This article arises from the current programme of excavation and survey of the Ager Cosanus and, in particular, of the Late-Republican villa of Settefinestre. The villa stands on a hill in the hinterland close to Cosa beside the line of the road which ran from the statio of Succosa, on the Via Aurelia, towards Saturnia. This villa is the most substantial and best preserved of a number of farms scattered over the district, all similar in plan and architectural features. The structural remains of some of these are still clearly visible: namely, the villa of Casale della Provinca which stands immediately to the north of Poggio di Malabarba, and the villa of Sughereto di Ballantino (or Valle d'Oro) which stands a few metres from the Via Aurelia opposite Succosa. Other visible remains, although clearly recognizable as villas, are in a worse state of preservation and do not allow any reasonably accurate reconstruction of their plan to be made.

Until the early nineteenth century it was agreed that the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus were products of the reign of Carinus, for the name of the poet Nemesianus appeared in the manuscripts and Nemesian was known as the author of the (partly surviving) Cynegetica, which explicitly praises the sons of the emperor Carus. However, in 1819 G. Sarpe first raised some of the arguments for setting the poems in the early years of the reign of Nero, and in 1854, in what Wilamowitz subsequently lauded as a model of scholarship, M. Haupt firmly distinguished the seven poems of Calpurnius from the four of Nemesian. With the link to Nemesian went the only support for a date in the later third century, and Haupt settled the identification of Calpurnius Siculus as a Neronian poet which has remained entrenched to this day. Attempts there have been to upset it, by seeing in the young Caesar praised a Domitian, a Commodus, a Severus Alexander, a Gordian III, even a Probus, but such attempts were clearly heterodox and obviously flawed. Those that were not refuted were ignored, and only isolated doubt remains today.

Air reconnaissance over the United Kingdom has been continued during the last four years, a period which has seen a considerable extension of such work, and one notable for exceptionally dry summers. Thus, both the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for England, through the Air Photographs Unit of the National Monuments Record, and the Royal Commission for Scotland have undertaken extensive surveys, while the growth of local flying has meant that many areas of the country have been reconnoitred more intensively than has hitherto been possible. The account that follows relates almost entirely to the work sponsored by the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge, though information is, indeed, often interchanged with others making similar surveys. The fullest knowledge of any given site comes from study of all available records. The first clue may be obtained by one observer, later reconnaissance by others may amplify the record, perhaps making plain what was previously only suspected. Nevertheless, had it not been for knowledge of the first, perhaps incomplete, observation, subsequent reconnaissance might never have been undertaken. This is a pursuit in which each participant may owe much to others: the cumulative results reflect the activities of many.

With this striking and bravura narrative of the earthquake and tsunami of 21 July A.D. 365 Ammianus Marcellinus ends Book 26 of his Res Gestae. Though displaying many of the features characteristic of Ammianus – daunting linguistic variation, brilliant observation of detail, a dazzling and blurred sequence of discrete pictures — this passage also stands out from the main body of the narrative. Most notably, the historian distorts chronological sequence: an event which occurred before Procopius' usurpation in September A.D. 365 is not narrated until after his capture and execution by Valens in the following year. It is also given a prominent position at the close of a book. Ammianus' perspective goes far beyond the normal limits of historiographical propriety — indeed is little short of omniscience. Finally, the tale of incredible events stands out for concluding with the historian's own personal testimony. Though Ammianus famously included lengthy accounts of his military adventures in earlier portions of his history, first person interventions in the later books are exceptional and always calculatedly striking.

In the cities of the pre-Christian Roman empire, Jewish groups were in general free to pursue their own religious and social practices and, at any rate until Hadrian, they were not persecuted by the Roman government; even the exceptional and provocative demands for worship which came from a tyrannical emperor such as Gaius Caligula do not amount to planned persecution. There is a contrast with the subsequent fate of the early Christians, whose cult was, of course, often suppressed by the emperor and his governors. There is also a contrast with the later plight of the Jews themselves under Christian rule.

Since, at the local level, Jews on the one hand and Greeks and natives on the other were often profoundly hostile to one another, the fact that the central government was on the whole proof against anti-Jewish pressure coming from below is indeed noteworthy. The edict of L. Flaccus as proconsul of Asia, by which in 62/1 B.C. he had confiscated the Jewish Temple contributions collected for export from his province, was never repeated, so far as we know (Cic., Flac. 66–9). Not only that: the Romans appear at times to have chosen to put their influence behind Jewish communities in dispute with their neighbours, as occurred to some extent in the cases which we shall discuss here, and did not cease even after A.D. 70.

Aphrodisias in Caria is an unusually well preserved site that offers exceptional material for a case-study of the impact of changed social, political, and religious structures on the urban centre of a medium-sized prosperous city of the Late Empire, probably typical of others in Asia. Against the background of the city's well preserved late antique townscape and the (relatively modest) architectural reconfiguring of its classical fabric, this paper looks at the public statuary of the period, its context and significance.

A number of inscribed pedestals which once carried statues of Julius Caesar have been found in Greece, on the Greek islands, and in Asia Minor. Two of these, one from the Agora Excavations (F), the other from Samos (Q), are published here for the first time. It may seem worth while to present and to examine these inscriptions as a group, since they indicate the position which Caesar occupied, at least in the Greek East, during the two years following his victory at Pharsalus.

In a justly famous paper published in 1961, Peter Brown set out a model for understanding the historical process whereby the formerly pagan aristocracy of imperial Rome became overwhelmingly Christian during the course of the fourth and fifth centuries. Brown's paper has deeply influenced all who have subsequently studied this historical phenomenon, at least in the English-speaking world. Since this article argues that the Roman aristocracy became Christian significantly earlier than Brown and most recent writers have assumed, it must begin by drawing an important distinction. Brown's paper marked a major advance in modern understanding because it redirected the focus of scholarly research away from conflict and confrontation, away from the political manifestations of paganism culminating in the ‘last great pagan revival in the West’ between 392 and 394, away from episodes which pitted pagan aristocrats of Rome against Christian emperors, away from ‘the public crises in relations between Roman paganism and a Christian court’, towards the less sensational but more fundamental processes of cultural and religious change which gradually transformed the landowning aristocracy of Italy after the conversion of Constantine. This change of emphasis was extremely salutary in 1961, it has permanently changed our perception of the period, and it entails a method of approaching the subject which remains completely valid. Unfortunately, however, Brown also adopted prevailing assumptions about the chronology of these changes which are mistaken, on the basis of which he asserted that the ‘drift into a respectable Christianity’ began no earlier than the reign of Constantius. The evidence and arguments set out here indicate that the process began much earlier and proceeded more rapidly than Brown assumed, but they in no way challenge the validity of his approach to understanding the nature of the process.

One group of fragments from the Aphrodisias copy of Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices has already been published in this Journal; and the discovery of some 150 new pieces in the Portico of Tiberius during the campaign of excavation in 1970 has also been announced; more in fact came to light in the same area in 1971 and 1972. Work has proceeded meanwhile on the assembly of what may be described as an enormous jig-saw puzzle in which many of the pieces are too heavy to move freely, and others too heavy to move at all without tackle. It will take some time to complete, but there seems a case for publishing now the somewhat idiosyncratic version of the imperial titles which headed the copy and one substantial section of the price list which it has been possible to recompose in large part. All the fragments used are stored in the Aphrodisias Depot.

The author of the Vita Constantini (traditionally and persistently identified with Eusebius, despite the silence of St. Jerome), tells us that Constantine ‘at a banquet he was giving to the bishops declared that he too was a bishop. He added these words which I heard with my own ears: ἀλλ᾽ ὑμεῖϛ μὲν τῶν εἴσω τῆϛ ἐκτὸϛ ὑπὸ θεοῦ καθεσταμένοϛ ἐπίσκοπϛ ἂν εἴην ’.

In attempts to define the relations between the first Christian emperor and the Church, no phrase is more frequently quoted than this obiter dictum. In the sixteenth century the French scholar Henri de Valois rendered τῶν ἐκτόϛ as if it were the genitive of τὰ ἐκτόϛ, and since then it has been the practice to regard Constantine as an ‘évèque du dehors’: the Emperor either exercised episcopal functions though not consecrated, or supervised mundane affairs (that is, the State), after the fashion of a bishop, or else held from God a temporal commission for ecclesiastical government, the bishops retaining control of dogma, ethics and discipline. Each of these three distinct interpretations is equally admissible.

In the reign of Tiberius, and probably early in the reign, two sons, one of them the subject of this paper, were born to a member of the Jewish community of Alexandria, Alexander mistakenly surnamed Lysimachus. His respectability was vouched for by the learning and standing in the community of his brother Philo, his piety by the gift of new gates to the temple at Jerusalem, and his wealth brought him into contact with prominent personalities in both the Roman and Jewish worlds. Agrippa, the grandson of Herod the Great by Aristobulus, was the beneficiary, at a crisis in his fortunes, of Alexander's sympathetic banking transactions; a letter of credit on Puteoli for a large sum enabled this winsome but wasteful scion of the Jewish royal house to face his creditors and return to Italy, and the investment turned out well for Alexander himself, and was to associate his children, particularly Tiberius Iulius, closely with the family of Agrippa for the rest of the latter's lifetime.

When Cilicia for a season was a province of consular rank, governed in succession by P. Lentulus Spinther, Ap. Claudius Pulcher and M. Tullius Cicero, what held it together was the high-road from Laodicea to the Syrian Gates. Those proconsuls never strayed very far from the road. Cicero, coming up from Tarsus early in February of 50 B.C., encountered an unexpected welcome. P. Vedius had journeyed out some way from Laodicea to meet him, that ‘magnus nebulo’, a friend of Pompeius Magnus. Vedius was escorted by a large and motley retinue. With him paraded a baboon in a chariot—no doubt congenial company, and perhaps a reminder of absent friends or a high dignitary like Ap. Pulcher, the recent proconsul, whom the outspoken Caelius Rufus likened to an ape. Vedius also had some wild asses (the bleak upland plains of Lycaonia and Cappadocia were their peculiar habitat). For what purpose no man can say, though the breeding of high-grade mules had become a lucrative pursuit in this age. The dubious credit of introducing the flesh of young onagri to Roman tables was reserved for the great Maecenas.

Early imperial arrangements must have been to some extent based on late Republican practice. I will therefore first set out the financial machinery of the last half-century of the Republic, as revealed in Cicero's speeches and correspondence, supplemented by secondary sources. The Aerarium at Rome was the central repository of the moneys of the Roman People. It was managed by the two urban quaestors, or rather by a body of scribae quaestorii under their nominal direction. Normally the Polybian rule that no payment might be made save under the authority of a senatusconsultum seems to have held: it does not appear that the old right of a consul to draw of his own initiative still survived. Magistrates proceeding to a province were voted a block grant to cover their estimated expenses: ornare provinciam is the technical term. On leaving his province a magistrate was obliged to account to the Aerarium for this sum. These accounts seem to have been somewhat summary. Those which Verres sent in on laying down his quaestorship were no doubt unusually brief, but if it was possible for a proconsul to distribute the unexpended balance of his grant among his staff—and Cicero's refusal to follow this practice was resented by his subordinates —auditing cannot have been very exact.

In a recent article, ‘Augustan Poetry and the Life of Luxury’, JRS 66 (1976), 87, I argued that much recent scholarship has misjudged the Augustan poets in certain important respects, because it has been thought in principle possible to separate ‘literature’ and ‘life’, as if they were clearly distinguishable entities; in reality, the two affect each other in a ceaseless mutual interaction. That argument was developed as a general treatment of the βίος φιλήδονος as presented in Latin literature, and as lived in reality in a society in which Greek and Italian elements, poetical motifs and real behaviour, were inextricably intermingled.

The present paper is devoted to a more particular enquiry into one poet and one type of historical figure. I argue that Propertius' presentation of himself in poetry as a lover—romantic, reckless and obsessed—is closely related to the figure in history of Mark Antony. That historical figure is itself to be seen in a long tradition of great lovers of pleasure, in which the actual lives of real men can be seen to be shaped and coloured by the influence of ‘literature’. The argument of my earlier paper does not depend for its validity upon the acceptance of the present one, but they both pursue the same approach.

Epistles 8.14, one of Pliny's longest letters, has been widely dismissed as a clumsy combination of two ill-fitting stretches of prose. This article demonstrates a significant chain of allusions in the letter's opening to Tacitus’ Agricola, as well as to Cicero, Ovid and Seneca; it shows how Pliny prompts such a reading in the surrounding Epistles 8.13 and 8.15; and, through consideration of the diptych form and the theme of slavery, it demonstrates the letter's pivotal role as centrepiece to Book 8.

Lists of provinces and cities of the Roman Empire were compiled and used for administrative or juridical purposes from as early as the time of Augustus, whose survey of Italy and the provinces formed the basis of the Elder Pliny's description of the Empire. The late Roman period is especially rich in such survivals, the proliferation of which can be ascribed to two tendencies prevalent in the fourth century. The first was the increasing bureaucratization of the Empire, reflected in the most famous and comprehensive of all official lists, the Notitia Dignitatum. The second was the urge to store information on a wide variety of topics in an economical and accessible form. Many lists, which may originally have had an official purpose, survive in literary forms alien to their inception, and which are the work of private individuals.

In JRS xiii, 1923 (pp. 1–55), Dr. E. Nischer published a paper on ‘The Army Reforms of Diocletian and Constantine,’ in which, in opposition to the opinions of other scholars, including Mommsen, Seeck and Grosse, he attempted to prove that a proper appreciation of the reforms of the two Emperors could only be attained if a sharp distinction were drawn between their respective policies. According to this theory, Diocletian is the augmenter, Constantine the reformer, of the Roman military system, in the sense that the former doubled the number of existing legions, while the latter created the field-army of palatini and comitatenses by disbanding some of the frontier-legions and withdrawing detachments from others to form independent units in his new mobile army. In a note in JRS xv, 1925, Professor Norman Baynes suggested some general grounds for caution in the acceptance of Nischer's opinions, and it is the purpose of this paper to examine more closely the latter's arguments and, while rejecting part of his conclusions, to consider what inferences may safely be drawn from the evidence which we possess for the work of Diocletian and Constantine.

Among the individual objects of antiquity that have been seen and copied by the artists of later generations, few have had a stranger history than the columns that once formed a screen in old St. Peter's, around the site of the tomb of the apostle. Their singular and distinctive form was in itself enough to attract attention; and the fact that, since the later Middle Ages, they were universally believed to have come from the Temple of Solomon, secured them an important place in the art and iconography of the Renaissance. Their character and early history, however, have never been adequately discussed; and now that the publication of a part of the results of the excavations undertaken since 1940 underneath St. Peter's has cleared up several important points that were previously obscure, the time seems to be ripe for such a discussion. It is the purpose of this article to try to determine their place in the history of classical art, and to say something of their significance in the history of the art of later times.

The early Principate tends to be interpreted in terms of the constitutional forms in which it was clothed and the administrative innovations which it brought, to the neglect of those, largely unchanged, social and economic factors which shaped the actual working of Roman politics. In no area has this tendency been more obvious than in works dealing with the Fiscus, which has thus been seen as an alternative ‘state treasury’ created at a given moment, by Augustus, perhaps in 21 or 20 B.C., by Tiberius, or by Claudius, which absorbed the revenues of the imperial provinces, and some indirect taxes. It is also seen as an administrative unit (like a Treasury, or a University Chest) concerned with the handling of an area of public finance.

A wide variety of objects may function as money in the different uses which this possesses—for payment, for storing wealth, for measuring value and as a means of exchange. In the Roman world coined money was clearly dominant over other forms of money in the first three uses, and I want here to explore the extent to which it served as a means of exchange, partly because this is the most distinctive function of money and one for which coined money or a token substitute is essential to achieve any great versatility, partly because the problems involved seem particularly complex. It is not sufficient simply to discuss how coined money was used as a means of exchange. Attitudes to the process are equally relevant. Nor should the absence of ancient discussions of monetary theory mislead us into minimizing the practical importance of coined money in the ancient world.