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A Favourable Horoscope: 'If a son is born when the Sun is in the terms of Mercury, he will be successful and have great power … He will be brave and tall and will acquire property and moreover will be married to his own sister and will have children by her.'

Summary of ArgumentIt has long been recognized that upper class Romans in their desire for small families practised abortion on a large scale. What is not well known is the extent to which these same upper class Romans were concerned with contraception. Some of the methods advocated by Greek and Roman doctors could have been very effective, and aspects of ancient contraceptive theory were as advanced as any modern theory before the middle of the 19th century. Such contraceptive theory was part of a lively literary medical tradition, appearing first in Aristotle and in the Hippocratic Corpus; its repeated appearance in our fragmentary sources, when considered together with the organization of doctors' training, argues for its significance in medical practice, at least among the upper class. Nonetheless, the total effect of contraception upon fertility in Rome cannot be seen only in these terms.

Introduction : Keith Hopkins : sighting shots / Christopher Kelly -- Contraception in the Roman Empire -- A textual emendation in a fragment of Musonius Rufus : a note on contraception ; afterword / Caroline Vout -- On the probable age structure of the Roman population -- Graveyards for historians ; afterword / Walter Scheidel -- Economic growths and towns in antiquity ; afterword / Neville Morley -- Taxes and trade in the Roman Empire (200 BC-AD 400) ; afterword / Willem M. Jongman -- Models, ships and staples ; afterword / Peter Fibiger Bang and Mamoru Ikeguchi -- From violence to blessing : symbols and rituals in ancient Rome ; afterword / Ja' Elsner -- Slavery in classical antiquity ; afterword / Keith Bradley -- Conquest by book ; afterword / William Harris -- Novel evidence for Roman slavery ; afterword / Catharine Edwards -- Christian number and its implications ; afterword / Kate Cooper -- The political economy of the Roman Empire ; afterword / Greg Woolf -- How to be a Roman emperor : an autobiography ; afterword / Mary Beard

This is the story of Rome's greatest arena - how it was built, the gladiatorial and other games that were held there, the training of the gladiators, the audiences who revelled in the games, the emperors who staged them and the critics, and the strange after-life

Introducing students to current controversies over the nature of the ancient economy, this volume brings together twelve influential studies by leading experts in the field. In 1973, Moses Finley unveiled a comprehensive model of the economic underpinnings of classical civilisation. Since then, supporters and critics have turned the study of the ancient economy into what has been called 'an academic battleground'. In recent years, however, a growing number of scholars have aimed to move the debate beyond partisan controversies. This volume takes stock of these developments. Embracing a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives derived from ecology, economics and cultural studies and drawing on literary, documentary and archaeological evidence, the contributions address crucial issues from agricultural production, the uses of money and the creation of markets to the scale of long-distance trade and economic growth in the Greek and Roman periods. In a general introduction and separate headnotes for each chapter, the editors provide a concise survey of recent debates, seeking to situate the different contributions in the broader context of contemporary scholarship. This is the first collection of its kind. It is designed to acquaint beginners as well as more advanced students with a variety of thematic and methodological approaches to the study of economic processes in the ancient world. All terms in foreign or ancient languages have been translated into English or explained in a comprehensive glossary. An up-to-date bibliographical essay covering pertinent scholarship in English offers guidance for further reading and the preparation of term papers