Perhaps the most remarkable product of Rhenish glass-furnaces during the Imperial period is the well-known fabric bearing polychrome or monochrome applied decoration. These are the glasses termed by German archaeologists ‘Schlangenfaden’ or ‘snake-thread’ glass. They are of various shapes and were produced in great numbers from the last quarter of the second to the fourth century A.D., probably largely, if not entirely, at Cologne.

Few mythological names are more familiar than that of Vulcan; and few cults present more puzzling difficulties than his. I propose to review the chief points connected with this god and one or two of the main theories concerning him, ending by putting forward the view which seems to me the most likely.

What may be called the orthodox theory concerning him is to be found in the works of the late Professor Wissowa, and is as follows. He was a genuinely Roman god, a deus indiges. His department was fire, considered, not as the flame of the hearth or of the smith's forge, but as the destroying element, pure and simple. Hence, he was regularly worshipped outside the city walls, or at all events outside the pomerium. For this reason the Volcanal at Rome was at one end of the Forum, outside the original Palatine settlement and the ‘Servian’ city ; the later temple of the god, of date about 540/214, was in the Circus Flaminius ; perhaps also at Perusia he was worshipped outside the walls ; at all events, the fire of 714/40, which destroyed all the rest of the city, spared his temple and, according to Cassius Dio, that of Juno likewise.

Ancient portraits are best interpreted with their busts or statue bodies and in the contexts in which they were set up and experienced, but such fully preserved monuments are not common. This article is the first publication of a new late antique portrait from Aphrodisias in Caria that has a statue body, an inscribed base, and a precise ancient setting. It was set up in honour of a provincial governor named Oecumenius, and his chlamydatus statue is now the most complete example around which others of this characteristic type of late antique statue can be understood. The monument also has wider connections outside Aphrodisias and raises interesting problems of historical interpretation in the period around a.d. 400.

This paper allows Ovid to shape a reading of Martial, and Martial to shape a reading of Ovid. It proceeds through close readings of some 40 epigrams, and is organized into three large sections respectively addressing receptions in Martial of Ovid's poetry of elegiac love (I), of exile (II), and of myth (III). The final section offers sustained discussion of Martial's early Apophoreta (Book 14) and Liber Spectaculorum. Issues addressed include genre, intertextuality, sexual vocabulary and euphemism, exile as a figure for status anxiety, the metapoetics of book production, ecphrastic movement between art and epigrammatic text, and the aesthetics of myth in the Roman arena.

This paper establishes a new date for the publication of Suetonius’ Illustrious Men through allusions to Suetonius’ Virgil in Pliny, Letters 5.10. These allusions are part of a much wider network of allusions, both within this particular letter and more generally in Pliny's Book 5, that revolves around the theme of unpublished writings. It is a partial or full publication of the Illustrious Men that probably led to Suetonius’ award of the ius trium liberorum in a.d. 110, and he may now have published all of the Caesars before his dismissal by Hadrian in a.d. 122.

If the field of ancient economy is a battlefield, arguments based on pottery research certainly belong with the best of the weapons. Among the various kinds of pottery serving ancient historians as sources, red-gloss pottery (terra sigillata) manufactured in several parts of the Roman Empire plays an outstanding role. This special kind of pottery bears inscriptions in the form of stamps referring to persons involved in its production. In combination with the archaeological contexts of stamp finds, such as excavated sites of production, transportation, storage, and consumption, these inscriptions enable us to gain an insight into the structures of production and distribution. An additional reason why Roman red-gloss pottery is of very great interest to students of the ancient economy is that it was mass-produced, and exported to all parts of the Empire. Results of research in this field are, therefore, frequently used as weighty arguments in the discussion of the character of the Roman economy as a whole.

The final settlement which began in A.D. 300 between the menacing power of Christianity and the forces of the state, was the unavoidable consequence of a long and slow development. The men who then stood at the head of the Roman Empire were compelled to become the protagonists in the last act of this great drama and, clearly as its final issue may have been indicated from the first, by the positions they adopted materially affected the course of the drama.

As all know, the climax was reached with the conversion of Constantine. Quite recently, however, so eminent a Byzantine scholar as H. Grégoire has disputed the belief that the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge was won in the sign of the Cross, and, as more than one serious student has accepted his view, we shall have to follow in rather closer detail his brilliant description of the political developments of these years. We shall readily admit with him that the account of Eusebius in the Vita Constantini, i, 28–30, is a highly-coloured romance and panegyric, marred by rehandling and later interpolation, and quite inconsistent with the information of Lactantius: yet, despite all this, it has a definite kernel of history in it, as I hope soon to show.

On the 21st of April, 1917, the embankment of the Rome-Naples railway gave way a short distance outside the Porta Maggiore: the works undertaken to repair the damage led to the discovery of a subterranean building of the greatest interest. One may say, without fear of exaggeration, that this is one of the most important discoveries ever made in Rome, and it raises a formidable number of problems archaeological, historical and artistic. It is impossible in a brief article to describe the building fully or to attempt an interpretation of the stucco reliefs that decorate it, especially as it has not yet been published in detail. I will therefore, in this short study, merely point out some of its most important characteristics and summarize the result of recent studies.

The largest private donations to a municipality recorded in the Latin West are probably those which appear in an inscription from Castulo in Hispania Tarraconensis. The inscription, known only from a copy made in the sixteenth century, is very laconic; but its details are self-consistent, and its phraseology resembles that of another inscription from Castulo whose original survives. Huebner, who had to reject as forgeries many inscriptions from this town, accepted the text as genuine, and his judgement was endorsed by Dessau, who included it in his Inscripttones Latinae Selectae.

‘His combination of feeling for style with historical knowledge is still a challenge to any editor of an historical text’ (Momigliano on Justus Lipsius). It is a far cry from the scholarly humanism of the sixteenth century to the complex specialism of modern scholarship, but the overlapping results of detailed research begin to call for integration or, at least, some attempt to define them in a wider context. This paper, therefore, proposes a combined exercise in the study of Roman historiography, ranging from the historian's choice of theme through its literary composition to the quality of its ultimate effect—to relate (so to speak) res, ars, ingenium. The subject is large, but the argument involves mainly precise treatment of evidence at the critical points.

Vindonissa, the only Roman legionary fortress in Switzerland, was occupied during the first century A.D. to guard the frontier against Germany. Because of the exactly defined period of habitation the pottery of this place is of special importance.

The legionary fortress at Vindonissa is situated on a plateau between two rivers and on the north side the ground slopes steeply down to the R. Aare. Some time after the foundation of the fortress, which is probably to be dated shortly after the Varus catastrophe of A.D. 9, perhaps after the third decade of the first century, the soldiers began to throw all the rubbish of the fortress down this slope.

An analysis of the formal features of the ‘epitaph’ of the poet Naevius reveals the handiwork of a later author who admired the older style of poetry represented by Naevius and used the allusive features of that style to reflect on the changing character of Latin poetics and its relationship to Hellenism. The very poetics of the epigram reveal a thoughtful attempt to admit Hellenic affect without sacrificing Roman sensibilities. Especially important is the relationship between divine and mortal and the proper hierarchy of the social world. The epigram is, in short, one literary reflection of the cultural and social struggles of the mid-second century b.c.

The document which forms the subject of this article is from the collection of papyri in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. It is published here by kind permission of the Museum authorities in advance of its appearance as no. 24 in the Catalogue of Brooklyn Museum Papyri, which is being prepared by Dr. John Shelton. We are very grateful to Dr. Shelton for drawing our attention to this papyrus and for generously allowing us, because of its exceptional importance, to publish it separately in this article.

The papyrus contains a Latin document relating to a unit of the Roman army stationed in Egypt. It is written in three columns on the recto of a piece of papyrus measuring approximately 27 × 18 cm. The verso, which according to Dr. Shelton contains a Greek private letter, has no apparent connection. Although the papyrus shows damage on all four sides, it is probable that the right-hand edge is preserved in lines 12 f. of the third column (see the notes ad loc). As it can be demonstrated that not much is lost at the left of the first column, what survives is likely to be the greater part of the original width. All three columns are incomplete at both top and bottom, and the loss here is much harder to estimate. Format and date are discussed in detail in section iv. It is here sufficient to say that it belongs in or near the year A.D. 215, and that in content it closely resembles two known papyri classed as pridiana, which have recently been re-edited as RMR 63 and 64.