Transport of Food to Rome

During the reign of Emperor Augustus (63 B.C-14 A.D.) ，the city of ancient Rome may have had as many as 1,200,000 inhabitants. With so many residents, the city needed an extremely large food supply, necessitating the development of an improved system for shipping food. Transportation of bulk goods by land was prohibitively expensive and slow. It simply was not practical to haul a wagonload of wheat very far, for example, since the animals needed to pull the wagon would quickly eat an amount of food equal to the relatively limited amount that could be carried in the wagon itself. The solution to this problem was to move goods by sea. Scholars have estimated that the cost of shipping grain from one end of the Mediterranean to the other was cheaper than hauling the same amount of grain 120ilometers overland. It Was perhaps 40 times more expensive to transport goods by land rather than by sea, and while it was somewhat more costly to move goods along a river than over the open ocean, river transport was still many times more efficient than land transport.

Since Italian resources were not sufficient to feed Rome. Romans naturally looked to the Roman-controlled areas that were closest to Rome and that had access to the sea. The first provinces that had surplus grain collected from them and transported to the city of Rome in large quantities were, logically enough, the nearby islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Once Rome had conquered the coast of North Africa, the foods from this region were rounded

up and routed toward the city of Rome as well. By the first century A.D., Egypt and the coastal areas of Spain and Gaul had been added to this list. Despite its distance from Rome, Egypt in particular was an important source of grain. The safe arrival of the Egyptian grain fleet off the Coast of Italy was a major cause for celebration.

While necessary as the only practical way to transport enough food to Rome, this maritime traffic could also be problematic. Particularly during the winter, the Mediterrar Sea can produce violent storms that would have sunk ancient ships. Thus, the prime sailing season was restricted to only three or four months during the summer since most of the supplies for the city had to reach Rome’s ports during this narrow window of opportunity or else face greatly multiplied chances of being caught in a storm and sinking. Natural dangers were not the only threat to shipping, however. Piracy in the ancient Mediterranean was rampant, and despite sporadic attempts at suppression, pirates had nearly free rein to prey upon merchant ships. The Romans were aware of challenges that had to be overcome to keep the City fed. The Roman historian Tacitus commented, “Italy relies upon external supplies, and the life of the Roman people is daily at the uncertain mercies of sea and storm” (Annals 3.54)。The scale of the food and other supplies pouring into Rome demanded an appropriate infrastructure, both administrative and physical.

Rome is not located directly on the Mediterranean Sea but is about22 kilometers inland on the Tiber River. The mouth of the Tiber lacked a natural harbor where ships could be safely unloaded. The smallest ships could have traveled upriver directly to Rome, but medium or large freighters had to be off-loaded somewhere else. During the republic (509 to about29b.c.) ，many ships (including the huge Egyptian grain freighters) docked at the good harbor at Puteoli on the Bay of Naples. From here, their cargoes had to be either shifted to smaller watercraft for their trip to Rome or else hauled overland. At the mouth of the Tiber was located the port city of Ostia. The harbor facilities at Ostia remained rudimentary through the republic, and larger ships that docked there simply had to anchor offshore and have their cargoes transferred onto barges or small craft for the trip upriver. As Rome continued to grow and traffic increased, these harbor arrangements were clearly unacceptable, and in A.D.42，the emperor Claudius tackled this problem and began to construct substantial harbor works at Ostia. Just north of the city, he excavated out of the coastline an artificial harbor known as Portus, although it was not a wholly successful project. Rome at last got first-rate harbor when the emperor Trajan rebuilt Portus and added an inner harbor where ships could be completely safe.

1.During the reign of Emperor Augustus (63 B.C-14 A.D.) ，the city of ancient Rome may have had as many as 1,200,000 inhabitants. With so many residents, the city needed an extremely large food supply,?necessitating?the development of an improved system for shipping food. Transportation of bulk goods by land was prohibitively expensive and slow. It simply was not practical to haul a wagonload of wheat very far, for example, since the animals needed to pull the wagon would quickly eat an amount of food equal to the relatively limited amount that could be carried in the wagon itself. The solution to this problem was to move goods by sea. Scholars have estimated that the cost of shipping grain from one end of the Mediterranean to the other was cheaper than hauling the same amount of grain 120ilometers overland. It Was perhaps 40 times more expensive to transport goods by land rather than by sea, and while it was somewhat more costly to move goods along a river than over the open ocean, river transport was still many times more efficient than land transport.