Roman historians refer to this period as the "Crisis of the 3rd Century." And the reason is that the problems of the Roman society in that period were so profound, so enormous, that Roman society emerged from the 3rd century very different in almost all ways from what it had been in the 1st and 2nd centuries. We may begin by looking at the mentality of the rulers of the Roman Empire, beginning at the end of the 2nd century AD and looking through to the end of the 3rd century AD. This point is central, I believe, to an understanding of the course of monetary policy in the late Roman Empire. If it also happens to enhance the prosperity and progress of the masses of the people, that is a secondary benefit but its first aim is to serve the needs of the rulers, not the ruled. Monetary policy therefore always serves, even if it serves badly, the perceived needs of the rulers of the state. And they are all so intertwined because any state normally seeks to monopolize the supply of money within its own territory. Monetary, fiscal, military, political, and economic issues are all very much intertwined. My analysis is based on the premise that monetary policy cannot be studied, or understood, in isolation from the overall policies of the state.
I've been asked to speak on the theme of Roman history, particularly the problem of inflation and its impact. And scholars since Gibbon have devoted a great deal of energy to examining that problem: How was it that the Roman Empire lasted so long? And did it decline, or was it simply transformed into something else (that something else being the European civilization of which we are the heirs)? Gibbon, in looking at this phenomenon, commented that the wonder was not that the Roman Empire had fallen, but rather that it had lasted so long. Gibbon's multivolume work is the tale of a state that survived for twelve centuries in the West and for another thousand years in the East, at Constantinople. One of them was Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and the other was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two centuries ago, in 1776, there were two books published in England, both of which are read avidly today.
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