Those who study and teach the history of the Ancient World suffer from a great disadvantage, which we find difficult to admit even to ourselves: in a perfectly literal sense we do not know what we are talking about. Of course we can dispose of a vast range of accumulated knowledge about what we are talking about. We can compile lists of officeholders in the Roman Empire, without our evidence revealing how government worked or even whether it made any impact at all on the ordinary person; we can discuss the statuses of cities and look at the archaeological remains of some of them (or rather some parts of some of them) without having any notion of their social and economic functions, or of whether it made any real difference whether an inhabitant of the Roman provinces lived in a small city or a large village.

Dio devotes almost an entire chapter to the aquatic displays forming part of Titus' one hundred days of spectacles to celebrate the inauguration in A.D. 80 of the Flavian Amphitheatre (which he calls θέατϱον [ϰυνηγετιϰόν]). He is not without limitations as an historian; but when his testimony contains details which are difficult to explain, it is not to be dismissed out of hand.

From the moment Rome's port city of Ostia was founded, boats of all kinds were needed to take care of the traffic about the Tiber's mouth and up-river to the capital. As the centuries passed, and both Rome and Ostia grew, the number and variety of such boats increased apace.

Ancient writers and, more important, inscriptions give the names of many of these craft and of the men who specialized in operating the particular types. We hear of codicarii, lenuncularii, scapharii and so on. What were their boats like? What special service did each perform?

In the year A.D. 137 the council of the city of Palmyra in Syria agreed to revise and publish the tariff and regulations according to which dues were levied on goods brought into and exported from the city and services provided within it. This was done in order to avert in future the disputes that had arisen between the tax collectors and the merchants, tradesmen and others from whom the taxes were due, and to make the situation absolutely clear the council ordered to be inscribed and displayed in a public place both the new regulations and the old ones which they superseded. The result is one of the most important single items of evidence for the economic life of any part of the Roman empire, and, especially in the taxable services mentioned in the regulations, a vivid glimpse also of the social life of a great middle-eastern city. In ordering the publication both of the old and the new regulations, the council also caused to be preserved crucial evidence for the development of the administrative position of Palmyra in the Roman empire, the old regulations being an accumulation of pronouncements and agreements affecting the city over a period of many years. And lastly, being inscribed both in Greek and in the dialect of Aramaic used in Palmyra and its region, the inscription is an important document in the relations between Classical and local cultures in an eastern province of the empire.

The article investigates the social profile of Roman funerary epigraphy, focusing on Ostia and Pompeii, and reconsiders the predominant role of freedmen in this material. Comparing the epigraphic behaviour of decurions and freedmen, it concludes that the ‘epigraphic habit’ was not uniformly adopted throughout Roman society; different classes used inscriptions in different ways and for different purposes. The epitaphs do not therefore reflect the overall composition of the Roman population as much as the particular concerns and aspirations of individual social groups and categories within it.

Sur la Syrie romaine, nos informations sont aujourd'hui vastes, lacunaires et dispersées. Fouilles et explorations ont considérablement enrichi la documentation disponible. Archéologie, épigraphie, numismatique ont donné lieu à des publications nombreuses. Les textes littéraires antiques ont été réinterprétés. Des études d'ensemble ou de détail, au premier rang desquelles prennent place celles d'Henri Seyrig, ont renouvelé notre connaissance des faits et des événements.

Quelques pages ne peuvent être ni une synthèse ni un catalogue; un choix s'impose. Certains points, assurés depuis longtemps, permettent d'être bref; d'autres, récemment acquis ou encore en discussion, appellent de plus longs développements.

A regret, nous laisserons de côté les multiples aspects de la civilisation, ou plus exactement des rencontres de civilisations, dont l'étude rend passionnante l'histoire de la Syrie dans l'antiquité. Nous tentons seulement de fournir pour cette étude en quelque sorte un cadre et une toile de fond indispensables, en montrant comment il a fallu plus de trois siècles pour que la Syrie fût solidement intégrée à un empire romain unifié. De l'emprise romaine, nous nous attacherons à préciser les étapes d'abord, de la conquête de Pompée à la reconquête d'Aurélien, les instruments ensuite, gouverneurs, armée, organisation des finances et de la monnaie. Cette perspective explique que nous nous arrêtions chronologiquement au règne de Dioclétien, malgré le grand intérêt que présente en Syrie le IVe siècle de notre ère.

The hilltop fortress town of Qaṣr Ibrîm is situated in Egyptian Nubia, some 150 miles south of Aswan. Transformed into an island by the rising waters of Lake Nasser, it has been excavated under the aegis of the Egypt Exploration Society since 1963. Until 1976 work was under the direction of Professor J. M. Plumley (University of Cambridge); the 1978 season was led by Professor W. Y. Adams of the University of Kentucky (site director) and R. D. Anderson, honorary secretary of the E.E.S. (administrative director and epigraphist). A site that attracted Egyptian interest at least as early as the New Kingdom and formed part of the district under the special protection of Horus of Mi'am, Qasr Ibrîm was for much of its history a military stronghold, administrative centre, and place of religious pilgrimage. Occupation can be traced for some 3,500 years till the expulsion in 1811 of the ‘Bosnian’ mercenaries stationed at Ibrîm soon after 1517 by the Ottoman Selim I. Ideal conditions of preservation, only now threatened by the lake, have combined with this long history to provide an astonishing wealth of documents from a wide variety of periods.

It is a well-established view that in the century following the Hannibalic War the Italian countryside saw the expropriation of its free peasantry and the introduction of slave-staffed villas. This assumption of fact underlies much modern historical research. As one recent study put it: ‘When we compare Roman with American slavery, the growth of slavery in Roman Italy seems surprising. In the eighteenth century, slavery was used as a means of recruiting labour to cultivate newly discovered lands for which there was no adequate local labour force…. In Roman Italy…slaves were recruited to cultivate land which was already being cultivated by citizen peasants. We have to explain not only the import of slaves but the extrusion of citizens'. The usual answer has been that land was the largest single available investment for the wealth which the upper classes had derived from imperialism and was also the most socially acceptable investment. But despite postulation of a largely economic motive, the approach taken by historians has been mainly social and political. The explanation, however, and the type of approach involved owe much of their plausibility and hence popularity to what is also their greatest weakness, namely somewhat circular argumentation. The evidence on which the phenomenon and its explanation have been constructed is above all that of the literary sources, and the context in which this information is given is almost invariably political—the obvious and major instance is the Gracchan reforms. It should hardly surprise us, then, that this view of Republican agrarian history provides a neat socio-economic explanation for the political upheavals of the later Republic for which we again take our main evidence from the very same sources. Such validation is only apparent. Perhaps it speaks for the internal consistency of these literary sources; certainly it illustrates our pathetic imprisonment within the ‘facts’ and ‘interpretations’—one could say tout court the bias—of these sources. There is little to be gained from further introspective critique of this type of evidence.

Our knowledge of the pottery industry in ancient Egypt has so far been derived from sculptured reliefs showing potters at work, from a few excavations of kilns and from chemical analyses of pottery wares. Documentary evidence has now come to light in the form of three pottery leases from Oxyrhynchus, all dated to the middle of the third century a.d.

They are so closely related in subject-matter, terminology, date and the names of the contracting parties that I publish in full only the earliest and most complete (which I shall refer to as A); but I include references to the more significant details of the other two (B and C). Their importance lies in the fact that they reveal a remarkably large scale industry, and also much concerning the techniques and terminology of the pottery industry, especially the names of the clays used and the sizes of the jars.

On the life of Poseidonios there is but little reliable information elucidating the theme of this paper. The probable years of his birth and death are 135 and 51 B.C. About his background nothing is known except that Apameia in Syria was his place of origin. In view of the mixed population of that country one might surmise the presence of non-Hellenic ethnical components in his ancestry, but nothing is known about this. He was a disciple of the stoic philosopher Panaitios of Rhodes, probably at Athens; afterwards he became himself the head of the stoic school in Rhodes, where he must have acquired the citizenship, for he acted as a magistrate (‘prytanis’) and as an ambassador of the city. Strabo's praise of the exemplary social-welfare work at Rhodes (14, 653) seems to be derived from Poseidonios; in any case it is characteristic of Poseidonios' interest in social problems (see below p. 48).

The Vestal Virgins have often been the subject of close scrutiny by classical scholars. Indeed many articles have been devoted to a careful analysis of individual, apparently trivial, aspects of their legal rights, their privileges, their cult obligations and even their dress. In the same tradition I intend in this paper to consider just one element of their priestly position: their sexual status and its relationship to their sacred status. It is however an element which will be seen to have wider implications for their cult as a whole and for ancient religion in general.

My intention is to base the present summary on the discoveries which have been made in the field during the past twenty years, but obviously within the limits of the space at my disposal I can only indicate the main outlines. My main concern is with the provinces of Germania Superior and Raetia, but I shall also refer from time to time to the results of recent research in Germania Inferior. The main Map B (opposite p. 176) is supplemented by Map A (fig. 16), which shows the military sites of the Augustan-Tiberian period, and by Map C (fig. 23), which indicates the sites of the late-Roman period. Each map is supported by its own bibliographical list; these should be consulted when specific footnote-references are lacking in the text. These lists and footnotes, wherever possible, give references only to the most recent literature and have been reduced to a minimum. For the General Works to be consulted, and for the Abbreviations used, see lists below (pp. 196 ff.).

The last half-century has seen a remarkable advance in our knowledge of the magical beliefs and practices of later antiquity. But in comparison with this general progress the special branch of magic known as theurgy has been relatively neglected and is still imperfectly understood. The first step towards understanding it was taken more than fifty years ago by Wilhelm Kroll, when he collected and discussed the fragments of the Chaldaean Oracles. Since then the late Professor Joseph Bidez has disinterred and explained a number of interesting Byzantine texts, mainly from Psellus, which appear to derive from Proclus' lost commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, perhaps through the work of Proclus' Christian opponent, Procopius of Gaza; and Hopfner and Eitrem have made valuable contributions, especially in calling attention to the many common features linking theurgy with the Greco-Egyptian magic of the papyri. But much is still obscure, and is likely to remain so until the scattered texts bearing on theurgy have been collected and studied as a whole (a task which Bidez seems to have contemplated, but left unaccomplished at his death). The present paper does not aim at completeness, still less at finality, but only at (i) clarifying the relationship between Neoplatonism and theurgy in their historical development, and (ii) examining the actual modus operandi in what seem to have been the two main branches of theurgy.

The greatest legal monuments to Late Antiquity are the Code of Theodosius II, published in 438, and the Code, Digest and Institutes of Justinian, produced between 529 and 534. The men on whose shoulders the main responsibility for their compilation rested were two imperial quaestors, each backed by teams of experts. Antiochus Chuzon, quaestor in 429, saw the Theodosian Code from its inception in the year of his quaestorship through a second stage in 435 to its completion in time for the marriage of Valentinian III and Theodosius' daughter Eudoxia in October 437 and publication in the following year. century later, under Justinian, Tribonian, perhaps the most famous and powerful of all quaestors, proved his organizational and legal ability during the production of the first edition of Justinian's Code in 529 and became the moving force behind the Digest of the works of the Roman jurists, the Institutes (an update of Gaius on the principles of law) and the second edition of the Code, all of which were crammed into the five years that followed.

The willingness of the Romans to adopt foreign military practices and to modify, and hereby strengthen, legionary organization, equipment, and tactics is well-documented and thas been discussed frequently by modern scholars. One manifestation of this pragmatic approach, however, has not received the attention it deserves—viz. their attempts during the Empire to develop an effective cavalry. In this effort the Romans employed a variety of cavalrymen and cavalry tactics, but one of the most interesting and certainly one of the most enduring products was the mailed cavalry. The origin, development and success of this force—which became a prominent branch of the Roman army after the first century A.D.—cannot be analysed without some reference to earlier experiments with cavalry equipment and tactics in the Mediterranean area. The Romans did not invent the heavy-armoured horseman: on the contrary, the innovators were the Assyrians, whose monuments uniquely illustrate the evolution of cavalry technique in antiquity. Delineation of the Assyrian development is instructive, for they were required to solve many of the technical and tactical problems which later confronted the Romans. Moreover, the tactics employed and the cavalry types created by the Assyrians are remarkably similar to the later Roman. To facilitate comparison of the Assyrian and Roman experience, in the following assessment the equivalent Greek and Latin terminology has been supplied for each phase in the Assyrian development.

A bronze tablet found at Larinum (near modern Larino), in the territory of the Frentani, and published in 1978, carries part of an SC of A.D. 19 that embodies measures against public performance on stage or in the arena by members of the upper classes.

This tablet poses a variety of interrelated problems which are the concern of this paper: it is itself incomplete; there are gaps in the history of the measures taken against public performance by members of the upper classes (the offence dealt with on the tablet); it is uncertain whether that was the only offence it dealt with or whether, as the testimony of Suetonius might suggest, it catered for the sexual misconduct of matrons; and there is a paradox about the penalty voluntarily incurred by would-be performers, in that it does not seem to have differed from the original penalty for performing. The solutions to each of the problems are mutually dependent, but I shall deal with them in the above order.

In December 1979, a Latin inscription on bronze came into the hands of Professor Guillermo Fatás of the department of Ancient History in the University of Zaragoza. It had been found by an unauthorized excavator on the site of the excavations on the hill known as Cabezo de las Minas, just outside the village of Botorrita, some 20 kilometres south of Zaragoza, on the banks of the river Huerva. The tablet, 438 mm. from side to side and 208 mm. from top to bottom, had clearly been attached to a wall or some other substantial object by means of six holes, three along the upper and three along the lower edge, and has been preserved in its entirety. However, the bronze is badly warped, and although the back of the tablet is quite smooth, the inscribed face has suffered considerable damage, apparently from fire and corrosion. After preliminary cleaning, Fatás published, with exemplary speed, a notice of the find in the Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia CLXXVI (1979), 421–38, and then, after further treatment by the archaeological laboratory in the Museo Arqueologico de Barcelona, a monograph on the inscription in 1980.

The purpose of the following pages is to study the problem of debt in Rome of the Ciceronian age. A part of this argument will be uncontroversial or at least familiar; that is, the way in which Roman politicians lived in prolonged states of indebtedness. The rest of the argument will be frankly more speculative; it will suggest that Caesar's arrival in Rome in 49 B.C. provoked a crisis that was in some degree inevitable; but that Caesar in consequence undertook certain remedial measures that were of an importance for the future developments of Roman law.

In recent years the ‘rex sociusque et amicus’ of the Roman Empire—frequently, if mistakenly, called a ‘client king’—has been the subject of much study, notably by D. Braund. Although ostensibly Braund and others are discussing the position and role of these kings on all the Roman frontiers, they concentrate in the main on those in the east. This is perhaps inevitable, since literary and epigraphic evidence abounds for the east, while it is scarce and often ambiguous for the west. Unfortunately direct comparison between east and west is meaningless: conditions which can be seen to apply to Rome's relations with her neighbours in the east cannot always be transferred to the west. Unfortunately direct comparison between east and west is meaningless: conditions which can be seen to apply to Rome's relations with her neighbours in the east cannot always be transferred to the west. In Greece and Asia Minor Rome was dealing with developed societies who could be integrated into a Roman administrative system; in the west, on the other hand, the peoples living beyond the frontiers, and indeed within them, were culturally less well-developed; here Rome had, on the whole, to negotiate with constantly changing tribal chiefs rather than with established monarchies.