Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome shows how, over the course of Rome's classical era, a vibrant commercial culture progressively displaced traditional systems of gift giving that had long been central to Rome's material, social, and political economy, with effects on areas of life from marriage to politics.

• Table of Contents


• List of Figures


• Introduction


• Chapter 1: Locating the Fault Line: Concepts and Scope


• Part 1: The Middle Republic: Adaptation


• Chapter 2: Looking Forward from Archaic Rome


• Chapter 3: Adapting the Law in the Age of Cato


• Chapter 4: Ideological Flexibility: Cato and Ennius


• Chapter 5: Life Before Liberality: Plautus and Terence


• Chapter 6: The Gracchi and the Failure of Collective Generosity


• Part 2: The Late Republic: Exploitation


• Chapter 7: Crooked Generosity in the Late Republic


• Chapter 8: Cicero between Justice and Expediency


• Chapter 9: Sallust and the Decline of Reciprocity


• Chapter 10: Caesar's Wicked Gifts


• Chapter 11: Atticus: Banker, Benefactor, Paragon


• Part 3: The Early Empire: Separation


• Chapter 12: Prying Worlds Apart: The Augustan Response


• Chapter 13: Seneca's Philosophical Cure


• Part 4: Conclusions


• Chapter 14: Halfway to Modernity


• Appendix


• Bibliography


• Index Locorum


• General Index

Neil Coffee is Associate Professor of Classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His interests include Latin poetry, Roman history, and digital humanities.