Month: December 2021

Production and reproduction are ways of talking about our relationship to the future. Both terms address a kind of world-building art, one that aims to create a future in which “we” – defined in a way that our notions of production and reproduction may themselves stipulate – can thrive or at least survive. They entail a providence that takes measures in the present, either to create objects for later consumption or to create people who will mature and, when they reach the age of maturity, will consume, produce, and reproduce in their turn.

We treat production and reproduction as distinctive social processes because of the way that capitalism distinguishes between people and commodities: people as sources of value (by purchasing or, more importantly, by freely selling their labor power), commodities as carriers or signifiers of value. In an agricultural slave society like the Roman Empire, though, the lines between production and reproduction get so blurry that the distinction between the two may not be analytically useful. Romans sometimes treat people as commodities, as carriers of value, while animals appear in Roman natural history as “sources” of value in sometimes a very literal sense.*

Can we trace Pliny’s analogy between (servile) human reproduction and the birth of pearls to this “confusion?” My answer is a qualified “yes:” Pliny has no good economic reason to treat slaves and pearls as essentially different in the way that we distinguish between people and commodities. And Pliny’s Natural History is, among other things, a textbook of Roman economics.

A qualified “yes,” however, because this explanation only shows why Pliny might think of pearls and people as similar kinds of things, both commodities carrying value. We still need to understand why it is that they carry the very different values that they do. Why are pearls precious qua unique (unio), while humans become more valuable when they’re identical (unitas of two or more?)

One obvious answer to that question would invoke the relative scarcity of the two goods: identical people who aren’t identical twins are about as hard to find as pearls, while “unique” human beings are a dime a dozen. However, “scarcity” describes a state of affairs without explaining it. What can we say about the economy or world-system or Empire that produces exactly this set of scarcity relations?

I think that, in an odd way, it mirrors a sense of inside/outside that was as important to the self-esteem of Roman elites as it was to the constitution of the Roman economy. Outside the boundaries of the Empire, Roman wealth could “command” the production or extraction of difficult-to-acquire goods whose value lay primarily in their rarity.** Pearls are both an example of this type of good – they come from the Red Sea and points beyond, they are guarded by sharks, the oysters themselves will bite off your hand if you let them – and a paradigm for it – as something unique, each pearl’s rarity is absolute.

On the other hand, Pliny and other authors regard “domestic” production from within the bounds of the Empire according to an ethic of abundance. The whole point of having an Empire, after all, is to make sure you never run short of anything. This is of course a very Rome-centric perspective: tribute and taxation bring goods from all over the Empire to the city of Rome, but provincials or even small farmers elsewhere in Italy would probably not have felt such a sense of abundance.***

Goods from anywhere in the Empire were available to Roman elites. The two identical slave children provided by Toranius to Marc Antony are paradigmatic of this availability in much the same way as pearls are paradigmatic of the scarcity of “foreign” luxuries. Coming from opposite ends of the Empire – in fact, from almost the utmost boundaries of Roman rule during the late Republic – they demonstrate the power of Roman elites to extract commodities from anywhere that Rome holds sway. So these children are paradigmatic – but not exemplary, since the pair of them, on account of their unitas, are not cheap and abundant but rather rare and scarce.

What is it about these children that puts them in the same realm of value as pearls, those paradigmatic and exemplary items of foreign exchange? One approach to answering that question would begin by asking how large a population, or an Empire, has to be before two unrelated but identical people appear in it. The answer would give us some way of evaluating Pliny’s subjective sense of the Empire’s magnitude – in one sense, “very big.” In another, “about the size of an oyster.” Through its bigness, Rome too becomes capable of producing pearls of great price.

Now let’s return to the problem of building a future. What’s the future towards which this parable of production and reproduction points? A full response to that question, which would have to take into account the self-conscious pastness of Pliny’s anecdote about Toranius and Marc Antony, as well as the Civil War toward which it points, is beyond the scope of this blog post. Nonetheless, the broad outlines of an answer are already visible. The Empire takes care of the survival of Roman elites; their task of self-production, which the Empire also enables, will be to acquire unique luxury goods and thereby to make themselves “unique” in a sense that transcends the uniqueness which Pliny already takes to be part of the human condition.

* Pliny says of a number of animals whose body parts circulate as luxury goods in the roman world that they “know for what reason they’re hunted” vel sim., and that they act accordingly – either to surrender the valuable part or to hide it from human beans. Here and elsewhere in the Roman animal imaginary, critters share our economic sense of what’s valuable.

** But see Matthew FitzPatrick’s “Provincializing Rome” for a discussion of how this relationship might have looked from the perspective of Rome’s trading partners in the East.

*** The major exceptions to this division between scarce foreign and abundant domestic production in Rome are gold and silver – precisely the metals that constitute Rome’s money supply. I’ve seen some interesting preliminary work on this problem from a colleague and will share it here when it’s published.

There’s a story in Procopius’ Wars about a pearl that ended up in the crown of the Sassanian Shah Piroz. It’s a pretty big one, visible from the surface, but guarded, as pearls usually are (Pliny testifies to this) by vicious sharks. A satrap, the Shah’s agent, tracks down the best pearl diver he can find and says “if you bring back that pearl, you can have whatever you want.” The diver takes one look at the shark and figures out how things are likely to go down. “Take care of my kids,” he says, then goes down for the pearl. Going down, he gets past the shark by a stratagem; on the way back up, though, the diver gets caught by the shark and devoured. With the last of his strength, he pitches the pearl up onto the beach. No word on whether Piroz keeps up his end of the bargain.

That’s one way to trade pearls for people. There are others, too. The genre of trade is one that I’m interested in because it speaks to how the Romans thought about problems of production and reproduction, which–since most goods that circulated in the ancient economy came from animals or plants, which produce as they reproduce–the Romans tended to think about together.

So caught were the Romans within this metonymy that they understood pearls not (in “correct” modern terms) as accidental byproducts of the oyster’s immune response, but as a kind of oyster baby. That conception obviously lies behind Pliny’s story about where pearls come from:

“Origo atque genitura conchae sunt, haut multum ostrearum conchis differentes. has ubi genitalis anni stimularit hora, pandentes se quadam oscitatione impleri roscido conceptu tradunt, gravidas postea eniti, partumque concharum esse margaritas pro qualitate roris accepti. si purus influxerit, candorem conspici; si vero turbidus, et fetum sordescere; eundem palere caelo minante.” (NH 9.54.107)

“Their origin and conception is from shellfish, a kind not much different from the oyster. When the time of year for conception arrives and stimulates them, they are said to open up with a kind of yawning and are filled with a dewy impregnation, such that they later become pregnant and bear young. The offspring of the shellfish is a pearl that has the character of the dew that was taken in. If it was pure, the pearl will be white; but, if turbid, the offspring too will be dirty. But the same will wax pale if the sky threatens a storm.”

Nor is this language of birth and conception merely analogical. Toward the end of the passage just quoted, you can see that Pliny uses it to generate an explanation of the varied coloration that differentiates some pearls from others. Pliny actually spends a couple more paragraphs drawing connections between weather patterns and pearl colorations according to a logic that will remind classicists of the Roman belief that children will turn out to look like whatever their mothers were looking at (or imagining) at the moment of conception.

If oysters generate pearls by recapitulating the sexual role of Roman women, then women complete the circuit by wearing pearls. For Pliny, this is a pinnacle of feminine luxuria – a word that covers the meanings of English “luxury” and “lust.” Women establish their status and their identity by wearing pearls. Biggest is best, but each is unique: the Latin word for pearl (margarita being a borrowing from Greek) is unio, which etymologizes as “something of which there is only one.” So, for the Roman woman, in other respects so identity-poor (e.g., while male children received actual names, female children were just called the feminine form of their family name, so that in effect all the daughters of a given family had one name to share), acquiring a pearl was also a way of acquiring a self.

Of course, the “normal” way of acquiring a self was to be born. That’s something else that humans share in common with oysters, according to Pliny: they produce unique offspring. But human children, unlike oyster babies, are things without value. As Pliny and plenty of other Roman authors attest, children could be bought (most of the time) very cheaply. If you were willing to bear the cost and the trouble of raising them, you could buy a household full of slaves for a pittance.

The really valuable thing (and not coincidentally, by Roman standards, a mirabilium) was to find two human children who weren’t unique. Pliny has an interesting anecdote about that, too:

“Toranius mango Antonio iam triumviro eximios forma pueros, alterum in Asia genitum, alterum trans Alpis, ut geminos vendidit: tanta unitas erat. postquam deinde sermone puerorum detecta fraude a furente increpitus Antonio est, inter alia magnitudinem preti conquerente (nam ducentis erat mercatus sestertiis), respondit versutus ingenii mango, id ipsum se tanti vendidisse, quoniam non esset mira similitudo in ullis eodem utero editis; diversarum quidem gentium natales tam concordi figura reperire super omnem esse taxationem” (NH 7.12.56)

“Toranius the slave dealer sold two children to Antony the Triumvir, one born in Asia and the other born across the Alps, as though they were twins: so great was their identity (unitas). Later, when the fraud had been discovered through the differing languages of the children and Toranius was assailed by a furious Antony, who complained among other things of the high price (for the children had been sold for two hundred sestertii), the wily slave dealer replied that he had sold them at so high a price just for that reason, since there was nothing miraculous about the likeness of children born from the same womb, but to discover children so alike belonging to two completely different peoples was a marvel beyond all price.”

I’ll come back to thinking about this passage, and about the broader connection between pearls and people, production and reproduction, in a future post.