The frequent use of the first person singular in the text of this article makes it necessary that we should explain how the work has been divided between us. Mr. Fell, who was resident for two years at the British School at Rome, first as Craven Student of the University of Cambridge, and then as Gilchrist Student of the Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters, is responsible for Section A (The Via Flaminia in History), and Dr. Ashby for Section B (The Topography of the Via Flaminia from Rome to Narni). In Section C the description of the road from Narni to Forum Flaminii by Terni and Spoleto is the work of Dr. Ashby, while from Narni to Forum Flaminii by Bevagna it is the joint work of both writers: but the concluding portion of the road was studied and described by Mr. Fell alone. The whole article has, however, been carefully read by both of us.

Reviewing Peter Sattler's Augustus und der Senat (1960), J. P. V. D. Balsdon remarked that the background to the events which marked the establishment of the principate is a field which has been ploughed, even deep ploughed times without number. This must be agreed, and the sceptical need go no further than Lothar Wickert's article s.v. princeps in Pauly's RE xxii, 2 (1953), esp. 2002–2004, to confirm the truth of the remark. Much of the ploughing however has been concerned with the question, ‘By what legal right did Octavian/Augustus govern before, during, and after the period in which he claimed to have “transferred the res publica into the discretionary power of the Senate and Roman people”?’ The interest of this particular question has somewhat declined recently, perhaps rightly so, in an age in which there is a score of Octavians in the world, governing by right of victory in a civil war, and the governed populations tolerate these rulers without constantly examining their constitutional credentials, because they have one all-important virtue—they have put a stop to civil war.

Scholars have given much attention to the procedure for submitting private petitions to the Roman emperor. Literary sources suggest that emperors spent a lot of time answering petitions from private individuals, and papyri and inscriptions offer tangible evidence that this was so. But our richest evidence is provided by the Roman legal sources, which preserve over 2,500 of the replies written by the emperors, at least in theory, beneath the petitions themselves. The sheer quantity of these subscriptions, and the fact that some of them were addressed to petitioners of relatively humble status, have suggested that the emperors attended to their subjects in a surprisingly personal way. Even more important is the fact that subscriptions in our legal sources consist almost entirely of formulations of principle; it has been assumed that they were issued to clarify the law, for private petitioners who had questions about it.

Tacitus described tribunician power (tribunicia potestas, trib. pot. hereafter) as the title of the highest pinnacle (sc. of power) in the Roman world (summi fastigii vocabulum), and Augustus counted his years of trib. pot. from 23 B.C. So much may be stated with confidence and without dispute. In 23 B.C. however trib. pot. was introduced quietly, so quietly that the exact date of the law by which it was conferred (if it was conferred in 23 B.C.) is unknown; and the title itself made so little impact on contemporary opinion that the reaction of the common people of Rome, for whose protection Tacitus says Augustus took the power, was negative—so negative that they spent the next five years trying to re-elect Augustus to the consulate which he had resigned at or about the time that the era of trib. pot. began. We must conclude that the conferment of trib. pot. (if there was any ceremony at all in 23 B.C.) was not made the subject of a great celebration designed to win popular acclaim for this new institution (if it was a new one), nor was it immediately advertised widely as a new formula for the government of the Roman world.

There is scarcely a region of the Roman west which can claim, superficially, to be better known than southern Gaul. There can be no lover of antiquities who has not visited Arles or Nîmes, studied the arch of Orange or the Pont du Gard, devoted some interest to the monuments of Fréjus, the sculptures of Nîmes, or the mosaics of Vienne, not to mention the houses of Glanum or Vaison which have been recovered from the earth by the dedication of Henri Rolland and Canon Sautel. And yet many of these famous monuments have had to wait until very recent years before becoming the subject of detailed monographs: so, the trophy of the Alps, the arch of Orange, or the mausoleum of Glanum. Others, without having received exhaustive publication, have only in recent decades been properly dated (the amphitheatres of Arles and Nîmes) or adequately described: I am thinking of the Maison Carrée.

Towards the close of the Epitaphios of Libanius on Julian we read:–

I have mentioned representations (of Julian); many cities have set him beside the images of the gods and honour him as they do the gods. Already a blessing has been besought of him in prayer, and it was not in vain. To such an extent has he literally ascended to the gods and received a share of their power from them themselves.

The statement that Julian was made synnaos theos, or something of the sort, has many precedents. On the other hand, the assertion that he had hearkened to prayer calls for special consideration.

The pompa circensis, the solemn procession that marched to the Circus Maximus on the occasion of the ludi magni, was headed by the boys and young men of the state, those whose fathers had the census equester going on horseback and the others on foot. The object of the procession was, Dionysius says, depending on Fabius for his account, to show to strangers how numerous and powerful were the youths about to come to man's estate. The martial ceremony must have been a stirring preparation for the military service that in early times was the duty of every Roman citizen. There was further preparation for such service at Rome. Cicero tells us that in former times, for a year after the taking of the toga virilis, the young tiro was trained at Rome in exercitatio ludusque campestris. This preliminary training was restored for the young noble by Augustus who felt its importance as a preparation for the military service insisted upon for all who sought political preferment. Indeed, the old tirocinium, as Rostovtzeff has shown, seems to have been lengthened from one to two years.

The unique character of Roman law has been treated for centuries; hymns enough have been sung. My purpose is different: I restrict the problem to Roman classical law and therefore have intentionally added this adjective to the title. Roman private law—and I have only private law to consider here—is not the same throughout the thousand years of its history. Modern research distinguishes in the legislation of Justinian what belongs to the Byzantine epoch from what is genuinely classical. Secondly, we now know more about pre-classical law so that we are better able to contrast classical with archaic law. A third reason for a revision of our view is the developed study of the oriental, the cuneiform, law, and some new research in Greek law. Owing to this threefold progress we can try to sketch the unique character of Roman classical law in comparison with other laws. I discern three periods of Roman law: archaic (or pre-classical) up to 150 B.C., classical from 150 B.C. to A.D. 300, Byzantine (or post-classical) from A.D. 300 to 565. These are the usual periods, except that I carry back the classical period to 150 B.C. I know that there are transitions; but if we take the years 150 B.C. and A.D. 300, we shall roughly mark the turning points and have before us three distinct periods of Roman law.

Cumae was the first city founded by Greek colonists on the mainland of Italy. It attained pre-eminence for a time in the Bay of Naples and its influence was exercised over a wide area for more than 500 years. Yet the detailed phases of its long history are still very nebulous and patchy. References in ancient writers deal mainly with its contacts with the rising power of Rome. Little excavation has been carried out on the site (apart from the cemeteries) and the published information is mostly of a general nature, more suited to tourist appreciation than to that of serious students. Serious students do not lack interest in the problems presented by Cumae, but they may perhaps lack familiarity with its topography. Whatever its faults of scholarship may be, this present study is at least the product of eight years' residence and assiduous delving into the archaeology of the Cuma/Bacoli Peninsula.

The story of Cumae is naturally divisible into two stages; the Greek and the Roman. Most accounts begin with a discussion about the date of its foundation, and where the colonists came from. But it is not the date that interests us here in this enquiry; it is the reason why exploring sailormen not only visited here but chose Cumae as their trading station, when there were apparently more attractive sites at Misenum and other places round the Bay of Naples; to say nothing of all the sites they will presumably have passed by on their voyage from Greece.

The movement that commonly goes under the name of the Second Sophistic extends far beyond mere literary affectation. It is as much a social phenomenon to be understood within the context of the Roman Empire of the second and early third centuries as a cultural development basing itself upon the models of an earlier Greece. Evidence drawn only from orations and belles-lettres does not suffice to do justice to all its complexities, and recent authors have rightly adduced inscriptional and legal references to supply both background and explanation. Among them Professor Bowersock has discussed with clarity and percipience the immunities granted to sophists and men of learning by successive emperors in the second century, and has attempted to relate these grants to the social and intellectual life of the time. His account of their development is unexceptionable: the lavish immunities given by Hadrian were curtailed by Antoninus Pius, and the modifications of later emperors brought no appreciable change.

In the study of social structure in the Roman world of the first and second centuries A.D. nothing is more important or more complex than the slave and freed-slave classes. Their numbers are indeterminately large and predominant in many urban and some rural areas. Most have a reasonable expectation of early manumission and enjoy a high rate of social advancement. But it is important to distinguish between the different social levels of the slave classes in general in order to isolate, if possible, those elements of exceptionally high mobility which are an example and incentive to the rest. Among the most important of these in the early Imperial period are the slaves and freedmen of the Emperor, the Familia Caesaris, itself comprising groups of differing legal and occupational status. By comparing different groups of Imperial slaves both with each other and with those of equivalent legal status outside the Familia Caesaris it is possible to illustrate the extent of social differentiation within the slave classes.

This paper makes two arguments. The first is that Trajan deliberately orchestrated the dedication of his Column on 12 May, the anniversary of the dedication of the Temple of Mars Ultor, to coincide with the beginning of a new war against Parthia in a.d. 113. The second is that although most modern commentators focus on the function of Mars Ultor as avenger of Caesar, the evidence of his actual invocation from the late first century b.c. through the third century a.d. more strongly supports another interpretation: as agent of vengeance against foreign enemies, and against Parthia/Persia in particular.

Ever since Augustine narrated an account of his mother's death at Ostia, social historians have tried to adduce the identity of the person who erected Monica's tombstone, a copy of which is preserved in a ninth-century codex. Three members of the gens Anicii, all of whom were Augustine's contemporaries, have become usual suspects in the secondary literature. Throughout these debates the epitaph itself, a fragment of which was found in 1945, is frequently cited but rarely treated as a primary text. This article presents a new study of that epigraph and proposes that it was erected much later than previously suspected.

The literary genre of the Res Gestae has always been a source of perplexity. Over a century ago Mommsen compared efforts to categorize it with attempts to pin a literary label upon Dante's Divina Commedia or Goethe's Faust. That did not prevent his arguing that the work was a ‘Rechenschaftsbericht’, a formal report of Augustus' achievements as princeps. Nowadays it can perhaps be accepted that the document has a multiplicity of models and many purposes, all of them propagandist in nature. However, the complexity of the work is even now insufficiently appreciated. It is, for instance, well accepted that world conquest is a primary and pervading theme, and Augustus' imperial ideology has been well documented and discussed in recent years. But world conquest suggests another theme, that of apotheosis. The two motifs are inextricably linked in Hellenistic literature after Alexander, and the linkage was inherited by Roman authors, not least by the poets of the Augustan age. As for Augustus himself, his propaganda owes much to the Hellenistic ruler cult. His victory issues after Actium show a startling similarity to the famous tetradrachms commemorating Demetrius Poliorcetes' naval triumph at Cypriot Salamis; he adopted the same pose, and assimilated himself to Neptune, just as Demetrius had recalled Poseidon. Augustus may have been directly influenced by Demetrius' issues. He was possibly aware of the divine honours which the Athenians had conferred upon Demetrius a few months before his victory, and made similar claims in his own right. But the relationship was probably more indirect — Augustus used motifs which had become familiar during the previous centuries, emphasizing simultaneously the protection of the gods and his own godlike status. Demetrius' issue helped inspire the general pattern of thought, but there was no direct imitation.

In 47 B.C., despite victory at the Battle of Pharsalus and the subsequent death of Cn. Pompeius Magnus, the Civil War continued for C. Julius Caesar. He faced hostile Roman armies in Spain and North Africa. Rumours circulated that the African army was preparing to invade Italy. Order was kept in Rome only through the force employed by Caesar's lieutenant M. Antonius. Contemporaries certainly did not believe Caesar's victory was a foregone conclusion. In the midst of these crises, Caesar faced a mutiny amongst his veteran Gallic legions billeted in Campania. These troops refused his orders to move from Italy to Africa to fight the Pompeian army that had gathered there. Instead they marched to Rome to demand back pay, discharge, and promised bonuses of money and land. Caesar's power, and his very survival, were hanging in the balance.

The decline of late Roman paganism could hardly be said to have been an under-studied subject in the past, nor one which currently lacks appeal among late Roman historians: indeed, one has the impression that it is often through this, and the broader question of the ‘conflict’ between paganism and Christianity in the fourth century, that students of Roman history have acquired their interest in the late imperial period. This is all for the best: at the same time, it may be that in this, as in other aspects of late Roman history, there is a danger of ‘over-familiarity’ in the interpretation of well-known evidence.

In the Antiquitates Romanae, Dionysius of Halicarnassus presents the Romans as a nation of Greeks. Throughout his narrative, Dionysius shows how the Romans have surpassed other Greek nations in the quintessentially Greek areas of morality and conduct. However, this assessment of Rome's cultural and ethnic identity proves to be much more nuanced when read side by side with the narrative of the concluding books of the Antiquitates Romanae, a largely unexplored section of the work dealing with the war between the Romans and Pyrrhus. The culturally-based definition of Roman ‘Greekness’ is accompanied, particularly in the last portion of the narrative, by a troubling awareness of its inherent instability as the Romans increasingly display the tendencies which eventually caused the ‘barbarization’ of Greece.

Codex Theodosianus 3.14.1, issued in the early 370s, has been understood in the past to indicate a ban on all marriages between ‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians’. But this interpretation contradicts evidence that Roman-barbarian marriages occurred with great frequency, and the lack of any other evidence for such a ban. This study argues that the specific wording of the law, referring to gentiles (barbarian soldiers) and provinciales (residents of provinces), suggests that the ban was imposed to ensure the continued performance of specific duties incumbent upon these two classes of individuals, and had nothing to do with ethnicity-qua-ethnicity.