Q : Galatia - Gallic factions

[cmacq]

paullus,

the following is from Rosenstein's Rome at War; which was preceded by an outline of the view that I presented herein.

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Although this reconstruction is internally consistent, supported by ancient literary evidence, and explanatory of much that caused the fall of the Roman Republic, doubters have increasingly questioned whether the growth of vast, slave-run estates in fact led to a crisis among smallholders during the early and middle decades of the second century. As early as 1970 Frederiksen placed the problem on an entirely new footing when he observed that although the archaeological record for the Italian countryside in the second and first centuries B.C. ought to reflect some trace of this massive decline in the number of small farms and their replacement by large estates worked by slaves, surveys of the remains of rural habitations in this period have strikingly failed to detect evidence that would confirm this hypothesis. Instead, the surveys have uncovered a complex situation that resists blanket characterization and cautions against monocausal explanations for declines where these occurred. Although evidence for small farmsteads is scarce in some areas, it abounds in others and may therefore indicate that independent farmers continued to work these holdings. On the other hand, few villas of the type associated with the new plantation agriculture appear in the literary or archaeological record before the mid-second century at the earliest. Evidence for their existence only becomes widespread more than a half century subsequently, in the age of Sulla.

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Here, Rosenstein plays a little slight of hand when he 1) argues that the conventual view places the rise of large landholdings in the early and middle 2nd century. Actually, from the literary sources it has been very clear for a long time that the change from small to large occurred in the Marian period, or late 2nd century. 2) He cites evidence from archaeological surveys as an anecdote (no numbers provided), that supports his first argument. First, depending on who conducts the survey and the very nature of survey data (surface evidence), this information may not provide an accurate temporal picture. Secondly, as you see above the survey evidence in fact supports the claims of the literary sources that the change took place in the late 2nd century.

Overall, Rosenstein claims that because the changes didn't occur in the early and middle 2nd centuries, then the causality has to due to a factor other that Roman military expansion. Of course one would simply counter his argument by pointing out that the numbers of slaves dumped on the market in the late 2nd to the middle 1st century, part due to the wars of conquest, dwarfed anything seen before. I think this work was the result of a dissertation that was not properly vetted.