A recent study of the Theodosian Code, which includes the identification of constitutions composed by Ausonius (A.D. 375 to 377) and Nicomachus Flavianus (A.D. 388 to 390) as quaestors prompts a fresh interpretation of the Historia Augusta and its author, whom I shall call Scriptor. On this interpretation his work is subtler than is generally conceded. The enigmatic series of biographies meant, and was intended to mean, different things to different people: to the vulgar it was an entertaining and often salacious series of lives interspersed with jokes; to the author an enjoyable exercise in teasing others and not least himself; to the insider a set of puzzles behind which lurked personal and political allusions, but also a reflection on certain political themes: the role of the Roman senate and urban prefecture, the importance of regular administration, the overriding need to defend Gaul and the west.

Ancient historians must be thankful for what they get; but it seems a pity that the fall of Corfinium in mid-February, 49 B.C., should be the best recorded episode in Roman warfare, so far as contemporary documents are concerned. Regrets apart, however, the affair is of interest, psychological and dramatic as well as austerely military; and I think the relevant letters in Cicero's correspondence will repay further investigation. ‘quae qui legat non multum desideret historiam contextam’—if he reads perceptively.

O. E. Schmidt arranged these letters, which take up a large part of the eighth book Ad Atticum, into a narrative, and I do not propose to do that work over again. My purpose is confined to points on which I think I have something new to say. But it may be well to begin with a brief reminder of the whereabouts of the principal persons involved.

The inscription here published was communicated to me in 1956 by Mr. L. Benaki of Alexandria who saw some of the fragments in early summer of that year in a dealer's shop in Alexandria and was subsequently able, by dint of considerable perseverance, to recover a few more pieces. Mr. Benaki assembled the pieces himself and had them photographed, and the excellent photograph (fig. 10) is the source of the text given below. He has also put me in his debt by verifying a few points and sending me paper rubbings of individual fragments where the photograph left the reading in doubt. The stone itself is now, thanks to Mr. Benaki, in Alexandria Museum.

By the beginning of the second century B.C. Italy was developing from federal conditions towards full social unity. Vital political issues were involved in these social changes. Earlier the local autonomy allowed by Rome had made the Roman domination in foreign policy and military organisation seem less pressing to the Italians, and in any event the Roman policy in the Gallic and Punic Wars had been closely connected with the immediate security of Italy. Now, in the common interest, Rome was extending her control gradually to Italian affairs where these were no longer purely local in their effect, and in foreign policy the overseas campaigns in East and West offered less obvious advantage to the Italians. The confederation began to lose its federal character. This was a natural development, due to its very success; but it called for a conscious response of statesmanship. As Roman and Italian politics came to coincide, the Senate needed to adjust the balance of rights and representation by an extension of Roman citizenship.

The discovery of an oak board from the box-rim of a de-watering device at the Dolaucothi mine is reported by O. Davies in Arch. Camb. XCI (1936), 51–7. An examination of the specimen, which is in the National Museum of Wales, in the light of parallels from the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere led to the accompanying attempt at a reconstruction of the original design. The Dolaucothi wheel is the only British representative of its type, and, curiously enough, the surviving board is the only definitely Roman object ever recorded from within the workings at Dolaucothi, as opposed to the general neighbourhood of the mine.

Geography is a fundamental element of ancient ethnography, yet the account of the environment in Tacitus' Germania is notably sparse. Standard elements of geographic description are absent, or are presented in restricted (and subversive) ways. This paper examines the presentation and structuring of Germanic spaces against a backdrop of contrasting contemporary geographic writings, and considers the implications of Tacitus' rejection of geographic norms.

This paper presents a new manuscript of part of the Historia Augusta from Erlangen, which vindicates a more than century-old hypothesis by E. Patzig: that the 1489 Venice edition of the work is textually valuable. On this basis, and building on the recent work of R. Modonutti, I present five new passages that are not printed in modern editions of the HA, six lacunose passages restored, and propose that the lost Murbach manuscript is the source. Armed with this new evidence, I re-examine the question of the great lacuna between the Lives of Maximus and Balbinus and the Lives of the Two Valerians, showing that it is a codicological — and not authorial — feature.

This essay examines the representation of the city of Rome in Martial's Epigrams, and specifically, his references to urban topography. The city is an insistent and vivid presence in Martial's Epigrams to a degree unparalleled in Roman poetry. He fashions a Rome that is more relentlessly sordid, irregular and jagged in texture, and overtly dissonant in its juxtapositions than the literary cities of his poetic predecessors. This new urban emphasis is not only a game of literary one-upmanship. Martial's urban poetics takes shape in the context of renewed attention to the city and monumental building under the Flavians.

There has been a tendency among some modern scholars to regard the constitutional position of Augustus as of negligible importance. This is a natural reaction from the excessive legalism of Mommsen and his school, and has had valuable results in elucidating extra-constitutional elements in the position of the first Princeps, such as his outstanding auctoritas and his huge clientela. I do not think however that we can lightly brush aside the constitutional basis of his power. I do not wish to suggest that the restored Republic was intended to be genuine, or even that Augustus meant to share his power with the Senate and People: never for one moment did he part with his control over the great bulk of the legions. But I would suggest he would not have created the elaborate facade of Republican legitimacy, and moreover have subjected his original scheme to at least one radical revision, unless there had been some important element in the State to which the constitution mattered, and mattered so profoundly that its dissatisfaction would endanger the stability of the régime.

The distinction which is drawn in this article between Appian's Ίλλυριῶν τοὺς Άτιντανούς (Illyr. 7) and Strabo's Ήπειρῶται δ’ εἰσι… ‘Ατιντᾶνες (326) is of both regional and general importance.

If the Atintani were an Illyrian tribe, they lived north of the Via Egnatia; for they were not one of the Illyrian tribes south of that line which were listed by Strabo (326). If the Atintanes were an Epirotic tribe, they lived inland of the Epirote coast which was defined as extending from the Ceraunian Mountains to the mouth of the Ambraciote Gulf by Strabo (324). The two tribes, then, were very far apart. However, if the two tribes were one and the same, as many scholars have supposed, and if the Illyrian label and the habitat in Epirus are applied to the single (fused) tribe, then one at least of the Epirote tribes was Illyrian. This second alternative appeals particularly strongly to writers in Albania, who regard themselves as descendants of the Illyrians and like to argue that the present border of southern Albania, which runs through the centre of ancient Epirus, was in part at least the border of the ancient Illyrians. Thus the regional issue involves the pattern of Illyrian settlement, the extent to which there was an Illyrian element in the Epirotic tribes, and the Albanian claim that their ancestors lived in North Epirus.

This paper has been written in connexion with Sir William Ramsay's Oxford Seminar for Historical Research in the Eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire. It is the result of an examination of Cicero's correspondence during his journey to Cilicia in the summer and autumn of the year 51; and while there is probably nothing contained in it which has not already been the subject of comment before, yet the conclusions arrived at respecting the precise dates and details of Cicero's movements will be found to differ in some considerable degree from the estimates of previous editors or commentators, especially those of O. E. Schmidt, the latest scholar, so far as I know, who has published a detailed reckoning of the times and rates of the journey in question.

The following inscriptions from the Roman colony of Antioch in Pisidia, which form part of the fruits of expeditions made in 1912 and 1913, have been kindly communicated to me by Sir W. M. Ramsay. I am indebted to him and to Mr. J. G. C. Anderson for helping me to elucidate several of the points discussed below, and I have also to thank Mr. W. M. Calder for suggestions made at a later stage.

Vasa murrina are a type of costly vessel mentioned by various ancient authors of the last century B.C. and later. The best account of them is given by the elder Pliny, who had ample opportunity of seeing and using these vessels, though his description of them is difficult to reconcile with any known product, natural or artificial, of the ancient or modern world. References in other authorities, of whom the earliest is Propertius, add little to the information given by Pliny.

Twenty years ago the publication of the Augustan edicts from Cyrene (now SEG 9, 8) was widely believed to have brought final proof that, as Dio asserts (53, 32, 5), Augustus held an imperium which was maius than that of other proconsuls and so enabled him with constitutional propriety to intervene in a senatorial province like Crete and Cyrene. But it may still be thought that the debates which led to this conclusion left certain unnecessary obscurities. If so, the present may perhaps be an appropriate time for an attempt to remove them, because the whole issue has lately been reopened by Mr. Michael Grant in his notable study of the base-metal coinages of the Roman world from 49 B.C. to A.D. 14.

As his is the most recent treatment of the matter, and one which will call for close consideration, it may be well to begin by noticing his conclusions, although the purpose of what is said below does not include any general discussion of the imperium conferred on Augustus. He writes (p. 412) that ‘Caesar's dictatorial imperium which began in 49 B.C. was an imperium maius’, and that ‘an imperium maius … controlled the provinciae of others, and subordinated imperia to an imperium’; and consistently with this he goes on to describe an imperium maius as ‘the revolutionary element which permitted the un-Republican subordination of imperia to an imperium’ (p. 422).

Much recent criticism of Roman love elegy, especially Propertian love elegy, has been concerned with the exposure of elegy's ego and puella as poetic constructions whose ‘partially realistic’ characteristics and actions serve as metaphorical representations of the poet's writing practice and poetic ideals. As Duncan Kennedy has pointed out, however, this discourse of representation has already threatened to create its own limitations of applicability, as it privileges the ‘partial realism’ of love elegy's first-person narratives, in which an authorial male narrator (ego) writes of his female subject (puella), at the expense of the more openly unrealistic representational strategies of works such as Ovid's Heroides and Fasti or, the more immediate concern of this article, the fourth book of Propertius' elegies.

It was probably in the agora at Athens and possibly in the seventieth Olympiad (i.e. 499–496 B.C.) that a wooden grandstand collapsed while a play by Pratinas was being performed. The Athenians responded quite sensibly to this disaster by moving their dramatic performances to the precinct of Dionysus Eleuthereus, where the audience could be more safely accommodated on the south slope of the acropolis. Or so it appears: no fact of this early period in ancient theatre history is ever entirely secure. By the time of Aeschylus, however, what we call the Theatre of Dionysus was certainly the place where Athenian tragedies and comedies were performed, and the facility grew in size and grandeur along with the festivals it served. One result of this continuity has been a great boon to the performance-based criticism of Greek drama.

The first part of this paper looks briefly at Greek representations of foreigners and the first individualized Greek portraits and the connections between them. The second part looks at Roman Republican portraits and the problem of the origins of their style and suggests that they should be seen in a historical and psychological context as a Greek reaction to a new group of foreigners of special concern to Greek artists and Greeks in general.