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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ancient authorities agree that C. Blossius of Cumae played an important part in Tiberius Gracchus's plans for reform. But the evidence they afford is only fragmentary, and it is no easy matter to arrive at a fair estimate of Blossius. In Cicero, Valerius Maximus, and Plutarch he is the adviser, almost the evil genius, of Tiberius—no doubt one of those ‘learned men who stirred up Tiberius against Scipio’. Last regards him as one of the teachers from whom the Gracchi ‘received the undoubtedly Hellenic ideas which appear in their public life at Rome’, and who can thus claim their place in history.

To all students and teachers of the political, administrative and constitutional history of the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries Professor Bury's volumes will be indispensable. This History of the Later Roman Empire (A.D. 395 to A.D. 565), though in name but a second edition of the book originally published in 1889, is in fact a new work, narrower in limit of period—it only extends to the death of Justinian—but ‘written on a much larger scale.’ Thus for the history of the centuries from Justinian to Irene the edition of 1889 must still be consulted; indeed, even for the sixth century that edition is not entirely superseded, since for the Lazic War of Justinian the reader is referred to the earlier account (ii, p. 113, n.). It is of course obvious that in a work of so wide a scope every student will regret the omission of matters which he would have wished to see included: some would have welcomed a fuller treatment of social conditions, of monasticism, of the barbarian legal codes, of the evidence of the papyri, of the questions recently raised by Dopsch concerning the survival of Roman culture in territories occupied by the barbarians—examples could easily be multiplied; but such criticism on the part of a reviewer would be beside the point, for the treatment of these subjects would have altered the character of Professor Bury's work: he has not sought to write a Kulturgeschichte; the great value of his work lies in the masterly clarity of his historical narrative and in his illuminating treatment of the problems of imperial administration.

This article reconsiders a set of Late Roman inscriptions which record the tax liabilities of dozens of landowners in terms of post-Diocletianic fiscality. The stones, from eleven cities in the Aegean and western Asia Minor, are evaluated as evidence for the social and economic history of the Late Empire, challenging Jones' fundamental study in which the inscriptions are read as a sign of structural crisis. With their non-Egyptian provenance, the inscriptions offer unique, quantitative insights into land-ownership and labour. The inscriptions reveal surprising levels of slave labour in the eastern provinces, particularly in a new inscription from Thera. This last document allows, for the first time, an empirical analysis of the demographics of an estate-based population of slaves in antiquity.

Italica in the province of Baetica is the ‘patria’ of the Aelii. Hadrian duly bears the tribe of that municipium, the ‘Sergia’. However, the place of a man's birth is not always the same as the legal ‘origo’ of his family. A child may see the light of day somewhere else, according to the rank and occupation of his parent. The consular historian, probably Narbonensian by his ‘patria’, might have been born at Augusta Treverorum or Colonia Claudia: a Cornelius Tacitus is on record as imperial procurator in Belgica and the Germanies. Or, for that matter, Claudius Caesar. That infant was born at Lugdunum, a Roman colonia. Seneca, by a double denigration, labels him a ‘Gallus germanus’.

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.

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.

Of the campaigns of Domitius Corbulo, not much remains to be said at so late a date in the annals of erudite investigation. His significance for social and political history is another matter. Corbulo's early career excites curiosity. And, later, the effort is not vain to look for links between Corbulo and certain persons, families, or groups destroyed by Nero in 65 and 66, in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy; and scrutiny of the legates who had served under Corbulo during the dozen years of his activity in the eastern lands also proves remunerative. In the winter of 66/7 Nero summoned Corbulo to Corinth and ordered him to put an end to his life. The general had become ‘capax imperii’.

It has usually been held that the shield emblems in the Notitia Dignitatum (Not. Dig.) were based upon an official pictorial register or pattern book, containing the unit emblems of the late Roman army. Thought to have been based upon an official source, as the text was, the shield emblems of the Not. Dig. are imagined to have been accurate in the original manuscript. It was only later, according to this view, that errors crept in during the transmission of the text and illustrations, so that the emblems now appear to be somewhat debased. For example, it is held that some of them no longer accompany the titles for which they were apparently intended.

Shifts in the relationship between the emblems and titles have long been noted. But there are other, more fundamental, inconsistencies that have escaped the attention of scholars. These previously led me to raise doubts about the truth of the conventional view above and to entertain the possibility ‘that the artist's sources were so impoverished that he was reduced to relying upon his own powers of invention’. I should now like to explain in greater detail my reasons for rejecting the conventional view and advancing the alternative explanation that the shield emblems of the Not. Dig. were largely ad hoc fabrications. The consequences for our understanding of the Not. Dig. and of the art of the later Roman Empire are obviously considerable.

The circumstances in which Roman rule over Britain came to an end have always been something of a puzzle to historians. There is of course no contemporary record giving a continuous narrative of the relevant events, and the few brief notices in ancient sources about British affairs in the first two decades of the fifth century come from writers of various dates and degrees of authority, none of whom seems to have had any first-hand knowledge of what took place. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that what they say should be subject to wide differences of interpretation, differences all the wider because some of the interpreters have been viewing the events from the standpoint of later English history and without an intimate knowledge of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. And it must further be admitted that, among scholars familiar with the conditions of this age, there has been something of a gap between those concerned with matters of history, whether political, administrative, social, or economic, and those concerned with thought and opinion, and primarily, of course, as theologians with the development of Christian doctrine in the great age of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. It is easy for theologians to forget that the immense creative achievement of these thinkers was carried out at a time when the foundations of the society they knew were collapsing under external pressure and internal strain, and it is easy for historians to forget that a society riddled with corruption and precariously held together by the barbarous methods of a repressive tyranny was yet the seed-bed for an extraordinary flowering of the human spirit. It is difficult for either to remember that the forms which that flowering took and the imagery within which it found expression inevitably reflected the social and political conditions, the legal and judicial practices, familiar to those who gave it birth.

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.

An analysis of the parallel accounts in Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch shows that the seemingly Augustan traits of Livy's Camillus already featured in late annalistic sources. Camillus' speech at Livy 5.51–4 condenses and expands late annalistic themes and fuses them with Ciceronian reminiscences. One reason for this fusion is Cicero's own self-fashioning as a new Camillus (particularly, in his post-exilic speeches). The accounts of the Civil War suggest that Pompey and Caesar, too, exploited the Camillus paradigm. The parallels between Livy's Camillus and Augustus probably result from the latter's attempt to silence the Republican opposition by appropriating one of its most powerful paradigms.

5. After the praescriptio there followed the entries in chronological order, each entry under the date on which the professio had been made. Sometimes of course several professiones were recorded under one date, viz. whenever several professiones had been made on the same day. Sometimes each date seems to have had a progressive number, for in no. 5 we read the quotation loco XV, IIII Idus Iunias.

Under the late Republic (after Sulla) a province was normally administered by a proconsul (an ex-consul or an ex-praetor) and, in subordination to him, a quaestor. If a quaestor died in the province or left it before the arrival of a replacement, the proconsul might appoint one of his legati or perhaps even one of his cohors praetoria to be acting-quaestor—‘pro quaestore’, ‘ἀντιταμίας’; and this was strictly the title also of a quaestor who remained at his duty in the province after the year of his magistracy had come to an end (either because his tenure had been extended by the government at Rome, or because he was awaiting the arrival of a successor).

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.