The west coast of Italy between the gulf of Spezia, once the harbour of Luna, and the bay of Gaeta does not at the present day offer a single safe anchorage for ships of any size, and even in early days, when ships were smaller, its harbours and landing places must have seemed very deficient. The cities of south-western Etruria had indeed developed a flourishing seaborne trade by the seventh century B.C. when they were importing freely from Greece, but the ports of their two leading towns, Tarquinii and Caere, which seem to have been at Graviscae and Pyrgi, were merely roadsteads. Strabo, in his summary of the ports along this littoral, mentions none between Monte Argentario and Ostia, and none again between Ostia and the bay of Gaeta. Such ports as there ever were, are of later origin. Centumcellae, the modern Civitavecchia, is a foundation of Trajan; the harbour of Antium, such as it was, was due to Nero, and the port of Terracina is the work of Pius. Even Ostia itself was in Strabo's time deemed a bad harbour and the Tiber estuary hard to enter. Good or bad, however, it was the one approach to a natural harbour on all this coast.

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).

Nobody who has worked in the field of late Republican and early Imperial Rome can fail to be aware how remarkably little archaeological evidence we have of any specifically Roman presence in the provinces of which Rome was in political and military control during the last century of the Republic. In the east, where she was faced with a civilization older and richer than her own, this is intelligible enough. But for the student of the spread of Roman institutions and ideas in the west the gap is embarrassing. In Roman Britain we have no difficulty whatever in identifying the Gallic precedents for the settlement that followed the Roman conquest. But what lay behind the Caesarian and Augustan settlement in Gaul itself? In terms of the recent history of the area it would be reasonable to expect that in the south, at any rate, it should have been rooted in local Republican Roman practice; and yet there is remarkably little evidence of any such roots in the surviving remains. Much the same is true of Spain and Africa. Why is this? Is it that the impact of the early Imperial settlement was so strong that it swept away all trace of what had gone before? Or is it simply that the Republican Roman presence in these territories was not of a character to leave any substantial mark on the archaeological record?

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.

The following stones, like no. 230 published in Part IV of this article (J.R.S. XVII, 1927, p. 49 ff.), were seen by W. M. Calder and C. W. M. Cox in the course of a hurried visit to the Upper Tembris Valley in July, 1924. The MS. of Part V was completed in March, 1926; in the revision of the proof-sheets we have been privileged to use the notes, impressions and photographs made by C. W. M. Cox and A. Cameron in the course of a systematic survey of the Tembris Valley monuments in May, 1926. For the notes on nos. 253 and 254 Calder and Cox are jointly responsible, for those on nos. 232 and 233 Cox, and for the remainder Calder. The letters C. Co. indicate the copyist.

In his play Dido Queen of Carthage, compassing Troy's fall, Aeneas' wanderings, and Dido's passion (with the curtain falling not on one corpse but on three), Marlowe makes his Dido say as she begs for the tale of Troy:

‘Many tales go of that city's fall,

And scarcely do agree upon one point:

Some say, Antenor did betray the town;

Others report, 'twas Sinon's perjury;

But all in this, that Troy is overcome,

And Priam dead.’

Few monuments of Ancient Rome can command more interest and fascination than the Marble Plan of the city of Rome. Early in the third century this colossal map was put up in panels on the wall of a building in the Forum Pacis at the behest of the Emperor Septimius Severus or his Praefectus Urbi. It is a unique document not only because no other plan of a major Roman city survives, but also because the city which it depicts is Rome, at the height of her development as the capital of the world. Although only a fraction of the Plan has come down to us, these fragments are invaluable for our knowledge of individual buildings as well as of the city as a whole; hence its appeal to students of architecture and urbanistics, of archaeology and history.

This paper draws on recent advances in our knowledge (much of it owed to the proliferation of military diplomas) and a new analytical method to quantify the number of soldiers and their children who received Roman citizenship between 14 and 212 c.e. Although significant uncertainties remain, these can be quantified and turn out to be small relative to the overall scale of enfranchisement. The paper begins by reviewing what is known about grants of citizenship to soldiers, with particular attention to the remaining uncertainties, before presenting a quantitative model of the phenomenon. The total number of beneficiaries was somewhere in the region 0.9–1.6 million — significantly lower than previous estimates have suggested. It also emerges that the rate of enfranchisement varied substantially over time, in line with significant changes in manpower, length of service (and hence the number of recruits and discharged veterans) and the rate of family formation among soldiers. The Supplementary Material available online (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435819000662) contains a database of military diplomas (Supplementary Appendix 1), a mathematical model of enfranchisement implemented in MS Excel (Supplementary Appendix 2), a description of the model (Supplementary Appendix 3A) and a derivation of the model of attrition across service cohorts in Fig. 6 (Supplementary Appendix 3B).

‘As intellectuals and academics we are constantly engaging in projects of representation, but in the dominant epistemologies that guide our work, our role as representers is effaced’.

‘At the heart of the issue lies a fundamental insistence on the contextualised nature of all forms of knowledge, meaning and behaviour. There is a further recognition of the partial and partisan edge to inquiry, theory construction, and scholarly (re)presentation, as well as an explicit acknowledgement of the importance of the author's biography in this creative process’.

The assertions of two modern geographers, Katz and Merrifield, are symptomatic of an underlying, but persistent, debate within their field of study. To what degree should academic prose aim at impersonality? The discipline of modern geography, perhaps more than any other academic subject at pains constantly to justify and redefine itself, has taken on this problem, formulated its history, and posited some solutions.

The recent adjustment to Palladas’ dates necessitates a fresh look at an old question: Should Constantinople be considered the proper setting for some of his epigrams? Allusions in a few poems to statuary and to buildings, and one ekphrasis of a coin, suggest not only that he was in Constantinople at some point during his life (as many others have thought), but also that he was there quite close to the time of the city's foundation. These epigrams yield precious (if also enigmatic) clues to a murky period in the history of the Eastern capital.

This essay examines the evidence for the Domitianic ‘Arae Incendii Neroniani’, a presumed set of monumental altars dedicated to Vulcan in fulfilment of a vow dating back to the Neronian Fire of a.d. 64. A close reading of the text of the dedicatory inscription creates a framework for exploring the larger historical and cultural context of these monuments, which offer a significant illustration of Flavian rhetoric concerning Rome's post-Neronian transformation. Reaffirming Julio-Claudian notions of civic identity, collective memory, and the ruler's privileged relationship with the gods, the Arae also constitute a conspicuous form of posthumous reproach to Nero.

Of all the Ptolemaic kings and queens of Egypt none met so intensely dramatic a fate as the last Cleopatra, and of none are the closing days more minutely described. In these circumstances it is all the more remarkable that there is no surviving record, even approximate, of the date of her death, nor, so far as I am aware, has any modern historian seriously attempted to determine it.

We may commence our investigation with the capture of Alexandria by Octavian. The date of this event is known from one literary source, Orosius (VI, 19, 16), who probably derived his information from Livy, and one inscription, the Fasti Antiates (CIL 12, p. 248= x, 6638). Both give the date as 1 August, and this may be taken as correct.

English scholars, loyal in their homage to Trajan's sound common sense in all matters of administration, never weary of quoting and approving, though not always without reserve, a verdict which that emperor is said to have passed on the first five years of Nero's principate. Abroad this verdict seems to have received comparatively little attention, but in England it is so constantly repeated in histories, large and small, and in reviews, long and short, that it has obtained the currency of a proverb, and its truth has almost become an article of faith. Trajan, we are told, often declared that the first five years of Nero's rule far excelled the government of all other emperors. There is a notable unanimity in the form of the statement.

This passage is usually taken to be a description, in however informal terms, of the constitutional position which Augustus (Octavian) held in the years immediately after the end of the Triumvirate. I propose to argue that in reality it has a different meaning.

The facts are fairly simple. The second period of the Triumvirate ended with the end of 33 B.C. After that date, it seems that Octavian did not use the title Triumvir, though he probably considered his extraordinary triumviral powers as still running till he formally laid them down in 28–27 B.C. The consulship began in 33 when Octavian was consul for a few hours on 1st January. He was consul again for the whole of 31 and for all the following years continuously till midsummer, 23 ; then he finally resigned the office. The question of the tribunicia potestas is more difficult. According to Appian, Octavian received the tribunicia potestas in 36 B.C. According to Dio, a vote was then passed “that neither in act or word should any violence be offered him, and that in the contrary case (that is, if he were assaulted) the assailant should be liable as in the case of assaulting a tribune.” The Monumentum Ancyranum adds what may be a third statement to the same effect. In a mutilated passage in chapter x it records, without giving a date, that Augustus was made sacrosanct, and that he received the tribunicia potestas for life. A further statement appears in Dio (li, 19, 6) to the effect that in 30 B.C., just after Actium, Octavian received the tribunician power for life, and that this power extended even a little way beyond the pomerium. Otherwise there is no mention of the tribunician power as used by Octavian (Augustus), till he began to reckon the dates of his reign by it in 23 B.C. (Dio, liii, 17 and 32).

Two important recent studies have independently tried to show that Polybius was consistent in his use of accurate Olympiad chronology in his introductory books I and II. Werner uses his demonstration as a means to his reconstruction of the early years of the Roman Republic, Pédech uses his as part of his attempt to show that Polybius, throughout the whole of his work, consistently used accurate Olympiad dating. As the arguments of each are independent and have a different ultimate purpose, it will eventually be necessary to discuss each separately. But before starting the discussion it is important to make the purpose of this article clear. The view under discussion seems to me to be fundamentally misconceived and the arguments used to support it either inconclusive or erroneous. Whatever the case may be elsewhere in his work, I can find no indication that Polybius, in his two introductory books, consistently used any system of chronology apart from that which he was able to find in his various sources. The few Olympiad dates which he does give refer without exception to the beginning or end of series of events, and are given in the form of synchronisms as an attempt to make his terminal points fixed and comprehensible to his readers.

The famous Varangian corps of mercenary soldiers in the service of the emperors of Byzantium is well known in its earlier days to have been recruited from the Scandinavian north. Forging their way from their own inhospitable lands the Northmen, first of all from Sweden, reached the Volga and the lands even to. the south of the Caspian; later by the ‘East Way’, called also the ‘Varangian Way’, they came down through Russia by way of the Dnieper and the Black Sea to Constantinople, first as pirates, then as traders, and finally as the most trusted guards of the imperial person. Later again they ventured on the all-sea route, the ‘West Way’, and also opened a path across Europe, either over the Alps or by way of Provence, and so through Italy: this was the ‘Southern Way’, otherwise called the ‘Way by Rome’ But in the eleventh century, in the first half of which Harald Hardrada, the most famous of all the Varangians, was in the imperial service, there was a certain change; recruits began to come increasingly from England.

The first actual mention of the English name seems to be in a bull issued by the Emperor Alexios in 1088 to Christodoulos, the Abbot of the Monastery on Patmos.

‘An opportune discovery–so opportune that forgery might be suspected, though the provisions of the will do not perhaps utterly pass belief.’ So Syme, judiciously; and the remarks that follow cannot be claimed to settle anything, but merely to draw attention to one feature of those provisions which seems to have escaped notice (or at any rate specific mention), and which may have a certain weight in the scales as between genuineness and forgery.