The collection of casts lately prepared by the Roman Society, and described in the following pages, was designed to include representative sculptures and architectural decorations of the Roman period in Britain. It had originally been hoped that these casts might find a place in the Archaeological Exhibition held in Rome in 1911 and eloquently described by Mrs. Arthur Strong in the first number of this Journal. Unfortunately, it was found wholly impossible to prepare the series in time for the exhibition; only a few pieces, brought together by the personal exertions of Dr. Ashby, could be included in it. The Society has, however, now completed the series, has put the casts on sale and has found enough purchasers to make the scheme financially self-supporting. In all, 165 casts have been purchased by various museums and institutions in these islands and abroad, and valuable illustrations have thus been provided of the character and meaning of the sculptures of the Roman period in Britain. Even the illustrated sale catalogue drawn up by one of the present writers has had the honour of being cited and used by M. Reinach in the most recent volume of his Répertoire.

The triumph, to a Roman of the later Republic and Empire, seemed sacred and all of a piece. Its venerable antiquity was more important than its origin or development. So on the one hand Roman antiquarians agreed the triumph was as ancient as Romulus himself; and on the other its antiquity was felt to be confirmed rather than impaired by the connection of many details with the Etruscans—though the ancients never claimed, as modern scholars have done, that the institution itself was borrowed from the Etruscans. It was simply neither important nor desirable to pin down precisely the dates or phases of such a hallowed celebration.

Of course it is not true that there were no changes. Yet the Roman attitude may have also affected modern historians, who until rather recently have been satisfied with a kind of ‘unitarian’ view of the triumph as something permanent and immutable, untouched by history; discussions of particular problems, such as the alleged divinization of the triumphator or the location of the porta triumphalis, have taken very little account of changes in the triumph itself. Many Roman rituals did, indeed, continue practically unchanged, and it is a peculiarity of Roman history that our most reliable documents for the early period are religious festivals celebrated year after year, rather than written records or histories. But the triumph was, more than other religious festivals, a part of the political life at Rome.

Martial's Liber de Spectaculis is almost universally considered a work describing the remarkable 100-day games held by Titus on the inauguration of the new Flavian Amphitheatre in A.D. 80. There is in fact no internal evidence for this attribution, which has been justified by Martial's praise of the building (“it sounds new”) and the inexact parallels between the description of Titus' games in Dio and the events memorialized by Martial. The highpoint of animal activities in Martial concerns the rhinoceros, not mentioned at all by Dio. Under Domitian a sudden, extensive and unparalleled issue of coins with the rhinoceros type signals the advertisement of that rare beast in his games. The coins date to A.D. 83–85. It is to that period, and to the reign of Domitian, that Martial's work should be dated.

Since Usener put prominently forward the theory of Sondergötter, the idea has been subjected to trenchant negative criticism by two experts in the fields of Greek and Roman religion respectively, Farnell and Wissowa. The former protests, and rightly so, against the cheerful assumption that, whenever a deity has a name describing a function, “Saviour,” “Queen,” “Victory,” for example, we should regard him or her as a primitive Sondergott; since many examples teach us that such figures are often the products of a developed polytheism. He would suggest, as a better test than the name, the non-anthropomorphic conception of the god, or rather daimon, in the minds of his worshippers. Thus he clears the field of Greek religion of a great many heroes and daimones who, whatever their names may be, are too developed and too late to have any claim to represent primitive thought. Wissowa attacks the question from a somewhat different standpoint. He sees in the formidable list of Roman Sondergötter nothing more recondite than Varro's attempt to arrange all possible deities under “di certi,” or at most the artificial “indigitamenta” of the pontifices which, in accordance with “die peinliche Genauigkeit in der Aufstellung der römischen Gebetsformeln,” endeavoured to call upon whatever god was addressed under all the names which applied to the actual petition.

When, under the Flavian dynasty, the Senate began to be opened to men of outstanding ability and wealth from the eastern provinces, the Roman colony of Pisidian Antioch was sure of representation. The rise of the Caristanius family at Antioch has been discussed by Cheesman; their startlingly sudden disappearance from the colony at the end of the first century A.D. left a gap which was partially filled in the second century by another colonial family of note, the Flavonii.

The paintings in the triclinium of the Villa Item, a dwelling-house excavated in 1909 outside the Porta Ercolanese at Pompeii, have not only often been published and discussed by foreign scholars, but they have also formed the subject of an important paper in this Journal. The artistic qualities of the paintings have been ably set forth: it has been established beyond all doubt that the subject they depict is some form of Dionysiac initiation: and, of the detailed interpretations of the first seven of the individual scenes, those originally put forward by de Petra and accepted, modified or developed by Mrs. Tillyard appear, so far as they go, to be unquestionably on the right lines. A fresh study of the Villa Item frescoes would seem, however, to be justified by the fact that the majority of previous writers have confined their attention almost entirely to the first seven scenes—the three to the east of the entrance on the north wall (fig. 3), the three on the east wall and the one to the east of the window on the south wall, to which the last figure on the east wall, the winged figure with the whip, undoubtedly belongs.

This paper outlines a new framework for the historical study of Rome and Italy during the middle republican period. We argue that traditional approaches centred upon social struggles at home and battles abroad, res domi militiaeque, do not sufficiently capture the dynamism of Roman society during the early stages of imperial expansion. Recent scholarship has been rightly critical of the appropriateness of applying concepts of Hellenisation to the period, as Rome's interactions with Magna Graecia and the Greek East in the fourth and third centuries look very different than they would in subsequent centuries. Moving in a new direction, we sketch the contours of an approach that foregrounds the many connectivities (temporal, geographical, methodological, historical) apparent from the interdisciplinary study of middle republican Rome and Italy. The result encourages a new mode of historical inquiry into the development of middle republican Rome and Italy, one which sees Rome already in this moment as both expansively interconnected with and actively involved in wider Mediterranean and Eurasian history.

The aim of this quinquennial survey remains the same as its predecessor, as for the most part does the format, though the team is regrettably reduced by one. With an eye to the study of the Roman world, we hope to signal the most important newly published inscriptions, significant reinterpretations of previously published material, new trends in scholarship, recent studies that draw heavily on epigraphic sources, and noteworthy developments in the various aids to understanding inscriptions (both traditional printed material and electronic resources). In the context of this journal, the geographical range and chronological scope reflect the contours and history of the Roman state from its beginnings down to the end of the seventh century. As such, not only does the survey naturally take in Greek as well as Latin texts, but also epigraphic material in other languages relevant to the Roman world. In the hope that they might usefully reflect the various fields of primary interest to readers of this journal, we have maintained the categories established in the last survey. These comprise, after material of general interest and significance, principal divisions under the headings of (II) Government, law, and authority, (III) Cities, (IV) Funerary epigraphy, (V) Religions, and (VI) Language, literature, and onomastics. The structure of the first section has been changed somewhat in order to give greater prominence to those inscriptions here singled out as historical highlights. The organization of the discussion within each section (or subsection) generally moves between the thematic, chronological, and geographical, as seems to suit the material best.

Although a panegyric can be defined very simply as a speech of praise, it is no longer assumed that praise is also its sole function. What that function might be, however, continues to preoccupy scholarship. Generalisations can be made, but even a nuanced judgement such as ‘every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite’ (Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric, ix) can be challenged by the particular: ‘there is no system and there never was. There is circumstance, preference and ambiguity’. The question is further complicated by the evolution of a rhetoric of praise, related to but independent of the formal panegyric, which came to characterise the literature of Late Antiquity and beyond. The questions, therefore, of what a panegyric is and what it is for are highly relevant to modern scholarship, not only to commentaries but, as is apparent from the books under review, to studies of rhetoric, late antique historiography and the creation of the imperial image.

This paper takes as its point of departure two much discussed fifth-century artifacts, an uninscribed and undated consular diptych in Halberstadt (Fig. 9), and the inscribed and (on the face of it) exactly dated consular missorium of Ardabur Aspar in Florence (Fig. 15), both hitherto presumed issued by western consuls and manufactured in western workshops. After calling into question the established criteria for distinguishing western from eastern diptychs, I propose a new set of criteria and a new date and interpretation of both objects, mainly in the light of a more comprehensive examination of the iconography of city personifications, in literature as well as art.

Non-orthodox Christian asceticism in Late Antiquity is known to us largely through the distorting lens of orthodox heresiology. This paper aims to reassess the character of the ascetic communities of rural Lycaonia in the fourth century a.d. in the light of the surviving funerary and ecclesiastical epigraphy, including three inscriptions published here for the first time. We are fortunate to be able to read these texts in the light of a neglected work of orthodox polemic, Amphilochius’ Against False Asceticism, the work of an embattled orthodox bishop at Iconium in the late 370s a.d. This treatise formed part of a successful campaign to stigmatize the Lycaonian ascetics as heretics, a position which was enshrined in Theodosius’ anti-heretical legislation of a.d. 381–3.

In three years' time, a hundred years will have passed since Luigi Rossini issued his series of plates illustrating Roman triumphal arches in Italy, delineations of interest not only for their accuracy and beauty, but also because Rossini made them the basis of the first detailed study of the Triumphal Arch as an artistic object in itself, treated apart from the surroundings which it embellished. All subsequent workers, Curtis, Nilsson, Loewy and Noack, took the same point of view: and the object of this study is to supplement their valuable research by reconstructing the surroundings of a group of arches connected with city gates, and seeing what light is shed by the relationship of the two structures upon the development of the decorative arch. It is not always possible to reconstruct the ancient grouping in full, nor can it be recovered so easily now as a century ago. But it will emerge that there is always something to be discovered which helps to determine the place of a given arch in the environment which it decorated.