Honor among Thieves

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 421 it allows him to “play the Gaul” (231). The editors of ILA-Bordeaux 146 identify him as dressed in a “tunique à col roulé,” which changes appreciably how one might interpret the portrait image incorporated into his tombstone. In a similar vein, it is surprising that no maps of the Gallic and Hispanic provinces are provided. For the discussion of Ausonius’ identity (mentioned above), for instance, it would have been very helpful to be able to locate on a map at a glance the various civitates with which he had ancestral connections. These shortcomings aside, this is a book that makes an important argument. It will need to be pondered by all those who seek to explain one of the central questions of Roman imperial history, i.e., the nature of the cultural change that occurred at the local level in Rome’s provinces following their incorporation into the Roman empire. York University Jonathan Edmondson Honor among Thieves: Craftsmen, Merchants, and Associations in Roman and Late Roman Egypt. By Philip F. Venticinque. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (New Texts from Ancient Cultures). 2017. Pp. xi, 275. Moses Finley famously averred, “Not only were there no Guildhalls in antiquity, there were no guilds, no matter how often the Roman collegia and their differently named Greek and Hellenistic counterparts are thus mistranslated” (The Ancient Economy2 [Berkeley 1985] 138). This was until now the opinio communis: associations played social and religious roles but they were not economic institutions. The burden of Venticinque’s book, which began as a University of Chicago dissertation, is to show that such a characterization overlooks critical aspects of associative practices. Venticinque’s theoretical resources are drawn from New Institutional Economics (NIE), Charles Tilly’s notion of “networks of trust” (Trust and Rule [Cambridge and New York 2005]), and Robert Putnam’s influential treatment of how networks lubricate social life and generate social capital for members of those networks (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community [New York 2000]). Advocates of NIE argue that associations (or in their language, “firms”) impose behavioral expectations on their members and that this has the effect of lowering transaction costs. Transaction costs arise from the lack of knowledge, for example, of the reliability of those with whom the members transact business. Members of associations are more likely to share knowledge relevant to such business; but since associations impose behavioral norms on members not specifically related to business—for example, obligating members to assist other members in times of need—this means that fellow members are always more reliable as partners than non-members. The basic thesis or insight of NIE is that the creation of firms is a critical factor in promoting economic growth. Venticinque begins with a wide-ranging introduction to associations and craftwork in the ancient world in which he sketches the types and organization of associations, membership profiles, and crucially, the idea of social capital and how associations become a site for the generation and exchange of social capital. By itself the introduction is a clear and lucid primer on craftwork and occupational guilds in the Mediterranean. Chapter One, “Charters, Transaction Costs, and Trust,” introduces the key theoretical notions that trust networks generate social capital through repeated interactions and thus lower transaction costs. Graeco-Roman associations are ideal sites at which to 422 PHOENIX make this case, since the nomoi of associations frequently elaborate the behavior expected of members, which includes participation in the monthly banquet, attendance at the funerals of members, contributing to the common fund, and providing assistance to members in need. Association nomoi from P.Mich. V (Tebtynis) offer salient examples of these rules, and P.Mich. V 244, the nomos of an association of salt merchants, illustrates Venticinque’s key point that such rules regulated economic exchange among members. The methodological problem here is that P.Mich. V 244 is one of the very few nomoi to be so explicit on the regulation of economic transactions, and this text is perhaps made to bear more weight than it can stand. Venticinque also suggests, slightly more problematically, that associations’ common treasuries might have been used for making capital loans

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