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The Greek, Hellenistic and Roman worlds were characterized by a culture of knowledge that fostered and celebrated innovation and invention. Greeks and Romans not only embraced technological practices developed elsewhere in earlier periods, maximizing their use, but also saw the diffusion of a broad range of inventions and innovations in agriculture, manufacturing, construction, transport, and communication. These innovations not only had a tangible impact on everyday material culture, but also supported the increasingly complex social, economic and political networks that came to characterize the ancient Mediterranean.

Graeco-Roman antiquity was a pre-industrial and agrarian society. It had limited means to circulate knowledge, and there were structural constraints on the emergence and diffusion of innovations compared to the early modern and modern world. At the same time, the Graeco-Roman world grew into an increasingly vast and complex conglomerate of social, political, and economic networks that facilitated (and fostered) innovation more than ever before, which resulted in significant change in technological practice and a well-developed consumer culture in which invention and knowledge could be appreciated and celebrated.

The social worlds of artisans and craftsmen were structured around skill on both conceptual and practical levels. On a conceptual level, artisans employed skill (τέχνη / ars) as a crucial component of the identities they constructed for themselves—identities that differed distinctly from perceptions of artisans among the elite, who dismissed most craftsmen as “base” manual labourers. On a practical level, the importance of apprenticeship as a tool for the acquisition of skill had a profound impact on the social profile of artisans and craftsmen: while it ensured that skill could be acquired by both free and enslaved artisans, it limited opportunities for women and for children born into households of low economic status. From an economic perspective, the small workshop remained the backbone of artisanal production. The ubiquity of small workshops in the economy can be explained best as the product of artisans’ efforts to respond to the risks created by product markets in which demand was inherently seasonal and uncertain. With some exceptions, artisans sought to mitigate their exposure to risk by minimizing fixed costs, while nevertheless preserving the ability to expand their output in periods of elevated demand. This was true even in industries that fostered specialization in discrete and technically demanding stages of a vertical production process: in these industries, artisans typically coordinated their production not within integrated firms, but rather within subcontracting networks.