This chapter attempts to reconstruct the early history of the ala Apriana, a cavalry unit present in Egypt from the Julio-Claudian period, and of early auxiliary units of the Roman army in Egypt, on the basis of Latin and Greek documentary papyri. It then looks at Claudius’ reorganisation of permanent alae with standardised names, and investigates the identity and role of Aper, the first eponymous commander of the ala Apriana, suggesting an identification with the Gaulish orator Marcus Aper, Tacitus’ teacher and a speaker in the Dialogus de oratoribus.

‘Economics’, i.e., household ethics, was included in the Late Antique ladder of sciences as a branch of practical philosophy. In Chapter 13, a preliminary sketch is proposed of this science, its topics and the authoritative texts to be used in its study. Comparing some chapters of Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus and of Marinus’ Life of Proclus, I show how in these texts Plotinus and Proclus exhibit exemplary practice in household ethics and how Marinus’ portrait of Proclus attempts to show his superiority in comparison with Porphyry’s portrait of Plotinus. I also indicate further texts where more material can be found concerning Late Antique Platonist household ethics.

The use of Latin alongside Greek in Roman soldiers’ private documents on papyrus or tablet has already been approached by modern scholarship. However, new evidence allows a further exploration of this topic and a reassessment of some of the results reached so far. Therefore, this chapter investigates three case studies based on this new evidence: the use of the tribal designation, the use of Latin in marriage agreements, and the use of Latin in Roman testaments. The following questions are addressed: What kind of Latin did Roman soldiers and veterans use? Under what circumstances? And why? What can we learn from new evidence? Does it strengthen or challenge traditional hypotheses? The investigation contributes to our understanding of the significance of written documentation in the daily lives of Roman soldiers and veterans and of the usages of the Latin language, script, or culture in their private documents. The new evidence considered sometimes strengthens and at other times challenges traditional hypotheses, showing how complex the relationship was between the Latin and Greek languages, scripts, and cultures in the Graeco-Roman eras.

This chapter discusses the use of Greek in the Roman judicial system. First, it considers the general question of the role of Latin as an official language of the judicial administration and the permission given to judges to deliver officially their sentences in Greek, at least from the end of the fourth century CE. Secondly, it uses papyrological sources (mostly records of court proceedings on papyrus) to examine traces of the use of Greek in trials before 396 CE. To shed more light on this issue, two reports on papyrus from Kellis are examined: these fourth-century documents provide further evidence of the use of official translations in the judicial system and the fees charged for their production. Furthermore, the analysis of a court record from the Viennese collection may offer additional elements to our knowledge of the subject.

Finally, lest the apparent scientific rigour of the arguments of a text such as Proclus’ Elements of Theology might mislead one to think that a definitive science of divine first principles is achieved, Damascius’ Difficulties and Solutions Concerning First Principles provides an effective antidote to such an illusion. In this chapter I describe how Damascius exploits the contradictory arguments and conclusions that rational soul can develop in its reasonings with concepts about the divine. I argue that these dilemmas, these impasses suffered by the rational soul are not, as Damascius sees it, expressions of the ultimate failure of metaphysics, nor the stalemate of a sceptic which requires suspension of judgement, but a privileged place where the soul exercises its rational powers in an approach to the divine.

Four levels of music are distinguished by Proclus, going from audible music, through harmonics (theoretical music) up to the highest, divine music, that of philosophy as assimilated to the divine. Bringing these four levels of music into relation with the scale of virtues, I describe how audible music can have a role in the education of irrational affects on the level of ‘ethical’ virtue. On the level of ‘political’ virtue, harmonics provide knowledge inspiring political virtue and which is of use in producing morally beneficial audible music. I note how Proclus, in dealing with these themes in relation of Plato’s association of virtues with musical concords, made use of Ptolemy’s Harmonics and how Damascius both provides more information about Proclus’ views and criticizes them. Finally, I refer to the highest levels of music and their relation to the highest levels of virtue, where plurality and differentiation (in music and virtue) are finally absorbed in unity.

Chapter 22 examines music in more detail, considered as a theoretical science dealing with the relations (or proportions) between numbers. The ontological status of the objects studied in theoretical music (‘harmonics’) is described and the primary proportions (or intervals), identified as concords, are presented. The importance of music as providing models for subordinate sciences, in particular ethics and physics, is sketched.

In his Life of Isidore, Damascius, as I argue in Chapter 9, described the lives of a wide range of figures of his period as exemplifying to varying degrees success or failure in progress through the scale of virtues, thus providing an edificatory panorama of patterns of philosophical perfection, a panorama which could serve to inspire people beginning the study of philosophy. Many of these figures in Damascius’ account were able to achieve lives lived on the level of the political virtues, but few were able to attain higher levels of virtue and very few the highest levels. Yet these exceptional examples could also serve to inspire.

This chapter discusses how Rome was overall an agrarian economy and the effects of slavery on small farms and peasant farmers, especially with the growth in size from the Republic to the Empire. It also looks at the main problems in the Roman economy: inflation, which the Romans did not understand, and how the Romans coped with runaway prices. Industry (or lack thereof) is ied; how Rome was not a consumer economy despite the great drain of the City itself in its demands for luxury goods. It also considers the role of the army in the Roman economy – as a means of economic expansion, but also as one of the driving forces behind the army (keeping it fed and paid).

Chapter 1 takes the multiple biography published by Damascius, the last head of the school of Athens. In this biography, the Vita Isidori, Damascius describes the lives of many of the intellectuals of his time, including various rhetors. Among these rhetors he singles out some who, in his view, were not only virtuous, but also worthy to be called philosophers. Damascius therefore distinguished between good and bad rhetors, a distinction which I relate to the distinction between good and bad rhetoric which we can find it in the work of two Alexandrian philosophers of the fifth and sixth centuries, Hierocles and Olympiodorus: bad rhetoric caters to the base desires of the mob, whereas good rhetoric has a worthy moral purpose and is based on true knowledge. Damascius also notes variety in rhetorical skill, in particular the limitations of his own teacher Isidore in this regard.

In this chapter, names attested in the new edited ostraca from Gigthi and Assenamat are analysed from the point of view of Palaeo-Amazigh linguistics and in relation to the names of Bu Njem and of Roman Africa as a whole. Special attention is devoted to personal names of carriers involved in commercial exchanges as well as some measures that are unusual in Latin. These new contributions of onomastic material yield some personal names already documented in other regions of North Africa and add new names that can be analysed as Palaeo-Amazigh on phonological, morphological, lexematic, and semantic grounds. The linguistic analyses are put into the geohistorical, cultural, economic, and epigraphic contexts in which Tripolitanian ostraca were written. The study of measures portrays a depiction of Palaeo-Amazigh groups (Garamantes amongst them) as suppliers of grain and other crops cultivated in Phazania (Fazzān) and in northern Sahara to the Roman frontiers thanks, on the one hand, to sophisticated systems of water extraction whose true extent has only recently been revealed by archaeological prospection focused on hydraulic engineering and, on the other hand, to skin or leather bags used as containers for grain, water, and other supplies in Trans-Saharan transportation.

This chapter starts with a general introduction to the topic of civic space and rural life in the Roman Empire; the discussion includes the sources available for the writer. It is stressed that Roman literature on rural life, especially, tends to be greatly idealised by contemporary authors who viewed the life of a ‘gentleman farmer’ as a virtuous ideal. The Roman aristocrat based his wealth on how much land he owned – the contrast between the ideal Roman country estate and Pliny the Younger’s drudgery as a landlord would make a good case study. The chapter looks at life in the City of Rome as well as provincial towns which emulated what they knew of the centre. It discusses street conditions and layout, types of buildings, styles of architecture, and construction materials. Issues of safety and the dangers of city living are discussed – crime, fire, etc. There is also a discussion of the types of housing found in the city – imperial and aristocratic palaces on the one hand, and the life of an apartment (insula) dweller on the other.

Alexander of Aphrodisias included Aristotle’s first principles of rational thinking, in particular the principle of non-contradiction, in the domain of metaphysics, as would Syrianus. In this chapter I discuss this principle as it was understood by Syrianus, in particular with regard to its roots in divine Intellect, where the unity of intellection and its objects grounds the principles of reasoning in human intellection and the truth of its objects.