CHAPTER ONE
3. The social arrangement of the workforce
city was from the Tiber port to the Porta Collina on the northern Quirinal. This was a little over 2 km as the crow flies, but it would have been more logical to observe the natural topography and draw the material across the flat and undeveloped Campus Martius and then up and through the valley between the Quirinal and the Pincian. This meant that material would have needed to be hauled 2.5-3 km before reaching the
construction site.210 Similar routes were probably used in other places: the distance from the port to the very steep western face of the Aventine was short (c. 200 m), but it would have been preferable to approach the hill from the gentle valley that cuts through its two peaks.211 To the best of our knowledge, there was as yet no paved route up any of the hills to assist in the delivery of heavy material: the need to transform “steep cliffs” into “useful roads” may have presented itself on the occasion of supplying stone to the wall, as we first hear of such activity in the early third century.212 There must, however, have been established routes in part dictated by earlier monumental construction projects on each of the hills.213
3. The social arrangement of the workforce
210 Because the wall’s construction included gates that aligned to the natural routes of the city, I don’t think that building one section of the wall would have made the delivery of material harder to another section. For this reason, it is hard to draw conclusions about the sequencing of the wall’s construction from one sector of the city to another from the supply routes, as the delivery of material along the city’s streets was probably not hindered by the ongoing construction project.
211 This was the later route of the heaviest material entering Rome by land, as see Amm. Marc. 17.4.14 on the route taken by the obelisk brought to Rome by Constantius II.
212 Ov. Fast. 5.293-94, qui tunc erat rupes / utile nunc iter est on the Clivus Publicius: with the Clivus Publicius built in the 2nd half of the 3rd century by the curule aediles L. and M. Publicius Malleolus, see catalog no. 52 for further discussion.
213 This was also true of the earlier individual circuit walls on each hill, which presumably required similar transport systems established from those quarries on the Capitoline and Palatine.
All of the labor for the construction of various phases of the wall was in some way coordinated by the Roman state, as the wall was a public undertaking.214 Livy 6.32.1-2, cited in full above, forms the crucial evidence, but his meaning is not entirely clear and, in fact, reveals his own confusion. He gives the following details for the actual arrangement: the plebs were compelled to accept the burden for the wall’s cost
(succumbere oneri coacta plebes); they had no means of disputing such an obligation in the absence of the dilectus that year, which could otherwise be manipulated by the tribunes (quem dilectum impedirent non habebant tribuni plebis); the wall was thus contracted for by the censors (locatum a censoribus); and by the resulting tax (tributo), debts increased massively. The conglomeration of tax, coercion, and debt on the one hand would suggest that Livy refers here to a corvée, to a form of compulsory labor obligation distrained directly on citizens in the form of a tax. The detail about censorial contracting, though, is odd because we know from later evidence that the result of state- let contracts was remuneration, not citizen debt.215 At the same time, however, the process of a censorial contract, well known in Livy’s day, would have been infeasible three centuries prior when the Roman economy was still thoroughly unmonetized (cf. Ch. 2). We need to underline this point: without symbolic currency, large-scale contracts that
214 There is no reason to think that large amounts of slave labor were involved in the wall’s construction at Rome. Not only is there nothing to speak in favor of such an idea, the passage of Livy discussed here would argue against such a thing. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence of widespread use of free labor in public works in the contemporary Greek world, see Epstein 2008.
215 In particular, see the Lex Iulia de municipalibus, but also Polyb. 6.13.3 that censorial contracts for building and upkeep formed by far the greatest domestic expense of the Roman senate, by far the greatest of that part of the budget not controlled by the consuls. A high public expense is not likely to cause private debt, but rather the exact opposite.
It should be noted here that corvée and wages were not always mutually exclusive formations, as some later evidence attests to: Pope Hadrian repaired Rome’s walls with a large labor force in AD 774 (LP 97.52 and 94.92) conscripted labor from Tuscany and Campania, but paid the workers in gold coinage as well as in food. On this, see Goodson 2010: 68, Coates Stephens 1998: 168. However, in the Mid-Republican case, not only the fact that the wall was built before Roman coinage began, but also Livy’s record of debt would strongly suggest that Romans were not remunerated for their work on the circuit wall.
extend both in cost and duration beyond a single agrarian cycle are difficult to imagine. The period in which Livy wrote was accustomed to such building contracts, but there is no reason to think that the contractual process for building was fully formed already in the early fourth century.216 On the other hand, the idea of large-scale compulsory labor must have seemed more foreign to Livy,217 and the fact that this detail survived in the narrative up to his time suggests its merit as a sort of lectio difficilior.
The idea of a labor corvée for the wall is also believable because that sort of arrangement has parallels in the historiography of earliest Rome.218 The mechanics of a possible corvée in 378 remain difficult to assess; again, Livy is our only source. The author seems to imply that a tax for the wall was the responsibility of the censors, and thus fell outside the power of the tribunician intercessio, whereas the tribunes would have recourse to their veto if the arrangement was carried out as a levy under the powers of
imperium.219 Livy adheres to his own familiar conception of Roman constitutional practice and censorial oversight,220 and there are difficulties with his interpretation, not least of all the fact that tributum was a property tax, and its applicability to those Romans already in serious debt (and therefore with property liens, or even no longer landed) is
216 Here, I am at odds with the opinion of Badian 1972: 15-17 (see Anderson 1997: 79ff, who follows Badian) that contracting in all sectors of Roman state expenses began as a deus ex machina in the early Republic. Arguments against the scanty evidence for building contracts prior to this point are laid out in the next chapter.
217 I do not know of the existence of large-scale labor corvée for building in Augustan Rome; I doubt Livy did either.
218 The social memory of the period of the kings is full of mentions of compulsory labor, often brutal, in the service of public construction, e.g.Dion. Hal. 4.44.1-2; Livy 1.56, 1.59.9; Plin. HN 36.107-8. These mentions are clearly meant to prove a point—in these cases, the wickedness of the Tarquins—but there is no reason to doubt that such a labor arrangement did exist in archaic Rome.
219 Mommsen St.R. II.1 290-97, esp. 296 where magistrative action fell squarely under the jurisdiction of the intercessio.
220Tributum, suspended in 167, was assessed again following Caesar’s death when it was met with violent protest, cf. Brunt 1971a: 641 for discussion and sources. It is from these events within his own lifetime that Livy is working.
questionable.221 A form of labor-tax, however, makes far more sense with an indirect but no less substantial impact on agrarian debt. We have parallels for the use of imperium to obtain non-military, manual labor, as well as for soldiers working on repairing the wall.222 Despite Livy’s specific insistence otherwise, something parallel to the dilectus
would have been appropriate.223 The way in which, as detailed by Polybius, all iuniores
assembled in Rome and were selected into legions would work both for mustering population and then for breaking them into various necessary work units,224 and the practice during the dilectus of calling the assidui by name and then having them respond by name or face penalties would appear tailor-made for the organization of a large labor force by corvée.225 That being the case, however, the question of why there was no specific action by the tribunes against such a labor-tax remains.226 The actual
relationship between the assessors and those assessed for the wall’s construction seems irrecoverable, but those details concerning compulsory labor are most plausible.
The cost of the circuit wall
221 This already troubled Niebuhr 1827 I 296-97, who assumed that the tributum could be assessed on property not owned but owed and still in one’s possession. Brunt dismissed the entire early Republican history of the tributum as an annalist invention, 1971a: 76 n.3 and 641.
222 As for example with L. Postumius Megellus in the early third century; this evidence discussed at greater length in the following chapter. Also relevant here is the fact that elsewhere the army appears capable of building wall-and-agger on campaign, e.g. 8.16.8 at the siege of Cales.
223 The dilectus was very closely attached to issues of debt in the annalist history of the 5th and 4th centuries, see the analysis of Gabrielli 2003a: 68-69.
224 Polyb. 6.19.21; cf. Brunt 1971: App. 20, who suggests this was impractical in Polybius day and records instead an earlier method of recruitment.
225 Calling by name, Liv. 5.19.4: citari nominatim; answer in turn, Liv. 3.11.1: ad nomina respondere; penalties, Brunt 1971: 629 n. 1. A wonderful parallel is provided from Cononian Athens where the long walls are repaired using the naval rowers, Diod. Sic. 14.85.3.
226 The dilectus was initiated by Senatus Consultum, as Brunt 1971: 628, but this was applicable to
The responsibility for arranging for the wall’s labor needs was in some way negotiated between the state (the senate, the magistrates) and Rome’s population. To determine the scale of that cost, we can make a quantitative estimate of the wall’s labor requirement. The full rationale for the model as well as calculations are given in
Appendices 2 and 3. In all, the model presented here purposefully trends where possible towards the minimal estimate as a means of checking the overarching thesis of this chapter. The point is less to provide some precise figure then to suggest an order of magnitude from which to start a discussion on the impact of a construction process on a human scale.227 The methodology used is that developed for the Greco-Roman world by J. DeLaine, who first applied figures from 19th century construction estimating manuals to the Roman building industry.228 Shortly, we will also attempt to check our estimate made through this method using extant ancient evidence.
In forming an estimate for the wall, certain elements are excluded: as quarrying may have relied primarily on slave labor, the cost of the material extraction is ignored, and instead focus is solely given to the actual labor cost for the wall’s construction once
227 Trigger 1990.
228 DeLaine 1997. Her primary source is the publication of an Italian railroad engineer, G. Pegoretti, published at the cusp of the industrial revolution in Italy and thus still including estimating formulae for various less mechanized building techniques. I was able to examine the only copy of Pegoretti’s work available, to the best of my knowledge, in Rome, the second edition of 1865 in the library of the Facoltà di Ingegneria at Università di Roma, La Sapienza. This is the same edition used by DeLaine.
DeLaine 1997: 104-7 gives certain caveats to her model that all continue to seem reasonable and discussion of her method can be found in most of her subsequent publications. Three pertinent assumptions in such a model are as follows:
i) The average output of a man at work at a given task with given tools has essentially been constant from antiquity until the industrial revolution.
ii) The average workday is assumed to be 12 hours with 2 hours of breaks, thus 10 working hours, and she marshals ancient evidence to this effect.
iii) The worker is assumed to have been male and adult, and the working capacity is assumed constant disregarding personal status (i.e. slave v. free).
the requisite stone had arrived in Rome.229 Planning and layout were time-consumptive activities, but we are mostly concerned with the unspecialized work that could have been carried out by Roman citizens and slaves. There were further hidden costs: wood for tools, cranes, wheelbarrows, and carts is not taken into account, nor is feed for animals or iron for shovels, picks, etc. All of these omissions will only have the effect of reducing the resulting figure, and thus the streamlined model presented here is in keeping with a generally conservative reconstruction. Total cost for construction of the wall based on calculations in the appendices was as follows:
Table 1.1: Cost in man-days for the construction of the fourth century circuit wall
Construction Project Man-days
Ashlar masonry walls including interior wall of the agger complex 1,197,791
Excavations of foundations and fossa 308,893
Creation of agger 37,558
Aggregate cost: 1,544,242
We are fortunate in this case to have the rare means to check these numbers from ancient evidence. A remarkable and important notice is furnished by a passage of Diodorus Siculus describing the construction of a wall by Dionysios I around Syracuse and its fortress, the Epipolae, in 401 B.C.:230
dio/per tou\v a)rxite/ktonav paralabw/n, a)po\ th=v tou/twn gnw/mhv e)/krine dei=n teixi/sai ta\v E)pipola/v…boulo/menov ou)=n taxei=an th\n kataskeuh\n tw=n teixw=n gi/nesqai, to\n a)po\ th=v xw/rav o)/xlon h)/qroisen, e)c ou(= tou\v eu)qe/touv a)/ndrav epile/cav ei)v e(cakismuri/ouv e)pidiei=le tou/toiv to\n teixizo/menon to/pon. kaq’ e(/kaston me\n ou)=n sta/dion a)rxite/ktonav e)pe/sthse, kata de\ ple/qron e)pe/taken oi)ko/mouv, kai\ tou\v tou/toiv u(phreth/santav e)k tw=n i)diwtw=n ei)v e(/kaston ple/qron diakosi/ouv. xwri\v de\ tou/twn e(/teroi pamplhqei=v to\n a)riqmo\n e)/temnon to\n a)ne/rgaston li/qon, e(cakisxi/lia de\ zeu/gh bow=n e)pi\ to\n oi)kei=on to/pon pareko/mizen… e)n h(me/raiv ei)/kosi te/lov e)/sxe to\ tei=xov, to\ me\n mh=kov kataskeuasqe\n e)pi\ stadi/ouv tria/konta, to\ de\ u/(yov su/mmetron…toi=v ga\r pu/rgoiv diei/lhpto puknoi=v kai\ u(yhlou=v, e)/k te li/qwn w)ikodo/mhto tetrape/dwn filoti/mwv suneigrasme/nwn.
229 Of course, slaves in the quarries had to be fed at least subsistence, and so some spike in surplus production is implied even in this arrangement.
Sending, therefore, for his master-builders, in accord with their advice, he decided that he must fortify Epipolae…Wishing to complete the building of the walls rapidly, he gathered the peasants from the countryside, from whom he selected some 60,000 capable men and parceled out to them the space to be walled. For each stade he appointed a master-builder and for each plethron a mason, and the laborers from the common people assigned to the task numbered two hundred for each plethron. Besides these, other workers, a multitude in number, quarried out the rough stone, and six thousand yoke of oxen brought it to the appointed place...The wall was brought to completion in twenty days. It was thirty stades in length and of corresponding height…there were lofty towers at frequent intervals and it was constructed of stones four feet long and carefully joined.
As has been noted in discussing metrology, Syracusan architects can be detected behind some of the planning aspects of the wall, and they may have influenced the labor
arrangements at Rome as well. The stones of Dionysios’ wall were four-feet long, equivalent to the ideal length of those tufo giallo della via Tiberina stones in the Roman wall ( = 4 x c. .30 m = 1.20 m).
Diodorus here follows the writings of Philistos, a contemporary and courtier of Dionysios I who had the advantage of being an eye-witness, but the disadvantage, at least as far as we are concerned, of being a court historian.231 The treatment of the tyrant of Syracuse is, as a consequence, wholly positive, and a whole sentence in this same passage is devoted to the gifts that Dionysios offered his builders and to the fact that he even lent a hand to the work (14.18.6). This latter fact is hardly believable, and the coordinating of so many (60,000) people and the completion of the project so rapidly (20 days) may likewise be exaggerated figures, as both numbers are meant to impress, although neither pa/ndhmov labor forces232 nor incredibly short time spans is unattested in the construction of walls in the Greco-Roman world of all time periods.233 Moreover,
231 On Philistos, Jacoby FrGH IIIB pp. 496-502; Marsden 1969: 48-49; for his attachment to the court of Dionysius, see Nep. Dion 3.2; Plut. Dion. 11; Cic. De Or. 2.57.
232 For the employment of entire populations on the construction of walls, see multiple examples from Classical Greek historians cited by Epstein 2008: 111-12.
233 Fortifications are often pressing concerns in the face of invading armies, and therefore provide some examples of our faster building projects in antiquity. Besides the aforementioned project of Dionysios I of
the total cost, according to Diodorus, was the equivalent of 1,200,000 man-days for the Syracusan wall, whereas an estimate based on a modern-comparative method arrives at c. 1,500,000 for Rome’s wall.234 When we consider that the Roman wall also included the eastern agger, which was not paralleled at Syracuse, our estimate does not seem wildly out of order.
In the year 399, Dionysios’ Syracuse was home to the best and brightest engineers of his time.235 Within the echelons of the court, Philistos had access to technological knowledge and probably to written treatises in circulation. In this case his technical details less susceptible to political flattery are as accurate as we can reasonably expect from the period. In particular, the reported ratio of 1 master-builder: 6 masons: 200 unskilled workers, 207 total, per stade (185 m) of wall probably had some basis in the reality of Syracusan engineering practice.236