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  • 26 - Commerce and finance

  • from PART Va - ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
    • By J. Andreau, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
  • Edited by Alan K. Bowman, University of Oxford, Peter Garnsey, University of Cambridge, Dominic Rathbone, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    12 October 2000, pp 769-786

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the financial activity of the senators, knights and other nobles, and that of the intermediaries, money-changers and professional bankers. Money-changers and professional bankers had existed for a long time alongside élite financiers. In Italy and the western areas of the empire, the major distinguishing feature of the money-changers/bankers, the argentarii and coactores argentarii, was their participation at auctions, so as to provide credit for the purchasers of the objects on sale. In the Roman world of the first and second centuries, no category of financiers limited themselves to loans for consumption. But this does not mean that the majority of loans were productive, nor that the banks were the privileged helpers of production and commerce. Throughout the Roman period, loans and orders of payment never circulated freely. References to the financial affairs of the upper classes are brief and fragmentary for all periods.