The supply and use of money are topics which lie at the heart of our understanding of the Roman economy and fiscal system. The view we take of these matters affects both our picture of everyday life and the economic models we construct to describe the structure and development of the Roman world. Monetary history is also relevant to social and political change, as medieval historians know well. In the great commercial revolution of Europe in the thirteenth century it was the increasing availability of money which allowed the payment of knights and civil servants and thus broke the hereditary grip on these functions, enabling the first post-feudal states to emerge. So in the Roman world the availability of money permitted the creation of a professional standing army and of a system of salaried officials.

Where did a large-scale Roman slave-owner obtain new slaves? Varro in effect tells us: Ephesus. And the answer would probably have been the same for many generations after his time. But can we work out more systematically and more thoroughly the relative importance of different kinds of sources? The sources which most require consideration are: (1) children born to slave-mothers within the Empire; (2) persons enslaved in provincial or frontier wars; (3) persons imported across the frontiers; (4) the ‘self-enslaved’; and (5) infants abandoned at places within the Empire.

Several years ago, I argued on a number of grounds that the last of these sources, child-exposure, was more important than had previously been recognized. Subsequent reconsideration of the problem has led me to suspect that the source-material under-represents the amount of slave-importation across the frontiers, but not to doubt that child-exposure was very widespread or that it made an important contribution to the slave supply. Of the many subsequent discussions, the most original is that of Ramin and Veyne, who, in an article of 1981 too little attended to in the Anglo-Saxon world, made it appear very likely that those who voluntarily sold themselves into slavery were a larger category than scholars usually imagine. More recently, Scheidel has attempted to revive the case, previously propounded by Shtaerman among others, in favour of the self-reproductivity of the slave population.

Few Roman documents have been more discussed than the great bronze tablet which Cola di Rienzo discovered and erected in the Church of St. John Lateran, and which preserves the latter part of a grant of powers made to Vespasian by senate and people. Does it relate to his tribunician power or to his imperium, or does it merely confer on him supplementary rights? Is the grant tralatician in character, or is it specifically designed to enlarge, or to limit, the imperial power of Vespasian? Does it explain the later juristic doctrines that the emperor could himself make law and was not bound to obey the existing laws? I shall argue that the document preserves part of the senatus consultum passed when Vespasian was first recognized at Rome in December 69; that with one possible exception in the final clause it is tralatician, probably going back to A.D. 37 but incorporating additional prerogatives conferred on Claudius and emperors between Claudius and Vespasian (Part I); and that it is indeed the basis of the juristic doctrines mentioned (Part II). A few remarks are appended on its relevance to the political theory by which imperial autocracy could be justified (Part III).

These two inscriptions come from the precinct of the temple of Hathor at Denderah (Tentyra), capital of the Tentyrite nome, just north of Thebes in Upper Egypt. The impressive remains of the complex are mostly late Ptolemaic and Roman (re)constructions, but they look Pharaonic and suggest social and cultural continuity across the centuries. The inscriptions, however, illustrate the radical changes in communal organization and administration which the Romans introduced. These changes form the subject of this paper. The first inscription dates to 12 B.C., but is almost entirely in the pre-Roman tradition. It is a trilingual dedication with the primary version in demotic (i.e. Egyptian). Augustus is god, implicitly Pharaoh, and lacks his Roman titles. The strategos (governor of the nome) Ptolemaios gives himself obsolete court titles and a string of local priesthoods. Ptolemaios came from a family which had hereditarily held local priesthoods (and probably continued to hold them after him), and his father Panas had preceded him as strategos of the Tentyrite nome, retaining office through the Roman annexation. On this occasion Ptolemaios' dedication was personal, but other dedications show him acting, like his father, as the head of local cult associations. Ptolemaios is last attested as strategos in 5 B.C. Five years later, our second inscription, which dates to 23 September A.D. I, reveals a very different situation. The dedication was made on Augustus' birthday, and was finely inscribed in Greek only. The strategos Tryphon, whose name suggests an Alexandrian sent up to the Tentyrite nome, figures only as an element of the official dating clause standard throughout Roman Egypt; he is just a cog in the Roman administrative machine. The dedication was made corporately by the local community, structured, as we will see, on the new Roman model.

The first part of this study (hereafter Panhellenion I) considered the nature of Hadrian's Panhellenion by looking at its known membership and activities and its social context, and reviewed the impact of the league's foundation on Athens, its capital city, and Eleusis, Attica's most prestigious sanctuary.

Here we concentrate on three Dorian member-cities: Sparta and Argos in the province of Achaia, and Cyrene in Crete-and-Cyrene. In doing so we sometimes need to go beyond the evidence relating specifically to the Panhellenion, since certain features of Greek city-life under the Antonines are best explained in the larger framework of Hadrian's initiatives in the Greek world: in particular a pre-occupation with civic origins, relations of kinship (syngeneia) and recognition through ‘diplomacy’ of the historic primacy of Achaia's most famous cities. In the archaeology of Cyrene and Argos it is possible to discern, as at Athens, a phase of urban development which owed its impetus to Hadrian and which, at Cyrene, embraced a marked archaism of style.

A remarkable new consensus, recognized even by its critics, has emerged among classical historians that ‘the normal Roman family seems to have been a “nuclear family” like our own’. The consensus is remarkable because practically all historians who support it admit that the portrait of the Roman family that emerges from many literary accounts and is enshrined in Roman law and language is nothing like the modern nuclear family. Saller demonstrates that the Romans had no term equivalent to ‘family’ in the modern sense, that is, the father-mother-children triad of the ‘nuclear family’. The English word ‘family’ has almost no relation to Roman concepts of familia and domus. As Saller explains, ‘Domus was used with regard to household and kinship to mean the physical house, the household including family and slaves, the broad kinship group including agnates and cognates, ancestors and descendants, and the patrimony’. The Latin familia, while usually narrower in reference than domus, also had little relation to anything meant by the English ‘family’.

The importance of Beloch's Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt and its influence on subsequent research in ancient demography can hardly be overstated. This book represents the key-stone of all modern investigation on size, structure, and, to a certain extent, dynamics of ancient populations. It was the first overall scientific treatment of the subject and it is still unparalleled in its scope. An attempt at its critical evaluation is not just an historiographical exercise: we must come to terms with Beloch's Bevölkerung, because its detailed treatment of most of the topics concerning the population of the ancient world is at the root of all modern debates and controversies.

In this paper, I seek to delineate the build-up of the Italian slave population. My parametric model revolves around two variables: the probable number of slaves in Roman Italy, and the demographic structure of the servile population. I critique existing estimates of slave totals and propose a new ‘bottom-up’ approach; discuss the probable sex ratio, mortality regime and family structure of the Italian slaves; and advance a new estimate of the overall volume of slave transfers. I argue that the total number of slaves in Roman Italy did not exceed one-and-a-half million, and that this population had been created by the influx of between two and four million slaves during the last two centuries B.C.

In A.D. 131/2 the emperor Hadrian created a new organization of Greek cities, the Panhellenion. This paper is the first of two in which we explore, from a provincial perspective, the implications of this novel initiative by Rome in Greek affairs.

The foundation of the Panhellenion belongs to a series of interventions by Hadrian in the Greek world, the others mostly in the form of acts of benefaction towards individual communities. Although Hadrian's reign marked a watershed in Greek relations with Rome, these relations had already evolved significantly over the previous two generations. The two most obvious developments lay in the overlapping areas of cultural and political life. Not only did educated Greeks and Romans now share an intellectual milieu, but a renaissance of Greek literary and rhetorical activity had begun under the leadership of provincials enjoying (more often than not) close ties with Rome. At the same time, a Roman career had become more available to ambitious Greeks; a marked increase in the numbers of Greek senators may be dated to the last quarter of the first century.

The work we call the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was entitled in the lost manuscript that Xylander used for the first printed edition (1559) Μάρκου Ἀντωνίνου αὐτοκράτορος τῶν εἰς ἑαυτὸν βιβλίων. This title was apparently unknown to a Byzantine historian of the fourteenth century, and may rest merely on the impression the work made on one reader, who affixed it to his copy. But that impression was surely just; even Book I, of which more later, is an intimate document, and Books II to XII a kind of spiritual diary, which Marcus wrote in moments of leisure, probably with his own hand, just as he continued to the end of his life to send autograph letters to his friends (Dio lxxi, 36, 2), and on parchment books, to which he could most easily refer, like those used by Aelius Aristides (xlviii, 8 K) to record his dreams; such books, intended for his own eyes alone, need have had no title. If this view is correct, the Meditations provide evidence unique in antiquity and perhaps in any age for the inmost thoughts of a ruler. The most cursory perusal will indeed show that Marcus was mainly concerned with the divine order of the universe and with the place of man in that order; overt personal allusions are rare. Yet it would be strange if his reflections were not on closer inspection to reveal traces of his own personal experience. I shall argue later that the very frequency with which he recurs to certain topics indicates the preoccupations of the ruler and has historical implications that have not been recognized, even by those who see the work as a spiritual diary and not in any sense as a philosophical treatise. But since that interpretation has not gone without challenge or modification, more must be said to justify it. I shall first discuss Books II to XII and then Book I.

The economy of the early Roman Empire has been an object of study for at least the last century. The discussion has been marked by continuing debate, known sometimes as the primitivist/modern debate and at other times as the Finley debate, following his famous Sather lectures, The Ancient Economy. This paper is a contribution to this debate, written by an economist rather than an ancient historian. My purpose is to define the concept of a ‘market economy’, and to see if it fits the evidence we have for the early Roman Empire.

Finley declared that, ‘ancient society did not have an economic system which was an enormous conglomeration of interdependent markets’. He drew implicitly on research by Polanyi to oppose the views of Rostovtzeff within the field of ancient history and those of Fogel and Engerman in economic history, but he did not explicitly join their conceptual apparatuses. Morris has summarized the debate fuelled by Finley's dramatic lectures in his foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition and argued that the controversy is still vigorous today. I hope to clarify the issues in this debate and even resolve the debate for the period of the early Roman Empire.

Augustine had to face the issue of religious coercion throughout his episcopate, and especially in his dealings with the Donatist schism. As far as I know, he is the only writer in the Early Church to discuss the subject at length. He even changed his mind on the issue, and he has told us of this ‘conversion’ with characteristic disarming frankness. It is a change which cannot fail to interest us, for whom the problem remains acutely relevant. He went on to justify religious coercion with a thoroughness and coherence which is quite as much part of his character as is his candour: and so Augustine has appeared to generations of religious liberals as ‘le prince et patriarche des persécuteurs’

Before A.D. 70 the prefecture of Egypt was the greatest prize in an equestrian career—four praetorian prefects were promoted to it—and thereafter it ranked only just below the praetorian prefecture, to which no fewer than fourteen governors of Egypt were advanced between 70 and 235. In the other great provinces of the empire legati Augusti pro praetore could leave finance to the procurators, while proconsuls perhaps soon came to retain little of their original responsibility for the collection of taxes, and had no army to command. The prefect of Egypt combined fiscal with military and judicial functions. So did the presidial procurators of such areas as Mauretania or Noricum, but the importance of Egypt and the complexity of its administration set the prefect far above them. Egypt was probably the most populous province in the empire and contributed more than any other to the revenues, partly in grain that provided much of Rome's essential food, and its exploitation was a vast public enterprise of which the prefect was the managing director. He also had to do justice not only under Roman law but under the traditional laws of the native Egyptians and of the Greek settlers, among subjects who were both litigious and turbulent. Only defence against external attack was a simpler problem than in other frontier regions.

It is now notorious that the production of inscriptions in the Roman Empire was not constant over time, but rose over the first and second centuries A.D. and fell in the third. Ramsay MacMullen pointed this out more than five years ago, with conclusions more cautionary than explanatory: ‘history is not being written in the right way’, he said, for historians have deduced Rome's decline from evidence that–since it appears only epigraphically–has merely disappeared for its own reasons, or have sought general explanations of decline in theories political, economic, or even demographic in nature, none of which can, in turn, explain the disappearance of epigraphy itself. Why this epigraphic habit rose and fell MacMullen left open to question, although he did postulate control by a ‘sense of audience’. The purpose of this paper is to propose that this ‘sense of audience’ was not generalized or generic, but depended on a belief in the value of romanization, of which (as noted but not explained by MacMullen's article) the epigraphic habit is also a rough indicator. Epitaphs constitute the bulk of all provincial inscriptions and in form and number are (generally speaking) the consequence of a provincial imitation of characteristically Roman practices, an imitation that depended on the belief that Roman legal status and style were important, and that may indeed have ultimately depended, at least in North Africa, on the acquisition or prior possession of that status. Such status-based motivations for erecting an epitaph help to explain not only the chronological distribution of epitaphs but also the differences in the type and distribution of epitaphs in the western and eastern halves of the empire. They will be used here moreover to suggest an explanation for the epigraphic habit as a whole.

The early Roman Empire rested on a network of cities, which were capable both of conspicuous expenditure locally, in the form of public buildings, shows and festivals, and of carrying many of the functions of government; but by the fourth century their capacity to perform these roles had drastically declined. Both the capacity and the decline depended in part on the availability or inavailability of the richer classes to undertake expenditures associated with public offices or with liturgies. These remarks are of course mere commonplaces. They have become so, in the first place, because precisely these changes were noted, and the issues relating to them consciously formulated, in the fourth century itself. So Libanius writes in his Funeral Oration for Julian:

He showed the same care also in relation to the councils in the cities, which formerly flourished in both numbers and wealth, but by that time had come to nothing, since their members, except for a very few, had switched course, some into military service, some into the Senate … The remainder were all but sunk, and for the majority of them undertaking public services (to leitourgein) ended in beggary. Yet who does not know that the vitality of its council is the soul of a city ? But Constantius, while in theory aiding the councils, in practice was their enemy, by moving elsewhere men who sought to evade them, and granting illegal exemptions (ateleiai).

Three points should be noted here: Libanius assumes an evolution which was, if not universal, at any rate general throughout the Empire; the crisis is regarded as having been caused by the availability of roles or statuses which offered an alternative to the obligations of city councillors ; and this availability itself is seen as a product of imperial actions, which (as Libanius goes on to say) Julian had taken steps to reverse.

One of the more tangible benefits that accrued to Rome from the conquest of an empire was the acquisition of significant mineral resources, significant because Italy, although rich in iron, could not provide a sufficient supply of the whole range of metals needed by the Roman state for coinage and by members of the élite for the luxury artefacts that helped to enhance their social status. Once Rome had gained control over metalliferous regions of the Mediterranean, Romans, and especially Italians, were not slow to become involved in mining overseas, while the state came to gain considerable revenue from the leasing of contracts for the right to exploit state-owned mineral resources.

Perusal of over a thousand years of the fasti of the Romans' eponymous magistracy is sufficient to demonstrate that Roman onomastic practice did not stand still. Why, then, is there a tendency to see the system of three names (tria nomina, i.e. praenomen, nomen gentilicium, and cognomen) as the perfection and culmination of the Roman naming system rather than as a transitory stage in an evolutionary process? The simple answer is probably that usage of the tria nomina happens to be typical of the best documented class in one of the best documented, and certainly most studied, eras of Roman history — the late Republic and early Empire. This perspective tends to pervade discussion of post-classical developments, the basic outline of which is clear from a glancing comparison of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, which catalogues eminent persons of the first to third centuries A.D., with the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, covering the fourth to seventh. The difference in their very organizational structure betrays the change since, while the entries in PIR are classified alphabetically by nomen, those of PLRE are arranged by last name, usually cognomen. The major problem requiring explanation is why the nomen gentilicium, the central element of the classical tria nomina, should have been displaced by the cognomen as the one most consistently attested element.

From the first Augustus employed Equites in military and civil posts (Dio LIII 15). The number of such posts multiplied in the course of time, and finally in the third century Equites supplanted senators in positions of the highest responsibility. In general ancient authors almost ignore the inception and development of the equestrian service. Dio makes Maecenas advocate the use of Equites by arguing that the emperor needed numerous assistants and that it was advisable that as many persons as possible, evidently from the higher classes, should feel that they had a share in the government (LII 19; 25). Modern scholars offer various explanations. It is clear that there were too few senators to fill the army commissions that went to Equites. Some equestrian posts were also below senatorial dignity. But others equalled or surpassed in importance those still reserved to senators. On one view the emperors, aiming at greater efficiency, found among the Equites more professional expertise; on another, they could better rely on the political loyalty of the lower order. Stein combined these theories: Augustus ‘called to life an admirable profession of officials (Beamtenstand) which performed its functions with distinction and which could at the same time unlike the senate never threaten the Princeps’; it was ‘an efficient and willing instrument of the autocrat’. For Hirschfeld its triumph in the third century marked the culmination of ‘the three hundred years’ long struggle between senate and emperor’. Individual emperors to whom the creation of particular posts is assigned (often with little justification) are supposed to have deliberately furthered this process. I can find no deep design nor overall plan, either in the arrangements made by Augustus (some of which were suggested by practices of the previous generation), or in those of his successors, but only a series of expedients to meet varying needs and the development of precedents, which ultimately produced the appearance of a system.