Free Rome: An Empire's Story by Greg Woolf Page A

were fragmented. Greek heroes fought with savage beasts that threatened grain-growing lowlands, monsters like the Nemean Lion and the Calydonian Boar. Those myths reveal a world already imagined in terms of a stark opposition between civilization and the wilderness. And the wilderness was in retreat. Over the Iron Age and Roman centuries, smaller domesticated cattle replaced aurochs in temperate Europe, and bison and elk were restricted to the far north. Deer retreated into the remnant forests and resurgent woodlands. Hunting became rarer and less exciting. When the Emperor Trajan wanted to hunt game in Italy, he had to climb to the summits of the Abruzzi. The Roman generals who conquered the east were amazed to find Hellenistic kings had, in imitation of the Persian emperors, created reserves in order to preserve animals worthy of a royal hunt. The Persian word was paradeisos , giving us our term ‘paradise’. Wilderness had become a scarce commodity, a luxury that needed to be conserved and cultivated. We can easily imagine this today, just as we can easily imagine the rich rewards that would follow Roman possession of the waking giant of temperate Europe.
    Ecology and Empire
    Imperial expansion since the fifteenth century has often had dire environmental consequences. One reason is that globalizing movements often connected up regions that had been out of contact for long periods. Most dramatic was the Columbian Exchange of plant and animal species that followed European discovery of the Americas, leading to extinctions and the catastrophic merging of disease pools, as well as the transformation of Old World diets with the introduction of coffee and chocolate, potatoes and cane sugar. 12 Then there have been deliberate modifications of colonialecosystems in modern times, such as the creation of cotton and coffee plantations in the Americas, the introduction of cattle ranching into parts of North and South America, of sheep farming into Australasia, and the transplantation of maize from the New World into Africa. Cash crops often replaced subsistence agriculture, and the needs of distant imperial markets took priority over those of indigenous populations who were sometimes dispossessed, and sometimes conscripted to labour within new agricultural regimes. Slavery notoriously allowed the wholesale movement of human populations. There are some prehistoric precedents. Human expansion at the end of the Pleistocene era, into first Australia and later the Americas, seems to have led to the extinction of native megafauna, from two-tonne giant wombats and three-metre-tall kangaroos to the American lion and giant sloths. The settlement of the Pacific Islands and New Zealand was accomplished only because explorers took pigs, chickens, dogs, and various domesticated crops with them in their canoes.
    Roman expansion did not have such dramatic effects. The empire expanded within a region the inhabitants of which used broadly the same domesticated species as themselves. When areas beyond the Mediterranean were eventually incorporated into the empire, this was usually just the latest phase in long histories of contact. As a result, Romans rarely encountered economies or ecologies very different from their own. The environmental changes that Roman expansion brought were, on the whole, more piecemeal and more subtle than those introduced by European empires.
    All this marks an important difference between the ecologies of modern and ancient empires. Roman expansion was facilitated by what the conquerors shared with their new subjects. The first tax levied (on Sicily) was a simple tithe of grain, and when armies campaigned in Spain in the second century or Gaul in the first century BC , their local allies were expected to provide food. African Lepcis paid a great indemnity in olive oil, and the Frisians at the Rhine mouth were taxed in hides. Taxation in kind was always an important part of Roman fiscal systems. Yet even when cash was