The relations between the Empire and the Church are a subject of such major interest, which has attracted so much attention from historians both ecclesiastical and lay, that it would be rash to suppose anything relevant and of value still to remain unsaid. Nevertheless, if it be permissible to think that the most familiar accounts are not the most satisfactory, some service may be done by emphasizing again certain considerations which, though they have not completely escaped notice hitherto, have too often been overlooked; and for such an undertaking the present occasion is perhaps made appropriate by the interest in early Christian history which the scholar whom we honour has combined with his studies of pagan Rome.

ὁ δὲ Σεβῆρος … διοικήσας δὲ τὰ κατὰ Βρετανίαν καì

διελὼν ἐς δύο ἡγεμονίας τὴν τοῦ ἔθνους ἐξουσίαν….

Thus Herodian (III, 8, 1–2), referring to the time after the Battle of Lugdunum in 197. It is a sign of our imperfect knowledge of the history of Roman Britain that the character of this division, its purpose and even its date, are all matters of doubt. Not only is there no evidence to confirm Herodian's statement until a considerably later period, but there are several contrary indications which suggest that his date, at least, is wrong. Such a conflict of ancient testimony leads, not surprisingly, to differences in modern authorities. It is not necessary, however, for it to lead to such a confusing picture as they now seem to present. Ritterling and E. Birley drew attention to the problem, and S. N. Miller set out all the evidence in the Cambridge Ancient History. It therefore seems unfortunate that eminent authorities in more recent works continue to accept Herodian's date, or, more rarely, offer an alternative, without any warning that they are handling dubious or hypothetical material. My aim in this paper is, therefore, partly one of clarification and restatement. But I also wish to draw attention to a small addition to the evidence on the subject, and to treat the whole problem anew in the light of recent additions to our knowledge of Roman Britain in Severan times. Until a fortunate epigraphic discovery solves the problem for us, all such discussions are bound to be inconclusive; but while we wait for a British Julius Cerealis, an interim statement may crave a hearing.

‘The sovereign power of the dictator, the imperium, was … an unrestricted regal power, taken over ca. 504 B.C. by the 300 horsemen of the noblemen-bodyguard, who constituted then the patriciate, i.e. the closed circle of the potential holders of the imperium’. This is a quotation from A. Alföldi's latest book, Early Rome and the Latins (Ann Arbor), 1965, p. 44, and summarizes his theory of the origins of the Roman Republic. According to Alföldi the aristocracy of the monarchic period was an aristocracy of knights, and their coup d'état of about 504 B.C. brought about the end of the monarchy. As is well known, Alföldi developed this theory in a previous book, Der frührömische Reiteradel und seine Ehrenabzeichen (Baden-Baden, 1952) which is chiefly meant to prove that the various attributes of the senatorial order—including the special shoe for the patrician senators, the calceus patricius—were originally characteristic of the archaic knights. To the best of my knowledge, Alföldi never says explicitly that the senators of the monarchic period must have been identical with the 300 ‘celeres’ who were the king's bodyguard according to some of the ancient sources (Livy 1, 15, 8; Plut., Rom. 26; Zonaras 7, 3, 4). But this seems to be Alföldi's implication—in fact it was already Niebuhr's hypothesis.

The idea that the dead were polluting — that is, that corpses posed a danger of making the living unclean, offensive both to their own communities and to the gods — has long occupied a fundamental position in Roman funerary studies. Nevertheless, what that pollution comprised, as well as how it affected living society, remain subject to debate. This article aims to clarify the issue by re-examining the evidence for Roman attitudes towards the dead. Focusing on the city of Rome itself, I conclude that we have little reason to reconstruct a fear of death pollution prior to Late Antiquity; in fact, the term itself has been detrimental to current understandings. No surviving text from the late republican or early imperial periods indicates that corpses were objects of metaphysical fear, and rather than polluted, mourners are better conceived as obligated, bound by a variable combination of emotions and conventions to behave in certain, if certainly changeable, ways following a death.

The two problems to be discussed here are :—

(1) Under what law or laws were charges brought in cases of treason during the first years of the Principate?

(2) What were the penalties prescribed by that law or those laws?

The answer to the first question raises no serious difficulties. It is true that apart from any consideration of perduellio no fewer than four laws de maiestate (to be discussed more fully later) were passed in the seventy years before the reign of Augustus. But it is clear that for all practical purposes these laws were comprehended and superseded by the Lex Julia of Augustus. Tacitus always speaks of a single law, e.g.

Ann. 1, 72, 3: ‘nam legem maiestatis reduxerat,’ and

Ann. 2, 50, i: ‘adolescebat interea lex maiestatis’

and the jurists always refer to a Lex Julia which must have been that passed by Augustus and not that of Caesar.

The answer to the second question also was until recently regarded as practically certain. It was held by all authorities, both Continental and English, that the only legal penalty was ‘interdictio aquae et ignis’, though with the establishment of the Principate there began a process of arbitrarily worsening the conditions of exile and even substituting the death penalty. But during the present century another view has been put forward—a view developed in most detail by R. S. Rogers in his Criminal Trials and Criminal Legislation under Tiberius (1935). In this book Rogers asserts positively and often that the Lex Julia embraced two different kinds of treason—high treason, which he calls by the old name of Perduellio, and Maiestas, which often amounted to no more than slander of the Princeps or his family—and that two different penalties were prescribed, viz. death (with confiscation of property and damnatio memoriae) for Perduellio, exile for Maiestas.

Roman London illustrates in more than one way the worst features of English archaeological study. There has been no want of interest in the subject. In England, indeed, Roman archaeology has throughout received a fuller share of general public interest than in any other country. Thanks to our classical system, nearly everyone has read a little Caesar and, it may be, some Tacitus, and though he has forgotten nine-tenths of it, he generally deems himself fitted to enquire into the history of the Roman empire. People who in every other country would give no heed to archaeology at all are in England extremely interested, and it has always been thought right and proper that they should be interested. Unfortunately, it has also been thought needless to do more than to be interested.

The places whose numismatic history is studied in this paper are those which happened to be comprised in the provinces of Arabia and Mesopotamia from the time of the institution of these provinces down to the end of the period of the Greek coinage. Thus, as regards Arabia, which was organised in A.D. 106, the mints of Philadelphia, Gerasa, Dium and Philippopolis are included, although they were originally in the Decapolis, and were only transferred to Arabia in the reign of Severus at the earliest. But Canatha, which was transferred at the same time, had then ceased to issue coins; it is therefore omitted from these pages. Eboda, of which a solitary coin of Nero's time is known, might have been omitted on the same grounds, but is included because its coinage does not find a place in the series of any other province. The latest Greek coins issued by any Arabian city are of the time of Valerian and Gallienus.

When the South Sea Bubble burst, a passionate member of the British Parliament called for the application of the Lex Pompeia on Parricides to those who had defrauded the nation. Just as the Romans, he argued, face to face with a monstrous and unprecedented crime, devised for it a monstrous and unprecedented punishment, so the British were invited to tie the directors of the South Sea Company into sacks with a dog, a cock, a viper and an ape in each, and sink them in the Thames.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the great astronomer Kepler wrote to his patron, the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II:

Most noble lord, I have now for several weeks on end devoted my utmost efforts to the nativity of Caesar Augustus, about which your kingly majesty wishes to know, but, as I see, it has been almost in vain. For although it is no specially difficult task to calculate the configuration of the heavens for a particular time, nevertheless, what is lacking in the nativity we are now considering is that we no longer today know the correct time of it.

The unfortunate astronomer had spent considerable time combing the evidence of the ancient authors available to him about the date of Augustus' birth. He attempted to sift through the conflicting evidence about which day would have been Augustus' birthday, before performing complex calculations of the planetary movements, in order to assess the role Capricorn might have played in his horoscope. His ingenious solution to the problem failed to impress Rudolf, as we can see from Kepler's second letter on the subject (the emperor's letters are not extant):

Most noble lord, your kingly majesty has suspected me of a lack of diligence, as though I had not sufficiently reported the nativity of Augustus…

On Aeneid 7, 37, ‘Nunc age,’ Servius observes : ‘hinc est sequentis operis initium; ante dicta enim ex superioribus pendent.’ This is obviously correct. That ll. 37 ff. are to be regarded as the prelude to the whole second part of the Aeneid follows from the contents of these lines and also from the fact that the opening words ‘nunc age … Erato’ are a quotation from the beginning of the second half of Apollonius's Argonautica (3, 1) εἰ δ᾽ ἄϒε νῦν, Ἐρατὠ. It is with this exordium, then, that ‘l’Odyssée finit, l'Iliade d'Énée commence’ (Sainte-Beuve, Étude sur Virgile, 2nd edition, 174). We might expect to see the solemn introduction to Part II coincide with the beginning of the Seventh Book. If ever a poet was sensitive to the effects of symmetry and clearly marked arrangement, it was Virgil. And yet here, at one of the most conspicuous points of the Aeneid, he allows himself a glaring asymmetry. An attempt to remove the stumbling-block by means of violent textual criticism has been made, but is now justly forgotten. The difficulty, however, has still to be faced. Instead of pretending that everything is normal when it is not, we should try to answer the question why Virgil has here avoided what seems to be the most natural arrangement.

In a previous article I discussed the urbanization of the territory of the Jews. In this I propose to treat the administrative development of the territory of another backward people of Syria, the Ituraeans. The history of the two peoples is somewhat similar. The princes of the Ituraeans, who like the Maccabees were at the same time high-priests, like them took advantage of the disintegration of the Seleucid kingdom to carve out for themselves an independent dominion at the expense of the neighbouring tribes and cities. Their progress was similarly checked by the Roman conquest, and their principality was similarly curtailed and divided, until eventually it was absorbed into the regular provincial administration.

My friend Mr. M. R. Popham, of the Government of Cyprus, was kind enough to inform me in a letter dated 9th July, 1959, of his discovery in the village of Nikoklia, some 2 km. to the north of Kouklia, site of the ancient Palaipaphos, of this important inscription.

A slab of fine white marble, 0·545 m. high, 0·605 m. wide, and 0·08 m. thick (pl. x), found during the spring of 1959 in the renovation of a floor of the village church and removed on 3rd May to the Epigraphic Museum at Kouklia: undoubtedly transported from the famous site of the Aphrodite temple of Palaipaphos, the source of so many inscriptions alike of Ptolemaic and of Roman date, it has thus now been restored approximately to the place from which it came. The stone preserves original surfaces above, to right and left, but below it is broken away.

When a Roman historian came to compose the orations that convention permitted him to include within his pages, all the arts of rhetoric were at his disposal. But in one signal sphere the historians renounced the procedure that Cicero had enjoined in theory and displayed in practice, the employment of the rhythmical clausula. Or rather, in reaction against the Ciceronian cadences they favoured other rhythms, not least the spondaic. The tendency is as true of Livy as it is of the patently anti-Ciceronian Sallust. Tacitus too, though in less marked degree, follows the historians' practice—a liking for the dispondaic ending and no disinclination for the heroic clausula (), but also a considerable fondness for the ditrochee. According to Zielinski the following patterns (C2 (+ C22esse uideatur) + C3 + T24 + M3 ( + M23)) account for almost 75 % of all Cicero's final clausulae (actually 73·8%): the figures for the historians are Sallust 28·3%, Livy 25·9%, Tacitus 44·8 %. The intermediary position that Tacitus adopts is not without its advantages. When Petillius Cerialis addresses the Treviri and Lingones as a bluff soldier, unaccustomed to public speaking, he can emphasize his pretence of artlessness by the heavy spondaic endings of his first two sentences —and similarly at the end of the chapter.

The literary sources relating to the foundation of Constantinople can be evaluated afresh if the numismatic material is reconsidered. On this subject O. Voetter, J. Maurice, and O. Seeck have already done valuable work; yet it would bear further study.

Everyone knows the little bronze coins struck on the occasion of the foundation of Constantinople on 11th May, 330, one type of which commemorates Constantinople as the mistress of the seas, while another portrays the old capital, recalling the legend of its origin, with the wolf and twins. The significance of these twin types can be grasped better in a still larger issue struck at the same time. Maurice classed these coins in the larger issue which bear the bust of Rome as having been struck at Rome, and those bearing that of Constantinople as having been struck in the latter city; and this incorrect classification has obscured the parallelism of the type, which was of great importance for imperial propaganda. It is clear that both groups were struck at Rome in the same issue.

The antiquities described below were seen by us during a visit to Konia and the Isaurian hill-country in June, 1924. One of us (Buckler) spent ten days at Konia while the other two were travelling in the south; after this we were together in Konia for four days. As a result of the instructions kindly given by the Ministers of the Interior and of Public Instruction, we were extremely well treated by the local authorities, and desire particularly to thank the Director of the Konia Museum for his courtesy. We would also express our gratitude to H.E. Halil Edhem Bey, Director of the Museum of Antiquities in Constantinople, to Professor Reisch and Dr. Josef Keil of the Austrian Archaeological Institute who have given invaluable help, and to Sir W. M. Ramsay for his kind aid and criticism.

The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is often dismissed as a mere slavish panegyric of Rome, written with no other purpose but to persuade her Greek subjects to acquiesce in her domination. Thus Schwartz, in his Pauly-Wissowa article (v, 934 f.), after describing the work as ‘ein trauriges Dokument dafür, wie tief die geistige Potenz noch mehr als die Bildung der Griechen gesunken war’, accuses Dionysius not only of incompetence as a historian, but also of a lack of the feeling proper to a Greek. Comparing him with Polybius and Posidonius, he writes ‘die tragischen Schmerzen, die jenen echten Hellenen das Begreifen des römischen Primats gekostet hatte, sind dieser kleinen Seele fremd’. He further suggests that Dionysius chose his subject because it was remote from contemporary events and he was not likely to meet much competition.

There is little need now to emphasise the importance of the declaration of war against Philip V of Macedon in the history of Roman imperialism, or to formulate the problem of the causes of the Roman decision to intervene in the East. The work of M. Holleaux has defined the problem and indicated its historical implications, and subsequent research has kept the issue clear. We have rather to justify a paper upon this subject which returns to details of reconstruction already fully treated. Yet the reconstruction of events has not received its final exposition, and a better understanding of the details is essential for the historical interpretation of the political situation in 200 B.C.

Any discussion of the policy of the Roman Senate towards the Hellenistic world at the end of the third century B.C. must inevitably take account of the work of two men who wrote their most important books around this topic. One is, of course, Polybius, the other Maurice Holleaux. Holleaux's book on Rome, Greece and the Hellenistic monarchies appeared in 1921; but it came as the culmination of several studies on this subject, which had been exercising his attention particularly since 1913. Today, then, we stand virtually at the fiftieth anniversary of Holleaux's thesis, and we can appropriately consider how far it has stood the test of time. However, that is not my main purpose in this paper, which will be concerned much more with what Polybius has to say on the subject. As everyone knows, it is the evidence of Polybius that stands behind Holleaux's remarkable reconstruction of Roman policy; and Holleaux's problem is quite central to Polybius' interests—indeed it is very close to, though not identical with, his main theme. ‘Who,’ he asks, ‘is so worthless and so indolent as not to want to know by what means and under what constitutional system the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government—a thing unique in history?’ It is perhaps not unfair to judge a historian by the degree of success he attains in tackling his main theme. If that seems a reasonable proposition, we may ask ourselves: Does Polybius in fact offer a satisfactory answer to the question he has raised?

The Surrentinum of Pollius Felix encouraged Statius to play on the meaning of felicity. The villa's prospect extended to Naples and Limon (near Pausilypum), where an inscription of A.D. 65 already attests the name of the family. Nereids climbed the rocks to steal the fortunate proprietor's grapes, and Satyrs tumbled in the sea in the eagerness of their pursuit. A local Siren flew up to hear songs better than her own (112 f.),

hic ubi Pierias exercet Pollius artes,

seu volvit monitus quos dat Gargettius auctor,

seu nostram quatit ille chelyn, seu dissona nectit

carmina, sive minax ultorem stringit iambon.

In other words Pollius was a poet (cf. 39 f.; III. I. 66 f.), who wrote hexameters, elegiacs, and iambi; that is why Statius refers to his eloquentia and facundia, for Schanz-Hosius are wrong to include so private a person among the orators. In particular he seems to have composed didactic verse on Epicurean subjects. In a context referring to the Siren and immediately after a mention of Pierian arts, volvit monitus (co-ordinate with quatit, nectit, stringit) surely refers to something more than an interest in philosophy (thus Vollmer's commentary) or an avoidance of public life (J. H. Mozley's Loeb edition).