This paper outlines a new framework for the historical study of Rome and Italy during the middle republican period. We argue that traditional approaches centred upon social struggles at home and battles abroad, res domi militiaeque, do not sufficiently capture the dynamism of Roman society during the early stages of imperial expansion. Recent scholarship has been rightly critical of the appropriateness of applying concepts of Hellenisation to the period, as Rome's interactions with Magna Graecia and the Greek East in the fourth and third centuries look very different than they would in subsequent centuries. Moving in a new direction, we sketch the contours of an approach that foregrounds the many connectivities (temporal, geographical, methodological, historical) apparent from the interdisciplinary study of middle republican Rome and Italy. The result encourages a new mode of historical inquiry into the development of middle republican Rome and Italy, one which sees Rome already in this moment as both expansively interconnected with and actively involved in wider Mediterranean and Eurasian history.

This paper reconstructs the history and meaning of a hitherto unexplained astronomical allusion recurring several times in Roman epithalamic poetry: the association of the evening star with Mount Oeta. By examining the iterations of this motif in surviving Latin literature (especially Catullus 62, Vergil's Eclogue 8 and the pseudo-Vergilian Ciris), I propose to explain the original meaning of this association as a mythological reference to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, offering a reconstruction of the Hellenistic epithalamic context where it was probably invented, and an interpretation of its function in each of the poems under consideration. The results of this analysis shed new light on some of the most well-known texts of Latin literature, allowing us to understand how this allusion was used to explore the relations between the genres of epithalamic poetry, bucolic and epyllion.

This article draws attention to a neglected archaeological datum (pointed out by Amanda Claridge in 2014) that has important consequences for our understanding of the Augustan Palatine. The ‘house of Livia’, excavated in 1869, has always been thought of as belonging to the Augustan complex, but the evidence suggests that it did not exist above ground level after the 30s b.c.; its basement, on the other hand, was connected with an underground passage that was evidently an integral part of the building project begun by Imperator Caesar (‘Octavian’) in 36 b.c. Claridge's argument, with its corollary, that the Apollo temple faced north-east to the summit plateau of the hill, explains the surviving textual sources much more satisfactorily than the current orthodoxy. In particular, it casts significant new light on Suetonius’ statement that the name ‘Augustus’ referred to Romulus’ augustum augurium at the foundation of the city.

In his discussion of Roman wind-names, Seneca the Younger employs a striking metaphor to describe the integration of the name of the south-east wind, Eurus, into Latin. The name Eurus, Seneca says, has been ‘granted citizenship’. This is one of six instances of the metaphor of ‘granting citizenship to words’ in surviving ancient texts. In this article, I use this metaphor as an entry-point to reconsider the importance of citizenship and language to ancient conceptions of Roman identity and status. The metaphor is revelatory of ancient thinking about what citizenship meant, what it depended on, and to whom and on whose authority it should be granted, questions that became urgent as citizenship spread across the Empire. Different versions of the metaphor offer tellingly divergent views of citizenship and of language. These reflect the tensions between origin and culture, inclusion and exclusion, cosmopolitanism and nativism, in contemporary notions of what it meant to be or belong as Roman.

Despite a range of literary and archaeological evidence for the importance of forests in Roman Africa, these marginal lands and their marginalised populations have been almost entirely ignored or downplayed by modern scholarship, leading to tortured interpretations of a range of material. This article asks two questions, one historical, the other historiographic: what role did the forests of Africa Proconsularis play in the economies and productive imaginaries of the region's inhabitants? And why have the products, labour and labourers of sylvan industries been largely written out of modern accounts? After drawing together evidence and proxies for the centrality of Africa's pine forests to a range of lifeways, cultural practices and economies — including their fundamental (and overlooked) role in providing the pitch that lined the exported amphorae that drove North Africa's economic boom — I argue that French colonial practices around forests led to their erasure from histories of Roman Africa.

Terentianus Maurus, a North African writing probably in the third century a.d., bequeathed to posterity a preface and three polymetric poems: De litteris, De syllabis and De metris. The poems’ titles reflect their content, the first two covering the pronunciation of letters and syllables and the third discussing the details of a bewildering array of metres. Unpromising subject matter for poetry? On the contrary. Terentianus Maurus uses this raw material to display his extraordinary poetic skill, while also conveying useful technical information. This paper first examines the programmatic preface to his poems, which is studded with intertextual gems and shines with every kind of literary polish. It then turns to look at passages from the rest of Terentianus’ poetry to see how he puts the ideals of his preface into poetic practice. The paper aims to show that Terentianus Maurus is not, or not just, a grammarian, but rather a consummate literary artist in the tradition of learned didactic verse.

Lurking in the Historia Augusta's life of the short-lived Emperor Carus is what appears to be a reference to the genuine contemporary poet Nemesianus and an extant work by him, the Cynegetica. Given the HA's predilection for ‘bogus authors’, this is rather surprising, but because some of what the HA says about Nemesianus is true, the otherwise unique details of his life and works that it provides have been generally accepted. We show first that the reference to the Cynegetica is an incorporated gloss in the text of the HA, one that reveals that the text was being read and studied in northern Francia. We then demonstrate that the name ‘Olympius’, which the HA gives to Nemesianus, is not authentic, offering an analysis of the text's onomastic habits more generally. We show that ‘Olympius Nemesianus’ is one of several invented authors in the HA, lent a superficial plausibility by borrowing the name of a real ancient writer. Finally, we reflect on the way that these conclusions might undermine two developing tendencies in the study of the Historia Augusta.

Roman coinage forms an astoundingly rich body of material. That applies to coins struck by the centre as much as so-called provincial coinage. The latter can be roughly categorised as 1) coins struck by cities in the east of the Roman Empire, and for the Julio-Claudian period also in the west (in the western provinces, cities stopped issuing coins around the end of Claudius’ reign); 2) coinages issued in the name of federations of cities (koina) or coins celebrating alliances between cities (so-called homonoia-coins); 3) coins struck by ‘friendly kings’; and 4) so-called ‘provincial issues’ — mainly drachms, didrachms and tetradrachms, but also bronzes — that were mostly struck by important mints such as Alexandria, Antioch and Caesarea (in Cappadocia), probably under the supervision of Roman magistrates, to circulate in specific provinces.1