In light of the seminal work 'Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 b.c.-a.d. 400)' by Keith Hopkins (1980), several ancient historians, including Walter Scheidel and Ian Morris, have developed, in recent decades, quantitative models to analyse the Roman economy.
The primary objective of these approaches is to employ cliometric parameters derived from contemporary economics (like, for instance, GDP, GDP per capita and the Gini coefficient), to make sense of many issues or shortcomings that long affected research on the ancient economy. These cliometric parameters, from the perspective of these scholars, would help facilitating the comparison of ancient economies among each other and with modern ones.
The aim of the research presented in this session is, in the first place, to undertake a detailed examination of a foundational article by Scheidel and Friesen’s, entitled 'The size of Roman economy', published in 2009, as a case study especially useful to detect the underpinnings of this cliometric approach. Furthermore, this research intends to critically examine the accuracy of the information which Scheidel and Friesen’s article relies upon, and the methodology the two scholars employ for data calculation and reconstruction.
The presentation will seek to demonstrate that the outcomes of Scheidel and Friesen’s research ensue mainly from ideological premises and prejudices, rather than from empirical evidence. The final section will examine the reception of Scheidel and Friesen’s article by analysing another article, by Alfani and Scheidel’s, 'A comparison of income inequality in the Roman and Chinese Han empires', published in 2025.
This research incorporates the numerical data of the 2009 paper and adds new parameters, like the Pareto index and the inequality extraction ratio. Agnello's presentation will attempt to deconstruct the narratives embedded also in the Alfani and Scheidel’s article, further questioning recent endeavours to utilise the ancient world as a means to promote evolutionary models in global history.
Speaker bio:
Sofia Agnello was born in Palermo on 23 December 1997. She received her MA in Classical Philology at the University of Siena in July 2022, with a dissertation on the representation of individual memory in Roman culture. Her research interests include Latin language, Latin literature, the anthropology of the ancient world and, more recently, quantitative approaches to ancient Roman economy. She is pursuing a doctorate in Sciences of Antiquity and Archaeology at the University of Pisa, in collaboration with the centre of Anthropology and Ancient World of the University of Siena. Her current project, supervised by Mario Lentano and Maurizio Bettini, aims to develop an anthropological analysis of the practices of writing in republican Rome. Its working title is 'Usus litterarum. Anthropology of writing in Rome'. In spring 2024, she has spent three months at the centre Anhima-Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antique in Paris.
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