This short survey of risk and ways of dealing with risk in ancient Rome derives from Toner’s previous studies, especially his Popular Culture in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009) and Roman Disasters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The latter included a chapter entitled “A Culture of Risk,” and this book shares many of the strengths and weaknesses reviewers pointed out here (BMCR 2013.10.18) and elsewhere (e.g. JRS 105 [2015] 336-337). Per the mission of the Key Themes series, it is topical, mostly jargon-free, informed by relevant scholarship, and aimed primarily at university students and teachers of Classics and Ancient History. It is most successful at providing a gateway to an impressive variety of recent work by ancient historians bearing directly or indirectly on risk, and to a lesser extent to pertinent evidence from the sources. Long before nuclear weapons, global warming, and artificial intelligence threatened human existence, Toner contends, catastrophes wreaked death and destruction on the ancient world. Far from being passive and entrusting their survival to the gods, ancient people coped with these catastrophes as well as the routine hazards of bad weather, stormy seas, disease, malnutrition, foreign and civil wars, random violence, and so on. Some risk-takers even managed to turn a profit or come out ahead. The book makes this case convincingly.
Less convincing is Toner’s determination to “narrow the gap between us and them” (14), not only in terms of the relative and to some extent culturally constructed nature of risk, but in the gap between ancient and modern risk calculation. Chapter 1, “Risk and Uncertainty,” begins by surveying the modern understanding of risk from Pascal’s probability theory to contemporary philosophers such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, who for several decades have argued that modern society is defined by risk in a fundamentally unprecedented way, because of both the scale and nature of so-called global or existential risks and the complexity of reckoning with them. Work by anthropologist Mary Douglas is presented as a corrective to the statisticians and “theorists,” such that “a more cultural approach to risk” rather than “numerical” will allow Toner to scrutinize ancient sources for “some element of calculation” or “probabilistic thinking” even where the “numerical calculation of probabilities . . . did not exist” (13-14). This he does most overtly in Chapter 4, “Risk Management,” calculating hypothetical default rates (86-87) and implied loss rates (91-92), for example, to demonstrate that Roman investors did not act blindly or randomly but used their experience and expertise in something like probabilistic thinking, as did other experts in law, religion, municipal management, and so on.
Elsewhere, though, the kind of risk management Toner describes seems quite distant from any version of probabilistic thinking. Take for example the conclusion to Chapter 5, “Moral Hazards: Constructing Risk”: “Moral hazards were partly brought in [e.g. by religious authorities or emperors] as an explanation for past disaster, but partly also as a forward-looking action to prevent calamity from happening again. Fears for the future were expressed in backward-looking terms, based on traditional moral notions” (124). Or take Chapter 3, “A Risk Culture,” which argues for a sort of popular pragmatism towards risk, “an ancient body of knowledge” transmitted generationally (48). These are interesting ideas that provoke thinking flexibly about risk assessment, as well as risk impact, in a wide array of activities and circumstances. But it is not clear how they support the book’s central thesis, as stated at the outset and conclusion, that modern risk assessment based on the mathematical calculation of probabilities was “a shift along a spectrum, not a sudden change” (5) and “an intensification of previous practice rather than a sudden and complete innovation” (125). Certainly it was not sudden but it appears very different from moral hazards and common wisdom.
The book is too concerned, I think, with how the ancient world measures up to the modern. Chapter 2, “A World Full of Risks,” begins by refuting modern risk theorists who see present day “risk society” as exceptional. Toner quotes a deceased financial historian and popular writer, Peter L. Bernstein, extolling the modern “notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature,” as they were before the “mastery of risk,” when “the future was a mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers” (15). Drawing especially on Cicero, Toner shows that human agency existed and was even commended, despite belief in gods and fortune (ironically, he frequently uses oracular texts throughout the book, but in ways meant to demonstrate strategic thinking). The argument then shifts to address the question, “Did Romans Face Less Risk?” (22-30), suggesting that projected mortality rates associated with global warming or other cataclysms are “not out of kilter with the ancient world’s” death tolls from natural disasters (23). This misconstrues the basis on which modern experts distinguish modern global or existential risks: they are not only large-scale but manufactured and non-localized in terms of origin, impact, and response, which Toner later acknowledges (111, 125-126). The chapter ends by asserting that perceived risks need not be real to be significant and asking “how can we compare the risk of nuclear war with the fear generated by the gods” whom Romans feared above all else (31), which oddly echoes Bernstein’s earlier quote.
Two other characteristics make this book less successful than it might have been. First is a confusing overlap and shifting of topics between and within chapters, which I have indicated above in the case of Chapter 2. Although there are frequent subtitles to distinguish sections, it is easy to lose the thread. Organizational lapses are aggravated in the book’s later chapters by lists of numbered paragraphs of information instead of connected prose, for example at 83 (where “two areas” of financial risk are followed by a list of three areas), 84-89 (a list of seemingly six types of risk associated with interest rates), and 100-101 (seven “attitudes relating to risk” deduced from an oracular inscription). Second, a critique made against Roman Disasters as well, is the inconsistent use of primary sources. While ostensibly restricting himself to the early empire (13), for example, Toner frequently makes use of much earlier or later texts and authors, sometimes to support significant claims (e.g. Cicero at 16-21). He is careful to remind readers often of the social and demographic diversity of the Roman world and the limitations of “elite” evidence for speaking to the concerns of “ordinary Romans” (e.g. 14, 122-124), and tries where possible to extrapolate “popular attitudes to risk” (53) from evidence such as funerary inscriptions and oracular and fortune-telling texts. But there are also numerous generalizing or speculative paragraphs where no evidence is adduced.
Mostly, this book is about ancient expertise reckoning against uncertainty in ways somewhat similar yet fundamentally different from the way modern expertise uses math to calculate odds. This is a topic worth exploring and, along with its ample use and citations of more specialized studies, makes Risk in the Roman World a thought-provoking and useful book, despite its limitations.