With respect to the use of sources other than literary texts, the study of the Roman Empire has long been interdisciplinary. Just as Edward Gibbon was in many ways the first modern historian of the Roman Empire, so too was he one of the last who framed his work almost entirely in terms of the literary sources. This was not entirely the result of his own preferences: he clearly had an interest in coins and inscriptions, and at times drew on works that made use of them (e. g. Gibbon 1994: 1: 270 n. 76; 366 n. 28). But it was only after his death that scholars first began really to emphasize the importance of documentary evidence, and so to promote systematic efforts to collect and edit these materials. These developments particularly characterized the growth of professional, university-based historiography in Germany, and it was a German scholar who did most to incorporate the use of documentary sources, especially inscriptions, into the study of the empire.
Although Theodor Mommsen won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his narrative history of Rome, it was his work on inscriptions that had the greatest impact. Mommsen initiated the grand project of a comprehensive collection of all extant Latin inscriptions from antiquity, properly edited and arranged geographically according to Roman province. Most volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum appeared between 1870 and 1890, and although the issuing of updates and supplements had to begin almost immediately, its publication transformed the study of the empire by providing convenient access to the vast amount of data that these inscriptions contained (Gagos and Potter, this volume). Although many scholars used this material simply to further traditional lines of research, it encouraged others to investigate aspects of the Roman Empire that the literary sources did not cover. In particular, it became possible for the first time really to explore the history of the provinces, especially those in the western part of the empire, to which literary texts, with their focus on Rome and the imperial elite, refer only incidentally. Mommsen himself produced the first comprehensive study of the Roman provinces, and in so doing broke for the first time with the Rome-centered approach that had inevitably followed from a concentration on the literary sources (Mommsen 1885).
If the systematic study of documentary evidence had a great impact, that of archaeology was eventually even more profound. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the discipline of archaeology developed rapidly; among other changes, there arose a greater appreciation for the sorts of everyday, utilitarian material that had hitherto been largely ignored in the search for works of art. This new archaeological research accelerated the study of the Roman provinces that Mommsen’s epigraphic work had initiated, by allowing researchers, for example, to trace the relative distribution of native and Roman material culture; it was in this context that scholars first developed some of the major analytical categories, such as Romanization, that still play a large if increasingly debated role in the study of the empire (see, e. g., Freeman 1997). Archaeological research also encouraged scholars to address a whole range of important social and economic issues on which the literary sources have little or nothing to say. This can perhaps best be seen in Michael Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, first published in 1926. Just as Mommsen had shifted attention from the capital to the provinces, Rostovtzeff placed his stress not on political and military events, but on the social and economic developments that (in his view) underlay them. Although Rostovtzeff’s specific interpretation won little acceptance, his work remains a milestone in large part simply because it was the first comprehensive interpretation of the Roman Empire to give a central role to archaeological evidence (see Bowersock 1973).
World History
