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This chapter responds to criticisms by W.H.C. Frend of the conclusions of Chapter 1 by investigating whether Diocletian's so-called fourth edict against the Christian Church was ever promulgated in the western part of the Roman Empire. Of particular importance for the enforcement of persecution in the West is the evidence for martyrdoms from Numidia, and the various Canons of Elvira, a Church Council held in Spain at some point between the 290s and the mid 4th century. Ste. Croix demonstrates that all western evidence for persecution is compatible with enforcement under Diocletian's first edict, an argument which involves reconstructing the administrative history of the province of Numidia. Ste. Croix also dissects the Canons of Elvira in an attempt to establish the chronological parameters for the Council, an investigation which is perused further in an appendix which considers Elvira's significance as the earliest attested Church Council.

In recent years, a strong case has been made for identifying intensive economic growth in the provinces of Africa Proconsularis and Numidia—notably, between the second and fourth centuries AD. This thesis is supported by comparative studies of other preindustrial societies, since Roman Africa reveals virtually all the classic elements associated with this phenomenon. These include growth in agricultural production and rural population, an increase in exports of primary products, raised levels of import substitution, larger-scale units of production (farms to oileries, workshop to manufactory pottery production), the emergence of a society that was patently involved in risk taking, economic calculation, technological innovation, and other “rational” economic behavior. In this respect, Africa stands out from many other provinces of the Roman Empire, where growth of this sort did not occur. This chapter considers the factors that may account for this difference and suggests a few pointers for further work in this developing field of research.

This chapter turns to questions of justice and ends with a close reading of Sallust's Jugurtha (and to a lesser extent, his Catiline). Sallust organizes his history of Jugurtha's war against the Romans in the North African kingdom of Numidia around the themes of justice and corruption; he ends by abruptly cutting off the conclusion of his story, the execution of Jugurtha. It is argued that Sallust's withholding of judgment at the end of Jugurtha signifies the ways in which agents in the decaying republic withhold justice on a larger scale. The silence at the ending caps a narrative pattern of repetition and deferral, creating a fundamental dislocation of consequentiality, the notion of an essential relation between intention and action.

This chapter analyses the ways in which political circumstances in Republican Rome were exploited by foreign kings to strengthen their positions. It argues that kings consciously used the increasingly public lack of cohesion within the Roman senate to boost their own standing, but that the lack of cohesion also made it more difficult to anticipate how Rome would react. Taking Numidia and Egypt as diachronic case studies, it highlights the importance of personal patronage in Republican foreign policy, and suggests that the clarity of obligations which client kings had towards Rome became more problematic as 'Rome' was increasingly difficult to define. Finally, it notices the somewhat biased position of Cicero in describing this process in the Late Republic.

This chapter provides the text and translation of Sallust's Bellum Iugurthinum, which begins with a prologue about the causes of the discord, followed by an excursus and the beginnings of the war. The second part contains the narration of the evolution of the war and the campaigns of Metellus and Marius. It provides a retrospective glance at earlier events, up to the division of Numidia between Adherbal and Jugurtha. It also details the excursus on Africa and events from the division of Numidia to the outbreak of the war. The historical account ends with the campaigns of Bestia and Albinus up to the shameful humiliation of the Romans and the Mamilia rogatio.

Like several other contributors to this volume I wrote my doctoral thesis for Barry (on the economic effects of the Roman army on Southern Numidia), learning from him of the possible ways in which Roman and indigenous peoples could interact, and the various Welds in which that interaction could take place. I was then, as now, interested in the Roman economy, and while my research has moved far away from both North Africa and the economy over the past twenty-five years it is a pleasure to come back to them. This paper attempts to identify the unidentifiable, the places where the periodic markets of Roman North Africa were held. While at some level we know a great deal about the nundinae of Roman Africa—Brent Shaw’s 1981 article is still fundamental for their study, although many of his conclusions have been questioned—on another we know absolutely nothing. Considering the 300-odd towns of North Africa, our epigraphic evidence for nundinae is actually very slight: in four cases the inscriptions were put up on private estates, in two others at castellae near Cirta. An inscription from Hassawana, near Tiaret in western Algeria, appears to relate to an annual tribal fair located, significantly, far from any settlement. No circuits comparable to those in Campania and Lazio are recorded, and indeed, as Shaw points out, two neighbouring praedial nundinae had identical market days, suggesting competition rather than collaboration—although, as De Ligt notes, the inscriptions are hardly contemporary. Shaw concludes, among other things, that the nundinae were generally linked to praedia and under private control, rather than characterizing small settlements in the process of urbanization. He suggests that nundinae were tied to the internal economy of the domain, but not to the external sphere of large-scale trade and exchange between domains, or between agricultural estates and the central state. Yet it is diffcult to imagine that periodic markets were not taking place, as they do today, at every agglomeration of significant size. Products such as the ubiquitous African Red Slip ware were not produced everywhere, but they are found everywhere, and we must imagine that they were sold by travelling traders at periodic markets. Itinerant traders are characteristic of pre-industrial economies, and fundamental to the retailing of manufactured goods.