Classical Studies

Honor and Profit: Athenian Trade Policy and the Economy and Society of Greece, 415-307 B.C.E. by Darel Tai Engen

Pompeii's Living Statues: Ancient Roman Lives Stolen From Death by Eugene Dwyer

Honor and Profit: Athenian Trade Policy and the Economy and Society of Greece, 415-307 B.C.E.

Darel Tai Engen

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

To date there has been no book devoted to Athenian trade policy, which is surprising given the importance of the subject and the evidence concerning it. Darel Engen's examination focuses specifically on the Athenian government's practice of granting honors and privileges to those who had performed services related to trade. Rejecting the either—or choice between an empirical and a theoretical approach, Engen instead combines the two.

Honor and Profit offers a collection and analysis of the evidence, mostly in the form of inscriptions of government decrees, for all known occasions on which Athens granted honors and privileges for services relating to trade. The analysis proceeds within the intellectual framework of substantive economic theory, in which formal market behavior and institutions are considered to be but a subset of a larger set of economic behavior and institutions devoted to the production, distribution, and exchange of goods. The author's conclusions have broad implications for our understanding not only of the ancient Greek economy, but also of the social and political history of Greece.

Darel Engen is an Assistant Professor at California State University, San Marcos.

Spring 2010
408 pages

Pompeii's Living Statues: Ancient Roman Lives Stolen From Death

Eugene Dwyer

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

In 79 AD Mt. Vesuvius erupted in two stages. While the first stage did relatively less damage, the second stage, a so-called pyroclastic flow, inundated the town with a combination of superheated gasses, pumice, and rocks. In the second flow many people and animals were killed on the spot, in some cases covered with ash and mud. When excavations of the town commenced in the 1860s, excavators were able to make casts of hollows in the volcanic material where victims had lain. In some cases skeletal remains and artifacts like jewelry were present; in others, the mud offered impressions of clothing, leather accessories, etc.

Stolen From Death examines these casts and related records, a number of which (along with their museum) were lost in WWII bombing. His work considers them as archaeological and cultural artifacts, but he also discusses Pompeii and its artifacts in the context of Italian unification and party politics, the development of modern excavation methods, and the challenges of maintaining a very large archaeological site.

Eugene Dwyer is a professor of art history at Kenyon College.

Spring 2010
216 pages