Several recent studies have greatly enhanced our understanding of economic developments during the middle and late Republic, notably Philip Kay’s Rome’s Economic Revolution and James Tan’s Power and Public Finance at Rome. Neil Coffee’s Gift and Gain. How Money Transformed Ancient Rome seeks to extend this progress by examining a heretofore unstudied aspect of the Republican economy, namely gift exchange. Gift and Gain argues that alongside Rome’s commercial economy —the ordinary buying and selling aimed at profit, that is “gain”—and deeply entwined with it there existed an economy based on gift exchange. Reciprocal generosity characterized the gift economy, which sought to establish and enhance affective ties between the participants in a world where self-help and mutual aid were essential. The story Gift and Gain tells then is one in which Rome’s imperial expansion and the vast inflow of money into the pockets of the Republic’s citizens, and especially its elite, increasingly displaced this early practice of reciprocal gift exchange with the economy of “gain” as gifts came more and more to be viewed as a means to the ends of the latter. That is, no longer did affection and generosity motivate gifts but instead some profit for the giver, either material or some other advantage. Despite the efforts of the senate and its individual members to preserve the distinction between gift and gain, the economy of gift exchange waned over the Republic’s last two centuries until by the early Empire the commercial economy prevailed whether this was transacted through gifts or straightforward buying and selling.