I. No Roman definition of nobilis or novus homo exists. Mommsen held that the nobiles comprised:

(a) all patricians;

(b) those descended from patricians who had effected a transitio ad plebem;

(c) those descended from plebeians who had held curule offices, viz. the offices of dictator, magister equitum, censor, consul, praetor, curule aedile. They were thus identical with the persons who had the ius imaginum. (On this footing Mommsen ought to have included plebeian aediles, at least for the post-Sullan era.) All others, including those who were the first of their lines to hold curule office, were novi. This theory has been generally abandoned in favour of Gelzer's; Afzelius argued that it corresponded to the conception of nobility in the second century, but not to that prevalent in Cicero's time. Yet it may after all be right.

It may be taken as proven, so far as anything is ever finally proved in ancient history that the Roman law contained in the fragmented bronze tablet once owned by Cardinal Bembo is the lex repetundarum, or recovery law, of Gaius Gracchus, or of a political associate who shared the same ideas about the so-called ‘extortion court’, despite the doubts of Professor Mattingly, who, reviving the thesis of Carcopino and earlier scholars, sought to identify it with the later law of Servilius Glaucia. This law, which may be conveniently called the Lex Sempronia; is probably the only law of Gaius Gracchus that was concerned with jurors. It is both a lex repetundarum and a lex iudiciaria, because at this time there was no other regular political jury court except the court of recovery. The Lex Sempronia which succeeds the Lex Calpurnia of 149 (and its adjunct the obscure Lex Iunia), replace the senatorial jurors of the previous system by jurors who are not drawn from the senatorial class. But it does many other things, and it is an absolute treasure-house of information about the political and social ideas of its author. Historians have not effectively used it information for the general interpretation of the political thinking of Gaius Gracchus because they suffer from a fixed idea.

When the emperor Claudius decided, at the instigation of his freedman Pallas, to make a highly unconventional marriage with his niece, he manoeuvred the senate, through the agency of his staunch amicus Vitellius, into passing an ‘unsolicited’ request that he marry Agrippina. He declared that his hesitations would be overcome if the senate put pressure on him: who was he to resist the will of the community, being but a citizen like the rest? Some senators even rushed to the palace promising to compel him by brute force. The incident encapsulates an ambivalence in the emperor's role familiar to all readers of Tacitus. On the one hand the autocratic reality: a decision of high political moment (it was no surprise that Agrippina's son subsequently acceded to the throne) taken in the palace on the counsel of freedmen, potent and resented, involving a violation of the mos maiorum. On the other hand the elaborate and yet transparent republican façade: the senate decrees, the princeps submits to the will of the citizen body.

When Ovid was relegated in A.D. 8, he left a notorious problem for scholarship. Some attribute his downfall to the Ars Amatoria, whose second edition appeared about 1 B.C., but that raises questions about the time-lag as well as about the misunderstanding of literature. Others emphasize the disgrace of Augustus' grand-daughter Julia, banished for adultery in the same year as Ovid, but doubts remain about the degree of complicity needed to explain the poet's punishment. Again it has been supposed that the domestic scandal masks a political plot, a possibility that has also been canvassed over the disgrace of the elder Julia in 2 B.C. Unfortunately the evidence for the various theories is so scattered that it may distract attention from the tone of particular poems, yet in this psychological drama over-all impressions ought to count as well as fragments of fact. Here I shall try to interpret a single elegy, Tristia 4. 3, looking at it in sections as it comes; though the debate about the exile will not be repeated in detail, a view will emerge at the end about what happened.

In the first Eclogue of Calpurnius Siculus, Corydon and Ornytus seek to escape from the heat of the sun in a grove sacred to Faunus. There, on a beech tree, they find a long prophecy (lines 33–88), freshly carved by the god himself. After an introductory announcement of joyful news, the inscription proceeds as follows:

Aurea secura cum pace renascitur aetas

et redit ad terras tandem squalore situque

alma Themis posito iuvenemque beata sequuntur

saecula, maternis causam qui vicit Iulis.

dum populos deus ipse reget, dabit impia victas

post tergum Bellona manus spoliataque telis

in sua vesanos torquebit viscera morsus

et, modo quae toto civilia distulit orbe,

secum bella geret: nullos iam Roma Philippos

deflebit, nullos ducet captiva triumphos;

omnia Tartareo subigentur carcere bella

immergentque caput tenebris lucemque timebunt.

I. When a consular turned to the writing of history he had full years of experience behind him; and the reminiscences of elderly survivors, not missed by an alert youth, carried a man nearly a century into the past. The mass of knowledge thus accruing has not always been taken into account by adepts of Quellenforschung.

A senator's employment could hardly fail to affect his beliefs and opinions. It might be expected to leave traces here and there in his writings. For Cornelius Tacitus ascertainment comes against impediments: reticence all through. He even proclaimed a distaste for ‘iactantia’ when adducing his praetorship and priesthood on the occasion of the Ludi Saeculares held in 88. For occupations abroad he chose to reveal only the four years' absence from Rome not long after that season. That disclosure was likewise made in strict relevance to his theme. The command of a legion will be assumed without discomfort.

Some time ago, pursuing humanistic Greek dictionaries, I was leafing through the volume of plates from Vienna MSS published by Josef Bick in 1930, when my eye was caught by a plate from a Latin–Greek dictionary, arranged not alphabetically but by topics. Bick and the catalogue informed me that there was a subscription at the end, written in beginner's Greek and then crossed out (Plate I): ‘And so ends, with God's help, the dictionary of Cicero, written out by me, Conrad Celtes, Poet, in the monastery of Sponheim, in the year of Our Lord 1495 on the seventh day of October, while Johannes Trithemius was Abbot. Praise be to God in heaven most glorious.’ On the first page of the volume, Celtes had written a table of contents: Continetur in hoc libello: I Grammatica greca brevissima, contracta ex diver sis autoribus per C.C. 2 Colloquia et conversaciones grece, quas vulgo apud Latinos Latinum ideoma dicunt (?), cum vocabulario per C.C. inventas. 3 Vocabularium rerum admirandum grecum, nuper a Conrado Celte in Hercinia silva apud druidas inventum. On the same page, Celtes had written instructions to a well-known publisher: Aldus meus is to add a short preface addressed to all the youngsters of Europe who want to learn Greek, and is assured that it will be a fine and very useful little book. Various additions are needed in the Grammar; but Aldus needs no telling, let him emend it all as necessary; and have accents added, for in Celtes' exemplar, and in all Greek books in France and Germany, there were none.

This article is concerned with a late antique consular diptych now divided between Florence and Milan. The front panel, in the Castello Sforzesco at Milan, displays a personification of Victory, seated frontally on the back of an eagle and holding an oval shield to her left (Pl. IV). In the centre of the shield is a bust of the consul and around the edge the inscription BONO REI PUBLIC(a)E ET ITERUM. A small portion of the top and the lower third of the panel are missing. The rear panel of the diptych, still intact, is in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence (Pl. V). The figure of the consul is standing, holding the mappa in front of his chest, and in his left hand a cross-surmounted sceptre. To the left of the consul stands the figure of Roma, who places her right hand on the consul's right shoulder and in her left holds the fasces. In the lower quarter of the panel is a scene of a chariot race and to the right are two small male figures. Across the top of both panels runs the inscription: ANIC(ius) FAUST(us) ALBIN(us) BASILIUS V(ir) C(larissimus) ET INL(ustris) EX COM(ite) DOM(esticorum) PAT(ricius) CONS(ul) ORD(inarius).

‘Le salut, pour l'histoire économique de l'antiquité, ne peut venir que de la mer’—heady talk, but typical of its time. It may well be that the decade of the’ 70s will come to be seen as the high summer of amphorae studies and it is, perhaps, no accident that such great claims have been made in a report on a wreck at Port-Vendres which is closely dated by the stamps on a remarkable series of ingots and also has an exceptional series of painted inscriptions on the amphorae of the cargo. Few wrecks have produced information of such quality.