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Engaging with Fergus Millar’s observation that ‘Italy under the Empire has no history’, the introduction outlines the aims of the book, which is envisaged as a contribution to the history of imperial Italy. It focuses on the paradox that the ‘golden age’ of the Roman Empire has often been thought a time of decline or even crisis for the Italian peninsula. It also emphasizes the multiplicity of local situations emerging from the documentary and archaeological evidence, and outlines the themes of the following chapters.

This introductory chapter draws attention to Fergus Millar's uncompromising desire for fairness and cooperation in all the societies and all the activities that concern him, and to the generosity with his time, energy, and intellectual force from which all his contemporaries have benefited, and still benefit, so much. The discussion is also intended to raise some issues of intellectual history: the question of how political commitments on current issues intersect with historical research, even though there seems to be no strictly logical correlation between the two; and also the problems of making a comparison between two historical situations, profoundly different in most respects, which seem all the same to echo one another in quite tangible and, at least theoretically, interesting ways.

In his Todd Memorial Lecture given in Sydney in 1997, Fergus Millar not only questioned the value of Tacitus as a source for the Principate, but also professed difficulty in discerning ‘what the purpose and subject of Tacitus's Annales really is’. This chapter responds to some of the issues raised by Millar both in his undergraduate lectures on Tacitus and in his Todd paper. It argues that one of Tacitus's preoccupations, particularly in the Annales, is a profound concern with the task in hand, a self-referential preoccupation not so much with the history of the Principate as an explicit theme, though that is undeniably one of Tacitus's self-imposed tasks, as with the writing of the history itself, the task of the imperial historian, and the possibilities for and limitations on historiography at this period.

In the history of Western political thought, the Roman Republic, not any of the Greek poleis, has been the fruitful object of study when it came to thinking about constitutional government. The decline of the Roman Republic was considered a constitutional problem, and constitutional remedies were sought that would prevent modern states from suffering similar decline. Hence it was Rome, not Athens, which gave rise to sustained constitutional thought about the proper limits of legislative authority and the power of magistrates. This special place of Rome in political and legal thought persisted until at least the rehabilitation of democracy, in particular Athenian democracy, in the nineteenth century.