At the central point of Horace's epistle to the Pisones (ll. 220–50 out of 476) is a lengthy passage on the history and composition of satyr-plays. At the central point within that passage (ll. 234–5), with emphatic use of the vocative and the first-person pronoun, Horace presents himself and his addressees as actively involved in writing satyr-plays:

non ego inornata et dominantia nomina solum

verbaque, Pisones, satyrorum scriptor amabo.

In his account of the year 443 B.C., Livy, reporting the first appointment of censors, introduced the censorship as an institution which

sprang from a small beginning but grew to such an extent that the guidance of Roman mores and discipline was in its hands (‘morum disciplinaeque Romanae penes eam regimen’), the distinction between honourable and dishonourable amongst the senators and the centuries of the equites was under the judgement of that magistracy …

This passage, with its mention of a regimen morum, is one of many which either attest explicitly or illustrate by anecdote that the censors concerned themselves with mores. In the eyes of several authors of antiquity it was this aspect which most strongly characterized the censorship, and there can be no doubt that it was a prominent and central feature.

This paper begins in the year 1569, when a hefty commentary on the Lives of Cornelius Nepos was published in Paris by one of the Royal Professors, Denys Lambin (known to classicists as Lambinus). The event intrigued me for two reasons. Firstly because, in France at that time, history was not a proper subject for professors. A professor could deal in Greek and Latin poetry, in oratory, philosophy, maths or Hebrew, or of course in the degree subjects theology, medicine and law; but history, including ancient history, was mostly a popular interest among the cultured ruling class, who preferred to read it in elegant vernacular versions, like Amyot's Diodorus and Plutarch, not in the dusty didactic form of text and commentary. So why did a professor, famous for his work on poetry and philosophy, suddenly devote himself to Nepos? The second puzzle was that, within weeks of publishing this commentary, Lambinus was violently attacked for it, and came close to losing both his job and his life. How, I wondered, could commenting on Nepos so seriously endanger the health?

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.

It is understandable that the small town of Irni attracted no attention from historians and geographers in Antiquity. Pliny the Elder, whose lists of cities in the provinces include so many insignificant as well as important communities, eschews any mention of it; in his eyes it will have been neither ‘dignum memoratu’ nor ‘Latio sermone dictu facile’ (NH III, 7). It was left to the enterprise of amateur archaeologists equipped with modern metal-detectors to bring to light the city law, and with that the existence of the city itself. The story of the find and of the stages leading to publication is recounted by J. González in the original publication of two years ago, and need not be repeated here. It is beyond question that it represents an extraordinary enrichment of our knowledge of the Roman city, not just in the Iberian peninsula but throughout the Roman Empire.

‘While Trajan was tarrying in Antioch’—it was in the winter of A.D. 115, after the conquest of Armenia and the annexation of Mesopotamia, before setting out for the Tigris, Ctesiphon and the Persian Gulf—‘a terrible earthquake occurred; many cities suffered injury, but Antioch was the most unfortunate of all’.

Two historical events occupy central positions in the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity. To study them makes for a radical and intriguing contrast in historical method. One, the conversion of Constantine, can surely only be approached by examining private and personally held beliefs as they were made public by a single individual, Constantine himself. A biographical approach will be the only way to approach the truth about an individual conversion. The other, the persecution of Christians at the beginning of the fourth century, initiated by an edict of Diocletian of 24 February 303, and concluded by the so-called ‘edict of Milan’, issued by Licinius on 13 June 313, cannot be understood except by examining the public documents which made known the various imperial decisions which implemented persecution, or toleration, of the Christian community at large.

It is a commonplace of modern scholarship that the Roman Imperial Army in the frontier areas was organized in limes-systems: fortifications linked by roads along a fixed boundary, marked in many, but not all, parts of the empire by a river or an artificial obstacle: indeed, the term limes is often used as though it were self-explanatory. The term is certainly used in ancient sources; thus while the literature may furnish only fragmentary information on the army and its activities along the border, it does at least apparently provide us with a name to which to link the material remains. Over the past four decades conferences on Roman frontier studies have regularly been held, often under the title ‘Limes Congress’.

The greatest legal monuments to Late Antiquity are the Code of Theodosius II, published in 438, and the Code, Digest and Institutes of Justinian, produced between 529 and 534. The men on whose shoulders the main responsibility for their compilation rested were two imperial quaestors, each backed by teams of experts. Antiochus Chuzon, quaestor in 429, saw the Theodosian Code from its inception in the year of his quaestorship through a second stage in 435 to its completion in time for the marriage of Valentinian III and Theodosius' daughter Eudoxia in October 437 and publication in the following year. century later, under Justinian, Tribonian, perhaps the most famous and powerful of all quaestors, proved his organizational and legal ability during the production of the first edition of Justinian's Code in 529 and became the moving force behind the Digest of the works of the Roman jurists, the Institutes (an update of Gaius on the principles of law) and the second edition of the Code, all of which were crammed into the five years that followed.