Romanization in the province of Asia did not manifest itself in linguistic or cultural changes, but is very visible in a trend towards corporate organization. In the cities of western and southern Phrygia, professional associations developed that were able to gain a prominent position alongside the civic institutions. It is possible to relate this process to incentives provided by Roman law. In the villages surrounding these cities, and especially in the rural areas of northern and eastern Phrygia, the conditions were different, but there are several indications that a new preference for formal organization and its epigraphic representation developed here as well.

This article investigates the use, in Pliny's official writings of imperial praise, of the theme of ‘divine comedy’ – the idea that everything is for the best in the imperial world under the ideal emperor. An examination of this prominent theme can help us understand how Pliny handled the inevitable tensions in an imperial ideology which was grounded in the opposing figures of the ‘good’ emperor who deserved deification, and the ‘bad’ emperor who deserved tyrannicide.

This article argues for a ‘reciprocal intertextuality’ between Catullus 64 and Lucretius anticipating the poetic interplays of Augustan poets with the De Rerum Natura. Catullus’ wedding guests (proto-readers), Ariadne (proto-Narcissus), and Aegeus (proto-Dido) are interpreted here as errantes in the Lucretian sense: through their erroneous gazes presented in Poem 64, they all exemplify how not to gaze at the structure of the universe. In the Lucretio-Catullan intertextual space — generated, as it seems, by the Catullan text — a reciprocal way of reading emerges: while, on the one hand, ‘Catullus’ uses ‘Lucretius’ to show that the aesthetic experience he offers is dependent upon an erroneous, unLucretian gaze/reading which deprives us of the external spectator position, ‘Lucretius’, on the other hand, uses ‘Catullan’ characters as deterrent examples in order to teach us how not to submerge in ‘Catullus’ poetics of illusion’.

This article surveys three important and interlinked aspects of Justinian's policy in his first decade: reconquest in the West; the establishment of a set of fundamental texts of Roman Law; and the achievement of unity of belief within the Church. In that context, it looks at the remarkable record preserved in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum III, of five successive sessions of a synod held at Constantinople, and one synod in Jerusalem. Its purpose is both to illustrate contacts and influences across the Mediterranean and, more particularly, to bring out distinctive features of the Church in the Near Eastern provinces.

Accounts of air reconnaissance in Britain have already been printed in this Journal (XLI, for north Britain; XLIII, for south Britain): the present paper records recent discoveries, bringing the previous records up to date.

Of the last five summers only in 1955 was there a marked drought favourable to the development of crop marks; but it has been possible to observe different parts of the country under a wide variety of conditions. These have allowed advantage to be taken of different combinations of weather, crops, and soil, so that a buried site invisible one year might be seen in another. Moreover, opportunities for reconnaissance in March and April have meant that large areas could be observed soon after spring ploughing, when soil-patterns in bare fields often reveal disturbances in the ground. These conditions have been particularly valuable for studying Celtic field-systems on the chalk downs and traces of ancient agriculture in the Fenland.

In the north, reconnaissance has revealed an interesting new group of military works, apparently of early date, at Troutbeck on the margin of the Lake District, besides yielding much fresh information at sites already known. This is particularly true of the extensive Roman sites in Scotland that often now lie within several different fields, not all of which are under suitable crops in any one year. Two forts, two signal-stations, and some sixteen temporary camps may be added to the list of discoveries given in JRS XLI.

During the last two centuries of the Roman Republic, Italian business-men swarmed into newly acquired provinces and lands that had fallen under Roman influence. Sometimes they settled abroad with their families and, as landowners, obtained a form of wealth that raised them in the social scale. At the end of the second century B.C. Italians began to emigrate and become landowners in another way—by the foundation in the provinces of colonies, veteran and civilian. It was Gaius Gracchus who initiated colonization overseas, and it remained a radical, controversial policy—but an indispensable one. Both forms of emigration kept up their momentum until the Imperial age. As they passed through the empire or settled abroad, families of Italian negotiatores and colonists left evidence of their movements, mainly in the form of inscriptions. Under the Caesars we may, in some cases, trace their progress in reverse: the descendants of Italian émigrés—negotiatores, colonists, and landowners—returned to Italy and held posts to which some at any rate of their ancestors could never have aspired.

A remarkable blue-grey marble horse with a white marble rider, found in the Basilica at Aphrodisias, has been a focus of recent research. The article describes the archaeology and history of the monument — how it can be reconstructed, with its base and in its precise setting in the Basilica. The group was a daring composition that had already fallen and been restored once in antiquity. What emerges is firstly a new full-size hellenistic-style statue group whose subject can be identified as Troilos and Achilles, and secondly a striking example of the long second lives of classical statues in Late Antiquity. The horse was a great public monument of the early imperial period that was moved to the Basilica probably in the mid-fourth century a.d., where it has a well-documented context. The subject of the group can be identified both from epigraphy and from its iconographic antecedents, and its version of the subject can be related to a particular strand in the rich later literary representations of the story.1

In this article we present a new study of the Arch of Janus, analysing previously unpublished aspects of its architecture and chronology based on new data obtained from a recent research project. This study provides the first complete planimetric view of the monument, together with a stratigraphic reading of the structure, evaluating the different elements of spolia that were re-used in its construction. Also, the discovery of a new inscription that was re-used in building the arch finally confirms that it dates from the period of Constantius II (a.d. 357). Finally, we present a proposal for the reconstruction of the dedicatory inscription of the arch, preserved in the nearby church of San Giorgio al Velabro.

In seventh-century Wiltshire, a scholar-monk began to write classicising Latin poetry. In bold terms he describes himself as the first of the Germanic peoples to write Latin poetry (‘neminem nostrae stirpis prosapia genitum et Germanicae gentis cunabulis confotum in huiuscemodi negotio [i.e. poetry] ante nostram mediocritatem tantopere desudasse’). His programmatic statements cite Virgil explicitly, and allude to Prudentius and Sedulius. His is a poetry that sets out a stall for the beginning of something new, but does so by making clear his predecessors. For Aldhelm, as for much of the Middle Ages, the canonical models of Latin poetry included classical Latin authors as well as the Christian Latin poets of Late Antiquity.

In a paper published in the 1917 volume of this Journal, pp. 59 ff., I attempted to make available for the general student the results of some recent research on coins. The present paper is designed to continue the task thus begun. It follows the same plan and is subject to the same restrictions. General principles are stressed, while for details reference is made to the special publications noted on pp. 263, 264. Only the imperial issues, not the purely local or provincial, are considered.