The demography of Roman state formation in Italy
This paper seeks to provide a basic demographic framework for the study of integrative processes in Italy during the Republican period.
Tiberiana 1: Tiberian Neologisms
Capri, which will explore the interrelationship between culture and empire, between Tiberius’ intellectual passions (including astrology, gastronomy, medicine, mythology, and literature) and his role as princeps.
New ways of studying incomes in the Roman economy
This paper very briefly considers three ways of expanding the study of Roman income levels beyond the limits of empirical data on costs and wages, by considering the determinants of real incomes, the use of proxy data for real incomes, and the potential of cross-cultural comparison.
Shock and Awe: The Performance Dimension of Galen
The explicit purpose of Galen’s anatomical dissections was to map the world of knowledge normally hidden within the body and then, by showing how form followed function, to reveal the perfection of Nature’s design. This essay, however, does not focus on the scientific and teleological dimensions of his anatomical enterprise, but aims instead to explore its performance dimension.
Narratives of Roman Syria: a historiography of Syria as a province of Rome
Existing scholarly accounts of Roman Syria revolve around three themes: hellenization,
similarity to Rome, and a profound difference with the western provinces of the Roman empire. In the following sections I argue that the overemphasis on these three themes by scholars has obscured the process of Syria’s incorporation into the Roman empire and the profound impact of this process on local communities.
Roman population size: the logic of the debate
Our ignorance of ancient population numbers is one of the biggest obstacles to our understanding of Roman history. After generations of prolific scholarship, we still do not know how many people inhabited Roman Italy and the Mediterranean at any given point in time.
Rule and Revenue in Egypt and Rome: Political Stability and Fiscal Institutions
This paper has more modest goals. It takes as its starting point Levi’s hy- pothesis that the transition from the Roman Republic to the Principate in the late first century BC brought political stability, which led to rationally calcu- lated fiscal reforms. It examines the effects of this transition in Egypt where there is abundant evidence due to the survival of administrative and tax docu- ments on papyrus and potsherds.
Communal Agriculture in the Ptolemaic and Roman Fayyum
My approach to land rights is social and economic rather than juristic. In other words, I am not interested in the interpretation of ancient legal terms according to Roman or civil law categories, which risks imposing rigid categories on social relations that have little explanatory power…In this paper, I use the economic concepts of communal and private land rights to illuminate these relations.
The size of the economy and the distribution of income in the Roman Empire
Different ways of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century CE 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 elites (around 1.5 per cent of the imperial population) controlled approximately one-fifth of total income while middling households (perhaps 10 percent 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.
Real wages in early economies: Evidence for living standards from 1800 BCE to 1300 CE
In this paper, I present a critical survey of pertinent data from antiquity and the early and high Middle Ages. This broadened perspective expands the chronological scope of the historical study of real incomes of unskilled workers from a few centuries to up to four millennia and at least in a few cases enables us to trace contours of change in the very long run.