Crisis, society and economy

The third-century crisis. After two centuries of peace, trouble came on two fronts from the 230s:

• In Iran, a new dynasty, the Sasanians (from 225 CE), expanded aggressively. Their king Shapur I claimed in a rock inscription in three languages to have destroyed a Roman army of 60,000 and captured the great eastern city of Antioch.
• In the north, groups of Germanic tribes such as the Alamanni, Franks and Goths crossed the Rhine and Danube frontiers again and again, and Rome had to give up much territory beyond the Danube.
• Rulers rose and fell quickly: 25 emperors in 47 years, a sign of how unstable the empire had become.

Families and women. The nuclear family was the norm; adult sons usually did not live with their parents. Slaves were counted as part of the household. Women were fairly well placed in law: a wife did not pass under her husband's control but kept her rights in her own family's property, and on her father's death became an independent property owner. Divorce was easy, needing only notice of intent. Yet men married in their late twenties or early thirties and women in their late teens or early twenties; marriages were usually arranged, and husbands tended to dominate their wives; Augustine, a later bishop, recalled that his father regularly beat his mother. Fathers also had sweeping legal power over their children.

Literacy varied a great deal. In Pompeii, buried by a volcano in 79 CE, walls were covered with writing: advertisements, graffiti and slogans, showing that many ordinary people could read. In Egypt, by contrast, many contracts were written by professional scribes for people who said they could not read or write. The empire was also rich in cultures and languages: Aramaic in the Near East, Coptic in Egypt, Punic and Berber in North Africa, Celtic in Spain and the north-west. Many of these were only spoken, and some were lost as Latin spread.

A busy economy. The empire had harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards and olive-oil factories. The most traded goods were wheat, wine and olive oil, carried in tall clay jars called amphorae. Archaeologists can identify where each kind of jar was made, so the broken jars tell us which regions sold most. Spanish olive oil, shipped in a jar type now called Dressel 20, took over many markets from Italian oil between about 140 and 160 CE; later, oil from North Africa, and after that from the eastern Mediterranean, took the lead in turn. Producers who offered better quality at lower cost won.

Some regions were famous for their fertility: Campania for fine wine, Sicily and Byzacium (Tunisia) for wheat, Galilee for intensive farming, Baetica (southern Spain) for olive oil. Other areas were much poorer. In Numidia (Algeria), pastoral people practised transhumance, moving their flocks between the mountains and the lowlands with the seasons and carrying oven-shaped huts. In northern Spain, people lived in hilltop villages called castella.

The economy was sophisticated. Romans used water power to run mills, hydraulic mining (powerful jets of water) in the gold and silver mines of Spain, and an advanced system of banking and money; the silver denarius held about 4.5 grams of pure silver. Large, well-organised industries and commercial networks existed side by side with very poor rural areas.