The role of Eastern wines in Roman Italy is an important yet long under-studied aspect of the ancient (wine) economy. Paulina Komar fills this void with an explicitly holistic and multi-faceted analysis of their supply and consumption in the peninsula in late republican and early/high imperial times. She starts with an unprecedented organoleptic review of these wines, moulding the relevant literary evidence into an expert oenological discussion that reveals much of their qualities and defaults. She then scrutinises the diachronic scale of imports based on amphora finds from Campania, Rome-Ostia and the northern Adriatic. This convincingly shows the increasing dominance of these wines over time, and the overall popularity of Aegean wines across Italy, but also reveals the distinct profile of the Adriatic, where local wines continued to rule in all periods. The data so presented provide strong indications for aggregate economic growth in several parts of early imperial Italy, but it remains to be seen if these trends can also be linked with per capita economic growth, as K. argues. However plausible it may be, corroborating such a claim would require more than the archaeological data which are discussed in this book.
A subsequent ranking of Eastern wines (based on texts and amphorae) reveals an interesting if still largely hypothetical (as K. admits) shift from expensive luxury wines to cheaper mass drinks across Republic and Empire. There seems, however, no denying that the success of Aegean wines was linked in part to the low transport costs associated with carrying them to Italy, as demonstrated by the author's use of Stanford's ORBIS Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World (https://orbis.stanford.edu). Still, even if these and other datasets suggest a role for modern-looking market forces and profit maximisation in the Roman economy, K.'s insightful prosopographic and socio-onomastic analysis of tituli picti on Rhodian, Cnidian, Cilican and Coan amphorae from Campania in the next chapter discloses a typically ‘Roman’ trade system, ruled by a dynamic entanglement of various actors and groups, from freedmen to elite, and from private to state. This synergy — largely responsible for the prominence of Cretan vintages among Aegean wines in Rome, whose grain annona ships passed the island on route from Alexandria — was the key constituting mechanism of Roman economic pathways, shaped and structured in entirely different ways to modern economies (A. Tchernia, The Romans and Trade (2016)).
As K. rightly observes in her sixth and final chapter, it was precisely the transformation of this system — and much less so pure commercial motives — that caused the decline of Aegean (and particularly Cretan) wines and the following rise of Palestinian, Cilician and Cypriote wines after the third century a.d. But while Komar considers this switch as mostly reflecting the lessening of market forces and the tightening of the state's grip on the late antique economy, history and archaeology suggest a more organic process of change, unfolding against the background of socio-political and environmental developments, and increasingly influenced by the emergence of the Church as an important player in trade.
K. has produced a valuable contribution to the debate on Roman Italy's wine economy. For sure, the lacunose geographical coverage of the book (large parts of Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Italy remain undiscussed) and the variety of contexts analysed (mingling houses, shops, baths, graves and drainage works) raise questions about the representativeness of its results for Roman Italy as a whole. Also, much of the author's reasoning is anchored in the now dreary primitivist-versus-modernist debate, which in this reviewer's view continues to hinder rather than help investigation of the ancient economy. Despite these minor caveats, K. has succeeded in skilfully dissecting the dialects of the Eastern wine phenomenon in Italy, appropriately visualised through helpful maps and graphs. Two useful appendices (collecting first all relevant textual sources and then Eastern wine amphora types), together with a comprehensive bibliography, offer ample ground to continue the study.
