by Douglas Boin
In the course of these negotiations, the couple divested themselves of, among other crops and tools, a grove of fig trees and olive trees, and an olive press. All said and done, husband and wife eventually sold off almost six or seven plots of land. The final sum of money earned from these sales was one gold coin, or solidus. However much the people on the top rungs of the economic ladder may have been celebrating their freedom from the Roman tax system, the Albertini wooden tablets show that at least some people at the bottom were still “struggling to make ends meet” (Andrew Merrills and Richard Miles, The Vandals [Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010], p. 160). The end of the Roman tax system, which had linked the societies and economies of North Africa and Italy in a strong bond, thus led to both a downturn and an upturn for the people of Vandal North Africa.
A hundred years later, the situation was thrown into tilt yet again. In 534 CE, the Roman Emperor Justinian recaptured North Africa from the Vandal government and reopened the long‐defunct state‐sponsored food routes. During Justinian’s reign, these ships no longer left Carthage for Italy, however, a land which the Roman Empire no longer controlled. They were setting sail towards an entirely new destination, the empire’s only capital, Constantinople. The newly recovered Roman control of North Africa, and the economic link between its cities and Constantinople, would last until the seventh century CE.
10.4 The Crypta Balbi Excavations, Rome: The Story of a Social Safety Net, Third Century–Sixth Century CE
What was happening to the city of Rome itself during this time? In 476 CE, the capital had been placed under the political management of Ostrogothic kings. Thanks to important new excavations from the city center, we can reconstruct the changing fortunes of the old capital and its people during this time. This evidence comes from the site of the “Crypta Balbi” in Rome’s lower Campus Martius.
Built in 13 BCE by a man from Roman Spain, Lucius Cornelius Balbus, the theater and crypt (or subterranean portico) which bear his name are fascinating sites in the history of the Late Antique city. The Crypta Balbi provides information that sheds light on the economy far beyond the limits of the city of Rome, too.
Visitors to the site sometimes don’t realize how unique it is. Roman archaeologists face a dilemma every time they begin an excavation. The amount of material that has accumulated, layer after layer over seasons and centuries, can make it difficult for researchers to decide which artifacts will be granted top billing in the final report and which ones will be relegated to fine print. In a modern capital like Rome, a city that has been inhabited for thousands of years, these decisions have acute consequences for our understanding of history. For the city of Michelangelo and the Renaissance popes sits on top of medieval limekilns and pilgrim churches, which, in turn, were built on top of Roman warehouses and ancient temples.
For much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lure of the layers of “classical Rome,” the period associated with big names like Julius Caesar, has meant that archaeologists made a choice to look for material that related to the first and second centuries CE, the period in which the Roman Empire expanded to its greatest geographical extent. Evidence from the in‐between times of history was often tossed aside during these campaigns or packed in a crate and sent to a storeroom. Sometimes, the circumstances of Late Antique discoveries were never recorded at all.
In the 1980s, archaeologists in Rome decided it was time to address this historical imbalance. During one of the largest excavations undertaken in the city since the time of Benito Mussolini in the early twentieth century, they made it a specific goal to find and record the entire stratigraphic story of one neighborhood: from antiquity to the present. These excavations took place on an ancient street a stone’s throw from where Julius Caesar had been murdered: the lower Campus Martius near the Theater of Pompey.
Ceramics from the Crypta Balbi excavations
For almost all Rome’s history, the lower Campus Martius had been located outside the walls of the city. It was not a suburban area, though. Rome’s first permanent theater, dedicated by Pompey, was located here, as were many temples vowed by victorious generals during the Republic. There was also a large open sanctuary, called the Porticus Minucia, where grain would be distributed to citizens who were fortunate to have a lottery ticket granting them a food supplement. By the first century CE, the area north of this distribution center would be occupied by Rome’s first Pantheon, an audience chamber built to honor Augustus.
Cornelius Balbus contributed to this development (Figure 10.4). In 13 BCE, he added a second theater and the subterranean portico which bore his name. Less than a century later, a fire would devastate much of the surrounding area (c.80 CE), but Balbus’ projects remained an integral part of the Campus Martius into the third century CE (Working With Sources 10.1: Coins as Evidence for Ancient Inflation?).
Figure 10.4 When the Emperor Aurelian paid for the construction of Rome’s new walls at the end of the third century CE, some neighborhoods which had once been outside the city’s boundaries were suddenly located within it. The Campus Martius, or Field of Mars, was one such region. In 13 BCE, Cornelius Balbus, whose father had been born on the Iberian peninsula, had dedicated a theater here to honor the rise of Augustus. This plan of the lower Campus Martius shows the urban area around Balbus’ theater in Late Antiquity. During the empire, citizens received their state‐sponsored grain distribution at the nearby Porticus Minucia; it fell out of use in the late third century CE and, by the fifth century, had become a Christian guesthouse (called a xenodochium) and a church. Plan by D. Manacorda, Crypta Balbi, Archeologia e Storia di un Paesaggio Urbano (Milan: Electa, 2001), p. 44. Used with the permission of D. Manacorda, with author’s modifications.
Working With Sources 10.1 Coins as Evidence for Ancient Inflation?
Some showed the emperor as Chief Priest of Rome. Others depicted personifications of divine qualities, like Felicitas (Happiness), Securitas (Security), or Pax (Peace). They could glorify the leader of the Roman world for his military prowess and could bear eagles to announce when those leaders had been taken up to the skies – turned into divi, gods. They came in sizes large and small and were composed of varying metals and alloys. Coins were more than money. They were tokens of a political ideology that kept the empire together.
When we think about the historical value of coins, however, we are probably more accustomed to wonder how they might shed light on narrow economic questions. In the early fourth century CE, for example, a new coin – the gold solidus known as a nomisma in Greek – was introduced to pay Roman officials, including the army. This coin’s introduction has been seen as an important move in stabilizing the economy as it emerged from the third‐century economic crisis.
To many historians, coin evidence, in particular, testifies to the seriousness of that crisis. Numismatists, scholars who specialize in the analysis of coins, including their weight and metallic composition, have detected what they see as disturbing trends in silver coins issued during the third century. Gradually, the amount of precious metal used in them was lowered. The signs of this “currency debasement,” seen across the third‐century Mediterranean, have been used to support the case for a widespread economic crisis in the third century. As coins lost value, their purchasing power decreased. Prices were soon raised so that merchants could continue to make a profit. Soon, the economy was beset with hyper‐inflation. It spiraled dramatically out of control.
This narrative will seem like an open‐and‐shut argument because it uses the familiar language of modern economics and theories of inflation. But there are significant reasons to question it. To begin, inflationary theories depend upon quantifiable data points which are lacking from antiquity. These include “the actual money supply in circulation and its relation to the number of inhabitants and the supply of goods” (Christian Witschel, “Re‐Evaluating the Roman West in the Third Century A.D.,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 17 [2004], p. 258). Without any empire‐wide census figures or even a
rchival records from a “federal” Roman bank, which might have helped us calculate the amount of money in circulation, historians of the ancient economy are left playing guesswork. The extent to which the entire Mediterranean world depended on coins as bullion (that is, they were worth the value of their metal content) or as a token currency (that is, the coin’s value was greater than its metal content) is also, surprisingly, an open historical question.
Coins may be a dime a dozen as artifacts. But just because they were once used as money doesn’t mean they give us the best snapshot of the economy – during the third century or at any other time. There may have been much more fluidity to how people used coins than we suspect.
The excavations of the 1980s have been particularly beneficial in helping scholars reconstruct the history of the site beyond the third century. During those campaigns buckets and eventually crates of ceramic material came to light that have shed light on our understanding of the Late Antique economy. By the end of the excavations, 100,000 sherds had been collected that illustrate the nature of the goods coming into Rome between the third and sixth centuries CE.
Ceramic specialists identified 47 percent of the collected material as having once belonged to amphorae, or shipping containers for liquid like oil or wine (singular, amphora). Of these amphorae sherds, nearly half of the material was classified as African Red Slip Ware, coming from North Africa. One fifth of the amphorae transport containers were imported from the eastern Mediterranean. A tenth of the amphorae had been shipped from southern Italy. The source of the remaining vessels could not be identified.
Additional data from Rome’s harbor town, Ostia, compiled from the study of nearly 4,000 sherds unearthed during excavations in the late 1990s and 2000s, confirms the general outlines of this picture in Rome. It also allows us to see the historical picture with a little more specificity. Transport vessels for wine and olive oil are particularly well attested at Ostia. Between 280 and 350 CE, Ostia was importing approximately 64 percent of its wine from eastern Mediterranean markets. These products came from the Aegean Sea and Black Sea. By contrast, about half of Ostia’s olive oil was being imported from North Africa during this same time. If we look at the evidence that can be accurately dated to the period between 350 and 475 CE – the time period just before Ostrogothic rule was established in the city of Rome – this robust data line shows surprisingly little signs of falling. Wine imports into Rome during this period are actually more geographically diverse than in earlier periods. About 55 percent of the imported wine was originating in the Levant.
As for olive oil amphorae, ceramics from Ostia suggest nearly 91 percent of the old harbor town’s supplies were coming from North Africa. (For an in‐depth look at these numbers, including the significant sample sizes, see the report by ceramics specialist Archer Martin, “Imports at Ostia in the Imperial Period and Late Antiquity: Evidence from the DAI‐AAR [German Archaeological Institute‐American Academy in Rome] Excavations,” in The Maritime World of Ancient Rome, ed. by R. Hohlfelder [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008], pp. 105–118.)
When the material from Ostia and the Crypta Balbi are taken together, then, a snapshot of the Late Antique economy does begin to develop.
While other cities throughout the Italian peninsula may have seen a drop‐off in goods from North Africa with the end of the imperial food deliveries, Rome, at least, maintained a thriving import economy between the third and late fifth centuries CE. In other words, we might say that underlying economic features of the capital of Ostrogothic Italy proved quite resilient, even during a change in government from empire to kings.
Two final details from the Crypta Balbi excavations
There are two other features of the Crypta Balbi neighborhood which are significant. One relates to the changing patterns of Rome’s urban history, the other to events in contemporary Constantinople.
Food handouts would cease at the Crypta Balbi sometime at the end of the third century, as portions of the Porticus Minucia were abandoned. Over time, this large open public space would be gradually raised by rubble. And by the sixth century CE, a xenodochium, or Christian hostel, had been built on the site of the former food distribution center. We know because a Latin inscription records the act of a late fifth‐century Roman aristocrat, Anicius Faustus, who paid to have the space transformed back “into its earlier use” (CIL 6.1676).
Anicius Faustus was a member of one of the wealthiest families in Rome, the Anicii. Later bishops of Rome, like Gregory I, make reference to a “guesthouse of the Anicii family” as a famous center of Christian philanthropy and care for the urban poor (Gregory, Letters 9.8). This “social service” institution is also mentioned in the Latin biography of the ninth‐century Pope Leo III (Liber Pontificalis [Book of the Popes] 98.80) as being located near the monastery of Saint Lucia, which was built inside the Porticus Minucia. All this evidence suggests that, even as state‐sponsored food distribution was stopped with the Vandal occupation of North Africa, wealthy Romans picked up the reigns of this long‐standing city tradition. Anicius Faustus seems to have reinstituted it on the same site – this time, as his own private gift.
The last important detail to emerge from the Crypta Balbi pertains to life not Rome but in fourth‐century Constantinople. On May 18, 198 CE – according to two Latin inscriptions that have been known from Rome since the sixteenth century – the guild in charge of measuring grain at the Porticus Minucia was honored with statues of the twin gods Castor and Pollux (CIL 6.85a–b). The date for this dedication was not chosen at random; it was the day in which the sun passes into Gemini, the constellation named for “the divine twins.” The two statues thus functioned as a generous acknowledgment to the work of the grain measurers but also called upon Rome’s divine protectors of seafaring to ensure the safe arrival of food in the future.
A century and a half later, after the Christian emperor Constantine founded his new city on the Bosporus, workers in the second capital were still following this Roman model. On May 18, 332 CE, the people of Constantine’s new city celebrated the festival of the Annonae Natalis, which honored the successful delivery of food from Egypt (Chronicon Paschale at 332 CE) – the exact same day Romans gave thanks to Castor and Pollux for ensuring food delivery in Italy. That holiday correspondence tells us, once again, that some customs and festivals in fourth‐century Constantinople were not immediately different than the ones celebrated in Rome itself. Traditions could be imported, too.
Summary
Studying the economy demands careful attention to assumptions, working definitions, and method. During the period in which the Roman Empire had two capitals, the main economic corridors were the state‐sponsored food delivery routes that linked North Africa and Rome, in the west, and Egypt and Constantinople, in the east. Luxury goods, like marble, played an important role in the economy. But smaller, more everyday objects, like ceramics, give economic historians more useful data for reconstructing imports, exports, and trade across the Mediterranean.
As this data reveals, many merchants, particularly those in North Africa, capitalized on the state grain shipments to ship their wares to Italy and cities far beyond Roman Tunisia and Algeria. Apart from the continued presence of African Red Slip Ware in Rome, however – seen in the Crypta Balbi excavations and at Ostia – Italian demand for African Red Slip Ware withers in the fifth century CE. From this phenomenon, economic historians like Chris Wickham have deduced that intra‐regional trade, not trans‐regional shipping, was a more important, more resilient feature of the Roman economy than we sometimes assume. Thus, although goods like marble could travel great distances, long‐distance trade eventually became less prevalent in the late fifth‐century western Mediterranean when the Roman food system – which had long sustained these twin shipping routes – was finally shut down. In the eastern Mediterranean, the greater number of sea routes for bringing food from Egypt to Constantinople sustained the Roman Empire in the east for two more centuries up until its loss o
f Egypt to Arab armies in 641 CE.
Study Questions
Identify the following marble types by their color and geographic origin: giallo antico, porphyry, serpentine.
What evidence do historians use to estimate the cost of marble construction projects?
Why are ceramics such an important body of evidence for archaeologists and historians?
The Crypta Balbi excavations present a slice of daily life in Rome before and after 476 CE, when Christian emperors were replaced by Christian kings. How did society and culture change during this transition?
Suggested Readings
Alan Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
Leslie Dossey, Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Ine Jacobs (ed.), Production and Prosperity in the Theodosian Period (Leuven: Peeters, 2014).
Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
11
The Household and Family
Across the Mediterranean home was the defining unit for many Romans and non‐citizens alike: father, mother, sons, daughters, and slaves. Some would try to leave this world behind. Others would try to bring parts of it with them as they sought opportunities elsewhere. Augustine, born in 354 CE in the town of Thagaste in Roman Algeria and later priest and bishop in the town of Hippo until his death in 430 CE (bishop 395–430 CE), illustrates the path that someone could take to get away from their family yet keep close its dearest members simultaneously.
