ABSTRACT
Ovid’s description of the personification of Hunger as an emaciated woman finds a parallel in the painting of ‘Famine’ in the Temple of Chalkioikos, a pale and starved woman, with hands tied at her back. Hunger and the fear of starvation were omnipresent in the Roman world (as in most premodern societies) and most people had probably witnessed – if not experienced themselves – the ravages of deprivation. The fate of starving – or dying of its side-effects – undoubtedly affected only a small minority of the individuals that ever lived in the Roman world, but that does not mean that famine and starvation were marginal and of little concern to most people. Of course, not every disruption of the food supply caused real famine. Peter Garnsey defined famine as “a critical shortage of essential foodstuffs leading through hunger to starvation and a substantially increased mortality rate in a community or region”. On most occasions the consequences of a subsistence crisis were less disastrous, merely leading to “a short-term reduction in the amount of available foodstuffs, as indicated by rising prices, popular discontent, hunger, in the worst cases bordering on starvation”. 1 The differentiation between famine and shortage is important, but it also is an artificial distinction, and there is no clear dividing line between them. During famines people succumbed en masse to the lack of food or the diseases that went with it, but among the poorest classes of society individuals died of hunger and deprivation-related diseases at all times. In normal years, when harvests reached expected levels and no plundering armies roamed the land, the sustenance of most people was at least sufficient, even if the calories largely came from the kinds of grains and pulses that were 297scorned by the more privileged. There was a continuous fluctuation with the seasons between times of relative scarcity and times of relative abundance. In times of dearth, more households had to turn to food that they would otherwise have rejected as only fit for animals, and more individuals faced the threat of hunger and fatal disease. In other words, as times were hard or kind, the consumption of inferior foods and the threat of death ascended or descended the social ladder, but there is no clear boundary between famine and normality.
