Myles Lavan

The rule of thumb that an individual with a Greek name can be assumed to be of freed status is widely used in the social history of Roman Italy.  This paper shows that it is based on a logical fallacy and must be abandoned. There is no valid way to use names to impute the status of individuals without knowing the mix of statuses in the population. The paper goes on to show that it possible to make inferences based on onomastics but that it requires a formal statistical model of the relationship between names and status. The method is illustrated by application to the lists of members of collegia from Roman Ostia.

This paper explores the implications of Thomas Piketty’s Capital au vingt-et-unième siècle for Roman economic history. We discuss his analysis of both the accumulation and the concentration of wealth with a view to their applicability to the ancient world. We are especially interested in the insight that random stochastic processes, such as interpersonal variation in the length of life or the number of surviving children, tend to increase wealth inequality. We discuss how these “Pikettian” dynamics might have played out in an ancient agrarian empire, but also note several distinctive features of the Roman context that might have restricted the scope of wealth concentration in the Roman economy: the vulnerability of ultra-large fortunes to confiscation, the role played by munificence in imperial and municipal economies and the large size of imperial, municipal and other collectively held properties vis-à-vis private landholdings.

This chapter examines the legal regime governing the status of children of Romans and non-Romans and considers its role in shaping family networks in the provinces. Part i reviews two key principles of Roman law: the rule established by the lex Minicia that the offspring of a mixed union took the status of the ‘inferior’ partner and the ban on testation to peregrines. Part ii traces the evolution of these rules over the long second century, stressing the modest scale of efforts to mitigate their prejudicial effects on mixed unions. The two principles remained intact at the time of Caracalla’s grant. Part iii supplements the legal analysis with concrete examples from inscriptions and papyri of peregrine children of Roman parents, proving the operation of the first principle through to the end of the second century. Part iv examines the effects of the legal regime on the structure of family networks in the provinces. It presents evidence that suggests that Roman law did have the expected effect of promoting endogamy among Roman families in non-Roman communities: there are mixed unions, but fewer than we would expect. It ends by noting the paradox that the strict rules about the transmission of status and property made Roman citizenship a potentially burdensome constraint but also, indirectly, an advantageous status, insofar as it gave preferential access to a network of families that had disproportionate access to patronage and control of capital.

This paper re-evaluates Dio’s famous passing reference to Caracalla’s universal grant of citizenship by re-contextualizing it within Dio’s larger narrative. Dio was the first historian of Rome to see the spread of Roman citizenship as we do – as a progressive expansion culminating in universal citizenship. While there is little evidence that the spread of citizenship was among the most important strands in his vision of Roman history, it is a significant minor thread in the Roman History, characterised by a consistent thematic focus. Dio’s treatment of the topic of enfranchisement repeatedly returns to the question of whether an exclusive citizenship distorts or affirms the natural hierarchy of honour in the empire. The question is explored almost exclusively through the medium of embedded speech, with various voices within the text contributing to an emerging opposition between two competing visions of the proper relationship between citizenship and honour. This emerges most clearly in the tension between two important texts at the beginning of the imperial narrative: the speech of Maecenas, which recommends the enfranchisement of all the emperor’s subjects in order to erase the distinction between Romans and subjects (52.19.6), and the political testament of Augustus, which urges against mass enfranchisement and insists on the importance of the very same distinction (56.33.3). The narrative voice offers no explicit guidance on how to resolve these contradictory visions, leaving individual readers to confront the questions that they raise, with significant implications for their evaluation of Caracalla’s grant.

It is well known that at some point in the late Republic, the aediles began including in their edict remedies for persons who purchased slaves or livestock in the markets at Rome that turned out have a disease or defect (morbus vitiumve). Buyers of a defective slave could return the sale for the price paid (redhibitio). The aedile’s remedies represent one of the standard institutional responses to the problem of adverse selection: the creation of legally enforceable guarantees. Whereas the doctrine of redhibitio is usually discussed to illustrate Roman law’ capacity to provide an institutional framework to support a market economy, I want to cast doubt on its efficacy in the context for which they developed – the market for slaves. I argue that the commodification of human beings always gives rise to an irreducible degree of quality uncertainty that cannot be mitigated by institutional solutions such as a system of guarantees. The value of a slave for a master is a function not just of soundness of body, but also of perceived behavioural characteristics such as obedience, diligence and entrepreneurship. Yet the aediles’ edict was interpreted as applying exclusively to physical defects, with just three explicit exceptions (the runaway, the erro and the suicide). Additional protections that could be provided through express warranties and that emerged through the later development of the actio empti would not have been sufficient to mitigate the effects of buyers’ uncertainty about how slaves would behave. Confirmation about the prevalence of quality uncertainty can be seen in the importance that buyers attributed to two very crude proxies for quality: ethnicity and the distinction between new and old slaves. The situation can also be illustrated by comparison with the Antebellum American South, particularly the state of Lousiana which incorporated the Roman doctrine of redibitio into its Civil Code to regulate the sale of slaves. Despite the relatively generous protections that Louisiana and other states offered for the buyers of slaves, law-makers and judges never thought it feasible to extend those protections to ‘mental’ or ‘moral’ qualities. The project of commodifying human beings has always foundered when it moves from commodifying bodies to trying to commodify emotion and volition.

This paper uses data from the province of Asia to challenge a widely-held assumption that there was continued growth in the representation of Roman citizens in the upper strata of most provincial communities over the course of the first and second centuries. The analysis is based on three exceptional longitudinal datasets: the Κούρητες lists from Ephesos, the prytany lists from Kyzikos and the lists of delegations to Klaros. These data reveal considerable variety in the trajectory of developments in the second century. The proportion of Roman citizens seems to have increased in Ephesos, but it appears to have stagnated in some cities (Chios, Herakleia Salbake and Phokaia) and may even have contracted in others (notably Kyzikos and Laodikeia-on-the-Lykos). These exceptional datasets demonstrate the limitations of the crude data on which local histories of citizenship usually rely – corpora of names appearing on inscriptions or small numbers of attested office-holders. The paper goes on to analyse the underlying social processes that explain why the prevalence of Roman citizenship might have plateaued and even declined in many cities: a slow-down in imperial grants, continuous social renewal within the upper strata and the pejorative treatment of mixed unions between Roman citizens and peregrines in Roman law. It also discusses the role of patronage in producing a high degree of variation even within a single province.

This chapter aims to spur reflection on the categories we use to analyse how second-century texts negotiate questions of identity and difference. The first half compares modern and ancient usage of the category ‘Romans’.  Modern scholarship often deploys the category ‘Romans’ in a manner that assumes both that its content is self-evident and that a distinction between ‘Romans’ and ‘non-Romans’ was one of the most salient divisions within the population of the empire. Both of these assumptions are problematic, especially (but not only) for the second century. The second half of the essay suggests that our focus on the category ‘Roman’ reflects unexamined assumptions about how contemporaries imagined the imperial order. We tend to approach the topic with a conceptual apparatus based on our own experience in a system of nation states, even though identities were organised differently in a context in which the city-state was the hegemonic form of political organisation and larger aggregations took the form of empires. Imperial society remained riven by horizontal and vertical divisions. The category ‘Romans’ is inadequate both for our own analysis of the structure of imperial society and for our exegesis of the complex gestures of inclusion and exclusion made by contemporary texts

This paper explores how the violence that Roman forces deployed against enemy and rebel populations was represented in Roman culture. Although the imperial elite did not think that they engaged in mass destruction widely or indiscriminately, they regarded the capacity to destroy human populations and their landscapes as an essential aspect of Roman power. Long after the period of rapid expansion in the late Republic, a language of erasure (verbs such as deleo, excido, tollo and uasto) remained an essential part of the lexicon of aristocratic achievement and good government, its connotations of ameliorative action euphemising the violence it described. In the visual sphere, images of Roman soldiers torching enemy settlements and barbarian families atomised through slaughter and enslavement were elevated into symbols of the enduring triumph of the imperial order against the enemies that threatened it. The paper traces the connections between the iconography of devastation on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, the language of erasure in Roman public discourse and the idea of annihilating whole peoples. The goal is to elucidate the verbal and visual tropes that elevated mass destruction by representing it as part of a larger imperial project.

Open access version available at: https://books.openedition.org/efr/4875

The subjective interpretation of probability—increasingly influential in other fields—makes probability a useful tool of historical analysis. It provides a framework that can accommodate the significant epistemic uncertainty involved in estimating historical quantities, especially (but not only) regarding periods for which we have limited data. Conceptualising uncertainty in terms of probability distributions is a useful discipline because it forces historians to consider the degree of uncertainty as well as identifying a most-likely value. It becomes even more useful when multiple uncertain quantities are combined in a single analysis, a common occurrence in ancient history. Though it may appear a radical departure from current practice, it builds upon a probabilism that is already latent in historical reasoning. Most estimates of quantities in ancient history are implicit expressions of probability distributions, insofar as they represent the value judged to be most-likely, given the available evidence. But the traditional point-estimate approach leaves historians’ beliefs about the likelihood of other possible values unclear or unexamined.

This paper draws on recent advances in our knowledge (much of it owed to the proliferation of military diplomas) and a new analytical method to quantify the number of soldiers and their children who received Roman citizenship between 14 and 212 C.E. Although significant uncertainties remain, these can be quantified and turn out to be small relative to the overall scale of enfranchisement. The paper begins by reviewing what is known about grants of citizenship to soldiers, with particular attention to the remaining uncertainties, before presenting a quantitative model of the phenomenon. The total number of beneficiaries was somewhere in the region 0.9–1.6 million — significantly lower than previous estimates have suggested. It also emerges that the rate of enfranchisement varied substantially over time, in line with signifcant changes in manpower, length of service (and hence the number of recruits and discharged veterans) and the rate of family formation among soldiers.

This chapter surveys the history of Roman practices of enfranchisement from their origins to Caracalla’s grant. It considers the varied purposes which enfranchisement was made to serve over several centuries and attempts to gauge the fluctuating pace of expansion and trace the changing shape of the citizen body. It also assesses the role played by Rome's distinctive approach to citizenship in its remarkable success as an imperial power. From the beginning the expansion of the citizen body was bound up with the expansion of Roman hegemony. But the fact that enfranchisement was regularly deployed as an instrument of empire does not necessarily mean that it was the key to Rome's success. Lastly, the chapter reflects on the implications of an expanding citizenship for Roman discourses of identity, with a focus on the imperial elite. Again, it is easy to exaggerate the importance of citizenship relative to others vectors of elite identity.

The fleets are often neglected in consideration of the military forces of the Roman empire. When the fleets are included in inventories of the Roman military, most scholars reckon them at either 30,000 or 40,000 men. In so doing, they are relying explicitly or implicitly on the work of Chester Starr or Michel Reddé respectively. There has been no discussion of the discrepancy between them. Moreover, those who rely on Reddé tend to overlook the fact that he himself implied a strength of more than 50,000 men. The divergence between the two estimates is too large for the question to be left as it is. This paper aims to draw attention to the significance of the problem and to offer a new estimate that takes better account of the uncertainties involved. It reviews the evidence adduced by Starr and Reddé but also draws on newer data from the archaeology of fleet bases and military diplomas. I conclude that the combined strength of the fleets was probably somewhat smaller than Starr suggested, around 25,000 men. But it is just as important to recognise that the margin of error is large.

This paper re-contextualises Book 10 of Pliny’s Letters within the corpus of imperial correspondence transmitted by inscriptions, papyri and juristic compilations. It takes stock of provocative recent readings of Book 10 by Greg Woolf, Philip Stadter and Carlos Noreña, but its larger goal is to shift attention from the Pliny-Trajan correspondence to the wider phenomenon that it represents. The important of the vast volume of correspondence between the emperor and office-holders in the provinces extended far beyond the functional dimensions of sharing information and enabling decision making across long distances. Regular correspondence was essential to building and maintaining the emperor’s personal ties to the aristocratic friends and slave and freed dependents on whom the administration of the empire depended. It was also an important space in which the ruling elite reaffirmed shared beliefs about the justice, good judgement and above all the humanitas of Roman administration.

This paper analyses the Roman discourse on revolt in the light of Ranajit Guha's influential study of peasant insurgency in colonial India and current approaches to Latin historiography. It explores the key terms in the Latin lexicon of revolt and the conceptual models that Latin texts use to explain and narrate revolt. It shows that Roman writers tend to conflate many different types of conflict, that they draw on a relatively limited repertoire of quite simplistic narrative models to explain revolt, and that their choice of which revolts to mention and how to describe them were often governed by larger narrative agendas that had little to do with revolt itself.

This paper explores the intimate connection between the idea of peace and imperialist politics in the Roman empire. It focuses on the verb pacare and past participle pacatus, usually translated as ‘pacify’ and ‘pacified’ respectively. The tropes of ‘peace-making’ are familiar to all Latinists, but they have received little close analysis. The meanings of both pacare and pacatus are considerably more complex than the glosses ‘pacify’ and ‘pacified’ suggest. This paper offers a semantic analysis of the two words which highlights the ways in which the lexical field of peace is structured differently in Latin than in English and explores what is lost in translation – particularly the ways in which the Latin language of peace works to motivate and legitimate an imperial project.

This paper takes an entirely new approach to the long-standing problem of quantifying the spread of citizenship before Caracalla. It argues that we already know enough to be confident that less than a third of the free population of the provinces were Roman citizens on the eve of Caracalla's grant. In the process, it suggests a new method of managing uncertainty in quantitative analysis for periods from which little data survives, based on probabilistic approaches to uncertainty that are widely used in the natural and social sciences.

The results are still preliminary and will be refined. Any comments or suggestions would be welcome (mpl2@st-andrews.ac.uk).

The Roman empire is often presented as the paradigmatic example of cultural integration in an imperial context. But it is all too easy to take the process of elite integration for granted for the earlier period, ignoring the many forms of difference that divided provincial elites from their Roman rulers (and each other) and the imaginative work that was required to overcome them. This chapter explores efforts to represent the propertied classes of the east of the empire as privileged members of the imperial order in the first century CE. I focus on the east because that is where the problem of difference was most acute, with most local notables marked off from their Roman rulers along multiple axes of difference, including culture, ethnicity, and legal status.

University of St Andrews, UK This paper draws attention to the unprecedented prominence of metaphors of enslavement to Rome in the historical narratives of Florus and Cassius Dio. Following an analysis of the thematic importance of the trope in their respective works, I point to further parallels in Herodian and Justin which suggest that the trope proved particularly productive in both Latin and Greek historiography in the late second and early third centuries CE. The end of the paper considers broader cultural developments that might underlie this phenomenon, notably the proliferation of dominus as an epithet for the emperor and the ongoing enfranchisement of provincials.

This conference will explore what pre-modern historians might learn from other fields about managing uncertainty. The goal is to reflect honestly on the limits of existing approaches and to identify methods that might allow for greater analytical rigour while still producing useful results. The conference is part of a larger AHRC-funded project on the potential value of probabilistic reasoning in historical analysis. Rather than a formal call for papers, this is a request for expressions of interest from potential participants.