If a map survived of part of the Roman world, say Italy in A.D. 100, showing the ownership and juridical status of land, it would reveal a number of different types. We should see for example some state land, some imperial land, and some city land, as well as a host of privately owned properties of varying size. This essay will attempt to assess the relative importance of the various types very briefly, before considering differences of size among private estates. The surviving evidence for private landownership is so distributed as to give a strong Egyptian bias to any exhaustive treatment of the empire as a whole. A selective discussion like the present one can at least attempt to avoid this imbalance.

Land generally fell into one of six categories (if both the nuances of legal title and the more complex situation in Egypt are ignored). There is no obvious hierarchy among these categories, but private land has deliberately been left until last here, because evidence for it is abundant enough to justify fuller consideration.

AGER PUBLICUS

The first type is ager publicus, land belonging to the populus Romanus, the Roman state. Such land, if cultivated, was generally in the hands of private tenants of the state. The extent of ager publicus was originally immense, since Rome's practice was to expropriate the land of conquered peoples, at any rate in name.

Lesquier in his comprehensive study of the Ptolemaic army established that Ptolemaic sources of manpower consisted of military settlers, mercenaries, and indigenous inhabitants. The Seleucid army, being similarly influenced by the structure of Alexander's army and by Persian military tradition, was based principally on the same components, but their proportion, character, and development were quite different. Consequently, the Seleucid regular array, despite territorial setbacks and heavy losses in it s numerous campaigns, maintained itself as a viable force for at least two generations after the final death throes of the Ptolemaic regular array at Panion, and could have survived even longer, had the kingdom not sunk into ceaseless internal strife after the death of Antiochus IV. It will appear from the following pages that most of the differences between the two armies, like the political, economic, and administrative distinctions between the two kingdoms, originated as much from geographical and demographic conditions as from policy.

THE MILITARY SETTLEMENTS

The long-established assumption that military settlers constituted the hard core of Seleucid manpower has not been seriously disputed. The main evidence, apart from analogy with Egypt, seems to be as follows: two phalanx corps, several tens of thousands in all, figure in the great campaigns; one is called alternatively ‘phalanx’ or ‘Macedonians’, and the other is an elite corps of argyraspides. It is unlikely that these were mercenaries or indigenous population. Neither hostile Macedonia nor even Greece could provide such a large number, and arming the orientals with heavy weapons would have laid the Seleucids open to the constant danger of native uprisings.

Whatever one's view of the ultimate cause of the fall of the Roman empire, land and more specifically the decline of productivity on the land always figure more or less prominently within an assessment of the social and political changes that were taking place. Even Jones, who has expressed far more reserve about general theories of decline than most, gave as his opinion that the devastation of the land and its subsequent desertion grew worse from the third century A.D. to the sixth. In other words, agri deserti are to be regarded as a malignant growth of the later Roman Empire, with a datable origin into the bargain.

The problems involved in making objective judgements about this, as about so many other subjects in the period, are too well known to need much repetition. But they are essentially methodological. That is to say, the sources are atrocious and there is a constant temptation to generalize from inadequate data – a limitation which applies with particular force to the third century during which the decline is supposed to have begun and with which this chapter is chiefly concerned. So it is worth stating clearly at the outset a few observations on the nature of the evidence.

The substance of this book was presented as the Trevelyan Lectures in the University of Cambridge in May 1973 and in a revised form as the A. Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College in February–March 1974. I have retained the lecture form and only added a bibliography to each chapter. My aim was to stimulate discussion on an important subject without indulging in speculations.

I owe much gratitude to the two institutions which invited and received me so generously. In Cambridge I found myself among old friends: at Bryn Mawr I gained new ones. It was a happy time in both places. I should like to thank especially Professors Owen Chadwick and M. I. Finley of Cambridge, President Wofford, Professor Agnes Michels and Professor Russell Scott of Bryn Mawr.

‘It is unlawful for any foreigner to enter the enclosure of the temple which is forbidden to the Jews, except to those of them who are accustomed to enter after purifying themselves in accordance with the law of the country. Nor shall anyone bring into the city the flesh of horses or of mules or of wild or tame asses, or of leopards, foxes or hares or, in general, of any animals forbidden to the Jews.’ This is not a piece of the Mishnaic treatise Kelim: it is a decree of Antiochus III, King of Syria, enacted about 200 b.c. (Joseph. Antiq. Jud. 12.145–6), and its authenticity has been proved beyond any doubt by Elias Bickerman, the scholar who, more than any other, has taught us to understand Judaism in its Hellenistic surroundings (Syria 25 (1946–8), 67–85). Suddenly, after two centuries of obscurity and legends, two documents coming from the chancery of Antiochus III allow us to see something of the life of Jerusalem; the second document is again quoted by Flavius Josephus (Ant. Jud. 12.138–44), and was again defended against doubts of forgery by E. Bickerman, Rev. Étud. Juives 100 (1935), 4–35. What we see is a little temple-state, the economic and social structures of which had been shattered by the recent wars between Antiochus III and Ptolemy V. Palestine had passed from Egyptian to Syrian control.

How many tear-drops are implied in the simple Greek word ὲδάκρυεν, ‘he wept’? Classical scholars can be trusted to ask such questions. The occasion is famous, the protagonists are distinguished; Scipio Aemilianus crying over burning Carthage, Polybius suitably present and ready to elicit the right answer: ‘turning round to me at once and grasping my hand, Scipio said: “A glorious moment, Polybius, but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced upon my own country”’ (38.21.1, transl. W. R. Paton). The mutilated text of the passage of Polybius has come down to us in the Excerpta de sententiis and the keyword ὲδάκρυεν, ‘he wept’, has to be supplied from Diodorus (32.24) with the support of Appian, Punica 132: they are known to have used Polybius directly or indirectly. The supplement seems to be right. Scipio did cry, and classical scholars are therefore entitled to ask how many tears he shed. As Professor A. E. Astin observes in his very valuable book on Scipio Aemilianus (1967): ‘By ὲδάκρυεν Diodorus (Polybius) need not necessarily mean that Scipio shed a flood of tears, that he truly wept. It is also possible to envisage moist eyes, with a tear or two trickling down either cheek; and this would be much more consistent with Polybius’ praise of Scipio's attitude, that of “a great, a perfect man, a man in short worthy to be remembered”’ (p. 285).

The Greeks were perhaps the first to study the peculiarities of foreigners. They began by collecting information as traders or colonists but by the end of the sixth century b.c. they were already writing books on ethnography and geography to satisfy their taste for enquiry – for historia, as they called it. As Herodotus shows, their enquiries extended to territories no Greek had ever visited (4.25). On the other hand we have noticed that the Greeks were much less curious than we would expect them to be about certain countries within their reach and indeed well inside their sphere of economic and cultural influence. Their interest in Celtic lands and civilization became apparent only in the fourth century B.C, though they had founded the important colony of Marseilles as early as the end of the seventh century. Even more paradoxically, that distinguished son of Marseilles, Pytheas, who discovered the north of Europe, seems never to have travelled inside France. The historians Ephorus and Timaeus, who in the fourth and third centuries b.c. were the first to collect extensive information about Gaul and Spain, do not seem ever to have visited these countries.

Ancient travellers did not find it easy to go into the interior of countries. We must consequently not expect Greek callers at Palestinian ports to go up to Jerusalem for the pleasure of observing Jewish festivals.

The philosophic historian will never stop meditating on the nose of Cleopatra. If that nose had pleased the gods as it pleased Caesar and Antony, a loose Alexandrian gnosticism might have prevailed instead of the Christian discipline imposed by the two Romes, the old one on the Tiber, and the new one on the Bosporus. The Celts would have been allowed to go on collecting mistletoe in their forests. We would have fewer books on Queen Cleopatra and on King Arthur, but even more books on Tutankhamen and on Alexander the Great. But a Latin-speaking Etruscologist, not a Greek-speaking Egyptologist, brought to Britain the fruits of the victory of Roman imperialism over the Hellenistic system. We must face the facts.

The victory of Roman imperialism can in its turn be described as the result of four factors: the new direction given by Rome to the social – that is the military – forces of old Italy; the utter inability of any Hellenistic army to match the Romans in the field; the painful erosion of Celtic civilization and its appendages which went on for centuries and ultimately enabled the Romans to control the resources of western Europe from the Atlantic to the Danubian regions; and finally the co-operation of Greek intellectuals with Italian politicians and writers in creating a new bilingual culture which gave sense to life under Roman rule.

You must not tell a citizen of Marseilles that Petronius, the author of the Satyricon, was not born near the Vieux-Port. Sidonius Apollinaris' lines

‘You, Petronius, who in the gardens of Marseilles were the worshipper of the sacred tree-stock’ are given as evidence for the Massaliote origins of Petronius. They simply prove, as was seen long ago by Conrad Cichorius (Römische Studien), 438–42), that an episode in the lost parts of the Satyricon was located in Massalia.

But Marseilles could do with another writer. Between Salvian in the fifth century A.D. and our friend Henri-Irénée Marrou in the twentieth century very few names of French intellectuals can be connected with Marseilles. Even now the men who gesticulate along La Canebière look towards the sea rather than towards France. The strong tradition of autonomy which goes back to 600 b.c. survived the guns of Louis XIV and turned a marching song composed at Strasbourg into La Marseillaise.

My tale for today takes us back to the origins of the resistance of Marseilles to the seductions of the Celtic mainland.

The epic story of how the citizens of Phocaea abandoned their town rather than submit to the Persians is told by Herodotus 1.163 ff. No story conveys a better impression of the unity of the Mediterranean world in the sixth century b.c.