Changes in foodways were an object of literary reflection on the Roman past in the early empire. They offered a rich set of ingredients with which to characterize social, economic, and cultural change. Varro is prominent in attesting and shaping this tradition, but it is an older, and more broadly based means of narrating Roman social history. Varro developed this material in his treatise, On the Life of the Roman People, which adapted the Life of Greece of Dicaearchus of Sicilian Messene, written at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. This article argues that Roman ideas of cultural and social history already took an interest in changing foodways at this time. The production, preparation, and consumption of food raised ethical and economic questions common to the milieu of Dicaearchus and to Rome in the age of the first conquest of Italy.

This account of viticulture in Italy during the period from the Punic Wars to the crisis of the third century A.D. is written in the conviction that the ‘economic’ history of the ancient world will remain unacceptably impoverished if it is written in isolation from the social and cultural history of the same period. The orthodoxy which sees a revolution in Italian agriculture in the age of Cato the Censor and a crisis in the time of the emperor Trajan seems to me to be an example of this. It is based on a traditional and limited selection of evidence, and is unable to answer many of the questions which are increasingly being asked about production and exchange in the ancient world, questions about the social background and cultural preferences which underlie production strategies and the evolution of demand. I hope that this study may show some other possibilities, which have still been only partly explored by researchers, of illuminating the changing patterns of Roman agriculture and trade, through the use of comparative evidence and the re-examination of the relevant literary texts for data that are more than simply ‘economic’ in the most restricted sense.

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ATRIUM LIBERTATISLa tesi sostenuta in questo lavoro e' che il progetto del luglio del 54 a.C. per il quale Cicerone (Att. IV 16) usa l' Atrium Libertatis come punto di riferimento non ha nulla a che fare con il Forum Iulium, e che il nome ‘Tabularium’ è un termine improprio per il grande complesso repubblicano al di sotto del Palazzo Senatorio. Conseguenza di tale problema è che un edificio estremamente importante resta senza conosciuta localizzazione, e uno dei principali monumenti della Roma repubblicana senza un nome. Alcuni indizi portano ad ipotizzare che il Palazzo Senatorio possa in realtà essere identificato con l' Atrium Libertatis. Le conseguenze di questa ipotesi sulla topografia storica dei centri del governo romano vengono esaminate.

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