Introduction to social science aspects of the ancient world:
the economy, agriculture, demography, nourishment, disease. The
course includes us of theoretical models and comparative
material from other societies to illuminate equivalent aspects
of the ancient world, where often not enough evidence remains
to generate reliable statistics.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students must write a research paper of 25-30 pages in
length that utilizes the ancient sources in the original
languages as well as employs modern scholarship, including that
written in Italian, French, and German. The papers must make a
contribution to the field; that is, graduate projects must
constitute new scholarship. All graduate students will present
their findings to the class in a full fifty-minute presentation.
Athena Title
Intro to Ancient Daily Life
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in CLAS 4360W
Prerequisite
CLAS 1000 or CLAS 1000E or CLAS 1000H or CLAS 1010 or CLAS 1010E or CLAS 1010H or CLAS 1020 or CLAS 1020E or CLAS 1020H or CLAS 3000 or CLAS 3010 or CLAS(ANTH) 3015 or CLAS(ANTH) 3015E or CLAS 3030 or CLAS 3040 or CLAS3050 or permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Not offered on a regular basis.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to compare, explain, and discuss the basic tenets and theories regarding ancient demography, morbidity, and the profile of various diseases, especially malaria and plague (smallpox and bubonic plague).
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to illustrate, explain, and discuss the ancient attitudes towards agriculture and business (including the mechanics of ancient banking and borrowing) and the role of slaves in the mercantile sector of the ancient economy.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to report on the latest, ground-breaking techniques for generating what we think is reliable information, using comparative and extrapolative data, as methods of combatting the scarcity of material regarding the demography and economy of the ancient world.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to appraise and synthesize the various categories of evidence for ancient daily life.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to formulate and compose original writing appropriate to the subject matter of the course and the discipline of classics.
Topical Outline
Week One: PART I. THE ECONOMY
Introduction to course and syllabus.
Reading Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Sections 1-7 (to p. 429).
Reading Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Sections 8-end.
Week Two:
Reading M. I. Finley’s The Ancient Economy ix – 34.
Please read Ian Morris’ introduction very carefully.
Reading M. I. Finley’s The Ancient Economy 35- 94.
Week Three:
Reading M. I. Finley’s The Ancient Economy 95-149.
Reading M. I. Finley’s The Ancient Economy 150-207.
Thirty years later. Reading The Ancient Economy, ed. By Walter Scheidel and Sitta von Reden, Introduction (1-8), Scott Meikle “Modernism, Economics and the Ancient Economy” (233-250) and Richard Saller “Framing the Debate over Growth in the Ancient Economy” (251-269).
Week Four:
Two classic articles on the scale of the Roman Economy, both by Keith Hopkins.
The first is “Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire, 200 BC-AD 400” Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980), 41-75.
The second is “Rome, Taxes, Rents and Trade,” originally published in Kodai: Journal of Ancient History, but the copy you will read is from Scheidel and von Reden, eds., The Ancient Economy, 190-230.
“Machines, Power and the Ancient Economy” by Andrew Wilson. Journal of Roman Studies 102 (2002), 1-32.
Week Five:
Jean Andreau, Banking and Business in the Roman World, 1-49.
Jean Andreau, Banking and Business in the Roman World, 50-99.
Jean Andreau, Banking and Business in the Roman World, 100-158.
Week Six: PART II: THE BASICS OF NOURISHMENT
T. Gallant Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece (1991), 1-33, “Introduction” and “Ancient Households and their Life Cycle.”
T. Gallant “Structural Constraints and the Household Vulnerability Cycle” from Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece (1991), 60-111.
Week Seven:
Peter Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, preface (xi-xiv) and 1-42.
Peter Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, 43-81 and Peter Garnsey “Famine in History” from Cities, Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity (1998), 272-292.
Peter Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, 82-112.
Week Eight:
Peter Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity 113-148.
The cultural flipside of famine: “An Approach to Eating” by Emily Gowers from The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (1993), 1-49.
PART III: DISEASE, SICKNESS, AND MISERY
Walter Scheidel, “Stratification, deprivation and quality of life in the Roman World” Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics.
Week Nine:
Reading Willem Jongman “Slavery and the growth of Rome. The Transformation of Italy in the second and first centuries BCE” and Walter Scheidel “Germs for Rome” both in Rome the Cosmopolis (Edwards and Woolf, eds. [2003]), 100-122 and 158-176.
Reading Robert Sallares Malaria and Rome (2002), Chapter 4 “The Ecology of Malaria in Italy,” 43-114.
Reading Robert Sallares Malaria and Rome (2002), Chapter 5, “The demography of Malaria,” 115-167.
Week Ten:
Walter Scheidel “Emperors, Aristocrats, and the Grim Reaper: Towards a Demographic Profile of the Roman Elite.” In Classical Quarterly 49.1 (1999) 254-281. Available on JSTOR.
R. P. Duncan-Jones “The Impact of the Antonine Plague” Journal of Roman Archaeology 9 (1996), 108-136 and Walter Scheidel “A model for demographic and economic change in Roman Egypt after the Antonine Plague” Journal of Roman Archaeology 15 (2002), 97-114.
Week Eleven: PART IV: LIFE, DEATH AND THE NUMBERS
An Introduction to Demography. Read Bruce W. Frier “Roman Demography” from Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire (2003), 85-109 and Richard Duncan- Jones “Age-awareness in the Roman World” from Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (1990), 79-92.
Walter Scheidel “Progress and Problems in Roman Demography” from Walter Scheidel, ed., Debating Roman Demography (2001), 1-81.
Week Twelve:
Walter Scheidel “Roman Age Structure: Evidence and Models” in Journal of Roman Studies 91 (2001),1-26. Available on JSTOR.
Brent Shaw “Seasons of Death: Aspects of Mortality in Imperial Rome,” Journal of Roman Studies 86 (1996), 100-138. Available on JSTOR.
Brent Shaw, “The Seasonal Birthing Cycle of Roman Women” in Scheidel, ed. Debating Roman Demography (2001), 83-110.
Week Thirteen:
Elio Lo Cascio “Recruitment and the Size of the Roman Population from the Third to the First Century BCE” in Scheidel, ed. Debating Roman Demography (2001), 111-137.
Bruce W. Frier “More is Worse: Some Observations on the Population of the Roman Empire” in Scheidel, ed. Debating Roman Demography (2001), 139-159.
Richard Alston “Urban Population in Late Roman Egypt and the End of the Ancient World” in Scheidel, ed. Debating Roman Demography (2001), 161-204.
Week Fourteen:
W. V. Harris, “Towards a Study of the Roman Slave Trade.” In The Seaborne Commerce of Ancient Rome: Studies in Archaeology and History. Ed. John H. D’Arms and E. C. Kopff. Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 36 (1980), 117–140.
W. V. Harris “Demography, Geography and the Sources of Roman Slaves” Journal of Roman Studies 133 (1999), 62–75.
And Walter Scheidel “Quantifying the Sources of Slaves in the Early Roman Empire” in Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1997), 156-169.
What you can do by using demography and thought experiments: Keith Hopkins “Christian Number and Its Implications” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6:2 (1998), 185-226.
Week Fifteen:
READ what you can do by using demography and thought experiments. Walter Scheidel “Marriage, families and survival in the Roman imperial army: demographic aspects,” Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (due out in P. Erdkamp, ed., The Blackwell Companion to the Roman Army).
Institutional Competencies
Analytical Thinking
The ability to reason, interpret, analyze, and solve problems from a wide array of authentic contexts.
Critical Thinking
The ability to pursue and comprehensively evaluate information before accepting or establishing a conclusion, decision, or action.
