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.

Our knowledge of the city of Rome after the fall of the Western Empire is largely determined by its position as the seat of the Papacy. Historical studies are based principally upon the Liber Pontificalis and the writings of the popes themselves, while architectural and archaeological research has concentrated on the city's numerous churches, many of which for the period A.D. 500–850 are remarkably well-preserved. The best known modern syntheses in English from each field are probably Peter Llewellyn's Rome in the Dark Ages (1971) and Richard Krautheimer's Rome. Profile of a City (1980). If we look beyond the purely ecclesiastical, however, we find very little Archaeological studies of Rome's urban infrastructure—walls, roads, bridges, aqueducts, sewers, housing—tend to stop, at the latest, with the Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century. The lack of research, and therefore lack of data, have in turn been interpreted as a sign that early medieval Rome was a city bereft of an artificial watersupply, and of the resources necessary to maintain such structures as the Aurelianic Walls. Studies of medieval urbanism have been affected by this dearth of evidence proposing, for example, settlement models with the population of the city crowded into the Tiber bend in order to obtain water.

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequences.

In 1913 J. B. Bury wrote of Diocletian's administrative reforms: ‘It is becoming clear that (Diocletian) was not the initiator, but was only extending and systematizing changes which had already been begun’; and subsequent research in many areas has tended to support this contention. Bury was particularly concerned with the subdivision of the provinces; yet that particular reform has continued to be ascribed almost wholly to Diocletian, on the authority of Lactantius' famous phrase, provinciae quoque in frusta concisae, and in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary. It is the purpose of this article to present new material from Aphrodisias in Caria which seems to indicate that a new imperial province of Phrygia and Caria, whose creation has hitherto been ascribed to Diocletian or his successors, had been separated from proconsular Asia before A.D. 259. If this is so, it may well prove fruitful to re-examine material from other parts of the empire, in order to determine whether similar developments, at such a date, can be identified elsewhere.

It is nearly forty years since Filippo Coarelli's brilliant Guida archeologica di Roma (FC 1974) announced the arrival of a new era in Roman topographical studies. A series of seminal monographs soon followed, on the Roman Forum (FC 1983, 1985), the Forum Boarium (FC 1988), and the Campus Martius (FC 1997). A volume on the Palatine was advertised as forthcoming, but unforeseen circumstances put that project on hold.

This is not intended to be a full discussion of the sources of Pliny's description of Spain: it will attempt only to establish certain limits of date for the purposes of the article which follows. Among other sources Pliny used Agrippa's survey (probably finished about 7 B.C.) and official documents—formulae provinciarum—which included lists of towns with indications of their municipal status. I am chiefly concerned with the dating of these lists.

The Roman polychrome mosaic, which forms the subject of this paper, came to light on 12th September, 1963, at the village of Hinton St. Mary in northern Dorset, 1½ miles north of Sturminster Newton. The field in which the pavement lies is the property of Mr. W. J. White, general engineer, blacksmith, and welder, who recognized as Roman the tesserae revealed by the postholes that were being dug for the foundations of a building near his forge. Mr. White immediately reported the discovery to the authorities of the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, and invited them to direct the clearance of the whole mosaic with the help of a group of local archaeologists and amateurs. Mr. R. A. H. Farrar, of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), also took part in the work of clearance; and the vertical photographs reproduced here, of which Mr. White holds the copyright, were taken at his request by the Commission with the aid of an 18-foot gantry.

On the basis of a random sample of English-language internet websites about empires, we can now formulate the first law of comparative imperialisms as follows: as an online discussion of empire grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Roman Empire approaches 1. (This is a variant of the general law that states that ‘as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1’.) The comparative study of empires is thriving, and the recent intensity of interest is connected, at least in part, to the international military interventions of the United States. But comparisons between empires are nothing new, and, in the 1960s, Peter Brunt wrote an insightful article on British and Roman imperialism. That analysis was the product of the age of decolonization, an age which also acted as a spur to comparative approaches within classical scholarship: witness Nicole Loraux's suggestion that it was anti-colonial movements associated with the Algerian and Vietnam wars that led Jean-Pierre Vernant to embark on his series of comparative investigations into Greek thought and religion. Brunt's article was written in a retrospective key at a time when it was possible to look back to the completion, or the near completion, of a major period of European colonialism and arrive at a sort of reckoning. Some two generations prior to Brunt, in the early twentieth century and at the apogee of the British Empire, Lord Cromer delivered an address to the Classical Association on ‘Ancient and Modern Imperialism’ in which he found it unimaginable to think of independence for Britain's overseas colonies. Francis Haverfield responded sympathetically to Cromer and in his own writings associated the British and the Roman empires. Any discussion of comparative imperialisms, therefore, will need to consider not just the recent concentration of debates over empire but also a lengthy trajectory that extends back to Cromer and Haverfield and indeed further beyond into the eighteenth century. None of the books under review reflects in detail on the intellectual history in which they may be situated, but this is a subject that at least needs to be acknowledged and that we shall have occasion to return to later.

The object of this paper is to trace the administrative development in Roman times of the Judaeo-Samaritan territory proper, that is of Galilee, Peraea, Samaria and Judaea as delimited by Josephus, excluding the tetrarchy of Philip and the cities of the Decapolis and of the coast. My reasons for choosing this region are that it affords a highly interesting, because singularly well-documented, example of that development from a centralised bureaucratic administration to a régime of autonomous city-states, which was generally promoted by the Roman government, and that it incidentally throws some light on that subject of perennial interest,—the attitude of the Roman authorities to the Jews.

During the first century of our era, each of the four regions enumerated above formed an administrative unit. Each had its capital and was subdivided into smaller units, termed toparchies. The evidence is fullest for Judaea. Here Jerusalem was the capital, and there were eleven toparchies. The list according to Josephus is Jerusalem, Gophna, Acrabatta, Thamna, Lydda, Emmaus, Pella, Idumaea, Engaddi, Herodium and Jericho. A similar list is given by Pliny who, however, omits Idumaea and Engaddi and calls Pella Bethleptapha.

The shift from a traditional polytheistic dispensation for empire to a Christian-oriented ‘commonwealth’ is unarguably one of the most significant historical processes that took place in the Roman world. Its ramifications were manifold, and not least in the arena of how empire and its territory would come to be conceived within Late Roman and Byzantine culture. In this paper I want to explore the ways one text, written in the lifetime of Constantine, takes a series of traditional forms within the established genres of Graeco-Roman travel-writing and transforms them into a new Christian paradigm not only of travel (in the form of Christian pilgrimage) but also of empire as a territorial concept defined by particular privileged places and their privileged mythologies. The surprise lies, in part, in how swiftly a Christian author was willing implicitly to re-arrange and redefine deeply entrenched institutional norms, while none the less writing on an entirely traditional model. The text I shall be exploring, the Itinerarium Burdigalense (henceforth IB), is an account of a journey to the Holy Land made by an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux in A.D. 333.

Chapter Seventeen of Plutarch's Life of Numa is well known to students of early Rome for the statement that it was the second king of Rome who created collegia for the craftsmen of Rome. Nor is Plutarch alone in his belief: two passages of Pliny's Natural History attribute the collegia of the bronze workers and brick makers to Numa (XXXIV, I; XXXV, 159); Pliny indeed seems to refer to an actual list of collegia in which these two figured. On the other hand, neither Cicero in the Republic nor Livy nor Dionysius displays any knowledge of such an initiative by Numa; an entirely different tradition indeed appears in Florus, according to which it was Servius Tullius who distributed the Roman people between collegia, in the general context of his timocratic organization of the census classes (1, 6, 3).

It seems to be the accepted view among historians who deal with Egypt under Roman rule to regard the two first centuries after the Roman conquest as a period of prosperity and happiness in Egypt, and the last three before the Arab invasion as one of absolute ruin and misery, though there are differences of opinion as to the point when the decline began and the causes to which it is to be ascribed. There is, however, considerable ground for believing that the condition of the country steadily deteriorated from the very beginning of Roman rule, and that this deterioration was the inevitable result of the mistakes made in the scheme of organisation adopted by Augustus.

This paper aims to illustrate the practical application of myth in public life under the early Principate. It begins by sketching the deep historical affection of the people of Rome for the twins Castor and Pollux, and the great posthumous popularity of Nero Claudius Drusus for generations after his death in 9 b.c. Concentrating on the dedicatory inscription of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome, the paper argues that Tiberius Caesar, notoriously addicted to mythology, crafted a potent public association between the heavenly twins and himself and his brother Drusus, and it goes on to examine the effect of that association.

Alluding to the scanty sources for the reign of Trajan, the historian Gibbon came out with a melancholy pronouncement: ‘the glimmerings of an abridgement or the doubtful light of a panegyric’. Gibbon's mind was on warfare and government. A later age is drawn to a wider and more subtle theme: the study of society. A document of unique value exists, the correspondence of Pliny. It illuminates class and rank and behaviour—and a whole region of Northern Italy. For other lands of the Roman West the evidence is poor and scattered. The written record has little more to disclose than the families of Seneca and Julius Agricola or the pedigree of the Antonine emperors. One has recourse to inscriptions and the study of nomenclature.

Pliny reveals persons of all orders, from consular magnates to small men and local friends. He also covers a wide range in time, from several long-lived survivors who had come to manhood under Claudius and Nero to youths of predictable promise whose consulates would adorn the first years of Trajan's successor. Further, the interrelation with other types of evidence is highly instructive. The information is abundant enough to permit some negative inferences. It is worth giving a thought to categories and groups that are absent from the correspondence or sparsely on show. Other ‘circles’ may therefore be surmised in the life of the capital. The categories are both social and regional. Certain cities of the North happen to make no contribution.

The Roman aureus exchanged for 25 denarii. The evidence for the equation, all literary, has reached us rather indirectly. The earliest preserved source is Claudius Didymus (first century A.D.), quoted in Priscian; in the second century Lucian equated 30 aurei with 750 denarii; in the third, Dio 55, 12, 3–5, a lost passage entirely reconstructed from the epitomes of Xiphilinus and Zonaras, put the exchange directly (p. 41, [3] below). In addition, the exchange can be inferred from two parallel passages: Suetonius relates that when Otho entertained Galba at dinner he regularly gave each member of the guard an aureus (Otho 4, 2 = Plutarch, Galba 20, 4, χρυσοῦς); Tacitus tells the same story, using the words ‘centenos nummos divideret’ (Hist. 1, 24).

Was the verism of Roman Republican portraits due to Italic, Etruscan, Roman, Egyptian, or Greek influence? This question has been much discussed, especially of late. Of particular interest is the recent theory that late Egyptian portraits played a decisive part. In this article I want first to discuss the evidence for the various influences that have been considered potent in the creation of Roman verism, and then try from this evidence to deduce which factor, or which factors, were the most potent. I shall examine in particular the Egyptian and the Greek theories, for in these fields I may perhaps have something new to say, whereas the Italian side has been thoroughly explored.

The question at issue is an important one; for, as Schweitzer has said, the birth of Republican Roman portraiture was as momentous a happening in the history of art as was the birth of individualistic representation in Greek art. The many different views that have been held regarding the origin testify to the complexity of the question. If a convincing solution could be obtained, it would clarify, I think, our whole understanding of that great phenomenon—the origin of Roman art.

First I must define the word ‘verism’, which has only comparatively recently entered our archaeological vocabulary. Verism I take to mean a somewhat dry realism, a realism which shows the person portrayed as he really is, without idealizing tendencies, with wrinkles and warts and other physical defects, and also, what is more important, with an expression not of a philosopher or poet or visionary, but of what might be called a man of affairs.

No analysis of the political character of the Empire can avoid the question of finance. The various sources of revenue of the Emperor and the res publica, the role of the private wealth of the Emperor, the nature of his control over public funds, the question of how and when various public revenues were taken by him—a satisfactory political interpretation of the early Empire must take account of all these.

This article attempts merely to take a second preliminary step towards such an interpretation. Its aim is to set out as clearly as possible the evidence as to the nature of the Aerarium and the functions of its officials, and, above all, to avoid the anachronistic approach which our language itself so readily invites. Not all anachronistic views of the subject have had the beautiful obviousness of Ramsay's contribution: even to speak of the ‘world-wide financial administration’ of the Aerarium will prove to be misleading.

During a brief visit to Afyon Karahisar in central Anatolia in September, 1954, my attention was drawn by Bay Süleiman Gökce, Curator of the Vilayet Museum, to a large inscription which had recently been brought to him. It had been found at Sulmenli (Eulandra ?) some nine miles away, and salvaged by local officials. Thanks to the Curator's kindness I was able to make a copy on the spot and take a squeeze and photograph. The latter was improved upon considerably by Mr. Michael Ballance, former Fellow of the British Institute at Ankara, who visited Afyon in September, 1955, at my request, with the result that many of the difficulties in reading a battered and incomplete text have been resolved.

The inscription (pls. VII and VIII) had been carefully cut on a large slab of greyish-yellow marble with a moulded edge. It had been broken on the left-hand side and below. There was a hole in the right side approximately 0·64 m. from the top for a dowel about 2 cm. square in section. There were two more holes in the back, and it is clear that the inscription had been originally fixed to a wall, perhaps in the village which won the case. Height, 0·82 m.; width at widest point, 0·69 m.; thickness, 0·12 m.; letters, 1·4–1·5 cm. for the first twenty-nine lines, and thereafter approximately 1·6 cm. The greater part of the first forty-one lines have survived, the surviving portion containing between forty-eight and fifty-six letters on each line.

This article explores the relationship between historical truth and rhetorical education in the Antiquitates Romanae of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. These two concerns dominate Dionysius' output, and have provided fuel for a long tradition of adverse criticism. Schwartz's RE article set the standard for a series of dismissive accounts; his premise is that by choosing a period of such remote history, Dionysius can fulfil his desire to make history the servant of rhetorical display, adding, with scorn, that Dionysius' love of the Romans disqualifies him from being a real Greek. Palm, still using Schwartz over fifty years later, is so convinced that Dionysius cannot have believed what he was writing that he ascribes the meticulously executed proof that the Romans were Greeks to ‘paradoxe Effekte’, in which anyone writing a rhetorical exercise of this kind would be careful to indulge. Polemic has recently waned, although by far the most common use of Dionysius' history is as a source for antiquarian anecdote or the lost annalistic tradition, often to highlight the originality of Livy. The recently published lectures of Gabba will do much to redress the balance, and are the first concerted attempt at harmonizing the details of Dionysius' rhetorical theory with his history.