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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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).

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.

Our sources for the constitutional settlement and division of the provinces in 27 B.C., and the modification of the settlement in 23 B.C., are notoriously brief and inadequate. Neither Augustus in the Res Gestae nor Velleius Paterculus mentions the provincial aspects of either settlement. The earliest source is Strabo (840): ‘(Caesar) δίχα διεῖλε πᾶσαν τὴν χώραν καὶ τὴν μὲν ἀπέδειξεν ἑαυτῷ τὴν δὲ τῷ δήμῳ (military provinces for himself, peaceful ones for the People)…ἑκατέραν δὲ τὴν μερίδα εἰς ἐπαρχίας διένειμε πλείους, ὡν αἵ μὲν καλοῦνται Καίσαρος, αἵ δὲ τοῦ δήμου. καὶ εἰς μὲν τὰς Καίσαρος ἡγεμόνας καὶδιοικητὰς Καῖσαρ πέμπει, διαιρѽν ἄλλοτε ἄλλως τὰς χώρας…εἰς δὲ τὰς δημοσίας ὁ δῆμος στρατηγοὺς ἤ ὑπάτους…(list of public provinces)…τὰς δὲ ἄλλας ἐπαρχίας ἔχει Καῖσαρ, ὧν εἰς ἃς μὲν πέμπει τοὺς ἐπιμελησομένους ὑπατικοὺς ἄνδρας,εἰς ἃς δὲ στρατηγικούς, εἰς ἃς δὲ καὶ ἱππικούς…’Then there is Suetonius (Div. Aug. 47) : ‘provincias validiores et quas annuis magistratuum imperiis regi nec facile nec tutum erat, ipse suscepit, ceteras proconsulibus sortito permisit.’ Finally there is the account in Cassius Dio (LIII, 12, 2–3): ‘τὴν μὲν φροντίδα τήν τε προστασίαν τѽν κοινѽν πᾶσαν ὡς καὶ ἐπιμελείας τινòς δεομένων ὑπεδέξατο, οὔτε δὲ πάντων αὐτòς τѽν ἐθνѽν ἄρξειν, οὔθ' ὅσων ἄν ἄρξῃ, διὰ παντòς τοῦτο ποιήσειν ἔφη, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν ἀσθενέστερα ὡς καὶ εἰρηναϊα καὶ ἀπόλεμα ἀπέδωκε, τὰ δὲ ἰσχυρότερα … κατέσχε, λόγῳ μὲν ὅπως ἡ μὲν γερουσία ἀδεѽς τὰ κάλλιστα τῆς ἀρχῆς καρπῷτο….’

These are the only accounts of the division of the provinces in 27. For the settlement of 23 our evidence is even poorer, a single sentence in Cassius Dio (LIII, 32, 5) ‘… τήν τε ἀρχὴν τὴν ἀνθύπατον ἐσαεἱ καθάπαξ ἔχειν ὥστε μήτε ἐν τῇ ἐσόδῳ τῇ εἴσῳ τοῦ πωμηρίου κατατίθεσθαι αὐτὴν μήτ' αὕθις ἀνανεοῦσθαι, καὶ ἐν τῷ ὑπηκόῳ τὸ πλεϊον τѽν ἑκασταχόθι ἀρχόνων ἰσχύειν ἐπέτρεψεν’.

The paucity of the sources—combined with the fact that they are mainly in Greek—has led to insoluble problems about how Augustus' position was described at the time, or (alternatively) what the nature of his imperium vis à vis the provinces was. None the less there is a fair consensus of opinion about the division of the provinces itself, and the nature of the administrative pattern which it produced. This can be summarized as follows:

Augustus undertook the administration of a large provincia, comprising Spain, Gaul and Syria, for a period of ten years, possibly with proconsular authority. He governed these provinces through legati appointed by, and responsible to, himself. The other provinces were governed by pro-magistrates responsible to the Senate. Down to 23 Augustus was also consul. In 23, while retaining his provincia, he abandoned the consulate and accepted imperium mains, which gave him superior authority to pro-magistrates, and enabled him to intervene outside his provincia when necessary. In normal circumstances, however, control of the provinces was divided between the Emperor and the Senate.

The aim of this article is to consider three questions which seem to me to be crucial to the understanding of the late-republican and Augustan censuses: (a) Why was only one lustrum—that of 69—performed between 86 and 28 B.C.? (b) Does this mean that there was only one census of the Roman people held in that period ? (c) Why was the figure of civium capita published in 28 B.C. (4,063,000) so much larger than that for 69 (900,000 or 910,000) ? The third question was re-opened recently when Professor Arnold Toynbee, in a long Annex on the republican census-figures in the first volume of Hannibal's Legacy, endorsed Beloch's view, which Tenney Frank had rejected, that Augustus used radically different criteria for his enumeration from those employed by the censors of the Republic. Moreover, P. A. Brunt has indicated his adherence to Beloch's view in several places, and defends it in detail in his forthcoming book on Italian manpower.

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.

With the increasing sophistication of excavation and exploration our knowledge of the provinces of Rome has grown stunningly in recent years. It will, one may hope, continue to grow; but the prospect of further advances ought not to be a deterrent to periodic reassessment and synthesis. Specialization, inevitable and productive, nevertheless runs the risk of a loss of perspective. The study of the Roman provinces involves widely divergent skills, and this is especially true for regions at the fringes of the empire. The pages which follow constitute a gathering together of new material on the history of Roman Arabia. Incorporated in this report are various observations and discoveries of my own,—some the result of a profitable visit to the Middle East in January of 1970. In writing I have had particularly in mind the needs of Roman historians, including myself: this paper represents a preliminary stage in the preparation of a history of the province of Arabia. Obviously there can be no continuous narrative history here or a balanced consideration of all aspects of the province. New evidence and important problems (old or new) are at issue.

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).

‘For those outside the circle of learned devotees important work by papyrologists too often remains unfamiliar’ (J. J. Wilkes, JRS 65 (1975), 187). In the past few years the contribution of the papyri to the history of the Roman Empire has been very important, and it is the main purpose of the notes which follow to provide for the historian a convenient summary of recent documentary evidence which demands his attention. This survey encompasses work which has appeared in the last fifteen years (though with reference to documents published earlier which have recently received significant discussion) and covers the period of Roman imperial history from Augustus to Constantine. The material is divided into three sections. In the first I collect items which provide new information on topics of general imperial history, mainly matters of chronology and prosopography relating to Emperors and the imperial house; to which I have added evidence for Emperors in direct contact with Egypt, relating largely to imperial visits and revolts. In the second part I discuss Egypt as a Roman province, its organization, officials, social and economic history; some of the fresh conclusions which have emerged naturally have a broader application, which I hope to have indicated in the course of my discussion. In the brief final section documents are collected which either have their provenance outside Egypt or specifically relate to places other than Egypt. It is hardly necessary to add that the overall selection of items is subjective and cannot hope to be comprehensive. It will be noticed that some important topics are intentionally excluded from systematic examination—in particular, Roman Law, Graeco-Roman religion and Christianity.

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.

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.