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.

Names of persons in the Codex Mediceus prior exhibit familiar corruptions, and many of the necessary corrections were easily made. The cogent evidence was often external—the same character appeared elsewhere in Tacitus, or in some other writer, and inscriptions might certify the orthography of a name or even permit the identification of an individual. None the less, there were, and there are, traps and uncertainties. First, an inoffensive or unimpeachable name need not be correct. Nobody would have suspected ‘Livius’ (Ann. II, 30, I—twice) : only later passages (IV, 13, 2; 28, I) showed that the person referred to was in fact Vibius Serenus. And ‘Vescularius Atticus” (Ann. VI, 10, 2) would stand but for ‘Vescularius Flaccus ’ (II, 28, I). Secondly, the rarity (genuine or only fancied) of a name has often been allowed to impugn it. On the contrary, if a gentilicium is uncommon, or even unique, that is no ground for discomfort. The nomenclature of Italy is startling, fantastic and myriad in its manifestations. The Annals of Tacitus display names which, deceptively familiar from their occurrence in a classical text, are yet of a rarity to adorn an onomatological aviary.

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.

The document called by its author commentariolum petitionis, though not transmitted in the Codex Mediceus of the Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem, appears at the end of these letters in the Codices Berolinensis and Harleianus, and in minor and deterior texts, under two alternative headings: ‘Incipit commentarium consulatus petitionis feliciter’ (Harl.), and ‘Q. Ciceronis de petitione consulatus ad M. Tullium fratrem’ (dett.). The work itself begins with the regular epistolary superscription, ‘Quintus Marco fratri s.d.’ Its diction has often been disparaged on aesthetic grounds, but the best editors have found no reason of Latinity or of stemmatology sufficient to exclude it from the corpus of Ciceronian correspondence.

Two ancient pastoral poems were published by Hermann Hagen in 1869 from a manuscript at Einsiedeln and were soon dated to the reign of Nero. In this study, I show that these poems are related to the Bucolicon Olybrii listed in a library catalogue of Murbach from around 850, and demonstrate on internal and external grounds that the poems were likely composed around the end of the fourth century by Anicius Hermogenianus Olybrius, the consul of 395. This attribution enhances our understanding of the literary culture of the age of Claudian and contributes to the on-going debate on the extent and import of Neronian literature.

There are (at least) two ways to approach the history of religious art in Antiquity. One is to study what was going on in the ancient world, to tell the story as they (the subjects of our inquiry) saw it and as they did it. Another is to ask how we know how they saw it and did it. The first might be called ‘history’, the second ‘critical historiography’. Both are crucial to the historical enterprise, and I in no way intend to demean the first by saying that this paper is largely of the second kind. My project is to examine what are the grounds for our assumptions in creating the generalizations of ‘Late Ancient Jewish Art’ and ‘Early Christian Art’ as real categories of visual production in Late Antiquity with specific and discrete audiences and constituencies of patrons and producers. Both fields are venerable, with long historiographies and complex guiding-agendas of the sort that are perhaps inevitable given the kinds of ancestral investments made by scholars and indeed members of the general public (which is to say, also adherents of the two faiths) in both fields. In addition to prising apart the history of some of these investments, I want to question the methodological basis for many of the assumptions about what can rightly be classified under either the heading of ‘Jewish’ art or of ‘early Christian’ art.

Mr. Graham's article on the division of Britain in the early third century usefully collects much of the relevant evidence. He concludes that Herodian is wrong in claiming that Britain was divided in A.D. 197, and suggests that no division took place until the reign of Caracalla. But he fails to take into account the possibility that a division was indeed made in 197, on different lines from those which applied later.

The one piece of new evidence produced to help in refuting Herodian is an Ephesian inscription which mentions embassies to the emperors Severus and Caracalla in Upper Germany and Britain. The grounds are that, in the wording of the inscription, Germany is qualified as τὴν ἄνω, while Britain is not qualified. But Germania without qualification would be too vague to be allowed to stand; it could even lead to confusion with free Germany. Britannia, on the other hand, is clearly merely a geographical description.

The Roman fort at Ribchester is one of the important strategic centres of Northern Britain (fig. 1), where a Roman road from south to north crossed the river Ribble, while another went eastwards to the legionary fortress at York through the Aire Gap and yet a third ran north-westwards to the Fylde. The Ribble, still tidal as far as Ribchester, may well have been navigable in Roman times as far as the lower crossing by a north-south road at Walton-le-Dale, though nowadays even small ships do not come further up river than Penwortham, three miles away. High fells, in Bowland and Croasdale, lie to north and north-east of the fort, which is itself situated in a deep valley. But the general formation of the neighbouring terrain is in wide sweeps of rolling plateau, suited to cavalry movements. In this respect the position has much in common with Stanwix, Corbridge, Binchester, or Lancaster, where Roman cavalry garrisons lay.

Ribchester does in fact appear to have been garrisoned by cavalry throughout the Roman occupation, and the name of the unit stationed there during the latter half of the period is well attested.

The preliminary aim of this paper is documentary: to clarify and confirm the dating of Gibbon's famous essay ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’. According to a new view, this essay may reasonably be read as if it were written in the early months of 1780. The obvious objection to this position is that, in a now familiar passage from his Memoirs, Gibbon explicitly assures us that the ‘General Observations’ were written before 1774, and thus in all probability before 1773, when he began writing his History. I argue that we should believe what Gibbon tells us. But though the discussion originates in the dry terrain of dates, important interpretative consequences follow. These stem from the interest of the ‘General Observations’ in their own right — a panoramic view of ancient and modern history as broad as the entire range of Gibbon's History — and from their insertion at the end of Volume III of that work (published in 1781). Were the ‘Observations’ so revised as to be virtually written in sequence (as the new view supposes), or do they present a more problematic case — being written before the beginning of Volume I but inserted at the end of an independent text completed eight years later? Consideration of this point raises issues fundamental to the understanding of Gibbon's compositional and intellectual processes, and is the principal justification for what follows.

‘Nova ea minus placebat sapientia’: that was the view that the ‘veteres et moris antiqui memores’ took of the diplomatic activity of Q. Marcius Philippus and his colleagues during their embassy to Greece and Macedonia in 172/1. For once we have evidence of a definite division in the Senate on a matter of policy, and if the political groupings established by prosopographers are to have any meaning beyond mere manoeuvring for office, it should be possible to discover the protagonists on each side, and to trace the division in the Fasti. Such an inquiry should make it possible to write a coherent political history of the years leading up to the Third Macedonian War. It has long been recognized that the decade after 180 was a period of sharp disagreement among the nobiles, but no satisfactory interpretation of the whole period between 179 and the end of the Third Macedonian War has yet been given. In this paper I shall attempt an analysis of the problem in two sections: firstly I shall discuss the diplomatic career of Q. Marcius Philippus and some related questions; secondly, I shall try to relate the conclusions of the first section to the political history of Rome in the 170's.

That Roman politicians function neither in splendid isolation nor in durable groups with common policies is a lesson we have grasped in large part through the imagination of the scholar who is honoured in this volume. Therefore a study aiming to put a tribune of 67 B.C. in his immediate context may be thought an appropriate offering, especially if the author does not fail ‘to keep the absent Pompeius in mind’ (Syme, Sallust 102).

If Sallust in his Histories reached the tribunate of C. Cornelius, he probably treated him as one of a number of sincere tribunes crusading against Optimate corruption; similarly, W. McDonald, writing in 1929 the first separate treatment of Cornelius' tribunate, saw him more as a representative of the Popular Party than as an agent of the ambiguous Pompey, whose quaestor he had been and who, McDonald thought, had put him forward to defend his own interests.

In Roman poetry of the late Republic and the Augustan age, allusiveness was an essential element in poetic technique. In Virgil in particular there is an immense debt to earlier writers for words, phrases and rhythms, all contributing to the poet's effect; although the reader's understanding of the basic meaning of the lines suffers little from his limited awareness of the more erudite allusions. The same thing is true of Horace, with the added consideration that in satire, as in Athenian Old Comedy, burlesque and parody play an important part. Only occasionally is there reason to suspect that our ignorance of Lucilius or other lost writers, Greek or Latin, prevents us from recognizing the whole tone of a passage. It is difficult to ascertain whether Lucilius himself had made literary borrowing an essential element in the satirist's technique; but it must be accepted as such from Horace onwards.

The part played by Christianity in the downfall of the Roman empire in the west has fascinated historians for more than two centuries. The Encyclopaedists in the person of Montesquieu opened the debate, but the latter's subtle anti-Christianity in his Considérations sur la Grandeur et la Décadence des Romains (published 1734) was succeeded by the thorough-going attack of Gibbon who singled out Christianity as the main cause for the change and decadence in the empire's structure. Since then the debate has continued. New factors have been brought into play, such as the annihilating effect of the barbarian attacks or the sense of social injustice so graphically described by Salvian in Gaul and Spain that drove many provincials to welcome the rebel Bagaudae and the Germanic invaders as liberators from Roman tyranny. Salvian, however, was not unpatriotic. He was a far greater laudator temporis acti than Augustine and Orosius, and unlike them found positive merit in the poverty and virtue of the Old Romans. What he criticized was the heartless wealth, luxury and oppression of his own day and the failure of the Catholic clergy to do anything about it.

After giving a six-months' emperor to Rome and setting the example of successful usurpation, the Spanish provinces took but little active part in the long agony which followed. It was, indeed, a contest not of provinces but of provincial garrisons, and the Spanish army was too small and remote again to take the lead; Cluvius Rufus, who succeeded Galba in Hither Spain, was not distinguished as a soldier. After a brief hesitation he recognised Vitellius, wishing perhaps to avenge Galba, and influenced by the strength and proximity of the armies of the Rhine. He proved his loyalty to his new allegiance by the measures he took against Albinus, the procurator of Mauretania, who threatened to rise for Otho. Fearing an invasion of Spain, he moved the Legio X Gemina southward to the coast of Baetica, and at the same time by active propaganda he won over the Mauretanian garrison to Vitellius; Albinus and his chief supporters were slain. Then being accused by Hilarus, an imperial freedman and probably a subordinate procurator of Hither Spain, of aiming at independent authority, he went to meet Vitellius in Gaul. His services procured him an easy acquittal; he was granted the privilege of governing his province through his legati, while he himself, attached to the imperial suite, returned to Italy and Rome.

The careers of Roman senators born in the Eastern half of the Empire are interesting and worthy of study for several reasons. They include men who influenced affairs in such different ways as Herodes Atticus and Avidius Cassius, and the rarity of the honour, in the earlier cases at least, led to an unusually large output of inscriptions which form a good source of information as well as an attractive field for conjecture. Besides this, the purely prosopographical interest, it is possible by following up and seeking to account for the gradual increase of the number in connection with other evidence, to supplement our rather meagre knowledge of life in the Greek East, and also, in the period before the death of M. Aurelius, to watch the working of the diarchy at a time when the Senate's prestige was at its highest and the emperors were most concerned to maintain its efficiency.

This article presents an English translation and analysis of a new historical fragment, probably from Dexippus’ Scythica, published by Gunther Martin and Jana Grusková in 2014. The fragment, preserved in a palimpsest in the Austrian National Library, describes a Gothic attack on Thessalonica and the subsequent preparations of the Greeks to repel the barbarian force as it moved south into Achaia. The new text provides several important details of historical, prosopographical and historiographical significance, which challenge both our existing understanding of the events in Greece during the reign of Gallienus and the reading of the main literary sources for this period. In this article we look to secure the Dexippan authorship of the fragment, identify the individuals named in the text, and date the events described in the text to the early 260s a.d.