Food Provisions for Ancient Rome

A Supply Chain Approach

Paul James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429631931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This book defines the processes used for delivering a range of food items to the city of Rome and its hinterland from the first century AD using modern supply chain modelling techniques.

The subject matter delves into the wider supply of goods, such as wood and building products, to add further perspective to the breadth of the system managed by the Roman administration to ensure supply and political stability. It assesses the impact of strategic changes such as the introduction of water-powered milling technology and restructuring of the annona in this period, as well as administrative reforms. Evidence from ancient sources, both literary and epigraphic, along with relevant archaeological comparative evidence is used to develop a detailed supply model, including the mapping of warehouse management systems; port and river traffic co-ordination; quality control mechanisms and administrative structures. Unlike other contemporary studies, this model takes into consideration supply chain losses to correct the erroneous assumption that supply is equal to consumption. A product flow map from the source of supply to the consumer details the labour, equipment and infrastructure required at each stage, painting a graphic picture of just what an achievement it was for the administration to have maintained such a complex system over this long time period.

Food Provisions for Ancient Rome provides an in depth exploration of this topic that will be of interest to anyone working on the city of Rome under the empire, as well as those interested in imperial administration and logistics.

1Introduction

The motivation for this book began some years ago during a visit to Ostia as part of a University of Sydney study programme. While standing in the via dei Molini (the street of the mills), viewing the remains of the Grandi Horrea (a large grain warehouse) located adjacent to the Caseggiato dei Molini (the house of the mills), it was evident from their relative locations that the builders had an understanding of the need to maximise efficiency, improve customer service, and minimise waste. These were concepts I was intimately familiar with, having worked as a practitioner of Supply Chain Management (referred to as SCM) and Lean Improvement techniques for the previous 30 years. Many organisations strive to improve business performance using a combination of these techniques to reduce waste and improve customer service, and it will be shown below that the Roman administration demonstrated a commitment to these principles with their consistent efforts to maintain stability in the food supply throughout the Imperial period.

The ability demonstrated by the Roman administration to sustain the supply of staple food products to the city of Rome and part of the hinterland for a period of 500 years was a remarkable achievement, especially when considering that for much of this time the population supplied was at least one million. It is even more impressive for a predominantly unmechanised pre-industrial society where the transportation of goods became more difficult and expensive, the further they travelled. Despite this, the system the Romans operated was a supply chain and could be analysed using the same structured approach as that used in modern SCM systems.

By and large, detailed SCM system analysis has not been used by other historians to evaluate the food supply to Rome, and few have considered the possibility of waste occurring, preferring to assume that supply was equal to demand. The reality is that wastage is impossible to eliminate even in the most advanced SCM system as natural variations occur at each process step that create inconsistent performance. The SCM model helps to quantify the amount of this and importantly, the impact on supply, a crucial point of difference between this and other studies.

The question that logically follows is what is different or beneficial in this approach? The simple answer is that SCM is not a new concept and the strength of the technique is that it recognises and improves on what supply practitioners intrinsically know, with advantages accruing from the application of the structured approach. The discipline of the SCM approach provides answers to many of the outstanding questions about the supply systems to ancient Rome, establishing a new level of understanding for these.

Several concepts introduced above require explanation before proceeding. These are waste, efficiency, and supply chain. The first, waste, has two distinct meanings: the act of using something carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose; or any unwanted or unusable material. Two widely applied synonyms for waste are debris and scrap, terms that reflect a far more limited view of the concept. In SCM, the definition of waste is more holistic, referring to any activity, human or otherwise, that absorbs resources and creates no value from the customer’s perspective. Value, in this context, is defined as any activity that a customer would not want to pay for as part of the product offering. The Roman administration was empirically aware of the importance of value to their consumers as can be seen from the efforts they expended to secure supply and minimise political unrest.

An excellent example of the application of waste reduction is visible at Ostia where the remains of a breezeway are visible crossing the via dei Molini to join the horrea, and the pistrina (bakery) referred to above. It allowed the grain to be carried across to the bakery from the horrea for direct feeding into hoppers located above the milling equipment on the ground floor.¹ This design reduced movement waste and increased productivity compared to the alternative of carrying grain to ground level in the horrea, across the street, and up to the second level of the bakery for dispensing. It is the same conceptual design that would be used today for a similar application.

The second term, efficiency, contains some subtle nuances. Generally, it refers to the waste of materials, energy, money, or time in achieving an objective. More specifically, it measures how well the process inputs are managed to achieve the desired output. Efficiency is often confused with effectiveness with the difference being that the former is measurable, generally as the ratio of acceptable quality output to the total input in percentage terms, whereas effectiveness is the ability to achieve a result irrespective of the inputs or cost. The Romans frequently substituted effectiveness for efficiency, albeit for reasons of necessity. An example of this is the amount of safety stock held in order to mitigate the variabilities in the supply system to maintain security. For example, two or more years of stock was maintained for grain, as shown below, that had the potential to cause substantial losses due to ageing of the product. In contrast, in today’s business world, the goal is to achieve delivery Just-in-Time (JIT), a system that involves the receipt of inventory for production or customer sales only as it is needed, and not before.

The third term, supply chain, or Supply Chain Management (SCM), is used to describe the supply process. A supply chain in this context is a series of linked operations involved in the production and distribution of a commodity. The management of Rome’s food supply is an example of this because it comprised a sequence of interconnected processes in a chain.² SCM, a relatively new concept first coined in 1982, refers to the control of such systems.³ From 1990, academics began describing it from a theoretical perspective to clarify the difference between it and traditional approaches for managing the flow of materials and information.⁴ An absolute position on the SCM system in antiquity is impossible to determine because of a lack of data. Notwithstanding this, there is sufficient evidence for many of the critical supply chain inputs from the sources, such as freight rates (the Edict of Diocletian and the Egyptian papyri), wheat weights (Pliny the Elder), the water content of bread (the Geoponica), the extraction rates for flour (Pliny the Elder), grain imports (Josephus and the Epitomator of Aurelius Victor), and the number of riverboats in the circuit between the ports and Rome (Tacitus), to enable the development of an accurate supply model, especially when these are considered in conjunction with the archaeological evidence and relevant comparative studies.

SCM is a structured approach that utilises mapping of individual process steps at both a macro and micro level to better define the system scope and identify constraints and inefficiencies. The first step is to establish the net demand for the required products and work backwards through the supply chain to identify the individual process steps. Based on these inputs, it is possible to calculate the gross volume required from the suppliers. The next step is to determine where to source the goods, the drivers of which are cost and availability, length and security of supply lines, transport cost, and the complexity of the handling systems involved. These factors determined the cost of supply and the amount of waste. The wastage, when added to the net demand, is equal to the gross supply volume.

The preliminary evaluation of the products consumed defined the goal of study as building a model for the provisioning of Rome and its hinterland with four significant food products: grain,...