Despite the long research tradition of using comic texts as sources for questions in economic history, the clarification of methodological issues in particular remains a desideratum. Comedies and satires are complex literary products; only at first glance do they provide direct access to the lived realities of antiquity.
The guiding insight for the conference’s conception is that the laughter of an era offers profound insights into its social order, because comedy is based on the playful frustration of everyday expectations. The three classical comic techniques—exaggeration, inversion, and transgression—indirectly point to the normative order of society. Comedy therefore not only marks social rules but also indicates their degree of validity and the extent of tolerance for their violation. Because of this multidimensionality, comedy and satire are not merely another group of sources but indeed among the most important historical sources for the study of ancient economic history. More than any other genre, they make it possible to reconstruct the lifeworldly context of economic activity.
The conference brings together interdisciplinary research approaches within a longue durée perspective: the period under investigation ranges from Greek Classical antiquity (5th century BCE) to the Roman Imperial period (2nd century CE). Topics addressed include, among others, trade, monetization, the political dimension of abundance and scarcity, value and the commodity character of (immaterial) goods, the role of law, exchange and purchasability as metaphors, and the moral evaluation of wealth and social mobility. The search for “hard” economic facts is thus combined with the reconstruction of the socio-cultural embedding of economic activity in value discourses and literary representations.