Lurking in the Historia Augusta's life of the short-lived Emperor Carus is what appears to be a reference to the genuine contemporary poet Nemesianus and an extant work by him, the Cynegetica. Given the HA's predilection for ‘bogus authors’, this is rather surprising, but because some of what the HA says about Nemesianus is true, the otherwise unique details of his life and works that it provides have been generally accepted. We show first that the reference to the Cynegetica is an incorporated gloss in the text of the HA, one that reveals that the text was being read and studied in northern Francia. We then demonstrate that the name ‘Olympius’, which the HA gives to Nemesianus, is not authentic, offering an analysis of the text's onomastic habits more generally. We show that ‘Olympius Nemesianus’ is one of several invented authors in the HA, lent a superficial plausibility by borrowing the name of a real ancient writer. Finally, we reflect on the way that these conclusions might undermine two developing tendencies in the study of the Historia Augusta.

A. H. M. Jones died from a heart attack on a very rough crossing from Brindisi to Patras; he was on his way to give lectures at the Universities of Thessalonica and Patras. It was a tragically sudden end to a life of intense mental activity. Academically he had fulfilled his greatest ambition; for more than twenty years he had determined to complete a major work of synthesis on the late Roman Empire: the publication in 1964 of The Later Roman Empire 284–602 will still be recognized as a major work by our grandchildren.

Lucus Feroniae, the scene of a great yearly assemblage in honour of the goddess Feronia and subsequently the site of an Augustan colony which took the name of the ancient grove, lay somewhere in the territory of Capena in south-eastern Etruria. The region presents great topographical difficulties. Except for Capena itself, which has been located with some degree of certainty on the hill of Civitucola, none of the ancient settlements, of which there are several in the city's extensive ager, has been definitely identified. This paper has been written in the belief that a fresh consideration of the evidence for the goddess's shrine will aid in determining its location and will present material of value for its bearing on the history of Capena and the origin of Feronia's cult.

H. Peter briefly stated the reasonable opinion that Trajan did not draft the rescripts himself or manage the details of law and administration which they involve, that being the work of the secretary Ab epistulis. This widely accepted view was established on a firmer basis by the investigations of A. Henneman into the ‘outer and inner style’ of the rescripts. His general conclusion was that Trajan settled the more important problems himself from material prepared by his secretariat, by giving a verbal decision which the secretary worked up into the drafts which we have. These were written in a uniform chancery style, but personal interventions and comments of Trajan are recognizable within the formal texts. Henneman used two main arguments to establish the secretarial manner.

This paper situates Roman actions undertaken against Christians amidst an unofficial pattern of measures employed throughout the imperial period to manage the expanding influence of freelance religious experts. Questions about the historical circumstances of martyrdom or persecution tend to proceed from the assumption that Christians were perceived and dealt with as a distinct religious community. However, the penalties alleged by writers such as Paul and Justin were more commonly issued against self-authorized individuals (magi, astrologers, prophets, diviners, philosophers, and so forth) than against undifferentiated religious groups. Thus, I propose that Roman motivations for investigating and punishing Christians, at least in the first and second centuries, are best understood in relation to the wider phenomenon of freelance expertise and the range of concerns that it engendered.

Seneca's Naturales Quaestiones explains the causes and functional mechanisms of natural phenomena, from common sights like rainbows to exotically out-of-reach ones like comets. The vividness with which he brings them all within the reader's grasp is certainly a literary feat as much as a scientific one, but the rhetorical power of his explanations does not cost them their epistemological validity. Analyses drawn from current philosophy of science reveal elements of fictionality omnipresent in scientific models and experiments, suggesting an approach to Seneca's ‘scientific fictions’ not as failed analogies but as a sophisticated expansion of the tradition of analogical scientific explanation.

This article offers an account of Roman imperial cameos as an archaeological category, and argues that the production of large high-quality cameos was more restricted in time than currently allowed; that the controversial dates and subjects of individual cameos need to be set in the wider sequence of the main examples; and that early imperial praise poetry sits in relationship to court cameos in a way that can be usefully investigated around their shared concern to understand the particular character of imperial divinity. An Appendix gives details of forty-one examples illustrated and discussed.