Prithee the addressee, as in "if it please you," "prithee" accompanies a request which addresses itself to the threat of being answered in the negative, as though the request were against the addressee's wishes. Stated otherwise, the word "please" suggests that the person being addressed is willing to comply with the request, whereas the word "prithee" suggests that he or she is not willing. This switch from stating the speaker's contrary desire to stating the speaker's wish not to impose signaled a cultural shift in the English-speaking world in which politeness became stated negatively rather than positively. Wider repercussions are observable
The Ancient Economy derives from a Greek word,οἰκονόμος, "one who manages a household". The household was the most important economic unit. Of course, they mined, taxed, and traded, but what the Ancients did not do was to combine all their commercial activities into an overarching sub-system of society, a giant marketplace where the means of production and distribution responded to market forces such as the cost of labor, supply and demand, trade routes, etc. Moreover, Finley takes the fact that the Ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a sophisticated accounting system as well as how imprecise or carefree they are about numerical