Our friends and comrades are smart people. Many of them have written many excellent essays, papers, and other assignments that have gone unnoticed, lost in the mass of student assignments that is generated by any university. But these essays should not go unnoticed. We have endeavored to include them here for readers who are interested in a variety of subjects. These are more than typical term papers, they are real pieces of research that we, and our friends, are excited to share with the world.
When a Woman Ruled the Romans
Logan (Janicki)
Hello, potential reader! Once upon a time, I was invited to have a paper of mine actually, really, published. Unfortunately, this invitation arrived just as the pandemic lockdowns began across the US and just after I had graduated. As a result, I lost the original copy that was later published by ISU’s Recounting the Past journal, and in the shuffle of early pandemic life, several errors were introduced to the published version during the editing process. This edition, which I have painstakingly recreated off the pdf available online, has corrected most of the errors present in that version.
Roma Invicta, Africa Felix
Josiah (Bloss)
When I wrote this paper on Late Roman economy in the fall of 2021, I was obsessed with the catastrophe of the Roman West. In many circles, the fall of Rome represents the end of the world, only to be dug up and resuscitated by the Renaissance. To borrow a cliché from the movie Gladiator, they see the Empire as “Light” and the rest as darkness. When Rome disappears, the light goes out. I do not see things this way. I came to view their Frankenstein version of “Western society” as a monster created by modernity. This paper is my reckoning with the simple and contrary truth: Life Goes On. I had to force myself into the grisly business of dissecting the one true historical apocalypse and showing how it really happened in concrete terms – not as an incomprehensible act of god, or some bygone ancient brutality, but how it just Was. And truly we must understand, the crisis just Was, and every person had to manage along economic lines, in the same way modern people ‘manage’ to ration their insulin, cut their grocery bill, or ‘manage’ to go to work while recovering from covid-19. Through plagues, war, environmental disruptions, migration, and economic collapse, people kept living. Many people died, sure, but their friends and family lived on. Entire villages disappeared, but not all their inhabitants died. Backwater yokels became legendary warlords, urban patricians became destitute. The logic of the Roman economy broke down, but the Human logic that governs most people’s day-to-day survival lived and pressed on.
It should be understood before reading, however, that the Roman economy worked differently than ours. There are many reasons for this. Beyond surface-level reasons like technology, which are important, the way economic relationships were conceived were simply different. Probably the most prominent factor that should be understood is that Rome conquered essentially the entire world with speed and in a way that would be totally unthinkable to any person now alive. From almost nowhere after the Second Punic War, Roman armies swarmed the Mediterranean causing ruin and chaos in the formerly Hellenic-dominated oceanways. Rome at this time consolidated power quickly and brooked no opposition besides Persia in the far east. It had no rivals, nobody even came close. An unbeatable army breathed down your neck every time the taxman knocked at your door. Every court case was conducted in Latin with the same violence behind it. The same for every land dispute, rent payment, job application, religious conversion, or even marriage.
Outside of a few border regions, there was no alternative to domination from Rome. Every economic, diplomatic, and political relationship formed for almost five hundred years was formed with these assumptions in mind. Because of this context, Rome was able to impose a tributary economic structure on the Mediterranean that essentially acted like a gigantic funnel – capital flowed into Italy, and armies and bureaucrats came out. The raw power that emanated from Rome rendered every outsider in awe. But astute people could see this power, in every respect, had its origins in the provinces. Thugga, the community I wrote about, is part of this system. It exemplifies the core logic of it, the exploitation of local labor and resources to feed the Roman economy, and how such a complex and large economy could be wrung from a relatively simple agrarian tribute-tax basis.
Something I want to be clear about this paper is that the machines – olive oil presses – that I am studying in such detail and so neutrally may be accurately described as Death Machines running on human misery. They take olives, grown and harvested by true chattel slaves, and using those same slaves, grind the produce of their lives’ harvest night and day, in mass quantities, for the profit of their absent owners. The oil press was the cotton gin and sweatshop of the ancient Mediterranean. What we should imagine when we see these objects abandoned and buried is not mass desolation, but mass liberation. However, this is not always the case when we see an abandoned factory or machine. The story of Thugga is that of every abandoned factory, mill, or mining town on Earth. People moved on. In Thugga’s case, they might have fled into the hills, converted to Islam and joined the army, or become pastoralists. Some people probably died. We see the near, modern, ghost towns, and tell ourselves that The Economy makes these things happen. What scares us is the historical framing of Thugga. Matt Christman remarked earlier this March on a live stream that he believes that Americans fetishize the apocalypse because we cannot possibly imagine how the economic/political/social order could change radically, so as to bring about a change like socialism, instead, it is easier for us to imagine the deaths of ourselves and everyone around us. But this is what is important about Thugga – It represents that change. We need to overcome our horror at the change and face the truth, which is that the real horror plays out in front of our eyes every day and we ignore it all the time. The goal is to bring about change so that there is no more horror. I had the privilege to bear historical witness to a change like that. Not in the polemic of historians or politicians, but right there in front of me. In hard numbers and statistics, to watch the rent going uncollected, the machines fall idle, the factory abandoned, and the chains fall away. The old world was gone, and it took many people with it. The Roman world was more brutal than any modern person can fully comprehend, and even more so in its demise. However, it did die, and the life of the once-Romans went on, perhaps a little freer and easier than it did before.
Normal Thoughts 