I am concerned in this paper with Plutarch's treatment of the story of Coriolanus, not with the historical truth of the legend or with its development before Plutarch's time. I start from the hypothesis that the Life is, in its essentials, a transposition into biographical form of the historical narrative in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, Books V to VIII. This has long been the common view. It was held and defended by Hermann Peter, Mommsen, and Eduard Schwartz. A careful reading of the two texts side by side tempts me to call it certain, so exact and frequent are the echoes. It is at any rate probable enough to justify an attempt to follow out its consequences by treating the differences between Dionysius and Plutarch, in default of other evidence, as Plutarch's constructions, to be explained in terms of his literary purposes and methods. This is what I shall do in the main part of this paper. I preface the details, however, by a few more general considerations.

The general chronology of the reign of Decius has been described by Arthur Stein in a recent paper, based principally on the evidence of papyri, inscriptions and coins.

Grenfell and Hunt had already pointed out (Ox. Pap. i, 35), in connexion with a papyrus giving a list of emperors from Augustus to Decius with the number of years of each reign, that ‘in reckoning the length of reigns, the months after the last Thoth I (Aug. 29) in an emperor's reign are neglected, since the interval between the death of an emperor and the next Thoth I counted as the 1st year of his successor.’ The latter half of the reign of Decius extended as we shall see for nearly a year after Aug. 29, A.D. 250. As, therefore, he has only two years (α and β) both on the papyri and on the coins of the Alexandrian mint, it follows that his reign in Egypt begins at a date after Aug. 29, 249. In other words, although Decius had been proclaimed emperor by the Pannonian legions at the close of 248 or in the first part of 249, the authority of Philip was maintained in Egypt until his overthrow and death at Verona in the autumn of 249. This is confirmed by the dating of Philip's coins which enter on a seventh year in Egypt and by Pap. Brit. Mus. 950-1 which, however, gives no month.

In the late Republic and early Empire special courts were established by statute, largely by Sulla and Augustus, to deal with the following crimes: treason, adultery, murder, parricide, embezzlement, forgery of wills, public and private violence, corrupt practices in elections, extortion, injury, and interference with the corn-supply. It is commonly thought that at least some of these quaestiones were still active in the Severan period. In a recent article Kunkel granted that the courts for treason, extortion, embezzlement and ambitus (which included bribery at elections) probably lasted for only a short time under the Principate. But he considered that the quaestio or iudicium publicum was nevertheless a living institution in the time of the classical lawyers, and, in particular, that the evidence was good for the continued operation of the quaestio de adulteriis. The case for the existence of the quaestio de adulteriis may well be stronger than the case for the existence of other quaestiones; but it is still weak. In the following pages the thesis will be put forward that all the quaestiones were defunct in the Severan age.

The towns of the Middle Roman Empire have left an array of grand columned marble architecture that makes classical sites, from Merida to Ephesus, still so imposing for the modern viewer. The great benefactors who paid for this strange marble culture and for everything else thought worthwhile in an ancient city received large public portrait statues set up on tall elegant moulded bases, set either in columned façades or posted around town at focal points of urban life (see below, Figs 1–2). In their method of signification these statue monuments shared more with poster hoardings than the gallery objects we think of as art. That is, they combined a commanding image with a loud complementary text. They were also different from the public statues of our own times in at least three other important respects — in their prominence, in their sheer quantity, and in that they mostly represented living persons. They were not isolated memorials but potent markers in local politics and aristocratic competition. Architectural setting, inscribed base, statue costume, and styled portrait head all combined to make sometimes complex statements about the subject.

In elucidating the history of Asia Minor it has always been profitable to examine the origin, background and influence of the wealthy families of the Greco-Roman cities, and the connections they established between themselves. As more information comes to light it becomes increasingly obvious how complex the relationships between the various families were, and how far the influence of any one family could extend. From this evidence we are beginning to be able to form a convincing, if sketchy, picture of a power structure, based on a close-knit network of dominant families, which produced the ruling élite of the cities, the dynasts of the Hellenistic period, and the senators and consuls who made careers for themselves in the eastern provinces and maintained their family traditions of power and influence within the framework of the Roman Empire. Fresh evidence now allows us to weave more threads into the pattern, linking two important families of the city of Perge on the south coast, one certainly of Italian descent, with the cities and families of the vast Anatolian hinterland, and suggesting an important source for the wealth which enabled members of these families to rise from a mercantile background to become senators in the first and second centuries A.D.

The western shore of the Dead Sea, the most remarkable natural feature in Palestine (fig. 4), is a strip of flat or very gently sloping land, mostly barren, its parched surface seamed with a wrinkled pattern of erosion channels. The strip represents in part the old bed of the lake, once larger than now, and in part the spill of detritus from the rocky cliffs which tower above it. These precipitous heights form an almost unbroken wall some 300 ft. high extending from Qumran to Sdom, being patterned in high relief only by the few wadis which bite through them and carry the rare but torrential winter rains. The cliffs themselves are but the floor of the plateau through which the Jordan valley has opened its deep and famous rift, reaching a depth of over a thousand feet below Mediterranean sea-level; and from the plateau itself rises the mountainous, pitiless desert of Judah, stretching to Hebron 21 miles westward and draining eastwards towards the rift-valley. Where the eastward face of the cliffs is cut by water-courses it is carved into promontories, but in the main these constitute an integral part of wide sweeps of hinterland and are not positions of strength. At one point only (fig. 5) do two wadis flow close together and then divide, to tear out deep ravines behind a promontory, and almost to cut it off on the landward side. The spot in question is Masàda (pl. XVI), a lozenge-shaped table-mountain, 730 yds. long and 215 yds. wide overall, lofty, isolated and to all appearance impregnable.

There are (at least) two ways to approach the history of religious art in Antiquity. One is to study what was going on in the ancient world, to tell the story as they (the subjects of our inquiry) saw it and as they did it. Another is to ask how we know how they saw it and did it. The first might be called ‘history’, the second ‘critical historiography’. Both are crucial to the historical enterprise, and I in no way intend to demean the first by saying that this paper is largely of the second kind. My project is to examine what are the grounds for our assumptions in creating the generalizations of ‘Late Ancient Jewish Art’ and ‘Early Christian Art’ as real categories of visual production in Late Antiquity with specific and discrete audiences and constituencies of patrons and producers. Both fields are venerable, with long historiographies and complex guiding-agendas of the sort that are perhaps inevitable given the kinds of ancestral investments made by scholars and indeed members of the general public (which is to say, also adherents of the two faiths) in both fields. In addition to prising apart the history of some of these investments, I want to question the methodological basis for many of the assumptions about what can rightly be classified under either the heading of ‘Jewish’ art or of ‘early Christian’ art.

One of the most peculiar features of Roman law was the father's dominant position. In theory, he exercised an almost absolute authority, patria potestas, over his descendants until his own death. The uniqueness of their family system did not escape the Romans themselves. In his mid-second-century legal textbook Gaius explained:

Item in potestate nostra sunt liberi nostri quos iustis nuptiis procreavimus. Quod ius proprium civium Romanorum est; fere enim nulli alii sunt homines, qui talem in filios suos habent potestatem, qualem nos habemus. Idque divus Hadrianus edicto, quod proposuit de his, qui sibi liberisque suis ab eo civitatem Romanam petebant, significavit. Nec me praeterit Galatarum gentem credere in potestate parentum liberos esse. (Inst. 1.55)

Again, we have in our power our children, the offspring of a Roman law marriage. This right is one which only Roman citizens have; there are virtually no other peoples who have such power over their sons as we have over ours. This was made known by the emperor Hadrian in an edict which he issued concerning those who applied to him for Roman citizenship for themselves and their children. I have not forgotten that the Galatians believe that children are in the power of their parents. (Translated by W. M. Gordon and O. F. Robinson, The Institutes of Gaius (1988))

This account immediately raises at least one fundamental question: If patria potestas was a distinctive feature of Roman society, how did the other peoples of the Empire react to it after the universal grant of the Roman citizenship in A.D. 212?

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.

Because men addressed him as Augustus in view of his claim to honour they revere him with temples and sacrifices over all the islands and continents, in cities and tribes requiting him for the magnitude of his virtue and his benefactions towards them.

This passage from a biography of Augustus by a contemporary writer, Nicolaus of Damascus, gives a rare picture of the way in which the emperor was honoured in his lifetime throughout the provinces of the empire. The temples and sacrifices to which it refers formed part of a nexus of cultic honours, classified by the Greeks as isotheoi timai, honours equivalent to those given to the gods, which also included priests, festivals and games. This form of royal ritual stretched back in the Greek lands three hundred years to the time of Alexander the Great and beyond and constitutes a fundamental aspect of the relationship between subject and ruler in the ancient world.

No one has done more than Norman Baynes to clarify our thinking on the later Roman Empire and its spiritual atmosphere, to dispel the mirage of ‘Orientalism’, and to emphasize the sober continuity of Roman thought. So he has stressed the emperor's conscious humanity and dependence upon the supernatural as against excessive inferences from the language of ruler-worship. May I offer to him a few remarks on a phenomenon which might seem to tell on the other side, the description of this or that deity as comes Augusti?

(i) Under Commodus we find a coin-type of 186–9, perhaps of about 189, HERCVLI C[OMIT]I. After a considerable interval SOLI (INVICTO) COM(I)TI (AVGVSTI) appears on issues of Gallienus and Probus. Gallienus has also SERAPIDI COMITI AVG and Probus has Minerva (unnamed, but recognizable) as COMES AVG and COMITI PROBI AVG as well as Hercules (unnamed) with the latter legend. The emperors of Gaul employed the legend; Postumus for Hercules, Neptunus, Serapis, and Victoria; Victorinus for Mars and Victoria (both, it seems, unnamed); Tetricus for the same pair, again without names; Tetricus II for Hercules (named), Minerva, and Victoria; Carausius for Neptunus, Apollo, Minerva, Victoria, and Providentia (Apollo alone named); Allectus for Minerva and Victoria (without names). Constantius Chlorus has comes for Minerva and the Dioscuri (no. names). After his death Sol as comes is frequent on the coins of the tetrarchy, and Hercules (named), Mars and Minerva also have the epithet. Sol still appears as comes under Crispus and Constantine II.

Among the many fields of Roman history which Mr. Last has illuminated the later Roman Empire is not the least, and it was he who first encouraged me to embark on its study. I hope, therefore, that he will accept this contribution to the volume dedicated to his honour both as testimony to the wide range of his interests and as a token of personal gratitude.

The problem of capitatio and iugatio has provoked much controversy and many ingenious theories have been propounded for its solution. In the limited space available it would have been impossible to traverse these theories in detail, and I have therefore thought it best simply to set out the evidence and to see how much can be deduced from it. Two general points must be premised. First, the accurate use of technical terms is not to be expected from the draftsmen of the Codes.

Summarizing Polybius' contribution to the study of Roman history, Mommsen paid him the following compliment: ‘His books are like the sun in the field of Roman history; where they begin, the misty veils which still cloak the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars are lifted, where they finish, a new and if possible still more vexatious twilight begins.’ Since Mommsen our understanding of Polybius' methods, his bias and omissions, his ideology and concerns, has progressed immeasurably, thanks largely to the work of Pédech and Walbank. Nevertheless, the idea that the Histories represent, at least in their conception, the illumination of an intrinsic reality persists. Polybius' supposed ‘poor style’ is often treated as in some way an absence of historiographical mediation. In this case, ‘transparency’ in a text, the sensation that it provides unmediated access to what it describes, is achieved not by a smooth and inconspicuous style, but by coarseness. Tarn compared Polybius' work to rescripts and despatches, as if he were only interested in an unobtrusive recording role, and this attitude to the historian, far from being in decline, has received some radical and authoritative support in recent years. One reappraisal of Roman imperialism has argued that Polybius was much closer to the reality of the process than many twentieth-century historians. Another study claims to ‘want to say no more than what Polybius said’. Ultimately, I have no argument with those who stress Polybius' honesty and reliability. More problematic, however, is an attitude to our use of Polybius' history which is often assumed in eulogies of his truthfulness: that when we read Polybius, we are enabled to gaze directly on the landscape of Roman history, a single substantial unitary reality, structured out of objective facts.

This article presents an English translation and analysis of a new historical fragment, probably from Dexippus’ Scythica, published by Gunther Martin and Jana Grusková in 2014. The fragment, preserved in a palimpsest in the Austrian National Library, describes a Gothic attack on Thessalonica and the subsequent preparations of the Greeks to repel the barbarian force as it moved south into Achaia. The new text provides several important details of historical, prosopographical and historiographical significance, which challenge both our existing understanding of the events in Greece during the reign of Gallienus and the reading of the main literary sources for this period. In this article we look to secure the Dexippan authorship of the fragment, identify the individuals named in the text, and date the events described in the text to the early 260s a.d.

In 1913 J. B. Bury wrote of Diocletian's administrative reforms: ‘It is becoming clear that (Diocletian) was not the initiator, but was only extending and systematizing changes which had already been begun’; and subsequent research in many areas has tended to support this contention. Bury was particularly concerned with the subdivision of the provinces; yet that particular reform has continued to be ascribed almost wholly to Diocletian, on the authority of Lactantius' famous phrase, provinciae quoque in frusta concisae, and in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary. It is the purpose of this article to present new material from Aphrodisias in Caria which seems to indicate that a new imperial province of Phrygia and Caria, whose creation has hitherto been ascribed to Diocletian or his successors, had been separated from proconsular Asia before A.D. 259. If this is so, it may well prove fruitful to re-examine material from other parts of the empire, in order to determine whether similar developments, at such a date, can be identified elsewhere.

Wars were once considered to be the essence of world history, but under the influence of social history, the histoire des mentalités, and the discourse of the ‘cultural turn’ their role has changed fundamentally. More interest is now paid to wars as part of cultural history than as highpoints of histoire événementielle.

Historians of the present generation stand in an ambivalent relation to the phenomenon of war. The ‘cultural turn’ in historical studies has generally focused on anthropological phenomena that are part of general human experience — love and death, body and soul, memory and hope, customs and emotions, mentality and ideologies. These phenomena, which are conceived as driving forces in history, are at the same time parts of the contemporary cultural furniture of those scholars who study their changing aspects as objects of research. The phenomenon of war, however, for the majority of contemporary historians and other observers in Europe and North America, has become a distant spectacle. So, what do we really know about war? And what do we want to know about war?

In his discussion of natural slavery in the first book of the Politics (1254a17–1254b39), Aristotle notoriously assimilates human slaves to non-human animals. Natural slaves, Aristotle maintains (1254b16–20), are those who differ from others in the way that the body differs from the soul, or in the way that an animal differs from a human being; and into this category fall ‘all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service’. The point is made more explicit in the argument (1254b20–4) that the capacity to be owned as property and the inability fully to participate in reason are defining characteristics of the natural slave: ‘Other animals do not apprehend reason but obey their instincts. Even so there is little divergence in the way they are used; both of them (slaves and tame animals) provide bodily assistance in satisfying essential needs’ (1254b24–6). Slaves and animals are not actually equated in Aristotle's views, but the inclination of the slave-owner in classical antiquity, or at least a representative of the slave-owning classes, to associate the slave with the animal is made evident enough. It appears again in Aristotle's later statement (1256b22–6) that the slave was as appropriate a target of hunting as the wild animal.

Our knowledge of the city of Rome after the fall of the Western Empire is largely determined by its position as the seat of the Papacy. Historical studies are based principally upon the Liber Pontificalis and the writings of the popes themselves, while architectural and archaeological research has concentrated on the city's numerous churches, many of which for the period A.D. 500–850 are remarkably well-preserved. The best known modern syntheses in English from each field are probably Peter Llewellyn's Rome in the Dark Ages (1971) and Richard Krautheimer's Rome. Profile of a City (1980). If we look beyond the purely ecclesiastical, however, we find very little Archaeological studies of Rome's urban infrastructure—walls, roads, bridges, aqueducts, sewers, housing—tend to stop, at the latest, with the Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century. The lack of research, and therefore lack of data, have in turn been interpreted as a sign that early medieval Rome was a city bereft of an artificial watersupply, and of the resources necessary to maintain such structures as the Aurelianic Walls. Studies of medieval urbanism have been affected by this dearth of evidence proposing, for example, settlement models with the population of the city crowded into the Tiber bend in order to obtain water.

The Roman polychrome mosaic, which forms the subject of this paper, came to light on 12th September, 1963, at the village of Hinton St. Mary in northern Dorset, 1½ miles north of Sturminster Newton. The field in which the pavement lies is the property of Mr. W. J. White, general engineer, blacksmith, and welder, who recognized as Roman the tesserae revealed by the postholes that were being dug for the foundations of a building near his forge. Mr. White immediately reported the discovery to the authorities of the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, and invited them to direct the clearance of the whole mosaic with the help of a group of local archaeologists and amateurs. Mr. R. A. H. Farrar, of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), also took part in the work of clearance; and the vertical photographs reproduced here, of which Mr. White holds the copyright, were taken at his request by the Commission with the aid of an 18-foot gantry.

C. Licinius Macer is little known outside the citations by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Cicero classifies him among the Roman historians but says nothing about the scope or contents of his work. From the fragments we can see that it dealt with the whole field of Roman history from the earliest times, evidently in the conventional manner used by Annalists and with considerable detail. Livy cites him seven times but not beyond the first Decade since he appears to prefer other Annalists for later history. These citations, however, are of great value because they reveal what sources Licinius himself quoted, e.g. 4, 7, 12, ‘Licinius Macer auctor est et in foedere Ardeatino et in linteis libris ad Monetae inventa’; 23,1 ‘… et Tubero et Macer libros linteos auctores profitentur … Licinio libros haud dubie sequi linteos placet’; 20, 8 ‘libri quos linteos in aede repositos Monetae Macer Licinius citat identidem auctores’. Thus we are taken behind our surviving authorities to the question of their information in the Roman historical tradition.