Roman History

Do you want to hear something worth knowing? If so, you're in luck, because Pliny the Elder has 20,000 such nuggets ready for your delectation. Even better, one of the elder statesmen of Roman history, Richard Saller, has provided a fresh study of them in his new book, Pliny's Roman Economy. Saller is famous for publications that have painted in broad brush strokes the landscape of Roman economic and social history as we now understand it. Here, instead, he offers a brief, focused study of a single author, albeit one whose Natural History is of extraordinarily ambitious scope. Published in ‘The Princeton Economic History of the Western World’ series, this is a book for both classicists and economic historians with a focused aim: to use Pliny to intervene in the long-standing debate over whether the Roman imperial economy enjoyed sustainable growth in the first two centuries ce (behind which lurks, as Saller notes, the more existential question as to whether the oppression of the Roman imperial project came with benefits). This question arises from a controversial methodological contention – that scholars’ efforts to develop sophisticated proxies to enable quantitative assessment of ancient economic growth (now largely associated with New Institutional Economics) have so far failed, and thus that we should return, at least in part, to more traditional use of literary sources: ‘at this point none [of those proxies] is reliable enough to justify neglecting our aristocratic authors’ (3). Pliny is particularly interesting here because eighteenth-century encyclopaedias have been seen (in part by the series editor, Joel Mokyr) as part of a culture of innovation that in turn fed the pronounced economic growth of that period.