Public Building in Rome between the Second Punic War and Sulla

Abstract

Discussion of the last century of the Roman Republic, now increasingly incisive and professional in the field of political and social history, if less so in the field of economic history, has so far taken little account of the evidence of archaeology, or rather of those historical investigations which make direct use of material objects as their primary source of evidence; the ‘material culture’ thus studied is naturally to be understood in the widest possible sense. Of course, a concern with material culture has not been wholly lacking in historians, who are perhaps now increasingly aware of it (it is here irrelevant whether they have rejected or accepted, however summarily, its relevance, provided they have done so explicitly). But the use of archaeological evidence, when it has occurred, has been for the most part conditioned by a traditionalist approach, which sees in a number of fields of study no more than ancillary disciplines to the science of history; fields of study concerned with material culture have been particularly vulnerable to being ranked in this hierarchical fashion and thus to being used to provide marginal support to theories based largely or exclusively on evidence of other kinds, for the most part literary.