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.

Justinian's codification may be considered a coherent aggregate of all the law existing in A.D. 530–534. On the basis of this and his subsequent legislation it appears that the condicio coloniaria existed in his reign in two forms. One, the adscripticiate, based on a contract by which a person fixated his origo from a town onto an estate. This implied his coming under the potestas of the estate owner and the treatment of his possessions as if peculium, while his descendants were tied to this origo and its implications. The other, a colonate with the origo also fixed to an estate, but without the implications mentioned before: hence ‘free’ coloni. This latter colonate came primarily into existence if an adscripticius had performed services during thirty years.

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.

Chapter Seventeen of Plutarch's Life of Numa is well known to students of early Rome for the statement that it was the second king of Rome who created collegia for the craftsmen of Rome. Nor is Plutarch alone in his belief: two passages of Pliny's Natural History attribute the collegia of the bronze workers and brick makers to Numa (XXXIV, I; XXXV, 159); Pliny indeed seems to refer to an actual list of collegia in which these two figured. On the other hand, neither Cicero in the Republic nor Livy nor Dionysius displays any knowledge of such an initiative by Numa; an entirely different tradition indeed appears in Florus, according to which it was Servius Tullius who distributed the Roman people between collegia, in the general context of his timocratic organization of the census classes (1, 6, 3).

The object of this paper is to trace the administrative development in Roman times of the Judaeo-Samaritan territory proper, that is of Galilee, Peraea, Samaria and Judaea as delimited by Josephus, excluding the tetrarchy of Philip and the cities of the Decapolis and of the coast. My reasons for choosing this region are that it affords a highly interesting, because singularly well-documented, example of that development from a centralised bureaucratic administration to a régime of autonomous city-states, which was generally promoted by the Roman government, and that it incidentally throws some light on that subject of perennial interest,—the attitude of the Roman authorities to the Jews.

During the first century of our era, each of the four regions enumerated above formed an administrative unit. Each had its capital and was subdivided into smaller units, termed toparchies. The evidence is fullest for Judaea. Here Jerusalem was the capital, and there were eleven toparchies. The list according to Josephus is Jerusalem, Gophna, Acrabatta, Thamna, Lydda, Emmaus, Pella, Idumaea, Engaddi, Herodium and Jericho. A similar list is given by Pliny who, however, omits Idumaea and Engaddi and calls Pella Bethleptapha.

It seems to be the accepted view among historians who deal with Egypt under Roman rule to regard the two first centuries after the Roman conquest as a period of prosperity and happiness in Egypt, and the last three before the Arab invasion as one of absolute ruin and misery, though there are differences of opinion as to the point when the decline began and the causes to which it is to be ascribed. There is, however, considerable ground for believing that the condition of the country steadily deteriorated from the very beginning of Roman rule, and that this deterioration was the inevitable result of the mistakes made in the scheme of organisation adopted by Augustus.

Alluding to the scanty sources for the reign of Trajan, the historian Gibbon came out with a melancholy pronouncement: ‘the glimmerings of an abridgement or the doubtful light of a panegyric’. Gibbon's mind was on warfare and government. A later age is drawn to a wider and more subtle theme: the study of society. A document of unique value exists, the correspondence of Pliny. It illuminates class and rank and behaviour—and a whole region of Northern Italy. For other lands of the Roman West the evidence is poor and scattered. The written record has little more to disclose than the families of Seneca and Julius Agricola or the pedigree of the Antonine emperors. One has recourse to inscriptions and the study of nomenclature.

Pliny reveals persons of all orders, from consular magnates to small men and local friends. He also covers a wide range in time, from several long-lived survivors who had come to manhood under Claudius and Nero to youths of predictable promise whose consulates would adorn the first years of Trajan's successor. Further, the interrelation with other types of evidence is highly instructive. The information is abundant enough to permit some negative inferences. It is worth giving a thought to categories and groups that are absent from the correspondence or sparsely on show. Other ‘circles’ may therefore be surmised in the life of the capital. The categories are both social and regional. Certain cities of the North happen to make no contribution.

The Roman aureus exchanged for 25 denarii. The evidence for the equation, all literary, has reached us rather indirectly. The earliest preserved source is Claudius Didymus (first century A.D.), quoted in Priscian; in the second century Lucian equated 30 aurei with 750 denarii; in the third, Dio 55, 12, 3–5, a lost passage entirely reconstructed from the epitomes of Xiphilinus and Zonaras, put the exchange directly (p. 41, [3] below). In addition, the exchange can be inferred from two parallel passages: Suetonius relates that when Otho entertained Galba at dinner he regularly gave each member of the guard an aureus (Otho 4, 2 = Plutarch, Galba 20, 4, χρυσοῦς); Tacitus tells the same story, using the words ‘centenos nummos divideret’ (Hist. 1, 24).

In 1854 Moritz Haupt, in a classic exercise of the higher criticism, established that only the first seven poems of a collection of eleven which had all passed under his name could be attributed to Calpurnius, and that the last four belonged to Nemesianus (Opuscula I. 358–406). This division and attribution is beyond question now. Haupt then went on to show that Calpurnius was active in the Neronian age. Some of the evidence was philological. Indeed, it was the very evidence which he had used to distinguish the techniques of the two poets. E. Champlin, however, claims that ‘all the traditional indications of a Neronian date are based on circumstantial details which are equally appropriate to other periods in imperial history’. This is incautious. For Champlin, unlike Haupt, fails to consider such matters as prosody and diction, which are, after all, historical data that may prove to be as useful tools to the historian as an allusion to a barbarian invasion or to a consular year. In fact, all the ascertainable evidence was not put into the balance. We now turn to that evidence.

One of the most remarkable phenomena within the pattern of monetary circulation in antiquity is the presence of large numbers of Roman Republican denarii, for the most part struck between c. 130 and 31 B.C., on the soil of present-day Romania, roughly ancient Dacia. Absolute figures are impressive; it has been calculated that taking together isolated finds, hoards closing with Republican pieces, nuclei of Republican coins in Roman Imperial hoards and Republican coins in collections in Romania the total comes to something like 25,000 pieces. But absolute figures are themselves unable to convey fully the uniqueness of the phenomenon; this emerges most clearly from a comparison with neighbouring territories.

There are no known hoards of Republican denarii from the territory of the Moldavian S.S.R.; the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the north-west have produced between them a mere handful of Republican hoards; Jugoslavia and Albania to the west and Greece to the south are slightly more productive, but display no trace of the feature characteristic of Romania, a great block of hoards, the latest coin of which belongs in the first century B.C.

This paper examines the Sermons of Leo the Great (a.d. 440–461) for their liturgical topography. Leo developed an annual cycle of set places on set days — the very definition of stational liturgy — in Rome as one means to assert papal authority over the city's Christian communities and especially over the resident Roman senatorial aristocracy. Leo's Sermons indicate that the bishop found new ways to centralize the liturgy at St Peter's in the Vatican, making St Peter's — not St John the Lateran — the religious centre and the symbol of the papacy.

No analysis of the political character of the Empire can avoid the question of finance. The various sources of revenue of the Emperor and the res publica, the role of the private wealth of the Emperor, the nature of his control over public funds, the question of how and when various public revenues were taken by him—a satisfactory political interpretation of the early Empire must take account of all these.

This article attempts merely to take a second preliminary step towards such an interpretation. Its aim is to set out as clearly as possible the evidence as to the nature of the Aerarium and the functions of its officials, and, above all, to avoid the anachronistic approach which our language itself so readily invites. Not all anachronistic views of the subject have had the beautiful obviousness of Ramsay's contribution: even to speak of the ‘world-wide financial administration’ of the Aerarium will prove to be misleading.

The greatest works of what we normally call ‘Augustan’ literature were produced by writers who came to maturity in the Triumviral period, and were already established as major authors before January 27 B.C., when ‘Imperator Caesar Divi filius’, whom we like to call ‘Octavianus’, gained the unprecedented cognomen ‘Augustus’. By that moment the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, the Epodes and Satires of Horace, and Book 1 of the Elegies of Propertius were already written. Livy had composed his sombre Praefatio, and probably the whole first pentad, in the later Triumviral period, perhaps around the time of Actium or soon after.

Vergil's fourth Eclogue, foretelling a child whose coming would usher in the golden age, has often been supposed to be based upon eastern material; and it has even been suggested that, in the period of Roman history which ended with Octavian's final success at Actium, both East and West alike were expecting the Roman world to pass under the rule of one man, whether a Roman or a king from the east, to be followed by the birth of a child with whom should come the final kingdom of peace. But the ideas of the East in this matter have been deduced from western and Jewish material; and I hope in this paper to do a little toward ascertaining the view of the Greek East from a contemporary Greek document which has never been seriously examined, and considering its relation to the ideas of Vergil. I can only do a little, for most of the material vanished when Augustus later burnt 2,000 prophecies; but the secondary historians from whom we derive our current ideas of the East in the crucial years before Actium are so extraordinarily tendencious that every scrap of contemporary material, outside the circle of the victors' version, must be of value. My aim is to treat the matter solely from the historical standpoint; and the name of the boy Alexander Helios, son of Cleopatra and Antony, in whom East and West met, will serve to unite the two aspects of what I have to say.

This article explores the relationship between historical truth and rhetorical education in the Antiquitates Romanae of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. These two concerns dominate Dionysius' output, and have provided fuel for a long tradition of adverse criticism. Schwartz's RE article set the standard for a series of dismissive accounts; his premise is that by choosing a period of such remote history, Dionysius can fulfil his desire to make history the servant of rhetorical display, adding, with scorn, that Dionysius' love of the Romans disqualifies him from being a real Greek. Palm, still using Schwartz over fifty years later, is so convinced that Dionysius cannot have believed what he was writing that he ascribes the meticulously executed proof that the Romans were Greeks to ‘paradoxe Effekte’, in which anyone writing a rhetorical exercise of this kind would be careful to indulge. Polemic has recently waned, although by far the most common use of Dionysius' history is as a source for antiquarian anecdote or the lost annalistic tradition, often to highlight the originality of Livy. The recently published lectures of Gabba will do much to redress the balance, and are the first concerted attempt at harmonizing the details of Dionysius' rhetorical theory with his history.

Extensive epigraphic evidence, juristic discussion, and mention in the letters of Pliny combine to show that testamentary munificence during the principate was a phenomenon of both social and economic importance. Beyond a few introductory remarks, however, this paper is not concerned with the social background and functions of philanthropy. Rather, how was munificence regulated? On what conditions for the use of their bequests would benefactors insist? And on what terms would towns accept them? These questions raise a whole complex of further issues such as the ability of benefactors (or their descendants) to enforce the conditions of an endowment, and the extent to which variation of the object of the endowment by the town might be possible. Previous discussions of towns and their capacities in relation to the law of succession have been concerned largely, if not exclusively, with issues of juristic personality. While some understanding of those issues is essential for any useful discussion, they are left aside here so far as possible.

In 1896 Franz Cumont published, as the second volume of his Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, the dossier of documents on the basis of which he was to render, three years later, the first truly historical account of the transformation of Mithra-worship from a branch of Iranian Mazdaism to a Roman mystery cult.

This transformative process, as he envisaged it, was long and evolutionary. He used a geological metaphor to describe its stages, as theology and practice were passed down the ages and across the lands from Iran to Rome:

Le fond de cette religion, sa couche inférieure et primordiale, est la foi de l'ancien Iran, d'où elle tire son origine. Au-dessus de ce substratum mazdéen, s'est déposé en Babylonie un sédiment épais de doctrines sémitiques, puis en Asie Mineure les croyances locales y ont ajouté quelques alluvions. Enfin, une végétation touffue d'idées helléniques a grandi sur ce sol fertile, et dérobe en partie à nos recherches sa véritable nature.

Central to Cumont's scenario was Anatolia and the Mazdean diaspora that survived (and flourished) there after the fall of the Achaemenian empire. It was there during the Hellenistic Age that ‘Mithraism received approximately its definitive form’, although Cumont hesitated to pinpoint the precise time and area.

Phaedrus, far from being a Greek freedman striving to inscribe himself among the élite of Latin letters, was a Roman aristocrat masquerading as a man of the people to say in fable what could not safely be otherwise said. Modern biographical constructions are mostly fantasy. In coded terms the poet playfully reveals his gentle birth in Rome itself; he parades a mastery of the two most Roman contributions to literature, (Horatian) satire and jurisprudence; and he proclaims his belief in life's unfairness and in resignation to it, his contempt for both monarchs and mobs, and his admiration for the wise individual.