Romans had economic intuition but never systematized it like Adam Smith
“They have absolutely an idea of supply and demand. They understand, and you see this never laid out in those terms, but they absolutely understand that at the harvest, when there's a large supply of whatever's been harvested, the prices go down. What they don't have, and I think this is literally what you're getting at, is that they don't have an organized, systematized way of thinking about economic activity that is discrete and separate from other kinds of activity and laid out as a kind of formal branch of reasoning.”
Even poor Romans owned multiple colorful tunics and elaborate shoes
“We have some great Jewish evidence for what constitutes the absolute bare minimum of clothes that anyone needs to have. And we used to think it was a tunic, and that was it. It turns out to be at least two or three tunics and two or three cloaks and a whole range of undergarments and socks and a whole bunch of other things. And they were colorful. Even poor people had clothes that were, you know, purple stripes and yellow stripes and all kinds of different patterns.”
Christianity spread far slower than commonly assumed after Constantine
“I think what would surprise me most and many of my scholarly colleagues is how few Christians there are. We somehow think that, you know, Constantine declares his support for this religion and then boom, everyone's Christian, when in fact, of course, they're you know, most people aren't Christian for a really long time. And since you were asking about rich people, you know, it takes a good fifty years, if not longer, for Christian rich people or for rich people to really say, okay, we're gonna go along with this new religion.”
Skip Rome and visit Hadrian's Wall, Split, and Dura Europos instead
“So I think I would start them off at Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian's Wall is extraordinary for a whole bunch of reasons. As one of the few places the Romans actually built a border, It's a kind of extraordinary statement of empire. Let's go to Split and see the Great Palace Of Diocletian, which is now home to some beautiful cafes and restaurants and gift shops right inside the great courtyard where Diocletian would have, greeted you if you were lucky enough to obtain an audience. The last place that I would send them, again, on the theme of empire and ordinary life, is the extraordinary town of Dura Europos.”
Rome lost a forgotten industrial brick belt along the Tiber Valley
“So how in the world did they build Rome? Well, Rome is not only a city of marble as Augustus claimed to have left it, but it is above all a city of brick. We used to think the bricks were made right there in the city of Rome. And some brilliant colleagues of mine figured out that in fact, that's not the case, that the Romans could never have made all the bricks that built Rome right in the city of Rome because they'd already cut down all the forests. And only recently have we actually found this massive industrial belt of brick factories going up and down the Tiber Valley, probably 80 to a 100 kilometers away from Rome. That's a kind of big thing to have missed. That's like having missed Pittsburgh.”
Roman banks were really just families lending to friends
“The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. But the Roman big state is really a kind of mask for an empire of friends and family. So you borrow money from friends and family and banks such as they exist are really nothing more than friends and family. So even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.”
Roman elite homes were garishly decorated workspaces, not private retreats
“I think you would find surprising the extraordinary amount of color and decoration that surrounds you. I mean, every single surface of that house would have been covered in some sort of decoration in ways I think we would have found garish. We would be astounded by how kitschy those houses were to our modern to our modern eye.”
Consumer demand, not just force, held the Roman Empire together
“So I don't think they cared about the empire. I don't think they paid attention at all. They are paying taxes. So taxation is one of the things that holds the whole thing together, if only as the stick and not the carrot. I think the carrot that holds it all together, strangely, is consumption. That it's a consumer economy. There's massive amounts of consumption. And on the one hand that binds people together because people are participating in a shared consumer universe.”
Romans were hyper-scalers of Greek inventions, not original inventors
“So I think what the sort of maximalists of Roman technology would argue is that the Romans didn't invent too much that hadn't already been at least in the works in the Greek world. What they did was make it bigger and increase the size of everything from all kinds of water powered devices, which is mostly what we credit them with, to the expansion of the use of mortar. So that the Romans are not so much inventors as they are gigantasizers. Right? They make everything bigger and they expand the scale.”
Inflation and population collapse likely doomed the Roman Empire
“The second thing I'm really puzzled by is demographics. I'm not going to give you an answer to how many people lived in the Roman empire, but I can tell you that an awful lot fewer people, right, lived in, say, the fifth century. And population decline sets in in Roman Italy almost certainly even by the late second century. If you want my early forecast inflation and population, those are the two culprits behind what happened to the Roman Empire.”
