June, 2022 Research Update

Amici!  It is now July!

June has been a useful month, though in ways that don't leave me with a lot of concrete things to report.  The two reviews I discussed last month are both submitted, but neither has come out yet.

A few forthcoming things are beginning to come into enough sight to talk about.  First off, it looks like my panel submission for SCS/AIA has been accepted so I'll be giving a paper there in New Orleans in January (the topic of my paper is Clientela and Rome's relationship with the Socii).  I should clarify, while I am on the panel, it was Sally Mubarak and Jeremy Armstrong who organized it.

In addition I think I can announce that I'll be a speaker at this year's PDXCON in Stockholm in September , alongside Eleanor Janega.  PDXCON is the annual convention for Paradox Interactive (the folks that make EU4, CK3 etc.) and they invited Dr. Janega and I to come to talk about how Paradox games go with history and learning.  Tickets there are both pricey and in limited supply but I am told they hope to record our discussion and post it in YouTube or something like that (of course, if you want to go to PDXCON, you should!  There will be Victoria III to play!)

Beyond that, a lot of June got eaten up by preparing to move to a new place (don't worry, it too will have a fireplace so the firesides may continue); actually moving will come this month, so those disruptions will probably continue.  Nevertheless, I was able to make some progress on the bookification, with the first chapter now properly done (though of course everything will face revisions) and now pushing into the next.

For this week's musing I wanted to expand a bit on my twitter thoughts about the way that academic debates can be path dependent.  The tweet thread came out of the writing I've been doing since I was working on a portion of the book that is, in effect, a literature review which tends to occasion one to think about how whole areas of scholarship come together.

To summarize the thread, what I noticed is that the study of Roman demography - really the study of the question of the population of Roman Italy - flourished beginning in the 1970s because there was a desire to answer two linked questions: where did the seemingly endless Roman reserves of the Second Punic War come from and if Rome had so much manpower available in the 200s, why is it that Tiberius Gracchus thinks the Romans are running out of manpower in 133?  The idea of 'counting Romans' was to answer both questions.

The irony here is that it turns out the most likely answers to both questions are at best loosely related to demography.  As I demonstrate in my first chapter, Rome didn't have a meaningful population advantage; Roman manpower was all about mobilization, not demographics.  Meanwhile, the apprehension of depopulation in 133 doesn't seem to have been directly related to a failure of manpower either, but a consequence of the limited information Roman elites had to work with: draft dodging caused census returns to fall at the same time that population expansion led to the landless crowding into cities, leading elites to assume that the free rural population was in decline when it wasn't.

But in the process of arguing about the number of Romans, the debate turned up all sorts of useful methods and valuable secondary conclusions in terms of population structure, mortality, subsistence and farming, etc.

At the same time, the way the debate was created continues to structure it in odd ways.  The biggest one is the tremendous focus on Roman Italy: there is about as much written on the population of Roman Italy between 225 BC and 14 AD as there is written about the population of every other region of the ancient Mediterranean from say, 1500 BC to 500 AD, combined.  Indeed, if you look at population estimates for places that aren't Roman Italy, what you see is demographic methods first introduced (usually brought over from other fields) to better estimate Roman Italy's population (or more correctly to better confirm or understand our preserved census statistics) are then later adopted for use in Greece or Egypt or the Seleucid Empire or what have you.

Part of this is a function of the evidence, of course.  We have counts of Roman citizens from 508 to 14, with effective counts of all free Italians in 225 BC, 86/5, 70/69, 28, 8 and AD 14 (the two of those in 86 and 70 are often considered to be of limited reliability).  But of course what really shaped the debate wasn't as much the evidence but the point that past 30 BC or so, Italian manpower stopped being an essential military resource (the legions were still recruited from citizens, but they didn't have to be citizens in Italy) and its role in Roman politics declined.

The whole thing is a good reminder that what gets studied is often very much dependent on current circumstances, shaped by who is asking the questions and what questions they think to ask.  To give another example, it is striking to me that the literature on Roman farming or ancient ironmaking go back pretty continuously into the 1800s, but actual really intensive research on ancient textile manufacturing really only begins in the 1990s and 2000s as more women began to break into academia and wanted to ask questions about that important part of the ancient economy.  It's striking that in the ancient economy debates of the 1970s - which were fierce and active following the publication of M.I. Finley's The Ancient Economy (1973) - really didn't consider textiles much at all.  Instead the ball on textiles really only started rolling with E.W. Barber's work in the 1990s (Prehistoric Textiles in 1991 and Women's Work in 1994).

Of course it is a good reminder to be thinking about 'what questions is no one asking,' though at the same time being the lone scholar out in an empty field is not exactly good for one's career, even if it does advantage human knowledge.  More broadly, I think it should be humbling: whatever one thinks the urgent, fierce debates are now, chances are they will be viewed, in ten or twenty years, as the over-studied cul-de-sac of yesterday.

In any case if you do want a more detailed summary of the Roman demography debate, I think one of the best starting points is L. de Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012).  The book is affordable (though not necessarily cheap) and it has been on my Fireside Recommendation list for a while; it hasn't bubbled to the top mostly because it is very, very dry and technical - it is absolutely written for an audience of scholars already deep in these debates rather than for the general public.  Nevertheless it is fairly readable.

And that's that for June.  On to July!  Here's a picture of my loyal and diligent writing assistant Percy to play us out: