This is the best explanation I have ever seen for why the giant Roman Empire had such a surprisingly weak cultural and intellectual legacy compared to classical Greece.
Their impact is not so easily distinguishable, though. The Romans adored Greek culture and made their Gods and philosophies their own, after all. They became bigger Hellenists than the Greeks ever were :)
Caesar, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Epicurus (to name the few I'm familiar with) all had lasting cultural impact. I could not name that many Greek authors of similar importance, actually (Aristotle, Plato, Socrates... Pythagoras?, Archimedes?, Archibaldes?). Some of them we don't have surviving texts from. But if we count Archibaldes or Alexander, we might as well count someone like Cato for the Romans.
I'm missing many important Greeks I'm sure. Latin itself has a declension category just for words of Greek origin. Calling it a shared Greco-Roman legacy works just fine.
Though the comparison of the Greeks being better than them was a bit of a sore spot for Romans. I do think they were justified in not calling themselves "barbarians" :)
Rome and Carthage were not Greek-speaking but were certainly part of the "civilized world" of ancient city states. Aristotle included Carthage in his survey of city-states with notable constitutions alongside 150 greek cities.
It is true that most ancient intellectuals: mathematicians, physicians, philosophers, artists, etc, were Greek-speakers, this applies even to the Roman period: in fact the most important references to Alexander and the wars of Rome vs Carthage were written by Greeks living in Roman times: the Greek-speaking regions were the economic and intellectual powerhouses of ancient world all the way to the 6th century AD. In that survey of 1,388 Roman cities, out of the top 20 largest cities, 17 were Greek poleis.
We have Roman law, still the basis of the legal system in many nations today. We had Latin, not Greek, as the common language of western Europe until fairly recently. We have languages like French, Italian and Spanish largely derived from Latin. The Romans founded cities in Europe, North Africa and the Mideast which are still extant. Roman technology continued in use for centuries and formed the basis for modern civil engineering. The political structures of Europe in the Dark Ages were outgrowths of Roman provincial structure and still determine borders today. Shakespeare wrote many plays dealing with issues of governance, and he cribbed a lot of them from tales of ancient Rome, not ancient Greece. Did you notice that this web page is rendered using the Latin alphabet, not the Greek alphabet?
I don't think it makes sense to argue that a state of perpetual warfare and limited interstate commerce is a better situation than having a broad general peace maintained by a relatively small military base. That militarization was expensive. The need to buy military gear could bankrupt a Greek citizen of modest means.
The Romans imposed common laws for commerce, marriage and residence, so it was much more open to interstate trade. Piracy was much more of a problem before Rome made a point of suppressing it. The goal of most Greek cities was self sufficiency, but there are sound arguments that trade can improve living standards, and the Romans opened the door to much more widespread trade.
I seriously doubt that the typical ancient Greek family had 2.5-3 children and that only half of all households had as much as one slave. I also doubt that two adults were the norm. This sounds a lot more like the post-war US suburbs - ignoring the slaves - except that the suburbs were full of much larger families. Those numbers are way low for any traditional society.
I also think the slave count in pre-Roman Greece is way low. A lot of that constant warfare was looting and slave raiding, something much less common in the Roman era. Does that estimate include public slaves like the 400+ Scythian police and soldiers Herodotus noted? How many other public slaves were there? Does it include slaves tied to businesses who generally slept on site? One would expect a power law distribution of slave ownership with large numbers of slaves being rare but dominating the count in the aggregate. How were the prostitutes counted? They weren't necessarily slaves, but they were often treated like them.
Besides, what kind of metric is square footage per person? Are people in New York City or Singapore that much poorer than people in Sioux Falls or Kansas City just because they have smaller houses? As a former New Yorker, I would expect Roman apartments to be rather cramped for the most part, at least by suburban US standards, but there was a payoff for being able to live in Rome.
P.S. The Roman countryside was full of slaves. Maybe most rural citizens couldn't afford any, but the wealthy would own large farms with hundreds of slaves. This was true not just in what is now Italy, but in Spain, Gaul and elsewhere in the empire. Look up latifunda.
Great job. My colleague at the U. of Dayton, Bruce Hitchner, was editor of "Antiquity." His expertise was the Roman plantation system in N. Africa. I think he would have agreed.
Was this order based on 1000 poleis dying anyway before the roman conquest? Greece was dominated by Macedon and other hellenistic kingdoms since Philip II and before that by various hegemonic greek cities like Sparta and Thebes or for Ionia by Persians and Athenians. Did that had an impact on Greek prosperity?
It seems there is a trade off between the benefits of the large internal market of an empire and the dynamism of a multicentric system. Pax Romana did brought economic growth to same regions.
1) Total prosperity over the entire ancient world likely peaked in the Pax Romana
2) Prosperity in the territory that belonged to the Greek poleis peaked earlier (around the time of Alexander) and declined under Roman rule
The beginning of the decline of the Polis was with the rise of Macedon but even in the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods, the Poleis still had high degree of automony even if they were often annexed by Hellenistic Kingdoms and the Roman Empire, it took centuries for the Greek city-states to gradually "dissolve" after they inside the Roman Empire.
For example, from the wikipedia page on the Athenian democracy narrates what happened to it from 330 BC to the Early Roman Empire:
"Philip II had led a coalition of the Greek states to war with Persia in 336 BC, but his Greek soldiers were hostages for the behavior of their states as much as allies. Alexander The Great's relations with Athens later strained when he returned to Babylon in 324 BC; after his death, Athens and Sparta led several states to war with Macedonia and lost.[20]
This led to the Hellenistic control of Athens, with the Macedonian king appointing a local agent as political governor in Athens. However, the governors, like Demetrius of Phalerum, appointed by Cassander, kept some of the traditional institutions in formal existence, although the Athenian public would consider them to be nothing more than Macedonian puppet dictators. Once Demetrius Poliorcetes ended Cassander's rule over Athens, Demetrius of Phalerum went into exile and the democracy was restored in 307 BC. However, by now Athens had become "politically impotent".[21] An example of this was that, in 307, in order to curry favour with Macedonia and Egypt, three new tribes were created, two in honour of the Macedonian king and his son, and the other in honour of the Egyptian king.
However, when Rome fought Macedonia in 200, the Athenians abolished the first two new tribes and created a twelfth tribe in honour of the Pergamene king. The Athenians declared for Rome, and in 146 BC Athens became an autonomous civitas foederata, able to manage internal affairs. This allowed Athens to practice the forms of democracy, though Rome ensured that the constitution strengthened the city's aristocracy.[22]
Under Roman rule, the archons ranked as the highest officials. They were elected, and even foreigners such as Domitian and Hadrian held the office as a mark of honour. Four presided over the judicial administration. The council (whose numbers varied at different times from 300 to 750) was appointed by lot. It was superseded in importance by the Areopagus, which, recruited from the elected archons, had an aristocratic character and was entrusted with wide powers. From the time of Hadrian, an imperial curator superintended the finances. The shadow of the old constitution lingered on and Archons and Areopagus survived the fall of the Roman Empire.[22]
In 88 BC, there was a revolution under the philosopher Athenion, who, as tyrant, forced the Assembly to agree to elect whomever he might ask to office. Athenion allied with Mithridates of Pontus and went to war with Rome; he was killed during the war and was replaced by Aristion. The victorious Roman general, Publius Cornelius Sulla, left the Athenians their lives and did not sell them into slavery; he also restored the previous government, in 86 BC.[23]
After Rome became an Empire under Augustus, the nominal independence of Athens dissolved and its government converged to the normal type for a Roman municipality, with a Senate of decuriones.[24]"
This was absolutely fascinating, Rafael. Thanks for this. It absolutely blows me away what people have accomplished with minimal technology. I am realizing how foundational culture and societal structures are in the production of wealth. If the Greeks could build such cities with their technology. What kind of cities could we build now if we operated as cohesively or efficiently?
What does this tell us about German unification? Did it have a net negative effect on German living standards till 1914 (not beyond, WW1 corpses obviously have an infinitely negative living standard)? Without the Reich, we'd never have had the "Gründerkrach" nor the "Long Depression" perhaps. It doesn't seem equally easy to analyze, with all the technological progress mucking everything up.
You are right that the German unification had a big impact on the world geopolitical system, which ultimately lead to WW1 and WW2. But, Imperial Germany at the peak of its power, in 1913 only ruled 3.6% of the world's population while the Roman Empire ruled over 80% of the population of the world known to the ancients.
The Roman Empire was essentially something of a "world unification" which is something of a different nature than the formation of a large nation state out of a large number of small states: the rise of Rome is analogous to the implementation of a monopoly after a series of mergers. While the German unification was analogous to the merger of many small companies into a large company, but the market share of the large company did not give it monopoly power.
Are Rome and ancient China comparable then? The Chinese also had a large unified (at times) Empire with probably an even narrower outward horizon. More periods of warlordism and being conquered from the outside though. Also not sure they had slavery to the degree Romans did.
Nor that I think we have so many surviving records for that place :(
China is very much like a Roman Empire that never collapsed: historical Chinese empires were civilization states like Rome. The difference is that when Rome collapsed it never came back (despite the pretensions of Charlemagne and Napoleon) while Chinese empires collapsed many times and were always reformed.
The reason was perhaps geographical: the bulk of China's population was historically concentrated in the northern plains which have a slightly larger area than Italy, so it was natural for China to be unified.
What does this tell us about the EU? Will the centralization of political power in Europe lead to economic collapse, as it did in the Classical World (according to this post)?
The EU is just a voluntary association of states, it is not a state in itself: the members of the EU still have their own armed forces. Also, the EU is only restricted to Europe, and the world today is much bigger than in antiquity: in antiquity the "ancient world" was just the cities close to the Mediterranean and their rural areas. In Roman times, the Romans expanded this world into central and northwestern europe, but it was still restricted than an area equivalent to 5% of the world's landmass. Today our global civilization includes all continent except antartica and is divided into 200 countries, its something much bigger and perhaps much harder to unify politically.
I think that the closest thing to the Roman Empire we have today is NATO: It is a military alliance system with the US as its leader. The Roman Empire also began as a military alliance system: it was a system of alliances where many city-states became allied with Rome, gradually these city-states lost their sovereignty, lost their capacity to mobilize troops, and became part of Rome's territory.
So, if lets say, NATO defeats Russia and China and breaks these countries into dozens of smaller states. Then NATO dramatically expands to include Australia, Japan, Korea, most Latin American, African, and Asian countries, and them NATO membership requires the dissolution of the the armed forces of all its members, and instead the armed forces are replace it with a centralized NATO military that follows the orders of the secretary general of NATO. Then we would have something like another Roman Empire.
This is the best explanation I have ever seen for why the giant Roman Empire had such a surprisingly weak cultural and intellectual legacy compared to classical Greece.
Their impact is not so easily distinguishable, though. The Romans adored Greek culture and made their Gods and philosophies their own, after all. They became bigger Hellenists than the Greeks ever were :)
Caesar, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Epicurus (to name the few I'm familiar with) all had lasting cultural impact. I could not name that many Greek authors of similar importance, actually (Aristotle, Plato, Socrates... Pythagoras?, Archimedes?, Archibaldes?). Some of them we don't have surviving texts from. But if we count Archibaldes or Alexander, we might as well count someone like Cato for the Romans.
I'm missing many important Greeks I'm sure. Latin itself has a declension category just for words of Greek origin. Calling it a shared Greco-Roman legacy works just fine.
Though the comparison of the Greeks being better than them was a bit of a sore spot for Romans. I do think they were justified in not calling themselves "barbarians" :)
https://youtu.be/iFddizRJRE0
Rome and Carthage were not Greek-speaking but were certainly part of the "civilized world" of ancient city states. Aristotle included Carthage in his survey of city-states with notable constitutions alongside 150 greek cities.
It is true that most ancient intellectuals: mathematicians, physicians, philosophers, artists, etc, were Greek-speakers, this applies even to the Roman period: in fact the most important references to Alexander and the wars of Rome vs Carthage were written by Greeks living in Roman times: the Greek-speaking regions were the economic and intellectual powerhouses of ancient world all the way to the 6th century AD. In that survey of 1,388 Roman cities, out of the top 20 largest cities, 17 were Greek poleis.
We have Roman law, still the basis of the legal system in many nations today. We had Latin, not Greek, as the common language of western Europe until fairly recently. We have languages like French, Italian and Spanish largely derived from Latin. The Romans founded cities in Europe, North Africa and the Mideast which are still extant. Roman technology continued in use for centuries and formed the basis for modern civil engineering. The political structures of Europe in the Dark Ages were outgrowths of Roman provincial structure and still determine borders today. Shakespeare wrote many plays dealing with issues of governance, and he cribbed a lot of them from tales of ancient Rome, not ancient Greece. Did you notice that this web page is rendered using the Latin alphabet, not the Greek alphabet?
I think the Romans left us a pretty solid legacy.
I'm not sure I buy your analysis.
I don't think it makes sense to argue that a state of perpetual warfare and limited interstate commerce is a better situation than having a broad general peace maintained by a relatively small military base. That militarization was expensive. The need to buy military gear could bankrupt a Greek citizen of modest means.
The Romans imposed common laws for commerce, marriage and residence, so it was much more open to interstate trade. Piracy was much more of a problem before Rome made a point of suppressing it. The goal of most Greek cities was self sufficiency, but there are sound arguments that trade can improve living standards, and the Romans opened the door to much more widespread trade.
I seriously doubt that the typical ancient Greek family had 2.5-3 children and that only half of all households had as much as one slave. I also doubt that two adults were the norm. This sounds a lot more like the post-war US suburbs - ignoring the slaves - except that the suburbs were full of much larger families. Those numbers are way low for any traditional society.
I also think the slave count in pre-Roman Greece is way low. A lot of that constant warfare was looting and slave raiding, something much less common in the Roman era. Does that estimate include public slaves like the 400+ Scythian police and soldiers Herodotus noted? How many other public slaves were there? Does it include slaves tied to businesses who generally slept on site? One would expect a power law distribution of slave ownership with large numbers of slaves being rare but dominating the count in the aggregate. How were the prostitutes counted? They weren't necessarily slaves, but they were often treated like them.
Besides, what kind of metric is square footage per person? Are people in New York City or Singapore that much poorer than people in Sioux Falls or Kansas City just because they have smaller houses? As a former New Yorker, I would expect Roman apartments to be rather cramped for the most part, at least by suburban US standards, but there was a payoff for being able to live in Rome.
P.S. The Roman countryside was full of slaves. Maybe most rural citizens couldn't afford any, but the wealthy would own large farms with hundreds of slaves. This was true not just in what is now Italy, but in Spain, Gaul and elsewhere in the empire. Look up latifunda.
Great job. My colleague at the U. of Dayton, Bruce Hitchner, was editor of "Antiquity." His expertise was the Roman plantation system in N. Africa. I think he would have agreed.
You have not considered the effect of erosion on farmland.Even a few centuries of farming can turn a fertile field into a poor goat pasture.
Very interesting.
Was this order based on 1000 poleis dying anyway before the roman conquest? Greece was dominated by Macedon and other hellenistic kingdoms since Philip II and before that by various hegemonic greek cities like Sparta and Thebes or for Ionia by Persians and Athenians. Did that had an impact on Greek prosperity?
It seems there is a trade off between the benefits of the large internal market of an empire and the dynamism of a multicentric system. Pax Romana did brought economic growth to same regions.
My points are that:
1) Total prosperity over the entire ancient world likely peaked in the Pax Romana
2) Prosperity in the territory that belonged to the Greek poleis peaked earlier (around the time of Alexander) and declined under Roman rule
The beginning of the decline of the Polis was with the rise of Macedon but even in the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods, the Poleis still had high degree of automony even if they were often annexed by Hellenistic Kingdoms and the Roman Empire, it took centuries for the Greek city-states to gradually "dissolve" after they inside the Roman Empire.
For example, from the wikipedia page on the Athenian democracy narrates what happened to it from 330 BC to the Early Roman Empire:
"Philip II had led a coalition of the Greek states to war with Persia in 336 BC, but his Greek soldiers were hostages for the behavior of their states as much as allies. Alexander The Great's relations with Athens later strained when he returned to Babylon in 324 BC; after his death, Athens and Sparta led several states to war with Macedonia and lost.[20]
This led to the Hellenistic control of Athens, with the Macedonian king appointing a local agent as political governor in Athens. However, the governors, like Demetrius of Phalerum, appointed by Cassander, kept some of the traditional institutions in formal existence, although the Athenian public would consider them to be nothing more than Macedonian puppet dictators. Once Demetrius Poliorcetes ended Cassander's rule over Athens, Demetrius of Phalerum went into exile and the democracy was restored in 307 BC. However, by now Athens had become "politically impotent".[21] An example of this was that, in 307, in order to curry favour with Macedonia and Egypt, three new tribes were created, two in honour of the Macedonian king and his son, and the other in honour of the Egyptian king.
However, when Rome fought Macedonia in 200, the Athenians abolished the first two new tribes and created a twelfth tribe in honour of the Pergamene king. The Athenians declared for Rome, and in 146 BC Athens became an autonomous civitas foederata, able to manage internal affairs. This allowed Athens to practice the forms of democracy, though Rome ensured that the constitution strengthened the city's aristocracy.[22]
Under Roman rule, the archons ranked as the highest officials. They were elected, and even foreigners such as Domitian and Hadrian held the office as a mark of honour. Four presided over the judicial administration. The council (whose numbers varied at different times from 300 to 750) was appointed by lot. It was superseded in importance by the Areopagus, which, recruited from the elected archons, had an aristocratic character and was entrusted with wide powers. From the time of Hadrian, an imperial curator superintended the finances. The shadow of the old constitution lingered on and Archons and Areopagus survived the fall of the Roman Empire.[22]
In 88 BC, there was a revolution under the philosopher Athenion, who, as tyrant, forced the Assembly to agree to elect whomever he might ask to office. Athenion allied with Mithridates of Pontus and went to war with Rome; he was killed during the war and was replaced by Aristion. The victorious Roman general, Publius Cornelius Sulla, left the Athenians their lives and did not sell them into slavery; he also restored the previous government, in 86 BC.[23]
After Rome became an Empire under Augustus, the nominal independence of Athens dissolved and its government converged to the normal type for a Roman municipality, with a Senate of decuriones.[24]"
Your post also nicely explains the poor intellectual output of the Eastern Roman Empire (500-1500)
This was absolutely fascinating, Rafael. Thanks for this. It absolutely blows me away what people have accomplished with minimal technology. I am realizing how foundational culture and societal structures are in the production of wealth. If the Greeks could build such cities with their technology. What kind of cities could we build now if we operated as cohesively or efficiently?
What does this tell us about German unification? Did it have a net negative effect on German living standards till 1914 (not beyond, WW1 corpses obviously have an infinitely negative living standard)? Without the Reich, we'd never have had the "Gründerkrach" nor the "Long Depression" perhaps. It doesn't seem equally easy to analyze, with all the technological progress mucking everything up.
You are right that the German unification had a big impact on the world geopolitical system, which ultimately lead to WW1 and WW2. But, Imperial Germany at the peak of its power, in 1913 only ruled 3.6% of the world's population while the Roman Empire ruled over 80% of the population of the world known to the ancients.
The Roman Empire was essentially something of a "world unification" which is something of a different nature than the formation of a large nation state out of a large number of small states: the rise of Rome is analogous to the implementation of a monopoly after a series of mergers. While the German unification was analogous to the merger of many small companies into a large company, but the market share of the large company did not give it monopoly power.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Are Rome and ancient China comparable then? The Chinese also had a large unified (at times) Empire with probably an even narrower outward horizon. More periods of warlordism and being conquered from the outside though. Also not sure they had slavery to the degree Romans did.
Nor that I think we have so many surviving records for that place :(
China is very much like a Roman Empire that never collapsed: historical Chinese empires were civilization states like Rome. The difference is that when Rome collapsed it never came back (despite the pretensions of Charlemagne and Napoleon) while Chinese empires collapsed many times and were always reformed.
The reason was perhaps geographical: the bulk of China's population was historically concentrated in the northern plains which have a slightly larger area than Italy, so it was natural for China to be unified.
mmmm
What does this tell us about the EU? Will the centralization of political power in Europe lead to economic collapse, as it did in the Classical World (according to this post)?
The EU is just a voluntary association of states, it is not a state in itself: the members of the EU still have their own armed forces. Also, the EU is only restricted to Europe, and the world today is much bigger than in antiquity: in antiquity the "ancient world" was just the cities close to the Mediterranean and their rural areas. In Roman times, the Romans expanded this world into central and northwestern europe, but it was still restricted than an area equivalent to 5% of the world's landmass. Today our global civilization includes all continent except antartica and is divided into 200 countries, its something much bigger and perhaps much harder to unify politically.
I think that the closest thing to the Roman Empire we have today is NATO: It is a military alliance system with the US as its leader. The Roman Empire also began as a military alliance system: it was a system of alliances where many city-states became allied with Rome, gradually these city-states lost their sovereignty, lost their capacity to mobilize troops, and became part of Rome's territory.
So, if lets say, NATO defeats Russia and China and breaks these countries into dozens of smaller states. Then NATO dramatically expands to include Australia, Japan, Korea, most Latin American, African, and Asian countries, and them NATO membership requires the dissolution of the the armed forces of all its members, and instead the armed forces are replace it with a centralized NATO military that follows the orders of the secretary general of NATO. Then we would have something like another Roman Empire.