Question
Go through the chapter carefully and pick out some basic features of Roman society and economy which you think make it look quite modern.
Solution
The features:
1. The empire had a substantial economic infrastructure of harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards, olive oil factories, etc. Wheat, wine and olive-oil were traded and consumed in huge quantities, and they came mainly from Spain, the Gallic provinces, North Africa, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Itlay, where conditions were best for these crops.
1. The empire had a substantial economic infrastructure of harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards, olive oil factories, etc. Wheat, wine and olive-oil were traded and consumed in huge quantities, and they came mainly from Spain, the Gallic provinces, North Africa, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Itlay, where conditions were best for these crops.
Liquids like wine and olive oil were transported in containers called ‘amphorae’. The fragments and
Mediterranean. In this way we can now say with some confidence that Spanish olive oil, to take just one example, was a vast commercial enterprise that reached its peak in the years 140-160.
2. The Spanish olive oil of this period was mainly carried in a container called ‘Dressel 20’ (after the archaeologist who first established its form). If finds of Dressel 20 are widely scattered across sites in the Medieterranean, this suggests that Spanish olive oil circulated very widely indeed.
3. By using such evidence (the remains of amphorae of different kinds and their ‘distribution maps’), archaeologists are able to show that Spanish producers succeeded in capturing markets for olive oil from their Italian counterparts.
This would only have happened if Spanish producers supplied a better quality oil at lower prices. In other words, the big landowners from different regions competed with each other for control of the main markets for the goods they produced.
The success of the Spanish olive growers was then repeated by North African producers - olive estates in this part of the empire dominated production through most of the third and fourth centuries.
4. Later, after 425, North African dominance was broken by the East : in the later fifth and sixth centuries the Aegean, southern Asia Minor (Turkey), Syria and Palestine became major exporters of wine olive oil, and containers from Africa show a dramatically reduced presence on
Mediterranean markets. Behind these broad movements the prosperity of individual regions rose and fell depending on how effectively they could organise the production and transport of particular goods, and on the quality of those goods.
