Coming off of some of the discussion of Gladiator II (I, II), this week I want to discuss the place of ‘bread and circuses’ in the narrative of Roman decadence and decline. This is one of those phrases which long ago entered the standard lexicon, but which gets used and interpreted in a range of ways. Indeed, I was a bit surprised, bringing it up on Bluesky, the relatively broad range of interpretations for the phrase, some quite sharply at variance with its initial usage.
There was ‘bread and circuses were necessary to maintain order’ (a broadly positive reading of the phrase and very much not its initial intent, as we’ll see), or alternately ‘bread and circuses as a means of suppressing the masses’ or even ‘bread and circuses as the means by which the Romans were bribed into surrendering their republic’ (closer, but also not quite the original use), but also ‘bread and circuses as metonym for Roman decadence and thus decline.’1 But generally I find among my students something a bit more vague, that ‘bread and circuses’ are bad in a vague, non-specific but-decadence-implying sense and the phrase may thus be used as a cudgel to be wielded at any policy deemed ‘over-indulgent’ towards the People, though with fault for that over-indulgence being variably defined: it can be the fault of the elites for spoiling their political children or equally the fault of the people, voting themselves gifts from the treasury.
But I want to unpack this phrase and its meaning this week with a bit more substance. So we will first look at its original appearance in the satires of Juvenal to see what Juvenal meant by it, and then we’ll broaden out our discussion of ‘bread’ and ‘circuses’ to ask if Juvenal’s interpretation is right and what we might make of bread and circuses.
(All translations below are mine, which is why they hit the ears like bricks, but I promise Juvenal is more elegant in Latin)
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Juvenal
So the phrase ‘bread and circuses’ – panem et circenses – originates in Juvenal’s 10th satire. Juvenal – Decimus Junius Juvenalis – was a Roman satirist who would have been writing in the first few decades of the second century AD (in the reigns of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian). Satire (satura in Latin) was a genre of Roman poetry that had emerged during the late second century BC (so during the transition from the Middle to Late Republics) to describe the poetry of Gaius Lucilius. An indigenous, Latin literary form (it has no Greek precursor; never let it be said the Romans didn’t develop any new forms of literature) it was a genre of poetry used for critique, generally social critique, often delivered quite harshly.
The thing is, this is something of a playful, humorous sort of genre – Juvenal is not writing straight didactic literature. It is thus more than a little awkward that a lot of his convenient little phrases – Juvenal is very good at memorable, compact little phrases – studied by Latin students for centuries, have become proverbs of sorts, because not all of them were intended to be read fully ‘straight,’ as it were. For instance, another phrase from Satire 10 has become just as famous as bread and circuses: mens sana in corpore sano (Juv. 10.356), “a sound mind in a sound body” which gets used entirely straight as the motto for athletics and fitness clubs and military training institutions and you can see it referenced by figures like Teddy Roosevelt during the Progressive Era as part of his emphasis on physical fitness.
Except the context of that line isn’t entirely straight. Satire 10 – where our bread and circuses come from as well – is a poem musing on the misuse of prayer and how men who get what they pray for are often destroyed by it. It is in that context at the very end of the poem, that he says what someone should pray for is mens sana in corpore sano, but here too the the context (Juvenal 10.346-366) and framing resists a direct reading: Juvenal leads into that statement by declaring “If you want advice, let the divine powers themselves weigh out what suits us and is useful in our affairs: for the gods give that which is most fitting, rather than pleasing”2 and then only concedes that if you must pray for something, “however, that you might ask something and vow, in little shrines3 the entrails and little sausages4 of a shining little white5 pig, you ought pray for a sound mind in a sound body.” Or put another way, ‘if you must do this foolish, selfish, crass little thing, at least do it this way.’
Advice which is then immediately undercut, because Juvenal declares he is showing you “that which you are able to give to yourself” and that Fortuna, to whom everyone is praying, “would have no divine power, if there was prudence; it is we, who place you, Fortuna, as a goddess in the sky.” Which is to say, ‘at least this way you are praying for something you can do yourself, rather than being reliant on Fortuna. So while it’s fair to read mens sana in corpore sano as something the speaker thinks is good, that phrase is coming in the context of, to paraphrase, “you shouldn’t ask for anything, because asking is self-destructive (because you don’t know what you need), but if you do ask for something (you idiot), ask for this thing, because it something you can give yourself without needing to ask and thus harmless and the only reason any of this matters is because we humans are idiots.” Again, the passage resists straight readings – instead, its meaning and intent change depending on how you turn it. That’s part of what makes it great literature.
Added on top of this is Juvenal’s persona generally over all of the poems. Juvenal is famous for his harsh, moralizing tone, most frequently directed at the excesses of the elite and what he sees as the moral decline of the Romans, but he equally targets other non-conforming behavior or simple cultural otherness: you may recall us already referencing his anti-Jewish bigotry in our series on diversity in the Roman world. There is some discussion by scholars as to if we should understand Juvenal’s tone as perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek – that he’s playing the role of a humorless, moralizing, intolerant scold – which is an interesting reading, but I tend to read his grumpy intolerance largely straight. Nevertheless, you can see how that reading adds further layers of uncertainty and complication in reading basically anything this guy says, because the poems themselves are often tongue in cheek and then on top of that, the implied author may himself be insincere (and generally speaking, it can be perilous to assume the implied author is the author himself: ancient writers as easily as modern writers construct a mask – more or less indicative of their authentic self – behind which they write).
Bread and Circuses
All of which at last brings us to the part of the poem where our line about ‘bread and circuses’ is.
The line occurs relatively early in the poem and here we should note that Latin poetry was written to be performed. This is a spoken genre first (although certainly also a literary genre as well), so when you consider a line, you want to consider it in light of what is immediately around it. We know how the poem ends (because we just talked about it above), but the “bread and circuses” phrase is on line 81, less than a third of the way into the 366 line poem. So while later lines can re-contextualize earlier ones, I think its important to keep in mind that at first listening, the initial impact is based on the context of the line where it is and a listener, unlike a reader, cannot flip back to check an earlier line.
The lines immediately preceding our passage muse on the folly of praying for power (potentia, political power) and Juvenal chooses as his example Sejanus (Lucius Aelius Sejanus, c. 20BC-31AD). Sejanus had risen to the heights of power under the the second emperor, Tiberius (r. 14-37) as his praetorian prefect. Tiberius, never much enjoying the role of being emperor, became increasingly reclusive over his reign, retreating to his villa at Capri and entrusting the day to day affairs in Rome to Sejanus, who as a result was fantastically powerful. Sejanus in turn seems to have plotted a coup, which was revealed and failed in 31. Sejanus was executed, along with his family and followers, his statues destroyed and Tiberius, who had always had a paranoid streak, launched a purge through the elite.6 Juvenal describes statues of Sejanus being melted down and turned into little jugs and chamber pots, to the celebration of the crowd, on the whim of an emperor (“but under what crime was he slain? What witness, what evidence proved the case?” “Nothing in this case; a wordy and grand letter came from Capri” “Ah, well done, I have no more questions.” (Juv. 10.69-72)). And it is in that immediate context that we get our passage.
In the event, the passage – and my bad translation – runs thusly:
…sed quid
turba Remi? sequitur fortunam, ut semper, et odit
damnatos. idem populus, si Nortia Tusco
favisset, si oppressa foret secura senectus
principis, hac ipsa Seianum diceret hora
Augustum. iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses.
(Juvenal 10.72-81)
But what of Remus’ mob?7 They follow Fortuna, as always, and hate the condemned. The very same people, if Nortia8 had favored her Etruscan, if the old man emperor, unwary, had been put down, they would have acclaimed Sejanus as emperor9 within the hour. From whence now we sell our votes to no one, it [the People] long since gave up oversight:10 for those who once gave command, high office, legions, everything,11 now it restrains itself and wishes anxiously for two things: bread and circuses.
So I think there is one reading we can rule out pretty quickly, the notion that Juvenal thinks panem et circenses are a good thing, something necessary to manage the people of Rome effectively. Instead, this is a scathing, withering rebuke of the Roman people, who have fecklessly surrendered their prerogative to judge crimes and oversee the function of the state. Its presented in the context of blithe indifference to momentous and bloody events – ones that, at the time of Juvenal’s writing, were not so long ago. The passage is immediately followed by descriptions of men anxious to be seen reviling Sejanus – who, note above, they would have hailed as emperor just as eagerly if he won – so that they won’t risk being caught up in the purges to come.
When I said Juvenal could be (and generally is) scathing, this is actually a pretty damn good example!
Juvenal wraps up this portion of the poem by asking the listener if they wish to be “greeted like Sejanus” (Visne salutari sicut seianus, 10.90) and arguing that Sejanus’ mistake was to keep demanding more honors and wealth, all of which only guaranteed that his fall would be from a fatal, ruinous height. He further compares the fates of Crassus and Pompey – both killed violently – before closing this section with “few kings go to Ceres’ son-in-law [Pluto, God of the Underworld] without slaughter and blood and few tyrants [get] a bloodless death.” (Juv. 10.112-3).
So the surface reading seems clear: he is putting the Roman people on blast for letting their authority over public affairs be taken away, usurped by emperors who promise them bread and circuses (we’ll come to if this is an accurate representation of the history in a moment). They used to have all of this power, the power to bestow offices and armies, but now they cower fecklessly in the wake of imperial slaughter and arbitrary rule.
Except, of course – wait a minute – isn’t the theme of this passage that power is an unwise thing to ask for? The theme of the whole poem is that you shouldn’t be asking the gods for these sorts of things! Juvenal’s very next example is school boys wishing for the eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero, two men who, Juvenal notes, were killed for their eloquence – but note: killed for their eloquence defending consensual governments (the Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, respectively) from rising tyrants (Philip II and the Second Triumvite – including Octavian/Augustus – respectively).
Once again, I’d argue the broader passage playfully resists straight readings! It is bad that the Roman people gave up their votes in exchange for ‘petty’ things like bread and circuses says Juvenal’s implied speaker, but it was also very foolish for Cicero and Demosthenes to fight for those very prerogatives using their eloquence. But equally, while it is bad that the Roman people gave up their ability to bestow powers and honors, also, receiving powers and honors is bad and self-destructive too. Remember, this is a poem about how wishing or praying for things is in and of itself vain and self-destructive and that one ought focus only one the things you can give yourself (that sound mine in a sound body), hardly a cry for the People to throw off their bread and circuses and demand the Republic back.12
One thing, however, that I will note that Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs. If the listener (or reader) is left in any doubt as to how Juvenal imagined that process to proceed, he clarifies thirty lines later: “What was it that overthrew Crassus and Pompey and he [illum] who having broken the Romans13 subjected them to his whip?”14 Leaving ‘he’ without an antecedent is a bit of careful obfuscation, as naming either Caesar or Augustus in this space might be taken as a veiled critique of the sitting emperor. Nevertheless, this is a heck of way to put it, the Romans are ‘broken in’ (domitare, ‘to domesticate, tame, break in’) and just to emphasize the violence of that they are ‘subjected15 to his whip.’
So while I think Juvenal has some contempt for the People who have given up their oversight of the state and ceased to be rightly concerned over public affairs, I don’t think we get the sense – as is often how the phrase is used today – of the people being bribed to give up their votes. Indeed, that’s the thing: the people stopped being able to sell their votes and so could only wish for bread and circuses (rather than buy them with their votes). Instead, the People weren’t bribed from their freedoms but broken and subjected to the lash by men like Crassus and Pompey and this one fellow we’re not going to name because Juvenal is a giant hypocrite who doesn’t want to get in trouble with the emperor either. They were thus reduced by violence to merely wishing for panem et circenses (which Juvenal, in appropriately Roman fashion, views as a cowardly abdication of duty).
It’s hard not for me to conclude that what has happened here, with many of the interpretations of panem et circenses is that a great many readers for a great long time have taken a text which resists a single, straight reading (by design) and instead read in their own assumptions. Juvenal’s angry moralizing, after all, made many of his satires precisely the sort of texts that elite young men might have had their Latin sharpened on in the 1700s and 1800s and so the phrase was a ready made way to indicate either contempt for the emerging voting public and their ‘base’ concerns (like not starving instead of ‘the glory of empire’ and such) or else to lambast radical programs (like not letting the poor starve) as corrosive to civic-mindedness. Juvenal certainly shares that contempt for a public merely wishing anxiously for its panem et circenses, but the reader is importing some causal links (that panem et circenses caused this state, either bottom-up or top-down) that Juvenal does not supply.
And the reason I suspect Juvenal doesn’t supply those causal links is, well…
Bread and Circuses and the Fall of…Something?
Because even a cursory understanding of the collapse of the Roman Republic reduces them to nonsense.
And here we come back to the other way this phrase gets read, as a marker of ‘decadence’ and generally indicating the fall of something. That something is usually fairly vague precisely because a lot of these ‘decadence brings collapse’ arguments work by carelessly conflating very different periods of Roman history, smashing together perennial complaints about luxuria in Roman literature that start from the very moment we have literature to see and continue unabated to and past the collapse of the empire in the West seven centuries later. ‘Bread and Circuses’ can become just a neat phrase to smudge those ideas together over a vague thing called ‘Rome’ (without distinction between the Republic, Principate and Dominate) over a vast sweep of centuries.
So what were panem et circenses? We’ve actually discussed the circenses just last week: these are a wide range of public entertainments (ludi and munera), most of which were tied to religious festival or observances. While in modern popular memory, these tend to be tied to gladiatorial games, Juvenal’s selection of circenses is apt: it was the races in the Circus Maximus which were generally the most popular and likely also the most frequent. Ludi circensis, which is to say chariot races (and other events held in the Circus Maximus or one of Rome’s other circenses) were an old tradition that reached back through the Republic into the regal period prior to 509, at least so far as the Romans know (Livy 1.35.8). Certainly these events seem to have gotten more frequent and more elaborate as Rome’s empire expanded – quite a number are established in the late third or early second century BC, as the Roman Republic is winning its wars overseas – but it’s impossible to make a clear chronological connection to the decline of the Republic (much less the collapse of the empire in the West five centuries later) without intentionally smudging together the back two centuries of the Republic’s history.
The panem is more complex.16 This refers to the Annona, a word meaning the year’s production of a farm but in practice came to mean ‘the food necessary for subsistence’ and thus could mean ‘supplies’ in a military context or just generally ‘grain;’ here the right translation is probably ‘food supply,’ but the word has a sense of basic food supply, not luxuries. The office that handled that was the cura annonae, which we might translate as the ‘office of grain oversight,’ keeping in mind the meaning of cura above. There was a thing called the annona militaris, which was a late Roman (third century and later) term for the military food supply system and that often leads to the annona in Rome being termed the annona civica or annona civilis or annona publica for clarity, but the sources almost always just say annona.
We generally start the history of this institution with the Gracchi, but it is worth noting that the idea of having a public official supervising the grain supply of the city of Rome itself was hardly a new one. The main problem here is that harvests were extremely variable in antiquity and so the food supply and thus food prices for non-farmers varied a lot based on harvest conditions and the availability of trade; almost any large community had to contend with this reality. Livy notes efforts by the state to ‘even out’ grain prices beginning in 508 B.C. – one year after the start of the Republic – and repeatedly afterwards (e.g. Livy 2.9.6, 2.34.2-7, 4.13-16). By the third century, the Republic has officials who are regularly engaged in regulating grain trade and trying to ensure its ready supply in the city of Rome (the task eventually settled with the Curule Aediles, Livy 10.11.9). Systematic importation of grain for Rome from Sicily and Sardinia had already begun by the end of the third century.
The impression that Gaius Gracchus’ law in 123 was thus a wholly new innovation is largely the product of the fact that introductory-level surveys aren’t going to get into the details of what, exactly, the curule aediles are doing in the Middle Republic (indeed, one suspects few survey courses mention the existence of two kinds of aediles (curule and plebeian) at all).
But what Gaius Gracchus is doing in 123 with the lex Sempronia frumentaria is not inventing a Roman state policy of trying to ensure a stable food supply in Rome, but systematizing it, using the substantial revenues Rome was now raising in its overseas provinces on ‘generous’ (we’ll come back to this) terms, admittedly to curry political favor. In any case, Gracchus’ law sets the distribution of grain, probably 5 modii (a modius is a Roman dry volume measure, equal to 8.73 liters) a month; it’s unclear if this would have been per person or per household, but I strongly suspect the latter. The grain was not free, but it did have its price fixed at a relatively low price.
Over the next several decades, at a degree of granularity we need not get into here, the program was expanded and shrunk, curtailed and reshaped. The low price eventually became free and the number of eligible individuals was fixed: it peaks in the 50s BC at over 300,000 citizens, Julius Caesar prunes it to 150,000 and Augustus finally expands it back to 200,000 at which it becomes effectively fixed permanently. So the notion that the Romans were somehow bribed out of their republic is already pretty tricky here: the guy who effectively destroys the republic (Julius Caesar) actually massively trims the size of the annona and its maximum reach was in the mid-first century, before the final cataclysmic collapse. Augustus’ implementation of the annona was effectively a moderate compromise in terms of scale.
Likewise, we need to be clear about what, exactly, the annona included. For the first two centuries AD, the distribution of the annona seems to have been constant: a couple hundred thousand recipients getting 5 modii of grain a month. Note how I keep saying grain and not bread: distributions were in unmilled grain. Recipients would have to then take that grain to be milled and baked, or do it themselves by hand; combined mill-and-bakeries were common in Rome and would take a percentage of the grain to prepare the rest. No other foodstuffs are included before the third century AD; this is just grain.
Five modii per month (so 60 modii per year) as a distribution amount is also notable, because it’s not terribly generous. A normal Roman household – at least two adults, probably quite a few children – might need something on the order of 100 to 200 modii of grain to meet basic caloric needs annually.17 Which matters, because distribution was probably on a by-household basis, rather than individuals: you probably had to be sui iuris (legally independent) to qualify, which explains why the number if eligible recipients never gets much above 320,000, even when Rome is probably approaching a population of nearly a million in the late first century BC.
Instead, even for a household that is receiving free grain, the distribution isn’t enough; it has to be supplemented with some other source of food (probably wage labor). Of course it wouldn’t be enough anyway: humans cannot, nutritionally speaking, survive forever on bread alone. Instead, the annona was always a supplement to the existing food supply in Rome. The vast majority, probably around 80% or so, of Rome’s grain supply remained ‘free market'(ish)18 and all of the other staple parts of the Mediterranean diet did. The annona through the end of the second century AD only ever supplied the most basic foodstuff in its most basic, unprocessed form, and only as a supplement for other sources of income.
So what was this program even doing? It’s a price-stabilizing mechanism designed to hold down the price of grain without making the state responsible for the whole of the city’s food supply. In doing so, it partly stabilizes the wild variations in prices, because there’s a bedrock of supply at a fixed price, which in turn undermines a lot of the speculation-and-hoarding cycles which could produce severe food shortages.19 And that’s important because it mostly averts bread riots. Not entirely, but mostly.
And that’s important because bread riots are politically destabilizing, regardless of if your polity is a monarchy, democracy or republic of some form. Indeed, a casual look through urban communities across the Mediterranean will reveal that most cities of any significant size had some sort of system to stabilize grain prices. Classical Athens had state-run grain imports, restrictions on grain exports and on grain hoarding, for instance.
Consequently, the framing of the annona as some sort of decadent luxury really only works within the moral frame of pre-three-spirits Scrooge, “then they’d better do it [that is, die], and decrease the surplus population.” The population receiving the annona was probably underemployed – wage labor in antiquity was irregular, usually functioning as day-labor, so the poor couldn’t be sure they’d have a paying job on a day-to-day basis – but not unemployed and certainly not wholly idle. Whatever one may think of a generous welfare state, the annona wasn’t it: this price stabilizer wasn’t even enough to keep a family from eventually starving if someone didn’t develop an additional source of income. This was not a luxury.
So I think it is fair to say that:
- The distribution of cheap or free grain did not allow politicians to buy their way to tyranny. Indeed, Julius Caesar and Augustus, the fellows who actually establish monarchic rule in Rome limit the scale of the annona, rather than expanding it.
- The annona was also hardly some great luxury eroding Roman civic virtue: it was, by modern standards, a remarkably austere program of price stabilization that aimed mostly to avoid sudden instability from food shortages.
- Nor was the annona an overwhelming burden on state finances. I once estimated its total cost to the treasury at around 60m HS20 a year whereas under Augustus the army probably cost probably well in excess of 400m HS annually, more than six times as much.
So if the Roman people didn’t give up their votes for the sake of bread (which they voted to themselves already) or circuses…why did they? After all, they don’t stop Augustus from eventually moving nearly all of the power of the popular assemblies either to the Senate or himself. Why give that power up? If they weren’t bribed, what were they?
Exhausted. They were exhausted.
By the killing. All of the killing. Just, so, so much killing.
Again, this is a point that can easily blur in a survey course where a class may fly over many decades of Roman history in just a lecture or two (much less a World History course, where the whole Roman Republic may get…a day or two). But the period of the Roman civil wars lasted a long time, from 91 to 31 BC (with some pauses in that). That means almost no one alive when Octavian seizes durable sole power had lived during a period when the Republic actually functioned well.
But it also means that the Romans had been kept at a very, very high level of military activity for a really long time. Back when I wrote my master’s thesis, I worked out an estimate of the year-to-year mobilizations of the Roman state; it was sloppy and I’d do it differently today, but for a basic sense of scale I estimated that on average between 91 and 31BC, Italy was furnishing something on the order of 170,000 soldiers each year. The real number must be lower (like I said, sloppy), but not much lower. What that means is that from 91 to 31BC, the Romans – post-88 this includes all of the Italians, as the Romans have extended citizenship over all of Italy – are averaging military activity on the level of the worst years of the Second Punic War. It is “Hannibal is in Italy” levels of bad for six consecutive decades. The Battle of Philippi (42 BC) alone practically matches peak Roman mobilizations from the Punic Wars and not every Roman army in the whole Mediterranean was even at that battle.
As an aside, there’s a tendency to read these civil wars as if they were conducted by a handful of professional soldiers gliding over the countryside, but you can’t pull these kinds of numbers out of ancient Italy without fairly broad mobilization and there’s a lot of evidence that the professionalization of the Roman army really only happens with Augustus after the civil wars are over. It’s not entirely clear to what degree Roman armies in this period were conscript forces or volunteer forces, but it is clear that the Romans were still mass-mobilizing in Italy in the first century.
And since those were Roman armies clashing with other Roman armies, all of the casualties were Roman and casualties were frequently high. Add to that the repeated proscriptions (that is, mass killing of political enemies, in 82 and again in 43), economic disruptions (Caesar’s march on Rome triggers a land-and-liquidity crisis, Sextus Pompey’s fleet in Sicily disrupts regular grain shipments to Rome, etc), large-scale confiscations of property and the general seizing uncertainty and you have a long period of miserable years, one after another.21 One of these days, we might do a ‘walk through’ of the Roman civil wars of the First Century, but I think it really must be stressed that they were awful. By 31, it’s clear the Romans would give anything to make the fighting and the killing stop, and Augustus made it stop.
They didn’t give up their votes for panem et circenses, but for pax – peace. Something Augustus knew well enough that he built an altar on the Campus Martius (the field of Mars), the Ara Pacis Augustae, “the Altar of Augustan Peace” to commemorate the idea that he was the peace-bringer. I think we can – and should – be deeply cynical about Augustus’ claims to have ‘restored the Republic‘ but the idea that he had at least made the killings, confiscations, shortages and uncertainty stop was both a powerful one and largely true, albeit with the caveat that before the killings stopped, Octavian had been the fellow doing a lot of the killing.
Nevertheless, it was for peace, not bread, that the Romans sold their votes. We can disapprove of that choice, perhaps, but we shouldn’t reduce it to a simple moral story ‘bread and circuses.’ And indeed, Juvenal’s panem et circenses is not a statement of how Rome fell, or how it was controlled, or how the republic died, but rather a statement – for us, a warning – of how sharply the loss of political liberty constrained the dreams of the Roman people: where once they had made generals and governors and statesmen with their votes, the Roman people were reduced to passively waiting, hoping anxiously for their needs to be met, in a world they no longer meaningfully controlled.
- Not, for instance, its use in this form by a remarkably bad Stefan Molyneux video rightfully roasted some years back by this video by the YouTuber Shaun.
- si consilium vis,/permittes ipsis expendere numinibus quid/conveniat nobis rebusque sit utile nostris;/nam pro iucundis aptissima quaeque dabunt di.
- sacellum, a diminutive meaning a small shrine which might not carry the strong sense of contempt it does except for how it fits into what follows (see the next two footnotes). But here I read it as almost sneering, ‘your little shrines.’
- tomacula, not a diminutive, but it shares that -ulum ending that most Latin diminutives have.
- candiduli, once again not a diminutive, just an adjective, but one which has that -ulus stem for diminutives, so we have three words quick after each other with diminutive forms, “your little shrines with your little white piglet and little sausage offerings,” to me delivers the sneer.
- Upside, he got to be played by Sir Patrick Stewart in I Claudius. So not a total loss.
- Remus being Romulus’ brother, he’s asking, “what of the Roman people?”
- The Etruscan equivalent to Fortuna; Sejanus was of Etruscan extraction, thus the joke.
- Seianum diceret Augustum, literally, “say Sejanus [is] Augustus,” which is to say, declare him emperor.
- curas here is tough to translate because multiple shades of its meaning are in use. It is both one’s ‘cares’ in the sense of attention, diligence, painstaking and so the people ‘give up their cares’ in the sense of ‘lay down their labors,’ but at the same time a cura is a formal office for oversight, so the people are giving up their oversight or administration of the state, laying down both their power and their duty in the same word.
- Literally, what is given is imperium (a complex idea we’ve discussed), fasces (the markers of high office, carried before magistrates by special functionaries called lictors) and legiones, legions.
- Instead, its quite stoic. Stoicism has been having a ‘moment’ in certain circles, but it really ought to be stressed: stoicism, like the other ‘philosophies of comfort’ is a formula for living a happy life in conditions of unfreedom. It was a philosophical response to the loss of control the Greeks faced in the aftermath of Philip II and Alexander’s conquests, a retreat from the virtue ethics of earlier philosophers. This isn’t to say stoicism is altogether bad (I think there are good notions in there!), but it is fundamentally a philosophy of accommodating one’s self to what one cannot control – often explicitly tyranny – rather than trying to, you know, fix something.
- Quirites, a poetic and religiously loaded way to say ‘Romans.’
- Juv. 10.108-10. quid Crassos, quid Pompeios evertit et illum, ad sua qui domitos deduxit flagra Quirites?
- deducere, ‘to lead off or down,’ with a range of meanings, to include the leading of captives in triumphal processions (e.g. Hor. Odes. 1.37.31-2).
- The standard work on this topic is G. Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (1980), on which this summary relies.
- P. Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005). Now you may ask, “what about unmarried individuals?” and here it is possible that the population in Rome was different, but where we can see Roman nuptuality rates – that is, the rate at which individuals marry – they are in excess of 95%, as noted by B. Frier, “Demography” in CAH v. 112. So as best we can get at, basically the entire population is married and actively having children. One of these days, we can get into Mediterranean family formation models, but in fact this is a society that at almost anything less than this level of reproduction, wouldn’t be able to maintain a stable population.
- The number of qualifiers that need to be attached to this phrase is very long and almost overwhelms the original phrase. But you bought your food with money.
- If you think there will be a food shortage, you hoard excess grain, which if a lot of people do this – or a few really rich people – can drive up prices and create a shortage. Knowing that the emperor is sitting on a fifth of the city’s grain supply inspires confidence and avoids these strategies.
- sestercii, equal to 1/4th a denarius
- We can actually map some of this instability chronologically, by looking at coin hoards, because you generally only bury a bunch of money to hide it because things are going bad. On this, see P. Turchin and W. Scheidel, “Coin hoards speak of population declines.” PNAS 106.41 (2009).
Interesting that Juvenal seems to approve of the People ‘selling’ their votes for things like power to appoint or state oversight. It’s viewed as a transaction and not directly an exercise of power. I wonder how much of that is the overall patronage system in Roman society expressing itself.
Would the population of Rome the city have really had so many households? I seem to remember reading (among other places here, on this blog) that dense urban communities pre-modern medicine were demographic sinks precisely because the crowded conditions spread disease so rapidly, and the very vulnerable, among which were infants and pregnant/recently pregnant women, were very hard hit by it. Wouldn’t that tend to leave a city that had significantly more men than women in it if women keep dying in or around childbirth?
To end on a higher note, the Altar of Peace is amazing. I’ve been fortunate enough to see it in person, and it’s just breathtaking. There’s this one little relief of one of the processions (I think it’s the one on the left hand side of the picture, but it’s not high fidelity enough for me to be 100% sure) where you have a man in a toga, and a little child, looking maybe 3-4 years old from the size, tugging on his toga to be carried, and he’s just in the process of turning around to pick up his presumable son. It’s a very powerful scene.
The Ara Pacis Augustae is now displayed at its original site in Museo dell’Ara Pacis, a modern glass box structure designed by American architect Richard Meir and completed in 2006. IMHO, this one place that modernist architecture works to enhance the ancient things within it.
When you visit Rome you must make it a priority to spend a couple of hours there.
http://www.arapacis.it/en
https://maps.app.goo.gl/xrV6tXQ8bqQ6GSYeA
Virtual Tour: http://www.arapacis.it/en/node/1007168
Thoroughly off-topic, but I just today encountered a youtuber doing song covers in Classical Latin and found them entertaining (although I cannot at all evaluate how good the Latin is).
Everybody Wants To Rule The World: https://youtu.be/Xtt78SW-mgg
All Star: https://youtu.be/Bf2Edoj3_t8
That is the funniest thing I have seen in a long time. I would rate the Latin as accurate, though others may have some criticisms.
Many thanks. Gems like this make up for a hundred crappy ads on YouTube.
(And no I can’t evaluate the Latin, or Middle English, either.)
Thanks for sharing! I prefer the latter to the former, but to be fair, I don’t really vibe with either of the original songs much.
What I would personally recommend when it comes to music in Latin are a few themes from last year’s Small Saga. It’s basically a very 1990s-JRPG type of a game, (almost) entirely made by one woman over a number of years, and it plays with those Japanese/anime tropes a lot by scaling them down to rodent level. I.e. the ridiculous “badass greatsword” from the archetypal “gritty grimdark manga” Berserk* makes a bit more sense when it’s just a Swiss Army Knife, but held by a literal rat. Likewise, it’s become a bit of a joke in gaming circles that no matter how a JRPG might start, they always have to end with fighting a god, so this one does too – except that to rodents in the modern world, humans ARE gods, and an unremarkable exterminator is a faceless, awe-inspiring Yellow God who brings not just death but outright apocalypse to whole societies when viewed from their eyes.
Thus, the Yellow God requires an epic theme when finally fought. The most famous JRPG, Final Fantasy VII, broke the mold with a handful of semi-accurate Latin lyrics in its final boss theme, One-Winged Angel. Small Saga’s Gloria in Muri has what appears to be actually grammatically correct lyrics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VumJR1hMF6A
Furthermore, “Showdown at Circus Minimus” (yes, that’s a reference to the same Circus Maximus that was far more important than the Colosseum, as Dr. Devereaux explained in the previous post!) includes crowd noises which break into the chanting of outright “Ave!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHKuzYv4QEg
The other examples of true Latin lyrics in gaming I can think of are Final Fantasies of course, although in spite of the enormous popularity of the aforementioned One Winged Angel, they haven’t been very eager to make such music into a regular treat. Sure, the sequel had Liberi Fatali (which cheated, as only half of it actually uses real Latin words.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Ng07R_HIM
And then, only after a ~15 year hiatus, Final Fantasy XV had Somnus and Apocalypsis Noctis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIt4RYlJX8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XQKQ0hEt2c
Lastly, another Japanese franchise, Ace Combat, also occasionally included themes with full (and seemingly accurate) Latin lyrics. Starting with Agnui Dei in 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ovcV2WWnOE
And continuing with the (surprisingly complex!) Unsung War in 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo5qLVbPBiI
And then 7 went heavily on it with Archange, Alicorn and Faceless Soldier all sporting extensive Latin lyrics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJEKoPU6_Rk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2MJRnmd-DA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cZ4q9oCt9o
I mentioned Small Saga first, because I felt the Romanesque trappings of some of its rodent factions would be more interesting to the readers here (and because such effort from small creators is more remarkable than from established studios) but I hope it’s all been helpful!
*P.S.: It could be really interesting to see an “It Didn’t Happen”-style series devoted to “Berserk”, which really has a very similar reputation in Japanese media to what ASOIAF has in the West, and with comparable issues.
I see two problems with a hypothetical Berserk “How It Didn’t Happen” series.
First, Berserk’s setting is much more overtly supernatural than Westeros. It’s easy to compare the political position of King Bran to real-world elected monarchs, because they are all working with more or less the same tools and limitations. Same deal with analyzing Cersei’s treatment of the church, or Dothraki tactics. You can’t analyze (for instance) Griffith’s use of the Crimson Behelit the same way.
Second, AFAIK Devereaux has never mentioned reading Berserk. Glancing at TV Tropes and the wiki like I did just doesn’t give you a clear enough picture of what’s actually going on with the Crimson Beherit or whatever to write about Berserk‘s depiction of a premodern society.
Hi, one of your best articles. I read some Juvenal in grad school, in both Latin and translation. I have just enough Latin to get the gist of a lot of it without peeking, but not all, and of course the proper names wouldn’t mean anything without your footnotes.
I think in your translation you left out this phrase—”si oppressa foret secura senectus
principis.” Am I missing something? I can’t decipher it.
Oh whoops. Yes, I dropped that out of my translation because I was busy making sure to get in the footnote about Nortia. I find the line a bit hard to parse, myself, the meaning is reasonably clear, “if the old man princeps, off his guard, had been put down.”
In any case, fixed in the main text.
Typo hunt:
“Which mattes,”
ITYM “Which matters,”
“(that sound mine in a sound body)” mine -> mind
“the number if eligible recipients” if -> of
its important → it’s important
Its presented → It’s presented
focus only one the things → focus only on the things
tied to religious festival → tied to religious festivals
my estimated → I estimated
Instead, its quite stoic. → Instead, it’s quite stoic.
Footnote #1: “Not” -> “Note” (I think)
“a sound mind in a sound body” which gets used entirely straight as the motto for athletics and fitness clubs and military training institutions
and why not? It’s pursuing an end he thinks worthy by means he deems practical. If he gets his nose out of joint for the want of something to satirize, that’s not their problem.
I’ll get back to reading the post in a minute, but I want to say this right away because I so rarely disagree with you, Bret: Sejanus’s breastplate in I, Claudius is bronze, not leather. The bronze is being played by leather, much as the Roman is being played by Patrick Stewart. You can see in the strap across his chest in the picture what leather playing leather would look like, a distinctive reddish brown; additionally you can see that the leather ties on the shoulders are portrayed by some kind of fabric cord.
Costuming and outfitting are separate arts.
Also, hilariously, that’s not Sir Patrick with hair, that’s Sir Patrick in a wig: he was bald by 20, more than fifteen years before this picture.
Here I was thinking Stewart had super thick hair into his thirties and then suddenly lost it, given I had only seen him in Star Trek and his roles since, in his fifties.
That’s not even Sir Patrick, not yet anyway. He wasn’t knighted until long after that picture was taken.
The change from the civil war to peace with the change of the Republic for the Empire lends a certain amount of irony to Star Wars.
For all their faults, this is something the prequels got right. Palpatine was able to get himself crowned Emperor because, as far as anyone knew, he was the guy who ended the Clone Wars. Of course, that he was also the one who started them is not exactly public knowledge.
On the other hand, there wasn’t really a reason for the populace to be so upset by the clone wars, which were relatively short, with most of the dying being done by slave armies of robots and clones created specifically for the task, in backwaters away from the metropole.
This would have been like clamoring to make Biden emperor because he ended the war in Afghanistan.
I mean, the Galactic Republic is large. Even Coruscant suffered a raid and an aerial battle at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. Back before the war, Naboo had been blockaded by the Trade Federation. We see Kashyyk at war. It’s not shown much, but it’s very possible that while the soldiers doing the fighting are all clones and robots there’s still a lot of splash damage on the civilians, by either severe economic disruption, strategic bombardment, or your ordinary brand of war atrocities.
This is the same universe where only 20 years later someone *blows up an entire planet* as an extreme form of strategic bombardment, and the weapon to do that was already in development by the Separatist Army. I really doubt they’d particularly hold back from carpet-bombing from orbit a planet or two.
If they didn’t do it during the clone wars, they definitely did it during the Rebellion. The old expanded universe has this sort of thing show up several times, called “base delta zero”, which it involves using turbolasers to heat the planet’s surface to melting. They bring it back as a reference in Star Wars Rebels a few times, and Wookieepedia says there are new-canon source books say the procedure already existed during the Old Republic.
Honestly, I might rather have my planet get hit by the Death Star. It’ll be uninhabitable afterward either way, but at least with the superlaser hit, it’ll be quick.
(In response to Richard H) “Base delta zero” appears to just be the “Alpha Strike” trope as used in sci-fi. According to the website (which regular readers would have likely already seen linked on here more a few times) that term was used during the IRL Vietnam War, after which it was then adopted by wargames.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlphaStrike
The earliest sci-fi use probably came from manga/anime like Macross, where it would have substantially preceded Star Wars EU, but I’m not sure on this.
The example with the most emotional resonance to me would be from a completely free videogame called Iji, where this is how the alien invasion begins, apparently leaving the Earth surface above deep military bunkers like the one the titular protagonist (daughter of a scientist who augmented her with captured alien nanomachines before getting killed) not COMPLETELY dead, but still mostly pitted with deep burn scars and subject to regular acid rain. (Probably from all the ash clouds.)
The remarkable thing is that after all this devastation, the game then enables you to follow a commitment to pacifism even MORE extensive than that of the far better-known Undertale (which followed it about 5 years later.) While both enable (even encourage) you to avoid fighting back when attacked first until the other gives up, Undertale does place your character in the position of a literal, uninvited intruder (and the local denizens do have reasons to be afraid of you beyond xenophobia.) Iji is confronted with the invaders who have already killed her father and seemingly the vast majority of the Earth’s population as they now shoot at her on sight – and yet, she can still choose to avoid embracing the role of avenging angel and instead use the enormous power of her enhancements a safety cushion to literally walk through their bullets.
In the 2nd half of the story, you do learn that your invaders were fleeing from their own pursuers intent on complete genocide, and the Alpha Strike was their way of cutting corners, since they have not a chance in hell to fight the pursuers and any potential resistance from functioning Earth at the same time, and if they lose, the much larger genocidal fleet would truly glass the Earth with their own Alpha Strike anyway. Further, playing “normally” and killing anyone openly hostile from the start will ensure literally none of them survives the genocide even as you save whatever humans remain from the 2nd alpha strike. You have no way of knowing this ahead of time, though, so it’s a real test of either your Hacksaw Ridge-style principles, or just a commitment to metagaming.
P.S. That game actually MIGHT have had directly quoted “bread and circuses” as well, but I’ll have to replay it to be sure of this. If it did, it was in the sense of the 2nd alien race starting the genocide of the 1st to distract the populace from internal issues with their leadership, thus also helping to stave off civil war. (Implied to be inevitable after their expedition ends either way.)
The Clone Wars themselves may not have lasted all that long, but focusing on that ignores why they started and everything that led up to. We don’t know how long all of that was building up.
We have a rough idea, because the whole mess was the creation of Palpatine, who couldn’t have started working on it until adulthood and was [whatever age President GW Bush was at the time the movie came out] when the vote to give him dictator-powers happened.
Eh. Just because Palpatine was responsible for the Clone Wars, doesn’t mean that there weren’t major pre-existing social tensions that Palpatine took advantage of or that a war wouldn’t have arisen eventually without him.
“For over a thousand generations the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic.” That is basically a collection of five different good things that have precedent in history, but have not existed at the same time.
longevity (though scaled up by several orders of magnitude)
a warrior elite with a moral code (who, the implication is, consistently lived up to that moral code – while the records of historical knights is rather mixed in that regard)
peace
justice
people having a voice in government
We only ever had at best three of those things at the same time, and always in imperfect forms. The Roman Republic had longevity, justice, and voice in government. The Principate had longevity, justice, and peace. Etc. If we make it to 2046 without a big war, I would say we have managed to combine four of those for the first time. Maybe we should try to find a way to bring back knights in a peace keeping role – get the full Kenobi checklist.
“it’s unclear if this would have been per person or per household, but I strongly suspect the latter.”
““what about unmarried individuals?” and here it is possible that the population in Rome was different, but where we can see Roman nuptuality rates – that is, the rate at which individuals marry – they are in excess of 95%, as noted by B. Frier, “Demography” in CAH v. 112. So as best we can get at, basically the entire population is married and actively having children.”
“because distribution was probably on a by-household basis, rather than individuals: you probably had to be sui iuris (legally independent) to qualify, ”
Erm, an orphan was a pater familias as pointed out by Roman lawyers. A woman could not get patria potestas, neither could an older brother.
How did a widow with minor children count? Unless her children were in patria potestas of her father-in-law (not unlikely when her husband died young and father-in-law survived), all of them (of both sexes) were suo juris. Did a widow without a living father-in-law collect annona for each child?
For example, Gaius Octavius became an orphan age about 4. At which point Atia was not suo jure (her father, Marcus Atius Balbus, was alive), but apparently Gaius Octavius was.
Also: Julius Caesar was married at no older than 15 (in Cinna´s lifetime, to Cinna´s daughter) – but Marcus Tullius Cicero married Terentia only at age 26. Which of them was common and typical to poor Romans? Did Rome have significant numbers of young men in their early twenties who were legally independent (father dead), but not married (trying to somehow make a fortune so they might afford to marry in their late twenties or thirties)?
What I find fascinating is that this is *very* different from what we can tell of early modern or medieval europe, where a significant (I think the usual number thrwon about is 25-30%?) of the population remained unmarried for various reasons.
(there’s a mention somewhere that the high point of marriage as an institution in “The West”, as in the point in history where the largest proportion of the population is married (post-medieval times at least) is…. the 1960’s….
“What I find fascinating is that this is *very* different from what we can tell of early modern or medieval europe, where a significant (I think the usual number thrwon about is 25-30%?) of the population remained unmarried for various reasons.”
What are you calling “Europe”? Europe lies on both sides of Hajnal line.
What are you calling “medieval”? I think it is not clear when Hajnal line formed, for shortage of medieval sources.
What sex?
We know, for example, about Renaissance Florence, Catasto of Florence, 1427, a few years before Leonardo Bruni discovered Middle Ages were over. There was only a small number of women who did not get married by 22. While a large fraction of men remained lifetime bachelors.
How does that not violate the pigeonhole principle? Was polygamy or massive female infanticide a thing at the time?
Not massive female infanticide, nor simultaneous polygamy.
Serial polygyny. Widowers often remarried, widows rarely.
Menopause probably had a great deal to do with that.
We do not find evidence for gender-distortions in ancient Mediterranean populations. That, actually, has been a pretty significant finding over the past 50 years or so; older scholars often assumed sex-selective female infanticide but when we can see populations clearly, we don’t see evidence of it.
On average, a European has twice as many female ancestors as male ones. Which is to say, women died after marriage and children, and men without.
That strikes me as unlikely. An ancestry chart will have just as many male slots as female ones. Now it is true that if you go back far enough, you will get some people appearing in multiple slots in the chart, as various descendants intermarry their nth cousins. But for there to be twice as many unique female ancestors as male ones in the chart, the average male ancestor would have had to have had surviving adult children by at least two wives whose descendants then intermarried to produce ancestors of the individual at the root of the chart. And there would have to be roughly as many male ancestors with surviving adult children by three or more wives in that chart as there were male ancestors who had surviving adult children by only one wife for the numbers to balance out.
Not every male ancestor is going to have as many wives as Henry VIII. And it is notable that even though Henry VIII did leave three children who ascended the throne, he didn’t get any legitimate grandchildren out of them, so he wouldn’t be anyone’s (legitimate) ancestor. That’s how James I became king.
Also, documentation of ancestry for many common people may be weak or non-existent, and illegitimate births are likely to be particularly poorly documented. I suspect the evidence for this particular claim is pretty shaky.
It’s DNA evidence. And it means that — ON AVERAGE — men who married at all had two wives. Sure, some women went through six husbands, and some men never remarried after losing their wives, but it’s feasible
I think it might be instructive to note here that the average ancestor is not the average person.
The men who marry multiple times will on average have more children, presuming they marry sufficiently young women, which appears to be the case here.
For example, take four men, once of which marries thrice, the others all marry once. For this generation of men the average number of wives is 1.5. For the next generation however, the number of wives their fathers had is 2, because you need to weight by the number of children.
Furthermore you do this over a great many generations, so you only need a small per-generation effect to end up with twice as many female ancestors as male ones.
While I haven’t seen the evidence for this particular claim, it doesn’t strike me as unlikely.
Only if each wife bore as many children. If each man had six children, it would work out the other way. And a fair number of remarriages occurred because a wife died before the end of her child-bearing years.
Just to be clear, if you go back even a thousand years, you don’t get “some people appearing in multiple slots,” you get massive pedigree collapse. A thousand years is thirty generations, and a thirty-generation pedigree chart has one billion (2 to the 30th) slots in the thirtieth generation, which is something like 20 times the European population in 1000 AD.
I am in no way an expert, but I remeber having read something about it on r/askhistorians. Iirc the evidence seems to suggest, that men in the senatorial classes tended to marry in their late twenties, probably after they had made a couple of steps on the cursus honorium. Men in the lower classes tended to marry in the late teens or early twenties, so basically when they were old enough to get conscripted.
Women seem to have married in their early to mid teens. With noble women (or rather girls) tending to marry earlier.
So if I remember correctly no, young men, who are legally independent, would probably be expected to marry as soon as possible.
Remeber that many pre-mordern economies heavily relied on the family as the smalest building block. I would wager that someone who was, single, fatherless and did not have the means to have several servants, needed to get married fast.
Rome of the bread and circuses time was peculiar in being an unusually militarized society.
Augustus (and that was when he was Augustus) cracked down on caelibes, defined as including men unmarried past 25.
With two problems:
*the consuls Papius and Poppaeus who made the law were both liable to its penalties;
*Augustus also forbade soldiers to marry, and extended their service so that they were required to be caelibes
Back in the Republic, there had been married soldiers. Sp. Ligustinus served in army multiple wars over 29 years – but with intervals back home, was married and managed to father 8 children.. There had been soldiers who served long time continuously, like the losers of Cannae who did not get home till 15 years later, but this was a rare punishment.
But how did Augustus expect to have his soldiers swallow the ban of marriage without mutiny… unless perhaps they were already planning to delay marriage anyway? Until they were older and less likely to be drafted?
Excellent post! Great lesson, professor. And then, “granularity”!
It’s articles like this that make me bemoan how often people confidently make assertions about elements of history that they’ve clearly never even read a proper article about, much less studied in any detail. Just think about how many times *today* someone will talk about bread and circuses without having any idea of the original context or intended meaning, or even any idea that they don’t know what they’re talking about!
See: sparta
I suspect this is because the meaning itself has changed over time.
People being exhausted by all the war when they accept Augustus’ rule makes me wonder about something:
As Bret has said in the past, hunter-gatherer societies have a lot of warfare, with ~25% every generation dying violent deaths. I presume that is higher than even the First Century in the Roman Republic. Did hunter-gatherers feel like a Roman in 30 BCE all the time, or is it different because war is and feels much more disruptive to normal life in an agricultural society?
Certainly gives an interesting perspective on state formation.
The traditional understanding I’ve heard is that agriculture based societies support more people by units of land (even though these people would have lived comparatively worse lives, wracked by hard labor, huge inequality and disease) and so outcompete hunting-gathering based societies through numbers alone. It was also not a sharp transition, nor was it one-way only, more like a spectrum with various societies oscillating on it depending on environmental circumstances
“Comparatively worse lives” is VERY arguable. The late Ted Kaczynski (yes, THAT Kaczynski) was SO annoyed by “anarchoprimitivists” treating him as hero and assuming he fully agreed with them that while imprisoned, he actually wrote a VERY extensive rebuttal to what he saw as unjustified valorization of pre-agricultural lifestyles.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism
It’s FAR too long for me to quote more than a small fraction of it, so I’ll choose SOME of the paragraphs where he discusses the misconceptions around hard labor.
> Let’s begin with the concept of “primitive affluence”. It seems to be an article of faith among anarchoprimitivists that our hunting-and-gathering ancestors had to work an average of only two to three hours a day, or two to four hours a day … the figures given vary, but the maximum stated never exceeds four hours a day, or 28 hours a week (average). [1] People who give these figures usually do not state precisely what they mean by “work”, but the reader is led to assume that it includes all of the activities necessary to meet the practical exigencies of the hunter-gatherers’ way of life. …. I’m not familiar with any other exact quantitative studies of hunter gatherers’ working time, but it is certain that at least some additional hunter-gatherers worked a great deal more than the forty-hour week of Lee’s Bushmen. Gontran de Poncins stated that the Eskimos with whom he lived about 1939–1940 had “no significant degree of leisure”, and that they “toiled and moiled fifteen hours a day merely in order to get food and stay alive.” [12] He probably did not mean that they worked fifteen hours every day; but it’s clear from his account that his Eskimos worked plenty hard.
> Among the Mbuti pygmies principally studied by Paul Schebesta, on days when the women did not fetch a supply of fruits and vegetables from the gardens of their village-dwelling neighbors, their gathering excursions in the forest lasted between five and six hours. Apart from their food-gathering, the women had considerable additional work to do. Each afternoon, for example, a woman had to go again into the forest and come back to camp panting and bowed under a huge load of firewood. The women worked far more than the men, but it seems clear from Schebesta’s account that the men nevertheless worked much more than the three or four hours a day claimed by the anarchoprimitivists. [13] Colin Turnbull studied Mbuti pygmies who hunted with nets. Due to the advantage conferred by the nets, these Mbuti only needed to hunt about twenty hours per week. But for them: “Netmaking is virtually a full-time occupation… in which both men and women indulge whenever they have both the spare time and the inclination.” [14]
> The Siriono, who lived in a tropical forest in Bolivia, were not pure hunter-gatherers, since they did plant crops to a limited extent at certain times of the year. But they lived mostly by hunting and gathering. [15] According to the anthropologist Holmberg, Siriono men hunted, on average, every other day. [16] They started at daybreak and returned to camp typically between four and six o’clock in the afternoon. [17] This makes on average at least eleven hours of hunting, and at three and a half days a week it comes to 38 hours of hunting per week, at the least. Since the men also did a significant amount of work on days when they did not hunt, [18] their work-week, averaged over the year, had to be far more than 40 hours. And but little of this was agricultural work. [19] Actually, Holmberg estimated that the Siriono spent about half their waking time in hunting and foraging, [20] which would mean roughly 56 hours a week in these activities alone. With other work included, the work-week would have had to be far more than 60 hours. The Siriono woman “enjoys even less respite from labor than her husband”, and “the obligation of bringing her children to maturity leaves little time for rest.” [21] Holmberg’s book contains many other indications of how hard the Siriono had to work.”
And here’s another remarkable point in regards to the same.
> Worth noting is that while Mbuti women often married villagers and lived in the villages, villager women hardly ever married Mbuti men, because the women “shunned the hard Gypsy life of the forest nomads and preferred the settled village life.” [275] Moreover, the mixed-blood offspring of Mbuti-villager unions usually remained in the villages and “only rarely found their way back to the forest, because they preferred the more comfortable village life to the tough life of the forest.” [276] This is hardly consistent with the anarchoprimitivists’ image of the hunter-gatherer’s life as one of ease and plenty.
In addition to my other comment – I should also note that “agricultural societies support more people by unit of land” also wasn’t anywhere near as straightforward for quite a while. Granted, that understanding is a relatively new development in scholarship, with Shennan et al., “Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-Holocene Europe.” Nature Communications 4 (2013) appearing to be the seminal work upending the non-linear understanding of this subject.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3486
> Following its initial arrival in SE Europe 8,500 years ago agriculture spread throughout the continent, changing food production and consumption patterns and increasing population densities. Here we show that, in contrast to the steady population growth usually assumed, the introduction of agriculture into Europe was followed by a boom-and-bust pattern in the density of regional populations.
> Although the European population follows an approximately exponential long-term growth trend (Fig. 2), considerable regional variation is evident. In virtually all the regions examined here, there are significant demographic fluctuations and in most there are indications at certain points of population decline of the order of the 30–60% estimated by historians for the much later Black Death, although of course absolute population sizes during the Neolithic were much smaller than that during the Middle Ages. It is particularly important to note that the bust following the initial farming boom is found in two historically separate agricultural expansions, the first into Central Europe c. 7,500 years ago and the second into Northwest Europe 1,500 years later.
> On present evidence the decline in the initially raised population levels following the introduction of agriculture does not seem to be climate-related, but of course this still leaves open a variety of possible causes that remain to be explored in the future. One possibility is disease, as the reference to the Black Death above implies, although this would have to be occurring on multiple occasions at different times in different places, given the patterns shown. It is perhaps more likely that it arose from endogenous causes; for example, rapid population growth driven by farming to unsustainable levels, soil depletion or erosion arising from early farming practices, or simply the risk arising from relying on a small number of exploitable species. …. Regardless of the cause, collapsing Neolithic populations must have had a major impact on social, economic and cultural processes.
Here is a fairly recent paper on the subject: G .R. Miller and J. S. Boldsen, “Population trends and the transition to agriculture: Global processes as seen from North America”. PNAS 120.4 (2021).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209478119
The TL;DR;
> There are now enough JI analyses from different parts of the world to identify several long-term patterns in the human experience (1, 13, 41, 70–74). …. A low point in the JI [Juvenility Index – basically, the fraction of the discovered bones which belongs to younger people, and something you would generally want to be low] is reached around the time of agriculture’s emergence, as defined in various studies, to as much as a millennium earlier (1, 41, 70, 71, 73). That is consistent with the North American midcontinental samples, as long as agriculture’s emergence is considered to be the widespread use of the EAC [Eastern Agricultural Complex plants], not the initial appearance of native domesticates or the adoption of maize. Following agriculture’s emergence, regardless of how it is identified, there is an increase in the JI in skeletal samples from several parts of the world (1, 13, 41, 70–74). The midcontinental skeletons reinforce the possibility that a low point followed by an increase in age-independent mortality was a common feature of the move toward agricultural economies, transcending great differences in specific cultural contexts.
> In the North American midcontinent, the population declined several centuries after the shift to a maize-based subsistence system (26, 57). A reduction in population also took place in Europe following the adoption of agriculture, as indicated by compilations of numerous radiocarbon dates (27, 70). The reasons behind such decreases have yet to be clearly identified. Nevertheless, in the midcontinent, they accompanied a combination of climatic events, warfare leading to great losses of life that interfered with essential survival tasks, group movement and whatever disruptions it entailed, and factional competition within societies.
Further excerpts:
> A decline in the JI , which reached a low point approximately 2 millennia ago during the Middle Woodland period, coincides with an increase in native cultigen consumption by many societies (Figs. 1 and 2). The shift in subsistence practices, even if the plants were mainly a means of blunting the worst effects of seasonal shortages (9), was sufficient to reduce age-independent mortality. Deaths directly or indirectly attributable to food shortages would have been a likely cause of such mortality, so resource-related hardships were seemingly not as severe or frequent as those experienced by earlier hunting-and-gathering populations. For about a half-millennium, there were impressive increases in mound and earthwork construction, a greater intergroup exchange of raw materials and symbolically charged artifacts, more permeable boundaries between spatially discrete groups, and a decline in warfare (42, 61, 62). Subsistence changes would have resulted in less pressure on local resources through the productive and storage potential of native cultigens. A more stable and sure food supply provided opportunities for leaders to orchestrate large ceremonies, which sometimes involved building massive earthen monuments, while it simultaneously reduced intergroup competition when wild resources were scarce.
> The JI increased shortly thereafter in the Late Woodland to Mississippian periods, peaking about a millennium ago when cultigen use was greatest (Figs. 1 and 2). Dietary and population changes were accompanied by an increase in intergroup conflict, as indicated by skeletal trauma and, increasingly from the 11th century CE onward, palisades surrounding villages (54, 57). By the early years of the first millennium CE, some of the most heavily populated and powerful societies to have existed in eastern North America were firmly established in resource-rich river valleys (42, 56, 63). Aggregations of settlements increased local population densities and hence pressure on nearby resources. Greater intergroup conflict meant correspondingly fewer opportunities to disperse during lean times, despite expanses of uninhabited land between pockets of population. Insufficient alternative foods to ameliorate periods of hunger and higher unpredictable losses of life from attacks that disrupted essential household activities are consistent with higher age-independent mortality. Conflict could result in numerous deaths, with up a third of all adults being killed in attacks on one particularly hard-hit village dating to ca. 1300 CE (64). Diseases also contributed, directly or indirectly, to many deaths. Among them were tuberculosis and a treponemal infection, both of which were chronic, debilitating conditions suffered by many members of some communities (65–69).
> After several centuries, the JI declined. That happened during a period of intergroup conflict coupled with group movement, the dissolution of formerly powerful societies, and population decline (42, 54, 56, 57). By 1500 CE, much of the midcontinent was depopulated, and inhabited places were more widely dispersed than they had been only a few centuries earlier (26). Despite considerable intergroup conflict, the decline in age-independent mortality raises the possibility that this change was primarily driven by altered subsistence practices and reduced local pressure on primary and alternative sources of food. The plant data indicate diets were more diverse than they were just a few centuries earlier, making them more resilient to resource shortfalls that inevitably occur.
From the combination of these papers and Kaczynski’s analysis of sources, it seems more reasonable to say that agriculture is at first widely adopted because it demonstrably makes people’s lives somewhat easier (“resource-related hardships were seemingly not as severe or frequent as those experienced by earlier hunting-and-gathering populations” is a remarkably direct statement for an academic paper) but once EVERYONE around you is a part of an agricultural society, a Red Queen’s Race begins which drives an explosion of violence between societies, while the societies themselves are in fact wracked by greater disease with increased numbers, so the collective population of the region ends up dropping – in large part because the less-capable agriculturalist groupings get wiped out in lean years, and more distance is formed between the more successful groups who begin to optimize for stability rather than the raw “extractive” population growth.
I would argue that hunter gatherers (or anyone living below the level of a state, or perhaps a very large chiefdom) don’t have the logistical ability to engage in actual warfare, or the social structure to benefit from the traditional spoils of war (territory, plundered goods, and slaves). Chronic raiding and murder on their part is being labeled “warfare” by analogy. (Note that I’m not saying actual warfare is necessarily better than chronic raiding and murder, just that it’s not exactly the same thing.)
Kaczynski’s rebuttal of anarchoprimitivism (which I linked in an earlier comment; not doing it again in case that triggers the spam filter) DOES describe conflict between groups of pre-agricultural people as less worse than modern warfare BUT it definitely contains accounts of deadly fighting over plundered goods or to defend territory. I am not sure if you would describe the practice of kidnapping children to be raised as your tribe’s own (after doing the best possible job of killing their parents, of course) as tantamount to slavery or not, but it’s certainly an example of taking advantage of the spoils of war.
> I’ve already had occasion at several points to mention violence among nomadic hunter-gatherers. Examples of violence, including deadly violence, among hunter-gatherers are abundant. To mention only a few such examples: “One account has been published of a mortal battle between an inland band of Tasmanians having access to ochre, and a coastal band who had agreed to exchange seashells for the other’s product. The inland people brought their ochre, but the coastal people arrived empty handed. Men were killed because of a breach of faith over the two materials, neither of which was edible or of any other practical use. In other words, the Tasmanians were just as ‘human’ as the rest of US.” [171] The Tasmanians made their spears “in two lengths…the shorter ones were for hunting, the longer ones for fighting.” [172] Among the hunter-gatherers of the Andaman Islands, “grievances were remembered, and revenge might be taken later. The raiders either crept through the jungle or approached in canoes. They leaped on their victims by surprise, quickly shot [with arrows] all the men and women unable to escape, and took away any uninjured children, to adopt them…”; “If enough members of the group survived to reconstitute the band, they might eventually grow numerous enough to seek revenge, and a lengthy feud might arise. [Peace efforts were] initiated by the women because it was they who had kept the hostilities alive, egging on their men.” [173]
> Among at least some groups of Australian Aborigines, women at times would provoke their menfolk to deadly violence against other men. [174] Among the Eskimos with whom Gontran de Poncins lived, there was “a good deal of killing”, and it was sometimes a woman who persuaded a man to kill another man. [175] Paintings made in rock shelters by prehistoric hunter-gatherers of eastern Spain show groups of men fighting each other with bows and arrows. [176]
> One could go on and on. But I don’t want to give the impression that all hunter-gatherer were violent. Turnbull refers to numerous nonlethal fights and beatings among the Mbuti, but in those of his books that I’ve read he mentions not a single case of homicide. [177] This suggests that deadly violence was rare among the Mbuti at the time when Turnbull knew them. Siriono women sometimes fought physically, striking each other with sticks, and there was a good deal of aggression among the children, even with sticks or burning brands used as weapons. [178] But men rarely fought each other with weapons, [179] and the Siriono were not warlike. [180] Under extreme provocation they did kill certain whites and missionized Indians, [181] but among the Siriono themselves intentional homicide was almost unknown. [182] Among the Bushmen whom Mrs. Thomas knew aggression of any kind was minimal, though she makes clear that this was not necessarily true of all Bushman groups. [183]
> It is important, too, to realize that deadly violence among primitives is not even remotely comparable to modern warfare. When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world soldiers fight because they are forced to do so, or, at best, because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call “freedom”. In any case the modern soldier is merely a pawn, a dupe who dies not for his family or his tribe but for the politicians who exploit him. If he’s unlucky, maybe he does not die but comes home horribly crippled in a way that would never result from an arrow- or a spear-wound. Meanwhile, thousands of non-combatants are killed or mutilated. The environment is ravaged, not only in the war zone, but also back home, due to the accelerated consumption of natural resources needed to feed the war machine. In comparison, the violence of primitive man is relatively innocuous. That, however, it isn’t good enough for the anarchoprimitivists or for today’s politically correct anthropologists. They can’t deny altogether the existence of violence among hunter-gatherers, since the evidence for it is incontrovertible. But they will stretch the truth as far as they think they can get away with in order to minimize the amount of violence in the human past.
” or what American politicians choose to call “freedom””
Think of those poor brainwashed Americans who fought against slavery, Nazism etc. I’m sure you would never be so foolish as to do such a thing!
In case it’s not clear, every paragraph in the comment above which had been preceded by an > symbol is a direct quotation from the source linked earlier – and that source is the Unabomber himself, writing from prison.
It should go without saying that thinking he was able to put his time in confinement to good use by parsing literature on contemporary hunter-gatherers and combining it with his pre-capture experience of attempting this lifestyle does NOT constitute an endorsement of his other ideas or of the actions which led to his confinement in the first place.
YARD, I obviously misread your comment: I can only apologise.
“When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world soldiers fight because they are forced to do so, or, at best, because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call “freedom””
Why is fighting over territory, of all things, worse than fighting over ideology?
Only one side in a war can actually be defending itself in a literal sense- both sides might see themselves as defending some more abstract interest, but those kind of abstractions are exactly what this quotation says hunter gatherer warfare *isn’t* about.
Also I believe the Mbuti Pygmies are not exactly hunter gatherers in the traditional sense, they’re more like commercial “hunter gatherers” who exchange game and forest products for agricultural products from farming communities, but that’s a separate point.
“Only one side in a war can actually be defending itself in a literal sense…” This can get complicated when resources important to survival are at stake. If someone from my village steals a dozen of your village’s cattle, and your villagers gather together a warband to raid mine, well… Which of us is the attacker and which is the defender gets a bit complicated.
Clearly, stealing your cattle was an attack on you, and since cattle provide resources that our villages need to subsist, it was a serious attack. At the same time, it’s physically a case of armed men from your village marching into mine, which also is arguably an ‘attack.’
Often in tribal warfare there is literally no way to decisively win a conflict except by forcing the other side to go away or suffer unacceptable ongoing casualties due to raids on their homes. And yet a ‘defender’ must be able to wage this kind of war to keep access to territory.
Replying late, but… territory “of all things”? Really? To a hunter-gatherer, more territory is literally more food.
Maybe I’m missing your point–I don’t know what you mean by “worse” here–morally worse, or more foolish, or what? If it’s a matter of ethics it’s a tough one to answer, but territory is what animals fight over, it’s the baseline… it’s an extremely natural thing to do. For the reason given above: food. One side is defending itself; the other side is trying to ensure more of its kids can survive. (They didn’t exactly have birth control.)
“Better known for other work” remains an undefeated footnote.
Part of the issue is WHO one is fighting. Fighting an alien Other in order to expand one’s tribe and increase one’s influence is going to result in a very different set of attitudes towards the wars than fighting internally.
Rome was always at war with someone (if not literally, than so close to it that the difference is merely pedantic), and as long as those wars were Over There it was fine. From a societal perspective it was good–you took the rowdy young men, put them into a situation that would beat them into the shape useful for your polity, and give them an outlet for that violent energy. The ones that didn’t make it back became heroes of the Republic or Empire, which is always useful. And if they won they expanded Rome’s power and influence, which is all to the good!
It’s when the wars were conducted internally, in ways that, win or lose, Rome’s people suffered that the wars became a problem. Even a friendly army marching through an area is rough for the population, but enemy armies marching through over and over would rather quickly result in massive economic problems. And whether your son is a martyr or a rebel depends on what day of the week it is and which side of that imaginary line he’s on. That’s a VERY different sort of war–one with no glory but for a small handful at the very time, and nothing but suffering for everyone else.
Further, I’d argue that agrarian societies can produce more effective soldiers. Hunter-gatherer warriors are all about exclusion–ambushes and increasing the cost of holding lands. In contrast, Roman soldiers would also engage in brutal oppression of the civilians–and, critically, they’d do so even among allies (again, the whole foraging thing). 25% of your population being warriors is easy when warriors also hunted and held office and didn’t shoot your own people; in contrast, a surprisingly small number of people can oppress a huge population if they are armed, trained, and have nothing else to do.
Huh, I never expected to see a Shaun cameo on ACOUP.
Thanks for the brief mention of Athenian grain policy. I’ve often wondered of it after having read a poem that mentioned a “bread dole” in Athens
Reading about Juvenal and how his writings have often been misconstrued reminds me of Niccolo Machiavelli, who likewise was a satirist, but whose writings, The Prince in particular, have often been misinterpreted, usually by taking them at face value. I wonder if this parallelism is more than coincidence. Machiavelli was a writer of the Italian Renaissance, and thus would have been heavily influenced by Roman literature, perhaps by Juvenal specifically.
The satirical interpretation of Machiavelli’s Prince is very old and was quite popular during the Enlightment and among the early Romantics (most notoriously Foscolo), but I can’t think of anyone in recent times (i.e. in the XX/ XXIth centuries) who still believes it.
Oh, I know all sorts of people who believe The Prince is satire. Very few of them have actually read The Prince, and none of them in a serious, scholarly way, but people believe it.
Really ? How do they believe it ? I’m curious since in Italy we study/teach Machiavelli in high school, including the “oblique interpretation” as it’s technically called, but as far as I know no one here still supports it, scholar or not, and it’s regarded as a thing of the past.
I find it interesting how someone somewhere else can believe it.
“yOu SEE, Mockiayelli was a REPUBLICAN, so if he wrote advice for a PRINCE, it was SATIRE! ”
That’s pretty much the level of ‘analysis’. It’s morons parroting other morons, usually online.
I see. I wasn’t aware that the “oblique theory” is no longer widely accepted. I wasn’t aware that The Prince was satire in the first place, so I guess I had it right the first time. Really though, I simply went from uneducated to miseducated. In fairness, I may not have been deliberately lied to. It’s possible that whomever I learned that “fact” from was simply recirculating old and outdated information without being aware that it has since been debunked. Unfortunately, that’s a common hazard, since outdated (or simply wrong) information can remain in circulation for a long time. Still, I can’t help but feel miffed that I’ve been made a fool of, even if it was accidental. I also feel sorry for Prof. Devereux, who has to do the hard work of setting the record straight on a lot of obsolete knowledge that can keep floating around in the popular consciousness decades or even centuries after it has been disproven.
The essential of the argument is that The Prince has the same format as the genre ‘Mirror for Princes’, which was popular at the time, and Machiavelli scrupulously copies every common element in the things, while inverting them all. In the Mirrors, an author would set out rules of good behaviour which, if followed, would make a prince sucessful, while Machiavelli sets out rules of evil behaviour to the same end.
One might speculate that Machiavelli was satirizing the genre of ‘mirrors for princes’ while at the same time writing a work with a serious message that is intended to convey factual information about how politics works.
One is reminded of Don Quixote, which is widely regarded as a satire of medieval romances and stories of knights errant, but which can still be said to present serious social commentary along with the comedy, as I understand it.
It’s not a mainstream view, AFAIK, but it’s definitely that been expressed more recently than you imply. Garrett Mattingly argued it was in 1958, and Erica Benning in 2013.
I can’t find anything on Erica Benning: I tried to google “Erica Benning Machiavelli”, but the first and only relevant link is the one to the present discussion…could you be more precise, please ? In the meanwhile I downloaded and read Mattingly’s article, but it’s little more than a short divertissement (11 pages): it reads very much as a “hey, I had this idea, what do you think ?” sort of thing rather than a serious argumentation.
Impressive article. I always wonder that, if you already got Panem (food) and circenses (food for the soul), what fucking else a government should do? I guess Pax is the answer. Or in my previous thoughts on this matter, the future. In theory the only thing you should trade your current Panem et circenses is guaranteed future Panem et circenses, or vice versa. I’m trying to make a connection between “peace” and “future” here but I came up short
You write that the expenditure on the Annona of 60M HS pales in comparison to military spending of 400M HS. And I think I see your point; the main “welfare” expense of the Roman state was 15% of military expenses, which is of course vastly lower than in modern societies. Even in the US, with its large military and relatively small welfare state for an advanced economy, military spending at $1.1T is far lower than spending on redistribution and public services (around $7T); the ratio has reversed.
But I think something you’re overlooking is who benefited from each function. The Roman military was at least in theory responsible for the defense of 45 million people across 3 continents. The Annona, on the other hand, was exclusively for the benefit of fewer than a million people (counting dependents) from among those 45 million, all of whom happened to reside in the city with the most political power. It’s as if the US’s public spending went to give everyone in the Capital Region $500,000 a year and no one else much of anything.
So while the Annona wasn’t particularly generous in an absolute sense (an impossibility given the limited surpluses of the ancient economy), the fact that Roman ‘welfare’ overwhelmingly went to the only portion of the lower class with at least the potential to influence elite politics does, I think, argue in favor of the more traditional ‘bread and circuses’ interpretation.
Respectfully, I think your comparison to the USA is a little spurious. Residents of Washington DC famously are not represented in congress, whereas very small states have the same number of senators as California, Texas, and Florida.
It would be like if the Roman province of Britain had as much say in the senate as Egypt while Rome had no say at all (recognizing this is not how the Roman senate functioned).
Much like the US for most of its history, the vast majority of public ‘welfare’ in the Roman Republic was in rural areas in the form of free land distribution. The value of the distributed resource is unquantifiable but absolutely dwarfs both the military budget and the Annona. The Roman state has a unique need with regard to the city of Rome to keep a certain level of population urban, so one can consider the grain distribution (at origin) a bribe to a household to dissuade that household from leaving for the Provinces/Colonies.
I do think it breaks down when land redistribution dries up, much like the US’s rural states went from Socialist battlegrounds to Libertarian oligarchies after they stopped giving people nearly-free subsistence farms to move there.
This sounds to me like what Vlad Vexler refers to as “depoliticization” of citizens, where politics becomes so toxic and/or dangerous that people stop engaging with it and just avoid it entirely. He talks about how it operates in Russia where politics is dangerous (you might fall out of a window), and how it also has a role in democratic decline elsewhere. Sounds like it was very dangerous for a very long time in Rome.
I can’t blame the Romans any more than I would blame a Chinese or Russian citizen today. I don’t know about the civil wars of Rome but at least regards Caesar it seems it had become so extreme that the faction trying to re-assert democratic (republican?) norms considered assassination the only or best option; when your politics can only be moved by assassination then your democracy is probably already mostly dead. I wonder under what vision Rome could have escaped the spiral of chaos and kept or rebuilt a representative system. Certainly they did not.
The more I learn about the end of the Roman Republic, the more I have to think about the phrase “Those who don’t learn from history are compelled to repeat it”.
Sir,
Since you mentioned your master’s thesis I’ll note I started reading your dissertation (for pleasure, IANAH). I noticed you refer to the Marian Reforms – is it very recent scholarship that has discredited Marius as the dude who did all of that (as opposed to gradual changes in the Roman approach to the army)?
Looking forward to your book.
I thought yesterday was Friday and got worried when no ACOUP showed up. As always a very informative and entertaining read.
Because my project explicitly ended with the end of the second century, when I formulated it, I wasn’t as up to date on the shifting scholarship on Roman military reform, which existed but was often scattered rather than in one place, and one key work was not available yet while working on the dissertation, Cadiou, L’armée imaginaire: les soldats prolétaires dans les légions romaines au dernier siècle de la République (2018), probably the most important single bit of scholarship on the question. My dissertation was completed the same year L’armée imaginaire was published.
Much appreciated!
Seriously disheartening to see the footnotes linking to Shaun, a fringe internet figure who has been on-record as a vicious antisemite since at least 2019.
Links? This is the first I’ve heard of that.
I find comments like yours more disheartening.
What’s this about Shaun being an anti-Semite? I agree that he’s not exactly in the first tier of famous Internet figures, but of the two criticisms that seems considerably less important.
Great post as usual, but I have to disagree with your take on stoicism being a philosophy of accomodation. Accepting that you have no control over someone else’s tyranny doesn’t mean that you cannot oppose it; quite the contrary, the notion of the “internal empire” insists that even if the world around you is collapsing in ways that you cannot be expected to change, it is still your duty to act in the way you see righteous. The conversation between Helvidius Priscus and Emperor Vespasian comes to mind: “you will do your part, and I will do mine. It is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear.” [Discourses, 1.2 19-21]
I’ve wondering what evidence there is that speculators destabilized grain prices in ancient Rome?
If the speculators were competent, one would expect them to buy when prices are lower (in anticipation of a shortage) and sell when prices are higher (when the shortage actually arrives) and this should often have a stabilizing effect on grain prices. But there are ways this could go wrong, because predicting events that cause shortages is hard, and storing grain can only do so much.
And even if they weren’t the cause, speculators could easily be *blamed* for shortages due to people not understanding economics, similar to how traders were regarded with suspicion despite bringing goods where they are scarce. It’s very easy to blame sellers for high prices, even today.
Meanwhile, it’s easy to see how selling grain at a fixed, low price, at a loss, will be more politically popular.
It’s not so much a matter of them being competent or not so much as them not having any better information than anyone else. (relatively speaking, they probably did have better information, but still obviously very patchy)
There’s an interesting problem with food prices in famine situations (I am not an economist, so I might be using terms wrong here) in that it often leads to a weird kind of effect, basically, food prices go up, but since people *have* to have food, they pay for it anyway, until the point where they don’t have any money. This in turn means that it makes more sense to take your grain and sell it in places that *don’t* have a famine; Becuase the famine stricken area has already used up all its money and can’t pay any more. (which is also why eventually people learn that the first thing you do in a famine situation is try to stop food exports)
And in places where the state lacks the capacity to hard-stop exports, they can instead act as a buyer in place of the people who’ve run out of money and operate a distribution service.
> since people *have* to have food, they pay for it anyway, until the point where they don’t have any money. This in turn means that it makes more sense to take your grain and sell it in places that *don’t* have a famine
This means that food prices in markets experiencing famine end up dropping below food prices in neighboring markets. Seems like a very interesting effect that would be pretty easy to see in the data for more recent famines, but I haven’t looked yet.
That would appear to be counter-intuitive indeed. For what it’s worth, this fairly recent peer-reviewed paper generally says that more open trade in food would be able to substantially reduce near-future food insecurity, but it DOES note that a scenario like what Arilou has been saying – food exports LEAVING the hunger-struck region – could occur in the future.
C. Janssens, P. Havlik & T. Krisztin et. al., “Global hunger and climate change adaptation through international trade”, Nature Climate Change, 10, 829–835 (2020)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0847-4
> International trade enables us to exploit regional differences in climate change impacts and is increasingly regarded as a potential adaptation mechanism. Here, we focus on hunger reduction through international trade under alternative trade scenarios for a wide range of climate futures. Under the current level of trade integration, climate change would lead to up to 55 million people who are undernourished in 2050. Without adaptation through trade, the impacts of global climate change would increase to 73 million people who are undernourished (+33%). Reduction in tariffs as well as institutional and infrastructural barriers would decrease the negative impact to 20 million (−64%) people. We assess the adaptation effect of trade and climate-induced specialization patterns. The adaptation effect is strongest for hunger-affected import-dependent regions. However, in hunger-affected export-oriented regions, partial trade integration can lead to increased exports at the expense of domestic food availability. Although trade integration is a key component of adaptation, it needs sensitive implementation to benefit all regions.
Increasing food trade reduces the risk of famine in situations where overall food production is adequate and so giving people more ways to work at things other than food production in order to buy food will reliably give them better food access.
The trouble is that when food trade is limited there are still grain merchants and sometimes those merchants can make an already bad famine situation disastrously worse by following their own personal economic incentives.
“We can actually map some of this instability chronologically, by looking at coin hoards, because you generally only bury a bunch of money to hide it because things are going bad.”
I’ve heard of funeral customs where rich people would have large portions of their wealth buried with them (often symbolically destroying it in the process). I’m curious how archeologists differentiate between that (symbolically destroying a bunch of wealth to show how rich and powerful you are) and what you’re describing here (burying wealth to protect it from being stolen), because they would imply opposite things about the state of the economy.
Sorry, this was supposed to be a standalone comment.
Rich grave goods are a thing, but do not usually include coin hoards. But burying one’s wealth in an attempt to take it with you, or at least deny it to others, was a thing. One Scandinavian historian noted that Gotland – a smallish island that was at the centre of several trading/raiding routes – has a very large number of hoards, and suggested that this was basically the locals taking the Viking ethos of possessive nihilism to heart. But that’s very much the exception.
“Speculators stabilize prices” is one of those free-market propaganda sayings going around that reality has disproven time and again.
In the specific case of grain prices, it should be noted that speculation does not require buying – rich people own land that provides them with a steady income on grain. To speculate on prices going up from a shortage, all they have to do is not sell the grain right now but keep it in storage.
I think it’s fair to say that it’s controversial, but saying that its “been disproven time and again” has no substance to it; it doesn’t point to any evidence at all.
Also, storing grain is not bad! After all, people need to eat year round, but there isn’t a harvest every day. If speculators have any value, it’s because they store grain. (Or pay others to do it.)
You’re asking for sources on a settled phenomenon. Commodities speculation leads to instability, you can mitigate that instability with trading regulations or price controls or by having the government operate a competing service but the need to address the instability never goes away.
Now show us the evidence that there isn’t a harvest every day. Why should I believe such a thing? Surely a man who knows how to harvest one day doesn’t forget how to do so all the other days!
> Commodities speculation leads to instability
Onion prices are notoriously more unstable than those of other commodities, because onion futures – a type of speculation – are illegal.
The difference is that we don’t actually disagree about harvests (you are only pretending to) so no evidence is necessary.
Saying something is “settled” is never going to convince someone who disagrees – or doesn’t know either way, but won’t take your word for it. And why should anyone take the word of a stranger on the Internet?
Of course there is not a harvest every day. I grew up on a Midwestern farm – we never harvested in January, or many other months. Almost all harvesting occurred in June-July (wheat) and Sept-Oct (soybeans and corn). We stored a good part of those harvest in order to get better prices outside harvest months.
As for evidence of the instability of a speculator-driven price: The existence of financial regulations. The dot-com bubble. The housing bubble. The current AI bubble. The fact that stock and commodities markets regularly have to shut down trades in certain items. That the word “short squeeze” has a reason for existing. The volatility of the value of cryptocurrencies.
Also, even if we assume that the premises of free-market capitalism are correct, it still predicts that speculation leads to instability. Firstly, the basic: A speculator makes money by capitalizing on price fluctuations. They make a profit when the price is lower one day and higher the next. A price that is stable is not profitable. Therefore, a perfectly rational speculator is not actually interested in stabilizing the price, because it undercuts their profits.
Secondly, the specific: It’s wrong to say “A speculator buys when a good is undervalued and sells when it’s overvalued”, because the “true” price (if such a thing is even assumed to exist, which most forms of free-market economic theory don’t) isn’t relevant to the profit-making of a speculator. A speculator buys now and sells later when the price is expected to rise, and sells now and buys back later when the price is expected to fall. Thus, in a situation where the prices are rising and are expected to continue to rise (like for example a bad harvest driving up food prices), speculators will buy, accelerating instead of decelerating the price increase.
Regarding your last sentence. Prices going up fast in anticipation of a shortage is a good thing. A price is a signal coupled with an incentive – the faster and higher the price goes, the more incentive and time there is for producers to source more supply. This signaling is the entire reason you want a market economy.
It is a VERY BAD thing for prices to stay stable if a famine is imminent. It means that the underlying supply issue will not be addressed until the last piece of grain is gone.
Prices are a signal, and when you suppress them, you are shooting the messenger because you don’t like his news about this year’s lack of rainfall.
> because the “true” price isn’t relevant to the profit-making of a speculator.
Of course the true price is relevant to the profit-making of a speculator. Pump the price of a commodity, the producers will react and make more of it and you’ll be left holding the bags.
In fact in a modern market economy you won’t even distort production much, because other speculators who pay attention to the actual supply & demand will identify the unjustified price change and speculate in the other direction. It’s funny that the same people who hate speculators also hate shorting, which is generally the dampening mechanism for the worst excesses of market groupthink (bubbles).
Recent stock market example: Bill Hwang borrowed massive amounts of money to buy shares in a small number of tickers. His massive buying increased the price of these stocks. This in turn increased the value of his collateral (the shares he owned were going up in price), allowing him to borrow more money and buy even more shares. Perpetual motion machine for free money right? Well, one of the companies acted on its high share price by selling shares, bringing prices down and causing a chain reaction which blew up Bill’s position. Conculsion: You do have to pay attention to the value of the underlying asset when you speculate.
A price signal in the absence of any means of reacting to it is pretty useless. As in classical and medieval food shortages – the costs of land transport and the often widespread nature of the shortage meant that all high prices did was starve the poor – and the town that allowed the rich to profit at the expense of the lives of the poor was not going to prosper.
In the case of a shortage, it’s not the high prices that are starving the poor. It’s the fact that you have 1 koku of rice per 10 people. Controlling the price does not change the underlying reality.
A price signal in the absence of any means of reacting to it means that everyone is doomed to die (regardless of price controls). Fortunately there are always means of reacting to the signal. As our host has already covered, the costs of land transport are why people made cities near rivers, so that food can be transported on water. There are also demand-side adjustments – if prices move up a month in advance due to the evil speculators, and not when the granary is already empty, then people have more time to move away, collect tree bark etc.
If it were that – an absence of supply, then yes. But almost always there are distributional issues involved – some have a lot, others nothing. Some can pay the (high) cost of imported food, others can not. Landlords will try to collect rents even as people starve and so on. Which is why state-directed rationing has been the answer that kept people alive until better times arrived in almost every case.
Redistribution is fine, or a separate can of worms. I wanted to push back specifically on the claim that rising prices during famine are bad. You can have rising prices and redistribution, preserving the price signal and associated supply increase while still feeding the poor.
” The existence of financial regulations.”
The existence of regulations proves nothing except the desire to regulate. We have seen, again and again and again, that regulations are often a response to “Do something!” and even when they are actively counterproductive, they remain.
I do not think many regulations are motivated by a “desire to regulate.” It is easy to attribute this motivation to people who are seen as sinister alien outsiders (‘bureaucrats’) hostile to society, but in reality large institutions legally answerable to the government are no more or less compulsive in their power-tripping behavior than any other large institution.
If we don’t expect corporations to enact misplaced and unreasonable restrictions out of sadism or desire for control, why should we expect governments to do so?
And indeed, when we zoom in on specific industries, we find many fields (such as aviation) where it is a truism that “the regulations are written in blood.” For most rules regulating what you can and cannot do with an airplane (and there are many of them) it is possible to point to one or more specific fatal accidents that occurred because that regulation wasn’t followed or wasn’t in place yet.
Likewise, there are rules regarding what you can’t do while driving a truck because we have experience showing us that otherwise we get sleep-deprived truckers slamming their 18-wheelers through buildings. There are rules regarding what you can and can’t do with a chemical refinery because we have experience of chemical refineries exploding hard enough that debris rains down and kills people a mile away.
And in a medieval or ancient society, the grain trade is regulated because anyone who knew the history of the region could probably point to one or more examples of a city where a famine hit and there were bread riots or people dying of starvation or both, even while there were grain merchants with large stockpiles they were waiting on an opportunity to sell at a higher price, or even while the city was exporting grain. It doesn’t take many examples of that for both the rich and the poor in society to see it as necessary to take steps to control the grain trade.
” in reality large institutions legally answerable to the government are no more or less compulsive in their power-tripping behavior than any other large institution.”
Irrelevant. We are talking about government bureaucrats here. Answerable to the government? VA officials goosed their waiting lists to win a cash prize. Veterans DIED. What happened to them? Were the bureaucrats sent to jail? Fired? Demoted?
They weren’t even made to pay back the fraudulently obtained bonus.
Likewise the EPA often drives endangered species to local extinction by suppressing all human activity in their environments even when the species are literally dependent on that activity
Bureaucrats are answerable to NO ONE. And since this is known, the jobs are particularly attractive to people who don’t want to answer to anyone.
If we don’t expect corporations to enact misplaced and unreasonable restrictions out of sadism or desire for control, why should we expect governments to do so?
What you mean “we,” white man? I expect corporations to do that. Often enough to do that enough to drive themselves out of business. Differences are probably chiefly driven by “civil service” vs. “bankruptcy.”
“If we don’t expect corporations to enact misplaced and unreasonable restrictions out of sadism or desire for control, why should we expect governments to do so?”
Simon, in the general case I would say: Because the governments control the justice system and the great majority of the military and police power in a country, and corporations do not. Governments have options that corporations do not.
A conflict between, for example, the richest man in China and its most powerful man is only going to end one way, and it is not with the victory of the man with the money.
As a lot of victims of mugging could tell you, even a weak weapon beats a fat wallet.
> examples of a city where a famine hit and there were bread riots or people dying of starvation or both, even while there were grain merchants with large stockpiles…
Simon, do you have specific examples of this?
Bureaucrats are answerable to NO ONE.
How’s that? That’s not the case at all. Bureaucrats (and more generally, employees of the state) are absolutely answerable to their superiors, who are in turn answerable to people higher up the chain of authority. That might mean they’re ultimately responsible to the electorate (in a liberal democracy) or to the party authorities (in a party-state), or to other forms of political authority, but bureaucrats and other state employees get fired, demoted, purged, etc., all the time.
Nonsense. It is vastly hard to punish them, up to firing them, and thus they do not answer to their nominal superiors.
Let alone “absolutely.” Are you under the impression that civil service protections allow a superior to fire any subordinate at any time for any reason?
Because the governments control the justice system and the great majority of the military and police power in a country, and corporations do not. Governments have options that corporations do not.
Even if that were the case, it means that governments have a greater capacity to enforce their will, it doesn’t really get to the question of what motivates government authorities to do what they do (which is what the comment about ‘sadism or misplaced desires’) was suggesting.
It’s not always the case either, particularly in a world with high levels of foreign trade or investment. A government can always, in theory, nationalize a domestic corporation, but if the corporation is a foreign one with most of its capital goods overseas, then they don’t really have that option. Corporations have plenty of ways to create economic havoc that can bring down a government.
In any situation of power, those who have a greater proportion of power will have some who abuse it.
Their motives are moot, because we can see them do it.
It seems to me that Stalin and Hitler and Mao implemented a good many “misplaced and unreasonable restrictions out of sadism or desire for control.” And their subordinates followed suit. Is the claim that US officials are different? If so, doesn’t that mean that we should eliminate legislative and judicial oversight over the administration, since it operates purely for the public good.
I tried to look at the academic literature around the contemporary speculation (not a perfect analogue for the Roman times due to worse information flow at the time, for sure) and it generally doesn’t appear to identify a strong effect?
D. Bredin V. Potì & E. Salvador, “Food Prices, Ethics and Forms of Speculation”, Journal of Business Ethics, 179 (495–509), (2022)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-021-04842-z
> This paper examines the role of speculative motives in the determination of commodity prices and specifically food related commodity prices. The motivation for this study is the considerable flow of funds into commodities, the widespread view that the process of financialization has led to greater levels of speculation and that speculation is the primary cause of regular spikes in food prices since the turn of the century. We consider two forms of short-term trading, a biasing influence (Manipulators) and a correcting influence (Speculators), relative to the fundamental price. While both forms of short-term trading are relevant, they are small in terms of their influence on overall prices. We do however find some evidence of an increased role being played by Manipulators during the period most associated with financialization.
N. E. Boyd, J. H. Harris & B. Li, “An update on speculation and financialization in commodity markets”, Journal of Commodity Markets, 10 (91-104), (2018)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2405851317300405
> This paper reviews the more recent literature addressing different facets of speculation in commodity markets, including the role of speculators and the impact that financialization in recent years. While speculation and financialization can theoretically destabilize commodity markets, the extant literature finds little evidence of destabilization and documents that speculators largely provide liquidity to hedgers. Moreover, recent concern that commodity index trading leads to price distortions has little support in the data.
(The above is all commodities, not just food, but still clearly relevant.)
I did find a 2011 publication SUGGESTING that speculation could have had a significant effect on the 2008-2010 food crises, but it’s more vague, was published in a seemingly very low-tier resource (generally devoted to “molecular-, cell- and developmental-biology”, rather than anything more directly relevant to the topic), and in general appears to be much, MUCH weaker than the subsequent research above.
Markus Henn, “The speculator’s bread: what is behind rising food prices?”, EMBO reports, 12: (296 – 301), (2011)
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/embor.2011.38
If anyone is aware of any other research, feel free to mention it in replies!
What it comes down to is that there are certain specific cases where the theoretical abstract effects of speculation (price stabilization) are overcome by factors specific to that industry or to the situation.
As you note, limited information is a factor. Speculators, especially in ancient times where transportation and communication are limited, are often going to make decisions that would seem irrational if they had perfect information.
Also important is that these are societies that often have severe wealth inequality, and grain is essential for life. Suppose that under favorable conditions the price of grain is two coins per bushel. But a famine strikes. Grain becomes very scarce and very precious.
If I am a grain speculator and I am simply trying to maximize the profit on the grain pile I’ve bought up, then there are situations where it may make sense for me to charge, oh, let’s say six coins per bushel of grain to cover my immediate expenses and keep the rest of my grain under armed guard in the full expectation of being able to sell it at seven or eight coins per bushel next week. Because as an individual, I have an incentive within the market to charge what the traffic will bear, and the traffic will bear a great deal for its next meal.
The trouble arises when, say, one third of the population has entirely run out of money because they cannot even find (6*X) coins per week, where X is enough bushels of grain to feed the family for a week. They presumably had savings and assets they could sell off to the rich for cash, but eventually that well runs dry.
From the point of view of the grain speculator, I may have enough grain in the warehouse to feed (my share of) these people for weeks if not months with careful rationing… but they are literally out of money and cannot pay me, while the richer two thirds of the population can. My incentive is, if I can, to reinforce the guards on my granaries, batten down the hatches, and defend myself through the ensuing food riots, then continue selling grain to the (now less numerous) population of the city at ten or twelve coins per bushel.
After a few grain merchants make enormous sums of money by pulling off this strategy, grain merchants become especially unpopular in the community, and any ruler who wishes political stability will strictly regulate the grain trade. Alternatively, the merchants may fail to pull off the “batten down the hatches” step and be overrun in the food riots. Even if the rioters are killed by the king’s soldiers afterwards, I as a grain merchant am already dead and the kingdom skips straight to the “strictly regulate the grain trade” step of the process.
Furthermore, it is in the interests of the rest of the propertied class that food riots NOT happen, because once the rioters have in their minds justified attacking the grain merchants to take the grain, they are fairly likely to start thinking in terms of looting the grain merchant’s mansion or treasury, and those of his neighbors and companions. Failure to prevent food riots is a relatively quick way to bring about the collapse of your government, or the radical destabilization of the elite’s property rights at the hands of peasants with nothing to lose.
Besides, fires spread
Even in pure economic terms – and as economists have come to appreciate – trust and social cohesion have positive medium to long term consequences. Letting the prices of necessities run unchecked is a sure way to undermine these.
“the order of 170,000 soldiers”
Just to be pedantic here. An order of magnitude is the base 10 logarithm of the number rounded to an ordinal.
The base 10 logarithm of 170,000 is 5.23. So it is in the 5th order of magnitude which centers at 100,000 and extends from 31,623 (log 4.5) to 316,227 (log 5.5).
With ancient quantities such as populations and economies, order of magnitude is about as much precision as we are entitled to considering the quality of data that we have.
“We can actually map some of this instability chronologically, by looking at coin hoards, because you generally only bury a bunch of money to hide it because things are going bad.”
I’ve heard of funeral customs where rich people would have large portions of their wealth buried with them (often symbolically destroying it in the process). I’m curious how archeologists differentiate between that (symbolically destroying a bunch of wealth to show how rich and powerful you are) and what you’re describing here (burying wealth to protect it from being stolen), because they would imply opposite things about the state of the economy.
I suspect that whether you find a dead body is probably the determining factor.
Fun fact: while there are only two cases of pirates actually burying gold in the iconic Caribbean pirate situation (Captain Kidd hoped to negotiate with the authorities and use it as a bargaining chip, and Sir Francis Drake hoping to come back because he had more treasure than he could take — didn’t work in either case), there is a lot of Viking pirate treasure in Gotland, buried because that was what you did.
I guess my question is whether (and how) we can rule out the possibility of there being some similar practice while the person in question was still alive.
There can be written evidence. Religions like to write things down in some form: it’s very important that the next generation do things right. Even without formal inscriptions or tablets , if someone writes down “over in such-and-such they bury a gold necklace every Hogswatch” one can guess that if you find some buried gold necklaces in such-and-such, that’s probably what they are.
Mostly there’s how the stuff was buried. As Mary pointed out, finding a dead body is a very strong hint. Most cultures have standard ways of burying or otherwise dealing with their dead that leave identifying traces or marks.
Those cultures that “sacrificed” wealth in some way while people were alive also AFAIK had standard ways of doing so. After all, if you’re sacrificing to the gods, the gods need to see you doing so. (And more cynically, you also need to let your neighbours and the priests see you’re doing so.) So we find say Celtic lake weapon deposits where there are many swords, with different makers and from different times. As a Pratchett hero observes, you find apples under apple trees, treasure under altars.
On the other hand, people who bury their coins because they’re worried about robbers / taxes will make sure that the coins are protected rather than being left to rust or tarnish. They’ll bury them nearby where they can be retrieved again rather than in the churchyard or sacred site. They won’t bury non-valuables with their coins, they won’t do the normal religious things, etc.
So no we can never be absolutely certain, but is good evidence.
You can’t.
We certainly have apparent offerings of precious items in water, and I have read discussions about the difficulty of telling whether something was buried as an offering or for safety.
Where you bury it.
Funeral burials of wealth happen, well, with funerals. A hundred gold coins and a fancy sword in a grave with a body showing traces of rich fabrics and a good diet? Clearly that.
Conversely, those same hundred gold coins bricked up into the wall of the outhouse, stabbed up corpses scattered through the buildings and the whole thing burned to the ground? Probably those were hidden to try and protect them from theft…
> Indeed, a casual look through urban communities across the Mediterranean will reveal that most cities of any significant size had some sort of system to stabilize grain prices.
This is a great detail! I actually would be quite interested in a post which would compare the known “nutrition” systems of the Mediterranean city-states like Carthage or the ancient Crete polities (and perhaps those of any other Ancient polities outside of the region where we have good enough records on the subject), to tease out if there were any notable differences in how they were administered. Apologies if the subject was already covered in the series on bread production, which I haven’t yet read in full.
Additionally, I am curious if any of the “Teaching Paradox” posts (there are a lot!) have covered another preconception about history which is related to this one, but seems particularly supercharged by video games like that. That is, the idea that the ancient “circuses” were an inherently highly wasteful form of spending which reflected the low sophistication of the superstitious and unenlightened rulers of the time, and same goes for the spending on monumental/religious construction. In a lot of those games, spending the lowest on this kind of thing as you can get away with in favour of either military or fundamental infrastructure (and better yet, “R & D” spending if the game allows for anything meaningful there and doesn’t tie inventions to specific dates) is very obviously the right thing to do from the bird’s eye view to maximize your chances.
To put it in the bluntest possible terms: is there any truth to the alt-history notion that a contemporary ruler could have had “shortcut” their polity’s development by decades (if not outright centuries) if only they had the strength of will not to focus on the ever-grander race courses/gladiator fights/public baths (for Rome) or the ever-escalating cathedrals (Medieval Western/Central Europe) and use the equivalent spending for sewers/irrigation/whatever an academy of sciences might have looked like at the time?
I read somewhere that the biblical storage plan to deal with “seven fat years followed by seven lean years” was in fact a standard practice back then, not some unique God-directed program.
It bears noting that grain doesn’t actually keep for seven years. I’m pretty sure that what’s meant there is that during your fat years, you keep storing the freshest sacks of grain and rotating the oldest sacks out for people to eat, with the result that they are eating a lot of quite old grain but that the storehouses are very full, since each year you feed the people X sacks of old grain, but put in 1.1X or 1.2X sacks of new grain. By the end of the fat years, your storehouses contain 2X sacks of grain, hopefully none of which are over two years old.
Then the lean years start, and you’re giving out X sacks of the oldest grain you have, but only bringing in 0.8X sacks on average let’s say (because food production normally doesn’t outright STOP) If you had 2X sacks at the start of the famine, you can keep this up for ten years before the granaries are truly empty.
The real trick is being able to predict which years are lean and which years are fat, well in advance. And resisting the urge to, say, use your big surplus in the granaries to feed a large workforce to work on the giant pyramid you’re planning to be buried in and accelerate its construction.
Is there any truth to shortcutting polity development: yes, no, maybe?
Prof Devereaux wrote about this in “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution”
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
Outside this blog, it seems to be a frequently argued topic, since it has current day implications (development studies ? I think that’s the name?) for poorer countries.
The Meiji Era of Japan in the 19th C is a frequently studied / cited / mis-cited example of very rapid directed development.
I know of two works of fiction, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Twain, M) and “Lest Darkness Fall” (de Camp, LS) which dealt with not just the introduction of modern ideas but the social factors which would get in the way.
Note that Prof. Devereux’s take on the causes of the Industrial Revolution–and the concomitant answer as to why no such thing happened in antiquity–is not universally shared, to say the least. Those who stress the relative political, economic, and intellectual freedom of Britain as a major factor would probably argue, however, that an ancient autocracy or oligarchy which lacked such freedom could not have produced an industrial revolution ex nihilo, as the British did, although Meiji Japan demonstrates that an oligarchic establishment can import an industrial revolution once they see how it works.
Right, both that post AND the debate it spawned in the comments was some of the most thought-provoking writing I have seen on here (or anywhere, really) to date. It also prompted me to look for others’ answers. If you go back to that post now, you’ll see my comment full of long excerpts with what I consider some of the most remarkable takeaways from the recent scholarship. To summarize recent sources’ opinions VERY quickly:
Thomas Turnbull, Energy, history, and the humanities: against a new determinism, History and Technology, 37 (247-292), 2021
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2021.1891394#d1e366
* Chronicle of how the “coal created Industrial Revolution” hypothesis emerged in the first place, with a focus on how the personal politics and life histories of its three main proponents shaped the arguments they deployed at certain points in time. Very, very interesting just for biographical reasons.
* Quotes the work of one of those proponents, Nef, on the expansion of British coal production well BEFORE the IR – the 15-fold (200,000 to 3 million tons) increase in annual production between 1560 and 1710 (all before the steam engine) with one million ton going to industry (including British shipbuilding) and the rest mostly for household use – and the induced demand it spurred, employing 18,000 ‘pitmen’ and 1,600 transport vessels by 1710 already. (Though all this production was still DWARFED in the next century.)
Madsen and Strulik, Inequality and the Industrial Revolution, European Economic Review, 164, 2024
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292124000539
* The authors’ statistical modelling strongly indicates that the most important factor in the British IR was high inequality spurring demand for manufactured goods and thus investment into novel manufacturing methods.
* Comparatively high level of education in Britain and its (relative) openness to foreign trade appear to be the second most-important factors.
* Patent protections and the post-Cromwell end of absolute monarchy (the “strong institutions/political freedom” argument) have a much weaker and inconsistent effect.
* The effect of coal price (“more expensive coal -> machinery demand -> steam engines” argument) barely shows up at all.
The Handbook of Cliometrics (the IR chapter):
https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-642-40458-0
* Estimates that coal mining and steel production contributed very little (single-digit fractions) to the British GDP increase of the IR, with improvements in agriculture (from a myriad of small improvements, with even the big things like crop rotation or enclosures having very limited effect) and transport (mostly due to better canals and sails, rather than steam engines) adding far more.
* Textile production improvements were dominant (as much as transport and agriculture ones combined) but likely could/would have increased without steam engines, as even in coal mining, costs wouldn’t have grown by more than 10/20% in the absence of steam pumps.
* Like Madsen and Strulik, it is critical of the “superior institutions” argument for several reasons – from the seemingly comparable (even superior) institutions in the Netherlands at the time to the lack of objective metrics of institutional quality. And like them, it is equally critical of the “patent protections were the most important by making innovation pay” argument.
* Also similarly to Madsen and Strulik, it agrees that education likely played a significant role – noting that Britain as a whole by then was FAR more literate AND numerate than Rome at any point of its history. It cites tombstone records to show that most Romans, even many wealthy ones, didn’t know THEIR AGE at all, and many of those who DID could only recall it within the nearest 5 years, while nearly all British at least were capable of that. (For that matter, Renaissance Florence did better than Rome, but still considerably worse than 18th century Britain on that metric.)
* The chapter ultimately cautions that there isn’t a conclusive answer yet.
Based on that, it seems like the best thing that Roman rulers (including all periods of Roman history, not just the Empire) could have focused on at any point after covering for the fundamental security needs would have been basic education – theretofore maximizing chances of advances which seem commonsense to us, but would not have occurred on their own without observation (hygiene is a good example.) This would have had to have spurred demand for a better writing material than vellum, likely motivating the creation of paper, and with sufficient focus, the printing press. Even if those measures WOULDN’T have led to an Industrial Revolution, it seems hard to argue Rome as a polity would have likely lasted longer and experienced significantly better outcomes in a whole range of areas as the result.
The problem with cliometrics is that prior to the 20th century accurate statistics in many fields are rare to non-existent (the first British census was in 1801), and it is difficult to know what figures remain are representative. And it gets worse as you go back, to where estimates of ancient populations come with very wide error bars and snapshots of daily life are scattered through literary references and a few places (like Egypt) which we know not to be typical.
“The Meiji Era of Japan in the 19th C is a frequently studied / cited / mis-cited example of very rapid directed development.”
Didn’t that require the people directing development to know what kind of society they wanted to direct development towards? So they couldn’t have directed their society to industrialise until after a society somewhere else had already done it without being directed to do so.
You can’t copy something until after someone has already invented the thing to be copied.
You can’t plan industrialization until after someone else has already industrialized.
I think that was exactly the point of the word “directed” in that sentence.
Perhaps, but the logical implication of that is that no society (Roman or otherwise) prior to British industrialization could have had directed industrialized development, because before then no one else had already industrialized.
“[N]o society (Roman or otherwise) prior to British industrialization could have had directed industrialized development.”
Agreed. The British Industrial Revolution was a product of factors which had developed without any such end in view. Referencing some factors cited by other commenters, and wildly oversimplifying, (i) the British acquired widespread literacy because Protestantism encouraged individual believers to read the Bible themselves, (ii) they acquired widespread numeracy because (a) Arabic numerals are easier to manipulate than Roman and (b) a commercial (though pre-industrial) society needs people with some numeracy skills, (iii) they acquired (somewhat) representative institutions and some degree of intellectual freedom as a result of various historical developments involving religious disputes, Anglo-Saxon traditions, and a relatively strong commercial class, and (iv) agricultural development was encouraged by patterns of land ownership, themselves the product of Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian traditions, which created incentives for increasing per acre production (as opposed to, say, maximizing the number of tenants per acre available to act as military followers).
Your writing on the bread dole was very interesting, although my two cents would be that in my experience people tend to emphasize the “circuses,” with modern sports or reality TV or whatever the speaker desires to disparage being declared a modern equivalent. But there was a New England grocery store (since bought out by Whole Foods) named Bread and Circuses, one of the few to acknowledge the bread part.
Based on the translation provided here, my impression is that Juvenal is complaining about the Roman public’s priorities — they only care about their own well-being and entertainment, with no interest in holding public officials accountable. That is, the state provision of bread and circuses is a symptom of malaise, not it’s cause.
A complaint often made of today’s public.
Re: tech change in fiction:
Poul Andersen wrote a short story in which the protagonist, a US military policeman posted to Iceland, didn’t know how to make gunpowder or anything of much use to the Early Medieval Norse he got sent back to, his advice on shipbuilding ran against local techniques, and he wound getting killed in a blood feud.
I suspect most of us would be lucky to avoid a similar fate.
I remember that one! It’s funny, because he was able to speak the language.
I think the author purposely chose Iceland as the setting because of the common belief that Icelandic ‘evolved very little’ since the time of Vikings. It is in fact misleading – the pronunciation did evolve quite a bit as in all languages (Middle Icelandic reflects that) and Modern Icelandic spelling was retrofitted so as to closely match that of 13th century sagas, due to linguistically purist reforms. It’s true a time traveler in Iceland would have an easier time adapting from Modern to Old Icelandic than, say, an English or even French speaker in England and France around the same time. Still there would be considerably more friction than what is depicted in the short story.
But this is pedant nitpicking (see the blog name yadda yadda) and one can still appreciate the clever attempt by the author to overcome the language hurdle in *some* way when many would just handwave it away.
“The Man Who Came Early”
After I was kindly linked to the Industrial Revolution ACOUP, I spent the past couple of days reading recent literature associated with the subject. My current impression (as commented there and here) is that even operating on purely contemporary knowledge, ancient rulers, be the Romans or just about anyone else, would have likely been able to lay down a foundation for substantially stronger outcomes down the line than what they ultimately got – simply by emphasizing education across the societal strata, even in terms of the absolute basics such as not just literacy but numeracy. The data suggesting most Romans, including many of the upper-class, couldn’t count well enough to know their own ages is shocking, and obviously places them on a massive back foot next to 16-18th century Britain when it comes to explaining why they didn’t get close to an IR.
Pondering the “isekai” narratives is a bit pointless, since so many laws of physics stand to prohibit those. They are certainly fun and this place IS about fun and pop culture. If I were to seriously ponder them, I would say two things:
1) Optimistically, if I got transported to a place in the past where I had any hope of meaningful communication from the start (not counting the “get enslaved and get the language of your masters beaten into you” scenario), I would strive to teach what I know of the modern mathematics and of hygiene. Innovations which require materials that do not yet exist are not going to be of much use, and even approaching them is hard (one might be able to explain a stirrup without knowing the specifics of what materials to use, but anything more complex than that is likely out of reach), but those changes would strengthen society from the get-go and lead to a cascading effect, even if you would likely to live to see much of it.
2) Realistically, the most altruist way I could have done that, though, may well have been by writing it all down on some stone tablet while finding a hermit cave or a pillar somewhere. Otherwise, there is a depressing argument that the best thing which time travellers could do to help the people from the past is to die as far away from them as possible.
https://geographical.co.uk/culture/uncontacted-tribes-around-the-world
Today, the main reason people are STRICTLY forbidden from approaching the remaining uncontacted tribes by whichever authorities are in the area is because of the great likelihood of devastating them with diseases they have never encountered. Almost no matter how you are sent to the past, you’ll literally be bringing diseases that have not evolved yet. If you went to around Gladiator II’s time, for instance, then Covid-19 would still be Covid-19 – 219 AD, that is, not 2019. NONE of the four “common cold” coronaviruses appear to have emerged until the last 500 years at the latest – and same likely goes to the myriad of other viruses (mostly rhinoviruses) which make up “the common cold”, multiple flu strains, etc. If our ancestors were to be exposed to any of those, the results are bound to be very deadly indeed.
This comes up in S. M. Stirling’s “Island in the Sea of Time” where the modern island of Nantucket gets sent back to the Bronze Age and fairly soon they realize “Oh, fuck, we’ve just started horrific pandemics in North America.”
On the other hand, dealing with epidemics AND invaders at once is more difficult than dealing with them at different times.
On the third hand, because the epidemics will kill a lot of people, and not evenly, the people who will benefit from having to deal with them at different times are different from those who would have had to deal with them at once. So is it really a benefit?
I’m a bit skeptical of the argument “upper-class Romans didn’t know how to count because their tombstones were imprecise as to their ages.” Wouldn’t you first have to deal with hypotheses like “upper-class Romans didn’t have a problem with rounding their ages off or misstating their birth year?”
It’s like arguing that people were illiterate in 1600-era England because they misspelled words a lot. Just because Will Shaxspar [sic] would sometimes spell his name three different ways on the same page doesn’t mean the man was illiterate; it meant he didn’t care how his name was spelt.
The Romans were able to manage fairly complex building projects and sustain logistics for large armies. That’s not the kind of thing you do in a society where innumeracy is so rife that even if you are a rich man, there aren’t enough people around who know how to count or track a calendar to work out your exact age to engrave on your tombstone.
“…it meant he didn’t care how his name was spelt.”
Standardized spelling is, as far as I can tell, the product of the printing press. Prior to that it seems that spelling was intended to convey words, not be a separate type of communication. (For what it’s worth, this argument utterly failed to convince my grade school teachers either.)
As for ages, the idea that they couldn’t count because they put the wrong age down is preposterous. People of the past often inflated or deflated their ages for a variety of reasons. Age was more a measure of experience than of orbits of the Earth around the Sun, after all. And it’s very likely that in an agrarian society no one cared too much. What you could do on the farm or in your trade was going to be much, much more significant for nearly everything (a few offices in the Roman hierarchy excepted). And when the calendar is subject to change as often as the Roman one was, things could get weird. Ask anyone who’s born on February 29–and then imagine this being the case for EVERYONE, because while the year was generally similar year to year it wasn’t identical. Accurate counts of birthdays are the product of a consistent calendar and a culture that cares.
I grew up in an agrarian area, and even when I was a kid it wasn’t unusual to see people arguing about how old someone was. That didn’t mean they couldn’t count–they knew exactly how many pigs and chickens they had, how many pecks of wheat they harvested last year, how many fence posts were damaged by last week’s storm, etc. They simply didn’t apply that skill to age. Sometimes it’s to make themselves look older–you may trust a 30 year old with something, but not a 28 year old–and sometimes to make themselves look younger–I know a woman who was 35 three years running, and only accepted that she was 36 when her little brother pointed out that HE was 35 now. Men lied to get into (or avoid) military service as well, and in one case I know a man’s father added 3 years to his age to get him a job in construction.
That’s what occurred in an era with birth certificates and other official documentation. Imagine what it would be like WITHOUT all that stuff!
These are very interesting and justified counterarguments! For what it’s worth, I now feel obligated to present the full argument on this subject from the Handbook of Cliometrics, rather than my initially abridged summary, and see what you make of it.
> We find interesting evidence that the average numeracy and literacy of even rich people in most earlier economies was surprisingly poor. A prosperous landowner in Roman Egypt, Isidorus Aurelius, for example, variously declared his age in legal documents in a less than 2 year span in 308–309 AD as 37, 40, 45, and 40. Clearly, Isidorus had no clear idea of his age. Other sources show he was illiterate (Duncan-Jones 1990, p. 80). A lack of knowledge of their true age was widespread among the Roman upper classes as evidenced by age declarations made by their survivors on tombstones. In populations where ages are recorded accurately, 20% of the recorded ages will end in 5 or 10. We can thus construct a score variable Z which measures the degree of “age heaping,” where and X is the percentage of age declarations ending in 5 or 10 to measure the percentage of the population whose real age is unknown. Z measures the percentage of people who did not know their true age, and this correlates moderately well in modern societies also with the degree of literacy.
> Among those wealthy enough to be commemorated by an inscribed tombstone in the Roman Empire, typically half had unknown ages. Age awareness did correlate with social class within the Roman Empire. More than 80% of officeholders’ ages seem to have been known by their relatives. We can also look at the development of age awareness by looking at a census of the living, as in Table 9. Some of the earliest of these are for medieval Italy including the famous Florentine Catasto of 1427. Even though Florence was then one of the richest cities of the world and the center of the Renaissance, only 68% of the adult city population knew their age. Medieval England had even lower age awareness. The medieval Inquisitions post mortem, which were enquiries following the death of landholders holding property where the King had some feudal interest, show that the exact ages of the heirs to property was known in only 39% of cases. In comparison, a 1790 census of the small English borough of Corfe Castle in Dorset with a mere 1,239 inhabitants, most of them laborers, shows that all but 8% knew their age. In 1790, awareness correlates with measures of social class, universal knowledge among the higher-status families, and lower age awareness among the poor. But the poor of Corfe Castle or Ardleigh in Essex had as much age awareness as officeholders in the Roman Empire.
> Another feature of the Roman tombstone age declarations is that ages seem to be greatly overstated for many adults. Thus, while we know that life expectancy in ancient Rome was probably in the order of 20–25 at birth, tombstones record people as dying at ages as high as 120. For North African tombstones, for example, 3% of the deceased are recorded as dying at age 100 or more.42 Almost all of these 3% must have been 20–50 years younger than was recorded. Yet, their descendants did not detect any implausibility in recording these fabulous ages. In contrast, the Corfe Castle census records a highest age of 90, well within the range of possibilities given life expectancy in rural England in these years.
Practical considerations aside, if I were transported into the past I’m not sure that I would want to change history in any significant way, because there would be no way to predict the outcome. Sure, it would be great if people in the distant past could be introduced to germ theory very early, but we have no way of knowing how that would turn out. We might still be living under a very corrupt feudal system.
Just have fun. Watch a chariot race. Fight in a tourney. Have tea with Da Vinci. Find out who Homer really was.
So many opportunities…
There’s no way to know what the consequences of any action is. Why would being in the past change that? Not to mention that just having fun could change the future.
I’ve always read “ suffragia nulli vendimus” as including the glory days of the republic in the criticism: “the kids these days don’t even know how to work for an honest bribe!” This both informed and was informed by my general sense of Juvenal as nihilistically cynical (which I didn’t care for—say what you want about the tenets of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty, at least it’s an ethos). Now I wonder if that was a misreading. Does vendere get used to refer to otherwise legitimate political give and take?
The bit of Juvenal I keep encountering is actually “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (most often translated as “who watches the watchmen?)
This is the first time I’ve heard “sound body, sound mind”
Be sounds a bit like Machiavelli to me, another writer who really shouldn’t be taken straight but has quotes show up out of context.
I never took bread and circuses fo imply bribing away votes, rather it was always the pageantry dictators use to divert the masses. Stuff like show trials and military parades.
Brett, you are a damn infohazard. I got linked this and an hour later I’m reading about how the deserts in Egypt screw with our knowledge of Roman life because we don’t know how Egypty Roman Egypt was.