The role divination played in allocating, maintaining, and justifying the authority of the senatorial élite in the Republic has been well established. Attention has also been paid to the use made of unofficial forms of divination by ambitious members of the ruling élite in the later Republic, who sought (often successfully) to make themselves pre-eminent before their peers by claiming personal divine attention. What has received less attention in discussions of prophecy and authority is the role the general population of non-élites played in this ideological system which served the interests of the powerful rich, either collectively or individually, at the expense of the less powerful poor. The following seeks to begin to correct this oversight, as discussion of this factor is urgently needed if the observations just identified are to be considered sound. This is simply because authority, the expected reward of élite claims of divine favouritism, can be neither universally shared nor coerced. It must be willingly granted to an individual or segment of society by an authority-lacking majority. Where divination is concerned, the identification of an occurrence as a ‘real' divine message is subjective, and general concession to accept one person's (or one group's) claims about divination as true is a concession of real authority. In short, if élite claims of divine favouritism were made to impress the general population, the general population had to be impressed for the claims to be at all meaningful.

The historicity of the ‘Gallic Emperor' Domitianus has long been disputed, but two quite separate events in 2003 have now provided incontrovertible confirmation of his existence. The first was the rediscovery in the collections of the Musée Dobrée in Nantes of what had been for a century the only known coin carrying the obverse legend IMP(ERATOR) C DOMITIANUS P(IUS) F(ELIX) AUG(USTUS), discovered in a coin hoard at the villa of Cléons at Haute-Goulaine near Nantes in 1900, but mislaid at some point after its arrival in the museum in 1929. Its reappearance in turn allowed Sylviane Estiot to disprove conclusively the aspersions cast on its authenticity by various influential scholars during the twentieth century. In addition, however, and with a serendipity which for most scholars is the stuff of dreams, a coin hoard containing a second coin of Domitianus, minted from the same dies as the first, was discovered in farmland at Chalgrove near Oxford. This numismatic evidence, combined with the failure of Domitianus' regime to show up in the historical record—aside from Zosimus' brief notice (1.49.2) of three rebellions against Aurelian early in his reign, by ‘Septiminus, Urbanus and Domitianus', the latter presumably referring to the same man—suggests that this usurper occupied a position of power very briefly indeed, but did occupy a position of power. Not only was Domitianus capable of issuing official coinage, albeit in extremely small quantities (his absence from all but two of the numerous coin hoards from this turbulent period is telling), but also, as Estiot's research reveals, he would appear to have combined the two hitherto separate mints that produced the coinage of the Gallic Empire—the feat of a man who exerted real control over significant elements of the Gallo-Roman state machinery, however momentarily.

The shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8 is the culmination of the poem's ‘propaganda', the political climax of the Aeneid. We can read the ecphrasis in optimistic mode, as Hardie and Binder did, for example; or like Gurval and Putnam we can try to cast a pessimistic light even on this passage that is so obviously encomiastic and ‘ideologically sound'. However, what I shall be concerned with in this paper is not so much the shield itself as what Vergil has to say on his own composition of the shield, on the motivation of the artist in writing this encomiastic passage, on his ‘inspiration', or (if you prefer) on the ‘constraints' which compel him to deliver the ecphrasis. In my view Vergil gives us not only the ‘propaganda' of the shield, its mannered distortion of history, its praise of those in power, together with the critical reactions to that ‘propaganda' made out by pessimistic critics; he gives us also some metapropagandistic reflections on his writing of the shield as a piece of ‘propaganda' and encomium, an illustration of the forces that drive an artist to write a piece of this sort (that is, his ‘inspiration'), and he gives us some thoughts on the nature of the distortion and repression that are in operation here.

Ten years after producing the Persians in 472 BC, in which Greeks and barbarians are locked in conflict with each other, Aeschylus in the Suppliants explores the inextricable intertwining of Greekness and barbarity. While even in the Persians Aeschylus recognizes the ultimate ‘kinship' between Greek and barbarian (the women of Atossa's dream – one wearing Persian robes, the other Dorian – are described as ‘sisters of one race': Aesch. Pers. 180–7), in the Suppliants the poet develops this theme and casts it in sharper relief. In this later play, now generally accepted (despite archaic or archaizing elements) to have been produced in the late 460s, Aeschylus is more actively interested in the ways in which kinship both intersects with and is complicated by cultural polarity, and at the same time undercuts and complicates ‘Otherness'.

Roman charioteers had a reputation, and not just for living fast and dying young. Nor was their reputation solely based on the glamour of their occupation, although it is clear that some charioteers could achieve something approaching celebrity status. Roman charioteers (by which I mean charioteers throughout the ancient Roman world) had a reputation of a rather darker stripe. The violence of their occupation, reflected and enhanced by the riotous violence of their supporters, contributed to the perception of charioteers in general as rough, uncouth characters. The gulf between some charioteers' celebrity and their slave status did much to encourage this brutal reputation in the Roman mind.

In the middle of the fourth century BC, Publius Decius Mus, a celebrated general in the Roman army, sacrificed himself against enemy lines in return for the gods' protection of his soldiers and city. Two hundred and seventy years later, the eques Quintus Sertorius was rescued from the battlefield by his Iberian followers, who hoisted him onto their shoulders and passed him safely over a city wall, out of the range of fire. What Decius did was called a devotio by ancient writers; modern scholars cite Sertorius' rescue as an example of devotio Iberica. In both cases, a cognate of the verb devoveo is used. This paper explores the confusion between two related but nevertheless distinct uses of the term, and argues that devotio Iberica, although possibly referring to an actual phenomenon, should be understood primarily as an ancient practice invented by modern historians to further an idealized image of ancient Spain under the Francoist dictatorship.