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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Ancient History
  • Cited by 14
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
2000
Online ISBN:
9781139054393
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521263351
Subjects:
Ancient History, Classical Studies
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Ancient History & Classics
Series:
The Cambridge Ancient History
Information

Book description

Volume XI of the second edition of The Cambridge Ancient History covers the history of the Roman empire in the period from AD 70 to 192, from Vespasian to the Antonines. The volume begins with the political and military history of the period. Developments in the structure of the empire are then examined, including the organisation and personnel of the central government and province-based institutions and practices. A series of provincial studies follows, and the society, economy and culture of the empire as a whole are reviewed in a group of thematic chapters. This edition is entirely rewritten from the 1936 edition. There is much more extensive discussion of social, economic and cultural issues, reflecting trends in modern scholarship, and the increase of archaeological evidence and development of new approaches to it. New documentary evidence, from texts on stone, wood and papyrus, has advanced knowledge in every chapter.

Reviews

‘… an enormous enterprise, into which immense academic energy has been poured … The volume thus offers a vast panorama survey of many aspects of the period … conspicuously strong in examining the history of the various separate regions of the Empire … volume XI is perhaps the most successful of all the Roman volumes in CAH2 published so far … excellent sections in government and the working of the Imperial system, with a notably original contribution by Brent Shaw on ‘Rebel and Outsiders.’

Source: English Historical Review

‘… the CAH has its firmly established place in the libraries, and vol. XI will provide useful guidance for many decades to come in the hands of whoever acquires it.’

Source: ARCTOS

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 25 - Industry and technology
    pp 741-768
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Archaeology has had a growing influence upon the study of Roman industry and technology in recent decades. Specialist studies of industrial products have helped to form an overall picture of industry in the early empire. Three (pottery, metal and textiles) are considered in order to provide a basis for generalizations about the nature, scale and organization of Roman industry. The processing of Roman agricultural products into wine, oil, textiles, or leather bore many similarities to, and was just as complex as, the 'industrial' production of pottery, glass, stone or metal. Terra sigillata derives from a Greek ceramic tradition which included a mixture of plain and decorated forms. The application of technology in the Roman empire is assessed in two different contexts, transport and milling, where new evidence has brought a change in perception, and in some other important aspects of Roman life: water-lifting, agriculture and architecture.
  • 26 - Commerce and finance
    pp 769-786
    • By J. Andreau, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the financial activity of the senators, knights and other nobles, and that of the intermediaries, money-changers and professional bankers. Money-changers and professional bankers had existed for a long time alongside élite financiers. In Italy and the western areas of the empire, the major distinguishing feature of the money-changers/bankers, the argentarii and coactores argentarii, was their participation at auctions, so as to provide credit for the purchasers of the objects on sale. In the Roman world of the first and second centuries, no category of financiers limited themselves to loans for consumption. But this does not mean that the majority of loans were productive, nor that the banks were the privileged helpers of production and commerce. Throughout the Roman period, loans and orders of payment never circulated freely. References to the financial affairs of the upper classes are brief and fragmentary for all periods.
  • 27 - Demography
    pp 787-816
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses Roman demography that can be approached in two ways. First, the population of the empire and of its regions can be examined for level, increase or decrease, age and sex structure, and so on. Second, population can be broken down into its three major demographic components: mortality; fertility; and migration. The pattern of Roman fertility was chiefly determined by two factors: marriage customs; and the methods by which fertility was controlled within the ancient world. The Roman demographic structure, though undeniably harsh by modern standards, posed no obstacle to modest population growth. Most of human history has been lived under conditions of mortality not unlike Rome's. Where peace, prosperity and freedom from general epidemic have obtained, populations of the past have normally experienced a modest measure of sustained growth; there is no reason to believe that the Roman empire's population did not grow similarly. The chapter hypothetically reconstructs the pattern of such growth in the early empire.
  • 28 - Status and patronage
    pp 817-854
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Rural patronage is likely to have been widespread in defining social relationships in the countryside, to judge by the evidence from the later empire and by modern Mediterranean studies. To the modern historian the élite Romans' perception of their social order seems incomplete, unsatisfactory and self-serving. The hierarchy and legitimacy of the ordines, and the privileges accorded them, were accepted as self-evident, with no thought given to how the Roman conception of the social order was projected and legitimated outside its centre. For members of the élite of the Roman empire, men like Aelius Aristides and Dio, the empire's social order was largely unproblematic. Elite imperial authors believed wealth to be a vital constituent of a Roman's standing. The economic and social structures in the towns were more conducive to upward mobility. By the end of the second century, however, men from the provinces came to dominate in the senatorial and equestrian ordines.
  • 29 - Family and household
    pp 855-874
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In language and law the Roman family appears very different from the contemporary family: no word for the nuclear family unit, the nearly complete lifelong dependence of children on their pater, and the nearly complete independence of wife from husband. Domus was the word commonly used in classical discussions of family and household, but it, too, does not correspond with the contemporary primary meaning of 'family'. Roman law offered a means to allow fathers to entrust their wives with effective management of the patrimony by bequeathing the estate to their children but lifetime usufruct to their wives. For every kind of support offered by kin beyond the household, examples can be found of both agnatic and non-agnatic relatives providing it. Clearly, the Roman, propertied family differed from the family of the industrial age because of the drastically lower life expectancy, the importance of inherited property and the pervasive presence of slaves in the household.
  • 30 - Literacy
    pp 875-897
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Roman Britain illustrates the possible limits of literacy in the provinces. Most of the graffiti scratched on pottery derives either from military sites or from towns, just as most of the names written on tiles and bricks before they were fired are Roman names, most of them probably soldiers. Writing played a number of important roles in the life and working of the Roman army in Britain, yet it seems hardly to have penetrated the countryside, except in the form of milestones and at rural sanctuaries like Uley. Documentary evidence provides the surest guide to literacy levels in any society. A degree of uniformity in the way in which the Roman military used writing, whether on papyrus or wooden writing tablets, is perhaps the least surprising aspect of the unity. This chapter discusses the extent to which the empire itself was sustained by and generated texts. Non-military uses of writing are known primarily from Roman Egypt.
  • 31 - Literature and sophistic
    pp 898-921
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Before Latin literature had staggered its first imitative steps, Greek education and culture had been diffused by Alexander's conquests not simply across the eastern Mediterranean but as far as Afghanistan and India. This chapter discusses the Greek philosophy of the empire. It is important to note that many sophists and philosophers saw each other as rivals in the provision of tertiary education. Mannered style and Atticist language suggest that Achilles, Longus and Heliodorus of Emesa may have been practising sophists. Many of the subjects were popularized in didactic poetry, usually, following the Hesiodic tradition, in dactylic hexameters. The Latin literary world presents a fundamentally different picture from the Greek, and at least part of the explanation may be found in the different place in it of sophistic rhetoric. The absence of sophistic declamation by members of the élites of the Latin West becomes much less puzzling if that function is conceded to Greek sophistic.
  • 32 - Philosophy
    pp 922-942
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Presumably as a reaction against the dogmatism of Antiochus, one finds arising in the mid-first century BC the figure of Aenesidemus, originally an Academic, who turns his energies to reviving the scepticism of Pyrrho of Elis. All the four Hellenistic traditions, Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic and Epicurean, continued vigorous throughout the period, though, interestingly, without any formal school structure to support them. Apart from the Epicureans, then, there is no clear evidence of a continuous, centralized structure for any of the major schools throughout the period. On the other hand, this lack of a central authority did not prevent the development of a considerable degree of systematization of doctrine. In this the Platonists and the Peripatetics were doubtless influenced by the scholastic tendencies of the Stoic school. It seems suitable, in a contribution to a general history, to close with some remarks as to the role or roles assumed by philosophers in society, as these were varied and important.
  • 33 - Medicine
    pp 943-965
    • By Vivian Nutton, The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Voluminous writings of Galen are the major source of information on Roman medicine. This chapter redresses the traditional imbalance by looking first at the general background and broader medical developments before describing the achievements of four major medical men, Soranus, Aretaeus, Rufus and Galen. Far from displaying a monolithic and dull academicism, medicine in the first two centuries of the Roman empire was the focus of a lively debate and discussion, and the concern of a great variety of healers, not just of the devotees of Hippocrates. The topic of acute and chronic diseases was also treated at length by an author of a different theoretical standpoint, Aretaeus of Cappadocia. To think of medicine in the Roman empire solely in terms of the surviving medical texts, the productions of only a few authors, is to underestimate the possibilities of healing available, and to attribute an exaggerated importance to the mere chance of survival.
  • 34 - Art and architecture
    pp 966-983
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Greek artefacts, craftsmen and artists had penetrated Rome since regal days; from the second century BC this trickle had become a continuing and influential flood, contributing together with Italic and Etruscan architecture and art, and the developing central Italian and Roman concrete architecture, to the rich tapestry of the art of the capital. Vespasian (69-79), founder of the Flavian dynasty, showed an astute pragmatism in his handling of architecture and art. In the provinces the architectural and art forms characteristic of the Flavian era continued to flourish. Dynamism returned to imperial commissions with the Romano-Spanish Trajan. The age of Hadrian (117-38) proved to be extraordinary, largely because of the extent to which he was able to impress upon it his own many-sided personality: ruler, philhellene, architect, dilettante, poet, traveller and romantic. The rich artistic harvest of the Flavian to the Antonine ages was not just an imperial, but a corporate achievement, one which offered a worthy inheritance to following generations.
  • 35 - Religion
    pp 984-1008
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Roman empire produced a lot of movement of people, and it was this that gave scope to the spread of so-called mystery religions, almost all cults derived from the ancient cultures of the Near East. The heart of Roman religion continued to be the traditional ceremonies of the ancestral religion as practised at Rome. Under the Flavians, the process by which each province acquired a provincial assembly and festivals of the imperial cult was completed in the western provinces. The importance of the so-called oriental or mystery cults is greater than the numerical strength of their followers, perhaps never more than a small fraction of the population. This is because these cults, despite the comparatively small numbers and relatively modest social level of their membership, did express, if in different ways and to different degrees, 'the new mood' which was to dominate the religion of the empire through to the triumph of Christianity.

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