Introduction to the Roman Era

This “Introduction” situates the chapters in the third part of Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money on the Roman era. Money—both as a practical instrument and as an abstract idea—was nearly ubiquitous in the Roman world. And yet, ubiquity was not uniformity. Not only, for example, did numerous varied local and regional coinages and monetary instruments persist until the third century AD, but this monetary diversity influenced or was influenced by a wide range of aspects of the Roman experience: mythology, law, politics, religion, and social relationships. Developments are thus impossible to adequately summarize. In this part of the Handbook, scholars instead offer snapshots of key developments in what might be broadly termed philosophical considerations of money. Such snapshots include the following themes: the origins of coinage in Roman myth; Cicero on property; Seneca on the uses of money; the treatment of money in Pliny’s Natural History; money and coinage in Roman jurists’ thought; imperial Roman law; Rabbinic thought and Jewish solidarity; monetary themes in the writing of the Christian Bible; and philosophies of money in early Christian thought. It is the collective hope that these chapters, taken together, give shape and clarity to an otherwise tangled milieu.