Roman History

Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald. 2018. “The Languages of Christianity on the Silk Roads and the Transmission of Mediterranean Culture into Central Asia.” In Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750, edited by Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas, 206–219. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Augustus’ success in implementing monarchical rule at Rome is often attributed to innovations in the symbolic language of power, from the star marking Julius Caesar’s deification to buildings like the Palatine complex and Forum Augustum to rituals like triumphs and funerals. This book illumines Roman subjects’ vital role in creating and critiquing these images, in keeping with the Augustan poets’ sustained exploration of audiences’ role in constructing verbal and visual meaning. From Vergil to Ovid, these poets publicly interpret, debate, and disrupt Rome’s evolving political iconography, reclaiming it as the common property of an imagined republic of readers. In showing how these poets used reading as a metaphor for the mutual constitution of Augustan authority and a means of exercising interpretive libertas under the principate, this book offers a holistic new vision of Roman imperial power and its representation that will stimulate scholars and students alike. (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, spring 2018)

Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald. 2019. “Where Is Syriac Pilgrimage Literature in Late Antiquity? Exploring the Absence of a Genre.” In Empire and After: Historiography and Space in Late Antiquity, edited by Peter Van Nuffelen, 164–180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This paper aims to set out the evidence for regional patterns in diet during the Roman period. It uses a specific sector of archaeological data to explore the notions of Romanization, inter-regional influence and diachronic change. That sector is the mammal bones in faunal assemblages from excavations, an area of data gathering that has only developed significantly since the 1970s and is therefore relatively new in terms of yielding useful results. The paper was originally published in 1999, and has been updated for its bibliography.

This article aims to analyze Roman domestic spaces excavated in the region of Celtiberia in central Spain. The main goal is to identify the relationship between social patterns and the spatial configuration of houses. The application of different space syntax methods (accessibility, relative asymmetry, and control value) is the principal means of analysis. This procedure allows us to identify some spatial patterns linked with different patterns of domestic behaviour. In addition, we propose a review of the local epigraphic evidence as a basis for an analysis of the relation between family structures and citizen status in Roman Celtiberia. Inspired by the comparison of the two kinds of evidence, we have also developed an interpretative approach to explain the uneven introduction of Roman models of domestic architecture in some specific sectors of local society.

The Canterbury Hinterland Project (CHP) has combined aerial photographic and LiDAR analysis, synthesis of HER and other data across east Kent with targeted survey south and east of Canterbury. We present possible hillforts, temples, large enclosures, a major trackway, linking paths, burials, and high-status Roman-period complexes and argue that people organized the landscape to communicate meaning in two main ways: a 'public' face oriented towards the Dover-Canterbury road and expressions of ritual and remembrance for local groups. The character of this rural population has traditionally been understood in terms of its relationship to the civitas capital and villas, we look beyond this to examine a more detailed vision of possible social interactions.

Since Maria Teresa Cipriano's and Marie‐Brigitte Carre's seminal 1989 paper ‘Production et typologie des amphores sur la côte adriatique de l'Italie’ in the volume ‘Amphores romaines et histoire économique’, our knowledge of Adriatic Italian wine amphorae has much improved. Most of these ‘new data’, however, remain poorly known among the wider scholarly community and no real update regarding their production loci and distribution patterns has as yet been attempted. This paper fills the void for the central part of the eastern coastline between Rimini and Pescara and reviews the latest evidence regarding the manufacture and circulation of these amphorae. In the process, the central Adriatic area of Italy emerges as a key player in the Late Republican and Early Imperial wine trade. This reassessment provides a new starting point for the diachronic exploration of the Adriatic wine commerce between c.250 BC and AD 150.

In this volume we have brought together a group of scholars working on different periods and regions of the Mediterranean to study the family from the earliest historical periods of the Mediterranean to early medieval times spanning a time range from the second millennium bce to the sixth century ce. This volume also offers an outlook on the family in later periods of the Mediterranean, which helps us to put our findings into perspective with better documented periods. The family should be understood here as an evolving process, also called the family life cycle, comprising marriage, childbirth, death, and divorce. On the basis of the family and household we can study the organization of domestic space, gender relations , social representation, and small‐scale economic activities along a continuum of the centuries and millennia. A house in this volume is defined as the physical building, while a household defines a group of individuals sharing a common dwelling, usually family members and their servants and/or lodgers. In a comparative approach taking into consideration the material, visual, and textual evidence for answering questions of cultural influence and social change, a study of houses and households as the core units of society we hope will eventually enhance considerably our knowledge of social organization in the ancient Mediterranean at large. It is our view that the Greek and Roman worlds as pre‐industrial societies were not fundamentally different from societies in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, and we firmly believe that further comparative work on the Mediterranean family therefore would prove itself extremely fruitful in mending the academic fragmentation of a subject split between so many different disciplines.

This paper examines the evidence for Saharan trade in the Roman period in the light of recent fieldwork in the Libyan Sahara by the Fazzan Project and the Desert Migrations Project and by the Italian Mission in the Acacus. The results of these projects suggest that trade between the Roman world and the communities of the Sahara was substantially greater than believed a few years ago and highlight the transformative effect that contact with the ancient Mediterranean had on Saharan society, especially on the Garamantes of Fazzan. But this paper also argues that in focusing chiefly on trans-Saharan commerce, much previous research has misunderstood the nature and importance of Saharan trade in antiquity. Relatively few types of goods were traded all the way across the Sahara from south to north or vice-versa in the Roman period. Rather, we should be thinking principally in terms of a network of interdependent sub-systems, of short-, medium- and long-distance exchange; the trans-Saharan traffic was only one part of this network. Moreover, Saharan trade -- and especially the short- and medium-distance subsystems -- also provoked transformations in the frontier zones of Roman North Africa. The abundant evidence of Roman imports to Fazzan discovered by British fieldwork there also calls into question the universal assumption that trans-Saharan trade in the medieval and modern periods exceeded the scale of trans-Saharan trade in antiquity; this is based on no good evidence at all and may be entirely false. Comparison with better documented periods suggests that the Roman world was capable of absorbing a trans-Saharan slave traffic at least as large as that of the medieval period and the evidence of Roman imports points to a substantial trade, of which slaves were probably a major component, via the central routes across the Sahara. Saharan trade in antiquity was organised around a set of drivers that were very different from those of the medieval trans-Saharan trade, with a key role played by the development of a substantial agriculturally-based trading state within the Sahara itself, the Garamantes. The collapse of Saharan trade in late antiquity is related to the decline of Garamantian authority and is linked in part to the emergence of new tribal conglomerations in the frontier zones between the fourth and sixth centuries AD.

This study is based on the analysis of some inscriptions which date to the tetrarchic age (approximately between 285 and 312) and have received little attention in scholarship. They are dedications of statues of deities, set up in different sanctuaries by order of the emperors themselves (Diocletian and Maximian, Galerius, Maximinus Daia, Licinius), through the agency of their provincial representatives, the governors. Some of these (it is the case of two statues from Didyma) seem to be acts of disinterested pietas and to fit perfectly into the inveterate tradition of the celebration of gods, coherently with the self-representation of tetrarchs as it is shown in panegyrics, inscriptions and coins. Others instead (a couple of dedications from ancient Ilion), explicitly – and quite surprisingly - refer to the fact that the statues were made of (a part of) the precious metal which the emperors ordered to be taken from the same temples, according to a practice of ‘exchange’ which is not unparalleled in previous times. A similar procedure (statues made from metal belonging to temple treasures) seem to have been followed by Licinius in two different temples of Dionysopolis in Scythia. The request of crude metal is then examined in the framework of the fiscal and monetary policy of the emperors of the first, second and third tetrarchy, as it is illustrated by several papyri. Finally, the possibility that seizure of temples’ properties was not uncommon in the Tetrarchic period invites us  to reconsider the originality and the meaning of Constantine’s politics towards pagan sanctuaries.

This article proposes a new reading of a late first-century c.e. inscribed dedication from Todi (Umbria) as an accusation of witchcraft, a rhetorical text aimed at propagating a particular story among the local community. Historical and anthropological studies of witchcraft accusations in other societies have emphasised how they can reveal tensions and anxieties that are normally not visible to the observer. By drawing on these studies and close examination of the language and content of the inscription, this article analyses an historical agent's experience of the social structure of early imperial Italy. The accusation is read as a freedman's response to his ambiguous position in a slave society, the ambivalent power of writing in Roman culture and the religious claims of Flavian imperial discourse.

This paper examines the relationship between the design and use of mechanical technology, patronage and investment, and economic return, using three main case studies: water-lifting devices, the water-powered grain mill, and the diverse uses of water-power in mining. Water-power was used on a wide scale and in diversified forms at an early date (by the first century A.D.), and the use of mechanical technology to perform economically critical work had an important impact on economic performance and the potential for per capita growth, especially in the latter centuries B.C. and the first two centuries A.D. Conversely, in the third century A.D. the cessation of the employment of hydraulic mining techniques enabling large-scale extraction of gold and other metals may have had an adverse impact on the economy as a whole. Growth and progress do not necessarily follow a linear pattern of advance; technologies are lost as well as adopted.

Abrupt climate change in the past is thought to have disrupted societies by accelerating environmental degradation, potentially leading to cultural collapse. Linking climate change directly to societal disrup- tion is challenging because socioeconomic factors also play a large role, with climate being secondary or sometimes inconsequential. Combining paleolimnologic, historical, and archaeological methods provides for a more secure basis for interpreting the past impacts of climate on society. We present pollen, non- pollen palynomorph, geochemical, paleomagnetic and sedimentary data from a high-resolution 2700 yr lake sediment core from central Italy and compare these data with local historical documents and archeological surveys to reconstruct a record of environmental change in relation to socioeconomic history and climatic fluctuations. Here we document cases in which environmental change is strongly linked to changes in local land management practices in the absence of clear climatic change, as well as examples when climate change appears to have been a strong catalyst that resulted in significant environmental change that impacted local communities. During the Imperial Roman period, despite a long period of stable, mild climate, and a large urban population in nearby Rome, our site shows only limited evidence for environmental degradation. Warm and mild climate during the Medieval Warm period, on the other hand, led to widespread deforestation and erosion. The ability of the Romans to utilize imported resources through an extensive trade network may have allowed for preservation of the environment near the Roman capital, whereas during medieval time, the need to rely on local resources led to environmental degradation. Cool wet climate during the Little Ice Age led to a breakdown in local land use practices, widespread land abandonment and rapid reforestation. Our results present a high- resolution regional case study that explores the effect of climate change on society for an under- documented region of Europe.

The book furnishes a unique insight into the world of meanings and emotions associated with hospital life by including narratives from both patients and caregivers. The story is told in a dozen episodes which illustrate the transformation of hospitals from  houses of mercy to tools of confinement, from dwellings of rehabilitation to spaces of clinical teaching and research, from rooms for birthing and dying to institutions of science and technology. From ancient Greece to the era of AIDS, the book  features key hospitals , covering the most important themes in the development of medicine and therapeutics.

Debates on the nature of the Roman city and its relation to the countryside have lately moved towards questioning the validity of the very category of ‘the city’, both analytically and in terms of past reality.  While archaeology has long been mobilized within these debates, this paper argues for the unexplored potential of a range of specialist pockets of qualitative knowledge about specific artefact classes. Terra sigillata, the red-gloss imperial tableware, is a case in point. By adopting a bird’s eye view on sigillata production, distribution, and consumption across a geographical and chronological range, this paper develops a new metaphor for the role of Roman cities: as switching devices in the building of networks. By describing the role of cities in structural rather than categorical terms, this metaphor allows for contingency and for the integration of different analytical and interpretive scales.

Robinson Crusoe's memoirs form "the most fascinating boy's book ever written", wrote Leslie Stephen. This self-help book, within a matter of decades, had reached an audience as wide as any book ever written in English. Edited by Daniel Defoe, it had become part of the literary consciousness of European civilization. For three centuries, there has been a need for studies summarizing the related intriguing scientific issues in the fields of history, geography, cartography, astronomy, geology, botany, zoology, climatology, archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, and linguistics. If the story is true, readers are curious to follow it on maps. The world calls one of Juan Fernández Islands of Chile as Isla Robinson Crusoe, without much evidence. Rather, Cocos Island of Costa Rica seems a better candidate for scientists, based on Crusoe's observations about latitude, lunitidal records, climate, flora, fauna, topographic features, and his map of 1719. A later map of Cocos Island, from Stevenson's Treasure Island, is briefly mentioned. Crusoe's travels through China, Russia, and the Pyrenees offer unique geographic information by dozens of toponyms. Different editions of the book's three parts contain a few misprints in geographical names. His travel route is compared with that of ambassador Ides and many contemporary maps. Three centuries ago, based on the complaints and optical reasoning of a blind man, the world hastily categorized Crusoe's autobiography as a fiction, the first English novel. The stubborn fact remains that the heroes, the story, the location and details of the island, or the words of Friday are historical.

The architectural evolution of the Regia between the end of the « Kingship » and the beginning of the Republic doesn’t allow to confirm the concomitant appearance of the rex sacrorum and of the republican political régime. This priest was at the origin holding a prevailing position in the ordo sacerdotum and it’s only during the IVth century BC that his role was outshined by the pontifex maximus’ one. His religious functions were accomplished in the Regia, at the curia Calabra and at the Comitium. The republican rex sacrorum  can only be the prolongation of a « king-priest » (rex) who was doing his functions next to the political and military chiefs of the city, maybe since the end of the VIIth century BC. The architectural sclerosis of the Regia starting at the beginning of the republican period reveals both the end of the political changings of the archaic age and the beginning of the slow decline of the function of the « king-priest ».

This paper discusses two scanty but complex groups of sources which seem to suggest that Thursday (dies Iovis, that is, Jupiter’s Day in the Roman planetary seven-day week) was a day of rest in honour of Jupiter during the later imperial period: a number of ecclesiastical texts from late antique Gaul and Galicia, and three documentary papyri from Oxyrhynchus. The former imply that an unofficial observance of Jupiter’s Day, as opposed to the Christian Lord’s Day (Sunday), persisted among the populace despite Church opposition to such deviant behaviour. The latter hint at Thursday being a non-working day for official bureaux during the third and early fourth centuries, before the formalisation of Sunday as an official day of rest by Constantine in 321. The paper concludes with reflections on the idea that during the later imperial period –as the use of the planetary week became increasingly popular– Thursday became the most important and sacred day in the Roman seven-day week by reason of being the day dedicated to the chief god of the Roman pantheon and, at the same time, the day associated to the astrologically favourable planet that had been named after Jupiter. If Thursday was ever a day of rest recurring on a hebdomadal basis during the later Roman Empire, it was presumably the Judeo-Christian tradition of the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day that provided pagans with the notion of a weekly feast day.

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This article examines the evidence for production activities in the cities of Roman North Africa and shows how the importance of urban craft production has been largely overlooked in many discussions of the ancient economy. It is usually difficult to determine the true scale of urban production activities without extensive excavation, since workshops were often quite small; they may, however, have been numerous and scattered throughout a city. Excavations of the scale required are rarely achievable with today's techniques; two sites excavated in the first half of the twentieth century, however, reveal a situation characterized by a number of workshops: 22 fulleries at Timgad and 18 establishments for salting fish in Sabratha. Urban surface survey is suggested here as the best method to investigate sites where it is feasible, in order to identify the extent of the deposits of waste production, with the help of geophysical surveys to locate ovens and furnaces, and excavation to investigage specific areas. This combination of techniques has been successfully tested at Leptiminus, Meninx and Thamusida, and has allowed us to identify the presence of production activities for ceramics, metal working, and the extraction of purple dye. The evidence emerging from recent archaeological investigations suggests that the contribution of craft manufacture to the economy of Roman cities was potentially significant, while the aggregate scale of production in the sites discussed indicates a much larger role for craft activities than has usually been considered. The model of the 'consumer city' does not seem suitable for many Roman cities, and attempts to describe the economy of Roman urbanism should pay more attention to the role of cities in networks of local, regional, and long-distance trade.

Questo articolo esamina l'evidenza per le attività industriali nelle città del nord Africa romano e dimostra come l'importanza della produzione artigianale urbana sia stata largamente sottovalutata in molte discussioni di economia antica. Di solito è difficile stabilire la giusta scala delle attività produttive urbane senza effettuare degli scavi estensivi, visto che i laboratori erano molto spesso piuttosto piccoli; ciò non toglie che essi potrebbero essere stati comunque numerosi e distribuiti all'interno della città. Scavi della estensione necessaria non sono irrealizzabili con le tecniche odierne; due siti scavati nella prima metà del ventesimo secolo hanno infatti portato alla luce un quadro caratterizzato da numerosi laboratori: 22 fulloniche a Timgad e 18 stabilimenti per la salatura del pesce a Sabratha. La ricognizione di superficie viene qui indicata come il metodo migliore per effettuare ricerche nei siti che lo consentono, al fine di identificare l'ampiezza dei depositi di rifiuti di fabbricazione, con l'aiuto di indagini geofisiche per trovare forni e fornaci, e scavi di alcune aree specifiche. Questo tipo di tecniche è stato sperimentato con successo a Leptiminus, Meninx e Thamusida, e ha permesso di identificare la presenza di attività di produzione ceramica, lavoro dei metalli e dell'industria per l'estrazione della porpora per la tintura. L'evidenza che emerge dalle recenti indagini archeologiche suggerisce che il contributo dell'industria cittadina all'economia delle città antiche fosse potenzialmente significativo, mentre la scala di produzione nei siti discussi indica un carattere artigianale della vita di queste città molto più consistente di quanto non sia stato di solito ritenuto. Il modello della 'città di consumo' non sembra adattarsi completamente a molte delle città romane, e i tentativi di descrizione dell'economia dell'urbanismo romano dovrebbero prestare più attenzione al ruolo delle città nelle reti di commercio locale, regionale e su lunga distanza.

This article considers a group of inscriptions, ranging in date from the late second to late third centuries ad, which indicates that low-ranked members of the Roman army gained access to equestrian rank in this period. The inscriptions attest two interrelated phenomena: (1) the promotion of soldiers to posts in the militiae equestres, a series of officer commands usually held by men from the ordo equester; and (2) grants of equestrian status to soldiers' sons, many of whom were only very young. These developments represent a marked departure from the circumstances that prevailed in the early Empire, when equestrian rank could be bestowed only by the emperor on men who possessed a census qualification of 400,000 sesterces. In this article, I propose that successive emperors gave soldiers greater access to the militiae equestres, and in some cases awarded equestrian rank to their sons, because they recognized the widespread desire for social mobility among the ranks of the army. The widening of access to equestrian rank within the Roman army contributed to the devaluation of this status over the course of the third century A.D.

Summary: Rome’s pre-Imperial circuit walls pose a particular problem of reconstruction: collectively, their 11 km course represents the largest monument of the early city, but our understanding of this single structure is based on an assemblage of several dozen disparate archaeological sites. After tracing the interpretation of these fragments from antiquity to the present, this article sets about examining the literary, topographical, and archaeological evidence for the wall’s character and date. Ultimately, the non-archaeological data is inconclusive, and the material evidence seems to affirm an early phase (sixth century BC) focusing on individual hilltops, rather than encompassing all hills within a full course. Following this logic, I continue to question the presence of a unified circuit wall at Rome prior to the Mid-Republic (fourth century BC). A concluding section reviews the historical circumstances in support of this view.

Was the Roman world caught in a Malthusian trap? In this survey, I draw on a wide range of evidence – from archeological data to city size estimates – to argue that Malthusian constraints were not binding over long periods. Market-size effects allowed the Roman economy to grow substantially in per capita terms, despite population growth. I place these observations in the context of recent debates and contributions by both ancient historians and – for the long run – by economists.

In his paper the author examines the sources of the supposed Western Roman military expedition of Emperor Avitus in Pannonia in 455 that was thought to be the last Roman military action in the territory of the former Roman province. Ana-lizing the sources, he comes to the conclusion that during his short reign, Avitus had no time to visit the province and his route (iter) mentioned by Sidonius Apollinaris must be identified with his journey from Arelate to Rome. The Roman military action in Pannonia can probably be identified with a short demonstrative campaign in the SW region of the dioecesis (i.e. Savia) or with a legation of the Pannonian Barbarians to the emperor in Northern Italy. One of the last episodes of late Roman Pannonia was-according to several theories-that Emperor Avitus would have visited Pannonia in 455-456 AD and regained the control of the provinces after Attila's death and the battle of Nedao in 454. 1 Some scholars even tried to localize it exactly, and the last Roman period of the inner fort of Keszthely-Fenékpuszta had been connected to this event. 2 As the fort was interpreted as a supply base of Avitus they identified its final destruction layer and mass graves with an unknown siege of the Ostrogoths who arrived at the province in the following year. 3 Despite these opinions, in my paper I intend to deal with this supposed imperial visit, and first of all, with its sources.