The female age distribution in Roman Egypt is easily interpreted through the Coale-Demeny model life tables. By contrast, the male age distribution presents greater difficulties, and reconstruction of male mortality is much more uncertain. The census returns preserve the ages of 350 males. The raw data are in Table A, from which derives the summary in Table 5.1.

Although the male figures also clearly point to a population with very high mortality, they are apparently somewhat disturbed, as will emerge below, by external influences on the reporting of male ages. The resulting distortion, although not great, suffices to impede an accurate estimate of male mortality. The results in this chapter are therefore more tentative than those in Chapter 4.

This chapter proceeds circuitously to explore the male age distribution and to bring out the problems with it. We begin by examining the overall sex ratio in the returns, then the age-specific sex ratio, and then a possible male life table. We conclude with broader observations on mortality in Roman Egypt.

The sex ratio

The sex ratio expresses the relative numbers of males and females in a population. By convention, it is stated as the number of males per hundred females. In populations of contemporary more developed countries, females outnumber males because female life expectancy is much higher than male; for example, in 1985 the United States had a sex ratio of 94.8 males per hundred females. But in India, where female life expectancy has historically lagged behind that of males, the sex ratio is reversed; in 1971, for instance, India had 107.5 males per hundred females.

The documents and the history of the census

This book is a study of the population of Egypt in the first three centuries of Roman rule. Its central questions concern the size and structure of Egyptian households, the population's age and sex distribution, and the patterns of mortality, marriage, fertility, and migration that are likely to have prevailed in Roman Egypt. The basis for all of this inquiry is a body of about 300 census declarations, of which the earliest dates to AD 12 and the latest to AD 259 (but survives only in a later copy, perhaps from around 266). These declarations are by no means the only evidence for the ages of the residents of Egypt in this period, but they are the only sizable corpus of evidence that at least purports to provide complete rosters of particular households, whatever the age, sex, or status of their members. The problems inherent in constructing statistics from any assemblage of ancient data are considerable. It has been our view that these problems could best be mitigated by a firm exclusion of all texts that could not with reasonable certainty be taken to be census declarations, copies of declarations, or full extracts of the lists of persons from declarations. That is not to say that all problems are thus removed. Chapter 2 is devoted to an assessment of the quality of these data from the point of view of demography.

Before we come to that assessment, however, the reader needs to understand the process by which these texts were created.

Bagnall and Frier have performed two extraordinary labors in their construction of this book. First, they have assembled about 300 original returns from censuses in Roman Egypt during the first to the third centuries. It has been possible to collect these returns in usable form because they were inscribed on papyrus. After assembling these records (literally assembling them in some instances of crumbled documents), they have put them in order, and translated the inscriptions. Second, they have applied to this body of data the set of modern methods of inferring basic demographic characteristics from incomplete and inexact information. These techniques have been devised in recent years to enrich our knowledge of the characteristics of historical populations and the populations of contemporary less developed countries. This combination of the skills of outstanding classical historians with the most refined techniques of modern demography is indeed unusual; the result is a clear picture of the age composition, marriage customs, fertility, and mortality in Egypt at the height of the Roman Empire. It is not a completely clear picture because of the limited size of the sample, and because of various kinds of bias in what is written on the returns, but still an exciting increase in our knowledge.

I. THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION

In what sense can one talk of ‘the Roman constitution’? Clearly, Rome had no written constitution of the type introduced into the modern world by the United States in 1787, but did Rome have a constitution in the weaker sense one uses in speaking of the British constitution? The answer must be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Bolingbroke in 1734 (A Dissertation upon Parties, Letter 10 ad init.) offers a working definition: ‘By Constitution, We mean, whenever We speak with Propriety and Exactness, that Assemblage of Laws, Institutions and Customs, derived from certain fixed Principles of Reason directed to certain fixed Objects of Publick Good that compose the General System, according to which the Community hath agreed to be governed.’ Now it is striking how Cicero in dealing with issues which we would label ‘constitutional’ appeals to an ‘Assemblage’, to use Bolingbroke’s word, with which the latter, and his readers, would have felt immediately at home. For example, when in March 43 the orator wishes to argue that M. Lepidus, the future triumvir currently governing Gallia Narbonensis and Hispania Citerior, cannot do what he likes with his army, he says: ‘It is lawful for no man to lead an army against his country, if by lawful we mean (si licere id dicimus) that which is allowed by the laws (legibus) and by the custom and institutions of our ancestors (more maiorum institutisque.)’ Sometimes Cicero adds the notion of ius, roughly equivalent to ‘right’ or ‘justice’; for instance, he summarizes as follows an attack by L. Aurelius Cotta on the manner in which Clodius had engineered Cicero’s exile:

Another element introduced into what we would regard as constitutional discussions is precedent (exemplum): Cicero condemns Gabinius, governor of Syria, for occupying Alexandria although mos maiorum, exempla and the severest penalties of the law forbade it.

Thus far Cicero seems to be discussing constitutional issues in a thoroughly British manner.

I. SULLA, SULPICIUS AND MARIUS, 88 B.C.

As the year 89 drew to its close, the predominant feeling at Rome may well have been one of relief. The fall of Asculum meant that the Social War was to all intents and purposes won, though isolated pockets of resistance lingered. Yet even the most cursory essay in divination should have revealed grave causes for concern about the future. The war had been bitterly contested, and resentment was bound to simmer. Rome’s concessions had been churlish and grudging. It seems that not all the Italians had yet been enfranchised, and the confinement of those who had within a minority of tribes made it clear that the Romans were determined to limit to the best of their ability the value of the prize that their allies had wrested from them. Thus the Italian question had by no means been settled: the struggle for even the most nominal equality still had much of its course to run, though the Italians could take comfort from the knowledge that there were still men at Rome who, for whatever motive, were prepared to champion their interests.

Nor did the manner in which the outbreak of war had been exploited in pursuit of private enmities give any grounds for hope that in internal affairs a spirit of conciliation would now prevail. The murder of Livius Drusus had gone unpunished, and the contentious operations of the quaestio Variana had inflicted wounds that were still unhealed. The war had enforced a temporary lull in political infighting, but now that it was over revival of the feuds of 90 could only exacerbate an already delicate situation and diminish further the always remote likelihood of a unified and statesmanlike approach to the problems of Italy. It could be safely predicted that the times would continue interesting and that the new citizens would have a large part to play.

The consulship of 88, to which Sulla was elected in the last weeks of 89, together with his friend Q. Pompeius Rufus, might have seemed no more than the just, if not inevitable, reward for his military achievements during the foregoing year. Yet it seems that he encountered competition from an unusual source: C. Iulius Caesar Strabo, aedile in 90, who had not held the praetorship, but nevertheless wanted to stand for the consulship.

I. THE REVOLT OF LEPIDUS, 78–77 B.C.

Catulus and Lepidus quarrelled again as they left Sulla’s funeral, and Lepidus soon stepped up his agitation. He promised to rescind Sulla’s acts, to recall those who had been driven into exile and to restore their lands to those who had been dispossessed to make way for Sulla’s veterans. He may also have succeeded in passing a law reviving distributions of cheap corn. Another issue promptly raised and constantly debated in the years that followed was the tribunate. It seems, though the text of Licinianus is uncertain, that the tribunes of 78 asked the consuls to restore the tribunician power, but that Lepidus was the first to refuse and surprisingly convinced a majority of those present that such a measure would serve no useful purpose. If so, then he later changed his mind and championed the tribunate, allegedly in the interests of concord.

These squabbles may have been enough to inspire the consul Catulus to introduce his law against public violence, though it may equally have been a response to the more serious disturbances that soon arose. The simmering discontent created by Sulla’s expropriations in many parts of the Italian countryside boiled over in one of the worst-hit areas, Etruria. The Sullan colonists at Faesulae were attacked by men who had lost their land and in some cases their citizen rights as well. The Senate was sufficiently alarmed to send both consuls to suppress the rising. What happened next is obscure, but Lepidus seems to have put himself at the head of the insurgents and clashed with Catulus, who was prepared to use force to resist him. But instead of giving Catulus firm backing the Senate imposed an oath to keep the peace on both consuls and, to placate Lepidus and get him out of Italy, took the dangerous step of assigning him Transalpine Gaul, perhaps with Cisalpina too, since we find that the latter province was occupied in 77 by Lepidus’ legate M. Iunius Brutus. No doubt many senators could not face the prospect of another civil war that might culminate in another capture of Rome and the loss of their newly restored authority. But then, feeling that it had humoured Lepidus enough, the Senate summoned him to Rome to hold the consular elections.

The expansion of the power of the city of Rome through the whole of the Mediterranean world during the last three centuries B.C. led to the establishment of Rome as the predominant military and economic force in the region. It also made it necessary to develop ways of administering so large and diverse an area. The patterns which emerged are now usually referred to as the provincial administration of the empire, and there is no doubt that some such collective title is necessary to describe the various methods used by officials of the state to control the communities and individuals with whom they were in contact. It is important at the outset, however, to recognize that ‘provincial administration’ was not a Roman concept, at least during the period of the Republic, within which the empire took shape.

I. PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAE: THE ORIGINS OF THE SYSTEM

Although the English ‘province’ is obviously derived from the Latin provincia, the meaning of the two is by no means identical. A province, whether in a constitutional context, as for example the province of Ulster or of Ontario, or in an ecclesiastical, such as the provinces of Canterbury and York, is an area defined for administrative purposes. The provincia on the other hand seems originally to have been a task assigned to a specified Roman magistrate or promagistrate, in the fulfilment of which he would exercise the imperium granted to him in virtue of his election or appointment. Although his task might well consist of using that imperium, the executive power of the Roman people, in a military command within a particular geographical area, it need not do so. Livy several times describes an Italian tribe as a consul’s provincia, and during his account of the Second Punic War he refers to the provinciae of the fleet and the war against Hannibal in the same way. Similarly the treasury is called the provincia of a quaestor, and the urbana provincia marked the allocation of the civil jurisdiction within the city. When used by Plautus and Terence, writing comedies in the second century, and also in Cicero, the word seems to have a sense rather like the secondary meaning in modern English, of a concern or sphere of influence.

I

Law has several facets, none of which a historical account ought to ignore. It may be seen as a set of rules of behaviour backed by sanctions, an instrument of social engineering, a mechanism for dispute-settlement, or a mode of argument and a way of thinking. It may at a given time be consonant, or be dissonant, with the desires and habits of its society; and it cannot alone give a picture of all the boundaries of behaviour in a society, because there are always social and economic constraints at least as powerful as the law, and in relation to those alone can it be properly understood.

This chapter is about the private law. Conceptual puzzles can be raised about the boundary between that and other categories of law, but for present purposes the plain man’s concept of the modern difference between private (what English lawyers call ‘civil’) and criminal law suffices. The courts that people came into for private litigation were different from those described in the previous chapter, and that can serve as a pragmatic criterion; but there were overlaps and borderline cases. The end-point is, loosely, the death of Cicero; as for the starting-point, discussion will be limited to developments subsequent to the Twelve Tables, and in fact little positive will be said about anything before the end of the Hannibalic War.

Apart from extrapolation backwards from the ‘classical’ law of the Principate, a procedure which remains essential in spite of its obvious dangers, the evidence for private law in the Republic is mostly not that of technical writings: relatively few things said or written by the Republican jurists survive. One later work requires special mention:5 a long fragment, preserved in Justinian’s Digest, of the ‘One-Volume Handbook’ (liber singularis enchiridii) of the jurist Pomponius, written in the middle of the second century A.D. The passage has three sections, of which the first two are about the growth of what we should call the ‘sources of the law’ and the jurisdictional magistracies, for which we mostly possess much better evidence. The third, however, is a historical list of the great lawyers, and constitutes unique testimony. A few Republican inscriptions are of some importance; otherwise, one must turn to general literature.

I. THE CIVIL WAR

We do not know exactly where the Rubicon was; nor are we sure that it was on 10 January that Caesar crossed it (by the sun it was nearly two months earlier). But it is possible that on doing so he did say, quoting a Greek comedy by Menander, ‘let the die be cast’.

For the events of the next weeks, we have Caesar’s own account, which can occasionally be convicted by Cicero’s correspondence (which includes some letters from Caesar and Pompey themselves, as well as from others) of apologetic bias. Dividing his single legion into two parts he marched with five cohorts to Ariminum, and sent Antony, probably immediately, to Arretium to block the route from Rome by the Via Cassia. He himself, on reaching Ancona, held the head of the Via Flaminia. When news of this reached Rome on 17 January, Pompey insisted on abandoning the panic-stricken city, and retired with the consuls and many senators to Campania. Caesar’s other troops began to come up, and perhaps even while abortive negotiations were in progress he occupied all Picenum. Several small garrisons went over to him; L. Domitius Ahenobarbus used others, and troops he had raised himself – the equivalent of three legions – to make a stand at the strategic crossroads of Corfinium, refusing as the new proconsul of Gallia Transalpina to obey the pleas of Pompey, the proconsul of the Spains, to join him at Luceria in Apulia. But Domitius was surrounded and forced by his men to surrender. Caesar ostentatiously released all prisoners of senatorial or equestrian rank, not to mention the state funds in Domitius’ charge, and recruited the troops (many Domitius’ own tenants) whom he then despatched to Sicily.

Pompey withdrew to Brundisium, whither he had already sent some of his men. On 4 March the consuls put to sea from the town with part of the forces, only a few days before Caesar arrived, now with three veteran and three new legions, to find Pompey still present. But on 17 March, in spite of Caesar’s attempts to make the harbour unusable, he escaped the attempted blockade and crossed to Epirus.

Roman morality and political harmony were at their height, wrote Sallust, between the Second and Third Punic Wars. After this came the evils that accompany prosperity – strife, greed, ambition and the pursuit of ascendancy by powerful men. The inadequacies of this kind of explanation and of the precise dividing line drawn here by Sallust were discussed in chapter 1 (pp. 7–9). In spite of this there is no doubt that the razing of Carthage introduced an era of political crisis, whose antagonisms recalled the dimly remembered struggles of the early Republic and brought into question the stability of the constitution which Polybius admired.

Polybius thought that the common people were wronged through the greed of some men and given a false sense of importance through the ambitions of others. These exploited the truculence and recklessness of the poor in order to dominate the constitution and created what was in name democracy but was in fact mob-rule. Modern scholars are in general reluctant to recognize so dramatic a change, at least in Polybius’ lifetime. The present writer has argued in an earlier book that the violence of the late Republic should not be regarded as the result of a sudden reversal of Roman values but the re-emergence of long-standing attitudes and conflicts, which had been temporarily suppressed by political prudence and the profits from success abroad. On the other hand, it is not excessively superficial to look to the personalities of men like the Gracchi and see in their imagination and resolve the initial moment of a new political process. However, this can only be done when we have discerned how much of the late Republic was already present in that middle period renowned in Sallust’s eyes for its moderation.

I. THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION IN THE SECOND CENTURY B.C.

Aristotle would have treated the Roman constitution either as a mixture of the basic forms of constitution (monarchy, oligarchy and democracy), as Polybius did later, or else as one of the more moderate forms of democracy, close to the ill-defined border he drew between this and moderate oligarchy. The Roman body politic was not completely in the power of either rich or poor; all citizens to some extent participated in politics, but the law was sovereign, and the few offices were only available to those with a property qualification.

In considering the level and nature of intellectual activity in Roman society, we are bound to be discussing, in the main, the culture of the Roman and Italian upper classes. Our evidence is such that it is easier to gauge their knowledge of Greek than the general level of literacy. We can note that second-century Roman legislators already assumed that their laws would be read throughout the peninsula and required that they be publicly displayed in a place where they could be easily seen; we can point to the graffiti at Pompeii which show that, in the first century A.D., in a prosperous town, a substantial proportion of the population could read and possibly write, though not to a very high standard. But such evidence tells us little about the numbers and kinds of people who could and would read sophisticated Latin prose and verse. There the most important factor must be the availability of education. One point, however, is worth making at the outset: that is, the importance of oral culture. Not only was drama, one of the earliest forms of Latin literature, accessible without reading, but so was oratory, which was not only the key to understanding public life but an intellectual and artistic product that reached its peak of sophistication and polish in this period. Political and forensic speeches in the Forum were a form of popular entertainment like dramatic performances, and Cicero attests the sensitivity of an ordinary audience to the arrangement of words and the use of metre or prose rhythm. Other forms of literature too were regularly recited: indeed the serious study of Latin literature had started in the middle of the second century when scholars started to prepare the works of Naevius and Ennius for recitation.

I. EDUCATION

Cicero, making a contrast with Greek education, notes with approval that Roman education was not publicly regulated or uniform. After their establishment, perhaps in the middle of the third century, feepaying primary schools must have become a regular feature of life in Rome, though, apart from allusions in Plautine comedy, we have little direct evidence. Many continued to learn their letters and the rudiments of arithmetic at home or, with other children, at the home of a neighbour who had a suitably trained slave, such as Cato’s Chilo. Secondary education on the Greek model developed rapidly in the latter part of the second century.

If we define ‘economy’, un-theoretically, as the production, exchange and consumption of goods (not only material goods but also what are called ‘services’), a study of all these three elements throughout the whole Mediterranean world, even for the period covered in this volume, would vastly exceed the dimensions of the present chapter. Some limitations will therefore be applied. First, a spatial limitation: we shall look at the history mainly from the standpoint of Italy and its political centre, Rome. Secondly, a limitation in time: the economy of Roman Italy already had a long history behind it in 133 B.C., but we shall take for granted and only briefly allude to that earlier structure and development, and lay all the stress on the changes that occurred in our period, which were considerable and have become better known as a result of modern research. A third limit will be in terms of orientation. It is the most delicate point to explain, although the most interesting. One cannot study the ancient (or any other) economy without relating it to the kind of society and the political structure within which its developments took place. In ancient society men were not only producers or consumers, rentiers or wage-earners: they were also free or slave, Romans or ‘allies’; they had a social status derived not just from their place in the economy but, mostly, from the role, hereditary or otherwise, assigned to them by the way the community was organized. Strongly emphasized in law, with its privileges and its exclusions, status was more civic than economic (though naturally certain economic facts, such as property, might be part of its definition). But status, in turn, affected the economy, directly: the control by the state of access to real property is a good example, or the exclusion of certain status groups – the upper ‘orders’ from certain economic activities, or the way in which the availability of slave labour varied as a function of Rome’s conquests. So a particular effort will be made in this chapter, in describing and analysing the facts and changes of the Roman economy, to signal wherever appropriate the interaction between economy and status.

One further preliminary word is necessary, on a characteristic of our period.

By the end of the second century before Christ the Romans faced a crisis as a result of their mastery of the Mediterranean, which was made sharper by an increased political awareness resulting from their wider experience and the intellectual contacts made during the acquisition of empire. What Floras regarded as the robust maturity of Rome, which was doomed to collapse into the senility of the Principate, is made a more complex and more rewarding study by Roman self-consciousness. The most penetrating assessment of the Roman rise to power before 150 B.C. was made by Polybius — a Greek familiar with Rome but still an outsider. The Roman histories which had begun to be written from c. 200 B.C. onwards are lost to us but for a few citations and quotations, but, even if they were to be recovered, it is doubtful if we would find anything to compare with Polybius’ analysis. Before the second century had ended, however, not only had the sheer bulk of Roman historical writing increased but the material had become diversified. Sempronius Asellio, who lived in the period of the Gracchi, drew a distinction between writing mere annals, the traditional Roman narrative of events in a strict chronological framework, and histories, which interpreted by seeking causation and motive. In practice this meant that Romans no longer always wrote omnibus narratives stretching from Aeneas, or the wolf and twins, to their own day, but produced monographs on specific topics from the past or present, biographies and autobiographies. Moreover, the development of Roman intellectual life led to other forms of writing in prose – treatises, especially on oratory and law, and letters. Meanwhile, Greek interest in Rome did not cease, and one of the most influential sources for later writers whose native language was Greek was the Stoic philosopher Posidonius, who in addition to works on geography and ethnography wrote a full-scale Roman history which picked up the story where Polybius left it.

The works of the Roman annalists culminated under the emperor Augustus with the work of Livy, 120 of whose 142 books dealt with history down to the death of Cicero. However, the only products actually of the Republican period to survive are two monographs and some substantial fragments of a history by Sallust, one short biography by Cornelius Nepos and the military commentaries of Caesar.