torrents when the rain no longer sank into the soil. Later, in the second century, Pausanias compared two Greek river basins: the Maeander, actively plowed agricultural land, and the Achelous, vacant land whose inhabitants had been removed by the Romans. The populated, actively cultivated watershed produced far more sediment, its rapidly advancing delta turning islands into peninsulas. But by how much did Roman agriculture increase erosion rates in Roman Italy?
In the 1960s Princeton University geologist Sheldon Judson studied ancient erosion in the area around Rome. He saw how the foundation of a cistern built to hold water for a Roman villa around AD 150 stood exposed by between twenty and fifty-one inches of erosion since the structure was built, an average rate of more than an inch per century. He noted a similar rate for the Via Prenestina, a major road leading west from Rome. Originally placed flush with the surface of the ridge along which it runs, by the 1960s its basalt paving stones protruded several feet above easily eroded volcanic soil of the surrounding cultivated slopes. Other sites around Rome recorded an average of three-quarters of an inch to four inches of erosion each century since the city's founding.
Sediments accumulated in volcanic crater lakes in the countryside confirmed the account of dramatic erosion. Cores pulled from Lago di Monterosi, a small lake twenty-five miles north of Rome, record that land shedding sediment into the lake eroded about an inch every thousand years before the Via Cassia was built through the area in the second century BC. After the road was built, erosion increased to almost an inch per century as farms and estates began working the land to produce marketable crops. Sediments from a lake in the Baccano basin, less than twenty miles north of Rome along the Via Cassia, also recorded an average erosion rate on the surrounding lands of a little more than an inch every thousand years for more than five thousand years before the Romans drained the lake in the second century BC. Thick deposits of material stripped from hillslopes and deposited in valley bottoms along streams north of Rome further indicate intense erosion near the end of the empire.
These diverse lines of evidence, together with Vita-Finzi's findings, point to a dramatic increase in soil erosion owing to Roman agriculture. Considered annually, the net increase was small, just a fraction of an inch per year—hardly enough to notice. If the original topsoil was six inches to a foot thick, it probably took at least a few centuries but no more than about a thousand years to strip topsoil off the Roman heartland. Once landowners no longer worked their own fields, it is doubtful that more than a handful noticed what was happening to their dirt.
It was easier to see evidence of soil erosion downstream along the major rivers, where ports became inland towns as sediments derived from soil stripped off hillsides pushed the land seaward. Swamped by sediment from the Tiber River, Rome's ancient seaport of Ostia today stands miles from the coast. Other towns, like Ravenna, lost their access to the sea and declined in influence. At the southern end of Italy, the town of Sybaris vanished beneath dirt deposited by the Crathis River.
Historians still debate the reasons behind the collapse of the Roman Empire, placing different emphases on imperial politics, external pressures, and environmental degradation. But Rome did not so much collapse as consume itself. While it would be simplistic to blame the fall of Rome on soil erosion alone, the stress of feeding a growing population from deteriorating lands helped unravel the empire. Moreover, the relation worked both ways. As soil erosion influenced Roman society, political and economic forces in turn shaped how Romans treated their soil.
When Hannibal razed the Italian countryside in the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC), thousands of Roman farmers flooded into the cities as their fields and houses were destroyed. After Hannibal's defeat, vacant farmland was an attractive investment for those with money. The Roman government also paid off war loans from wealthy citizens with land abandoned during the war. The estimated quarter of a million slaves brought back to Italy provided a ready labor supply. After the war, all three of the primary sources of agricultural production—land, labor, and capital—were cheap and available.
The growth of large cash crop—oriented estates (latifundia) harnessed these resources to maximize production of wine and olive oil. By the middle of the second century BC, such large slave-worked plantations dominated Roman agriculture. The landowning citizen-farmer became an antiquated ideal but a convenient emblem for the Gracchi brothers' popular cause in 131 BC. They promoted laws giving a few acres of state-owned land to individual farmers, yet many of those who received land under the Gracchi laws could not make a living, sold their land off to larger landowners, and went back on the dole in Rome. Less than two centuries after the Gracchi brothers were assassinated, huge estates accounted for nearly all the arable land within two days' travel from Rome. Forbidden to engage directly in commerce, many wealthy senators circumvented the law by operating their estates as commercial farms. The total area under Roman cultivation continued to expand as the transformation from subsistence farming to agricultural plantations reshaped the Italian countryside.
The land fared poorly under these vast farming operations. In the first decade AD the historian Titus Livius wondered how the fields of central Italy could have supported the vast armies that centuries before had fought against Roman expansion—given the state of the land, accounts of Rome's ancient foes no longer seemed credible. Two centuries later Pertinax offered central Italy's abandoned farmland to anyone willing to work it for two years. Few took advantage of his offer. Another century later Diocletian bound free farmers and slaves to the land they cultivated. A generation after that, Constantine made it a crime for the son of a farmer to leave the farm where he was raised. By then central Italy's farmers could barely feed themselves, let alone the urban population. By AD 395 the abandoned fields of Campagna were estimated to cover enough land to have held more than 75,000 farms in the early republic.
The countryside around Rome had fed the growing metropolis until late in the third century BC. By the time of Christ, grain from the surrounding land could no longer feed the city. Two hundred thousand tons of grain a year were shipped from Egypt and North Africa to feed the million people in Rome. Emperor Tiberius complained to the Senate that “the very existence of the people of Rome is daily at the mercy of uncertain waves and storms.”6 Rome came to rely on food imported from the provinces to feed the capital's unruly mobs. Grain was shipped to Ostia, the closest port to Rome. Anyone delaying or disrupting deliveries could be summarily executed.
North African provinces faced constant pressure to produce as much grain as possible because political considerations compelled the empire to provide free grain to Rome's population. The Libyan coast produced copious harvests until soil erosion so degraded the land that the desert began encroaching from the south. The Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, and its salting of the surrounding earth to prevent its resurrection are well known. Less widely appreciated are the longer-term effects of soil degradation when the growing Roman demand for grain reintensified cultivation in North Africa.
The Roman Senate paid to translate the twenty-eight volumes of Mago's handbook of Carthaginian agriculture salvaged from the ruined city. Once the salt leached away, land-hungry Romans turned the North African coast into densely planted olive farms—for a while. Major farming operations centered around great olive presses developed in the first century AD. Proconsuls charged with producing food for Rome commanded legions of up to two hundred thousand men to protect the harvest from marauding nomads. The barbarians were kept at bay for centuries, but the threat of soil erosion was harder to stop as political stability under the pax romana encouraged continuous cultivation aimed at maximizing each year's harvest. By the time the Vandals crossed from Spain into Africa and took Carthage in AD 439, the Roman presence was so feeble that fewer than fifteen thousand men conquered all of North Africa. After the Roman capitulation, overgrazing by herds of nomadic sheep prevented rebuilding the soil.
