There are many periods of history—and unfortunately not always the least important—that survive, for us, entirely or mainly in one version. Ever since the development of modern critical historiography it has been recognized that it is the historian's duty to test that version, and highly skilled methods in the use of evidence have been worked out in order to enable him to do so. We all know some of the outstanding results in our field: the age of Augustus, once seen through the eyes of court literature; the ages of Tiberius and Claudius, once known only through the resentment of those who had suffered under tyranny; one could name many other periods that have gained a new reality in the last few generations and that now stand out in three dimensions.

The task of this paper is, in part, an invidious one: for I shall have to begin by looking a gift-horse in the mouth. I shall have to question a group of opinions that link the rise of Christianity in Africa with a resurgence of the local culture of the area. This resurgence, it is said, explains not only the rapid collapse of Roman rule at the time of the Vandal invasion of 429, but the disappearance of Roman civilisation and of Christianity itself in Africa in the early Middle Ages.

Discussion of this suggestion, however, tends to be jeopardised from the start because claims for the honour of being the resurgent local culture of Late Roman Africa have been enthusiastically advanced on behalf of two distinct and mutually-exclusive local cultures, associated with the two native languages—with Punic, on the one hand, and with ‘Libyan’ (which is often described by a convenient if perilous anachronism as ‘Berber’), on the other. What is more, these claims have been advanced by two equally distinct groups of scholars, handling different evidence. The evidence for the survival of Punic—or, so as not to prejudge the issue, of a lingua Punica—is literary: Augustine of Hippo and Procopius are the sole authorities for the period. The evidence for ‘Berber,’ by contrast, is largely confined to the interpretation of Libyan inscriptions and of traces of unchanging habits of worship and craftsmanship allegedly betrayed in the remains of the Christian Churches of Central Numidia.

The two problems to be discussed here are :—

(1) Under what law or laws were charges brought in cases of treason during the first years of the Principate?

(2) What were the penalties prescribed by that law or those laws?

The answer to the first question raises no serious difficulties. It is true that apart from any consideration of perduellio no fewer than four laws de maiestate (to be discussed more fully later) were passed in the seventy years before the reign of Augustus. But it is clear that for all practical purposes these laws were comprehended and superseded by the Lex Julia of Augustus. Tacitus always speaks of a single law, e.g.

Ann. 1, 72, 3: ‘nam legem maiestatis reduxerat,’ and

Ann. 2, 50, i: ‘adolescebat interea lex maiestatis’

and the jurists always refer to a Lex Julia which must have been that passed by Augustus and not that of Caesar.

The answer to the second question also was until recently regarded as practically certain. It was held by all authorities, both Continental and English, that the only legal penalty was ‘interdictio aquae et ignis’, though with the establishment of the Principate there began a process of arbitrarily worsening the conditions of exile and even substituting the death penalty. But during the present century another view has been put forward—a view developed in most detail by R. S. Rogers in his Criminal Trials and Criminal Legislation under Tiberius (1935). In this book Rogers asserts positively and often that the Lex Julia embraced two different kinds of treason—high treason, which he calls by the old name of Perduellio, and Maiestas, which often amounted to no more than slander of the Princeps or his family—and that two different penalties were prescribed, viz. death (with confiscation of property and damnatio memoriae) for Perduellio, exile for Maiestas.

During a visit to Naples in June, 1913, I was permitted by the courtesy of Professor Spinazzola, the distinguished Director of the National Museum, to examine a number of decorated bowls of Samian ware obviously of south Gallic style, preserved in the ‘magazzini’ of the museum. Professor Spinazzola most kindly afforded me every facility for their study, and consented to their publication. Seventy-six of these bowls bore, in addition to the inventory-number, the date 1882, and a subsequent reference to three passages in the Notizie degli Scavi made it possible to identify ninety bowls in all as belonging to a group found together at Pompeii. The circumstances of the discovery were as follows: the ninety bowls were found on 4th October, 1881, in the ‘tablinum’ of house 9, insula 5, region viii (ii). They were arranged in order in a wooden box, of which some charred fragments remained, together with thirty-seven earthenware lamps said to have shewn no sign of use. Of these lamps twenty-four bear the stamp STROBILI; six, COMVNIS; four, ECHIO; two, FORTIS; and one is uninscribed. Side by side with this box were found two others, containing red powder, either pounded brick or red earth, the use of which I do not know.

This article explores the religious importance of Cicero's De Haruspicum Responso against the background of prodigy-handling in Republican Rome. Comparing the prodigy in question to an ‘auditory epiphany’, it argues that key issues raised by the speech include the nature of the divine voice, the relationship of the prodigious ‘rumbling and clattering’ to the gods themselves, and the ambiguous temporalities implied by Roman practices of divination. The article also suggests that De Haruspicum Responso proposes a significant overlap between religious and political speech, and it questions the radical split often assumed between the religious ideology of Cicero's philosophical and his more ‘public’ works.

In JRS 97 Sabine Huebner argued that the brother-sister marriages in Roman Egypt could be explained as marriages between an adopted son and a natural daughter, a widespread family strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Remijsen and Clarysse now return to the traditional view that Egyptians did marry their full sisters. Ancient authors considered brother-sister marriages as a peculiarity of the whole Egyptian population and, moreover, papyrological sources do not prove any connection between adoption and brother-sister marriage. Neither the household size nor the onomastic pattern in families with brother-sister marriages are consistent with the usual adoption practices of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Ill fortune bore down the family of the Labieni, and an ill repute hangs over their memory. Q. Labienus, an ally of Saturninus, perished miserably, cut down in the Curia by good citizens. His nephew, T. Labienus, Caesar's legate in Gaul from the first campaign to the last, deserted to Pompeius Magnus at the outbreak of the Civil War, conveying promises which he failed to implement, was held in scant honour by his new allies, and met his death at Munda. The son of Caesar's marshal, a renegade styling himself ‘Parthicus imperator,’ invaded the provinces of the Roman People and swept through Syria and Cilicia into Asia with an army of Parthian cavalry: he was defeated in battle and killed by Ventidius the Picene and the Marsian Poppaedius, generals of Antonius.

Members of the late Roman élite commemorated the holding of certain offices by the distribution of ivory diptychs. This paper attempts to show how diptychs came to play this rôle; that they were not originally distributed by consuls but by any official who provided games; that they had nothing to do with the ecclesiastical diptychs that are first heard of at about the same time; that the custom spread from east to west, not from west to east; and that the earliest western consular diptychs are not illustrated with scenes from games because there were no multi-day consular games at Rome before the fifth century.

Our knowledge of the Jewish Revolt in A.D. 115–117, derived formerly from scanty literary sources only, has been considerably enriched during the last few decades by new evidence, papyrological, epigraphical, and archaeological and the course of the events in the countries of the Jewish Diaspora can now be ascertained in fuller detail than was possible before.

The purpose of this paper is to inquire into the general aspects of the revolt.

This paper discusses the widely held view that politics in fifth- and sixth-century Italy were largely driven by rivalry between the two great families of the Anicii and the Decii, supposedly following distinctive policies (pro- or anti-eastern, philo- or anti-barbarian, etc.). It is probable that individual members of these (and other) families had feuds and disagreements from time to time, but there is absolutely no evidence for continuing rivalry between Decii and Anicii as families, let alone on specific issues of public policy. Indeed by the mid-fifth century the Anicii fell into a rapid decline. The nobility continued to play a central rôle in the social and (especially) religious life of late fifth- and early sixth-century Italy. Their wealth gave them great power, but it was power that they exercised in relatively restricted, essentially traditional fields, mainly on their estates and in the city of Rome. The quite extraordinary sums they spent on games right down into the sixth century illustrate their overriding concern for popular favour at a purely local level. In this context there was continuing competition between all noble families rich enough to compete. Indeed, the barbarian kings encouraged the nobility to spend their fortunes competing with each other to the benefit of the city and population of Rome.

This article presents a new interpretation of the historiographical production of Jordanes by situating it in the political and social environment of Constantinople of the years 550–552. It argues that these years were a period of crisis in Justinian's reign and that this is reflected in the pessimistic view of Roman power and the critique of Justinian's military and religious policy we can see in Jordanes’ Romana. If this prevents us from understanding Jordanes as a mouthpiece of the court, he cannot be reduced to a mere reproducer of Cassiodorus either: while there is more evidence for a close interaction between Jordanes and Cassiodorus (in particular the use of the Historia Tripartita in the Romana) than usually adduced, this is balanced by Jordanes’ explicit attempts to keep his distance from the senator. If the latter can be explained by Jordanes’ much lower social and literary status and his Moesian rather than Italian origin, which made him only a marginal member of Cassiodorus’ circle in Constantinople, the agreement between both men is the result of a confluence of views caused by the turn of the Italian war in 540–550. Jordanes, then, appears as a unique voice in what must have been a polyphony of opinions in mid-sixth-century Constantinople.

‘Can I fix Rome for you on this poor sheet of paper?’ Something like Petrarch's lament must precede any attempt to sum up Rome in words; only an Atlas could do justice to the vast weight of such a city. But there is at least one compensation: we are describing a city that we all know, or think we know. For Montaigne, it was the first city that entered his consciousness: ‘I have had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long time before I had knowledge of those of my own house. I knew the Capitol and its platform before I knew Louvre, the palace of our kings in Paris; the river Tiber before Seine’. And for him it remained the ultimate city: ‘And therefore can I not look so often into the situation of their streets and houses, and those wondrous-strange ruins, that may be said to reach down to the Antipodes, but so often must I amuse myself on them. Is it nature or by the error of fantasy, that the seeing of places we know to have been frequented or inhabited by men whose memory is esteemed or mentioned in stories doth in some sort move and stir us up as much or more than the hearing of their noble deeds or reading of their compositions?’ For Freud, the city provided the best analogy for the human consciousness itself, an overlayering of past and present events, all capable of being experienced simultaneously. He asks us, in a flight of fancy, to ‘suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past — an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into being will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one’.

Any knowledge of the municipal system evolved in Italy after the Social War must turn, however we might wish it otherwise, upon the four bronze inscriptions found respectively at Tarentum, Veleia, Ateste and Heraclea. They have been much discussed, and it may seem that there is nothing more useful to be said; but the present state of opinion leaves room for doubt. To Mommsen and scholars of his generation they were at least ingenuous documents, but poorly engraved and in places obscure and inexplicable. Even that was challenged by Gradenwitz, who in a remarkable series of articles turned upon them an eye sharpened in the pursuit of interpolation in legal texts, and declared that at least two—the Lex Rubria and the Tabula Heracleensis—were products of inept draftsmen who inserted glosses and interpolations in defiance of style and sense. A. von Premerstein went further; like the Spanish charter from Urso, the Heraclea inscription was an unfinished draft of Caesar's published, after his murder, by Antony with reckless additions of his own; and more recently, the same has been urged by G. Beseler, F. Schulz and others of the Lex Rubria. The internal problems of these inscriptions are thus met by questioning their evidential value, but this seems, like a conjuror's explanation, to raise deeper mysteries than it solves.

In this paper I wish to discuss the evidence of certain pragmatic calculations in Martial's Epigrams and Statius' Silvae, prescinding entirely from whatever literary qualities this kind of poetry may have. Specifically, the paper is concerned with the problem of presentation, and it has two parts. Part I argues that the poets' published books represent only the last and least important means of presenting poems to patrons, and collects evidence for the ways in which the poems were primarily communicated, via recitation, impromptu performance, and private brochure. Discussion of a special form of presentation, the book-dedication, is reserved for Part II. After attempting to redefine the status of the dedication in an ancient book, I will explore a contrast that is apparent between Martial's procedure and Statius'.

Caesar returned to Rome from his African campaign on 25 July 46 b.c. (by the old calendar). Cicero felt comparatively secure at Rome at this time, both because of the assurances of safety he had received from Caesar and because of his intimacy with those who expected to play a role in the new administration: A. Hirtius, L. Cornelius Balbus, and the pardoned C. Cassius Longinus, M. Iunius Brutus, and P. Cornelius Dolabella. At Brutus's request he had composed a treatise on the role of oratory in the practice of republican politics (Brutus, published earlier in the year) and was at this very moment composing a panegyric on Cato. Cassius, Dolabella and Hirtius had been guests at his Tusculan villa engaged with the master in long-interrupted oratorical exercises (‘intermissis exercitationibus’, Fam. 9. 18. 3) for some time during the month, whence he ‘sent’ them to greet Caesar and put in a word for him with their familiaris.

In volume xx of the Journal (pp. 55–70) there appeared an article by Mr. Syme on the imperial finances under Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. Briefly, his object was to shift on to the shoulders of Nerva the financial embarrassment often attributed to the reign of Domitian, and also to strive for a fairer recognition in general of Domitian's qualities. The following notes deal with some of the principal points at issue, and attempt a reconsideration of the financial policy of the period.

Since its rediscovery in the late nineteenth century, the ‘Ara of Domitius Ahenobarbus’ has become a keystone in the history of Roman republican art. Following the seminal interpretation of Alfred von Domaszewski, the monument is usually understood as commemorating the key stages of the Roman census. This paper offers a fundamental reappraisal of the Ara's imagery, based on an iconographic analysis which takes into account all relevant signs of rank and status such as shoes, clothing and other attributes. From this it becomes clear that none of the three protagonists on the Ara can be identified as a censor. Consequently, the monument neither commemorated a census nor was it a censorial location. Instead, I suggest that the Ara actually shows another important political event, namely the deductio of a Roman colony which I tentatively identify as the colonia Neptunia founded by Gaius Gracchus in 123 b.c.

There survive from a number of places in Western Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean inscriptions recording census registrations. They are undated, but were probably engraved in the late third or early fourth century A.D., when Diocletian and his colleagues and successors are known to have been active in carrying out censuses to serve as the basis of their new system of taxation. All are fragmentary, but some are of sufficient length to yield results of some statistical value on the distribution of landed property, on the density of the agricultural population, and on the proportion of slave to free labour. In view of the extreme paucity of any statistical data for the ancient world they are worth analysis.

Recent archaeological investigations have revealed that at the end of the fifth century b.c.e., Gabii, an ancient centre of Latium Vetus, was reorganised in a planned, quasi-orthogonal pattern, which constitutes an anomaly in the regional context. This is indicative of an important transformational moment in its history, representing a break from previous patterns of occupation and involving significant spatial and socio-political discontinuities with the previous settlement. This article proposes that the reorganisation reflects a moment of refoundation after a period of abandonment, an urban trajectory that can be clarified by a critical re-examination of the historical evidence, focusing on two pivotal processes: the devotio of the city by the Romans and the dynamics of early colonisation in Latium. This new interpretation not only has important implications for understanding the archaeology of Gabii and of early republican urbanism, but also sheds light on one of the ‘darkest’ ages in Roman history.

The most notable personality in the history of Augustan Greece is the Spartan, C. Julius Eurycles. As a partisan of Octavian, he led the Spartan force against Antony at Actium, and his name reveals that his allegiance was rewarded with Roman citizenship. Eurycles enjoyed the friendship of Augustus, and abused it. The history of this man provides valuable evidence for Augustan policy toward cities and dynasts of the East. Yet most of the modern literature dealing with him is inconclusive. It will be impossible to say the final word about Eurycles, but a great deal of confusion can be cleared up. Moreover, a recently published palimpsest requires that a crucial piece of evidence be revised.