In unsettling times, as the present era might be described by many, it would not be unexpected to think about risk, the dangers (and opportunities) that the world offers. Cam Grey’s work lives up to its title, providing an interesting and multidisciplinary look into how communities and individuals in the later Roman world lived with risk, a subject that has drawn more attention from scholars of the ancient world in recent years.[1]
In his first section (“Prologue”), Grey’s opening statement provides a succinct definition of the temporal and spatial focus and scope of his work: “The late Roman world (late third century CE through mid-sixth century CE) was a world of uncertainty. Dangers at once physical and metaphysical hovered constantly and insistently at the edges of human perception” (p. 1). Within this time and place, Grey makes use of literature from the growing field of Critical Risk and Disaster Studies to develop an analytical framework for drawing out insights about the everyday world of late Romans. He looks not only at accounts of major events (“disasters”) but also the daily actions of people responding to and shaping the risks that they faced in their lives. Grey notes that “human communities are inextricably intertwined with the world around them” and argues that we should focus as much upon their everyday efforts to plan for and mitigate the potential harm from risk as upon how they responded to major events (p. 2). His intention is not to examine solely the responses undertaken following events but instead study how people in the late Roman world attempted to evaluate and plan ahead for what could happen ahead of them. How did the people of that era live with risk?
Grey then outlines his approach and how each individual chapter works to further his goals. He discusses how differences in “Scale, Temporality, and Regionalization” impact how people responded to disasters. In addition to place, there are two further important factors he focuses on: one is how quickly, or slowly, a threat emerged and the second is the role of power, specifically the differences between communities that had the power and resources to deal with adverse events and those that did not. Furthermore, Grey outlines the biases that exist within our sources (they are mainly limited to the viewpoint of elite men with an often constrained worldview), which requires him to engage in a degree of speculation at times, reading into the silences of the sources, in order to see the world outside the narrow group that created the vast majority of our written evidence.
Chapter 1, “Cultures of Risk”, begins by claiming that modern accounts of the late Roman world seem to take a similar rhetorical stance to that found in late antique authors such as Eusebius and Augustine concerning the overall trajectory of events during the time period. Despite the great advances in scientific knowledge and information from archaeology, many modern writers still treat the people of the era as largely passive receivers of disasters brought about by Nature (in place of the Christian God, to whom Eusebius and Augustine would ascribe agency over their lives). Grey proposes that the way to free us from this mindset is to focus our attention away from the momentous events and drill down to individual stories and perspectives. Drawing from a wide range of individual experiences, predominantly those of Simeon the Stylite found in his biography in Syriac, Grey aims in this opening chapter to show that people in that era took action to mitigate or manage the sort of risks that they constantly perceived themselves to be surrounded by, from physical ailments to violence. The use of amulets, incantations, and ritual ceremony were all part of the attempt to manage the “riskscape—an important term for Grey, which he spends some time discussing—that they lived in, i.e. the whole landscape of potential dangers and hazards (and sometimes opportunities) that people perceived to be ever present around them. The term also encompasses those actions people took in response to their perceived dangers/opportunities.
Chapter 2, “Seismicity and Society”, examines the various riskscapes associated with seismic activity: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunami, using contemporary written sources such as Ammianus Marcellinus, Isidore of Seville, John Malalas, and Jerome, in order to reconstruct the world of risk resulting from such events and the ways in which people attempted to manage such disasters. While it may seem that people had no means of preventing such calamities from affecting their lives, Grey attempts to show how on the individual level, in relation to both powerful members of society and the common people alike, took what actions they could to cope with them.
Chapter 3, “Weathering the Weather”, moves Grey’s focus to how late Romans evaluated and responded to the riskscape associated with weather, which he defines very sharply as local conditions, not the broader climatic conditions at larger scale. Once more he turns the reader’s attention to the individual, not the general, through the use of specific viewpoints. Utilizing various sources including the agronomic treatise by Palladius and the response from farmers in the Mediterranean to a period of extended cooling dated roughly to the 530-40s, Grey again explains how people did not see themselves as merely passive sufferers to forces completely beyond their control, but were actively engaged with attempts to control the world of risk around them, through both practical measures and ritual actions. Special attention is given to various Christian figures who were said to have the power to control or influence weather events.
Chapter 4, “Living with Water”, places the spotlight on water and the riskscapes associated with it. As in the previous chapters, Grey begins by taking a general look at the grand scale of climate, then moves to his preferred ground of examining specific viewpoints at a more individual level. Notably, he uses the evidence here to further support a position advanced earlier that “it is marked divergences from a collectively held set of expectations that tend to find their way into our written sources” (p. 165). This appears to be the reason why Grey prefers to dig down into the specific rather than remain focused on the bigger picture, as he argues that the larger picture based upon the written sources is skewed by rhetorical and ideological aims, giving the unwary reader an incorrect view into the set of assumptions that the general population of that era had about risk and how to address it. Much of the focus of this chapter is a detailed look at the local interactions along two major river systems (the Rhone and the Nile), as well as in Syria, delving into the differences between the riskscapes of each. Again, Grey ends by giving special attention to Christian ascetics and holy men, who were reported to have had an ability to control water-related risks.
Chapter 5, “Writing Riskscapes”, moves away from looking at one particular category of risk and instead attempts to reconstruct the complete riskscapes for individuals in two distinct places and times: Noricum Ripenese in the late fifth century and Rome in the early sixth, when Belisarius was holding the city against the Ostrogoths. Grey admits that this is “of necessity” a speculative exercise (p. 205). For Noricum Ripense, located along the Danube, the riskscape is mostly drawn from the information contained in Eugippius’s Life of Severinus. For Rome, Grey attempts to draw out from the grand narratives what the perceived risks were to common people, those who were not in the center of the spotlight in the written sources, those often being mentioned not by name but rather lumped into a collective group such as “townspeople” or “farmers.” Grey makes a pointed comparison between the perceptions of imperial elites, such as Procopius, our main source for the siege of Rome, and those of the city’s inhabitants, as to which courses of action were risky and which had potential rewards.
In his final section, “Epilogue,” Grey comes back to the central aim of his book, which is to argue that viewing disaster and risk only at the system level (the grand narrative) can result in a skewed perspective that renders people mere objects upon which greater forces act. By digging down to the specific and the local, one can restore the notion of agency to the people of the late Roman world, seeing them as actors within the world rather than mere puppets manipulated by events at the larger scale. One can also see “how fraught and incoherent contestations of power and authority were throughout the period” (p. 253). In this final section, Grey pulls together many of his illustrative examples from throughout the book to illustrate how examining riskscapes at the local level gets us closer to the lived experiences of people, something that is often lacking in the scholarship that is focused on the imperial scale.
Overall, I think that Grey has succeeded in his core aim, which is to argue for bringing back the role of people, both high and low, into examinations of risk, disaster, and recovery/adaptation in the late Roman world. While recent scientific scholarship on climate change and systemic challenges to the inhabitants of the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean gives us important information and further data to help interpret the sometimes fragmented and skewed accounts that we have in our written sources, it is necessary to remember that the people of that time were active participants in their own fates, even if they were unaware of some of the larger forces that played a major role in shaping their world.
Notes
[1] See Jerry Toner, Risk in the Roman world. Cambridge; New York, 2023 (reviewed in BMCR 2024.11.07), which likely appeared after Grey’s work was already deep in the editorial process, though he made use of Toner’s earlier work on disasters from 2013. Specifically in the context of later Antiquity, disaster was the focus of a recent special issue last year of Studies in Late Antiquity).