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.’

To speak of Roman politics in the late Republic without touching on violence would hardly be possible. But my real theme is concerned with methods of interpreting Roman history. We have seen in the last hundred years some three general attitudes or schools of thought about the study of the later Republic. It all begins with Mommsen, of course. First there were those who, following Mommsen, tended to explain Roman history in terms of the nineteenth century. The conflict of Optimates and Populares tended to be assimilated to the forms of conflict in parliamentary countries; parties, programmes, even democrats and conservatives were brought in. Then came a swing away. The stress was laid more and more on the generals and their ambitions. The terminology of parliamentary democracy was discarded as unsuitable, and the history of the late Republic was seen as an inevitable procession of great Imperatores, each foreshadowing the next. Even the Scipios were involved, then Marius, Sulla and so forth. Much less stress was laid on the popular movement. Apart from the Gracchi the tribunes were treated as tools of the Imperators and nothing more. The politics of the generation before the Social War were explained in terms of the Ciceronian age. One might cite the great chapters of the Cambridge Ancient History, and Meyer's Caesars Monarchie as characteristic.

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.

Before the accession of Vespasian it is rare to find anyone outside the imperial family holding the consulate more than once. From A.D. 70 onwards the pattern is established whereby prominent lieutenants of the emperor are distinguished in this way. Mucianus, of course, is outstanding: consul first c. 64, he appears in the Fasti again in 70 and 72, as a fitting honour for the architect of Flavian supremacy. The great general Plautius Silvanus, consul as long before as 45, is consul again in 74, on his return from governing Tarraconensis, a province which Vespasian evidently wished to render secure beyond doubt. In the inscription of Silvanus' career (ILS 986), Vespasian states his reasons, apparently based simply on a recognition of merit long unrewarded, rather than for services to the Flavian cause. A more obvious supporter is Q. Petillius Cerealis, consul in 70, probably after his departure to the Rhine, and again in 74, after settling the Batavian revolt and governing Britain: he had taken an active part in hostilities against the Vitellians, and was also connected to Vespasian by a propinqua affinitas (Tac., Hist. 111, 59). Eprius Marcellus, a less clearly military figure, but active on behalf of the Flavians, in opposition to the intransigent Helvidius Priscus, likewise goes straight to an important province, Asia (CIL X, 3853; XIV, 2612; P-W VI, 263–4; PIR E, 84), and returns to a second consulate in 74.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

At long last the text of the Tabula of Banasa, of which so tantalising a glimpse was given to historians by the brief strip-tease of CRAI 1961, has been revealed in full view. In their new publication Professors W. Seston and M. Euzennat have confined their elucidations largely to the clarification of the tribal setting of the beneficiaries, and to the technicalities of the drafting of imperial documents revealed by this text. They have not added to their brief but valuable comments on the contribution of the Tabula to the interpretation of the Constitutio Antoniniana known from the famous P. Giessen 40. Meanwhile other documents have accrued that are relevant, notably the colloquia texts of the Baquates, of which the French scholars make some use, and the long letter of Marcus Aurelius to the Athenians about matters of civic status, which appeared too late for their study. Hence a deeper cultivation of the excessively exhausted soil of P. Giessen 40, enriched by new material, may yet yield a crop.

The agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus is on any reckoning a significant piece of legislation in the history of the later Roman republic, and it is a measure of our ignorance of that critical period that it should still be possible to ask who he intended its beneficiaries to be without any immediate prospect of a clear answer. This is of especial concern because the problem affects not only the interpretation of Gracchus himself, and the evaluation of the sources for the period, but also our estimate of the whole complex of attitudes and actions which make up the turbulent half-century which followed his death in 133 B.C.

In so far as there is any agreement among modern scholars, opinion has favoured the view that Roman citizens alone were intended to profit from the law. I wish to suggest here firstly that the connection between land distribution and citizenship is more intimate and more complex than has sometimes been realised, and also that an inclusion of non-Romans among the beneficiaries of Gracchus' law may explain certain puzzling features in the historical tradition about the law itself and its aftermath.

The history of Syria and Transjordan during the period immediately after the close of the Jewish War is obscure. Yet scattered hints in the sources together with the random evidence of epigraphy and numismatics imply policies and developments of some moment. These may be presumed to have a bearing upon the annexation of Arabia by Trajan. The present investigation emphasizes the land which lies to the east of the great depression which runs from north to south along the River Orontes, the Lebanese Beqa‘, and the River Jordan. When the literary texts are brought into conjunction with the evidence on and from the ground, some progress can be made.

Josephus has left us a detailed account of the Jewish War of Vespasian. This emperor's knowledge of the Near East was superior to that of all his predecessors on the throne of the Caesars. Apart from Augustus' and Tiberius' visit in 20 B.C. none had ever seen the Levant. Policy was made at a distance and administered when necessary by persons specially empowered, an Agrippa or a Germanicus.

Buchner's reconstruction of the Horologium Augusti continues to be influential, despite fatal flaws demonstrated by Rodríguez-Almeida and Schütz; so we begin by reviewing the state of the evidence. There is no credible indication that Augustus or his successors built an extensive sundial, so we must conclude with Schütz that what Pliny described and what the excavations of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) uncovered was a solar meridian line. We then proceed to discuss its significance in the context of the Augustan building programme. Since the DAI in fact discovered a Flavian reconstruction, the final question to be addressed is what purpose it served Domitian to rebuild a largely symbolic Augustan instrument that had grown inaccurate over time.

A considerable number of texts of official pronouncements of Roman emperors (which will be referred to, rather inaccurately, as constitutions, for the sake of brevity) have been preserved on inscriptions, in papyri and in the writings of the classical jurists and the imperial Codes. Such texts provide the kind of documentary evidence which is regarded by historians of more recent periods as primary material, as narrative histories and biographies are not. Such rigour is not possible in Roman history, but it is clearly desirable to make the best use of these documents, especially in a period such as that between Hadrian and Commodus, when they are especially plentiful but, as far as literary sources go, there is not even the doubtful light of a panegyric to supplement the glimmerings of an epitome. But the kind of use to which they are put depends on the question of their authorship: are they to be treated as the work of the individual emperors in whose names they were issued, or of a civil service which continued to operate in much the same way while emperors came and went? The latter hypothesis has commonly been taken for granted until recently, even if not explicitly stated and argued for. In 1967 Millar showed that all the external descriptions of the methods of work of the emperors took it for granted that the emperors normally dealt in person with problems presented to them and produced the constitutions issued in their names themselves: hence those who wished to uphold the second hypothesis described above would have to prove that ‘vast ranges of imperial business were handled by the bureaux in private, systematically concealed from the view of our literary sources.’

The career of Tiberius Claudius Maximus, published in the last volume of this Journal, is unique. The relevant portion runs: militavit eque(s) in leg(ione) VII C(laudia) p(ia) f(ideli), factus qu(a)estor equit(um), singularis legati legionis eiusdem, vexillarius equitum, item bello Dacico ob virtute(m) donis donatus ab imp(eratore) Domitiano, factus dupli(carius) a divo Troiano in ala secu(n)d(a) Pannoniorum, a quo et fa(c)tus explorator in bello Dacico et ob virtute(m) bis donis donatus bello Dacico et Parthico, et ab eode(m) factus decurio in ala eade(m), quod cepisset Decebalu(m) et caput eius pertulisset ei Ranisstoro, missus voluntarius honesta missione a Terent[io Scau]riano, consulare [exerci]tus provinciae nov[ae …

His career not only contains two otherwise unattested posts, quaestor equitum and singularis legati legionis, but is unparalleled in the promotion from principalis in a legion to duplicarius, an alternative title for optio, in an auxiliary unit. Speidel assumes that this latter move involved a pay rise, since transfer from a legion to an ala would usually be accompanied by an increase in pay. This assumption if correct has such far reaching implications that it requires detailed examination.

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.