Risky Business: Law, Economics, and Society in the Ancient World

Catalog description

How did Aristotle get a mortgage without a credit score? How did the few thousand people in the Roman imperial administration manage to tax the entire Mediterranean world? Most courses on ancient Greece and Rome study their literature, art, and history; but Greco-Roman antiquity represents a formative period not only in the politics and culture of the Mediterranean, but also in its economic and social history: at its height the Roman Empire encompassed some 2.5 million square miles, organizing more than 70 million people into a single state and, in some sense, a single market-all without modern telecommunications, mechanized transportation, firearms, mass media, professional police forces, or extensive bureaucracies. This course will explore how individuals, organizations, and governments in Greco-Roman antiquity solved a variety of economic and organizational problems in their comparatively low-information, small-government institutional environments. We will study such topics as: measurement and standards; markets, auctions, and prices; money supply and credit; property, conflict, cooperation; contracts, torts, insurance, and liability; agency and corporations; courts and enforcement; reputation and self-help; and regulation and taxation. The course will proceed largely via the case method, analyzing ancient transactions, disputes, and laws that survive in inscriptions and papyri, supplemented by ancient and contemporary theoretical readings in law, society, and economics. For Fall 2023 the period studied will be Athens and Classical Greece.