32 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Addendum
The early Roman empire was centred on the Mediterranean basin. Augustus pushed
the frontiers beyond the Alps to the Rhine and Danube, but the pendulum of power
did not swing away from the Mediterranean until the second half of the third century,
when the empire was saved, and taken over, by military men from the Balkans.
Under the Principate the emperors and the aristocracy over whom they presided
were drawn from a class of hereditary, city- based, landowners. Romans and Italians
in the fi rst instance, in the course of time they shared power and most of the rewards
of empire with the richest, most ambitious, and best- connected members of the
urban elite from the peaceful, demilitarized provinces of the Mediterranean region.
The careers and origins of the governing class continue to exercise scholars (see ch. 1
and ch. 8 Addendum); also the shared culture of Rome- based and local elites (ch. 12
Addendum), imperial and municipal institutions (ch. 3 Addendum), the ideology of
empire (Ando 2000, Inglebert 2002, Woolf 2011b, Lavan 2013), and the army and
frontiers (Whittaker 1994, 2004, Goldsworthy 1996, Bowman 2003, Sabin et al.
2007). In addition, there has been new and lively interest in the environment and
ecology of the Mediterranean, and the diet and living standards of its inhabitants.
All modern research into the interaction of people and the environment in the
Mediterranean is in debt to Braudel (1949, Engl. transl. 1972). Subsequently
archaeologists, whether primarily interested in land- or seascapes, have made the
running, in delineating the essential characteristics of the region – fragmentation,
variability, risk, connection – and modelling human adaptation and survival
strategies in a semi- arid environment. Trail- blazing papers include Evans (1973,
1977), Forbes (1976), Halstead (1981a, 1981, 1987) and Cherry (1981, 1985).
Book- length treatments have followed, in some cases at a distance: Halstead and
O’Shea (1989), Jameson, Runnels and van Andel (1994), Broodbank (2000), Forbes
(2007), Halstead (2014), the last of these a classic work of synthesis, accessible and
written with a light touch, on the nature of the peasant economy in the Mediterranean,
based on four decades of watching and conversing with ‘recent’ peasants. The
conceptual scheme devised by these and other archaeologists fed into historical
works such as Garnsey, Gallant and Rathbone (1984), Garnsey (1988), Purcell
(1990), Gallant (1991), and Horden and Purcell (2000), the last of these a
monumental volume covering the Mediterranean as a whole over three millennia
(and volume II is in the pipeline). Immensely learned, dense and provocative, this
work has expanded interest among historians in the society and economy of the
Mediterranean. See e.g. Shaw (2001a), Fentress and Fentress (2001), Malkin (2005,
2011), and Harris, ed. (2005, 2013). Broodbank (2013), foreshadowed by Broodbank
(2000), is a book on a similar grand scale. Highly illuminating and engagingly
written, it treats the Mediterranean ‘from the beginnings to the emergence of the
classical world’ (c. 500 BC ). Secular climate change is at the centre of the narrative;
the classic ‘Mediterranean’ regime (risky, semi- arid) is revealed to be not a constant,
but a roughly 6000-year bubble in time, preceded by all kinds of other regimes. We
are thus led to look further back in time than a few centuries for the origins of the
system that underpinned the Roman Empire. What emerges is a complex picture
with many different strands, and a long drawn out process of self- ordering
convergence. This book will provide added stimulus to the growing interest in
climate change, profi ting from the increasing availability of climate data. The