ABSTRACT
TRADE and industry played very much less significant roles in the Roman Empire than in the modern world : inevitably so, since technology was backward and transportation primitive. Ships sailed only between April and September, and as the horse-collar had not been invented, the ox, the donkey and the camel had to be used as the beasts of burden. Agriculture rather than commerce was the great source of wealth, and its methods were wasteful of land and labour. The alternate year of fallow was normal; handmills, rather than water mills, ground the grain. Nevertheless there had been a great burgeoning of economic activity under the Principate, and by a.d. 100 the Empire may have been exchanging goods and services on as large a scale as Europe ever attained before the later Middle Ages.
