Despite a deep commitment to the ideals of First Nature landscape cosmology, Lucretius had no influence on the conduct of Roman agriculture. Fortunately, the Roman world had little need for a philosophical grounding of its institutions. Farming, the foundation of Roman life, was fully supported by a pantheon of agricultural deities and a calendar packed with agricultural commemorations. The Roman world may seem familiar to many readers. It was hierarchically organized and bureaucratic, strong on infrastructure, and, above all, enduring. Given the role that Rome—along with Greece—still plays as a cultural underpinning of the modern West, its closeness to us seems even greater. But if the Roman Empire existed today and could be directly compared with modern states, our reactions would be very different. By all contemporary measures, the Roman Empire, even at its second-century CE height, would rank as a third-world country. The birth rate was high, but infant mortality and a low life expectancy kept population stable. (In the late years of the empire the demographic picture became decidedly negative, and population declined.) Commerce was widespread, but industry employed only a small fraction of the population, and most jobs were in agriculture. Wealth, much of it derived from trade in natural resources and food, was concentrated in the hands of a few. Though the empire was dotted with populous cities and towns, the majority of the population lived in the countryside. Most importantly, the Roman world was governed not so much by reason as by ritual. Daily life and especially agricultural life were ruled by tradition and a packed calendar of festivals that commemorated every phase of cultivation. This calendar of commemorations, more than anything else, marks Rome as a premodern society with a mature, articulate, and integrated religious belief system that justified and regulated every aspect of life. This belief system is one of the most detailed pragmatic expressions of the First Nature consensus that has come down to us.
The state religion of the Roman Empire was an important part of public life at every level, and it was one of the fundamental ways the state provided cultural support for farming. The gods of Rome’s Capitoline temples—the triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva—were formally worshipped in special-purpose buildings set next to the marketplace in every imperial town. The religious responsibilities of the state extended far beyond the worship of the major Olympian gods, and officials performed rites on behalf of the entire society on many days during the year.
The official state cult was attuned to the rhythm of cultivation and celebrated its sponsoring gods in festivals from seedtime to harvest. Sometime in late January a sowing festival was held to honor Ceres, goddess of grain, and Tellus, goddess of the earth. This festival, celebrated in Rome and other cities as the sementina dies, was duplicated throughout the countryside in festivals called paganalia. Games in honor of Cerealia, another grain goddess, who entered the pantheon in the third century BCE, were held in mid-April. On April 25, priests of Quirinus, one of the avatars of the war god Mars, celebrated the Robigalia festival, in which the god Robigo was asked not to infest the young crops with blight or mold.1 A festival to Venus on May 1 honored the first of the new wine. August, the month of harvest for many crops, was crowded with festivals. The god Ops—abundance—was honored on the first of the month. Vertumnus, god of orchards, was worshipped in midmonth. Ceres was celebrated again in early October.
Individual households, both urban and rural, were considered to be under the protection of gods who were invoked from time to time in a pattern that echoed the official calendar of festivals. Each household honored the several gods devoted to its care. The lar was the protector spirit of the house, the neighborhood, and the fields. This god was honored at shrines in homes and at crossroads and street intersections in towns and cities. Along with the lar, a family shrine contained representations of the animating spirits of the father and mother of the house. The lares shared their shrine with the penates, whose responsibility was the household stores, the provisions that kept everyone nourished throughout the year. Their combined shrine received frequent sacrifices, in some households as often as twice a day. On the first, ninth, and fifteenth day of the month more elaborate honors were required.
Many other gods and goddesses looked after the family and its well-being. Like the penates, many of them were concerned with nourishment. Priapus was the best-known figure of this kind. His image, a little man with an outsized swollen phallus, represented agricultural fertility. The richness of the fields was his responsibility. Faunus was a general fertility god. Flora was the goddess of flowers. Picumnus and Pilumnus presided over both productivity on the land and the birth of children. All received honors on a regular basis. Throughout cities and the countryside, there were local shrines and sacred places. For help with special problems, individuals could pray to Olympian gods. Venus was invoked in matters of love. Hercules, whose labors involved traveling, was invoked by merchants, as was Hermes, the go-between of the gods and the sponsor of liars and thieves. Asclepius, a god borrowed from the Greeks, was the patron of healing, and his shrines were centers for healing as well as the dissemination of medical knowledge.
If the Oeconomicus is accurate, the small farmer was the backbone of Greek agriculture. In a heavily mythologized vision of the Roman past, the historian Livy represented Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman farmer, as the ideal of early Roman rule. Having served as consul in 460 BCE, Cincinnatus was called on again some three years later to serve the state in an extraordinary capacity. In a battle with a neighboring city, a Roman army had been surrounded. The Senate sent emissaries to Cincinnatus, whom they found plowing a field at his farm. The delegation informed Cincinnatus that he had been named dictator for six months with absolute authority over the state and the army. As dictator, Cincinnatus organized his forces and opened negotiations with the enemy that resulted in a bloodless victory. Sixteen days after his appointment, with his work completed, he resigned and returned to his farm.2
Cincinnatus was the proprietor of a small family farm like the one Xenophon described in Oeconomicus. Cincinnatus was also a Roman citizen prominent enough to be a member of the Senate. In the earliest period of Rome’s history, citizens lived both inside and outside the city limits. They met in the forum on market day to decide issues of law and policy. Market day was the most convenient time for those living outside the city to attend these meetings. In time, however, the coordination between market day and assembly day was deliberately broken. From then on, power was in the hands of those within the city walls; Romans who lived on the periphery were disenfranchised.
The Roman republic began as a polis—a cooperative urban-farm community. The cooperation ended in political divorce, and the city emerged not just as the seat of government but as the ideal of political organization. The model of all forms of Roman administration was the city of Rome. Political enfranchisement within every successive Roman polity, whether it was widely or loosely extended, was termed “citizenship”—literally, “membership in the city.” Like many Greeks, Romans exalted the city and substituted the rationale of its government for the more inclusive enfranchisement of both city dweller and exurbanite that the polis had embodied.
On the social side, the divide was equally important. A Roman of standing was a city dweller, focused on the business, the legal conflicts, and the social life of either the capital or a city that imitated its characteristics. The manners and perspective of city dwellers, their urbanitas—urbanity—were the hallmark of proper behavior. Though a founding father like Cincinnatus might be admired for his simplicity, the manners of real country people were despised. When Romans went into the country, as they often did, it was to enter a space that was defined most clearly by an absence. The countryside provided relief from the pressures, temptations, and risks of the city. The horror of every Roman of importance was real rustication—losing touch with the urban scene and being forced to live life in the boondocks.3 Once the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, suburban retreats gained in popularity among wealthy Romans. These second homes were within easy reach of the cities, and from the most desirable of them, the city was actually visible, at the end of a long garden, say, and through a vista framed by trees. When the busy public servants of the imperial period—Livy’s readers—returned to their farms, it was not to resume their interrupted plowing but to carry out an entirely metaphorical action. They were participating in a way of life that had been packaged and idealized through literature, architecture, and the manipulation of landscape.
Meanwhile, the agricultural countryside carried on its own productive life. That life was, in many instances, attached directly to properties owned by urban dwellers, but there were also many different structures that sustained agriculture. Some of these structures were grandfathered into the Roman Empire and reflected the adaptive use of landscapes by indigenous peoples.
The Biferno Valley in southeastern Italy is one of the most intensively studied agricultural regions of the Roman world. The Biferno River begins in the Appenines, the spine of the peninsula, not far from the modern city of Campobasso. It flows northeastward some fifty miles to empty into the Adriatic Sea near Termoli. The Appenines guard the western entrance to the river valley, and ridges on the east separate its drainage basin from the Trigno River to the north and the Fortore to the south. This region offers a variety of environments, from mountain slopes to bottomlands, that have been inhabited and exploited for millennia. During the 1970s the British archaeologist Graeme Barker and a team of collaborators carried out a series of pioneering surveys there. Additional studies in the following decades led to a two-volume publication of their remarkable data in 1995.4
In historic times the valley was a stronghold of the Samnites, one of the most powerful and enduring antagonists of the Romans in their battle to subdue the Italian Peninsula. Conflict between the rivals began in the fourth century BCE and continued until the Romans finally prevailed around 80 BCE. Before the Romans arrived, the Samnites had organized the river valley into two separate regions, which reflected important differences in terrain, climate, and culture. Dominated by the mountain flanks, the upper valley was cooler; its terrain was steep and its soils shallow. In the lower valley the climate was milder; the ground was flat, and the alluvial soils were deep and rich. Because of these different conditions and the different opportunities that they offered, the Samnites used each part of their territory in different ways.
Hill forts in the uplands guarded the mountain passes and protected the valley from invasion. Again and again they held the front line in the multicentury warfare between Samnites and Romans. Guarding the border was their primary role, but they also protected upland grazing from raiders. Middle-altitude areas with flatter lands supported small villages. These, too, might be fortified, though less substantially than the upland outposts. Pathways connected these villages with the forts and with upland pastures. At the junctions of these pathways, the Samnites built shrines. Some of the largest and wealthiest were the scenes of costly animal sacrifices. Others were small and undistinguished.
Both small and large farms dotted the countryside. Villagers apparently worked fields within walking distance and returned to their homes at night. More distant land with available water and workable soils was cultivated by farmers who lived year-round in relative isolation. The lower altitudes at which villages and farms flourished made cultivation of grain and other crops, especially grapes, possible. An excavated Samnite farmhouse may be typical of the architecture. The building, made of local limestone, is square, about forty feet on each side. Its main entrance leads to a central courtyard surrounded by rooms that are for the most part also square. Hearths in two of them suggest that they were used for eating and sleeping. Some of the interior rooms appear to have been used for grain storage. Stables and sheds stood against the southeast wall of the structure. There was plenty of timber in the region for building. Tiles manufactured locally covered roofs. While some richer farms may have had more elaborate architecture, the remains of huts scattered through the valley suggest that a portion of the population lived in much more primitive shelters.
With the exception of the hill forts, upland settlement and building types—towns, farms, villas, and shrines—were widespread in the lower valley as well. What distinguished the two zones was the presence of a large and powerful city in the flatlands. This city, called Larinum, controlled the fields in the floodplain of the Biferno. It also sat at the nexus of roads that served the entire region. Larinum had an organized grid of streets, impressive buildings made of dressed stone, a separate temple quarter, and an area were artisans congregated. Its most valuable exports were grain and wool. Larinum was evidently a cosmopolitan center where speakers of the Samnite language, Oscan, mingled with speakers of Latin and Greek.
Grain was cultivated on the valley floor, and the country around Larinum was said to be especially fertile. Grapes and olives grew abundantly, but there is no evidence of trade in these commodities. Even in the lower valley, the Samnites raised a great many animals. Sheep and goats were evidently favored, with pigs running a close second. The Samnites also raised cattle for plowing and kept small numbers of horses. Pork was the most commonly available meat, but pigs were typically slaughtered near important upland shrines and consumed in ritual feasts. Sheep, goats, and cattle were slaughtered more rarely, typically at the end of their working lives. Some hunting still went on along the mountain slopes, and an occasional deer or rabbit was killed. People in the lower valley supplemented their diet with fish, including some deepwater species, as well as shellfish and oysters.
Rome’s conquest of Samnium in 80 BCE led to Romanization, but the Samnite base was preserved. The conquerors did not substitute Romans for the indigenous people or Roman practices for traditional ones. Under Roman rule, people in the region did about the same things that they had always done, but they did them more intensively and with a greater level of organization. By integrating the valley into their own international economy, the Romans brought wealth into the region in amounts that exceeded the investment in infrastructure and administration that the Samnites had made.
The Roman Empire encompassed the entire Mediterranean Sea at the end of the fourth century.
With the resolution of conflict between the Romans and the Samnites, the hill forts protecting the border were abandoned as unnecessary. On a few sites, Roman towns supplanted Samnite villages. Saepinum in the upper valley was one of these. Its street grid and many of its houses remained in place but were incorporated into an urban pattern that within a few years looked Roman. The town was walled, and there were gates allowing access to two main roads that crossed at the heart of the town. In a Roman colony planted in open country, these roads would have been oriented due north and south and would have met in the center of town. The builders here worked with old roads that were not geographically oriented, did not meet at right angles, and did not intersect in the center. Still, the Roman engineers used their intersection as a location for defining structures. They built a forum and a capitolium, a temple dedicated to the three principal gods of the Roman state. Near it was a basilica, where law courts met. These government buildings were surrounded by houses, shops, and workshops and by a building that excavators have identified as a slaughterhouse. On the edge of town there were a theater and public baths. An aqueduct supplied the city with water. It appears that the fields outside the towns were resurveyed in the Roman period. There is sketchy evidence of what is called centuriation, the gridlike laying out of rectilinear fields that Roman surveyors created. Tombs, again typical of Roman towns, lined the roads into Saepinum. Prominent families built their monuments as close to the town as possible and made them as lavish as they could afford.
A Samnite Rip Van Winkle returning home after many years would have found the fields around the town bigger and more regular. He would have been shocked by the tombs and surprised at the height and strength of the town wall. The slaughtering of animals in the city center rather than in a shrine, like the consumption of meat in a nonreligious setting, might have struck him as improper. Despite these innovations, he would probably still have been able to find his home and the street he grew up on, but the old neighborhood would now be embedded in a town that bore all the marks of standardized Roman urbanism. The city would have been the same on the neighborhood scale but dramatically different on a large scale.
In the lower valley the Roman style of agriculture had its greatest impact both in the towns and in the countryside. The modest and rough-built Samnite farmsteads that had served as the base for cultivation throughout the territory were replaced in the lowlands by fewer and larger Roman villas. An excavation at Matrice shows how a Samnite farmstead grew into a larger Roman country house in the early years of occupation and then into an extensive villa in the Roman imperial period. The rough Samnite walls enclosing a small area survived and formed the core of the house throughout its lifetime. Rather than build over that area, owners in the Roman era added on to it. A first set of walls, apparently built in the early years of occupation, simply enlarged the perimeter of the old compound while keeping its shape and proportions. Building in the imperial period took a different direction. The older structures were retained, but additions more than doubled the size of the house. Its stolid square shape was modified to produce a building that was either a long rectangle or one with two end blocks of rooms united by a long corridor.
Excavations at other sites confirm what literary sources describe, that the country homes of wealthy Romans who settled in the region were comfortable and elegantly decorated. Remains of terra-cotta pipes show that some villas had water distribution systems that were analogous to those of towns and cities. Some rooms, especially rooms with baths, which many larger villas included, were heated by furnaces that pumped hot air through spaces beneath their floors. Walls might be covered with fresco paintings or veneered with marble. Colorful mosaics decorated bare floors. These refined and expensive features were confined to the part of the villa reserved for owners and guests; it was called the pars urbana. The rest of the farm population lived in much more modest quarters, on the site but at a distance. The best evidence of their presence comes from cemeteries.
The basis of the wealth that produced the villas and justified the employment of vast numbers of laborers and the purchase of numbers of slaves was large-scale agriculture. Through an accident of history we have some literary evidence of that development. Wealthy Romans from the town of Larinum figured in a criminal case that Cicero argued. His speech for the defense, published as the Pro A. Cluentio, contains incidental details of the agribusiness that made the Romanized town and its leading inhabitants wealthy. The client is described as owning multiple houses, commercial interests, and livestock in the countryside around Larinum. References elsewhere in the argument suggest that the herds included pigs that were slaughtered for market and sheep that moved from winter grazing in the fields outside the town to summer pastures that were either in the mountains where the Samnites had pastured flocks or in upland fields that lay to the south in Apulia.
Both the elegant villas and the wealthy town were centers of agricultural production that was similar in kind to the cultivation practiced by the Samnites but notably different in scale. Samnite farmers had always raised pigs, but pork production expanded during the Roman period, and evidence from throughout the Roman world shows that pork was the Romans’ favorite meat. For them it was a decidedly secular food, and pork production in the empire became a profitable industry. Pigs can be driven to market, and this practice continued well into the imperial period, but pork can also be cured in salt or smoked, which increases its shelf life and its economic potential.
After 100 CE or so, cultivation changed in the Biferno Valley. The inhabitants stopped trying to compete as suppliers of grain, wine, and oil and seem instead to have concentrated on herding. The record of silt deposits at the river’s mouth shows that the fields the Romans had opened up in the early years of their occupation were no longer worked annually. They were being allowed to revert to pasture as the business of the region shifted from diverse agricultural production to a monoculture driven by market forces. The money was in pigs and sheep, and the grain fields (and their annual silt deposits) shrank as the pastures grew.
About the same time that Biferno Valley producers were putting their money into pork futures, farmers on the other side of the Mediterranean were investing in a remarkable kind of infrastructure. The Romans had won North Africa from the Carthaginians during a long series of wars that culminated in a decisive victory in the second century BCE. Not until two centuries later, however, did Rome consolidate control over the former enemy and began to integrate Carthaginian territory into its regional economy. Roman garrisons kept the peace, and Roman administrators established boundaries to control the indigenous Berber people. In Libya, as in the Biferno Valley, development was sparked by Roman occupation but carried out by local farmers. What distinguished development in Libya from that in the Biferno Valley was the difference in climate and in the Roman technologies that made agriculture possible there.
Modern Libya, like the rest of North Africa, is arid, except in areas along its Mediterranean coast. Inland annual rainfall averages one to three inches per year. It is generally agreed that farming that relies on rainfall requires a minimum of about eight inches annually. In contemporary North Africa, areas of lower rainfall are classified as pre-desert. No farming takes place there. Yet it was these arid regions that sustained not just subsistence agriculture but marketable crops in the Roman period.5
The Romans have always been recognized for their genius in water management. Roman aqueducts running across the landscape on arcades that rise or fall with the terrain are found wherever they built towns and cities. Despite their virtuoso handling of urban water supplies, the Romans are not particularly known for irrigation projects. Most of the areas where they built did not require them. But in Libya, on the threshold of the desert, irrigation offered the only hope for agricultural success.
The structures that began to appear in the first century CE did not look anything like aqueducts, and they did not perform exactly the same work, though there were sizable overlaps. Roman aqueducts began far from the city in a network that gathered surface or spring water and fed it into the arcaded channels that carried the water from its source to its outlet. In the Libyan system, the job of collecting water was all important and the transfer insignificant. Essentially, the Libyan system was an improvement on floodwater farming, the earliest form of Mediterranean agriculture that has been identified. Just as the traditional system had done thousands of years before, the Libyan system relied on wadis—dry ravines—to concentrate seasonal rain. Rainfall on each square foot of ground might be scanty, but the wadi and its feeders collected the water that fell over a wide area. That water was directed to fields that were much smaller than the collection area. This disproportion effectively multiplied the amount of rainfall available for agriculture. Three inches of rain collected from a hundred acres become thirty inches of rain when spread over only ten acres. The collection could not be 100 percent efficient, but the system still multiplied the amount of rainfall available to each square foot of cultivated land from a trickle to an amount that was sufficient to nourish crops.
The heart of the Libyan system was a series of barriers that slowed runoff and captured water. Enormous effort was invested in clearing land of stones, transporting the stones, and using them to build not just one dam at a wadi mouth but a series of dams in every wadi and its tributaries. This was a public work on an enormous scale, every bit as complex and extensive as an aqueduct system, but the character of the work was such that the dams could not be built, supervised, or maintained as a single project. The system of dams in one wadi and its feeders was entirely independent of the system in another. Both worked on the same principles, but their builders needed to understand the particular dynamics of each individual watershed.
Building the dams not only depended on local expertise but demanded extraordinary commitments of local labor. There must have been master wall builders who directed construction, but the job depended on a huge workforce. People were needed to collect stones to be transported to multiple worksites. More people were required to carry and pile up the stones in hundreds of separate sites. Walls properly sited and built to hold water and withstand the force of floods required skilled labor. Like so many of the forms of labor on which the traditional agriculture of the Mediterranean depended, this complex task could not be duplicated by earth-moving machines. Like terracing or cultivating crops under trees by hand, water collection on this scale demanded incessant, skilled manual labor in quantities and of a kind that is unavailable in most areas of today’s industrialized world; it is certainly unavailable in contemporary Libya. The captured water was fed into selected fields along the sides of the wadis and especially in the broader and flatter areas where the wadis ended in alluvial fans. By impounding the water during the brief rainy season, conserving it, and selectively releasing it to the fields, crops could be produced in areas that had been only modestly productive before this period and that have declined dramatically in productivity since about 700 CE.
Evidence from archaeological digs shows that during the Roman era Libyan farmers cultivated a broad range of crops in these carefully tended plots. They grew barley, durum wheat, bread wheat, lentils, peas, field peas, and watermelons. They produced oil from olives, safflower, and flaxseed. Their diet was sweetened with a number of fruits, including grapes, figs, almonds, pomegranates, peaches, and dates.
Remains of slaughtered domestic animals include sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, camels, and a few chickens. Large game like antelope and gazelle and smaller animals like rabbit, porcupine, and even jackals supplemented the meat ration. Hunting not only enriched the diet; it also destroyed animals that might otherwise have eaten the grain in the fields or competed with the herds for forage. During part of the year, domestic animals were pastured in the grain fields, where they could graze on the stubble and where their dung increased the fertility of the soil. There is also evidence that Libyan farmers planted a relative of the alfalfa plant, a crop that significantly increases the productivity of arid fields.6
What was most astonishing to the archaeologists who surveyed the region was not the widespread evidence of subsistence farming but dramatic evidence that the region had produced a marketable crop. Olive presses were found everywhere in the area, and experts estimate that the annual export of oil to Rome probably totaled a million liters. More oil went to other markets around the Mediterranean.7 Pollen evidence confirms that the bulk of what the Libyans cultivated in their carefully watered fields was olive trees. Other food crops may have been grown underneath the olive trees in many areas.
The Roman demand for agricultural products was unprecedented, and their organization of the entire Mediterranean basin into a single market economy has never been duplicated. Olive oil from Libya and pork from the Biferno Valley were only a small portion of the many agricultural goods that this market supplied. As the Roman dominance of the Mediterranean disappeared, local agriculture changed. Pioneering historians misperceived the causes of this shift and attributed it to environmental neglect: “The image of the ruined cities of North Africa, from which olive oil and timber were exported in ancient times but which later were buried beneath the desert sand, epitomizes the environmental factor in the decline of civilization.”8
This much-repeated argument about desertification holds that intensive agriculture leads to overuse of soil and depletion of its nutrients. Wind or water erosion follows, and then the transformation of productive regions into desert or semidesert. This sequence does not fit the Libyan evidence, however. Intensive agriculture there led to soil enrichment, not depletion. Political collapse, not environmental exhaustion, led to the abandonment of the Libyan fields. Roman North Africa did not fail in its job of producing food for the regional market. Just the opposite occurred: an international market failure brought on by invasion and fragmentation within the Roman Empire made export-based agriculture unsustainable. Political change, not environmental irresponsibility, led to the abandonment of productive infrastructure in North Africa.
The destinies of Roman politicians have been described as rising and falling with the amount of bread supplied to the large population of the capital city. Typical arguments suggest that the imperial houses won the goodwill of the Roman poor through lavish public entertainments and an unending supply of free food—the “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses) that the satirist Juvenal talked about. It is certain that grain shortages had great political repercussions and that the demand for grain in Rome was necessarily vast. An estimated 150,000 tons of wheat came to the city from Egypt every year, and that was only one source. Sicily also provided a huge amount. It happens that the archaeological evidence for the Egyptian supply is more complete than the evidence for other regions.
In Egypt as elsewhere, the grain that found its way to Rome came from two sources. Taxes imposed by the Roman Empire on those that it controlled were often paid not in money but in produce. It was useful to the state to collect taxes in the form of grain, which it could redistribute. Much of the grain collected in this way went to feed the Roman armies, which were more or less constantly engaged on the various frontiers of the empire. A certain percentage of it fed the slaves in public enterprises. Only a portion of it found its way into the grain ships heading to Rome.9 The second major source of Egyptian supply was imperial properties. One of the peculiar features of the Roman Empire was the accumulation by successive emperors of large estates in every part of the world. These estates in time became an imperial legacy. Though they belonged to the imperial family, they were typically put to use for the benefit of the population as a whole. In Egypt the imperial family owned enormous estates that provided much of the grain that Roman citizens consumed.
As we saw in Chapter 4, archaeology in Egypt traditionally focused on the tombs and temples that spread along the Nile Valley south of Cairo. In the great age of Egyptology, interest in the era of Roman occupation was minimal. Lack of interest coupled with a bias against exploring the life of ordinary citizens meant that many sites were unexplored. Only in recent decades have survey archaeology and selective digs opened up the literally thousands of sites in the Delta that reflect the centuries of Roman occupation and the agricultural communities and estates that sustained it.10
Archaeological discoveries in the Delta suggest that Romanization altered the landscape there in predictable ways. Romans built roads that made communications faster and more secure between cities and towns. Roads also made it easier for authorities and military forces to respond to emergencies and streamlined commerce between inland areas, the agricultural zone, and the port of Alexandria. At the same time that roads were improved, canals linking the multiple branches of the Nile were built, and much of the grain produced in the region was floated in barges to the port. Villages that had been small and disorganized in the pre-Roman period grew larger; their streets now met at right angles, and in larger towns the typical Roman complex of forum and capitolium took center position. Population appears to have increased—by some estimates, to levels that were not matched again until the nineteenth century. The main crop of the region was wheat, and Roman farming and field improvement combined with traditional Egyptian techniques of field irrigation to produce large yields. These crops fed the agricultural communities, the city of Alexandria, and the privileged citizens of Rome. Between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Muslim capture of Egypt, the same fields provided grain for Constaninople (now Istanbul), the eastern capital of the empire.
Although the Romans added some dikes and canals to the Nile and its tributaries, they made no attempt to alter the annual flooding schedule of the Nile, so the Egyptian agricultural season remained what it had been. Grain was harvested early in the year and stored in dockside warehouses in Alexandria. Some portion of the Roman grain fleet probably overwintered in Egypt. The ships were loaded soon after the harvest but were held in port until the winter weather with its strong winds and unpredictable storms had subsided. Because of the prevailing winds, the route out of Egypt had to be circuitous. Some ships headed straight north along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean toward Cyprus. There they turned west toward the island of Rhodes. From Rhodes the route led south of Crete to Malta. From Malta the fleet turned north toward the Straits of Messina, which separate Sicily and Italy. Once through the straits the ships followed the coast to the port of Ostia. An alternative route lay along the North African coast with a sharp northern turn off Libya. Once in Italy, small ships could sail directly up the Tiber to be unloaded at the commercial docks on both sides of the river below Tiber Island. Larger ships were emptied in Ostia, and their cargoes were transferred to barges that could navigate the river. The luckiest and fastest ships might complete the trip in a month. The trip between Alexandria and Rome—cities that are no more than twelve hundred miles apart—more commonly took two months.11
For the first and only time in history, Rome capitalized on the full potential for productivity and exchange within the Mediterranean basin. Goods from every part of that diverse ecozone circulated through the region. Areas that had not flourished before and have been barren since were important parts of an intricate region-wide web of production and exchange. Though the countryside had long given way to the city as the dominant political and social institution, Rome remained an agricultural society. It was characterized by high rural populations and narrowly held wealth that rested primarily on commerce in agricultural commodities. The empire functioned because Roman agriculture was widespread and effective. It sustained the lives of citizens, and it maintained, indeed increased, the productivity of its soils. Had it not been marred by extensive and cruel agricultural slavery, we could cheer its unmatched record of sustained success.