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?

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.

During a visit to Naples in June, 1913, I was permitted by the courtesy of Professor Spinazzola, the distinguished Director of the National Museum, to examine a number of decorated bowls of Samian ware obviously of south Gallic style, preserved in the ‘magazzini’ of the museum. Professor Spinazzola most kindly afforded me every facility for their study, and consented to their publication. Seventy-six of these bowls bore, in addition to the inventory-number, the date 1882, and a subsequent reference to three passages in the Notizie degli Scavi made it possible to identify ninety bowls in all as belonging to a group found together at Pompeii. The circumstances of the discovery were as follows: the ninety bowls were found on 4th October, 1881, in the ‘tablinum’ of house 9, insula 5, region viii (ii). They were arranged in order in a wooden box, of which some charred fragments remained, together with thirty-seven earthenware lamps said to have shewn no sign of use. Of these lamps twenty-four bear the stamp STROBILI; six, COMVNIS; four, ECHIO; two, FORTIS; and one is uninscribed. Side by side with this box were found two others, containing red powder, either pounded brick or red earth, the use of which I do not know.

The men of the Antonine era shared with us a keen interest in divination, which they expressed in a variety of complementary or apparently contradictory ways: in polemic and dispassionate research, but more obviously in the act of reviving their ancient prophetic shrines and of establishing new oracles. If the rage that the vaticinating demons inspired in Oenomaus of Gadara and in Lucian is sufficient evidence of the rationalist's reaction to a mounting social and intellectual trend, the scholarly achievement of Artemidorus of Daldis at the instigation of Apollo himself exemplifies in more positive fashion the involvement of the age with prophetic lore. So does the incredible success of the Pythagorean Alexander's oracular establishment on the inhospitable shores of the Black Sea, and the personality of Aelius Aristides, that professional valetudinarian whose night-diaries dictated by Asclepius covered more than three hundred thousand lines. It was in precisely this world that the Delphic oracle underwent a remarkable renaissance under the auspices of a Platonist philosopher, and that an emperor commended the publication by a senator of a work about the dreams which foretold his ascent to the throne.

The ‘Service des Monuments historiques de l'Algérie,’ in carrying out, during 1913, some excavations in the middle of the ruins of the Roman town of Lambaesis (not in the fortress of the Legio III Augusta) discovered, not very far from the Capitol and the probable site of the Forum, an inscribed fragment, which I wish here to discuss fig. 14). It had been used up in building a wall of a late epoch, and, in consequence, was not in its original position; but it is not likely to have strayed very far. The text inscribed on it had obviously been arranged in several columns, probably in two. There remain now, in any case, parts of two columns; the right part of the left-hand column, and the left part of the right-hand column. The letters are 2·5 cm. high, and resemble in style the writing au calame which, especially in Africa, denotes the age of Hadrian and of Pius.

The square piece of linen cloth (pl. iv) which I propose to discuss in this note was acquired by V. S. Goleniščev in Egypt some years ago, and forms part of his splendid collection of Egyptian antiquities, which was subsequently incorporated into the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, now the State Museum of Fine Arts. Years ago I reproduced and discussed it in a short paper (Monuments of Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow iv, 1913, 149–153 (in Russian) and pl. xxiv in colour) in which I interpreted it as a military vexillum. My paper remained, however, unnoticed by students of military antiquities. For example, in 1923, so careful and well-informed a scholar as Kubitschek (P-W s.v. ‘Signa’ 2337 f.) in speaking of the inscriptions which appear on the vexilla, after quoting Cassius Dio xl, 18, and Vegetius ii, 13, says: ‘andere Bestätigungen haben wir nicht, und (fast darf man sagen: selbstverständlich) ist auch kein vexillum erhalten.’

The name Central Etruria is applied in this article to the region which is, roughly speaking, bounded by the river Mignone on the south, by the Ciminian Hills and the Plain of Viterbo on the east, by the Lake of Bolsena and the River Fiora on the north, and by the Roman Maremma on the west (fig. 1). Even now it is sparsely populated and covered with scrub; and the peculiar conformation of the ground has from the earliest times imposed on its scattered inhabitants special conditions of choice both for the position of their cities and for the type of their sepulchres.

The present aspect of this vast region is very strange. It may be compared to the Roman Campagna, but to a Campagna the monotonous desolation of which is relieved by frequent ravines, carving the landscape into fantastic and romantic pictures.

The task of this paper is, in part, an invidious one: for I shall have to begin by looking a gift-horse in the mouth. I shall have to question a group of opinions that link the rise of Christianity in Africa with a resurgence of the local culture of the area. This resurgence, it is said, explains not only the rapid collapse of Roman rule at the time of the Vandal invasion of 429, but the disappearance of Roman civilisation and of Christianity itself in Africa in the early Middle Ages.

Discussion of this suggestion, however, tends to be jeopardised from the start because claims for the honour of being the resurgent local culture of Late Roman Africa have been enthusiastically advanced on behalf of two distinct and mutually-exclusive local cultures, associated with the two native languages—with Punic, on the one hand, and with ‘Libyan’ (which is often described by a convenient if perilous anachronism as ‘Berber’), on the other. What is more, these claims have been advanced by two equally distinct groups of scholars, handling different evidence. The evidence for the survival of Punic—or, so as not to prejudge the issue, of a lingua Punica—is literary: Augustine of Hippo and Procopius are the sole authorities for the period. The evidence for ‘Berber,’ by contrast, is largely confined to the interpretation of Libyan inscriptions and of traces of unchanging habits of worship and craftsmanship allegedly betrayed in the remains of the Christian Churches of Central Numidia.

The procedural rules of civil courts stimulate interest among few except the lawyers who practise in them. The procedures of the courts of the Roman world may therefore not seem an enticing topic. But procedure lies at the heart of any legal system and the Roman legal system is no exception. So when the discovery of the Lex Irnitana brought us fresh material about the jurisdiction and procedure of the local magistrates and courts at Irni, it added greatly to our understanding of one of the central institutions of the first-century Roman world. But the information is not always easy to interpret. The purpose of this article is first to try to solve an apparent mystery in Chapter 90 of the Lex and then to use the new material to fill out our picture of procedure in this period. In this way it is hoped to contribute to a fuller understanding of the Lex Irnitana as a whole.

In investigating the workings of the Roman clientela system in the first century B.C., we are accustomed to finding a complex pattern. Within a province or other area, different cities or even different families inside a city may look to different Roman magnates, or even have a plethora of patrons, who can be played off against each other. For example, Sicily in Cicero's time was particularly richly provided: various branches of the patrician and plebeian Claudii, notably the Marcelli, also Pompey, Cicero himself, and others. After the Mithridatic War, as I have tried to argue, Pompey's view of his influence and responsibilities in the East clashed head-on with that of the patrician Claudii, who had long-established interests in many parts of the area. A great dynast might indeed control a city, though he would probably have some opponents in it; given inter-city and other rivalries he would find it hard to control a whole province, though his influence might be strong and widespread within it.

In 149 B.C. the tribune L. Calpurnius Piso proposed a law which was to have momentous consequences for the legal, political and administrative history of the Roman republic. It was his lex de rebus repetundis which first established the practice of trial before a quaestio perpetua, a jury, drawn from a panel of jurors who had always to be available, which became the standard procedure for criminal cases in the late republic. For over fifty years, from the first tribunate of C. Gracchus in 123 to the passing of the Lex Aurelia in 70, such courts were to provide a political storm-centre as various political figures attempted for their own ends to alter the criteria for the selection of the iudices who manned the juries. Moreover, from the late second century B.C. down to at least the second century A.D., the process de repetundis formed the most important means that was available to Rome's provincial subjects of bringing an action against a provincial governor for maladministration.

In JRS 97 Sabine Huebner argued that the brother-sister marriages in Roman Egypt could be explained as marriages between an adopted son and a natural daughter, a widespread family strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Remijsen and Clarysse now return to the traditional view that Egyptians did marry their full sisters. Ancient authors considered brother-sister marriages as a peculiarity of the whole Egyptian population and, moreover, papyrological sources do not prove any connection between adoption and brother-sister marriage. Neither the household size nor the onomastic pattern in families with brother-sister marriages are consistent with the usual adoption practices of the Eastern Mediterranean.

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.

Ill fortune bore down the family of the Labieni, and an ill repute hangs over their memory. Q. Labienus, an ally of Saturninus, perished miserably, cut down in the Curia by good citizens. His nephew, T. Labienus, Caesar's legate in Gaul from the first campaign to the last, deserted to Pompeius Magnus at the outbreak of the Civil War, conveying promises which he failed to implement, was held in scant honour by his new allies, and met his death at Munda. The son of Caesar's marshal, a renegade styling himself ‘Parthicus imperator,’ invaded the provinces of the Roman People and swept through Syria and Cilicia into Asia with an army of Parthian cavalry: he was defeated in battle and killed by Ventidius the Picene and the Marsian Poppaedius, generals of Antonius.

Our knowledge of the Jewish Revolt in A.D. 115–117, derived formerly from scanty literary sources only, has been considerably enriched during the last few decades by new evidence, papyrological, epigraphical, and archaeological and the course of the events in the countries of the Jewish Diaspora can now be ascertained in fuller detail than was possible before.

The purpose of this paper is to inquire into the general aspects of the revolt.

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.

In this paper I wish to discuss the evidence of certain pragmatic calculations in Martial's Epigrams and Statius' Silvae, prescinding entirely from whatever literary qualities this kind of poetry may have. Specifically, the paper is concerned with the problem of presentation, and it has two parts. Part I argues that the poets' published books represent only the last and least important means of presenting poems to patrons, and collects evidence for the ways in which the poems were primarily communicated, via recitation, impromptu performance, and private brochure. Discussion of a special form of presentation, the book-dedication, is reserved for Part II. After attempting to redefine the status of the dedication in an ancient book, I will explore a contrast that is apparent between Martial's procedure and Statius'.

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’.

In volume xx of the Journal (pp. 55–70) there appeared an article by Mr. Syme on the imperial finances under Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. Briefly, his object was to shift on to the shoulders of Nerva the financial embarrassment often attributed to the reign of Domitian, and also to strive for a fairer recognition in general of Domitian's qualities. The following notes deal with some of the principal points at issue, and attempt a reconsideration of the financial policy of the period.