Doyle Saylor quotes:
> "The literate people of antiquity despised "labor" in any form.
> The law was
> an honored profession-- it was virtually the only profession, aside from
> war, which was presumed to be a necessity of citizenship for virtually all
> men. Farming and income from land ownership were likewise acceptable, but
> "Trade" was generally viewed as servile and demeaning, incompatible with
> one's dignity
Doyle,
Romans were as snobbish as the rest of us, but when it comes to trade being
demeaning, let us not forget that they even named their leading families
after the humble trades of their forebears. Thus, Lentullus (lentils),
Cicero, (chick peas) and the Flavians (green beans) may have made it big in
the times of the emperor Augustus and Julius Caesar, but to begin with they
were just grocers.
> Hence the conceptual basis for thinking about how a business works is not
> present in the Roman concept of something that did work as Mark uses the
> word firm. That is the typical capitalist understanding of work.
On the contrary, the Flavians etc ran family firms. Cicero the great lawyer
and rhetorician, byw, also had a lot of money invested in the Gaul New
Economy, ie mass produced samian ware.
Doyle
> Secondly Mark relies upon statistics reports in ancient times but
> these are
> notorious for their lack of planning in the sense of financial effects of
> borrowing and accounting practices that we would be able to
> understand now.
> So that the anecdotal nature of the figures, the lack of accountability to
> standards etc is elided in quoting as Mark does above.
True, all this happened before 1929 when banking regulation and oversight
was much slacker than it is now (nothing ever goes wrong nowadays).
>And
> understanding of
> the purpose of making money through a business is absent from the Roman
> concept. See this commentary upon tribute in ancient worlds by Shupp,
Eh? When I was a lad, we still called our coinage LSD, which did not mean
acid, but coins based on Roman denarii...
> Doyle
> Thirdly Mark says that leading Roman families were deeply
> involved in trade,
> yet this ignores that that is exactly the limitation of how trade
> was done.
> The families organized and controlled trade. The financial system had
> little to do with organizing that. Rather, the families and the way a
> family functioned was what made the trade system work. These heavily
> structured any sort of understanding of what business was in
> ancient times.
As opposed to nowadays, when we don't have oligarchs who own everything, now
it's all pension funds, yes?
mark
