Untitled - UTSC Humanities Research Projects server - University of ...

The Mediterranean and Ancient History 35
This is a strange kind of conclusion. What counts as a catastrophe?
Presumably nothing in the way of ordinary misery or
ordinary climatic events is going to qualify. There seems to be
plenty of evidence for microregional famines in the better documented
eras of antiquity. 117 And if we want major catastrophes,
the candidates are very few—the eruption of Thera, the end of
the Mycenaeans (perhaps a mainly military event), the epidemics
that troubled the Roman Empire in the second and fifth
centuries ad, deforestation. As for epidemics, Duncan-Jones
and others have reinstated the demographic importance of the
smallpox epidemic that began under Marcus Aurelius, 118 and a
strong case can be made for seeing it as a catastrophic event. In
the case of deforestation, Horden and Purcell, while allowing
that there was periodically over-felling of woodland, choose to
support the ‘optimistic’ case repeatedly stated by O. Rackham.
119 But the reader familiar with, among other things, the
remarkable evidence from Greenland about the level of coppersmelting
in the Roman Mediterranean, or with the vast consumption
of wood in the Roman Empire—not least for heating
baths—requires a fuller and more balanced presentation of the
evidence to be convinced. 120 The notion that the Roman
117 Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply.
118 R. P. Duncan-Jones, ‘The Impact of the Antonine Plague’, JRA 9
(1996), 108–36; W. Scheidel, ‘Progress and Problems in Roman Demography’,
in W. Scheidel (ed.), Debating Roman Demography (Leiden, 2001) (Mnemosyne,
Suppl. 211) 1–81: 74–5, etc. For some doubts, not very substantial it seems to
me, see the papers by J. Greenberg and C. Bruun in JRA 16 (2003), 413–34.
119 CS 182–6, 338 (there is a Panglossian tone to these passages). The
authors are prepared to admit that there were ‘fewer dense woodlands . . . in
the nineteenth century than there had been in the Bronze Age’ (p. 339), but
what I have in mind is a difference between (say) the fifth century bc and the
first century ad For O. Rackham’s views, which cannot unfortunately be
discussed in full here, see ‘Ecology and Pseudo-ecology’. It is interesting to
see what a role timber shortage plays in a recent (much-debated) comparative
history of the eighteenth-century economies of north-west Europe and China
(K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the
Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000), 219–42).
120 Greenland: S. Hong, J.-P. Candelone, C. C. Patterson, and C. F.
Boutron, ‘History of Ancient Copper Smelting Pollution during Roman and
Medieval Times Recorded in Greenland Ice’, Science 272 (1996), 246–9, etc.
For wood consumption under the Roman Empire CS 185 adopts an estimate
by H. N. le Houérou (‘Impact of Man and his Animals on Mediterranean