86 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Again, the edict of Domitian (or rather edicts, since a late author alludes
to a second edict which prohibited the planting of vines within city
boundaries) does not indicate a downturn in the fortunes of Italian
viticulture.^30 Suetonius provides a context for Domitian’s extraordinary
attack on wine production: there was a shortfall in cereals that coincided
with a bumper wine harvest. That is all that a fi rst reading of the sources
entitles us to infer, apart from the fact that the edict was discriminatory
against provincial vine- growers; but this is what one might have predicted
in view of the still privileged position of Italy in the empire. It is a quite
different, and implausible, claim that the edict was a protectionist measure
designed to support a fl agging wine industry in Italy. A brilliant piece of
deduction by the leading historian of Italian viticulture invites us to deepen
the analysis. There was a short- lived crisis in the wine industry of central
Tyrrhenian Italy in the last years of the fi rst century. It was a crisis of
overproduction following a period of underproduction. The eruption of
Vesuvius on 24 August, 79, had wiped out at a stroke the vineyards extending
from the foot of Vesuvius to Pompeii, Stabiae and Nuceria; but, as the
amphorae remains have established, this branch of the Italian wine industry
met a very signifi cant proportion of Rome’s needs, especially in the area of
popular wine. The planting of new vines (in intramural areas of cities too, as
Domitian knew or was to discover) was successful but uncontrolled; it was
bad luck for the growers concerned that an excellent year for grapes
coincided with a poor year for cereals. The edict represents the impulsive
reaction of an emperor who knew from the experiences of each of his
predecessors, if not yet from his own, the political dangers involved in
permitting his subjects, in particular the plebs of Rome, to go hungry. But in
addition to popular pressure, Domitian might have been offerred the not-
disinterested advice of large landowners worried by the prospect of losing
their share of urban markets to the new growers.
So far we have found no evidence of a structural crisis in the wine industry
or in Italian agriculture in general. The missing pieces are not provided by
the complaints of a landowner about his tenant- farmers (e.g. Pliny, Ep.
9.37), which might belong to any age, or by the scheme of the paternalistic
emperor Trajan for feeding the children of country towns in Italy, not in
itself evidence for worsening conditions in the countryside or for recent
population decline.
The decline thesis has been restated, with great energy and power, and
with new arguments, by a group of Italian scholars led by Carandini.^31 In
this version it is a crisis thesis, involving the collapse of the ‘slave mode of
production’, as practised above all in the setting of the large villas of central
and southern Italy. Since wine production was the main specialist concern of
these enterprises, the debate still revolves around the historical development
of the Italian wine industry. But whereas the classic statement of the decline
thesis is made in terms of mainly literary sources – and an earlier statement
of the crisis thesis by the Russian scholar Staerman depends upon literary,