This paper looks at the words, pictures and shapes that people in the Roman provinces placed on the thousands of coins that were made by each of several hundred cities, and uses the patterns that can be found to discuss the contribution provincial coins can make to our understanding of how relationships developed between the early Roman emperors, especially Augustus, and their audiences in provincial cities.

This paper re-examines the scholarly views about the beginning of Latin poetry that were current in the late second century b.c., and proposes that the earliest scholars, specifically Accius and Porcius Licinus, marked Livius Andronicus’ hymn to Juno Regina of 207 b.c., rather than a play in 197 b.c., as the fountainhead of Latin literature. Those histories would suggest that the dominant interpretation put poetry at the heart of the affairs of the state at war; when in the early 40s b.c. Varro and his contemporaries disproved Accius, they were both bringing out new facts about Livius’ earlier career, and rewriting the history of Latin poetry, so that it had its origins in peace, rather than in war.

Two poets addressed by Propertius in his first book are in fact pseudonyms. Ponticus was formed on the model of Horace's Alpinus to designate someone who embodies the antithesis of the poet's Callimachean sensibilities. Bassus is none other than Horace himself, who was then in the course of writing iambics. In the eleventh epode, Horace responded in kind by creating the pseudonyms Pettius, Lyciscus and Inachia, all of which derive from aspects of Propertius' first book. This exchange between Horace and Propertius has echoes in their later work. We conclude by examining why Ovid seems to treat Ponticus and Bassus as real poets in the Tristia.

This paper aims to illustrate the practical application of myth in public life under the early Principate. It begins by sketching the deep historical affection of the people of Rome for the twins Castor and Pollux, and the great posthumous popularity of Nero Claudius Drusus for generations after his death in 9 b.c. Concentrating on the dedicatory inscription of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome, the paper argues that Tiberius Caesar, notoriously addicted to mythology, crafted a potent public association between the heavenly twins and himself and his brother Drusus, and it goes on to examine the effect of that association.

When reading exempla and applying them to ethical decisions, Romans had to bear in mind the principle of situational variability: whether an action can be judged to be right depends on the circumstances in which it is performed; what is right for one person in a given situation may not be right for another. This principle and its ramifications are articulated by Valerius Maximus, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia. Comparison with Cicero, de Officiis suggests that situation ethics was a key feature of Roman ethics and that, within this framework, exempla may be understood as moral tools mediating between universal and particular.

This article examines the implications of Galen's newly-rediscovered Peri Alupias (On Consolation from Grief) for our understanding of the function and contents of public libraries in late second-century a.d. Rome. As a leading intellectual figure at Rome, Galen's detailed testimony substantially increases what we know of imperial public libraries in the city. In particular, the article considers Galen's description of his use of the Palatine libraries and a nearby storage warehouse, his testimony on the contents, organization, and cataloguing of the books he found there, and his use of provincial public libraries for the dissemination of his own works.

This article is an exercise in the historiography of ancient technical artefacts, beginning from the examination of a second-century a.d. cippus inscribed with the story of a Roman engineer, Nonius Datus, who designed and supervised the construction of an aqueduct in Algeria. The first section looks at the aqueduct from the point of view of the history of engineering. The second traces the history of the inscription as a document in the debate about imperialism and technology. In the third section, the focus is on what Datus himself was trying to communicate. The conclusion makes a case for considering ancient technical artefacts from multiple perspectives.

The a.d. 362/3 crisis in Antioch is usually interpreted as an economic or ideological crisis, and Julian's Misopogon as a ‘festive satire’ or ‘edict of chastisement’. This article situates the root of the problem in a crisis of communication: Julian's failure to communicate publicly as expected in a situation that was tense because of the food shortage led to a short-circuit between emperor and subjects. Whilst the Misopogon is Julian's extraordinary post-factum attempt to explain away this failure of ritualized communication on his part, Libanius’ speeches on the topic seek to give a positive twist to the extraordinary nature of Julian's reply, which posed serious problems for emperor, city, and sophist alike.

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.

Twenty-one plays survive under the name of Plautus. Add the six by Terence and the fragmentary record from Andronicus in the mid-third century to Turpilius late in the second, and the result is a significant corpus with something for nearly everyone: an extensive record of Latin at a key period in its history, a major arena for the Romans' ongoing struggle with Hellenism, a genre more central to later Western drama than anything Greek, and, however well scholarship may sometimes obscure the fact, plays that are genuinely funny and replete with the sights, sounds, and smells of what passes for daily life in the Roman Republic. Small wonder the comoedia palliata once attracted some of the great names in Roman studies. What Alison Sharrock was taught to regard as only ‘a stereotype-ridden exercise in lamentable literary secondariness’ (ix) must from the beginning have meant something quite different to Ritschl and Leo, not to mention Studemund, whose eyesight never recovered from the strain of transcribing the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus. How did the study of comedy ever become a literary backwater? And what has happened to it since?

On the basis of a random sample of English-language internet websites about empires, we can now formulate the first law of comparative imperialisms as follows: as an online discussion of empire grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Roman Empire approaches 1. (This is a variant of the general law that states that ‘as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1’.) The comparative study of empires is thriving, and the recent intensity of interest is connected, at least in part, to the international military interventions of the United States. But comparisons between empires are nothing new, and, in the 1960s, Peter Brunt wrote an insightful article on British and Roman imperialism. That analysis was the product of the age of decolonization, an age which also acted as a spur to comparative approaches within classical scholarship: witness Nicole Loraux's suggestion that it was anti-colonial movements associated with the Algerian and Vietnam wars that led Jean-Pierre Vernant to embark on his series of comparative investigations into Greek thought and religion. Brunt's article was written in a retrospective key at a time when it was possible to look back to the completion, or the near completion, of a major period of European colonialism and arrive at a sort of reckoning. Some two generations prior to Brunt, in the early twentieth century and at the apogee of the British Empire, Lord Cromer delivered an address to the Classical Association on ‘Ancient and Modern Imperialism’ in which he found it unimaginable to think of independence for Britain's overseas colonies. Francis Haverfield responded sympathetically to Cromer and in his own writings associated the British and the Roman empires. Any discussion of comparative imperialisms, therefore, will need to consider not just the recent concentration of debates over empire but also a lengthy trajectory that extends back to Cromer and Haverfield and indeed further beyond into the eighteenth century. None of the books under review reflects in detail on the intellectual history in which they may be situated, but this is a subject that at least needs to be acknowledged and that we shall have occasion to return to later.