This paper is written to give some account of the part played by secret agents against foreign states. Only in the most incidental way will it mention secret agents who tried to detect internal dissent and conspiracy. Plato thought that all Greek states were in a permanent state of war, declared or undeclared. Even in modern times no two independent states have totally identical interests, and when negotiating about clashes of interests, in peacetime just as in war, any government will seek a position in which it can keep its own secrets and discern those of the opposing side. We know very little of Greek spying in time of peace. When diplomacy failed, Greek states could have recourse to war to attain their objectives. War requires some strategic plan of intended operations. In modern conditions many experts must have a hand in devising the plan, and it must be prepared well in advance. In the ancient world things were simpler. One wonders how many Carthaginians knew, or had to know, that Hannibal intended to march round the Mediterranean and attack Italy. Certainly he took the Romans by surprise. The execution of the plan is best entrusted so far as possible to a single commander, even in modern times. We know next to nothing about how military policy was determined in peacetime, but we have a little more information about conditions in times of war.

The Romans knew that they had once been ruled by kings, and they believed, perhaps rightly, that the fall of the monarchy had taken place at what we would call the end of the sixth century B.C. The texts that tell us this – Livy, Dionysius, Plutarch, etc. – all depend on a historical tradition that can be traced back as far as the second half of the third century B.C., when the Roman literary genres of historical drama, historical epic, and prose historiography began. Before that, we do not know how the Romans conceived or recorded the memory of their own past.

Intertextuality in Classical Literature can operate on different scales. Even a single distinctive word or string of words may briefly conjure up an isolated phrase from another author. For example, when Tacitus says at Histories 2.12.2 that the Othonians approached northern Italy and ‘tamquam externa litora et urbes hostium urere vastare rapere’, ‘burned, devastated, and plundered as if they were attacking foreign shores and enemy cities’, the text may momentarily recall a fragment from Naevius’ epic, the Bellum Punicum: ‘transit Melitam exercitus Romanus. insulam integram urit populatur vastat’ ‘The Roman army crossed to Malta. It burned, ravaged, and devastated the whole island.’ If the Bellum Punicum had not been reduced to such a fragmentary state, then it doubtless would have been possible to detect further evocative Naevian phrasing in Tacitus and other authors. Alternatively, intertextuality can be more cohesive and sustained, as when Tacitus at Histories 3.84 invests his description of the capture of Rome by the Flavians with echoes from Virgil's account of the fall of Troy in Aeneid 2. Of course this was not the end of the chain: Virgil himself probably describes the fall of Troy in terms which evoked Ennius’ account of the fall of Alba Longa in the Annales.

In his seminal work, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, Paul Zanker wrote of a problem with nude honorific statuary in Late Republican Rome and of ‘conflict and contradiction’ in the style of Roman portraits during the same period. The ‘problem’ was a matter of nudity and style; it also had a moral dimension. Under political or social pressure, there was a tendency at Rome to express the effects of cultural change in moral terms: viz., literary works concerned with political or social attitudes of the Romans tended to describe elements like luxuria and adulatio(‘luxury’ and ‘sycophancy’) as ‘Greek and decadent in contrast to good, honest, ‘Roman’ values and traditions, such as virtus (‘courage’), fides (‘good faith’), and pietas (‘devotion’). Taking his cue from such attacks on aspects of the hellenization of Rome, Zanker gave a moral dimension to the ‘conflict and contradiction’ he discerned in the style of Roman honorific statues and portraits of the second and first centuries B.C. This idea that art can express moral values, even moral conflict, is of great interest and fundamental significance. The present paper focuses upon the way Zanker applies it to Late Republican statues and portraits in the light of recent scholarship. In particular, it will be argued, firstly, that the form of the art does not really make sense if there was as much conflict with Greek ideas and styles as generalizations from the literary sources might imply; secondly, that a nude or partially nude portrait statue of a living noble or emperor was not as problematic at Rome as is commonly believed; and thirdly, as a consequence, that Zanker's views about moral conflict in the style of Late Republican statues and portraits, and about the stylistic resolution of this ‘conflict’ under Augustus, should be substantially modified.

Fausta, or Flavia Maxima Fausta to call her by her full name, was the daughter of one western emperor, Maximianus Herculius (286–305), the sister of another, Maxentius (306–12), and the wife of a third, Constantine I (306–37). She was married to Constantine in 307, and bore him at least five children from 316 onwards, three sons (Constantine, Constantius, and Constans), and two daughters (Constantina and Helena).2 Following his defeat of his rival Licinius at the battle of Chrysopolis in 324, and the unification of the empire under his rule as the sole Augustus once more, Constantine honoured with the title of Augusta both his wife Fausta and his mother Helena, as is revealed by the issue of coins in their names each with this title.3 However, tragedy struck in 326 when Constantine appears to have executed first his eldest son Crispus, then Fausta herself. The reason for these executions, and the extent to which these deaths were related, has attracted a great deal of debate. Yet more remains to be said about the manner in which Fausta died, which may well provide an important clue as to the full circumstances of her death, whether she was executed, died by accident, or committed suicide even. Thus, it is my intention here, firstly, to offer a new explanation for the manner of her death, and secondly, to draw attention to an overlooked allusion to her death in a late Latin source, the Historia Augusta.