Erich Gruen has questioned the notion of ‘succession planning’ under Augustus, arguing that the princeps was careful to avoid giving the impression that he wanted to create a heritable dynasty, for it was not in his interest to emphasise autocracy and there was no office of state to pass on. This view seems incomplete, since the prerogatives and resources of the Julian family were of such magnitude that Augustus’ heir could hardly fail to occupy a position of dominance in the state, as everyone surely knew. Moreover, it seems likely that Gruen overestimates the level of opposition to autocracy, that the cause of state stability was aided overall by clear lines of succession, that relevant attitudes were dynamic rather than static, and that there was a higher public profile (and more practical, substantial importance) for the imperial family than Gruen describes.

Under this heading I wish to raise two points connected with the tradition about Q. Fabius Maximus Verrucosus. (i) Did ‘Cunctator’ become a cognomen of Fabius and, if so, when? (ii) How far did Ennius’ famous eulogy of Fabius penetrate subsequent Latin literature?

Cicero, like most of us, lived his life subject to certain rules of politeness. What he said and how he behaved were subtly shaped by the circumstances and expectations of the society in which he moved. This fact strikes us most forcefully perhaps in his correspondence, where we can discern at first hand the result of these pressures on aristocratic manners. And yet these letters necessarily challenge our interpretative skills. For we bring to them today views of politeness that may well be very different from those of Cicero himself. The potential for cross-cultural misunderstanding yawns wide.

In this article I would like to discuss two letters in particular which seem to me to have fallen victim to cross-cultural confusion: Fam. 5.8 from Cicero to M. Crassus and Fam. 15.5 from M. Cato to Cicero. In both cases, misinterpretation arises primarily, I believe, from the form of linguistic politeness used in them. Modern scholars, it is true, often show an awareness that Roman aristocrats possessed their own peculiar norms of politeness; but few have tried to examine these in detail or consider why they took the precise form that they did.

The late B. E. Perry’s work on the stories of Aristomenes and Thelyphron in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses is a classic of its kind. Originally a by-product of his doctoral dissertation on Lucius of Patrae, it has stood the test of time as a critical analysis of Apuleius’s narrative style; Perry himself repeated his analysis with only minor changes of emphasis forty odd years later in The Ancient Romances, having energetically repelled a few attacks early in its career, and it holds the field still. His study on the two stories observes an effect which all readers sense in the text, perhaps without being aware of it as a distinct phenomenon, and traces this effect to certain causes which lie under the surface of the text. As he said: ‘I am trying to explain for myself and others the secret of that exceedingly strange and romantic effect which certain of (Apuleius’s) stories produce.’ He goes on to remark: ‘Only a part of this effect is produced by the subject matter as such’; that which is peculiar to Apuleius, ‘the unique element … which contributes most of a reader’s sense of mystification, even when he is not aware of it, is the absence of a natural and normally logical sequence of events …’

The administrative framework of a newly annexed Roman province is generally taken to conform to a regular and predictable pattern. The conquering general, with the help of ten commissioners sent from Rome, laid down a basic lex for the new territory; the edict of each successive governor confirmed or modified details of administrative and legal business.

But Roman conquests were often haphazard affairs. A procedure as schematic as this is not, in fact, warranted by our evidence: lex and edict not only resembled each other much more closely, but (as will be argued in this paper) can often be regarded as essentially the same type of ordinance. Their relationship in turn reveals considerable flexibility in Roman provincial rule.

Nobody has seriously questioned the proposition that the enmity between Clodius and Cicero dated from their clash over Clodius' impeachment for sacrilege at the Bona Dea Festival of 62 B.C., nor has anyone seriously doubted that the basic evidence on which an assessment of these events must rest is contained in the five letters of Cicero, ad Atticum i 12-16. The treatment of this evidence however has produced very divergent results; the purpose of this paper is to argue that the story told by these letters is clear, coherent and comprehensible, and that the conflict which developed was not based on psychological motivations (deep or otherwise) but on a conflict of dignitas.

Suetonius and Cassius Dio give assessments of the emperor Titus which are, at first sight at least, contradictory: for Suetonius he was ‘natura benivolentissimus’, but for Dio . The most recent treatment of Titus’ handling of financial affairs takes issue with earlier commentators who considered Titus extravagant and incompetent and offers a positive conclusion: ‘Titus’ financial acumen must be recognised; the economy did not suffer during his reign … he was well aware of the need to observe the formalities and appear to be generous, and at the same time ensure that he had the funds to be so’. Jones reaches his verdict on the basis of a range of numismatic, epigraphic and literary evidence, without, however, any detailed analysis of Suetonius’ section on Titus’ personal kindness. An examination of this material will strengthen Jones’ conclusions and cast light on Suetonius’ compositional skills.

This article addresses the neglected problem of elite sport in classical Athens. Democracy may have opened up politics to every citizen, but it had no impact on sporting participation. Athenian sportsmen continued to be drawn from the elite. Thus it comes as a surprise that non-elite citizens judged sport to be a very good thing and created an unrivalled program of local sporting festivals on which they spent a staggering sum. They also shielded sportsmen from the public criticism that was otherwise normally directed towards the elite and its exclusive pastimes. The work of social scientists suggests that the explanation of this problem can be found in the close relationship that non-elite Athenians perceived between sporting contests and their own waging of war. The article’s conclusion is that it was the democracy’s opening up of war to non-elite citizens that legitimised elite sport.

‘O seed of Atreus, after how many sufferings have you come forth with difficulty into freedom, perfected by this present enterprise.’

In these words the Chorus expresses a typically choral summation of the action. By the murder of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus, Electra and Orestes have at last won through to freedom; they have put an end to the long history of violence and vengeance which has plagued the house of Pelops from the beginning. The morality of the matricide is not in question. The Chorus regards it simply as both necessary and just, however dreadful it may seem to dispassionate reflection. For the Chorus, the justice of the matricide is self-evident, as it was necessary to restore Orestes to his rightful throne, to bring an end to the chain of violence and retribution and to restore the house of Atreus to its proper condition. In these final words the Chorus betrays no sense of unease; there is no suggestion that the matricide may have repercussions in the future. There is nothing, in short, in these words, other than the happy anticipation of a life, from this point on, of prosperity and freedom. The Pelopid curse has run its course, the chain is broken, and all has come to a satisfactory and just conclusion.

Since Gomme dated the embassy to Sardes to 506, he did not believe that the form of the Athenian government was still unsettled after the recent disturbances but was uncertain as to how Athenian politics worked at the beginning of the period with which he was concerned, 510 - 483. Where Gomme was doubtful, F.J. Frost is prepared to be positive:

The reader of the Letters of Synesius will soon perceive that Synesius tends, with surprising frequency, to repeat combinations of words and phrases which he has used elsewhere, both in letters and in occasional speeches. Although this habit has on occasion received scholarly attention, it has not yet been subjected to systematic analysis. My method, in undertaking this task, will be first to present the evidence in the form of an exhaustive list of examples. This will be followed by a brief discussion of the significance of the repetitions for our understanding of the Letter collection as a whole.

There was a temple or shrine to Hercules at Rome which bore Pompey’s name: aedes Herculis Pompeiani. If we knew when Pompey vowed or dedicated it, we might be able to map more clearly his association with this hero figure and thus one aspect of his public image (and his image of himself).

This paper begins with a stark contrast. Whereas the Athenians took great pride in claiming autochthony, a bloodline unsullied by admixture with barbarians or even other Hellenes, Rome's legendary genealogy unhesitatingly encompassed a host of divergent blends and multiple minglings. Greek forbears from Arcadia, Trojan immigrants who merged with Latins, Sabine and Etruscan kings, the fabled intermarriage of Romans and Sabine women – all indicate a firm belief in ethnic mixture at the origins of the nation. This article asks a pointed question: if Romans were perfectly comfortable with multiple identities in their own makeup, how does one account for the numerous slurs, smears and nasty comments addressed by Roman writers against other races and peoples? It examines a variety of such calumnies and stereotypes and argues that they do not fall into the category of ethnic prejudice. Many of the more (ostensibly) hostile remarks have been taken out of context, misunderstood, more humorous than malicious, and outweighed by a host of admiring comments. The collection of quips, jibes and clichés does not amount to ethnic bigotry. Indeed ethnicity, in terms of genetic characteristics that render non-Romans inferior to Romans, plays little or no role in these assessments. A far better indicator of the Roman outlook is the remarkable practice of extending citizenship to manumitted slaves — almost all of whom (or their ancestors) came from abroad. The Romans’ sense of themselves did not require the establishment of ethnic superiority.

Commentators have agreed that this poem is among the finest, if not the finest of Horace’s Satires. Naturally, therefore, it has been accorded much critical attention. One of the most penetrating analyses is that of Brink, who quite properly places considerable emphasis on the complex nature of the relationship between Horace and Maecenas. Rudd too adopts this line, relating Satires 2.6 to the sixth satire of Book 1, which describes the beginning of Horace’s association with Maecenas.

Interstate politics in the ancient Mediterranean was for centuries what political scientists term a multipolar anarchy – a world consisting of a plurality of independent states all contending with each other for survival and hegemony. The most successful of these was, of course, Rome. But did the tremendous victories of 196 and 188 BC over the Antigonid monarchy and then the Seleucid monarchy – which followed the defeat in 201 of the Carthaginian Republic in the West – mean that Rome established an empire in the eastern Mediterranean? That the Roman Republic established an empire in the Greek East from 188 BC is asserted by some scholars. I will argue differently here. The emergence of Rome as a true imperial metropole was haphazard and long-delayed. After the defeat of Carthage, Macedon and the Seleucids, Rome by 188 had certainly achieved what political scientists term ‘unipolarity’: in the Mediterranean state-system of states, the preponderance of power was now in the hands of a single entity. But does the emergence of even greater inter-state asymmetry of power equal the establishment of an ‘empire’? This is the complicated question I will address.

The quaestiones perpetuae, although added to, refurbished and furnished with a definitive procedural code by Augustus, did not fare very well in the Principate or in the sources. Our view is constantly obscured by the senate and the emperor’s court, and by the praefectus urbi whenever he chooses to put in an appearance. The broad outlines are reasonably clear: Augustus sent down to the Principate a fully-formed and fully-functioning system of jury-courts, but by some time in the third century the whole system had collapsed and the bulk of the jurisdiction previously exercised by the quaestiones perpetuae was in the hands of the praefectus urbi, with a small but politically important minority of trials continuing to be brought in the senate or in the emperor’s court, as hitherto. So much for the general picture. There is less certainty about the various stages in the decline. It is clear that the problem cannot be considered as an organic whole, for different courts undoubtedly decayed at different times. Some courts, notably the quaestio maiestatis and the quaestio repetundarum, were not called upon to handle a large volume of day-to-day work at any time, and least of all when the senate and the emperor began making inroads into their spheres of competence. There is therefore no reason to assume a long currency for either of these courts, and the same can be said of the quaestio de ambitu, the quaestio de annona and the quaestio de plagiariis.

Martial on a number of occasions declares himself the literary inheritor of Catullus, and repeatedly evinces that indebtedness by unmistakable echoes and adaptations of his Republican predecessor. But the Catullan legacy in Martial has not fared well at the hands of scholars. Many of the passages pertinent to the topic are industriously assembled in the secondary literature. But that literature is (it must be said) seriously deficient. Ferguson's 1963 article ‘Catullus and Martial’ is lightweight and vitiated by value judgements as to the respective worth of the two poets. Despite a disclaimer of bias, Ferguson is plainly of a mind with Muretus, who said that Martial was to Catullus as a buffoon is to a gentleman, and with Andrea Navagero, who each year burned a copy of Martial in an assertion of Catullus' superiority. A similar criticism can be levelled at Offermann's ‘Uno tibi sim minor Catullo’, which, descriptive rather than analytical, devotes a great deal of space to castigating Martial for sacrificing Catullus' intense emotionalism and to devaluing the Flavian poet in consequence; Offermann was unwilling to recognise that impassioned sincerity more Catulliano was not part of Martial's epigrammatic brief. J.K. Newman's recent treatment of Catullus and Martial, while helpful in some respects, makes much of the ‘carnivalesque’ or Saturnalian spirit which allegedly infuses the work of both poets, a claim which is valid for Martial, for the most part,8 but questionable for Catullus.

‘One of the unwritten chapters in the literary history of antiquity is that providing a comprehensive account of (ancient) translation.’ This statement still holds true after 20 years, and so this study will inevitably lack completeness; all it can aim at is to try to give an outline of what one might consider to be the most important issues concerning our theme.

To underline the vast quantity of material concerning our topic we might refer to a list entitled ‘Greek works translated into Latin before 1350’. This list is restricted to philosophical works only, omitting all other fields such as medicine, law, mathematics, theology, and liturgy. Nevertheless even this limited list gives the names of no less than 119 authors whose philosophical works in Greek were translated into Latin; the space needed for Aristotle alone runs to more than five pages. Thus it is easy to estimate what an enormous number of Latin translations there were, and what countless efforts must have been taken over more than one and a half millennia for this kind of literary work. One may add that there is a very helpful collection of some 90 testimonia covering the time of St. Augustine, in the book of Heinrich Marti, Übersetzer der Augustin-Zeit. There is also the basic study of Jiȓi Levỳ, which deals with modern theory, and outlines all the problems and all the facts of the art of translation.

The ancient critics were not in doubt about the purpose of the Aeneid: it was to glorify Rome and Augustus. In the Donatus-Suetonius life we read (21) ‘Last of all he began the Aeneid, a varied and complicated theme, a sort of equivalent of both Homer’s poems; also it was concerned with characters and events which were both Latin and Greek, while in it (and this was his special interest) there would be contained the origin of the city of Rome and of Augustus’ (… in quo, quod maxime studebat, Romanae simul urbis et Augusti origo contineretur). Similarly Tiberius Claudius Donatus says (Prooem. Aen. i): ‘he had to depict Aeneas as a worthy first ancestor of Augustus, in whose honour the poem was written’ (talem enim monstrare Aenean debuit, ut dignus Caesari, in cuius honorem haec scribebantur, parens et auctor generis praeberetur). And again, Servius (in the introductory note to his commentary on the Aeneid): ‘Virgil’s intention is to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus by means of his ancestors’ (intentio Vergilii haec est, Homerum imitari et Augustum laudare a parentibus); and he quotes a magno demissum nomen Iulo (i 288).

Catullus is fascinated by the subject of incest. In the last third of his collection, no less than eight pieces are devoted to this particular topic. There are, in addition, thematically significant mentions of the practice in poems 59, 64 and 67. Furthermore, China's Zmyrna, the neo-Callimachean virtues of which are famously touted in poem 95, dealt centrally with the incest of the eponymous heroine and her father Cinyras. To put the matter crudely, then, the incest-theme surfaces in roughly ten per cent of Catullus' surviving poems. But the bulk of such allusions are clustered in poems 69-116, most particularly in the cycle on Gellius (74, 88-91), who, while not disdaining an oral-genital fling with a male partner (80), suffers, according to Catullus, from a psychologically and somatically unhealthy obsession with bedding his closest female relatives. Of especial importance is poem 79, Lesbius est pulcher: it will be discussed at the close of the paper.