The literary sources that survive from the Roman Principate are so defective that any chronology that exists anywhere else is worth the effort of analysis. If extensive enough, documentary time-series usually embody some reality of the period from which they come. Stimuli that they reveal may include dynastic, fiscal and economic change.

The available sources include inscriptions, papyri and coins. All three survive in abundance, and all three contain obvious dated series. Inscriptions are in some ways the most useful, because they typically represent significant expenditures, in other words, discrete economic events. In themselves, dated papyri and coins primarily show the functioning of government machinery which existed at all times, but they still have great interest as sources of chronological data. Examined by category, dated papyri can yield specific evidence about economic change, and changes in coin-output can potentially mirror changes in government spending.

Building-series

Approaches to the evidence

Public inscriptions on stone from the Roman world provide some index of building activity, whether they refer to the construction of statues or to complete buildings. Different ways of interpreting this evidence can be considered.

(1) One approach would regard town building activity as essentially an expression of political and social tendencies. Within the Roman empire, local populations sought to equip their towns with public buildings and statues in imitation of Rome and of each other, and members of local aristocracies aided that process by competitive spending, usually linked to local office.

Introduction

The shortage of information about the volume of ancient trade makes fresh sources of inference worth exploring. Some of the interactions between other elements of the Roman economy may have implications for trade. In one of the most arresting contributions of recent years, Keith Hopkins has argued that long-distance trade grew very considerably during the Roman Principate, under stimuli that were an incidental by-product of Roman rule.

His model notes that the provinces which produced the most tax-revenue were not those which cost the most to govern. Wealthy provinces with small garrisons were probably net exporters of tax-revenue, while less wealthy provinces with large garrisons were probably net importers of tax-revenue. Each time that the tax-cycle took place, the imbalance would tend to drain money out of the tax-exporting provinces, making it more difficult for those provinces to pay their taxes in future. In the model, it is argued that the imbalance was corrected by an increase in production in the ‘tax-exporting’ provinces and by an increase in their exports; that in turn meant an expansion in the volume of long-distance trade within the empire.

Roman authors show some awareness of disparities like those envisaged in the model. Cicero claimed that some of Rome's provinces hardly brought in enough to pay their defence costs. Strabo writing before the Claudian conquest thought he could foresee that Britain would not yield enough tribute to support the cost of one legion.

Introduction

As the main source of bread, the staple foodstuff of antiquity, wheat has obvious interest for the economic historian. Its central importance has not always been fully recognised. The advertised menu at dinners of plebeian colleges in Italy under the Principate usually consisted of bread and wine. In Egypt, small property-owners who made contracts with their heirs for their own maintenance, asked only for wheat and oil. Apprenticeship and entertainment contracts in Egypt often show the same terms.

The position was similar in the Mediterranean in more recent times. Labourers on a farm in Sicily in the late seventeenth century lived on bread and wine, with small amounts of cheese and oil. Paupers in eighteenth century Languedoc received bread and very small amounts of wine. In Lucania under Mussolini the agricultural poor ate bread and little else. Though a bread diet leads to malnutrition and greatly increases vulnerability to disease, the evidence for its prevalence through long periods of Mediterranean history is relatively clear–cut.

Egyptian evidence is crucially important for the price of bread in the Roman world, though what it refers to (for reasons discussed in section 7) is usually wheat from which bread would be made. Even Roman soldiers received rations in this form, and the warlike emperor Caracalla is said to have endeared himself to his troops by sharing their lot and baking his own bread while in camp.

The Egyptian evidence for wheat prices falls into three categories.

This book, a sequel to The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies, carries the discussion into further areas of the Roman economy. Some related discussions of numismatic and metrological problems have been separately published as articles, and are referred to in the text where necessary.

Eight of the thirteen chapters are new. The remaining five, which are versions of studies first published as articles, have been reworked for the purposes of the book (chapters 5, 7, 8, 9 and 11: the corresponding earlier publications are listed in the Bibliography under the years (1977), (1979A), (1980A); (1978); (1976A); (1976B); and (1985).

I should like to express a continuing debt to the teaching of the late Professor A.H.M. Jones, notwithstanding the fact that two of the chapters below seek to modify certain conclusions in Jones's pioneering survey of the Later Roman Empire.

This brief survey considers three pieces of demographic evidence from the Roman world. They consist of a register of town councillors, an actuarial table from a Roman lawyer and a body of age-statements from tombstone inscriptions and papyri.

The album of Canusium

The complete list of the town council at Canusium in southern Italy as it stood in AD 223 is both a source for Roman municipal history of almost unique value, and a potential source of demographic information.

The key to any demographic interpretation is the age at which office–holding began. The inscription lists a standard Roman town–council of 100 members, of whom 68 had held at least one magistracy. Its contents allow two possible reconstructions. The standard legal age for entry to the town council and to the junior magistracies was 25. In a society where life–expectancy was far below modern western levels, the legal age–threshold was quite likely to function in practice as both minimum and maximum. The pressures were if anything for age–thresholds to be lower: when tombstones break their customary silence about the age of magistrates, it is often to reveal a case in which office was held below the legal minimum age.

Town magistracies were normally held in parallel by two colleagues, like the original consulships of Rome.

A detailed map of landholding in the Roman world would show many differences. We should see state land, imperial land and city land, as well as a host of properties of different size in full private ownership. This chapter briefly considers juridical differences before investigating the underlying reality of landholding patterns. Because of the layout of the evidence, an exhaustive treatment would be strongly biassed towards Egypt, but a wider approach is possible in a short discussion.

Ager publicus

Land generally fell into one of six categories (if the nuances of legal title and the more complex situation in Egypt are set on one side). The first type is ager publicus, land belonging to the populus Romanus, the Roman state. Such land, if cultivated, was generally in the hands of private tenants of the state. The extent of ager publicus was originally immense, since Rome normally expropriated the land of conquered peoples, at any rate in theory. But the amount diminished as cultivable land was gradually assigned to veterans, civilian colonists or purchasers. As late as Trajan's time, ager publicus made up almost a quarter (22%) of peripheral holdings in a list of lands owned by private individuals and cities at Veleia in the far north of Italy. Not all of it was necessarily cultivated, since Veleia lay in a mountainous and infertile region; some may have been pasture. In a similar list from Ligures Baebiani in southern Italy, ager publicus forms 10% of peripheral holdings.

Introduction

The spread of cities on the Roman model, within at least the western Mediterranean, can be seen as one of the great successes of Roman rule. This was not merely a question of institutions and procedures imposed under compulsion, even though Rome did often provide local constitutions and the strongest single impetus came from veteran settlement. Urbanisation on the Roman model also rapidly became a movement sustained by positive forces at the local level.

First, there was some direct eagerness to imitate the city of Rome and the existing cities of Roman type, both in their institutions and in their physical appearance. Roman practices tended to spread even where Roman institutions did not exist. The introduction of magistracies and priesthoods soon fuelled the social ambitions of local aristocracies. And the newly invented position of Augustalis provided a surrogate office for wealthy former slaves, excluded by Augustus from the town council. Provincial cities competed with each other for titles and other marks of status. The rites of urban life meant ceremonies, shows, handouts and new public buildings. Ulpian defined domicile as the place where a man makes his purchases, sales and contracts, and where he goes to the forum, the baths and the shows.

Many of these features had obvious popular appeal and reinforced the involvement of ordinary people in town life.

Evidence from Roman lamps

Signed Roman lamps (‘Firmalampen’) show some of the ways in which archaeology can increase our knowledge of trade. Their usefulness here is as a commercial artefact whose large numbers show identifiable distribution patterns. The patterns tend to suggest trading regions within the Mediterranean, divided by discernible boundaries. The boundaries imply restricted sailing patterns, and commercial zones which were more or less distinct from each other.

Pottery lamps, because they supplied household lighting by burning oil, were a standard artefact in the Roman world. Lamps produced in the western Mediterranean during the Principate survive in thousands. While many carry inventive pictorial designs, a large number are plain lamps whose main identification is a maker's name. The number of known signatures is roughly 2,000, a few being so common that they resemble modern trade marks. Frequency-counts for a number of marques were published by Harris in an important study in 1980; present indebtedness to his survey will be obvious. This discussion utilises Harris's figures, analysing some of them in greater detail.

There are serious uncertainties about how lamps of a particular marque achieved wide diffusion. At least four possibilities have been envisaged:

1. Long-distance export from a central production point.

2. Production in secondary areas under licence.

3. Unlicensed production in secondary areas (pirating).

4. Production in more than one area by lamp-makers who moved from one place to another.

The lack of sure information about where given specimens came from leaves these difficulties partly unresolved.

Introduction

As seen in the previous chapter, our knowledge of the tax-system of the Principate is very indistinct. Tax inscriptions are very few, and surviving legal sources, almost all selected at a much later date, throw very little light on taxation in this period. With the late Empire, the position changes. Legal texts bearing on taxation become relatively abundant, and a series of detailed census inscriptions survives, together with some relevant literary evidence.

This extreme imbalance between what is known at different dates greatly restricts comparisons. It seems obvious in itself that important features of the Diocletianic tax-system, if not explicitly encountered in earlier sources, should represent innovations. But there are almost no detailed general descriptions of what preceded it. Where evidence will allow, it is worth trying to assess how new Diocletian's system was. The present chapter examines the main Diocletianic land tax-unit, and its implications both for the tax-system, and for the level of agriculture manpower.

Our knowledge of land-taxation of course remains very imperfect even in the late Empire. It is limited both by the increasing insistence of imperial draftsmen on literary elegance at the expense of exactness (adding to the problems of terminology in literary sources of the Principate seen in the previous chapter), and by the fact that isolated fragments of information are spread over a long period. Though the constitutions are dated, they are generally too few to allow effective inferences about long-term change.

The aim here is to ask how the civic burdens discussed in the previous chapter were distributed, and to look at the dividing–line between what came from town funds and what was directly paid for by the individual. Two African towns, Thugga and Thamugadi, are taken as test cases (Thugga is considered from a different perspective in chapter 4). Evidence from other towns in Africa is considered in a short further analysis (Table 48).

Direct labour

Cicero writes of the ancient Capitol at Rome as having been built for nothing, because it was built with forced labour. Livy says that the Capitol was built with a mixture of forced labour and public funds. Forced labour on public works continues to figure to some extent in Rome's later history, where there is better documentation. One of the more severe legal punishments was damnatio ad opus publicum, being condemned to labour on public works. When the younger Pliny was governing Bithynia under Trajan, he found that the largest cities contained many men who had been condemned ad opus publicum, but who had managed to escape. Instead of working on buildings, they had found alternative employment in the city as public slaves. When told of this, Trajan ruled that they must go back to their original punishment, unless condemned more than ten years previously. Trajan laid down that they must work on servicing public baths, cleaning sewers and building roads and streets.