Free movement
The cultural interaction that defined the Roman Empire was not something that took place only within peoples’ heads, whether humble potters or ancient theorists. And it was not merely a matter of different local accommodations to the power of Rome, although that was an important part of it. There were also massive movements of peoples and goods across the empire, which intensified this cultural diversity while bringing enormous profits to some and making victims out of others. This was a world in which people could, as never before on this scale, make their homes, their fortunes or their graves thousands of miles away from where they were born; in which the population of Rome relied on basic food grown at the edges of the empire; and in which trade distributed new tastes, smells and luxuries – spices, ivory, amber and silks – from one end of the Mediterranean to the other and beyond, and not only to the super-rich. Among the precious possessions of a fairly ordinary house in Pompeii was a delicate ivory figurine made in India; and a document from Vindolanda shows that quantities of pepper, from the Far East, were being sold to the garrison there.
The routes into Italy from the rest of the empire were an important axis of this movement. Everything that Rome wanted was sucked into the metropolis. People were one of those commodities. Packed as the city was, the human death rate – from malaria and infections, as well as the other regular dangers to ancient life – meant that there was always the room, and the need, for more. Some of them were slaves, picked up in war or now more likely the victims of an unsavoury trade of people trafficking that made the margins of the Roman world a dangerous place to live. Others must have migrated to the city with hopes and aspirations or out of desperation. Their stories are largely lost to us; but the short epitaph of a young man called Menophilos, who died in Rome, had come ‘from Asia’ and was skilled in music (‘I never uttered offensive words, and I was a friend of the Muses’), hints at the innocent ambitions of some of those who thought that the streets of the capital were paved with gold.
95. An Indian figurine, and no doubt precious possession, found in a house at Pompeii. How it travelled from India is a mystery. Maybe it was brought back directly by a trader with the East, or maybe it came through various hands, thanks to a series of indirect connections between Rome and the outside world.
The natural products of empire, its luxuries and curiosities, also flooded to Rome and signalled the city’s status as an imperial power. Balsam trees of Judaea were paraded in the triumphal procession of 71 CE. Exotic animals captured in Africa, from lions to ostriches, were slaughtered in the arena. Luscious coloured marbles, quarried in remote locations across the Roman world, decorated the theatres, temples and palaces in the capital. The images of trampled barbarians were not the only things to stand for Roman domination. So too did the colours of the floors on which the Romans walked in the grandest buildings of their city: these stones amounted to an assertion – and a map – of empire.
96. Hadrian’s Pantheon with the exotic Egyptian columns supporting the porch. It is a deceptive building. Although in its present form it was built by Hadrian, the bronze letters across the gable proclaim that it was the work of Augustus’ colleague Marcus Agrippa. He certainly was behind an earlier version of the temple, but Hadrian’s new build was entirely new – and his reference to Agrippa was public piety.
They also hint at the enormous effort, time and money that the emperors were prepared to devote to displaying their control over their distant possessions. To take just one example: supporting the porch of the emperor Hadrian’s Pantheon, finished in the 120s CE, were twelve columns, each 40 Roman feet high (roughly 12 metres) and carved from a single block of Egyptian grey granite. This is not to modern eyes a spectacular material, but it was an extremely prestigious stone used in many imperial projects, partly because it was found only in one faraway place, 2,500 miles from Rome, Mons Claudianus (the ‘Mountain of Claudius’, named after the emperor who first sponsored work there) in the middle of the eastern Egyptian desert. It was only with immense difficulty and a huge investment of labour and cash that columns of this size could be quarried and transported to Rome in one piece.
Excavations at Mons Claudianus over the past thirty years have revealed a military base, small villages for the quarry workers and a supply and transport centre; and they have turned up many hundreds of written documents, often scratched on recycled broken pieces of pottery (a workable alternative to wax tablets), that give a hint of the organisation and its problems. The provision of food and drink was only the first. There was a complicated supply chain of everything from wine to cucumbers, which did not always work (‘Please send me two loaves of bread, for no grain has come up here for me so far,’ reads one begging letter), and water was rationed (one document is a water distribution list that numbers 917 people working in the quarries). The work was laborious. Every one of the Pantheon columns would have taken three men well over a year to hack out and trim down, and occasionally, as some of the documents attest, a half-prepared monolith would crack and they would have to start again. Transport was the next hurdle, especially as the quarries were almost 100 miles from the Nile. One letter on papyrus from Mons Claudianus begs a local official to send grain supplies, as the quarries had a column of 50 Roman feet (weight: 100 tons) ready to go, but the food for the pack animals to get it to the river was running out. Even in the case of the Pantheon, it is clear that not everything went to plan: some slightly awkward design features of the finished building make it seem likely that Hadrian’s architects had banked on getting twelve 50-foot columns but had to adjust at the last minute when twelve 40-foot columns were all that the quarry could provide.
97. The site of Mons Claudianus, where the famous grey granite (granodiorite) for the Pantheon columns was quarried; 30 miles away in the desert another quarry, Mons Porphyrites, was the source of the porphyry also used in major Roman building projects. These were literally military operations, serving the construction needs of the Roman state.
The stone transported from Mons Claudianus is an unusual case of the movement of goods around the Roman world. It was largely in the hands of the imperial administration, backed up by soldiers; and is hard not to suspect that it was intended in part as a display of Rome’s ability to pull off the virtually impossible – a reductio ad absurdum of Roman power. But in many other markets, from absolute staples to more affordable luxuries, trade and profits boomed in the empire. Vivid snapshots survive of men who struck it very lucky in all sorts of commercial enterprise. One papyrus of the mid second century CE lists the goods, with their cash value, which came on a single ship from southern India to Egypt, presumably destined for Rome. It was worth, after tax, more than 6 million sesterces, the equivalent of a decent senatorial estate in Italy at the time (Pliny had bought a large but slightly run-down property, plus land, for 3 million), and the cargo included a hundred or so pairs of elephant tusks, boxes of oils and spices and very likely vast quantities of pepper. A man called Flavius Zeuxis was not quite in that league, but his epitaph, found in the ancient textile town of Hieropolis in what is now southern Turkey, boasts that over his career he made seventy-two journeys around Cape Malea, at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, on his way to Rome to sell his fabric. It is not clear whether his seventy-two trips were single or return voyages, but either way this was a lifetime’s achievement worth parading.
Beyond these individual entrepreneurs, the bigger picture is revealed in the much less glamorous but even more impressive facts and figures of basic supply. A little hill on the bank of the river Tiber in Rome, now known as Monte Testaccio (‘Broken Pot Mountain’), conjures up better than anything else the scale of the trade in staple foodstuffs that kept the million people who lived in the city alive, and the network of transport facilities, shipping, warehousing and retailing required to sustain it. Despite its appearance, this is not a natural hill at all but the remains of a man-made Roman rubbish dump, the broken fragments of 53 million containers of olive oil, pottery amphorae with a capacity of about 60 litres each. These had almost all been imported from southern Spain over a hundred years or so, from the mid second to the mid third century CE, and had been dumped as soon as the oil was decanted. This was one part of an enormous export trade that changed the economy of that part of Spain into an agricultural monoculture (nothing but olives and more olives) and delivered to the city of Rome just some of what it needed to survive. At a rough estimate, that basic requirement amounted to 20 million litres of olive oil per year (for lighting and cleaning, as well as cooking), 100 million litres of wine and 250 tons of grain. Almost all of this came to Rome from outside Italy.
The mobility of empire, however, was not restricted to the axis between the metropolitan centre and the rest of the Roman world. One of the main developments in the empire of the first two centuries CE was that it became a territory through, around and within which people moved, often bypassing Rome; the traffic did not simply flow between centre and periphery. There are many ways of tracking this movement. The most up-to-date involves looking at the evidence of human skeletons, particularly their mouths, in ever more precise ways. Modern scientific analysis has shown how the distinctive imprint of the climate, water supply and diet of the growing child leaves traces in the teeth of the adult, giving hints about where any particular dead person grew up. The studies are still very provisional, but they seem to show that a substantial proportion of the urban population of, for example, Roman Britain grew up in a different climatic region from the one in which they died – whether that was the warm south coast of Britain versus the chilly north or the balmy south of France, is so far hard to tell.
98. Monte Testaccio is one of the most surprising hills, and rubbish dumps, in the world – being made up almost entirely of broken amphorae, which once carried Spanish olive oil. They could not be re-used because the oil seeped into the fabric of the vessel and turned rancid.
Some of those journeys can be traced in the stories of the people who ended up near Hadrian’s Wall. The picture often conjured up of a miserable bunch of soldiers from sunny Italy being forced to endure the fog, frost and rain of northern Britain is very misleading. The garrison was largely made up of forces recruited in equally foggy places across the English Channel, in what are now Holland, Belgium and Germany. But at all levels of the Wall community, individuals came from much further afield, even from the opposite ends of the empire. These range from Victor, an ex-slave of a cavalry soldier, whose tombstone identifies him as a ‘Moor’, to one of the grandest Romans in the province, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the governor of Britain between 139 and 142 CE. Thanks to some lucky survivals we can still identify both the building work he sponsored in northern Britain and the family tomb he commissioned at the other end of the Roman world, in his home town (of Tiddis, as it is now called) in northern Algeria.
Most evocative of all is the story of a man from Palmyra in Syria, Barates, who was working near Hadrian’s Wall in the second century CE. It is not known what brought him the 4,000 miles across the world (probably the longest journey of anyone in this book); it may have been trade, or he may have had some connection with the army. But he settled in Britain long enough to marry Regina (‘Queenie’), a British woman and ex-slave. When she died at the age of thirty, Barates commemorated her with a tombstone, near the Roman fort of Arbeia, modern South Shields. This depicts Queenie – who, as the epitaph makes clear, was born and bred just north of London – as if she were a stately Palmyrene matron; and underneath the Latin text, Barates had her name inscribed in the Aramaic language of his homeland. It is a memorial which nicely sums up the movement of peoples and the cultural mix that defined the Roman Empire, and raises even more tantalising questions. Who did Queenie think she was? Would she have recognised herself as that Palmyrene lady? And what would this couple have thought about the ‘Rome’ in whose world they lived?
99. The figure of Regina on her tombstone is similar to many found in Palmyra. But the Latin text beneath explains that ‘Barates the Palmyrene put this up for Regina, ex-slave and wife, aged thirty, of the Catuvellaunian tribe’. It is not made absolutely explicit, but she had almost certainly been his own slave. The production of the memorial is an interesting puzzle. Did Barates provide a sketch of what he wanted to some local sculptor? Or was there a craftsman at South Shields already familiar with this style?