This article focuses on the debate about the size of the population of Roman Italy. I point at logical inconsistencies related to the dominant view that the Republican census tallies are meant to report all adult males. I argue instead that the figures stemming from the Republican census may...

The article presents the model that rising demand for land drives the process of privatization. It likens ancient developments in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt to similar trends towards privatization in nineteenth-century Egypt. Given the difficulty imposed by the ancient evidence for tracing...

In this paper, I address the role of Athenian grain trade policy as a driving factor of the city's growing power in the 5th and 4th centuries. Recent explanations of increasing Athenian hegemony and dominance over other poleis during this time period have focused on the role of warfare. I...

Against recent attempts to argue that generic distinctions between history and other forms are not particularly relevant to analysis of how the divine is represented, this paper argues that generic distinctions are important from Herodotus on. History has its own distinctive discursive...

An ethnography-of speaking-approach to proverb-use lets us explore the deployment of this genre as part of personal self-projection and of social life. Greek drama, by presenting proverbs in the mouths of its staged characters, makes use of the ordinary performance value of this “genre of...

The scale and productivity of maritime trade is a function of environmental conditions, political processes and economic development that determine demand, and more specifically of trading costs. Trading costs are the sum of transportation costs (comprised of the cost of carriage and the cost of...

This article approaches the phenomenon of fertility in Roman Italy from a range of perspectives. Building on anthropological and economic theory, sociology and human evolutionary ecology various processes that affect fertility patterns by influencing human behaviour are set out. The insights...