Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic (review)

Rome at War issues serious challenges to the orthodox interpretation of the interrelationship between Roman warfare, agriculture, and families in the middle republic. Its interdisciplinary range is impressive, including archaeological field surveys, climatology, chronography, agricultural manuals, military mortality figures (as available), numismatics, and computer-generated demographic projections.

Rosenstein argues that Rome's military demands did not destroy the smallholder. The agricultural year was not uniformly labor-intensive; Roman and Italian families indeed often enjoyed a labor surplus. Military conscription therefore would not have placed undue strain on the small farm's operation, and may even have been complementary to the family's economic interests (colonization allotments and war loot). Moreover, recruitment patterns show that Roman men over the age of thirty (the age at which evidence suggests that Roman men began to marry and raise families) were relatively lightly recruited for the reserve forces of the triarii. Consequently, Roman military-recruitment requirements were not inimical to the reproduction of the Roman subsistence-farming population, nor to its labor needs. In any event, at least from the late fourth century B.C.E., Roman military campaigns had already removed conscripts (as surplus labor, according to Rosenstein) from the critical labor-intensive periods during the agricultural year, sowing in the fall and harvesting in the spring.

Rosenstein suggests that massive military mortality, coupled with emigration to colonies and outbreaks of epidemic diseases, presented new opportunity to those left alive and stimulated rapid population growth in the first two-thirds of the second century B.C.E. Population pressures, land hunger, and a relatively poor class of smallholders comprised Rome's demographic realities. The tragedy was that as tribune in 133 B.C.E., Tiberius Gracchus (along with other Roman statesmen) misinterpreted the evidence of the census returns, assuming that they indicated a population decline. His fatal error was to assume that there was ample state-owned land (ager publicus) for redistribution. The miscalculation led to constitutional crisis and political tragedy. This reconstruction is the book's most striking challenge to the communis opinio, certain to provoke sharp debate.

Rosenstein does not provide extensive discussion of the lex Claudia (Livy, 21.63), which restricted sea-born commercial interests of senators. The law seems to imply the beginnings of latifundist agriculture seeking commercial outlets (which Rosenstein maintains became significant only in the Sullan era), and it dates to 218 B.C.E. Nor does he provide an in-depth treatment of Gaius Gracchus' reform program in 123/122 B.C.E. The younger Gracchus' proposed overseas colony, Junonia, would have provided an outlet for the excess population in Italy posited by Rosenstein. Yet this proposal aroused the fiercest senatorial opposition. How do we account for that reaction on Rosenstein's reconstruction?

Rosenstein has produced a provocative and iconoclastic book. The methodology is a model of interdisciplinarity. Much of the argument is hypothetical, but it is reasoned and judicious. It is certain to put the old question of Hannibal's legacy in Italy on a new footing.