3.A Economic Actors in the Hellenistic and Roman Empires: The Mediterranean and Southwest Asia

The economy of the ancient Mediterranean and Southwest Asia was driven by a wide variety of actors whose behavior was shaped by social, cultural, and physical structures.1 This chapter examines a variety of types of actors who played important roles, both positive and negative, in this development in order to shed light on the ways in which their economic behavior impacted the behavior of others and the structures within which they operated. We start with urban systems, before moving on to consider sovereign rulers, armies, temples, local elites, households, producers, and networking agents like bankers and merchants. The structures within which these actors operated are the focus in part II, which treats economic ‘tools.’ In the ancient Mediterranean and Southwest Asia, state power was distributed across several constituencies. For our present purposes, the most important are cities, which interacted directly with the bulk of the population; imperial and regional rulers, who exercised power at a higher level; courts, who intermediated between rulers and locals; armies, who exercised military power but also consumed a large portion of the resources extracted by the state; and temples, which served as another space of state-population interface. In addition to (or in consequence of) their state functions, these units were both economic actors in their own right (producing, distributing, and consuming goods), and also shaped the structures within which the behavior of others took place. In addition to the coordinating behaviors mentioned above, war-making/conquest and the cultivation of urbanism (both the spread of urbanism and the patronage of capitals that became megacities) were two of the most consequential actions taken by ancient states.