The aims of this volume are outlined in a useful opening chapter by the editors, including a summary of each piece and a historiographical survey of mobility and migration. The editors home in on two popular contemporary frameworks and their difficulties: diaspora studies and longue durée analyses of Mediterranean connectivity. The former, they argue, examine the consequences, not the processes, of mobility, while the latter risk insensitivity to diachronic change in the experience and meaning of mobility. The emphasis in all the chapters, therefore, is firmly on the causes, practicalities and explanatory frameworks for movement in the Roman world, from the Republican period to Late Antiquity. The chapters are not explicitly arranged in a thematic or chronological order, and are here examined under three headings – military, political and civilian mobility.
Military mobility is the core focus of three chapters, by L. de Blois on invasions, deportations and repopulation in Thrace, Moesia Inferior and Dacia c. 250–275, A.R. Birley on the east–west movement of viri militares between ad 133 and 162, and P. Herz on the peacetime mobility of Roman soldiers. These chapters rely primarily on a combination of narrative, legal and epigraphic sources that permit detailed analyses of the movement of individuals and groups. The presentation by de Blois of a text newly deciphered on a Viennese palimpsest highlights the potential impact of new documentary evidence. Mainly, however, these chapters use the themes of mobility and migration to re-examine existing evidence.
De Blois considers the experience of mobility for raiding bands and their victims, when marauding might recur regularly for ten years or constitute de facto residence in a region. The subsequent reassertion of imperial control over the Danubian regions by Aurelian provides further opportunity to categorise and problematise movement engendered by military action, from the migration of Roman and foreign warriors to the highly local movement of populations into centralised fortified centres. Herz's chapter takes a similar, though empire-wide, approach, unpicking the logical implications of fragmentary examples of military mobility. In many cases the evidence is lacking to support definitively Herz's hypotheses, but simply collating and considering the attested existence of military escorts for prisoners and detachments of soldiers tasked with capturing wild animals or cutting trees leads to thought-provoking conclusions, including Herz's key argument, that the Roman army was, more than a fighting force, a huge, flexible labour pool upon which the state could draw for almost any purpose it saw fit. Birley's chapter, by contrast, focuses specifically on the movement of military commanders, many of whom seem to have followed a regular career trajectory, which involved building experience and a network of trusted senior staff. These senior figures could then be deployed in times of emergency, either solo, with an accompanying support staff of known officers, or along with their entire legion.
Four chapters deal with what might be termed political mobility. E. Torrerary Pagola addresses diplomatic movement within the Roman Empire, G. Woolf examines the near-absence of forced population movement by the Roman state, W. Eck discusses the role of the Senate in driving migration, and S. Benoist discusses the distinction between coloni and incolae in the context of imperial colonisation. For Torregaray Pagola recognition of the similarity between the language used in Roman sources for structured communication with enemies and neighbours and between communities within the empire provides the starting point for exploring the growing role of the princeps as a focal point for petitions, embassies and gift-giving from provinces and cities of the empire. Such embassies, involving requests for local aid, but also condolences and congratulations to the emperor from distant communities, helped to constitute an imperial space, but also revealed distinctions between eastern territories, which already had pre-Roman protocols for diplomatic conduct, and western regions, which did not. Eck's chapter on Senatorial mobility also focuses on the gravitational pull of the centre as a force for mobility in the Roman world. Senatorial appointment, including the legal requirement to attend the Senate regularly and the personal need to build and maintain political networks in Rome, affected not only senators but their households and home regions. The size of personal households that might travel with a senator, the possible financial pressure to sell land at home in order to support a new domestic set-up in the capital and the possibility of supplying domestic needs (for oil or grain) with produce brought from a senator's home region are considered through case studies.
Woolf's chapter provides the only comparative or global view of Roman mobility. The forced movement of populations was a popular strategy by pre-modern empires, but was rarely deployed by Rome. Comparing the Roman Empire with the work of James C. Scott on south Asia, however, Woolf argues that while in many parts of the world enclosure of people rather than land underpinned expanding state control, the Mediterranean was already too densely populated for control over populations to be effective without simultaneous control over territory. Woolf's chapter is complemented by Benoist's revisiting of a debate about the meaning of the etymologically connected terms coloni and incolae in the Republican and post-Republican period, which Benoist sees explicated in the need for Roman law to respond to the challenges posed by defining the conquered, indigenous population of regions newly drawn under Roman power and migrants into these areas who were Roman by origin.
Finally, five chapters can be categorised loosely as addressing civilian mobility. Each deals with people moving for ‘private’ reasons, though categories of private and public inevitably blur, as for example, when M. Carucci in her chapter on the dangers of female mobility discusses the wives of state officials travelling with their husbands or when C. Moatti talks about the underpinning legal logic behind state views of mobility, which then affected the choices of Roman citizens. These chapters address movement for economic reasons, as in G. Gambash's chapter on coastal versus deep-sea shipping in the Mediterranean, movement in relation to a specific site in E. Tacoma's methodological examination of the cemetery of Ostia, and forced migration in the form of expulsion in E. Koestner's chapter on the linen weavers of Roman Alexandria.
Moatti's chapter, which makes an excellent final chapter, explores, across the Republican to late-antique periods, the tension in Roman legal texts between the reality of extensive mobility in the empire and an ideal of stability. Within this wider context a change is identified from mobility in the Republic being associated with insecurity for the traveller and the need for state protection, towards a gradual emphasis on limiting mobility for the protection of the state. The consequence, for Moatti, is a permanently multi-dimensional concept of mobility in the empire, the regulation of which contributed to the changing definition of Roman territorial identity and authority. For Carucci, conflicting ideals are also significant, with women idealised both as the centre of a stable home and the steadfast, and thus potentially mobile, companion for their husband. While (elite) women might be valorised for their willingness to travel, their experiences were often presented as traumatic. The general risks of travel – banditry, shipwreck, absence of social support networks – were perceived to fall more heavily on women and especially pregnant women. While Carucci cites examples of women travelling without men, mainly drawn from papyrological sources, these (mainly non-elite) women's experiences do not seem to have made a significant impact on the Roman cultural perception of female mobility.
Gambash, instead, focuses initially on modern perceptions and the perceived link in modern scholarship between connectivity and mobility. Beginning with an analysis of the dangers facing Roman seafarers, he then turns to the probable prevalence of cabotage or multiple, interlocking short sailing routes in moving people, goods and ideas in the Mediterranean. Lots of short hops on a journey could take a traveller to a destination not originally intended or mean a journey took much longer than planned. It required a strong infrastructure for local mobility but left the potential for long-distance mobility largely unfulfilled. Cabotage, Gambash argues, was good for the flow of goods and information, but not the ubiquitous and convenient mobility of people with which it is often implicitly conflated.
Perhaps the chapter that least obviously speaks to mobility is Koestner's, which seeks to apply the idea of ethnic colonies to legislation expelling foreigners from Alexandria after a riot by the linen weavers in ad 215. It is not clear how the concept of ethnic colonies fits the situation in Alexandria as revealed through complex and lacunose source material, but the chapter usefully explores the difficulty defining foreigners and the likely incentive for not doing so. While citing outsiders, actually, the legislation seems designed to allow ejection from the city of anybody the authorities deemed unsavoury, returning to a thread connecting all chapters in this volume – the role of the state in driving many different kinds of mobility. Also focused on a single location is Tacoma's exploration of the cemetery of Ostia. This is examined from the perspective of isotopic analysis of bones, epigraphic evidence from gravestones and the account of the travels of Augustine's mother Monica, who was buried in Ostia. These three types of evidence reveal three distinct pictures, which defy synthesis but which cannot be organised into a hierarchy of authority. Just accepting this discrepancy is rejected by Tacoma as dangerously postmodern, and in its place an effort is made to paint as plausible a picture as possible out of the overlapping sets of parameters defined by each source type. The result illuminates especially the relationship between families, mobility and the importance of asserting emplacedness in a location like Ostia, and offers a thought-provoking case study of cross-disciplinary methodology.
In the introduction, the editors argue that the Roman empire provides ideal source material for the creation of a new theory of mobility and migration. This volume does not present such a theory, but the papers gathered here offer an excellent starting point. The strong focus maintained by virtually all the papers on the nuts-and-bolts of mobility is invigorating and offers new insights into old evidence. The book is well presented and copy-edited, and includes a general index and indexes of names, locations and sources. The lucidity, rigour and contained argumentation of many of the chapters would make them superb set readings for teaching, for which default publication as an e-book may compensate for a prohibitively high print cost. As a research publication, however, the price is entirely justified by the importance of this volume for scholars of mobility, whether focused on the Roman Empire or beyond.
