This essay is speculative and tentative, a preliminary attempt at exploring a broad territory of Roman economic history over a long period. For the sake of clarity, I have canvassed several probabilities in the form of propositions, but the evidence is so sparse that it is difficult toprovethat each proposition is right. It is disappointing to confess at the outset that one's case is unproven and that the generalizations advanced are disproportionately large in relation to the supporting evidence. Even so, the experiments made here with both evidence and methods may stimulate others into refuting or reshaping the propositions. And besides, some of the methods can be usefully applied to other problems in Roman history.

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.' 1The subject of this article is marriage between full brother and sister in Roman Egypt in the first three centuries after Christ. The practice of brother-sister marriage is not known to have been common among ordinary people in any other human society. The Egyptian practice therefore challenges several well-established theories about a universal incest taboo.The evidence for brother-sister marriages in Egypt comes primarily from household census returns. Every fourteen years, between AD 19-20 and 257-8, the Roman governor of Egypt ordered district officials to carry out a household census of the whole population (kat'oikian apographe) to serve as a basis for taxation. 2 Under threat of penalty for incomplete reporting, heads of households listed each member of the household, their names, parentage, age, and relationship within the family. An illustrative complete return is set out on page 306. Some 270 of these ancient census returns have been preserved, written in Greek, which was the official language of the Roman administration in Egypt.Brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt is interesting because it violates our own norms; it violates the incest taboo. It is worth stressing that we are dealing here not with occasional premarital sex between siblings, abnormal This is a revised version of my inaugural lecture at Brunei University; I am very grateful to my colleagues at Brunei for comments; and to Dr.

This is a volume of studies concerned with death and its impact on the social order. The first topic considered is gladiatorial combat; not merely popular entertainment, it was also an important element in Roman politics. The book then investigates the composition of the political elite in the late Republic and Principate (249 BC – AD 235), showing that ideals of hereditary succession disguised high rates of social mobility. The final chapter ranges over aristocratic death rituals and tombs, funerals and ghost stories, to the search for immortality and the power of the Roman dead in distributing property by written wills.

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The average expectation of life has often been calculated from ages given on the many thousands of surviving Roman tombstones. But the distribution of these ages at death is demographically most improbable. However, this can be easily explained once attention is paid to the patterns of commemoration between relatives, for in some inscriptions the age at death is given, in others a relationship (e.g. marriage) is commemorated, in yet others both are recorded. But the distortions cannot be corrected; these ages at death must be discarded as useful evidence for estimating life expectation.