Introduction: space and society

On 28 October 1943, Winston Churchill commented, apropos of how to rebuild the House of Commons following its destruction in a wartime air raid, ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ Over the last thirty years, in the fields of anthropology, sociology, geography and archaeology, in what has often been labelled the ‘spatial turn’, Churchill’s observations have been endorsed, investigated and expanded at an ever-increasing rate. Today, we think about spaces – from the individual room to the widest landscape – in an exciting variety of ways. Spaces can no longer stand solely or primarily as static geographical entities, but instead as fluid social constructs. They reflect and articulate practices of social behaviour. They exist in physical and perceptual forms, constructed through material, literary and epigraphical sources. Their meanings are dynamic and multiple thanks to the vibrant, subtle, complex and often unpredictable ways in which they interact with their (many and varied) users over time.

This book asks what use such a reconfigured understanding of space can be to the study of ancient history. That different resolutions of space are firmly fixed on the historian’s radar is undeniable: recent commissions for this Key Themes in Ancient History series, for example, include L. Nevett Domestic Space in Classical Antiquity; A. Zuiderhoek The Ancient City and D. Dueck and K. Brodersen Geography in Classical Antiquity. In addition, recent large-scale research projects across Europe, such as HESTIA, PELAGIOS and TOPOI, have sought to examine spatial issues within both literary and physical contexts. What this book sets out to achieve, in contrast, is not so much to understand one particular level or type of space, but rather to set out an argument for (and the potential of) a much broader engagement between history and space across the study of the Greek and Roman worlds.

Introduction

The case-studies so far have focused on particular kinds of physical space (civic, sacred, funerary). This chapter, in contrast, outlines a significantly different conception of space as something both physical and perceptual. Its focus is on how we can understand the changing proximity or distance of the relationship (the perceptual ‘space’) between particular physical spaces. This is to be done by examining not only the way in which that perceptual space is constructed in the literary, epigraphic and material sources, but also how the nature and experience of each physical space themselves contribute to the texture of the spatial relationship between them. The case-study here will be one of the most often discussed relationships between poleis in the ancient world, that of metropolis and colony.

Studies of colonisation have advanced dramatically in the last three decades. The traditional portrayal of colonisation (cf. Bérard 1957; Mossé 1970) as a series of dramatic events occurring in the eighth to sixth centuries BC when mainland Greek cities, often pushed by land overcrowding or some kind of internal stasis, sought a solution (often in conjunction with a consultation of the oracle at Delphi) in the colonisation of a new settlement around the Mediterranean, has been severely criticised. In 1998, Osborne argued that the term colonisation should be abandoned (Osborne 1998), and in 2005 Purcell commented that ‘colonization was a category in crisis’ (Purcell 2005: 115). The resulting rethink has led to a much more dynamic interpretation of both the context and the process of founding colonial settlements (and subsequent further foundations made by the colonies themselves), as well as of the role that the concept of ‘colonisation’ played in literature and later Greek history.

The history of economic thought, rooted in (moral) philosophy and jurisprudence, is readily analyzed using general principles that equally apply to ancient and modern thought. It seems almost a platitude to say that ancient sensibilities differed from our own, or even from those of medieval Europe, shaped as it was by Christianity, and that we should not lose sight of this. This observation, however, is far from redundant considering that a great deal of (pseudo)history of thought has been done by adapting the work of one author to a theoretical grid worked out by another, sometimes in a later period.

The Romans, like the other ancients, lacked a systematic view of economics, either as an abstract theory or as an activity independent of politics. Though this may appear an endorsement of the Polanyian conception of economics “embedded” in other categories, the picture has now become more complex. After the traditional division into “primitivists” and “modernizers,” and Finley's “new orthodoxy,” the recent institutional approach raises fresh doubts. The basic principle that institutions are involved in economics as soon as transactions reach a relevant size (and cost) is acceptable; but to attribute “the fundamental assumption of scarcity” of neoclassical theory to ancient economic thought appears excessive. Only in modern thought is the postulate of scarcity required to define an economic good; at most, antecedents may be found in the medieval debates on value that inspired the analysis of exchange, reflected in the formulation of concepts such as indigentia (i.e., wants), an idea destined to play an important role in later economic thought.

Introduction

After the armies of the eastern Roman Empire had conquered the Vandal Kingdom, the emperor Justinian (527–65 ce) decided to build a city on the location of a minor and insignificant town, close to where his army had landed. The account by the contemporary historian Procopius shows his wholehearted support of the undertaking:

This one passage offers occasion for several reflections on urbanism in the Roman world. To begin with, the ancients did not perceive a city as merely a concentration of many people in one place. To them it was a symbol of prosperity and civilized culture. Hence, peoples without towns and cities were uncivilized. Concomitantly, country-dwellers are often depicted by the urban writers as boorish and ignorant simpletons, at best as naïve and unspoiled. Related to these ideas is the notion that a city is only a city if it contains the markers of civilized life: towns and cities had to be built around public monuments like temples, theatres, and baths, and contain halls and public spaces where councils and people assembled. In the later Roman Empire, walls had become an important feature too. Without these monuments and features such settlements would indeed have been no more than many people living in the same place. Hence, it was the duty of rulers and of social elites to support urban society by building and maintaining public monuments. Rulers of the Roman Empire could of course go a step further and, in the tradition of Hellenistic kings, create a city were none had been before. At the end of Classical Antiquity Justinian founded Justiniana Prima near his birth place in modern Serbia.

Any attempt at providing a synthesis of the salient characteristics and chronological development of ‘post-Roman’ economies, which will be taken here to begin from the fifth century ce, is complicated by the extent to which change varied across space and time. The most meaningful and revealing approach to this infinite variety lies in extended and comparative regional study, as has recently been magisterially demonstrated. Within the confines of an overview, however, one can only try to encapsulate this general pattern of fragmentation within a unitary framework of analysis, notwithstanding the schematic superficiality that this inevitably involves. In outline, a familiar distinction between the political destinies of the two halves of the empire, the fragmented, newly-barbarian West and the integrated and lately-flourishing East, can readily be carried over into the economic sphere because of the importance of the fiscal interests of the Roman state in shaping the dynamics of production and exchange. In neither case, however, was any radical economic transformation immediately and generally triggered by ‘the fall of Rome.’ In the East, the late antique boom encouraged by the foundation of Constantinople, and implicit in the expansion of the extent and intensity of rural settlement in several regions, continued unabated. In the West, with the notable exception of Britain, where the involution of the Roman system was complete within little more than a generation, the various successor-states entered upon a species of economic half-life, in the sense that they emitted Roman-ness in various aspects of their fiscal organization and patterns of exchange until the later seventh century, but in steadily diminishing quantities. This fading but still recognizably post-Roman pattern would be significantly complicated, but not fundamentally altered, by the absorption of Africa and parts of Italy back into the imperial orbit as a result of Justinian's reconquests. In the seventh century, however, the eastern empire underwent a military-political crisis of its own, at once more concise in its nature and less decisive in its outcomes. The Byzantine state survived, in shrunken form, and a variant of fiscal organization was maintained by the Umayads in the territories over which they had assumed control.

Economists seeking to explain the unparalleled economic growth of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have paid increasing attention to human capital – that is, the education, training, and health of the labor force. Over the past two centuries higher levels of education have provided the foundation for discovery of new knowledge and the resulting technological advances needed to sustain growth over long periods at unprecedented rates. Training and education of the work force has enabled the technology to be used in economic production. And the life span and health of the population have improved to permit longer life spans and more intensive use of the skills. The magnitude of these gains is striking, as the average life span has more than doubled and the productivity per worker has increased by an order of magnitude in the most developed economies.

Roman historians have considered various aspects of the subject, but none has conceptualized a study of the Roman economy based on human capital. This is not surprising, since only in the second half of the twentieth century, when investments in human capital have come to dominate investments in physical capital, has it become clear to economists that the quality of labor is a major driver of growth. In the absence of reliable quantitative data for Rome, this chapter aims to provide a description of the levels of education and training of various sectors of the Roman labor force, an analysis of the extent of institutionalization of education and training, and some broad comparisons with other pre-industrial economies in order to assess Rome's level of economic development. The challenge is to add precision to the assessment of Keith Hopkins (1995/96) of “modest, though significant growth” of the Roman economy. While it is not possible to calculate a growth rate with any confidence, it is possible to assess Roman institutions for education and training against those of other pre-modern economies. I will argue that Roman imperial levels of urbanization, education, and literacy (unsurprisingly) exceeded those of previous societies, but fell noticeably short of the most advanced societies of early modern Europe before the industrial revolution. On the one hand, Rome benefited from the more intense exchange of knowledge and differentiation of labor that generally comes with higher levels of urbanization; on the other hand, Rome was not able to break out of the contradiction that more intense urbanization also brought higher mortality.

The role of slave labor has rightfully been a focus of historians assessing the performance of the Roman economy. But to develop a comprehensive picture of economic relationships in the Roman Empire, one must assess the situation of the empire's vast class of small-scale landowners, tenants, artisans, and people engaging in various forms of wage labor. Often these groups overlapped. So a basic question is the degree to which economic growth in the Roman Empire benefited the vast class of working people in the Roman economy. Did the legal and social institutions surrounding the use of contract labor encourage the efficient use of resources, or did they simply promote the interests of the empire's elite at the expense of the vast majority of its population, including both farmers and urban laborers? As comparisons with later societies will show, it is unlikely that Roman workers ever escaped Malthusian constraints, so that population remained a decisive factor in determining the welfare of workers. In the Roman Empire, workers faced increasing competition as population grew over the first two centuries ce, at least until the Antonine Plague in 165 ce, which apparently caused widespread loss of life and arguably substantial economic disruption. Indeed, documentary papyri from Egypt, which provide some detailed information about wages and prices, suggest that wages and prices remained relatively stable in Egypt until in the 160s ce, when they doubled over a period of thirty years, quite possibly as a result of the loss of population. This sudden change, after a long period of stability, suggests how important population pressure was to the welfare of the empire's workers. After the 190s ce prices and wages remained stable until about 270 ce, when serious inflation set in.

There is no single up-to-date study of the Roman economy in English. Chapters 18–28 of W. Scheidel, I. Morris, and R. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge 2007; henceforth CEHGRW) cover the development of the Roman economy from its beginnings into late antiquity. M. I. Finley's classic The Ancient Economy, first published in 1973, expanded in 1985 and now available in an updated edition with a foreword by I. Morris (Berkeley 1999), is still required reading for its coherent (if contested) vision of the Greco-Roman economy as a whole. M. I. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (2nd edn. revised by P. Fraser, Oxford 1957) and A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (3 vols., Oxford 1964) are ambitious works that focus more specifically on particular periods of Roman economic history. P. Garnsey and R. Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (London 1987), chapters 3–5 offer a convenient overview, and C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford 2005) traces the ending of the Roman economy. Recent treatments in other languages include H.-J. Drexhage, H. Konen and K. Ruffing, Die Wirtschaft des Römischen Reiches (1.-3.Jahrhundert): Eine Einführung (Berlin 2002) and J. Andreau, L’économie du monde romain (Paris 2010). W. Scheidel and S. von Reden (eds.), The Ancient Economy (Edinburgh 2002) reprint important contributions to this field and provide a more wide-ranging bibliographical essay (272–8). The most comprehensive relevant bibliography, with close to 3,400 titles, can be found in the aforementioned CEHGRW (769–917).

W. V. Harris, “Between archaic and modern: some current problems in the history of the Roman economy,” in W. V. Harris (ed.), The Inscribed Economy: Production and Distribution in the Roman Empire in the Light of instrumentum domesticum (Ann Arbor 1993), 11–29 discusses the state of research, as do I. Morris, “The ancient economy twenty years after The Ancient Economy,” Classical Philology 89 (1994), 351–66 and J. Andreau, “Twenty years after Moses I. Finley's The Ancient Economy” in Scheidel and von Reden's aforementioned collection (33–49). In their introduction to J. G. Manning and I. Morris (eds.), The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models (Stanford 2005), 1–44, the editors consider different approaches to the study of ancient economies.