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Setting the Rules of the Game

This chapter analyses the mainly juridical evidence (from the Digest and the late antique Codes, as well as Cassiodorus’ Variae) on the working of the market in the Roman Empire and the role played by the imperial authority in regulating it, in the light of the conceptualizations of the new institutional economics. This evidence seems to suggest undeniably not only that the economy of the Roman Empire, from its very beginning in the late Republic to late antiquity, was characterized by the free market, but also that maintaining competitive markets was the consistent and deliberate policy of the Roman authority throughout the whole of Roman history.