Rome

by Woolf, Greg

  When a Roman army marched out against Samnites or Tarentines, Epirots or Gauls, its general commanded an army composed of citizens and allies.17 When consuls levied their citizen armies, each allied community was sent orders to provide their own quota of troops. Allied detachments were commanded by their own leaders, and brigaded alongside the Roman forces. Those leaders were drawn from the same sort of propertied classes as ruled Rome: Romans tended to support those classes in allied communities, siding with Greek aristocrats against democrats, and Etruscan nobles against their serfs.18 The ruling classes of Italian cities had much in common with each other, and a community of interest must also have consolidated Roman power. Athens’s short-lived empire had foundered in part on the promotion of democracy among its lesser allies, and on strengthening the ideology of citizenship: Roman hegemony, by contrast, always stressed class solidarity among the elites. The seeds of an aristocratic empire had been sown. Rome exacted no regular taxes, nor any tribute in kind from its allies: they generally received a share of booty from victorious campaigns, and in some colonial foundations some of the Latins even received grants of land. Perhaps Roman rule did not seem entirely oppressive to members of the propertied classes, more like a movement that benefited those drawn into it.

  Pyrrhus and History

  King Pyrrhus had ruled the tiny Balkan kingdom of the Molossians since 306 BC. Macedon had expanded on the margins of the Greek world to produce Alexander, who died in 323 BC master of the Persian Empire and overlord of most of the Greek world. Pyrrhus’ kingdom was on the margins of Macedonia, and he spent most of his career trying to imitate his great neighbour and predecessor. Epirus corresponds roughly to what is now north-west Greece. It looks westwards, towards the Adriatic, and beyond it to that part of southern Italy known as Magna Graecia (Greater Greece) because of the wealth accumulated there by the Greek cities founded in the archaic period. The Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily had had their own complex history through the archaic and classical periods, fighting wars between each other and against and alongside Etruscans and Carthaginians. During the fifth century some of the Greek cities immediately south of Rome were captured and taken over by peoples from the Italian interior. Lucanians took control of Posidonia around 390 and ruled it for just over a century before Rome took control in 273 and made it into the Latin colony of Paestum. Majestic archaic Greek temples, Lucanian tombs, and a model Roman city stand side by side today.

  Fig 3. A bust of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, Roman copy after a Greek original, from the Villa of the Papyri, Ercolano (ancient Herculaneum), Campania Region, Italy

  But in the far south of the peninsula, and in Sicily, the larger Greek cities were more successful. If Rome and Carthage were hegemonic powers, then so were Greek Syracuse and Taranto. It was Taranto which called in Pyrrhus. This was nothing new for them. They had had an alliance with one of Pyrrhus’ predecessors, and had tried to get help from Sparta and others in recent years. The novelty was the enemy, Rome, which in 284 had founded a colony on the Adriatic at Sena Gallica. For Rome, this was an extension of their wars in the Apennines: the name of the colony shows they had their eyes on the Gallic tribes of Marché and the Po Valley. But the Tarentines were right that the Romans had more grandiose ambitions. Two years later they intervened in the affairs of Rhegium, on the toe of Italy, and of Taranto’s neighbour Thurii, leading to direct conflict. No one can have been in any doubt that Rome was extending its hegemony in all directions. Taranto was next.

  Pyrrhus’ expedition into southern Italy hardly changed the world. He arrived in 281, and inflicted a couple of defeats on the Romans: he may have won the battles but the cost was so high that it has given us the phrase ‘a Pyrrhic Victory’. He was then invited to Sicily to fight Carthage on behalf of Greek cities there, which he did with less success. Returning to Italy he was defeated by a Punic fleet, and then fought another, less conclusive, battle with a Roman army. Those reverses prompted him to return to Epirus in 275. Pyrrhus was no Alexander. Three years later he was dead, killed in a botched attempt to wrest control of the Greek city of Argos from Macedon. The Romans took Taranto the same year. The significance of the Pyrrhic War, however, was that it put Rome on the Greek map. From this point on, Rome has proper history. One of the Greeks who wrote an account of Rome’s war with Pyrrhus was his contemporary Timaeus, a native of Taormina in Sicily, who spent fifty years in exile in Athens writing the first connected history of the western Mediterranean. That work is lost, but it has left traces in the histories and geographies composed by Greeks and by Romans over the following centuries. Roman history was only a minor part of his output. But so little else had been written that it was a vital source even for the first Roman to write history, Fabius Pictor, and both directly and indirectly also for Polybius, the Greek historian who wrote a continuation during his own exile in Rome. Thanks to Timaeus and his continuators it is possible, from the third century on at least, to write detailed political history with secure chronology. Thanks to Pyrrhus, the scale of Roman hegemony was now clear across the Mediterranean. Greek cities began to send embassies to Rome from the early second century. Among them were appeals for military help, as Greek cities and Balkan peoples asked the Romans to cross the Adriatic in the opposite direction to Pyrrhus.

  Further Reading

  Archaeological understanding of the appearance of cities and states in the early last millennium BC is progressing rapidly thanks not only to new evidence but also to advances in the way we understand it. The state of the question is presented in a series of essays edited by Robin Osborne and Barry Cunliffe and entitled Mediterranean Urbanization 800–600 BC. On the immediate vicinity of Rome see Christopher Smith’s Early Rome and Latium (Oxford, 1996). An excellent archaeological introduction to the Etruscans is provided by Graeme Barker and Tom Rasmussen, The Etruscans (Oxford, 1998). Guy Bradley, Elena Isayev, and Corinna Riva’s Ancient Italy (Exeter, 2007) gives a good sense of the wider Italian world into which Rome expanded.

  Tim Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome (London, 1995) is now the standard introduction to early Roman history. Mario Torelli’s Studies in the Romanization of Italy (Edmonton, 1995) gives an excellent sense of how archaeological and historical evidence can be effectively combined in the study of this period.

  The earliest stages of Roman imperialism are the subject of William Harris’s War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327–70 BC (Oxford, 1979) and of several chapters of John Rich and Graham Shipley’s War and Society in the Roman World (London, 1993). Jacques Heurgon’s The Rise of Rome to 264 BC (London, 1973) remains full of interesting insights. Jean-Michel David’s Roman Conquest of Italy (Oxford, 1996) tells the whole story up to the end of the Republic.

  Map 2. The Mediterranean and its continental hinterlands, showing major mountain ranges and rivers

  IV

  IMPERIAL ECOLOGY

  Next comes the earth, that one part of nature that for her many gifts to us we honour with the name of Mother. She is our realm, as the sky belongs to the gods. She welcomes us when we are born, nurtures us as we grow, and when we are adults sustains us always.

  (Pliny, Natural History 2.154)

  From its foundation to the Arab conquests the story of Rome was played out over a millennium and a half. At first expansion was so slow that few outside Italy can have noticed it. But by the reign of Augustus the empire was bounded by the Atlantic to the west and the Sahara to the south, its northern frontier bisected temperate Europe, and its eastern edge was extended deep into western Asia. There the frontiers more or less rested until disintegration began at the end of the fourth century, once again slow at first but eventually collapsing into the Aegean world of seventh-century Byzantium. That fifty-generation tale of rise and fall is an epic one in human terms.

  Geologically, however, a millennium and a half is the blink of an eye. The Roman Empire was a bubble that grew on the surface of the pond and then burst. During this time the physical environment of the Roman world—its landforms a
nd climate in particular—hardly changed. New crops and methods of agriculture spread, but they had only a little impact on the landscapes Rome ruled over. Had Romulus been transported seven centuries forward at his death (rather than taken up into heaven) he might well have been amazed at what his heirs had achieved, but he would not have been puzzled at how they did it. All this is hard to imagine today, living as we do at the end of two centuries of accelerating technological change, change that is having major impacts on the entire biosphere and moves now at a pace hard to adjust to psychologically even in our own brief lifetimes. This chapter explores the long-term stability of the ancient world and the slow secular changes against which the whole of Rome’s imperial story was played out.

  The Environment in Classical Antiquity

  Let us begin with the visible. The coastline of the Mediterranean 3,000 years ago was hardly different from what it is today. Slight changes can be spotted around the mouths of the larger rivers: the harbour of Ephesus is now a few miles from the coast, and half of Ostia, the port of Rome, has been washed away. Just off Pozzuoli in the Bay of Naples, a series of luxurious villas lie just a few metres under water. So does the great harbour of Alexandria. But these are marginal changes in highly susceptible locations. Sea levels did begin to rise gradually at the end of antiquity, but the only regions where this had a marked impact were low-lying areas such as the Fenland of eastern England and the areas around the Rhine mouth in the Netherlands, where late antique villages are built on low mounds, terpen, for protection against floods. Unsurprisingly, the ancients had no sense of geological time or incremental environmental change. There was almost no ancient science of seismology, and the explanations suggested for earthquakes were underground counterparts of those developed for meteorology.1 A few writers were so committed to this steady-state idea of the world that they believed marble would, eventually, grow back from where it had been quarried.2 Their world was eternal; the gods had wandered in the same forests and mountains they knew.

  The Mediterranean is, in fact, shrinking, as the African tectonic plate moves northward. But this is happening very slowly. Tectonic movement generates vulcanism in Sicily, the Lipari Islands, and Campania, and earthquakes in central Italy, central and southern Greece, and western Turkey. There are extinct volcanoes in other parts of the Roman world—around Rome, for example, in central France, and southern Scotland—but the ancients had no memory of their eruptions. Volcanoes and earthquakes occurred in antiquity more or less where they occur most often today. Etna, into which the philosopher Empedokles reputedly threw himself, Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, and Santorini, which did the same for the Bronze Age city of Akrotiri, remain active today, indeed the most spectacular volcanoes of the Mediterranean world. Major earthquakes have struck in recent memory at the Isthmus of Corinth, where Poseidon the Earthshaker had his greatest sanctuary; in Aegean Turkey, the cities of which received five years’ remission of tribute in AD 17 from the Emperor Tiberius to help them rebuild themselves after a devastating quake; and in central Italy, where a series of quakes in the middle of the first century AD perhaps inspired Seneca to write our first surviving discussion of them, in the sixth book of his Natural Questions.

  Climate change moves at a faster pace. But in climatic terms, too, the ancient Mediterranean was very similar to the one we know today.3 We live within the same interglacial period as the Romans, the Holocene, which began around 12,000 years ago with the retreat of the European glaciers and the northward expansion of the Sahara Desert. As the region warmed there were consequent movements of plant and animal species. Such movements are slow: in botanical terms the Mediterranean can be considered as still in postglacial recovery, and not all its native species of plants are yet well adapted to the current climate. Around 6,000 years ago the Mediterranean basin became significantly warmer, establishing today’s pattern of mild wet winters and warm dry summers. ‘Mild’ means no long freezes which kill many species of tree and plant. ‘Dry’ means the Mediterranean as a whole was, and remains, an arid environment. There was never sufficient rainfall to support either dense forests or the grasslands on which herds of ruminants such as cattle, horses, and bison depend. Some parts of the Mediterranean world are exposed to droughts severe enough to cause many crops, including wheat, to fail as often as one year in four. Droughts of that kind are not predictable, and have knock-on effects on species that depend on susceptible crops. Humans that farm are among such species. Classical civilization was built in the shadow of scarcity and risk.4

  The Roman Empire originated in the Mediterranean basin. But from the end of the last century BC, it had expanded into adjacent ecological zones. The climate changed most dramatically as one went north or south. This ecological gradient had economic consequences, since many of the central components of the polite culture adopted by local elite members across the empire remained Mediterranean in character. Wine was the alcoholic drink of choice, even where it was easier to produce beer: in the early first century AD some Mediterranean producers grew rich producing wine for export until grape varieties were developed that could survive in the Rhineland and even southern Britain. Olives could not (and still cannot) be cultivated in regions susceptible to frost. Yet olive oil was essential not only for cooking but also as fuel for lamps and for use in Roman bathing, where it was rubbed onto the skin and then scraped off along with any dirt. Olive oil was consequently traded northwards in great quantities.5 The southern half of the Mediterranean is notably warmer. From the late second century BC, great quantities of grain were being exported from modern day Tunisia, Sicily, and Egypt to cities in the northern half of the Mediterranean.6 By the early first century AD olive oil production had also increased in southern Spain and various parts of North Africa.7 North of the Mediterranean basin, temperate Europe had harsher winters and much more plentiful rainfall. That made it a much better area for raising large domesticates. Rome’s European provinces would come to supply much of her cavalry. The accumulating evidence of animal bones found on Roman period sites also shows much more beef eaten north of the Alps, with sheep and goat most evident in the assemblages from sites in the more arid south and east of the empire.8 Studies of faunal material (bones), of seeds and other biofacts, and of container amphorae all also show how the most powerful and privileged members of Roman society—local aristocrats and soldiers for the main part—were able to consume more or less what they liked wherever they were. The main limit on exchange across these sharp ecological contrasts (ecotones) was the cost of transport. Even the journey to north Italy made olive oil so expensive, according to St Augustine who was born and brought up in North Africa, that it was too expensive to burn lights all night long. Traffic beyond the Mediterranean basin was blocked at several points by mountain ranges. A few cities, located at the southern terminal of north–south river valleys or mountain passes, grew rich on trade: Aquileia and Aosta in Italy, Arles and Narbonne in southern France still impress visitors with their Roman period monuments.

  The climate of Holocene Europe has not been completely stable. A relatively warm period in the Middle Ages was followed by the Little Ice Age which ran from 1300 to 1800 and was at its coldest at the end of the seventeenth century. Mean temperatures were perhaps a degree or more below those today, but this was enough to make the Thames freeze over on a regular basis. Evidence is mounting for a Roman Warm Period, one that perhaps raised the mean temperature as much as two degrees above those of today.9 The proposed peak is around 150 AD, with temperatures dipping until they began to rise again at the start of the Medieval Warm Period, perhaps around 900 AD. Geophysical evidence from ocean sediments and ice-cores, and tree-ring data, is supported by literary and archaeobotanical indications that some plant species existed further north or at higher altitudes during the early Roman Empire than they do today. The reality of this phenomenon remains very controversial. Unlike the early modern cold period, any change in antiquity was too slow to be noticed by ancient observers. But it may
have been important. It has been pointed out that this Warm Period would coincide chronologically with the empire’s furthest northward extent and with the Roman urban maximum. Might a period of warming have increased the productivity of southern Mediterranean agriculture, and made it easier to adapt crops for northern Europe at just the right moment? And might the subsequent cooling have put pressure on Roman agriculture (weakening the empire)? Or else on the barbarian peoples living north of the empire (driving them south)? Investigating these apparent correlations is a priority for future research.

  A World of Farmers