Augustus had started the process of making Rome, as a matter of policy, a worthy capital of the world. Travelling to Rome, city of wonders in a land of wonders, was a special experience. In the world of thinking, speaking and writing, Rome was the centre too, the norm and exemplar of Antonine cities. The architecture of Rome was the greatest of its wonders. The cities of Italy in the Augustan period had functioned as channels of horizontal and vertical social mobility. In the Antonine period, moreover, there was more to economic life than landowning. The nature of production in Italy in this period constitutes one of the most problematic sets of questions in ancient economic history. In the Flavian and Trajanic period, the evidence suggests a burgeoning of the cash-crop based, villa-centred, agrarian economy which had characterized the rural landscape of large parts of Italy since the middle Republic.

Quintilian, the leading rhetor, 'teacher of rhetoric', of the Flavian period, fostered and, in his own writing, represented a reaction in literary taste against the innovations of Seneca, Lucan, and their contemporaries. In the long technical sections of Books 3-9 Quintilian attempts mainly to evaluate existing theories rather than to propound new ones: he is flexible and undogmatic. Cicero is his principal model, but he is no thoughtless imitator. Quintilian exercised vast influence on critics and teachers of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries: he seemed to offer precepts they could accept and ideals they could try to realize. Fronto is a rhetorician, confirmed by an introduction to his projected history of Lucius' Parthian campaigns: he apparently intended to work up Lucius' own notes. The principal interest of the correspondence lies in language and style. Aulus Gellius retails numerous fascinating details of Greek and Roman life, language, and thought, suitably predigested.