The ancient Mediterranean was a world of cities and in the eastern Mediterranean at least, it had been long before the Roman period. By the beginning of the Roman Republic (509 BC), the pattern of organization was broadly similar in Italy, Sicily, coastal North Africa, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Greece: agricultural land was broken up into the territory of cities (so that each city consisted of both its urban core but also its agricultural hinterland). Those cities might then either be independent, as with the poleis of Greece and the various communities of pre-Roman Italy, or be the basic administrative units of larger empires, as in the Persian Empire (or later Roman Italy). And so, while most people still lived in the countryside, most of that countryside was in turn attached to an urban center which was the center of political, economic, religious and cultural life.
This was the world the Romans knew and the world they were most comfortable governing. Consequently, while the Romans were utterly uninterested in “civilizing” anyone, when they conquered areas which weren’t urbanized, they tended to found cities or encourage local urbanization in order to create the administrative structures through which the Romans could extract revenue most efficiently.
As mentioned above, the Romans generally wanted these cities to be mostly self-governing. While at conquest, the Romans found themselves managing a bewildering array of different styles of local urban government, over time a mix of Roman administrative preference and cultural diffusion tended to produce a fairly similar set of civic institutions. City governments, which also administered their rural countryside, were run by a town council which consisted of the wealthiest notables of the town – the curiales – in much the same way that the Roman upper-class had dominated the running of the city during the Republic. Roman authority generally protected the curiales and their wealth from the sorts of popular uprisings that tempered many Greek oligarchies in the classical period and in return the curiales managed the population and the collection of taxes for the Romans.
The curiales both managed the town affairs and were also expected to use their own wealth to fund public activity and works: maintain temples and baths, fund religious rituals and festivals, and so on. Through the first and second century, that process was mostly responsible for providing the cities of the Roman Empire with the impressive collection of often still-visible public works they boasted: baths, theaters, amphitheaters, aqueducts, temples, courthouses, public spaces and so on. While some of these structures were little more than the public posturing of the elites, many of them were open to the general public and will have represented, in as much as anything before the industrial revolution could, meaningful improvements in the lives of regular people.
While most of the wealth of any of these cities was derived from the rents and taxes extracted from their agricultural hinterlands, these cities also substantially lived off of trade and markets. Because the local city typically housed the local market, they were the obvious point for local products to enter the stream of provincial-wide or empire-wide trade or for distant imports to reach their final customers. We’ll come back to this next time when we discuss trade and the economy, but for now I want to note that this trade provided a fair bit of the economic vitality of these cities but also that it did in fact reach down beyond mere luxury goods into the basic staples that even the relatively poor might buy.
The decline and fall of these Roman cities is most extensively described in J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz’ aptly titled, Decline and Fall of the Roman City (2001). Given his title, as you might imagine, Liebeschuetz is in the “decline and fall” camp, arguing that the classical city which defined the Roman world largely did not survive it. Regional patterns differ, with Liebescheutz identifying three “patterns”: I) Western and Central Anatolia, II) Syria, Palestine and Arabia, III) the west, including North Africa).
We’ll deal with the situation in the east in just a moment, so let’s focus here on the cities of the west, which were at the start generally smaller, less wealthy and generally far younger than those of the east (with some exceptions in Italy). Decline sets in fastest and is most severe in Britain, with the final collapse of the cities coming as early as the 360s, whereas in North Africa, the classical city doesn’t seem to tip into decline until after 400.
While each individual region and indeed each city will have been subject to its own unique conditions, a few basic causes seem to have been active everywhere to some degree. First, the crisis of the third century seems to have fundamentally disrupted empire-wide Roman trade, which then stabilized at a lower level for the fourth century, before declining precipitously in the fifth. That first decline seems to have been somewhat offset by the increased demands of imperial administration and in particular the centralized taxation in-kind and movement of goods which had to move through cities. Peter Brown describes the late Roman state as, “the crude but vigorous pump which had ensured the circulation of goods in an otherwise primitive economy” (The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed., 13). We’ll return to this when we discuss the shape of the economy next time, but for now it works as a crude, but vigorous description of that facet of the late Roman economy.
At the same time, as Liebescheutz describes, the role of the curiales steadily atrophies in the fourth century. On the one hand, much of the authority and power of being on the council was steadily eroded as those functions were pulled upwards into the imperial bureaucracy. At the same time, members of the curial class who sought imperial office could get immunities from the progressively more severe taxation which otherwise often fell on the curiales and so the imperial elite often crowded out the curiales when it came to wealth and prestige in the community. As they lost both control and responsibility for their cities, the curiales‘ investment in public works and monumental architecture also ceased (though local elites do invest in church-building and monastic foundations), leading to the decay of the physical urban centers.
Finally, the warfare of the fifth century had its impact, though as Liebescheutz notes, it cannot be presented as a sole cause simply because many urban areas were already clearly in decline when conflict hit. In the case of Britain, the cities were gone by 420, decades before the arrival of any invaders. Nevertheless, political instability and violence in the fifth century seems to have delivered death-blows to ailing communities, especially in the Balkans and along the Rhine.
The end result was that in the West, urbanism declined severely between the fourth and sixth centuries. Rome, once a city of a million people, collapsed down to a population of just 80,000. Arles, which had been a thriving Roman city with an amphitheater, an aqueduct, a chariot-racing track, a theater and full city walls shrunk so severely that the remains of the city moved inside its amphitheater, repurposing it as a new set of city walls, with the town square in the middle and houses built in the stands. While many towns survived in their new, shrunken and impoverished form, urbanism in Europe outside of the Eastern Roman Empire would largely have to be reinvented during the High Middle Ages, (though with some key institutional survivals from the Roman era and often rising out of the diminished remains of Roman cities). Instead, the society of the early Middle Ages was overwhelmingly rural in both population and focus. If on politics we have a bit of a mix between decline and continuity, when it comes to the cities that made up the old political system, the “decline and fall” knight strikes a clear blow: the system of social organization that characterized the ancient world practically vanished and would have to be redeveloped centuries later. The institutions that had maintained it (like the curiales) largely vanished, replaced in some cases by local “notables” and in other cases by ruralization.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.
April 17, 2026
QotD: The decline of cities in the late western Roman Empire
April 14, 2026
Caligula – Feeding Rome’s Most Evil Emperor
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Oct 2025Skin-on marinated and roasted pork belly decorated with edible gold paint
City/Region: Rome
Time Period: 1st CenturyCaligula, the third Roman Emperor, is remembered as one of the most notorious and cruel of the lot. While he tortured and killed whomever he pleased, he also threw lavish banquets. Suetonius writes that Caligula’s reckless extravagance included “loaves and meats of gold”, and while it’s possible that he meant loaves and meats made of actual gold, I’m going with an edible interpretation.
The Roman flavors of garum, asafoetida, and other seasonings come through strongly, but aren’t overpowering. The meat is wonderfully crispy while being meltingly tender, and the sauce is a nice sweet counterpoint. The gilding is, of course, optional, but it does look rather impressive.
As always, feel free to change up the amounts of anything in the marinade and sauce to suit your tastes as Apicius doesn’t give us any amounts to go on; your version will be just as authentic as this one.
Offelas Ostienses
You slice the meat beneath the skin, so that the skin remains intact. Grind pepper, lovage, dill, cumin, silphium, and one bay laurel berry; moisten with liquamen (garum), pound. Pour over the meat pieces in a roasting pan. When they have marinated for two or three days, take them out, tie them crosswise and put them into an oven. When cooked, separate each piece, and grind pepper and lovage; moisten with liquamen, and add a little passum so that it is sweet. When it comes to a boil, thicken the sauce with starch, pour over the meat pieces and serve.
— De re coquinaria by Apicius, 1st century
April 4, 2026
RESISTANCE and REBELLION – The Conquered and the Proud 19
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 10 Sept 2025Today we think about attitudes to Roman rule and discuss how frequent rebellions were in the Roman empire’s provinces and what were their causes. In particular we think about Judaea, and the Jewish population of the empire more generally, in the first and second centuries AD. Why was there a big rebellion in AD 66 against Nero’s rule, another of the Jewish population in Egypt, North Africa and Cyprus but NOT Judaea against Trajan, and then the final major rebellion in Judaea under Hadrian.
April 1, 2026
The fall of Rome and the rise of Islam
Gustavo Jalife points out that a work from nearly a century ago identified the rise of Islam as being far more disruptive to western civilization than the fall of the western Roman Empire (and the surge of Islamic power destroyed the Persian Empire and nearly toppled Constantinople as well):
Expansion of the Caliphate: Mohammed, 622-632 (red), Rashidun Caliphate, 632-661 (orange), and the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750 (yellow).
Wikimedia Commons.
In Mohammed and Charlemagne – posthumously published in 1937 – renowned historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) advanced a thesis at once simple and much contested: that the true rupture between Late Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages was not the fall of Rome in the fifth century, as traditionally held, but the expansion of Islam in the seventh. The Germanic kingdoms, he argued, had preserved much of the Roman economic and cultural architecture. Trade across the Mediterranean continued; cities, though diminished, remained nodes in a wider network sustained by the circulation of goods and by administration. For the Romans, the mare nostrum was a highway rather than a barrier.
If a good article starts after it ends, one might say that a civilisation reveals itself most clearly not in its proclamations, but in the modification of its habits – when what was once assumed becomes contested. In such subtle alterations, Pirenne discerned the end of the ancient world.
With the Islamic expansion the greater part of the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern shores fell under Muslim control, from the Levant and Egypt to North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The sea was no longer a unified Roman basin, but a divided one. Authority and function shifted: the Mediterranean ceased to operate as a shared commercial zone. Long-distance trade dwindled, the flow of goods between East and West was disrupted and with it the urban and monetary life that depended upon it. Only then did Western Europe withdraw inward, shrinking into the medieval world as it is recognised today.
The argument has been debated, qualified, and revised. Yet its inner core endures: civilisations are sustained not merely by armies or laws, but by the invisible fibres of exchange – commercial, intellectual and cultural – that bind their parts together. Sever those threads and, without even the cut of a sword, a whole order may vanish into a rumour.
To draw a parallel with present-day Europe is to tread on disputed ground. The language of “invasion” is often employed with more heat than light; yet to deny that significant demographic and cultural changes are under way would be equally unhelpful. The question, then, is whether Pirenne’s model can illuminate what many believe is a tragedy without reducing it to a farce.
The spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries was a series of military conquests. The Arab fleets that took North Africa and Spain, the armies that crossed into Gaul, and the long struggle for control of the Mediterranean were enterprises of war and empire. Contemporary migration into Europe, by contrast, occurs largely through civilian movement, legal and illegal. However, both historical processes demonstrate that massive migratory movements, whatever their specific nature, do not merely add numbers to a population; they introduce new networks, new loyalties, new values and new norms that eventually fracture the existing state of affairs.
Before the eighth century, the Mediterranean economy continues to function, vibrant and connected. After the eighth century, that system is shattered. The sea is closed. Trade disappears. Europe faces an empire whose only wealth is the land, where the movement of goods is reduced to a bare minimum. Far from advancing, society regresses.
Pirenne’s thesis gains thrust and edge in presenting the Islamic expansion as embodying a fundamental alteration in coexistence.
March 31, 2026
QotD: Slavery
It is impolite to say of one’s spouse or one’s debtor that they are part of one’s property. With slaves, politeness is unnecessary. (Slavery and Social Death, P.22)
What makes a slave different from a wife, professional player or even a serf is that a slave is in a state of social death: they have no claims of social connection that their master (or anyone else) need pay attention to beyond that to the master.
This is not to say slaves have no legal personality — all slave systems are very well aware that slaves are people. Rather, the relationship of exclusive domination was such that they had no connections that anyone had any obligation to respect other than to their master.
Other individuals might be in relationships of servitude under a master but still retained connections with others subject to presumptive respect. This was true even of serfs and is what distinguishes various forms of serfdom from slavery. Even under Russian serfdom, a serf marriage was a legally recognised marriage; a serf father had legally recognised authority over his family; a serf could legally own property. Once somebody had suffered the social death of slavery, they were utterly bereft of any such connections.
Both serf and slave lacked any choice of master or about the nature and content of that mastery: that is what makes both forms of labour bondage. Nevertheless, a serf had legally recognised relationships, and choices about them, that a slave simply did not.
Slaves are violently dominated: the whip or equivalent has been a control device in every known system of slavery. They are natally alienated: both from from any (positive) standing from their ancestors or claims over their descendants. They are culturally degraded: whether in naming, clothing, hair style, marks on the body or required acts.
All this serves to establish, mark and reinforce the relationship of domination. For that level of domination is required to turn one human into the possession, and so the property, of another. (Karl Marx’s talk of “wage slave” is not only rhetorical excess, it is contemptible rhetorical excess: a manifestation of his comprehensive mischaracterisation of commerce.)
None of these key features of domination require the acknowledgement of the wider society. There are likely slaves in every major city in the world, even in economically highly developed democracies with the rule of law.
While it can be helpful to have your relationship of domination over a slave recognised by others, the crucial thing is the acknowledgment by the slave. Slavery is a relationship between people about an owned thing, where the slave acknowledges that they are the owned thing. This is a key element in the humiliation of slavery.
The mechanisms of domination are, however, obviously much more powerful if they are embedded in wider institutional acceptance of slavery. Where there is no such wider acknowledgement, then even greater isolation from the wider society is required to establish and maintain the relationship of domination.
In social systems that openly incorporate slaveholding, a slave’s state of domination, of the social nullity of no independent connection, normally meant that they could not be a formally recognised owner of property: that they could not be a legal owner of property, not a person who could have property. They lacked the sort of legal standing that could legally own things.
To do so would require the slave to have social and legal connections, beyond the claims and decisions of their master, that others are bound to accept or respect, and that is precisely what slavery, as a structure of domination of one by other, denies. The Ahaggar Tuaregs express this feature of slavery very directly, holding that:
without the master the slave does not exist, and he is only socializable through his master. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4.)
Slavery is, always and everywhere, a created relationship of dominion. As the Kel Gress group of the Tuareg say:
All persons are created by God, the slave is created by the Tuareg. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4)
In a society that accepts slavery, the conventions of acknowledged possession will operate for the master about the slave in a far more complete way than any other claim of property in another human. If other mechanisms of delegated control were sufficiently absent or attenuated, then slaves became preferred agents. The use of slaves as commercial agents was surprisingly common.
In societies dominated by kin-groups, slaves could make preferred warriors or officials precisely because they had no other connection entitled to presumptive respect than that to their master — hence the slave warriors of Greater Middle Eastern (Morocco to Pakistan) Islam.
The danger of kin-groups is that they readily colonise social institutions — rulers come and go, the kin-group is forever. Slave warriors and officials were a solution to that problem in societies where suppression of kin-groups was not a practicable option.
Imperial China found kin-groups useful for economising on administrative costs and Emperors used distance — officials could not be assigned to their home counties — and rotation of officials to inhibit kin-group colonisation of their administrations. Even so, much of the appeal of eunuchs to Emperors was precisely the presumed severing of kin-group ties. (They also had the advantage of being the only males, other than the Emperor, permitted overnight residence in the imperial palace.)
Nevertheless, slavery can exist without such wider acknowledgement by laws. For turning someone into a slave requires forcing them to acknowledge the relationship of domination to the point of being a possession of another.
So, slavery is not, at its core, a matter of property but of domination. Domination to the extent that the conventions of acknowledged possession can apply to slaves entire. Slaves can be turned into property without any other connections with presumptive respect or standing. Yet, even a slave could be a beneficial participant in the conventions of acknowledged possession.
For, so powerfully useful are the conventions of acknowledged possession, that masters have, surprisingly often, allowed slaves to also be accepted beneficiaries of the conventions of acknowledged possession. To be owners of property in practice, if not in law. This was done to lessen the burdens of control, the cost of subsistence or to enable the slave to buy their freedom. The Romans acknowledged this through the concept of peculium.
The Romans, being relentlessly logical in such matters, held a slave to be an owned animal. That is, a human on which such a comprehensive social death has been imposed that they are the legal equivalent of a domesticated animal. (Yet, somewhat awkwardly, still people.)
Just as you can geld an animal, you can castrate a slave. Despite the Islamic slave trade being on a comparable scale to, and lasting centuries longer than, the Transatlantic slave trade, there is no ex-slave diaspora within Islam, unlike the Americas. All children of a Muslim father are members of the Muslim community while so many of the male slaves were castrated.
The Roman concept of property as dominium, as absolute ownership of a thing, may have transferred the domination of slavery into a more general conception of property so as to absolutely separate slave (who suffers dominium) from citizen (who possesses it). Rome ran one of the most open slave systems in human history, such that a freed slave could become a citizen. This necessitated particularly sharp legal delineation of the difference between slave and citizen.
Such dominion is not a relationship between a person and thing (despite claims to the contrary) for it is still setting up a relationship with others regarding what is owned, remembering that the crucial thing in property is not mine! but yours!: the acknowledgement by others of possession and so the right-to-decide. Hence the importance of the signals of possession for slavery.
The Greeks also had citizenship and — particularly in the case of Athens — mass slavery. Greek citizenship was, however, far more exclusive than Roman citizenship and the existence of metis, resident non-citizens, further separated citizen from slave. The Greek city-states also operated much more convention-based, and distinctly less developed, laws than did Rome. If law is a matter of such abstraction as is needed to establish functional differences, and no more, the Romans perhaps felt more need to establish that a citizen could possess dominion.
Conversely, as Romans were not moral universalists, they felt no need to generate some justificatory abstraction about slavery: a slave was simply a loser. If a slave later became a Roman citizen, then, congratulations to them, they had become a winner (and few cultures have worshipped success quite as relentlessly as did the Romans). Hence freedmen would put their status as freedman on their tombstones.
Aristotle — as his moral theory did tend towards moral universalism — came up with a clumsy justificatory abstraction (natural slaves) as to why slaves could be morally degraded. Indeed, the combination of moral universalism and slavery invariably led to justifications that held some essential flaw in the slave justified their domination by others. A process much easier to manage if slaves were from a different continental region, so with distinguishing physical markers of their continental origin.
The Romans had no need of such Just-So stories to justify slavery and did not generate them. Muslims and Christians are moral universalists and so did manifest the need to tell such Just-So stories about enslaved groups: why children of God were being enslaved. (Because that is what they were fit for, clearly.)
Islamic writers generated the first major discourses of skin-colour racism, applying them to the populations they enslaved. In their case, generating both anti-black and anti-white racism, as they systematically enslaved both Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans. It also led to some awkward rationalisations as to why the inhabitants of South Asia could have dark skins but not suffer from any deemed inherent inferiority.
Just as slavery continues, modern totalitarian Party-States have used forced labour — labour bondage — on massive scales, starting with the Soviet Union and then wartime Nazi Germany. Such continues to the present day in CCP China — infamously of the Uyghurs — and the Kim Family Regime of North Korea. From 1940 to 1956, the Soviet Union banned workers moving jobs without the permission of their existing workforce, the key element of serfdom.
Lorenzo Warby, “Owning people, owning animals, controlling attributes”, Lorenzo from Oz, 2025-12-25.
March 30, 2026
QotD: The Revenge of the Archaeologists
It is thus relevant that over the past half-century or so, it has so happened that effectively all ancient historians have had to develop a strong grasp of archaeological data; we don’t all necessarily learn to do the excavation work, of course (that’s what archaeologists do), but pretty much all ancient historians at this point are going to have to be able to read a site or artifact report as well as have a good theoretical grasp of what kinds of questions archaeology can be used to answer and how it can be used to answer those questions. This happened in ancient history in particular for two reasons: first, archaeology was a field effectively invented to better understand the classical past (which is now of course also used to understand the past in other periods and places) so it has been at work the longest there, but also because the sources for ancient history are so few. As I like to say, the problem for the modern historian is taking a sip of meaning from the fire-hose of evidence they have; but the challenge of an ancient historian is finding water in the desert. Archaeological data was a sudden, working well in that desert and much of the last two decades of ancient history has been built around it. Other fields of history are still processing their much larger quantity of texts; why dig so deep a well when you live next to a running river?
The result, in ancient history, has been what I tend to refer to as “the revenge of the archaeologists”. Not, mind you, revenge on medievalists, but in fact revenge on a very specific ancient historian and classicist, Moses Finley. Moses Finley was, from the 1950s to the 1980s, one of the most prominent classicists and his work touched on many fields, including the study of the ancient economy. Finley, writing in the 1960s was generally skeptical of the ability of archaeology to provide useful answers about the ancient economy (he preferred to understand the question by probing the mentalities of the Greek and Roman elite). Archaeology, Finley thought, was frequently over-interpreted and could never give a representative sample anyway; as he quipped in his 1965 article “Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World”, “we are too often victims of that great curse of archaeology, the indestructibility of pots”, a line for which, as far as I can tell, he is still quite unforgiven by some archaeologists.
As if in response, the archaeologists have spent the subsequent almost-six-decades proving again and again the tremendous value of their discipline by, among other things, utterly burying Finley’s The Ancient Economy (1973) under a mountain of archaeological data. It turns out the mentalités of aristocrats who largely hated merchants were not a good barometer of the activities of those merchants.
But you may now guess how this is going to play out in the discussion of Late Antiquity. The ancient historians come to the question ready to think in archaeological terms and ask what archaeological data can do to clear up these questions. Scholars of Late Antiquity trained as medievalists on the other hand, may or may not be well versed in archaeological methods or data (to be clear, some medievalists very much are versed, including prominent voices on the “change and continuity” side of this debate! But it is also very possible to be a “pure text” medievalist in a way that I don’t think I know a “pure text” ancient historian younger than sixty) because their field has not been forced, by dint of the paucity of sources, to revolve so heavily around archaeological data and because the archaeological data on the Middle Ages is not yet as voluminous as that on Classical Antiquity.
As I noted in the first post, beginning in the 1970s, what James O’Donnell calls the “reformation in Late Antique studies” launched a long overdue reassessment of Late Antiquity and the impact of the Fall of Rome – what we’ve called the “change and continuity” argument. I bring up all of this to note that the “counter-reformation” – what we’re calling the “decline and fall” argument – that really emerges beginning in the 90s is in many ways an extension of the “revenge of the archaeologists” in Classical studies (and especially the ancient economy) into the field of Late Antiquity. Indeed some of the scholars are the same (e.g. Willem Jongman) and many of them enter the debate on Late Antiquity as an extension of the debate about the Roman economy (in part demanding that “change and continuity” Late Antique scholars acknowledge things now generally considered “proved” by ancient historians about the earlier Roman economy).
In my own experience, particularly in more informal conversations, the methodological difference that interaction creates between ancient historians – for whom it has long been almost entirely settled that in a “fight” between archaeological evidence and effectively any other kind, the archaeological evidence “wins” – and medievalists for whom archaeology is a much less central part of their method (in part because their textual sources are more extensive) can lead to situations where the two sides of the debate talk past each other.
But when it comes to questions of demographics, economics and the conditions of life for the sort of people who rarely figure in our sources, archaeological evidence – although it is often incomplete and hard to interpret – offers the possibility of decisive answers to questions that otherwise would have to live entirely within the realm of speculation.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-02-11.
March 15, 2026
QotD: The Roman Empire “worked” for centuries because it was run like the Roman army
A Roman legion is technically a “manipular phalanx”. A phalanx — that is, a tactical formation — that can detach parts of itself to pursue smaller tactical objectives. As far as I know, the Legion was an administrative unit, not a tactical one — the largest tactical formation was the cohort — but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, the Romans were accustomed to independently-operating tactical units. So long as they maintained formation, the sub-commanders had very broad latitude to do whatever they needed to do. They were expected to be able to command what we’d call “combined arms” (a vexillation). Ancient Auftragstaktik.
They ran their Empire the same way. So long as the sub-commanders (the Governors) “held formation”, they could pursue the agreed-upon tactical objectives (peace, revenue maximization) as they saw fit. They could put together what amounted to an administrative vexillation, using whoever was available at the time. The Emperor basically dealt with personnel problems, like a general — he had his broad policy objectives, but most of the stuff he ruled on boiled down to personnel matters; he’d direct his sub-commanders to fix a problem in whatever way seemed best to them.
We run our polities like bureaucracies — businesses, not armies. The Army’s basic problem is how to keep itself occupied in peacetime — it assumes that it exists, and always will exist, because it’s necessary; should the Army cease to exist, so will the State. Business’s basic problem is to generate enough output to keep itself in existence — a very different proposition, requiring a very different mindset.
A State bureaucracy is the worst of both worlds — it assumes it always will exist, like the Army, so it needs to find a way to keep itself occupied during “peacetime”; but that means it needs to produce enough output to justify itself in “peacetime”, because it’s never not peacetime — the business mentality.
Severian, commenting on “Means and Ends”, Founding Questions, 2025-09-04.
February 23, 2026
Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire PART TWO
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 27 Aug 2025This should have posted earlier this morning, but for some reason did not.
This is the follow up to last week’s discussion of grand strategy, looking at the reactions and criticisms of Luttwak’s ideas, followed by some of my own thoughts.
February 19, 2026
QotD: The Donation of Constantine
I love it because it’s clearly a watershed moment in human thought. I don’t mean the rediscovery of the classical past; I mean the shift between a more cyclical orientation towards life, versus an orientation around linear time. Time as the regular procession of the seasons, vs. time as a stream or river.
Some examples will help. The 15th century saw not just the creation of archives-based history, but the techniques in various fields that make archival work possible. For instance, the Donation of Constantine was definitively proved to be a forgery in the 15th century, on the basis of philological evidence. Before that point, the people using the Donation – both ways — wouldn’t have cared too much if they knew it was a fake. Not because they were opportunists (although they were), but because “factual accuracy”, to use one of my favorite of the Media’s many Freudian slips, just didn’t matter much back then.
When they said “the Donation of Constantine” they meant “hallowed by tradition”, and if you’d proved to them that the Donation was fake, they’d just keep on keepin’ on — ok, then, “hallowed by tradition” it is, everyone update your style books accordingly.
Severian, “The Ghosts (II)”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-18.
February 18, 2026
QotD: Defending the borders of the Roman Empire
The thing is, approximately none of this logic applied in the Roman situation. First of all, as we’ve already noted, a huge fraction of the threats the Romans faced were “low-intensity”: border skirmishes, slave raids, pirates and brigands, that sort of thing. Static fortifications, walls and towers, are often more than sufficient for dealing with these problems. Paradoxically, that actually increases the mobility and responsiveness of the main forces. If they aren’t constantly running back and forth along the border dealing with bandits, that means they can respond with short notice to “high-intensity” threats (like major invasions and rebellions) that pop up, and are probably better rested and better provisioned when the emergency arrives. So, far from diluting their strength, a lightly-manned series of linear fortifications actually enabled the Romans to concentrate it.
Secondly, those linear fortifications can also be very useful when that major invasion shows up, even if they are overrun. A defense system doesn’t have to be impenetrable in order to still be very, very useful. One thing it can do is buy time, either for the main army to arrive or for some other strategic purpose. The defenses can also act to channel opposing forces into particular well-scouted avenues of attack, or change the calculus of which invasion routes are more and less appealing. Finally, in the process of setting up those defenses, you probably got to know the terrain extremely well, such that when the battle comes you have a tactical advantage.
[…]
The third, and perhaps most important, reason why the Roman frontier fortifications were actually very smart is that they were carefully designed to double as a springboard for invasions into enemy territory. Luttwak coins the term “preclusive defense” to describe this approach. The basic idea is that an army can take bigger risks — pursue a retreating foe, seize a strategic opportunity that might be an ambush, etc. — if it knows that there are strong, prepared defensive lines that it can retreat to nearby. Roman armies were constantly taking advantage of this, and moreover taking advantage of the fact that the system of border fortifications was also a system of roads, supply lines, food and equipment storage depots, and so on. The limes were not a wall that the Romans huddled behind, they were a weapon pointed outwards, magnifying the power that the legions could project, helping them to do more with less.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.
- I, an ignoramus, assumed this was all downstream of the Maginot line’s bad reputation, but Luttwak says it’s actually the fault of Clausewitz.
February 11, 2026
QotD: Delusional takes – “There are no white people in the Bible”
Oh boy, I get to post more Damned Facts that will offend people who richly deserve to be offended.
There were lots of white people in the Bible. And you don’t need to get into any definitional questions about the genetics of ancient Judea, either.
Greeks and Romans were white — that is, pale-skinned Caucasians. We know this from art, from sequenced genomes, and from contemporary descriptions of what they looked like. Herodotus described the Pontic Greeks as being blonde and blue-eyed.
Here’s the really Damned Fact: brownness in Mediterranean European populations was a late development. Post-Classical. Caused by …
… the Islamic invasions, post 722 CE. Resulted in Europeans of the Mediterranean coast becoming admixed (to put it very, very diplomatically) with Arabs and Africans. That’s why there’s a really noticeable gradient in Italy between lighter-skinned Northerners and darker-skinned Southerners; it’s all about how long various regions were under Islamic domination.
The question that usually comes up is, was Jesus himself “white”?
It’s possible. We can’t go by the artistic evidence, because Byzantine art deliberately confused Jesus with stylized depictions of the Emperor in his glory (there’s a really famous example of this in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople). And those Greek emperors may well have been depicted as a bit blonder and more blue-eyed than they actually were, because that was considered beautiful. Dashboard Jesus is a late polyp of this tradition.
But until we find actual genetic material we’re not going to know. Imperial-run Palestine was a swirling cauldron of different ethnic groups, and the genetic boundaries didn’t necessarily match up neatly with the religious ones. Knowing that his parents were part of the Jewish people doesn’t necessarily help much.
The two most likely cases are that Jesus looked like a current-day city Arab, or he looked like a Philistine — that is, Greek with some local admixture; a lot of coastal Lebanese still look like that today. But full-bore pasty-skinned Euro can’t be ruled out.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-10.
February 4, 2026
QotD: The impact of quasi-official monotheism on the Roman Empire
That is part of the context where we should understand Constantine (r. 306-337). Constantine is famous for declaring the toleration of Christianity in the empire and being the first emperor to convert to Christianity (only on on his death-bed). What is less well known is that, having selected Christianity as his favored religion, Constantine – seeking unity again – promptly set out to unify his new favored religion, by force if necessary. A schism had arose as a consequence of Diocletian’s persecution and – now that Christianity was in the good graces of the emperor – both sides sought Constantine’s aid in suppressing the other in what became known as the Donatism controversy, as the side which was eventually branded heretical supported a Christian bishop named Donatus. Constantine, after failing to get the two groups to agree settled on persecuting one of them (the Donatists) out of existence (which didn’t work either).
It is in that context that later Christian emperors’ efforts to unify the empire behind Christianity (leading to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380) ought to be understood – as the culmination of, by that point, more than a century of on-again, off-again efforts by emperors to try to strengthen the empire by enforcing religious unity. By the end of the fourth century, the Christian empire was persecuting pagans and Jews, not even a full century after it had been persecuting Christians.
These efforts to violently enforce unity through homogeneity had the exact opposite effect. Efforts to persecute Arian Christians (who rejected the Nicene Creed) created further divisions in the empire; they also made it even more difficult to incorporate the newly arriving Germanic peoples, who had mostly converted to the “wrong” (Arian) Christianity. Meanwhile, in the fifth century, the church in the East splintered further, leading to the “Nestorian” (the term is contested) churches of Syria and the Coptic Church in Egypt on the “outs” with the official (Eastern) Roman Church and thus also facing persecution after the Council of Ephesus in 431. The resentment created by the policy of persecution in the East seems to have played a fairly significant role in limiting the amount of local popular resistance faced by the Muslim armies of the Rashidun Caliphate during the conquests of Syria, the Levant and Egypt in the 630s, since in many cases Christian communities viewed as “heretical” by Constantinople could actually expect potentially better treatment under Muslim rule. Needless to say, this both made the Muslim conquests of those regions easier but also go some distance to explaining why Roman/Byzantine reconquest was such a non-starter. Efforts to enforce unity in the empire had, perhaps paradoxically, made it more fragile rather than more resilient.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
January 31, 2026
“… nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a ‘granfalloon'”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to an older tweet about the replacement of “original” Romans during the Republic with other ethnicities over the course of the Empire:
Any time a nation allows slavery, de jure or de facto, the business owning class immediately tries to replace the working class with slaves.
If they succeed, the nation collapses and everyone dies. A nation cannot survive if it’s populated by slaves.
Why?
Because nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon” … his word for an association that only exists because people believe in it.
Now Vonnegut, who was a liberal and therefore wrong about everything important, meant to mock the concept of nations and tribes by coining this term. He believed them to be unnecessary throwbacks to humanity’s primitive past … a delusion he was able to sustain because he never had to try existing without one.
Granfalloons are indeed arbitrary — you could base them on anything — but humans cannot survive without them. Because humans are a pack animal.
If you drop your cat off somewhere in the woods at night, assuming he is a healthy and physically fit cat, he will likely survive, regardless of his unhappiness at the sudden deficiency of chin scratches and clean laundry to sleep on.
Try that experiment with your dog, and he’ll die.
Why? It’s not because cats are smarter than dogs. They’re about the same.
It’s because cats are not a pack animal. A cat doesn’t need other cats to survive. The basic unit required to execute all cat survival strategies is one cat.
Dog survival strategies work just fine, too, but they require multiple dogs. A lone dog will die because he cannot execute his survival strategies by himself.
And so it is with humans.
The great error of the classical liberal worldview is that, because history is full of tribes fighting wars over scarce resources, that it was the tribes, not the scarcity, that caused conflict.
So they decided they were going to get rids of tribes, and nations, and religions, all the granfalloons, and just glue everything together with economics. And there would somehow be world peace.
Kurt Vonnegut was a dreamer.
Unfortunately for all of us, he was not the only one.
So the experiment was carried out, and in every single place it was carried out, things got observably, obviously worse. Sometimes “gosh the boomers had it way easier than us” worse, and sometimes “what shall we do these corpses, Comrade Commissar” worse, but always worse.
Because economic incentives alone cannot hold a society together.
Economic incentives, without ethnic or cultural solidarity, get you nothing but massive robbery and fraud.
It’s why the Biden Administration let millions of third world savages into America. It’s why Proctor and Gamble sells you poison food, and why the American Heart Association takes their money to lie to you and say it’s healthy. It’s why every product you buy, from your Tesla to your laptop to your security camera system, tries to spy on you and control how you use the thing you paid for and theoretically own. It’s why you’ve never held the same job for more than three years, because they either laid you off or gave you two percent raises every year until you had to find a new company to pay you what you’re actually worth.
When there is no granfalloon, there is no incentive not to cheat. And no, fear of punishment doesn’t work. The police cannot arrest, try and convict everyone. And when there is no granfalloon, the enforcers themselves have no incentive to actually perform, instead of looking just busy enough to get paid, or taking bribes to look the other way.
An atomized group of individuals, unconnected by a granfalloon, have no morality, because morality isn’t something an individual has. It’s something a tribe has, because what the word “morality” actually means is the system of behavior that tribe members display towards each other.
A slave has no morality. He has no sense of responsibility, not only for the nation, not only for his masters, but even for his fellow slave. He is homo economicus, the man who responds purely to incentives of reward and punishment.
A slave has no granfalloon.
Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote “If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.” By which he meant that such associations are nothing but a puff of air, and therefore unimportant.
But having been surrounded by air all his life, in abundant supply, Kurt had forgotten that air is important.
You need it for breathing.
Try removing the skin of a SCUBA tank.
January 29, 2026
QotD: Nitpicking the Roman army in Gladiator (2000)
In the process of Maximus riding up, the failure of negotiations and Maximus riding to join his cavalry, we get something of an overview of the Roman army and its position and both are wrong. Let’s start with the soldiers: we see a very clear distinction between two kinds of soldiers, the mail-clad auxilia, all archers, and the legionaries wearing the lorica segmentata and there appear to be about the same number of both groups. And here is where we first see the clear influence of the Column of Trajan (and to an unfortunately lesser degree, the far more appropriate Column of Marcus Aurelius) on the depiction, because this use of armor to distinctly signal the Roman citizen legionaries and non-citizen auxilia is straight from the Column of Trajan, completed probably around 113 and commemorating Trajan’s two Dacian Wars (101-102, 105-106).
What this sequence gets correct is that the Roman army was divided into those two groups, they were roughly equal in number (by this period, the auxilia probably modestly outnumber the legions in total manpower)1 and Trajan’s Column does use that visual signifier to distinguish them. This component is the crux of the verisimilitude that leads people to trust the rest of this sequence.
The problems start almost immediately from there. Roman auxilia were far more varied than what we see here in terms of equipment and tactics and only very few of them were archers. So let’s break down Roman auxiliary contingents. With all due caveats about the limits of our evidence, infantry auxilia outnumber cavalry by about 2:1 in attested auxilia units (auxilia were grouped into cavalry alae and infantry cohortes, generally of 480 men (sometimes around 800), but unlike for legionary citizen-infantry, these cohorts were not grouped into larger legions).2 So we ought to expect about a third of our auxilia to be cavalry, which is important because the cavalry detachments of Roman legions were very small (and mostly for scouting and messenger duties). Auxilia cavalry ranged in equipment and could include horse archers and even ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry, but most were mailed shock cavalry, equipped quite a lot like how Gallic or Germanic warrior-aristocrats or Roman legionary cavalry would be.
Of the remainder, the most common kind of infantry auxilia by far seem to have been heavy infantry, fighting in fairly heavy armor. These fellows get depicted in Roman artwork generally in mail armor, with flat oval shields (as opposed to the curved, rectangular imperial-period Roman scutum), spears and swords. These fellows, totally absent in this sequence are all over the Column of Trajan, with their flat oval shields being frequently seen (although one must distinguish them from Dacians who carry the same shield; the auxilia stick out for their mail and helmets). A bit less than 10% of auxilia units are attested as cohortes sagittariorum (“cohort of archers”). We also know the Romans used slingers within the auxilia, but as far as we can tell, not in specialized units; they may have been brigaded in with other auxilia cohorts. In either case, they appear in fairly small numbers. Finally, we also see on things like the Column of Trajan Roman allied or auxiliary units that are substantially lighter infantry: on the Column of Trajan, these are local troops shown wielding large clubs and stripped to the waist, presumably representing troops local to the Danube region, fighting in local (unarmored, with heavy two-handed weapons) style.
So whereas the army we see is a nearly even split between legionary heavy infantry and auxilia archers (with a small amount of legionary cavalry waiting for Maximus to show up to lead them), in practice a typical Roman field army would have far fewer archers, indeed around ten times fewer: not almost 50% of the force, but in fact probably a bit less than 5% of the force (since they’re less than 10% of the auxilia who would make up around half of a Roman field army). Meanwhile we’re simply missing the – by far – two most common sorts of auxilia cohorts, those of heavy infantry or heavy cavalry. This mangling of the structure of a Roman army is going to have implications when we get to Maximus’ overall plan for the battle as well.
Meanwhile, the legionary infantry are also much too uniform, literally. This is easily the most pardonable error, because what has happened here is that director Ridley Scott has copied the Column of Trajan but far too uncritically. After all, the Column of Trajan is not a photograph and thus has space for the artists producing it to take liberties, particularly in the name of imperial ideology and propaganda. In this case, showing large numbers of identically equipped soldiers, often moving in unified formation, serves the same rhetorical purpose in antiquity as it does today, suggesting an impressive, inhumanly uniformed and disciplined source. Moreover, the segmented Roman body armor, which we call the lorica segmentata (we don’t know what the Romans called it), was very distinctive to the legions, as it was the one armor that it seems like the auxilia probably (the evidence here can be tricky) didn’t share. And keeping the legions distinct from the auxilia also matters, as the legionary soldiers are higher status citizens who thus get “higher billing” in the imagery, as it were, than the auxilia. So showing all of the legions equipped neatly with this armor makes them seem distinct, impressive and uniform.
In short, it served Trajan’s image (and thus the artists aim) to suggest that all of his legions wore this armor.
Archaeology tells us quite clearly it was not so. Indeed, the lorica segmentata, so iconic because of its use in this way on the Column of Trajan, was probably the least common of the three major types of Roman legionary body armor in this period. The most common armor of the Roman legions was almost certainly still – as it had been in the Late Republic – mail, exactly the same as we see the auxilia wearing. We find fragments of Roman mail in legionary sites in all corners of the Empire and it remained common everywhere. To head off a standard question: no, it does not seem that the Romans ever got the idea to layer other defenses over mail, so when it was worn, it was the “primary” armor (worn over a padded textile defense called a subarmalis, but not under any other armor).3 We also see mail represented in Roman artwork, including on very high status soldiers, like senior centurions.
The next most common armor was probably scale armor, which we find very frequently in the East (that is, on the frontier with the Parthians/Sassanids) and often enough (if less frequently) in the West (that is, the Rhine/Danube frontier). We also know that some auxilia units wore this armor too and we see quite a bit of scale armor – wholly absent in this sequence – on the Column of – wait for it – Marcus Aurelius (completed c. 193). That’s the column that commemorates this war. Contemporary with this fictional battle. But it is less famous and somewhat less well-preserved than 70-years-earlier Column of Trajan, which they pretty evidently used quite a bit more of.
The lorica segmentata shows up the least often and – to my knowledge – effectively exclusively in the west on the Rhine/Danube frontier, where it is still probably not the most common (although it may have been more common than scale on that frontier). So what we ought to see in this army are legionaries who are marked out by their large scuta (the big Roman shield, by this period distinctly rectangular and also (as in the republic) curved), but in a range of mail, scale and lorica segmentata (with mail and segmentata being the most common, because we are on the Danube frontier, but scale hardly rare), along with auxilia divided into specialist cohorts (480 man units) each with different sets of armor and weapons: a few missile cohorts (archers, slingers), a lot more heavy infantry cohorts with spears and long shields, some lighter troops, and so on. The auxilia ought to be wearing basically every armor under the sun except for the lorica segmentata (which to my knowledge we’ve only ever found in sites associated with the legions).
Finally, these units are backed up by a whole load of catapults. We see two kinds, dual-arm arrow-throwing machines (which most folks would casually call ballistae) and single-armed pot-throwing machines (which most folks would casually call catapults), all of them in stationary mounts. Now on the one hand, “the Romans use lots of torsion-based catapults as artillery” is a true statement about the Roman army of this period, but on the other hand once again beyond that basic idea, most of this is wrong. Once again there’s an issue of verisimilitude here: the appearance of strange catapults and the true fact that the Romans used a lot of unusual catapults is likely to lead the viewer to assume some research has been done here and thus that these are the right catapults. For the most part, they are not.
We can start with the easy one, the larger single-armed pot-throwers. These are onagers, a late-Roman simplified single-arm torsion catapult, named for their fearsome “kick” (like an ass, an onager). These are popular favorites for Roman artillery, for instance showing up in both Rome: Total War and Total War: Rome II (both of which have main campaigns set during the Late Republic). There’s only one problem, which is that Gladiator (much less the even earlier Total War games) is set substantially too early for an onager to appear. Our first attestation of the onager is in Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in the last two decades of the 300s AD about the events of 353-378 (his work was broader than this, but only the back end survives). Vegetius, writing roughly contemporary with Ammianus also mentions them. But before the late fourth century, we don’t have any evidence for this design and it doesn’t show up on the Columns of Trajan or Marcus. So this isn’t just a little bit too early for these catapults but, given the evidence we have, around 150 years too early, the equivalent of having a line of M1 Abrams show up in a film about the Battle of Gettysburg.
What we do have are a number of twin-armed bolt or arrow-throwing machines and the Romans certainly had those, though what we see doesn’t match up well with what the Romans used. What we see is a single size of fairly large arrow-throwing engines, aimed upward to fire in fairly high arcs and built with large metal cases containing the torsion springs (generally made of hair or sinew, tightly coiled up; it is the coiling of these springs which stores the energy of the machine).
These two-armed torsion catapults came in a wide range of sizes and could be designed to throw either arrows/bolts or stones (the latter carved into spheres of rather precise caliber for specific machines). And we ought to see a pretty wide range of sizes here, from massive one-talent engines, which threw a 1 talent (26kg) stone and stood about three times the height of a man, to much smaller anti-personnel weapons (scorpiones) that were more like a “crew served” weapon than a large artillery piece. By Trajan’s time, the Romans had even taken to mounting these smaller crew-served engines on mule-drawn carts (called carroballistae) to allow them to be rapidly repositioned, something like early modern “horse artillery” (they were not meant to fire on the move; when we see them on Trajan’s Column, at least one of the operators is usually standing on the ground outside of the cart to winch the machine). These smaller machines, which would have made up the bulk of those deployed in a field battle, seem mostly absent in the sequence.
The result of all of this is that the Roman army presented in the opening moments of Gladiator manages to strike a remarkably unhappy balance: having just enough of the appearance of accuracy to decisively influence two decades of subsequent depictions of the Roman army without actually being particularly correct about anything beyond a very surface level. But subsequent pop-culture (again, I think Rome: Total War played a significant role here) would codify this vision of the Roman army – fire-throwing onagers, lots of auxilia archers, legionary rather than auxiliary cavalry, uniform use of the lorica segmentata – as the dominant model for quite some time.
But the army isn’t the only thing that’s wrong.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nitpicking Gladiator’s Iconic Opening Battle, Part I”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-06.
- See figures in P. Holder, Auxiliary Deployment in the Reign of Hadrian (2003).
- There’s some complexity here because some infantry auxilia cohorts had small attached cavalry contingents too.
- I suppose I should note that is an odd exception for a type of very fine armor sometimes called lorica plumata (“feathered armor”) by modern writers where metal scales were mounted on mail armor (typically with extremely fine, small rings), rather than on a textile backing. This armor type seems to have been rare and must have been very expensive.
January 25, 2026
Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire – Part ONE, the start of the debate
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 20 Aug 2025Following on from videos about military planning under the Republic, and about forts and garrisons, today we will begin to look at one of the big debates in the study of the Roman army and the Roman empire — did the Romans plan in a rational and informed way how to secure and defend their empire for the long term future. In short, did the Roman emperors and their advisors have a Grand Strategy which informed their decisions. This time, we will think about how this all started, and in particular Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976), which really kicked off and did much to shape the debate.
