W.V. HARRIS, The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans

Publisher's blurb:

The only up-to-date account of the problems concerning both Greek and Roman money. Links the disciplines of economics and history. Offers contrasting and challenging points of view, representing the various current approaches to the subject. Most people have some idea what Greeks and Romans coins looked like, but few know how complex Greek and Roman monetary systems eventually became. The contributors to this volume are numismatists, ancient historians, and economists intent on investigating how these systems worked and how they both did and did not resemble a modern monetary system. Why did people first start using coins? How did Greeks and Romans make payments, large or small? What does money mean in Greek tragedy? Was the Roman Empire an integrated economic system? This volume can serve as an introduction to such questions, but it also offers the specialist the results of original research.


List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Introduction by W. V. Harris 1
1 The Monetary Use of Weighed Bullion in Archaic Greece by John H. Kroll ...12
2 What Was Money in Ancient Greece? by David M. Schaps...38
3 Money and Tragedy by Richard Seaford...49
4 The Elasticity of the Money-Supply at Athens by Edward E. Cohen...66
5 Coinage as 'Code' in Ptolemaic Egypt by J. G. Manning...84
6 The Demand for Money in the Late Roman Republic by David B. Hollander...112
7 Money and Prices in the Early Roman Empire by David Kessler and Peter Temin...137
8 The Function of Gold Coinage in the Monetary Economy of the Roman Empire by Elio Lo Cascio...160
9 The Nature of Roman Money by W. V. Harris...174
10 The Use and Survival of Coins and of Gold and Silver in the Vesuvian Cities by Jean Andreau...208
11 Money and Credit in Roman Egypt by Peter van Minnen...226
12 The Monetization of the Roman Frontier Provinces by Constantina Katsari...242
13 The Divergent Evolution of Coinage in Eastern and Western Eurasia by Walter Scheidel...267
References 287
Index 323