04/03 Melissa Kutner (UMBC): "Enslavement, Education, and Roman Accounting"

Economic accounts from Roman Egypt often stand for Roman accounting in general, since few survive elsewhere. But a reliance on Egypt may obscure the full variety of Roman accounting, especially regarding the education and experiences of accountants themselves. This is because accountants in the early western Roman Empire were often enslaved, while enslavement was less pervasive in Roman Egypt. Focusing particularly on education, I argue that the experiences of accountants differed sharply between these contexts. Educational mathematical texts in Egypt range from arithmetical tables to complex geometrical problems. While not all of them necessarily reflect the education of every accountant or manager, taken together they suggest a broad and challenging mathematical education, which coincided to some extent with literary training. Evidence from the western Roman Empire and Italy, though much sparser, suggests a more limited mathematical education with fewer connections to prestigious geometrical problems, much less to literary education. Educational contexts, meanwhile, were more coercive and exploitative, with seemingly less scope for a sense of professional identity and community among accountants. Whether this impacted accounting practice remains unclear due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence. But debates about the nature of Roman accounting should attempt to grapple with this variety in experience.