Conference: Ensuring Continuity in a World of Uncertainty and Risk

Please join us from April 9th to 11th for the conference "Ensuring Continuity in a World of Uncertainty and Risk: Taking Precaution and Making Provisions in the Roman World," organized by Professors Andreas Bendlin and Philip Egetenmeier. Please see the following link for a full program schedule and list of speakers and paper titles: Ensuring Continuity April 2026 Toronto.pdf

Participants may attend the conference either in person or online. To register, please email Philip Egetenmeier by April 1st, 2026 (philip.egetenmeier@utoronto.ca). 

People in the ancient Roman, like ourselves, desired sustainability and continuity. However, uncertainty and risk––triggered by high mortality, famines, insecure trade and supply routes, daily violence, and warfare––were permanent features of the lived experiences of individuals, social groups, and polities. This desire for sustainability resulted in various risk management and resilience strategies: economic, legal, political, or religious. Nor did this desire apply only to the immediate present: people employed strategies of forward-thinking to predict and control the future or safeguard their memories and fortunes.

Scholars of the pre-modern Mediterranean world have recently begun to focus on questions of riskmanagement and future-thinking, investigating, for instance, ancient economic strategies for sustainability and (short to mid-term) gain. But what is still lacking is a re-conceptualisation of the field, building on the (relatively recent) insight that “future-thinking” was indeed prominent in premodern societies. The field, in other words, lacks a holistic approach. Our contribution to this emerging conversation is to invite leading scholars to develop a methodological framework for “future-thinking” in Roman antiquity, asking: How did people ‘take precaution’ and ‘make provisions’ about their lives? How did they take recourse, for instance, to local and Roman law, thus overcoming political, social or gender inequalities? Which “future-thinking” strategies, if any, did the medical profession develop to address infant mortality, death in childbed, or contraception? How did priests and laypeople employ religious ritual to influence how the gods had determined their future? How did local imperial elites and Roman emperors manipulate institutions? What strategic choices did people make to ensure that the future might be as they intended? Our speakers examine these questions through the lens of economic, intellectual, legal, medical, political, and religious history. The geographical scope of papers ranges widely, from the city of Rome and Italy to Roman Spain in the West and Asia minor (modern Turkey), Roman North Africa, Egypt and the Near East.

This conference will be of interest to scholars of the Roman Mediterranean, but also to colleagues working on related questions in other premodern and modern societies. The topic resonates with contemporary (felt) experiences of risk and uncertainty. The resilience ancient societies developed to ensure survival and continuity in world of risk and uncertainty provides an historical exemplum for our own societies, making the topic particularly pertinent to today’s concerns.