This article examines the Contra Andromachum, the open letter in which Gelasius of Rome (A.D. 492–496) condemned the continued involvement of members of the now Christian élite in the Lupercalia. It is suggested that the Pope's argument is less straightforward than has been supposed: the current status and recent history of the festival are left unclear, and the Pope's allegations about the motives of its sponsors are of dubious credibility. Of more significance is the public aspect of the festival, and in particular the opportunities it provided for those who organized it to advertise a connection with the heritage of Rome.

It has for a long time been recognized that a sharp decline in the prosperity and strength of municipal life in the Roman Empire took place during and shortly after the reign of Diocletian, and this has been attributed largely to his bureaucratic administrative system and heavy increases in taxation, with their consequent pressure upon the urban middle class—the curiales. Of the essential correctness of this view there can be no doubt; and apart from possible new evidence there is little more to be said on that phase of the subject. But there are other aspects of this important problem which seem to have received less attention than they deserve. Bureaucracies and crushing taxes have not always destroyed the middle classes of the countries in which they have existed, as the case of France under the Old Régime clearly proves; so there must be other contributory factors which helped to produce this result in the case under consideration. Some of these have been dealt with ; but one at least—the continuance under the new system of a type of internal municipal government suited only to the most prosperous period of the system which it replaced—seems to have been largely, if not entirely, ignored by investigators. Diocletian not only tried to make the municipia of his empire efficient agents of the central government, but in addition attempted to render them once more the energetic and prosperous organisms which they had been before the Military Anarchy ; and, as his efforts in the end contributed powerfully to produce exactly the opposite result, this portion of his work is worthy of note, if for no other reason than to serve as a warning for would-be benevolent despots in other ages.

This article begins with a review of the traditional dates for Palladas (c. A.D. 360–450) and the current consensus of most scholars (c. A.D. 319–400). The first of these relies almost exclusively on the dubious manuscript lemmata and the second on an interpretation of Palladas' epigrams pertaining to the rise of Christianity and the weakening of the pagan cults, which are supposed to be Theodosian in date. Both timelines are difficult to reconcile with two external clues, which together suggest that his floruit must have been earlier than the second half of the fourth century. Further analysis reveals that the important pagan-Christian epigrams are full of Constantine's political and religious propaganda post-324. Another line of inquiry establishes a new set of dates: c. A.D. 259–340.

The subject is the Roman occupation and control of the river Danube between the river Inn and the Black Sea, with a special emphasis on recent research and discoveries. Themes examined include the pattern of recent research and publication in the dozen modern states that now exist in the area; the construction of strategic roads linking the upper and lower Danube basins with the rest of the Roman world; military history and the creation of the military cordon along the river and the civil and military settlements associated with this. Recent research on social, economic, and cultural themes is also reviewed. Detailed accounts of major roads to the Danube and sites along the river are provided in two topographical appendices.

In 44 B.C. Caesar, newly declared dictator perpetuo, told a crowd hailing him halfheartedly as king that they were mistaken: he was ‘not Rex but Caesar’; but he punished the tribunes who removed the diadems placed on his statues, and who arrested a man for putting them there. Not long after, at the Lupercalia, the consul Mark Antony thrice offered a diadem to Caesar, who was sitting, as Cicero, doubtless an eye-witness, describes him, ‘amictus toga purpurea, in sella aurea, coronatus’; Caesar refused it, sending it to Jupiter on the Capitol, and had inscribed in the Fasti a notice that he had been offered the diadem populi iussu (which was certainly not true), but had not accepted it. But would he have accepted had the people been more enthusiastic ? Thus began a controversy as to Caesar's final intentions that has still not been resolved. I have no dogmatic answer to the question, and I do not wish to go through all the old arguments, though I would like to suggest that there is good contemporary evidence for believing that Caesar was willing to be worshipped as a god, but did not wish to take the name of king; and I would also like to suggest that there might have been more logic than appears at first sight in accepting a number of honours that suggested kingship (as well as divinity, which so often in the East went with it), and yet refusing the name. For on the usual interpretations of Caesar's last actions we are in a dilemma: if he simply wanted to avoid the name of king and the hatred which, as a practical proposition at least, it still aroused in Rome, then he did, or permitted, a lot of incredibly foolish things. On the other hand, if he simply wanted to take the title, he was, as events were to show, very shortsighted—and indeed some scholars have supposed him suffering from megalomania or senility.

The surviving literary evidence for the lex Pompeia, provincial charter of the joint province of Bithynia-Pontus, is of prime importance for our knowledge of the nature and content of these charters, which established the fundamental organization of a Roman province. Of the charters of other provinces, only the lex Rupilia of Sicily is known in any comparable detail. Our knowledge of Pompey's law, a piece of work which stood the test of time and lasted, with some modification, until the day of Cassius Dio, also affords some reasonable basis for an assessment of his administrative achievement.

The discussion of Pompey's organization of this province has tended to concentrate attention on two traditional questions. Firstly, controversy about the extent of the territory added to Bithynia from the kingdom of Mithridates to form the new province has led to lengthy debate concerning the exact location of the eastern frontier. Secondly, much speculation has centred around the attempt to determine Pompey's ultimate purpose in organizing this area as he did and to accord him appropriate praise or condemnation.

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.

‘Le salut, pour l'histoire économique de l'antiquité, ne peut venir que de la mer’—heady talk, but typical of its time. It may well be that the decade of the’ 70s will come to be seen as the high summer of amphorae studies and it is, perhaps, no accident that such great claims have been made in a report on a wreck at Port-Vendres which is closely dated by the stamps on a remarkable series of ingots and also has an exceptional series of painted inscriptions on the amphorae of the cargo. Few wrecks have produced information of such quality.

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.

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.

One of St. Augustine's purposes in writing the De Civitate Dei was to counter the view which became current in pagan circles after Alaric's sack of Rome that Christianity was responsible for the disaster. To this end he quoted, introduced with the refrain ‘Ubi ergo erant illi dii ?’, many examples of similar disasters which the old gods had apparently been unable to ward of f in the pre-Christian period (III, 17 f.). In 1905 A. Dufourc pointed out that Rutilius Namatianus devotes a number of eloquent lines in his De Reditu to precisely the opposite claim, that Rome had risen with renewed and increased strength from each of these disasters (the Gauls, Samnites, Pyrrhus, Hannibal). Dufourc suggested that Rutilius had read Civ. Dei I–III, and that the De Red. was a pagan reply to Augustine's thesis. Little attention was paid to this suggestion at the time, but in 1948 P. Courcelle adduced further parallels between the two works, and claimed that Rutilius had read not only Civ. Dei I–III, but IV and V as well.

There is an obstacle to our natural appreciation of Virgil's Eclogues which looms as large in their case as in that of any poetry whatever. The Eclogues form probably the most influential group of short poems ever written: though they themselves take Theocritus as a model, they were to become the fountainhead from which the vast and diverse tradition of pastoral in many European literatures was to spring. To use them as a model was in itself to distort their character: it is one of the greatest ironies of literary history that these elusive, various, eccentric poems should have become the pattern for hundreds of later writers. Moreover, the growth of the later pastoral tradition meant that many things were attributed to Virgil which are not in Virgil. Sometimes they were derived from interpretations which were put upon Virgil in late antiquity but which we now believe to be mistaken; sometimes they are misinterpretations of a much later date; sometimes they originated from new developments in pastoral literature which their inventors had not meant to seem Virgilian, but which in the course of time got foisted back on to Virgil nevertheless. It is hard, therefore, to approach the Eclogues openly and without preconceptions about what they contain, and even scholars who have devoted much time and learning to them have sometimes continued to hold views about them for which there are upon a dispassionate observation no good grounds at all. No poems perhaps have become so encrusted by the barnacles of later tradition and interpretation as these, and we need to scrape these away if we are to see them in their true shape. My aim here is to do some of this scraping by examining the use of Arcadians and the name of Arcadia in Virgil's work.

At the central point of Horace's epistle to the Pisones (ll. 220–50 out of 476) is a lengthy passage on the history and composition of satyr-plays. At the central point within that passage (ll. 234–5), with emphatic use of the vocative and the first-person pronoun, Horace presents himself and his addressees as actively involved in writing satyr-plays:

non ego inornata et dominantia nomina solum

verbaque, Pisones, satyrorum scriptor amabo.

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.’

Responding to recent discussions of brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt, this article re-examines the Greek and Egyptian evidence for the practice, both papyrological and literary. Exploring possible antecedents in Egypt and Greece and the distinctive development of Egyptian inheritance practice, we argue that the brother-sister marriages involved real siblings, and that by the beginning of Roman rule such marriages were legitimised by a Ptolemaic law and the prevalent belief that they followed ancient Egyptian custom. But new circumstances introduced by Roman rule, particularly the increasing importance of private property ownership, encouraged the practice to become popular through much of northern Egypt. The explanation for brother-sister marriage in Egypt must be sought in the immediate local historical context, not that of the Eastern Mediterranean generally.

‘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.

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.

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 Maltese islands, Malta, the ancient Melite, Gozo, the ancient Gaulus, and three lesser islets, lie in the centre of the Mediterranean in a significant position. They command the highway of sea-borne traffic between east and west, and they form a link between north and south, between Sicily and Tunis. They are small, indeed; their whole area is about four-fifths that of the Isle of Wight, but they are in their own fashion very fertile, their seas are rich in fish, and their coasts have many harbours. Naturally they have long been inhabited; they have a real and, for certain centuries, a stirring history. Their closest geographical kinship is with Sicily, which is less than sixty miles north of Gozo, and can easily be seen in clear weather from the higher parts of the islands. Hence, perhaps, it was that during seven centuries of the Roman period, just as during five centuries of the middle ages, they were connected especially with Sicily; but their relations with the more distant African coast and with the eastern and western waters of the Mediterranean are too strong to allow them to be called purely Sicilian or even purely European, and they have often owned other allegiance.