The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
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However, in the conditions of later times, without flourishing international and regional markets, specialization and investment became much more difficult, and the inhabitants of areas like the limestone hills were forced to return to a more mixed, and hence less productive, agriculture. When this happened, the population had to fall. It is indeed thought that parts of the Levant did not regain the levels and density of population that they sustained in late Roman and early Arab times until well into the nineteenth, or even the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, there is no reliable way at present of measuring Roman agricultural output, let alone of comparing it with that of the post-Roman centuries. But we do, from the West, now have some very revealing evidence for the changing size of stock animals. The careful recording of animal leg bones, recovered from datable excavated contexts, has allowed zoologists to estimate the changing size of livestock in different periods. The results are striking. Cattle and, to a lesser extent, other domesticated animals show a marked rise in average size in Roman times (Fig. 7.3). These larger animals, like modern cattle, carried a much greater weight of meat than their pre-Roman ancestors. But to put on this weight they required intensive feeding on good-quality pasture and, probably, plentiful winter fodder.6 These conditions could be achieved in an economic environment, like that of Roman times, that encouraged some specialization in the use of land and in the deployment of labour. But it appears to have been impossible to sustain this improvement in the more basic conditions of the post-Roman centuries. Cattle size fell back to prehistoric levels.
7.3 The rise and fall of the Roman cow. The approximate size of cattle, from the Iron Age, through Roman times, to the early Middle Ages. The information is based on finds from 21 iron-age, 67 Roman, and 49 early medieval sites.
In the Roman period, the land certainly supported high levels of population, with no evident signs that resources were overstretched—since, even in densely populated areas, peasant households could afford consumer products like imported pottery. To sustain this level of population and affluence, food production must surely have been highly efficient. It is also very possible that in post-Roman times agricultural sophistication disappeared as comprehensively as the manufacturing industries whose miserable fate is so much better documented in the archaeological record. On balance, slippery and elusive though the evidence is, I believe it is much more likely than not that the post-Roman period saw a marked decline in agricultural productivity, and therefore in the number of people that the land could sustain. This was decline at the baseline of human existence.
Greater Sophistication, or Greater Exploitation?
The Roman period is sometimes seen as enriching only the elite, rather than enhancing the standard of living of the population at large. Indeed, some scholars claim that the wealthiest and most powerful members of society were enriched specifically at the expense, and to the detriment, of the less privileged. For instance, a recent book on Roman Britain depicts its economy as an instrument of oppression, and explicitly compares Rome’s impact on the island to the worst effects of modern imperialism and capitalism. The end of Roman power is celebrated as the end of exploitation: ‘The mass of British people could then enjoy a short golden age free from landlords and tax collectors.’ Roman economic sophistication had benefited only property-owners and the state; and the ‘Dark Ages’ that followed its demise were in reality a ‘golden age’.7
I think this, and similar views, are mistaken. For me, what is most striking about the Roman economy is precisely the fact that it was not solely an elite phenomenon, but one that made basic good-quality items available right down the social scale. As we have seen, good-quality pottery was widely available, and in regions like Italy even the comfort of tiled roofs. I would also seriously question the romantic assumption that economic simplicity necessarily meant a freer and more equal society. There is no reason to believe that, because post-Roman Britain had no coinage, no wheel-turned pottery, and no mortared buildings, it was an egalitarian haven, spared the oppression of landlords and political masters. Tax, admittedly, could no longer be collected in coin; but its less sophisticated equivalent, ‘tribute’, could perfectly well be extorted in the form of sheaves of corn, pigs, and indeed slaves.
However, while criticizing those who see the Roman world in very negative terms, I would not want to make the mistake of depicting it in too rosy-tinted a hue. The presence of a more complex economy and of better-quality manufactured goods did not make for a universally happy world, in which no one was oppressed or economically downtrodden—just as the material well-being of the modern western world has by no means solved all its own poverty, let alone the poverty of those strangers abroad on whom we all depend. Many of the most impressive engineering feats of Roman times were carried out by slave labour—for instance, the granite columns of the Pantheon that so impressed me as a child were laboriously hacked out of the rock of the Egyptian desert by convicts and slaves, forced to work in unimaginably harsh and bleak conditions. An observer of the first century BC noted that ‘the slaves who work in the mines … wear out their bodies day and night … dying in large numbers because of the exceptional hardship they endure’.8
There were also huge differences of wealth even amongst the free, just as there are today, and greater economic sophistication may well have widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Even in prosperous and highly developed parts of the empire, people at the bottom of society could live abject lives and die in misery. For instance, in Roman Egypt, one of the richest provinces of the empire, new-born children were abandoned on dumps of excrement and rubbish sufficiently often to gain a special name, ‘dung-foundlings’ (coprianairetoi). Some of these infants may have been abandoned by their parents for social reasons (for instance, if born out of wedlock), but others were certainly left to the kindness of strangers only because their parents could not afford to feed them. We know that the rubbish heaps of Egypt contained broken amphorae and fine-ware bowls from all over the Mediterranean; but these will have been of little consolation to the abandoned dung-children of the province and to their wretched parents.9
Similarly, however sophisticated Roman agriculture was, harvests could still fail, and, when they did, transport was not cheap or rapid enough to bring in the large quantities of affordable grain that could have saved the poor from starvation. Edessa in Mesopotamia was one of the richest cities of the Roman East, surrounded by prosperous arable farming. But in AD 500 a swarm of locusts consumed the wheat harvest; a later harvest, of millet, also failed. For the poor, disaster followed. The price of bread shot up, and people were forced to sell their few possessions for a pittance in order to buy food. Many tried, in vain, to assuage their hunger with leaves and roots. Those who could, fled the region; but crowds of starving people flocked into Edessa and other cities, to sleep rough and to beg: ‘They slept in the colonnades and streets, howling night and day from the pangs of hunger.’ Here disease and the cold nights of winter killed large numbers of them; even collecting and burying the dead became a major problem.10
Suitable Homes for Saints
If we turn our gaze upwards from the fundamentals of human society, the production and availability of food, to ‘higher’ things, like the scale of buildings and the spread of literacy, we find a similar dramatic downturn at the end of the Roman world. This is not very surprising, because craftsmanship and skill cannot flourish in a material vacuum: architects, builders, marble-workers, and mosaicists, teachers and writers, all require a degree of economic complexity to sustain them.
In Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, there was an unbroken tradition of some building in mortared brick and stone throughout the post-Roman centuries, as we have seen, and many impressive earlier buildings were also kept in repair. Late sixth-century Anglo-Saxon visitors to Rome, for instance, would have seen things undreamed of in their native Britain, where the Roman buildings had been allowed to decay and all new building was in timber. They would have foun
d a few newly built brick churches, freshly decorated with mosaics and frescos, and, above all, a large number of immensely impressive fourth- and fifth-century basilicas, kept in repair and in continuous use. Old St Peter’s, for instance, the fourth-century predecessor of the present basilica, stood proud throughout the Middle Ages—a huge building, around 100 metres long and with five aisles separated by a forest of marble columns.
But, if we look at the new churches of post-Roman Italy, what is most immediately striking about them is how small they are (Fig. 7.4). Buildings of the late sixth, seventh, and early eighth centuries are very rarely over 20 metres long; a modern viewer might well describe them as ‘chapels’ rather than ‘churches’. The embellishment of earlier buildings was also often on a very small scale. Pope John VII, at the beginning of the eighth century, was evidently proud of his decorative works in the basilicas of Rome, since his brief biography lists these in some detail. His principal project may have been the oratory dedicated to Mary the Mother of God, which he built inside St Peter’s. His biographer states that he spent on it ‘a large sum of gold and silver’. The oratory was demolished when the present St Peter’s was built, but it survived long enough to be drawn by Renaissance antiquarians, which allows us to see how big a structure an early eighth-century ‘large sum’ of money could build. By the standards of the Roman period (or of the later Middle Ages) John’s oratory was tiny: a few columns (most of them older ones reused), and the embellishment of one wall with a sizeable panel of mosaic.11
7.4 Tight quarters for the saints. The ground-plans of some representative churches in Italy, all drawn to the same scale. The small size of buildings of the sixth to early eighth centuries is very clear—only in the later eighth and ninth centuries do larger churches again appear.
Evidence from Visigothic Spain, which has much the finest collection of seventh-century churches anywhere in the West, confirms the picture from Italy. The Visigothic churches are built of squared stone blocks and are impressively solid, but all of them are similar in size to the contemporary buildings of Italy. For instance, San Juan de Baños, built by a Visigothic king in the mid-seventh century (and therefore a commission from the very pinnacle of society), is only about 20 metres long, as is the most elaborate church of the period, San Pedro de la Nave near Zamora.12
What we see in Italy, Spain, and most of the Mediterranean is a partial survival of the heritage of the past, and a dramatic shrinkage in the scale of new construction (Fig. 7.4). In these areas not every building and skill of the Roman period was lost—it is only in a few exceptional places, like the parts of Britain conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, that anything quite so apocalyptic occurred. On the other hand, all over the West, if God and his saints had had to rely on their newly built quarters, they would have found themselves very cramped indeed.
This abandonment of building in mortared brick and stone in provinces like Britain, and the very reduced scale of building elsewhere, are sometimes interpreted as the result of cultural choice, rather than economic necessity. According to this argument, the elite were no longer in thrall to the Roman obsession with bricks and marble—as the historian Chris Wickham put it in 1988, ‘fine clothes were becoming for kings more precious than good bricks’.13 The rich in early medieval times, according to this interpretation, were just as well off as the elite of Roman times, but chose to spend their money differently: in particular on jewellery and fine textiles (as clothing and as wall-hangings).
There is, however, one insuperable problem with this argument—the Romans had plenty of jewellery and fine textiles, as well as their splendid buildings. Comparatively little of their jewellery survives, because they very rarely buried it with the dead (unlike the Germanic peoples); but occasional finds, and frequent references and representations in written sources and in art, prove beyond any doubt that elaborate earrings and necklaces were a well-established feature of aristocratic Roman life. There have also been enough spectacular finds of large and elaborately decorated silverware (Fig. 7.5) to prove that rich Romans relished the chance to show off their access to precious metals.14 Similarly, the sumptuous textiles that survive from Roman Egypt are quite sufficient to dispel any notion that Roman dress was characterized by the homespun toga.
We notice Roman jewellery and precious metalwork less than their post-Roman equivalents, mainly because we are distracted by a mass of other luxury items that disappeared (or became very scarce) after the end of the empire: marbled and mosaiced private houses, in both town and country; baths with piped water and underfloor heating; a plethora of exotic foods, spices, and wines; as well as immensely expensive items of pure waste, like the animals imported for the sole purpose that they should die in the amphitheatre (ideally taking with them a few unfortunate slave ‘huntsmen’). Very wealthy Romans even derived status from their costly libraries and their expensive literary education. This was a world where the display of social superiority could be very subtle—while paying out huge sums of money for the barbarian slaves and exotic beasts, whose slaughter in the amphitheatre was necessary to secure his status, a Roman aristocrat could also lay claim to a philosophical education that set him above such vulgar things.
‘Here Phoebus the perfume-seller had a really good fuck’: The Use of Writing in Roman Times
Sometime shortly before the fatal eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, this message was scratched onto the wall of a brothel in the centre of Pompeii.15 It is apparently evidence of a satisfied customer—unless, of course, it is only male posturing. But it is certainly evidence that one tradesman in Pompeii could write, and assumed that other clients could read and would appreciate his account of time and money well spent. Evidence such as this has led to an intense debate over the extent to which the people of Roman times could read and write, and the importance of the written word in their society.16 In the absence of any statistical evidence, the issue will always be open to discussion, since it will never be possible to come up with reliable figures for the number of people comfortable with literacy, let alone provide a nuanced view of what level of literacy they had attained. The principal evidence we have of people being able to write is the chance survival of texts, like the one above, and these are only a small and an unknowable proportion of what once existed; while, for people being able to read, hard evidence is necessarily even slimmer. There is no way of knowing how many Pompeians could read Phoebus’ message.
7.5 The Roman love of precious metal. The silver treasure of a rich Roman, hidden after about AD 450 in the large cauldron shown on the left, and discovered in the late 1970s. The total weight of the silver is 68.5 kilograms.
However, what is striking about the Roman period, and to my mind unparalleled until quite recent times, is the evidence of writing being casually used, in an entirely ephemeral and everyday manner, which was none the less sophisticated. The best evidence for this comes, unsurprisingly, from Pompeii, because the eruption of AD 79 ensured a uniquely good level of preservation of the city’s buildings and the various forms of writing that they bore. Over 11,000 inscriptions, of many different kinds, have been recorded within Pompeii, carved, painted, or scratched into its walls. Some of them are very grand and formal, like the dedications of public buildings and the funerary epitaphs, similar to others found all over the Roman world. Inscriptions such as these are not necessarily good evidence of widespread literacy. The enormous numbers that were produced in Roman times could reflect a fashion for this particular medium of display, rather than a dramatic spread of the ability to read and write.
Other Pompeian inscriptions are perhaps more telling, because they display a desire to communicate in a less formal and more ephemeral way with fellow citizens. Walls on the main streets of Pompeii are often decorated with painted messages, whose regular script and layout reveal the work of professional sign-writers. Some are advertisements for events such as games in the amphitheatre; others are endorsements of candidates for civic office, by individuals and groups within the city. These endorseme
nts are highly formulaic, and for the most part decidedly staid: worthy Pompeians declare their support for one candidate or another. However, a fascinating group of three breaks the mould. All support the same candidate for office, a certain Marcus Cerrinius Vatia. One claims to have been painted on behalf of ‘all the sleepers’ of the city, one by the petty thieves, and one by the ‘late drinkers’.17 Either this Marcus had a very good sense of humour, or he had political opponents prepared to deploy dirty tricks against him. But either way these texts are from a society sophisticated enough, not only to have professionally painted political posters, but also to mock the genre.
Graffiti offer even more striking evidence of the spread and use of writing in Pompeian society. These are found all over the city, scratched into stone or plaster by townspeople with time on their hands and a message to convey to future idlers; in Phoebus the perfume-seller’s message we have already met an example from one particularly famous group, the brothel-graffiti (Fig. 7.6). Many of these messages are highly obscure, because we lack the local knowledge needed to understand them; but some, like ‘Sabinus hic’ (Sabinus [was] here), are both very simple, and entirely familiar.18