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James_Miller comments on Crossing the History-Lessons Threshold - LessWrong
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Something seems off about Roman history. Rome should have been in a Malthusian trap which should have made it easy for the army to find recruits among Roman citizens yet for much of the Empire's history this doesn't seem to have been the case as the Empire relied on Germans to fill the lower ranks. Why? What was the check on Roman population growth if it wasn't starvation? Was it disease?
Home politics in Rome were incredibly fragile. The ruling elites were never really safe from the next angry uprising, which led to all kinds of economic and political appeasement - this is where we get the phrase "bread and circuses" because that's what the Emperor literally had to hand out for free. Whoever proposed heavy conscription would not long keep his job (or head). Italia was essentially a black hole that sucked in resources from the outer provinces - troops from Germania, bread from Aegyptius, taxes from everywhere else.
As for the Malthusian trap, for Italia at least the answer is simple: they emigrated. Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies goes into great detail on Rome's perverse economic/demographic situation.
I'm listening to his 90 minute video about his ideas-- he says that the Romans hit an era where their taxes were so high that people couldn't afford to have enough children to replace themselves. Since things weren't working, the taxes were raised higher.
My understanding is that the affluence the Empire afforded them lead to Rome (and much of Italy) experiencing a demographic transition similar to the one modern developed nations are experiencing.
But we did it with effective birth control and safe abortions. What did Rome use? Was it infanticide?
From Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms:
"The intervening factor that kept [Roman] Egyptian birth rates lower than we would expect was again social custom. In northwestern Europe younger widows commonly remarried, but not in Roman Egypt. Furthermore, divorce was possible in Egypt. But while divorced husbands commonly remarried younger women, divorced women typically did not remarry. Thus while in Egypt almost all the women got married, the proportion still married fell steadily from age 20. Consequently women surviving to age 50 typically gave birth to only 6 children rather than 8."
Well, condoms go back to ancient Egypt.
That's not quite accurate. The crucial change was that people stopped wanting to have as many children. Also in both cases late marriage played a big role.
This is far from saying they were comfortable, effective or easy enough to manufacture to be widely in use.
Effective birth control and safe abortions are an easy and threshold lowering means to that end.
The demographic transition is first observed in the 18th century, without what people usually think of as "effective birth control and safe abortions."
What do you think caused it?
As it happens I recently came across a blog post/essay on this very topic.
Methods used to limit fertility historically 1: Non-penetrative intercourse. Oral isn't new, and is very reliable. 2: very late marriages. 3: Prostitution and /unsafe/ abortions. (this is a really depressing bit of history...)
I've seen the assertion that Rome had an effective birth control drug which they drove to extinction. Not sure how much I believe this.
"It was said that it could be used to treat cough, sore throat, fever, indigestion, aches and pains, warts, and all kinds of maladies." :)
I've never heard of woo contraceptives. Getting pregnant isn't susceptible to the placebo effect, and its pretty obvious when it doesn't work.
Getting pregnant may be more difficult than you think. Even if there's no placebo, there's still confirmation and disconfirmation bias and argument from authority i.e. doctors. Perhaps it wasn't marketed as a perfectly reliable contraceptive and therefore noticing that it doesn't work would have been more difficult. Medical authorities could explain the failures away with the phases of the moon or the will of the gods or something similarly silly.
Does this imply that Roman citizens could not serve in the army, or that they would not? In the US today, you can get more Southerners than Northerners to sign up for the army at any given pay rate, and it would not surprise me if similar cultural, ethnic, and economic effects led to Germans being overrepresented in the Roman army.
It's not quite accurate to say that the Roman Empire relied on Germans to fill the lower ranks of its army, at least before 212. Typically the Romans would form battalion- or regiment-sized units wholesale from a particular territory, from troopers to high officer ranks (sometimes under a Roman commander). Roman citizens (originally only from Rome proper, but from all of Italia after the Marian reforms) formed the famous legions; the provinces formed auxiliary forces of various kinds, and the latter became more important in comparison to the former as the empire grew. They also tended to grow closer to each other in terms of organization; the first auxiliary forces used their native weapons and tactics, but that distinction eroded over time.
Also, the legions were a major public employment project in the late Republican period and the early empire, with 125,000 legionaries under Tiberius at a time when Rome was a city of a million. Manpower shortages grew severe enough by Diocletian's time that he had to institute conscription, but that may have been a consequence of more need for troops rather than declining enlistment.
If lots of people are starving but the army is well fed you would expect plenty of people to want to join the army.
Right, but why would the army want to pay them? I would not be surprised if the army had some sort of physical standards that the destitute were unlikely to meet.
If this were true it would mostly explain my confusion, although I would still expect that fear of future starvation would push many parents to get their healthy sons to enlist.
Future is uncertain. You have to balance your sons' chances of dying from starvation against their chances of being ordered to march into the Teutoburg Forest...