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Greeks, Romans, and Barbarians: Spheres of Interaction
Book by Barry Cunliffe
- GenresHistoryArchaeology
243 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
About the author
Barry Cunliffe
174 books170 followersSir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe taught archaeology in the Universities of Bristol and Southampton and was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 2008, thereafter becoming Emeritus Professor. He has excavated widely in Britain (Fishbourne, Bath, Danebury, Hengistbury Head, Brading) and in the Channel Islands, Brittany, and Spain, and has been President of the Council for British Archaeology and of the Society of Antiquaries, Governor of the Museum of London, and a Trustee of the British Museum. He is currently a Commissioner of English Heritage.
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March 25, 2020This book was a lucky find in one of those bookshops that pop up now and again selling remaindered stock. Beneath the surface attraction of a single book about Greeks, Romans and Barbarians, there is the lasting satisfaction of the system of relationships between the sophisticated Mediterranean world and barbarian inhabited interior of darkest Europe ("'And this also,' said Marlow suddenly, 'has been one of the dark places of the earth.'")
Thinking about the chronology, and I'm not precisely sure about this because in the long years before I started my current austerity reading habit I was buying books and not reading them for for years if at all, this may well have been the book that started off my interest in systems thinking which has lead me down paths of delight and despair since thinking in systems is very interesting but not always for the faint hearted as we shall see.
Cunliffe's starting point is that he saw (writing in the late 80s) a disconnection between archaeologists specialising in the Classical world of Greece and Rome and those working in prehistoric Europe and in this book he sought to apply some of the ideas current among the prehistorists to explain the relationship between the apparently very different Classical and Barbarian worlds.
The argument is that the Classical world was trading with the Barbarian world. In the Mediterranean there was a demand for tin to alloy with copper to make bronze (not geography is destiny but more like geology is destiny since in Europe tin was mined in Spain and Britain and not available elsewhere) and also constant demand for slaves, luxury goods like furs and amber, hides and hunting dogs (a mainstay of exports from Ireland and Britain apparently for centuries). In exchange the Mediterranean world provided Bronze table wear and overwhelmingly, wine. Some of this is attested by Classical sources and archaeology (though the hunting dogs and Gaulish hams are known only through the written sources their barks having left no exacavatable record).
So far so simple. But this had a profound affect on the societies of prehistoric Europe which developed in response to this trade. The trade was controlled by an elite who received the incoming goods and distributed them to reward their followers and procured goods from remoter regions to give to merchants. A port of trade is surrounded by a market zone with which it has direct dealings increasingly using coins, beyond that is a zone dominated by hierarchical societies in the earlier period creating massive hillforts, beyond them is what Cunliffe calls the procurement zone where warriors struck out enslaving people from presumably even remoter and less fortunate regions (here for instance).
This system however was prone to instability. Firstly because the trade from the Mediterranean world is not constant (chiefly because trade wars pushed people out of their traditional markets and forced them to find new people to work with), secondly because the elite is vulnerable to groups trying to muscle in their control of the trading. This causes a series of abrupt collapses spread out over centuries typified by mass movements of population and the eventual development of new elites down to the end of the Roman empire.
Cunliffe makes the broader point that the same system that we're familiar with from the African slave trade, though sugar and rum standing in for vines and wines in the Classical version. Further this trade intensifies the social dynamic in the Roman world; in the early period the Roman army was not professional, with peasants called up to fight for particular conflicts. However as wars dragged on for longer the loss of manpower causes smallholders to go bust, the wealthy buy up their lands and create larger estates, seeking a return on their capital in the region of five to seven percent they turn to intensive cultivation of cash crops (primarily wine but also corn and olive oil) which in turn requires people to consume those crops which means more trade into the Barbarian world. In time this means that Rome is dragged into conflicts in southern France.
This was the other side of the coin of the Roman social system, an important component of success for their elite was success in war. War, trade and slavery formed a reinforcing loop in the Roman social system which intensified the division between an increasingly wealthy land owning elite who commanded armies, and people leaving the countryside to become the urban poor who served in those armies.
The pottery record shows Italian wine conquering Gaul, crushing the competition of the long established Greek cities on the southern French coast, long before Julius Caesar came and saw. Wine for the market was increasingly produced by estates predominantly using slave labour. Since at this stage slave breeding was only limited in extent and unable to meet the labour demands of the estate, there had to be a regular inflow of slaves. As a result the sources of slaves were piracy (a regular risk in novels like The Golden Ass and Daphnis and Chloe), warfare (a bit unpredictable, it could glut the market, or potential slaves could end up getting killed) and trade with estimates of an annual inflow of 100,000 slaves required just to maintain a constant rate of production let alone to allow for any increase.
Rome and the Celtic worlds mirrored each other. Both had militarised elites dependant on a slave trade that was intensifying social relations. And in both the competition to dominate the hierarchy was a source of instability. In Republican Rome this peaked with Caesar's conquest of Gaul and the following civil wars.
But a consequence of Rome's long term involvement in Gaul before the conquest was the development of societies that could be conquered, but the rapidity of the Roman spread northwards brought them into contact and conflict with far less complex social groups that were far more difficult to integrate into their systems of control and governance, both beyond the Rhine and outside of south-eastern Britain. Beyond the Rhine the earlier pattern then repeated itself with a market zone visible in the archaeological record some 200 kilometres deep from the Rhine frontier, followed by an elite zone, followed by a procurement zone where the business end of slave raiding was taking place.
In all Cunliffe has written a thoughtful book that sets out a model for the spread and development of more complex societies in western Europe based on control over trade networks. The argument is developed in the context of prehistoric Europe but to my mind has some applicability to later state formation in Europe too (thinking say of Charlemagne or the Ottonians).
Illustrated with plans, maps showing the dispersal of grave types and finds of luxury goods - the dense clusters on the Danish island of Bornholm are very striking - and the kind of diagrams showing economic and social relationships that make my heart sing like a bird.
Afterthought: Cunliffe poses the question why the early Roman Republic was able to withstand the migrations resulting from the crashes of the system he describes while the Roman Empire collapsed under the pressure. His answer here is that the Roman republic had "all its youthful energy" (p192). Another way of stating that would be to say that the Roman republic was comparatively a much less complex society than the empire would be and as a result was more resilient. The Empire would become more complex, developing a much greater degree of specialisation (and I suppose efficiency in an economic sense) but as a result was vulnerable to disruption.
Thinking about the chronology, and I'm not precisely sure about this because in the long years before I started my current austerity reading habit I was buying books and not reading them for for years if at all, this may well have been the book that started off my interest in systems thinking which has lead me down paths of delight and despair since thinking in systems is very interesting but not always for the faint hearted as we shall see.
Cunliffe's starting point is that he saw (writing in the late 80s) a disconnection between archaeologists specialising in the Classical world of Greece and Rome and those working in prehistoric Europe and in this book he sought to apply some of the ideas current among the prehistorists to explain the relationship between the apparently very different Classical and Barbarian worlds.
The argument is that the Classical world was trading with the Barbarian world. In the Mediterranean there was a demand for tin to alloy with copper to make bronze (not geography is destiny but more like geology is destiny since in Europe tin was mined in Spain and Britain and not available elsewhere) and also constant demand for slaves, luxury goods like furs and amber, hides and hunting dogs (a mainstay of exports from Ireland and Britain apparently for centuries). In exchange the Mediterranean world provided Bronze table wear and overwhelmingly, wine. Some of this is attested by Classical sources and archaeology (though the hunting dogs and Gaulish hams are known only through the written sources their barks having left no exacavatable record).
So far so simple. But this had a profound affect on the societies of prehistoric Europe which developed in response to this trade. The trade was controlled by an elite who received the incoming goods and distributed them to reward their followers and procured goods from remoter regions to give to merchants. A port of trade is surrounded by a market zone with which it has direct dealings increasingly using coins, beyond that is a zone dominated by hierarchical societies in the earlier period creating massive hillforts, beyond them is what Cunliffe calls the procurement zone where warriors struck out enslaving people from presumably even remoter and less fortunate regions (here for instance).
This system however was prone to instability. Firstly because the trade from the Mediterranean world is not constant (chiefly because trade wars pushed people out of their traditional markets and forced them to find new people to work with), secondly because the elite is vulnerable to groups trying to muscle in their control of the trading. This causes a series of abrupt collapses spread out over centuries typified by mass movements of population and the eventual development of new elites down to the end of the Roman empire.
Cunliffe makes the broader point that the same system that we're familiar with from the African slave trade, though sugar and rum standing in for vines and wines in the Classical version. Further this trade intensifies the social dynamic in the Roman world; in the early period the Roman army was not professional, with peasants called up to fight for particular conflicts. However as wars dragged on for longer the loss of manpower causes smallholders to go bust, the wealthy buy up their lands and create larger estates, seeking a return on their capital in the region of five to seven percent they turn to intensive cultivation of cash crops (primarily wine but also corn and olive oil) which in turn requires people to consume those crops which means more trade into the Barbarian world. In time this means that Rome is dragged into conflicts in southern France.
This was the other side of the coin of the Roman social system, an important component of success for their elite was success in war. War, trade and slavery formed a reinforcing loop in the Roman social system which intensified the division between an increasingly wealthy land owning elite who commanded armies, and people leaving the countryside to become the urban poor who served in those armies.
The pottery record shows Italian wine conquering Gaul, crushing the competition of the long established Greek cities on the southern French coast, long before Julius Caesar came and saw. Wine for the market was increasingly produced by estates predominantly using slave labour. Since at this stage slave breeding was only limited in extent and unable to meet the labour demands of the estate, there had to be a regular inflow of slaves. As a result the sources of slaves were piracy (a regular risk in novels like The Golden Ass and Daphnis and Chloe), warfare (a bit unpredictable, it could glut the market, or potential slaves could end up getting killed) and trade with estimates of an annual inflow of 100,000 slaves required just to maintain a constant rate of production let alone to allow for any increase.
Rome and the Celtic worlds mirrored each other. Both had militarised elites dependant on a slave trade that was intensifying social relations. And in both the competition to dominate the hierarchy was a source of instability. In Republican Rome this peaked with Caesar's conquest of Gaul and the following civil wars.
But a consequence of Rome's long term involvement in Gaul before the conquest was the development of societies that could be conquered, but the rapidity of the Roman spread northwards brought them into contact and conflict with far less complex social groups that were far more difficult to integrate into their systems of control and governance, both beyond the Rhine and outside of south-eastern Britain. Beyond the Rhine the earlier pattern then repeated itself with a market zone visible in the archaeological record some 200 kilometres deep from the Rhine frontier, followed by an elite zone, followed by a procurement zone where the business end of slave raiding was taking place.
In all Cunliffe has written a thoughtful book that sets out a model for the spread and development of more complex societies in western Europe based on control over trade networks. The argument is developed in the context of prehistoric Europe but to my mind has some applicability to later state formation in Europe too (thinking say of Charlemagne or the Ottonians).
Illustrated with plans, maps showing the dispersal of grave types and finds of luxury goods - the dense clusters on the Danish island of Bornholm are very striking - and the kind of diagrams showing economic and social relationships that make my heart sing like a bird.
Afterthought: Cunliffe poses the question why the early Roman Republic was able to withstand the migrations resulting from the crashes of the system he describes while the Roman Empire collapsed under the pressure. His answer here is that the Roman republic had "all its youthful energy" (p192). Another way of stating that would be to say that the Roman republic was comparatively a much less complex society than the empire would be and as a result was more resilient. The Empire would become more complex, developing a much greater degree of specialisation (and I suppose efficiency in an economic sense) but as a result was vulnerable to disruption.
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