The Uncertain Past

Myles Lavan is Reader in Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 2013) and co-editor of Roman and Local Citizenship in the Long Second Century CE (2021) and Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (2016). Daniel Jew is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, and Director of Studies at the College of Alice & Peter Tan, within the National University of Singapore. He is co-editor of M. I. Finley: An Ancient Historian and his Impact (Cambridge, 2016) and author of several papers on agriculture, craft, women and slaves in the ancient Greek economy. He is writing a monograph on carrying capacity in Athens. Bart Danon is Assistant Professor in Ancient History at Groningen University. He works on the social and economic history of the Roman Empire, with a focus on inequality, the political economy, urbanisation and slavery.

• 1. Probabilistic modelling in ancient history Daniel Jew and Myles Lavan; Part I. Uncertainty: 2. Assessing the scale of property confiscation in the ancient Greek world Emily Mackil; 3. Senators and senatorial wealth at Pompeii: reconstructing the local wealth distribution Bart Danon; 4. The Roman coinage under the Antonines revisited: an economy of silver, not gold Gilles Bransbourg; Part II. Variability and Missing Data: 5. Children and their impact on family finances in Roman Egypt Paul V. Kelly; 6. The financial sustainability of grain funds: a model-based approach using Monte Carlo simulation N. Solonakis, A. Toure and M. Elhouderi; 7. New approaches to the urban population and urbanization rate of the Roman Empire, AD 1 to 200 J. W. Hanson; 8. Afterword Bart Danon, Daniel Jew and Myles Lavan.

'… the volume as a whole is to be commended, and I recommend it both to historians of the ancient Mediterranean … as well as to economic and social historians from other areas … The editors make a compelling and clear argument (directly and through their contributors) that probabilistic methods deserve further use, and are more accessible than one may initially think: I can't help but find myself agreeing.' Thomas Laver