Class 11 History Chapter 2 An Empire Across Three Continents NCERT Solutions in English

Q. If you had lived in the Roman Empire, where would you rather have lived – in the towns or in the countryside? Explain why.

Answer: I would rather have lived in a town, and the chapter gives four solid reasons for that choice.
1. Food security. A town was far better provided for in a food shortage than the countryside around it. The physician Galen describes city-dwellers collecting and storing a whole year’s grain immediately after the harvest, carrying off the wheat, barley, beans and lentils, so that the peasants were left with a little pulse and, by spring, were eating twigs, shoots and the roots of inedible plants.
2. Amenities. Public baths were a striking feature of Roman urban life, and entertainment was on a scale the countryside could not match: one surviving calendar records shows, or spectacula, on 176 days of the year.
3. Self-government and status. A Roman city had its own magistrates and its own city council, and a village that was upgraded to city status received that promotion as a mark of imperial favour. Living in the city meant living where decisions were taken.
4. Opportunity. Cities were the bedrock of imperial administration and the point through which taxes from the countryside passed. The local upper classes who ran them collaborated with Rome, and across the second and third centuries it was these provincial elites who supplied the empire’s administrators and army commanders.
The other side, briefly. Town life was not comfortable for everyone. Tacitus calls the plebs sordida, the ‘unkempt lower class’, addicted to the circus and the theatre, and city populations also included large numbers of casual labourers and many thousands of slaves. So the honest answer is that a town was the better place to live if one had some property or a trade; for the poorest, the difference was much smaller.

Q. Compile a list of some of the towns, cities, rivers, seas and provinces mentioned in this chapter, and then try and find them on the maps. Can you say something about any three of the items in the list you have compiled?

Answer: The chapter names places on all three of its continents. A working list, grouped by kind:

Three of them, in a little more detail:
(i) The Euphrates. This one river is the chapter’s dividing line between the two superpowers of the age. Rome and Iran were separated by nothing more than a narrow strip of land along it, and by the early second century CE every client kingdom lying west of it had been absorbed into the empire. Trajan’s one great campaign of expansion, in 113-17 CE, was an occupation of territory across this river, and it was abandoned by his successors as fruitless.
(ii) Alexandria. One of the three biggest cities of the Mediterranean, alongside Carthage and Antioch. It shows what an imperial city actually did: it was a centre through which the government taxed the Egyptian countryside, and it was also an industrial city, since the chapter uses the sealed aprons, masks and body searches of its frankincense factories as its sharpest example of how closely workers were supervised.
(iii) Baetica, in southern Spain. A province with a reputation for exceptional fertility, producing olive oil on estates called fundi along the river Guadalquivir. Its oil, shipped in the container archaeologists call Dressel 20, reached its commercial peak between 140 and 160 CE, and the wide scatter of Dressel 20 finds across the Mediterranean shows that Spanish producers had taken the market from their Italian rivals, almost certainly with better oil at lower prices.

Q. Imagine that you are a Roman housewife preparing a shopping list for household requirements. What would be on the list?

Answer: The chapter tells us what a Mediterranean household actually consumed, so the list can be built from the book itself rather than from imagination.
1. The three staples. Wheat, wine and olive oil. These were traded and consumed in huge quantities across the empire, and they come at the head of any Roman shopping list. The wheat would most likely have come from Sicily, Byzacium in Tunisia or Egypt, the wine perhaps from Campania, which had a name for the best wines, and the oil from Spain or, later, North Africa.
2. Other food. Barley, beans, lentils and other pulses, all named in Galen’s account of what city households stored after the harvest.
3. Containers and household goods. Amphorae, since wine and oil arrived in them, along with ordinary pottery, which survives in such quantity that archaeologists use it to date and place a site.
4. Cloth and dress. The chapter names dress as one of the ways the empire’s cultural diversity showed itself, so clothing bought in the local style belongs on the list.
5. Labour for the household. Uncomfortable as it is to modern readers, slaves were counted as part of the Roman family, so a wealthy household’s purchases could include them, and their food and maintenance had to be provided all the year round.
6. What she would pay with. Denarii, the silver coin of about 4½ grams that carried the empire’s economy for its first three centuries, and in the late empire the gold solidus. Since a wife of the late Republic kept her property under her own family’s authority and became an independent property owner on her father’s death, she could well have been paying out of money that was legally her own.

Q. Why do you think the Roman government stopped coining in silver? And which metal did it begin to use for the production of coinage?

Answer:
1. The reason: the silver ran out. The empire’s monetary system for its first three centuries rested on the denarius, a coin of about 4½ grams of pure silver. That system depended on a steady supply of metal, and the main source was the Spanish mines, worked by hydraulic mining on a scale not matched again until the nineteenth century. Once those mines were exhausted, the government could no longer maintain a silver-based currency, so it stopped coining in silver.
2. The metal it turned to: gold. Constantine founded a new monetary system on gold. Its coin was the solidus, 4½ grams of pure gold, minted on a huge scale, with circulation running into millions.
3. Why the change worked. The solidus was stable enough to outlast the Roman Empire itself. Monetary stability, together with a growing population, stimulated real economic growth in late antiquity: archaeology shows investment in oil presses and glass factories, new technologies such as screw presses and multiple water-mills, and a revival of long-distance trade with the East. Egypt alone paid over 2.5 million solidi a year in tax, roughly 35,000 lbs of gold, in Justinian’s reign, and the late bureaucracy drew most of its salary in gold, which it invested in land.

Q. Suppose the emperor Trajan had actually managed to conquer India and the Romans had held on to the country for several centuries. In what ways do you think India might be different today?

Answer: This question asks for informed imagination, so the answer has to be built out of what the chapter says Roman rule actually did to the places it held.
1. The starting point. Trajan never came close. Cassius Dio, quoted in the chapter through Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East, describes him at the head of the Persian Gulf in 116 CE, watching a merchant ship set off for India and wishing he were as young as Alexander. His actual campaign across the Euphrates in 113-17 CE was abandoned by his successors as fruitless.
2. Cities and administration. Rome ruled through cities, not through anything like a modern government. Indian towns would probably have been reorganised as Roman cities, each with its own magistrates, its own council and a territory of villages under its jurisdiction, and the existing Indian upper classes would have been drawn into collecting taxes for Rome, as local elites were everywhere else in the empire.
3. Language and law. Latin or Greek would have become the language of administration, as they were in the west and the east of the empire respectively. The chapter shows what that could do to a local written language: Celtic stopped being written after the first century CE as Latin spread. Roman law, which by the fourth century was strong enough to act as a brake even on fearsome emperors, might have left a deeper mark on Indian legal ideas than any other single import.
4. The economy. India would have been drawn into the Mediterranean trading system in wheat, wine and olive oil, with its produce shipped in amphorae and its regions competing for markets exactly as Spain, North Africa and the East did in turn. Roman coinage, first silver and then the gold solidus, and Roman banking and commercial networks would have spread the use of money further.
5. Society. Roman social categories such as the equites and the humiliores might have overlaid Indian ones, and Roman family law, in which a wife kept her property under her own family’s authority and either partner could end a marriage by a notice of intent, would have sat very oddly beside existing custom.
6. Religion. After Constantine’s conversion the empire was substantially Christianised, so several centuries of Roman rule would probably have left a much larger and older Christian population in India.
7. What would probably have happened in the end. The chapter’s own evidence suggests the hold would not have lasted. Rome absorbed client kingdoms near its own borders and gave up territory that was too far away or too costly to defend, and Diocletian deliberately abandoned areas of little strategic or economic value. A province at the far end of the empire, beyond the Euphrates frontier that already gave Rome trouble, is exactly the kind of territory the empire found it could not keep.

Q. Go through the chapter carefully and pick out some basic features of Roman society and economy which you think make it look quite modern.

Answer: The chapter itself warns against assuming that “ancient” meant backward, and several of its features would not look out of place today.
1. The nuclear family. Adult sons did not usually live with their parents, and it was exceptional for adult brothers to share one household, so the ordinary Roman household looked much like a modern one, except that slaves were counted as part of it.
2. Married women’s property rights. A wife’s property stayed under her natal family’s authority rather than her husband’s. She remained her father’s primary heir and became an independent property owner on his death, so in law the couple was two financial entities, and the wife was fully independent.
3. Divorce by notice. Ending a marriage needed no more than a notice of intent from either husband or wife, which is closer to modern practice than to most pre-modern societies.
4. A paid professional army. Soldiers enlisted for a minimum of 25 years and were paid by the state, and they agitated for better pay and conditions, sometimes by mutiny, in a way that looks much like organised labour.
5. A salaried bureaucracy. The higher and middle ranks of the late bureaucracy were paid in gold and invested in land, and complaints about corruption were met with laws that tried to curb it.
6. Widespread use of money and banking. The empire had well-organised commercial and banking networks, and money was in use everywhere, so its economy worked through prices and coin rather than only through tribute in kind.
7. Wage labour. Free labour was extensively used on public works at Rome because slaves had to be fed all year round and were therefore dearer, and Anastasius built the city of Dara in under three weeks by attracting workers with high wages. Papyri show wage labour widespread in parts of the Mediterranean by the sixth century.
8. Long-distance trade and branded containers. Wheat, wine and olive oil moved across three continents, with the Dressel 20 container acting almost like a modern brand: its shape and clay identify the producer, and its find-spots show a Spanish industry taking market share from an Italian one on quality and price.
9. Technology at industrial scale. Diversified uses of water power, advances in water-powered milling, screw presses, multiple water-mills, and hydraulic mining in the Spanish gold and silver mines on a scale not matched again until the nineteenth century.
10. Casual literacy and advertising. The walls of Pompeii’s main streets carried advertisements, and graffiti covered the city, including a joke complaining that the wall had to hold up so much boring writing.
11. Urban public services. Public baths, aqueducts and a calendar of shows on 176 days of the year amount to a real municipal life.
12. A legal tradition that limited rulers. By the fourth century Roman law was strong enough to act as a brake even on the most fearsome emperors, and bishops such as Ambrose could confront emperors over the harsh treatment of civilians.
The caution. None of this makes Rome a modern society. It rested on slavery, on debt bondage that let parents sell children into 25 years of servitude, and on a state that was authoritarian and usually met protest with violence.