Roman Disasters

Jerry Toner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745665498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der römischen Antike

Roman Disasters looks at how the Romans coped with, thought about, and used disasters for their own ends. Rome has been famous throughout history for its great triumphs. Yet Rome also suffered colossal disasters. From the battle of Cannae, where fifty thousand men fell in a single day, to the destruction of Pompeii, to the first appearance of the bubonic plague, the Romans experienced large scale calamities.Earthquakes, fires, floods and famines also regularly afflicted them. This insightful book is the first to treat such disasters as a conceptual unity. It shows that vulnerability to disasters was affected by politics, social status, ideology and economics. Above all, it illustrates how the resilience of their political and cultural system allowed the Romans to survive the impact of these life-threatening events. The book also explores the important role disaster narratives played in Christian thought and rhetoric. Engaging and accessible, Roman Disasters will be enjoyed by students and general readers alike.

1

What is a Disaster?

Anthemius had fallen out with his neighbour Zeno. Whether it was the result of prying or some building work that had taken his light is unclear, but Anthemius wanted to get his own back. He thought about turning to the law. Always a risky business at the best of times, this route was made impassable by the fact that Zeno was a skilled lawyer and a friend of the emperor, no less. A down-to-earth engineer, as Anthemius was, could never hope to compete with his neighbour in the face-to-face verbal sparring that the Roman courts demanded, let alone run the risk of offending the emperor. So he decided to retaliate on his own terms. Zeno had a fine upper-floor room where he loved to pass the day and entertain his close friends, but the two houses were joined in such a way that the room below belonged to Anthemius. Filling some huge cauldrons with water and placing them at intervals, he fastened on tapering, trumpet-like pipes, which were encased in leather and sufficiently wide at their bottom ends to allow them to fit tightly over the rims of the cauldrons. He then fixed the upper ends of these pipes to the beams and joists of the ceiling, which obviously also served as the floor to Zeno’s fine room. With this apparatus in place, he lit fires beneath these great cauldrons and as the water boiled, the steam it produced travelled up the pipes and exerted pressure on the woodwork. Little by little the pressure increased until it became so great that it shook the whole structure. Yet as an engineer, Anthemius had been careful not to overdo it, given that any collapse would have seen him lose his house too. Instead he calculated that the steam would exert just enough force to make the woodwork creak and wobble slightly. Moreover, Anthemius employed some other mechanical tricks to enhance the effect. He used concave reflective disks to produce lightning and struck percussive, resonant objects to imitate the sound of thunder. The impact on Zeno and his friends was dramatic. Fearing the onset of an earthquake, they ran outside, terrified. Zeno went straight to the palace to find out how the other notables had been affected by the tremors. They became indignant with him for his lack of taste: how dare he concoct such stories as some kind of practical joke? Embarrassed by his perceived faux pas, poor Zeno left the palace completely nonplussed about the ‘earthquake’ he had experienced.¹

Anthemius’ trick shows us the degree of fear and panic that the experience of a disaster could generate within a Roman. This is hardly surprising given the unexpected nature and often devastating effects of natural disasters such as earthquakes. The onset of life-threatening events drives inhabitants of all societies into a state of confusion and alarm. But if we look a little deeper we can see that the story also reveals a number of characteristically Roman features. The first is that even for a wealthy orator like Zeno, building quality was of such a low level that even a modest wobble sent shivers of terror running down his spine. When we look at great Roman buildings, like the Colosseum or the Pont du Gard, it is easy to imagine that Roman building techniques were generally of a high standard. This is far from the case. Domestic architecture was, by modern western standards, often jerry-built: lacking adequate foundations and constructed of variable-quality materials.² These were buildings which were prone to collapse even in normal conditions let alone when placed under the enormous stresses of an earthquake. The degree of panic which a wealthy man like Zeno showed, therefore, was partly an inverse index of his faith in Roman architectural practice. The fact that his neighbour was an engineer and architect seems to have done nothing to raise his level of trust in the ability of the building which they shared to withstand the impact of an earthquake. That Anthemius understood the mechanics of steam power but harnessed it only for the purposes of playing a practical joke on his neighbour underlines how different were the concerns of Roman engineers. The fake disaster, therefore, can be said to have stress-tested Roman life, thereby revealing both the limits of the social system and the faith that its inhabitants had in it. When we look at genuine Roman disasters, I suggest, we will be able to learn much about the wider Roman world and the expectations of its inhabitants.

Anthemius’ story also shows how disasters penetrated right to the top of Roman society. The wealthy could be just as vulnerable to events such as earthquakes and, what is more, the impact was something which Zeno assumed would be of interest to everyone in the palace. Indeed, the strong reaction of palace officials to what they saw as Zeno’s poor judgement in spreading false rumours of disaster shows how seriously they took such events. Obviously this interest stemmed partly from the fact that earthquakes affected everyone. Zeno would have been keen to see if his friends and colleagues had survived, or indeed if his enemies and competitors had been obliterated. But the emperor’s interest in the earthquake also reflected several other characteristically Roman concerns. Earthquakes destroyed buildings and if there was one thing which emperors were concerned about, it was their architectural legacy. It mattered to them if their pet building projects had been knocked down. On the other hand, the laying waste of a city might have its positive side. Disasters could generate significant opportunities for vast rebuilding programmes. The 64 CE Great Fire in Rome provided the emperor Nero with a rare chance to redevelop swathes of central Rome, one which he took full advantage of by building his infamous Golden Palace. It was hardly surprising that many Romans wondered whether Nero himself had in fact started the fire, so great was the personal benefit he accrued from it.

The Chinese symbol for disaster is often said to be a combination of two different characters, one symbolizing danger, the other, opportunity.³ Few emperors tried to benefit from the opportunity presented by their subjects’ misfortune in quite so blatant a way as Nero was alleged to have done. But most did try to exploit the shock of unforeseen calamities to express, increase and advertise their own power. Disasters, whether in the form of events such as fires, floods or earthquakes, gave emperors a tremendous opportunity to bring into operation that key Roman social force, patronage. Victims wanted help and support; structures and facilities had to be repaired; above all, social relationships needed to be re-established and reaffirmed. This is not to say that Roman emperors saw themselves as providing some general emergency service in the event of disaster striking. The reality was that emperors tended to be highly selective as to where, how and to whom they offered their assistance. This can naturally tell us a great deal about who and what mattered in Roman society, since the emperors were keen to help those who were most in a position to return the favour in some way.

Anthemius had a much better understanding of structural forces than did most ancients. Like him we can stand back and laugh at Zeno’s reaction to his trembling living room. But we also live in a world where disasters are common. The World Disasters Report of 2001 calculated that 2,108,025,000 people had been affected by disasters globally during the last decade of the twentieth century.⁴ Of course, the relative unpredictability of many disasters means that the number of people affected varies considerably from one year to the next. The low year of the last decade, 1997, saw only 67 million touched by a disaster, compared with a high of 344 million in 1998. Not only does the modern world continue to be affected by disasters in the same way that the Roman empire was, but both the frequency and the impact, in terms of both human and financial cost, are increasing.⁵ The ranking of different types of natural disaster according to the number of deaths worldwide gives an indication of what types of event have historically been the biggest killers (table 1).

Table 1 Natural disaster type ranked by number of deaths, 1947–1980

Disaster type	Number of deaths
Hurricane	499,000
Earthquake	450,000
Flood (not associated with hurricane)	194,000
Thunderstorm/Tornado	29,000
Snowstorm	10,000
Volcanic eruption	9,000
Heatwave	7,000
Avalanche	5,000
Landslides	5,000
Tsunami	5,000

Source: Shah, B. V., ‘Is the environment becoming more hazardous? A global survey 1947–1980’, Disasters, 7 (1983), 202–9.

This indication has severe limitations, however, because the numbers are skewed by a small number of particularly significant events. A larger-scale study looked at the percentage contribution to total deaths for each hazard type for the twentieth century as a whole (table 2).⁶

Even then, though, the numbers are affected by the fact that certain types of disaster have news value and so the number of deaths from these events has tended to be over-reported. There has also been a regional bias in the interest taken by the west in certain disasters. Asia has been more prone over the last century to suffer disastrous events, but these have held less interest for the western media. By contrast, relatively small-scale calamities in Europe have attracted significant coverage. A moment’s reflection will also bring the realization that these numbers, even over a timescale as seemingly long as a hundred years, are highly variable. The figure for tsunami, for example, which appears low in both these studies partly as a result of under-reporting, partly because of the vagaries of chance, would leap if the period were to include the dreadful South Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed perhaps 250,000, and that in Japan in 2011, when almost 20,000 died.

Table 2 Hazard type by percentage of deaths, 1900–1999

Hazard type	Percentage of deaths
Famine/Drought	86.9
Flood	9.2
Earthquake/Tsunami	2.2
Storm	1.5
Volcanic eruption	0.1
Landslide	<0.1
Other	Negligible

Source: Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), ‘EM-DAT: The International Disaster Database’, www.emdat.be.

We will come back to the problems of methodology involved in studying disasters, but for now it will have become apparent that greater technical expertise and knowledge have not allowed humanity to stand aloof from the problems of disaster in the manner of Anthemius. All too often, modern societies are reduced, like Zeno, to fleeing in panic from the impact of some potentially catastrophic occurrence. Disasters, therefore, give us a means of comparing how different societies have reacted to and tried their best to cope with the extreme situations which they often generate. In some basic way, disasters also provide a ready means for us to empathize with Roman experiences, if only as a prelude to understanding how radically different were their own conceptions of these events.

The Roman empire was an extraordinarily successful military, political and cultural enterprise. Indeed, Rome has been famous throughout history for its great triumphs.⁷ Yet Rome also suffered frequent, regular and sometimes colossal disasters. From the battle of Cannae, where 50,000 men fell in a single day, to the Great Fire in Rome, to the first appearance of the bubonic plague in the sixth century, the Roman world experienced large-scale calamities.⁸ The aim of this book is to analyse from the top down how the Romans coped with, thought about and used these events. There has been much excellent scholarship on individual or localized disasters, such as famines or floods, but none that has looked at disasters as a conceptual unity.⁹ I think this is an oversight given the importance the Romans themselves attached to these events and how useful a source they can be for telling us about the Roman approach to societal danger and risk.

The ancients recognized that disasters could be both significant and interesting. The fifth-century BCE Greek historian Thucydides argued at the start of his History of the Peloponnesian War that whereas the greatest struggle of the past had been the Persian wars, in which a coalition of Greek states had repelled the two punitive expeditions of the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes in 490 and 480 BCE, it was the war between Sparta and Athens from 431 BCE that was the more important. The reason, he suggests, is that during this war, disasters befell Greece the like of which had never occurred in any equal space of time. Cities were left desolate, exiles flooded alien states, and never had there been so much bloodshed, all of which man-made disaster was matched by natural phenomena of equally destructive force: earthquakes of great violence struck everywhere, eclipses of the sun and moon were seen, and the land was ridden with droughts and attacks of the plague.¹⁰ Similarly, disasters fascinated Roman historians. Harking back to his Greek forerunner and model, the second-century CE Roman writer Tacitus starts his Histories by justifying his chosen period of the early empire because this was a time that was ‘rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil strife, horrible even in peace’.¹¹ Later, during the crisis period of the third century when the empire came close to falling under the weight of barbarian invasions, the historian Herodian claimed that what made the period from Marcus Aurelius to the third century more significant than the earlier imperial period, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, was not only the succession of reigns, the variety of fortunes in both civil and foreign wars, the disturbances among the provincial populations or the destruction of cities; it was also the fact that in the later period ‘there have never been such earthquakes and plagues or tyrants and emperors with such incredible careers’.¹² Significantly, disasters also formed part of the official annual record of the most important events to have occurred in republican Rome, the Annales Maximi, which were drawn up and publicly posted by the pontiffs.

What is clear from this is that the Roman fascination with disaster did not simply reflect a ghoulish interest in death and destruction. Instead, what these Roman sources and their audiences saw as particularly significant was the causal link between military and political disorder and both natural and man-made disasters. War and rebellion were the usual stuff of politics, and food shortage and disease the everyday nuisances that went hand in hand with life in a pre-industrial society like Rome. But when catastrophe struck it was clear that here was a period in which the usual ordering of the world was breaking down. We can see this perhaps most clearly in the fact that it was a sure sign of the infamous emperor Caligula’s perversion that ‘he even used openly to deplore the state of his times, because they had been marked by no public disasters, saying that the rule of Augustus had been made famous by the Varus massacre, and that of Tiberius by the collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidenae, while his own was threatened with oblivion because of its prosperity’. What Caligula in his madness occasionally wished for, ther...