This essay offers a survey of the history of the Roman Society during the 100 years since its foundation in 1910. It discusses relations with other classical bodies, especially the Hellenic Society and the Classical Association; the Society's fragile finances until the 1950s; and the key role played over several decades by its Secretary, Margerie Taylor. Separate sections deal with the Society's library; its journals, the Journal of Roman Studies (1911) and Britannia (1970); membership and finance; and relations with schools, amateur archaeologists and the University of London, whose Institute of Classical Studies has housed the Society's office and library since 1958.

In the Antiquitates Romanae, Dionysius of Halicarnassus presents the Romans as a nation of Greeks. Throughout his narrative, Dionysius shows how the Romans have surpassed other Greek nations in the quintessentially Greek areas of morality and conduct. However, this assessment of Rome's cultural and ethnic identity proves to be much more nuanced when read side by side with the narrative of the concluding books of the Antiquitates Romanae, a largely unexplored section of the work dealing with the war between the Romans and Pyrrhus. The culturally-based definition of Roman ‘Greekness’ is accompanied, particularly in the last portion of the narrative, by a troubling awareness of its inherent instability as the Romans increasingly display the tendencies which eventually caused the ‘barbarization’ of Greece.

This article re-examines a passage in the first book of Propertius which has generally been interpreted as establishing that the collection was published after Actium. In fact, these lines do not necessarily allude to Antony's defeat, but fit even better with the situation in the years leading up to the battle. Once that has been established, the balance of evidence supports a considerably earlier date for Propertius’ first book. This prompts a re-evaluation of the direction of influence between it and Virgil's Georgics. Contrary to traditional assumptions, Virgil can be seen to have reacted strongly to the elegist's brilliant debut.

Suetonius (Aug. 72.2) records among the habits of Augustus his inclination to retreat from time to time to a place he called ‘Syracuse’ or his ‘technophuon’ (workshop). These names have been variously explained, without agreement. The paper argues that ‘Syracuse’ evokes a complex of associations beyond the obvious connection with Archimedes and his inventions. By recalling other well-known figures, such as Marcellus and Dionysius, as well as Augustus’ own experiences in Syracuse, the name of his den effectively encapsulates the courses of action available to the emperor as ruler and as private citizen.

This essay examines the representation of the city of Rome in Martial's Epigrams, and specifically, his references to urban topography. The city is an insistent and vivid presence in Martial's Epigrams to a degree unparalleled in Roman poetry. He fashions a Rome that is more relentlessly sordid, irregular and jagged in texture, and overtly dissonant in its juxtapositions than the literary cities of his poetic predecessors. This new urban emphasis is not only a game of literary one-upmanship. Martial's urban poetics takes shape in the context of renewed attention to the city and monumental building under the Flavians.

Epistles 8.14, one of Pliny's longest letters, has been widely dismissed as a clumsy combination of two ill-fitting stretches of prose. This article demonstrates a significant chain of allusions in the letter's opening to Tacitus’ Agricola, as well as to Cicero, Ovid and Seneca; it shows how Pliny prompts such a reading in the surrounding Epistles 8.13 and 8.15; and, through consideration of the diptych form and the theme of slavery, it demonstrates the letter's pivotal role as centrepiece to Book 8.

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.

This article is the first publication of a Greek inscription from Akmoneia in Phrygia, dated to a.d. 6/7. The monument is an honorific stele for a priestess by the name of Tatia, and was voted by a body of ‘Greek and Roman women’. As a document of collective political activity by a female corporate group, the inscription has no real parallels in either the Greek or Roman world. The monument is set in the context of the Roman mercantile presence in central Phrygia in the late Republican and early Imperial periods, and some proposals are offered concerning the identity and significance of the honouring body.

The recent adjustment to Palladas’ dates necessitates a fresh look at an old question: Should Constantinople be considered the proper setting for some of his epigrams? Allusions in a few poems to statuary and to buildings, and one ekphrasis of a coin, suggest not only that he was in Constantinople at some point during his life (as many others have thought), but also that he was there quite close to the time of the city's foundation. These epigrams yield precious (if also enigmatic) clues to a murky period in the history of the Eastern capital.

Ever since Augustine narrated an account of his mother's death at Ostia, social historians have tried to adduce the identity of the person who erected Monica's tombstone, a copy of which is preserved in a ninth-century codex. Three members of the gens Anicii, all of whom were Augustine's contemporaries, have become usual suspects in the secondary literature. Throughout these debates the epitaph itself, a fragment of which was found in 1945, is frequently cited but rarely treated as a primary text. This article presents a new study of that epigraph and proposes that it was erected much later than previously suspected.

Whether or not Syme made a convincing case for revolution at Rome, his Roman Revolution did not effect a revolution in Roman history. To be sure, his choice of where to start and where to end his discussion was unorthodox (if orthodoxy was the old edition of the Cambridge Ancient History or Rice Holmes or the periodization of Oxford Greats), but his relentless focus on individual political actors and their relations with one another differs from the emphasis of earlier scholars only in its priorities and intensity. Whether or not Wallace-Hadrill makes a convincing case for revolution at Rome, Rome's Cultural Revolution is revolutionary. To be sure, the individual parts of the book have been variously anticipated in particular studies, but the insistence that what happens in the history of buildings, instrumentum domesticum, dress, and monuments constitutes not simply the background to a political story, but is itself the story of Late Republican Rome — in W.-H.'s own words ‘that the political transformation of the Roman world is integrally connected to its cultural transformation’ (xix) — challenges the assumptions on which Roman historians have built the history of the Republic ever since Asinius Pollio.