Présentation de l'éditeur
The reasons why no economic history of Rome has hitherto been available may perhaps not be apparent to those who have not attempted to write one. The lack of easily interpreted data has indeed made the task almost impossible. Roman his.tory which received little attention until Rome had become a world power was thereafter for two centuries written chiefly by public men who had devoted their lives to politics and diplomacy. These men naturally had no personal interest in commerce and manufacture; indeed they were members of a class that ,held traders and manufacturers in slight esteem. As a consequence their books, from which of course Livy drew his account, contained only casual remarks regarding the economic conditions of their nation. Archaeology has recently provided important material, especially for the study of the early period, but it is material that cannot always be precisely interpreted. The inscriptions dating from the Republican period are brief, and unfortunately temple accounts, which have provided many facts for the reconstruction of Greek economic history, were at Rome kept on perishable material. The papyri that have recently been found in large quantities in Egypt provide data in the main only for that kingdom, the economic mechanism of which was so peculiar that the historian cannot apply the inferences drawn from them to conditions prevailing elsewhere.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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