Reflections on Pox Romana

Welcome to my Substack and hopefully the first of many posts.  The purpose of this Substack is to write up reflections on a variety of topics in economic history, including How the World Became Rich, my recent book with Jared Rubin.  Expect book reviews and reflections on various topics I am teaching or writing about.

Pox Romana is a great book to kick-off this book club. How many ancient historians quote Austrian economist F.A. Hayek?  My guess is none before this new book by ancient historian Collin Elliott.  And this would be reason enough for me to be interested! But Pox Romana is an important work of ancient history in many respects.  One that I recommend highly for both casual and scholarly readers.

The book concerns the high-point of the Roman Empire and the epidemic thought by many historians to mark the point of irrevocable decline.  This period has long fascinated me – at least since I watched The Fall of the Roman Empire as a child and loved Alec Guinness’s Marcus Aurelius.  It fascinates all the more in the wake of our own global pandemic.  And it is hugely understudied - despite the success of Gladiator and Marcus Aurelius’ status as the first self-help writer - the shelves of most bookshops and libraries contain far more material on the late Republic or the Julio-Claudians than on the late 2^nd century CE. 

Other factors recommend this book.  In particular, what struck me is how it is both seemingly heterodox and revisionist, yet clearly correct in its main thesis.   

Let’s explore why it appears revisionist.

First, it is a different take on Edward Gibbon’s golden age, when the greatest proportion of mankind were allegedly happy and at peace. For Elliott, the 2nd century CE was characterized by fragile peace, rather than unbridled prosperity.   While I tend to think of any prolonged peace in premodern times as a tremendous achievement, Elliott’s attitude is more critical: “Universal empires in all periods promise “peace” once there are no more external enemies to fight: but inevitably, the violence previously exported merely consolidates inward in the form of oppression and control” (p. 4).  This assessment echoes both a distinctive American skepticism of an imperial state, and the words of the historian and senator, Tacitus (“they make a desert and call it peace”) who lived through the first part of Gibbon’s golden age.

Building on argument laid out by Kyle Harper in his 2017 book, The Fate of Rome, Elliott points to a climatic deterioration in the 150s CE.  Nile floods, the key to Egyptian grain yields, had begun to fail prior to onset of the plague, and continued to be erratic through the 180s. Increased population, urban poverty and elite extraction provided “dry tinder” for the disasters that would come.  When Elliott looks at the governing institutions of the Roman empire at its height, he finds them wanting. 

Related to this skepticism of ruling elites, Elliott takes Marcus Aurelius down a notch.   Marcus has a huge fan club (just take a look at the Daily Stoic’s Youtube page).  As much as it pains me to say it (as someone who loved the Meditations when I first read it), Marcus Aurelius was just a decent Roman emperor who enjoyed an especially favorable write-up by historians.   He does come across as a nicer and more humane person than many of his predecessors or successors.   But he wasn’t a Philosopher King.   The Meditations were just personal notes and not a work of philosophy.   And his rule was not especially enlightened.  

Elliott’s portrait really brings this home.   Marcus excelled at policies that looked good by the metrics of conventional Roman piety. When the plague struck, his response was the conventional one: offerings to the gods. His personal abstinence and generosity, selling off arts and statues from the imperial palace, during the crisis, was commendable but as Elliott notes this policy was not going to address ``the root cause of its economic malaise” (p. 151).

In 166 CE, Marcus and his co-emperor Lucius weathered the plague in Rome and erected statues to the noble victims of the epidemic. But in late 168 when the plague returned to the city of Aquila, Marcus and Lucius did not ``attempt to rally the city’s spirits or inspire pro-social behavior. No, both men immediately fled the city’’ (p 109).  Elliott further dwells on Marcus’s indifference to the persecutions of the Christians, which pick up in his reign, and perhaps were due to Christians being scapegoated for the plague.

Third, and perhaps more importantly, Elliott reassesses the robustness of the Roman economy circa. 150 CE.   Here Elliott’s analysis builds on the thesis laid out by Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome.  Such a reassessment matters because recent scholarship argues that the Roman economy was a market economy (example by Peter Temin).  And this evaluation of the Roman economy as market-based is associated with relatively favorable assessments of Roman per capita GDP and growth potential.   As an amateur, interested in this literature, I certainly fell into this camp.

In contrast, those historians who have emphasized the extractive and command aspects of the Roman economy have tended to be more in the Moses Finley camp, and less receptive to economic analysis and models. I previously criticized Peter Bang’s otherwise excellent work here for associating a market economy solely with Ricardian models of comparative advantage.  

Elliott, unlike many historians, is receptive to economic frameworks and theories being applied to the past.  But compared to Temin, his assessment of the growth potential of the Roman economy is more negative.   Here he makes a great point.   We think that the high rates of urbanization of Roman Italy, and epitomized by massive size of Rome itself, are indications of the sophistication of the Roman economy. 

The reasoning is as follows: a society with 5% urbanization was one where approximately 95% of the population were farmers. In contrast, an economy that was 20% urbanized was one in which agriculture was productive enough to produce a surplus for at least one in five.  Surely the second society was much more economically sophisticated than the former?

Of course, such a calculation was always crude, as some town-dwellers would in fact be farmers and some of the urban population would be transients who would return to farm work at harvest time.  But Elliott points out another way in which this comparison could be distorted.  We know Roman policies focused on provisioning cities. And these policies could be very coercive. In the most extreme case, that of Rome the state ensured that huge quantities of grain were shipped from Egypt to feed the population and provided a generous grain and oil allowance for male citizens.

These policies artificially induced people to move into the cities. At the same time, they would have hurt farmers by forcing down prices and undermined their incentives to improve agricultural productivity. Rent-seeking and dysfunctional government policies in post-independence sub-Saharan Africa have similarly produced urbanization without industrialization.  Similarly, the Roman empire had bloated “consumption” cities, most notably Roman. This means that trends in urbanization are not necessarily indicative of trends in manufacturing or productivity.

Surprisingly the Antonine plague itself is the least interesting part of the book.  This isn’t the fault of the author.  The writing is elegant and the analysis erudite. It is simply that we don’t know enough about the disease, whether it was smallpox, influenza, or something else. Elliott notes that the most up-to-date research rules out Variola major, the main form of smallpox, but notes a different orthopoxvirus might be responsible.  There is stunning evidence of depopulation in parts of the Empire, particularly rural Egypt in the 170s CE, but in contrast to the Black Death of the 14^th century, we really know very little about the demographic impact of the Antonine plague.  It is not clear even when the plague finally dissipated.

More interesting is Elliott’s analysis of the Roman response to the plague. Government policies appear ad hoc and shortsighted.  In response to poor harvests in Egypt, the Roman state repurposed ships that had previously supplied mines and quarries to move grain and “as a consequence, operations designed to extract and transport” others goods “may have declined, or even paused” (p. 157).  Many mining sites were abandoned in the decades following the plague.  As state revenues collapsed, tax collection became more coercive prompting fiscal flight among peasant farmers.

Elliott argues that “state intervention . . . burdened labor markets further”. Marcus Aurelius responded to the high price of gladiators following the epidemic by cutting the tax on their sale and imposing a price ceiling.  The former policy lost the government serious amounts of revenue (enough to pay for 3-4 legions!).  The latter, like all price ceilings, produced a shortage.  This shortage of trained fighters intensified, so Elliott speculates, the persecution Christians who were cheap substitutes.

Running to just 240 pages, Pox Romana is a short book. But it has enough new evidence in it to make one feel quite differently about an important period of history.  Its thesis is very much in keeping with Harper’s The Fate of Rome and it shows that by leveraging new archeological evidence, and variegated forms of quantitative evidence, scholars are making substantive advances in our understanding of the Roman world.