The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

  5.3 Regional distribution. The diffusion of pottery manufactured in the third and fourth centuries at a production site just outside modern Oxford.

  The Solid Roofs of Antiquity

  The picture I have so far presented derives entirely from the evidence of pottery. The sceptic can argue that ceramics play only a minor role in daily life, and that pottery production and distribution are a small part of any economy. This is, however, true only up to a point. Pottery in most cultures is vital in relation to one of our primary needs, food. Ceramic vessels, of different shapes and sizes, play an essential part in the storage, preparation, cooking, and consumption of foodstuffs. They certainly did so in Roman times, even more than they do today, since their importance for storage and cooking has declined considerably in modern times, with the invention of cardboard and plastics, and with the spread of cheap metalware and glass. Furthermore, in the ancient Mediterranean, pottery played a particularly important role, because amphorae, not barrels, were the normal containers for the transport and domestic storage of liquids. There is every reason to see pottery vessels as central to the daily life of Roman times.

  I am also convinced that the broad picture that we can reconstruct from pottery can reasonably be applied to the wider economy. Pots are low-value, high-bulk items, with the additional disadvantage of being brittle—in other words, no one has ever made a large profit from making a single pot (except for quite exceptional art objects), and they are difficult and expensive to pack and transport, being heavy, bulky, and easy to break. If, despite these disadvantages, vessels (both fine tablewares and more functional items) were being made to a high standard and in large quantities, and if they were travelling widely and percolating through even the lower levels of society—as they were in the Roman period—then it is much more likely than not that other goods, whose distribution we cannot document with the same confidence, were doing the same. If good-quality pottery was reaching even peasant households, then the same is almost certainly true of other goods, made of materials that rarely survive in the archaeological record, like cloth, wood, basketwork, leather, and metal. There is, for instance, no reason to suppose that the huge markets in clothing, footware, and tools were less sophisticated than that in pottery.

  There is also some fascinating recent evidence from the ice cap of Greenland, that seems to confirm, for metalworking, the general picture from pottery, that manufacturing in the Roman period was on a grand scale. Snow, as it descends to earth, collects and traps atmospheric pollution; in the Arctic it then forms a distinct annual layer, distinguishable from that of other years by a partial thaw in the summer and a subsequent refreezing. By coring into the ice cap and analysing the samples, it is therefore possible to reconstruct the history of atmospheric pollution through the ages. This research has shown that lead and copper pollution—produced by the smelting of lead, copper, and silver—were both very high during the Roman period, falling back in the post-Roman centuries to levels that are much closer to those of prehistoric times. Only in around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did levels of pollution again attain those of Roman times.13 As with Monte Testaccio, we can pay the Romans the double-edged compliment of noting their modernity.

  Further confirmation for this view can be found in an even humbler item, which also survives well in the soil but has received less scholarly attention than pottery—the roof tile. In some parts of the Roman world tiles were so common that they go almost unnoticed by modern archaeologists. When I thought it would be interesting to compare the use in Italy of roof tiles in Roman and post-Roman times, I found no general discussion of the availability of brick and tile in the Roman period. But I did encounter an unspoken and general assumption that tiles were quite normal throughout the peninsula, even in out-of-the-way places and in very humble settings. Archaeologists surveying the countryside around Gubbio, in the central Italian Apennines, for example, divided the Roman rural sites they discovered into four categories, depending on the quality and quantity of their surface remains. Of these categories, the very lowest type was considered to represent the remains of mere ‘sheds’. However, even these ‘sheds’, at the very bottom of the building hierarchy and in an upland area, had tiled roofs. Indeed, in some parts of Italy, a tiled roof, like good-quality pottery, was already a common feature in pre-Roman times. For instance, in southern Italy around the Greek city of Metapontion, a field survey was able to map over 400 ancient farmsteads, discovered from surface remains, ‘above all roof tiles’.14

  Excavation has confirmed the impression from surface finds that in ancient Italy even very humble structures often had tiled roofs. The farmstead behind Luna that produced such a diverse range of pottery had a roof that was at least partly of tiles; while further south, in a remote Apennine setting (near Campobasso in Molise), an even smaller farmstead, of the second century BC, also had a tiled roof. Even buildings intended only for storage or for animals may well often have been tiled: a Roman structure in the hills near Gubbio had a roof of tiles, but is thought to have been only a barn or stable.15

  Because they are so common, tiles are, as we have seen, taken for granted by archaeologists working in many parts of the Roman world. But, of course, their very frequency is extraordinary, and well worthy of note. Tiles can be made locally in much of the Roman world, but they still require a large kiln, a lot of clay, a great deal of fuel, and no little expertise. After they have been manufactured, carrying them, even over short distances, without the advantages of mechanized transport, is also no mean feat. On many of the sites where they have been found, they can only have arrived laboriously, a few at a time, loaded onto pack animals. The roofs we have been looking at may not seem very important, but they represented a substantial investment in the infrastructure of rural life.

  A tiled roof may appeal in part because it is thought to be smart and fashionable, but it also has considerable practical advantages over roofs in perishable materials, such as thatch or wooden shingles. Above all, it will last much longer, and, if made of standardized well-fired tiles, as Roman roofs were, will provide more consistent protection from the rain—with minor upkeep, a tiled roof can function well for centuries; whereas even today a professionally laid thatch roof, of straw grown specifically for its durability, will need to be entirely remade every thirty years or so.16 A tiled roof is also much less likely to catch fire, and to attract insects, than wooden shingles or thatch. In Roman Italy, indeed in parts of pre-Roman Italy, many peasants, and perhaps even some animals, lived under tiled roofs. After the Roman period, sophisticated conditions such as these did not return until quite recent times: as with good-quality pottery, I suspect it is only in late medieval Italy that tiles again became as common as they had been in the Roman period.

  How was such Sophistication Achieved?

  Because I am particularly interested in the impact of economic change on daily life, I have concentrated so far on Roman artefacts at the consumer end—the range and quality of the products available, and the type of person who might have access to them. However, to believe in the impressive picture I have outlined, we need also to look briefly at production and distribution. Again it is pottery that provides our most complete and convincing evidence. An influential study by the archaeologist David Peacock, which combined archaeological evidence with modern ethnographic data, divided Roman pottery production into a number of different categories: at its simplest, ‘household production’, characterized by a rough appearance and very basic technology (without the use of a wheel or kiln); ‘workshop industries’, making kiln-fired, good-quality, wheel-turned pottery; and, finally, some ‘giant fine-ware producers’, whose output can reasonably be termed ‘industrial’ in scale.17 Both workshop industries and the giant producers required skilled, specialist labour; and, to survive, had to sell their goods in quantity, often over substantial distances.

  These different types of production coexisted, in various combinations and proportions, within the Roman world. For instance
, whereas in the Mediterranean the ‘industrial’ producers dominated the market for tablewares, in later Roman Britain, pottery was primarily made by smaller workshop industries, with a regional (though sometimes not inconsiderable) distribution (Fig. 5.3, at p. 93). But in neither Britain nor the Mediterranean did these more sophisticated products entirely displace simple ‘household production’.

  Unsurprisingly, it is the really large Roman pottery industries that produce the most striking evidence of complex and sophisticated production methods. The best evidence of all comes from the potteries that flourished between AD 20 and 120 at la Graufesenque, near Millau, in what was then southern Gaul. Like the fine tablewares of other giant producers, pots from la Graufesenque were distributed very widely through the empire, and indeed even beyond it (Fig. 5.4). But, in this case, we are also fortunate to have some telling evidence excavated at the production site itself, in particular, a large number of graffiti scratched onto broken potsherds. One group of these almost certainly records the stacking of huge communal kilns on behalf of different individual workshops, so that each could recover their own vessels at the end of the firing (Fig. 7.9, at p. 161). Independent workshops were shaping and decorating their own pots—though to common designs—and were then pooling the costs and expertise needed for the vital and technically difficult process of firing.18

  More impressive still are the contents of a deep refuse pit from the same site (Fig. 5.5). This contained the remains of about 10,000 vessels, over 1,000 of them undamaged when excavated. These were rejected ‘seconds’ (some of them with a hole deliberately punched through their base, to prevent them from slipping into circulation), which did not quite match the standards expected, and which the potters at la Graufesenque discarded in order to maintain the quality and consistency of their product.19 Their pride in these features, and the premium that consumers would place on their wares, is also suggested by the prominent makers’ stamps that many south-Gaulish vessels bear (from la Graufesenque and elsewhere). It is not too fanciful to see these stamps as a guarantee of quality and status, like ‘Royal Worcester’ or ‘Meissen’ in a modern context.

  5.4 Empire-wide distribution. The diffusion of one type of mass-produced Roman pottery—find spots of the tableware manufactured at la Graufesenque (near Millau in southern France).

  5.5 Quality control. A refuse pit at the pottery-production site of la Graufesenque. The pit was about 3 metres deep and 2.3 metres in diameter, and (as is clear from the photograph) filled with pottery ‘seconds’, discarded as substandard.

  In the Mediterranean region, the manufacture of tablewares during imperial times was always dominated by a few major producers, who operated on a similar vast scale, and, presumably, with similar sophistication to that documented at la Graufesenque. In other areas, Roman production was on a smaller scale, such as that exemplified by the various potteries of later Roman Britain, with small kilns, less evidence of quality control, and networks of distribution that are best described as ‘regional’ (Fig. 5.3, at p. 93).20 However, even smaller industries will have required considerable skills and some specialization in order to flourish, including, for example: the selection and preparation of clays and decorative slips; the making and maintenance of tools and kilns; the primary shaping of the vessels on the wheel; their refinement when half-dry; their decoration; the collection and preparation of fuel; the stacking and firing of the kilns; and the packing of the finished goods for transport. From unworked clay to finished product, a pot will have passed through many different processes and several different hands, each with its own expert role to play.

  To reach the consumer then required a network of merchants and traders, and a transport infrastructure of roads, wagons, and pack animals, or sometimes of boats, ships, river- and sea-ports. How exactly all this worked we will never know, because we have so few written records from the Roman period to document it; but the archaeological testimony of goods spread widely around their region of production, and sometimes further afield, is testimony enough to the fact that complex mechanisms of distribution did exist to link a potter at his kiln with a farmer needing a new bowl to eat from. Occasionally a lucky archaeological find takes us closer to the process, like the discovery of a case of south-Gaulish tableware still waiting to be unpacked in a shop at Pompeii, or the many wrecks of the Roman period that have been found in the Mediterranean still carefully loaded with their cargoes (Fig. 5.6). Wrecks filled with amphorae are so common that two scholars have recently wondered whether the volume of Mediterranean trade in the second century AD was again matched before the nineteenth century.21

  I am keen to emphasize that in Roman times good-quality articles were available even to humble consumers, and that production and distribution were complex and sophisticated. In many ways, this is a world like our own; but it is also important to try and be a little more specific. Although this is inevitably a guess, I think we are looking at a world that is roughly comparable, in terms of the range and quality of goods available, to that of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, rather than at a mirror image of our own times. The Roman period was not characterized by the consumer frenzy and globalized production of the modern developed world, where mechanized production and transport, and access to cheap labour overseas, have produced mountains of relatively inexpensive goods, often manufactured thousands of miles away.

  In Roman times machines still played only a relatively small part in manufacture, restricting the quantity of goods that could be made; and everything was transported by humans and animals, or, at best, by the wind and the currents. Consequently, goods imported from a distance were inevitably more expensive and more prestigious than local products. A seventh-century bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, for instance, reinforced his reputation for asceticism by consistently refusing to drink wine imported from Palestine, preferring to consume a local vintage, although ‘its taste is nothing to boast of and its price is low’.22 Although some goods travelled remarkable distances, the majority of consumption was certainly local and regional—Roman pottery, for instance, is always much commoner near its production site than in more distant areas. What is striking, however, from the archaeological evidence, is how many people were able to buy at least a few of the more expensive products from afar.

  5.6 Roman transport: a shipwreck, loaded with amphorae, under excavation off the south coast of France.

  Making and Moving Goods for the State

  Whether all this production and distribution were motivated primarily by the desire for profit, or generated by the needs of the state, has been the source of much debate amongst historians. A consensus in the 1960s, that the state was the prime mover in the Roman economy, has been challenged—in my opinion successfully—by an explosion of archaeological work, uncovering goods and patterns of distribution that are impossible, or at least very difficult, to explain in terms of state activity. For example, it would take a lot of special pleading to see, in the distribution map of ‘Oxford ware’ pottery within late Roman Britain (as shown in Fig. 5.3, at p. 93), a pattern of production for the Roman state: the area where the potteries were sited played no role in the administration of Britannia, and it is on domestic sites in the demilitarized south of the province that the vast majority of Oxford ware is found. The pattern that the find spots of this pottery form looks straightforwardly commercial, with a fairly even spread of goods around the kiln sites, falling off with distance and hence increased transport costs.23

  However, even if many, myself included, would now choose to prioritize the role of the merchant over that of the state, no one would want to deny that the impact of state distribution was also considerable. Monte Testaccio alone testifies to a massive state effort with a wide impact: on Spanish olive-growers; on amphora-manufacturers; on shippers; and, of course, on the consumers of Rome itself, who thereby had their supply of olive oil guaranteed. The needs of the imperial capitals, like Rome and Constantinople, and of an army of around half a million men, stationed mainly o
n the Rhine and Danube and on the frontier with Persia, were very considerable, and the impressive structures that the Roman state set up to supply them are at least partially known from written records. We have, for instance, a list from around AD 400 of the imperial manufactories (fabricae), making goods specifically for the use of state employees.24 They were scattered through the empire (though most were located within comparatively easy reach of the frontiers, where the army was based), and they produced above all clothing and weaponry. In northern Italy, for example, there were fabricae for woollen cloth at Milan and Aquileia, for linen at Ravenna, for shields at Cremona and Verona, for body armour at Mantua, for bows at Pavia, and, finally, for arrows at Concordia. The sheer number of these fabricae is impressive; but considerable administrative coordination must also have been required to collect, transport, and distribute their disparate finished products. Somehow an archer facing the barbarians across the Rhine had to be united with his bow from Pavia and his arrows from Concordia, as well as his socks from Milan or Aquileia.