For a space of forty years, from 98 to 138, few praefecti occur on named attestation. In fact only six : two registered in isolation, four in collegiate pairs. Apart from seasons of disturbance, the holders of this useful and necessary office tend to evade notice in written history.

It was not until 2 B.C. that Caesar Augustus appointed commanders of the Praetorian cohorts, so Cassius Dio states. The occasion might excite curiosity: perhaps after the grave crisis in the autumn. The historian adds no comment. He had previously put emphasis on the dangers inherent in a single prefect. Not perhaps clear at first—and Seius Strabo was in sole charge when Augustus died. Named associate with his parent by Tiberius Caesar, Aelius Seianus managed almost at once to have him sent away to be governor of Egypt.

The site of Choma has been a long-standing puzzle. Its approximate location in the north of Lycia, in the general neighbourhood of Elmalı, has long been known; the ancient notices leave no doubt on this score. But for the exact position no real clue had hitherto been found. The following inscriptions were discovered, copied and photographed by Harrison in 1963, and were collated, and squeezes taken, by Bean in 1965. They resolve the problem definitively and satisfactorily, including as they do not only tombstones and other monuments erected by persons expressly designated as Chomatitae, but also an honorific decree of the Council and People of Choma.

The inscriptions are in and around the villages of Hacımusalar and Sarılar, which lie close together about 13 km. south-west of Elmalı, on the way to Gömbe, the ancient Comba (Fig. 3). About 1 km. south-east of Hacımusalar and east of Sarılar is a large prehistoric mound (hüyük), conspicuous in the dead-flat plain (Pl. I, 1).

It is universally assumed that the peregrine praetor from the outset had jurisdiction (a) in lawsuits between peregrines, and (b) in lawsuits between a peregrine and a citizen. This view is indeed supported by Pomponius, provided we regard him as saying that the second praetor was called peregrine ‘because his jurisdiction was mostly between peregrines’, i.e. mostly in case (a). On this rendering the author would imply that the praetor in question always had jurisdiction in case (b) as well. However, for one thing, the words ‘quod plerumque inter peregrinos ius dicebat’ conceivably mean:‘because his main business was jurisdiction between peregrines ‘—sc, though he was often used by the Senate for entirely different purposes.

Modern assessments of city population in the Roman provinces of Africa have been based on notions about the numbers that a given area of land is likely to have supported; upon estimates of the size of the piped water-supply; upon comparisons between ancient and modern city areas; and upon inferences from the density of surviving Roman remains. Reference has also sometimes been made to the seating capacity of theatres or amphitheatres. While each of these methods can suggest loose probabilities, none of them provides firm or precise information.

How, in books of Roman poetry, are poems related to each other and to the book as a whole? The question is approached with divergent preconceptions. On the one hand, many assume that the design of a book will be symmetrical, and should be represented in a diagram. In such a scheme, every connection must be plausible—which is never the case; and it must be supposed that ancient readers were given to making diagrams, through which alone such symmetry can be perceived. It is also remarkable how seldom such schemes illuminate the most salient questions about the books. Thus in Book I of Propertius it is the last three poems whose presence most needs to be explained. Skutsch detaches them from his scheme and refers to them as a ‘coda or superstructure’.

Modern writers have remarked with surprise upon the absence of a postal service under the Roman Republic. The fact that Latin literature makes no mention of any such service would not, taken alone, be sufficient to prove that it did not exist; but Suetonius in his account of the institution of the Imperial post by Augustus speaks as if it were a new departure in the history of Roman administration, and it is clear from many incidental references in Cicero's correspondence that in his time there was no government postal service which an official could make use of. A provincial governor sent his despatches by one of his own lictors or orderlies (statores) or by the tabellarii of the tax-farming companies, there being no other means of transmission available. “Your orderly has brought me two letters from you,” writes Cicero, then governor of Cilicia, to Sallustius, proquaestor of Syria. “I have thought it advisable to send my orderlies and lictors to you with despatches,” he writes about the same time to his own quaestor.

It is commonly assumed that the vigintivirate and the military tribunate, held in that order, were necessary preliminaries, except in the case of adlection, to a senatorial career in the ‘cursus honorum’ established by Augustus. There is, however, reason to believe that certain variations occurred, of sufficient number to warrant consideration as a class, and as evidence for social distinctions among the candidates. The significance of the vigintivirate in determining the future career of senators has already been brought to notice by Professor Eric Birley. The ever-increasing powers of the emperors in the creation and advancement of senators were of great importance in the political and social transformation of that body in the first century of the Empire. This paper is concerned with careers of the Julio-Claudian period, the most relevant from this point of view. The use of later inscriptions, however, as illustrations, could not be excluded.

Antiquarian research in the Renaissance period was unfortunately not always free from the reproach of deliberate falsification. It seems strange, at first sight, that the amount of genuine material discovered did not suffice to occupy the minds of archaeologists, and that they should have found it necessary to add to it by purely gratuitous inventions. But, given a certain knowledge of the subject, it was easy for a fertile brain and a facile pen to fabricate inscriptions, coins, plans of buildings, etc., whether in order to prove a favourite theory or to attain an ideal completeness which could not be attained by more prosaic, though more honest, means.

Building on recent scholarship concerning the ‘colonate of the late Roman Empire’, and focusing in particular upon the vocabulary used in the legal sources, this paper offers three propositions. First, the colonatus of the legislation was not a legal shorthand for the ‘colonate’ of modern historiographical debate. Second, the coloni of the legislation were not a discrete group of individuals subjected to a definable, articulated set of restrictions. Finally, it is not colonatus but rather the origo and the link it created between individuals and the land which is the key to the tax system of the late Roman Empire.

The historical record of the Roman civil wars gives an unusual prominence to C. Asinius Pollio (76 b.c.–a.d. 4). There is more than one reason for the anomaly, not the least being that Pollio was himself largely responsible for creating that record in the form of his celebrated Historiae of the civil wars. It was this work which provided the authors we read — Appian, Dio, Plutarch, and Suetonius — with their major source for the period, and a characteristic feature of the work, as these later texts attest, was the emphasis which Pollio placed on his presence on the scene and immediate, eyewitness knowledge of much of the historical material he narrated.

And yet Pollio had earned for himself at least a small place in history, independently of his historiographical activity. After the death of Caesar he played an important role in the manoeuvring which brought Mark Antony to power (three letters to Cicero survive from the period), and held the consulship in 40 B.C. (cf. Ecl. 4.1–17). Whilst consul he acted as co-sponsor of the pact of Brundisium between Antony and Octavian, and subsequently celebrated a triumph over the Parthini, a Balkan tribe.

Throughout its history, Latin Satire was engaged in acts of impersonation and masquerade. While written by and for members of an élite and highly literate class, it continually affected a low style in metre and diction, an aggressive engagement with or pointed withdrawal from contemporary social realities, and the partial or wholesale adoption of an authorial voice at some rungs below the highest of society. All this is well-known and relatively uncontroversial. What is also well-known is the way in which Roman satirists, especially Juvenal, were engaged in a dialogue with epic and other literary genres (including earlier satire). What is less accepted is that Roman satirists, not least Horace, were equally engaged in a dialogue with other non-literary or ‘subliterary’ traditions of verse. I shall be arguing that a primary intertext for the definition of Horace's poetry and poetic persona was the rich and varied contemporary tradition of popular invective poetry. I suggest that he is attempting to erect a cordon sanitaire between the genre of satire and these ‘unofficial’ or ‘folk’ forms, to segregate elite and popular culture, and to define his poetry as what we may anachronistically call literature.

This conflict has for moderns a perennial interest, second only to that which is excited by the Peloponnesian war. The superior attractiveness of the struggle between the Greek cities, as felt by readers in general, is a supreme testimony to the genius of Thucydides; since in intrinsic importance for the world's history, his theme is far inferior to that which was handled by Polybius and by Livy. At the end of the Peloponnesian war few men can have foreseen the rise of the Macedonian kings, to which it contributed; when Second Punic war finished, it was obvious that the ultimate control by Rome of the whole area of ancient civilisation was assured. For those who care less for the form of historical records than for the value of events, the second and decisive long-drawn duel between Romans and Carthaginians must ever possess a fascination which belongs to few other periods in the history of mankind. There is a continual flow of publications dealing with its incidents and its manifold aspects.

The literary genre of the Res Gestae has always been a source of perplexity. Over a century ago Mommsen compared efforts to categorize it with attempts to pin a literary label upon Dante's Divina Commedia or Goethe's Faust. That did not prevent his arguing that the work was a ‘Rechenschaftsbericht’, a formal report of Augustus' achievements as princeps. Nowadays it can perhaps be accepted that the document has a multiplicity of models and many purposes, all of them propagandist in nature. However, the complexity of the work is even now insufficiently appreciated. It is, for instance, well accepted that world conquest is a primary and pervading theme, and Augustus' imperial ideology has been well documented and discussed in recent years. But world conquest suggests another theme, that of apotheosis. The two motifs are inextricably linked in Hellenistic literature after Alexander, and the linkage was inherited by Roman authors, not least by the poets of the Augustan age. As for Augustus himself, his propaganda owes much to the Hellenistic ruler cult. His victory issues after Actium show a startling similarity to the famous tetradrachms commemorating Demetrius Poliorcetes' naval triumph at Cypriot Salamis; he adopted the same pose, and assimilated himself to Neptune, just as Demetrius had recalled Poseidon. Augustus may have been directly influenced by Demetrius' issues. He was possibly aware of the divine honours which the Athenians had conferred upon Demetrius a few months before his victory, and made similar claims in his own right. But the relationship was probably more indirect — Augustus used motifs which had become familiar during the previous centuries, emphasizing simultaneously the protection of the gods and his own godlike status. Demetrius' issue helped inspire the general pattern of thought, but there was no direct imitation.

Comparable to the legates who govern the consular provinces of Caesar, and standing at parity or sometimes above them, the high equestrian dignitaries, by their careers and promotions, serve to explain how a whole system worked. They also illuminate a process. Enormous benefit accrues to the study of social history. The men themselves can seldom be grasped as personalities, given the dearth of literary evidence, nor do they often impinge on great events.

Est postridie decretum in curia, populi ipsius Romani, et eorum qui ex municipiis convenerant admonitu, ne quis de caelo servaret, ne quis moram ullam adferret. Pro Sestio, 129.

Time and again Cicero abused Clodius for having, in his tribunate, both rescinded the lex Aelia Fufia of 153 B.C. and also destroyed the censorship. The ‘destruction of the censorship’ was, in fact, a seemingly just and reasonable bill to the effect that for the future no senator might be expelled from the Senate unless, after he had been given the opportunity of answering the charges against him, both censors were in agreement over his expulsion. It would, therefore, be reasonable to suppose that the ‘rescinding of the lex Aelia Fufia’, too, was far less drastic a measure than Cicero's vituperative language implies, even if there was not, as there is, abundant evidence in the years following Clodius' tribunate that the lex Aelia Fufia remained on the statute book.

This paper examines the language of power and authority in the Italian Alps, after the Roman pacification of the area in 14 b.c. The focus of the examination is an arch set up at Segusio to Augustus by a local dynast named Cottius, which allows us to consider how the incorporation of the region into the Roman Empire was perceived and presented from a ‘local’ point of view, and how we might use our interpretations to construct ideas of identity and power relationships integral to early imperial provincial administration.

The following list of the colonies planted in this period can be made (a name in italics indicates that the colony was of the Latin type):

194 Puteoli, Salernum, Buxentum, Liternum, Volturnum, Sipontum, Tempsa, Croton (Livy xxxiv, 45; cf. xxxii, 29, 3). ca. 194 Pyrgi (see below, p. 28).

193 Copia (Livy xxxv, 9, 7; cf. xxxiv, 53, 1).

192 Vibo Valentia (Livy xxxv, 40, 5; cf. xxxiv, 53, 1).

189 Bononia (Livy xxxvii, 57, 7; cf. 47, 2).

184 Pisaurum, Potentia (Livy xxxix, 44, 10).

183 Mutina, Parma, Saturnia (Livy xxxix, 55).

181 Gravisca (Livy xl, 29, 1), Aquileia (Livy xl, 34, 2; cf. xxxix 55, 4).

177 Luna (Livy xli, 13, 4).