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.

There are many periods of history—and unfortunately not always the least important—that survive, for us, entirely or mainly in one version. Ever since the development of modern critical historiography it has been recognized that it is the historian's duty to test that version, and highly skilled methods in the use of evidence have been worked out in order to enable him to do so. We all know some of the outstanding results in our field: the age of Augustus, once seen through the eyes of court literature; the ages of Tiberius and Claudius, once known only through the resentment of those who had suffered under tyranny; one could name many other periods that have gained a new reality in the last few generations and that now stand out in three dimensions.

‘Ceteris in rebus statim ab initio principatus usque ad exitum civilis et clemens, mediocritatem pristinam neque dissimulavit umquam ac frequenter etiam prae se tulit. quin et conantis quosdam originem Flavii generis ad conditores Reatinos comitemque Herculis … referre irrisit ultro’ (Suet. Div. Vesp. 12).

Vespasian came of peasant stock; he succeeded to a position which had been occupied by men of the noblest birth. For the Julio Claudians no proofs need be produced; of their successors Galba boasted descent from Jupiter and (strangely) Pasiphae, and Otho from Etruscan princes; even Vitellius had a pedigree going back to Faunus and a local goddess, Vitellia. Vespasian was far too shrewd to make similar claims; he deliberately rejected the attempts of flatterers to find him a noble ancestor. Much of the Life of Suetonius is evidence for the statement ‘mediocritatem pristinam neque dissimulavit umquam ac frequenter etiam prae se tulit.’ His reign marked a return to simpler ways of living, and emphasised a contrast with the pomp and extravagance of a Nero, wealthy and degenerate (see infra, p. 55). It was a realistic and sensible policy, and likely to win support from the lower classes of population in Italy, whether peasants or city proletariate.

The excavations that have been conducted since 1931 by the American School of Classical Studies in the Athenian Agora have illumined virtually all phases in the development of the civic centre from its modest beginnings in the time of Solon to its dramatic end in the third century of our era. The exploration has also made it possible to trace the history of habitation in the area from Neolithic times down to the present day. One of the periods for which the excavations have yielded especially abundant documentation is late antiquity, more specifically the centuries from the third through the sixth. The new evidence has led to the correction of various misapprehensions that had arisen because of the paucity of evidence previously available for the study of this period. The results are the more interesting because our detailed knowledge of what happened in the Agora now helps in understanding contemporary developments in the city as a whole. Athens in fact has become a useful ‘case history’ for the study of the actual way in which ancient civilization went to pieces in one of the best known and most characteristic communities of the ancient world.

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.

Fiscal explanations often given for Rome's first coins fail to account for the shape of monetary development. Nothing in the mid-republican budget matches the small scale and sporadic production of Roman coins during the early third century, or coinage's rapid expansion in the lead-up to the Second Punic War. Instead, I locate early Roman coinage within a broader reconfiguration of wealth and political power during the early phases of imperial expansion. Coins facilitated the exchange of wealth in the absence of strong social ties; conquest opened up Roman society to vast wealth of this order while also sparking debate about wealth's integration into the political community. Archaeological and textual evidence permits us to trace the contested and uneven development of elite accommodation to impersonal wealth during the third century. This context, I argue, offers the best explanation for Rome's initial coins.

The term ecphrasis in ancient doctrine denoted any poetic or rhetorical description, including descriptions of landscape (topothesia), buildings, battles, and storms. In recent critical idiom it has been narrowed to refer specifically to literary descriptions of visual works of art. This critical focus indicates the interest of the problem of comparing the two media of literature and the visual arts. The great benefit of considering ‘ecphrasis’ in the modern sense is that it forces us to confront both the nature of the visual artistic medium and that of the verbal medium describing it.

While lately engaged with an edition of the ‘Agricola,’ it occurred to me to enquire how far Tacitus was read, and his works copied, during the period between his lifetime and the introduction of printing. Such an enquiry is more necessary than is always realised, if one is to appreciate properly the character and importance of the manuscripts of an ancient author. One needs not only to know their dates, relationships and general merits or demerits, but also to understand what may be called their ‘background,’ that is to know how far the author in question was seriously studied and his works copied during the centuries between his own day and the Renaissance. I therefore tried to work out some account of the history of Tacitus in this respect. I have been able to do this only very briefly, but the sketch, though short, may interest some readers of our Journal, and, being more or less historical, is not alien to its proper scope. Moreover, no quite similar sketch seems to exist, either in English or, so far as I am aware, in any language.

This article summarizes some of the results of an inquiry into third-century rescripts which has been proceeding for the last seven years but of which nothing has so far been published. The main source, the Codex Justinianus, contains some 2491 items dated between A.D. 193, when we first have a substantial number of texts, and 305, which are certainly or probably private rescripts, as I shall call them, i.e. subscriptiones. These were written answers given by the emperor to petitions by private individuals on points of law. If these written answers, which were in some sense the concern of the imperial office a libellis, are reassembled from the titles under which they are grouped in the Codex, and are read in complete chronological order, the reader is struck by the fact that their style is consistent over a period which varies from a few months to several years.The periods of consistent style, however, do not coincide with the reign of a particular Augustus or Augusti. Some twenty such periods and hence some twenty third-century composers of rescripts, who are clearly not emperors, can be distinguished in this way. In half a dozen cases there is evidence, again drawn from the style of composition, that the composer is one of the jurists known to us independently from the pages of Justinian's Digest; for example, Papinian, Ulpian, Menander, Modestinus or Hermogenianus. In two cases the evidence for the identification is set out in some detail below. It seems, therefore, that the composition of rescripts of any importance was the responsibility of professional lawyers, acting in their capacity of imperial secretaries a libellis, an office which Papinian at least is known to have held.

I. Cato's title and commission: the problem.

II. Cic., fam. XIII, 48: C. Sextilius Rufus, quaestor in Cyprus, and his family.

III. The arrangements for annexation and administration.

IV. The precedent: P. Lentulus Marcellinus and Cyrene.

In 58 B.C. M. Cato, then of tribunician standing, was sent to Cyprus to confiscate and realize the King's property. The mission, with its political context, has been frequently discussed—best by S. I. Oost, with his usual historical insight and critical acumen. The present article proposes to base itself on Oost's discussion and investigate some further matters that did not come within the scope of his enquiry.

I

We must start with Cato's title, on which the truth has only quite recently been recognized. Amid dozens of references to the famous mission, we have only two that purport to give his title accurately. The author of de uiris illustribus tells us that Cato was sent to Cyprus as quaestor. Since he is notoriously inaccurate in such matters, to the confusion of much modern scholarship, this would not be worth a great deal by itself. But it is fully supported by Velleius, who in fact gives more details: Clodius passed a law that Cato, as quaestor with praetorian status, and with a quaestor to assist him, should be sent to Cyprus to strip Ptolemy of his kingdom.

In JRS LVI (1966) I gave a description of the Aoi Stena which was based on autopsy, and I discussed the campaigns of Rome against Philip V of Macedon in the years 200 to 198 B.C. In this paper I am concerned with the area farther north which Rome acquired in 229 B.C. and with the actions which took place there before 200 B.C. Many scholars have discussed Rome's early activities in Illyris but practically none of them has trodden the ground. My knowledge of most of the area may help me to advance more down-to-earth views of the extent of Rome's sector in Illyris and of Roman and Macedonian policies. I include some new evidence on the position of Dimallum.

The salient feature of Central Albania is the belt of coastal plain which extends from north of Lesh (Lissus) to north of the Gulf of Valona (see fig. 1). The widest and richest part of this plain is in the Myzeqija, which extends southwards from Kavajë. The Myzeqija in particular is integral to the economy of Central Albania, the area which was called Southern Illyris in the third century B.C. The transhumance of sheep has always been practised in this part of the Balkans, and the coastal plain of Albania with months of very heavy rainfall in October and March affords exceptionally fine pasturage for the winter period.

The purpose of this paper is to put forward a new interpretation of five rock-reliefs in the province of Fars, S. Persia, which have been held to commemorate the capture of the Emperor Valerian near Edessa in A.D. 260. These reliefs may be grouped according to the number of Romans present.

The aim of this paper is to summarize the available information on the types of plough used in Roman Britain. There are a number of sources for such a study. Much of our knowledge of the basic structure of these early ploughs comes from the finely preserved Iron-Age examples which have been found in Scandinavian peat bogs. These also serve to supplement and clarify the most detailed surviving description of the Roman plough, which is given by Vergil in Georgics I. A few models of the Roman period have been found in Britain and Germany. Of major importance, of course, are the surviving parts of Romano-British ploughs (which are all, in fact, either shares or coulters), and material from Roman Europe can be used to amplify these. The Elder Pliny has a detailed, but difficult, section on the various types of share and occasionally he throws light on other aspects of the subject. Finally, a certain amount of information can be gained from comparisons with modern plough types.

The reign of Aemilian is one of the most obscure episodes in the dark third century of our era. ‘Obscurissime natus obscurius imperavit,’ wrote Eutropius of him, and the epigram has not lost its point to-day. But on one vexed question—the date of his reign—the coins, studied in connexion with the literary tradition, will yield an answer at least approximately certain, and from that answer results follow, which are of vital importance to the chronology of the whole succeeding period.

The duration of the reign of Aemilian was about three months. At Alexandria, where the year began on August 29th, Aemilian has not uncommon coins of year B, none of year A. This should imply that his rule did not extend far back behind the end of August. An inscription of Gemellae in Numidia shows Valerian and Gallienus as Emperors on October 22nd, 253; a detachment of Legio III Augusta, demobilized and sent home from Raetia, makes a dedication ‘pro salute Augg.’ to Victoria Augusta. We have here three pieces of evidence—all equally trustworthy. If we can succeed in combining them, we should be very near the truth.

Members of the late Roman élite commemorated the holding of certain offices by the distribution of ivory diptychs. This paper attempts to show how diptychs came to play this rôle; that they were not originally distributed by consuls but by any official who provided games; that they had nothing to do with the ecclesiastical diptychs that are first heard of at about the same time; that the custom spread from east to west, not from west to east; and that the earliest western consular diptychs are not illustrated with scenes from games because there were no multi-day consular games at Rome before the fifth century.

‘Can I fix Rome for you on this poor sheet of paper?’ Something like Petrarch's lament must precede any attempt to sum up Rome in words; only an Atlas could do justice to the vast weight of such a city. But there is at least one compensation: we are describing a city that we all know, or think we know. For Montaigne, it was the first city that entered his consciousness: ‘I have had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long time before I had knowledge of those of my own house. I knew the Capitol and its platform before I knew Louvre, the palace of our kings in Paris; the river Tiber before Seine’. And for him it remained the ultimate city: ‘And therefore can I not look so often into the situation of their streets and houses, and those wondrous-strange ruins, that may be said to reach down to the Antipodes, but so often must I amuse myself on them. Is it nature or by the error of fantasy, that the seeing of places we know to have been frequented or inhabited by men whose memory is esteemed or mentioned in stories doth in some sort move and stir us up as much or more than the hearing of their noble deeds or reading of their compositions?’ For Freud, the city provided the best analogy for the human consciousness itself, an overlayering of past and present events, all capable of being experienced simultaneously. He asks us, in a flight of fancy, to ‘suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past — an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into being will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one’.

Any knowledge of the municipal system evolved in Italy after the Social War must turn, however we might wish it otherwise, upon the four bronze inscriptions found respectively at Tarentum, Veleia, Ateste and Heraclea. They have been much discussed, and it may seem that there is nothing more useful to be said; but the present state of opinion leaves room for doubt. To Mommsen and scholars of his generation they were at least ingenuous documents, but poorly engraved and in places obscure and inexplicable. Even that was challenged by Gradenwitz, who in a remarkable series of articles turned upon them an eye sharpened in the pursuit of interpolation in legal texts, and declared that at least two—the Lex Rubria and the Tabula Heracleensis—were products of inept draftsmen who inserted glosses and interpolations in defiance of style and sense. A. von Premerstein went further; like the Spanish charter from Urso, the Heraclea inscription was an unfinished draft of Caesar's published, after his murder, by Antony with reckless additions of his own; and more recently, the same has been urged by G. Beseler, F. Schulz and others of the Lex Rubria. The internal problems of these inscriptions are thus met by questioning their evidential value, but this seems, like a conjuror's explanation, to raise deeper mysteries than it solves.

The mint of Republican Rome was located on the Capitol somewhere in the vicinity of the temple of Juno Moneta. This is one of the best known but perhaps worst attested pieces of topographical information concerning the Republican city of Rome. The evidence that the coins of the Roman Republic were made there is exiguous to say the least. Indeed, there are only two literary sources that explicitly site the mint at Juno Moneta's temple. The first is Livy's account of the condemnation and execution of M. Manlius Capitolinus, the hero who had previously saved the Capitol from assault by the Gauls. Livy mentions that the people passed a law to the effect that no patrician would thereafter be permitted to live on the Capitol or the Arx, for Manlius' house had stood on the site where, Livy says, now stands the aedes atque officina Monetae, the temple and the workshop of Moneta. The second is contained in the Suda (s.v. Μονήτα), in a passage to be discussed below. These are the sole threads of evidence on which the location of the mint of Republican Rome hangs. Nevertheless, despite an attempt to impugn Livy's reputation for topographical accuracy, they should suffice.

This paper discusses the widely held view that politics in fifth- and sixth-century Italy were largely driven by rivalry between the two great families of the Anicii and the Decii, supposedly following distinctive policies (pro- or anti-eastern, philo- or anti-barbarian, etc.). It is probable that individual members of these (and other) families had feuds and disagreements from time to time, but there is absolutely no evidence for continuing rivalry between Decii and Anicii as families, let alone on specific issues of public policy. Indeed by the mid-fifth century the Anicii fell into a rapid decline. The nobility continued to play a central rôle in the social and (especially) religious life of late fifth- and early sixth-century Italy. Their wealth gave them great power, but it was power that they exercised in relatively restricted, essentially traditional fields, mainly on their estates and in the city of Rome. The quite extraordinary sums they spent on games right down into the sixth century illustrate their overriding concern for popular favour at a purely local level. In this context there was continuing competition between all noble families rich enough to compete. Indeed, the barbarian kings encouraged the nobility to spend their fortunes competing with each other to the benefit of the city and population of Rome.