A friend recently sent me a link to one of the UK’s earliest-recorded “Commodity Conversations” – a letter sent by a certain Octavius to his brother Candidus in around AD 100. The letter is part of the Vindolanda tablets, a rich source of information about life on the northern frontier of Roman Britain. Written on fragments of thin, postcard sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with Hadrian’s Wall – photo above).
The documents record official military matters as well as personal messages to and from members of the garrison of Vindolanda (photo below), their families, and their slaves. Highlights of the tablets include an invitation to a birthday party held in about 100 AD, which is perhaps the oldest surviving document written in Latin by a woman.
In his letter, Octavius uses a variety of financial idioms and a few technical terms. The letter shows entrepreneurial initiative; the sums of money and goods mentioned are significant. The two brothers are involved in the supply of goods, mainly animal hides and grains, to the military. There is no way of knowing whether Octavius is a civilian entrepreneur and merchant, or a military officer responsible for organising supplies for the Vindolanda garrison.
The letter refers to credit arrangements, evidence for the operation of a cash economy. He writes,
“I have several times written to you that I have bought about five thousand modii of ears of grain, on account of which I need cash. Unless you send me some cash, at least five hundred denarii, the result will be that I shall lose what I have laid out as a deposit, about three hundred denarii, and I shall be embarrassed. So, I ask you, send me some cash as soon as possible.”
He instructs his brother to
“See with Tertius about the 8½ denarii which he received from Fatalis. He has not credited them to my account. Know that I have completed the 170 hides and I have 119 modii of threshed bracis. Make sure that you send me cash so that I may have ears of grain on the threshing-floor. Moreover, I have already finished threshing all that I had.
He then writes about what appears to be a customer default,
A messmate of our friend Frontius has been here. He was wanting me to allocate (?) him hides and that being so, was ready to give cash. I told him I would give him the hides by 1 March. He decided that he would come on 13 January. He did not turn up nor did he take any trouble to obtain them since he had hides. If he had given the cash, I would have given him them.
As I wrote in my book, Commodity Conversations, commodity trading is much older than the Roman Empire:
In ancient Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC, the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, created one of the first legal codes: the Code of Hammurabi. The code allowed for goods and assets to be sold for an agreed price for delivery at a future date. The code required contracts to be in writing and witnessed and allowed those contracts to be sold or assigned to others. This is the first recorded incidence of derivatives, in the form of forward and futures contracts, with trading carried out in the temples.
A few years back, Greg Page, at that time the executive chairman of Cargill, spoke at the FT Commodity Conference in Lausanne. He quoted Libanius, a Greek teacher of rhetoric, from his Orations III, written in the fourth century,
God did not bestow all products on all parts of the earth, but distributed his gifts over the different regions, to the end that men might cultivate a social relationship because one would have need of the help of another. And so he called commerce in to being, that all men might be able to have common enjoyment of the fruits of earth, no matter where produced.
Greg continued with his own view of the commodity business,
“Trading, or exchanging goods, has long underpinned human progress, and the interdependence that comes from trading creates the real capacity to raise living standards. Trading across national boundaries is a necessity, not a luxury, if the world wants to better serve the needs of its citizens. And as we face a global population reaching nine billion by midcentury, an even greater proportion of the world’s food will need to move across oceans to feed the people. National self-sufficiency in food will not suffice. Trading has always been important and will always continue to be so.”
There is not much I can add to that!