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Zusatztext ...brings in a range of interesting and provocative evidence. ... Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Informationen zum Autor Neil Coffee is Associate Professor of Classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His interests include Latin poetry, Roman history, and digital humanities. Klappentext The economy of ancient Rome, with its long-range trade, widespread moneylending, and companies of government contractors, was surprisingly modern. Yet Romans also exchanged goods and services within a traditional system of gifts and favors, which sustained the supportive relationships necessary for survival in the absence of extensive state and social institutions. In Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome, Neil Coffee shows how a vibrant commercial culture progressively displaced systems of gift giving over the course of Rome's classical era. The change was propelled by the Roman elite, through their engagement in a variety of profit-making enterprises. Members of the same elite, however, remained habituated to traditional gift relationships, relying on them to exercise influence and build their social worlds. They resisted the transformation, through legislation, political movements, and philosophical argument. The result was a recurring clash across the contexts of Roman social and economic life. Neil Coffee's comprehensive volume traces the conflict between gift and gain from Rome's prehistory down through the conflicts of the late Republic and into the early Empire, showing its effects in areas as diverse as politics, law, philosophy, personal and civic patronage, marriage, and the Latin language. These investigations show Rome shifting, unevenly but steadily, away from its pre-historic reliance on mutual aid and toward the sort of commercial and contractual relations typical of the modern world. Zusammenfassung Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome shows how, over the course of Rome's classical era, a vibrant commercial culture progressively displaced traditional systems of gift giving that had long been central to Rome's material, social, and political economy, with effects on areas of life from marriage to politics. Inhaltsverzeichnis Table of Contents List of Figures Introduction Chapter 1: Locating the Fault Line: Concepts and Scope Part 1: The Middle Republic: Adaptation Chapter 2: Looking Forward from Archaic Rome Chapter 3: Adapting the Law in the Age of Cato Chapter 4: Ideological Flexibility: Cato and Ennius Chapter 5: Life Before Liberality: Plautus and Terence Chapter 6: The Gracchi and the Failure of Collective Generosity Part 2: The Late Republic: Exploitation Chapter 7: Crooked Generosity in the Late Republic Chapter 8: Cicero between Justice and Expediency Chapter 9: Sallust and the Decline of Reciprocity Chapter 10: Caesar's Wicked Gifts Chapter 11: Atticus: Banker, Benefactor, Paragon Part 3: The Early Empire: Separation Chapter 12: Prying Worlds Apart: The Augustan Response Chapter 13: Seneca's Philosophical Cure Part 4: Conclusions Chapter 14: Halfway to Modernity Appendix Bibliography Index Locorum General Index ...
