Figuring in myth, religion, law, the military, commerce, and transportation, rivers were at the heart of Rome's increasing exploitation of the environment of the Mediterranean world. In Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome, Brian Campbell explores

The Romans developed sophisticated methods for managing hygiene, including aqueducts for moving water from one place to another, sewers for removing used water from baths and runoff from walkways and roads, and public and private latrines. Through the archeological record, graffiti, sanitation-related paintings, and literature, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow explores this little-known world of bathrooms and sewers, offering unique insights into Roman sanitation, engineering, urban planning and development, hygiene, and public health. Focusing on the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and Rome, Koloski-Ostrow's work challenges common perceptions of Romans' social customs, beliefs about health, tolerance for filth in their cities, and attitudes toward privacy. In charting the complex history of sanitary customs from the late republic to the early empire, Koloski-Ostrow reveals the origins of waste removal technologies and their implications for urban health, past and present.

Reading Rivers is the first book in a new series: Roman Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Author Prudence Jones examines rivers as a literary phenomenon, particularly in the poetry of Vergil. The point of such an investigation is twofold: an examination of VergilOs poetry elucidates particularly clearly a point about rivers: that their inclusion functions almost as a literary device, and an examination of rivers makes a point about Vergil: that rivers are essential to understanding the trajectory of his works, in particular the structure of the Aeneid. This study depends primarily on the close analysis of the poetry of Vergil and of other relevant authors. In Part I Jones examines the Greco-Roman understanding of the river in its primary symbolic roles: cosmological, ritual and ethnographical. Part II analyzes the river as a literary device, with particular attention to the works of Vergil, and argues that descriptions of rivers in Roman poetry are, in many cases, a form of authorial comment on the progress or structure of a narrative. Jones gives scholars in the classics, and literary critics who focus specifically on Roman antiquity a special prism through which to view the works of Vergil as well as other significant authors. This book is also for those working in the fields of cultural studies, cultural geography, and ancient philosophy.

Taking a broad geographical, temporal, and cross-disciplinary approach, this volume explores new and innovative research which focuses on rivers and waterways from across the Roman world. Rivers and Waterways in the Roman World brings together cross-disciplinary chapters focussing on theoretical approaches, new digital and scientific methods and analytical techniques, and related surveying and excavation case studies to examine the Romans' extensive use of rivers and inland waterways around the Empire. Roman seafaring is well studied, but this book expands our knowledge of Roman transport, communication, and trade networks inland. The book highlights the challenges of archaeological work in the dynamic environments of rivers and waterways and showcases the use of new methodologies, including the increasing availability and accessibility of digital technologies that have led to a growth in the development and application of new archaeological and analytical techniques, as well as the discovery of new archaeological sites, many of which were previously inaccessible. This book is for archaeologists, historians, classicists, and geographers with an interest in the history and archaeology of the Roman Empire. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Historians have long asserted that during and after the Hannibalic War, the Roman Republic's need to conscript men for long-term military service helped bring about the demise of Italy's small farms and that the misery of impoverished citizens then became fuel for the social and political conflagrations of the late republic. Nathan Rosenstein challenges this claim, showing how Rome reconciled the needs of war and agriculture throughout the middle republic. The key, Rosenstein argues, lies in recognizing the critical role of family formation. By analyzing models of families' needs for agricultural labor over their life cycles, he shows that families often had a surplus of manpower to meet the demands of military conscription. Did, then, Roman imperialism play any role in the social crisis of the later second century B.C.? Rosenstein argues that Roman warfare had critical demographic consequences that have gone unrecognized by previous historians: heavy military mortality paradoxically helped sustain a dramatic increase in the birthrate, ultimately leading to overpopulation and landlessness.

This is a sweeping tour of the Mediterranean world from the Atlantic to Persia during the last half-century of the Roman Empire. By focusing on a single year not overshadowed by an epochal event, 428 AD provides a truly fresh look at a civilization in the midst of enormous change--as Christianity takes hold in rural areas across the empire, as western Roman provinces fall away from those in the Byzantine east, and as power shifts from Rome to Constantinople. Taking readers on a journey through the region, Giusto Traina describes the empires' people, places, and events in all their simultaneous richness and variety. The result is an original snapshot of a fraying Roman world on the edge of the medieval era. The result is an original snapshot of a fraying Roman world on the edge of the medieval era. Readers meet many important figures, including the Roman general Flavius Dionysius as he encounters a delegation from Persia after the Sassanids annex Armenia; the Christian ascetic Simeon Stylites as he stands and preaches atop his column near Antioch; the eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II as he prepares to commission his legal code; and Genseric as he is elected king of the Vandals and begins to turn his people into a formidable power. We are also introduced to Pulcheria, the powerful sister of Theodosius, and Galla Placidia, the queen mother of the western empire, as well as Augustine, Pope Celestine I, and nine-year-old Roman emperor Valentinian III. Full of telling details, 428 AD illustrates the uneven march of history. As the west unravels, the east remains intact. As Christianity spreads, pagan ideas and schools persist. And, despite the presence of the forces that will eventually tear the classical world apart, Rome remains at the center, exerting a powerful unifying force over disparate peoples stretched across the Mediterranean.

The division of the late Roman Empire into two theoretically cooperating parts by the brothers Valentinian and Valens in 364 deeply influenced many aspects of government in each of the divisions. Although the imperial policies during this well-documented and formative period are generally understood to have been driven by the religious and ideological aims of the emperors, R. Malcolm Errington argues that the emperors were actually much more pragmatic in their decision making than has previously been assumed. The division of responsibilities between the emperors inevitably encouraged separate developments and allowed locally varying and often changing imperial attitudes toward different forms of religious belief. Errington demonstrates that the main stimulus for action in this period nearly always came from below the level of the imperial government, and not from an imperial initiative. Extending the theory of Fergus Millar into the later empire, Errington argues that the emperors were fundamentally reactive to regionally supplied information, as Millar has asserted was the case for the High Empire. Thus, despite significant structural changes, the empire remained broadly traditional in its operations.