Pompey's Effect On The Home Front

Pompey, celebrated in Rome as a statesman and general who consolidated its sphere of influence beyond compare, once declared, when shipping grain across the Mediterranean "We must go on; it is necessary that Rome should be relieved, but it is not necessary that we should live.” Evidently, Pompey was speaking to the major concerns of the era, as without land to grow grain, ships to transport it and a harbour to dock at, Rome’s one million citizens would starve, and the epicentre of the classical world would collapse. Perhaps, Pompey, acutely aware of the problems faced by the numerous legions guarding Rome’s fragile borders, was aware of the immediate importance grain played in the lives of his soldiers, and of Rome’s burgeoning civilian population.
As Paige Gibbons Backus notes in her 2021 essay ‘Total War’, the Civil War’s effect on the home front: “Since the Confederate army had priority in terms of transportation, what little food was earmarked for civilians often went bad before it could be shipped from warehouses. When the government tried to rectify the situation by delivering food, farmers responded by hiding their crops and livestock. Hyperinflation sent the price of food skyrocketing while the value of the Confederate dollar cratered. Soon, food riots broke out in several cities, including the Confederacy’s capital at Richmond. Over the course of the “Richmond Bread Riots” in April 1863, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered the militia to open fire on several hundred women if they did not go
According to Ibrar Ahmad, agriculture has “enabled a role in the establishment of cities and the division of labour”. Hence the major components of agrarian civilisations, labour and slavery are tied to the success of the farming patent of the Fertile Crescent to the innovative stance on vertical growth - agriculture evolves and develops with society and major reforms to the agricultural system such as the emancipation of millions of enslaved workers within the space of a few years brought many societies to their knees. In this sense, a very simple analogy can explain much of the reason for the Confederacy's destruction - agriculture drives slavery and slavery drives agriculture. Judgement is passed today by historians at a stroke, but few fail to address in their arguments how agriculture constrained the Confederacy itself - how the Union diversified into the industrial sector soon after its first cities were established, and continued to thrive in the post-war and Reconstruction Era. In contrast, millions of residents in the south were trapped in rural depression long after the war closed - their seemingly infallible system of agrarian slavery unable to survive the war. This essay also looks deeper within the past, and examines the role of borders, trade and