The supply and use of money are topics which lie at the heart of our understanding of the Roman economy and fiscal system. The view we take of these matters affects both our picture of everyday life and the economic models we construct to describe the structure and development of the Roman world. Monetary history is also relevant to social and political change, as medieval historians know well. In the great commercial revolution of Europe in the thirteenth century it was the increasing availability of money which allowed the payment of knights and civil servants and thus broke the hereditary grip on these functions, enabling the first post-feudal states to emerge. So in the Roman world the availability of money permitted the creation of a professional standing army and of a system of salaried officials.

It seems to be generally accepted that electoral bribery, together with various other forms of munificence aimed at securing electoral advantage, was widespread in the late Republic. The sources repeatedly describe how the magistracies of the Republic were sought and won by providing feasts, entertainment, and often money, to the urban plebs. At the same time, the centuriate assembly, which elected the higher magistrates, is generally thought to have been dominated by the rich. The urban plebs, according to the prevailing view, was ‘practically disfranchised’ in this assembly.

The ancient historian is used to dealing with texts that are fragments through the accident of transmission. This paper is concerned with a deliberate fragment: a work that is notionally complete, in that it is written and presented as something finished and whole, but which at the same time draws the reader's attention in a more or less systematic fashion to the fact that it is incomplete; it shows itself to be only part of the whole. The mode was especially popular in the Romantic period; the best-known example for English readers is Coleridge's Kubla Khan, but it also revealed itself in such diverse forms as the aphoristic writings of thinkers like Friedrich Schlegel, or the widespread admiration of the ruins of ancient buildings. I intend to argue that Sallust's Jugurtha is a work of this sort.

Juvenal is charged with misogyny. The evidence brought against him is Satire 6. A secondary charge is that of unstructured composition. This paper will attempt to show that the case is unfounded. My contention is that the poem is shaped by contemporary discourses about marriage, in particular the treatment of marriage in rhetoric. The understanding of the poem's ideological grounding thus gained will provide a basis for exploring the complex interrelationship of author, speaker, addressee, and audience in the poem.

How much did Rome pay the soldiers serving in the legions and the auxilia, who expanded and defended her empire? The answer is of some significance not only to the history of the Roman army but to the political, social, and economic history of the Roman Empire in general. Many a learned article has therefore been devoted to this matter and steady progress has been made. Yet problems remain, the evidence being scanty and often not readily intelligible. Work on the 600 and more writing-tablets from the legionary fortress of Vindonissa (Switzerland), currently in progress, has turned up a missing link in the chain of evidence. The new text, a pay receipt of an auxiliary soldier, reveals a new sum and thus allows the reconstruction of the Roman army's pay scales through the first three centuries A.D. The overall pay model given below reconciles all the hitherto known evidence.

These two inscriptions come from the precinct of the temple of Hathor at Denderah (Tentyra), capital of the Tentyrite nome, just north of Thebes in Upper Egypt. The impressive remains of the complex are mostly late Ptolemaic and Roman (re)constructions, but they look Pharaonic and suggest social and cultural continuity across the centuries. The inscriptions, however, illustrate the radical changes in communal organization and administration which the Romans introduced. These changes form the subject of this paper. The first inscription dates to 12 B.C., but is almost entirely in the pre-Roman tradition. It is a trilingual dedication with the primary version in demotic (i.e. Egyptian). Augustus is god, implicitly Pharaoh, and lacks his Roman titles. The strategos (governor of the nome) Ptolemaios gives himself obsolete court titles and a string of local priesthoods. Ptolemaios came from a family which had hereditarily held local priesthoods (and probably continued to hold them after him), and his father Panas had preceded him as strategos of the Tentyrite nome, retaining office through the Roman annexation. On this occasion Ptolemaios' dedication was personal, but other dedications show him acting, like his father, as the head of local cult associations. Ptolemaios is last attested as strategos in 5 B.C. Five years later, our second inscription, which dates to 23 September A.D. I, reveals a very different situation. The dedication was made on Augustus' birthday, and was finely inscribed in Greek only. The strategos Tryphon, whose name suggests an Alexandrian sent up to the Tentyrite nome, figures only as an element of the official dating clause standard throughout Roman Egypt; he is just a cog in the Roman administrative machine. The dedication was made corporately by the local community, structured, as we will see, on the new Roman model.

One of the most revealing aspects of any society is the distribution of wealth. In the ancient world, the stratification of landholdings essentially determined the stratification of wealth. There were, to be sure, many other kinds of wealth: funds and commodities for lending, urban rental property, productive enterprises, slaves, ships, and so on. To some extent these were no doubt owned by the same people who owned agricultural land, but the almost total absence of quantifiable data makes generalization difficult. Land, moreover, occupied a unique position in the economy and government of the Roman Empire, both practically and ideologically. The great bulk of taxation fell on the land, and almost all of the burdens of public service both in the cities and in the villages were attached to its ownership. That these disadvantages of land as a form of wealth were insufficient to deter the élite from desiring land is in some measure the result of the enormous ideological preference that all of classical antiquity attached to land as a form of wealth, an ideology connected in part to the relative stability of returns from landed property compared to those from other, more volatile, forms of wealth.

Here is one of the laws of history: every event begins with a woman. It is the woman who confers life or death. It is in conformity with the nature of things that Helena should have converted Constantine. It is contrary to the nature of things that Constantine should have converted Helena.

While we may smile at the ruminations of a nineteenth-century bourgeois on the sexual politics of Constantine's conversion to Christianity, if we turn our attention for a moment from the Emperor to the Empire itself we will perceive that our own more scientific studies reflect a similar vision of Helena, refracted in the persons of pious matrons across the Empire. For we generally imagine the religious changes which swept the later Roman Empire as resulting from a fateful collaboration, that of a few unusually persuasive clerics with a multitude of devout Christian women, who enforced the views of their clerical friends at home, and shepherded their prominent husbands towards the once-only cleansing of baptism. The view has much to recommend it, and it has sparked some of the most interesting writing on late antiquity in recent decades, beginning with a celebrated contribution by Peter Brown to this journal.

Documentary and archaeological evidence concurs in placing the foundation of Marseille by colonists from Phocaea in around 600 B.C. The site can only have been chosen with an eye to its maritime commercial potential. Surrounded on the landward side by a chain of hills, the city's immediate hinterland was tiny, and only moderately fertile. Geographically, in the words of Camille Jullian, ‘Marseille … semble tourner le dos à la Provence’. But thanks to its magnificent, sheltered, deep-water harbour, now known as the Vieux-Port, the city has been a focal point for Mediterranean trade throughout its long history, and its immediate landward isolation has not affected its ability to exploit the Rhône corridor and establish commercial relations with the interior of France. Its location makes it a classic gateway community.

This survey article — the first in a new series to be published in the Journal of Roman Studies — is an attempt to review developments in the study of the city of Rome since 1980: a decade which can reasonably be seen as one of the most exciting in this field for a century, in terms not only of the archaeological discoveries and other related research taking place in Rome itself, but also of the increasing integration of the topographical and monumental history of the city of Rome into what might be termed ‘mainstream’ Roman history.