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 belief is widespread that the majority of Plutarch's works was written after the death of Domitian in 96, when the author was a comparatively old man. So far, however, the foundations for this belief have not been firmly laid. The latest study of Plutarchean chronology, that of Ziegler, omits much, and new evidence is constantly accruing. The following study is an attempt to make use of all the material now available that bears on the dating of Plutarch's works. It cannot be definitive: there may be omissions, certain problems (such as that of Plutarch's marriage and the number of his children) appear insoluble, and new data, particularly new inscriptions, that affect the question are sure to turn up.

In attempting to estimate the rate of the Imperial Post in the first two centuries, two points must be borne in mind. The first of these is that the object chiefly aimed at was not speed, but the certainty of arrival within a reasonable and calculable time. It was as an instrument of government, and a means of centralising the administration of the Empire, that Augustus instituted the Imperial Post. This is clear enough from the whole scheme of his administrative system, and is accepted by ancient writers generally, though expressed most clearly by Procopius, in the period when the Byzantine government had demonstrated the full use which might be made of the institution. ‘The earlier Emperors, in order to obtain information as quickly as possible regarding the movements of the enemy in any quarter, sedition or unforeseen accidents in individual cities, and the actions of the governors or other persons in all parts of the Empire, and also in order that the annual tributes might be sent up without danger or delay, had established a rapid service of public couriers throughout their dominions according to the following system. As a day's journey for an active man they fixed eight ‘stages,’ or sometimes fewer, but as a general rule not less than five. In every stage there were forty horses and a number of grooms in proportion. The couriers appointed for the work, by making use of relays of excellent horses, when engaged in the duties I have mentioned, often covered in a single day, by this means, as great a distance as they would otherwise have covered in ten.’

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.

The spread of religions throughout the Roman world may be explained partly as a consequence of the movements of peoples, partly in terms of the emergence of new elective cults. Understanding these processes entails exploring the kinds of contacts and exchanges established between individual worshippers, and the contexts — local and imperial — within which they took place. These developments culminated in the emergence of new cults that spilled over the boundaries of the Roman Empire to create the first global religions.

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.

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.

Two historical events occupy central positions in the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity. To study them makes for a radical and intriguing contrast in historical method. One, the conversion of Constantine, can surely only be approached by examining private and personally held beliefs as they were made public by a single individual, Constantine himself. A biographical approach will be the only way to approach the truth about an individual conversion. The other, the persecution of Christians at the beginning of the fourth century, initiated by an edict of Diocletian of 24 February 303, and concluded by the so-called ‘edict of Milan’, issued by Licinius on 13 June 313, cannot be understood except by examining the public documents which made known the various imperial decisions which implemented persecution, or toleration, of the Christian community at large.

Not all students of the Roman world may have realized that, following extensive discoveries in the last few years, Egypt has ceased to be the only part of the Empire from which there are now substantial numbers of documentary texts written on perishable materials. This article is intended as a survey and hand-list of the rapidly-growing ‘papyrological’ material from the Roman Near East. As is normal, ‘papyrology’ is taken to include also any writing in ink on portable, and normally perishable, materials: parchment, wood, and leather, as well as on fragments of pottery (ostraka). The area concerned is that covered by the Roman provinces of Syria (divided in the 190s into ‘Syria Coele’ and ‘Syria Phoenice’); Mesopotamia (also created, by conquest, in the 190s); Arabia; and Judaea, which in the 130s became ‘Syria Palaestina’. These administrative divisions are valid for the majority of the material, which belongs to the first, second and third centuries. For the earlier part of the period we include also papyri from Dura under the Parthian kings (Nos 34, 36–43, and 166), since they belong to the century before the Roman conquest and illustrate the continuity of legal and administrative forms; and five papyri from the kingdom of Nabataea, which after its ‘acquisition’ in 106 was to form the bulk of the new province of Arabia, on the grounds that in some sense dependent kingdoms were part of the Empire (Nos 180–184). Both groups are listed in brackets. We also include the extensive material from the first Jewish revolt (Nos 230–256) and from the Bar Kochba war of 132–5 (Nos 293–331), even though it derives from regimes in revolt against Rome. The private-law procedures visible in the Bar Kochba documents are continuous with those from the immediately preceding ‘provincial’ period (that of the later items in the ‘archive of Babatha’ and other documents). What changes dramatically after the outbreak of the revolt is language use: Hebrew now appears alongside Aramaic and Greek. But even as late as the third year of the revolt we find contracts in Aramaic. Our list at this point will supplement and correct that given by Millar in The Roman Near East, App. B.

Antinous was the young, male lover of Hadrian. His premature death in A.D. 130 led to an oddly extravagant commemoration. Post-Renaissance he became one of the most collectable portrait types. This article re-examines the corpus of portraits as it is currently configured. Its primary aim is not to exclude or add pieces but to question the criteria on which inclusion and exclusion are based. This questioning cuts to the heart of issues of identification, dating, and authenticity which impact on art-historical classification more generally. It exposes how in some ways the modern Antinous is one of the discipline's making.

The History of Livy is extraordinarily full of references to the gods and their worship. In this way it differs strikingly from the writings of Sallust and Tacitus, not to mention the Commentaries of Caesar. This fact has been interpreted in various ways. Kajanto has argued that, the frequent references to religious matters notwithstanding, events in Livy's History are mainly determined by human beings, not by gods and fate. Bayet sees in Livy a pure agnostic who has grasped the importance of the religious factor in history. On the other hand, Stübler maintains that Livy was traditionally orthodox and supplemented tradition with a belief in the mission of the emperor Augustus as a god and son of a god to save Rome. An intermediate position is taken up by Walsh who sees in Livy a Stoic who can continue to respect traditional beliefs and practices because they have been given a symbolic place in a comprehensive philosophical system.

This inscription (pl. XII, 1, 2), a dedication to Castor and Pollux, the Kouroi, was found in 1959 during Professor F. Castagnoli's and Dr. L. Cozza's excavations at Pratica di Mare, the site of ancient Lavinium, by the eighth of a series of thirteen altars. It has been published by Castagnoli with a valuable commentary. It is engraved on a bronze tablet (29 cm. by 5 cm.), reads from right to left, and is attributed by Castagnoli, with reference to the inscriptions of the Forum (CIL 12, 1 = ILS 4913 = Degrassi 3) and of Tivoli (CIL 12, 2658 = Degr. 5), to the fifth century B.C. Another more recent inscription engraved on a bronze tablet of the same size was found a few years ago in the same place: ‘Cerere auliquoquibus/Vespernam poro.’

It is not the purpose of this paper to propose a new commentary on the legal provisions recorded in the Lex Irnitana, or to attempt to re-interpret as a whole what is certainly one of the major epigraphic discoveries of this century. Much more modestly, it employs an analysis of the diplomatic form to understand the imperial document called until now the ‘letter of Domitian’, which stands at the end of this copy of the Flavian municipal law.

In the anxieties of the Second Punic War the Romans sought divine aid alike from new Greek and even oriental cults and from ancient Italian rites. But in the subsequent decades a deeper—and to some extent a disenchanted—knowledge of Greece and things Greek combined with the nationalistic pride of a conquering people (and one already committed to reverence of its ancestors) to create a new consciousness of the Roman religious tradition, and of the need to keep it free from the contamination of foreign cults—or foreign scepticism. In 186 B.C. the Bacchanals were suppressed, and in 181 the books of Numa; in 161 philosophers and rhetors were expelled; either in 173 or 154 two Epicureans were thrown out of Rome by a consul, L. Postumius; in 155 the embassy of the Athenian philosophers caused some concern; and in 139 Chaldaeans (astrologers) and possibly Jews were banned by the praetor and Xvir, Cn. Cornelius Scipio Hispanus.

Among the collection of documents on limitation in the ‘Corpus agrimensorum Romanorum’, a very rare and strange piece of writing has been handed down as it were by miracle: the fragment, in Latin, of an Etruscan prophecy which is supposed to have been delivered by Vegoia to Arruns Veltumnus. Vegoia was an Etruscan ‘nymph’ to whom a part of the Etruscan revelation was attributed. There were libri Vegoici, which were kept together with the libri Sibyllini in the temple to Apollo on the Palatine. As Egeria had inspired Numa, so Vegoia had communicated the secrets of Etruscan discipline to Arruns Veltumnus, who seems to have been a seer or a prince from Clusium.

When Diocletian ascended the throne of the Caesars on September 17, 284, there was still in the field against him an army under the command of Carinus, the elder son of Carus. Carinus was killed by one of his own officers in the battle of the Margus (285), and Diocletian was thus left undisputed master of the Empire. Of all the emperors who up till now had reigned in Rome none had succeeded in emancipating himself so completely from outside influence, whether wielded by the Senate or by the Praetorian Prefect or by any one else, as did this native of Illyria. It was left for him to deprive the Senate of the last of its fictitious prerogatives—prerogatives which had extended even into the domain of army administration—and to become in the fullest sense of the term the founder of an absolute monarchy.

This paper looks at the words, pictures and shapes that people in the Roman provinces placed on the thousands of coins that were made by each of several hundred cities, and uses the patterns that can be found to discuss the contribution provincial coins can make to our understanding of how relationships developed between the early Roman emperors, especially Augustus, and their audiences in provincial cities.

The remains of 39 villas have been discovered, up to the present, in the region which was covered by lapilli and ash during the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Twelve of these were excavated between the years 1749 and 1782, in the vicinity of Castellammare di Stabia; the rest have been excavated during the last half-century, either in the immediate neighbourhood of Pompeii or in the territory of the modern comuni adjoining it (Boscoreale, Scafati, Gragnano). A list of 36 of the villas arranged in the chronological order of their excavation is given in Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. Rostovtzeff concludes his note with the words ‘Useful work could be done by a scholar who would devote a little time and care to a study of the Campanian “villae rusticae,” and endeavour to investigate the history of the buildings.’ Unfortunately all of the villas were buried again after their excavation, and, in investigating the history of the buildings, we have only the scanty information furnished by the reports, which, often amounts to nothing at all. Inability to see the buildings, however, would not be such a great disadvantage if, at the time of the excavation, adequate records had been made of the building materials used, and the methods of their use.

This article examines the context in which Caesar, enthroned in state, attended the Festival of the Lupercalia of 44 B.C. at which he was offered and rejected a diadem; it asks the question what the ritual had to offer to Caesar. An examination of the Festival's character and tradition suggests (a) that it took the form of a street carnival, (b) that it was concerned simultaneously with the purification, fertility and protection of the people of Rome, and (c) that it had no element of a coronation in its rituals. The suggestion is offered that Caesar's prime motivation was to associate himself with the founders of the city, since he and his family were receiving the honour of a new group of Luperci, set up to parallel those of Romulus and Remus. If Antony's offering of the diadem was pre-arranged, the light-hearted and provocative atmosphere of the occasion strongly suggests that the plan must always have been that Caesar should publicly reject the offer, as he did. But the whole incident illustrates the vigour and creativity of religious life at the time.

The Social war broke out when Rome refused to grant the allies' demand for citizenship. Any explanation of this refusal is conjectural; on this subject I have nothing new to say. This paper is concerned rather with the attitude of the Italians. I shall argue, like Professor Gabba, that they sought a share in political power, though not only, if at all, for the reasons he suggested; and that their desire to become Romans reflects the success of Rome in unifying them in sentiment and was stimulated by the Cimbric war and by the career of Marius and other novi homines of his time.