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This paper presents an examination of Rome’s impact on its provinces via an analysis of local disaffection with Roman rule across the Mediterranean, focusing on the period from c. 150-70 BC. In this period Rome extended its empire across the Mediterranean, exposing diverse regions to Roman practices and attitudes. The affects of this expansion on the provinces has in the past been studied in relation to Rome and the elite (Santangelo 2007) or in relation to individual provinces or areas (eg Richardson 1986; Meloni 1987; Kallet-Marx 1995; Prag and Quinn (eds) 2013).

This paper examines the conditions on which Romans could acquire land in Italy and in the provinces during the Middle and Late Republic, arguing that while several Roman institutions and practices persistently made new land available to Romans, their legal construction also made sure that these economic benefits could not be translated into political capital in Rome. After all, imperial expansion not only spelt changes for the conquered, but also those conquering - changes that, as my argument shows, were heavily mediated and contested.

This paper examines how associations of Roman citizens acquired influence in the political systems of non-Roman cities in the Late Republic. The product of waves of migration from Italy and the spread of Roman citizenship in the periphery, these groups of Roman and/or Italian businessmen formed minority populations in non-Roman cities and went by names like Rhomaioi hoi katoikountes and conventus civium Romanorum.

This paper examines discourses concerning male sexuality in the Roman Republic as epiphenomenal to Roman expansionism in the third and second centuries BC. It finds that the Romans during this period sought to reassert traditional civic discourses advocating male sexual restraint, both at home and abroad. This emphasis on civic restraint is at odds with later discourses related to sexuality and empire manifest in the notorious statue from Aphrodisias representing the emperor Claudius as a heroic nude raping the female personification of Britannia (Whittaker 2004: 115-143).

Amongst the many liturgies of Roman Egypt catalogued by Naphtali Lewis, various ‘receivers’ (παραλῆμπται) were tasked with the collection of goods and services from the communities. The requisition of these goods and services most frequently took the form of compulsory purchase between the customer (the Roman administration or military) and the manufacturers, a practice perhaps based on Republican or Ptolemaic precedents. As regards the procuration of vestis militaris, documentary evidence derives from the second century (Sheridan, esp. pp.

Sealing and labeling containers constituted important steps in the distribution of commodities in the ancient world. This paper presents implements for these activities that have been exceptionally preserved in the archaeological record: wooden stamps. In addition to the corpus of c. 26,000 papyri, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt’s 1899/1900 excavations of Tebtunis yielded nearly two thousand artifacts, all of which are currently housed in the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fragments from a carbonized papyrus scroll are kept in a non-descript confectioner’s box at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo. No inventory number is assigned to this papyrus. The scroll is believed to be one of those found by Naville at Tell Timai (ancient Thmouis) in the Nile Delta during 1892/1893 excavations.

The recent proliferation of published documents (in both Greek and Demotic) concerning the temples of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt has now made it possible to study the administration and oversight of these institutions in a meaningful and theoretically informed fashion (as Chauffray or Monson). The key administrative role in these periods was that of the lesonis, a position that was held by one priest at a time in the Ptolemaic period, but which was held jointly under the Romans.

From the eighth to the sixth centuries, the Mediterranean was transformed by what has come to be known as the “orientalizing” phenomenon. Approaches to the impact of Near Eastern civilizations in the Mediterranean Iron Age are particular to the countries involved, and in each case different emphases are placed on the agency of the local cultures and on that of the colonizing or external cultures.

How might we make sense of classical reception in South Africa today? Nearly a full generation has emerged since Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, and there are plenty of criteria by which to evaluate change and continuity. In one sense, the place of classics came rudely to the fore when the Rhodes Must Fall movement started focusing attention on colonial and apartheid symbols, many of them classicizing.