Brent D. Shaw

Tombstones and Roman Family Relations in the Principate: Civilians, Soldiers and Slaves

Tombstones furnish perhaps three-quarters of the entire corpus of Latin inscriptions. Many of these give no more than the name of the deceased, but tens of thousands also offer the historian a few additional details, such as age at death and the name and relationship of the commemorator. Previous studies of the tombstones en masse have focused on nomenclature and age at death. In this study we wish to ask what conclusions can be drawn from the data about the commemorators relationship with the deceased.

Climate, environment and prehistory in the Sahara

Abstract The issue of climatic fluctuation in the Sahara during the early Holocene is of considerable importance because of the supposedly ‘more humid’ phase during which the Saharan Neolithic flourished. An analysis of the evidence, however, seems to indicate the reverse, that is, that the Neolithic had its genesis and development in an environment which was becoming increasingly arid. In fact, the termination of the more favourable humid conditions of the pre‐Neolithic marked the departure from an economy primarily dependent on hunting/gathering, and incited the shift to the herding of domestic animals. Further, the methodological assumptions which underlie the interpretation of the evidence for climatic change are examined and questioned, especially the assumption that climatic as opposed to environmental variables can be deduced from the data at our disposal.

Seasons of Death: Aspects of Mortality in Imperial Rome

Within the last decade significant advances have been made towards a better understanding of the fundamental demographic regimes that characterized the Mediterranean world of Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Coincident with this improvement in our knowledge has come a renewed interest in the rituals and cultural practices associated with death and burial in the societies that were part of the Roman Empire. These divergent interests are reflected in two distinct approaches to the analysis of death in Roman society. The cultural method, which finds significance in reading the quality of a given death and burial, has tended to concentrate on eliciting connections between the archaeological remains of burial, the ritualistic celebration of death, and the social values of the living. The other approach to the phenomenon of death is more directly concerned with the crude biological facts of life and death: the historical demography of human mortality that has emphasized the analysis of quantitative data. In almost any consideration of death, however, the two approaches are pragmatically inseparable. This interdependence of the evaluative and quantitative aspects of death is apparent from the fact that it was a dramatic shift in cultural values that produced the consciousness and the recording of the temporal ‘quantity’ that made the writing of this study possible. What I propose to do is to track the seasonal variations of mortality in Roman society. Pronounced seasonal fluctuations in the demographics of any given human population are one of the most fundamental and enduring aspects of its characteristic profile. This applies not only to crudely biological processes such as birth and death, but also to practices, like marriage, that are apparently culturally driven. These annual oscillations rarely alter very much over the long term; they are one of the ‘deep structures’ that identify the main environmental and cultural factors that form a given population. As such, they mirror the interplay between the bare biological forces and the human decisions that give any population its peculiar shape. The delineation of a central diagnostic feature of a given population, in this case that of a vanished population of one and a half millennia ago, is something that will enable us better to understand its basic demographic structure.

Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory

An institution whose effects were as traumatic, mundane, spectacular, and ordinary as the Roman trial necessarily left its imprint on the consciousness, both waking and unwaking, of the empires subjects. The experience of going to court provoked a recursive dynamic in which images of the judicial process were recalled and replayed. Memories of trial and punishment became a kind of recollection that was an ekphrasis of the experience. Since Roman courts were so central to their history and to their ongoing experience, Christians, and their texts, especially reflect this imperial subjectivity. The judicial nightmare was a rhetorical form that both enabled memory and configured response. The dreamworld of Christian consciousness reveals what was necessary to the making of this kind of subjectivity, and the necessary qualities of the memories themselves.

The Myth of the Neronian Persecution.

A conventional certainty is that the first state-driven persecution of Christians happened in the reign of Nero and that it involved the deaths of Peter and Paul, and the mass execution of Christians in the aftermath of the great fire of July 64 c.e . The argument here contests all of these facts, especially the general execution personally ordered by Nero. The only source for this event is a brief passage in the historian Tacitus. Although the passage is probably genuine Tacitus, it reflects ideas and connections prevalent at the time the historian was writing and not the realities of the 60s.

Lambs of god: an end of human sacrifice

Ferrando: … e si rinvenne mal spenta brace… e d’un bambino, ahime l’ossame bruciato a mezzo, fumante ancor! Uomini: Ah scellerata! Oh donna infame! Del par m’investe ira ed orror! Il Trovatore . Act I, Scene 1 In certain modern sensibilities, played upon here by Verdis librettist Salvadore Cammarano, infant sacrifice has tended to rouse a basal sense of horror. The moral outrage has usually imputed alien rites and the evils of dreadful barbaric practices. Consider the following descriptions not about the fictions of an imaginary Iberian court, but rather of an actual historical practice.

Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (review)

A signiacant item on the recent research agenda in Roman social history is the problem of understanding how the matrix of core values informed social behavior, honor being high on the list of the values concerned. Barton’s book is another attempt at an explication of this knotty problem. Those who have read her arst monograph on Roman values, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans (Princeton, 1992), a work that exploits the extremes offered by dwarfs and gladiators, will and themselves on familiar terrain. Those who have not might have to steel themselves for an idiosyncratic method. Readers of a traditional scholarly disposition may prefer to consult other recent works, such as Ted Lendon’s more orthodox approach to the same subject, Empire of Honour (Oxford, 1997). Nor is the matter without other current resonances in the aeld. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, in their massive anti-Braudellian essay— The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000)— have designated honor as one of the touchstone values of Mediterranean antiquity. A thorough investigation of the Roman species of honor should therefore contribute to a better understanding not only of Roman behavior but also of its place in current debates about “Mediterranean values” in Graeco-Roman antiquity. These objectives might be difacult to attain with this book in hand. The reason is not for any lack of scholarship or interdisciplinarity, or of plentiful data. There is much evidence on display in this work to show that the author has read profusely and widely, and often far beyond the “normal limits” of Roman history. The core difaculty, rather, lies in the method, which might be described as personal and highly eclectic. Everything from Cher’s diet and exercise regimen, as reported in People magazine, to Cal Ripken’s obduracy and the rose of Saint-Exupéry’s “Prince” is arraigned in support. The author pursues this path self-consciously, deliberately eschewing what she describes as analyses that are linear in nature or causal descriptions that are sequential in kind (289). When married to the desire to let the Romans speak for themselves (15), the consequence is that the argument not infrequently slips into long pastiches of quotations (142–143 provides as good an example as any). Despite all the pushing of envelopes, the lasting impression is that the book does not have much new to offer. The author subscribes to the same general view expounded over the past three decades (at least) by Veyne—that the dominant values of the Roman elite in the republic were those of warrior aristocracy whereas during the principate, these values were subverted to the tamer values of a service class (13, 277, 281–82)—a process which, to Barton, betokens an “infantilization” of Roman culture (278).1 This view might be true if, as Barton asserts, Ro284 | BRENT D. SHAW

A Note about the Text

When you read these documents, it is important to be aware of the nature of the sources in which the information appears. To that end, I have provided a general description of the most important authors of the literary works from which this information has been derived (see “List of the Principal Authors and Literary Sources”). The dates provided for many of these authors are approximate, not much better than educated guesswork.

Reading Greek and Roman Historical Sources

Today we are so far removed from a world where servitude in manual labor was the norm that empathy alone is often our faulty guide to historical understanding. For instance, in Spartacus’s day, Enna was a center of the slave economy on the island of Sicily and of the slave wars against the Roman state; now it is the home of Marina Taglialavore, the inventor of a new computer chip that has revolutionized the reading of images. Any hope of crossing this chasm to better historical understanding must begin with the fundamentals of reading the original documents that have been translated into English in this book.

The Second Sicilian Slave War, 104–100 b.c.

The second major slave war that afflicted the Roman state was almost a carbon copy of the first Taking place a generation after the first war, it also occurred on the island of Sicily. The sequence of events and the actions of the main protagonists are so reminiscent of the first slave war that some modern historians have hypothesized that the Greek and Roman historians who told the story of the second war simply copied the narrative patterns of the first. The real differences between the two wars, however, are significant, and the similarities may be explained by imitative behavior—the slaves and their repressors had learned from the first great war—and by the similar social, economic, and geographic conditions in which the events happened.