Tag: Rome

To beat the dragon be the dragon

Posted on by Razib Khan

In The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire Kyle Harper argues that the Plague of Cyprian, between 249 to 262 A.D., served as a massive exogenous shock to the Roman Empire that changed history. Harper observes that the structures of Roman society were reordered in the face of near collapse and exhaustion due to the onslaught of disease. The Plague of Cyprian, at least in Harper’s telling, plays a major role in the rise of Christianity and the fading away of the traditional religion (more through the inability of the old pagan institutions to persist in the face of social instability as opposed to a crisis of faith).

But the change was more than cultural. It is well known that Augustus, the first of what we call Roman Emperors, styled himself Princeps, and maintained the external fiction that he restored the republic. The term Imperator was not applied regularly to Roman Emperors until the reign of Vespasian, in the last quarter of the 1st century A.D., nearly a century after Augustus came to power. But even then the rulers of the Roman world maintained a conceit and fiction that they were scions of the old republican world, the first among the aristocrats. This was certainly true of Marcus Aurelius, who famously styled himself something of a philosopher-king as well.

After the disastrous reign of Marcus Aurelius’ son, Commodus, the dynasty founded by Septimius Severus moved in a more nakedly autocratic direction. Severus notably presented laws to the Senate as expressions of his fiat will. But Severus was from the old aristocracy of Rome. He underwent the cursus honorum under the Antonines.

The true shift came during the late 3rd-century and the rise of the Tetrarchs. These military rulers, who came out of the barracks of the Illyrian legions, ushered in the Dominate. This is the despotic later phase of the Roman Empire and derives from the fact that Diocletian added dominus, lord or master, to one of his titles. Diocletian and his successors did not see the need for the pretense that their world was that of the Republic. It was fundamentally different. They accrued to themselves the powers and styles of despotic eastern rulers.

Why? The shock of the Plague of Cyprian induced instability in the Roman world, which a powerful ruler stabilized. But according to Peter Heather in The Fall of the Roman Empire the Romans were reacting to the emergence of the Sassanians, who had reconfigured Persia to be a more formidable rival to Rome.* The irony here is that just the Persians became the great enemy of Rome, the Emperors of Rome began to resemble their eastern rivals in their external form and internal self-identity.

* Adrian Goldsworthy disagrees that Sassanian Persia was so formidable, ascribing the military parity more to Roman decay than the rise of Iran.

The souls of peoples gone

Posted on by Razib Khan



Stonehenge was first erected around 3100 BC, though the timber was only replaced with stone in 2600 BC. The great monument was a product of the Late Neolithic in Britain. Ancient DNA today tells us that these people were distantly related to the modern Sardinians, and derive from a wave of farmers that radiated out of Anatolia across much of Europe.

About a century after the stone form of Stonehenge was erected, prehistoric Britain was culturally and genetically transformed. In the space of a few centuries after 2500 BC there was nearly a ~90% genetic turnover, and a new people more closely related to Northern Europeans in Germany and further east became ascendant. The majority of the ancestry in Britain today probably derives from this migration period.

And yet the new people continued to utilize Stonehenge for over 1,000 years. Clearly, they co-opted a monument erected by their predecessors and maintained its significance across an enormous cultural disruption.

This is on my mind because on the episode of The Insight recorded with Patrick Wyman (it will probably drop in June) we talked extensively about Roman demography. And one of the peculiarities of 2013’s The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe is that Italy has a lot of deep population structure. From the paper:

There is relatively little common ancestry shared between the Italian peninsula and other locations, and what there is seems to derive mostly from longer ago than 2,500 ya. An exception is that Italy and the neighboring Balkan populations share small but significant numbers of common ancestors in the last 1,500 years, as seen in Figures S16 and S17. The rate of genetic common ancestry between pairs of Italian individuals seems to have been fairly constant for the past 2,500 years, which combined with significant structure within Italy suggests a constant exchange of migrants between coherent subpopulations.

The implication here is that there’s population structure deeper than the Roman period. When I first saw these results I was surprised. Looking at genome-wide data I was pretty sure that most of the modern Italian population dated to the Roman Republican period, but I was not expecting provincial level substructure. It was like telling me that the Samnites and Umbrians were still with us!

But what about the great cosmopolitan cities of Neopolis, Rome, and Ravenna? Some commenters on this blog routinely get frustrated when I dismiss the textual and epigraphic evidence of massive migration into the Italian peninsula during the height of the Roman Empire. Actually, I believe that this migration occurred. I just do not believe it was particularly impactful genetically today. Though my general outlook on this issue goes back over ten years (in part thanks to the suggestion of Greg Cochran), I believe the issue here is that cities are such incredible demographic sinks.

Roman urban cosmopolitanism was parasitic on migration. Demographically it was never self-sustaining. In fact, as Patrick points out urban areas probably did not see sustained above replacement reproduction anywhere in the world before about 1900, with the emergence of germ theory and massive public sanitation works, especially in the United States. This is evident in books as diverse as Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome and The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

So did Roman urban civilization leave nothing to posterity? On the contrary. Like much of Rodney Stark’s work in the last twenty years Cities of God is needlessly polemical and oftentimes unscholarly*, it gets at the reality that Christianity was fundamentally an urban cult. It was brought to Italy by people from the Eastern Mediterranean, Jews and Greeks. In its early period it was dominated by urban cosmopolitans. Some of the sermons in urban churches even castigated rural peasants  as pagan beasts of the field.

Christianity was an international religion with foreign origins, and like many elite cultural constructions of the pre-modern oikoumene its existed operationally as a social network across the various cities around which elites congregated. In some ways the vast sea of villages which filled in the landscape were untouched by many of the cultural innovations occurring in the cities. A Neolithic person might be confused by some aspects of Roman village life (in particular, access to standardized manufactured goods), but they would be totally flabbergasted by the city of Rome.

Over the 200 years between 400 AD and 600 AD the population of Rome probably went from ~500,000 to ~50,000. The decline of the Western Empire and the period of the Gothic Wars choked off the economic subsidies which could maintain the city’s population by drawing newcomers. And yet the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, remained in the city. If Patrick and I are correct then medieval Rome was repopulated by the descendants of peasants from Lazio, the hinterlands around the city.

Some scholars, albeit often from a partisan Protestant viewpoint, have suggested that the Western Christian Church of the early Middle Ages did not truly Christianize the peasantry. Whether this is true or not, it does seem to correct to say that deeply rooted popular Christianity took many centuries to become pervasive in rural areas. Despite their relative decline in the medieval period, both substantively and in terms of cultural prestige, cities remained remained the stalwart redoubts of Roman Christianity. They were the braintrust of European civilization, even if they were not demographically self-sustaining.

To a great extent the last ten years has seen a refutation of “pots not peoples.” It turns out that many of the archaeological transitions seen in the physical record correlate with demographic changes inferred from genetic changes. And yet we know from history that some peoples and social groups which were highly influential left far less of a demographic footprint. I suspect that the rise of cities and complex polities transformed the “pots not peoples” calculus significantly.

* Google the fact that about ten years ago Stark was dismissing reports that Americans were getting more secular as wishful thinking by biased liberal scholars. Who do you really think had a bias with hindsight?

10 Things About Roman History You Should Know

Posted on by Razib Khan

Since Since the earlier “10 Things” was quite popular, I thought I’d try my hand at another one on a topic I know rather well. This involves Roman history. Unfortunately, history is a less clear and distinct topic than evolutionary biology, so there may be some disagreement with the assertions below.

But here we go….

1) Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire did not have an established religion, at that point, in any way we could understand today. Rather, there were customary subsidies given to traditional cults, and favor shown to particular religions by particular emperors. The subsidies from the state coffers to pagan cults were cut off more than two generations after Constantine.

2) By the late Republic most of the “noble” families of Roman society were originally plebeian, rather than patrician, in origin. They were defined by their wealth, power, and achievements, as opposed to their blood. There were still powerful patrician lineages, such as the Julii and Claudii, by they no longer held a monopoly on the public square (Julius Caesar may have been from an old patrician line, but his mother was a Cotta, who were plebeians).

3) Most of the emperors who were “not Roman,” were thoroughly Roman. Septimius Severus, the “African emperor,” born in Libya, did come from a paternal lineage of Punic (so Phoenician) origin. But his mother descended from Italian colonists in North Africa. He was culturally a man of the Latin West.

4) At the elite level Roman culture was to some extent dual-culture, with many Latin elites cultivating aspects of Greek culture and learning. But Western (Latin) and Eastern (which usually been Greek or Hellenized non-Greek) societies remained sharply differentiated in many ways. The first emperor who may have spoken Greek as his first language, Anastasius, reigned at the end of the 5th century. Greeks dominated philosophy, while Latins dominated rhetoric.

5) Though Latin political control collapsed in Italy in 476, the cultural and economic destruction of the Italian peninsula occurred during the East Roman reconquista of the 6th century.

6) The forms of Republican Rome persisted for centuries during the imperial period. The transformation of Roman Emperors into purely naked autocrats did not occur until after the chaos of the middle 3rd century.

7) Speaking of which, the Roman system almost collapsed during the “Crisis of the Third Century”.

8) The early “bad emperors,” such as Nero or Caligula, often caused problems for the Roman elites. But the overall institutional system persisted and was minimally impacted. In contrast, Julius Caesar would almost certainly be judged to have committed genocide in Gaul were he judged by modern standards.

9) Most of the expenditure of the Roman state went to the military.

10) Romans arguably invented Western bureaucracy. Though the Roman state in was incredibly understaffed by modern standards, one consequence of the Western Empire’s fall was the collapse of tax collection in specie as opposed to kind or service.