History is a mix of contingency and inevitability. It is not coincidental that human societies tended to aggregate in political size and grow in institutional scale and elaborate a more complex ideology. The early Ottoman Empire was quantitatively different than the Hittite Empire in all these things, and eventually, quantity has a quality of its own.

But there is an element of contingency as well. It is plausible that if Phillip of Macedon had not been assassinated the Persian Empire would have remained intact longer, with the Macedonians winning some victories to acquire extra territory and booty. The ascendency of Greek culture and language in the eastern Mediterranean may never have marginalized Aramaic as the lingua franca in the way that it did.

Shifting back to inevitability, I am now convinced that the quasi-animistic religion of the numina which was quite widespread in early Imperial Rome was not sustainable as the cult of a multi-ethnic polity. Something was going to emerge as a “new religion” which would serve as a stable religious matrix for the Roman system. There were various experiments and false starts. Vespasian brought back the cult of Isis as a personal devotee in the 1st century. In the early and late 3rd century there was an attempt to center the cult of Sol Invictus at the heart of the Roman pantheon. Diocletian, a traditionalist, set this aside during his reign.

More famously, Diocletian persecuted the Christians. Though there have been many academic debates on the magnitude of the Christian persecutions, it seems there is a consensus at that the last one under Diocletian was serious, though perhaps less eliminationist in intent than some chroniclers have depicted. The next step is well known. Constantine the Great first tolerated, and then promoted, Christianity as the religion of the Imperial court. Unlike Europe during the Westphalian period and down to the modern era, there was no “official religion” of a given polity, but a bundle of subsidies and favors from on high. Roughly, the period between 325 and 400 saw the decline of public elite paganism, the religions not Christianity, as the Roman elite converted to the new religion, and the Roman state shifted subsidies and supports from the old cults to the new.

The victory and centrality of religion with the general outlines of Christianity in broad features seems likely, though in its specific details there is a great deal of contingency. Early Christians exhibited social cohesion and were concentrated in cities. They could be instruments of state power through their parallel socio-political network across the Empire. The Christian religion presented a coherent and accessible ethos to the population and developed a sophisticated philosophy to appeal to the intelligentsia. It was functionally complex.

Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD details the assimilation of Christianity into elite Roman society, and how the new religion was transformed by its new adherents, as well as how the religion transformed them. The point here though is that the relationship of Christianity to the Roman elite between 325 and 500 was dynamic and bidirectional. A Christian Church led by men of modest, though not abject, background, was transformed into an institution captured by the old nobility. Meanwhile, the Christian Church’s institutional independence was such that noblewomen could look to it as an ally in escaping the conventions of early and obligate motherhood.

The Final Pagan Generation and The Last Pagans of Rome outline how the elite transformed itself. Ideological Roman Catholics might argue that the rational genius of Christianity attracted the Roman nobility, while Marxist materialists view the conversion as one guided by pure self-interest. But human motives are more complex and self-justifying than that. Both books agree that some Roman nobles converted to Christianity out of sincerity, but both make it clear that a large number converted over time as it became first acceptable, then useful, and finally, necessary. Many scholars argue that the poet Ausonius converted to Christianity mostly because he saw that that was the direction of the world as it was. It was personally useful, but Ausonius seems to have never been particularly devout or plausible in his sincerity.

We know some of Ausonius’ thinking because his correspondence has been preserved. But what of the average Roman noble? It seems likely that most of them were conventionally religious, and initially conventionally pagan. The reaction of pagans and non-Christians to the religion are strikingly similar across time and place (e.g., Romans and Chinese both accused Christians of cannibalism due to the transubstantiation). But over time the new religion won more converts, either sincere or self-interested, and laggards would be noticed. One can imagine insincere converts who in their hearts remained pagan going through the motations. But over the decades the whole nobility converted to the new religion, and so over the decades, it took “root in their heart” in a more thorough way. The psychological change may have been gradual and imperceptible to them. Even if a deep Christian belief never takes root, a deep Christian identity may do so.

Obviously this changes in the generation of the children. Born as Christians, paganism for them is a shadowy religion that wafts down vaguely and in a blur from their familial heritage. For them their identity is undivided. Born Christians, in a world of Christians, their thoughts are unperturbed by heresy.

The social element in religious conversion is well known. The Mormon Church* obtains most converts not through its missionaries, but through friendship connections. A non-Mormon family sees and gets to know a functional Mormon family, and aspires to that sort of bourgeois happiness and contentment. One thing I have noticed among some people who are non-Mormons in a Mormon matrix (I grew up around many Mormons) is that they begin internalizing the views and beliefs of the majority without doing so consciously. The pagans of the Roman aristocracy may have undergone a nominal conversion, but surrounded by more and more devout Christians, it is inevitable that the contempt they may have toward the new religion turns into easy acceptance and even belief.

Christianity “took” in the West. The nominal Christians of the early generations became self-consciously pious in later generations, and later Europeans took their Christian identity for granted. Not all belief systems are like this. Some are quite thin. Their staying power is ephemeral. But the dynamics of the initial conversion phase is probably general.

* I know they don’t call themselves that anymore.

The paper is out, Ancient Rome: A genetic crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean:

Ancient Rome was the capital of an empire of ~70 million inhabitants, but little is known about the genetics of ancient Romans. Here we present 127 genomes from 29 archaeological sites in and around Rome, spanning the past 12,000 years. We observe two major prehistoric ancestry transitions: one with the introduction of farming and another prior to the Iron Age. By the founding of Rome, the genetic composition of the region approximated that of modern Mediterranean populations. During the Imperial period, Rome’s population received net immigration from the Near East, followed by an increase in genetic contributions from Europe. These ancestry shifts mirrored the geopolitical affiliations of Rome and were accompanied by marked interindividual diversity, reflecting gene flow from across the Mediterranean, Europe, and North Africa.

If you don’t have access to the paper, the supplements are very good, with lots of visualizations.

The figure above summarizes the main clear dynamic:  the period of cultural and genetic cosmopolitanism of the Imperial period turned out to be ephemeral. The authors express a bit of surprise that the cosmopolitanism of Roman genetics during the Imperial period seems to manifest itself in an ‘eastward’ shift, and hypothesize that this is due to the greater population density of the eastern provinces.

This is almost certainly true.

The western focus of the early Roman Empire was somewhat at odds with the reality that the wealthiest and most populous domains were located in the eastern Mediterranean. The shocks of the 3rd-century resulted in an eastward orientation because that’s where the largest cities and tax base were. The Greek-speaking east, in particular, continued to provide the intelligentsia even throughout the Classical period, and due to the wealth of eastern cities, it is plausible that the mercantile elite of the capital often had eastern roots. The prevalence of Greek inscriptions in burials also is strongly indicative of eastern people in the capital.

That’s all to be expected. But what happened after the fall of Rome? The evidence above shows a western and northern shift. Though the proximal populations that contributed to this shift are somewhat different, overall the distal ancient components (e.g., “Neolithic”) return to frequencies that are closer to Iron Age Latium than the Roman Imperial phase. How did this happen?

Ancient DNA is a great window into the past, but it needs to be synthesized with an understanding of historical and anthropological processes. The Rome of the 400s was still a massive city, only marginally off its imperial peak in terms of population. But the Rome of 600 A.D. was a city filled with emptiness. What happened? A combination of the wars of the 6th-century, which are recorded to have depopulated much of Italy, and the overall decentering of Rome from the Mediterranean system after the ending of the Western Empire, probably resulted in the inevitable contraction of the Eternal City.

Of course, Rome grew again over the centuries. But the new Romans were not the same Romans as those of the Roman Empire, who left few descendants. In addition to far off cosmopolitans, the bulk of the population was probably derived from northern Lazio and southern Tuscany. Rural people whose genetic makeup resembled the Iron Age Italians from whom they descended.

This answers the question that people have been asking for decades: are modern Romans descended from the people of Republican Rome or Greeks and Syrians who transformed themselves into Romans? The answer is neither. Modern Romans descend from Italian peasants, who were less impacted by the predations of the Goths and Byzantines, and had higher fertility than urban dwellers even in peaceful times.

Which brings me to a second paper in the same issue of Science, The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation:

There is substantial variation in psychological attributes across cultures. Schulz et al. examined whether the spread of Catholicism in Europe generated much of this variation (see the Perspective by Gelfand). In particular, they focus on how the Church broke down extended kin-based institutions and encouraged a nuclear family structure. To do this, the authors developed measures of historical Church exposure and kin-based institutions across populations. These measures accounted for individual differences in 20 psychological outcomes collected in prior studies.

The results are not that surprising, though the statistical rigor of the paper is impressive. I first encountered the idea about the instrumental role of the Western Church in imposing a new family order in Western Europe in Adam Bellow’s In Praise of Nepotism (others may have heard about this via HBD Chick). Bellow offers a very simple explanation: the early Roman Catholic Church used its ideological power to prevent the emergence of powerful lineage groups. More concretely, limiting marriage prospects of elite lineages increased the probability that properties of wealthy families would be given to the Church as a gift.

In some ways, this paper has nothing to do with the first. But note that the period when the Western Church began to transform the familial structure of Western Europe is at the end of the Roman Empire. Between the 6th and 9th centuries the Roman Church was a particularly cosmopolitan institution in a rapidly barbarizing Western Europe. In the 7th and early 8th century, there were a series of ethnically Syrian Popes, to give one example. As the post-Roman world in the West began to devolve into localism, the Western Church remained international. Global.

Consider then this Late Roman institution, the Western Church, a locus of urbane cosmopolitanism reflecting the civilian values of the ancient Roman aristocracy, surrounded by a rising tide of unlettered barbarism in the form of marginally Christianized Lombards and their ilk. This cultural tension during these centuries of Late Antiquity may lay at the root of the ideological program promoted by the Western Church against the ascendent barbarian elites which had inherited the mantle of Rome.

Finally, a map within this paper showing the role of kinship in modern societies illustrates a striking pattern:

In Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels he asserts that Southeast Asia, like Europe, is part of a “protected zone” against the predations of the steppe. As such, it retained stability and continuity which allowed for the emergence of modern nation-states. Notice that Theravada Southeast Asia has a low kinship index, just like Europe (Vietnam, like China, has a high kinship index probably because of Confucianism’s focus on family as the atomic unit of society). Japan, also part of the “protected zone”, has a low kinship index.

It strikes me that exploring the role of institutions and historical contingency in these regions in decreasing the importance of familialism might be something that needs to be done. With that being said, the fact that the Western Church inherited Greco-Roman aversion to polygamy and innovated its own aversion to consanguinity resulted in a very unique familial configuration in Western Europe. Monogamous. Deemphasizing the extended kinship group.

We live in a time when some people would assert that “Western civilization” is a racist term. But it seems to me that these tendencies within Western civilization are highly correlated with flourishing and innovative societies.

The plot at the top is from a Peter Turchin post, History Is Now a Quantitative Science. Peter has been on this for more than ten years now. I’ve long been broadly sympathetic, but of late it’s been nice to see his formal and data-intensive approach take hold and make some waves. Using raw data from a PNAS paper on the concentration of lead in Greenland ice caps one can illustrate the theory of secular cycles, as the western edge of the oikoumene went through periods of rise and fall. I don’t say specifically Rome because as Peter observes the first rise probably had more to do with Carthage than Rome, and the last recovery was particular mild probably because its focus was on the eastern Mediterranean, rather than the west.

As readers of this weblog know this lead data is not entirely new. I remember stumbling on it in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. It’s just more fine-grained and detailed than what came before. This sort of result definitively convinced me in a flash that the “fall of Rome” was neither fiction nor propaganda, but a true material event.

And yet the materiality is important. Like Song China, the Augustan and Antonine periods were characterized by a phase of intensive coordinated economic activity and productive output that one can’t deny. It’s right there in the material record. But from the perspective of a Christian or a Muslim, the collapse of the power of the Roman state coincided with the rise to power of the most important development in human history: the cultural dominance of singular religious visions.

The point being that when we say that “Rome fell,” it hides within it assumptions of value and importance. History is not fiction and can be understood in all its reality, but it is always critical to expose your assumptions and gain an understanding of the common ground shared between individuals whose viewpoints may differ.

I chose a fortuitous time to read Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. This is a great book, and a nice compliment to Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Where Ward-Perkins attempts to convince you that Rome did indeed fall, and that that fall mattered, Harper takes it as a given that you accept this position. Rather, he tries to show you in The Fate of Rome that a series of contingent and necessary causal factors set the Roman system up for its fall. The fall of Rome is not just an idea, but a material event that was given a strong push by material factors.

As the The Fate of Rome was published in the fall of 2017, so it was written well before recent work which highlights both the nature and role of steppe barbarians in triggering the changes which we dramatically term the “fall of Rome” and the “barbarian migrations.” A few months ago I wrote about a paper which reported that post-Hunnic people of the Balkans were genetically different from typical Europeans in that they exhibited some East Asian admixture. Harper does assume that the Huns were barbarians whose ultimate provenance was somewhere in the region of modern Mongolia, but emphasizes that their peregrinations transformed them.

As so it did. A new paper in Nature, 137 ancient human genomes from across the Eurasian steppes, nails the overall dynamics. As illustrated in the figure above the early steppe was dominated by peoples of a West Eurasian provenance, while the latter steppe shifted toward a more East Asian shifted population.

These early groups go by various names. But the Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians have origins on the Pontic steppe. Flourishing in the first millennium before Christ, I should precisely label them “Iranian,” but that might mislead readers a bit since some of these groups were never resident within Iran. The Scythians were a presence across a huge zone of Inner Asia and were a force in Eastern Europe, West Asia, South Asia, and in Eastern Asia. Likely emerging out of the Andronovo culture, genetically the results from the paper confirm early work that Scythians mixed with the local substrate where they went. In this way, they prefigure later steppe populations. Being a nomad was a lifestyle, the genetic correlates to some extent an accident.

In The Fate of Rome  the Huns have a role to play as a push for the migration of Goths into the Roman Empire, which eventually leads to their rebellion and a collapse in both the prestige and military manpower of the Roman state. The genetic evidence above and elsewhere is strongly indicative of the likelihood that the Huns were originally part of the Xiongnu confederacy. As they moved west they mixed with post-Scythian and other Iranian and Siberian elements, and presumably by the time they arrived on European frontier of Rome they had picked up some Germanic and proto-Slavic ancestry. In 137 ancient human genomes from across the Eurasian steppes the authors also report that the East Asian gene flow was somewhat “male-mediated” in the later steppe. Similarly, earlier work on proto-Iranian peoples in the Altai region is strongly suggestive of male-mediation in West Eurasian gene flow.

The obligate and exclusive Eurasian nomad lifestyle was one dominated by men, though as one can see the importance of Genghis Khan’s wives and daughters women maintained independence as well.

For whatever reason, full-blown nomadism only became a feature of the landscape north of what became China in the last few centuries before Christ. The mobile and militarized nomadic lifestyle that emerged in western Eurasia in the years around 1000 BC seem to have taken five centuries to penetrate the far eastern fringes. Until the crushing of the Dzhungar’s by the Manchus in the 18th century, 2,000 years later, the dynamic between nomad and settled was a defining feature of Chinese statecraft and political culture. And, it was also a major feature of nomad culture, because the wealthy Chinese state was an almost irresistible attraction to steppe elites as a source of plunder and tribute.

But human action is not the only relevant parameter in human history.  The Fate of Rome  is fundamentally a work of history, but it also takes ecology and evolution seriously. In fact, it foregrounds them. Kyle Harper makes the argument that the expansionary phase of the Roman Empire was not necessarily coincidental, or at least it was lucky indeed because there was a climatic optimum, similar to the one which preceded the demographic expansion of medieval Europe. In contrast, in the 6th century, the world went through some of the coldest years in the Holocene because of a combination of fluctuations in solar radiation and volcanic explosions. I assume that the likelihood of the latter is Poisson distributed, so the combination of decreased radiation and several successive volcanic events can be chalked up to randomness. But its consequences were not random at all.

The climatic changes can have demographic and social consequences obviously. Desperate armed pastoralists can overwhelm states, and change the course of history, just as peasants can rebel from taxes and subordination. And, pastoralists can also bring Yerisina pestis, the plague. Climate is an abiotic pressure which is to some extent an exogeneous shock which occurs randomly, and does not react to human feedbac k.* Disease though is a biotic pressure, and though it may relate to abiotic forces, human interaction and agency matter quite a bit.

The Fate of Rome clearly hinges on abiotic factors as initial drivers: a good harvest is good for the state. But the biotic factors, disease, are partly under the control of the state. The Romans did not have germ theory, and were under constant stress due to the high pathogen load, especially of the cities. Harper presents the evidence of high mortality within Roman society well. Because of the endemic ubiquity of disease even elites were impacted by it. But Rome was not just affected by endemic ailments, it was subject to pandemics and plagues. Three loom large in  The Fate of Rome:

• The Antonine Plague, which ended the expansionary phase of the High Empire in the middle to late 2nd century.
• The Plague of Cyprian of the middle 3rd century which ushered in a period of state collapse.
• And finally, the Justinian Plague which marked the end of Late Antiquity and the beginning of the “Dark Ages.”

One of the major insights that Kyle Harper reiterates is that these plagues, these pandemics, are a feature/bug of the Roman imperial system. They are not just the consequence of simply settled agricultural society. As described in books such as Pandora’s Seed, agriculture and settled society transformed the lifestyles of human groups, and many diseases which were rare in hunter-gatherer populations probably became common among farmers. But The Fate of Rome the author argues that pandemics were a novel outcome of complex imperial state-systems with long-distance trade-networks. Small-scale pre-state Neolithic chiefdoms did not have the scale and interconnections to foster plague.

Mass pandemics of smallpox, plague, and influenza are then aspects of civilized life, not, settled agricultural life. This puts the argument of Charles C. Mann in 1493 into greater focus. It wasn’t just more extensive and intensive agriculture in the Old World which left Amerindians vulnerable, it was also that the Old World had thrown up several massive imperial systems which had incubated pandemic producing pathogens (smallpox and influenza epidemics were a major issue in New World societies). These were unleashed at once upon New World societies.

It also suggests to us why adaptation seems to be occurring in the last few thousand years. Bouts of plague which persisted for generations may have driven immunological responses.

Kyle Harper also seems to agree with the general thesis in The Fall of Rome that this period in European civilization was in some ways proto-modern, with economic specialization resulting in a modicum of affluence in ways unimaginable in times before, or after. Trade and some level of mass production allowed British peasants to eat off tableware that was standardized, and not homemade. In contrast after Britain’s post-Roman regression a more local economy had to step in. The most curious fact from The Fall of Rome is that pollution in British ponds did not attain Roman levels until the early modern period, with the rise of industrialization. Again and again  The Fate of Rome emphasizes that social and economic complexity achieved in the Roman Empire was not attained in Europe again to the same scale as the early modern period.

Roman wealth was fundamentally due to the returns on scale and specialization that are the hallmark of Smithian growth. Though the Romans did invent a few things, Roman prosperity was not fundamentally driven by innovation. Rather, the Roman peace was a framework for trade and exchange that took advantage of abiotic clement conditions (the Roman climatic optimum highlighted in The Fate of Rome).

But this political system had biotic costs, as well as being subject to biotic shocks. Though Romans may have been wealthier than their Iron Age predecessors in things, and also wealthier than their early medieval successors, they were also a smaller people. Using isotope data Harper suggests that this is not due to Malthusian immiseration as the imperial population pushed up against food supply. Apparently Romans did not subsist on gruel alone, but ate a fair amount of meat, especially pork. Rather it was the high pathogen load enabled by the advancement of Roman urban life and its scale. Rome was a world of intense morbidity.

Unlike physical/abiotic forces biological/biotic pressures on human existence are adaptive. Moderns know this with the rise of antibiotic resistance, it’s the eternal race. The Romans were not aware of the consequences of their means of prosperity, and were not ready for the exogenous shocks of climate and disease which were to perturb their state system.

But The Fate of Rome is not just a story of exogenous factors, climate and disease. Rather, Harper puts into stark relief the variables which might push an empire over the edge, or eat into its seed corn of human capital. That does not negate the fact that endogenous variables matter. The Roman elite of the early centuries exhibited some level of asabiyyah, social cohesion. The Empire was fundamentally not a strong state in comparison to modern ones. It was a thin skein of cities and fortifications binding together an overwhelmingly rural population of villages. Its achievement of peace and prosperity was bound up in an ideology and identity focused project which bound together an elite (or bound together elites).

The origins of this elite were not always arbitrary. Though the Empire was famously cosmopolitan, The Fate of Rome crystallizes something that anyone who had sat back and thought about could see: certain groups bound the imperial state together as a ruling caste. Harper observes that between the reign of Claudius and Phocas, from 268 to 602, 75% of the Emperors were of Illyrian/Balkan stock. That is, 75% of the Emperors were drawn from 2% of the Roman Empire’s territory. The exception being the Theodosian dynasty, which was of Iberian origin and jumped into the breach after the defeat of Valens at Battle of Adrianople.

This is a fascinating fact in and of itself. Harper points out that these Emperors from the Danube frontier did not enrich their own region to the detriment of others. They were ideological heirs of the earlier Roman project, and their identity was as Romans first, Illyrians and Thracians of Latin stock second (or third, after Christianization). But they brought particular skills of administration and an overall martial attitude which served to lead the Empire through a period of greater stress than it had been subject to during the earlier climatic optimum.

The Fate of Rome does not plumb the depths of ideological and social change but emphasizes their interaction with biotic and abiotic factors. Harper observes that public temple building decreases sharply after the Cyprian plague. Why? Perhaps there was a loss of faith in the old religious institutions. Though popular paganism remained dominant, new elite religious ideologies such as the cult of the Invincible Sun and later Christianity came out of the shadows during this period.

These cultural and political aspects remain bit players and mostly offstage in The Fate of Rome. If you are interested in political narrative, then something like Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire may be more to your taste. If culture, then Mary Beard’s SPQR. But ultimately social, political, economic, biological, and climatological factors are critical and interconnected. The rise of plague is hard to understand outside of the context of trade, which was enabled by political power and unity. Ecological factors may have driven Yerisina pestis out of its Central Eurasian reservoir, and those ecological factors may have been triggered by climatic variables.

The fall of Rome is a huge topic. I’m just glad that we’re beyond the revision of the previous generation which denied that it happened in the first place. The reason that it occurred is probably contingent in the details, though inevitable over the long-term. All things must end, even the Roman peace.

* This is not totally true, but over the time-scales we’re talking about probably mostly true.

A friend of mine was pointing out that there is something of an anti-civilizational polemic in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. It’s the same sort of impulse which also asserts that “Rome never fell it evolved” and that the “Dark Ages” is a myth. I pretty much agree with Scott Alexander’s take. The datum that pollution due to lead did not match that of Classical Antiquity until the early modern period is one I remember as a searing one from The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. You can’t really argue with that.

After reading The Fall of Rome I had a period when I read a lot of stuff on late antiquity. For example Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000. Brown is a serious scholar, and I’ve read several more of his books. But, I do think it shares something with earlier scholarship, and some of the more polemic recent screeds of Rodney Stark (see How the West Won), and that is that Christianity is viewed as a good in and of itself.

That is, if there is one thing that can be said for the period after the fall of Rome, it is that Christianity transcended its Mediterranean focus, and became a truly international religion, and a light unto the nations. If you believe that Christianity is true, then details about population collapse and a recession of cultural productivity matter a lot less than otherwise.

I think the economic historical evidence on the balance does lead to the conclusion that the Roman Empire achieved an optimum of economic development during the Antonine period of the 2nd century A.D. through classical efficiencies on the margin (e.g., specialization through trade, bringing all of the land into production, etc.). These levels were not again reached until after 1000 A.D. in Europe, though comparisons are not entirely apt because innovations such as the moldboard plow and windmills allowed for increases in genuine economic productivity.

The bigger question that looms in the background though is would it have been better to be a median Roman citizen or a median subject of a Dark Age warlord? I don’t have a strong opinion on this, especially when it comes to the ability to consume above subsistence.  It seems likely that the far worst treatment of slaves in places like Sicily than anything serfs were subject to (though serfdom only truly came into its own during the end of the Dark Ages) should be weighed in the calculus, but the Roman peace was also a genuine peace. The petty conflicts persistent at a local level in the Dark Ages may have made the life of a typical peasant less secure than for Roman citizens.

Rather constant reports of subjects and citizens fleeing from strong political units, or more “advanced” nations (e.g., the early American frontier), tell us something real. People valued freedom. But not everyone fled, so we’re probably seeing a bias in terms of who attempted to escape the shackles of civilization (e.g., young able-bodied single men, in particular, loom large in these reports, and I think there’s a reason for that).