Why ancient Rome matters to the modern world
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Some see Rome through the eyes of the conservative: Once a great nation that fell to decadence and handouts to the populares.
Other see Rome through the eyes of a more socialist/anarchist bent: Once a great nation frittered away on useless wars while elites competed for power.
The truth? Rome is complex and fairly well recorded. We can know a lot about it and it allows us to see that humans build quite complex and often contradictory societies. Easy, bumper-sticker versions of this are often at least partially wrong and do not do justice to the very vibrant lives that the Romans lead. Similarly, they too were often slaves to the bigger trends and forces that were often unseen in daily lives.
That's a long way of saying, be careful when you think you've got a lesson from history. It probably says more about you than the Romans.
All of the above are true to some extent.
http://sentent.blogspot.com/2010/05/r-lafferty-and-semitic-g...
http://www.amazon.com/The-fall-Rome-R-Lafferty/dp/B0006CALC4
http://theevitable.blogspot.com/2009/01/ra-laffertys-fall-of...
22. "Bread and circuses"
I'd love to see the theory on that one.
Edit: It's way more boring than I hoped. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
The most fun part of Wikipedia is always following the related links at the bottom of the article.
In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, as the Romans were expanding out from Italy into North Africa, Spain, Greece, and what is now Turkey, the people of influence (generals and politicians) were accumulating vast amounts of wealth, in the form of loot, land, and slaves. They used their newly-obtained wealth to buy up lots more land and establish huge agricultural operations, both in Italy and abroad.
At the same time, the small farmers that had formed the backbone of the economy and military, were in big trouble. They couldn't compete with the large farming establishments, which had the advantage of mass production, and were run off of the cheap labor of all the newly-arrived slaves. These small farmers had to sell their land to the wealthy people. They simply couldn't continue to make a living as farmers. These dispossessed people moved into the cities, where they formed a large group of poor and desperate people.
So we had a huge wealth gap forming, where the top 5% had something like 80% of the wealth. This is far worse than the wealth gap we see today, and there were lots of problems.
This new class of urban poor was typically too poor to even afford enough food to survive and employment was often difficult to find. As a result, they tended to get pretty cranky and riot a lot. So in order to keep this under control, the poor Roman populace got bread and circuses.
A populace that was getting free food and entertainment was a lot less likely to cause problems and revolt, so the wealthy people in society spent large amounts of money on free grain and free entertainment.
It was part of the culture of Rome for the wealthy to give stuff away to show how awesome they were. As they got wealthier, it wasn't a problem to give away lots of stuff. This was known as the patron-client system. In return for free stuff and favors, the recipients were expected to support the person giving them stuff by voting for them (or their allies) and attacking opponents.
The politicians shamelessly used their vast wealth to buy loyalty and used angry mobs under their control as political tools. It went downhill quickly from there as the Roman Republic slid into power grabs, civil war, and the eventual establishment of the Imperial system.
The emperors solved the political instability, but the wealth gap became even worse. At some points, the emperor personally controlled something like 80% of the wealth of the empire, with most of the remaining 20% being controlled by wealthy families.
The majority of the populace was poor, completely apathetic when it came to politics, and they had very little hope of improving their lot in life. This is considered to be one of the many reasons for the weakening of the Roman Empire. The weakening and eventual downfall as a complex thing that stemmed from a variety of factors working together, and this is just one of them.
If anyone is interested, I very much recommend the (now completed) podcast: The History of Rome. Mike Duncan makes Roman history both interesting and entertaining.
This is one of those times I read something that I know I'll find myself quoting for a long time to come. Thanks for that.
"You know that 19th century commonplace, "If you don't know history, you're doomed to repeat it?" That's what most people think is the reason why you do history: you're doomed to repeat it.
Historians don't think you're doomed to repeat it. Historians don't think in cycles of history, the way they did in say, the fourteenth century. We think in terms of arrows of time.
You're not doomed to repeat anything. What you're doomed to do is to continue it. Early modern Europe has established so much of the modern world, and so many of the ideas that we have in our brain, were thought up once upon a time, for some reason that made sense—perhaps, perhaps not—at that time.
We continue to have those ideas inside our heads and we don't even realize that they are products of history. Unless you understand the history, you have no choice to examine those ideas and decide whether or not they make sense, or that they are moral, or they have anything to do with you, or your culture.
And so it's only by understanding your whole world as a historical product, and specifically as a product of early modern Europe, that you can do anything to change your world."
Isn't that the whole point of the exercise - finding similarities with Roman history conveys authority to something you want to say about the present.
Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Debasing the currency comes from when the romans switched from noble metals gold and silver in the coins to more worthless metals.
Fiat money gives a much better control over the currency. Now we can argue what inflation/deflation rate a currency should have, instead of leaving that to random chance.
It's just that having this debate is pure luxury already. Otherwise it'd be "where the hell do we get the gold we need to fuel our economy?" or "what do we do with all the surplus gold that's ruining our economy?".
> but alternatives such as Bitcoin become increasingly interesting in countries plagued by hyperinflation.
Bitcoin, really? Private currencies where inflation is at the mercy of random developers who may or may not control significant currency reserves as well?
Using foreign currencies to supplant or replace a failed domestic currency isn't a new phenomenon, nor limited to "crypto""currencies" (the Balkans used the German Mark extensively in the late 90s, and US Dollars get you far in a lot of places).
The problem is that, in the example quoted, no one had that control. Gold mines run dry and you're fucked. Not because some incompetent banker is controlling the gold supply, but because there is no more damn gold. The most competent financial advisor of Rome -- a figure so gargantuan in the field of finance that, if transplanted to the modern world, would not only win that fake Nobel prize for economics, but would cause every other economist to retire out of shame -- would have been powerless. Because there was literally no more gold.
Obviously, it wasn't the end of all things -- new mining facilities would be open, sometimes processes would be optimized in older ones, wars would be waged, but these things took time and needed money.
I'm not suggesting the Romans needed to venture westward and discover the Americas, but did they really have no other options?
Apart from that, there was also normal economic and population growth – even without trade, if your population and economy grows, you'll need more money if you want to keep prices and wages stable.
So, they had several options:
• Conquer places that have gold! That went well for a few centuries, until it didn't any more.
• Debase the currency to make more of the money still here. That was, unsurprisingly, massively unpopular. And because monetary value was still tied to precious metals, people just started to hoard old money to melt it in later (something you still occasionally see with e.g. copper pennies), which led to all sorts of economic problems (occasionally crashing all the way down to barter trade).
The price revolutions were literally a one off event and while it's usually described as "rampant", the inflation rate was at most in the range of a few percent and it would be seen as moderate to low today.
Stability is not inherently good. Stable currencies that suffocate the economy because they do not allow for rapid enough expansion or reduction of the money supply are a burden. Another example would be the interwar years and great depression, were virtually all countries suspended the gold standard because it was simply impossible to uphold, and the economy recovered from it.
And then we have the other problems: What about rents? Debts? Wages? Do you decrease them over time, too? What happens if they aren't? Who would lend money under such circumstances, if just keeping the money under your pillow will make you richer anyway, and at zero risk, too?
Etc. pp.
Yes, because that's absolutely what happened. What actually happened is that there is no longet any reason to buy the top end, because the low end is enough for most people.
>And then we have the other problems: What about rents? Debts? Wages? Do you decrease them over time, too?
Why should wages decrease?
>What happens if they aren't?
People have more money to spend and the additional demand further boosts the economy.
>Who would lend money under such circumstances, if just keeping the money under your pillow will make you richer anyway, and at zero risk, too?
People would definitely go back to saving and away from making debts. That is not a problem, the need to invest money when there is no objective reason to do so is what leads to investment bubbles and excessive debts.
Sales are down down. Total sales. Not "high end sales". All sales.
> Why should wages decrease?
The economy is growing. The population is growing. Everything is growing… except your money supply. You have to make products cheaper with fixed wages, your personnel costs will explode, until it's no longer affordable to pay the current rates.
Same with rents: Building housing will become progressively cheaper. Rents, land taxes, etc. will have to go down to match these prices, or nobody will be able to afford living in existing housing any more.
> People would definitely go back to saving and away from making debts.
You seem to conflate a lot of issues here. We had inflation with gold standards (because you can debase your currency anyway). We had crashes and bubbles with gold standards (and pre-gold-standard gold based currencies, which you conflate too…). The destruction of the middle class and impoverishment of the lower classes aren't a result of fiat currencies.
> That is not a problem, the need to invest money when there is no objective reason to do so is what leads to investment bubbles and excessive debts.
Except that deflation will result in a shortage of investment even where there is objective need.
For how long? A few years? Prices have been dropping rapidly for many decades. Yes all sales are down, because you don't need high end computers any more, which also means you don't need to replace old computers as often.
>The economy is growing. The population is growing. Everything is growing… except your money supply.
Yes, that's why prices get lower to compensate.
>You have to make products cheaper with fixed wages, your personnel costs will explode, until it's no longer affordable to pay the current rates.
That's illogical. If you need to cut wages in order to decrease prices, you aren't growing, you are cutting costs.
>Same with rents: Building housing will become progressively cheaper. Rents, land taxes, etc. will have to go down to match these prices, or nobody will be able to afford living in existing housing any more.
If they will have to drop so be it. But I doubt that the costs of building the house is what determines property prices, it's more about the location.
>We had inflation with gold standards (because you can debase your currency anyway).
No, inflation started after gold standards were abandoned. As you wrote previously, the 1-2% inflation caused by influx of gold from the new world was seen as catastrophic at the time.
>We had crashes and bubbles with gold standards (and pre-gold-standard gold based currencies, which you conflate too…).
Not nearly as often. Yes, bubbles did happen as rare occurences, today they are seen almost as an unavoidable part of the economy.
>The destruction of the middle class and impoverishment of the lower classes aren't a result of fiat currencies.
That's not what I said, but it could be so. Avoiding inflation is much easier for the wealthy after all.
>Except that deflation will result in a shortage of investment even where there is objective need.
There is no reason to believe it would.
Note all of the entries that start with "Panic of.." from well before the collapse of Bretton Woods.
Even the Great Recession wasn't that bad compared to what we had before.
Not really. Let's say we're on the gold standard, and now the computer revolution happens, and the internet revolution, and so on. We've created a bunch of new businesses, which are worth a bunch of money, but the amount of gold didn't change. So the value of money had to change, because the size of the economy changed, and the amount of gold didn't.
For that matter: Which is growing faster, the population, or the amount of gold? That affects the value of money if we're on the gold standard.
I suppose you mean with the traditional way money is explained, that is very probably wrong.
The idea that first was barter and then people started to use precious metals doesn't match the historical evidence.
There is strong evidence that money is invented in the first states in parallel with writing and numbers in order to register debts. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer : "Several centuries after the invention of cuneiform, the use of writing expanded beyond debt/payment certificates and inventory lists to be applied for the first time, about 2600 BC, to messages and mail delivery, history, legend, mathematics, astronomical records, and other pursuits.")
Metals (strong money) are not necessary and if fact was not the most used system for most part of the history (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Split_tally_in_Eng... )
So, the gold thing doesn't match humanity's tradition until very recently. This is controversial, I think, because it has political implications.
Ish. There's no unified "human tradition" anyway. Mediterranean societies have used gold- and other metal-based tallies for thousands of years, until they eventually settled on (gold, silver) coins as a standard. Greek/Roman conquests and trade then spread the idea.
In this view, one important consequence, is that the material of the token is not relevant. The use of precious metals is just an added security measure against counterfeit, but not the thing that make it valuable (that would be the debt that represent).
If this is true, part of the debate about strong money vs. fiat money just become pointless.
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/03/time-for-a-rant-why-o...
The short answer is a run on safe assets like gold creates a positive feedback loop. A demand short fall causes people to try to acquire safe assets like gold. Spending 'money' on gold means money not spent on real goods and services. Which results in a demand shortfall. And people wanting safe assets to park their wealth.
Rinse lather repeat till 1/4 of workforce is unemployed. A central bank can print or lend out any amount of paper money to satisfy investors craving for safe assets. It can't make more gold.
Why not have both? Problem: Trying to peg the money supply to the price of gold hamstrings the central banks ability to supply paper. Lesson learned 1929-1939. And learned again by Argentina in 2000 with a US dollar peg serving as a de facto gold standard.
I don't see why you think that the link is relevant. It would apply if there were gold and silver standards simultaneously, for example, but that's not what is being discussed.
If I loan creshal $5000 at %5 interest, I have basically a note on $500 worth of income a year. I can turn around an use that note to buy something. Now someone else owns the debt worth $500/yr. Until the crisis hits, creshal loses his job and flees to Argentina and now that note isn't worth diddly.
Short: Modern economies are rife with way to turn physical assets and rent streams into something akin to cash. So even if you think you're on a gold standard, you aren't really. Your on a gold + this bond entitles the holder to £500 per annum from the Village of Shlopshire. (Because in 1804 the village borrowed money to replace a bridge)
For most of history, economic growth was minimal. Growth we expect in a year would not be seen across a lifetime. A fixed supply of money worked for a fixed-size economy.
In the 1800s, the economy grew on gold due to the coincidence of gold mine output roughly matching economic growth. The moment that link broke, calls for bi-metallism grew. Within a generation, the world was forced off gold.
From the site above, and the related book, i got the impression that Rome didn't get into monetary issues until they started using gold and silver for foreign trade.
Internally they used "worthless" metals with few problems for generations, in large part because the "worthlessness" made them durable tokens rather than metals to hoard.
Meaning that they acted as an accounting system without a third party.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/2015/02/28/what-is-mon...
India, China and the Arabian peninsula take one hundred million sesterces from our empire
per annum at a conservative estimate: that is what our luxuries and women cost us. For
what fraction of these imports is intended for sacrifices to the gods or the spirits
of the dead?
— Pliny, Historia Naturae 12.41.84. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Roman_trade_relations#Establishment)
From your quoted piece you deduce that the outflow of wealth and the disproportionate trade that most likely caused it was because of the poor selection of the trade-able goods made in the Mediterranean, but I think that it was because the Roman Empire was rich and the other markets - not so much (or at least not rich enough as markets to worth bearing the inherent risks of trade).
It's kind of hilarious to read through the annals of the British East India Company[1], for example. On their initial expeditions, they loaded ships full of wool, English broadcloth, leather, and other kinds of trade goods that they might shuttle around the Baltic Sea trade. When they got to Malabar or Indonesia, they realized these trade goods were basically worthless - on a couple of expeditions they were lucky enough to capture Spanish or Portuguese ships loaded with Indian cotton goods that it turned out could be traded for peppercorns or nutmegs, on others they had to use what little gold and silver they were allowed to ship.
The silk, ceramic and tea trade to China vacuumed up a huge percentage of the output of the Spanish New World silver and gold mines. So much Peruvian silver came into Ming and Qing China that it wrecked the conversion rates between gold, silver and cash currency, and much of the mercantilist economic studies of the period were focused on finding ways to get the balance of trade to result in specie coming into, e.g England, rather than going out.
I enjoy that Pliny quote, because it highlights the same problems of international trade in the Roman Republic that the various East India companies experienced.
Before I begin, let me say that "the West" is a very political term of the actual times and we were talking about the ancient times. Let's try to keep our heads lucid by avoiding sensitive topics, by avoiding blame casting (related to opium), and other such things. Now, pretty much every community in the ancient times "produced just about everything locally", at least everything they needed. Trade usually happens because of cultural differences (even when these differences are induced by other natural factors, like climate), and it just happened that the cultures in question (Roman, Indian, and Chinese) were different enough. Who were the usual consumers of the imported goods? Not the average Joes, mind you! They were the ones that: first - were open to appreciate foreign things for any reason (exotic tastes, cosmopolitan nature, etc.), and second - could afford to! You may assume here that for various reasons the Indian and Chinese high class could have been more closed and not so interested in foreign products, preferring only the good ol' local produced things, but I don't. I don't want to think that their nature was somehow lesser in this regard (because I like to consider human to be equals about that), and I prefer to assume that even if they wanted to, their collective potential that formed the market depth was not deep enough. India accepted the Roman gold. That's because Rome happened to have it (from its conquests, mostly), whereas India did not so much! A steep difference of their historical evolution that ultimately shaped their cultures and trade, you see? Another kind of cultural difference between Roman Empire and China shaped the trade between them. Who were the consumers of luxury goods in Roman Empire? Women, mostly! Did women in China have the same leeway in shopping spree? No! That's because unlike the women in the Roman Empire, which enjoyed equal social status with men, and many other things, women in ancient China bared a lower social status in comparison! So, another big cultural difference that heavily shaped the nature of commerce between Roman Empire and China. I'm glad to enlighten, thank you!
The Mediterranean possessed few unique trade goods that were practical for long-distance trade. There are copper and tin mines in China and India. You can as easily get ivory from Indian elephants as North African ones. Tyrian purple appears to not have been very popular in areas that produced indigo. Shipping Egyptian wheat doesn't make a great deal of sense when you are already producing surpluses in the Indus, Yangtze and Yellow river valleys. Chinese porcelain was comparable, if not superior to Attic pottery. It would be insanely extravagant to import Italian or Greek marble when you have to transship it across the Sinai peninsula. Garum was a massively important Roman luxury good, but you can make fermented fish sauce elsewhere, or use soy-sauce to get your MSG. In an era of astronomically high transport costs, only the rarest, highest-value goods made any sense at all to transport long distances.
So there were raw goods that the Roman elites desired that could not be locally sourced, because they were, by geographical accident, only produced in other places. Elites in other places happened to have these goods locally, and there was very little that was uniquely produced in the Mediterranean that could be exchanged for those goods. So they used hard-currency, because everybody likes shiny metal.
The Chinese opium trade was a huge deal, because at the time, the American precious metal mines were just about played out, and revolution throughout the old Spanish colonies were further disrupting supply. Although the heydey of importing opium into China didn't last very long - within a couple of decades, China was producing more locally grown opium poppies than were ever imported.
Irony is when ones action contradict ones plans?
Maybe they could have had an industrial revolution but its not as simple as just slaves.
But the laws of nature haven't changed; the Romans could have discovered science back then if they'd only set up society to do so.
The Romans had no concept of the scientific method. No concept of machines that could do work or produce energy. The whole philosophy that the universe obeyed simple laws that could be discovered empirically was foreign to them. The Greeks believed that they could discover the laws of the universe just by thinking really hard about them.
An interesting take on this is Archimede's Chronophone: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/
> We hardly need to read of the difficulties of the Roman legions on the Syrian borders to understand that modern military interventions in western Asia might be ill‑advised, or that feeding inedible food to refugees is likely to rebound.
As far as I know the refugees now passing through different European countries have not been given inedible food by the locals, or not on purpose, anyway, quite the contrary, there are more than a couple of YT videos of some refugees throwing away bottles of water and what looks to be good enough food. Not sure how this Cambridge professor might have come to this conclusion, and more so, why she chose to propagate this false fact as being, well, the truth.
EG:
Shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Beard was one of several authors invited to contribute articles on the topic to the London Review of Books. She opined that many people, once "the shock had faded", thought "the United States had it coming", and that "[w]orld bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price"[11] (the so-called "Roosting Chickens argument").
Reactions to the attacks, often based on terrible strategy, have killed far more innocent people outside of the US than were killed in the attacks. It would make no sense to argue that previous foreign policy was harmful to other poorer countries in such a way that the attacks were justified, without acknowledging that the attacks made people's lives worse around the world.
"Had it coming" is a phrase I'd expect more from a right winger who feels his or her superiority is insufficiently respected. Such a right wing person would still be angry with the US for Roosevelt telling Churchill that he didn't get to keep his empire, and argue about the terrorist attacks in terms of disorder and power vacuums and other imperial concepts. (It should go without saying that colonialism causes far more harm than terrorism)
I'm joking to say that she is a closet believer in colonialism, and I think she was making a joke too, but I think the humor is aimed for a domestic audience's national pride. Taking glee in others misfortune because they "deserve it", when the result will be counter productive to anything good happening is not good.
Note that in Britain, there's a small community of classicists who are permanently having to defend the relevance of their studies. It seems to be drilled into them that what they study is relevant to modern society (which it is). Thus you find the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, peppering in Rome references in his writings. Everything that happens in the news is at some point going to have a commentator who studied classics, and you'll get nice Latin quotes.
Food for thought in light of the common belief that we still live by the Constitution.
On the other hand don't forget that a favorite Roman pastime was to watch live fish cooking in a glass bowl.
I wonder if modern factory farms are any less barbaric?
I won't be so naive that things haven't changed a lot since it's inception, but I don't recall Rome having an independent judiciary either, with sole jurisdiction over Constitutional issues.
Just saying. I don't think it's as dead as some might lead you to believe.
I have ambivalent feelings about the constant need to justify why we need to learn the truth about something extremely big. Particularly using complicated analogies that have to show how its relevant to today. I understand scholars need to raise money and part of this is showing why something "matters today" but I prefer the altruistic search for truth. ie the whole history is valuable because history repeats itself idea is so boring (and never really true) which the author does a great point making.
But again great piece.
Other civilizations can be profitably studied as well, of course. But for western Europe and the US to specialize on Rome is quite reasonable.