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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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).

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).

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.

It is at least a tenable hypothesis that the acute phase of transition from classical to post-classic culture lies in the third century A.D. rather than in the fifth. The confused and tangled epoch between the accession of Septimius Severus and the accession of Diocletian seems either to foreshadow or to shape the future both for the Western Provinces and for the East. So much that had marked the civilisation of the Antonines, the sense of gravitas and the restraint of form, the tranquil acceptance of the interplay of individual privilege and obligation within a social structure conceived as effortlessly stable, the solid bourgeois standard of what was perhaps essentially a small-town culture, went down in the chaos of an economic collapse. The emergence of Neo-Platonism, the creation of the new conventions in Imperial portraiture and the triumph of the cult of Sol Invictus all seem to symbolise a change in the conception of the functions of personality and of the relationship of man with the Divine and of man with men.

It may be taken as proven, so far as anything is ever finally proved in ancient history that the Roman law contained in the fragmented bronze tablet once owned by Cardinal Bembo is the lex repetundarum, or recovery law, of Gaius Gracchus, or of a political associate who shared the same ideas about the so-called ‘extortion court’, despite the doubts of Professor Mattingly, who, reviving the thesis of Carcopino and earlier scholars, sought to identify it with the later law of Servilius Glaucia. This law, which may be conveniently called the Lex Sempronia; is probably the only law of Gaius Gracchus that was concerned with jurors. It is both a lex repetundarum and a lex iudiciaria, because at this time there was no other regular political jury court except the court of recovery. The Lex Sempronia which succeeds the Lex Calpurnia of 149 (and its adjunct the obscure Lex Iunia), replace the senatorial jurors of the previous system by jurors who are not drawn from the senatorial class. But it does many other things, and it is an absolute treasure-house of information about the political and social ideas of its author. Historians have not effectively used it information for the general interpretation of the political thinking of Gaius Gracchus because they suffer from a fixed idea.

The age at which girls tend to marry is one of the most important factors in determining the overall rates of fertility in a given population, and hence its general demographic profile. It also affects a whole range of social institutions of reproduction, above all the ‘shape’ of the family, the relationships between the mother and her children, between husband and wife, and the ways in which property can be redistributed through inheritance. It is the simple and restricted purpose of this paper to re-examine the data that have hitherto been used to determine the age at marriage of girls in Roman society. For the purposes of this study, ‘Roman society’ is defined as the conglomerate of urban-centred communities that developed in Europe west of the Adriatic, as well as in the lands of the Danubian Basin. It is conceded that family types and modes of family formation in the eastern parts of the empire were different from those in the west, and therefore require separate analysis. In performing this task, the analysis presented here also attempts to demonstrate the highly specific nature of the set of data employed in the ‘age-at-marriage’ debate, and to question its relevance to the age at first marriage of most girls in the western Roman empire. Having demonstrated the limited validity of these data, I shall then suggest another method that might usefully be employed to approach the problem. Finally, to complete the argument, a series of hypotheses will be advanced that seek to link the range and modes of age at first marriage of girls of various status groups and classes to other social and economic factors in the Roman world.

This paper compares the early imperial period results from thirty surveys in and around regio VII Etruria in order to identify similarities and differences of settlement, population, and economy. Three sub-regional patterns are defined: the suburbium, coastal Etruria, and inland Etruria. Consideration of methodological issues of survey comparison suggests the problem is real, but not insuperable. A range of interpretative models is discussed with particular reference to the impact of the Urbs on economic, agricultural, and social developments. The structural connections between these sub-regions are emphasized, particularly the organization of labour, demography, and agricultural strategies. The results reveal varied responses to Roman control, leading to more not less diversity. More generally, the results underline the value of comparing regional survey data.

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 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.

When the Achaeans, in 197 B.C., sent an embassy to Rome, they asked for the conclusion of a formal treaty of alliance, but the matter was held over by the Senate. In 183 we find an Achaean embassy in Rome to ‘renew the alliance,’ and from then on there is frequent mention of it; but we do not know when the treaty was actually concluded. Täubler thinks that the ‘renewal’ was really the first signing of a formal treaty; but this view is generally rejected, as he cannot demolish all the evidence for its existence before that date. Holleaux believes it was signed in 196, and this view is widely held. Aymard puts it in the winter of 194–3, Larsen between 196 and 193, and Horn some time before 189 (with a preference for an earlier date). It is the contention of this paper that careful examination of the evidence enables us to reject some of these proposed solutions as impossible; and that, within the resulting range of the possible, although we have not sufficient evidence for a positive conclusion, there are strong indications pointing towards a particular date.