Proxies for Economic Performance in the Roman Empire

• Main Author: Saller, Richard P.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Princeton University Press 2022
• Subjects: Greenland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691229546.003.0002

This chapter shows that the hopes that the precision of the hard sciences—whether archaeological, biological, or environmental—will provide solid proxies for datable trends in Roman economic performance have been continually frustrated. This is not only because there is a need for more data; the reasons for the repeated frustration are intrinsic. The empire was vast and varied with many unknowns. One of the most basic was identified by Paul Erdkamp: in order for the proxies to provide evidence for the “significance” of trends in economic performance, we would need to know the baseline from which the growth or decline of any quantifiable data occurred in order to estimate the impact on aggregate production. The Greenland lead flux measurements offered hope that the resolution could be sharpened with the result that the Antonine Plague could be identified as the specific external shock that halted growth and set off the decline in economic performance, but a careful statistical analysis shows that again the conclusion does not stand up to scrutiny. The chapter then suggests that attention to literary texts to understand cultural attitudes affecting the economy is worthwhile. In this regard, one of the most underexplored texts is Pliny's Natural History .