Anno 117 Pax Romana

A few hours into any settlement in Anno 117: Pax Romana, the player arrives at a moment the series has been staging for its entire history. The town has grown. The first Roman settlers, fed on the grain of the fields laid down around them, have multiplied and asked to become something more than farmers, and the class they become wants things the founding island cannot make: wine, oil, cloth, the pottery to carry the wine, the small marks of status that separate a citizen from someone who merely grows food. The map that looked like abundance an hour ago is now visibly too small. Grain fields cannot share ground with vineyards; the vineyards cannot sit on the clay the potters need; the potters cannot work without fuel hauled from somewhere else. So the player does what every Anno player is eventually made to do. They lay a trade route. A ship leaves for another island carrying what the home island lacks, and the settlement stops being a place and becomes a node.

That is the moment the game says what it thinks an empire is, and the answer is not the legions.

Anno, a city-building series that has run since 1998 and now lives inside Ubisoft's Mainz studio, is a machine for rendering civilization as a supply chain. Its loop holds steady across every historical costume it has worn, from the age of discovery to a flooded near future: a population sorted into tiers, each tier defined less by who its members are than by what they demand, set against a landscape of production nodes that must be chained together to meet those demands. Grain becomes flour becomes bread. Sheep become wool become cloth. Every satisfied need lets a population grow and climb into a higher tier, and every higher tier wants more goods, of more kinds, from further away, so that growth is never a reward the player banks but a debt the logistics must keep paying. The genre calls this city-building. It is more honestly described as the management of demand.

Setting this machine in the Roman Empire, in the year 117, at the moment the empire under Trajan reached the greatest extent it would ever hold, is a sharper choice than a change of scenery. It lays the city-builder's native thesis, that a civilization is the sum of its supply chains, over the one ancient state whose survival depended, to a degree the marble-and-eagles image works hard to hide, on getting grain from one place to another.

The critic Ian Bogost gave this kind of reading its name. In Persuasive Games, his 2007 account of how the medium makes meaning, he argued that games mount their arguments procedurally: not through the words on their screens or the pictures in their cutscenes but through their rules, through the dynamics that emerge when a player inhabits a system and learns what it rewards and forbids. A simulation is a claim about how some part of the world works, compressed into the shape of what the player is permitted to do. Read that way, Anno 117 is not a game about Rome that happens to involve trade. It is an argument about Rome, and the argument is that the thing holding the empire together was the unglamorous apparatus of provisioning: the fields, the routes, the warehouses, the ships.

The history is on the game's side.

Rome, the city, at the height of the empire held something close to a million people. No pre-industrial city had reached that size before, and few would reach it again for a millennium and a half. A settlement that large could not feed itself, could not come close, could not have drawn a fraction of its bread from the fields of Latium around it. It ate imported grain, and it ate it by the hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year, and the political stability of the capital rested on that grain arriving. It came from Sicily, from the province of Africa in what is now Tunisia, and above all from Egypt, whose harvest Augustus had folded into the imperial system precisely because whoever controlled it controlled Rome's stomach. The state built an entire administration to manage the flow, the cura annonae, headed by an equestrian prefect whose office existed to see that the grain fleet sailed and the dole was distributed. The poet Juvenal sneered that the populace had narrowed its wants to two things, "bread and circuses." He had the order right. Bread came first.

The modern scholarship on that supply has reconstructed an operation of real sophistication. Geoffrey Rickman's study of the corn supply laid out the machinery of it; later work, Paul Erdkamp's among it, has argued that the state did not merely hand out free bread but rode on top of a functioning grain market, buying, subsidizing, and releasing stock to hold prices where the city could survive them. Even the annona, the most directed thing the Roman state did, looks on close inspection less like a command economy than like a market the government leaned on. Hold that thought; the game will force it back up.

The physical infrastructure of the supply is still legible. Trajan, whose reign frames the game, finished a vast hexagonal harbor basin at Portus, beside Ostia, in roughly the years the game depicts, because the old river port could no longer handle the tonnage. The grain was piled in horrea, warehouses engineered against damp and fire and vermin, some of them the size of a modern distribution center. And the clearest surviving image of the scale is a hill in Rome called Monte Testaccio, thirty-five meters high, made of nothing but the deliberately smashed fragments of some fifty million amphorae, most of them oil jars from southern Spain, stacked and broken over two centuries of imports. It is a mountain of packaging. It is the archaeological sediment of a demand-fulfillment loop, and it is the most Anno-like object the ancient world left behind.

What made the flow possible was water. Overland transport in the ancient world was so costly that a cart of grain could eat its own value in a few hundred miles of hauling, while a ship could carry the same grain the length of the Mediterranean for a small fraction of that. Rome was a Mediterranean empire for a reason that precedes culture: the sea was the one surface across which bulk goods could move cheaply, and Rome had turned the whole of it, mare nostrum, into a single safe interior lake, cleared of pirates and ringed by its own ports. The Pax Romana that gives the game its subtitle is usually remembered as a military peace, the long stretch in which the legions kept the borders quiet. It was also, and perhaps more consequentially, a logistical peace: safe lanes, standard coin, maintained roads, the conditions under which a shipment could be planned a season ahead. The peace was the precondition of the supply chain, and the supply chain was the substance of the peace. Anno 117, which asks the player to secure routes before profiting from them, has that causal order exactly right.

All of which raises the question the game cannot help but answer, and answers without knowing it has been asked. How modern was the Roman economy? This is the oldest live argument in the field. On one side stands Moses Finley, whose 1973 book The Ancient Economy made the case that the ancient world had no economy in the sense the word now carries: economic life was embedded in status and politics, elites drew their wealth from land and held trade in contempt, cities consumed what the countryside was taxed to provide, and there were no integrated markets coordinating price and production across distance. Finley's Rome is not a smaller version of a modern economy but a different kind of thing, one that the tools of modern economics simply misdescribe. On the other side stands Peter Temin, whose 2013 The Roman Market Economy used those very tools to argue the reverse: that grain prices across the empire moved together in the way only connected markets produce, that Rome had working markets in land and labor and credit, that its economic life sat on the same spectrum as early modern Europe's rather than in a separate category.

Here is the point at which criticism earns its keep. A city-builder can only represent the Temin end of that argument. The genre's rules presuppose an integrated market: every good carries a price, goods flow along routes toward the demand that pulls them, populations are modeled as consumers whose satisfied wants drive growth, and the player is a rational coordinator maximizing throughput. Anno has no way to represent Finley's world, no mechanic for wealth that despises its own source, no procedure for a city that is a parasite on rents rather than a node in a market, no model for an economy embedded in status rather than governed by price. By the mere fact of being an Anno game, Anno 117 casts a vote, and the vote is for Temin. Its procedural rhetoric is modernist to the root, because the genre has modernism built into its foundations.

This is worth naming with care, because it is both the game's insight and its distortion. The insight is real and valuable: it makes vivid, in a way no textbook manages, that the Roman achievement was substantially an achievement of provisioning, that the empire was warehouses as much as it was armies. The distortion is smuggled in alongside the insight: the game presents Roman economic life as fully rationalized, transparent to a spreadsheet, coordinated by price signals a modern manager would recognize, and that presentation takes one contested side of a debate the historians have not settled and dresses it as the neutral background of play. A player who absorbs the logistics lesson has learned something true. A player who absorbs the modeling assumptions along with it has also, without being told, been enrolled in Temin's camp.

A reader who has followed the argument this far has an objection ready, and it is worth stating at full strength before answering it. The market model reflects no considered position on Roman historiography so much as a standing feature of the genre, present in every century it has touched. The same tiered population, the same priced goods, the same ships routed toward wherever demand is loudest, govern Anno 1800's nineteenth-century docks and Anno 2070's flooded coastlines exactly as they govern Anno 117's Ostia, three settings separated by two thousand years and by economic institutions that share almost nothing. If the identical market machinery would have appeared whatever year Ubisoft Mainz had typed into the project file, then calling its appearance in 117 a vote cast in a live argument between Finley and Temin mistakes a standing engine default for an opinion about this particular empire. A racing game does not take a position on the tuning of two specific engines merely because it uses one physics model for both cars on the grid; it uses one model because building a second would cost money nobody intends to spend. Perhaps Anno's market is the same kind of accident, present because the genre has never built a second set of rules for a setting that might need one, not because anyone at the studio has an opinion about Peter Temin.

The objection is right about the mechanism and wrong about the conclusion, because Bogost's own account of procedural rhetoric does not require an author who meant to argue anything. A system can enact a claim about the world whether or not the people who built it ever stopped to consider the claim, the way a flight of stairs makes a claim about who is expected to enter a building whether or not the architect ever thought about a wheelchair. Anno's market engine being a standing genre default does not clear it of an argument so much as relocate the argument, from Anno 117 in particular to the Anno series as a whole, and from there to the wider genre the series belongs to. For three decades and eight installments, city-building games in this lineage have told their players that whatever civilization is on screen, ancient, industrial, or drowned, coheres through priced goods moving toward demand. That the claim arrives by default, without anyone at the studio needing to have read a page of Finley, does not weaken it as a claim about Rome specifically. If anything it makes the claim stranger: a commercial engine designed to model nineteenth-century shipping has been modernizing every economy it depicts since 1998, and 117 CE happens to be the first year on that list old enough for historians to still be arguing, in print, about whether the modernizing is a distortion.

The game's two-region structure, a Mediterranean heartland and a province across the northern sea, folds a second historical argument into the same machinery. Greg Woolf, in Becoming Roman, his 1998 study of how Gaul was absorbed, took apart the old picture of Romanization as a finished Roman template pressed onto passive natives. What actually happened, in his account, was that provincial elites built a new, provincial way of being Roman, and that they did it substantially through consumption: by acquiring the wine and the oil and the tableware and the bath-houses that marked a person as belonging to the imperial order. To become Roman was, in large part, to learn to want Roman things. Anno models exactly this. Integrating a province, in the game, means teaching it to demand the goods the network supplies, wiring its population into the same tiers of need that drive the heartland. The game's procedural theory of empire is that Romanization is the export of a demand structure, and Woolf's history suggests the procedural theory is not far wrong.

Woolf's argument works at the level of what a province learned to want. A harder test is whether the empire's market machinery actually reached the frontier at the level of who got paid, and the archaeological record happens to preserve evidence, from within a few years of 117, that lets the question be checked directly. Vindolanda, an auxiliary fort in what is now Northumberland, had stood since about 85 CE, first garrisoned by the First Cohort of Tungrians, a thousand men originally raised in Gallia Belgica. By 117, the year the game is set, the fort had already been active for more than three decades, still five years before Hadrian would order the wall that eventually ran a short march north of it. Excavators digging through its waterlogged ditches from the 1970s onward recovered several hundred thin wooden leaf tablets, covered in ink handwriting that had been sealed in oxygen-starved mud instead of rotting away in a season the way such documents do almost everywhere else in the Roman world. Most of what survives is the ordinary paperwork of a garrison: strength reports, requests for socks and beer, a birthday invitation from one officer's wife to another that is, as it happens, the earliest surviving line of Latin known to have been written by a woman. One of the tablets is a business letter.

Tablet 343 is a letter from a trader named Octavius to a colleague he addresses as his brother, Candidus, and it survives complete enough to read like the invoice it effectively is. Octavius reports a hundred pounds of sinew still owed from a supplier named Marinus, a deposit of three hundred denarii he has already laid out toward roughly five thousand modii of grain still on the ear, another five hundred denarii he now needs sent north in cash or the deposit is lost, and a consignment of hides waiting at Cataractonium, a supply post on the road at what is now Catterick, along with the wagon required to move them. The letter is datable to somewhere between AD 104 and 120, a range that comfortably contains the game's own year of 117. Nobody in it is requisitioning anything. Two private dealers are running a grain purchase on credit, tracking a cash debt between named men, worrying about a wagon, at a fort on the edge of the known world. What the letter shows, at that fort, in those years, is a supply chain running on deposits and private credit between men who called each other brother, alongside whatever requisitions came stamped from a prefect's office in Rome. That is closer to Temin's Rome than to Finley's.

Once the frame is in hand, it stops being about Anno and stops being about Rome. Every grand-strategy game and every city-builder encodes a theory of what holds a society together, and the theory is almost always logistical, almost always modern, almost always a claim that a civilization is at bottom a system for moving goods and satisfying demand. Civilization, the Victoria series, the long line of Caesar and Pharaoh and Tropico, the whole genre: they are procedural arguments that history runs on supply chains, and they are all, in Finley's terms, primitivist heresy, modernizers to the last. The reader who has watched Anno turn Rome into a demand-fulfillment loop can watch any of them do the same to its chosen period, and can ask the sharper question the frame makes available: what does this rule-set assume about why societies cohere, and whose side of which historical argument has it taken.

The frame reaches past games, too, into how history itself gets told. For most of its existence the discipline narrated the past as a sequence of battles and reigns, the drum-and-trumpet history of who defeated whom. The twentieth century turned much of the field toward the unglamorous substrate: prices, harvests, transport costs, the movement of grain, the plumbing of empires. Anno belongs, without meaning to, to that turn. It is drum-and-trumpet history's opposite, rendered as a toy. It insists, in the only language a simulation has, that the interesting question about Rome is not how the legions won in Dacia but how the bread reached the capital on an ordinary Tuesday in an ordinary year.

Which returns to the hill. Monte Testaccio is not a monument. Nobody built it; it accumulated, one broken oil jar at a time, as the residue of a city eating what the empire shipped it, for two hundred years, until the discards formed high ground. There is no arch on it and no inscription. It is the part of Rome the marble does not commemorate and the films never show, the sheer material weight of provisioning made into a landform. A player closing a session of Anno 117, having spent the evening threading ships between islands so that a distant population could have its oil, has been raising a small virtual Monte Testaccio the whole time, a private mound of satisfied demand. The game's quiet claim is that this, and not the eagle standards, is what the empire actually was. The hill of broken amphorae, still standing in Rome, agrees.