To date, Rome's intervention to the West from the mid-second century BC has not really been looked at with any sense of overview. Instead, there has been an unconnected series of micro-regional ...studies looking at particular areas, from the river Ebro in Spain round to Italy on the land front, and from the Balearic Islands to Corsica, Sardinia and even Sicily as regards the seaborne aspect. In contrast, the aim of this volume is to push the historical and archaeological debates about Rome's expansion beyond these traditional geographical boundaries and the discipline-based previous research. The entire north-western Mediterranean is treated as a micro-region and is addressed using various interdisciplinary approaches. The result is to provide an innovative and comprehensive overview of the north-western Mediterranean in a period of historical crossroads, aided particularly by focusing on the connectivity and integration within this region as two interrelated issues. While Republican Rome enforced itself as an expansive power towards the West, all sorts of polities, military operations and individuals also played a significant role in creating interconnectivity and integration of the north-western Mediterranean into a new hybrid reality. In order to uncover such processes of hybridisation, contributors to this volume were encouraged to focus on the historical, archaeological and numismatic material from several areas within the region, and to incorporate aspects of interdisciplinary methodologies in order to address the region's military, political, social and economic interconnections with Italy, Rome and each other within the overall period.
During the 4th-1st century BC, Mediterranean polities, stateless formations and stronger powers fought for hegemony. Edited by Toni Ñaco del Hoyo and Fernando López Sánchez, this volume addresses ...interstate relations and warlordism according to classical studies and social sciences.
Traditionally, Latin terms such as civitas stipendiaria and stipendiarii have served, in modern scholarly works, to defi ne Roman provincial subjects as regular and permanent taxpayers to the Roman ...Republic. However, this paper argues that alternative meanings for stipendiarius – not always related to Roman Republican taxation – may be uncovered from our literary and epigraphical evidence. When such texts are analysed in terms of their historical background, both the political and military dimensions of Roman Republican tax terminology appear to emerge.
Predating the consolidation of the Pax Augusta as a linchpin of the Principate’s new imperial ideology, the benefits of progressively longer interludes of peace— both for Rome and its provincial ...subjects in varying degrees— ultimately legitimised its territorial expansion. This paper places the accent on the initial stages of that process. With the overseas expansion of mid-Republican Rome, peace, along with war, gradually became a central aspect of its incipient empire-building ideology.
This paper deals with the political and military use of confidential information gathered on behalf of the Roman Republic and the kingdom of Pontus during the reign of King Mithradates VI (c. 120–63 ...BC). Unlike the Roman Empire, when spies worked for well-organized intelligence agencies, in this period the available sources mention several other methods of gathering sensitive information which served such secretive purposes as well. This paper explores non-professional intelligence strategies employed in ancient politics and war at a time of extreme political and military turmoil.
This article investigates the impact of ancient tsunamis on the ancient World. Nowadays, the effects of such events on contemporary economic is easy to assess and investigate, thanks to the amount of ...information available. More complicated is the picture for pre-modern societies. The aim of this paper is precisely to focus on the economic consequences, if any, of tidal waves on certain regions and periods of the classical world. As a matter of fact, the study of natural disasters has been a popular topic for modern scholarship of the Antiquity. Along the Mediterranean basin, ancient tsunamis usually devastated regions with high levels of seismic activity, such as the Balkans, the South-East, the Levant or the central and eastern islands. Most of the archaeological evidence from tsunamis and earthquakes, however, has been mixed up by a combination of geological and human activity, making it difficult to single out which is which. Tsunamis were less frequent than earthquakes but their impact on human communities and their available natural resources could have been more catastrophic, at least in the short-term. The unexpected nature of such tidal waves surely produced considerable unrest within the affected population, who might have been familiar with the devastating effects of earthquakes but most probably were unaware of such a rare natural phenomenon. Our main goal, however, is to ascertain the economic impact of ancient tsunamis on the ‘ longue-durée’. The article is composed of two main parts. In the first one, we examine the evidence for tsunamis occurred in the Mediterranean basins from fifth century BC till the fourth AD, before the great tsunami of AD 365. It is possible to recognize how the Graeco-Roman literature describes, in some cases with remarkable accuracy, the basic functioning of what geologists know as tsunamis, but generally fails to provide any information on the economic impact of them on the ancient societies. In the second part, we focus on the tsunami of AD 365, for which we have more information, provided by both literary and documentary evidence, allowing us to use it as an interesting case study with a particular relevance in the ancient history. The final conclusion is that tsunamis in antiquity, as far as it is possible to infer from the status of our sources, despite having probably a huge damaging effect on the economy on the short term, usually did not affect it on the ‘ longue-durée’, given, most likely, to efficient policies devised by ancient civilizations, to cope with such events.
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