Mediterranean Basin. War and Taxes

The Mediterranean Basin consists of the Mediterranean Sea and the lands that surround it. As the arena within which arose several of the ancient civilizations that influenced the cultures of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, the basin is of particular importance to the study of environmental history. Historians have remarked that many of the Mediterranean lands, which in early times bore great cities, flourishing farms, and tall forests, later became poor and barren. Scholars have speculated about changes in climate but also about the effects of ancient land practices.

Mediterranean societies, like societies everywhere, have always operated within the context of the natural environment, have had various positive and negative effects on it, and have in turn been affected by those effects. Civilizations flourish only as long as the ecosystems they depend on flourish. Among many other examples, cities such as Lepcis Magna, Sabratha, and Thamugadi in North Africa, which were thriving centers in the Roman Empire but later buried by advancing Sahara sands, illustrate this principle.

One of the most damaging effects of human activities in the Mediterranean was deforestation, which occurred to one degree or another in most parts of the basin. The great cedar forests of Lebanon, for example, were cut so intensively during Roman times and earlier that only a few small groves remain. Studies of ancient pollen deposits give evidence of forest removal in many localities around the inland sea. Of course, forests can recover from felling if given the chance, and there is also evidence of regrowth. But all too often, repeated exploitation, fires, the grazing of goats that eat small trees, and the expansion of agriculture meant that forests disappeared over wide expanses of land.

With fewer forests to absorb rainfall and release it in the form of springs, sudden downpours of rain that are common in the Mediterranean Basin swept down the mountainsides, bringing floods and eroding the soil. The resulting effects of erosion, leaving bare rocks and badlands, can be seen in some places such as southern Italy, Spain, and the Levant even today. Certainly it would take centuries to reestablish the same kinds of forest in some of these denuded tracts.

Soil from the steeper slopes was deposited by the floods in coastal plains, which became poorly drained, silt-choked marshlands where malarial mosquitoes bred and forced villagers to move to higher elevations where possible. An example is the town of Paestum on the southern Italian coast, which flourished in Greek and Roman times but was uninhabitable by the Middle Ages.

Salinity is a problem wherever irrigation occurs in warm, relatively dry climates. As evaporation takes place in waterlogged fields, salt is concentrated in the soil, making the soil more saline. In some areas this can become so severe that most food crops cannot grow. Salinization has been noted in many places around the Mediterranean, including the Fayum, an Egyptian oasis that is below sea level. This phenomenon is not unrelated to deforestation and erosion because water dissolves more salt from exposed rocks and soil than it does from well-forested, stable slopes.

War and Taxes. Farmers in Mediterranean lands knew remedies for problems such as siltation, salinization, and soil exhaustion through leaching of minerals. But political and military pressures often made the remedies difficult to apply. The tax system made its greatest demands on the agricultural sector of the economy.

Farmers were conscripted into armies, making their labor unavailable to care for the land. War ravaged the countryside; farm families were killed, their property requisitioned, and crops, buildings, and terraces destroyed. Antiecological warfare was practiced in order to deny food and other resources to the enemy. These pressures bore more severely on small farmers, who were ruined and became dependents of landlords who, often having several large estates located in places distant from each other, survived more successfully.

Writers such as the Greek Hesiod and the Roman Virgil described typical Mediterranean farms, and it is evident that they were relatively complex ecosystems. Topography, soil, and exposure mandated that different crops be grown in the locations that most favored them. Portions of the land were left in forest as woodlots, and trees were planted for shelter and other purposes.

But the tendency in some periods, especially under Roman rule in Italy and Spain, was to amass land in larger estates under single ownership, where grazing often replaced farming. Single grains such as wheat and barley were planted in extensive fields, a practice called "monoculture." These practices created simplified ecosystems vulnerable to insects and fungi. Because a complex ecosystem is more stable than a simple one—because it has more ways of reasserting its balance if it is subjected to stress—as one species after another is removed, the total complex becomes more susceptible to disaster.

Agriculturalists persecuted predatory animals that sometimes raided their herds and farm animals. The Greek Aristotle and other ancient writers recorded disastrous plagues of rodents. Perhaps they resulted from the fact that wolves, foxes, wildcats, and other predators had been hunted out. Thus by killing off many animals, people were unwittingly undermining their economies. However, these writers did not make the connection between the plagues and the reduced numbers of predators.

These factors affected agricultural productivity in the ancient Mediterranean, where agriculture was the most important sector of the economy. Shortages of food and rising prices were among the debilitating effects. The result of the human failure to support nature was that nature was less able to support humans. During much of antiquity in the Mediterranean, population decline was a continuing problem. Roman emperors tried to counter it by making marriage and childbearing mandatory.

A decline in the population would mean fewer workers on farms, so that reductions in population resulted in lower agricultural production, which in turn would fail to feed the population. The Roman emperor Diocletian's Edict on Occupations commanded men to provide sons to fill their positions, and his Edict on Prices set maximum prices for many commodities including food, which is evidence of the economic situation during his reign (the end of the third century ce). Food was scarce, prices were rising, and there was a shortage of labor.

Although sporadic wars and plagues were also to blame, the chronic agricultural decline basically resulted from environmental causes.

The effects of industrial activity were also important in the ancient Mediterranean Basin. Scars left by ancient mines are still visible today. The Greek historian Herodotus remarked that miners on Thasos had turned a whole mountain upside down. The fuel needs of a large smelting operation such as the one that produced silver at Laurium in ancient Greece for Athenian coins or the Roman iron center at Populonium in ancient Italy would each consume annually the growth of wood provided by a forest extending over 404,687 hectares. In addition to these metallurgical factories, the ceramic industry demanded huge amounts of wood and charcoal for fuel.

Pollution. Several ancient writers remarked on pollution produced by industry. The Greek geographer Strabo visited silver-smelting furnaces in Hispania and noted that they needed high chimneys to carry the noxious smoke away because otherwise workers would suffer disability or even death. Lead, the predominant metal in silver ore, was present with other poisonous elements such as arsenic and mercury in industrial procedures, including the processing of other metallic ores, pottery, leather, and textiles, so that workers in these industries were in danger of poisoning.

The general population was also exposed to toxic substances. Utensils, dishes, and cooking pots were often made of lead or silver with high lead content. Sweeteners, jam, and fish, sauces contained lead compounds, sometimes at high concentrations. Water came through lead pipes, and aqueducts had ceramic channels sealed with lead. Water coming through such conduits could be contaminated by lead if it were acidic, although most water in the Mediterranean Basin contains calcium carbonate and therefore would have been buffered against contamination.

Studies of accumulated ice in Greenland have shown that lead in the Earth's atmosphere increased during Roman times. Studies of bones from Roman burials have demonstrated variable, but often high, lead levels. Lead poisoning's effects include interference with reproduction, physical weakness, and dulling of the intellectual faculties, and these are cumulative, slow to develop, and long-lasting.

As though that were not enough, mercury was used in gold refining, and arsenic appeared in pigments and medicines. It seems certain that large numbers of people in the Roman Empire suffered from environmental poisoning produced by industrial processes.

Urban dwellers in the ancient Mediterranean Basin found themselves afflicted with problems of pollution. The complaints of poets about conditions in the city of Rome sound remarkably familiar to modern readers. Air pollution from smoke and dust was bad in the larger cities, but noise pollution also generated protests. Indoor charcoal braziers and wood-burning fireplaces were the usual sources of heat in winter and were used for cooking all year.

Lamps and torches provided as much smoke as light. Public baths, whose furnaces and hypocausts (ancient Roman central heating systems) were heated with prodigious amounts of fuel, were immensely popular throughout the Roman Empire. Wealthy Romans fled to country villas to escape the polluted atmosphere of Rome. The Roman writer Juvenal catalogued urban nuisances, including traffic, fires, construction projects that destroyed natural beauty, chamber pots emptied into the streets from upper-story windows, and rising crime and vandalism.

Waste disposal caused serious health problems. Many cities had carts to carry the worst of the garbage outside the walls, but in some places dung heaps could be seen and smelled in the midst of town. Even when there was a sewer system, as in Rome, difficulties remained. The cloaca maxima (main drain), discharged into the Tiber River, polluting the downstream stretch. Moreover, floods, their frequency increased by the deforestation of the Tiber watershed, backed effluents up the sewers into the city. Sometimes the drain in the floor of the Pantheon temple in Rome spouted like a fountain.

Athens channeled sewage out of the city and used it as manure for crops. Materials from latrines were taken to tanneries. Pompeii installed stepping stones so that pedestrians could cross muddy, polluted avenues. The effects of water pollution, vermin, and diseases on the health of urban populations were staggering. The lack of sanitary conditions enabled the spread of the plagues that swept around the Mediterranean Sea in every period of the ancient past.

Questions Remain. Evidence in documents, archeological excavations, and scientific studies indicates that environmental problems were of critical importance in the history of Mediterranean civilizations. These problems may not have been as widespread and rapid as those of more recent centuries, but they were cumulative and mounted to a devastating level by the time of the late Roman Empire. Mediterranean societies could not flourish after their forests had been decimated, their agricultural soil eroded and salinized, their health undermined by the spread of malarial marshes, toxic pollution, and the unsanitary conditions of urban crowding.

Of course, these problems were not equally present everywhere throughout Mediterranean history. For some locales and in some periods evidence is available, but for other locales and periods all too little is known. Why did ancient Mediterranean people act in ways that produced erosion, exhaustion of resources, debilitating pollution, the spread of disease, food shortages, and ruinous inflation? There is no simple answer, but several observations can be made.

First, ideas and beliefs affect the way people regard and treat the environment. A prevailing attitude of common people toward the natural environment was worship. Their gods were gods of nature who were believed to protect at least some aspects of nature such as sacred groves and chosen animals. But immediate needs often cause people to circumvent religious prescriptions.

The ancients also had a secular practicality, often found in Greek and Latin literature, that weighed the economic value of natural resources and avoided involving the gods in their calculations. A philosopher such as Aristotle could declare that the highest purpose of everything in nature's order is to serve humankind.

In late antiquity, Christianity came to dominate the Mediterranean area, and although affirming that the natural world reflects the glory of God, denied that the creation has intrinsic spiritual value, so that it could be used for the benefit of humankind.

Second, in regard to gaining understanding of the environment, many ancient people were interested in learning what makes the world of nature work. Farmers and others did this through experience, through trial and error. Philosophers and scientists developed many ideas that prefigured some principles of the science of ecology. Aristotle himself was important in this way, as was his brilliant student, Theophrastus. But observational and experimental science did not advance far enough to enable a sound theoretical understanding of the web of life.

An intuitive grasp of what needs to be done to care for the Earth existed in agriculture and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in pastoralism and forestry. The Greek historian Xenophon expressed it thus: "Earth is a goddess who willingly teaches justice to those who can learn, for the better she is served the more good things she gives in return" (Xenophon 1923, 5.12). But economic, political, and military factors intervened to upset the balance.

Third, in order to maintain ecological balance, a society must have appropriate technology. It might be thought that the ancients did because they lacked many destructive inventions that later appeared. But their technology made major impacts in the long run. Dependence on wood and charcoal as the only major fuels meant a drain on forests. Water and wind power were discovered but not widely used until the Middle Ages.

Fourth, ability to interact creatively with the environment requires effective social organization. This is true because a community's environmental ends may involve sacrifices on the part of its individual members that they would not make without some degree of encouragement or coercion. That the ancients had social control is clear from the works they constructed, including aqueducts, canals, and roads. These works enabled cities to draw resources from distant lands.

Technology and social organization can be directed either to conserve or destroy ecosystems. Unfortunately, it often seems that their dominant tendency is toward destruction. The peoples of the ancient Mediterranean Basin set in motion a wearing away of the landscapes where civilization had its birth on three continents. There was deterioration at the same time of both environment and people, and it was caused to a great extent by the actions of the people themselves.