The poetics and politics of exchange in Roman agronomy

Abstract

There is no reason to imagine that the market reflected natural human instincts and desires in Roman Italy any more than, as Graeber argued, it did anywhere else. Market values had to become thinkable and conceived as first an acceptable and then an integral part of society. It is strange, therefore, that his account omits Rome almost entirely. This chapter starts to remedy that omission by exploring the process of naturalization of economistic modes of thinking in the late Roman Republic through a case study of key passages in Varro’s agronomical work Rerum Rusticarum. This complex text both reflected the new economic structures and opportunities that emerged as the spoils of imperial violence flowed into Rome and, through a range of rhetorical and literary moves, actively sought to shape elite discourse by identifying virtue and honor with the rational pursuit of profit.