As we learned in classes Adam Smith is the father of Economics. Did the Ancient Rome Empire have people developing economic theories, battling inflation, thinking about the forces of the market? And secondly was Rome a command economy?
No, it did not. The ancient world really had no conception of the economy in the way that we think about it. The genre of Oikonomia literally means rules for households, and are basically books like how to run your farm, how to make sure your family works well together, etc. There is no conception of the broader economy. Even if you are one of the people (like, e.g., Peter Temin) who thinks that there was a Roman market economy, there was no systematic Roman economic thought. The best book on this is M. I. Finley's The Ancient Economy.
In this book Finley argues both a historical and a historiographical position, although the two are intertwined. His historical position is that the ancients (defined as the Greeks and Romans from c. 1000 BC to c. 500 AD) had no conception of the economy in the way that we have it today: they had no word for the totality of goods and markets, and the basic words of the economic discipline, “labour, production, capital, investment, income, circulation, entrepreneur, utility, at least in the abstract form required for economic analysis” (21) did not exist in Greek and Latin. This historical point opens up a historiographical critique, of scholars who assess ancient thinking on matters such as buying and selling and land and money in terms of proto-modern economic thinking. Finley rejects the view that scholars can understand the ancient economy by using modern economic principles, to talk, e.g., about the land being the primary investment of the elites. It is far better, he argues, to think of the attachment to land from a social and moral standpoint than from an economic, return on investment standpoint.
There was no drive toward increasing the economy: “technical progress, economic growth, productivity, even efficiency have not been significant goals since the beginning of time. So long as an acceptable lifestyle could be maintained, however that was defined, other values held the stage” (147).
As for the question of the command economy, there's an argument to be made that the later (post-Diocletianic) empire was, or tried to be. A huge amount of economic activity was directed or at least influenced by the demands of the state, especially the army. But the Roman government is never actually that powerful, even at its most powerful, when compared with a modern government.