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The Epitome of Roman History, attributed to Lucius Annaeus Florus, was a key text in the universities of early modern England. This paper seeks to trace the procedures and purposes of early-modern readers as they used Florus as part of their classical and historical studies. Two manuscript notebooks form the basis of the piece: one dates from the late-sixteenth century, kept by Samuel Foxe, son of the martyrologist; the other is that of Simonds D'Ewes, dating from around 1620. Both contain lengthy, but significantly selective, notes on Florus. Comparing these notes with the editions available at the time, the paper explores the mutability of texts within the reading process, and looks at what is revealed of the readers' intentions through their parallel and active note-taking. The paper explores the act of reading as part of the educational system in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, using contextualizing evidence about tutors' instructions to their students to locate the two notebooks within a framework of ideas about the academic concept of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to build on Hind's hypothesis (1989) that the Roman invasion of AD 43 took place in Sussex, by examining the implications for the conquest campaign. It is suggested that the usual tactics of the Roman army and the size of the invading army are not consistent with the standard invasion campaign theory, in particular the events leading up to the so-called battle of the Medway. Other aspects of the evidence available to us are also inconsistent with the standard theory but can be explained in terms of a Sussex landing. The result is to offer further support for Hind's hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization across the Roman Empire created a demand for building materials on an unprecedented scale. Quarrying was largely conducted by municipalities, institutions, or landed aristocrats, who owned or inherited the valuable land from which stone was extracted. By using principles of economics as a guide, and with greater coordination between theory and written and archaeological sources, this article examines the decision-making processes involved in opening a quarry. Theories of economic rationality, resource economics, and statistical methods are helpful for understanding the prices for marble recorded in Diocletian's Edict, Roman jurists' writings about exploitation on private land, and newly discovered quarries in the region of Aphrodisias, Turkey. Here it is argued that the exchange of local building stone took place in a competitive market where landowners actively tried to improve their financial situation, but did so at considerable risk. At Aphrodisias, examples of failed attempts exist alongside long-running and successful enterprises. Entrepreneurs there did not extract a homogeneous set of resources, but chose to target marbles with inconsistent physical properties at increasing distances from the city in response to greater demand and rising prices. Roman jurists, primarily interested in protecting property value, made landowners calculate whether potential profits earned from sales outweighed the degradation of land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article claims that the territorial structure of government results from a tension between scale and community. The benefits of scale arise from the nature of public goods, and include economic exchange, political power and protection against external shocks. Communities are double-edged in that they are characterized by parochial altruism. Altruism and social solidarity facilitate government within communities, but parochial attachments constrain government among communities. Scale and community, as theorized here, provide a setting for strategic choice. Both are in flux as patterns of human interaction change, and government itself shapes those patterns. Evidence is drawn from the five largest polities in the history of western Europe: the Roman Empire, the Frankish Empire, Napoleonic France, the Third Reich and the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first section of this article examines the various types of charitable institutions operative in Rome between the seventh and the ninth centuries, in the light of what available textual and comparative evidence reveals about their respective functions. It is then suggested that these centres of assistance were staffed by resident monastic communities, an arrangement which accounts well for their many apparent similarities; which may help to explain the disappearance of the most commonly attested types (xenodochia and diaconiae ) over the course of the ninth century; and which opens a window onto an alternative conception of monastic practice hitherto under-represented in the scholarly tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]