Abstract

In every generation the overwhelming majority of those who inhabited the imperium Romanum worked on the land and derived their sustenance directly from it. The notion is commonplace and scarcely admits of debate, but its implications for long have suffered unwarranted neglect. The well-being of any society ultimately rests upon the quantity and diversity of its food supplies, but the immediacy of their contact with the soil continually reminded the Roman people of this platitude with a force which few students of their history today can readily appreciate. The annual yield of wheat in particular, always a staple item in the Roman diet, and to a lesser extent of such cereals as panic and millet, acutely affected every segment of the Roman community. One example will serve to illustrate the point. The dependence of the plebs urbana upon imported surpluses is notorious, equally the intense suffering and violence which typically accompanied any disruption of their supply. Such outbreaks frequently punctuated the chaotic final decades of the Republic, but they also scarred more than one régime during the first two centuries of the Principate.