History & Empires
The Roman Empire and the Silk Road
For roughly four centuries, the Roman Empire was the single most important western customer on the Silk Road — and yet the Romans themselves never set foot…
For roughly four centuries, the Roman Empire was the single most important western customer on the Silk Road — and yet the Romans themselves never set foot anywhere near a Chinese silk workshop. Roman aristocrats paid staggering sums for Chinese silk, and it was that demand, sustained over generations of senators and empresses, that gave the overland trade much of its economic engine between the first century BCE and the third century CE. But the two empires never met. Between Rome and Han China stood a long chain of middleman states — and the most important of them were the Parthian and then the Sasanian dynasties of Iran, who were perfectly happy to keep the two ends of the trade apart. The story of Rome and the Silk Road, in other words, is the story of an absence: a vast commercial relationship conducted entirely through intermediaries.
The Parthian and Sasanian middlemen
No Roman envoy ever made it to Luoyang or Chang’an. Not one. The Parthian Empire — ruling Iran and Mesopotamia from the third century BCE to the third century CE — sat astride the principal overland corridors, taxed every bale of Chinese silk that crossed its territory, and had no interest whatever in letting Roman merchants bypass the toll. Parthian control of the trade was, in my view, the single most important reason the Roman-Silk Road relationship stayed second-hand for its entire duration.
After the Parthian collapse, the Sasanian dynasty (224–651 CE) inherited the middleman role and, if anything, played it harder. Sasanian royal workshops, particularly the great factories at Merv (modern Mary in Turkmenistan) and at Ctesiphon on the Tigris, supplied most of the silk that actually reached Mediterranean ports — and they guarded the technique. I have always found it striking that the Sasanians managed to keep sericulture secrets from the Byzantines for nearly a century after Justinian’s supposed smuggling of eggs from China in the 550s. Roman access to the Sasanian silk industry was limited, in any case, by something more durable than industrial espionage: four centuries of intermittent war between Rome/Byzantium and Iran, each round of which closed the trade routes and wrecked someone’s caravans.
Roman demand and the drain of gold
When did the Romans first hear of the Seres — the silk people of the far east? Probably in the late Republic, around the time of Augustus. Roman interest in Chinese silk then grew steadily through the first and second centuries CE, and by the early Empire it had become one of the most prestigious luxuries in aristocratic life. The lighter, more transparent weaves that reached Rome via Parthian and Indian hands went into the vestis holoserica, an all-silk garment that sumptuary law reserved for the emperor and a narrow circle of senior officials. Pliny the Elder, in Book XII of his Natural History (completed in 77 CE), put the annual outflow at fifty million sesterces — a figure that has been quoted, and disputed, ever since. Pliny’s motive, of course, was moral: he thought the Empire was being drained of gold for useless luxury, and the figure is best read as a complaint dressed up as a statistic. I think the conventional number is too round to be a true count; it is, however, the only one we have. The mechanics of the trade itself are described in the article on Silk Road trade, goods, and economy.
In commercial terms, Rome was the western end of the road. In political terms, it was only ever the customer.
A personal note
A note on Roman evidence. The Roman sources for the Silk Road are mostly the writings of moralists (Seneca, Pliny, Tacitus) who used silk as an example of luxury and decadence, and the surviving pieces of actual Roman silk from burial sites in the eastern Mediterranean. The combination is biased: we have a great deal of complaining about silk and relatively little documentation of the actual trade. The reader should read Pliny’s famous figure of fifty million sesterces a year as a moral complaint, not an audited statistic.
Further reading
If you only have time for one thing, read Hansen (2012) — the rest is detail.
- Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
- Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
- Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
- The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
- One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.