SUPPLYING THE ROMAN EMPIRE 121political and cultural leadership of the empire: in particular, the Iberian
peninsula, the south of France, and western Asia Minor.^26
The upshot is that the burden of supporting the Roman government with
food, other supplies and cash was distributed over the whole empire. Rome
was engaged in tapping the resources of every corner of the Roman world.
Subjects as consumers
It is easy to slip into the language of gloom and doom when discussing the
subsistence problems of Rome’s subjects. The beginning of On the wholesome
and unwholesome properties of foodstuffs, a treatise of Galen, the mid-
second century physician and philosopher, is commonly quoted, but
unfortunately without the prolegomenon that provides the context^27 :
The famines occurring in unbroken succession over a number of years
among many of the peoples subject to the Romans have demonstrated
clearly, to anyone not completely devoid of intelligence, the important
part played in the genesis of diseases by the consumption of unhealthy
foods. For among many of the peoples who are subject to the Romans,
the city- dwellers, as it was their practice to collect and store enough grain
for all the next year immediately after the harvest, left what remained to
the country people, that is, pulses of various kinds, and they took a good
deal of these too to the city. The country people fi nished the pulses during
the winter, and so had to fall back on unhealthy foods during the spring;
they ate twigs and shoots of trees and bushes, and bulbs and roots of
indigestible plants; they fi lled themselves with wild herbs, and cooked
fresh grass. (VI 749ff.)The passage cannot be taken as a description of normal conditions, as it is
regularly presented, for two reasons. The fi rst emerges from the passage
itself, unless it is quoted selectively. Galen is picturing the behaviour of city-
dwellers and rustics in the throes of a severe famine. The treatment is
rhetorical. Galen shows in a number of colourful anecdotes that he was
familiar with the cunning and resource demonstrated by country folk in the
face of natural and human constraints. Secondly, famine itself, and the
urban–rural confrontation that it engendered, were not everyday occurrences.
If Galen had thought he was describing the norm, he contradicted himself
many times in the course of his ample descriptions of peasant diets, in his
On the properties of foodstuffs, and elsewhere, and in vignettes like the
following, embodying a youthful memory:
But I myself, when travelling as a young man into the countryside some
distance from Pergamum with two companions of the same age, came
upon some peasants who had already eaten their supper, and the women