Hi everybody, and welcome to the twelfth episode of The Fall of Rome.

I'm your host Patrick Weiman, thanks for joining me today.

When we think of the Roman Empire, there are a few different things that come to mind.

We might think about gladiators, always a fun topic in pop culture.

We might think about the army of disciplined legions marching in lockstep to fight some barbarian

foe.

The most enduring and obvious legacy of the Roman Empire is its buildings, huge structures

like the Colosseum, embedded within the landscape of enormous cities that held hundreds of thousands

of people.

It was the Roman economy that enabled all of this, from amphitheaters and aqueducts to highly

skilled gladiators fighting for the entertainment of mass urban audiences.

The surpluses the Roman economy produced allowed for the concentration of people in cities

in numbers and proportions that wouldn't be matched again until the modern period, for

the construction of thousands of monumental buildings that endured to this day, and for

the support of a standing army of hundreds of thousands of professional soldiers along

a frontier that stretched from Britain to the Sahara.

The Roman economy was an agrarian one focused around agricultural production, but that

doesn't mean that it was primitive.

It was quite complex, and despite its basis in agriculture, it had well developed commercial

markets that operated on a trans-regional scale.

The Roman state provided the infrastructure and stability that lowered costs to the point

where huge amounts of bulk goods, and the agricultural products the economy specialized

...