This essay is speculative and tentative, a preliminary attempt at exploring a broad territory of Roman economic history over a long period. For the sake of clarity, I have canvassed several probabilities in the form of propositions, but the evidence is so sparse that it is difficult to prove that each proposition is right. It is disappointing to confess at the outset that one's case is unproven and that the generalizations advanced are disproportionately large in relation to the supporting evidence. Even so, the experiments made here with both evidence and methods may stimulate others into refuting or reshaping the propositions. And besides, some of the methods can be usefully applied to other problems in Roman history.

To study the position of the holy man in Late Roman society is to risk telling in one's own words a story that has often been excellently told before. In vivid essays, Norman Baynes has brought the lives of the saints to the attention of the social and religious historian of Late Antiquity. The patient work of the Bollandists has increased and clarified a substantial dossier of authentic narratives. These lives have provided the social historian with most of what he knows of the life of the average man in the Eastern Empire. They illuminate the variety and interaction of the local cultures of the Near East. The holy men themselves have been carefully studied, both as figures in the great Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, and as the arbiters of the distinctive traditions of Byzantine piety and ascetic theology.

The intention of this paper is to follow well known paths of scholarship on all these topics, while asking two basic questions: why did the holy man come to play such an important rôle in the society, of the fifth and sixth centuries ? What light do his activities throw on the values and functioning of a society that was prepared to concede him such importance? It is as well to ask such elementary questions. For there is a danger that the holy man may be taken for granted as part of the Byzantine scene. Most explanations of his position are deceptively easy.

Different methods of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century C.E. produce convergent results that point to total output and consumption equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat or close to 20 billion sesterces per year. It is estimated that élites (around 1.5 per cent of the imperial population) controlled approximately one-fifth of total income, while middling households (perhaps 10 per cent of the population) consumed another fifth. These findings shed new light on the scale of economic inequality and the distribution of demand in the Roman world.

In the spring of 1981, on a hill called Molino del Postero, in undulating territory 5 km south-west of El Saucejo and 3 km north-east of Algámitas, in the province of Seville, a group of men looking for ancient coins and armed with metal-detectors discovered six bronze tablets and some small fragments of other tablets, containing part of the municipal law of a hitherto unknown town, the Municipium Flavium Irnitanum. Although the name of the town was probably Irni, since ancient place-names in Spain ending with -i are very common, such as Astigi, Ucubi, Tucci, Iptuci etc, a name such as Irnium remains possible.

Tombstones furnish perhaps three-quarters of the entire corpus of Latin inscriptions. Many of these give no more than the name of the deceased, but tens of thousands also offer the historian a few additional details, such as age at death and the name and relationship of the commemorator. Previous studies of the tombstones en masse have focused on nomenclature and age at death. In this study we wish to ask what conclusions can be drawn from the data about the commemorator's relationship with the deceased.

Tertullian, illustrating the sacrilegious nature of pagan religion, records that in an auditorium he saw a person being burned to death in the role of Hercules and another being castrated as Attis; both of these examples he adduces to substantiate his assertion to his pagan audience that ‘criminals often adopt the roles of your deities’ (‘et ipsos deos vestros saepe noxii induunt’). The practice that Tertullian here deplores is the subject of this paper: the punishment of criminals in a formal public display involving role-play set in a dramatic context; the punishment is usually capital.

One of the best episodes in Petronius' Satyrica involves the presence of the narrator, Encolpius, his lover Giton, and the rogue-poet Eumolpus, on board a ship owned by Lichas, of which another passenger is the flighty matron, Tryphaena. In an earlier episode of the novel, Lichas seems to have been the lover of Encolpius and Tryphaena of Giton, though both affairs had ended in enmity. There ensues a comic deliberation between Encolpius and Giton about ways of escape. One of them involves the ink which Eumolpus has brought aboard as a man of literature. Encolpius suggests that he and Giton dye themselves with it from head to foot and pretend to be Eumolpus' Ethiopian (that is, African) slaves. Giton contemptuously dismisses the idea, and proposes suicide. Eumolpus intervenes with what he considers a better idea. His manservant, who is a barber, will shave the heads and eyebrows of Encolpius and Giton, and then he himself 'will mark your faces with an elaborate inscription to give the impression that you have been punished with a mark. That way the same letters will both allay the suspicions of your pursuers and hide your faces with the appearance of punishment' ('sequar ego frontes notans inscriptione sollerti, ut uideamini stigmate esse puniti. ita eaedem litterae et suspicionem declinabunt quaerentium et uultus umbra supplicii tegent'). This is agreed to, and 'Eumolpus filled the foreheads of us both with huge letters, and with generous hand covered our whole faces with the wellknown inscription of runaway slaves' ('impleuit Eumolpus frontes utriusque ingentibus litteris et notum fugitiuorum epigramma per totam faciem liberali manu duxit').

When the emperor Claudius decided, at the instigation of his freedman Pallas, to make a highly unconventional marriage with his niece, he manoeuvred the senate, through the agency of his staunch amicus Vitellius, into passing an ‘unsolicited’ request that he marry Agrippina. He declared that his hesitations would be overcome if the senate put pressure on him: who was he to resist the will of the community, being but a citizen like the rest? Some senators even rushed to the palace promising to compel him by brute force. The incident encapsulates an ambivalence in the emperor's role familiar to all readers of Tacitus. On the one hand the autocratic reality: a decision of high political moment (it was no surprise that Agrippina's son subsequently acceded to the throne) taken in the palace on the counsel of freedmen, potent and resented, involving a violation of the mos maiorum. On the other hand the elaborate and yet transparent republican façade: the senate decrees, the princeps submits to the will of the citizen body.

This paper explores, in a very preliminary fashion, the relationship in the ancient world between the design and use of mechanical technology, social or political patronage and investment, and economic return, using three main areas as case studies: water-lifting devices, the water-powered grain mill, and the diverse uses of water-power in mining. The emphasis is on the use of devices and techniques which replaced human power with alternative power sources, and especially on water-power for driving machinery and hydraulic mining techniques employing the erosive power of water. It is argued that water-power was used on a wide scale and in diversified forms at an early date (by the first century A.D.), and that the use of mechanical technology to perform economically critical work had an important impact on economic performance and the potential for per capita growth, especially in the latter centuries B.C. and the first two centuries A.D. Conversely, in the third century A.D. the cessation of the employment of hydraulic mining techniques enabling large-scale extraction of gold and other metals may have had an adverse economic impact on the economy as a whole. Growth and progress do not necessarily follow a linear pattern of advance; technologies are lost as well as adopted.

It is a commonplace of modern scholarship that the Roman Imperial Army in the frontier areas was organized in limes-systems: fortifications linked by roads along a fixed boundary, marked in many, but not all, parts of the empire by a river or an artificial obstacle: indeed, the term limes is often used as though it were self-explanatory. The term is certainly used in ancient sources; thus while the literature may furnish only fragmentary information on the army and its activities along the border, it does at least apparently provide us with a name to which to link the material remains. Over the past four decades conferences on Roman frontier studies have regularly been held, often under the title ‘Limes Congress’.

The vocabulary of empire, as it has developed in European contexts since the period of the Roman empire, reveals clearly enough the significance of the inheritance of Rome for the regimes which have followed it. From Charlemagne to the Tsars, from British imperialism to Italian Fascism, the language and symbols of the Roman republic and the Roman emperors have been essential elements in the self-expression of imperial powers. Such communality of language, by creating a sense of familiarity in the mind of a modern observer of the Roman empire, may hinder a proper understanding of antiquity, because the importance of the after life of these words and symbols tends to obscure the nature of the contexts from which they originated. An obvious parallel instance can be seen in the case of the word ‘democracy’, where the adoption of the Athenian term to describe a series of political developments in the modern world which claim some connection with the Greek notion of demokratia has tended to make more difficult the modern understanding of what happened at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.

In any attempt to understand Roman history the first half of the second century B.C. must have a special place. Victory in the Hannibalic war had laid the foundations of a general dominance of the Mediterranean world, but had hardly yet produced an Empire. Outside Italy, only Sicily, Sardinia and two commands in Spain were normally allotted as provinciae for annual magistrates; and this list was not increased by the famous victories in the Greek East, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia and Pydna. Roman imperialism is too crude a term for what we can observe between 200 and 151 B.C. Roman dominance was felt everywhere, from Spain to Carthage, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch and Ankara; Roman militarism was demonstrated consistently in N. Italy and Spain, at various periods in Greece and Macedonia (200–194, 191–187, 171–168), and for one period of three years in Asia Minor (190–188). Roman colonialism was still confined, with one very marginal exception, to the Italian peninsula.

The exposure of infants, very often but by no means always resulting in death, was widespread in many parts of the Roman Empire. This treatment was inflicted on large numbers of children whose physical viability and legitimacy were not in doubt. It was much the commonest, though not the only, way in which infants were killed, and in many, perhaps most, regions it was a familiar phenomenon. While there was some disapproval of child-exposure, it was widely accepted as unavoidable. Some, especially Stoics, disagreed, as did contemporary Judaism, insisting that all infants, or at least all viable and legitimate infants, should be kept alive. Exposure served to limit the size of families, but also to transfer potential labour from freedom to slavery (or at any rate to de facto slavery). Disapproval of exposure seems slowly to have gained ground. Then, after the sale of infants was authorized by Constantine in A.D. 313, the need for child-exposure somewhat diminished, and at last — probably in 374 — it was subjected to legal prohibition. But of course it did not cease.

The purpose of this paper is to present a particular model of how Roman politics worked, and of what Roman politics before the Social War was ‘about’. In essence I want to place in the centre of our conception the picture of an orator addressing a crowd in the Forum; a picture of someone using the arts of rhetoric to persuade an anonymous crowd about something. The most important subject of oratory, and the most important fundamental right exercised by whoever came to vote, was legislation. Yet the greatest of all the extraordinary distortions which have been imposed on our conception of Republican politics in the twentieth century is that the process of legislation, and the content of the legislation passed by the people, have both ceased to be central to it. With that we have ceased to listen sufficiently to the actual content of oratory addressed to the people, to the arguments from rights, from the necessities of the preservation of the res publica, from historical precedents, both Roman and non-Roman, and from social attitudes and prejudices. In the second century above all, we can see how the prestige which the office-holding class derived from family descent and personal standing on the one hand was matched on the other by popular demands for appropriate conduct, and by popular suspicions of private luxury, of profiteering from the conduct of public affairs, and of improper collaboration with wrong-doers both at home and abroad.

This account of viticulture in Italy during the period from the Punic Wars to the crisis of the third century A.D. is written in the conviction that the ‘economic’ history of the ancient world will remain unacceptably impoverished if it is written in isolation from the social and cultural history of the same period. The orthodoxy which sees a revolution in Italian agriculture in the age of Cato the Censor and a crisis in the time of the emperor Trajan seems to me to be an example of this. It is based on a traditional and limited selection of evidence, and is unable to answer many of the questions which are increasingly being asked about production and exchange in the ancient world, questions about the social background and cultural preferences which underlie production strategies and the evolution of demand. I hope that this study may show some other possibilities, which have still been only partly explored by researchers, of illuminating the changing patterns of Roman agriculture and trade, through the use of comparative evidence and the re-examination of the relevant literary texts for data that are more than simply ‘economic’ in the most restricted sense.

How much did Rome pay the soldiers serving in the legions and the auxilia, who expanded and defended her empire? The answer is of some significance not only to the history of the Roman army but to the political, social, and economic history of the Roman Empire in general. Many a learned article has therefore been devoted to this matter and steady progress has been made. Yet problems remain, the evidence being scanty and often not readily intelligible. Work on the 600 and more writing-tablets from the legionary fortress of Vindonissa (Switzerland), currently in progress, has turned up a missing link in the chain of evidence. The new text, a pay receipt of an auxiliary soldier, reveals a new sum and thus allows the reconstruction of the Roman army's pay scales through the first three centuries A.D. The overall pay model given below reconciles all the hitherto known evidence.

The relative importance of different sources of slaves in the Roman Empire during the Principate cannot be gauged from ancient texts. However, simple demographic models show that, for purely statistical reasons, natural reproduction made a greater contribution to the Roman slave supply than child exposure, warfare, and the slave trade taken together and was in all probability several times as important as any other single source. The most plausible projections also suggest that on average the incidence of manumission was rather low. By implication, overall fertility of ex-slaves in general and of freedwomen in particular would be low as well, which must have reduced their chances of acquiring legal privileges that accrued from sexual reproduction.

To appreciate the importance which the Romans attached to transport and communications we need surely look no further than the roads which they built. To the modern observer this gigantic network of highways, which was not to be equalled or surpassed before the present century, is one of the most telling symbols of the control which Rome exercised throughout her empire, and of the organization which was imposed on it. The traffic which they carried has attracted less attention, but is clearly no less worthy of consideration. The roads of the empire had been designed and built to suit the state's needs, above all those of its armies, and one would reasonably expect the government to have devoted as much care and attention to the means by which goods and personnel were transported along them as it had to building them in the first place. Even if the sources were silent, and they are not, we could readily assume that post horses and carriages, pack and draft animals, and all the other paraphernalia of a state transport system would be needed at all times both for the use of civilian and military officials, and for the carriage of supplies and provisions. Under the empire the burden of providing this transport fell largely on the subject communities of Italy and the provinces, and the complaints of these communities against the unauthorized seizure of men, animals, waggons, hospitality in billets and other facilities for state transport form a recurrent theme in Roman history. Although authors of the republican period frequently refer to such requisitions, our information for the system by which this transport was provided and organized comes largely from a long series of imperial documents, beginning in the reign of Tiberius and culminating in a group of rescripts from the emperors of the fourth and early fifth centuries collected in book vm of the Theodosian Code.

The twenty-three Demonstrations of Aphrahat are not likely to be familiar to most students of Roman history or of Constantine. Aphrahat was head of the monastery of Mar Mattai, near modern Mosul, with the rank of bishop and, apparently, the episcopal name Jacob: as a consequence, he was soon confused with the better known Jacob of Nisibis, and independent knowledge of his life and career virtually disappeared. Fortunately, however, twenty-three treatises survived, whose attribution to ‘Aphrahat the Persian sage’ seems beyond doubt. Aphrahat wrote in Syriac and composed works of edification and polemic for a Mesopotamian audience outside the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, he provides crucial evidence not only for the attitude of Persian Christians towards Rome, but also for the military situation on Rome's eastern frontier at the end of the reign of Constantine. It is worth the effort, therefore, to set Aphrahat's fifth Demonstration, which bears the title ‘On wars’ or ‘On battles’, in its precise historical context. The present paper begins by considering the place of this Demonstration in Aphrahat's oeuvre and its exact date (I–III); it then argues that in 337 Constantine was preparing to invade Persia as the self-appointed liberator of the Christians of Persia (IV, VI), that Aphrahat expected him to be successful (V), and that Constantine's actions and the hopes which he excited caused the Persian king to regard his Christian subjects as potential traitors—and hence to embark on a policy of persecution (VII).

The significance of the African provinces is well-appreciated in historical studies of the Roman Empire, but there is a distinct lack of good summaries in English on recent developments in the field of study. Some introductory books sacrifice readability in favour of detail, others offer a more synthetic view, but lack depth. The bibliography is now vast and ever more intimidating for the uninitiated; we hope that what follows will serve both as a useful introduction for those new to the field and as a refresher for others. In this review we have concentrated on developments which seem to us to be of particular importance, whilst directing the reader's attention to basic references in other areas. The emphasis throughout is on archaeological work and this will explain short measure having to be given to some important historic and epigraphic studies. Another choice had to be the geographical limits of the study and, mostly, we have restricted our coverage to Africa Proconsularis and Numidia, though certain themes demand expanding the horizons to sites in the Mauretanian provinces and Cyrenaica also. We have considered 1970 as an appropriate start-date for our survey, allowing us to review developments across the last twenty five years, though necessarily with greater emphasis being placed on publications of the last decade.