7 ms·

Considering one of the biggest issues that plagued the Later Roman empire was the inability to pay it's legionnaires either via coin or freshly conquered land,

Considering one of the biggest issues that plagued the Later Roman empire was the inability to pay it's legionnaires either via coin or freshly conquered land, it's a substantial factor to it's rise and decline. But to me it feels orthogonal to the benefits of increased state capacity, trade, and standardized coinage that helped provide the Roman Empire it's economic benefits. Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome?

xapata 5y ago
Comparative advantage isn't necessarily the cause for Rome's largeness. If society size follows a log-normal distribution, or perhaps a power law, due to the effects of preferential attachment (using a network metaphor), then the difference between Rome and other societies could be entirely random error.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Rome was unusually superior to its rivals. Chinese, Indian and Persianate empires occurred again and again. Rome happened once and was never reassembled. Great big plains where you can grow lots of food are a much better foundation for an enduring empire than a sea where almost all of the connecting land masses has mountains nearby. I’m not aware of anything similar to the Punic Wars happening elsewhere until the Hundred Years’ War. That’s staggering levels of state and popular commitment to war, for a very long time. Rome was in fact special.
  - xapata 5y ago
    There's always a winner in hindsight. Explaining why the winner won is easy, but predicting who will win is hard.
  - xapata 5y ago
    BTW, at the time, I think being on great big plains would have been worse. Sea transport was, what, 20x cheaper than land transport? Rome couldn't possibly have supported a million residents if it weren't on the sea and able to extract grain from across the Mediterranean.
kiba 5y ago
In the end, it's all about sun-provided energy input. Coins or treasury, or freshly plundered lands really represent the means by which to convert energy into goods that can be consumed whether that's food. But you can't get more slaves if you don't have more lands, but more lands means administration difficulty increases, which means you need more soldiers and bureaucrats, who are not directly producing food.
pasabagi 5y ago
One thing people don't really have an intuition for is just how chaotic the ancient world generally was. Banditry was basically normal, murder was a 'personal matter', civic infrastructure investment was generally not a thing, etc. Empires like the Romans made some basic inroads into these problems (although in Rome, murder was still a personal matter, banditry was still the norm, etc). Building an aqueduct or a road is a massive quality-of-life achievement for everybody.
- leafmeal 5y ago
  Surely the ancient world was more common, with bandits, etc, but do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I imagine most communities had was to prevent / punish this.
  - ska 5y ago
    > do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I suspect the differentiation they are drawing is that in "modern" society there are very few accepted reasons for killing someone, and all cases should be examined by an arms-length person. This is very much not true across societies, or historically.
  - iamthemonster 5y ago
    I think the distinction they were drawing was the level of faith people could have in law enforcement by the state. In most Western countries you would tend to expect that as soon as a murder occurs, the police attempt to find the murderer and prosecute, with no action required by the victim. In the Ancient world, I don't expect murder of slaves or subsistence farmers would have any involvement outside of their families/owners/patrons.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      > with no action required by the victim. It's fortunate that no action is required from the murder victim, I guess.
  - 5y ago
tablespoon 5y ago
> Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome? Did it have any advantage? Rome has a special place for Europeans because it's "our" ancient empire, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was superior all of its peers. Also, maybe those peer empires didn't build aqueducts, but they built different but equivalent projects instead.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Yes. It had a much, much better system of military organization than any rivals in the legion. It was radically better at incorporating its conquests politically. That’s what “friends and allies of Rome” was. Its system of laws was probably also a real source of comparative advantage or there wouldn’t still be many countries using direct lineal descendants of it.

xapata 5y ago

Comparative advantage isn't necessarily the cause for Rome's largeness. If society size follows a log-normal distribution, or perhaps a power law, due to the effects of preferential attachment (using a network metaphor), then the difference between Rome and other societies could be entirely random error.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
barry-cotter 5y ago
Rome was unusually superior to its rivals. Chinese, Indian and Persianate empires occurred again and again. Rome happened once and was never reassembled. Great big plains where you can grow lots of food are a much better foundation for an enduring empire than a sea where almost all of the connecting land masses has mountains nearby. I’m not aware of anything similar to the Punic Wars happening elsewhere until the Hundred Years’ War. That’s staggering levels of state and popular commitment to war, for a very long time. Rome was in fact special.
- xapata 5y ago
  There's always a winner in hindsight. Explaining why the winner won is easy, but predicting who will win is hard.
- xapata 5y ago
  BTW, at the time, I think being on great big plains would have been worse. Sea transport was, what, 20x cheaper than land transport? Rome couldn't possibly have supported a million residents if it weren't on the sea and able to extract grain from across the Mediterranean.

kiba 5y ago

In the end, it's all about sun-provided energy input. Coins or treasury, or freshly plundered lands really represent the means by which to convert energy into goods that can be consumed whether that's food. But you can't get more slaves if you don't have more lands, but more lands means administration difficulty increases, which means you need more soldiers and bureaucrats, who are not directly producing food.

pasabagi 5y ago

One thing people don't really have an intuition for is just how chaotic the ancient world generally was. Banditry was basically normal, murder was a 'personal matter', civic infrastructure investment was generally not a thing, etc. Empires like the Romans made some basic inroads into these problems (although in Rome, murder was still a personal matter, banditry was still the norm, etc). Building an aqueduct or a road is a massive quality-of-life achievement for everybody.

leafmeal 5y ago
Surely the ancient world was more common, with bandits, etc, but do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I imagine most communities had was to prevent / punish this.
- ska 5y ago
  > do you have any justification that murder was a 'personal thing'? I suspect the differentiation they are drawing is that in "modern" society there are very few accepted reasons for killing someone, and all cases should be examined by an arms-length person. This is very much not true across societies, or historically.
- iamthemonster 5y ago
  I think the distinction they were drawing was the level of faith people could have in law enforcement by the state. In most Western countries you would tend to expect that as soon as a murder occurs, the police attempt to find the murderer and prosecute, with no action required by the victim. In the Ancient world, I don't expect murder of slaves or subsistence farmers would have any involvement outside of their families/owners/patrons.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > with no action required by the victim. It's fortunate that no action is required from the murder victim, I guess.
- 5y ago

tablespoon 5y ago

> Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome? Did it have any advantage? Rome has a special place for Europeans because it's "our" ancient empire, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was superior all of its peers. Also, maybe those peer empires didn't build aqueducts, but they built different but equivalent projects instead.

barry-cotter 5y ago
Yes. It had a much, much better system of military organization than any rivals in the legion. It was radically better at incorporating its conquests politically. That’s what “friends and allies of Rome” was. Its system of laws was probably also a real source of comparative advantage or there wouldn’t still be many countries using direct lineal descendants of it.