Collections: Teaching Paradox, Imperator, Part IIa: Pops and Chains
- WORDSWORTH WORDSMITHY
- Jul 26, 2024
- 25 min read
This is the first half of the second part of our three part (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb) look at Paradox Interactive’s Hellenistic-era grand strategy game Imperator: Rome. I had hoped to do this part in a single post, but my book writing schedule intervened and so it became necessary to split it up. Last time we looked at how Imperator models diplomacy and warfare and in particular how it examines the question of why Rome emerged as the sole Mediterranean power. We found that Imperator‘s decision to simulate ancient diplomacy as an even more ruthless and intense form of interstate anarchy largely accords with the evidence, but that Imperator‘s model or how military power was structured and raised applies at best imperfectly to many of the great powers of this period.
In this part, we turn to how Imperator approaches ancient societies and economies. We’ll split this into two parts: this week we’ll look at how Imperator approaches ancient people through mechanics representing population in discrete units of population called pops. In particular, we’re interested in how well these systems reflect the actual social structures of ancient societies – the degree to which they map on to real legal and economic statuses – and how well they represent economic structures – the degree to which they simulate ancient economic activity with some fidelity.
In both cases, Imperator is presenting a ‘theory of history,’ a vision of how the past was that it attempts to express through its game mechanics.
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A Game About Pops?
Imperator is not, I’d argue, a game about pops, rather it is a game interested in simulating ancient economic systems, particularly urbanism and pops are the tool it uses to do this.482 Nevertheless, while Imperator is mostly not interested in pops for their own sake – as we’ll see, even in ‘democratic’ states, pops play basically no role in politics – pops are the foundation of Imperator‘s economic system. Put bluntly, pops are the basic unit of production, producing most of the game’s key resources (tax revenue, manpower, levy-capacity, trade goods, trade route capacity, research).
So we need to talk about pops.
Pops represent discrete units of population in game. Unlike Victoria, the game does not keep track of precise population, rather each pop represents a somewhat simplified large block of population, with a single social class, religion and culture. A single territory, then, contains a number of pops, with rural territories generally in the high single or low double-digits, while very large cities can crest into several hundred pops.
The most important fact about a pop is their social class: Imperator splits pops into five social classes, which determines what they can produce. At the top are ‘Nobles‘ who produce a large amount of research and trade route capacity. Below them are ‘Citizens,’ who produce a mix of research, trade routes and manpower, but at a lower level than more specialized pops. Below them are ‘Freemen,’ who produce the most manpower and a small amount of tax revenue. Below them are ‘Slaves‘ who produce by far the most tax revenue and also produce local trade goods. Finally, parallel to ‘Freemen’ there are ‘Tribesmen‘ who produce a smidge more taxes and a bit less manpower. The quirk with tribesmen pops, who represent a mix of hill folk, pre-urban and non-agrarian peoples, is that they have high base happiness, but their happiness goes down as the ‘civilization’ level of a province (increased by buildings and technology) goes up, presumably reflecting these folks being pushed ever further to the margins by expanding cities and their agrarian economic networks.483 Consequently, they’re useful for non-state peoples, but become pretty useless pretty fast for state polities like Rome or Carthage.
Pops promote and demote over time based on an individual territory’s ‘desired ratio’ which is in turn influenced by buildings, so cities or rural territories can be, to a degree, specialized into certain kinds of communities (e.g. the ‘forum’ building encourages more freeman, while the ‘library’ encourages nobles); they’ll also migrate to achieve those balances. Each state also limits how high a given culture of pop can promote, with the state’s primary culture always being able to go all the way up to nobles, but other cultures by default being restricted to freeman and below. For pops of non-primary culture, the player can either wait for assimilation (pops slowly gravitate towards the primary culture) or integrate that non-primary culture, enabling them to promote up higher at the cost of lower happiness for other integrated or primary culture pops (who don’t want to share their privileges) and stopping assimilation for integrated cultures.
The main problem with this setup is that these societies, particularly the major states, drew the line between ‘full members’ of the political community – what the ‘citizen’ pop is meant to represent – and everyone else very differently and understood the obligations of those full members very differently as well. Imperator, for the sake of making the game mangeable and preserving the Paradox approach whereby all polities are playable, tries to flatten this into a single social class system (which cuts across, but is not limited to, ethnicity), but the result ends up being a relatively weak representation of any one system, nor does it serve as a strong reflection of something about all of them.
Notionally, the ‘noble’ pops represent the upper elite, including both the ‘imperial elite’ (like the Roman Senate or a royal court) but also local elites, what in a later period we’d call the curiales or curial class. And while not a perfect representation, having them produce ‘research points’ which go into technologies that make the government more effective is at least a gesture to the role these figures play as rulers and administrators. ‘Nobles’ is a bit of an awkward term, as in most cases these are not members of a hereditary nobility, but rather, in the Roman sense, nobiles, local notables rather than nobles, but the terminology fudge is an acceptable break to allow the player to understand what these fellows do.
Instead, most of the problems here reside in the break between ‘freemen’ and ‘citizen’ pops. Notionally, ‘citizens’ represent true full members of the community, while ‘freemen’ represent the free, non-citizen poor: freemen generate a substantial amount of taxes and the best manpower-per-pop, whereas citizens act like miniature versions of nobles (generating a small amount of research and trade capacity) and also generate a small amount of (military) manpower, but no revenue.484 So citizens serve less and don’t pay taxes, but take part in governance and administration (which is what ‘research’ seems to really reflect, as the ‘technologies’ are mostly governing innovations).
And that’s not really quite how any of these states were organized.
In the Roman Republic, it is difficult to see who large numbers of ‘Roman-culture’ freemen would even represent. ‘Roman,’ after all, was a legal status, fundamentally tied to citizenship: a non-citizen Roman was a contradiction in terms. One might argue that the poorest Romans, the capite censi might count, given how their votes were discounted in the comitia centuriata, but of course those Romans were so discounted because they were too poor to serve, and so ought to offer no manpower at all and in any case, there are far too few of them to reflect the numbers of freemen pops you’d expect in Imperator. Instead the ‘freemen’ class might represent the socii, but here we have a problem in terms of the resources they generate. Historically, the socii paid no taxes to Rome, but did generate manpower, while Roman citizens did pay taxes (unlike citizen pops in Imperator), but on a per capita basis served more than the socii, because Roman armies only had a slim socii majority, but the population of Roman Italy was far more heavily slanted towards non-citizen socii.
The system works even less well for Carthage. As far as we can tell, Carthage’s citizen body was effectively closed and largely endogamus (that is, marrying within itself), so Carthage’s citizen class ought to be essentially limited to the city of Carthage itself, with perhaps very small numbers limited to only a handful of colonies. While citizen pops generate manpower in Imperator, one of the defining things about Carthaginian citizens after the Battle of the Crimissus (340) is that they don’t seem to have served in the army, save for a handful of officers. The only time we see meaningful numbers of Carthaginian citizen troops are situations like the Battle of Zama (202) or the Third Punic War (149-146), where the city of Carthage itself was threatened.
However, the culture system that Imperator has means that any pop of the ‘Punic’ culture – one of the most widespread cultures at game’s start – can promote into citizenship. Assimilation will in turn generate even more ‘Punic’ culture pops over time as Carthage expands. Imperator is not really prepared to simulate a non-ethnic closed citizen body in this way, in part I suspect because it is such an obviously losing strategy. But it is also, for political reasons, how nearly every citizen polity in antiquity was organized – the Romans, with their expansive citizenship were the unusual ones.
Meanwhile, representing the economics of this system is also, as a game system, difficult: the idea of supporting a population that isn’t producing most of the tax revenue (that’s what tributary populations are for) or manpower makes no strategic sense – but of course it makes quite a lot of political sense for those citizens if they find themselves ruling an empire. In this sense, the Carthaginian citizen body is actually better represented by the ‘noble’ pop types, producing ‘research’ (read: administration) and very little else, but pushing the desired ratio for ‘noble’ pops in Carthage proper so high isn’t really practical.
Instead, like many of Imperator‘s mechanics, the system makes the most sense transposed onto the Hellenistic kingdoms, with their ethnic hierarchies. The tie between primary/accepted culture and access to the higher pop levels, at least, makes immediate sense, as these were states – particularly the Ptolemies and the Seleucids – with a fairly clearly defined ethnic ruling class, constructed on the basis of ethnos (‘ethnic group’) or patris (‘fatherland, homeland’), with the Macedonians (which, as a legal status, included most native Greek speakers as well) on the top and subject peoples subordinated to them.
But beyond that, many of the elements of the system break down. Critically, this is a system designed to simulate Rome’s expansive, assimilationist citizenship system and subsequent cultural Romanization, but while many people in the East learned Greek and adopted Greek cultural patterns, legal Macedonian identity was generally closed with just a handful of exceptions. Sometimes, as in the case of the Ptolemaic class of ‘Persians’ (who were, in fact, not Persians but Hellenized Egyptians), a ‘middle’ subordinate class was created for Hellenized locals, but frequently not. But they only rarely became ‘Macedonians.’ On the flipside, the way the culture system is set up in Imperator, Greeks (split into many smaller sub-groups under the larger heading of ‘Hellenistic cultures’) aren’t ‘Macedonian’ and so are, in the successor states, generally blocked from promoting into being citizen-level pops or higher. But in fact we know that a great many of the ‘Macedonians’ we see in colonial foundations in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms were not cultural ‘Macedonians,’ but rather Greek-speakers drawn broadly from the Aegean world who became legally Macedonian in their new homes.
But perhaps most critically, if what the citizen pop represents are these Macedonian settlers who – unlike the local subject peoples – have full membership in the political community (in this case, as subjects of a king), this is the key military manpower base of these kingdoms. Rather than providing a functionally negligible part of Seleucid and Ptolemaic manpower, they should supply an indispensable portion of it! There may never have been many more than 200,000 ‘Macedonians’ in Ptolemaic Egypt and perhaps a similar number in the Seleucid Empire, compared to perhaps 4 million native Egyptians and c. 15-20 million native subjects of the Seleucid Empire, respectively, but Greeks and Macedonians provided about half of Antiochus III’s army at Raphia, and about 45% of his army at Magnesia and probably two-thirds of the Ptolemaic army at Raphia, despite it incorporating a massive native Egyptian phalanx for the first time.
In short, the Hellenistic kingdoms were extremely reliant on the manpower of those ‘citizens’ in order to maintain control over everyone else: the citizen ‘Macedonians’ were about the only population in any Hellenistic kingdom that was utilized militarily at anything like its peak capacity (whereas the Romans are doing this with everyone in Italy, which is why they can steamroll so hard), something that is simply not reflected well in the game’s systems (though the Seleucids do get a penalty to assimilation to push a play-style of trying to manage a culturally diverse kingdom).
In practice, this is an aspect of the game where I think I understand what the developers were going for, but cannot help but conclude that in order to actually capture these various ethnic-legal systems of political belonging and non-belonging, the game needed to have multiple bespoke systems (perhaps with a ‘reform’ system to try to switch between them) rather than trying to have one combined system that represents all of them, using the culture-integration element of the system to try to capture regimes with different degrees of openness. But I am also well aware that developing that many parallel, state-specific systems simply wasn’t in the cards in terms of scope.
Nevertheless, as much as this system feels like a bit of a ‘kludge,’ it is clearly trying to express an awareness of these factors, in particular of the way that ethnic identity was tied closely to legal status in many of these states. It is a lot better than what most games set in this period (or a lot of popular culture) manage to do, and I have a lot of grace for any game that is willing to try to simulate complex, multi-ethnic ancient communities.
But of course, we’ve left one pop-type out in all of this, so now it’s time to talk about…
Slavery and Warfare in Imperator
The final pop-type in Imperator, of course, are slaves. And I want to note at the outset that I appreciate Imperator‘s courage in tackling ancient slavery: a lot of games set in antiquity either largely whitewash the topic or simply leave it out. By contrast, Imperator is trying not only to acknowledge the existence of this institution, but to understand its economic and social role. However, I think in the process of trying to make those roles legible to the player and to have them produce interesting and clear strategic choices, Imperator ends up presenting a rather too binary vision of ancient labor and production.
Every polity in Imperator, state or non-state has slaves. That is, as a straight description of the ancient Mediterranean, not an unfair characterization, as so far as we can tell, every ancient Mediterranean polity of any substantial size in this period did practice at least some form of slavery – though not all in the same ways or to the same extent. In Imperator, slave pops can be generated in two ways: existing freemen and tribesman pops that demote, which happens slowly as a result of the territory they’re in being below its ‘desired ratio’ for enslaved pops. In theory this might represent something like individuals falling into debt-slavery, except that a lot of civic communities went out of their way to abolish debt slavery (at least for citizens) long before the game begins. The Roman practice of debt slavery, for instance, called nexumwas abolished in the late 300s, while debt slavery in Athens seems to have been abolished for citizens as part of Solon’s reforms as part of the seisachtheia(‘the shaking off of burdens,’ a word I have a ton of fun saying every year in my ancient history survey) in 594.
There were other ways for the poor and desperate to fall into slavery: in most of these societies, a family with children they could not afford to raise could abandon or sell those children into slavery. However, it is more than a bit odd that Imperator structures this as a ‘pull’ factor – when the number of slaves in a territory is insufficient, the game pulls (otherwise stable?) freeman households down to fill the gap. It almost suggests that the game imagines that all of the free persons in antiquity are fundamentally reliant on slavery to remain free (such that a shortage of slaves would imperil their economic stability) – and we’ll come back to that ‘model’ of the ancient economy in a moment. But just to leave a note here: no, a ‘shortage’ of enslaved labor would not imperil the stability of small freeholders. It might actually be good for them, as it would mean more demand for their labor.
But Imperator mints new enslaved pops another way: through warfare, because warfare in Imperator generates slaves. Any time an army takes control of a territory (nearly instantly for unfortified territories and cities), a portion of the pops present are either enslaved or killed. Enslaved pops keep their culture and religion, but are, of course, enslaved and then relocated (instantly and for free) to the polity that captured the territory. They’re not moved at random: the game prefers first to place them in the main capital, and then smaller provincial capitals and finally smaller cities. That is, as we’ll see, a key method by which the capitals of big imperial states in this game grow into huge urban centers: as the empire expands, the capital receives stead and substantial influxes of new population, reshaping the demographics of the game map over time.
And this was absolutely a major part of ancient warfare, so much so that Greek has a technical term for the enslavement of war captives, andrapodizein (ἀνδραποδίζειν) which enters English as the rare word ‘andrapodize.’485 Mass enslavement was sometimes an end into itself in ancient warfare but just as frequently was a tool of terror to compel broader submission. War captives on the battlefield were generally enslaved after capture (though it was sometimes possible for them to be ransomed as well), while armies would generally enslave the civilian populace they encountered as they moved.486
This was an ugly process (involving, among other things, large scale sexual violence), but was generally considered a ‘normal’ part of war by ancient societies. As Xenophon has Cyrus say, “For it is the nomos [law/custom] among all men for all time that when a city is taken in war, the persons [somata, lit: ‘bodies’] of those in the city and their property belong to the captors. It will be no injustice to keep what you have, but if you let them keep anything, it is generosity not to take it” (Xen. Cyrop. 7.5.73). The Romans differed little in this: to leave anything to the defeated was kindness to be lauded, but not a moral necessity.
Imperator forces the player to think about this destructiveness, because different approaches to warfare produce different results. In particular, a territory may be occupied either directly, by moving a military unit over it, or indirectly, by capturing the province capital or a nearby fort. Consequently, a player can either maximize the brutality of their wars, by occupying each territory individually (possibly several times as the fortunes of war shift), killing and enslaving pops each time or minimize it (within the frame of ancient warfare’s already high minimum brutality), by focusing on administrative centers and leaving the rural population largely intact (territory control shifts caused by the capture of a fort or local capital don’t cause the same enslaving effects).
That in turn is a strategic choice too: warfare enslavement is ‘negative sum,’ as a significant portion of the pops involved are always killed, reducing the value of territory that the player may be about to annex anyway. That actually leads the player into a fairly brutal strategic calculation, because enslavement in war is also the most efficient way to rapidly grow the population of the player’s polity’s core region and capital, which for reasons discussed below, the player will want to do – but doing so means both longer, slower wars but also fewer pops as a result of conquest overall. The fact that this is a choice the player has to make (alongside choices when capturing major cities about how brutally to sack them) directs the player’s attention, at least a little, to the brutality of warfare in this period.
It isn’t by any means perfect, but it is present in the game and various events also draw the player’s attention to the human suffering created by the practice of slavery and warfare. Of course, this creates a tension: the player is confronted, occasionally, with the suffering that the game’s warfare causes, but at the same time this is a game about conquest which expects the player to largely adopt the value-structural of the historical societies being simulated: that war was, if not good, at least normal and that conquest was a valid activity for states. But for a historical simulation, as opposed to a true fantasy game, it seems difficult to do otherwise: unlike EUIV or Victoria III, there is no abolition movement in this period to highlight, no alternative model to conquest and hegemony for state building.
On the whole then, as a representation of the interaction of warfare and slavery in antiquity, Imperator‘s model has something to say which largely accords with the evidence. But what about the economic and social role of slavery?
A Slave Mode of Production?
Imperator is designed mechanically so that nearly all polities will trend towards a situation where slave pops are the most numerous kind. For state polities, the ‘desired ratio’ for slave pops is 66% in rural settlements and 20% in cities; non-state polities have the same city ratio but only 44% in rural settlements (to make more room for their tribesmen pops). Most states start well below those desired ratios, particularly in their rural territories, but the systems for pop promotion and demotion are going to steadily move them in that direction, leading slaves to be the largest pop-group. Even without warfare, which can generate enslaved pops in sufficient numbers to put capital cities well above their ‘desired ratio’ for slave pops.
It is worth noting how strong those default desired ratios are in influencing the population mix of a polity in Imperator over time. As we’re going to save, the slice of the population of an ancient state held in slavery seems to have varied considerably: even discounting clear outliers like Sparta, some Greek poleis might have been close to 50% enslaved, while some parts of the Roman world were likely just below 10%. However in Imperator, the rural desired ratios are effectively static and the majority of territories will remain rural over the game’s run. The player has more ability to control the desired ratios in cities, where they are influenced by buildings, though at the same time those buildings can also increase rather than decrease the desired ratio of slave pops. Consequently, while the actual economies of the ancient Mediterranean ranged significantly in how heavily they employed enslaved labor, Imperator‘s single set of systems means that over time basically all polities will get pulled to the same basic ratio of enslaved pops and thus have economic systems that broadly resemble each other.
Mechanically, slave pops do two things in Imperator: they are by far the most efficient pop for producing tax revenue (roughly double a tribesman and triple a freeman pop) and they govern the production of trade goods. The way this works is that each territory produces a single trade good (iron, surplus grain, horses, spices, etc.) and automatically produces one unit of that good, which is then pooled at the province level. Large populations of slaves, however, can produce multiple units of those goods for export, if the number of pops passes a threshold (base 15 in rural settlements, 20 in urban), so a city with 1-19 slave pops produces one unit of its good, 20-39 produces two, 40-59 produces three, and so on. Should the player want to generate meaningful commerce revenue, the way to do it is to select cities with valuable trade goods and use the ‘slave mill’ building to drive up the desired ratio of slaves: a high population city of this sort can produce many surplus goods for export and will also produce a lot of tax revenue.
Trade goods, in turn, are quite important. Every level of trade-good surplus in a province gives a base bonus, but perhaps more importantly, the first level of surplus in the capital gives an empire-wide bonus, making it very important to stack trade surplus in the capital (something we will return to next week). At the same time, each import or export deal generates trade revenue: out-of-country exports generate 100% of their trade value in revenue, imports 35% and domestic trade routes (from one of your provinces to another) just 20%. As a result, producing lots of trade good surpluses that can be traded with other states is a key source of revenue, often rivaling tax income (and massively exceeding the third category, tribute form vassals, in almost all cases).
That means that state income is substantially a product of tax revenue, which is produced mostly by slaves, and trade income, which is produced entirely by slaves. As a result, for most polities, slaves are going to come to represent anywhere from roughly 35 to 50% of the total number of pops, and produce upwards of three-quarters of the revenue. The player thus cannot move away from slavery even if they wanted to: the game systems make it so that a state without slavery would have almost no revenue and no trade goods at all.
Now, does that reflect a theory of history? Well, yes: it is a rather blunt application of Marx’s theory of a sequence of ‘systems ‘modes of production,’ in which the ancient world was slotted as the ‘slave mode of production.’ To greatly simplify, in this vision, what makes the ancient economy distinct from other subsequent forms was its substantial reliance on slavery (as opposed to dependent tenants or wage laborers) as the main system by which labor beyond subsistence was organized, with the elite extracting effectively 100% rents off of the slaves they owned. The enslaved population, it was posited, was mostly generated by warfare and thus warfare was also fundamental to the system. Under this vision, while some free small farmers exist, they primarily work only for subsistence and are minimally engaged in markets, while most of the surplus, including agricultural goods for trade and non-agricultural goods, were produced by slaves.
This is, in a heavily moderated form, something of the vision of Moses Finley in The Ancient Economy (1973) – a book which in part was presenting a vision of the ancient economy which could fit with a somewhat modified version of the Marxist ‘modes of production.’487 Finley argued that the ancient economy was relatively more ‘primitive’ than the previous generation of scholars had been willing to acknowledge, governing by the pursuit of status and elite ideology rather than profit motives or market forces, that most households were minimally tied to markets, that trade was mostly limited to elite luxuries and in any case small in scale and scope, and that the role of slavery in ancient economic systems was large and decisive.
And of course long-time readers of the blog may already remember this fellow and so know what happens next: the ‘revenge of the archaeologists.’ Finley had built his model of the ancient economy out of the textual evidence (written by elites) – he was a philologist (a language expert) by training – buttressed by the work of ideologically similar social scientists, most notably Karl Polanyi (1886-1964). He had broadly discounted the ability of archaeological information to really alter the debate, once quipping that, “we are too often victims of that great curse of archaeology, the indestructibility of pots” when arguing that pottery data was over-interpreted.488 What I term the ‘revenge of the archaeologists’ is the process by which modern archaeology proceeded to spend the next half-century burying quite a lot Finley’s ideas under a mountain of pot sherds, demonstrating many of the things that his model says shouldn’t exist in the ancient economy – large-scale trade in bulk commodities like grain, the production of consumer goods for non-elites at commercial scale, sophisticated financial systems, ‘producer’ cities structured around production rather than rent extraction, smaller-scale for-market production, and meaningful technological progress – did, in fact, exist.
None of which is to say that the societies of the ancient Mediterranean weren’t ‘slave societies.’ They absolutely were slave societies and the fact of slavery permeated (and deformed) most of their social institutions, cultural values and customs. But the idea that ancient production was dominated, everywhere and in all cases, by slavery is an outmoded one. Instead, ancient production was a lot more complex and there was quite a lot more variation that Imperator‘s model suggests.
Estimating how many people in the ancient Mediterranean were enslaved is very difficult, as our sources give us very little reliable information and our normal methods do not work: ancient censuses do not count the non-free, military mobilizations do not help us estimate a population that did not serve militarily and population density studies cannot distinguish between enslaved farmers and free ones. Nevertheless, based on what meager evidence we do have, the percentage of the population held in slavery was likely never so high across the whole Mediterranean as Imperator‘s systems might suggest.
Our best evidence is for Roman Italy, where we have good archaeological evidence, a reasonable amount of evidence for the influx of enslaved captives (and particularly the scale of it, reported in our sources) and of course the Roman census figures to estimate a baseline population. Here our evidence and modeling generally suggests an enslaved population at the beginning of the period Imperator focuses on (the late fourth century) might have been as low as 10%, rising over the course of the third, second and first centuries as a result of Roman conquests to roughly 15-20% of the population of Italy – a total enslaved population of perhaps 1.2m people (out of 5.7 to 7m persons in Italy total).489 We would generally assume that the enslaved population by the first century would be the highest in Italy of almost anywhere, given that Rome was the beneficiary at that point of three centuries of spectacular conquests, and so the usual estimate for the Roman Empire as a whole, covering essentially the whole of the Mediterranean basin, is generally around 10% (with fairly large error bars).490 There were pockets that seem to have been much higher: estimates for the enslaved population of Athens range from 30-50%, while we’ve already discussed the unique brutality of Sparta’s slave society.491
Now that is, by any standard, a lot of slavery and it is absolutely fair to describe the societies of the Hellenistic Mediterranean as ‘slave societies.’ But this is not an economy where slavery is the primary mode of labor employment; instead, slavery existed alongside various forms of tenancy, freeholding farmers and a small but meaningful number of wage laborers. And while the ideal of the self-sufficient freeholding farmer remains powerful in Greek and Roman culture (especially in elite discourse), it’s clear that actual small freeholding farmers did have meaningful market interactions – far more than Finley would allow, albeit far less than modern households.492 Which is to say, not all of the trade goods moving around in antiquity were the product of large estates. And, of course, on top of that, not all large estates ran entirely on slaves: tenants (who might, depending on the cultural context, be entirely free or substantially dependent (read: serfs)) might also provide the labor for large market-oriented estates, something we see fairly clearly in the letters of Pliny the Younger.
If it seems like enslaved workers end up more visible in our sources than these tenants and freeholders, despite most likely being outnumbered by them in most places, remember that our sources are written almost exclusively by the relatively small number of men who held vast numbers of slaves and relied upon them for their luxury: typical smallholding households with more free laborers than enslaved ones do not generally write to us (though I should note that it is certainly the case in antiquity that even quite ‘humble’ smallholder households often had enslaved workers).
That in turn distorts how Imperator imagines state revenues are generated. In practice, the largest portion of state revenues were effectively land taxes, sometimes in the form of a direct wealth tax (like Rome’s tributum) or in the form of rents (such as rents on ‘royal lands’ in the Seleucid Empire) or in the form of tribute from subject states whose revenues in turn derived from land taxes (as with Carthaginian North Africa). Outside of Classical Sparta, the vast majority of laborers working those lands to provide those revenues were free persons.
In short, then, Imperator presents an economic model in which the free peasant population (freemen pops) are mostly engaged in pure subsistence, generating little surplus and no goods for trade (and thus producing primarily manpower), while the bulk of economic activity was accomplished by vast numbers of enslaved workers whose labor made it possible for the citizen class to live in relative leisure. This is a historical vision of the structure of the ancient economy, but it is largely an outdated one, complicated out of existence one pot sherd at a time by the growing archaeological evidence that the ancient economy was more dynamic than this. Slavery was an important part of the economy, but in most of the ancient Mediterranean, it represented a significant and substantial minority of production.
Ancient Economies
More broadly, because this vision insists that slavery was essential for all forms of the ancient economy, it is unprepared to account for differences in systems of production. And that in turn dovetails with Imperator‘s broader pop-system’s inability to represent different class structures as well.
The foundation of the economy of Roman Italy by the third century appears quite clearly to have been a very large class of freeholding farmers who held citizen rights in their communities and served in the army; the Roman freeholders also provided the Roman Republic with most of its revenue through the tributum. By contrast, the foundation of the economic system of many Gallic non-state polities seem to have been small farmers reduced to a sort of dependent tenancy, to trust what our ancient sources tell us. The economic systems of the Hellenistic Near East seem to have had far fewer freeholders, but also fewer slaves and a larger class of tenants (both free and non-free).
On the one hand, the basic structures of a fundamentally organic economy apply to all of these societies: agricultural productivity was low, labor was inefficiently distributed and as a result surpluses were very limited, leading to societies that were, by modern standards, extremely poor and quite static. But within that framework there is quite a lot of difference, from the closed citizenship of Greek poleis or Sparta, as compared to the expansive citizenship in the Roman Republic (though with somewhat less equality among the citizens as a result) to Hellenistic kingdoms structured around legally-encoded ethnic hierarchies between the Greek-speaking ruling class and the native subject class.
Imperator‘s single combined class-and-economic system, structured around pops cannot help but flatten those different systems. Now I will say that on the one hand, I appreciate the effort to develop this aspect of the game at all (compare, say, EUIV or CKIII which abstract these aspects away) and apart from the economic over-reliance on slavery, as a basic outline of ancient class structures the pop system is better than most. At the same time, it feels like the kind of system that ought, in the course of post-release development, to have gotten bespoke variations to express the wide-ranging differences in economic and social patterns in these different areas (and I haven’t even touched its applicability in India because I simply do not have the expertise to say!).
However, pops are really only one half of Imperator‘s vision of the ancient economy and society, in many ways they are just a mechanical foundation for something the game finds – I’d argue – much more interesting: urbanism. And that’s where we’ll turn to next week.
