The purpose of the following pages is to study the problem of debt in Rome of the Ciceronian age. A part of this argument will be uncontroversial or at least familiar; that is, the way in which Roman politicians lived in prolonged states of indebtedness. The rest of the argument will be frankly more speculative; it will suggest that Caesar's arrival in Rome in 49 B.C. provoked a crisis that was in some degree inevitable; but that Caesar in consequence undertook certain remedial measures that were of an importance for the future developments of Roman law.

Documentary and archaeological evidence concurs in placing the foundation of Marseille by colonists from Phocaea in around 600 B.C. The site can only have been chosen with an eye to its maritime commercial potential. Surrounded on the landward side by a chain of hills, the city's immediate hinterland was tiny, and only moderately fertile. Geographically, in the words of Camille Jullian, ‘Marseille … semble tourner le dos à la Provence’. But thanks to its magnificent, sheltered, deep-water harbour, now known as the Vieux-Port, the city has been a focal point for Mediterranean trade throughout its long history, and its immediate landward isolation has not affected its ability to exploit the Rhône corridor and establish commercial relations with the interior of France. Its location makes it a classic gateway community.

This article is intended to be read in association with that of Schofield which follows. They share a common outlook—for we both believe that an understanding of the literary form of De Divinatione is integral to an understanding of its philosophical and historical point. But in detail our approaches are rather different. My own paper is the work of an historian and is concerned principally with the intellectual and cultural context of De Divinatione. My analysis of the text, highlighting its tensions and unresolved contradictions, follows from my analysis of that broader context. Schofield, by contrast, studies De Divinatione as an example of Hellenistic philosophical argumentation and explores the ways Cicero translates this not merely into Latin, but into a specifically Roman rhetorical mode. Other differences—in particular some disagreement as to how far it is possible to identify a ‘Ciceronian position’ on religion—are signalled in the text and notes of what follows.

No subject in the history of the Roman Empire has more significance or more pitfalls than that of the local cultures of the provinces. The evidence is in each case, with the exception of Judaea and Egypt, relatively slight, disparate and ambiguous. But, on the one hand, the subject has very real attractions, which may lead to the building of vast but fragile historical theories, attempting to bring the distinctive culture of an area into a schematic relationship with events such as political movements or the spread of Christianity. On the other, we can never escape the possibility that the denial of the survival of a significant local culture may be falsified by new evidence; even worse, a local culture may have existed in a form which left no written records or datable artefacts.

Yet the problem must be faced, not only for the intrinsic interest which such cultures present, but for the light the enquiry sheds on Graeco-Roman civilization itself. We might conclude for one area that Graeco-Roman culture remained the merest façade, for another that it completely obliterated a native culture. More commonly, we will find a mixture or co-existence of cultures. In such a situation, again, the local element might have been culturally and socially insignificant, or, as it was in Egypt and in Judaea, embodied in a coherent traditional civilization with its own language, literature, customs, religion and (in Egypt) art-forms.

What we know of Roman political life under the early Empire we owe mostly to senatorial writers, and to an eques, Suetonius; a single Imperial freedman, Phlegon of Tralles, has left some scraps of information about the Court in his own time and before. It is therefore worth paying some attention when we have a lengthy text which reproduces the observations on human life and fortune of a man who was himself the slave of an Imperial freedman. Epictetus has been little used as a historical source; it is the aim of this paper to bring out both the extent and the value of his references to Roman society and politics in his own time.

Before we can assess the value of these references, we must examine both the experience on which they are based and the authenticity of the text in which they occur. Epictetus originated from Hierapolis in Phrygia; according to an inscription he was born a slave. Either by birth or sale, he belonged to Epaphroditus, the freedman and a libellis of Nero, who after Nero's death survived unharmed until relegated, and then (in 95) executed, by Domitian. Whether Epaphroditus remained a libellis under the Flavians is not clear, though the likelihood is that he did not. This view would be supported if we could be sure that it was the same Epaphroditus who encouraged Josephus in the writing of his Antiquitates, completed in 93–4.

How did the relentless spread of Roman power change people's lives? From military mobilization, urbanization, slavery, and the nexus between taxation and trade to linguistic and religious change and shifting identities, the most pervasive consequences of empire all had one thing in common: population movements on an unprecedented scale. Yet despite its pivotal role in social and cultural change, the nature of Roman mobility has never been investigated in a systematic fashion. In this study, I develop a comprehensive quantitative model of population transfers within, to, and from Italy, from the late fourth century B.C. to the first century A.D. Owing to the diverse and complex character of these movements, I develop my argument in two steps. The present paper deals with the demographic context, scale, and distribution of the migration of free persons. I argue that the total population of Italy in the early imperial period was of the order of five to six million rather than fourteen to twenty million (Section II); that state-sponsored re-settlement programmes dramatically increased overall levels of mobility on three occasions (during the Italian wars in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C., in the aftermath of the Second Punic War in the early second century B.C., and in the period of constitutional transition from the 80s to the 10s B.C.) (Section III); and that in the last two centuries B.C., colonization programmes and urban growth in Italy required the permanent relocation of approximately two to two-and-a-half million adults (Section IV).

Epictetus speaks: Just as it is not open to the banker or the greengrocer to reject the value of Caesar's coin, but he is obliged, whether he likes it or not, when you offer it, to hand it over for what he has for sale in exchange for it, so it is with the soul. The good on its appearance instantly attracts to itself, the bad repels. The soul will never reject the worth of something with the manifest appearance of goodness, no more than one would reject Caesar's coin.

Spain was famous for its mineral wealth long before the Romans arrived there. Stesichorus in the sixth century had written of the silver-rich river Tartessos, and the wealth extracted by the Carthaginians was well-known to later writers. The way in which Rome exploited these resources is of special interest. So large a source of profit must have benefited not only the state, but also the men who organized the working of the silver mines; and this in turn may well have led to political and social changes in Rome. Moreover in Spain for the first time the Romans had to evolve financial institutions and methods whereby an overseas province of substantial wealth might be taxed. The two Spanish provinces were not of course Rome's first possessions outside Italy; but Sicily already had a comprehensive set of fiscal institutions, known as the lex Hieronica, which the Romans had taken over along with their control of Hiero's kingdom, and which they had copied for the tax system in the rest of the island; while in the case of Sardinia, though very little indeed is known of the early period of its administration by Rome, the association in Livy's reports of its corn tithe with that of Sicily indicates that an essentially similar system was used there too. In the Spanish provinces therefore the Romans had few precedents in their own experience on which to draw.

‘Sit ergo nobis orator quem constituimus is qui a M. Catone finitur, vir bonus dicendi peritus, verum, id quod et ille posuit prius et ipsa natura potius ac maius est, utique vir bonus.’ (Inst. XII, 1, 1). Why did Quintilian insist so strongly on the moral qualities of the orator ? The question has not been persistently enough asked. Austin, for example, thinks that it is only ‘a steadfast sincerity of purpose throughout’ that redeems the first chapter of Book Twelve from ‘mere moralizing’. And it only takes the problem a stage further back to say that this is a matter of Stoic influence. Even if Posidonius did formulate in connexion with rhetoric a maxim on the lines of Strabo's οὐχ οἷόν τε ἀγαθὸν γενέσθαι ποιητὴν μὴ πρότερον γενηθέντα ἄνδρα ἀγαθόν, we must still ask why Quintilian troubled to give this Stoic view such new prominence. After all, ‘oratori…nihil est necesse in cuiusquam iurare leges’ (XII, 2, 26). And it is clear that Quintilian realized that he was innovating. Cicero, he writes, despite the width of his conception, thought it enough to discuss merely the type of oratory that should be used by the perfect orator: ‘at nostra temeritas etiam mores ei conabitur dare et adsignabit officia.’ (XII, pr. 4). This is perhaps to schematize the contrast a little over-dramatically. Cicero had certainly written in theDe Oratore: ‘Quarum virtutum expertibus si dicendi copiam tradiderimus, non eos quidem oratores effecerimus, sed furentibus quaedam arma dederimus.’ (III, 55). But there is no doubt that Cicero was not primarily concerned with the moral aspect. As the leading orator of his day, he may have thought it indelicate or superfluous to stress that the perfect orator must be a good man. Moreover, it was not clear that the troubles of Cicero's day were the result of morally bad orators: one had to look back to Saturninus and Glaucia for examples of the evils caused by unscrupulous use of words.

Normally, little attention is paid to the authors of military manuals in the imperial period. ‘Entertaining though trifling’ is a comment that can generally be heard. Frontinus is more familiar than most because of his distinguished career and other writings, but even his Strategemata is considered more as a source of historical anecdote than as an object of serious study in its own right. Yet the military textbooks fit into the tradition of didactic literature in antiquity and as such raise questions about their scope and purpose, and about what use could be or was made of them. This has special significance in relation to generalship and the evolution of tactics in the Roman empire.

One of the most revealing aspects of any society is the distribution of wealth. In the ancient world, the stratification of landholdings essentially determined the stratification of wealth. There were, to be sure, many other kinds of wealth: funds and commodities for lending, urban rental property, productive enterprises, slaves, ships, and so on. To some extent these were no doubt owned by the same people who owned agricultural land, but the almost total absence of quantifiable data makes generalization difficult. Land, moreover, occupied a unique position in the economy and government of the Roman Empire, both practically and ideologically. The great bulk of taxation fell on the land, and almost all of the burdens of public service both in the cities and in the villages were attached to its ownership. That these disadvantages of land as a form of wealth were insufficient to deter the élite from desiring land is in some measure the result of the enormous ideological preference that all of classical antiquity attached to land as a form of wealth, an ideology connected in part to the relative stability of returns from landed property compared to those from other, more volatile, forms of wealth.

It should be plain that important progress is to be made in the economic and social history of the Greco-Roman world through more systematic studies of the material remains. In the field of ancient manufacture and commerce, M. I. Finley has called for ‘a more sophisticated effort to approach quantification and pattern-construction’, and other historians too are well aware of what needs to be done. Doing it, however, can be difficult, for such projects, if approached with a scholarly desire for precision, bristle with complications, and the results can often be no more than tentative. Such is the case with this study of the terracotta lamp industry. For their part, the archaeologists who have studied groups of terracotta lamps, whether from particular sites or particular museums, have not altogether succeeded in fitting the material into the known framework of Roman life (this is not to suggest a primacy of written over material sources, simply that both are indispensable in economic history).

τὰ γὰρ τὸ πάλαι (sc. ἄστεα) μεγάλα ἦν, τὰ πολλὰ σμικρὰ αὐτῶν γέγονε. The period of high prosperity in Roman Puteoli extended from the late Republic until the early years of the second century A.D., after which economic primacy in Italy passed from the great port city on the Bay of Naples to Ostia at the Tiber's mouth. Or so, at any rate, it is now commonly believed: Charles Dubois was the first scholar to develop the thesis that Puteoli declined in the second century, and his arguments have been accepted, with modifications, both by economic and social historians and in most recent investigations of the two Roman cities. But inevitably, given the nature of our sources, there are elements of subjectivity in the criteria used to measure historical change; ‘decline’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘growth’ are relative, and therefore often ambiguous, terms, particularly when applied to pre-industrial cities and towns. In this article I hope to modify the prevailing opinion by a closer scrutiny of the evidence for social and economic conditions in second-century Puteoli. In part one the various arguments for a decline are critically reviewed; parts two and three are attempts to exploit a substantial body of local evidence, which is largely inscriptional, to shed light on the nature of Puteolan society and on the economic conditions prevalent in the city; the results of the study are set forth in a brief conclusion.

A conventional certainty is that the first state-driven persecution of Christians happened in the reign of Nero and that it involved the deaths of Peter and Paul, and the mass execution of Christians in the aftermath of the great fire of July 64 c.e. The argument here contests all of these facts, especially the general execution personally ordered by Nero. The only source for this event is a brief passage in the historian Tacitus. Although the passage is probably genuine Tacitus, it reflects ideas and connections prevalent at the time the historian was writing and not the realities of the 60s.

The narrative organization of Propertius' first poetry-book seems to encourage a practice of reading the characters and events of his love elegy as real. The predominantly autobiographical mode allows the reader to equate the lover of the text with the author Propertius. Direct addresses to a beloved ‘Cynthia’ who is allocated physical and psychological characteristics suggest that the narrative's female subject has a life outside the text as Propertius' mistress. The illusion of a real world populated by real individuals is then sustained by various other formal mechanisms such as the regular deployment of addresses to the historically verifiable figure of Tullus or occasional references to the landscape of Baiae, Umbria and Rome. Having established a recognizable setting, the poetry-book seems even to account for its own existence as literary discourse with the claim that composition is a method of courtship. Writing is subsumed within and subordinated to an erotic scheme: Propertius writes to woo a woman.

One fundamental question is already implied in the use of the word ‘policing’. A glance at the scholarly literature shows that ‘policing’ is used in the context of Roman history with respect to the aediles and the tresviri capitales, or as an equivalent of magisterial coercitio; or it is applied to the vigiles, the cohortes urbanae or the cohortes praetoriae of the Principate as well as to the respective praefecti; and, of course, to the various controlling bodies and agents of the Later Roman Empire. This is at least partly due to the fact that the fundamental nineteenth-century works reflect a usage of ‘policing’ which oscillates between the description of a function, i.e. securing public order, on the one hand and the designation of a specialized agency to fulfil this function on the other hand. This is due to the fact that the establishment of a specialized law-enforcement apparatus only took place during the (eighteenth and) nineteenth century. The institutionalization of a professional police force represents a fundamental change in societal as well as individual attitudes towards and demand for public order. It may easily be overlooked that the indisputable gain in security and public order had to be paid for with a considerable loss of flexibility in the interaction between rulers and ruled (which was now mediated by a bureaucratic organization), and with an intensification of control and discipline in the everyday life of most members and strata of society.

Concrete is regarded as a quintessentially Roman achievement. The spread of the technology is usually dated to the fourth or third centuries b.c., and interpreted as a symptom of Rome's early expansion in Italy. In this paper I offer a reappraisal of the available evidence for early concrete construction in Rome. On the basis of stratigraphic evidence, I conclude that a later date should be assigned to most of the remains. I situate the origins of the technological innovation within the radical change in architectural styles that unfolded in the middle of the second century b.c., affecting both domestic architecture and public building. The new chronology has an impact on current models of cultural diffusion in Roman Italy, linking the development of Late Republican architecture with the broader debate on the cultural implications of the Roman conquest.