Behaviour Space: Simulating Roman Social Life and Civil Violence

Abstract

Agent based modelling, also known as individual-based modelling, holds great promise for historians as a tool for formalizing and visualizing historians’ understandings of historical processes. It also provides a means to explore exploring the emergent consequences of such assumptions. Such models specify the possible behaviours for a single individual, and then enable individuals within the simulation to interact, with each applying the behaviours in a context-specific manner. Artificial societies begin to emerge from these interactions, allowing us to study their characteristics. Moreover, when these models produce behaviours that cohere with patterns embedded in historical or archaeological data, it becomes possible to interrogate aspects of past experience otherwise lost to us. This article presents PatronWorld, an agent based model of the ancient Roman daily ritual of salutatio, a ritual in which clients gathered to make a morning greeting to their patron. It explores the ritual’s role in the development and maintenance of patronage networks, and its relationship to the emergence of civil violence in the Roman world. The model is also based on a framework that describes the social network surrounding land holding (the foundations of wealth in antiquity) in the City of Rome from the late first – early second century AD. Civil violence was a constant feature of Roman society, frequently targeting the men upon whose social connections the political economy of the state depended. Results from the model suggest the social conditions that made the state vulnerable to periodic bouts of violence, and suggest new directions for further research.