Food, poverty and patronage: the significance of the epigraphy of the Roman alimentary schemes in early imperial Italy

Abstract

At the end of the first century A.D., the emperors of Rome began to feed the children of Italy. They did this by loaning Italian landowners large sums of money against the security of land. The interest on these loans was paid, as a subsistence allowance, to selected children in municipalities near the landholdings on which the loans were fixed. The children received the allowance until they were fifteen or sixteen years old.Almost everything we know about the alimentary schemes is based on some sixty or seventy inscriptions, found up and down the length of Italy. The standard view is that they commemorate measures taken by the imperial government to combat rural poverty and depopulation. 2 I believe this interpretation to be mistaken. This paper has two objects: first, to show how little evidence there is to link these schemes with poverty, rural or urban, and second, to suggest that the inscriptions, and the measures they commemorate, may more profitably be set in the context of a series of contemporary ideological frameworks: ideas about the distribution of food, ideas about patronage and ideas about the role of the emperor. Seen in this light, the alimentary inscriptions are acts of communication linking the emperors with their Italian subjects. This process of communication, this discourse, gives us a valuable glimpse of the character and style of early imperial government.

A Stored-Products Revolution in the 1st Millennium BC

“…6-, 9-or 12-poster) and eventually above-ground Roman warehouses (horrea; Haselgrove 2007: 503; Van Oyen 2019). The latter warehouses were a relatively late arrival even in Rome itself, appearing most likely as part of the fraught politics of Gracchan grain reform (Rickman 1971: 149-150) and also featuring as part of a wider elite moral discourse about appropriate ways to store and display surplus (Van Oyen 2015; Woolf 1990). In any case, both in Rome and across the emerging empire, horrea provided the pre-conditions for massively increased bulk exchange of food surpluses, whether by private landowners, by the military or for enormous state disbursements such as Rome's citizen grain ration (Mattingly and Aldrete 2000).…”

El viaje histórico de la fundación hacia su institucionalización como entidad jurídica corporativa em la Civilización Romana

“…Sin embargo, estimamos que estos fines constituyeron claros objetivos de utilidad pública fundacional para el Estado romano y un honor público de interés general para las ciudades y los municipios de Italia, y, posteriormente, de las provincias del Imperio 48 . Así, aunque, Greff Woolf ha sostenido que los alimenta no fueron diseñados como fundación para aliviar la pobreza 49 , creo que ciertamente, las fundaciones alimentarias del Estado permitieron no sólo nutrir, sino también vestir, y, posiblemente, educar a niños y niñas, ciudadanos plebeyos pobres 50 de Italia y de las provincias durante varios siglos. Actividad tal vez iniciada por Nerva, quien Tutela Italiae 51 .…”

Dispatches from the Home Front: The Anaglypha Panels in Rome

“…Expanded greatly under Trajan, the programme was probably inspired by preexisting private alimentary schemes, which had important connections to ideologies of patronage. Woolf (1990) presents a convincing argument that alimentary schemes typically supported local leading families, rather than the strictly needy.…”