere captions sometimes impede the argument, as does the decision to forgo the use of footnotes. Temin’s remarks are occasionally baffling. Why should we be surprised that the Romans ate a lot of grain (p. 97)? What is “lighthearted” about a legal case featuring stolen goods and a dead donkey (p. 104)? Where does his trade equation (p. 235) come from? Some comments are just tantalizing. What, for example, is the basis for Temin’s claim that less than 50 percent of the labor force in Roman Italy may have worked in agriculture (p. 259)?

These are minor complaints, however. The strengths of this book are many. Temin makes effective use of the ancient evidence (including difficult sources like the archives of Iucundus and the Sulpicii) and provides valuable discussions of comparative evidence, particularly with respect to systems of slavery, land tenure, and financial intermediation. Roman historians will profit from his perspective on many issues, but his writing is sufficiently clear to be accessible to a lay audience. Overall, Temin has produced a major contribution to the study of the Roman economy, making a convincing argument for (limited) per capita economic growth in the early Empire. He has also helped, I suspect, to bridge the gap between ancient historians and economists.