Using A Shield With A Spear?

[Lawnmower Boy]

Being a good cavalry fighter is hard, because it comes down to getting good at riding and taking care of horses. It takes work and exertion and a solid base in horses to exercise on. We tend to think of the Athenian knights and the Roman equites in terms of an evolutionary history of politics, in which the "democracy" of the city states is rooted in an prehistory of primeval feudalism. It isn't, and can't be, because we can follow the rise of the cavalry arm in the Assyrian annals, and see that horse riding, whatever its Bronze (or even Neolithic) history in central Eurasia, it did not become a socially reproducible skill until around 600. The knights and equites would have been established in the 600s --and they didn't work.

 

Now, I didn't paste this in without reason, by the way. Okay, I'm cheating: I'm actually listening to the promised "Roy Rogers/Emmylou Harris" collaboration right now. Give it a listen --it's less meandering than the traditional Don Edwards version, and beats my first test of using "remuda" and "extra guard"  rather than Marty Robbins' Anglicisations.

 

Little Joe the Wrangler will wrangle nevermore
His days with the roundup they are o'er
Was a year ago last April when he rode into our camp
Just a little Texas stray and nothing more

 

Was late in the evening when he rode into our camp
On the little Texas pony he called Chaw
With his brogan shoes and overalls a tougher looking kid
You never in your life before had saw

 

His saddle was a Texas kack built many years ago
An OK spur on one foot lightly swung
With his packroll in a cotton sack so loosely tied behind
And a canteen from his saddle horn was slung

 

He said he had to leave his home his pa had married twice
His new ma whipped him every day or two
So he saddled up old Chaw one night and lit a shuck his way
He said he'd try to paddle his own canoe

 

He said if we would give him work he'd do the best he could
Though he didn't know straight up about a cow
So the boss he cut him out a mount and kindly put him on
He sorta liked this little kid somehow

 

He learned to wrangle horses and learned to know them all
And get them in at daybreakk if he could
And to trail the old chuck wagon and always hitch the team
And help to cook each evening rustle wood

 

We had hardly reached the Pecos the weather it was fine
We were camped down on the south side in a draw
When a northern commenced blowing and we doubled up our guards
It took every one of us to hold them in

 

Little Joe the Wrangler was called out with the rest
Scarcely had the little fellow reached the herd
When the cattle they stampeded like a hailstorm on they fled
And everyone was ridin' for the lead

 

Amid the streaks of lightnin' there was one horse up ahead
He was tryin' to check the leaders in their speed
It was little Joe the Wrangler with a slicker o'er his head
He was ridin' Old Blue Rocket in the lead

 

At last we got them millin' and kinda quited down
And the extra guards back to the wagon went
But there was one a missin' we could see it at a glance
Was our little Texas stray poor Wrangler Joe

 

Next morning just at daybreak we found where Rocket fell
Down in a washout twenty feet below
Beneath his horse his life had gone his spur had run its knell
Was our little Texas stray poor Wrangler Joe

 

Why am I inflicting old country and westtern on you? Because it hurts my heart to think of young men like Little Joe the Wrangler, trying so hard, to the limit of their skills and courage and further, to earn their places in an unwelcoming society.  

 

The only way to get a solid cavalry on a scale that gives you even 1 sabre to every 10 infantry on the basis of mass mobilisation is to recruit young men like this, men that the Romans used to call "shepherds."  Little Joe is one of those recruited shepherds. He has an old horse, a bad saddle, and doesn't know anything about cattle, but he has nowwhere else to go than the remuda, and is willing to learn its ways --again I'm emphasising the Hispanicisms of the working life that he has entered. He is not becoming Mexican so much as Southwestern, rather in the way that a boy who was allegedly born in New York City would eventually become the fluently Spanish-speaking Billy the Kid.*

 

The rest of this post is devoted to problematising "shepherd," suggesting that as both a class and (implicit) ethnic construction, it also masks the interest of the senatorial class in resisting agrarian reform laws intended to put land near Rome back into "proper" grain land to support the yeomanry perceived to have been the ancient foundation of Roman power.

 

So now let us go back to the Rome of circa 220BC. Here is the Via Flaminia again:

 

 

 

Rome is an important road juncture due to its positin on the lowest ford on the Tiber, and the natural salt market for the Pontine marshes. One of the roads that crosses path at Rome heads north to Tuscany. We don't care about that one. The other follows the Tiber, which climbs into the Appenines and descends via passes and gorges and even a tunnel first cut in the 2nd century BC, but which is the most practicable route to the extent that the Tiber rises in a water gap. The Via Flaminia ends at the Adriatic coast at Ravenna. The upper reaches of the route paasses through the territory of the Sennones, a Gallic nation with their capital at Senegallia on the Adriatic coast in Ancona, which in ancient times rose to become one of five such towns in the Pentapolis. This gives you a sense of just how far south and east "Gallia Cisalpinia" extended --to the point of raising questions of whether they were understood as being on thisi side of the Alps, or the Appenine spur!

 

The Sennones were conquered in 280BC by P. Cornelius Dolabela, and the conquered region, the ager Gallicus, the modern Marche, shows signs of the earliest centuriation of lands falling to Rome. I'm going to highlight this by pointing out just how far we are into the ancient past of Rome. We are fascinated by these early days and the picturesque stories of Livy, and so we tell them with great certainty, even though they are all that we have. And when it comes to stories we like, we have a  a far greater certainty than Livy, who is constantly speculating about what his sources are telling him --because he lacks an anthropological perspective, he is even more puzzled by the fragments he passes on than we are! By far our earliest source, and most scientific, is Polybius, who is almost two two centuries separate from the incursion of the Gauls, about which he tells us, in any case, little. (The Etruscans are the earliest settlers of what Polybius calls the "plain of the Po." The Gauls, near neighbours, cast covetous eyes at this fertile land, and cast the Etruscans from it.)  

 

Livy, on the other hand, tells us that the Sennones crossed the Alps in search of land to settle around 400BC. Friction developed with the Etruscan city of Clusium, and three Roman ambassadors of the Fabian clan were sent to negotiate a settlement, and did horrible things. The result was a war, in which the Romans, having violated the sacred laws of the gods, were justly deteated at the Battle of the Allia (NSFW Wikipedia page). The Claudian clan won back some of the gods' respect by dying en masse on the battlefield, but not enough to spare Rome from a sack at the hands of Brennus, "Vae victis" and all of that. Except that the sack was interrupted by the honking of the sacred geese of Juno, as often happened in those days, allowing the exiled Roman dictator, Marcus Furius Camillus, who just happened to be in the vicinity with a spare army, to intervene and save the city.

 

So, uhm, yay Claudians and Furians, boo Fabii. One might even go s far as to suggest  that the version of the story we have from Livy has been written with an eye to contemporary politics.

 

Meanwhile, the defeated Gauls wandered off to Bologna, so called as the "City of the Boii," which means "City of the Cowboys," although in this case we are taking "Cowboy" to be the name of a remarkably far-travelled tribe of Gauls. (If we go with tracing migrations by placenames, they also hung out at Bologna, in Bohemia, and in Bavaria, and I think a town on the Rhine.) And, as Polybius says, cast the Etruscans from it.

 

Only they didn't. We identify the Etruscans with the Villanovan archaeological culture, which has longstanding affinities with the central European Urnfield culture, usually associated with the proto-Celts, if that concept is at all useful. (Remember that Gauls and Celts are to be considered as approximately equivalent for the purposes of this discussion. Romans didn't know what they were talking about, except when they did.) The extensively excavated cemetery at Villanova that gives the culture its type-name shows no break at c. 400BC. This has long been acknowledged in the form of a conceptualised Gaullic-Etruscan cultural fusion. We preserve the trans-Alpine incursion of the Gallic tribes (which, recall, is known to Livy, but not the much earlier Polybius, unless we chosse to read "near neighbours" as meaning "just across the Alps," as is often done.) It is, in general, hard to distinguish the earlier Villanovan from later Etruscan, Galic and Italic cultures, so that the latter tend to be recognised from the literature, or, to put it another way, the single stool of Livy, rather than by the archaeology.

 

Not that I'd put much faith on the ability of the archaeologists to recognise "culture." "this grave has ashes on the right side. Therefore they were Proto-Indo-European speakers, and we can say with certainty that they had a warrior caste, worshipped a sky god, and that their word for "hundred" started with  a soft 'c!'"

 

What we can say with certainty is that Etrusco-Gallic culture persistently hugs the edges of the Appenine and Alpine mountains, building cities and roads at places like  Bologna at what archaeology calls the "spring line," the point where softer sedimentary rock caps rest on underlying igneous formations, creating a constant contour of subterranean springs breaking the surface as water percolating down from the heights is forced into the open. Traditional roads follow spring lines, because they combine frequent watering stops, a low altitude, and an ability to avoid bridging. The pasture-and-pannage country at the spring line is also particularly valuable, especially for traditional economies which have not made much head at draining the lowlands or deforesting the heights. Hence the whole Bologna ham, "country of the Boii" thing.

 

So if we look at what we know about the social composition of  Italy out along the Via Flaminia/Via Aemilia  in circa 280-180BC, we see a traditional claim, dating to much later, that the people there were Gauls, well-supported in the literary and placename tradition, but not archaeologically evident. If we look at its economic relationship with Rome, we see a traditional cattle or pig droving route links Bologna with the city --the wealther the city of Rome, the more livestock is going to travel this route, and, not surprisingly, the more money there is going to be in mixed farming around Bologna.

 

Now I'm going to jump well forward, to a guy named Marius,  (157--86 BC0, a prominent Roman politician-general of the late Republic, perhaps best known for his electoral and political hijinks down south, but who gained his original fame by i) throwing a titanic tantrum when he was cut out of the business of allotting colonial lands in north Africa; ii) raising a quasi-illegal army to defeat an imminent invasion of ...uhm, Rome, yeah, that's what we're going to go with, Rome. .. by tribes from Denmark, or Germany, or Sweden, or somewhere up there, who were gathering just on the other side of the Alps, in France or Austria. One or the other. They're close, right? So, up and down the spring line marging the swampy lowlands of the Po goes Marius, darting across this pass or that to defeat armies of barbarians just on the cusp of attacking Rome. All this marching naturally forces Marius (actually, his colleague Lucius Valerius Flavius) to create Bologna as an official colony, in association with a likely lad name of Caesar. Then, with the support of the men he established around Bologna, Marius was off to  the aforementioned hijinks, which, blah blah Social War, civil war proscriptions civil war proscriptions civil war proscriptions civil war Empire leads us to Augustus, and his official court historian, Livy. Who wants to tell us about the threat of all those ancient Gauls (Germans? They're pretty similar, right?) who used to invade Rome and stuff like that. 

 

In conclusion, Drusus is awesome. Because history. In a less facetious tone, what I would rather say is that the whole idea of a "Gallic invasion," back in about 400BC or so, is vague ancient history and urban myth, recreated to the needs of Roman politics, and historians/politicians writing in the late Republic. As to what actually happened in the transition from villanovan to its successor cultures, it is very difficult to make claims about ethnicity and language, but it is at least potentially possible to make claims about economic changes.

 

Above all, I am going to insist on the primacy of these livestock drives, which are in any case at least indirectly supported by the archaeological survival of taxing pens at provincial borders. Now I turn the podium over to the late Empire panegyrist Claudius Mamertius, talking about the "Bagaudae," whoever the heck they were:

 

"simple farmers sought military garb; the plowman imitated the infantryman, the shepherd the cavalryman, the rustic harvester of his own crops the barbarian enemy". Notice the implicit social hierarchy here. Simple farmers are the landless labourers; "plowman" are usually those who own animals, and so can contract plow-work; shepherds own horses; and "the rustic harvester of his own crops" is a free-holder. Shepherds are not seen here as poor, precisely, but as the third of four steps of insurgent rural society. Of course they are! They own their own horses!

 

Now, shepherds are seen by (not only) Classical sources as a dangerous strata of society. They are rootless, unsettled folk who do not own proper arable land on neatly centuriated fields near cities in which they can participate in the public political life which defines the patrician. That does not mean that they are poor, nor even landless. Landlessness is, in fact, a pretty vague idea for Little Joe, who, had he not gotten himself killed by trying too hard, would probably have ended his life as a rancher way up in the back of nowhere in Montana or some such place. Then he would have owned a lot more land, and stil have been much poorer than someone who owns a quarter acre of super productive truck garden land just outside Central City. Where his wealth would lie is in the cattle he brings to market every year.

 

Except that you don't really sell cattle in Rome. They usually speak of a "meat market," rather than a "cattle market." Traditionally, cattle are driven in from the pasture land, then held in feedlots near the city, where they are "finished" by fattening them up on good quality fodder. Roman politicians, begining well before Marius, were apoplectic at the tendency of the lands near the city going from proper grain farms where stout, potentially legionary yeomen raise proper crops such as grain, and take time out to go vote in civic elections. People have continued to complain about this trend down into the Twentieth Century, at which point we haven't so much given up as shifted to a different line of attack, in which tofu and fibre replace wheat in our hierarchy of values.  

 

And who owns the feedlots? I'm tempted to say the equites do --except that it's not reallly true, it's mostly the even richer senatorial class. But what I will say is that the wealthiest sector of the Roman population, the very class that is supposed to provide its citizen cavalry, have the closest association with the rootless up-country "shepherds" who in reality make the best cavalry. In conclusion --my conclusion, not the conclusion of some strawman version of Livy, the supposedly clear ethnic and cultural boundaries between Italic and Gaullic,or later Germanic, and between citizen and mercenary cavalry rest on a refusal to see that the mixed pastoral economy is necessarily fluid in local and social-associational terms. The kind of "ethnogenesis" that I'm trying to illustrate with the example of Little Joe the Wrangler is, I believe, in action even in ancient times. It's just that it is in the interest of the senatorial class to blur it.

 

I know, I know, all of this line of thinking is just so many doggies all meandering around the range. I've done my best to drive them to a logical conclusion, and if I haven't go there, it's their misfortune, and none of my own. 

 

*The "allegedly" is doing a lot of work here. The back story of Billy the Kid makes a great deal more sense if we throw out the early anecdotes entirely, allowing him to be Hispanic-American. but neve rmind.
 

[Markdoc]

 We know from contemporary texts and artifacts that both Greek and Roman cavalry started as proto-feudal troops (around 450 BC, for what it's worth in Greece, somewhat later in Rome)  - indeed the origins, equipment and duties of the Hippes of Athens are described in detail, as are the details of their peacetime drilling, and the city offices established to ensure the fitness and care of cavalry horses. To say that can't be the case because (like pretty much all other historical evidence) it conflicts with an idea you've come up with is .... not convincing.

 

To be honest the entire post is, to use your own word, meandering. If there's a point in there (apart from the suggestion that the cavalry were drawn from shepherds, which all evidence we have states flatly is wrong) I'm not sure that I caught it. I'm not trying to be mean - it's just that there really doesn't seem to be any coherent argument.

 

It's like your comment about the Billy the kid - it might make more sense (to you) if he was Hispanic, but according to his birth records, he was born William Henry McCarty, Jr, to two Irish parents in New York. Contemporaries describe him as a blue-eyed, blond with pale skin - which matches pretty well with the few photos of him that exist. To everyone else, it makes more sense if we just assume that he was Irish-American, just as everything indicates that he was.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Oh and as a specific point, I should note that your romantic ideas of roman shepherds actually have little to nothing to do with the rather grungy details of actual shepherds in the Roman era: far from being "rootless, unsettled folk who do not own proper arable land on neatly centuriated fields near cities in which they can participate in the public political life which defines the patrician" the vast majority were slaves, who looked after other men's animals on private land (ager occupatorius) with a small (and shrinking, even during the republic) population who herded animals on publicly owned land (ager publicus). Indeed Cato details pasturing for sheep - not in the mountains of romantic imagination, but on manured and irrigated pasture - viz: "Manure the pastures at the beginning of spring at new moon, or, if they are not irrigated, when the Favonius begins to blow. While the animals are out of the pastures, clear them and root out all invasive weeds ..." He comments later in the same section on the benefits of letting sheep graze the stubble after the crops are harvested. In other words, we have practical agricultural advice by a contemporary farm-owner describing the actual sort of practice that you are saying didn't happen. At any rate, neither kind of shepherd was likely to own horses - shepherds were among the poorest of the rural poor. By Julius Caesar's time, the imbalance between slave and free shepherd was so great that laws were passed to try and force landowners to hire at least one free herder for every two slave herders - principally to try and boost employment, though without much success. At the same time the laws on how many animals could be grazed by free herders on public land was subject to severe regulation - Livy goes into this in detail. 

 

Through the Gracchan period the ager publicus gradually vanished, snapped up by greedy private landowners, and with it the last of the free shepherds.

 

And that's why shepherds were considered a danger to public order. Shepherds were part of the vast population of unfree or semifree agricultural workers, who were all considered a danger to public order - there were 6 uprisings by agricultural workers in the second century BC, one of which (in 186) specifically mentions shepherds as being involved. Livy wrote of it: "There was a wide-spread movement amongst the slaves in Apulia this year. The herdsmen had entered into a conspiracy and were making the highroads and public pastures insecure through acts of brigandage." He notes that a ) the shepherds were making trouble and b ) the shepherds were slaves. In this regard it is worth noting that Varro stated that shepherds were hardier than most slaves since their work required them to live on the land and they were often armed to protect their flocks. So troublesome, yes. Romantic horse-riding masters of their own destiny (and flocks) no.

 

cheers, Mark

[Lawnmower Boy]

William Henry Bonney was a young participant in the Lincoln County, New Mexico, Range Wars of 1880/1. In 1881, he was killed by surprise by Pat Garrett. In his last moments, he spontaneously spoke Spanish, suggesting that by the time of his death he was highly fluent. From this, we can conclude that either the ethnogenesis that turned a New York-born American Irishman into a cowboy was rapid and thorough, which would support my point; or, I admit, that he was not New York-born at all. The reader can follow up as he will. I would only point out that only a single and somewhat questionable photograph of Billy the Kid exists. It does not show a blue-eyed blond, because it is a black-and-white ferrotype. Not that there is no such thing as a blue-eyed, blond Hispanic.

 

Moving on

 

Knights as a social class

 

Is this a thing? Of course it is! The Athenian Constitution has been the subject of continuing controversy and research, but the traditional claim is that the lawmaker, Solon, remedied tensions between rich and poor by dividing the Athenian population into wealth classes for various purposes, including military service. The second of four classes, the Hippeis, traditionally identified with the "medieval class of knights" (like any thorough researcher, I quote Wikipedia), were classed as those with enough wealth to equip themselves for cavalry service. Much later, corps of first 300 and latter 1200 cavalry were formed; as with many officeholders in the classic Athenian democracy, they were paid, and in return were expected to drill in times of peace.

 

The Romans are a little vaguer, because their history starts later, but we have Livy, an enticing, history-like text to draw us back to before we have any certainty whatsoever. So what? The  equites certainly existed as a social class, again, the second rank of the Roman wealth classification, usually seen as the Roman aristocracy. I'll go with that as far as aristocracy goes, I just don't think we ought to blunder with certainty into all the implications of caste and formal hierarchy that words like this carry with them for this early period. They might get in the way of understanding either our sources, or their best interpretation.

 

But equites, sure.

 

Notice that I'm not trying to get rid of the idea of "drilling." I'm trying to wedge apart the ideas of practice, exercise, disciplilne nad regimentation. I've already noticed Pham, and will refer those interested in the question to her work again.

 

Social Class and Nationality Obscures Our Account

 

Here is where I keep trying to put scare quotes around "shepherd," and you keep prying them off. To be as clear as I possibly can be, by "shepherd" [Argument Coherence Danger Warning: Do Not Remove Scare Quotes] I specifically mean a mounted proletariat associated with long-distance livestock drives. It will be noted that cowboys are not essential to cattle, sheep, pig or geese drives. Those would be the Roman shepherds [no scare quotes needed!] that you are discussing. Did these "cowboys" exist in Roman times? I am suggesting that they did, and not just on the distant steppe.They may not be vital, but they are more useful for livestock-driving purposes, and they pay for themselves specifically in the context of stock raising including horse raising --something that does not happen on the Mediterranean littoral, but which, I argue, can be happening on the slopes of the Appenines and Alps.

 

It's an economic argument, in other words. I think we can have an agreement that, say, Scythians, or Tatars, or Mongol cavalries can be explained in these terms? I'm trying to add Germans and Gauls, and you may well want to argue that point. 

 

Equites as Cavalry

 

At the first moment at which we have cognisance of them, the Athenian cavalry already contains Scythian horse archers. The Roman case is somewhat more ambiguous. We have an account of Roman warfare against Pyrrhus in 280BC. Unfortunately, it's from Plutarch (46--120AD), but his Greek sources are much more reliable than our Latin ones. At this point, the Roman cavalry is supplied by the Roman senatorial, equites and perhaps the First Class of commoners; and by Italic allies.

 

Roman Barbarian Mercenary Cavalry

 

Again, I think we can all agree that the Romans were using Gallic and Germanic cavalry by the end of the Republic. That is, some time between 280BC and 46BC, they began recruiting mercenary cavalry from the north. A place in the north that contains Gauls is Gallia Cisalpinia, which, as I have noted, is very close indeed to Rome. I won't rehearse the main obstacles to horse raising in Italy, except to note the importance of lack of summer pasture in a Mediterranean climate, which is what makes uplands so important, and especially ones with a reliable snowpack --the Appenine spur and Alps. This doesn't matter in the sense that Gallic cavalry is not attested in Roman service during the Second Punic War. The barbarian mercenaries attested were Numidians, used in the North African campaigns.

 

Slipperiness of Ethnic Construction

 

What do we mean when we say that there was a band of Gauls living north of Roman territory from around 400BC. Ethnicity is hard to attribute from archaeology, after all. What we mean is that a set of authors, and above all, Livy, tell us so. They do have sources, although we cannot always weigh them properly. This is why I am specifically bringing into question the events of 400BC, when, allegedly, several tribes of Gauls invaded northern Italy. (Including the Boii, or "Cowboys," make of that what you will.) Why? Who would it benefit to tell this elaborate story? Here, things get a bit complicated, but I am suggesting that the events of Marius's wars in northern Italy, Germany and France were highly massaged to fit the needs of that rising politician. Subsequently, Roman politicians of Marius' following, most notably the Emperor Augustus, not only used their patronage to give Marius's actions the kindest possible intepretation, but used them for their own purposes. Above all, Augustus' campaigns in the Alps and in Germany can be understood as just war if these peoples represent a longstanding, existential threat to Rome's existence. The sack of 400, the threat of the Cimbri and Teutones, and Augustus's campaigns across the Rhine are all linked by this longstanding threat to Rome. It follows, therefore, that the hazily remembered "Gauls" of 400BC are literally the same as the Gauls of Julius Caesar's day, the Cimbri and Teutones, and even the Germans. 

 

Ideology in Its Economic Sense, Cavalry in Roman Service, and Shepherds

 

Are Roman accounts of "shepherds" questionable? Yes! Roman economic ideology is politically-rooted."Shepherds" threaten ideas of what it is to be a citizen-farmer. In the familiar, "stadial" theory of political history (evolution by stages, in less fancy talk) human societies evolve from primitive farmers to less primitive pastoralist to modern, advanced farmers. "Shepherds" are evolutionary throwbacks. Their mobility, and lack of urban ties make them a threat to Roman ideas of politics. Their wealth, which is rooted in remote pasturing rights and mobile livestock, cannot be accounted for by Roman political ideas. Romans are not, therefore, likely to give us a respectful account of "shepherds." Rather, they are going to elide the distinction that I am here trying to make between "shepherds" and shepherds. 

 

But we should not be talking about ideology in its political sense! That's just a cover! We need to talk about it in its economic sense! At what point do we get "shepherds" in Rome? Who are their patrons? Who mobilises them for military services?

 

The nexus I see here is: feedlot owner>cattledrive entrepeneur>"shepherd." Here comes a herd of beef down the Via Flaminia to Rome. Rangy from their travels, they need to be fed up on a feedlot so that they can be slaughtered and eaten in a street festival thrown by a Roman senator. Who owns the feedlot? A Roman senator! Who is the entrepeneur who organised this? We don't know. Who are the "shepherds" who have herded these cattle down from the mountains? Good horsemen, potentially good cavalrymen. What is their ethnicity? Who cares? But political ideology says that they ought to be "barbarians," and since we don't care one way or the other, that's the line we'll take. They're barbarians. Hopefully, they'll even throw some Spanish Germanic/Gallic lingo into their talk. 

[Lawnmower Boy]

Just as an additional note, here's a scenic picture taken at Montepastore, jammed between Bologna and the Appenines just south of the city. This terrain wasn't invented last month. It existed in Roman times.

 

There is a screaming argument in Roman history about the population of the peninsula in the late Republic and the argument over the "public lands" that begins with the assumption that places like this don't exist. Look around you: it's land. People can live a very precarious life on it as autarkic farmers, or they can try to move grain down to Bologna and sell it; but their marginal costs are likely to be so high that they can't. In an ideal, Roman social order, people live on this land, feed themselves, and then serve in the legions in war time. The economic rationality of living here need not be accounted for.

 

But look up at those clearances further up into the hill. Are those grain farms? I doubt it. They're probably pastures --not because you can't plant grain up there, but because you can't sell it, and because the people who might live up there on their own grain can't walk down to the city and participate in its social life . The same may be said of the woods above them. Mixed decidious woodlands are actually more biotically productive than dry arable. It's just that the product is pork and beef --and acorns and chestnuts and all the other food that, in a proper agrarian ideology, people don't live on. 

 

What was being done with this land in Roman times? The Romans could have been just ignoring them and leaving the forest to be dark and deep and wild, because it doesn't fit their grain-raising political ideology. But I kind of doubt that this was the case. I assume, on the contrary, that it was being used, at some level of intensity, for raising livestock. 

 

You must, however, then herd that livestock down into the valley, first, to winter pasture, second, to market. But before they can be marketed, they must be fattened. That's your feedlots --or your stubbly grain fields, or, in general, the classic "in field." And you must have people to do the herding. Do they live in the heights, on acorns? Probably not --that's a marginal option, at best. But they could. I submit, again, that these people are potentially dangerous --at one and the same time military vital, and threatening the erosion of the state order at the same time. Blah blah. 

 

 

[Markdoc]

The Romans are a little vaguer, because their history starts later, but we have Livy, an enticing, history-like text to draw us back to before we have any certainty whatsoever. So what? The  equites certainly existed as a social class, again, the second rank of the Roman wealth classification, usually seen as the Roman aristocracy. I'll go with that as far as aristocracy goes, I just don't think we ought to blunder with certainty into all the implications of caste and formal hierarchy that words like this carry with them for this early period. They might get in the way of understanding either our sources, or their best interpretation.

 

But equites, sure.

 

Aaaand ... according to the people who were, you know, actually there at the time, these equites provided the Roman army with its cavalry.

 

 

 

Here is where I keep trying to put scare quotes around "shepherd," and you keep prying them off. To be as clear as I possibly can be, by "shepherd" [Argument Coherence Danger Warning: Do Not Remove Scare Quotes] I specifically mean a mounted proletariat associated with long-distance livestock drives. 

 

Ah, yes, of course! The "mounted proletariat associated with long-distance livestock drives"! How could I have forgotten .... wait a minute. There's no such evidence - written, painted or sculpted - that such a thing ever existed in Roman times (or medieval times, for that matter). There are also no traditions, no folk remnants in Italy suggesting such people ever existed. I should also note in in Roman times the proletariat were exempt from military service making the idea not only completely without any support, but also in direct contradiction to everything we know about the Roman military.

 

So ... who mobilised the shepherds? Nobody. As contemporary writers noted, shepherds - like the rest of the proletariat and other slaves - were exempt from military service.

 

There's also no need to invent a mythical class of wandering horsemen to roam Roman Italy, since the Romans left a great deal of writing on the subject of agriculture. Shepherds (without scare quotes) are discussed a great deal and we know as much about them as we know about anybody of the time - they were typically slaves or very small private graziers, they grazed their flocks on public lands and also in the uplands (summer in the hills, the rest of the year on the croplands and pastures around the cities), they were poor and prone to joining in public uprisings. There is, in all this vast body of description nary a word about itinerant, mounted graziers . Or horse-riding shepherds, for that matter- all the depictions of rural rustics I know of, show them on foot or occasionally on donkey. We also know (just as in Italy of the medieval period, or even, for that matter, today) that the wooded hills were not desert - they were used, and owned. Pigs were fattened there (sheep and cattle actually do relatively poorly in wooded terrain) -archeo-ostology indicates that pork was the Romans' favoured meat - wood was cut, charcoal made, acorns harvested (very important for feeding cattle) etc. Sheep and cattle were grazed in pasturage in the hills and the frequent references in roman texts to conflict between itinerant graziers and landowners makes it very plain that the hills were also settled and the pasturage was owned. Not only is there no evidence for a horse-riding herding proletariat roaming Roman Italy, there is actually not much space for them to roam either. Remember, by our best estimates (and given Augustus' censuses, our best estimates are more solid than for most of antiquity) the population of Roman Imperial Italy was not equalled again until about the mid-1700's.

 

So given the total lack of evidence for their presence, and the fact that you still haven't actually suggested so far a single reason why we should entertain the notion of their existence, I think we can be pretty certain that they didn't exist. Interestingly, outside of Italy (in Iberia, for example), such people did apparently exist and the Romans made note of their peculiar ways - and also hired them as mercenary cavalry But that was long after the initial Roman expansion, and these people were most emphatically not Roman. You mentioned Marius upthread - one of his innovations in the reform of the Roman military was the abolition of the Roman cavalry drawn from the equites, who thereafter served with the legions on foot, and were replaced with mercenary cavalry recruited from outside Italy.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Edit: actually on thinking about it, I should note that one type of shepherd did actually ride horses, according to roman sources - the ones who herd horses. Varro wrote "Two men are needed for a herd of fifty mares, and each of these should certainly have for his use a mare which has been broken to the saddle, in those districts where it is customary for the mares to be rounded up and driven to stalls, as is frequently true in Apulia and Lucania"

 

I'd suggest actually reading the contemporary literature rather than just making stuff up out of whole cloth. Varro, Cato, Columella and Palladius were not writing ideological texts but instructions for their fellow farmers and herders. Far from scorning or fearing shepherds, Varro makes the point that the ancient romans and the founders of the city were shepherds. But the texts also make very, very plain indeed that shepherds were minor cogs in the the whole business of farming - often slaves, but always tightly linked to the specific farms and landowners who owned their service.

 

I can in particular recommend Columella, who devotes the whole of book 7 of De Re Rustica to shepherds, sheep-herding and sheep. There's no mention of mythical horse riding nomad shepherds, of course, but a great deal of information on how Roman shepherds actually lived and worked, and the Roman system for sheep herding, breeding and use. Interestingly, the Roman shepherd described by Columella with his broad straw hat and his dogs and his little stone hut in the hills for summer, is recognisably the same (near identical, in fact) to the shepherds of medieval and early modern Italy, suggesting that not very much changed in this area for over 1500 years.

[Narf the Mouse]

Having watched a re-enactor demonstrate possible spear-holding techniques on Youtube...

 

...Sure. You just take an OCV and DC penalty as usual.

[assault]

Supposedly, and I'm using this as a concession to Lawnmower Boy, the Romans described and absorbed a lot of the hill dwellers around them quite early.

[Markdoc]

Supposedly, and I'm using this as a concession to Lawnmower Boy, the Romans described and absorbed a lot of the hill dwellers around them quite early.

The Romans started out as hill dwellers! And shepherds, for what that's worth so, yeah. But shepherds in the Italian style, based in a specific town, not peripatic horsemen like Gauchos.

 

By the beginning of the Roman republic, most of Italy outside the South was covered in a patchwork of tiny protostates, pretty much all of which were based around fortified hilltop or island towns. There were cultural differences, but these were ones of degree rather absolute. The Romans were lucky in that they managed to occupy and defend an area which had plenty of good cropland, enough to support a burgeoning population, and probably one reason they turned into such a military-focused society is that from the start they were almost continually at war with some of their neighbours (and allied and trading with others) defending that fortunate patch of land, and expanding it where they could.

 

As far as we can tell, Rome (and several of the surrounding tribes) were originally dominated by the loose Etruscan federation of tribes to their north, and that when they broke free of that, the Etruscan political elite in the area gradually evolved into the Roman political class. But you are right - by the time Rome as we know it came to be a distinct political entity, it had already absorbed many of the neighbouring tribes and spread its political power into the surrounding mountains. These were not just pasture for shepherds, though. The land was already settled, and we know that crops and wine were grown in the Appenines from the earliest time. The via Flamina that Lawnmower Boy mentions was not built for long distance cattle drives (which never seemed to be a significant feature in Roman agriculture) but specifically by Gaius Flaminius to ship cheap grain and corn to Rome. Only later was it expanded to the east coast to facilitate trade from the Adriatic.

 

Cheers, Mark

 

Edit: and in a loop back to the original topic, the Romans conquered those mountainous areas using their original, greek-style army built mostly around close order foot who fought with long spear and shield. this was long before the days of the legion.

[Lucius]

I know, I know, all of this line of thinking is just so many doggies all meandering around the range..... but nevermind.

But as long as you keep Markdoc talking, you're serving a useful purpose.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary remarks that there are certainly less useful people to be found.

[Lawnmower Boy]

I'm amazed at how much time I wasted on this thread last week. But it's a new week, so I can waste more! (I have a justification here, in that I think that this puzzling episode of the Third Century Crisis may be better explained as a cattle drive gone wrong than as a barbarian invasion. In case anyone's interested. Sorry about linking to myself. The episode seems bizarrely obscue on the Worldwide Web.)

 

i) "The Romans started out as hill dwellers. . ." Uhm, yes, in the sense that the nucleus of the later Roman city is a settlement on the Palatine Hill, insofar as we can tell, archaeologically speaking, subject to recent work. No, in the sense that this is a reference (I apologise for being so disagreeable if it's not) to the Livy/Virgil picture of Rome's origins at Alba Longa.  Hill towns in general are not to be projected into the deep Italian past. Archaeology shows little sign that Latium's fundi(Plural of fundus? Me not know Latin!) of the uplands had nucleated into towns at the time that Rome's development overtook them and imposed a pattern of villa development. The replacement of villas as rural centres by towns is a medieval phenomena that has its roots in the immediate post-Roman "sub-Roman" era. I cannot do better than Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages as a jumping-off point for those interested in the period, although of course it is no longer cutting edge, and, who knows, might even have been completely supplanted and overturned by now! The Wikipedia formulation that the people of Latium "started out in the hills" and then moved down into the plains seeking better agricultural land will serve for describing how population growth coincided and interacted with the draining of low-lying land. I don't particularly want to get into the argument about whether the drainage was driven by population growth, or allowed it here, because the last thing this thread needs is a further hijacking around Malthusian versus non-Malthusian theories of growth in agricultural economies.

 

ii) "...And shepherds." This is stadial anthropology again: hunter-gatherers>shepherds>farmers>modern man! Google isn't delivering a "preview" of Horden and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History today (although it is showing all the torrents for some reason). So here's a brief book review.  As the very brief discussion of transhumant pastoralism in Latium following 264 in my handy edition makes clear, pastoralism is not an early stage of evolutionary development. In fact, it depends more heavily on the market than subsistence agriculture. Our authors may be going a bit far in the direction of speculation when they imply that it is the late Roman Republic's economic dynamism that is forcing ovicaprine production into the nooks and crannies of the Appennines, but let's take their authority as the latest word anyway. Sheep and goat production for the Roman market is ongoing and intensifying in the Late Republic. You may need an academia.edu membership to download this report, and I am being lazy in summarising only one, anyway, but the takeaway is that sheep and goats, and not pigs or cattle, represent the major source of the surprisingly large amount of meat consumed in the late Republic. Though the butchering remains strongly suggest that upper-class Romans mainly ate the better cuts of pork. 

 

iii) The demographic history of the late Republic is also very interesting, and currently up in the air. It does not make a great deal of sense (except in terms of the old "Ancients versus Moderns" debate of the late Seventeenth Century) to argue that the Italian population of the late Republic was higher than the medieval population. Not only do we have plenty of evidence that the Italian agricultural economy had become more productive, beginning, with respect to long distance vertical transhumance of equids and cattle, in precisely the sub-Roman period, but the Romans had hardly even begun to settle the bottom of the Po plain! If you like reading historians arguing about arguing, Walter Scheidel's introduction to the edited collection, Debating Roman Demography is available online in toto at Google Books. If you want to cut to the chase, Dr. Scheidel has, or used to have, a pdf up on the Intertubes somewhere summarising his chapter in Debating Roman Demography that you may or may not be able to get at from Google Books. It's moot, because the guys at Livescience have done an awesome job of boiling the essential debate over the population figures of the Augustan census reported in his gestae down to a paragraph.  

 

iv) It is, of course, impossible to argue that long distance livestock cattle drives played much of a role in the economic history of Rome. The taxation evidence (which is entangled in the history of Aurelian's new city walls) is only good for showing that some animals were so used, and the faunal evidence suggests that it was sheep and goats. The social history, on the other hand... Because it is unquestionable that there were livestock drives bringing large numbers of animals long distances to Rome. Our literary evidence for the Roman economy is frustratingly sparse, because it was written by and for the senatorial elite, and they didn't care about that stuff. 

 

But when it comes to stuff that they did care about, like organising games out of their own pocket as one of the liturgies of consular office, that's another matter entirely! We tend to think of the regular Roman sacred games exclusively in terms of gladiatorial contests, beast fights and chariot races, but they were actually scenes of votive offerings and feasting as well. Barbecue! Again, when we read of Senators spending enormous amounts to bring in animals for the pleasure of the Roman populace, the imagination goes to those beast fights. I'm not even going to guess what proportion of the money that one late senator complains that he has spent on throwing a games went to beef cattle for sacrifice/feasting as oppposed to beast fights, but I will post a link to this weird little essay. Aurochs and elk in the arena. Who knew?

 

v) Now: those itinerant gauchos. The claim that I want to make is that those Jugunthi of 264AD, who were encountered near Milan and Augsburg on either side of what seems to have been a winter quarters in the Alps, were precisely "itinerant gauchos." It will be noted by keen historical minds that 264AD is,  uhm, not "the Roman Republic." Not the "early" Republic (280BC), not the "middle" republic (105BC), not the "late" Republic (60BC). 

 

You'll notice that I'm using somewhat eclectic definitions of "early" Republic in particular. You will encounter, in readings on this subject, confident assertions about historical events in Roman republican history going back to 400BC. Fie on that, fie, I say! The sources will not support it! I demand that we see, in particular, the "Gallic invasion" of 400BC as non-history!

 

Well, actually, I'm perfectly fine with the idea that a guy named Brennus led an army of Sennones to sack Rome, and that the Sennones were a people of the ager Gallicus, hence "Gauls." That strikes me as legitimate popular history. Where I think we go wrong is in assuming that the "Gauls" who lived  up in the nooks and the crannies of the Appenines necessarily had anything to do with the "Celts" and "Gauls" of late Roman history. Deconstruct the lot, I say: Livy is writing an ancient history --of Brennus and of Marius-- for the purposes of his patron, the Emperor Augustus. 

 

The key points here are the Pyrrhan campaign, the Second Punic War, and Marius's army reforms.

 

In the former, a Roman citizen cavalry formed from the equestrian classes did a perfectly serviceable job, as Markdoc points out. Nothing wrong with the Roman cavalry here, in relation to that of Pyrrhus.

 

In the second, the Roman cavalry doesn't seem to have performed so well, although we can have a screaming argument about just how and why, and, indeed, over just how many of the 6000 "Roman" cavalry at the Battle of Cannae were actually "Italic allies," in the absence of information from our sources, and in the light of what we think we know of the demographic history of the early Republic. Just for the record, I'm all in favour of problematising every number we get from the Battle of Cannae. They may or may not be accurate, but they ought to be the subjects of research, and not data points from which to develop our arguments. Was the problem that the Roman cavalry was outnumbered? That it fought poorly? That it was light cavalry up against heavy? All valid beginnings for interesting speculation that really needs better sources than we have to be resolved --IMHO.

 

In the third, a petulant Marius, needing an army to "save Rome," and not being allowed to raise one by legitimate methods, decides to call up "slaves and gladiators, etc." That's a literary topoi, that is. It means that Marius isn't being allowed to perform a classic citizen call-up, and responds by taking recruits from outside the census classifications. There's a whole lot of questions about Roman politics embedded in this conversation. The one takeaway that I want to extract is that from here on in, the cavalry that serves the Roman armies is looking "mercenary," that is, it is being recruited from walk-ins with the relevant equestrian skills. Gauchos? Gallic/Germanic chieftains and their retinues? Probably both --I'm seeing the social boundaries here as fluid, and poor young horsemen as negotiating this transition. (Unless horses were herding themselves andn breaking themselves, I decline to believe that there were no young working horsemen, although I am willing to accept that there weren't many.)

 

So what happened in the stages between 280, 220, and 105 BC? I say, put the Italian countryside into flux, admit that we don't know what we don't know. By all means, exclude the possibility of systematic long-distance movements of livestock between Rome and marginal pastures. That certainly came later. But when a Senator wanted to offer a hecatomb of spotless oxen to Jupiter-the-Ambitious-Politician, they had to be got to Rome somehow. There is no particular reason not to think that they were being raised in pastures around Bologna, and were driven to Rome by people called "Gauls," of the tribe of the Boii. It's what the  city name means! As to whether such young men fought with the equites at Asculum, well, if you have a highly idealised vision of the early Republic, then there is no question that the equites were the wealthiest citizens of Rome doing their patriotic duty. "Then hew down the bridge, Sir Consul/With all the speed ye may/While I with two others beside me/Will hold the foe at bay."

 

I memorised huge swathes of that poem once. I'm a lot more cynical now.

[Markdoc]

I think we can sum this up by simply pointing out this bit:

 

You write: "Because it is unquestionable that there were livestock drives bringing large numbers of animals long distances to Rome. Our literary evidence for the Roman economy is frustratingly sparse, because it was written by and for the senatorial elite, and they didn't care about that stuff."

 

It's unquestionable ... because there's no evidence that it ever happened? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

 

Yes, the texts we have left on the Roman pastural economy were mostly written by patricians ... but not only for other patricians. They survived because they were best-sellers in their day, being widely read outside the patrician class. And really, they discuss droving of sheep, goats, cattle pigs and horses in detail. They discuss the uses and importance of manure, where to place drinking troughs, different kinds of pasturage. They discuss beekeeping, how to preserve herbs, cures for colic, how to ensure good plowing, how to select the best working dogs, etc, etc. There are, in all about 70 books on the topic. And you somehow feel that all these books, written by different people over a period of several centuries discuss every aspect of farming ... except - inexplicably - long distance cattle droving. So they cared about everything else, except this one thing? Somehow I doubt it.

 

Fortunately, though, we don't have to rely only on text: the Mediterranean world is still dotted with old cattle paths, some of them very clearly dating back to the classical era (and dubiously, dating much further back). In Spain, where I have already noted that long distance animal drives did occur (and were noted in Roman texts) the paths (called Canada, with a tilde over the n) still exist, though most of them are now built over. As an aside, I've hiked on the canada in Spain: there are still hundreds of kilometers of the old (much larger) network extant. Many of them ran for hundreds of kilometers (the longest I know of is over 800 km) and they have left rich traces on the countryside, in local laws and in the existence of folk stories and organisations such as the Meste. In Italy, none of these things exist. Oh, to be sure there are droving paths (called Tratturo) that date back to at least roman times. But they are short (typically 20-30 kilometers, though a few are longer) and (unlike in Spain) don't form networks. They usually run directly from old settlements in valleys and on the coast into the hills. None rival (or even resemble) the Spanish canada very much. For a start not only are they shorter, but much smaller, being built primarily to take sheep and goats, not cattle. Likewise all the other traces that drover culture left in the Spanish culture are entirely absent in Italy, where everything agricultural - including droving - appears to have been oriented about urban centres (villages or towns).

 

Indeed, your own links argue against you - the one you linked to here, on archaeological food, remains specifically notes that cattle was a small minority of the meat eaten and that most of it appears to have come from older, well-used animals (ie: probably old draft animals no longer useful for work, or old dairy cattle no longer productive for milk). Most of it was sheep or goats, with pork preferred in the richer quarters. That matches with what I have already posted above and exactly contradicts the idea of cattle droving as a significant activity.

 

So in this case "unquestionable" is probably best translated as "absolutely no evidence exists to support and quite a lot to contradict".

 

cheers, Mark

 

Edit - and on the topic of Roman census' ... With regard to Roman population, the argument has swirled because the numbers changed so dramatically. Note these numbers are for the census population (males eligible to vote and pay tax: not women, children, slaves or proletariat) Through the third and second centuries BCE, the numbers remained around 300,000 but move up or down, presumably due to military attrition and/or intermittent variation in registration quality or coverage.  Reported numbers increased in the following century, to 463,000 in 86/5 BCE, 900,000 or 910,000 in 70/69 BCE, consistent with a growing population (and also consistent with archeological evidence showing a sudden increase in urban construction), but then took a sudden leap to 4,063,000 in 28 BCE, followed by a slightly rising trend of 4,233,000 in 8 BCE, 4,937,000 in 14 CE, and 5,984,072 in 47 CE.

 

So the argument goes, that the increase from around 900,000 in 70 BCE to over 4 million in 28 BCE cannot be real. Biologically speaking it is possible … but it’s highly, highly, unlikely. So much so that nobody really believes it. Julis Beloch argued that the census must have changed from recording the census population (Voting males) to all citizens. The trouble with this interpretation is that there’s no evidence at all to support it and quite a lot to argue against it. So the “low estimate” of Roman population has fallen out of favour. Consensus these days is that the changes made by the early empire (for the first time it became possible to register by post, and for the first time local census takers were systematically deployed) probably led to a much more accurate count: we know from contemporary complaints that earlier censuses were plagued by the fact that many men did not turn up to register and the state lacked the resources to track them down. It’s hardly a surprise, given that registering made you subject to both conscription and taxation that people were loathe to do it voluntarily and that numbers increased once a system was put in place (backed by military force) to ensure compliance. Given all that, arguments these days tend to centre on whether the population was as low as 11-12 million (in total) or as high as 18-22 million. We’re unlikely to ever know, but the odds are good that it lies somewhere at the lower end of those estimate: the consensus estimate of 112-12 million is probably reasonable given that population in medieval Italy reached about that level pre-Black Death and that was the  point where the larger Italian cities (with the notable exception of Rome itself) started to fill up or exceed their old roman boundary walls.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Lawnmower Boy]

Since I seem to be pissing away another good writing morning on procrastination and distractions, I'll keep this brief. We know from Dio Cassio that there was a 3--5% customs tax levied on goods moved across Roman provincial boundaries. With specific reference to the problem of Aurelian's Roman walls and their odd (or, alternatively, quite intentional) mapping onto the Roman customs boundary, R. E. A. Palmer went looking, in a 1980 article, for evidence for the collection of those taxes on goods. (JSTOR link here. I think. It may come up with some kind of denial of service. Here, have a copy-pasted bibliographic link: 

 

Customs on Market Goods Imported into the City of Rome

R. E. A. Palmer

Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome

Vol. 36, The Seaborne Commerce of Ancient Rome: Studies in Archaeology and History (1980), pp. 217-233 )

 

Palmer concluded that a tax on livestock, the foricularum, was levied by stopping animals in pens at boundaries on major highways leading into the city of Rome, pens (and taxes) which probably date to Augustus' censorships, at least. The existence of such pens in the vicinity of Rome is at the moment based on literary evidence. However, the argument that frontier fortifications, notably a line in the interior of North Africa, but even famous works such as Hadrian's Walls, were about "customs and passport control," says Eric Birley, quoted by David Breeze, 202. This then calls our attention to the curious works around Aquileia,*& a crucial control point on the northeastern routes out of Italy, perhaps with a pre-Roman history as the centre through which "Hallstatt" trade reached Italy. (For extra craziness, imagine it as lying on the road by which Etruscan reached Tuscany, even though to do so we have to throw out our one concrete piece of evidence that Etruscan had to reach Italy at all, which says that it sprung from a maritime colony.) 

 

That digression aside, the system of works around Aquiliea includes enclosures that seem to conform to the needs of a taxing pen. I'm going to throw you here to the Petrokovits article, because it has the virtue of being online, although a quick scan didn't turn up anything in Friulia. Those interested in proving that I'm blowing smoke out of my butt (which in fairness should include me, of course), might want to check out Stephen Johnson's trainspotter's guide to Roman military fortifications, a 32 year-old book from an obscure publisher that isn't on the Internet because reasons, although Bernie Bachrach's book about Charlemagine's campaigns in the area and their use of late Roman fortifications is.  Fortunately, Bachrach is a great discussion of the Roman roads over the low passes of the eastern Alps into Friulia and their early Medievial strategic significance. 

 

So, in summary, a customs tax seems to have been levied on Roman frontiers, precisely to extract tax revenues from the profits of pastoral peoples, at the provincial boundaries of Italy, where presumably barriers at the foot of Alpine passes indicates trans-Alpine (long distance enough by my reckoning) livestock drives, and at the customs barrier of Rome, which latter, at least, date to the late Republic at least. 

 

As for the "high" estimate of late Republican Roman population, I can only urge the closest attention to Scheidel's contribution to Debating Roman Demography.

 

*Works, for example, like this.

&Also see.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Aha! The Scheidel pdf. 

 

Brief summary: the population of Roman Italy might have been 8 million, or 20. Many very good scholars have argued either side of the case. Here is all the arguments ever. As you can see, you can go either way. More work is needed, because this is a very important subject to study. (It was 8.)

[Markdoc]

Aha! The Scheidel pdf. 

 

Brief summary: the population of Roman Italy might have been 8 million, or 20. Many very good scholars have argued either side of the case. Here is all the arguments ever. As you can see, you can go either way. More work is needed, because this is a very important subject to study. (It was 8.)

 

I'm familiar with Scheidel - indeed, most of my argument upthread is drawn from his work. As he notes, neither the lowest estimate of 8 million or the high estimate of 20 million are remotely plausible and we are more or less forced to assume a figure in the middle: though exactly where it really lay, we don't know. 11-12 million seems to be the most popularly accepted figure today, but of course we're never going to be certain. More work probably is not going to make the figure more precise because mostly it's just speculation based on what we already know. Without new data or some new insight, this is probably as far as we go.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Since I seem to be pissing away another good writing morning on procrastination and distractions, I'll keep this brief. We know from Dio Cassio that there was a 3--5% customs tax levied on goods moved across Roman provincial boundaries. With specific reference to the problem of Aurelian's Roman walls and their odd (or, alternatively, quite intentional) mapping onto the Roman customs boundary, R. E. A. Palmer went looking, in a 1980 article, for evidence for the collection of those taxes on goods. (JSTOR link here. I think. It may come up with some kind of denial of service. Here, have a copy-pasted bibliographic link: 

 

Fortunately, I have a JSTOR account, so having read the piece, I can safely say it offers no support at all for your argument. It discusses the possible existence of toll gates around Rome, and mentions pens for cattle directly around Rome, which he suggests may have been used for tax purposes for import into the city or alternatively, for gathering animals for slaughter and distribution in Rome. Nothing at all in the article suggests long distance droving. Indeed, he blows your argument that we can look at the existence of toll gates as evidence of droving, completely apart by noting that live animals were not subject to the ansarium (ie: the tax of foodstuffs and drink).

 

The other links discuss tax posts at provincial borders, all of which I think most people studying Roman culture would find noncontroversial. None of the links you posted offer the slightest support for the idea that Italy was host to long distance animal droving, still less a secret, but substantial droving culture that mysteriously vanished leaving behind neither literary nor physical evidence. Really, the Romans left us detailed instructions about home and commercial husbandry, they left us notes and comments about subjects as obscure as taxes on different grades of wine, discussions of different levies on goods imported to Italy and actually into the cities - but we are expected to believe that they were entirely silent about a commercial/ cultural aspect of the whole food supply system that would have had a dramatic and obvious effect on virtually every aspect of the economy ... and further, that they made extensive use of troops recruited from this secret, hidden culture in direct contradiction of every contemporary text describing the military. 

 

For some odd reason, I find this line of argument oddly unconvincing. I suspect the reason you can't find any evidence to support the idea is not because something something, but because it doesn't exist. Actually, to be honest, I don't suspect that, I know it. Had there been any evidence at all, it would have been discussed to death. I have (I kid you not) read discussions about Roman tax policy on urine!

More links that offer no support for your argument are not going to move the dial on this.

 

I do thank you for the Petrokovits article, though: I hadn't read that. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with trade, still less trade in animals, but it's a really nice summary of the change of late Roman fortifications toward sustained independant defence with some great illustrations (as an aside for those not up on the subject, Roman fortifications underwent a ground change in the late empire that laid the foundations for later European castle-building).

 

cheers, Mark

[Lucius]

Very informative, and absolutely epic thread drift.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

But the palindromedary reminds me I need to go meet friends for supper.

[Markdoc]

People often think that economic history is dull - but it's not*. If you don't understand the economics of a culture or an era, odds are good you'll have a very skewed if not downright wrong understanding of why things happened, how things happened, and how the people actually viewed them. There's a lot more than direct economics behind most people's actions, but almost everyone's actions are affected by economics, even when the actions in question are apparently unrelated. Romeo and Juliet is a story about love, right? But according to the original story, the Montagues and Capulets are fighting over privileges (ie: status, and mostly - money). Without that money-driven conflict, you'd have a boring story about two people who meet at a party and get married.

 

If we loop back to an earlier part of the thread, Pyrrhus hoped Cathage would aid him in his war against Rome. They didn't, (in fact they fought - more or less - on Rome's side) because they had their eyes set on gaining the trade routes and ports of Sicily and the Sicilian Greek cities called in Pyrrhus to help defend them. Pyrrhus broke off his Roman war to attack the Carthaginians and after defeating them proposed to invade and subdue Carthage. He didn't, because the Greek cities of Sicily felt it would be too expensive and refused to pay for an expedition. Bad move. When Pyrrhus went home to Greece, he predicted (accurately) that the Romans and Carthaginians would be at each other's throats over the trade rights and 12 years later, they were. Heck the whole war started as a dispute over trade rights between the Romans and the Greek colony of Tarentum in Italy. 

 

Pyrrhus was able to beat all-comers in his Italian/Sicilian war, even though he was usually outnumbered, in part because he was commanding a professional army made up (mostly) of  full-time soldiers. It's also what made him unable to sustain the fight long-term: professional soldiers are expensive, and take time to replace. Once he realised that he was in for the long haul against Rome, with no immediate prospect of a big payoff, he started negotiating for peace. Epirus was not big enough economically to sustain a large army in foreign territory. As I commented earlier on about the phalanx, it withered away in the Hellenistic world because the fragmentation and turmoil of the post-Alexander successor states meant that fewer and fewer of the little Hellenistic kingdoms could actually afford to field a professional phalanx - and citizen soldiers just didn't cut it. As I noted, it then reappeared in Europe centuries later at precisely the time that professional mercenary companies and professional standing armies started to become prominent.

 

In the end, it's all about the benjamins.

 

cheers, Mark

 

* one of my favourite populist history authors starts one chapter with "Now let's dive into the thrilling topic of Umayyid tax policy!"

[Lawnmower Boy]

If anyone's interested in where this thread drift/hijack is going, it is going to Tuesday, my next library day. That said, some points at the head.

 

i) Did the Romans tax livestock movements? 

 

Ans: We don't know, but we think so. The tax would be the foricularum, it would be levied along the routes (perhaps a strong interpretation of the traditional customs barrier on the Via Flaminia a few miles from  Rome, but we'll go with that now, and there is more evidence to be considered), but payment might be deferred at interest. This is the argument of R. E. Palmer, and, of course, falls under the skeptic's scrutiny for lacking the kind of definitive statement of its purpose that we have for the auricularum and the tax on urine. (Which strikes one as a Roman author amusing hiimself, as important an industrial product as urine was.) 

 

ii) Did they have customs dues for livestock? A slightly different question than above, in that it pushes the resolution to the state frontiers (for now). 

 

Ans: A tentative yes, in that we have tariffs for Eastern Desert stations where toll rates for animals are given. It's in interpreting the spirit of this, and its application to the rest of the Empire, where skepticism has its proper place. The literature has jumped from this evidence to a full-throated interpretation of the Fosstum Africae as a customs-levying barrier in the interior of Roman North Africa.

 

iii) Does this idea of customs/tariff/excise stations extend into the Empire? 

 

Answer: there are reasons to suspect that it does. First, we have definitive information that customs dues were levied at the boundaries of provinces. The precise mechanism here would be, according to Jerome France, the Quadrigesima Galliarum. In one case specifically cited by France, the customs were levied along a route, notably along the routes over the Alps between Germany and Italy. The question of what was taxed at these state-sanctioned highway robbery sites remains open for the moment. 

 

iv) Was livestock from outside the city sold at Rome? 

 

Ans: yes, at the Forum Boarium. It remains, however, to be shown that the cattle were brought any great distance. 

 

v) Is there a reason to be all speculative like this?

 

Ans: Yes, the Economics, attributed in antiquity to Aristotle, describes the tax regimes of various kinds of ancient states. Pseudo-Aristotle identifies the "satrapal state" as deriving its revenues from:  "land, from peculiar products, from merchandise, from taxes, from cattle, from all other resources." Here is an extended conversation about which allusively-discussed Seleucid taxes might have been levied on cattle, which on pasture. Seleucia is not Rome, but the notion of Rome as a "satrapal" state that for some reason opted not to levy excise taxes on livestock is beginning to get to the point where the onus on the skeptic is to prove the negative.

 

vi) Have we got to the point where we can argue that, in the Roman imperial period, a livestock tax was levied at Aquiliea and then collected upon sale at Rome? That would be an impressive example of state organisation?

 

Ans: We have not. It remains an attractive speculation.

 

vii) Have we got to the point where we can argue that such a hypothetical system is descended from one which, in earlier ages, levied a tax on cattle from Bologna a few miles from Rome at a customs barrier on the Via Flaminia in the Third Century BCE?

 

Ans: We have not. It remains an attractive speculation. 

 

See you all next Wednesday!

[Markdoc]

Excellent post. We can sum up thusly.

Animals taxed at the borders of the empire? Yes, good evidence for that.

Animals penned and sold just outside Rome's city limits? Definitely. There's textual and archeological evidence. Taxed there? Actually, probably not, according to Palmer and others. At the very least there's no evidence for that, and some textual evidence against. The Forum Boarium likely served as a place to hold animals for slaughter, since we know that driving animals in the city and commercial slaughter inside city limits were both heavily restricted, for obvious reasons.

Evidence for long distance droving inside Italy? So, far, zero.

 

But this discussion has helped firm up the evidence!

 

Cheers, Mark

[Narf the Mouse]

...Isn't this thread about fighting with a spear and shield?

[L. Marcus]

It was, once.

[Ndreare]

...Isn't this thread about fighting with a spear and shield?

No this thread is about nerd rage. I feel like I learned something about real life in this thread, but nothing at all about gaming.

I think the spear and shield Q was answered in the first five responses with MarcDoc providing a nice was of handling it.

Then a comment about hearding became a full on debate (rather one sided) about Roman tax policy.

I am sure whoever the OP is they have long abandoned spears (perhaps Hero if this was their first time) for being too provocative.

[Lucius]

No this thread is about nerd rage. I feel like I learned something about real life in this thread, but nothing at all about gaming.

Really? What did you learn about life?

 

I think the spear and shield Q was answered in the first five responses with MarcDoc providing a nice was of handling it.

Then a comment about herding became a full on debate (rather one sided) about Roman tax policy.

I am sure whoever the OP is they have long abandoned spears (perhaps Hero if this was their first time) for being too provocative.

bigdamhero, who started the thread, has been around for ten years. Imaginary ancient Roman cowboys aside, this wasn't his first rodeo.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says it's worth listening to Lawnmower Boy describe imaginary ancient Roman cowboy shepherds fight imaginary dinosaur riding ancient Aztec robots if it keeps Markdoc talking.

[Ndreare]

From Marc's post there is a lot to learn.

 

PS: I did not look to see who the OP was, but I still hold to this being a complete derail, with a whole new rail built perpendicular to the first.