Few historical problems have produced more unprofitable discussion than that of Hannibal's pass over the Alps. But if there is still no clear answer, some headway had at least been made in defining the question—which is half the battle. Kahrstedt put the matter as succinctly as anyone. ‘Mit Topographie ist nicht zum Ziele zu kommen, weisse Felsen and tiefe Schluchten, Flusstäler und steile Abhänge gibt es uberall. Das Problem ist literarhistorisch, nicht topographisch.’ Hence a feeling of dismay at finding the question reopened without, apparently, any realization of what sort of question it is. For in fact Sir Gavin de Beer's forthright and attractive little book, despite its ingenious attempt to introduce new kinds of evidence, never comes to grips with the fundamental issue—the relationship between Polybius' account and Livy's. This central question is dismissed with a fatal facility : ‘each account complements and supplies what was missing from the other ‘(p. 33). If one is to get anywhere with this problem one must treat it more seriously than that; and it may therefore perhaps be worth while, yet again, to reconsider the evidence and to indicate the limits within which the answer is to be sought (without any guarantee that it will necessarily be found). Such a survey can offer none of the ‘certainties’ or the excitement to be found in Alps and Elephants; it will propose no novelties; and if it is not to become unreadable, it had better avoid all but the most obvious and necessary references to a fantastically inflated modern literature.

Several versions of Constantius Chlorus' invasion and recovery of Britain in A.D. 296 have appeared in recent decades. These accounts agree in some respects, but differ widely in others, and the whole episode seems to need further study.

The literary evidence for the campaign is mostly contained in the contemporary panegyric addressed to Constantius by an unknown author and ascribed to Eumenius (Panegyrici Latini, ed. Baehrens, Incert. Pan. VIII, 11–19). To this may be added Incert. Pan. VI, 5; Aurelius Victor, De Caes. 39, 42; Eutropius 9, 22; and Orosius 7, 25.

Fresh water came from a variety of sources, streams and springs as well as aqueducts. Much of the Roman law on fresh water concerns its supply, regulating rights to use it with a variety of legal institutions from public and private law (e.g. ownership, servitudes, interdicts). The study of fresh water has usually followed the legal categories, segregating the public water supply from water that was private property, and consequently segregating different types of evidence. In this paper varied evidence is analysed using the ‘bundle’ approach, an analytical framework from legal scholarship on rights in the environment, in which water rights are not monolithic but are represented by component rights, including rights of access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation. Analysing component rights in fresh water reveals significant continuities in the Romans' regulation of it and the impact of this regulation. Although there was no centralized water administration in the early Empire, Romans took a systematic approach to regulating fresh water based on consistent working principles and policy priorities.

In the decade or so before the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus the Roman political scene was bristling with perplexing problems: the relation of Senate and People; the claims of the business classes; Rome's attitude to the allies; declining standards in provincial administration and military conduct; threats from Greece to traditional Roman ways of thought; deteriorating moral standards; the influx of wealth; the supersession of peasant husbandry by latifundia; land as an object of speculation; slave labour; the decline in the absorption of provincial corn by the armies abroad after 167 B.C. and its importation to Rome, which thus needed less from Latium; and behind all the changing conditions of agriculture was the steady decline after 164 of the free population, attested by the census figures, provided that these are admitted to have any demographical value at all. Although the first radical attempt to grapple with some aspects of this Hydra-headed monster was made by Ti. Gracchus, his was not the first mind to apply itself to the challenge even though it was his will and courage that first promoted resolute action. Earlier attempts at reform loom dimly through the mists that hide from us any proper understanding of the preceding years. The evidence is fragmentary, but one obvious way of trying to unify the surviving scraps of information is to try to view the period through the eyes of one of its dominant leaders: thus an examination of some aspects of the political career and thought of Scipio Aemilianus and his supporters and their attitude towards the problems of their day and towards reform, together with the views of their opponents, may help to throw some light on the revolution that flared up, with such apparent suddenness, in 133 B.C.

In 1854 Moritz Haupt, in a classic exercise of the higher criticism, established that only the first seven poems of a collection of eleven which had all passed under his name could be attributed to Calpurnius, and that the last four belonged to Nemesianus (Opuscula I. 358–406). This division and attribution is beyond question now. Haupt then went on to show that Calpurnius was active in the Neronian age. Some of the evidence was philological. Indeed, it was the very evidence which he had used to distinguish the techniques of the two poets. E. Champlin, however, claims that ‘all the traditional indications of a Neronian date are based on circumstantial details which are equally appropriate to other periods in imperial history’. This is incautious. For Champlin, unlike Haupt, fails to consider such matters as prosody and diction, which are, after all, historical data that may prove to be as useful tools to the historian as an allusion to a barbarian invasion or to a consular year. In fact, all the ascertainable evidence was not put into the balance. We now turn to that evidence.

In JRS XL (1950), 77 f. P. M. Fraser published from a photograph a considerable but incomplete inscription comprising documents sent to the city of Cyrene by Hadrian (and possibly others during his reign). It seemed natural to relate them to the material and moral damage caused by the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 115–17, although Fraser thought that they had been inscribed much later. Subsequent discussion has been concentrated mainly on the opening sections, concerned with representation in the Panhellenion.

Although Palmyra is mentioned in several cuneiform texts, the oldest of which go back to the time of Sargon I of Assyria, it seems to have remained a mere village until the middle of the first century B.C. Its sudden growth to the size of one of the largest towns in the East coincides with the moment in history when the demand for oriental luxuries began to grow in Rome and its dominions, and it was due to the clever policy of its merchants and camel-riders who knew how to keep order in the desert between their town and the great factories and warehouses of Lower Mesopotamia. From that time caravans were able to cross the Syrian desert instead of skirting it, and the transit brought huge profits to the Palmyrenes. The desert therefore, whose barren waste, to our European eyes, would easily seem a barrier, was no such thing in reality, but acted on the contrary as a link with Mesopotamia, very much in the same way as the sea connected Venice by her merchant ships with the harbours of the Levant. Indeed, a comparison of Palmyra with the great commercial cities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Venice, Antwerp, Bruges, Lisbon, etc.), is one that in several respects helps us to understand its sudden and great prosperity, as well as its sudden decline. From the day when Aurelian put an end to Palmyra's command of the wilderness, the roads of commerce had to change, the caravans again resorted to the Euphrates route around the desert, and the fortunes of Aleppo and Chalcis began to rise.

The great honour, which the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies has done me in entrusting me with this first ‘M. V. Taylor Memorial Lecture’, is the last, not the least, benefit for which I am indebted to our venerable and most regretted friend. I do not think it is my duty, indeed I think it would be very improper for me to set about reminding you here of who she was and what she did. I suppose I am expected to try to dedicate to her memory a paper which would not be too unworthy of her. I shall try to do my best. But I must confess at once that I am not quite sure that my subject is one of those she would have entirely approved of. Not that she had confined herself to Roman Britain. Of course I am sorry not to be able to present her today with a new enameled patera enumerating all the forts of the Wall, like the Amiens patera which, fifteen years ago, inspired her benevolence towards me. I am sorry not to be able to guide her through the halls of the Baths of Cluny, as I had the pleasure of doing in September, 1963, when she came to Paris for the last time on the occasion of the Archaeological Congress. I know her range of curiosity and learning was limitless indeed. Only I wonder whether Etruscan matters would not have raised in her a sort of smiling and sceptical reluctance, as something which is not altogether serious. I might plead, with Professor Momigliano's authority, that the Emperor Claudius, though the father of these queer researches, did something after all for Roman Britain. Still, as I cannot help imagining Miss Taylor sitting here in the front of my audience, I shall be exceptionally careful not to say anything which could arouse her sometimes passionate severity. If I fail, as is probable, I appeal in advance to her, and your, indulgence.

Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo fama Marcelli: so it was with Posidonius from 1878 for forty years, with no voice raised to the contrary save by A. E. Housman in his caustic asides. Had we not found a figure lesser in dimensions than only Plato or Aristotle, the principal intellectual influence of two succeeding centuries, the fountainhead of Neoplatonism ? In retrospect the element of exaggeration is clear, and yet the quest must not be counted as labour in vain; for there came of it a great enlargement of the frontiers of scholarship. So in the familiar fable the sons did not find the buried treasure for which they dug, but their digging bore rich fruit.

The legislation of the Roman Empire, as exemplified in the two great Codes, may often be regarded as the consolidation in law of practices already current. This tendency, however, is most obvious in respect of those practices which were of administrative utility in the eyes of the government. Thus, while there is much information concerning the organization or regimentation of certain sections of the population in which the government, for good or ill, showed its interest, the more unofficial expressions of bias and prejudice arising from existing social convention tend to escape notice. Yet even the convention of snobbery has its place in the history of a society, and the purpose of this paper is to examine it, in certain aspects, in the life of the East in the fourth century.

The ostraca of Bu Njem come from a military outpost on the North African fringes of the Empire. Vernacular languages were spoken in the area. The ostraca record, among other things, contact between soldiers and the local population, and contain various African (Punic or ‘Libyan’) words and names, some of them previously unrecorded. The soldiers themselves have in many cases African names, or names with a special African connection, and it is likely that many were recruited locally. If so they may not have been fluent Latin speakers, and consequently the Latin which they wrote raises unusual questions. Is it Latin at all, or perhaps a pidgin or Creole? Or, on the contrary, is the language merely bureaucratic and formulaic Latin of no great interest? Do we, at last, have some hard evidence for a regional variety of Latin, in this case perhaps influenced by a substratum language or languages?.

The outbreak of the Social War brought in its wake a furious succession of criminal prosecutions with important political implications. The wheels of ‘justice’ were set in motion by the notorious lex Varia, a criminal law passed on the motion of the tribune Q. Varius Severus Hybrida. It was not long before numerous prominent individuals came under attack and the Roman political scene was thrown into turmoil. The lex Varia will repay close scrutiny.

Modern scholarship has been content with the analysis of this measure delivered by Appian. Some time after the death of M. Livius Drusus, the tribune of 91 B.C., the equites endeavoured to make his liberal policy towards the Italians a ground for malicious prosecution of their enemies, and to this end they induced Q. Varius to pass his law. The purpose was to bring the entire senatorial oligarchy under the odious charge of sympathy with the Italian insurgents and to entrench equestrian control of the state. Such is the version of Appian. It is certainly true that, as was by now customary, external crises were made the pretext for attacks upon political opponents. The charge of bearing responsibility, in some sense, for the outbreak of war could be stretched to fit a wide variety of activities. But a careful examination of the lex Varia and of the cases heard under it will demonstrate that Appian's judgment leaves much to be desired. Legal and political consequences have never yet been fully understood or analysed, and the law can shed much light on Roman internal struggles in this period.

In 1896 Franz Cumont published, as the second volume of his Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, the dossier of documents on the basis of which he was to render, three years later, the first truly historical account of the transformation of Mithra-worship from a branch of Iranian Mazdaism to a Roman mystery cult.

This transformative process, as he envisaged it, was long and evolutionary. He used a geological metaphor to describe its stages, as theology and practice were passed down the ages and across the lands from Iran to Rome:

Le fond de cette religion, sa couche inférieure et primordiale, est la foi de l'ancien Iran, d'où elle tire son origine. Au-dessus de ce substratum mazdéen, s'est déposé en Babylonie un sédiment épais de doctrines sémitiques, puis en Asie Mineure les croyances locales y ont ajouté quelques alluvions. Enfin, une végétation touffue d'idées helléniques a grandi sur ce sol fertile, et dérobe en partie à nos recherches sa véritable nature.

Central to Cumont's scenario was Anatolia and the Mazdean diaspora that survived (and flourished) there after the fall of the Achaemenian empire. It was there during the Hellenistic Age that ‘Mithraism received approximately its definitive form’, although Cumont hesitated to pinpoint the precise time and area.

The constitutional position of M. Minucius as a result of the plebiscitum of Metilius in 217 B.C. has never been satisfactorily defined; this is due to the vagueness of the ancient authorities. Polybius does indeed make the explicit statement that there were two dictators appointed to carry on the same campaign, a thing unprecedented in Roman history. On the strength of this passage, it has often been assumed that the formal title of ‘dictator’, with all that it implied, was conferred on Minucius by the proposal of Metilius. But the other authorities are not so explicit, and their language seems to contradict Polybius. Livy, for example, refers to the rogatio of Metilius as a proposal ‘de aequando magistri equitum et dictatoris iure’ (XXII, 25, 10), or ‘de aequato imperio’ (26, 7). Nowhere does Livy refer to Minucius as Dictator; in fact, he seems deliberately to avoid doing so. In this respect Plutarch, too, seems to follow Livy. In his Life of Fabius he states that Metilius proposed that Minucius should share the command with Fabius and have equal authority in conducting the campaign; he concludes by saying that the People conferred on Minucius a power equal to that of the Dictator. To judge from the language of both Livy and Plutarch it would appear that whatever position Minucius may have held as a result of the rogatio it was not that of Dictator.

This paper examines the Sermons of Leo the Great (a.d. 440–461) for their liturgical topography. Leo developed an annual cycle of set places on set days — the very definition of stational liturgy — in Rome as one means to assert papal authority over the city's Christian communities and especially over the resident Roman senatorial aristocracy. Leo's Sermons indicate that the bishop found new ways to centralize the liturgy at St Peter's in the Vatican, making St Peter's — not St John the Lateran — the religious centre and the symbol of the papacy.

Since Bury's magistral article in this Journal over thirty years ago (XIII, 1923, 127 ff.) no scholar has attempted a comprehensive study of the date and value of the Laterculus Veronensis. Various historians have in passing expressed a preference for this date or that. Ernst Stein argued for 293–305 in Rheinisches Museum LXXVII (1925), 367, but in his Geschichte des spätrömischen Reiches 1, 102, preferred 304–306. E. Schwartz in a rathe fuller treatment (Abh. Bayer. Akad., phil.-hist. Kl., 1937, 79–82) argued for a much later date, between 325 and 337 for the eastern dioceses, and under Valentinian I for the western dioceses. Others have more modestly confined themselves to certain areas. H. Nesselhauf has maintained a relatively early date (305–306) for Gaul (Abh. Preuss. Akad., phil.-hist. Kl., 1938, 8 ff.), while W. Seston has argued for a date after 306 for Africa (Dioclétien et la Tétrarchie, I, 327–8). It may be timely to reassess the problem, particularly as some new evidence has recently emerged.

In March 1973, a Roman milestone was discovered in a cultivated field, several hundred metres from the western edge of the town of Afula in the Valley of Jezreel. The stone was found broken into two pieces. The column was removed by a farmer belonging to the settlement of Balfouria, who transferred it to the garden of his home, where we had the opportunity to examine it. The base and lower part of the column remained on the spot. The inscription, incised on the column above the fracture, consists of six lines of irregular lettering.

When Saint Chrysostom's Prayer asks that the petitions of the Lord's servants be fulfilled as may be most expedient for them, it expresses what, in traditional autocracies, was expected of every ‘good king’ by his subjects. St. Louis, the model of a medieval king, would go regularly with his courtiers to the Bois de Vincennes, there to hear his subjects' petitions, seated under an oak. Dr. Millar has pointed out that Roman emperors were expected to be accessible to their subjects, especially those of humble station, in much the same way. The evidence shows that much of the emperors' time was taken up with answering petitions (in the form of libelli) from private individuals or from groups of humbler people, and that it was only ‘bad’, lazy emperors who neglected this task. Not only was there a secretarial department for handling petitions, as distinct from epistles, but its head, the a libellis, was, according to Seneca, deluged with work. Literary sources, however, tell us little or nothing of value about the actual methods of accepting and handling petitions. For information on such topics we have to turn to the surviving texts of the ‘subscripts’ (subscripttones), the imperial replies to petitions (very few actual petitions survive). By far the largest number of these from the period of the Principate is to be found in the Code of Justinian, and they are mainly the work of the Severan and later third century emperors. In the process of transmission many of these texts have been abbreviated, and the formal elements have been omitted or garbled as a result, and it is from these formal elements that most can be learned about the procedures for handling petitions. One is therefore thrown back on the epigraphic and papyrus texts, in which these formal elements are often preserved.

One of the most remarkable phenomena within the pattern of monetary circulation in antiquity is the presence of large numbers of Roman Republican denarii, for the most part struck between c. 130 and 31 B.C., on the soil of present-day Romania, roughly ancient Dacia. Absolute figures are impressive; it has been calculated that taking together isolated finds, hoards closing with Republican pieces, nuclei of Republican coins in Roman Imperial hoards and Republican coins in collections in Romania the total comes to something like 25,000 pieces. But absolute figures are themselves unable to convey fully the uniqueness of the phenomenon; this emerges most clearly from a comparison with neighbouring territories.

There are no known hoards of Republican denarii from the territory of the Moldavian S.S.R.; the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the north-west have produced between them a mere handful of Republican hoards; Jugoslavia and Albania to the west and Greece to the south are slightly more productive, but display no trace of the feature characteristic of Romania, a great block of hoards, the latest coin of which belongs in the first century B.C.

The most widespread and best-known use of computers in stylistic analysis has been in the attempts to resolve questions of disputed authorship. Here, the computer's ability to store the whole known corpus of an author's work and to compare it with the disputed work in many ways which would be inexpressibly tedious, if not impossibly lengthy, by hand, is an invaluable aid. Many studies have been carried out on classical texts where the authorship is doubtful, but these studies have most often had undisputed texts against which a disputed work could be compared. The Historia Augusta presents a different situation: there are six ‘authors’ to whom varying amounts of the work are assigned.