The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  In short, Rome had not displayed any very great audacity or ingenuity either in Germania, where success would probably have required control of the Baltic and North Sea, or in the Euphrates valley, the vast expanses of which could be crossed with ease only on horseback. Fallout from this failure was to affect the first steps taken by Hadrian (117-38). Trajan’s successor spent most of his reign visiting and reinforcing his frontiers. The first thing he did was to evacuate the provinces created by Trajan beyond the Euphrates. The reaction to this common-sense policy was the conspiracy of 118 which ended in the execution of Trajan’s generals, Cornelius Palma and Lucius Quietus. All imperialist expansion ceased forthwith. The Empire had reached its definitive outline: it would now shelter behind a miniature version of the Great Wall of China. Rome had stopped devouring territory.

  This halt was called for internal rather than external reasons, as if suddenly Rome had lost the appetite for expansion. If ‘optimism and nationalist sentiment died with Trajan’, as J.-L. Lauguer puts it, one should not hold Hadrian responsible. The new regime suited the Empire, since it proved durable, becoming established in what one might call a monotonous and unexciting routine, but also bringing the Pax Romana, an unrivalled benefit. And if the whole edifice remained intact for so long, was it simply because of the solidity of the wood, earth and stone of the Roman defence works, the efficiency of its roads, the remarkable organization of a well-disciplined, well-trained and enthusiastic army, itself anxious to deploy its variously recruited men and the social mobility it represented? Once the price of Rome’s own security had been estimated and paid by the praetorian cohorts, the Empire still needed to deploy about thirty legions along the endless perimeter of the fortified frontiers, perhaps as many as 300,000 men, a figure at once enormous and derisory. Did the solidity of the Empire not also depend therefore on the simple fact that Hadrian’s forced retreat, and Antoninus’ immobilism, were matched by the complicity and agreement of the population outside the Empire’s frontiers?

  Later on, when the great steppes began to see the stirrings of unrest once more, as restlessness in the far east drove the Parthians westwards from 162 and the Germans from 168, the limes quickly turned out to be powerless against this human tide, and the Empire lost the initiative for centuries to come, to the advantage of the primitive populations which surrounded and harassed it. Rome’s defence became now more than ever a question of resources, of the quality of its men and their intelligence. It had to face ten, twenty, a hundred problems at once, all without any real solution – or rather requiring a miracle, a providential saviour such as Diocletian (245-313).

  But saviours often die in the attempt. From then on, a tragic landscape formed the backcloth of the Empire as, assailed from without and within, wounded and bleeding, it still clung to life.

  Ill A Mediterranean civilization:

  Rome’s real achievement

  With Rome victorious, the Mediterranean continued to be true to its own identity. That meant diversity over time and place, and a wealth of different colours, for in this sea of age-old riches, nothing ever disappeared without trace: sooner or later everything surfaced once more. But at the same time, the Mare nostrum, as centuries of the Pax Romana encouraged trade between regions, also displayed a certain unity in style and life. This civilization, as it became established, would become one of the most outstanding in human history.

  Currents and counter-currents

  The chief feature of this civilization was the Latin language, and with it the Latin religion, and Roman style of life. These gained ground without difficulty once the legions had prepared the way by conquest,for example in North Africa until the time of Septimus Severus (193-zii); in Dacia after Trajan’s brutal triumphs; in Gaul until the first century ad, though with some curious reversals: ‘worship of Mars outstripped Mercury in the Narbonnaise and eliminated him altogether in Aquitaine proper, whereas Mercury drove out Mars in the east and overtook him in the militarized zone of the Agri Decumates’.

  But there were also counter-currents dictated by obstinate loyalties, by the refusal to come into line, whether in Syria with the revival of pre-Hellenic cults, or in Gaul with the spread of Druid religions, which escaped Roman vigilance. And what is one to say of the strong cult of Mithras, which reached Italy and Rome itself, having spread through the soldiers’ camps; or of St Paul, defending Christianity in Athens in front of the Areopagus? These were part of a deep-seated refusal to bend the knee. The east remained faithful to its ancient languages; Greek constantly and successfully challenged the supremacy of Latin. Indeed this was the essential imbalance in the cultural life of the vast sea.

  A shared civilization was more easily assimilated when it came to the details of material life. The Cisalpine hood, the poenula, was worn in Rome as well as in colder countries; Italian wine seduced the Gauls; while the braces, breeches and woven goods of Gaul were exported over the Alps; the Greek pallium, a garment consisting simply of a broad length of woollen cloth passed over the shoulder and secured at the waist, became the preferred garb of many Romans, especially philosophers; Tiberius when in exile in Rhodes wore one all the time. Cooks exchanged recipes and spices, gardeners exchanged seeds, cuttings and grafts. The sea had long made such voyages possible, but with the unlimited authority of the Empire, barriers fell and transfers happened more quickly.

  The landscape: still recognizably the same

  In a short and stimulating article writen in 1940, Lucien Febvre imagined how surprised Herodotus, ‘the father of history’, would be, if he could see the Mediterranean peasants of the twentieth century. Pliny the Elder, who lived only a few centuries later than Herodotus (ad 13-79), would not have been so astonished.

  Still, even Pliny had never seen the eucalyptus (a nineteenth-century arrival from Australia) or the plants imported after the discovery of America: sweet peppers, aubergines and tomatoes, the ubiquitous Barbary fig, maize, tobacco and many ornamental flowers. He did know, because he had reflected upon it, that plants and cuttings can travel and that they had certainly spread through the Mediterranean. Things usually moved from east to west. So we read in Pliny that ‘the cherry tree did not exist in Italy before the victory of Lucullus over Mithridates [73 BC]. He brought the first one from the Black Sea and in a hundred and twenty years it had crossed the ocean and even reached Britannia.’ Still in Pliny’s time, peach- and apricot-trees had just arrived in Italy, the former probably originating in China and coming via Asia Minor, the latter from Turkestan. Walnut- and almond-trees from the east had only recently arrived. The quince, no doubt an earlier arrival, had come from Crete. The chestnut was a fairly late gift from Asia Minor. Cato the Elder (234-149 BC) does not mention it.

  Of all these travellers, the three oldest, which we imagine to be rooted since the beginning of time on the shores of Mediterranean, are wheat (and its related cereals), vines and olive-trees. A native of Arabia and Asia Minor, the olive-tree was probably carried westward by the Phoenicians and Greeks, and the Romans completed the work of diffusion. ‘Today,’ Pliny writes, ‘it has crossed the Alps and reached the centre of Gaul and Spain,’ that is, it had already passed its optimum geographical habitat. It was even reported to have been tried in England!

  Vines too were planted everywhere, despite rain, wind and frost, since the first far-off times when planters took an interest in lambrusco, a wild vine with fruit containing but little sugar, probably originating in Transylvania. The determination of the peasant vinegrower, the different tastes of drinkers, and the minute variations of soil and microclimate led to the creation of hundreds of varieties of vine in the Mediterranean. There were many ways of growing them: on stakes, left to trail on the ground, or trained up trees, such as elms or even the tall poplars of Campania. Pliny provides an endless list of varieties of vine and the way to grow them, as well as an already quite impressive list of fine wines. He is equally eloquent about types of wheat, theirspecific weight and flour content, or the value to men and animals alike
of barley, oats, rye, beans and chick peas.

  Oil, wine, cereals and pulses – between them they provided virtually the entire basic daily fare of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean. To complete the picture, we have only to include flocks of sheep, coming down the mountains in winter in southern Italy to make Tarentum a wool town, and some characteristic plants such as box, sad cypress, Pluto’s funereal tree, and toxic taxus, poisonous yew, ‘hardly green, frail and sad’ – and we could almost be standing at Pliny’s side, surveying the classical landscape of the hills and plains of the Mediterranean. Like him, we might – and why not? – prefer to all the perfumes of Egypt and Araby the intoxicating scent of olive-trees in flower and the wild roses of Campania.

  This geography helps explain many things: the Roman world was based on an agricultural economy governed by principles which would remain in force for many hundreds of years, until the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. The division of the economy into sectors delegated to poorer regions the task of producing grain, while allowing the richer ones the benefits of vines, olives and livestock. Here originated the split between advanced economies, such as Italy, and backward ones like North Africa or Pannonia, the latter, however, being better balanced and less vulnerable than the former. In any given zone, the landscape might be closer to one or other of these poles and a dividing line separated what cannot quite be called a developed economy from an under-developed one. The line did not become sharply drawn, and then not always, until industry, capitalism and growing population provided the impetus, that is until a free market became established.

  Towns and technology

  The Empire was characterized by its towns and cities: both the older ones, which continued to exist on their ancient sites and, like the Greek cities, set Rome an example with their developed urban culture and its refinements, and the new towns, most of them founded in the western Empire, often far from the Mediterranean. Brought into being by a Roman power which shaped them in its own image, they provided the means of transplanting to far-flung places a series of cultural goods, always identifiably the same. Set down in the midst of often primitive local peoples, they marked the staging-posts of a civilization of self-promotion and assimilation. That is one reason why these towns were all so alike, faithfully corresponding to a model which hardly changed over time and place. What towns could have been more ‘Roman’ in character than the military and trading cities along the Rhine-Danube axis?

  Every Roman town depended on stone-built roads, intended for pack animals and soldiers laden with their impedimenta. Each road, on arriving at its destination, led straight into the city from the countryside which surrounded it on all sides like a sea. Neither Pompeii in Campania, nor Timgad in Numidia had suburbs, such as one regularly finds around medieval cities, with their slums, flea-infested inns, workshops for noisy or malodorous trades, sheds for carts, and stables for post-horses. Indeed, there was hardly any wheeled traffic on Roman roads, and no post-horses except for imperial messengers, while urban manufacture had not yet spread outside the city centre. The trades could all be found inside the city, sometimes grouped by street: bakers, barbers, weavers, innkeepers. In Pompeii, the taverns were rather like ‘modern snack bars, where customers could be served instant food, and where the rooms were often hired by the hour’. We would not have felt lost looking in at a Roman bakery: the equipment and working practices have come down to us through the ages. The Roman smithy could still be seen not long ago in any French village, with its furnace, bellows, pincers to hold red-hot iron, and anvil. The fulling basin or the shears of the cloth-cutter look exactly the same in Roman sculptures and in medieval paintings.

  Similar reflections come to mind if one contemplates the Romans’ lifting gear, pulleys and cranes; their methods of quarrying stone and the stone lathes used to finish cylindrical columns; or their brick walls built exactly like those of today. However, baked brick was not in general use in Greece until the third century BC, reaching Rome a couple of hundred years later. It was a costly building material, and its use indicates a certain rise in living standards.

  The major innovation in this field, starting about 200 BC, was the technology of concrete. What the Romans called opus caementiciumwas originally a simple mixture of sand, lime and stone chips. Later on, the lime was replaced either with pozzolana, volcanic ash from Pozzuoli, which gave good hydraulic concrete, or crushed brick dust, which produced the reddish mortar so typical of many imperial buildings. Left to harden in moulds made of planks, this concrete mixture, which was waterproof, enabled the Romans to build quickly and cheaply major buildings of previously unheard-of design, with arches and vaults bigger than any earlier architects had managed. When the moulds were taken away, this early ‘industrial’ material could be faced with stone, stucco, mosaic or even brick, to give it a more noble appearance: it certainly played an important role in the building of the many city centres of the Roman Empire.

  The plan of these city centres was virtually identical in all cases. Around the forum, a rectangular space paved with large flagstones, would stand the temple of the three gods of the Capitol: Jupiter, Juno and Minerva; then would come the curia, or local senate (the decurions were the city’s senators and the duumviri its consuls), the basilica, which might have a colonnade, where lawsuits were heard and where strollers could seek shelter on rainy days, though they could also find cover under the portico surrounding the forum. The forum was always a market place, even when there were other markets near by, and was periodically appropriated by peasants selling fruit, vegetables, poultry or lambs. Other buildings always to be found close to the centre included theatres, amphitheatres, circuses, latrines and baths. Baths in particular took up an immense amount of space. Under the Empire, they were ‘the cafes and clubs of Roman cities’, the place to go at the end of the day. Finally there were the triumphal arches, monumental gates, libraries, and the aqueducts vital for the massive water consumption of the city-dwellers. This completes the list of features found in all Roman cities, according to an almost invariable plan.

  There were a few exceptions: Leptis Magna had a forum outside the town; Aries had a portico underneath the forum, which was built on top of it, as if on pillars. Timgad put its ‘Capitol’ outside its walls. These anomalies, dictated by the expansion of the city or the peculiarities of the site, did not affect the basic plan, which we find endlessly repeated. New towns were usually built by the labour of soldiers and local inhabitants, workers who were more numerous than they were expert. The idea was to have a simple design and work quickly. Starting from the centre, the future forum, a north-south line was drawn, the cardo> and an east-west line, the decumanus: they met at right angles in the forum, providing the median axes along which the city would be built. In Lutetia (now Paris), the forum of the small open town on the left bank of the Seine was underneath the present-day rue Soufflot, the cardo ran along the rue Saint-Jacques, the baths were on the site of the Musee de Cluny and the College de France, and a semi-amphitheatre stood on the site today known as the Ardnes de Lutece.

  Of course these elements had themselves travelled a good distance before being assembled to make up the composite model of the Roman city. The forum was a version of the Greek agora, as was the portico. The theatre too was Greek in origin, although Rome altered it considerably. The basilica came from Greece as well: Cato the Elder probably built the first one in Rome, the Basilica Porcia. The Roman temple borrowed much from Greece at first, via the Etruscan temple. The amphitheatres (where gladiatorial combats or venatio with wild beasts took place) were probably of Campanian origin, while the thermal baths were also probably from pre-Roman southern Italy.

  In short, Rome took a great deal from elsewhere – which is not to say that it was inferior. It borrowed much and gave much back, as all long-lasting civilizations do, and as indeed Greece had done.

  Cities and Empire

  Rome was thus at the head of a federation of towns and cities, each handling its own affairs
, while overall control was vested in Rome.

  Prospering until about the second or third century ad, these cities thereafter fell upon hard times. If we accept the pessimistic but probably accurate view of Ferdinand Lot, they were not inhabited by sufficiently large populations. Rome, Alexandria, and possibly Antioch, were the only large cities of the Empire until the rise of Constantinople. Networks of second-rank towns were conspicuous by their absence. Timgad was the only town for miles around, but it had merely fifteen thousand inhabitants at most. What was more, while the town acted as political centre and market place for the localcountryside, the town-country relationship was not mutual. In other words, the town did not fulfil for its region that manufacturing role which would later enable the economy of medieval Europe to take off. Should we blame the great estates and their workshops, where labour was carried out by slaves or ‘colonists’, small farmers already chained to the land? Was it because the known sources of energy were not systematically used? Or was it simply that the depressing economic situation was more to blame than structural features for the stagnation and then decay of the towns?

  The impression that the towns’ destiny was linked to that of the Empire is not inaccurate. The Empire had long enabled them to rise. It had created a vast economic area, or at any rate made it possible to operate within it; it had promoted a monetary economy of sorts, which increased trade, and a form of capitalism, limited perhaps but already in possession of the essential elements, all in fact inherited from the Hellenistic world, such as merchant guilds, and quoted prices on the exchange (the forum at Rome). Alongside the tnercatores or merchants there were already bankers (argentarii) who offered credit, the proscriptio, a sort of cheque, and the permutatio, a kind of transfer. But these modern terms may give a misleading image of an economy which was very quickly to be caught in the lethal toils of the state, even before the downturn of the last centuries of the Empire.