We have exiguous but significant evidence in Roman agricultural handbooks that at least some landowners were thinking (however inexpertly) about relative rates of return from different crops, and the most effective use of labour and draught animals. The Heroninus archive from Roman Egypt in the third century shows systematic attempts to control draught-animal costs by the unified management of the scattered farms which made up a large estate,. Perhaps what is most surprising is that the central Roman government, at the end of the third century and in the fourth , actually tried to increase agricultural productivity (and its own tax returns) by encouraging farmers to cultivate extra land (emphyteutic leases) and to use innovative techniques. Incidentally, at the same period they also tried to check up upon and improve the productivity of competing shipyards. Alas we have no idea how successful or isolated these initiatives were. But at least Roman rulers tried, and that is quite unexpected.

Successive empires which came under Roman control, and the Roman empire in particular, encouraged the growth of towns, and so of non-agricultural occupations. Towns, even pre-industrial towns make possible a relatively sophisticated division of labour and concentrate higher value production. There are 65 different occupations recorded in stone inscriptions and painted slogans on the streets walls of the small town of Pompeii (population c 12,000?), n in the small town of Korykos in southern Turkey, and 262 occupations named on stone inscriptions found in the city of Rome. All these lists are likely to be incomplete, and besides, having separate names for slighly different occupations or hierarchical gradings within occupations may reflect cultural differences as well as differences in occupational specialization. That said, relative numbers can serve as a crude index of economic development. The Roman number compares with the over 350 occupations found in London in the eighteenth century.

What is particularly striking about the towns of the Roman empire is their number, their location mainly in the coastal regions around the Mediterranean Sea, and the size of the largest cities. Rome, as we have seen, had a population (if our ancient evidence is to be trusted) of about one million people; Alexandria is thought to have had a population of half a million people. Antioch and Carthage had populations of well over 100,000. Although each of these secondary but major cities began as the capital of a mini-empire later conquered by Romans, they maintained or even expanded their populations, even after they ceased to be the seats of kings. Unlike Rome, their populations were not subsidised by free distributions of basic food. They had to support themselves by the services which they provided, by manufacture and by trade. Only to a limited extent can they be envisaged as 'consumer' cities, that is unproductive
cities, living off the expenditure of agricultural rents by their richest inhabitants. That said, it seems doubtful that the population of all towns in the Roman empire exceeded 20% of the total population.

The Roman empire was huge, and large enough to effect important economies of scale. One obvious saving was in military expenditure. The Roman army at about 300,000 soldiers in the first century, and less than 400,000 in the second century, was significantly smaller than the aggregate armies of the mini-empires, kingdoms and tribes which the Roman empire conquered. The Roman imperial army in the first century constituted barely 2% of all adult males in the empire, compared with an average military participation among Romans in the last two centuries BCE of 13% of adult males. That was one part of the peace dividend. But the cut in overall military expenditure (Ptolemaic Egypt alone had had an army of 200,000 soldiers) indicates that the apparent wealth of Rome in the first two centuries CE was not so much the product of economic growth, but rather the product of piling up into Rome (and to a lesser extent other cities), the transferred savings from the taxes previously spent in the conquered kingdoms.

Another arena for massive growth was in the production of coinage. Perhaps. But confirmationof the huge volume of Roman silver-lead mining (silver was produced by cupellation as a by-product of lead-mining) comes impressively from an apparently incontrovertible source.
I refer of course to the Greenland Icecap, and the peat bogs or lake sediments of Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. A whole series of recent studies from a variety of sites have shown with remarkable concordance that the volume of wind-borne contaminants from smelting mineral ores reached a significant peak in the Roman period. Hong and associates (1994: 1841) showed that lead pollution from systematic samples of the Greenland icecap, datable to between 500 BCE and 300 CE, reached densities four times the natural (ie prehistoric) levels. Renberg et al. showed that lead contamination in a wide assortment of sediments from southern Swedish lakes reached a peak in or around the first century CE.

There seems little doubt among these investigators that the main source of contamination in this period was lead smelting and cupellation for silver and copper in the Roman empire, and particularly Spain. Hong and associates (1996: 246) showed that copper production in the world rose sevenfold in the last five centuries BCE, continued at a high but reducing level in the first five centuries CE and then fell sevenfold to reach a trough in the thirteenth century. Once again they are convinced that classical civilizations, and in particular the Roman empire was the major source of this wind-borne pollution.
Ancient methods of smelting were so inefficient that in the period 500 BCE to 500 CE, according to these estimates, some 800 metric tonnes of copper, were carried in the high atmosphere to Greenland. Lead pollution in antiquity reached levels not reached again until the eighteenth century.

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