Fiscus and Patrimonium

During our travel day to Amalfi, our class had the chance to stop by a local sheep farm, as well as an ancient Roman land where transhumance and grazing was a common economic and agricultural practice.

As Connor and I learned in our article Ficus and Patrimonium, the practice of transhumance in early Rome was a very unknown but important part of the economy at the time. The main reasons as why this practice has gone relatively unnoticed throughout history has to do with the illiterate type of workers and smaller areas where this went on in the Empire, making it near impossible to transcribe this practice.

As we visited these ancient places, it was very interesting to see not only the areas where these people had to bring sheep to and from, but the very mountainous and rigid topography that the area provided them. I felt that this must have had a lot to do with some of the laws and regulations set in place for these workers. Some of these requirements i'd like to point out are how there were many checkpoints in different villages where grazers were forced to pay their way through the towns or else they weren't allowed to pass with their animals. This in my mind was able to happen largely due to the fact that the mountains forced them through one area, as it probably would've been too risky to take their livestock up through these dangerous hills and cliffs, and it could have been more profitable to just pay the tax a specific area might require. Another point I found interesting in this article is that people at the time did not fully understand who was forcing this workers to pay for the practice of transhumance, whether it was the empire itself, or a mixture of smaller local areas as well as the larger government of Rome. Again, I see this going back to the difficulty of transcription on how all of these practices were working at this time, and some of the information that may have been lost in history.

Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture of this article, I find it fascinating how factors like illiteracy can prevent major historical economic practices to be somewhat lost in time, as well as how other factors like geographical location can have a large impact on how these economic activities are practiced, and what types of regulations and barriers are put as a burden for these workers.