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Comment by Spellman | Hacker News Reader

Considering one of the biggest issues that plagued the Later Roman empire was the inability to pay it's legionnaires either via coin or freshly conquered land, it's a substantial factor to it's rise and decline.

But to me it feels orthogonal to the benefits of increased state capacity, trade, and standardized coinage that helped provide the Roman Empire it's economic benefits. Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome?

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One thing people don't really have an intuition for is just how chaotic the ancient world generally was. Banditry was basically normal, murder was a 'personal matter', civic infrastructure investment was generally not a thing, etc.

Empires like the Romans made some basic inroads into these problems (although in Rome, murder was still a personal matter, banditry was still the norm, etc). Building an aqueduct or a road is a massive quality-of-life achievement for everybody.

Surely the ancient world was more common, with bandits, etc, but do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I imagine most communities had was to prevent / punish this.

> do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'?

I suspect the differentiation they are drawing is that in "modern" society there are very few accepted reasons for killing someone, and all cases should be examined by an arms-length person.

This is very much not true across societies, or historically.

I think the distinction they were drawing was the level of faith people could have in law enforcement by the state. In most Western countries you would tend to expect that as soon as a murder occurs, the police attempt to find the murderer and prosecute, with no action required by the victim.

In the Ancient world, I don't expect murder of slaves or subsistence farmers would have any involvement outside of their families/owners/patrons.

> with no action required by the victim.

It's fortunate that no action is required from the murder victim, I guess.

'Personal' is probably too far, 'private', as in, not the business of the state, is more where I was going with it.

I think in general, for antique societies, they don't have detectives - if a crime is committed, the first problem is, there's no state agency interested in investigating the matter.

The claim that murder was a 'private matter' is from Emma Southon, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Pre-modern history is rife with blood feuds that are basically the 'private' way of preventing murder. The state typically wouldn't have the resources to get involved, even if they did have the interest.

If you imagine the chain of somebody_is_murdered to somebody_is_punished there are questions like: 'who reports the crime, and to whom?' and 'how do you establish the crime actually happened, in the way it was reported?' that are just really hard to answer unless you have a big state organization dedicated to managing stuff like that.

In some culture and religion it's even written in books. Under some circumstances and granted the insulted peer followed a few steps, right to murder was granted.

> Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome?

Did it have any advantage? Rome has a special place for Europeans because it's "our" ancient empire, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was superior all of its peers. Also, maybe those peer empires didn't build aqueducts, but they built different but equivalent projects instead.

Yes. It had a much, much better system of military organization than any rivals in the legion. It was radically better at incorporating its conquests politically. That’s what “friends and allies of Rome” was. Its system of laws was probably also a real source of comparative advantage or there wouldn’t still be many countries using direct lineal descendants of it.

In the end, it's all about sun-provided energy input. Coins or treasury, or freshly plundered lands really represent the means by which to convert energy into goods that can be consumed whether that's food.

But you can't get more slaves if you don't have more lands, but more lands means administration difficulty increases, which means you need more soldiers and bureaucrats, who are not directly producing food.

Comparative advantage isn't necessarily the cause for Rome's largeness. If society size follows a log-normal distribution, or perhaps a power law, due to the effects of preferential attachment (using a network metaphor), then the difference between Rome and other societies could be entirely random error.

Rome was unusually superior to its rivals. Chinese, Indian and Persianate empires occurred again and again. Rome happened once and was never reassembled. Great big plains where you can grow lots of food are a much better foundation for an enduring empire than a sea where almost all of the connecting land masses has mountains nearby. I’m not aware of anything similar to the Punic Wars happening elsewhere until the Hundred Years’ War. That’s staggering levels of state and popular commitment to war, for a very long time.

Rome was in fact special.

There's always a winner in hindsight. Explaining why the winner won is easy, but predicting who will win is hard.

BTW, at the time, I think being on great big plains would have been worse. Sea transport was, what, 20x cheaper than land transport? Rome couldn't possibly have supported a million residents if it weren't on the sea and able to extract grain from across the Mediterranean.

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