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As a city located along the Tiber river, Rome has been a trade stop practically since its founding.

The grain shipments from Egypt during the Imperial period are certainly a prime example of foreign trade on a huge scale.
 
Wait a tick, when we talk about trade, don't we usually talk about a city buying AND selling tons of stuff instead of just buying for its own consumption (like Rome did with grain)?
 
Wait a tick, when we talk about trade, don't we usually talk about a city buying AND selling tons of stuff instead of just buying for its own consumption (like Rome did with grain)?

Rome had tax money and income from properties flowing in from the Empire. The city could afford to import goods of much greater value than it exported.
 
Rome had tax money and income from properties flowing in from the Empire. The city could afford to import goods of much greater value than it exported.
Naturally, sorry, I kinda missed the thread title. I was thinking about trade metropolis like Venice, which made their living off trade, something that IMHO does not quite fit a consumer like Rome.
 
As a city located along the Tiber river, Rome has been a trade stop practically since its founding.

Tiber River is not really navigable - or rather, only navigable up to Rome itself. It has never been a commercial river of significance. Except for carrying salt from the southern marshes up to Rome.

What Rome's location has is a strategic bottleneck on overland Italian trade, between Etruscan Tuscany to the north and the Greek Campania to the south. Tiberina island creates a natural fording point across the Tiber river. So, Rome's perched hill-top position allowed it to command the river crossings. Trade has to go through it, or with its consent.

That is why Romulus & Remus set themselves up there - they started off as bandit chiefs preying/extorting passing trade caravans.

And it is why early Rome always furiously tried to destroy Fidenae (& its sponsor Vei), the only other city that could establish an alternative crossing route circumventing Rome.
 
As an actual practicing Christian, from a group that tends to take the bible rather literally, taking the exact words from the book of revelation literally simply isn't possible. It's not written in a concrete factual manner like a science textbook, or a story about a particular set of events. As written, it's intended to convey feeling, sensation, warnings, precautions, hope etc. with respect to rather uncertainly described future events. Also, as pointed out by others, the exact details in revelation are to unclear to definitively be applied to one particular time or place. It's not even clear that it's even intended to represent a real series of events that will take place, since it's explicitly stated that it was a dream meant to convey a warning. Even if every single word in it is 100% 'true' there simply isn't enough information there to figure out what is likely to go on.

If you take it completely literally, there's only one way to honestly break down the book of revelations

  1. John had a series of incredible visions of the future.
  2. He tries, to the best of his ability to write it all down accurately.
  3. John is human, and his knowledge and abilities to understand the revelations of God are limited (this is a recurring theme in the bible by the way)
  4. He fails to properly describe and understand everything in detail (another recurring theme in the Bible)
  5. We too are human, and fail to fully be able to properly understand the significance, and meaning of everything that John is trying to tell us (thus even the stuff he IS explaining correctly we may not understand)
  6. In retrospect, it will become obvious what he was writing about (the book of Daniel is a classic example of this - what he wrote made little sense at the time, but events a few hundred years later suddenly made it obvious what he had prophesied)
There's no reason to 'worry' about anything from the book of revelation, as a Christian, or otherwise. It will happen, or not (or possibly already happened) and the consequences will be what they will be.
Also a Christian here. But that doesn't require you to think of Revelation as a forward looking book. It's pretty clearly talking about the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.

Lotsa allegory, but that is the core of it.
 
Unlike the many kind and considerate folks here, several Christian, suggesting you not worry about conversion and refusing to proselytize, I want to take the truly opposite position here.

I am a staunch rationalist and atheist, who, while flawed, tries very hard to model my beliefs on facts and statistics and never faith. I am a firm atheist because I do not see evidence of gods existence. What I do see overwhelming statistical evidence for is Christianity or at least Catholicism as good at a group level, for metrics I care about. Given two groups of equal wealth, political lean, race, etc, the catholics just dump all over us atheists on charity, personal responsibility, environmental awareness, etc.

So, repent, ye sinners! Confess with your mouth and believe with your heart so that you can stay together for the kids, pick up trash, give to the homeless, and tutor in your free time.


As for the Whore of Babylon, this really needs to take a further look back at the context of the Jewish people involved. Babylonian captivity did not merely upset the Israelite self rule, it further encapsulated the entire Jewish culture and shot its indo-aryan cultural ideals into father Abraham's many sons. Jewish monotheism was especially impacted, eg compare "thou shalt have no other gods before me" to "the lord your god is one" - thanks Zoroaster. This is the real "evil" that is associated with Babylon by these dudes: their perverse culture tainted the Jewish people.

So the revelationary new whore of Babylon is (purely imo here) inherently a culture. In this case it is Pagan Roman culture which has by this time already spread through most of the Mediterranean and is making inroads into Egypt and the levant. These early church dudes are worried that their beliefs, at that point basically a Jewish cult in its infancy, would be consumed by Latin culture.

So, finally, since Constantine went and organized the faith and elevated it over Paganism, either he defeated the whore and made Christ triumphant, or he himself was the whore of Babylon who corrupted centuries of early faith by dragging Rome into it.
 
Unlike the many kind and considerate folks here, several Christian, suggesting you not worry about conversion and refusing to proselytize, I want to take the truly opposite position here.

I am a staunch rationalist and atheist, who, while flawed, tries very hard to model my beliefs on facts and statistics and never faith. I am a firm atheist because I do not see evidence of gods existence. What I do see overwhelming statistical evidence for is Christianity or at least Catholicism as good at a group level, for metrics I care about. Given two groups of equal wealth, political lean, race, etc, the catholics just dump all over us atheists on charity, personal responsibility, environmental awareness, etc.

So, repent, ye sinners! Confess with your mouth and believe with your heart so that you can stay together for the kids, pick up trash, give to the homeless, and tutor in your free time.


As for the Whore of Babylon, this really needs to take a further look back at the context of the Jewish people involved. Babylonian captivity did not merely upset the Israelite self rule, it further encapsulated the entire Jewish culture and shot its indo-aryan cultural ideals into father Abraham's many sons. Jewish monotheism was especially impacted, eg compare "thou shalt have no other gods before me" to "the lord your god is one" - thanks Zoroaster. This is the real "evil" that is associated with Babylon by these dudes: their perverse culture tainted the Jewish people.

So the revelationary new whore of Babylon is (purely imo here) inherently a culture. In this case it is Pagan Roman culture which has by this time already spread through most of the Mediterranean and is making inroads into Egypt and the levant. These early church dudes are worried that their beliefs, at that point basically a Jewish cult in its infancy, would be consumed by Latin culture.

So, finally, since Constantine went and organized the faith and elevated it over Paganism, either he defeated the whore and made Christ triumphant, or he himself was the whore of Babylon who corrupted centuries of early faith by dragging Rome into it.
And Latin culture did devour that Jewish cult as completely and comprehensively as could be
 
I would argue that the greeks won the culture war, certainly in regards to the organizing of Christian faith into religion, if not over Rome in general.
 
Also a Christian here. But that doesn't require you to think of Revelation as a forward looking book. It's pretty clearly talking about the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.

Lotsa allegory, but that is the core of it.

That part is a reasonable assumption to make, but then it gets into what happens afterwards - the rebuilding, the millennial kingdom on earth, etc. That stuff is clearly not referring to past events, and that's the part that has the OP concerned.
 
I would argue that the greeks won the culture war, certainly in regards to the organizing of Christian faith into religion, if not over Rome in general.

The Greeks were the biggest losers of all this.

Nothing Greek survived through the first centuries except the language. Even the language's influence had been confined to a part of the Roman empire when it probablypurob to be the lingua franca in the whole Mediteranean for centuries prior to that. We had to wait for Arabic influence and further decay of the Roman Empire to see the Greek culture return to prominence.

Unless you only are talking about Rome's elite.
 
Attempt at a serious answer:

Around the time of Christ, Rome had a population of around 1 million people.

Their diet was based on wheat, wine, olive oil, and legumes.

Given the over-crowded conditions in Rome, there was little food grown inside the city or the suburban region (save perhaps for some legumes, from some garden plots). Meaning the population had to be fed primarily by imports.

We know wheat consumed in Rome was primarily imported from Sicily, Spain, Egypt and North Africa. Oil was imported from Africa. Wine was imported from Spain.

Let us focus on wheat.

The average Roman consumed between 30-40 modii of wheat per year (1 Roman modius = approx. 1 peck = 2 US dry gallons).

So with 1 million people, some 30-40 million modii of wheat must be imported every year. Let's go with the higher number.

The average Mediterranean long-distance merchant ship can carry up to 10,000 modii of wheat.

So there need to be roughly an average of 4,000 ships trips per year to Rome to feed Romans with wheat.

Or about 11 shiploads per day.

(but since only 8 months of the year are fit for sailing in the Mediterranean, it is more like 16 shiploads per day during the sailing months, and very few or none in the off-months).

That's just wheat. Add more for oil and wine.

How's that?
 
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Attempt at a serious answer:

Around the time of Christ, Rome had a population of around 1 million people.

Their diet was based on wheat, wine, olive oil, and legumes.

Given the over-crowded conditions in Rome, there was little food grown inside the city or the suburban region (save perhaps for some legumes, from some garden plots). Meaning the population had to be fed primarily by imports.

We know wheat consumed in Rome was primarily imported from Sicily, Spain, Egypt and North Africa. Oil was imported from Africa. Wine was imported from Spain.

Let us focus on wheat.

The average Roman consumed between 30-40 modii of wheat per year (1 Roman modius = approx. 1 peck = 2 US dry gallons).

So with 1 million people, some 30-40 million modii of wheat must be imported every year. Let's go with the higher number.

The average Mediterranean long-distance merchant ship can carry up to 10,000 modii of wheat.

So there need to be roughly an average of 4,000 ships trips per year to Rome to feed Romans with wheat.

Or about 11 shiploads per day.

(but since only 8 months of the year are fit for sailing in the Mediterranean, it is more like 16 shiploads per day during the sailing months, and very few or none in the off-months).

That's just wheat. Add more for oil and wine.

How's that?

What about things like silk, iron, bronze, marble
 
What about things like silk, iron, bronze, marble

What? No thanks for my singular effort? Do you know how hard it is to find data? You think I had modii and ship tonnage just lying around at my fingertips?

As for you new questions, much harder to calculate, since we don't have a sense of their needs. Things made of bronze, copper, etc. don't tend to survive from Ancient times. They are too valuable and tend to be melted down and re-used again and again over the centuries. The only reason museums happen to have any Ancient bronze artifacts at all is because some were buried in tombs or sunk in shipwrecks.

So I can't answer "how often", because we don't really know "how much" they used. Although if you really want to, you can probably sit down and estimate usage in typical Roman households, army, etc., and scale that by class and population, you might get some approximation. But I am too lazy to try.

How that translates into shipping is a whole other kettle of fish, as some of the more precious things would be carried in small quantities alongside other more mundane bulk goods like wheat, wine, etc. So you can't use tonnage as a proxy the same way I did for wheat.

If you want to investigate further, I'd recommend Pliny the Elder's Natural History, written around 73 AD, in particular Book 33 (on gold, silver, etc.) and Book 34 (on brass, copper, iron, etc.) and Book 36 (on marble) and Book 37 (on precious stones, esp. detailed on amber trade with Baltics). He talks a lot about their uses and where they're from. So you may get a sense of it.

We can say that most of the things you list are not found locally in Rome or central Italy and had to be imported, some at very long distances.

Bronze always requires trade. Bronze is a combination of copper and tin, which are hard to find, and you have to go long distances for both metals. The Mediterranean's main source of copper was Cyprus (hence the word - Cyprus = Copper island; or more properly, Copper = Cyprus metal) and the Rio Tinto region of southwestern Spain. Tin was much rarer. There was some tin in western Spain, which had been exploited at the very beginning of the Bronze Age, but were exhausted during Roman times. There was a little tin in Brittany, and larger amounts in Cornwall (England), which were also imported into the Mediterranean during Roman times.

Iron also required trade, but not as far. Although there isn't iron ore in the region of Rome itself, but there is some in Tuscany and plenty of iron ore in the Alps (esp. Noricum), southern France and Spain, which were their main sources.

By luck, a lot of marble is nearby - the marble quarries at Carrara, in northern Tuscany, were (and still are) among the largest in the world. But marble was also brought in from Egypt, the Aegean and as far away as Armenia.

Silk is impossible to calculate. But it had to come all the way from China.

And that's only scratching the surface of what they imported. There are spices, dyes and pigments, etc. Go look at Pliny to get more details. He outlines some unusual things Rome needed to import in large amounts from far away that you'd never think of - such as sand from Ethiopia, to polish the marbles.
 
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Did the merchants of the earth grow to rely on ancient rome for their livelihood
Merchants of the Earth? Well the floating ones of Rhodes did not....

What about things like silk, iron, bronze, marble

There is much I don't agree with in FInley's "The Ancient Economy" particularity his parasitic city ideal. But the Imperial city of Rome was almost certainly a parasite. It would of course import virtually everything. If you are meaning regional economies or the Empire as a whole one of the huge advantages of the early empire was peace and the trade that followed on a European wide scale.

But if you are looking for numbers you are going to be disappointed mostly. While the Imperial bureaucracy might some 2000 years ago have been able to provide you with the tax numbers and such that would answer your questions, sadly monks might copy the works of Aristotle over and over but Roman tax records not so much.
 
I read somewhere that the Silk trade between China and Rome made Parthia quite wealthy as the in-between of those two empires. In fact Parthia mostly imported raw silk from China and the craft was mostly done in Persia which is when the famous Persians rugs where born and also created a lot of Artisans/Merchants jobs solely dependent of that trade.

I know it doesn't directly that question but hey still good to know I think.