To speak of Roman politics in the late Republic without touching on violence would hardly be possible. But my real theme is concerned with methods of interpreting Roman history. We have seen in the last hundred years some three general attitudes or schools of thought about the study of the later Republic. It all begins with Mommsen, of course. First there were those who, following Mommsen, tended to explain Roman history in terms of the nineteenth century. The conflict of Optimates and Populares tended to be assimilated to the forms of conflict in parliamentary countries; parties, programmes, even democrats and conservatives were brought in. Then came a swing away. The stress was laid more and more on the generals and their ambitions. The terminology of parliamentary democracy was discarded as unsuitable, and the history of the late Republic was seen as an inevitable procession of great Imperatores, each foreshadowing the next. Even the Scipios were involved, then Marius, Sulla and so forth. Much less stress was laid on the popular movement. Apart from the Gracchi the tribunes were treated as tools of the Imperators and nothing more. The politics of the generation before the Social War were explained in terms of the Ciceronian age. One might cite the great chapters of the Cambridge Ancient History, and Meyer's Caesars Monarchie as characteristic.

The ‘insider-outsider problem’ has had little impact on the study of religion in pre-Christian Rome. Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrifice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. This study argues, however, that the apparent continuity is illusory in some important ways and that we have lost sight of some fine distinctions that the Romans made among the rituals they performed. Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. Roman sacrificium is both less and more than the typical etic notion of sacrifice.

This article examines marriage as a pathway to free status for enslaved women in the early imperial Roman world, arguing that women manumitted for marriage to their former owners experienced a qualified form of freedom. Analysis of a funerary altar from early imperial Rome alongside larger bodies of legal and epigraphic evidence shows that in this transactional mode of manumission, enslaved women paid for their freedom by foregoing certain privileges, including, to varying degrees, the ability to enter and exit the marriage at will and the separation of their property from that of their husbands. Through a close examination of one mode of manumission and the unequal unions that resulted from it, this paper offers further evidence that freedom was not uniform, but varied in its meaning depending on who achieved it and by what means.

This article reconsiders the possible statuary of the Pantheon in Rome, both in its original Augustan form and in its later phases. It argues that the so-called ‘Algiers Relief’ has wrongly been connected with the Temple of Mars Ultor and is in fact evidence of the association of the Divus Julius with Mars and Venus in the Pantheon of Agrippa, a juxtaposition which reflects the direction of Augustan ideology in the 20s b.c. and the building's celestial purpose. This triple statue group became the focus of the later Pantheon, and its importance is highlighted by the hierarchized system of architectural ornament of the present building.

This paper outlines a new framework for the historical study of Rome and Italy during the middle republican period. We argue that traditional approaches centred upon social struggles at home and battles abroad, res domi militiaeque, do not sufficiently capture the dynamism of Roman society during the early stages of imperial expansion. Recent scholarship has been rightly critical of the appropriateness of applying concepts of Hellenisation to the period, as Rome's interactions with Magna Graecia and the Greek East in the fourth and third centuries look very different than they would in subsequent centuries. Moving in a new direction, we sketch the contours of an approach that foregrounds the many connectivities (temporal, geographical, methodological, historical) apparent from the interdisciplinary study of middle republican Rome and Italy. The result encourages a new mode of historical inquiry into the development of middle republican Rome and Italy, one which sees Rome already in this moment as both expansively interconnected with and actively involved in wider Mediterranean and Eurasian history.

A geoarchaeological coring survey of the Forum Boarium has shed considerable light on Rome's archaic landscape. We present the first empirical evidence that substantiates ancient and modern assumptions about the existence of a river harbour and ford in early Rome. Prior to the growth of the city, the riverbank — reconstructed as a high ledge at the base of the Capitoline Hill and a low-lying shore north of the Aventine — was particularly advantageous for river-related activities. However, the river valley changed significantly in the sixth century b.c.e., as a result of complex fluvial processes that were arguably spurred by urbanisation. Around the beginning of the Republic, Rome's original harbour silted up, and a high, wide riverbank emerged in its place. The siltation continued until the Forum Boarium was urbanised in the mid-Republic. In order to build their city and maintain river harbour operations, the Romans therefore had to adapt to dynamic ecological conditions.

This article seeks to jumpstart the politico-historicist scholarship on Virgil's Georgics in the direction of Marxist criticism. I argue that the Georgics should be understood less as a battle site for intra-elite power struggles or civil strife, more as an ideological stomping ground to work out, and dig in, the particular relationships of slavery and imperialism disfiguring the Roman world in 29 b.c.e. After a brief analysis of the dynamics of labor in Books 1–3, I train on a close reading of Book 4, which sees the bees (et al.) as crucial to the new dominant logic of compelling others (whether slaves or provincial subjects) to produce and give up the fruits of their labour — all for the leisured enjoyment of the upper crust.

This article offers an account of Roman imperial cameos as an archaeological category, and argues that the production of large high-quality cameos was more restricted in time than currently allowed; that the controversial dates and subjects of individual cameos need to be set in the wider sequence of the main examples; and that early imperial praise poetry sits in relationship to court cameos in a way that can be usefully investigated around their shared concern to understand the particular character of imperial divinity. An Appendix gives details of forty-one examples illustrated and discussed.

Different methods of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century C.E. produce convergent results that point to total output and consumption equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat or close to 20 billion sesterces per year. It is estimated that élites (around 1.5 per cent of the imperial population) controlled approximately one-fifth of total income, while middling households (perhaps 10 per cent of the population) consumed another fifth. These findings shed new light on the scale of economic inequality and the distribution of demand in the Roman world.

Despite a range of literary and archaeological evidence for the importance of forests in Roman Africa, these marginal lands and their marginalised populations have been almost entirely ignored or downplayed by modern scholarship, leading to tortured interpretations of a range of material. This article asks two questions, one historical, the other historiographic: what role did the forests of Africa Proconsularis play in the economies and productive imaginaries of the region's inhabitants? And why have the products, labour and labourers of sylvan industries been largely written out of modern accounts? After drawing together evidence and proxies for the centrality of Africa's pine forests to a range of lifeways, cultural practices and economies — including their fundamental (and overlooked) role in providing the pitch that lined the exported amphorae that drove North Africa's economic boom — I argue that French colonial practices around forests led to their erasure from histories of Roman Africa.