Economics and etymology

[rochvelleth]

Just opened an email from someone I don't know with the subject line 'How much was a sesterce?' If that's spam, it horribly well tailored to me :) But no, it turns out it's a message to a UK Classics list that says the following:

I noticed that Martial (book 1) is selling his books at 6-10 sesterces

Comments

[vyvyan]

The OED rejects the Arabic etymology of adobe in favour of Spanish adobar "to daub, plaster", from a Late Latin form adobare (which might be from Classical adoperire "to cover", I wonder?). First attestations of that and daub in English are about four centuries apart, however, and the pronunciation of adobe with /i/ for the final syllable seems to be the earlier one, so a link within English seems very unlikely!

[rochvelleth]

Ah, thank you for that! I suppose it's one of those deus/theos similarities then. Unless it's just me who thinks they look related, that is :)

[cartesiandaemon]

Of course, it might be semi-spam: someone emailing everyone on every classics mailing list they have, saying "Hi! We just created this dumb website about how to have a classics conference. Pay attention to us! Buy our thinly-veiled crap!" :)

the presence or absence of slaves in a society must be a very significant economic factor

Someone described an exchange rate to medieval england as something like "A penny then is equivalent to about £5[1] for goods and £50 for services, though of course, there are lots of things that were more or less expensive then, and many that were simply unobtainable." Presumably slaves would skew it similarly. (I wonder if necessarily more? You might think so, but then peasantry weren't necessarily more free than slaves.)

[1] Warning: not actual numbers

[rochvelleth]

:)

Slaves are strange, being both property and services at the same time, I suppose. Hmm, yes. Well, Medieval England is further complicated by the presence of a feudal system, which has all sorts of mechanisms that are difficult to express in either modern or general terms.

[livredor]

My opinion is that slavery is a significant economic factor, but that we don't really have any examples of a complex society which doesn't run on slavery. Like, we've had a couple of hundred years of being very proud of the fact that we don't own slaves, but actually our economy depends on the labour of a lot of people who are so poor they are essentially owned by their employers, and quite a lot of manufacturing of goods we use in our enlightened, democratic society is carried out by literal slaves in distant countries. In other societies (eg 20th century communist ones) there is such strong political compulsion that a large proportion of the population are basically serfs if not actually slaves. I'm not saying the role of slaves and slave labour in our society is exactly identical to that in Classical Rome, but it's not a non-existent factor either.

[rochvelleth]

Yes, you're quite right. The situation in ancient Rome might be simplified as: a slave is property owned (and housed and fed) by an individual, with no legal rights (unless freed), who provides services for his master at no extra cost, and thereby allows his master to have more leisure time than he otherwise would have had. Which is a very similar scenario to your modern examples in many ways - perhaps the biggest difference (not to say that there aren't others, of course) is the institutionalised vocabulary of slavery, which modern society avoids for obvious reasons.