Economy

From Rome

Description of the economic structure and currency system of ancient Rome. Ancient Roman economy was not very complicated compared to our economy.

1 Farming/Slaves
2 Trade
3 Currency
4 References

Farming/Slaves

Slaves did most of the labor work for them. They were mainly trying to focus on feeding everyone in their vast empire. They got most of there food from trade. And very little of it was from farming. The farming was not used often because it would take many slaves to work on the crops. What few farmers there were could donate the extra food in lieu of straight money. Also the more crops they made the higher their taxes were. This did not provide much insentive for farmers to make lots of crops. The main things they farmed were grain, olives, and grapes. These were sometimes exported to be made into olive oil, wine, bread, etc.

Trade

Some of the Technology the romans used were roads. And there is the saying "All roads lead to Rome". This originated from romans trading with everyone around them. They traded with countries they had conquered as well as countries outside of their empire. From china came silk and from India came perfumes and spices. Much of the time shipments were made via boats due to the fact that on land it could be dangerous and it was sometimes faster.

Currency

In the very beggining of the empire they still used the Barter System. This was the exgange of goods or livestock instead of money. Then they added chunks of bronze to their currency. These chunks of bronze were called Aes Rudes. In the begging of the 3rd century they added markings to state weight and thus value these were called asses or individually one as. They had diffrent forms of asses semis (half an as), triens ( a thrid of an as), quadrans (a fourth of an as), sextrans (a sixth of an as), and uncias (twelfe of an as). In 269 BCE they introduced the denarius which was worth about ten asses. After that the aureus was introduced. This was a gold coin. The aureus and the denarius were the official coins used for example to pay salaries, were as the as was for everyday use for example in the market buying a fancy bauble. They put a little bit of propaganda on each coin, it is use of words to sway the publics opinion. For example "the king is the best"