Warfare, Weather, and the Politics of Grain Shortage in the Early 2^nd c. BC Achaian League

Abstract

This article examines the Achaian League's imposition of a grain export embargo c. 191-188 BC. This was a response to a reduction in the availability of grain in its territory due to Roman campaigning in Greece, restricted agricultural exports from the eastern and central Mediterranean, and perhaps extreme weather. The embargo was aimed primarily at ensuring the Eleans, Messenians, and Spartans exported their grain within rather than beyond its borders. This demonstrates how ancient federations could engender resilience in the face of hardship, although by altering the food entitlement of different groups they unevenly distributed the social burden of that resilience.

7 Recent research on climate, environment, and society in the ancient Greek world

“…Alain Bresson, for example, offered a general discussion in his 2014 paper on climate and society in Greco-Roman antiquity, even though the palaeoclimatic proxy data that he used was of a more general and non-local nature (Bresson 2014). More recently Ruben Post utilized available proxy records from the northern Peloponnese to explore the ban on grain exports enforced by the Achaian league between ca 191 and 188 BC, arguing that increasingly dry conditions as inferred from the proxy data could have played into the restrictions imposed by the federal community (Post 2022b). In terms of research focused on the Greek archaeological record, members of the DoLP research group have further provided new comparative analyses of land use and climate in the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, particularly focused on the northeastern Peloponnese (Bonnier and Finné 2020; 2021).…”

“…Geochemical proxies and the PC1 trends are provided at a higher temporal resolution compared to stable isotope data of n -alkanes (as discussed by Seguin et al 2020a). The differences between archives and regional variations can also be tied to atmospheric circulation patterns that impact regional variations in precipitation and temperature in the Greek mainland between the drier east and the more humid west (Katrantsiotis et al 2019; Seguin et al 2020a; Post 2022b).…”