La riqueza epigráfica de las ánforas olearias de la provincia Bética es bien conocida gracias a los numerosos sellos de alfarero, rótulos pintados (tituli picti) y grafitos grabados en la arcilla fresca (ante cocturam). Éstos últimos suelen contener signos y simples letras, pero a veces, también nombres de personas y fechas calendariales y consulares. En este trabajo presentamos un grafito de carácter excepcional por su contenido estrictamente literario. En él, proponemos identificar un fragmento de poema de Virgilio. Analizamos y discutimos el contexto en que se realizó, la autoría del mismo y su significación para el conocimiento del grado de alfabetización de la sociedad rural romana en el Valle del Guadalquivir. Constituye el primer caso constatado sobre ánfora romana y es de excepcional interés para arqueólogos, epigrafistas y filólogos del latín vulgar.

This paper presents a graffito written after firing on a Samian-ware bowl dated to the turn of the first and second centuries c.e., which seems to contain part of a hexameter included in the well-known anthology Carmina XII sapientum, the composition of which has recently been attributed to the Christian author Lactantius.

This article examines marriage as a pathway to free status for enslaved women in the early imperial Roman world, arguing that women manumitted for marriage to their former owners experienced a qualified form of freedom. Analysis of a funerary altar from early imperial Rome alongside larger bodies of legal and epigraphic evidence shows that in this transactional mode of manumission, enslaved women paid for their freedom by foregoing certain privileges, including, to varying degrees, the ability to enter and exit the marriage at will and the separation of their property from that of their husbands. Through a close examination of one mode of manumission and the unequal unions that resulted from it, this paper offers further evidence that freedom was not uniform, but varied in its meaning depending on who achieved it and by what means.

The Roman fortress at Carpow, Perthshire, was excavated in 1961–62 and 1964–79. The gates of the fortress are the key to our understanding of its occupational history. The suggestion made here is that they were initially constructed in timber, at the same time as the associated turf rampart, but were soon replaced in stone specifically to support heavy dedication slabs set above them. A new arrangement of the surviving inscribed fragments at the East Gate is proposed, and new readings adopted, which confirm their traditional Severan dating. The Supplementary Material which includes detailed descriptions of the fragments and possible restorations is available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068113X19000138.

This article proposes a new reading of a late first-century c.e. inscribed dedication from Todi (Umbria) as an accusation of witchcraft, a rhetorical text aimed at propagating a particular story among the local community. Historical and anthropological studies of witchcraft accusations in other societies have emphasised how they can reveal tensions and anxieties that are normally not visible to the observer. By drawing on these studies and close examination of the language and content of the inscription, this article analyses an historical agent's experience of the social structure of early imperial Italy. The accusation is read as a freedman's response to his ambiguous position in a slave society, the ambivalent power of writing in Roman culture and the religious claims of Flavian imperial discourse.

The article presents an edition of and commentary on a Latin bronze inscription (152 lines long) from the time of Hadrian, found at Agón, near Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza), in ancient Hispania Citerior. The inscription contains a set of regulations (lex riui Hiberiensis) governing an irrigation community consisting of rural districts (pagi) from two different cities (Caesaraugusta and Cascantum) which shared a canal, the riuus Hiberiensis. The lex was produced in accordance with an agreement of the pagani after the intervention of the provincial governor [—Fun]ndanus Augustanus Alpinus. It provides information about the pagus institutions (magistri pagi, concilium, curatores, publicani?) as well as procedural aspects such as iusiurandum, uadimonium, and judicial formulae.