Title: Social Networks of Debt, 51-50 BCE

Abstract:

Focusing on the 50s BCE, and especially the Ciceronian corpus of letters from his Cilician governorship, this paper tries to strike a balance between economic and socio-political interpretations of debt on the eve of Civil War. The first half of the paper gives a state of the conversation over the last 50 years with a special eye to improvements in models for both thinking about debt on a global scale and how new data has changed our understanding of the Roman monetary supply. The second half of the paper addresses the reading of anecdotal literary sources and the difficulties of interpretation, trying to answer the question: are socio-political factors driving the economic factor or vice versa?