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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.

When the Law of the Twelve Tables was promulgated, the Roman economy was overwhelmingly agricultural. As social and economic conditions became more complicated, the formalistic law of early republican times no longer sufficed. The rise of the ius honorarium can be seen as a response to these new circumstances. While scholars have tended to assign all important developments to the praetors of the second and first centuries BC, at least some important changes in the law took place earlier. The bigger picture that emerges is that, contrary to the tenets of institutionalism, Roman law developed pari passu with the economy. Roman law functioned as an autonomous discipline, governed by its own rules and principles. Law-making magistrates and jurists certainly responded to new juridical challenges created by the emergence of an increasingly sophisticated economy, but their principal aim was not to create legal rules that were conducive to economic development or growth but to find practical solutions to juridical problems created by economic developments. Finally, the Principate, to which a large proportion of the surviving evidence belongs, saw far fewer legal innovations than the last centuries of the Republic. The explanation must be that there was less need for legal innovation because most of the economic developments creating a need for new legal remedies had already taken place. Ironically, the period in which the pace of legal change had slowed down has produced most of the surviving evidence.

This chapter focuses on the early empire under Augustus and his successors, a two-century period known as the Principate. Two developments during the Principate altered the history of business. First, Augustus created political changes that dramatically improved business conditions. Without his work, the provinces would have continued to be exploited, impoverished, and rebellious colonies. And Roman business would not have enjoyed the prolonged period of peace and security that was its most innovative and important business condition. Second, in Judea, part of the province of Syria, certain little-noted developments would later have an even more profound effect on business than Augustus's efforts. These include the formulation and dissemination of the idea of human equality, leading ultimately to modern consumer societies; the creation of Christianity and its powerful church, which would strongly influence the business environment for many centuries to come; and a dispersal of the Jews, which would position their communities to play a leading role in the trade and commerce of the Middle Ages.

This chapter discusses key business conditions that impacted business life during the Principate. These include the demand for goods and services, fueled by private purchasing power in the empire's cities; the nature and operation of business enterprises, contracts, agents, and property transactions as molded by Roman law; the sources and conditions of labor; and the status of business and its practitioners. Roman wealth was a vital aspect of the Principate's business environment. By this time, Rome held much of the Western world's wealth. Some belonged to the state; most of the rest belonged to no more than 200,000 people. Roman law also had a major impact on business by reducing the cost of transactions among strangers. With regards to status, society tended to view businessmen with disdain. Business owners, however, did not share society's contempt for their work.

This chapter first explains the downfall of business that occurred during the third century c.e.. It shows that the decline of business during and after the third century was not due to the plagues and invasions that afflicted the empire, but rather, to policies chosen in response to the crises. The chapter then describes how the Principate became the Dominate, the restructured Roman state that emerged from the travails of the third century. While its institutions, including the church, once again relegated business to a marginal role, the foundations of Hellenistic and Roman business remained alive in the parts of the empire that fell to the Arab conquest in the seventh century.

This chapter secures a hypothesis that in the late Republic and Augustan period, no individual priest of the state religion, coming from the educated class, could carry out his duties with the credulity of an archaic man. Each perceived the discrepancy between the extent of his own spiritual freedom and the world of ideas that he had to reproduce in worship. The state religion for the contemporary Roman was not identical with the entire complex of religious possibilities that could have occupied him. The question regarding the degree of substance or, more accurately, the decay of substance in belief in the maiores system of rituals, constitutes only a partial inquiry into the problematic of late Republican and Augustan religion. This was hardly the most burning question for the average individual if he was not a priest, but it was a serious, pressing concern for the leadership of the state at the beginning of the Principate.

The fall of Nero in 68 CE, followed by the "Year of the Four Emperors" ending with the victory of Vespasian, is not usually treated as a revolution, and this chapter is therefore an exception in doing so. It analyzes the political transformation that led to the fall of Nero as an integrative revolution which began with revolutionary mobilization in Gaul that was led by Julius Vindex, who had been given Roman citizenship by Julius Caesar and rose for the restoration of liberty, and quickly spread to Spain, also on the near periphery of the Roman empire of the Caesars. Furthermore, it ended with the victory of Vespasian in the eastern provinces on the farther periphery of the Roman Empire, notably including Egypt. The chapter also analyzes a major flaw in the authority structure of the so-called Principate or the Roman empire in that period that is considered a major cause of revolution. The flaw was rectified by the winner of the revolutionary power struggle among the legions of the Roman army, Vespasian, who consolidate the legal authority of the Caesars and thus laid the foundation of the imperial autocracy for the subsequent century.

In chapter 5 Tacitus’ historical writings are divided into three units: 1) the Agricola and the Germania, 2) the Histories, and 3) the Annals, not to refer to successive stages in the evolution of his understanding of virtus, but to stress the repeated insistence by which he delineates the expressions of virtus in three diferent periods of Roman history. By identifying what was essential to Roman virtus and what was superfluous and susceptible to change, Tacitus illustrates how, even though a certain degree of political freedom was lost, there were some Romans who could exercise a more ‘personal’ freedom which led to new manifestations of virtus. Tacitus’ perception of the nature of political change is one of the main themes used throughout the chapter to plot the barriers that virtus had to overcome in the new world of the principate.

This chapter focuses on the scenographic architecture of Augustan era Rome. The author sees in this monumental architecture the foundations of the Romans’ concept of their imperial ruins. The urban renewal program and buildings like Augustus’s mausoleum, the Ara Pacis, or the theater of Marcellus, turned Rome’s center into the empire’s theo-political stage. The new ornate scene-buildings, or scaenae frons, which decorated Rome’s first permanent theaters, were also part of the empire’s theatricality of politics. The iconic buildings of this architectural stage and their ruins would remain European imperialism’s literal and metaphorical core, a stage-in-ruins to be reconquered literally and metaphorically through the ages.

The conclusion draws together the main threads of the argument before considering, briefly, the ‘afterlife’ of republican reform efforts under the principate. It also reflects on some broader implications of this study for our understanding of Pompey and Cato, of reform and politics in the Roman republic, and of the very viability of republican government.

We can better understand Vergil’s equivocations toward plague and its remedies as a solution to civil war by turning to Ovid’s account of plague in Metamorphoses 7.490–660: in Ovid’s narrative the citizens of Aegina, nearly eradicated from a pestilence sent by Juno, are replaced by ant-born men, the Myrmidons, characterized in a manner reminiscent of collectively oriented, uniform apian community in the Georgics. I argue that the episode should be read as a reflection of Ovid’s cynical attitude toward Augustus’ attempt to restore a war-depleted population by replacing it with a new generation of loyalists. The ant-born population of Myrmidons, bound to serve as soldiers in the war between Athens and Crete, constitute a new citizenry dreamt into existence by king Aeacus after he receives signs from Jupiter in the form of ants filing up a nearby oak tree. The privileges (grants of land) and functions (serving in war) awarded to this new population effectively sort out the confused heaps of those rotting cadavera of kin and acquaintances left in the wake of contagion. The poet’s narrative of recovery thus broaches the political utility of pestilence, in such a way that not only confronts the open-ended post-apocalyptic visions of his predecessors, but also questions the rigorous mechanisms of recovery, often in the form of population controls, implemented by the Augustan Principate.

This chapter analyses the first tension around which Roman political culture revolved: the restricted space for debate. The issue is discussed on the basis of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis. With the coming of the Principate the number of issues on which the senate could take decisions was reduced, as was its capacity to debate them seriously. At the same time, the emperor positioned himself as the upholder of the social order and as protector of the state’s institutions. As the senate’s functioning was predicated on the voluntary behaviour of its members, this left the senators some agency. The result was a particular social dynamic in which debates were conducted as if nothing had changed, but where both emperor and senators were locked in expectations about each other’s behaviour. In reflecting on the ambiguities, there were two major themes to consider. The first was that there were situations in which the senate had to debate matters that pertained directly to the position of the emperor. The other occurred when the senate debated its own membership. Both not only revolved around the senate’s capacity to debate these matters in a serious way, but both also raised the issue of the role of imperial intervention. How much space for debate was left? The Apocolocyntosis brilliantly explored both.

This chapter examines two exponents of satiric literature written under the politically fraught conditions of the Roman Principate, Phaedrus and Juvenal. It is unclear who (or what) both were; their names, shorthands for de-authored texts rather than stand-ins for historical individuals. The literal self-effacement at work here creates a paradoxical authority: the words on the page, loosened from a definite first-person speaker identity, slip and slide easily from person to person, yet the concealment wreaks havoc with the readerly desire to know the source behind the words, generating an energetic ‘erotics’ of the weaker voice. This chapter analyses their shared yet distinctive strategies of authorial self-erasure, arguing that both not only render key markers of Roman elite male identity—name, body, and autobiography—ineffective, but that, in doing so, they also foreground and relish the particular potential of literature as the written word in its supposed inferiority to author-bound speech.