INTRODUCTION

Terry Buckley’s Aspects of Greek History, 750-323 BC: a Source-based Approach was published in 1996, followed by Richard Alston’s Aspects of Roman History, AD 14-117 in 1998. Both books were intended for an international readership and for students at school, college or university. However, they took as their starting point the specification for the UK examining board OCR’s Advanced Level in Ancient History. Our book continues this series. It is based on the new, post-2008, OCR specification but, like its

predecessors, is intended not only for those taking the A level but for the many students in Britain who begin Ancient History at university and for students in other countries who are coming across this period for the first time. The book is not a text book in the narrow sense, in that it does not contain questions or exercises or suggestions to the teacher for lesson plans. It is an account of the period designed to be useful to those at the end of secondary or the beginning of higher education. We aim to provide an introduction that goes beyond an account of the main topics (a job done with brilliant success by David Shotter in his Lancaster Pamphlets The Fall of the Roman Republic and Augustus Caesar) and provides a narrative with some close examination of the sources, but without going into the level of specialist detail of, say, the Cambridge Ancient History. The titles in this series reflect the fact that, in books of this scale, the

range of issues and events included must be restricted if those that are dealt with are not to be treated too superficially. So the coverage of foreign and military affairs is selective: there is little on Caesar in Gaul or Antony in Parthia.1 Social, economic and religious issues are all raised in this book, but we have followed the emphasis of the specification and focused primarily on politics, specifically the question of how power was gained and used. This approach might be criticized as old-fashioned. However, we would strongly defend it from a pedagogical viewpoint. The most important

thing for a student at this stage to learn is the intelligent and critical use of sources. This is a challenging enough task when dealing with narrative history and well known individuals. When dealing with wider topics – class issues, the role of women, law and society – which are rightly prominent in later undergraduate and postgraduate study, there is a need to collect a very wide range of material and use archaeological and inscriptional evidence that needs expert and sophisticated interpretation. A student who starts with this kind of study will get a wide and balanced view of Roman society, but will have to take a great deal on trust and will not easily learn to become a historian. It also has to be acknowledged that, for many people, the initial attraction of ancient history is the famous individuals such as Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra and Augustus and the stories that are told about them. We are secondary school teachers and our experience is of helping stu-

dents coming across the study of ancient history for the first time to an understanding of the period. Our hope is that this book will help students to acquire the knowledge and skills to take their study of ancient history further and to engage with more specialist material. We regularly make reference to modern historians, sometimes because we feel that a historian has summarized a point particularly well, sometimes in order to indicate that there are different opinions on an issue rather than a single view among experts. There is not enough space in a book of this kind to include each historian’s supporting argument, and students should not take a reference to an author’s judgement as an indication that his judgement is beyond criticism. Where there is significant dispute among historians, we have not hesitated to express our own opinion, in the belief that this acts as a prompt to students to form their own views. We start, as in both previous Aspects books, with a survey of the sources.

After that we do not always give source references for factual information, although equally we have not restricted references to sources to points where there is particular controversy over the evidence: we feel that it is helpful to give students frequent reminders of where our information comes from. As with modern historians, a citation of an ancient author’s words should not be taken as an invitation to students to accept those words uncritically. We have, however, selected for detailed comment certain passages where interpretation is difficult or which illustrate issues of evidence and source-criticism. Like Alston, we end the book with some short thematic chapters. These

are designed not to be full surveys, still less systematic introductions to particular theoretical approaches, but to provide summary and context to some issues that have emerged in the narrative section. There is an emphasis on the Augustan age in these chapters, reflecting the greater emphasis in the specification on issues of religion, propaganda, public buildings and provincials for that period than for the Republic,

which in turn reflects the emphases in recent scholarship. However, the Republic is not ignored, and each chapter does contain an overview of the whole period. The authors have each taken responsibility for specific sections of the

book, and we have not attempted to guess each other’s thoughts or imitate each other’s writing style. Hilary Swain has written section 3 of this Introduction and Chapters 2-10. Mark Everson Davies has written sections 1 and 2 of this Introduction and Chapters 11 to 20. It is assumed that some readers will start at Chapter 11 or at Chapter 13, and so a little repetition is allowed at these points. Dates are BC unless AD is specified. We use ‘AD’ because we live in the

West; the abbreviations ‘BCE’ and ‘CE’, which claim universal validity for a specifically Christian and western dating system, are avoided. Sums of money are given in sesterces: the sestertius was the accounting

unit used by Romans even before the sestertius coin became common under Augustus. Some books use denarii; there were four sesterces to the denarius.