Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam

Bryson's Management of the Estate (Oikonomikos Logos) offers advice on the key private concerns of the Roman elite: getting rich, managing slaves, love and marriage, bringing up children. This estate owner is a farmer and a merchant, making his money through good and effective business. His wife is co-owner of the estate and their love promotes material prosperity. Their child needs twenty-four hour supervision in 'all his affairs'. Bryson's book was almost certainly written in the mid-first century AD, but survives mainly in Arabic. It had a profound effect on Islamic thinking on the economy and on marriage, but is virtually unknown to classicists. This new edition of the text together with the first English translation will appeal to Roman social and economic historians, students of imperial Greek literature and all those interested in the development of Greco-Roman thought in the Islamic empire of the Middle Ages.

Author: Simon Swain
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 06/10/2013
Pages: 585
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.35lbs
Size: 9.10h x 5.90w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9781107025363

About the Author
Swain, Simon: - Simon Swain is Chair of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick. He is the author of a number of well-known studies of the Greek literature of the Roman period and is co-editor (with Jaś Elsner and Stephen Harrison) of Severan Culture (Cambridge, 2007).