Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics

Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs 9, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xii+417. £49.50 (hbk). ISBN 0–7546–3021–8. ‘The proposition for which I shall argue’, wrote Peter Garnsey in his deservedly influential Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge, 1988, p. 6), ‘is that famines were rare, but that subsistence crises falling short of famine were common’. Yet how is rarity to be defined? ‘How’, Garnsey continued, ‘is the question “how many” to be answered when there is no prospect of compiling anything approaching a comprehensive list of subsistence crises?’. Such a list has, however, now been compiled, using the late antique and early Byzantine evidence of which Garnsey, focusing on the classical world, could make only occasional use. In the title of Dionysios Stathakopoulos's admirable post-doctoral monograph, the operative word is indeed ‘systematic’. He has scanned all the narrative, legal, and theological texts likely to contain references to food stress or epidemics. He has added the few pertinent inscriptions and papyrus fragments. And he has produced a 200-page catalogue—of 222 entries—running from famines in Rome in the early 300s to plague in Constantinople in 747. After giving a comprehensive bibliography, each catalogue entry discusses the event in question and submits it to a complex classification, inspired by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928), covering all aspects of crises from their nature and causes to their social and demographic effects. The details of the classification, fully represented only in the author's doctoral thesis, provide the foundation for the overall analysis contained in the first 173 pages of the book. Like the catalogue itself, this discussion brings together the best ideas and material of the earlier accounts of late antique famine (by Garnsey, Patlagean, Ruggini, and a handful of others) while going significantly beyond them in comprehensiveness and sophistication.