Neil Coffee is Associate Professor of Classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

The economy of ancient Rome, with its long-range trade, widespread moneylending, and companies of government contractors, was surprisingly modern. Yet Romans also exchanged goods and services within a traditional system of gifts and favors, which sustained the supportive relationships necessary for survival in the absence of extensive state and social institutions. In Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome, Neil Coffee shows how a vibrant commercial culture progressively displaced systems of gift giving over the course of Rome's classical era. The change was propelled by the Roman elite, through their engagement in a variety of profit-making enterprises. Members of the same elite, however, remained habituated to traditional gift relationships, relying on them to exercise influence and build their social worlds. They resisted the transformation, through legislation, political movements, and philosophical argument. The result was a recurring clash across the contexts of Roman social and economic life.
Neil Coffee's comprehensive volume traces the conflict between gift and gain from Rome's prehistory down through the conflicts of the late Republic and into the early Empire, showing its effects in areas as diverse as politics, law, philosophy, personal and civic patronage, marriage, and the Latin language. These investigations show Rome shifting, unevenly but steadily, away from its pre-historic reliance on mutual aid and toward the sort of commercial and contractual relations typical of the modern world.

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 of Quoted Works
General Index