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This is the first half of the second part of our three part look at Paradox Interactive’s Hellenistic-era grand strategy game Imperator: Rome. I had hoped to do this part in a single post, but my book writing schedule intervened and so it became necessary to split it up. Last time we looked at how Imperator models diplomacy and warfare and in particular how it examines the question of why Rome emerged as the sole Mediterranean power. We found that Imperator‘s decision to simulate ancient diplomacy as an even more ruthless and intense form of interstate anarchy largely accords with the evidence, but that Imperator‘s model or how military power was structured and raised applies at best imperfectly to many of the great powers of this period.

In this part, we turn to how Imperator approaches ancient societies and economies. We’ll split this into two parts: this week we’ll look at how Imperator approaches ancient people through mechanics representing population in discrete units of population called pops. In particular, we’re interested in how well these systems reflect the actual social structures of ancient societies – the degree to which they map on to real legal and economic statuses – and how well they represent economic structures – the degree to which they simulate ancient economic activity with some fidelity.

In both cases, Imperator is presenting a ‘theory of history,’ a vision of how the past was that it attempts to express through its game mechanics.

But first, if you like what you are reading here, please share it around, as I rely on word of mouth for all of my new leaders. If you really like it, you can support me, my academic research (on the Roman Republic!) and this project on Patreon! I cannot promise I will use your donations to buy replica Roman swords, but I also won’t promise not to ~~waste~~ use them to buy swords. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).

I tend to focus on mechanics in my discussions here, but I think it is worth noting how a game’s artwork can also shape the way the player understands it. This is, of course, a looting scene, but the viewer’s eyes are meant to be pulled first to the center of the image, to the captives being led away (lightly colored, framed by the dark, shaded shapes of the warriors), before seeing the village on fire behind them. It’s a scene that seems intended to evoke some discomfort with the violence of war – not merely a burning city in the distance, but a vision of the direct human cost (and of the men inflicting that cost).

A Game About Pops?

Imperator is not, I’d argue, a game about pops, rather it is a game interested in simulating ancient economic systems, particularly urbanism and pops are the tool it uses to do this.¹ Nevertheless, while Imperator is mostly not interested in pops for their own sake – as we’ll see, even in ‘democratic’ states, pops play basically no role in politics – pops are the foundation of Imperator‘s economic system. Put bluntly, pops are the basic unit of production, producing most of the game’s key resources (tax revenue, manpower, levy-capacity, trade goods, trade route capacity, research).

So we need to talk about pops.

Pops represent discrete units of population in game. Unlike Victoria, the game does not keep track of precise population, rather each pop represents a somewhat simplified large block of population, with a single social class, religion and culture. A single territory, then, contains a number of pops, with rural territories generally in the high single or low double-digits, while very large cities can crest into several hundred pops.

For the sake of illustration for this post, I am going to borrow some images from a Seleukid Empire playthrough which I’ve taken through to about 130 BC. Here you can see the resulting empire, in the process of wresting Greece and Macedon from Rome and concluding the conquest of Egypt. Note that you can see the balance of my pops on the top of the culture screen. Slave pops are, as you will note, by far the largest single group.

The most important fact about a pop is their social class: Imperator splits pops into five social classes, which determines what they can produce. At the top are ‘Nobles‘ who produce a large amount of research and trade route capacity. Below them are ‘Citizens,’ who produce a mix of research, trade routes and manpower, but at a lower level than more specialized pops. Below them are ‘Freemen,’ who produce the most manpower and a small amount of tax revenue. Below them are ‘Slaves‘ who produce by far the most tax revenue and also produce local trade goods. Finally, parallel to ‘Freemen’ there are ‘Tribesmen‘ who produce a smidge more taxes and a bit less manpower. The quirk with tribesmen pops, who represent a mix of hill folk, pre-urban and non-agrarian peoples, is that they have high base happiness, but their happiness goes down as the ‘civilization’ level of a province (increased by buildings and technology) goes up, presumably reflecting these folks being pushed ever further to the margins by expanding cities and their agrarian economic networks.² Consequently, they’re useful for non-state peoples, but become pretty useless pretty fast for state polities like Rome or Carthage.

Pops promote and demote over time based on an individual territory’s ‘desired ratio’ which is in turn influenced by buildings, so cities or rural territories can be, to a degree, specialized into certain kinds of communities (e.g. the ‘forum’ building encourages more freeman, while the ‘library’ encourages nobles); they’ll also migrate to achieve those balances. Each state also limits how high a given culture of pop can promote, with the state’s primary culture always being able to go all the way up to nobles, but other cultures by default being restricted to freeman and below. For pops of non-primary culture, the player can either wait for assimilation (pops slowly gravitate towards the primary culture) or integrate that non-primary culture, enabling them to promote up higher at the cost of lower happiness for other integrated or primary culture pops (who don’t want to share their privileges) and stopping assimilation for integrated cultures.

The main problem with this setup is that these societies, particularly the major states, drew the line between ‘full members’ of the political community – what the ‘citizen’ pop is meant to represent – and everyone else very differently and understood the obligations of those full members very differently as well. Imperator, for the sake of making the game mangeable and preserving the Paradox approach whereby all polities are playable, tries to flatten this into a single social class system (which cuts across, but is not limited to, ethnicity), but the result ends up being a relatively weak representation of any one system, nor does it serve as a strong reflection of something about all of them.

Notionally, the ‘noble’ pops represent the upper elite, including both the ‘imperial elite’ (like the Roman Senate or a royal court) but also local elites, what in a later period we’d call the curiales or curial class. And while not a perfect representation, having them produce ‘research points’ which go into technologies that make the government more effective is at least a gesture to the role these figures play as rulers and administrators. ‘Nobles’ is a bit of an awkward term, as in most cases these are not members of a hereditary nobility, but rather, in the Roman sense, nobiles, local notables rather than nobles, but the terminology fudge is an acceptable break to allow the player to understand what these fellows do.

From the aformentioned Seleucid game, here is Seleukia Pieria, a very large city (211 pops) by Imperator’s standards, showing the various pop-types (on the bottom right of the left-side panel), from left to right: nobles, citizens, freemen, tribesmen (of which there are none) and slaves. Each one lists the number of pops of that type at the bottom and then has a slider representing pop happiness (which influences production for all pop-types except slave pops) behind it.

Instead, most of the problems here reside in the break between ‘freemen’ and ‘citizen’ pops. Notionally, ‘citizens’ represent true full members of the community, while ‘freemen’ represent the free, non-citizen poor: freemen generate a substantial amount of taxes and the best manpower-per-pop, whereas citizens act like miniature versions of nobles (generating a small amount of research and trade capacity) and also generate a small amount of (military) manpower, but no revenue.³ So citizens serve less and don’t pay taxes, but take part in governance and administration (which is what ‘research’ seems to really reflect, as the ‘technologies’ are mostly governing innovations).

And that’s not really quite how any of these states were organized.

In the Roman Republic, it is difficult to see who large numbers of ‘Roman-culture’ freemen would even represent. ‘Roman,’ after all, was a legal status, fundamentally tied to citizenship: a non-citizen Roman was a contradiction in terms. One might argue that the poorest Romans, the capite censi might count, given how their votes were discounted in the comitia centuriata, but of course those Romans were so discounted because they were too poor to serve, and so ought to offer no manpower at all and in any case, there are far too few of them to reflect the numbers of freemen pops you’d expect in Imperator. Instead the ‘freemen’ class might represent the socii, but here we have a problem in terms of the resources they generate. Historically, the socii paid no taxes to Rome, but did generate manpower, while Roman citizens did pay taxes (unlike citizen pops in Imperator), but on a per capita basis served more than the socii, because Roman armies only had a slim socii majority, but the population of Roman Italy was far more heavily slanted towards non-citizen socii.

I am apparently going to have no end of reasons to keep using this diagram of mine on the breakdown of social class in the Roman Republic.

The system works even less well for Carthage. As far as we can tell, Carthage’s citizen body was effectively closed and largely endogamus (that is, marrying within itself), so Carthage’s citizen class ought to be essentially limited to the city of Carthage itself, with perhaps very small numbers limited to only a handful of colonies. While citizen pops generate manpower in Imperator, one of the defining things about Carthaginian citizens after the Battle of the Crimissus (340) is that they don’t seem to have served in the army, save for a handful of officers. The only time we see meaningful numbers of Carthaginian citizen troops are situations like the Battle of Zama (202) or the Third Punic War (149-146), where the city of Carthage itself was threatened.

However, the culture system that Imperator has means that any pop of the ‘Punic’ culture – one of the most widespread cultures at game’s start – can promote into citizenship. Assimilation will in turn generate even more ‘Punic’ culture pops over time as Carthage expands. Imperator is not really prepared to simulate a non-ethnic closed citizen body in this way, in part I suspect because it is such an obviously losing strategy. But it is also, for political reasons, how nearly every citizen polity in antiquity was organized – the Romans, with their expansive citizenship were the unusual ones.

Meanwhile, representing the economics of this system is also, as a game system, difficult: the idea of supporting a population that isn’t producing most of the tax revenue (that’s what tributary populations are for) or manpower makes no strategic sense – but of course it makes quite a lot of political sense for those citizens if they find themselves ruling an empire. In this sense, the Carthaginian citizen body is actually better represented by the ‘noble’ pop types, producing ‘research’ (read: administration) and very little else, but pushing the desired ratio for ‘noble’ pops in Carthage proper so high isn’t really practical.

Instead, like many of Imperator‘s mechanics, the system makes the most sense transposed onto the Hellenistic kingdoms, with their ethnic hierarchies. The tie between primary/accepted culture and access to the higher pop levels, at least, makes immediate sense, as these were states – particularly the Ptolemies and the Seleucids – with a fairly clearly defined ethnic ruling class, constructed on the basis of ethnos (‘ethnic group’) or patris (‘fatherland, homeland’), with the Macedonians (which, as a legal status, included most native Greek speakers as well) on the top and subject peoples subordinated to them.

But beyond that, many of the elements of the system break down. Critically, this is a system designed to simulate Rome’s expansive, assimilationist citizenship system and subsequent cultural Romanization, but while many people in the East learned Greek and adopted Greek cultural patterns, legal Macedonian identity was generally closed with just a handful of exceptions. Sometimes, as in the case of the Ptolemaic class of ‘Persians’ (who were, in fact, not Persians but Hellenized Egyptians), a ‘middle’ subordinate class was created for Hellenized locals, but frequently not. But they only rarely became ‘Macedonians.’ On the flipside, the way the culture system is set up in Imperator, Greeks (split into many smaller sub-groups under the larger heading of ‘Hellenistic cultures’) aren’t ‘Macedonian’ and so are, in the successor states, generally blocked from promoting into being citizen-level pops or higher. But in fact we know that a great many of the ‘Macedonians’ we see in colonial foundations in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms were not cultural ‘Macedonians,’ but rather Greek-speakers drawn broadly from the Aegean world who became legally Macedonian in their new homes.

But perhaps most critically, if what the citizen pop represents are these Macedonian settlers who – unlike the local subject peoples – have full membership in the political community (in this case, as subjects of a king), this is the key military manpower base of these kingdoms. Rather than providing a functionally negligible part of Seleucid and Ptolemaic manpower, they should supply an indispensable portion of it! There may never have been many more than 200,000 ‘Macedonians’ in Ptolemaic Egypt and perhaps a similar number in the Seleucid Empire, compared to perhaps 4 million native Egyptians and c. 15-20 million native subjects of the Seleucid Empire, respectively, but Greeks and Macedonians provided about half of Antiochus III’s army at Raphia, and about 45% of his army at Magnesia and probably two-thirds of the Ptolemaic army at Raphia, despite it incorporating a massive native Egyptian phalanx for the first time.

In short, the Hellenistic kingdoms were extremely reliant on the manpower of those ‘citizens’ in order to maintain control over everyone else: the citizen ‘Macedonians’ were about the only population in any Hellenistic kingdom that was utilized militarily at anything like its peak capacity (whereas the Romans are doing this with everyone in Italy, which is why they can steamroll so hard), something that is simply not reflected well in the game’s systems (though the Seleucids do get a penalty to assimilation to push a play-style of trying to manage a culturally diverse kingdom).

In practice, this is an aspect of the game where I think I understand what the developers were going for, but cannot help but conclude that in order to actually capture these various ethnic-legal systems of political belonging and non-belonging, the game needed to have multiple bespoke systems (perhaps with a ‘reform’ system to try to switch between them) rather than trying to have one combined system that represents all of them, using the culture-integration element of the system to try to capture regimes with different degrees of openness. But I am also well aware that developing that many parallel, state-specific systems simply wasn’t in the cards in terms of scope.

Nevertheless, as much as this system feels like a bit of a ‘kludge,’ it is clearly trying to express an awareness of these factors, in particular of the way that ethnic identity was tied closely to legal status in many of these states. It is a lot better than what most games set in this period (or a lot of popular culture) manage to do, and I have a lot of grace for any game that is willing to try to simulate complex, multi-ethnic ancient communities.

But of course, we’ve left one pop-type out in all of this, so now it’s time to talk about…

Slavery and Warfare in Imperator

The final pop-type in Imperator, of course, are slaves. And I want to note at the outset that I appreciate Imperator‘s courage in tackling ancient slavery: a lot of games set in antiquity either largely whitewash the topic or simply leave it out. By contrast, Imperator is trying not only to acknowledge the existence of this institution, but to understand its economic and social role. However, I think in the process of trying to make those roles legible to the player and to have them produce interesting and clear strategic choices, Imperator ends up presenting a rather too binary vision of ancient labor and production.

Every polity in Imperator, state or non-state has slaves. That is, as a straight description of the ancient Mediterranean, not an unfair characterization, as so far as we can tell, every ancient Mediterranean polity of any substantial size in this period did practice at least some form of slavery – though not all in the same ways or to the same extent. In Imperator, slave pops can be generated in two ways: existing freemen and tribesman pops that demote, which happens slowly as a result of the territory they’re in being below its ‘desired ratio’ for enslaved pops. In theory this might represent something like individuals falling into debt-slavery, except that a lot of civic communities went out of their way to abolish debt slavery (at least for citizens) long before the game begins. The Roman practice of debt slavery, for instance, called nexum was abolished in the late 300s, while debt slavery in Athens seems to have been abolished for citizens as part of Solon’s reforms as part of the seisachtheia (‘the shaking off of burdens,’ a word I have a ton of fun saying every year in my ancient history survey) in 594.

There were other ways for the poor and desperate to fall into slavery: in most of these societies, a family with children they could not afford to raise could abandon or sell those children into slavery. However, it is more than a bit odd that Imperator structures this as a ‘pull’ factor – when the number of slaves in a territory is insufficient, the game pulls (otherwise stable?) freeman households down to fill the gap. It almost suggests that the game imagines that all of the free persons in antiquity are fundamentally reliant on slavery to remain free (such that a shortage of slaves would imperil their economic stability) – and we’ll come back to that ‘model’ of the ancient economy in a moment. But just to leave a note here: no, a ‘shortage’ of enslaved labor would not imperil the stability of small freeholders. It might actually be good for them, as it would mean more demand for their labor.

Here we have a Freeman pop in Soukas demoting to slave, which is **quite odd** – this is the Seleucid Empire after all, these fellows – Greek-speaking ethnic Macedonians – are the most important manpower pool the state can get access too. Historically speaking, Hellenistic rulers frequently offered these fellows land settlements in exchange for military service, an option that is **remarkably underutilized** in *Imperator* (though it does exist in some cases).

But Imperator mints new enslaved pops another way: through warfare, because warfare in Imperator generates slaves. Any time an army takes control of a territory (nearly instantly for unfortified territories and cities), a portion of the pops present are either enslaved or killed. Enslaved pops keep their culture and religion, but are, of course, enslaved and then relocated (instantly and for free) to the polity that captured the territory. They’re not moved at random: the game prefers first to place them in the main capital, and then smaller provincial capitals and finally smaller cities. That is, as we’ll see, a key method by which the capitals of big imperial states in this game grow into huge urban centers: as the empire expands, the capital receives stead and substantial influxes of new population, reshaping the demographics of the game map over time.

And this was absolutely a major part of ancient warfare, so much so that Greek has a technical term for the enslavement of war captives, andrapodizein (ἀνδραποδίζειν) which enters English as the rare word ‘andrapodize.’⁴ Mass enslavement was sometimes an end into itself in ancient warfare but just as frequently was a tool of terror to compel broader submission. War captives on the battlefield were generally enslaved after capture (though it was sometimes possible for them to be ransomed as well), while armies would generally enslave the civilian populace they encountered as they moved.⁵

This was an ugly process (involving, among other things, large scale sexual violence), but was generally considered a ‘normal’ part of war by ancient societies. As Xenophon has Cyrus say, “For it is the nomos [law/custom] among all men for all time that when a city is taken in war, the persons [somata, lit: ‘bodies’] of those in the city and their property belong to the captors. It will be no injustice to keep what you have, but if you let them keep anything, it is generosity not to take it” (Xen. Cyrop. 7.5.73). The Romans differed little in this: to leave anything to the defeated was kindness to be lauded, but not a moral necessity.

Imperator forces the player to think about this destructiveness, because different approaches to warfare produce different results. In particular, a territory may be occupied either directly, by moving a military unit over it, or indirectly, by capturing the province capital or a nearby fort. Consequently, a player can either maximize the brutality of their wars, by occupying each territory individually (possibly several times as the fortunes of war shift), killing and enslaving pops each time or minimize it (within the frame of ancient warfare’s already high minimum brutality), by focusing on administrative centers and leaving the rural population largely intact (territory control shifts caused by the capture of a fort or local capital don’t cause the same enslaving effects).

That in turn is a strategic choice too: warfare enslavement is ‘negative sum,’ as a significant portion of the pops involved are always killed, reducing the value of territory that the player may be about to annex anyway. That actually leads the player into a fairly brutal strategic calculation, because enslavement in war is also the most efficient way to rapidly grow the population of the player’s polity’s core region and capital, which for reasons discussed below, the player will want to do – but doing so means both longer, slower wars but also fewer pops as a result of conquest overall. The fact that this is a choice the player has to make (alongside choices when capturing major cities about how brutally to sack them) directs the player’s attention, at least a little, to the brutality of warfare in this period.

It isn’t by any means perfect, but it is present in the game and various events also draw the player’s attention to the human suffering created by the practice of slavery and warfare. Of course, this creates a tension: the player is confronted, occasionally, with the suffering that the game’s warfare causes, but at the same time this is a game about conquest which expects the player to largely adopt the value-structural of the historical societies being simulated: that war was, if not good, at least normal and that conquest was a valid activity for states. But for a historical simulation, as opposed to a true fantasy game, it seems difficult to do otherwise: unlike EUIV or Victoria III, there is no abolition movement in this period to highlight, no alternative model to conquest and hegemony for state building.

On the whole then, as a representation of the interaction of warfare and slavery in antiquity, Imperator‘s model has something to say which largely accords with the evidence. But what about the economic and social role of slavery?

A Slave Mode of Production?

Imperator is designed mechanically so that nearly all polities will trend towards a situation where slave pops are the most numerous kind. For state polities, the ‘desired ratio’ for slave pops is 66% in rural settlements and 20% in cities; non-state polities have the same city ratio but only 44% in rural settlements (to make more room for their tribesmen pops). Most states start well below those desired ratios, particularly in their rural territories, but the systems for pop promotion and demotion are going to steadily move them in that direction, leading slaves to be the largest pop-group. Even without warfare, which can generate enslaved pops in sufficient numbers to put capital cities well above their ‘desired ratio’ for slave pops.

It is worth noting how strong those default desired ratios are in influencing the population mix of a polity in Imperator over time. As we’re going to save, the slice of the population of an ancient state held in slavery seems to have varied considerably: even discounting clear outliers like Sparta, some Greek poleis might have been close to 50% enslaved, while some parts of the Roman world were likely just below 10%. However in Imperator, the rural desired ratios are effectively static and the majority of territories will remain rural over the game’s run. The player has more ability to control the desired ratios in cities, where they are influenced by buildings, though at the same time those buildings can also increase rather than decrease the desired ratio of slave pops. Consequently, while the actual economies of the ancient Mediterranean ranged significantly in how heavily they employed enslaved labor, Imperator‘s single set of systems means that over time basically all polities will get pulled to the same basic ratio of enslaved pops and thus have economic systems that broadly resemble each other.

Mechanically, slave pops do two things in Imperator: they are by far the most efficient pop for producing tax revenue (roughly double a tribesman and triple a freeman pop) and they govern the production of trade goods. The way this works is that each territory produces a single trade good (iron, surplus grain, horses, spices, etc.) and automatically produces one unit of that good, which is then pooled at the province level. Large populations of slaves, however, can produce multiple units of those goods for export, if the number of pops passes a threshold (base 15 in rural settlements, 20 in urban), so a city with 1-19 slave pops produces one unit of its good, 20-39 produces two, 40-59 produces three, and so on. Should the player want to generate meaningful commerce revenue, the way to do it is to select cities with valuable trade goods and use the ‘slave mill’ building to drive up the desired ratio of slaves: a high population city of this sort can produce many surplus goods for export and will also produce a lot of tax revenue.

Trade goods, in turn, are quite important. Every level of trade-good surplus in a province gives a base bonus, but perhaps more importantly, the first level of surplus in the capital gives an empire-wide bonus, making it very important to stack trade surplus in the capital (something we will return to next week). At the same time, each import or export deal generates trade revenue: out-of-country exports generate 100% of their trade value in revenue, imports 35% and domestic trade routes (from one of your provinces to another) just 20%. As a result, producing lots of trade good surpluses that can be traded with other states is a key source of revenue, often rivaling tax income (and massively exceeding the third category, tribute form vassals, in almost all cases).

A look at the revenues of a large state (the same Seleucid playthrough as before). A more trade-oriented economy (like Carthage) might have commerce income roughly equal or even higher than tax income, but notice how, despite having two large tributary vassals, tribute income is functionally negligible here. I should also note the fact that ‘wages’ for government officials is higher than the cost of army maintenance, in this case for an empire that relies primarily on a standing army, is a bit off too. The highest ‘budget’ item for effectively **every** ancient state was its military, particularly the army.

That means that state income is substantially a product of tax revenue, which is produced mostly by slaves, and trade income, which is produced entirely by slaves. As a result, for most polities, slaves are going to come to represent anywhere from roughly 35 to 50% of the total number of pops, and produce upwards of three-quarters of the revenue. The player thus cannot move away from slavery even if they wanted to: the game systems make it so that a state without slavery would have almost no revenue and no trade goods at all.

Now, does that reflect a theory of history? Well, yes: it is a rather blunt application of Marx’s theory of a sequence of ‘systems ‘modes of production,’ in which the ancient world was slotted as the ‘slave mode of production.’ To greatly simplify, in this vision, what makes the ancient economy distinct from other subsequent forms was its substantial reliance on slavery (as opposed to dependent tenants or wage laborers) as the main system by which labor beyond subsistence was organized, with the elite extracting effectively 100% rents off of the slaves they owned. The enslaved population, it was posited, was mostly generated by warfare and thus warfare was also fundamental to the system. Under this vision, while some free small farmers exist, they primarily work only for subsistence and are minimally engaged in markets, while most of the surplus, including agricultural goods for trade and non-agricultural goods, were produced by slaves.

This is, in a heavily moderated form, something of the vision of Moses Finley in The Ancient Economy (1973) – a book which in part was presenting a vision of the ancient economy which could fit with a somewhat modified version of the Marxist ‘modes of production.’⁶ Finley argued that the ancient economy was relatively more ‘primitive’ than the previous generation of scholars had been willing to acknowledge, governing by the pursuit of status and elite ideology rather than profit motives or market forces, that most households were minimally tied to markets, that trade was mostly limited to elite luxuries and in any case small in scale and scope, and that the role of slavery in ancient economic systems was large and decisive.

And of course long-time readers of the blog may already remember this fellow and so know what happens next: the ‘revenge of the archaeologists.’ Finley had built his model of the ancient economy out of the textual evidence (written by elites) – he was a philologist (a language expert) by training – buttressed by the work of ideologically similar social scientists, most notably Karl Polanyi (1886-1964). He had broadly discounted the ability of archaeological information to really alter the debate, once quipping that, “we are too often victims of that great curse of archaeology, the indestructibility of pots” when arguing that pottery data was over-interpreted.⁷ What I term the ‘revenge of the archaeologists’ is the process by which modern archaeology proceeded to spend the next half-century burying quite a lot Finley’s ideas under a mountain of pot sherds, demonstrating many of the things that his model says shouldn’t exist in the ancient economy – large-scale trade in bulk commodities like grain, the production of consumer goods for non-elites at commercial scale, sophisticated financial systems, ‘producer’ cities structured around production rather than rent extraction, smaller-scale for-market production, and meaningful technological progress – did, in fact, exist.

None of which is to say that the societies of the ancient Mediterranean weren’t ‘slave societies.’ They absolutely were slave societies and the fact of slavery permeated (and deformed) most of their social institutions, cultural values and customs. But the idea that ancient production was dominated, everywhere and in all cases, by slavery is an outmoded one. Instead, ancient production was a lot more complex and there was quite a lot more variation that Imperator‘s model suggests.

Estimating how many people in the ancient Mediterranean were enslaved is very difficult, as our sources give us very little reliable information and our normal methods do not work: ancient censuses do not count the non-free, military mobilizations do not help us estimate a population that did not serve militarily and population density studies cannot distinguish between enslaved farmers and free ones. Nevertheless, based on what meager evidence we do have, the percentage of the population held in slavery was likely never so high across the whole Mediterranean as Imperator‘s systems might suggest.

Our best evidence is for Roman Italy, where we have good archaeological evidence, a reasonable amount of evidence for the influx of enslaved captives (and particularly the scale of it, reported in our sources) and of course the Roman census figures to estimate a baseline population. Here our evidence and modeling generally suggests an enslaved population at the beginning of the period Imperator focuses on (the late fourth century) might have been as low as 10%, rising over the course of the third, second and first centuries as a result of Roman conquests to roughly 15-20% of the population of Italy – a total enslaved population of perhaps 1.2m people (out of 5.7 to 7m persons in Italy total).⁸ We would generally assume that the enslaved population by the first century would be the highest in Italy of almost anywhere, given that Rome was the beneficiary at that point of three centuries of spectacular conquests, and so the usual estimate for the Roman Empire as a whole, covering essentially the whole of the Mediterranean basin, is generally around 10% (with fairly large error bars).⁹ There were pockets that seem to have been much higher: estimates for the enslaved population of Athens range from 30-50%, while we’ve already discussed the unique brutality of Sparta’s slave society.¹⁰

Now that is, by any standard, a lot of slavery and it is absolutely fair to describe the societies of the Hellenistic Mediterranean as ‘slave societies.’ But this is not an economy where slavery is the primary mode of labor employment; instead, slavery existed alongside various forms of tenancy, freeholding farmers and a small but meaningful number of wage laborers. And while the ideal of the self-sufficient freeholding farmer remains powerful in Greek and Roman culture (especially in elite discourse), it’s clear that actual small freeholding farmers did have meaningful market interactions – far more than Finley would allow, albeit far less than modern households.¹¹ Which is to say, not all of the trade goods moving around in antiquity were the product of large estates. And, of course, on top of that, not all large estates ran entirely on slaves: tenants (who might, depending on the cultural context, be entirely free or substantially dependent (read: serfs)) might also provide the labor for large market-oriented estates, something we see fairly clearly in the letters of Pliny the Younger.

If it seems like enslaved workers end up more visible in our sources than these tenants and freeholders, despite most likely being outnumbered by them in most places, remember that our sources are written almost exclusively by the relatively small number of men who held vast numbers of slaves and relied upon them for their luxury: typical smallholding households with more free laborers than enslaved ones do not generally write to us (though I should note that it is certainly the case in antiquity that even quite ‘humble’ smallholder households often had enslaved workers).

That in turn distorts how Imperator imagines state revenues are generated. In practice, the largest portion of state revenues were effectively land taxes, sometimes in the form of a direct wealth tax (like Rome’s tributum) or in the form of rents (such as rents on ‘royal lands’ in the Seleucid Empire) or in the form of tribute from subject states whose revenues in turn derived from land taxes (as with Carthaginian North Africa). Outside of Classical Sparta, the vast majority of laborers working those lands to provide those revenues were free persons.

In short, then, Imperator presents an economic model in which the free peasant population (freemen pops) are mostly engaged in pure subsistence, generating little surplus and no goods for trade (and thus producing primarily manpower), while the bulk of economic activity was accomplished by vast numbers of enslaved workers whose labor made it possible for the citizen class to live in relative leisure. This is a historical vision of the structure of the ancient economy, but it is largely an outdated one, complicated out of existence one pot sherd at a time by the growing archaeological evidence that the ancient economy was more dynamic than this. Slavery was an important part of the economy, but in most of the ancient Mediterranean, it represented a significant and substantial minority of production.

Ancient Economies

More broadly, because this vision insists that slavery was essential for all forms of the ancient economy, it is unprepared to account for differences in systems of production. And that in turn dovetails with Imperator‘s broader pop-system’s inability to represent different class structures as well.

The foundation of the economy of Roman Italy by the third century appears quite clearly to have been a very large class of freeholding farmers who held citizen rights in their communities and served in the army; the Roman freeholders also provided the Roman Republic with most of its revenue through the tributum. By contrast, the foundation of the economic system of many Gallic non-state polities seem to have been small farmers reduced to a sort of dependent tenancy, to trust what our ancient sources tell us. The economic systems of the Hellenistic Near East seem to have had far fewer freeholders, but also fewer slaves and a larger class of tenants (both free and non-free).

On the one hand, the basic structures of a fundamentally organic economy apply to all of these societies: agricultural productivity was low, labor was inefficiently distributed and as a result surpluses were very limited, leading to societies that were, by modern standards, extremely poor and quite static. But within that framework there is quite a lot of difference, from the closed citizenship of Greek poleis or Sparta, as compared to the expansive citizenship in the Roman Republic (though with somewhat less equality among the citizens as a result) to Hellenistic kingdoms structured around legally-encoded ethnic hierarchies between the Greek-speaking ruling class and the native subject class.

Imperator‘s single combined class-and-economic system, structured around pops cannot help but flatten those different systems. Now I will say that on the one hand, I appreciate the effort to develop this aspect of the game at all (compare, say, EUIV or CKIII which abstract these aspects away) and apart from the economic over-reliance on slavery, as a basic outline of ancient class structures the pop system is better than most. At the same time, it feels like the kind of system that ought, in the course of post-release development, to have gotten bespoke variations to express the wide-ranging differences in economic and social patterns in these different areas (and I haven’t even touched its applicability in India because I simply do not have the expertise to say!).

However, pops are really only one half of Imperator‘s vision of the ancient economy and society, in many ways they are just a mechanical foundation for something the game finds – I’d argue – much more interesting: urbanism. And that’s where we’ll turn to next week.

“I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it!” — Slacker

In my roundup this week, I flagged some disappointing results for a basic income experiment. When people got $1000 a month, 2% of them stopped working. That’s a significant amount, considering that $1000 a month is not enough to really support anyone by itself. It suggests that a much larger UBI would cause a much larger percentage of people to stop working. That would increase the costs of the program, and probably doom it politically — the idea of having the government pay a large portion of the citizenry not to work is likely to be very unpopular.

When I posted the result on ~~Twitter~~ X, however, I got some interesting reactions. A number of people told me — often in angry, indignant terms — that paying people to take leisure is the whole point of basic income, and is a good and desirable thing. Here are just a few examples:

From an economic standpoint, this argument is unpersuasive. Yes, taking more leisure time is valuable — even if you drop out of the labor force entirely, you’re still presumably doing something you like with all those spare hours. But the benefit of that leisure has to be weighed against the cost of the lost production when the people stop working, plus the monetary cost of providing the UBI in the first place, and the deadweight loss of whatever taxes you had to use to transfer the money. A welfare program that causes a significant number of people to stop working entirely is unlikely to pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

But what’s interesting here is the deep antipathy to the idea of work that seems to have taken root among some on the political left. Not everyone on the left, of course — back in the late 2010s there were fierce battles between supporters of UBI and supporters of a federal job guarantee. But I notice a bunch of leftist types these days basically saying that work — or at least, most work — is useless and pointless and should be abolished.

A prime example was the late David Graeber, whose 2018 book Bullshit Jobs was something of a sensation. Although Graeber doesn’t support his argument very well — his list of “bullshit” jobs includes such obviously useful things as pizza delivery, dog washing, and corporate law1 — the notion that a large percentage of jobs could be eliminated without reducing real economic value appealed to a lot of people. For less erudite and scholarly examples of leftist types who decry the idea of work, check out r/antiwork.

I admit that I’m not a scholar of the history of leftist thought, but this feels like a vibe shift compared to the socialists of a century ago. Obviously socialists in the early 20th century wanted workers’ lives to be less back-breaking and toilsome, but “worker” was also an identity that socialists deeply valued and viewed as their core support group. The Labor Theory of Value held that things were only valuable to the degree that it took work to create them (that theory is wrong, but it demonstrates what 20th century socialists cared about). Lenin vilified the bourgeoisie as being “those who shirk their work”, and the Soviet constitution declared that “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

For much of the 20th century, the great political struggle of the left was to reward workers more for their labor — to raise wages and benefits, to give workers more control over companies, and to raise the status and political power of workers as a group. The people who designed the American welfare state took great pains to avoid the right’s accusation that they were paying people not to work; as a result, U.S. government programs are full of work incentives.

What has changed? The standard answer to that question will be something along the lines of “kids these days are just lazy”, but that’s completely unsatisfying to me — even if it’s true, which I doubt, it doesn’t really answer the question. Laziness does not appear out of the void; there must be some cause.

In fact, the simplest answer is that nothing has really changed. The people who thump their copies of Bullshit Jobs and post on r/antiwork and troll anyone who questions UBI are probably a small minority of Americans (and many of them are not Americans at all). After all, the share of Americans who say they’re satisfied with their jobs has been rising pretty steadily since 2010:

The argument that Americans are trapped in jobs they hate and from which they need to be liberated by basic income is looking weaker by the year.

As for the fraction of Americans who do think work is bullshit, it’s probably not too hard to come up with plausible explanations for them either. Working-class people are undoubtedly annoyed by low wages, despite the fact that real wages have been rising at the bottom of the distribution for a decade now. Working for $16 an hour is better than working for $12.502, but it’s still not amazing, and low-paid workers still tend to get treated poorly in many workplaces. I’m sure that fuels plenty of online complaints. Most of those workers would probably rather just get paid more and get treated better, but I’m some would accept a UBI-supported life of leisure as an alternative.

Among educated Americans, however, I suspect there’s another factor at work: elite overproduction. In the 1990s and 2000s, smart young Americans were told that a college education was the ticket to a career that wasn’t just high-paying, but also deep, fulfilling, and meaningful. And even if that was true for the median college graduate, there were plenty for whom things didn’t turn out that way. The college wage premium has shrunk over time. Many humanities and social science majors turned out to be less useful for employment after the busts in the law and journalism professions. And academia is basically full.

If you went into $30,000 of debt for a state university, and now you’re facing the prospect of living out your life as an insurance assessor or a human resources compliance officer, perhaps you think a shabby life of leisure — paid for by all your classmates who struck it rich — doesn’t sound too bad.

Social media might be bad for work ethic

But on top of all that, it’s also possible that Americans have gotten lazier — or in less condescending econ terminology, there may have been a shift in the preference for leisure.

One of the most interesting economic facts of the last few decades is that Americans have gotten steadily richer since the 1980s, but haven’t really reduced the amount they work since then:

Many people — including John Maynard Keynes — think that as people get richer, they should work less. But in fact, as real wages go up, the incentive to work more hours actually increases, because each additional hour of work lets you buy more stuff. So it’s not clear whether people should work less or work more as they get richer.

Until the 1980s, Americans chose to work less as they got richer. But since then, increased income has had basically no effect on how much Americans work. There are several possible reasons for this. One possibility is that work itself has become more meaningful, fulfilling, and fun. Another is that the invention of new stuff to consume — better TVs, cars, video games, vacations, elective health procedures, etc. — has kept people working hard in order to afford it all.

But if it’s the latter, then the invention of new free forms of consumption — Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and so on — could reduce the incentive to work. If the way I have fun is by buying a boat and sailing it up and down the coast while drinking Clase Azul and watching TV on a big screen, then sure, I might work 50-hour weeks in order to afford all that. But if the way I have fun is by going on X and arguing with Elon Musk, and watching TikToks of college kids complaining about cultural appropriation, then why am I busting my butt at work?

Of course, that’s theoretical. The cold, hard data says that Americans are working just as much as ever before…or does it?

Data on labor hours comes from two places: A) asking businesses how long their employees worked, and B) asking people how many hours they worked. But neither of those is likely to capture actual time-on-task very well. If people browse social media on their smartphone in their cubicle, that’s going to be counted as “work” in the government numbers, even though in reality that’s leisure.3 Before the internet, smartphones, and social media, goofing off at work was probably both more boring and harder to get away with; now, people bring their whole social lives to the office in their pockets.

All day long, whenever I check Twitter, there are a ton of people talking who list high-paying jobs in their bio. And yet there they are, gabbing away on the internet instead of doing those jobs!

If lots of people are taking stealth leisure via social media use during “work” hours, then this might be satisfying the increased demand for leisure time due to a shift in consumption preferences toward social media. This might increase job satisfaction — because work now involves a lot more goofing off — while also making many jobs feel like “bullshit”. Because if you’re actually getting paid to do a couple hours of work and six hours of arguing on the internet every day, why are you even clocking in to the office or logging onto the company Slack?

The robot fantasy

I did notice one other very common argument among the people who had no problem with UBI discouraging work. A whole bunch of people said that since jobs are going to be automated away anyway, people are going to have more leisure time whether they want it or not. And so, they argue, at least UBI will regular folks well-fed during their new leisurely obsolescence:

I can’t tell you with certainty that this won’t happen, but I can tell you with certainty that it hasn’t happened. Among those who are too young to retire and mostly too old to still be in school, the percentage of people with jobs is as high as it has ever been:

There’s just no sign of mass technological unemployment, either in the U.S. or anywhere else.

Now it could be that this is about to change. Sometimes the economy really does encounter a sudden break point where all the old certainties get tossed out and a new reality takes hold. The Industrial Revolution is a good example of this. Maybe the invention of Artificial General Intelligence is right around the corner, and will replace the bulk of the work that normal humans can possibly do, leaving a world in which only the most brilliant AI engineers, savviest and boldest entrepreneurs, and most well-heeled financiers can make a living.

I encounter a surprisingly large number of people in the San Francisco tech industry who believe that this is going to happen. They might be right — Daron Acemoglu agrees with them — but I suspect they’re overgeneralizing from their own experience. Everyone likes to marvel at how billion-dollar software companies have been created with just a handful of employees. If you see that kind of thing all day, you very well might start to think that labor is obsolete! But if you look at the overall economy, you’ll see that the fraction of output that gets paid to labor has fallen by only a couple of percentage points since the dawn of the information age:

(And part of this fall is just the increase in land rents from our national failure to build housing.)

Science fiction futures are fun to imagine, but as things stand right now, pretty much every American company still needs lots of labor from lots of human workers. If all the janitors, food service workers, farmers, construction workers, checkout clerks, receptionists, security guards, cooks, warehouse workers, food delivery people, and other working-class people in the economy vanished tomorrow, advanced technological society would simply collapse, and those software engineers and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who didn’t starve to death would find themselves scratching out a meager living from unforgiving soil in short order. Economics bloggers would not be spared.4

A less colorful way of saying this is that labor and capital might have become a tiny bit more substitutable over the last few decades, but they’re still mostly complements.

Personally I like the idea of unconditional cash benefits. They have much to recommend them over other forms of welfare — they’re easy to administer, simple to navigate, relatively free of perverse incentives, and have the potential to be broadly popular. I supported the expanded Child Tax Credit, which is the closest thing we’ll get to a federal basic income in the near future.

But at the same time, I think the intellectual culture around UBI has become a bit weird and dysfunctional. It seems like a strange alliance between rich nerds who think that anyone with an IQ of less than 130 is either economically useless or soon will be, and downwardly-mobile overeducated elites who feel like normie middle-class jobs are beneath them.

Neither of those attitudes makes much sense to me; neither the dream of a world free of workers nor the dream of a world free of work is particularly useful right now. Human labor is still incredibly valuable, and figuring out how to make human workers more capable is still how most value is created. And for that reason, we should focus policy on rewarding human labor more, and be wary of economic philosophies that claim that most human beings would be better off as glorified pets.

Update: I should have mentioned this in the post, but unpaid work like child care and housework is no less valuable than the paid kind — and society seriously undervalues it. But in the recent big UBI experiment, detailed surveys of the cash recipients found that they didn’t spend more time on these unpaid tasks — or on things like community engagement, caring for others, or self-improvement — after getting UBI. I should have been more explicit about that!

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But what about “econ blogger”, you ask? Surely that is a bullshit, useless job? Ahh, but if not for us econ bloggers, someone somewhere might make actual policy based on something David Graeber wrote. And just think how much economic value that would destroy!

Assuming both numbers are adjusted for inflation, which in this case they are.

Note that this might help explain the productivity slowdown! If people today spend an hour more out of every workday goofing off on social media rather than doing work, compared to 2005, this increased “stealth leisure” could mask increasing productivity from new information technologies. So far I haven’t seen anyone investigate this possibility.

In fact, this is a joke from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.