A comparison between the legal treatment of flood and earthquake risks has shown that the management of hydraulic risks is made possible by the identification of the human vulnerability. Agricultural practices were indeed well identified as posing a possible threat to the neighbouring plots. The analysis of the texts shows a clear acknowledgement, in the Roman world, that acting upon the human behaviours was more efficient than trying to control the natural hazards themselves. This result has been presented at Vienna’s Forum Antike seminar in December 2018, and then turned into a paper submitted to the Journal of Roman Studies. The regulation of social, technical and economic practices was enforced by public policy, but the protection of their interests by private individuals was equally instrumental in this process for which procedural tools were developed by Roman jurists. This conclusion is proposed in a contribution in press in the Proceedings of a conference held in Berlin in 2017 and co-edited by the fellow and Prof. Cosima Möller (FU Berlin).
On the methodological level, jurisprudential sources illustrate: firstly, the perception that human practices may increase the risks and that it was more efficient to act on the human behaviour than to try and control the natural hazard; secondly, the acknowledgement that private individuals, while protecting their private interests, were the best in managing the risks for the benefit of the whole community. The investigation was then directed towards the case studies. While central Italy and the Ebro Valley, in Spain, have been carefully considered, the case of Africa and especially of the Medjerda wadi (Tunisia) still needs to be explored.
In central Italy, the fellow proposes that access to water provided by land servitudes were primarily designed for small, intensively cultivated plots devoted to market gardening around the metropolis. The most favoured areas were in the valleys, where the proximity of navigable rivers facilitated the transportation of goods towards the urban market. The pressure on natural resources was high in this kind of suburban landscape and the jurists were asked to regulate the competition for accessing the water (see M. Ronin « Sharing Water in the Roman Countryside: Environmental Issues, Economic Interests and Legal Solutions », Water Management in Ancient Civilizations, Jonas Berking éd., Berlin, 2018). On the contrary, it is proposed that the legal action to ward off rainwater was developed for the exploitation of terraced landscapes, which became crucial in the supplying of Rome with the expansion of cultivated areas towards the nearby hillsides in the 2nd c. BC. The main concern, there, was not to access water, easily stocked in reservoirs and cisterns, but to prevent waterlogging and erosion. By shaping the sophisticated and detailed features of the legal action to ward off water, jurists help to prevent these risks.
In Spain, the Ebro valley constitutes the example of a landscape comparable with the Tiber Valley, where irrigation was necessary to intensive cultivations, presumably destined to long-distance (and maybe overseas) export. On the rural territory of the colony of Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza), the Roman administration provided the institutional framework for irrigation communities along the river. The existence of these communities was besides authorized by the legal status that Romans granted to a public river like the Ebro: the water was freely accessible to riverside landowners.
