2.8 The Economy of the Roman Empire

Roman economic life rested on three primary commodities — wheat, wine and olive oil — which dominated production, trade and daily diet across the Mediterranean. The empire was, the historian Peter Garnsey has argued, an "Olympic-class" economy: in the second century CE its level of urbanisation, monetisation and long-distance commerce was probably not equalled anywhere in the world before the early modern period.

2.8.1 The Trade Networks

The Mediterranean — what the Romans called mare nostrum, "our sea" — functioned as a single, low-cost, water-borne motorway. A bulk cargo of wheat could move from Alexandria to Rome in 12–20 days for less than the cost of land-haulage over 100 km. Beyond the Mediterranean, four further frontiers carried goods in and out:

2.9 Coinage — The Silver Spine of the Economy

Rome's monetary system unified its economy. The basic silver coin was the denarius^? (about 4.5 g of nearly pure silver under Augustus). Above it sat the gold aureus; below it the copper-alloy sestertius and as. Soldiers, civil servants and tax-payers across three continents reckoned in the same coinage. By the late first century CE, however, emperors began debasing the silver to fund their armies — a slow inflation that would burst into hyper-inflation during the third-century crisis.

Figure 2.2: The four denominations of imperial Roman coinage. A first-century legionary's annual pay of 900 sesterces equalled 225 denarii or 9 aurei.

2.10 Society — Slaves, Free Workers and the Family

Roman society was deeply unequal but also surprisingly mobile. At its peak the empire perhaps had between 5 and 10 million slaves — possibly 15% of the total population. Slavery in the Roman world was not racial; it followed war, piracy, debt and birth into a slave household. Slaves worked in mines, on great estates (latifundia) and in elite households as cooks, secretaries, doctors and tutors. Many were freed during their lifetime and became liberti — freedmen — who could rise to become merchants, bankers and (within two generations) Roman citizens of full standing.

2.10.1 Family, Marriage and Women

Roman families in the Early Empire were typically nuclear — husband, wife, children — rather than the joint-family households common in many other ancient societies. Adult sons usually set up their own homes once married. Women had no political rights but enjoyed wide control over their own property: a married Roman woman kept her birth-family name and her dowry remained legally hers. Divorce was easy and could be initiated by either spouse; in elite circles it was extremely common.

Literacy spread further among women in the Roman world than in many later societies. A papyrus letter from Egypt records a young wife asking her absent husband to send her good Falernian wine and a particular kind of silver hairpin; another, from a soldier on the Danube, asks his sister to forward a copy of Virgil's Aeneid. Schooling, where it occurred, taught children to read Greek and Latin texts, do simple arithmetic and recite poetry.

2.11 Social Hierarchies of the Imperial Era

Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century historian, described the Roman elite of the Early Empire as a single "world-aristocracy" of senators and equites, sharing villas, baths and Greek poetry from Britain to Syria. By the late empire, the historian Peter Brown argues, the social pyramid had narrowed: a new "aristocracy of service" — high-ranking civil and military officials — had grown enormously rich at the expense of decurions, the formerly proud city-councillors of the Mediterranean.

2.12 The Third-Century Crisis and Late Antiquity

Between 235 and 284 CE the empire endured fifty years of compounding disasters: civil war, plague, a Sasanian Persian invasion in the east, repeated breakthrough raids by Goths and Franks across the Rhine and Danube, and runaway inflation as the silver coinage collapsed. More than fifty men were proclaimed emperor in those five decades, of whom only one died of natural causes.

The crisis ended in 284 CE when Diocletian, an army officer of obscure Balkan origin, seized power. He restructured the empire into four administrative units (the Tetrarchy), separated military from civilian administration, raised armies to over half a million men, fixed prices in a famous edict of 301 CE, and reformed the currency. The state grew larger and far more bureaucratic. Historians use the term Late Antiquity^? for the long period — roughly 250 to 750 CE — that followed.

2.13 Christianity and the Empire

Christianity began in early-first-century Judaea as a small Jewish reform movement around the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. After his execution under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate (c. 30 CE), his followers — led by Paul of Tarsus — carried the new faith to the Greek-speaking cities of the eastern Mediterranean. For three centuries Christians were a minority, periodically persecuted under emperors such as Nero, Decius and Diocletian.

The decisive turning-point came in 312 CE. Before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the emperor Constantine^? reportedly saw a vision of the Christian cross. He won the battle, became sole emperor, and in 313 CE issued the Edict of Milan tolerating Christianity. By 380 CE, under Theodosius I, Christianity had become the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Constantine also founded a new eastern capital at the Greek city of Byzantion in 330 CE; he renamed it Constantinople ("the city of Constantine").

2.14 The Division of the Empire

The empire was already too big for one person to govern. In 285 CE Diocletian formally split rule between two senior emperors (Augusti) and two junior ones (Caesares). After Constantine, the eastern and western halves drifted apart. From 395 CE the division became permanent: a Latin western empire ruled from Ravenna and a Greek eastern empire ruled from Constantinople.

The west came under increasing pressure from Germanic peoples — the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals and Franks — who had long been settled along the frontier as foederati (treaty-allies) in exchange for military service. Old arrangements about land, recruitment and trade broke down in the late fourth century; the Visigoth Alaric sacked Rome in 410 CE, and the Vandal Gaiseric did the same in 455 CE. The last western emperor was deposed in 476 CE. Successor kingdoms — Visigothic Spain, Vandal North Africa, Frankish Gaul, Ostrogothic Italy — emerged from the wreckage.

2.15 The Eastern Empire and the Rise of Islam

The eastern Roman empire — known to historians as Byzantium — survived the fifth-century crisis intact. Constantinople, defended by triple walls and the Bosphorus, kept the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean unified for another thousand years. Under Justinian (527–565 CE) it briefly reconquered North Africa and Italy, codified Roman law (the famous Codex Justinianus), and built the cathedral of Hagia Sophia. But by the early seventh century Byzantium was exhausted by an endless struggle with the Sasanian Persian empire.

It was at this moment, around 610 CE, in the Arabian city of Mecca, that the merchant Muhammad^? began to preach the message of Islam — submission to one God, Allah. In 622 CE he and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina; this Hijra ("emigration") marks year 1 of the Islamic calendar. Within a decade Muhammad had unified most of Arabia. After his death in 632 CE, his successors — the caliphs^? — launched campaigns of breath-taking speed.

By 642 CE the Arabs had destroyed the Sasanian Empire of Iran. They took Egypt from Byzantium in the same decade, conquered Syria and the Holy Land, and within a century had reached the Indus in the east and Spain in the west. The eastern Mediterranean — formerly Roman — passed under the rule of the Umayyad caliphate (661–750 CE), based at Damascus, and then the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258 CE), based at Baghdad. A close, often creative, dialogue between Greek-Byzantine and Arab-Islamic civilisations unfolded along their shifting frontier.

2.16 Continuities and Legacies

The vanishing of the Roman state in the western Mediterranean did not mean the vanishing of Roman things. Latin survived as the language of the Catholic Church and of European law. The Roman alphabet remains in daily use across half the world. Roman law, codified by Justinian, became the basis of legal systems in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and most of Latin America. The system of provinces and dioceses passed almost unchanged into the administrative geography of the medieval Church. And the very idea of an empire that joined Europe, Africa and Asia through trade, law and a common urban culture exercised a magnetic pull on every later European state — from Charlemagne to Napoleon.