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14 - Mass diet and nutrition in the city of Rome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2009

Peter Garnsey
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

In this paper I investigate the diet and health of the mass of Rome's inhabitants. This is not a subject that has roused much interest among historians. The provenance of the foods that poured into the city of Rome, the ‘decline’ of Italian agriculture and the rise of provincial production, the growth of state intervention in the food supply of Rome, the public distribution system (frumentatio), its birth, development and periodic breakdown, its organization and politics – all these issues have been fully investigated and debated. But the discussion has more or less petered out at Rome's ports, warehouses, distribution points and rubbish dumps (notably, the mountain of broken oil-containers that is Monte Testaccio). The plebs frumentaria, once it has received its (unmilled) grain, has faded from view; while the group or groups of non-recipients have never come into focus. My object in this paper is to take the matter of the food supply of Rome into the area of food consumption, concentrating on ordinary Romans.

But who were the ordinary Romans of Rome? It is an integral part of my argument that the social structure of the population of Rome is essential background to any study of the nutritional status of its residents. Most Romans, most of the 750,000–1,000,000 residents of the city, were poor, but there were different levels of poverty.

Type
Chapter
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Cities, Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity
Essays in Social and Economic History
, pp. 226 - 252
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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