Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

the distribution of goods and wealth 369
All this misery took place in Mesopotamia in a period when the near east
seems to have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Edessa itself clearly
benefited from this prosperity and was a very wealthy city, as can be seen
from the amounts of tribute that it was (repeatedly) able to pay the
Persians: 2,000 pounds weight (more than five times the cost of S. Vitale in
Ravenna) promised in 503 soon after the end of the famine; 200 pounds
paid in 540; and 500 pounds more in 544. All this gold did not spare the
poor from misery and death in 499–501. 37
vii. the distribution of goods and wealth within the
late antique economy: the role of overseas commerce
No one would or could dispute that wealth and goods travelled widely
within the Roman empire. However, the relative importance of the state
and of commerce in the distribution of goods and wealth has been much
debated. Historians (taking written texts as their point of departure) have
tended to emphasize non-commercial mechanisms to explain the movement
of both goods and wealth. They have played down the role of a free
market and stressed, above all, the role of the state, as a power that raised
substantial taxes in both coin and kind and then spent these in selected
parts of the empire. They have argued that, even when goods were transported
over a distance and sold, this happened only because they were able
to travel at no cost (or at least at a heavily subsidized rate) in state-financed
shipping. 38
They have also pointed to private estate management as a means of distributing
goods between the scattered holdings of landlords with property
in several different parts of the Mediterranean. According to this latter
model, a dish in African red-slip ware or an African oil amphora found in
Italy could have reached its destination at the command of a rich aristocrat
who ordered the transfer of goods from one of his African estates to one
of his Italian ones. 39
Archaeologists, by contrast, tend to see things in more modern and more
commercial terms, and talk blithely of ‘trade’ whenever they see an
imported piece of pot. This difference of opinion has led to a lively debate
between those who see the movement of goods in the Roman world as
essentially commercial and those who emphasize non-commercial modes
of distribution. 40
37 503 promise (not in the end delivered): Joshua the Stylite, trans. Wright, 53, and trans. Chabot, 213.
540: Procop. Wars ii.12.34. 544: Procop. Wars ii.27.46.
38 Finley (1973) 17–34; Jones, LRE 465 and 824–58. 39 Whittaker (1985).
40 The argument for trade as important, and for archaeological evidence as vital in revealing it, has
been made most forcefully by a group of Italian archaeologists: see the papers by Carandini and others
in Giardina, Società romana iii.
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