The artes, in the sense of systematic treatises on various disciplines of specialized knowledge, are not well understood today because they are usually studied in isolation from one another. This book argues that the artes of the early Roman Empire—the period of the greatest flourishing of this kind of literature—belong to a common intellectual culture and ought to be studied together. Their unity stems ultimately from a shared preoccupation with relating theory to practice vis-à-vis disciplinary expertise. Within the artes, the theory–practice problem stimulated the emergence of theories of knowledge and theories of nature embedding Roman specialized knowledge in a broader understanding of the world. Indeed, the artes crystallize a uniquely Roman scientific culture that has not been previously recognized as such. The aim of this book is to study this scientific culture.