The greatest works of what we normally call ‘Augustan’ literature were produced by writers who came to maturity in the Triumviral period, and were already established as major authors before January 27 B.C., when ‘Imperator Caesar Divi filius’, whom we like to call ‘Octavianus’, gained the unprecedented cognomen ‘Augustus’. By that moment the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, the Epodes and Satires of Horace, and Book 1 of the Elegies of Propertius were already written. Livy had composed his sombre Praefatio, and probably the whole first pentad, in the later Triumviral period, perhaps around the time of Actium or soon after.

Extensive epigraphic evidence, juristic discussion, and mention in the letters of Pliny combine to show that testamentary munificence during the principate was a phenomenon of both social and economic importance. Beyond a few introductory remarks, however, this paper is not concerned with the social background and functions of philanthropy. Rather, how was munificence regulated? On what conditions for the use of their bequests would benefactors insist? And on what terms would towns accept them? These questions raise a whole complex of further issues such as the ability of benefactors (or their descendants) to enforce the conditions of an endowment, and the extent to which variation of the object of the endowment by the town might be possible. Previous discussions of towns and their capacities in relation to the law of succession have been concerned largely, if not exclusively, with issues of juristic personality. While some understanding of those issues is essential for any useful discussion, they are left aside here so far as possible.

Vergil's fourth Eclogue, foretelling a child whose coming would usher in the golden age, has often been supposed to be based upon eastern material; and it has even been suggested that, in the period of Roman history which ended with Octavian's final success at Actium, both East and West alike were expecting the Roman world to pass under the rule of one man, whether a Roman or a king from the east, to be followed by the birth of a child with whom should come the final kingdom of peace. But the ideas of the East in this matter have been deduced from western and Jewish material; and I hope in this paper to do a little toward ascertaining the view of the Greek East from a contemporary Greek document which has never been seriously examined, and considering its relation to the ideas of Vergil. I can only do a little, for most of the material vanished when Augustus later burnt 2,000 prophecies; but the secondary historians from whom we derive our current ideas of the East in the crucial years before Actium are so extraordinarily tendencious that every scrap of contemporary material, outside the circle of the victors' version, must be of value. My aim is to treat the matter solely from the historical standpoint; and the name of the boy Alexander Helios, son of Cleopatra and Antony, in whom East and West met, will serve to unite the two aspects of what I have to say.

This paper examines the evidence for military activity in the Republican provincia of Sicily from the Punic Wars to the Civil Wars, and the implications of this for our understanding of Republican Sicily and Republican imperialism. After the Second Punic War there was very little use of Roman or Italian allied soldiers on the island, but extensive use, by Rome, of local Sicilian soldiers. The rich evidence for gymnasia suggests one way in which this use of local manpower was based upon existing civic structures and encouraged local civic culture and identity. These conclusions prompt a reassessment of the importance of auxilia externa under the Roman Republic and of models for Republican imperial control of provinciae.

Res Gestae 34.3 (‘auctoritate omnibus praestiti’) is conventionally taken to reflect Augustus' conception of the fundamental nature of his rule, and a great deal of attention has consequently been given to the word auctoritas. But no other source repeats this idea or gives weight to auctoritas. The passage is best understood as alluding to a specific event, probably Octavian's becoming princeps senatus in 28 b.c.

In elucidating the history of Asia Minor it has always been profitable to examine the origin, background and influence of the wealthy families of the Greco-Roman cities, and the connections they established between themselves. As more information comes to light it becomes increasingly obvious how complex the relationships between the various families were, and how far the influence of any one family could extend. From this evidence we are beginning to be able to form a convincing, if sketchy, picture of a power structure, based on a close-knit network of dominant families, which produced the ruling élite of the cities, the dynasts of the Hellenistic period, and the senators and consuls who made careers for themselves in the eastern provinces and maintained their family traditions of power and influence within the framework of the Roman Empire. Fresh evidence now allows us to weave more threads into the pattern, linking two important families of the city of Perge on the south coast, one certainly of Italian descent, with the cities and families of the vast Anatolian hinterland, and suggesting an important source for the wealth which enabled members of these families to rise from a mercantile background to become senators in the first and second centuries A.D.

The Seneca family came to Rome from Spain, the province that Rome took from Carthage in the Second Punic War, acquiring thereby great mineral wealth, splendid soldiers, and a war of conquest that took nearly two centuries to complete. Rome's motive in acquiring Spain was strategic, yet she had been impressed by the wealth that had recently sustained Hannibal's armies and with the abilities of the Spanish troops that both sides had used. But nothing so impressed the Romans with the military talents of the Spaniards as the resistance they put up to their rule. By the second half of the second century Baetica was already pacified, so that the main trouble there came from the raids of Lusitanian brigands; at that time horrific stories were being told of the Celtiberians who fought at Numantia; they in their turn were becoming τογᾶτοι when similar tales were being told, more than a century later, of the Astures and Cantabri with whom Augustus had to deal.

The eight inscriptions transcribed and discussed below concern, in the first instance, the early history of Cyrenaica as a Roman province; but since most of them certainly and all of them perhaps involve Pompey and Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus, one of his legates in 67 B.C., they have a much wider significance in illustrating Pompey's policy and position in that year.

1 and 2. Two rectangular marble bases, each inscribed on one face with identical texts. Found at Cyrene, one in 1860, within the Temple of Apollo (now in the British Museum), the other in 1927, in front of the same Temple (left in situ).

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.

Two prefects of Egypt, Aelius Gallus and C. Petronius, undertook expeditions outside their province under Augustus. Aelius Gallus led a campaign against Arabia Felix, and C. Petronius on two occasions fought the Ethiopians. Dio dates the Arabian expedition to 24 B.C., the Ethiopian campaigns to 22.

The sources suggest that both men waged their wars during their prefectures. The proximity of their periods of activity, which may well confuse their chronology, is vouched for by Augustus himself, who says that both the Arabian and the Ethiopian wars took place ‘eodem fere tempore’. Several scholars have, indeed, rejected the order of prefectures given by Dio; others have involved themselves in a series of constitutional difficulties, which demand attention if it is assumed that the campaigns in these two areas overlapped.

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.

In a recent number of this Journal, Edward Champlin called in question the dating of the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus, traditionally placed in the early years of Nero's reign. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the Neronian date fits the references in the poems much better than does Champlin's date in the reign of Severus Alexander, and that there is no valid reason for doubting it.

Some of the purely negative arguments may be dealt with briefly. When in 4.87 Calpurnius uses the phrase ‘facundo comitatus Apolline Caesar’, there is no need to take this as referring to the divine comes who becomes part of imperial propaganda in the third century (C., p. 96). Already in Nat. Deor. 2. 165–6 Cicero mentions Homer's attachment of various gods to great men as ‘discriminum et periculorum comites’; and in Rep. 2.44, ‘Fortuna comitata est’ Tarquin. For more specific activities, Propertius (4. 3. 16) makes Arethusa regret that she married ‘non comitante deo’; and this is brought into the realm of poetical composition in Prop. 3. 2. 13 and Ovid, Tr. 4. 1. 20, where the gods act as comites to the writers. This is precisely the context of Calpurnius' words, where Apollo's facundia is set beside the kingliness of Jupiter, as in Ecl. Eins. 1. 29–33, and provides poetic inspiration, just as Apollo does, ibid. 38, amplified in the following lines (39–42) with reference to Nero's poem on the Sack of Troy, and again in Apocol. 4, where there is a suggestion of Nero's identification with the god (‘ille mihi similis voltu similisque decore, nec cantu nec voce minor’). Nero was to exploit this idea much more as the reign proceeded, but Apollo's patronage of the poet-emperor was too firmly established at the beginning of the reign for any doubts to be raised.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus arrived in Rome at one of the most exciting moments in Roman history, on the morrow of Actium in 30 B.C. He lived in Rome for twenty-two years and at the end, in 7 B.C., his history was finished, an authoritative—indeed, he claimed, the first authoritative—history of Rome from the Foundation down to 265 B.C. His work would be the first in the triad of reliable Greek histories of Rome. Possessing his book and the books of Polybius and Posidonius, a Greek reader would at last have a continuous and reliable history of Rome written for him in Greek and by Greeks from the Foundation down to the late Republic.

In chapters 7 to 29 of book 2, Dionysius gave an analytic account of the ordinances of Romulus, painting him in the character of a Greek nomothetes, responsible for nearly everything that was fundamental in Romanità.

§ 1. The exact measure of the originality of Diocletian's statesmanship has not yet been taken. ‘Like Augustus,’ said Gibbon, ‘Diocletian may be considered the founder of a new empire’ and these words express the accepted view. In the whole work of pulling the Empire together, which went on from A.D. 270 to 330, the three outstanding actors were Aurelian, Diocletian, and Constantine, and the part played by Aurelian was indispensable for the restitutio orbis. It was he who destroyed the Principate, notwithstanding the negligible episode of Tacitus. It was he who founded the autocracy; Diocletian who regularized and systematized it. Two new things Diocletian certainly did, one of which was a success and the other a failure though not a fruitless one. His division of the Empire into Dioceses was permanent for nearly three hundred years. His throne system led to disaster and disappeared; yet the territorial quadripartition which it involved was afterwards stereotyped in the four Prefectures, and Nicomedia pointed to Constantinople. But in many of the other changes which distinguished the Empire of Constantine from the Empire of Severus and which have generally been regarded as inventions of Diocletian, it is becoming clear that he was not the initiator but was only extending and systematizing changes which had already been begun. The separation of civil from military powers in provincial government had been initiated by Gallienus (the importance of whose reign has in recent years been emerging). Some of the characteristics which mark the military organization of the fourth century had come before Diocletian's accession. Mr. Mattingly's studies in the numismatic history of the third century have been leading him, as he tells us, to similar conclusions.

In 1918 the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge acquired with Professor Babington's collection a hoard of some-what unusual objects. They were found in 1857 in Willingham Fen, Cambridgeshire, south of the River Ouse or Old West River, on a spot, which is now no longer fen but a field known as ‘The Hempsalls,’ two and a half miles north-west of Cottenham and eight miles north of Cambridge. They had been placed in a wooden box, no doubt for concealment in a convenient place. Their curious character makes them worthy of more detailed notice than they have hitherto received.

On 25 July A.D. 124 C. Iulius Demosthenes, the prytanis and secretary of the boule of the Oenoandians, made a promise to found a penteteric thymelic festival in Oenoanda to be called the Demostheneia. As part of that formal promise, Demosthenes set out terms about how the festival would be financed, how the prize money was to be divided, and how the agonothete, or president of the festival, was to be elected. At the same time, in the announcement of 25 July, the arrangement and dates of the competitions to take place at the festival over slightly more than a three-week period in July were spelled out in detail

For many Romans, life was short. In consequence, the young greatly outnumbered the elderly. Historians have long accepted these basic truths, even if they are only beginning to come to terms with the social implications of an alien demographic regime. But how short is ‘short’, and how many Romans were children, how many adults? Does it matter, and can we know?

The importance of demographic structure is not in doubt. High mortality causes scarce energy resources to be wasted in pregnancies and nursing, and poses a disincentive to investment in education. It destabilizes families and households, exposes orphans and widows to risk and potential hardship, and shortens the time-horizons of economic activity. In the long term, average life expectancy is the principal determinant of fertility. Poor chances of survival trigger high birth rates to ensure genetic survival. High fertility, in turn, is negatively correlated with the status and well-being of women, and constrains female participation in economic and public affairs. Overall age structure, in conjunction with cultural practices from marriage to child care, determines the prevalence of orphans and widows, and affects the age-specific distribution of fertility. In sum, age structure is instrumental in framing and shaping expectations and experiences. For this reason alone, our understanding of life in the Roman world is critically dependent on our knowledge of demographic conditions.

Little more than a decade after Constantine's conversion to Christianity the ancient gods and goddesses of the Graeco-Roman pantheon ceased to appear upon the official coinage and public monuments of the Empire. The personifications—Victoria, Virtus, Pax, Libertas, Securitas, etc., and the ‘geographical’ figures of Res Publica, Roma, Tellus, cities, countries, and tribes—remained. Yet some of these had, up to that very time, received, like the Olympians, their shrines and altars and other honours associated with pagan cultus; and we ask ourselves how it was that a Christian State, while rejecting the one, could retain and ‘baptize’ the other. The answer to this question, which involves the whole complex problem of the nature of pagan religious belief under the later Empire, can only be tentatively suggested here. The pantheon had eventually to go because its denizens had possessed, for the great majority of pagans, a real, objective, and independent existence.