Colloquium, Department of Classical Studies
Thursday, October 1, 2020, 4:30
The late Roman world was a world of uncertainty. Dangers at once physical and metaphysical hovered constantly and insistently at the edges of human perception. Equally, year-to-year variation in the timing and extent of rainfall and sunlight constituted variable, if characteristically manageable, growing conditions, producing comparable variability in both supply of and demand for agricultural surpluses. In such circumstances, considerable opportunities existed for some individuals to profit from much the same factors that created dearth for others. Similarly, societal and political uncertainty, the pervasive potentiality of banditry, piracy, religiously motivated violence and other threats to health, life, or livelihood provided opportunities for figures who were able to claim or mobilize the capacity to thwart, manage, or redirect such threats. This sense of uncertainty, engendering as it does the potential for both negative and positive outcomes, can most effectively be explored by recourse to the analytical concept of risk. But risk is neither an objective phenomenon nor universally manifest, generalized or generalizable in its instantiation. On the contrary, risks are highly localized, conditioned by the particular characteristics of a specific place, as well as such factors as socio-economic status, political power, religious beliefs, age, or gender. This paper will employ the concept of the "riskscape" as a tool for exploring the implications of these propositions, focusing in particular upon the riskscapes of the Danubian region in the late fifth century CE.
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