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.

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.

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.

The tribunate of the plebs, according to a statement that Marcus Cicero puts into the mouth of his brother Quintus, was an office born in sedition and destined to create sedition (‘in seditione et ad seditionem nata,’ Leg. III, 19). There were two major periods of sedition. The first, the time of strife between patricians and plebeians, lasted from the birth of the tribunate in the early fifth century to the Lex Hortensia of 287 B.C. The second is usually dated from the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 to the dictatorship of Caesar, a time when the tribunate was repeatedly an instrument of revolution, now accompanied by violence. The general view is that in the century-and-a-half between these two periods the tribunes, except in the time of Gaius Flaminius, were in accord with the Senate and were indeed agents of senatorial rule.

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.

On I April A.D. 326 the Emperor Constantine issued a strongly worded edict (CTh IX. 24. 1) violently attacking the practice of abduction marriage or bride theft. Addressed ‘to the people’ (‘ad populum’), the law demands the punishment of all persons involved in such cases, including even the girl herself and her parents, if they had later agreed to the marriage of their daughter with her abductor. This edict marks the first explicit recognition in Roman law of marriage by abduction, although it is clear from other literary sources that the phenomenon was not new to the age of Constantine.

In general histories of the Principate a prominent place is often given to the growth of bureaucracy, characterized especially by the equestrian procuratorial service. Along with a growth in size, it is said, came the development of an organization regulated by guidelines—the ‘formation of the rigid framework of a civil service, one that was to a certain extent more and more impersonal’. Thus, with regard to promotion, ‘the procurator's career had a precise promotion ladder, on which the scale of remuneration conferred a surprisingly modern character’. This view carries with it wide-ranging general and specific implications. It suggests that Roman government of the early empire reached a fairly sophisticated level of rational organization in which friendship and patronage, so vital to the workings of Republican politics, declined in importance, as bureaucratic rules played an increasingly decisive role in the appointment and promotion of procurators. More specifically, it has been thought that once the rules have been discovered, missing steps in individual careers can be interpolated with confidence.

In his political Apologia, the letter Ad Fam. 1, 9, addressed to Lentulus in the year 54 B.C., Cicero observed that, as he had repeatedly preached, the goal at which statesmen like himself and his correspondent ought to aim in the conduct of affairs of State was cum dignitate otium. The obvious example of this preaching is the well-known passage in the Pro Sestio, 96 ff., which is Cicero's fullest extant statement of cum dignitate otium as the aim and purpose of the Optimates. The political import of this statement is, for the modern student at any rate, somewhat vague, its vagueness being due to the variety of different meanings of which both dignitas and otium admit.

Sixteen years ago, in an article entitled ‘Polybius and Rome's eastern policy,’ F. W. Walbank raised and examined aspects of what seemed to be an absolutely central flaw in the fabric of Polybius’ account of Roman expansion in the Greek world. The situation that he saw both then and a decade later in his Sather Lectures on Polybius may be put briefly, and I hope fairly, as follows. Polybius believed that Rome's eastern expansion came as the conscious execution by Rome of a consciously adopted plan. Such a view, however, is altogether at odds with the interpretation worked out by Maurice Holleaux on the basis of Polybius’ own narrative (and its survivals in Livy). This state of affairs could come about because of a fundamental contradiction between Polybius' general statements and his own detailed narrative.

The Babatha archive contains documents of a Jewish woman who lived in the village of Maoza situated on the southern shore of the Dead Sea, in what had been the kingdom of Nabataea and became in 106 C.E. the Roman province of Arabia. The first dated document in the archive dates to 22 Elul (August/September) 94 and the last to 19 August 132; some of the documents therefore precede the annexation of Arabia, but the majority follow it. This offers a rare opportunity to examine the consequences of Roman annexation: by examining in detail the changes effected by the Roman presence in the newly acquired province of Arabia, we may improve our picture of Roman provincial government and the relationship between Roman law and native local law, as well as our understanding of the reaction of the provincial population to Roman rule.

In a speech attributed by Xenophon to Jason of Pherae, Thessaly is described as an exporter of grain, in contrast with Athens which was obliged to supplement its own foodstocks with the surplus of others. The ancient sources record the dispatch of Thessalian grain to a few Greek cities; but Thessaly must have been a resource for other Greeks in peacetime, as it was in wartime to Roman armies operating in the region in the middle and late Republic. A newly published inscription from Larisa indicates that on one occasion in the middle of the second century B.C. the Thessalians actually provided grain for the Roman populace itself, in response to a request delivered to the Thessalian koinon by a Roman magistrate. Our main objective in this paper is to place this inscription in a suitable historical context and explain its significance for Rome and Thessaly.

One of the measures carried by Gaius Gracchus in the course of his first tribunate in 123–2 B.C. provided for the regular sale of grain to citizens of Rome at the price of 6⅓ asses per modius. Gracchus also, presumably by the same law, provided for the construction of state granaries.

The sources for the law are meagre. None of them is contemporary, and those later writers who do comment on the law furnish few details. What is known of its content is conveyed in a brief sentence from Livy's Epitomator supported by a scholiast on Cicero's pro Sestio, and in a few words of Appian. The Epitomator and Scholiast give the price at which the grain was sold.

The location of the majority of major sites in Cyrenaica is well established. This has obscured the fact that our knowledge of the detailed topography of the area is in reality highly fragmentary, and can only be increased by detailed work in the field. The purpose of this article is to review the archaeological evidence from the area between Benghazi and Derna as it has been collected by the authors in recent years, and to give an account of its more important implications. On this basis one may examine the complex interrelation of local climate and geography that has controlled the development of settlement between the northern edge of the Cyrenaican plateau and the sea.

The administrative unit known to the Romans as Cyrenaica lies on the coast of North Africa between longitude 19° east and 24° east. Its southern limits were never defined, but any route to the south was effectively blocked by the Calanshu sand sea and the wastelands of the Jebel Zelten.

In A.D. 96 Nerva courted popularity in Rome for his new regime by changing the way in which the special tax on Jews payable to the fiscus Judaicus was exacted. The reform was widely advertised by the issue of coins, under the auspices of the senate, with the proclamation ‘fisci Judaici calumnia sublata’. Precisely how Nerva removed the calumnia no source states, but it can be surmised. The tax did not cease to be collected, for its imposition was still in operation in the time of Origen and possibly down to the fourth century A.D. It is a reasonable hypothesis that Nerva's intention was to demonstrate publicly his opposition to the way in which his hated predecessor, Domitian, had levied the tax, and to procure release for those described by Suetonius (Dom. 12. 2) as particular victims of Domitian's tendency to exact the tax ‘acerbissime’. According to Suetonius, these unfortunates were those who either ‘inprofessi’ lived a ‘iudaicam vitam’ or ‘origine dissimulata’ refused to pay the tax: the people thus trapped by Domitian and, if the hypothesis is correct, exempted by Nerva were those who failed to admit openly to their Jewish practices and/or those who hid their origins (presumably as Jews). I shall argue in this paper that by removing such people from the list of those liable to the Jewish tax, Nerva may unwittingly have taken a significant step towards the treatment of Jews in late antiquity more as a religion than as a nation.

It is understandable that the small town of Irni attracted no attention from historians and geographers in Antiquity. Pliny the Elder, whose lists of cities in the provinces include so many insignificant as well as important communities, eschews any mention of it; in his eyes it will have been neither ‘dignum memoratu’ nor ‘Latio sermone dictu facile’ (NH III, 7). It was left to the enterprise of amateur archaeologists equipped with modern metal-detectors to bring to light the city law, and with that the existence of the city itself. The story of the find and of the stages leading to publication is recounted by J. González in the original publication of two years ago, and need not be repeated here. It is beyond question that it represents an extraordinary enrichment of our knowledge of the Roman city, not just in the Iberian peninsula but throughout the Roman Empire.

Perhaps the most significant feature of the end of paganism in Rome is that we do know about it; in the words of one of the earliest students of this death of a religion, Beugnot, ‘L'histoire n'a daigné qu'assister aux funérailles du paganisme.’ That this is so is due largely to the central position occupied in the religious history of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, by the senatorial aristocracy of Rome.

If great men were the driving force in historical development, the history of antiquity according to Beloch could not be written; our knowledge of their actions is incomplete and their personalities are virtually unknown. ‘In the best case we have only a couple of anecdotes of altogether dubious value, but almost never a line from their own hand; the first and nearly the last of whose character we can form a picture in some degree adequate is Cicero; apart from him we may perhaps count Julian, who already stands on the threshold of a new age.’ In this judgement there are obvious exaggerations, but its truth in many instances is beyond question, and those historians who feel obliged to hold that the course of history is not entirely determined by impersonal factors, which may also be no better known, must acknowledge that any reconstruction of developments in the ancient world is speculative to a greater degree than for some more recent periods.

In 418 the Patrician Constantius recalled the Visigoths from Spain and settled them in the province of Aquitanica Secunda (on the western seaboard of Gaul between the mouth of the Garonne and that of the Loire) and in some neighbouring civitates. Where these neighbouring cities lay is not certain. One of them was Toulouse in Narbonensis Prima, and this became the capital of the Visigothic kings. Salvian writing in 440–1 seems to imply that the Visigoths controlled Novempopulana as well as Aquitanica II. That is an exaggeration, but it may well be that the additional cities granted to the Visigoths over and above Aquitanica II lay immediately south of the Garonne. And this is in some measure confirmed by the fact that in 439 Orientius, Bishop of Auch, acted as the Visigothic king's ambassador to Litorius and Aëtius. We may conclude that in addition to Aquitanica the Visigothic kings controlled a strip of land south of the Garonne running from Toulouse to the ocean, but this did not extend to the Pyrenees. Moreover, they did not control any land north of the Loire. Whether they allowed themselves to be dispersed uniformly over the whole of their territory or whether they were concentrated in more or less dense settlements in restricted parts of their new kingdom is obscure.