July, 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now August!

August is always a busy, stressful month as we get ready for classes to start again.  Syllabi have to get written, assignments crafted, schedules made and so on all before the first day of class.  This August may be a bit more compressed than normal; the combination of in-person classes resuming bringing in more students with the hiring freeze of the last year-and-a-half reducing course offerings has apparently led to something of a course crunch (too many students, too few seats in classes) which might lead to more courses being offered.  Which might lead to me having to plan an extra course on short notice (though I wouldn't mind the bump in compensation; as an adjunct I am paid per-course).

On the blog, of course we've just finished "The Queen's Latin."  I've been wanting to write something on that particular topic for some time though I am not sure that the final product lived up to my original hopes, but that is always the risk with blogging on a weekly schedule.  Next up is going to be a look at Paradox's Victoria II, followed by a short discussion of the mechanics of trench warfare.  Somewhere in there (probably this week, actually) I'll have the first referendi ad senatum which is what I am going to call the Q&A posts.  The phrase referre ad senatum was the standard formulation for how a magistrate posed a question to the Senate to get its opinion (called a senatus consultum); referendi ad senatum means "things which ought to be referred to the Senate."  Latin is a wonderfully compact language sometimes.

Meanwhile on the research front, the chapter on the organization of the Roman military food supply is 'feature complete' and I'm now polishing and editing it before submitting it to the book editor, probably before the end of this week.  Frankly, I'll be glad to have that off of my desk; the short timeline on the project (as I was replacing another author) meant that it really shoved everything else aside.   Also, proofs are in for my piece to appear in The National Interest which will be titled "America's Legionnaires" in the print edition, so we can look forward to that in the next print edition of TNI.

I'm actually looking forward to perhaps sending the late part of August on shorter writing projects; I have a number of stubs for shorter essays on a variety of topics for popular press outlets like Foreign Policy (some of them on topics which have already gotten the long treatment on the blog), though of course everything depends on getting an editor to humor me (and also writing them in the first place).  Still, I want to clear off the small-project backlog left by the big chapter project.

Finally, a bit more about the work on the food chapter.  Last month we talked about some of the conundrums of trying to figure out how a system worked when we don't have any detailed manual for it, but we do have lots of descriptions of it functioning.  That was the case for the logistics system of the Roman Republic: we see it in action a lot in our sources, but never have it described.

The situation is different for the logistics system of the Empire, which is both more and less well attested.  On the one hand, the fact that the legions are permanently stationed instead of on offensive operations means we have lots of archaeological evidence for diet and in some places we even have a handful of surviving receipts and pay-stubs.  On the other hand, we lack the sort of detailed year-to-year operational history Livy provides for the Republic.  For the most part, when the legions aren't engaged in offensive operations, our sources ignore them, meaning that they fade into the background of narratives about emperors (until they suddenly explode into the foreground when things get dicey).

The way I've explained the challenge of this evidence is like this: imagine you had to reconstruct the structure of a certain kind of office - let's say a small dental practice, for instance - but the only evidence you have are a handful of receipts, along with a few job titles.  That evidence isn't from any one office though, it's from different offices, stretched over a century or more.  You'd be left seeing that you have a dentist here, a dental assistant there, a dental hygienist there, a dental technician over there; here there is a mention of a secretary, there an administrative assistant, and there a receptionist.  Note that you don't have their job description, just the title.  And you know there are at least some jobs that are entirely unattested.  And again, all of the references you have are from different offices, so some of these titles may be different names for the same job.

This is the problem with reconstructing the administration of Roman logistics in the empire.  Often what we have are inscriptions (frequently fragmentary) which either 1) declare that XYZ official has done something, approved some expenditure, etc or - more commonly - funerary inscriptions listing the offices an individual has held where we have only job titles.  Often the positions attested in these inscriptions are either entirely unmentioned in our literary texts or only very briefly mentioned because, again, our writers for the period are generally most interested in the jobs and actions of senior members of their own class: the emperor, senior senators serving as governors and generals, etc.  

So what we have is very mixed.  We have the a rationibus (literally the 'from accounts;' essentially the top treasury official).  We have a decent sense of his job because Statius writes a poem eulogizing one, which tells us that the a rationibus was in charge of keeping all of the expenses of the empire straight.  Inscriptions around Rome attest to an official called the a copiis militaribus (the 'from military supplies') but give no real sense of what his job might have been.  Presumably he handled military supplies.

That odd bit of grammar, that these guys have their titles put in the ablative with 'a' or 'ab' (a preposition meaning 'from') is actually consistent for the various senior imperial secretaries.  Most of these posts began being staffed by imperial freedman (that is, freed slaves of the emperor) but come to be held by senior members of the equestrian order (rich, but non-senatorial Romans).  The more well-known of those offices is the ab epistulis ('from letters') who had the job of answering formal correspondence to the emperor.  It was an important post and we occasionally hear about individuals being the ab epistulis for specific regions of the empire, implying some kind of staff, perhaps overseen by some sort of general ab epistulis.  That frozen usage of the ablative doesn't show up anywhere else, which is why we can be relatively confident that the a copiis militaribus is probably also an imperial secretary of some sort.  Fergus Millar - who I mentioned last month - does a brief survey of these fellows and concludes that their careers follow the trajectory of the other imperial secretaries in that they are initially imperial freedmen but by the second century are always senior equestrians.  Interestingly, unlike the ab epistulis or the other top imperial secretaries, the a rationibus never seem to have been jurists, but frequently had a lot of military experience (including one senior centurion!), which speaks to the military import of the position.  The Roman army, after all, was the biggest line item in the budget by far.

Then we have what appear to be a bewildering array of positions associated with specific campaigns, which might be temporary, ad hoc jobs: praefecti copiarum or praepositus annonae and one minister bello.  The general thinking is that these positions, which are only attested in odd one-offs, might have been stop-gap positions set up to manage the logistics of large campaigns rather than the constant needs of the peacetime army.

We're actually a lot better informed as we get a bit closer to the actual soldiers.  In the provinces, the key officials were the legati Augusti pro praetore, who replaced your normal Roman governor in provinces directly under the control of the emperor (which is all of the provinces with armies).  Each legatus pro praetore would thus command a complete province, with whatever military forces were there.  Under him, there were legati Augusti legionis, junior commanders for each legion in the province and the procuratores Augusti.  The procurators were essentially the provincial treasury official (replacing the Republican quaestors in this role); Strabo (3.4.20) helpfully tells us that managing local supply concerns and purchases (along with taxes) was the job of the procurators in the imperial provinces.

But who oversaw and coordinated the procurators?  We know from archaeological evidence that supplies were being shipped, en masse from one province to the next, which means from one procurator to the next.  Who coordinated that?  The a copiis militaribus?  It's also been suggested that another very well attested official, the praefectus annonae might have done it; he was in charge of the state distribution of grain in the city of Rome, but there's no actual evidence that he was ever involved with military food supply.

Would that we had a sort of Constitution of the Roman Empire in the same way that Aristotle wrote a Constitution of the Athenians (the Ath. Pol.), but we don't and so we are often in the dark about what all of these fellows do and how they interact.  The one thing we can be sure of is that the system worked: Roman soldiers seem to have eaten quite well and the Roman state coordinated supply such that those soldiers could enjoy a Mediterranean diet even in Northern England and on the Rhine (shipping in things like wine and olive-oil not produced locally).

If you are dying for a more in-depth overview of Roman logistics, I should note J.P. Roth, The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 BC - AD 235) is probably the best overview, although it has its problems - while Roth's guesses at how the system worked are generally plausible they are often not certain.