What was the usual custom of the city dwellers in the Roman Empire?

Question

Doctor Galen on how Roman Cities Treated the Countryside

‘The famine prevalent for many successive years in many provinces has clearly displayed for men of any understanding the effect of malnutrition in generating illness. The city-dwellers, as it was their custom to collect and store enough grain for the whole of the next year immediately after the harvest, carried *** all the wheat, barley, beans and lentils, and left to the peasants various kind of pulse- after taking quite a large proportion of these to the city. After consuming what was left in the course of the winter, the country people had to resort to unhealthy foods in the spring; they ate twigs and shoots of trees and bushes and bulbs and roots of inedible plants....

(a) What was the usual custom of the city dwellers in the Roman Empire?

(b) The country people had to resort to eating what type of food?

(c) What values are revealed in the above passage?

Answer 1

(a) It was the custom of all the city dwellers to collect and store enough food grains for the whole of the next year immediately after the harvest, carried *** all the wheat, barley, beans and lentils and left to the peasants various kinds of pulse- after taking a quite a larger proportion to the city.

(b) The country people had to resort to unhealthy foods in the spring; they ate twigs and shoots of trees and bushes and bulbs and roots of inedible plants.

(c) The passage reveals the selfishness of the citydwellers, as they thought about themselves only. They stored enough food grains for the whole of the next year, while the country people had to resort to unhealthy foods in the spring.