Veterans, Agriculture, and Monetization in the Late Roman Republic

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20053493
AutoresDavid Β Hollander (0000-0001-8172-7663, autor correspondente)
Ano2005
Páginas229-240
Data de publicação2005-12-31
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoCHAPTER
PeriódicoTall Order. Writing the Social History of the Ancient World (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/9783110931419.229
OpenAlexW4214736444
ISBN9783110931419
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas12

In Ancimt Literaq William V. Harris argued that the Greeks and Romans never achieved mass literacy in part because they lacked an "essential instrument," that is "an extensive netwotk of schools ... subsidized by religion or by the state."2 The Romans did, however, have one large and very well ~ded educational institution: the army. Though it may never have taught reading and writing,3 the Roman anny was constantly training tens of thousands of soldiers in the arts of war.4 But the anny was more than an institution, it was also a community with its own special rules, traditions and procedures. 5 In addition to learning how to fight, a recruit had to learn how to live in his new military environment: Scholars have long recognized the anny's important role in the acculturation or 'Romanization' of auxiliaries.6 In 'this paper I want to consider how anny life taught soldiers to use money, that is, how exposure to the military community may have altered economic behavior. The army, I would like to suggest, taught soldiers a style of 'household management' or money use that was risky when ptacticed by fanners. Since in the first century B.C.E. the Romans typically settled veterans on the land where they were presumably expected to engage in agriculture, the military's inadvertent instruction may have contributed to the political and economic difficulties of the age, particularly debt crisis

Agriculture · Archaeology · Economics · Geography · Keynesian economics · Monetization · Ancient and Medieval Archaeology Studies · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Classical Antiquity Studies