Since its rediscovery in the late nineteenth century, the ‘Ara of Domitius Ahenobarbus’ has become a keystone in the history of Roman republican art. Following the seminal interpretation of Alfred von Domaszewski, the monument is usually understood as commemorating the key stages of the Roman census. This paper offers a fundamental reappraisal of the Ara's imagery, based on an iconographic analysis which takes into account all relevant signs of rank and status such as shoes, clothing and other attributes. From this it becomes clear that none of the three protagonists on the Ara can be identified as a censor. Consequently, the monument neither commemorated a census nor was it a censorial location. Instead, I suggest that the Ara actually shows another important political event, namely the deductio of a Roman colony which I tentatively identify as the colonia Neptunia founded by Gaius Gracchus in 123 b.c.

This article presents a new interpretation of the historiographical production of Jordanes by situating it in the political and social environment of Constantinople of the years 550–552. It argues that these years were a period of crisis in Justinian's reign and that this is reflected in the pessimistic view of Roman power and the critique of Justinian's military and religious policy we can see in Jordanes’ Romana. If this prevents us from understanding Jordanes as a mouthpiece of the court, he cannot be reduced to a mere reproducer of Cassiodorus either: while there is more evidence for a close interaction between Jordanes and Cassiodorus (in particular the use of the Historia Tripartita in the Romana) than usually adduced, this is balanced by Jordanes’ explicit attempts to keep his distance from the senator. If the latter can be explained by Jordanes’ much lower social and literary status and his Moesian rather than Italian origin, which made him only a marginal member of Cassiodorus’ circle in Constantinople, the agreement between both men is the result of a confluence of views caused by the turn of the Italian war in 540–550. Jordanes, then, appears as a unique voice in what must have been a polyphony of opinions in mid-sixth-century Constantinople.

When ancient historians wanted to take cognizance of what their predecessors had written, they seem usually, though not always, to have preferred an anonymous reference to one by name. To this practice the most noteworthy exception is Polybius. In his Histories he mentions about a score of previous writers, including philosophers, orators and historians, a large number of whom are the object of quite bitter self-righteous polemic. This harsh trait in Polybius' character appears slightly odd, when one considers his generally sanguine and optimistic view of the world he lived in and of the advantages which he himself enjoyed over his predecessors.

The paper by Saller and Shaw in JRS 1984 calls for some comment on its treatment of epigraphic evidence, and especially on the question of what we can expect inscriptions to tell us about the people of a given area.

A first point to make in relation to their argument is that the poorer classes throughout the empire could not in any case afford stone inscriptions. If, then, the extended family is (as could be argued) an adaptation of the nuclear family induced by poverty, rather than its biological or cultural predecessor, evidence for it will naturally tend to be absent from the epigraphic record, even if it is in fact quite common at the lowest levels of society.

But my present purpose is to consider a different aspect of the use of inscriptions—the question of habit, a subject recently raised by Ramsay MacMullen. After examining the relevance of this matter to the claim by Sailer and Shaw that there was little or no local recruitment to the Roman army in Britain, it will be argued that the epigraphic evidence cannot be used to support this view.

The following pages contain the results, not devoid of interest, if meagre in quantity, of various short visits to the valley of the Caystrus in Central Phrygia, and to the hills which bound it on the north and south. This valley formed the meeting-place of five great Anatolian roads, the northern and central trade-routes from the east, the highways to the west coast down the Maeander valley or past Akmonia or Eucarpia and Sardis, and the road to the Bosporus by way of Dorylaeum. Naturally therefore the valley of the Caystrus was traversed by many generals or governors or other persons known to history, and, little as history has recorded of the state of the valley at different periods, enough has been gleaned from various writers to enable us to fix the main features of its ancient topography. It was traversed from west to east by Cyrus the Younger and Xenophon in 401 B.C. Alexander the Great crossed it from south to north on his way from Celaenae to Gordium in 333 B.C. The battle of Ipsus was fought somewhere near its eastern end in 301 B.C. The plunder-laden army of Cn. Manlius Vulso moved slowly over it, proceeding northwards, in 191 B.C. Cicero travelled through it on his way from Synnada to Philomelium in 51 B.C. To cut short a long list, this valley was the scene of a fierce battle between the emperor Alexius I and the Turks in A.D. 1116; the account given by Anna Comnena of this campaign is the fullest record we possess on the ancient topography of the Caystrus valley, and it throws some light on places in the hills to the north.

Air reconnaissance has been continued over the United Kingdom during the last four years, and this summary of results follows the same pattern as the accounts of earlier surveys already described in this Journal. The years 1969 and 1970 saw the most favourable weather for archaeological reconnaissance, particularly in the eastern half of Britain. Hopes of a good year for crop marks in 1971 vanished when the month of June turned out to be almost the wettest of this century, and then in 1972, cold, damp weather persisting from the end of May through June did not favour the development of crop marks.

Once again most of the new information has come from the military districts of Wales and the north. Understanding of military sites, both in their immediate setting and their wider significance in relation to the system to which they belong, requires some appreciation of local geography.

There survive from a number of places in Western Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean inscriptions recording census registrations. They are undated, but were probably engraved in the late third or early fourth century A.D., when Diocletian and his colleagues and successors are known to have been active in carrying out censuses to serve as the basis of their new system of taxation. All are fragmentary, but some are of sufficient length to yield results of some statistical value on the distribution of landed property, on the density of the agricultural population, and on the proportion of slave to free labour. In view of the extreme paucity of any statistical data for the ancient world they are worth analysis.

The meaning and implication of this passage of Livy have been so generally misunderstood, that it is worth translating and explaining it; for its true meaning is important both in itself and, perhaps, for understanding one aspect of Roman colonial policy between 190 and 180 B.C.

The passage runs as follows: ‘nouum ius eo anno a Ferentinatibus tentatum, ut Latini qui in coloniam Romanam nomina dedissent ciues Romani essent. Puteoleos Salernumque et Buxentum ascripti coloni qui nomina dederant et cum ob id se pro ciuibus Romanis ferrent, senatus iudicauit non esse eos ciues Romanos.’

A papyrus dated to the year 8 B.C. attests the existence of the legion XXII Deiotariana and, indirectly, that of the other legions as well in the series with numbers running from XIII to XXII. It is therefore no longer necessary to say anything about the theory of Mommsen, that eight of them were raised all at once at the time of the Pannonian Revolt, and the other two after the disaster of Varus, or about the milder form in which Hardy served it up. Nobody could now wish to depart very far from the estimate of Emil Ritterling, that Augustus began his Principate with twenty-six or twenty-seven legions, or from that of Mr. Parker, that in 15 B.C. he had twenty-eight. But a general acquiescence does not preclude debate about details which, if they appear small, are never to be despised when they cast light upon imperial principle, or at least practice, and add coherence to a narrative or harmony to a picture.

This paper had its origin in an attempt to elucidate the connexions of three fragmentary mould-blown glasses in the Ashmolean Museum (infra, pp. 172–3, nos. F i d and e and ii c) which bear the complimentary motto ΚΑΤΑΧΑΙΡΕ ΚΑΙ ΕΥΦΡΑΙΝΟΥ, ‘Your very good health.’ The first two of these on close examination proved to be so much alike in every detail that they must have come out of the same mould.

The most notable personality in the history of Augustan Greece is the Spartan, C. Julius Eurycles. As a partisan of Octavian, he led the Spartan force against Antony at Actium, and his name reveals that his allegiance was rewarded with Roman citizenship. Eurycles enjoyed the friendship of Augustus, and abused it. The history of this man provides valuable evidence for Augustan policy toward cities and dynasts of the East. Yet most of the modern literature dealing with him is inconclusive. It will be impossible to say the final word about Eurycles, but a great deal of confusion can be cleared up. Moreover, a recently published palimpsest requires that a crucial piece of evidence be revised.

The subject of this paper is the relations between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, that long-protracted racial animosity which forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of what is commonly, if loosely, known as anti-semitism; but before coming to my subject proper it will be necessary to say something about the position of the Alexandrian Jews.

Around the world, covers have become advertisements for their books. The dignity that characterizes something self-contained, lasting, hermetic — something that absorbs the reader and closes the lid over him, as it were, the way the cover of the book closes on the text — has been set aside as inappropriate to the times. The book sidles up to the reader; it no longer presents itself as existing in itself, but rather as existing for something other, and for this very reason the reader feels cheated of what is best in it. Theodor Adorno

In his last book, at the end of a successful, literary career, Martial asks in regard to his own genre of epigram: ‘quid minus esse potest?’ (‘What can be humbler?’, 12.95). Such self-disparagement is not necessarily surprising, since there is no reason to imagine that Martial's success as an epigrammatist would alter his genre's place in the traditional hierarchy of literary seriousness. Martial's denigration of his own oeuvre, however, goes beyond consciousness of epigram's status as a low genre. The epigrammatist not only registers his genre's formal rank, he develops fully articulated fictional scenarios depicting the nature of his writing and its role in society. According to the most salient and pervasive fiction characterizing Martial's work, epigram is an ephemeral form of literature embedded in specific, social contexts, and dedicated to immediate uses.

If any ancient historian—either Greek or Roman—made any systematic comment on the principles observed in the choice of coin types in the classical world his account has not come down to us. Aristotle, indeed, in his Politics, made a theoretical reference to coin types when he wrote ὁ γὰρ χαρακτὴρ ἐτέθη τοῦ ποσοῦ σημεῖον. This reference, though it is of characteristic Aristotelian brevity, in reality goes beyond the theory and implies the almost invariable principles of choice everywhere. For, as scholars have often noted and now generally agree, when Aristotle defined the addition of a type to a coin as a means of indicating its value, he was saying not that the type showed how great the value of the coin is, but that its very presence gives an assurance that the proper value of the coin—whatever that value might be—can be safely assumed. As G. F. Hill pointed out, and as will be seen later, ‘the importance of this apparently subtle distinction lies in its bearing on the significance of types.’

Recent archaeological investigations have revealed that at the end of the fifth century b.c.e., Gabii, an ancient centre of Latium Vetus, was reorganised in a planned, quasi-orthogonal pattern, which constitutes an anomaly in the regional context. This is indicative of an important transformational moment in its history, representing a break from previous patterns of occupation and involving significant spatial and socio-political discontinuities with the previous settlement. This article proposes that the reorganisation reflects a moment of refoundation after a period of abandonment, an urban trajectory that can be clarified by a critical re-examination of the historical evidence, focusing on two pivotal processes: the devotio of the city by the Romans and the dynamics of early colonisation in Latium. This new interpretation not only has important implications for understanding the archaeology of Gabii and of early republican urbanism, but also sheds light on one of the ‘darkest’ ages in Roman history.

The Lex Valeria Cornelia of A.D. 5, known to us only from the Tabula Hebana of 19, provided that the senators and those Equites who were enrolled in the judicial decuries should henceforth vote in ten centuries, named after the dead princes, C. and L. Caesar, for the ‘destinatio’ of consuls and praetors. In 19 these same voters were redistributed into fifteen centuries, and in 23 into twenty centuries; the new units were named after Germanicus and Drusus respectively.

Professor Tibiletti has virtually established that these ‘destining’ centuries were an integral part of the comitia centuriata. Candidates who received the majority of their votes were credited with all of them, before the remaining centuries voted. Furthermore, the ‘destining’ centuries must have taken over the role of the old centuria praerogativa; before A.D. 5 the vote of that century, composed of iuniores of the first class, was declared before the proceedings were carried further and the Comitia had been apt to follow its lead.

A new moneyed class, thrusting rapidly to public estate in an ancient society, needed the enhancement of symbols and titles. Most Roman titles were military in origin, and it was natural to borrow the name of the old Roman cavalry, with its associations of high rank and property-census, antique tradition, and decorative imagery. Not less naturally, the military metaphors of the new civil equites concealed change and misled some secondary authors into anachronism. Modern historians too have been apt to assume the perpetuity of forms or conditions appropriate to the Servian Army, and long afterwards retailed in antiquarian descriptions of the ‘exercitus urbanus’. In general outline, indeed, the comitia centuriata may have retained its archaic structure; nevertheless, both Dionysius and Livy warn us plainly enough that changes had taken place. However modern hypotheses may attempt to reconcile the difference, the stark fact remains that two discrepant versions of the Servian system were current in the first century B.C. Such institutions were perhaps not as static as the terminology which attached to them.

The world of learning owes debts many and varied to Sir Henry Stuart Jones: it is the Camden Professor and historian of Rome that Oxford knows best. In Roman history, wherever knowledge may be deepened and however horizons may be widened, the transformation of the Roman State and the transition from Republic to Principate must ever claim the centre of interest. For this reason a paper concerning one of Caesar's partisans, a military man from Spain, may be offered as a tribute from the School of Literae Humaniores—and from one of the three Colleges with which Sir Henry's life in Oxford has been identified.

The data which Beloch has collected for the population of Syria are very scanty, and his calculations are highly insecure. It is perhaps possible to reach a more certain result by a closer study of the most important piece of evidence on the topic that we possess. The census conducted by Sulpicius Quirinius as legatus of Syria in A.D. 6–7, which, owing to its mention in the Gospel of St. Luke (ii, I), has evoked endless controversy among commentators, is also referred to in an inscription, probably found at Beyrout and preserved since the eighteenth century at Venice, which supplies information of a precision unique of its kind. We read, in fact, in the epitaph of an officer, Q. Aemilius Secundus:—Iussu Quirini censum egi Apamenae civitatis millium hominum civium CXVII. To estimate the value of the figure 117,000, it is important to decide what the author of the inscription meant by homines cives.