sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 12

Jerry Toner: Risk in the Roman World

Cambridge's "Key Themes in Ancient History" series needs no introduction: for over 30 years, it has provided succinct, readable, and intellectually provocative introductions to consequential topics in the study of the Ancient Mediterranean World. A cursory scan of titles in the series reveals various trajectories of scholarly interest: societal impacts of law and relations between states and their citizens; ritual practices, religious heterogeneity and social relations; economic and fiscal institutions; space and temporality; political and philosophical thought. The modern reverberations of these topics are not difficult to discern: indeed, the series explicitly recognizes their importance in its mission statement.

Jerry Toner's Risk in the Roman World sits firmly within this context. Toner himself notes the unapologetically modern focus of the bulk of scholarship and public discourse concerning the concept of risk. Within that rubric, the book explores a breathtaking range of topics. And, upon engaging with those topics, the reader (at least, this reader) is stimulated to ask a collection of follow-up questions. To be sure, the constraints of the genre - most particularly that the book be introductory and brief - limit the extent to which topics can be fully elaborated and thorny questions fully explored. Nonetheless the book invites close reading by a wide range of readers: students and pedagogues in ancient world studies, to be sure; but also experts in the contemporary field of risk and disaster studies, for whom some of the propositions advanced in this short monograph may be surprising.

The book comprises five substantive chapters followed by a synthetic Conclusion. The interpretative lens is established immediately by the opening sentence, "Risk defines modernity" (1), which leads in to a detailed meditation on the influential interpretative framework established in the 1980s by Ulrich Beck: modern Western civilization is a "risk society", characterized by an exponential increase in the quantity and quality of the risks that threaten us, a widespread tendency to favor probabilistic and quantitative methods for understanding and evaluating these risks, and an equally widespread distrust of the experts best placed to employ those methods. For Beck and his interlocutors, modernity is fundamentally different in these (and other) respects from what preceded it: indeed, the concept of risk itself is a product of modern capitalism and therefore could not have existed in the premodern world.

Toner's objective throughout the following chapters is to dispute these propositions. He proposes to do so by demonstrating that, while they did not apprehend the concept with anything resembling the precision of modern scholars and their predictive methods were, at best, very basic mathematics and, at worst, founded upon instinct and intuition, nonetheless, "the Romans did display some understanding of risk and took a variety of steps to help manage it." Moreover, he continues, "modernity's attitude to risk should not be seen as entirely unique." (5) Fellow practitioners of premodern risk and disaster studies will (and should) applaud Toner's firm stand on this matter. But they may be surprised at the strategy Toner adopts in making this stand: as he states in his scene-setting, synthetic opening chapter, "Risk and Uncertainty", he will "restrict [his] approach to looking at areas where some element of calculation can be found in the Roman material." (13)

That is to say, Toner proposes to demonstrate not that the probabilistic, quantitative approach to risk that, per Beck, characterizes our modern age is less different from what preceded it than scholars assume, but, rather, that premodern approaches are more similar to Beck's vision of a modern risk culture. This distinction may seem, at first, to be purely a matter of semantics. But it is more than that, for accepting prima facie this modern conceptualization of risk - with all its unexamined presentism and unacknowledged Western bias - enshrines a very particular set of sensibilities and practices as the default from which all other cases must be adjudged to diverge.

There is, to be sure, a certain heuristic utility in this approach, especially in an introductory handbook. It permits Toner to lead his reader on a journey from concepts and sensibilities that intuitively feel familiar to practices and approaches that may seem strange or inexplicable. This strategy is especially evident in the first chapter, and in the transition to the second ("A World Full of Risks"). Toner begins with modern discourses of risk: the specificity and moralizing valence of particular cultures and discourses of risk; the unavoidable power dynamics present in judgments of hazard and the efficacy of response; the key role of individual and collective perception in both shaping and mitigating risk; and so on. He then moves on in Chapter 2 to confront one of the fundamental assumptions underpinning the modernist discourse: namely, that "modern" probabilistic thinking has superseded "premodern" fatalism in the face of uncertainty. This assumption, Toner demonstrates here and in following chapters, is wrong: the Romans did not merely fatalistically endure the vicissitudes of fate, indeed, to the contrary, they actively took steps both to "game the system" and to predict, and therefore influence, the future. Further, the notion that the Romans faced less risk than we do in our modern world is, at best, a problematic and partial one - a conclusion arrived at through recourse to the admittedly tendentious ancient figures for mortality in the face of any given disaster.

The following chapters contemplate the implications of these propositions, drawing upon both textual and material evidence largely deriving from the period of the early empire (late first century BCE - second century CE). Here, Toner's long-term engagement with the modern scholarship and ancient sources pertaining to leisure and popular culture, the social dimensions of law, and disasters in the Roman world is strongly in evidence. Chapter 3 ("A Risk Culture") explores further the ways in which evaluations of risk based on tradition and intuition may be interpreted as entailing calculation, focusing on socio-economic strategies for managing risk (primarily in agrarian contexts), social (and ritual) relations with peers and the more powerful, and the prevalence of gambling and risk-taking behaviors. The fourth chapter ("Risk Management") highlights areas of expertise where managing or measuring the uncertainty of the future is especially relevant: architecture and building in the face of seismicity and other potential hazards; military supply; the law; financial transactions, loans, and annuities; and oracles and dream interpretation. Finally, Chapter 5 ("Moral Hazards: Constructing Risk") begins from the proposition that particular societies argue about what count as risks and how those risks should be managed, then proceeds to examine heterogeneity in attitudes to religious morality, societal luxury in the aftermath of empire, and adultery, especially through the lens of Augustus' legislative program.

The broad material, societal, and institutional fields across which this book travels are immediately apparent. There are deep dives: for example, a detailed exploration of a legal text known as Ulpian's Table, which Toner uses to illustrate a basic, pragmatic approach to life expectancy as it calculates how much a 5% annuity was likely to cost over the life of the recipient; or a statistical analysis of the outcomes promised by the Oracle of Astrampsychus, a deliberately obscure second-century collection of oracular responses which constitutes both an exercise in protecting special knowledge and a canny evaluation of the relationship between intuitive expectations of probability (on the one hand) and the anxieties of petitioners (on the other).

These pragmatic, practical dimensions of risk evaluation are likely to be what lingers longest in the mind of the modern reader of this book. They speak to a society that was deeply conscious of risk, but did not, on the whole, evaluate that risk in explicitly quantitative terms-whether, per Toner, because of a lack of mathematical tools or, perhaps, due to a set of cultural practices, decisions, and sensibilities that mandated a more socially-embedded, holistic attitude to uncertainty. They also reveal a society that chose to orient its attitude to risk not towards changing or managing an unknowable future (as Beck's modern society), but, rather, towards acknowledging the prevailing relevance of its past practices and values - indeed, in Toner's fifth chapter, identifying and remediating deviations from those practices emerges as a crucial mechanism for managing risk.

This orientation towards the past rather than the future may also feel jarring to modern readers, especially modern scholars of risk and disaster. It reminds us of the distinct lack-of-fit between the Roman world and our own. In focusing primarily upon moments of calculation, whether based on intuition, founded in pragmatism, or resting on previous practice, this book acknowledges but subtly elides that lack-of-fit, while also implicitly privileging the modernizing lens of contemporary constructions of risk. Nonetheless, future studies of risk and disaster in both modern and pre-modern worlds will find much to build on, as well as to argue with, in its pages.