If we define ‘economy’, un-theoretically, as the production, exchange and consumption of goods (not only material goods but also what are called ‘services’), a study of all these three elements throughout the whole Mediterranean world, even for the period covered in this volume, would vastly exceed the dimensions of the present chapter. Some limitations will therefore be applied. First, a spatial limitation: we shall look at the history mainly from the standpoint of Italy and its political centre, Rome. Secondly, a limitation in time: the economy of Roman Italy already had a long history behind it in 133 B.C., but we shall take for granted and only briefly allude to that earlier structure and development, and lay all the stress on the changes that occurred in our period, which were considerable and have become better known as a result of modern research. A third limit will be in terms of orientation. It is the most delicate point to explain, although the most interesting. One cannot study the ancient (or any other) economy without relating it to the kind of society and the political structure within which its developments took place. In ancient society men were not only producers or consumers, rentiers or wage-earners: they were also free or slave, Romans or ‘allies’; they had a social status derived not just from their place in the economy but, mostly, from the role, hereditary or otherwise, assigned to them by the way the community was organized. Strongly emphasized in law, with its privileges and its exclusions, status was more civic than economic (though naturally certain economic facts, such as property, might be part of its definition). But status, in turn, affected the economy, directly: the control by the state of access to real property is a good example, or the exclusion of certain status groups – the upper ‘orders’ from certain economic activities, or the way in which the availability of slave labour varied as a function of Rome’s conquests. So a particular effort will be made in this chapter, in describing and analysing the facts and changes of the Roman economy, to signal wherever appropriate the interaction between economy and status.

One further preliminary word is necessary, on a characteristic of our period.