| Unit name | Economy and Society in the Ancient World |
|---|---|
| Unit code | CLAS22331 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | I/5 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Professor. Morley |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of Classics & Ancient History |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Traditionally, ancient historians have focused on the activities of the upper classes of Greece and Rome, on politics, war and high culture; these are, after all, the major preoccupations of most of the surviving literary sources. Little evidence survives of the lives of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the ancient world, and yet it was the labour of these untold millions of peasants, labourers, freedmen and women and slaves which enabled the upper classes to pursue their leisured interests and to create what we now know as 'classical civilisation'. This unit will make use of traditional literary sources, archaeology, evidence from comparable 'pre-industrial' societies and modern theories such as anthropology to reconstruct the economic and social structures of antiquity and to see how the 'material base' of ancient society shaped the development of the civilisations of Greece and Rome.
