My object in this paper is to examine the implications of a contradiction in Augustan poetry which seems clearest in the Odes of Horace. He exhorts his emperor to curb the present extravagances of vice and restore marriage to its ancient dignity, and praises him for having done so. But this high moral tone ill fits his claims to be an erotic poet: content to love marriage as a bachelor, he addresses many odes to girls not burdened, nor likely to be, by the chains of wedlock. Indeed erotic poets have seldom found their inspiration in the stable affections of lawful marriage. In spite of the disparate freedom (even greater then than now) allowed to the male, it nevertheless seems reasonable to confront Horace first with his praises of matrimony, then with his more licentious outpourings, and require an explanation.

Non fraudando et Studio divi Augusti aetate, qui primus instituit amoenissimam parietum picturam, villas et porticus (portus?) ac topiaria opera, lucos, nemora, colles, piscinas, euripos, amnes, litora, qualia quis optaret, varias ibi obambulantium species aut navigantium terraque villas adeuntium asellis aut vehiculis, iam piscantes, aucupantes aut venantes aut etiam vindemiantes. Sunt in eius exemplaribus nobiles palustri accessu villae, succollatis sponsione mulieribus labantes trepidis quae feruntur, plurimae praeterea tales argutiae facetissimi salis. Idem subdialibus maritimas urbes pingere instituit, blandissimo aspectu minimoque inpendio.

(Pliny, NH xxxv, 116–17)

Studius too, of the period of the Divine Augustus, must not be cheated of his due. He first introduced the most attractive fashion of painting walls with villas, porticoes (harbours?), and landscape gardens, groves, woods, hills, fish-pools, canals, rivers, coasts—whatever one could wish, and in them various representations of people strolling about, people sailing, people travelling overland to villas on donkey back or in carriages, and in addition people fishing, fowling, hunting, or even gathering the vintage. His pictures include noble villas reached across marshes, men tottering along with women, trembling burdens, on their shoulders, carried for a wager, and very many such lively and witty subjects besides. It was the same man who introduced the practice of painting seaside cities in open terraces, producing a charming effect with minimal expense.

The aim of this article is to challenge a theory which is current about the operation of criminal appeal under the Principate. Since the important essays of Professor Jones on the subject, it has been commonly accepted that there were two separate and distinct systems of appeal in the period from Augustus to the Severans. In the first century, appeal, provocatio, was lodged before trial. The judge did not try the case at all, but at most made a preliminary investigation. By the reign of Hadrian, a new system, appellatio, has supplanted the old one. Appeal is now after sentence.

This survey article — the first in a new series to be published in the Journal of Roman Studies — is an attempt to review developments in the study of the city of Rome since 1980: a decade which can reasonably be seen as one of the most exciting in this field for a century, in terms not only of the archaeological discoveries and other related research taking place in Rome itself, but also of the increasing integration of the topographical and monumental history of the city of Rome into what might be termed ‘mainstream’ Roman history.

Juvenal is charged with misogyny. The evidence brought against him is Satire 6. A secondary charge is that of unstructured composition. This paper will attempt to show that the case is unfounded. My contention is that the poem is shaped by contemporary discourses about marriage, in particular the treatment of marriage in rhetoric. The understanding of the poem's ideological grounding thus gained will provide a basis for exploring the complex interrelationship of author, speaker, addressee, and audience in the poem.

At a critical period of European history a princess of the Theodosian house played a brief but conspicuous and outrageous part. Her relations with Attila have secured a scandalous notoriety to the princess Honoria, who would otherwise have been as mere a name to us as her cousins Arcadia and Marina; for her action, if it did not alter the main course of events, determined the Hun king's policy during three critical years. But the true facts of an extraordinarily interesting episode have been obscured, as I hope to prove, by a curious error in one of our sources. Honoria cannot be dismissed as a perverse or romantic schoolgirl, nor, with Mommsen, as ‘eine lüderliche Prinzessin.’

‘The famous Ballad theory of Niebuhr of which we seldom hear now except in connexion with Macaulay's lays’ … These are the words of Mr. Last's tutor—W. Warde Fowler. When he wrote them, in 1912, Warde Fowler was apparently not aware that the ballad theory had been revived a few years before by an Italian historian who was to exercise a deep influence on Mr. Last. But the ballad theory involves other names—such as Perizonius, Vico, Niebuhr, Schwegler, Mommsen—which have been ever present in Mr. Last's mind and have often recurred in conversation. In more recent years the ballad theory has lost nothing of its prestige in Italy; two pupils of De Sanctis, A. Rostagni and L. Pareti, have made it the cornerstone of their interpretation of archaic Latin literature and historiography. Indeed, the theory has again found favour in England.

In Minucius Felix' dialogue on the value of Christianity, written in the late second or early third century C.E., the character Caecilius, who presents the anti-Christian arguments, recounts a story about their initiations, ‘a story as loathsome as it is well known’: after the initiate has struck a baby concealed under a covering of flour, those present drink the blood from its wounds and so seal their union (Oct. 9.5). Later in the dialogue, Octavius, the defender of Christianity, refutes this slander. The alleged crime, he argues, is so terrible that ‘no one could believe it except the sort of person who would attempt it’. He goes on to point out that pagans, not Christians, are the ones who practise actual human sacrifice. He supports his claim by citing specific examples: the Africans who used to sacrifice their children to Saturn, the Taurians and the Egyptian Busiris who sacrificed foreigners, the Gauls, and lastly the Romans themselves, who in the past would bury alive two Greeks and two Gauls and who in his own day sacrifice men to Jupiter Latiaris (Oct. 30.1).

Until recent centuries, historians had to reckon with only limited social movement. I use the phrase in a very wide sense, to cover change of habitation, profession, or class; but even so defined, in a world dominated numerically by small farmers, people rarely moved around, or up or down, socially. This is as true of the thirteenth as of the third century.

But it is usual to say that, granted these limitations, social movement was still much more restricted after 250 than before. This has recently been challenged by A. H. M. Jones. ‘The late Roman empire is often conceived of as a rigid hierarchical society, in which every man was tied to the station in life to which he was born.’ But the laws directing this confess, in their repetitions and relaxations, that they could not really be applied. Society, he says, was actually less static after 250 than before. Despite what has become the almost canonical view of the question, Professor Jones is certainly in the right. Under three major headings, all perfectly well known, many people did change jobs and homes. Some fled from invasion, in numbers powerfully suggested by the thousands of coin hoards from Britain to the Black Sea—we must assume that for every treasure we find, a hundred are still hidden, and for every man who buried his money, a hundred took it with them—; another group, from one to two hundred thousand, joined an expanded army; an equal number in Egypt alone turned monk. If we say, then, that over the century 250–350, half a million people were taken from one life and newly rooted in another, we have a figure by no means fantastic, yet without parallel in any earlier era of the Empire.

The ninth book of the correspondence of Q. Aurelius Symmachus contains a number of letters lacking the names of their addressees. Otto Seeck once suggested that one of these letters might have been written to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. This suggestion has been accepted and built upon by most subsequent writers on Ammianus, and it has come to be generally agreed that he had connections among the senatorial aristocracy of Rome; connections, according to some scholars, that led to serious distortions in his history. A. Alföldi, in an attempt to rehabilitate his fellow-Pannonian, the brutal emperor Valentinian, maintained that Ammianus, ‘body and soul on the side of the senators’ (who hated Valentinian), presented ‘his dear Roman aristocrats’ with a picture of Valentinian ‘as black as one-sided hatred can contrive’. W. Ensslin suggested that Ammianus was a supporter of the usurper Eugenius whom Theodosius crushed in 394, and that the letter in question was deliberately published without his name to protect Symmachus' family—in which he has been followed by W. Hartke, and, with added refinements, by R. A. Pack.

Animal sacrifice was a central component of ancient Roman religion, but scholars have tended to focus on the symbolic aspects of these rituals, while glossing over the practical challenges involved in killing large, potentially unruly creatures, such as bulls. The traditional explanation is that the animal was struck on the head with a hammer or an axe to stun it, then had its throat cut. Precisely how axes, hammers, and knives were employed remains unexplained. This article draws upon ancient sculpture, comparative historical sources, and animal physiology to argue that the standard interpretation is incomplete, and, in its place, offers a detailed analysis of exactly how the killing and bleeding of bovines was accomplished and the distinct purposes of hammers and axes within these rituals.

This paper revises current understandings of the rôle of land in the economy of the Italian diaspora in the Greek East in the second and first centuries b.c., arguing that these Italians owned more land than has previously been assumed and that many of these Italian landowners practised a highly commercialized form of agriculture that focused on high-end products. This strategy shaped what empire meant both locally and in Italy and Rome, where the products they marketed fed into the ongoing consumer revolutions of the time. After discussing the evidence for the extent of Italian landholdings and examining their exploitation in three case studies, we conclude by reflecting on the long-term history of such landholdings in the provinces and the implications for our understanding of Roman imperialism more generally.

Tacitus' Agricola is one of the most tantalizingly enigmatic of ancient texts. Coming from the pen of one who was to become a renowned historian, it is notoriously hard to place in generic terms. It fails to conform to any commonly accepted model of political history, and yet, as I shall argue, it has much to tell us about Tacitus' views of Roman political life. We can turn to the parallel of the Germania for another possible way out of the dilemma, and yet the ethnographic details which the Agricola undoubtedly encompasses could hardly be seen as its main focus. The most natural cast to give the work draws on its ostensibly biographical aspect. Commemorating the res gestae of Tacitus' father-in-law, Agricola, is the purpose signalled to the reader from the first sentence onwards: ‘to hand on to future generations the deeds and values of distinguished men’ (‘clarorum virorum facta moresque posteris tradere’). All of these interpretations have had their proponents. But I shall argue here for a different reading of the Agricola, one which not only highlights an aspect of the text which has tended to be sidelined, but also provides an interpretative framework within which some of the other, more extensively treated, themes may be reconsidered. My reading of the Agricola is focused not on the state of Rome under the emperor Domitian, nor on the customs of the inhabitants of Britain, nor even on the figure of Agricola himself, but on the actual location of his res gestae. I shall consider how Tacitus' portrayal of Britain itself may ultimately offer us insights into Agricola, Domitian, and Roman political life.

The reign of Gratian marked a turning-point in the conflict between Christianity and Paganism in the Roman Empire. One of the more spectacular manifestations of this change of emphasis which culminated in the anti-pagan legislation of Theodosius was Gratian's ostentatious repudiation of the title of pontifex maximus, held by every Emperor from Augustus down to Gratian's own father, Valentinian. The Christian Emperors had tolerated it hitherto as a purely formal element of their titulature. But Gratian refused the pontifical robe, ἀθέμιτον εἶναι Χριστιανῷ τὸ σχῆμα νομίσας.

Zosimus, our only authority for the event, dates it to the beginning of Gratian's reign. If he means 367, when Gratian was created co-Augustus by Valentinian, then he is certainly wrong, for pontifex maximus is attested among Gratian's titles in an inscription of the year 370 (CIL VI, 1175). And even if his accession proper in 375 is meant, when Valentinian died, this is still wrong, for Ausonius addressed him as pontifex in his Gratiarum Actio of January 379.

The Emperor Julian stood to the Roman world of the fourth century as the personification of the older faith, and with him died the hopes of a pagan restoration. His death came at a critical moment, and both pagan and Christian felt that it could have been no human hand which dealt the fatal blow. To Kallistos Julian was the victim of a demon : Κάλλιστος δέ, writes Socrates, ὁ ἐν τοῖς οἰϰείοις τοῦ βασιλέως στρατευόμενος (i.e. as one of the imperial domestici), ἱστορήσας τὰ ϰατ᾿ αὐτὸν ἐν ἡρωιϰῷ μέτρῳ, τὸν τότε πόλεμον διηγούμενος ὑπὸ δαίμονος βληθέντα τελευτῆσαι ϕηαίν. The comment of the Christian historian is interesting : ὅπερ τυχὸν μὲν ὡς ποιητὴς ἔπλασε, τυχὸν δὲ ϰαί οὕτως ἔχει· πολλοὺσς γὰρ ἐριννύες μετῆλθον. Libanius pictures the blessings which men anticipated under Julian's rule and adds ταῦτα ϰαὶ ἔτι πλείω προσδοϰώμενα χορὸς φθονερῶν ἀφείλετο δαιμόνων. To the Christian similarly it was the saints who had fulfilled the will of Heaven in removing the Apostate persecutor of the Church, though a human assassin could hardly have been condemned—σχολῇ γε ἄν τις ϰαὶ αὐτῷ μέμψαιτο διὰ Θεόν ϰαὶ θρησϰείαν ἣν ἐπῄνεσεν ἀνδρείῳ γενομένῳ.

In 23 B.C. the first three books of Horace's Odes appeared. In the years which followed, up to the completion of Epistles 1, his work took a new direction, and the ethical themes which had had a marked place in his lyric verse became his entire concern: in his own words (Ep. 1.1.10–11),

nunc itaque et versus et cetera ludicra pono;

quid verum atque decens euro et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum.

What Horace describes in this context, at the very beginning of the book, is a kind of conversion to philosophy; and so the reader is at once drawn to ask what philosophy means to the poet. Before considering this question by scrutiny of the poems, two more general ones should be raised: first, what are the dominant features of ancient ethics as a whole and how far does it differ from modern ethical systems or moral thinking? Second, what part did moral philosophy play in the life of Romans in Horace's time? The answers I shall give to these very large questions are pragmatic and limited: they are meant simply as preparation for considering Horace's Epistles.

This article is the first publication of a Greek inscription from Akmoneia in Phrygia, dated to a.d. 6/7. The monument is an honorific stele for a priestess by the name of Tatia, and was voted by a body of ‘Greek and Roman women’. As a document of collective political activity by a female corporate group, the inscription has no real parallels in either the Greek or Roman world. The monument is set in the context of the Roman mercantile presence in central Phrygia in the late Republican and early Imperial periods, and some proposals are offered concerning the identity and significance of the honouring body.

The inscription here published was first seen by Mr. Applebaum in 1945, when he was in charge of Antiquities in the newly-acquired territory of Cyrenaica. It was at that time standing by the Museum at Cyrene, and its provenience is unknown.

In ancient historiography, characterization of leading statesmen was often the central preoccupation. A Berber prince was an irresistibly exotic subject, and the composite portrait of Massinissa, king of Numidia between 201 and 148 B.C., well exemplifies this focus of historia. There is abundant detail of personal attributes—his handsome bearing, his extraordinary strength, his unrivalled powers of endurance. We read how at the age of eighty-eight, sans teeth but with other faculties unimpaired, he led his troops on horseback to decisive victory over the Carthaginians. His love-life attracted admiring attention; his affair with Sophoniba, invested with a historical significance quite fictitious, was depicted by historians and painters of both the ancient world and the Renaissance. The achievements of his virility were enthusiastically recounted; he sired a son at eighty-six, and forty-four (? fifty-four) children are said to have survived him. Nor did his interest in children end with procreation. He reared his grandchildren in his own residence, and Ptolemy Euergetes cherished his query to the Greeks who sought to purchase Numidian monkeys as household pets: παρ΄ ὑμῖν, ὦ οὗτοι, αἱ γυναῖκες οὐ τίκτουσι παίδια; There is detail of the luxury of his court-life: δεῖπνα ΄Ρωμαϊκῶς ἦν κατεσκεσκευασμένα, with Greek musicians, golden baskets, silver tableware.