When ancient historians wanted to take cognizance of what their predecessors had written, they seem usually, though not always, to have preferred an anonymous reference to one by name. To this practice the most noteworthy exception is Polybius. In his Histories he mentions about a score of previous writers, including philosophers, orators and historians, a large number of whom are the object of quite bitter self-righteous polemic. This harsh trait in Polybius' character appears slightly odd, when one considers his generally sanguine and optimistic view of the world he lived in and of the advantages which he himself enjoyed over his predecessors.

The meaning and implication of this passage of Livy have been so generally misunderstood, that it is worth translating and explaining it; for its true meaning is important both in itself and, perhaps, for understanding one aspect of Roman colonial policy between 190 and 180 B.C.

The passage runs as follows: ‘nouum ius eo anno a Ferentinatibus tentatum, ut Latini qui in coloniam Romanam nomina dedissent ciues Romani essent. Puteoleos Salernumque et Buxentum ascripti coloni qui nomina dederant et cum ob id se pro ciuibus Romanis ferrent, senatus iudicauit non esse eos ciues Romanos.’

Around the world, covers have become advertisements for their books. The dignity that characterizes something self-contained, lasting, hermetic — something that absorbs the reader and closes the lid over him, as it were, the way the cover of the book closes on the text — has been set aside as inappropriate to the times. The book sidles up to the reader; it no longer presents itself as existing in itself, but rather as existing for something other, and for this very reason the reader feels cheated of what is best in it. Theodor Adorno

In his last book, at the end of a successful, literary career, Martial asks in regard to his own genre of epigram: ‘quid minus esse potest?’ (‘What can be humbler?’, 12.95). Such self-disparagement is not necessarily surprising, since there is no reason to imagine that Martial's success as an epigrammatist would alter his genre's place in the traditional hierarchy of literary seriousness. Martial's denigration of his own oeuvre, however, goes beyond consciousness of epigram's status as a low genre. The epigrammatist not only registers his genre's formal rank, he develops fully articulated fictional scenarios depicting the nature of his writing and its role in society. According to the most salient and pervasive fiction characterizing Martial's work, epigram is an ephemeral form of literature embedded in specific, social contexts, and dedicated to immediate uses.

A papyrus dated to the year 8 B.C. attests the existence of the legion XXII Deiotariana and, indirectly, that of the other legions as well in the series with numbers running from XIII to XXII. It is therefore no longer necessary to say anything about the theory of Mommsen, that eight of them were raised all at once at the time of the Pannonian Revolt, and the other two after the disaster of Varus, or about the milder form in which Hardy served it up. Nobody could now wish to depart very far from the estimate of Emil Ritterling, that Augustus began his Principate with twenty-six or twenty-seven legions, or from that of Mr. Parker, that in 15 B.C. he had twenty-eight. But a general acquiescence does not preclude debate about details which, if they appear small, are never to be despised when they cast light upon imperial principle, or at least practice, and add coherence to a narrative or harmony to a picture.

No aristocrat of the fourth century A.D. was so brilliantly successful or so widely hated as S. Petronius Probus. Greedy for public office when his peers preferred opulent leisure, more at home amid the intrigues of court than the salons of Rome, a Christian when most of his peers were still pagan, he rose to a pinnacle of wealth and power.

His unusually long career is abundantly documented by literary, legal and epigraphic sources. But the details have always been problematic. And in 1971 G. Barbieri published a new dedication from Capua that raised a whole new set of problems.

The following pages contain the results, not devoid of interest, if meagre in quantity, of various short visits to the valley of the Caystrus in Central Phrygia, and to the hills which bound it on the north and south. This valley formed the meeting-place of five great Anatolian roads, the northern and central trade-routes from the east, the highways to the west coast down the Maeander valley or past Akmonia or Eucarpia and Sardis, and the road to the Bosporus by way of Dorylaeum. Naturally therefore the valley of the Caystrus was traversed by many generals or governors or other persons known to history, and, little as history has recorded of the state of the valley at different periods, enough has been gleaned from various writers to enable us to fix the main features of its ancient topography. It was traversed from west to east by Cyrus the Younger and Xenophon in 401 B.C. Alexander the Great crossed it from south to north on his way from Celaenae to Gordium in 333 B.C. The battle of Ipsus was fought somewhere near its eastern end in 301 B.C. The plunder-laden army of Cn. Manlius Vulso moved slowly over it, proceeding northwards, in 191 B.C. Cicero travelled through it on his way from Synnada to Philomelium in 51 B.C. To cut short a long list, this valley was the scene of a fierce battle between the emperor Alexius I and the Turks in A.D. 1116; the account given by Anna Comnena of this campaign is the fullest record we possess on the ancient topography of the Caystrus valley, and it throws some light on places in the hills to the north.

This paper had its origin in an attempt to elucidate the connexions of three fragmentary mould-blown glasses in the Ashmolean Museum (infra, pp. 172–3, nos. F i d and e and ii c) which bear the complimentary motto ΚΑΤΑΧΑΙΡΕ ΚΑΙ ΕΥΦΡΑΙΝΟΥ, ‘Your very good health.’ The first two of these on close examination proved to be so much alike in every detail that they must have come out of the same mould.

Air reconnaissance has been continued over the United Kingdom during the last four years, and this summary of results follows the same pattern as the accounts of earlier surveys already described in this Journal. The years 1969 and 1970 saw the most favourable weather for archaeological reconnaissance, particularly in the eastern half of Britain. Hopes of a good year for crop marks in 1971 vanished when the month of June turned out to be almost the wettest of this century, and then in 1972, cold, damp weather persisting from the end of May through June did not favour the development of crop marks.

Once again most of the new information has come from the military districts of Wales and the north. Understanding of military sites, both in their immediate setting and their wider significance in relation to the system to which they belong, requires some appreciation of local geography.

The subject of this paper is the relations between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, that long-protracted racial animosity which forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of what is commonly, if loosely, known as anti-semitism; but before coming to my subject proper it will be necessary to say something about the position of the Alexandrian Jews.

If any ancient historian—either Greek or Roman—made any systematic comment on the principles observed in the choice of coin types in the classical world his account has not come down to us. Aristotle, indeed, in his Politics, made a theoretical reference to coin types when he wrote ὁ γὰρ χαρακτὴρ ἐτέθη τοῦ ποσοῦ σημεῖον. This reference, though it is of characteristic Aristotelian brevity, in reality goes beyond the theory and implies the almost invariable principles of choice everywhere. For, as scholars have often noted and now generally agree, when Aristotle defined the addition of a type to a coin as a means of indicating its value, he was saying not that the type showed how great the value of the coin is, but that its very presence gives an assurance that the proper value of the coin—whatever that value might be—can be safely assumed. As G. F. Hill pointed out, and as will be seen later, ‘the importance of this apparently subtle distinction lies in its bearing on the significance of types.’

A scholar usually manages at some period in his life to read Xenophon's Cyropaedia, but probably rarely re-reads it. For the Cyropaedia has suffered from a change of fashion; once it was regularly read, and an admirable school commentary upon it by H. A. Holden is still purchasable. Now it is certainly not a school book, and it was mere chance brought me upon a passage which seems to raise questions about the development and propagation of a tradition, which may interest the great and friendly scholar to whom this volume is dedicated. But the topic ranges over so many territories into which I have no right to enter that I must ask him to forgive me for offering him a short essay rather than a rigorously reasoned and documented statement; I wish merely to put before him two texts, with brief observations.

In the Cyropaedia Xenophon depicts an ideal ruler. One important thing about that ruler is that he must not only be in every way a better man than those whom he commands, but must be admittedly and visibly so.

In A.D. 530 the Emperor Justinian gave orders that a commission of lawyers should take the 1,500 libri containing the works of the Classical Roman jurists, and condense them into a single work, the Digesta or Pandectae. His purpose was that the result should be a coherent whole, stripped of repetition and contradiction. Fortunately for us, what they actually produced was something which is quite different, and belongs to a type which is familiar to all modern students of the Ancient World: a sourcebook. For what the commission in fact did was to arrange the work by topics, and under each topic to assemble a series of examples of legal reasoning extracted from the surviving works of Classical jurists. Nearly all of these jurists had worked in the Antonine and Severan age, with a few belonging to the period of the Tetrarchy.

The Lex Valeria Cornelia of A.D. 5, known to us only from the Tabula Hebana of 19, provided that the senators and those Equites who were enrolled in the judicial decuries should henceforth vote in ten centuries, named after the dead princes, C. and L. Caesar, for the ‘destinatio’ of consuls and praetors. In 19 these same voters were redistributed into fifteen centuries, and in 23 into twenty centuries; the new units were named after Germanicus and Drusus respectively.

Professor Tibiletti has virtually established that these ‘destining’ centuries were an integral part of the comitia centuriata. Candidates who received the majority of their votes were credited with all of them, before the remaining centuries voted. Furthermore, the ‘destining’ centuries must have taken over the role of the old centuria praerogativa; before A.D. 5 the vote of that century, composed of iuniores of the first class, was declared before the proceedings were carried further and the Comitia had been apt to follow its lead.

Did the events surrounding Diocletian's persecution of 303–311 launch a debate over religious toleration? The first suggestion that they did occurs in Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles, a defence of traditional religion and theology in three books. Writing before the persecution, the celebrated Neoplatonist philosopher from Tyre, a man whom several Christian emperors and church councils would soon condemn, asked the question that stood at the heart of the persecution:

How can these people [i.e., Christians] be thought worthy of forbearance (συϒϒώμη) ? They have not only turned away from those who from earliest time are referred to as divine among all Greeks and barbarians … and by emperors, law-givers and philosophers—all of a common mind. But also, in choosing impieties and atheism, they have preferred their fellow creatures [i.e., to worshipping the divine]. And to what sort of penalties might they not justly be subjected who … are fugitives from the things of their fathers?

The world of learning owes debts many and varied to Sir Henry Stuart Jones: it is the Camden Professor and historian of Rome that Oxford knows best. In Roman history, wherever knowledge may be deepened and however horizons may be widened, the transformation of the Roman State and the transition from Republic to Principate must ever claim the centre of interest. For this reason a paper concerning one of Caesar's partisans, a military man from Spain, may be offered as a tribute from the School of Literae Humaniores—and from one of the three Colleges with which Sir Henry's life in Oxford has been identified.

A new moneyed class, thrusting rapidly to public estate in an ancient society, needed the enhancement of symbols and titles. Most Roman titles were military in origin, and it was natural to borrow the name of the old Roman cavalry, with its associations of high rank and property-census, antique tradition, and decorative imagery. Not less naturally, the military metaphors of the new civil equites concealed change and misled some secondary authors into anachronism. Modern historians too have been apt to assume the perpetuity of forms or conditions appropriate to the Servian Army, and long afterwards retailed in antiquarian descriptions of the ‘exercitus urbanus’. In general outline, indeed, the comitia centuriata may have retained its archaic structure; nevertheless, both Dionysius and Livy warn us plainly enough that changes had taken place. However modern hypotheses may attempt to reconcile the difference, the stark fact remains that two discrepant versions of the Servian system were current in the first century B.C. Such institutions were perhaps not as static as the terminology which attached to them.

When in the autumn of 44 Octavian embarked on his perilous journey as heir to Caesar's mantle he and his soldiers were branded as brigands or extolled as saviours of their country. What was their legal status ? Most modern historians, fascinated with naked power, tacitly dismiss this question as utterly frivolous. They are fully satisfied with Ciceronian epithets. Octavian and Cicero were not. The Roman doctrine of the genera militiae afforded Octavian a comfortable legal niche at each stage of his career. It allows us to comprehend the intricate manoeuvres in the senate at the turn of 44 and 43 B.C.; it also sheds light on the crowning coup of Octavian when he led Italy as a dux against Antonius and the Queen. But this antiquarian doctrine, attested only in late authors, could easily be dismissed as an artificial construct far removed from real life. Historical puzzles lie dormant and insoluble until a spark of insight creates an instant enlightenment. And the spark comes from Aphrodisias, from the new documents published in an exemplary way by Joyce Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome (1982). It comes in the shape of a new puzzle.

The document called by its author commentariolum petitionis, though not transmitted in the Codex Mediceus of the Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem, appears at the end of these letters in the Codices Berolinensis and Harleianus, and in minor and deterior texts, under two alternative headings: ‘Incipit commentarium consulatus petitionis feliciter’ (Harl.), and ‘Q. Ciceronis de petitione consulatus ad M. Tullium fratrem’ (dett.). The work itself begins with the regular epistolary superscription, ‘Quintus Marco fratri s.d.’ Its diction has often been disparaged on aesthetic grounds, but the best editors have found no reason of Latinity or of stemmatology sufficient to exclude it from the corpus of Ciceronian correspondence.

Names of persons in the Codex Mediceus prior exhibit familiar corruptions, and many of the necessary corrections were easily made. The cogent evidence was often external—the same character appeared elsewhere in Tacitus, or in some other writer, and inscriptions might certify the orthography of a name or even permit the identification of an individual. None the less, there were, and there are, traps and uncertainties. First, an inoffensive or unimpeachable name need not be correct. Nobody would have suspected ‘Livius’ (Ann. II, 30, I—twice) : only later passages (IV, 13, 2; 28, I) showed that the person referred to was in fact Vibius Serenus. And ‘Vescularius Atticus” (Ann. VI, 10, 2) would stand but for ‘Vescularius Flaccus ’ (II, 28, I). Secondly, the rarity (genuine or only fancied) of a name has often been allowed to impugn it. On the contrary, if a gentilicium is uncommon, or even unique, that is no ground for discomfort. The nomenclature of Italy is startling, fantastic and myriad in its manifestations. The Annals of Tacitus display names which, deceptively familiar from their occurrence in a classical text, are yet of a rarity to adorn an onomatological aviary.