20 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
(126). Strabo’s message is in line with the political ideology of the Augustan
age, which stressed the cultural unity of Greece and Rome.
In asserting the superiority of Mediterranean, or southern European,
civilization, Strabo does not fall back on environmental determinism. In this
he is parting company with his major source, Posidonius, and a stream of
authors going back to the fi fth- century BC Hippocratic corpus.^2 Whereas his
contemporary Vitruvius talks of the balanced temperament of the Italian
peoples, lying ‘in the true mean within the space of all the world’ (6.1.10),
Strabo is interested in the ‘diversifi ed details with which our geographical
map is fi lled’, including the favourable positions of cities and peninsulas and
the broken texture of coastlines (120ff.). In the case of Italy, he points to the
length of the peninsula, the extension of the Apennines down much of its
length, and the not unrelated climatic variation which ensures a variety and
comprehensive range of foodstuffs.
This is Strabo at his most percipient. Regional variation in climate is a
dominant feature of the landscape of Italy and the northern Mediterranean
as a whole, which experiences many deviations from the ‘pure’ Mediterranean
type.^3 This means that given the good communications and developed
exchange relationships that are easily established in the setting of the
Mediterranean, individuals, families and communities could survive all but
the worst natural catastrophes. We should not expect any ancient source to
produce a balanced account of conditions of life in the Mediterranean. We
hear nothing from Strabo about endemic weaknesses of the Italian and the
Mediterranean climate. These include the maldistribution of the rainfall that
prevents summer growth for root crops; the unreliability of the drought-
breaking autumn rains which hinders planting and germination; rainfall
variability during the growth period of the plant; the low level of rainfall in
certain regions (for example, in the northern Mediterranean, Apulia, much
of Sicily, and south- east Greece), coinciding with a very high rate of
variability. Moreover, Strabo obscures the fact that Augustan and early
imperial Italy was not and could not be economically self- suffi cient, given
the distribution (and perhaps also the absolute level) of the population.
There are no reliable demographic data from antiquity, but Rome and the
cities of Italy may have contained about 30 per cent of the population of
the peninsula or around two million people, half of them concentrated in
the capital.^4 The task of feeding so many non- producing consumers was
beyond the underdeveloped agricultural economy of Italy in the Roman
period. Of course Rome had been steadily and inexorably tightening its grip
on external sources of supply in the Mediterranean for two centuries before
the inauguration of the Principate. It was left to Augustus to extend the
tentacles of Rome far beyond the Mediterranean basin, and in particular in
the European sphere.
The Roman empire at its peak in the early third century AD comprised not
only the Mediterranean peninsulas, islands, coasts and substantial tracts of
the interior (to the fringe of the Sahara, to the river Tigris), but also Europe