INTRODUCTION

Rome used its power to control the distribution of a large part of the grain surpluses produced in the provinces. The scale on which the Roman government determined the flows of corn (and also olive oil) throughout the Empire has important implications for our understanding of trade. Wolfgang Liebeschuetz noted that the Roman government ‘organized so large a part of the distribution of the products of the empire, that there was no scope beside it for the growth of large privately run enterprises’. He did so in a book on the later Roman Empire. However, one may wonder whether things had been significantly different in the early Empire. Hence, this chapter investigates the distribution of public corn to the capital and tries to assess its importance, relative to trade, in the long-distance distribution of corn in the Roman world. The role of taxes in kind to meet the government's requirements and to supply the city of Rome (and to feed the armies) should be seen against the background of the low degree of market integration that was observed in the previous chapter.

As in any developed pre-industrial economy, long-distance supply in the Roman world was only a fraction of total consumption. Despite the relative ease of transport across the Mediterranean Sea, which favoured the long-distance distribution of corn, the amounts involved in long-distance shipments of corn should not be overestimated.