Roman banking
David Jones has written an article on some 1st century AD banking records. He tells of the Sulpicii who provided finance for grain merchants in Puteoli, the port of entry for Egyptian wheat coming to Rome. Somehow, a collection of wax writing tablets recording the transactions turned up in a suburb of Pompeii. David looked carefully at the tablets from the point of view of his own experience of modern banking: “bankers are bankers in any age” and he found a pattern of deposits and profitable lending just as you might expect but still feel slightly surprised that societies so far distant in time should behave as we do. The Sulpicii, he concluded, “provided short-term loans for small business enterprise and bridging finance for well-to-do individuals. To fund this, they took in deposits from property owners, merchants and foreign residents and members of the imperial household.”
The article appears in Friends of Classics’s journal (Vol XXXIV). David is a fellow Classicist who used to be a financial journalist with the Times and the Investor’s Chronicle. The article is based on his book, “The Bankers of Puteoli” Tempus 2006. I will be putting it on my birthday list.
