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.

In a recent article Mr. Fergus Millar has propounded the hypothesis that in the first two centuries of the Principate the term ‘fiscus’ always refers to the emperor's private wealth and is indistinguishable from such terms as ‘res familiaris’. In support of this view he has collected a great mass of useful material where the term ‘fiscus’ is actually used. Some of this evidence undoubtedly accords very well with his contention, and indeed no one can reasonably deny that the term is often employed in the sense stated. But many other texts which he cites only fortify his thesis if what he seeks to prove is already assumed, and can readily be interpreted in accordance with the view that ‘fiscus’ has more than one meaning. In my judgment he has failed to disprove Professor A. H. M. Jones' theory that ‘fiscus’ has diverse senses: it may mean

(1) in the Republic the private funds of an individual;

(2) in the Principate the private funds of the emperor ;

(3) in both the Republic and the Principate a chest, provincial or departmental, containing public monies ;

(4) in Jones' words, ‘the whole financial administration controlled by the emperor’ ; hence to say that property or income was fiscal may simply denote that it was under the emperor's administration and control, whether in strict law it was owned by the emperor in his private capacity or by the res publica. In this sense we may call the ‘fiscus’ the imperial treasury, without implying that it was ever a single chest in which coin or bullion was kept.

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.

Recent studies of Roman gold-mining, in Britain at Dolaucothi, and in Spain at las Médulas, Montefurado and Puerto del Palo, have shown that many valuable results can be obtained at such sites by a careful programme of field-work. The present article is the result of field-work in the region of the Rio Duerna in 1970. It was also possible to undertake a special in-depth survey of one of the mines, the working known as los Castellones. This mine was chosen as one of the most important and interesting in the valley.

Previously attention has centred on the hard-rock mines of the south of Spain and Portugal, and there are few sources referring to the gold-mines of the north in any but very general terms. O. Davies has compiled a list of most of them and thus rendered a valuable service, in spite of some errors. Strangely he does not give the most comprehensive source as his reference for the mines of the Duerna area (which he calls ‘Quintanilla’ on his map IIIa), although he makes use of it elsewhere.

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.

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.

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 defeat of Perseus at Pydna, the destruction of the Macedonian kingdom, and the contemporary humbling of the Seleucid monarch Antiochus Epiphanes at Alexandria by an insolent Roman parvenu, are reasonably taken to demonstrate the absolute supremacy of Rome over the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Orient. At the same time the state of Rhodes suffered a drastic reduction of power through the removal of its mainland territories, and the king of Pergamum was severely snubbed, because both were believed to have favoured a negotiated settlement of the Macedonian war. Henceforth, in the consensus of modern opinion, the kings of Anatolia were puppets on a Roman string. This follows the theme song of Polybius—that Rome had acquired the mastery over all the parts of the civilized world, and in common opinion men had no choice but to listen to the Romans and obey their instructions.

The question of the degree of continuity in urban life from antiquity into later times has recently emerged as a preoccupation among scholars of the late antique and early medieval periods. Considerable attention is currently being devoted to the fate of the classical city and of the traditional patterns of urban life, with special reference to features such as reduction of physical area in individual cities, decline of population, changes in use or physical decay of classical buildings and the emergence of new social organizations as reflected in urban topography and development. Attempts to refine and analyse these issues with greater precision have largely stemmed from the recent upsurge of interest in late Roman archaeology, well demonstrated in such major excavations as those at Sardis, Aphrodisias, Caesarea, Carthage, Ephesus and Thessalonika. Yet the archaeological evidence can only tell part of the story. We must still rely a great deal on literary evidence, and the interconnection of the literary and the archaeological material is the subject of this article.

For all studies of late antique cities the single most important contemporary literary text is the Buildings, or De Aedificiis, of Procopius of Caesarea. Where it provides (as often) the only literary evidence for a particular site we need to be able to evaluate its contribution critically. So far there have been remarkably few detailed discussions of the value of its evidence either from the literary or the archaeological standpoint. As a result, the traditional view that the reign of Justinian witnessed a major effort to secure and refortify the defences of the eastern frontier, based on the information provided by Procopius, still largely holds the field, despite the availability of other sources of information which could be used to clarify Procopius' picture.

Students of Ancient History and in particular of Roman Law will, I hope, welcome the following summary of a long discussion. The arduous but successful work which has been devoted to these documents since the beginning of this century is scattered and dispersed in various collections and periodicals, not easily accessible to everybody. A comprehensive and critical statement of what has been achieved so far will therefore be useful. Under war-time conditions it is impossible to reprint these texts here, though a handy and reliable collection of the texts would have been convenient for the reader. I must be content with giving a full list of the documents. I have arranged them in two groups, birth certificates of legitimate and of illegitimate children. Within each group the documents follow in chronological order, as far as possible according to the date of the entry in the register. I have given each a progressive number to facilitate citation.

On 30 January 9 B.C., two thousand years ago this year, the Senate dedicated the Ara Pacis Augustae. This paper celebrates that anniversary by putting forward a new interpretation of the altar's significance. Rather than focusing on a discussion of iconography or the identification of individuals portrayed on the altar, I shall explore the sacrificial implications of what was, after all, an important site for sacrificial cult in Rome. We may note that the earliest Roman accounts of the Ara Pacis both emphasize sacrificial rite. In the Res Gestae, Augustus comments (12.2):

Cum ex Hispania Galliaque, rebus in iis provincis prospere gestis, Romam redi, Ti. Nerone P. Quintilio consulibus, aram Pacis Augustae senatus pro reditu meo consacrandam censuit ad campum Martium, in qua magistratus et sacerdotes virginesque Vestales anniversarium sacrificium facere iussit.

On my return from Spain and Gaul, in the consulship of Tiberius Nero and Publius Quintilius [13 B.C.], after successful operations in these provinces, the Senate voted in honour of my return the consecration of an altar to Pax Augusta in the Campus Martius, and on this altar it ordered the magistrates and priests and Vestal virgins to make annual sacrifice.

When in A.D. 130 Hadrian journeyed to Egypt through Judaea, the latter province seemed altogether peaceful and calm. The imperial coinage pronounced the adventus of the Emperor to be a cheerful and blessed event in much the same terms as in other parts of the Empire. Hardly anyone in the company of the Emperor could have guessed that a few years later a revolt would break out in this very province — a revolt which would cast a shadow over Hadrian's later years. The slogans on the Bar Kokhba coins proclaimed the ‘Freedom of Israel’ and ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem’. The war which followed the uprising was cruel and heavy in losses for both sides.

The scholarly debate over ‘The Bar Kokhba revolt and its consequences’ has intensified in recent decades. The papyrological finds in the Judaean Desert, the large-scale archaeological surveys resulting in the discovery of scores of ‘hiding places’ at different sites, and the evaluation of the coinage and the coin-hoards all extended our knowledge, but failed to create more unanimity regarding different aspects of the revolt — its causes, its course, and finally its result for the history of Judaism and for that of Rome. It can hardly come as a surprise to find that the point of view of the ‘modern beholder’ has played a significant role in the interpretation of events. Above all it has been maintained that the threat to Roman power constituted by the revolt has been grossly exaggerated. But this critique pays little heed to powerful evidence which comes from Rome itself and expresses its reaction to the revolt.

In the first part of this paper, I have tried, by an examination of certain words, the ways in which they are used, their tone, and the contexts in which they occur, to infer some unknown details of earlier Roman marriage ceremonies. In the second part, I have tried to suggest solutions to two unsolved problems in Latin literature, making use of ideas from the first part and tracing further the history of certain Roman ideals of marriage, which seem immediately relevant to the solution of these problems.

The text here published has a claim to be the most important military document ever discovered in Britain. It was found during the 1988 season of excavation of the pre-Hadrianic area at Vindolanda. The archaeological context in which it was found is the earliest level in which tablets are present; it was located in the ditch by the west wall of the earliest phase of the fort, beneath four successive buildings of the later periods. The ditch appears to have been filled by A.D. 90/92 and the tablet is therefore most probably to be dated c. A.D. 90 (unless it was part of a deposit of rubbish put into the Period I ditch by the builders of the Period II structures). It would thus reflect the situation at Vindolanda only a few years after Agricola's departure from Britain, presumably just before the enlargement of the fort which made this area the site of the praetorium in the southern sector of the central range of buildings. The small amount of relevant evidence from other writing-tablets confuses rather than clarifies the picture. The commanding officer named in the strength report is Iulius Verecundus and there are five or six other texts associated with a man named Verecundus who may or may not be the same person (in only one case is the gentilicium (Iulius) preserved).

In this article we explore, in more detail than was possible for Richardson in his paper published last year, some of the issues raised by the tabula Contrebiensis. Since this discussion is intended to complement Richardson's article, we have not dealt with matters discussed by him upon which we feel that we have nothing fresh to add. We have modified some of the points made by Richardson, and the reader will soon notice that we raise more questions and doubts than we are able to answer or settle, so that the picture which emerges from this article may appear less clear-cut than the picture drawn by Richardson. It is hoped none the less that by drawing attention to the problems which we have encountered we may at least alert other scholars who may be able to solve them.

In a short article in the Zeitschrift für Numismatik for 1887, entitled ‘Die fünfzehn Münzstatten der fünfzehn diocletianischen Diöcesen’, Mommsen drew attention to what he considered to be a parallelism confirming his conclusions on the date of the Laterculus Veronensis and the origins of the diocesan system. It was not, in its details at least, one of his more distinguished contributions, and its shortcomings were mercilessly exposed by Mispoulet in a communication to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1908. Mispoulet's verdict—that no parallelism between mint and diocese had existed under Diocletian, and was indeed not to be expected—was accepted by Seston in 1946 in his monograph on Diocletian and the tetrarchy, and despite the occasional subsequent comment implying limited support for Mommsen this verdict seems to have won general acceptance.

The Serapeum or Sarapeion, which contained the Temple of Serapis, was Alexandria's most important sanctuary, and one of the most famous pagan sanctuaries of antiquity. It was also the centre of a cult which spread widely across the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Although the excavation of the Serapeum was completed half a century ago, the archaeological evidence for its form and phases has never been fully collected and analysed. When the records of the remains uncovered in c. 1900 are combined with those of the excavations during World War II, analysis of them reveals that there is sufficient evidence from which to suggest reliable reconstructions of both the Ptolemaic and Roman phases of the complex and to clarify its chronology. The archaeological evidence also elucidates the information in the written sources about the conversion of the site to Christian use after the destruction of the temple in A.D. 391. Previously unpublished architectural fragments excavated at the site in c. 1900 suggest that the architecture of the Ptolemaic sanctuary was ‘classical’ (Greek) not Egyptian in style (see Appendix).

‘Magnum est stare in Danubii ripa’, wrote Pliny in his panegyric to Trajan. The significance of his words can only be appreciated by the sight of the Danube's gorges: Struden, Wachau, Devin, Esztergom, Iron Gate, either fairytale-like in their beauty or gloomy and menacing, through which the movements of European prehistory forced their way. The prestige of the great river can be felt in Augustus's proud words protulique fines Illyrici ad r[ip]am fluminis Dan [u]i.

Trajan spent the winter of 98 and the whole of 99 with the Moesian armies. He paid special attention to military discipline; together with the army leaders he worked out careful plans for a preventive attack on the Dacians. Some of the measures he undertook, then and later, are in process of being recovered. Relevant items are: 1: The construction of the famous fortified bridge at the old fording-point at Kostol. 2: the mobilization on a war-footing of the military river flotilla. 3: the reorganization of military bases on the northern bank of the Danube. 4: the creation of an intelligence-espionage service. 5: co-ordination and organization of the troops to be used in the assault. 6: a large-scale building programme to provide accommodation for the invasion force and to increase the capacity of ports in the winter months. 7: the modernization and reconstruction of the towing-path along the river, especially the rock-cut sections in defiles. 8: the engineering of navigable canals beside sections of the river with rapids.

The poem begins with a passionate cry. ‘To my aid, little poems, every one, all of you from everywhere, every single one of you, all!’ When Catullus says adeste, hendecasyllabi, he is not of course summoning representatives of one metrical genre only. Since by far the greater part of those short poems which now make up the first section of his book (I–LX) has as its metre the hendecasyllable (phalaeceus), he can readily use this name for his short poems in general without excluding an occasional iambic or choliambic piece. Catullus has to summon his poems undique, for they are scattered over a wide area, which proves, if proof were needed, that, like other poets in antiquity, he was in the habit of sending first, before publication, individual poems to individual addressees.