HYDE LECTURE: Brent Shaw, Princeton, "Did the Romans Have a Future?"

The investigation offers no real answers, but asks many questions. Given the exigencies of the future needs of the Roman state in areas as diverse as army supply, the massing of currency, and arrangements for the settlement of legal claims, what sort of future was it for which the managers of the empire made provision? Were their concepts of futurity available to them in areas other than the computation of time? And what were some of the pragmatic effects of their ideas of the future?