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This chapter introduces the major themes of the collection Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East. It surveys the arguments of David Graeber’s 2011 monograph Debt: The First 5,000 Years and situates them in the wider context of the author’s oeuvre. It examines the implications of his anthropological theory of value and makes a case that it has the potential to widen the field of vision of ancient historians. Unlike the currently dominant paradigm of new institutional economics, which tends to see the market as the natural and efficient resource allocation mechanism, it directs attention to the processes by which some fields of life were subjected to quantitative logics and others were not. The chapter concludes by exploring to what extent the studies assembled in this volume corroborate or modify the picture of ancient economic history presented in Debt. It suggests that Graeber’s concept of a “military–coinage–slavery” complex provides a useful analytic for understanding the ways in which the expansion of state power, the creation of new commodity markets, and the emergence of new forms of rationality reinforced each other in different ancient societies.

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Since Mommsen, it has been a tenet of Roman history that Augustus transformed the ‘senatorial order’ into a hereditary class, which encompassed senators, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the male line. This paper shows that the idea of a hereditary ordo senatorius is a myth without foundation in the evidence. Augustus and his successors conferred new rights and duties upon relatives of senators, but did not change their formal rank. Moreover, the new regulations applied not to three generations of descendants, but only to persons who stood under a senator's patria potestas during his lifetime. Emperors protected the honour and property of these filii familias of senators, in order to incentivise them to participate in politics and invest their wealth into munificence. The Supplementary Material available online gives all known early imperial holders of the title clarissimus vir in the province of Africa (Supplementary Appendix 1), all known early imperial clarissimi iuuenes (Supplementary Appendix 2) and all known early imperial clarissimi pueri (Supplementary Appendix 3).

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