Rome: An Empire's Story (12 page)

Other ecological niches were subjected to the same process of intensification: wetlands and mountains, woodlands and the pre-desert. Roman construction technology allowed a few innovations here, most notably in the imperial period. Injections of capital are difficult to document, but they
must lie behind some agricultural development such as the construction of massive sheep pens on the plain of the Crau in south-east France, and the development of industrial-scale production of fish-sauces. A small amount of irrigation farming was introduced, a spin-off of the aqueducts bringing water from highland areas down to the cities of the plain.
¹⁵
Terraces were constructed across seasonal river courses in the Libyan pre-desert to catch floodwater. Drainage of marshes took place across the empire from central Italy to the English Fenlands. Hydraulic engineering allowed for advances in fish-farming. Establishments dedicated to salting and pickling fish appeared wherever catches were abundant, including on both sides of the straits of Gibraltar, up the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Gaul. The processing, storage, and transportation of agricultural produce was in general improved. Large mills driven by water, animals, and slave labour supplemented hand mills, and large-scale olive presses were constructed.
¹⁶
Advances in granary construction and harbour installations went hand in hand with the manufacture of earthenware containers and ships better adapted to the transport of bulky produce. Road infrastructure was improved, perhaps first for military reasons, but others benefited too. Closely allied to this was increased production in the most common urban productions, such as textile production.
¹⁷

A different form of intensification is evident in stock-raising. The scale of sheep farming increased in several parts of the empire, including Italy and south-east Gaul where very large flocks clearly catered to demand from outside the region. There were highly successful efforts made to increase the size of the main meat-producing domesticates: the growth of cattle of various breeds is now well documented from faunal remains in Italy. North of the Alps it occurred so rapidly that it seems almost certain that new breeds were introduced. This reversed a long trend in Europe towards smaller and smaller animals, showing very clearly the impact of new priorities and techniques.

The cumulative impact of these improvements was economically significant. Appreciating them helps us understand how the Roman Empire sustained, in such an unpromising environment as the Mediterranean basin, a ratio of consumers to producers that rose by the early third century from one in ten to three in ten in some regions. City life brought a demand for bread instead of porridge and for a more varied diet. The archaeologically visible result was a proliferation of bakeries and food markets,
macella
, that sold fresh meat, vegetables, and dairy products. Improved communications and the muscle of civic and imperial authorities and of landlords made such a diet possible for a minority. But the long-term environmental impact was
limited. When the cities (and so their aggregate demand) shrank, and when authorities could no longer maintain roads, aqueducts, and the like, rural economies shifted back to a more local scale. The Roman urban boom left few lasting environmental traces, except in respect of mining, which generated levels of heavy-metal pollution that would not be reached again until the Industrial Revolution. Repeated attempts to convict Roman civilization of causing deforestation and soil erosion have failed to convince. Roman expansion led to an intensification of production, not the wholesale transformation of their environment. Their imperial ecology was very different from that of the modern age.

Further Reading

The most influential environmentally organized account of antiquity is Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s
The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History
(Oxford, 2000), which has already prompted many responses, some of which are gathered in William Harris’s
Rethinking the Mediterranean
(Oxford, 2005). Equally innovative is Robert Sallares’s
The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World
(London, 1991). Conditions on the Steppe are discussed in Roger Batty’s
Rome and the Nomads
(Oxford, 2007). Brent Shaw’s essays on North Africa are collected in
Environment and Society in Roman North Africa
(Aldershot, 1995). No environmentally oriented account of Roman temperate Europe has yet been produced, but there is much of relevance in Chris Wickham’s
Framing the Early Middle Ages
(Oxford, 2005).

A realization of quite how precarious conditions could be in parts of the ancient Mediterranean is relatively recent. A pioneering collection of answers to the question of how ancient farmers managed was Paul Halstead and John O’Shea’s
Bad Year Economics
(Cambridge, 1989). On the means through which classical civilization was sustained in the face of these stresses the fundamental work is Peter Garnsey’s
Famine and Food Supply in the Greco-Roman World
(Cambridge, 1988).

The impact of Roman agriculture and especially mining on the environment is a topic of current debate. A good starting point is the collection edited by Graham Shipley and John Salmon,
Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity
(London, 1996). A vivid account of the environmental cost of ancient mining is presented in chapter 7 of David Mattingly’s
Imperialism, Power and Identity
(Princeton, 2011). Two very well-written introductions to the prehistoric background are Tim Champion et al.,
Prehistoric Europe
(London, 1984) and Graeme Barker’s
Prehistoric Farming in Europe
(Cambridge, 1985).

KEY DATES IN CHAPTER V

V
MEDITERRANEAN HEGEMONY

What man can be so frivolous and lazy that he does not wonder how it has come about, and under what kind of political regime, that almost the entire civilized world has in less than fifty-three years been brought under the sole rule of Rome? These events are unprecedented.

(Polybius,
Histories
1.1.5)

The Rivals of Rome

The expansion of Roman influence within Italy, related in
Chapter 3
, had been a slow process. But during the century and a half that followed Pyrrhus’ invasion, Roman hegemony mushroomed out to cover the entire Mediterranean world. That did not mean that second-century
BC
Rome (yet) ruled a well-ordered tributary state, divided into territorial provinces over which were extended imperial systems of law and taxation, administered by a colonial bureaucracy. Roman rule remained, in modern terms, both informal and indirect. Supremacy meant simply that Rome no longer had any rival in the region. And Polybius was correct that the rulers of Rome in the mid-second century
BC
(many of whom he knew well) felt
they could issue orders to whomever they wished. This chapter tells how this was achieved.

Rome’s unification of the Mediterranean was the culmination of processes of political growth that characterized the last millennium
BC
.
¹
By the third century, Mediterranean politics was dominated by a small number of great powers. At the western end of the Mediterranean, that meant Rome and—until 201
BC
—Carthage. Less powerful cities retained their nominal independence in North Africa, Italy, and southern France. Around them were tribal societies of various kinds and sizes. During the third century the biggest cities had either challenged Rome and lost—as had Syracuse and Tarentum—or else were now subordinate allies, like Marseilles and the major cities of Etruria and Campania. East of the Adriatic, the political map was dominated by the kingdoms formed when Alexander’s empire fragmented on his death in 323
BC
. The Big Three were Antigonid Macedon, Seleucid Syria, and Ptolemaic Egypt. Around them were a plethora of smaller states. These included Persian successor kingdoms in Anatolia, breakaway Greek kingdoms in Afghanistan and western Turkey, federal leagues of communities in southern and north-west Greece, and a few independent city-states including Sparta, the naval power Rhodes, and a much diminished Athens. This was the Greek—sometimes called the Hellenistic—world into which Rome would expand. No nation could take on and defeat every single city and tribe, and the Romans did not try. Hegemony only required the defeat of all conceivable rivals. That was the process that Polybius claimed had taken less than fifty-three years, from the outbreak of the second Punic war, that is, until the defeat of Macedon in 167
BC
.

Events unfolded at a breakneck pace.
²
The retreat of Pyrrhus, his death, and the fall of Taranto in 272 removed all Rome’s rivals south of the Apennines. Carthage and Rome had allied against Pyrrhus, but their spheres of influence were now so close it is rather surprising it took them until 264 to fall out. The cause was, unsurprisingly, control of the island of Sicily that lay between them. The first Punic war, fought mainly in naval engagements around the Tyrrhenian Sea, ended in 241 with Rome controlling most of Sicily as a province, and the remainder through an alliance with Syracuse. Shortly afterwards Romans seized control of first Sardinia and then Corsica. The second Punic war broke out in 218 when spheres of influence in Spain clashed. A new Punic empire had been created there, based on New Carthage (Cartagena) and the rich silver mines in the
vicinity. Geopolitical considerations suggest the competition for influence in Iberia was as inevitable as it had been in the case of Sicily: Roman historians preferred to believe the real reasons lay in bitter resentment of Rome fostered by the Barcid dynasty of whom Hannibal was the most famous member. The conflict begun in Spain was swiftly carried into Italy by Hannibal’s audacious march through southern France and across the Alps. Initial victories at Trasimene (217) and Cannae (216) seemed to bring Rome to the brink of disaster, and Hannibal went on to occupy much of the south, detaching Roman allies. But the long-feared assault on Rome never materialized. During the deadlock Rome made advances in other theatres, especially in Spain and Sicily. After more than a decade in southern Italy, Hannibal was eventually forced to return to North Africa to meet a Roman army outside the walls of Carthage itself. Scipio’s victory at Zama in 202 ended the war.

Between the first and second Punic wars, while the Barcids had been busy in Spain, the Romans had continued to extend their influence in Italy, especially over the Gallic peoples north of the Apennines.
³
Major victories had been won over Gallic armies at Telamon in 225 and Clastidium in 222. As soon as Carthage was defeated, Roman generals resumed this priority. During the 180s a series of colonies were founded north of the Apennines, anchored on the via Aemilia that remains today the main highway down the Po Valley.
⁴
Roman magistrates led campaigns against either Gauls or Ligurians almost every year until the start of the third Macedonian war in 168. There were further campaigns in Liguria in the 150s. By the end of the second century the whole area up to foothills of the Alps was in effect a Roman province. The defeat of Hannibal allowed Rome to increase its influence elsewhere in Italy too: exemplary punishments were handed out to former Roman allies who had defected to the Punic cause, and much of their territory was confiscated.
⁵
New Roman colonies were founded on spear-won territory in southern Italy, some imposed on existing cities and others on greenfield sites. Syracuse had picked the wrong side in the war: her defeat left Sicily entirely under the rule of the Roman praetors. Spain too was now available for conquest, thanks to the campaigns of Scipio which had swept the Carthaginians out of the peninsula. By 197 there were two provinces, one in the south where local societies were most urbanized and where there were rich supplies of silver, and another in the north-east, the territory of the Iberians. Up until the end of the 170s there were generally four legions in Spain at any one
time. Like the campaigns in north Italy, these wars could usually be put on hold when Rome was occupied elsewhere, and started up again when other fronts closed down. Major campaigns restarted in Spain in the 150s and culminated in great wars against the Celtiberians of the interior that only ended with the capture in 133 of their great citadel at Numantia. There were other conflicts around the Alps in this period too, and two short but ferocious wars in the Rhône Valley in the mid-120s. Not all these campaigns were of Rome’s choosing. There were colonists and settlers to defend in northern Italy, and Rome faced attacks from the Lusitanians in Spain and the Arverni in Gaul. Nor was Rome always fighting flat out: there were decades of intensive warfare, and others when fewer troops were in the field each year.
⁶
All the same, it is impossible to avoid the impression that Rome was now geared up to more or less continuous expansion and that the Roman west was always available when more lucrative or threatening campaigns were not available.