Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

CHAPTER 13
SPECIALIZED PRODUCTION AND EXCHANGE
bryan ward-perkins
i. difficulties and evidence
Writing about complexity within the economy of the fifth to the seventh
century will never be straightforward, partly because there has been so
much debate about the nature of the ‘classical’ Roman economy that preceded
it. Was the ‘Roman economy’ really a series of local economies,
linked into a broader structure only by the demands of the state and by
some limited trade in luxury products? Or was it a unified system in which
even quite basic goods were produced by specialists, and traded by merchants
across long distances? In examining economic activity in the late
Roman and post-Roman period, we are inevitably measuring it against the
classical economy that preceded it; but the measuring-stick itself is constantly
being altered. 1
As with evidence for the exploitation of the land examined in the last
chapter, much of our information on economic specialization now derives
from archaeology. However, the written record can also produce isolated
but very valuable nuggets of information. For example, just before our
period, Gregory of Nazianzus happens to tell us, in a poem on the events
of his own life, that one of his enemies in Constantinople in 379/80 was a
priest who had come to the city from Thasos, with money supplied by his
church in order to buy ‘Proconnesian slabs’ (prokonēsias plachas). These must
have been slabs for a chancel-screen in the marble of the island of
Proconnesos (very close to Constantinople), of a type which was widely
diffused in late antiquity (see Fig. 15,p.359 below).
This tiny scrap of information, which entered the written record only
by chance, is very useful. It confirms what we can infer from archaeology:
that the Proconnesian quarries were engaged in commercial activity
(alongside work for the state). But it also shows us, which we could not at
present demonstrate any other way, that one buyer (admittedly from a
town not too far distant in the northern Aegean) purchased his marble by
the rather laborious process of visiting the region of the quarries, rather
than doing it all from home via a middleman. There is much that we would
1 See p. 369 below, nn. 38–40.
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