When the word ‘party’ became obscene in the context of the history of the Roman republic, it was frequently replaced by ‘faction’—or factio, to give an air of authenticity. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the occurrences of factio in writers of the republic and early principate in order to discover to what extent the usage of modern historians is justified by the sources. It will not be denied that there are numerous occasions when factio functions as a collective, with the meaning ‘group, clique, faction’. But originally factio had a verbal force, sometimes active—‘way of doing things’—sometimes potential—‘capacity to do things or get things done’. This verbal force is retained in many instances, including some where the rendering ‘faction’, i.e. ‘group’, has become standard. The precise shade of meaning may vary, but three principal connotations can be discerned: influence, concerted action, and intrigue.

Livy wrote of the great Scipio at the conclusion of the second Punic war ‘primus certe hic imperator nomine victae ab se gentis est nobilitatus’. But already more than half a century earlier M'. Valerius Maximus, consul of 263 B.C., who captured Messana and was honoured with the cognomen ‘Messalla’, had received a title from a conquest in war. In the century and a half after Scipio became Africanus, many such honourable cognomina were acquired by others. In only six cases is there evidence of the cognomen descending within the family: Valerius Messalla, Scipio Africanus, Scipio Asiaticus, Metellus Creticus, Servilius Isauricus, and (with a slight difference) Pompeius Bithynicus.

This paper examines the political content and context of Seneca's Natural Questions. It argues that, on the one hand, Rome is marginalized in the context of the immensity of the cosmos; and philosophy is elevated above traditional Roman pursuits, including political activity and historical writing. But at the same time the work is firmly anchored in its Roman geo-political context; Seneca situates himself in a long and continuing tradition of investigation of the natural world, where Roman writers can stand alongside Greeks and others; and the current emperor Nero is presented not just as princeps and poet, but as sponsor of geographical and scientific investigation.

‘The sovereign power of the dictator, the imperium, was … an unrestricted regal power, taken over ca. 504 B.C. by the 300 horsemen of the noblemen-bodyguard, who constituted then the patriciate, i.e. the closed circle of the potential holders of the imperium’. This is a quotation from A. Alföldi's latest book, Early Rome and the Latins (Ann Arbor), 1965, p. 44, and summarizes his theory of the origins of the Roman Republic. According to Alföldi the aristocracy of the monarchic period was an aristocracy of knights, and their coup d'état of about 504 B.C. brought about the end of the monarchy. As is well known, Alföldi developed this theory in a previous book, Der frührömische Reiteradel und seine Ehrenabzeichen (Baden-Baden, 1952) which is chiefly meant to prove that the various attributes of the senatorial order—including the special shoe for the patrician senators, the calceus patricius—were originally characteristic of the archaic knights. To the best of my knowledge, Alföldi never says explicitly that the senators of the monarchic period must have been identical with the 300 ‘celeres’ who were the king's bodyguard according to some of the ancient sources (Livy 1, 15, 8; Plut., Rom. 26; Zonaras 7, 3, 4). But this seems to be Alföldi's implication—in fact it was already Niebuhr's hypothesis.

ὁ δὲ Σεβῆρος … διοικήσας δὲ τὰ κατὰ Βρετανίαν καì

διελὼν ἐς δύο ἡγεμονίας τὴν τοῦ ἔθνους ἐξουσίαν….

Thus Herodian (III, 8, 1–2), referring to the time after the Battle of Lugdunum in 197. It is a sign of our imperfect knowledge of the history of Roman Britain that the character of this division, its purpose and even its date, are all matters of doubt. Not only is there no evidence to confirm Herodian's statement until a considerably later period, but there are several contrary indications which suggest that his date, at least, is wrong. Such a conflict of ancient testimony leads, not surprisingly, to differences in modern authorities. It is not necessary, however, for it to lead to such a confusing picture as they now seem to present. Ritterling and E. Birley drew attention to the problem, and S. N. Miller set out all the evidence in the Cambridge Ancient History. It therefore seems unfortunate that eminent authorities in more recent works continue to accept Herodian's date, or, more rarely, offer an alternative, without any warning that they are handling dubious or hypothetical material. My aim in this paper is, therefore, partly one of clarification and restatement. But I also wish to draw attention to a small addition to the evidence on the subject, and to treat the whole problem anew in the light of recent additions to our knowledge of Roman Britain in Severan times. Until a fortunate epigraphic discovery solves the problem for us, all such discussions are bound to be inconclusive; but while we wait for a British Julius Cerealis, an interim statement may crave a hearing.

At this late date there is not much prospect of producing new and cogent emendations in Tacitus. ‘Hoc artificium periit.’ Past excesses counsel sobriety, and there has been a strong revulsion. Among the items which scholars unjustly impugned and prematurely corrected were a number of proper names, their sole offence often being rarity or an unusual shape. However strange a name may look, it should not lightly be altered. The vast and vivid nomenclature of ancient Italy invades the lower orders of the Roman Senate well before the Republic ends, and proliferates under the Caesars.

Names of a more familiar contour can still be a source of perplexity. The senatorial annals of Tiberius' principate carry a plethora of persons, among them the recurrent and aristocratic members of a few families. The consular historian, however, was adequately equipped for his task. He knew the methods of documentary inquiry, he was ferociously accurate, and he was interested in all the characters of his narrative, down to the most obscure—‘originem non repperi’ (VI, 7, 4). That being so, two Aemilii Lepidi, a Marcus and a Manius (the consuls of 6 and of 11), gave him no trouble. That he could avoid error everywhere, too much to hope. There are slips. And he might be held guilty of inadvertence. For example, it is an annoyance that the same person should appear as ‘Cotta Messallinus’ in the year 16 (11, 32, 1), as ‘Aurelius Cotta consul’ in 20 (III, 17, 4).

Ever since that day when Michal, the daughter of Saul, looking out from a window saw her husband, David, ‘leaping and dancing before the Lord,’ and despised him in her heart (II Sam. 6, 16), it has been orthodox to scoff at the productions or performances of royal or imperial artists. Even more does this prejudice apply to Nero, and the world has agreed to accept the verdict of the unsuccessful rebel Vindex that he was a poor artist. I come neither to praise nor whitewash him, but simply to ask you to consider with me certain aspects of his reign and personality, which have been scantily treated, and which may throw light upon certain political tendencies of his time. The topics I wish to take are (1) Nero's voice and art; (2) the Domus Aurea and the reception of king Tiridates; and (3) Nero's tour of Greece, and the survival of his memory.

In this paper Virgil's description of a plough (Georgics, 1, 169 ff.) is re-examined in the light of modern records of wooden ploughs from SW Europe, taken in a broad sense to include Italy and the Swiss canton of the Grisons, and from neighbouring Mediterranean regions. This on the assumption that Virgil is describing a single type of plough, not ‘integrating’ types; in other words, that there is such a thing as ‘Virgil's Plough’ and that one may hope to find its modern analogues. To archaeological evidence only incidental allusions are made, mainly to evidence appearing later than Gow's and Drachmann's articles.

When the passage from the Georgics is set out in separate sentences of 2 + 2 + 3 lines with their differing evocations, the field and woodland scenes evoked do not appear so closely related to each other and to the references to parts of the plough as they do if the passage, which is fundamentally a structural account of the plough, is interpreted in the light of a visit to a craftsman's shop with outdoor evocations arising from the craftsman's explanations to his visitor. The thesis now put forward is that Virgil's description arises from just such a visit, which would open quite naturally with talk about the ‘knee timber’ needed for the curved beam (buris) as the part taking the principal strain. So to-day in talks with Spanish ploughwrights, one of whom even used Virgil's verb when explaining to the writer in 1935 that, in a certain valley from which he bought the elm for his beams, ‘doman el ramito de año,’ they tie down the yearling branchlet.

The campaigns of Caesar and Augustus gave Italian merchants an opportunity of establishing relations with the free Germans. Intercourse was maintained after the withdrawal of the legions to the west of the Rhine, and literary references to the trade which grew up, though few in number, testify to its continuance throughout the time here to be considered. The conception of an illimitable forest primeval stretching unbroken from the borders of the empire into the furthest recesses of barbarism is very far from the truth. Great as were the forests, there existed open or lightly-wooded areas suitable for the settlements of primitive man, and communication between such inhabited regions can be traced from very early times.

The idea that the dead were polluting — that is, that corpses posed a danger of making the living unclean, offensive both to their own communities and to the gods — has long occupied a fundamental position in Roman funerary studies. Nevertheless, what that pollution comprised, as well as how it affected living society, remain subject to debate. This article aims to clarify the issue by re-examining the evidence for Roman attitudes towards the dead. Focusing on the city of Rome itself, I conclude that we have little reason to reconstruct a fear of death pollution prior to Late Antiquity; in fact, the term itself has been detrimental to current understandings. No surviving text from the late republican or early imperial periods indicates that corpses were objects of metaphysical fear, and rather than polluted, mourners are better conceived as obligated, bound by a variable combination of emotions and conventions to behave in certain, if certainly changeable, ways following a death.

The places whose numismatic history is studied in this paper are those which happened to be comprised in the provinces of Arabia and Mesopotamia from the time of the institution of these provinces down to the end of the period of the Greek coinage. Thus, as regards Arabia, which was organised in A.D. 106, the mints of Philadelphia, Gerasa, Dium and Philippopolis are included, although they were originally in the Decapolis, and were only transferred to Arabia in the reign of Severus at the earliest. But Canatha, which was transferred at the same time, had then ceased to issue coins; it is therefore omitted from these pages. Eboda, of which a solitary coin of Nero's time is known, might have been omitted on the same grounds, but is included because its coinage does not find a place in the series of any other province. The latest Greek coins issued by any Arabian city are of the time of Valerian and Gallienus.

Roman London illustrates in more than one way the worst features of English archaeological study. There has been no want of interest in the subject. In England, indeed, Roman archaeology has throughout received a fuller share of general public interest than in any other country. Thanks to our classical system, nearly everyone has read a little Caesar and, it may be, some Tacitus, and though he has forgotten nine-tenths of it, he generally deems himself fitted to enquire into the history of the Roman empire. People who in every other country would give no heed to archaeology at all are in England extremely interested, and it has always been thought right and proper that they should be interested. Unfortunately, it has also been thought needless to do more than to be interested.

Any discussion of the policy of the Roman Senate towards the Hellenistic world at the end of the third century B.C. must inevitably take account of the work of two men who wrote their most important books around this topic. One is, of course, Polybius, the other Maurice Holleaux. Holleaux's book on Rome, Greece and the Hellenistic monarchies appeared in 1921; but it came as the culmination of several studies on this subject, which had been exercising his attention particularly since 1913. Today, then, we stand virtually at the fiftieth anniversary of Holleaux's thesis, and we can appropriately consider how far it has stood the test of time. However, that is not my main purpose in this paper, which will be concerned much more with what Polybius has to say on the subject. As everyone knows, it is the evidence of Polybius that stands behind Holleaux's remarkable reconstruction of Roman policy; and Holleaux's problem is quite central to Polybius' interests—indeed it is very close to, though not identical with, his main theme. ‘Who,’ he asks, ‘is so worthless and so indolent as not to want to know by what means and under what constitutional system the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government—a thing unique in history?’ It is perhaps not unfair to judge a historian by the degree of success he attains in tackling his main theme. If that seems a reasonable proposition, we may ask ourselves: Does Polybius in fact offer a satisfactory answer to the question he has raised?

The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is often dismissed as a mere slavish panegyric of Rome, written with no other purpose but to persuade her Greek subjects to acquiesce in her domination. Thus Schwartz, in his Pauly-Wissowa article (v, 934 f.), after describing the work as ‘ein trauriges Dokument dafür, wie tief die geistige Potenz noch mehr als die Bildung der Griechen gesunken war’, accuses Dionysius not only of incompetence as a historian, but also of a lack of the feeling proper to a Greek. Comparing him with Polybius and Posidonius, he writes ‘die tragischen Schmerzen, die jenen echten Hellenen das Begreifen des römischen Primats gekostet hatte, sind dieser kleinen Seele fremd’. He further suggests that Dionysius chose his subject because it was remote from contemporary events and he was not likely to meet much competition.

When a Roman historian came to compose the orations that convention permitted him to include within his pages, all the arts of rhetoric were at his disposal. But in one signal sphere the historians renounced the procedure that Cicero had enjoined in theory and displayed in practice, the employment of the rhythmical clausula. Or rather, in reaction against the Ciceronian cadences they favoured other rhythms, not least the spondaic. The tendency is as true of Livy as it is of the patently anti-Ciceronian Sallust. Tacitus too, though in less marked degree, follows the historians' practice—a liking for the dispondaic ending and no disinclination for the heroic clausula (), but also a considerable fondness for the ditrochee. According to Zielinski the following patterns (C2 (+ C22esse uideatur) + C3 + T24 + M3 ( + M23)) account for almost 75 % of all Cicero's final clausulae (actually 73·8%): the figures for the historians are Sallust 28·3%, Livy 25·9%, Tacitus 44·8 %. The intermediary position that Tacitus adopts is not without its advantages. When Petillius Cerialis addresses the Treviri and Lingones as a bluff soldier, unaccustomed to public speaking, he can emphasize his pretence of artlessness by the heavy spondaic endings of his first two sentences —and similarly at the end of the chapter.

When the South Sea Bubble burst, a passionate member of the British Parliament called for the application of the Lex Pompeia on Parricides to those who had defrauded the nation. Just as the Romans, he argued, face to face with a monstrous and unprecedented crime, devised for it a monstrous and unprecedented punishment, so the British were invited to tie the directors of the South Sea Company into sacks with a dog, a cock, a viper and an ape in each, and sink them in the Thames.

The Surrentinum of Pollius Felix encouraged Statius to play on the meaning of felicity. The villa's prospect extended to Naples and Limon (near Pausilypum), where an inscription of A.D. 65 already attests the name of the family. Nereids climbed the rocks to steal the fortunate proprietor's grapes, and Satyrs tumbled in the sea in the eagerness of their pursuit. A local Siren flew up to hear songs better than her own (112 f.),

hic ubi Pierias exercet Pollius artes,

seu volvit monitus quos dat Gargettius auctor,

seu nostram quatit ille chelyn, seu dissona nectit

carmina, sive minax ultorem stringit iambon.

In other words Pollius was a poet (cf. 39 f.; III. I. 66 f.), who wrote hexameters, elegiacs, and iambi; that is why Statius refers to his eloquentia and facundia, for Schanz-Hosius are wrong to include so private a person among the orators. In particular he seems to have composed didactic verse on Epicurean subjects. In a context referring to the Siren and immediately after a mention of Pierian arts, volvit monitus (co-ordinate with quatit, nectit, stringit) surely refers to something more than an interest in philosophy (thus Vollmer's commentary) or an avoidance of public life (J. H. Mozley's Loeb edition).

There is little need now to emphasise the importance of the declaration of war against Philip V of Macedon in the history of Roman imperialism, or to formulate the problem of the causes of the Roman decision to intervene in the East. The work of M. Holleaux has defined the problem and indicated its historical implications, and subsequent research has kept the issue clear. We have rather to justify a paper upon this subject which returns to details of reconstruction already fully treated. Yet the reconstruction of events has not received its final exposition, and a better understanding of the details is essential for the historical interpretation of the political situation in 200 B.C.

In a previous article I discussed the urbanization of the territory of the Jews. In this I propose to treat the administrative development of the territory of another backward people of Syria, the Ituraeans. The history of the two peoples is somewhat similar. The princes of the Ituraeans, who like the Maccabees were at the same time high-priests, like them took advantage of the disintegration of the Seleucid kingdom to carve out for themselves an independent dominion at the expense of the neighbouring tribes and cities. Their progress was similarly checked by the Roman conquest, and their principality was similarly curtailed and divided, until eventually it was absorbed into the regular provincial administration.