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350,000 of them). The army therefore spent much of its money buying food that had been shipped by merchants from the empire’s more productive Mediterranean provinces to its less productive frontier ones. This generated more profits for the traders, which the government could tax, generating more money to spend on the army, creating more profits still, and so on, in a virtuous circle.
    The flows of taxes and trade tied the Mediterranean economy together as never before. Each region could produce whatever it made cheapest andbest, selling its goods wherever they fetched high prices. Markets and coinage spread into every nook and cranny of the empire.
    Thanks to bigger markets, bigger ships became profitable; thanks to bigger ships, transport costs fell. And as they did, more and more people could afford to flock to the great cities, where the government spent most of the money that did not go to the army. In the first two centuries A.D. , a million people lived in Rome—far more than had ever lived in one place before—and Antioch and Alexandria boasted perhaps half as many each.
    These cities were the wonders of the world, seething, stinking, and raucous, but full of pomp, ceremony, and gleaming marble—all of which required more people, more food, and more bricks, iron nails, pots, and wine, which meant more taxes, more trade, and more growth.
    Little by little, this frenetic activity increased the quantity of goods in circulation. By the best estimates, per capita consumption typically rose about 50 percent in the first two centuries after incorporation into the empire. The process disproportionately favored the already rich, who grew even richer, but every class of objects that archaeologists can count—house sizes, animal bones from feasts, coins, the height of skeletons—suggests that tens of millions of ordinary people profited too ( Figure 1.4 ).
    Figure 1.4. An age of plenty: parallel increases in Mediterranean shipwrecks, documenting levels of trade, and in lead pollution in the Spanish bog of Penido Vello, documenting levels of industrial activity. Numbers of wrecks and amounts of lead have been normalized so they can be compared on the same vertical scale, with the amounts of each in 1 B.C. being counted as 100.
    â€œWho does not now recognize,” the Roman geographer Pliny (most famous for getting himself killed by standing too close to Mount Vesuvius when it erupted) asked just four years before the battle at the Graupian Mountain, “that thanks to the majesty of the Roman Empire, communications have been opened between all parts of the world? Or that standards of living have made great strides? Or that all this is owed to trade, and the common enjoyment of the blessings of peace?” The Roman Empire was no wasteland.
    Stationary Bandits
    To Gibbon, the explanation for the empire’s joy was obvious. Rome had been blessed with good rulers, who felt themselves “over-paid by the immense reward that inseparably waited on their success; by the honest pride of virtue, and by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors.”
    The a-few-good-men theory has a certain appeal, above all its simplicity. If what made Rome such a success story really was just a run of great leaders, we would not need to reach the unpleasant conclusion that war was good for something in ancient times. It might simply be that an organization that has good enough bosses can survive pretty much anything. Perhaps the ancient world got safer and richer in spite of its wars, not because of them.
    But the Gibbon thesis also has weaknesses. The first is that there were limits on how much ancient emperors could actually do. Rome certainly did have energetic rulers who rose before dawn and worked deep into the night answering letters, hearing lawsuits, and making decisions. But to get results, they had to work with layer upon layer of bureaucrats, lawyers, and