This chapter argues that men with the requisite wealth for political office outside the political orders contributed to the stability of the Roman timocratic political system by serving as a reserve pool from which new magistrates and councillors were recruited. Correspondences between the surpluses of wealthy households at the senatorial, equestrian, and curial levels of the political system, and evidence of shortages of candidates at these levels, substantiate this argument.

This chapter examines the development of the Italian economy over the first two centuries CE. It re-evaluates two prevalent narratives– declining economic performance and increasing inequality– using proxy data. The evidence indicates that both trends were relatively modest, began only towards the end of this period, and were marked by significant regional and local variation.

This chapter shows that Italian households with sufficient wealth for political office outnumbered the men actually holding these offices by a wide margin. It achieves this by estimating the number of Italian households that satisfied the senatorial or equestrian census minimum. A new reconstruction of the distribution of elite wealth in Roman Italy is presented, which is based on an economic (power-law) model combined with a bottom-up (‘tessellated’) approach that expressly takes the heterogeneity of the Italian civitates into account.

This chapter outlines the methodological approach for reconstructing the top of the wealth distribution of early-imperial Italy. Traditional social-table models are deemed inadequate for this purpose. Instead, I advocate for an economic model that assumes the top of the Italian wealth distribution can be represented by a simple mathematical function– a power law.

This chapter assesses wealth inequality among the elites of the Italian civitates, using four sets of wealth proxy data. The analysis reveals significant variation in the implied inequalities, which nonetheless fall within the same range as those implied by other premodern datasets. Interestingly, these levels of inequality do not appear to correlate with the size of the civitas.

The Introduction sets out the theme of the book. It discusses the census qualifications (wealth minimum requirements) that prevailed in the Roman timocratic political system.

This chapter introduces a new model to represent the heterogeneity of the Italian civitates. The model is based on the abundant archaeological evidence of the inhabited areas of their administrative centres, using it as a proxy for various economic and socio-political aspects of the civitas. This new variation model surpasses previous ones by being continuous (rather than categorical) and by formally incorporating the uncertainties associated with missing data.

This chapter investigates the relationship between wealth and officeholding in Pompeii. It presents a new reconstruction of the wealth distribution among the Pompeian elite, combining an economic model with archaeological evidence from the local housing stock. The findings suggest that there were significantly more households in Pompeii with curial and senatorial wealth than there were Pompeian decurions and senators.

Macedon and Qin are introduced, providing separate summary histories of these two polities, examining the differing types and quality of evidence for the study of each, examines the geographic and cultural location of these polities relative to their cores of their cultural networks, and argues for the usefulness of the center-periphery axiom in the study of these entities. Lastly, the nature of the Macedonian and Qin identity is explored, suggesting that prior attempts to define them as Greek/Zhou or not Greek/Zhou miss the clearer dynamic that they are frontier cultures. Their significant divergences from Greek and Zhou norms are explained by the same factors that cause colonial and frontier societies throughout human history to “deviate” from norms of a core culture. I also point out the significant ways in which their identities seek to preserve earlier cultural modes.