The Roman emperor served a number of functions within the Roman state. The emperor's public image reflected this diversity. Triumphal processions and imposing state monuments such as Trajan's Column or the Arch of Septimius Severus celebrated the military exploits and martial glory of the emperor. Distributions of grain and coin, public buildings, and spectacle entertainments in the city of Rome all advertised the emperor's patronage of the urban plebs, while imperial rescripts posted in every corner of the Empire stood as so many witnesses to the emperor's conscientious administration of law and justice. Imperial mediation between man and god was commemorated by a proliferation of sacrificial images that emphasized the emperor's central role in the act of sacrifice. Portrait groups of the imperial family were blunt assertions of dynasty and figured the emperor as the primary guarantor of Roma aeterna. Public sacrifices to deified emperors and the imagery of imperial apotheosis surrounded the emperor with an aura of divinity. An extraordinary array of rituals, images, and texts, then, gave visual and symbolic expression to the emperor's numerous functions and publicized the manifold benefits of imperial rule.

This paper asks how much money Republican aristocrats could make from agriculture and approaches the question from the perspective of supply rather than demand. Potential growers of wheat, wine, and grain were so numerous in second- and first-century B.C. Italy that its urban population could not have provided a market large enough to enable each of them to derive a substantial income from meeting its demand for staple foods. Agriculture is not likely to have furnished the economic foundation for most senators' lavish life-styles. Instead, money-lending and other commercial activities were where the profits were, while prestige and similar non-economic factors guided their decisions about investments in land.

Cicero's views on history and historians, and his general conceptions of the past, have received a good deal of attention—some, most recently, in Rambaud's short book Cicéron et l' Histoire Romaine; but his historical practice has had less consideration. True, practically every passage in which he refers to an event of the past has been somewhere thoroughly elucidated, and the sources to which he turned in any particular work have been investigated by a crowd of commentators. But the general accounts of Cicero's knowledge of and relation to the historiographical tradition of his time are either antiquated or disappointing, and estimates of Cicero's scholarship range from the enthusiastic admiration displayed, but hardly justified, by most recent writers, to the contempt of older ones, most extravagantly Münzer, who stigmatized the De senectute as a historical fantasy, or Zingler, who even accused Cicero of inventing his exempla. The subject is important both for Cicero's own sake, and in order to throw light on the historiographical standards and activities of his time. Advance can perhaps be made by distinguishing more carefully than has usually been done between the kinds of approach that he made to different types of historical subject at different stages in his career and in different literary genres.

The collected philosophical essays of Plotinus—to which we still unfortunately give the senseless and unplotinian title Enneads—constitute a nodal point in the evolution of Western ideas. In this book converge almost all the main currents of thought that come down from 800 years of Greek speculation; out of it there issues a new current, destined to fertilize minds as different as those of Augustine and Boethius, Dante and Meister Eckhart, Coleridge, Bergson, and Mr. T. S. Eliot. And the historian cannot but ask himself what is the secret of this transmutation by which the old is taken up in the new and given a fresh direction and significance. Such a question admits of no complete answer and none is offered here. The present paper seeks merely to illustrate a few aspects of the problem for the benefit of readers who are not deeply versed in Plotinus. It omits much that a Plotinian specialist would rightly think important; and it uses broad terms where an expert might well insist on the need for qualification.

The aim of the present paper is to reassess the events connected with the Romanization of the Etruscan metropolis of Volaterrae in the light of recent archaeological findings. The results of the Cecina Valley survey and of other related fieldwork have prompted a full reconsideration of the issue: indeed, they show a very different picture when compared with some of the recent mainstream reconstructions of the making of central Roman Italy; in particular, they are in sharp contrast with what was found in other Tyrrhenian regions, such as Southern Etruria or Campania. In line with these developments, recent local work in various parts of Italy now strongly suggests the need to consider each area, almost each civitas, individually, leaving aside for the moment overarching models based on insufficient data. This appears to resonate with a wider and growing realization that the process of Romanization, all over the Empire, exhibits a very heterogeneous and dialectic character, so much so that the appropriateness of the very term has often been put in question. For this reason, Romanization will be used here only in its weakest sense, simply as a convenient term covering the events involved in the creation of a new and unified political entity, disclaiming any assumptions concerning the acculturation of non-Roman ethnic groups. What is clearly emerging is a need for a new generation of regional studies, with the aim of carefully charting the trajectory of each community towards incorporation in the Roman state and working towards the creation of far more robust and informed syntheses. The present paper strives to make a contribution in this direction.

During the 1970 campaign of excavations at Aphrodisias in Caria, investigations begun during the previous summer in the Portico of Tiberius were continued and brought to light some 150 fragments of marble panels bearing inscriptions in Latin in a hand of the fourth century A.D. Initially, these fragments were considered additional evidence to the considerable harvest of pieces of Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices found in the course of preceding seasons. Most of them, indeed, proved to belong to the Edict. On closer examination and more careful transcription, however, it became clear that, while the Price Edict was cut on free standing panels, most of which were c. 0·12–0·14 m thick, a small number of fragments belonged to thicker panels.

Here is one of the laws of history: every event begins with a woman. It is the woman who confers life or death. It is in conformity with the nature of things that Helena should have converted Constantine. It is contrary to the nature of things that Constantine should have converted Helena.

While we may smile at the ruminations of a nineteenth-century bourgeois on the sexual politics of Constantine's conversion to Christianity, if we turn our attention for a moment from the Emperor to the Empire itself we will perceive that our own more scientific studies reflect a similar vision of Helena, refracted in the persons of pious matrons across the Empire. For we generally imagine the religious changes which swept the later Roman Empire as resulting from a fateful collaboration, that of a few unusually persuasive clerics with a multitude of devout Christian women, who enforced the views of their clerical friends at home, and shepherded their prominent husbands towards the once-only cleansing of baptism. The view has much to recommend it, and it has sparked some of the most interesting writing on late antiquity in recent decades, beginning with a celebrated contribution by Peter Brown to this journal.

One of Rome's greatest achievements was the successful enlistment of her conquered peoples for the defence of her empire. How much was Roman statesmanship willing to pay for this? Part of the answer lies in the dignity, freedom, and participation which Roman rule granted to these peoples. Another part of the answer will be found in the pay of the auxilia; for although they were recruited from among the subject nations they matched the legions in numbers, fighting spirit, and efficiency at integrating the provinces into the Empire.

The pay of the auxilia and its relation to the pay of the legions is a vexing problem which has elicited the ingenuity of many scholars. Recently, however, a new reading of the papyrus P. Gen. Lat. l and a newly-found inscription have increased the scanty evidence. They may now reveal at least part of the answer.

In any reconsideration of the meaning of the phrase ‘lustrum condere’ the first stage must be to decide its approximate antiquity. If it were shown to be an antiquarian imposture, it would have to be regarded in a very different light from a genuine survival of religious language. Three passages are relevant to this first point.

Although the name of Riotinto has become synonymous with mining throughout the world and the site was very clearly exploited in antiquity, the Roman mines have received relatively little archaeological attention at the analytical level. The reasons for this situation are complex, not least perhaps the impression amongst archaeologists that there now remains little or nothing from antiquity capable of examination. The two major expansions of large-scale open-cast mining by the old Riotinto Company have led to a general impression that modern mining has removed all worthwhile archaeological evidence. Furthermore, in the last century a massive study by Rua Figueroa appeared at the time to offer a comprehensive survey of all that was known of ancient and more recent exploitation.

Flavius Valerius Constantius, the senior reigning emperor since Diocletian and Maximian had abdicated on 1 May 305, died at Eburacum on 25 July 306. At once his entourage and army proclaimed Augustus the son who stood beside his death-bed, and invested him with the purple. Constantine, however, with a subtlety beyond his years, contented himself with obtaining recognition as a Caesar from Galerius, who now, as the senior emperor, possessed the right of appointing new imperial colleagues. Constantine's modesty or foresight was soon repaid. On 28 October 306 the praetorian guard and people of Rome raised to power Maxentius, the son of Maximian. Severus, Augustus in the west since Constantius' death, marched on Rome to suppress the insurrection, but was forced to retreat by the desertion of his troops, besieged in Ravenna and inveigled into surrender by Maximian, who had emerged from retirement to aid his son.

In a previous article in this Journal the writer and Mr. J. B. Ward Perkins gave a summary historical and archaeological sketch of the Roman Limes in Tripolitania, illustrated by the two sites, Ain Wif and Gasr Duib, investigated in 1948. Further evidence of the character of this Limes was obtained in the summer of 1949 when air and ground reconnaissances were made over a considerable area of the frontier zone, with the aid of the Royal Air Force and of the military authorities in Tripolitania. Since this new information relates particularly to the indigenous elements in the Tripolitanian frontier army, and to the types of fortified homesteads occupied by the limitanei—aspects which were referred to very briefly in the former article—it has seemed desirable to incorporate it in a supplementary paper, preceded by a note on the historical regio Arzugum, which is evidently to be identified, at least in part, with the Tripolitanian frontier zone.

A reconsideration of the chronological data for Fronto's extant works is desirable on several counts, not least in providing a firmer base for the investigation of Antonine history. Various systems have been devised, but there is great room for improvement even in the little that is known. It is now almost forty years since the last full attempt, and much knowledge has accrued, notably from the Ostian fasti. Also, unfortunately, a ‘date’ has too often been engendered by simple horror vacui. More serious are the many misinterpretations, often quite small but some of wider significance, which have become lodged in print and then used by others as a firm base for other researches. Conflicting views on matters of some import, notably the year of Fronto's death (the main estimates vary by a decade), require examination. Most misleading of all, some investigators have wreaked Procrustean violence on the corpus by discerning and ruthlessly applying an alleged underlying editorial principle. On that account, an agnostic method of considering each piece on its own merit will be used here, letting that editorial principle emerge if it will. The evidence, where available, for each work will be set down in the manuscript order, preceded by a discussion of the date of Fronto's demise and followed by some remarks on the original edition of the corpus and a section tabulating the results.

Series of provinces and peoples were something new in Roman art. They were a distinctively Roman way of representing their empire visually, and reflect a distinctively Roman and imperial mode of thought. Such images are most familiar to us in sculpture from the reliefs that decorated the temple of Hadrian in Rome, and on coins from the ‘province’ series of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. We know, however, from various written sources that extensive groups of personified peoples were made at Rome under Augustus. Recently, the discovery of such a series in relief at Aphrodisias, there called ethne (peoples), allows us for the first time to see what an early imperial group of this kind looked like. The new reliefs were part of the elaborate decoration of a temple complex, probably called a Sebasteion, dedicated to Aphrodite Prometor and the Julio-Claudian emperors. I have already published in this journal the reliefs with imperial scenes, which portray the Roman emperor from a Greek perspective. This article publishes the ethne reliefs which, it will be argued, set out to reproduce or adapt in a much more direct manner an Augustan monument in Rome. The use of an Augustan-style ‘province’ series in Asia Minor is a telling illustration both of some of the mechanisms in the transmission of imperial art and of a Greek city's identification with the Roman government's view of its empire.

Among that select band of philosophers who have managed to change the world, and not just to interpret it, it would be hard to find a pair with a higher public profile than Brutus and Cassius — brothers-in-law, fellow-assassins, and Shakespearian heroes. Yet curiously little is understood of the connection, if any, between the fact that they were philosophers and their joint decision to form the conspiracy against Caesar. It may not even be widely known that they were philosophers.

What work has been done on this question has been focused on Cassius' Epicureanism, thanks above all to a famous review published by Momigliano in 1941 which included a seminal survey of the evidence for politicized Epicureans. I shall myself have less to say on that topic than on the richer, and less explored, evidence for Brutus. For the present, we may note that at the time of the assassination, March 44 B.C., Cassius had been an Epicurean for just three or four years; that he had already prior to that been actively engaged in philosophy; but that his previous allegiance is unknown. His conversion to Epicureanism seems to have been timed to reflect his decision in 48 B.C. to withdraw from the republican struggle and to acquiesce in Caesar's rule, expressing his hopes for peace and his revulsion from civil bloodshed. This sounds in tune with a familiar Epicurean policy: minimal political involvement, along with approval of any form of government that provides peaceful conditions. We may, therefore, plausibly link Cassius' withdrawal to his new-found Epicureanism. In which case it becomes less likely that his subsequent resumption of the political initiative in fomenting conspiracy against Caesar was itself dictated purely by his Epicureanism. Yet he did remain an Epicurean to the end.6 At its weakest then, the question which we must address might simply be how, when he became convinced that Caesar must be eliminated, he managed to reconcile that decision with his Epicureanism. I shall have a suggestion to make about Cassius' Epicurean justification, but it will emerge incidentally during the examination of the evidence for Brutus, who is the real hero of this paper.

In 1968, Peter Brown read at the Society's Annual General Meeting a paper entitled ‘The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire’. Delivered at a time when little research was being carried out by British scholars either on Manichaeism or on the cultural and religious relationship between the Roman and the Sassanian Empires, it was for many a complete revelation. With consummate skill and vast erudition Brown placed the history of the diffusion of the sect against a background of vigorous and dynamic interchange between the Roman and the Persian Empires. He also mounted a successful challenge on a number of popularly held views on the history of the religion in the Roman Empire. Manichaeism was not to be seen as part of the mirage orientale which fascinated the intellectuals of the High Empire. It was not an Iranian religion which appealed through its foreigness or quaintness. Rather, it was a highly organized and aggressively missionary religion founded by a prophet from South Babylonia who styled himself an ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’. Brown reminded the audience that ‘the history of Manichaeism is to a large extent a history of the Syriac-speaking belt, that stretched along the Fertile Crescent without interruption from Antioch to Ctesiphon’. Its manner of diffusion bore little or no resemblance to that of Mithraism. It did not rely on a particular profession, as Mithraism did on the army, for its spread throughout the Empire. Instead it developed in the common Syriac culture astride the Romano-Persian frontier which was becoming increasingly Christianized consequent to the regular deportation of whole communities from cities of the Roman East like Antioch to Mesopotamia and adjacent Iran. Manichaeism which originally flourished in this Semitic milieu was not in the strict sense an Iranian religion in the way that Zoroastrianism was at the root of the culture and religion of pre-Islamic Iran. The Judaeo-Christian roots of the religion enabled it to be proclaimed as a new and decisive Christian revelation.

The Limes Tripolitanus, the easternmost of the series of limites protecting the Latin provinces of Roman Africa, ran for some 1,000 km. from Turris Tamalleni (the modern Telmine, on the edge of the Chott el Djerid) to its eastern terminus at Arae Philaenorum (Muktar, near ‘Marble Arch’) on the border of ancient Cyrenaica. Of this total length the western 300 km. lie within the confines of the French Protectorate of Tunisia, and for this sector Cagnat's admirable summary of the archaeological evidence, although written in 1912, has not been seriously outdated by any more recent explorations. The eastern sector, also of 300 km., from the great salt-marsh of Sebcha Tauorga to Arae Philaenorum, is still completely unknown, and its character cannot be profitably discussed until exploration has been carried out : it should, however, be observed that in this eastern zone the limes must have followed the bleak shores of the Greater Syrtis, where there were few coastal centres of importance, and virtually no Romanized hinterland.

The cities of the Roman Empire were, on the whole, plural societies, which had in them significant sub-groups, ethnic, religious, or, indeed, both together — for the two categories were still only sometimes distinguishable. Such an environment carries many resonances for us and it is surprising to realize its neglect as a subject for study. The classical Greek polis had been a theoretically homogeneous institution of look-alike citizens, with outsiders excluded or enslaved. The notional Roman approach was, in the early days, to deal with outsiders by assimilating them. When we look at the cities of the Hellenistic kingdoms, we observe that they often did consist of several racial elements, though how these were accommodated has been for some time an issue for debate, and this remains an open question. But beyond that, our concern seems to stop.

The work of the spade and the use of common sense have done much to mitigate the influence of Tacitus and Pliny and redeem the memory of Domitian from infamy or oblivion. But much remains to be done. The policy of this able and intelligent Emperor has been vindicated on the frontiers, but is still, in the matter of finance, condemned as extravagant and ruinous. Not only is this the view of those who, with the warrant of the senatorial tradition, see little in his reign but the dark night of despotism before the dawn of a new era of felicity—even a judicious historian like M. Gsell reproaches Domitian for not having done enough to restore the finances of the Empire, compromised as they had already been by Titus. So the charge is not baseless: and it is more with sorrow than with surprise that we read at the beginning of M. Carcopino's elegant and ingenious paper, Les richesses des Daces et le redressement de l'empire romain, the emphatic statement ‘c' est un fait reconnu de tous que Domitien laissa derrière lui une situation financière obérée.’