Pliny's Roman Economy: Natural History, Innovation, and Growth

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The first comprehensive study of Pliny the Elders economic thought and its implications for understanding the Roman Empires constrained innovation and economic growth.

The elder Plinys Natural History (77 CE), an astonishing compilation of 20,000 things worth knowing, was avowedly intended to be a repository of ancient Mediterranean knowledge for the use of craftsmen and farmers, but this 37-book, 400,000-word work was too expensive, unwieldy, and impractically organized to be of utilitarian value. Yet, as Richard Saller shows, the Natural History offers more insights into Roman ideas about economic growth than any other ancient source. Plinys Roman Economy is the first comprehensive study of Plinys economic thought and its implications for understanding the economy of the Roman Empire.

As Saller reveals, Pliny sometimes anticipates modern economic theory, while at other times his ideas suggest why Rome produced very few major inventions that resulted in sustained economic growth. On one hand, Pliny believed that new knowledge came by accident or divine intervention, not by human initiative; research and development was a foreign concept. When he lists 136 great inventions, they are mostly prehistoric and dont include a single one from Romeoffering a commentary on Roman innovation and displaying a reverence for the past that contrasts with the attitudes of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists credited with contributing to the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, Pliny shrewdly recognized that Romes lack of competition from other states suppressed incentives for innovation. Plinys understanding should be noted because, as Saller shows, recent efforts to use scientific evidence about the ancient climate to measure the Roman economy are flawed.

By exploring Plinys ideas about discovery, innovation, and growth, Plinys Roman Economy makes an important new contribution to the ongoing debate about economic growth in ancient Rome.

Reviews

"Sallers book is truly interesting in many ways. Not only does it do justice to the existence of a reflection on economy in Western antiquity and to its few points of convergence with modern economic thought, but [it] also . . . raises a question that goes beyond antiquity: that of the conditions that make long-term economic growth and development possible, with a particular interest in cultural causes."---Etienne Helmer, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Author Bio

Richard P. Saller is the Kleinheinz Family Professor of European Studies in the Department of Classics at Stanford University. He is the author of Personal Patronage under the Early Empire and Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family; the coauthor of The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture; and the coeditor of The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World.