William Harris' War and Imperialism (Oxford, 1979) has already received a long review in last year's Journal (70 (1980) 177 f.) by A. N. Sherwin White; but the importance of the book and of its theme clearly justifies further discussion of the essential problems raised. In any case, the review concentrated almost entirely on points of disagreement and hardly stated a position on the general questions raised by Harris' work. What is more the author and his reviewer, sharp though their disagreements may be, seem to share a range of assumptions about the scope of the problem and the appropriate methods of dealing with it; in my view, these assumptions need to be stated and examined.

It is a well-established view that in the century following the Hannibalic War the Italian countryside saw the expropriation of its free peasantry and the introduction of slave-staffed villas. This assumption of fact underlies much modern historical research. As one recent study put it: ‘When we compare Roman with American slavery, the growth of slavery in Roman Italy seems surprising. In the eighteenth century, slavery was used as a means of recruiting labour to cultivate newly discovered lands for which there was no adequate local labour force…. In Roman Italy…slaves were recruited to cultivate land which was already being cultivated by citizen peasants. We have to explain not only the import of slaves but the extrusion of citizens'. The usual answer has been that land was the largest single available investment for the wealth which the upper classes had derived from imperialism and was also the most socially acceptable investment. But despite postulation of a largely economic motive, the approach taken by historians has been mainly social and political. The explanation, however, and the type of approach involved owe much of their plausibility and hence popularity to what is also their greatest weakness, namely somewhat circular argumentation. The evidence on which the phenomenon and its explanation have been constructed is above all that of the literary sources, and the context in which this information is given is almost invariably political—the obvious and major instance is the Gracchan reforms. It should hardly surprise us, then, that this view of Republican agrarian history provides a neat socio-economic explanation for the political upheavals of the later Republic for which we again take our main evidence from the very same sources. Such validation is only apparent. Perhaps it speaks for the internal consistency of these literary sources; certainly it illustrates our pathetic imprisonment within the ‘facts’ and ‘interpretations’—one could say tout court the bias—of these sources. There is little to be gained from further introspective critique of this type of evidence.

The first part of this paper looks briefly at Greek representations of foreigners and the first individualized Greek portraits and the connections between them. The second part looks at Roman Republican portraits and the problem of the origins of their style and suggests that they should be seen in a historical and psychological context as a Greek reaction to a new group of foreigners of special concern to Greek artists and Greeks in general.

As long as poetry has existed, men. have wondered and argued about its relationship to reality. The Muses, meeting Hesiod beneath Mount Helicon, told him that they knew how to tell many lies that sounded like truth; Solon and Pindar echo the chastening refrain, and Plato and Aristotle are concerned to find new answers to the hoary problem. Poetry is in fact a very slippery stuff, which seems to turn into something else as we try to comprehend it; like Proteus, it can turn under our grasp into a raging fire—the revolutionary Marxist view, perhaps; or a wild beast—the Freudian id, as it might be; or, most commonly, into a stream of water, which flows away to nothing between our hands.

Like all works of literature, works of history end up sooner or later with a readership quite different from that envisaged or hoped for by their authors. A subtle and polemical work such as The Gallic War of Caesar has become a standard text for teaching Latin in the early years of secondary education, as have the tender and sophisticated elegies of Tibullus and Propertius. In Italy, the unpopularity of ‘The Betrothed’ by A. Manzoni, a finely ironical and difficult but rewarding novel, is the result of the distaste or boredom experienced by children forced to read it at school.

A similar fate has dogged Thucydides. As T. P. Wiseman has recently emphasized, Thucydides and Polybius, precisely because their historical method is close to our own, are regarded as the paradigms against which to judge ancient historical writing—quite wrongly. In fact they are untypical and exceptional; and one has moreover to ask to what extent they were even properly understood in antiquity. In a famous chapter near the beginning of his work (1. 22. 4), Thucydides proudly distances it from that of Herodotus, though without naming him: his own history is not designed for passing appreciation, but is to be of permanent value. Because human nature is always the same, a critical record of past events will present analogies and resemblances when compared with future developments. Knowledge of the past is thus useful, because it improves ones judgment and understanding and even suggests how to behave in situations in which one may find oneself.

Those who study and teach the history of the Ancient World suffer from a great disadvantage, which we find difficult to admit even to ourselves: in a perfectly literal sense we do not know what we are talking about. Of course we can dispose of a vast range of accumulated knowledge about what we are talking about. We can compile lists of officeholders in the Roman Empire, without our evidence revealing how government worked or even whether it made any impact at all on the ordinary person; we can discuss the statuses of cities and look at the archaeological remains of some of them (or rather some parts of some of them) without having any notion of their social and economic functions, or of whether it made any real difference whether an inhabitant of the Roman provinces lived in a small city or a large village.

From the time of the introduction of the denarius system onwards, Roman currency gradually spread over all, or nearly all, the regions under Roman rule, in the wake of their progressive integration into the Empire. Partly, the denarius replaced previous currencies, partly it brought about the monetization of areas not yet monetized. It was therefore the most striking feature, and indeed the logical premise, of the economic unification of the Empire (in so far as one can speak of such a unification). Until the Severan age, the Roman monetary system remained stable, notwithstanding the widening of the area it covered and the various changes it underwent—the introduction of new denominations and new metals, the retariffing of some elements in relation to each other, the transformation of the physical quality of the coins, for instance through debasement: in fact, there were no sudden and considerable rises of prices and Roman currency almost always enjoyed automatic confidence.

Our knowledge of the pottery industry in ancient Egypt has so far been derived from sculptured reliefs showing potters at work, from a few excavations of kilns and from chemical analyses of pottery wares. Documentary evidence has now come to light in the form of three pottery leases from Oxyrhynchus, all dated to the middle of the third century a.d.

They are so closely related in subject-matter, terminology, date and the names of the contracting parties that I publish in full only the earliest and most complete (which I shall refer to as A); but I include references to the more significant details of the other two (B and C). Their importance lies in the fact that they reveal a remarkably large scale industry, and also much concerning the techniques and terminology of the pottery industry, especially the names of the clays used and the sizes of the jars.

Sacidava (Musait) lies on the right bank of the Danube in the Dobruja and a brick with the retrograde stamp I CIL, discovered in 1972, has already been reported. During the excavations of 1979 further epigraphic evidence of the presence of cohors I Cilicum at Sacidava was found, and it seems worth presenting this with a minimum of comment at this stage.

In 1913 J. B. Bury wrote of Diocletian's administrative reforms: ‘It is becoming clear that (Diocletian) was not the initiator, but was only extending and systematizing changes which had already been begun’; and subsequent research in many areas has tended to support this contention. Bury was particularly concerned with the subdivision of the provinces; yet that particular reform has continued to be ascribed almost wholly to Diocletian, on the authority of Lactantius' famous phrase, provinciae quoque in frusta concisae, and in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary. It is the purpose of this article to present new material from Aphrodisias in Caria which seems to indicate that a new imperial province of Phrygia and Caria, whose creation has hitherto been ascribed to Diocletian or his successors, had been separated from proconsular Asia before A.D. 259. If this is so, it may well prove fruitful to re-examine material from other parts of the empire, in order to determine whether similar developments, at such a date, can be identified elsewhere.

This survey of developments in Roman Epigraphy is innovatory in being the work of a team, whose range of interests should ensure the inclusion of a wider variety of texts than heretofore. We have all made some contribution, larger or smaller, to most sections, but, in the last resort, each section represents a personal choice by its writer. It may help the reader, therefore, to know that sections I and II are by Joyce Reynolds, III, VII, part of IX, and XI by Mary Beard, IV, V, VI and part of IX by Richard Duncan-Jones, and VIII and X by Charlotte Roueché.