lacked any calculated or systematic knowledge of rational accounting.
This is one aspect of Finley’s thesis to which there has been a huge
academic response. There is plenty of evidence for‘rational accounting’,
particularly from Egyptian papyri, although evidence of accounting
practices does not necessarily amount to strategies that used year on
yearfigures as a basis for future agricultural plans. Accounts provided
ledgers for recording private estate operations and dues owed by tenants,
so were driven by annual rural dynamics. The productivity of estates is
much harder to define and even harder to demonstrate. In many ways,
historians may be aiming at the wrong sort of target. Attempts to
quantify the best-documented case study, namely that of Ptolemaic
and Roman Egypt, can most usefully be seen as heuristic devices. The
process should not be seen as a data-generating mechanism; such an
experiment amounts to no more than‘an ongoing, iterative exercise in
the building of an open model that can be used by many scholars,
experimenting with different values and incorporating new evidence as
it becomes available’(in Roger Bagnall’sdefinition).^55
At the same time, Finley did not care to examine how the members of
his prime Greek status group, namely the Athenian propertied classes,
maintained their income, whilst paying for public liturgies; and what
kind of effect such payments may have had on the revenues of individual
families. Analysis of the Athenian liturgical class, that is of known
individuals whose names can be connected with exceptional incomes,
with direct payment of trierarchies, or of festival liturgies, or who
qualified for the enlarged group of(pro)eisphoratax payers in the fourth
century, indicates that only four hundred men in thefifth century, and
(^55) Finley 1985 [1999], 95–122, esp. 97–109, 111–118; on accounting see esp. Macve
1985; contributors to Verboven et al. 2008 (especially, in this context, those of M. Faraguna,
L. Migeotte, V. Chankowski, V. Gabrielsen, K. Geens, K. Vandorpe and W. Clarysse). There
is now a substantial literature on the productivity of Roman agriculture and from a range of
perspectives, none of which maps directly onto Finley’s approach; see e.g.CEHGRW, 506 –
10 (J.-P. Morel, on Cato and second-century agricultural production, including wine
exports, emphasizing some of the economic disparities that were beginning to cause
profound social tension); 514, 523–8 (W. V. Harris: concentrates on some very significant
fortunes in the early Empire; some degree of serious exploitation of slave labour, including
women and children, but outnumbered by men); 550–9 (D. Kehoe: emphasizes various
forms of evidence in support of crop diversification and rotation, all of which served to
enhance crop yields; enhancements resulting from livestock rearing, the use of olive and
vine presses; irrigation and other forms of technological investment; villa production for
markets; different yields resulting from tenancies, especially under imperial legislation, the
most notable examples being thelex Mancianaand thelex Hadriana de rudibus agris,
documented in the imperial estates of the Bagradas valley in north Africa). Cf. also Bowman
in Bowman and Wilson 2009, 177–204, and Roger Bagnall’s response, 205–9, with the
citation above on p. 208.
Societies and economies 107