124 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
forced to adjust their supply systems, political loyalties and land use. Some
held their own, others suffered short- term or permanent decline. In the long
term, the vulnerability of the majority of cities in the region concerned was
not signifi cantly increased, their survival chances not seriously undermined,
by Rome’s latest advance.
So much for the specifi c matter raised by Casson, whether the annexation
of Egypt threatened the East with starvation. To take further the associated,
broader issue, whether the Roman imperial government prejudiced the
future of subject communities by cornering the surplus of the richest agrarian
provinces, we turn to a consideration of the local evidence for food supply
and food shortage. The documentation is of necessity drawn from the cities
of the Greek East. It would be convenient if the evidence were spread evenly
around the provinces of the empire, and between urban and rural
environments, but this is not the case.
We present fi rst three indicators of continuity with the past, that is, with
the Hellenistic period, and then two of change.
First, there were periodic food shortages, when prices rose and supplies
of essential foodstuffs were defi cient. This was nothing new. Food crises
were endemic in the Mediterranean region.
Secondly, local institutions for ‘famine relief’ remained essentially the
same. Every city had developed over time rudimentary mechanisms and
practices designed to keep it supplied with necessities, especially grain, at
reasonable prices. The post of grain commissioner ( sitones, sitophylax,
curator annonae ) is widely attested and has the appearance of a standard
public service, at any rate in the East.^32 The Roman period shows little
institutional change and little signifi cant development in the scope or range
of local government responses to crisis. The lack of public monies in the
form of permanent funds for the purchase of goods in short supply is
particularly conspicuous.
This statement does not require modifi cation in view of Egyptian grain
distributions (attested at Oxyrhynchos, Alexandria and Hermopolis in the
260s and 270s, and at Hermopolis in AD 62) or lists of ‘receivers of distributed
grain’ in some Lycian cities. The Egyptian distributions were temporary and
isolated phenomena; we cannot even say that distributions were regular in
Lycia. No regular distributions in other provinces are hinted at in the
documents. If local governments were intended to follow Trajan’s Italian
example of funding poor relief schemes, they failed to do so. For that matter,
permanent funds fi nancing regular distributions were a rarity in the Hellenistic
age. There is another point: in Lycia, the distributions were funded by private
benefactors, acting in rotation. In one inscription, a man from Oenoanda
claims to have been the fi rst to do so twice. Thus something less than a
permanent grain fund operated here. Samos at the turn of the third century
BC had done better, with its grain fund fi nanced by private donations.^33
Thirdly, euergetism, the public display of generosity by individuals,
remained the key factor in the response of local governments to shortage –