Peter Candy’s Ancient Maritime Loan Contracts is the first full-scale monograph on the written maritime loan contracts that played a central role in the ancient economy. Originally developed in Athens, their form remains consistent from at least the 420s BCE to the reign of Justinian and into the Middle Ages. The contracts primarily interest specialists in Greek and Roman economics and law, but Classicists and ancient historians working in a wide variety of subjects, regions, and eras are likely to encounter them and to need to understand how they worked. The book offers a clear and concise overview of the evidence, a synthesis of scholarship since the nineteenth century, and Candy’s own interventions in areas of controversy.
Most scholarship on maritime loan contracts focuses on either Athens or Rome. Candy offers what the preface calls a “holistic account.” Each of the five chapters considers both the Athenian and Roman contexts, showing how the standard form of the contracts provided a shared legal and commercial framework and how different conditions led to developments within that framework. The first two chapters are most concerned with economic systems and the latter three with the interaction between law and commerce. Even within this distinction, the intertwining of law and commerce is a prominent theme throughout. It concludes with two appendices, bibliography, index locorum, and general index. The indices, which italicize page numbers to distinguish detailed treatments from incidental mentions, are useful.
Chapter One, “Maritime Loan Contracts” addresses how the contracts were structured. As is well known, direct evidence for their form is slim and various. One complete contract is preserved as documentary evidence in a speech of Demosthenes (ca. 350 BCE), the terms of another are paraphrased in a discussion by Scaevola (second century CE) quoted in Justinian’s Digest, a third may be preserved in a lacunose Ptolemaic papyrus (second century BCE), and the latter part of a fourth may be preserved in the so-called Muziris papyrus (second century CE). The first part of the chapter presents translations of these four documents and explicates their terms, addressing textual complexities and controversies over meaning. The second part describes the standard clauses (such as those about yield, time limits, penalties, security, and the safe arrival of the ship), referring both to these four documents and to more abundant indirect evidence in, e. g., Attic oratory, papyri, and discussions of Roman jurists. The chapter illustrates two characteristics of Candy’s approach. First, it acknowledges, relies upon, and engages with past scholarship. The discussion of the Ptolemaic papyrus is a good example. Candy examines Wilcken’s conjecture [ἄτο]κα and the history of interpretation of why a lender would make an interest-free loan, concluding that a profit-sharing arrangement (Wilcken), a quid pro quo where a borrower agreed to perform a service in lieu of an interest payment (Wilhelm), or an accounting maneuver that counted the interest as part of the principal (Thür) are all reasonable explanations, given the state of the papyrus. A virtue of the book is that it summarizes such information (which is familiar to specialists) clearly for non-specialist readers. Second, Candy advances his own ideas. For instance, in discussing standard clauses, he introduces the concept of interlinked contracts, through which a merchant would agree both to borrow capital from a lender and to carry that lender’s freight. Candy proposes that such an arrangement lies behind the 1000 denarii that Menelaos from Keramos acknowledges receiving along with a contract of affreightment in a document of the first century CE preserved in the Sulpician archive.[1]
Chapter Two, “Maritime Loan Contracts and Long-Distance Trade,” traces the origin of the contract form in Athens and its development in Rome. In addressing Athenian merchants’ motivations for borrowing money, Candy considers the proposals of Cohen and Bresson and Bresson that they leveraged their own investments, borrowing more than they needed to fund the voyage to buy more goods in foreign ports, which they could then sell for a profit. He agrees that such a strategy would have been possible (and lucrative) but argues that the evidence points instead to a system where merchants, rather than aspiring to maximize their profits as sailors and traders, sought to make enough as quickly as possible to retire from the sea and become professional lenders.
Chapter Three, “Commercial Practice and Dispute Resolution,” outlines the mechanisms lenders could use to enforce contracts and mitigate the risk of a borrower’s default. In a step-by-step account first for Athens and then for Rome, it describes the preparation of the contract, the ways that creditors monitored debtors by placing representatives on their ships, the creditors’ rights in security, and then the process of negotiation, arbitration, and litigation. While the broad picture is clear, the details in individual situations are less so, thanks to the state of the evidence. In analyzing the famous borrowers’ club that Plutarch tells us Cato the Elder required merchants to join before he would lend them money, Candy offers a novel theory. He compares the borrowers’ association to a modern protection and insurance (P&I) club, suggesting that one of its key purposes was to ensure that only trustworthy people would be allowed to join. The proposal is compelling, but an example of one such P&I club in action would have made the comparison more vivid and easier to understand.
Chapter Four, “The Interpretation of Maritime Loan Contracts,” looks at the intersection of contracts with legal reasoning. Standard terms of the contracts are triggered by certain events: debtors may owe penalties for missing deadlines or creditors may lose their entire investment if a ship does not return safely. Through a series of case studies, Candy shows how the very different legal cultures of Athens and Rome balanced strict interpretation of such clauses with potentially mitigating circumstances. The Athenian sources—speeches by self-interested litigants—differ markedly from the Roman ones—sober conclusions of jurists and imperial constitutions. These types of documents are rarely compared directly, and Candy’s approach is productive, not least because it encourages scholars of each period to adopt a broader historical perspective. Candy appropriately avoids drawing sweeping conclusions, but the chapter is successful in showing that the core intellectual approach to interpreting contracts remains the same in both contexts: a concern with considering equity in determining justice. Athenian litigants are not systematic in their approach. The speaker of Demosthenes 56 argues for a strict interpretation of the contract when it favors him and appeals to mitigating circumstances—in this case the fault of the merchants—when it does not. Roman jurists, on the other hand, seek to situate maritime loan contracts within a framework applicable to all types of contracts and to administer it uniformly, as Candy shows in his discussion of a text from the quaestiones of Africanus explicating the rule that penalties apply only if debtors miss deadlines through their own fault. Rhetorical handbooks show a similar concern with mitigating circumstances in sections on stasis theory, and Candy’s argument in this chapter lays the foundation for a larger, cross-cultural study of this issue that could extend beyond the context of maritime loan contracts.
Chapter Five, “Financial Terminology and the Regulation of Interest Rates,” is the most technical part of the book. Candy accepts the conclusions of Cohen (in the Athenian context) and von Jhering (in the Roman one) that maritime loans differed from other loans not because of an inherent distinction between loans on land and loans at sea but because of the way they produced interest, or, more precisely, yield. Where Cohen continued to distinguish between the two categories of land and sea loan, however, Candy maintains that the Athenians recognized only one type of loan for consumption. Cohen placed the fundamental distinction in how yield is calculated. Candy prefers to situate the difference in what he terms the “structure of the transaction.” Without creating a new type of loan, he argues, the Athenians responded to commercial needs by introducing contracts that made repayment with yield dependent upon a ship’s returning to port. The distinction Candy draws with Cohen is a fine one, and, as I understand it, the two positions differ more in terms of what they emphasize than in terms of any core conceptual disagreement. The key question in the Roman context is whether the Romans distinguished loans subject to regular interest rates (usurae communes) from special sea loans that were not. Candy, with von Jhering, concludes that the Romans recognized a single type of loan that could generate a higher yield if it were subject to the uncertainty of a sea voyage and if the lender assumed the risk, but, if either of these conditions was absent, reverted to producing only usurae communes. I am less familiar with the complexities of the Roman context than the Athenian one, but the evidence Candy provides seems to support this framework. Particularly compelling is Candy’s interpretation of a dramatic seven months in Constantinople recorded in the Novels. In Candy’s reconstruction, Justinian does in fact seem to have set a limit to maritime yield in September 540, persuaded by the self-interested assertions of merchant borrowers, but in April 541 he was obliged to void that law, just in time for the next sailing season, probably because it had wreaked havoc with the financial underpinnings of the entire system of long-distance trade.
The first appendix, “The Enforcement of Maritime Loan Contracts in Classical Roman Law,” addresses how creditors could have hoped to recover the yield from recalcitrant borrowers. After reviewing past proposals, Candy concludes that the key factor is the long-recognized technique of including the yield in the amount of the loan rather than agreeing to it by stipulation. The second appendix includes the original Greek or Latin of six key texts discussed in the book, including the four translated in chapter one.
Ancient Maritime Loan Contracts is characterized by the clarity of Candy’s writing and the breadth of material he controls, both in terms of ancient sources and modern scholarship. At the same time, this is not a book for beginners, and some organizational choices detract from its clarity. To take one example, the technical expression pecunia traiecticia appears multiple times before Candy defines it in the book’s final chapter. Overall, the book is remarkably reader- friendly, especially considering its subject. Each chapter is structured through headings and subheadings, judicious use of bold and italicized text emphasizes key points, and chapter summaries keep the reader apprised of Candy’s most important conclusions. The copyright page informs us that “the book will be made open access within three years of publication,” which is welcome news both for specialists in ancient contract law and for all historians looking for a comprehensive, well-organized, and even-handed account of these documents.
Notes
[1] Candy develops this argument in a chapter of P. Candy and E. Mataix Ferrándiz, eds. Roman Law and Maritime Commerce. Edinburgh University Press. 2022.