The Antonine Plague, Climate Change and Local Violence in Roman Egypt

Complaining about the paucity, ambiguity and fragmentary nature of evidence concerning ancient Mediterranean societies is a common pastime among ancient historians. 1 The situation provokes a wide range of reactions. 2 Some scholars have chosen carefully to restrict their conclusions and interpretations to those which can be supported only by an inductive, empirical or, at a pinch, positivistic study of the evidence. Suspicion of generalising approaches, once the ‘dominant orthodoxy’ among ancient historians, 3 has in recent decades given way to a full backlash characterized by a flourishing of engagement with a wide variety of methodological concepts borrowed from other disciplines. The late Roman historian Keith Hopkins, whose ‘Taxes and Trade’ has come to be seen as a pivot point in the methodology of ancient historiography, was a master of combining otherwise weak generalizations — some derived from empirical study of limited evidence, some based upon the purely logical relationships of economic or sociological models — into what he called ‘wigwam’ arguments. In metaphorical terms, generalizations were akin to the individual poles which held up a larger structure: a single pole could not stand on its own, but if several of them pointed the same way, the historian could lean them together and they would ‘point roughly in the same direction, and circumscribe “truth” ’. 4 If I were to extend Hopkins’ analogy a little further, it is also true that individual poles are often not exclusive to one wigwam. Generalized arguments and limited data are fraught with ambiguity — perhaps that is what makes rearranging them into different meta-arguments so fruitful; but also, of course, potentially perilous.