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.

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.

One of the most peculiar features of Roman law was the father's dominant position. In theory, he exercised an almost absolute authority, patria potestas, over his descendants until his own death. The uniqueness of their family system did not escape the Romans themselves. In his mid-second-century legal textbook Gaius explained:

Item in potestate nostra sunt liberi nostri quos iustis nuptiis procreavimus. Quod ius proprium civium Romanorum est; fere enim nulli alii sunt homines, qui talem in filios suos habent potestatem, qualem nos habemus. Idque divus Hadrianus edicto, quod proposuit de his, qui sibi liberisque suis ab eo civitatem Romanam petebant, significavit. Nec me praeterit Galatarum gentem credere in potestate parentum liberos esse. (Inst. 1.55)

Again, we have in our power our children, the offspring of a Roman law marriage. This right is one which only Roman citizens have; there are virtually no other peoples who have such power over their sons as we have over ours. This was made known by the emperor Hadrian in an edict which he issued concerning those who applied to him for Roman citizenship for themselves and their children. I have not forgotten that the Galatians believe that children are in the power of their parents. (Translated by W. M. Gordon and O. F. Robinson, The Institutes of Gaius (1988))

This account immediately raises at least one fundamental question: If patria potestas was a distinctive feature of Roman society, how did the other peoples of the Empire react to it after the universal grant of the Roman citizenship in A.D. 212?

The following inscriptions, published by permission of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and of Yale University, are all from Jerash, the ancient Gerasa, or the immediate neighbourhood. They range in date from the reign of Domitian to after that of Justinian. The language is almost always Greek; the few examples of Latin are, with one exception, memorials of members of the imperial civil service or the army. I here put the Latin inscriptions first (nos. 1–10); the Greek I have arranged as far as possible in their chronological order, leaving to the end those which I cannot date.

It may save repetition to note that Gerasa employed throughout her known history the Pompeian era, which was reckoned as beginning from about October 1, 63 B.C. (Brünnow, Die Provincia Arabia, iii, 304).

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

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.

The origin and purpose of the centuriate organization are a subject for which the surviving evidence is too scanty to permit of any confident interpretation; and it might well be argued that, when so much has been written already about so little, it is idle to write more. Nevertheless, I have ventured to put down the remarks which follow because, unless I am wrong, there are still some relevant facts which have not been taken into account, and also because certain recent treatments of the matter, by concentrating on selected details without regard to the fundamental problem of the reason why the Servian system, was introduced, seem to me to have moved rather away from the truth than towards it. But for the conclusions suggested below at most I do not claim more than that they deserve consideration.

In dealing with so complicated a piece of history within the limits of an article it is obviously both necessary to be selective and more than usually desirable to be clear. So I have not hesitated either to pass by the less relevant detail in silence or to mention points on which opinion is now generally agreed when such points are essential to make the argument intelligible. For help in an attempt to attain these ends I owe my hearty thanks to four friends—Professors Buckland and de Zulueta, Dr. David Daube and Dr. Momigliano, and in particular also to the first three of them for their generosity in putting at my disposal their knowledge of recent literature in the field of private law. They must not, however, be assumed to share any of the views here outlined.

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.

The Corbridge lanx, a silver dish of excellent workmanship, unusually well preserved, is one of the most interesting relics of Roman antiquity as yet discovered on English soil (pl. viii). Its admirers, however, after more than two centuries, are faced with the problem, still unsolved, of satisfactorily understanding and explaining its puzzling decoration. Of the two lines of research hitherto adopted the first is mystical or allegorical, and is attracted particularly by the mysterious objects close to the undoubted figure of Apollo, though it exaggerates their mysterious character in every respect; and the explanation of them as illustrating a systematic cosmological antithesis between heaven and earth, in the style of Neo-platonism or of the Emperor Julian, has not so far proved likely to lead anywhere. The simpler and more definite interpretation of the second group is based on classical legend, an interpretation well justified by the undoubted presence of at least three Olympian deities. Yet the attempt to deduce a Judgment of Paris from no more than the joint presence of Artemis, Apollo, and Athena was from the first a difficult line to pursue; for of the normal characters in the scene only Athena is shown, while the presence of Apollo and Artemis is a positive drawback. Cogent proof is absent here also. Despite the light meanwhile thrown on numerous details, there is nothing to change in the statement made by Roger Gale in 1735, that a gathering of deities is represented, while their relation to any given legend, if such exists, is certainly still to seek.

§ 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.

In two articles published in this Journal in 1969 and 1970, Dr. Mattingly has made a new and systematic assault on the identification of the Lex Repetundarum of the Tabula Bembina with any law of the Gracchan period, and has argued at length for its possible identity with both the recovery law of Servilius Glaucia and the law of the Tabula Tarentina. The question is of importance not only for the politics of the Gracchan period, but for the whole history of the development of the only means which the Roman Republic created for the redress of wrongs which provincials suffered at the hands of Roman officers and governors, while the history of the extension of the Roman citizenship is also involved. The Lex Repetundarum (as the law of the Tabula Bembina will be called henceforth) reveals great political ingenuity in its elaborate devices of procedure, intended to eliminate the undue influence of interested parties and to secure the conviction of the guilty and the effective compensation of the injured. Whether the mind so revealed is that of Gaius Gracchus or a later politician is a matter of some moment.

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.

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.

An allusive plot of an incestuous brother-sister marriage runs through Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas, signalled both by imagery comparing Dido and Aeneas to Diana and Apollo, moon and sun, and by allusion to Callimachean poems celebrating actual brother-sister marriages at the Ptolemaic court. Aeneas' departure from Carthage marks the relegation to the past of Alexandrian temptations and a journey to a future foundation based on exogamy, although Italy itself is not free from the dangers of incest and fratricide. Ovid's explicit tales of incest comment on Virgil's allusive narrative.

Les deux premiers livres du De re publica de Cicéron traitent de la meilleure forme de gouvernement. Protagoniste du dialogue, Scipion Émilien fait d'abord un exposé théorique sur les trois constitutions simples, leurs déviations, leur instabilité profonde, et indique à plusieurs reprises qu'aucune d'entre elles, pas même la monarchiquc qu'il place au-dessus des deux autres, ne saurait égaler celle qui unit les principes monarchique, aristocratique et démocratique en une constitution mixte et tempérée. C'est ce qu'il se propose de confirmer dans le second livre, en prenant cette fois l'exemple de la cité romaine, et en montrant comment les Anciens ont su mettre progressivement en place cette forme idéale de gouvernement, pendant les trois premiers siècles de l'histoire de la ville. De cette ‘archéologie romaine’, le palimpseste de la Bibliothèque Vaticane publié en 1822 par A. Mai nous a conservé de très importants fragments, qui permettent d'en reconstituer les grandes lignes. Le but de la présente étude n'est pas tant d'apporter une nouvelle contribution à la Quellenforschung du De re publica que de préciser, en les confrontant avec celles de deux auteurs qui figurent incontestablement au nombre des sources du dialogue, les conceptions de la constitution mixte et du rôle de l'homme politique qui se trouvent exprimées dans l'archéologie du livre 2.

Similes in the Aeneid, like Homeric similes, have commonly been thought of as similes à queue longue, as similes which have one point of comparison with the narrative and a large ornamental development. The purpose of this paper is to show that almost all the similes in the Aeneid contain many details which correspond to details in the surrounding narrative. Correspondences involving explicit details in both simile and narrative I call bilateral correspondences. Sometimes there occurs in a simile a detail for which we should clearly supply in our imagination a corresponding detail for the narrative; similarly we should sometimes imagine a detail for the simile to correspond with some detail in the narrative: these I call unilateral correspondences. Sometimes there occurs a correspondence which does not fit the main comparison: this I call an irrational correspondence. To establish and study these three types of correspondence, we shall take as our sample the second book of the Aeneid and look at every simile in it. Then we shall take some similes from other books and see if this approach helps us to understand the text of the Aeneid.

It has long been surmised that the Italian peasant in the Roman period could not have subsisted entirely upon his heredium, even when it was considerably more than two iugera. Juvenal was speaking for many of those before him, as well as for his own contemporaries, when he said of the traditional allocation:

‘Nunc modus hic agri nostro non sufficit horto’.

(Satires XIV, 172)

Yet amid much speculation upon this point one aspect of the countryman's livelihood seems to have attracted little attention. In addition to any other resources he had the use of the wild plants of the extensive forests, the mountains, pastures and fallow fields. In general, food obtained from wild plants did not in Roman times, any more than it does in Italy today, take the place of grain, the staple article of diet. This may account for Pliny's statement in the Natural History XXI, 50 (86) where, after mentioning the large number of ‘herbae sponte nascentes’ used for food by other peoples, he writes: ‘In Italia paucissimas novimus, fraga, tamnum (wild vine), ruscum (butcher's broom), batim marinam (samphire), batim hortensiam, quam aliqui asparagum Gallicum vocant. …’ Such a remark seems astonishing in view of the numerous other examples Pliny himself has previously given, but its interpretation depends on the meaning to be assigned to the word cibus, as well as on the limiting effect of the phrase ‘herbae sponte nascentes’, which may not include all the plants we call ‘wild’. It is clear from the conclusion of the paragraph cited above, where ‘oblectamenta’ are compared with ‘cibos’, that cibi is being used here to mean ‘staple foods’.

This article arises from a visit to Albania in September 1972, when I travelled up and down the valley of the Shkumbi river, and from recent discoveries by Albanian archaeologists which have been reported in Albanian periodicals, Monumentet 1971, i, 43–59, and ii, 25–35, and Studia Albanica 1972, i, 85–106. The new evidence has confirmed some views and overthrown others which I put forward in A History of Macedonia i (1972), 19 f., based as they inevitably were on the reports of Pouqueville and other travellers down to Praschniker and Schober. I have now seen part of the scene for myself and have had the advantage of conversations with the discoverers themselves, Hasan Ceka, his son Neritan Ceka and Llazar Papajani, to whom I am most grateful. The new evidence is in Section A 1–3 of the article, and some conclusions are given in Section B.