The Limes Tripolitanus, the easternmost of the series of limites protecting the Latin provinces of Roman Africa, ran for some 1,000 km. from Turris Tamalleni (the modern Telmine, on the edge of the Chott el Djerid) to its eastern terminus at Arae Philaenorum (Muktar, near ‘Marble Arch’) on the border of ancient Cyrenaica. Of this total length the western 300 km. lie within the confines of the French Protectorate of Tunisia, and for this sector Cagnat's admirable summary of the archaeological evidence, although written in 1912, has not been seriously outdated by any more recent explorations. The eastern sector, also of 300 km., from the great salt-marsh of Sebcha Tauorga to Arae Philaenorum, is still completely unknown, and its character cannot be profitably discussed until exploration has been carried out : it should, however, be observed that in this eastern zone the limes must have followed the bleak shores of the Greater Syrtis, where there were few coastal centres of importance, and virtually no Romanized hinterland.

The legend of the Scythians and the books of Athens, with Petrus Patricius' comments on it, raises precisely the most crucial question about the culture and society of later Antiquity: what was the relationship between the all-pervasive literary culture of the time, with its obsessive and apparently sterile fascination with the classical past, and men's conduct in the world ? The question cannot of course be answered. If we wished to stress the positive and vital aspects of Imperial Greek culture, we could partly avoid answering it by concentrating on a few figures of real intellectual stature in the second to early fourth centuries, and thereby pointing to a number of fields in which the Greek Renaissance saw significant, sometimes revolutionary, progress. Ptolemy, Galen, Diophantus, Origen, Plotinus, Porphyry and Eusebius all in their different ways marked an epoch in the intellectual history of Europe. Even a man of much lesser originality, Cassius Dio, provided the Byzantine world with its definitive account of the history of Rome. But we can also try, if not to answer the question properly, at least to raise some themes directly relevant to it.

In Rome of the early empire, most of the residential population lived in rented apartments (cenacula). Only the privileged few could afford single-family dwellings; the character of this minority is vividly illustrated in Juvenal's famous line on Nero's persecutions: ‘rarus venit in cenacula miles’ (10. 18). Almost all of the non-privileged many, if they could afford accommodation, were obliged to dwell in buildings that they did not own, in exchange for rent that our sources agree was exorbitantly high.

However, not everyone in the tenant class was on equal footing, despite recent suggestions to the contrary. The range of accommodation regularly available to the urban masses was, as will be shown below, quite varied, though this range was often effectively limited by the wealth and other social characteristics of the prospective tenant. The rental market of Rome can be reconstructed from three kinds of sources: literary references to rental; the types of rental situations described in legal texts; and the archaeological remains of apartment houses, particularly those in Ostia. These sources converge to suggest a model of the urban rental market that is rather more complex than the one which has appeared in recent scholarship. It must be stressed, however, that the new model suggested below is still just a model, and that variations from it must have been numerous. For instance, no ancient authority conclusively demonstrates that a lease like the typical modern American lease (an apartment taken on a year term for exclusive occupancy of the tenant and his dependants, with monthly payment in advance and many services supplied by the landlord) was legally impossible in antiquity, or was not in fact developed; but the Roman leases actually described in the extant sources are markedly different, and the ruins of Ostian apartment houses seem to accord well with the leases to which these sources refer.

The cities of the Roman Empire were, on the whole, plural societies, which had in them significant sub-groups, ethnic, religious, or, indeed, both together — for the two categories were still only sometimes distinguishable. Such an environment carries many resonances for us and it is surprising to realize its neglect as a subject for study. The classical Greek polis had been a theoretically homogeneous institution of look-alike citizens, with outsiders excluded or enslaved. The notional Roman approach was, in the early days, to deal with outsiders by assimilating them. When we look at the cities of the Hellenistic kingdoms, we observe that they often did consist of several racial elements, though how these were accommodated has been for some time an issue for debate, and this remains an open question. But beyond that, our concern seems to stop.

The question of the Christianization of Italy in the late fourth century has been much discussed in the recent past, but it has rarely been approached at local level, despite the fact that focusing upon local situations, where a wealth of material is available, makes it easier to follow the interplay between paganism and Christianity.

The geographical area broadly corresponding to Northern Italy offers a vast body of material, especially from the second half of the fourth to the first half of the fifth century. There are enough archaeological and epigraphic sources for us to get an idea of the changes in urban organization brought about by Christianity. In terms of literary sources, the North of Italy is a privileged region (as are Cappadocia at the time of Basil and the two Gregories and Syria at the time of John Chrysostom and Theodoret of Cyrrhus) in that we have the sermons of a number of bishops who were very close to Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. These texts have been used to study the economy of the region but they are also basic for elucidating Christian doctrine and practice at the time of Ambrose.

The work of the spade and the use of common sense have done much to mitigate the influence of Tacitus and Pliny and redeem the memory of Domitian from infamy or oblivion. But much remains to be done. The policy of this able and intelligent Emperor has been vindicated on the frontiers, but is still, in the matter of finance, condemned as extravagant and ruinous. Not only is this the view of those who, with the warrant of the senatorial tradition, see little in his reign but the dark night of despotism before the dawn of a new era of felicity—even a judicious historian like M. Gsell reproaches Domitian for not having done enough to restore the finances of the Empire, compromised as they had already been by Titus. So the charge is not baseless: and it is more with sorrow than with surprise that we read at the beginning of M. Carcopino's elegant and ingenious paper, Les richesses des Daces et le redressement de l'empire romain, the emphatic statement ‘c' est un fait reconnu de tous que Domitien laissa derrière lui une situation financière obérée.’

One morning early in the year 363, the citizens of Antioch awoke to find, prominently displayed outside the imperial palace, a lengthy and vehement communication from their emperor. He begins with an attack on his own beard, and we know the satire today as the Misopogon, or ‘Beard-Hater’. But it also bore the title ‘Oration on Antioch’ (Antiochikos). The double title is indicative of a parodox in its rhetorical strategy. Normally an Antiochikos would be a panegyric, and normally a rhetorical description of an emperor's person and achievements should conform to the encomiastic formulae of the basilikos logos. But Julian in his satire turns the panegyrical topoi upside down, and abuses the city by joining its citizens in abuse of himself. In so doing he paints a vivid contrast between the emperor, breast shaggy like a lion, beard alive with vermin, fingers stained with ink, and the smooth-skinned Phaeacians of Antioch. Scholars have been embarrassed at the spectacle. Was Julian sufficiently conscious of the dignity of his position?

Our perspectives on ancient history can sometimes be significantly affected by contributions from scholars of other disciplines. An obvious example from the military field is Edward Luttwak's 1976 book on The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. Luttwak is a respected and insightful commentator on modern strategic issues, and his distinctive contribution was to analyse Roman military affairs in terms of modern concepts such as ‘armed suasion’ and the distinction between ‘power’ and ‘force’. His book has prompted considerable debate among specialist ancient historians, and although much of this has been critical of his ideas (largely due to the alleged anachronism of applying them in the Roman context), there is no doubt that the injection of this new dimension has helped to influence subsequent thinking on Roman imperial defence.

At the bottom of the fifth column of what is now the ninth block of the Aezani copy of the Prices Edict of Diocletian there stand fifteen lines of Greek; of these, the end of line nine and lines ten to fifteen are transcribed by R. and F. Naumann, who conjecture that they are the work of the local governor; their conjecture is substantiated by the complete text, though hardly the view that it represents a ‘Greek résumé’ of the Edict. Internal evidence (line 15) shows that this Greek text always stood, as it stands now, at the end of the text of the Prices Edict itself.

The ‘insider-outsider problem’ has had little impact on the study of religion in pre-Christian Rome. Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrifice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. This study argues, however, that the apparent continuity is illusory in some important ways and that we have lost sight of some fine distinctions that the Romans made among the rituals they performed. Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. Roman sacrificium is both less and more than the typical etic notion of sacrifice.

The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures throughout the Empire — an epigraphic boom occurred, in Italy and in every province of the Empire. That explosion of new inscriptions, and the subsequent rise and fall of an epigraphic culture, was experienced by eastern and western provinces alike, in Greek as well as in Latin epigraphy. Many regional epigraphies remain to be characterized in terms of their chronology, but such local studies as have been done strongly suggest that, although there was certainly some inter-regional variation in the scale, rate, and timing of this phenomenon, in its broad outlines this pattern was very widespread. Across the entire Empire, the number of inscriptions set up each year began to rise from the Augustan period and increased more and more steeply through the second century. In every region that has been examined in detail, the majority of extant inscriptions were produced in the late second and early third centuries. The peak or turning-point seems to have been reached at slightly different times in each area. But everywhere the subsequent decline was much faster than the original rise, reaching a new low between the middle and the end of the third century A.D. Epigraphy does survive into the fourth century — in most areas of the Empire, if not in most cities — but late imperial inscriptions are very much rarer and differ markedly from early imperial examples in genre, form, and style.

In Minucius Felix' dialogue on the value of Christianity, written in the late second or early third century C.E., the character Caecilius, who presents the anti-Christian arguments, recounts a story about their initiations, ‘a story as loathsome as it is well known’: after the initiate has struck a baby concealed under a covering of flour, those present drink the blood from its wounds and so seal their union (Oct. 9.5). Later in the dialogue, Octavius, the defender of Christianity, refutes this slander. The alleged crime, he argues, is so terrible that ‘no one could believe it except the sort of person who would attempt it’. He goes on to point out that pagans, not Christians, are the ones who practise actual human sacrifice. He supports his claim by citing specific examples: the Africans who used to sacrifice their children to Saturn, the Taurians and the Egyptian Busiris who sacrificed foreigners, the Gauls, and lastly the Romans themselves, who in the past would bury alive two Greeks and two Gauls and who in his own day sacrifice men to Jupiter Latiaris (Oct. 30.1).

In the first Eclogue of Calpurnius Siculus, Corydon and Ornytus seek to escape from the heat of the sun in a grove sacred to Faunus. There, on a beech tree, they find a long prophecy (lines 33–88), freshly carved by the god himself. After an introductory announcement of joyful news, the inscription proceeds as follows:

Aurea secura cum pace renascitur aetas

et redit ad terras tandem squalore situque

alma Themis posito iuvenemque beata sequuntur

saecula, maternis causam qui vicit Iulis.

dum populos deus ipse reget, dabit impia victas

post tergum Bellona manus spoliataque telis

in sua vesanos torquebit viscera morsus

et, modo quae toto civilia distulit orbe,

secum bella geret: nullos iam Roma Philippos

deflebit, nullos ducet captiva triumphos;

omnia Tartareo subigentur carcere bella

immergentque caput tenebris lucemque timebunt.

One of the most dramatic expressions of Christian charity in late antiquity was the practice of ransoming captives taken in brigandage, piracy, or war. Involving, as it did, the collection and disbursement of large sums of money, and delicate negotiations with hostile parties, the redemption of captives eventually came to be included in the duties of local bishops. Bishops, in turn, not only accepted, but actively solicited this responsibility, for, like other charitable activities, the liberation of captives enabled them to reinforce or expand ties of clientela, enhance their own status as local patrons, and publicly enact, and so promote and validate, the Christian ideal of caritas.

There exists a strong link in modern thinking between letter collections and biographical or historical narration. Many ancient letter collections have been rearranged by modern editors along chronological lines, apparently with the aim of realizing the biographical and historiographical potential of these ancient collections. In their original format, however, non-fictional Greco-Roman letter collections were arranged predominantly by addressee or by theme (often without the preservation of chronology within addressee or thematic groupings), or they might be arranged on the principle of artful variety and significant juxtaposition. Consequently, some purpose or purposes other than biographical or historical narration must be attributed to ancient letter collections. This paper asks what those purposes might be.

The Roman revolution, which transformed an oligarchic Republic into the Principate of Augustus, had its origin, as Sallust (BJ, 41–2) saw, partly in the misery of the poor, in a social crisis, whose origins I cannot discuss here; it began with the Gracchi and with agrarian reform, and agrarian reform remained a leitmotiv in the turbulent century that followed. I need only mention the laws or bills of Lucius Philippus, Saturninus, Sextus Titius and the younger Drusus, the settlement of the Sullan veterans, the proposals of Plotius, Rullus and Flavius, the agitation of Catiline, and the land allotments of Caesar, the Triumvirs and of Augustus himself. Modern accounts tend to obscure or even deny the unity of this theme throughout the period. It is true that in the earlier phase reformers were more concerned to find remedies for social distress as such, and in the later to provide homes for veterans. But the Gracchan settlers and the veterans had two things in common: they were mostly countrymen, and they desired to obtain a secure livelihood by owning their own land. According to Appian (BC 1, 27), whose testimony we have no right to reject, the work done by the Gracchi was not lasting (cf. n. 1). Hence, the distress they had tried to alleviate persisted or revived; the governing class remained indifferent. Unorganized and unarmed, the followers of the Gracchi could save neither their leaders nor their own interests; men of the same class, with arms in their hands, were the essential instruments for bringing down the Republic.

A study of the fate of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire derives its interest from three main problems. First, Manichaeism was invariably associated with Persia: to study the growth of Manichaeism in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, and to trace the attitude of the Roman governing-class to its expansion, is to touch on an important sector of the cultural relations between the Sassanian Empire and the Roman world. Secondly, the repression of Manichaeism in the Christian Empire was the spear-head of religious intolerance: the only Christian heretics to be executed in the Early Church were Manichees or those, such as Priscillian, on whom the accusation of Manichaeism could be made to stick. Thirdly, Manichaeism was a missionary religion: its rapid expansion in the third and fourth centuries makes it the last religion from the eastern provinces to attempt to make headway in Roman society, just as its appearance in the T'ang Empire of China, alongside Buddhism and Nestorian Christianity, place it among the leading ‘barbarian’ religions that spread into an Empire which had suddenly opened to the Western World. Conversely, the withering away of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire is a symptom of the growth of a new, more exclusive, more localized society, that foreshadows the embattled Christendom of the Middle Ages.

This article is concerned with a late antique consular diptych now divided between Florence and Milan. The front panel, in the Castello Sforzesco at Milan, displays a personification of Victory, seated frontally on the back of an eagle and holding an oval shield to her left (Pl. IV). In the centre of the shield is a bust of the consul and around the edge the inscription BONO REI PUBLIC(a)E ET ITERUM. A small portion of the top and the lower third of the panel are missing. The rear panel of the diptych, still intact, is in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence (Pl. V). The figure of the consul is standing, holding the mappa in front of his chest, and in his left hand a cross-surmounted sceptre. To the left of the consul stands the figure of Roma, who places her right hand on the consul's right shoulder and in her left holds the fasces. In the lower quarter of the panel is a scene of a chariot race and to the right are two small male figures. Across the top of both panels runs the inscription: ANIC(ius) FAUST(us) ALBIN(us) BASILIUS V(ir) C(larissimus) ET INL(ustris) EX COM(ite) DOM(esticorum) PAT(ricius) CONS(ul) ORD(inarius).

In his account of the year 443 B.C., Livy, reporting the first appointment of censors, introduced the censorship as an institution which

sprang from a small beginning but grew to such an extent that the guidance of Roman mores and discipline was in its hands (‘morum disciplinaeque Romanae penes eam regimen’), the distinction between honourable and dishonourable amongst the senators and the centuries of the equites was under the judgement of that magistracy …

This passage, with its mention of a regimen morum, is one of many which either attest explicitly or illustrate by anecdote that the censors concerned themselves with mores. In the eyes of several authors of antiquity it was this aspect which most strongly characterized the censorship, and there can be no doubt that it was a prominent and central feature.