Transport of Food to Rome
During the reign of Emperor Augustus (63 B.C-14 A.D.) ，the city of ancient Rome may have had as many as 1,200,000 inhabitants. With so many residents, the city needed an extremely large food supply, necessitating the development of an improved system for shipping food. Transportation of bulk goods by land was prohibitively expensive and slow. It simply was not practical to haul a wagonload of wheat very far, for example, since the animals needed to pull the wagon would quickly eat an amount of food equal to the relatively limited amount that could be carried in the wagon itself. The solution to this problem was to move goods by sea. Scholars have estimated that the cost of shipping grain from one end of the Mediterranean to the other was cheaper than hauling the same amount of grain 120ilometers overland. It Was perhaps 40 times more expensive to transport goods by land rather than by sea, and while it was somewhat more costly to move goods along a river than over the open ocean, river transport was still many times more efficient than land transport.
Since Italian resources were not sufficient to feed Rome. Romans naturally looked to the Roman-controlled areas that were closest to Rome and that had access to the sea. The first provinces that had surplus grain collected from them and transported to the city of Rome in large quantities were, logically enough, the nearby islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Once Rome had conquered the coast of North Africa, the foods from this region were rounded
up and routed toward the city of Rome as well. By the first century A.D., Egypt and the coastal areas of Spain and Gaul had been added to this list. Despite its distance from Rome, Egypt in particular was an important source of grain. The safe arrival of the Egyptian grain fleet off the Coast of Italy was a major cause for celebration.
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