Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate

Bryson’s Management of the Estate (Oikonomikos Logos) offers advice on the key private concerns of the Roman elite: getting rich, managing slaves, love and marriage, and bringing up children. This estate owner is a farmer and a merchant, making his money through good and effective business. His wife is co-owner of the estate and their love promotes material prosperity. Their child needs twenty-four hour supervision in ‘all his affairs’. Bryson’s book was almost certainly written in the mid-first century AD, but survives mainly in Arabic. It had a profound effect on Islamic thinking on the economy and on marriage, but is virtually unknown to classicists. This new edition of the text together with the first English translation will appeal to Roman social and economic historians, students of imperial Greek literature and all those interested in the development of Greco-Roman thought in the Islamic empire of the Middle Ages.