In A.D. 192, the last year of his reign, Commodus threw restraint to the winds and had the senate declare him a god. He assumed such titles as Conqueror of the World, Roman Hercules, and All-Surpasser and named the twelve months of the year after himself. Founding Rome anew, he gave it the name Colonia Commodiana and ordered the legions likewise to be called Commodianae. Before the year was out, on 31 December, he was murdered, his memory cursed.

Although Cyrenaica ranked, under the earlier Empire, as a senatorial province, it was too exposed to barbarian attack to be left undefended; and there is ample evidence that it had its own garrison—probably a small one—from the first century A.D. onwards. This garrison was evidently inadequate to prevent the outbreak of the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 115, and may consequently have been strengthened; but it was the crisis of the mid-third century that showed all too clearly the insecurity of the isolated Cyrenaican plateau. The Marmaric tribes invaded the province, and Cyrene itself seems to have been overwhelmed. The Diocletianic reforms resulted in the creation of a new ‘middle-eastern’ command under the Dux Aegypti Thebaidos utrarumque Libyarum, but the loss of the chapter of the Notitia Dignitatum enumerating the units stationed in the two Libyas makes it difficult to reconstruct the military organization of these provinces at the end of the fourth century. The works of Synesius help to fill the lacuna and at the same time provide a vivid picture of life in an invaded area.

This paper seeks to locate Seneca's treatment of earthquakes in Natural Questions 6 in the broader ancient seismological tradition; and, more particularly, to examine the initiatives which potentially transform his treatment into a highly original mode of literary-philosophical investigation not just into the cause of earthquakes, but also of how a ‘scientific’ understanding of them can at least partially quell the intimidating effect of such wonders of nature. On this approach Natural Questions 6 is perhaps concerned not so much with earthquakes per se but with shaping attitudes towards the natural world as a whole, inculcating in us a vision of such phenomena as but ‘normal’ aspects of cosmic functioning. By this method the book promotes within us a different, engagingly Senecan appreciation of cosmic integrity.

§ 1. The document (or rather two documents) which has come down under the title Notitia Dignitatum is well known to all students who have concerned themselves, however incidentally, with the government of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. It sometimes strikes one that it is referred to in a way that betrays a defective realisation of what it was. Some of those who quote it appear to think that it was compiled for the purpose of giving information to the Roman public as to the organisation of the civil and military services and belongs to much the same class of work as e.g. the Synecdemus of Hierocles or the Notitia of Polemius Silvius. It was, of course, nothing of the kind, and it has been known since the days of Pancirolus precisely what it was; but even by some who were fully aware of its character and purpose deductions have been drawn which its character and purpose exclude. For students of Roman Britain it is particularly important to have a full grasp of the general questions connected with the Notitia, since it contains a great deal of the little evidence we have for the fortunes of that country at the beginning of the fifth century.

§ 2. The primicerius notariorum was one of the highest officials of the second class (i.e. those who had the rank of spectabilis). In A.D. 381 an imperial law elevated him above the vicarii and placed him in the same group as the proconsuls.

The following remarks are intended to call attention to a profound difference between manumission censu and some other ancient modes of manumission; a difference emerging if, in examining the several modes, we pay regard to form and original setting rather than to the general role they came to acquire in fully historical times.

Modern scholars appear to seek for a uniform pattern of early manumission (I). In point of fact, whereas the fundamental idea underlying some other modes was release of a slave by his master, though this release was controlled or ratified by the public authority (II), that underlying manumission censu was incorporation of a man by the State, though, as a rule, the incorporation was made only with the master's consent (III).

Antiquity records few more cruel twists of fate than that which met the two-time former consul and conqueror of Macedon, L. Aemilius Paullus, on his return to Rome in 167 B.C. The great victory at Pydna the year before had finally removed the major rival to Roman power on the Greek mainland, and the riches generated in the campaign were such as to permit the abolition of direct taxation at Rome. The grant of a triumph should therefore have marked the acme of an already distinguished public career. Amidst this pomp, however, there intervened the worst of private disasters. For, a few days before the triumph, Paullus lost one of the two young sons born to him from his second marriage, and, only a few days after, the second died as well. The general responded with a notably dignified speech in which he recalled his prayer prior to the campaign, that the gods should reserve any intended catastrophe for his house alone and not for the state, and gave thanks for their having granted him his wish.

Criticism of Propertius 2.7 has usually centred around the elegy's role as evidence for the poets's attitude towards Augustus. Treated as such, it has been used to support a surprising variety of conclusions. For Stahl and Lyne the poem represents a courageous defence of individualism under a repressive and intolerant regime. At the other end of the spectrum, Cairns has tried to show that the poet's deliberate presentation of himself as ‘a morally tainted individual’ undercuts his argument to such an extent that the poem is effectively an endorsement of the legislation which it purports to attack. Between these two extremes, Baker detects ‘a cautious blend of levity and gravity’ and suggests that, while emphasizing the value of amor, the elegy hints at a tension between Propertius' personal inclinations and the demands of others or his own sense of duty; Boucher, who believes that Propertius is generally pro-Augustan, reads 2.7 as an open and straightforward critique of the princeps' attempts at moral reform, which, by its very openness, militates against the reading of subtle irony into apparently patriotic elegies such as 3.11 and 4.6; and Camps speaks of ‘a certain extravagance, even shrillness, in the manner in which Propertius expresses his defiance of ordinary Roman values’ which ‘may reflect tensions within the poet himself’. More recently, Cloud has argued that Propertius has simply used the marriage law as a peg on which to hang his working out of a collection of Hellenistic erotic topoi, and that the poem cannot be read as a serious statement of opposition to the princeps.

The city state was the most characteristic expression of the Hellenic way of life; and it is appropriate that the most Philhellenic of Roman emperors should have been distinguished as a founder of cities and an encourager of civic institutions. We are ill informed about the constitution and history of most of his foundations, but concerning one, which was in Egypt, a country whose soil preserves so perfectly the antiquities which it covers, we have a considerable amount of evidence. Antinoopolis is thus of interest not only to the historian of Roman and Byzantine Egypt, but also for the light it may throw on Hadrian's aims and ideals as a founder of cities.

Although a considerable amount of work has been devoted to the identification of the supporters and opponents of Tiberius Gracchus, the central feature of the prosopographical picture that emerges has not been given the attention it deserves. For Tiberius Gracchus, whose mother was both the sister of the adoptive father of Scipio Aemilianus and the niece of Scipio's natural father, and whose sister was married to Aemilianus, found his most notable noble supporters among those who were political opponents of Aemilianus. In the context of Roman politics as they operated in the pre-Gracchan era, that is a very remarkable situation, and one that merits further investigation. For if it is the case that Tiberius Gracchus broke away from his inherited connections to join the political opponents of those connections, it is worth asking what consequences and repercussions this action had. We might expect to find persons who could be put into the following categories: (a) other former supporters of Aemilianus, who joined Gracchus in his break-away, (b) friends of Aemilianus who remained loyal to him, (c) opponents of Aemilianus who would not accept the Gracchan programme, and (d) opponents of Aemilianus who supported Gracchus. What follows is an attempt to define the membership of the various categories. I restrict myself to this process of identification: I am not here concerned with the larger question of the extent to which the motives of those who supported Gracchus were purely factional and how far they genuinely backed the Gracchan programme. On these, and many other matters, one will naturally turn now to Badian's exhaustive survey in the first volume of Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt.

The varied talents of Olympiodorus of Thebes, which made him a significant personality of his own age, deserve also to have made him, more than he seems to have become, a figure of interest to students of his age. By origin and education, he represents the surviving vigour of the late ‘Hellenistic’ culture of the Roman empire; in his political services to the court of Constantinople, he can be recognized as the first of a distinctive profession—of Byzantine diplomats; as a man who travelled to Syene and the distant Blemmyes he subscribes to a tradition of educated tourism reaching back to Herodotus; while in the inseparable company, which he kept for more than twenty years, of a pet parrot that could ‘dance, sing, call its owner's name, and do many other tricks’, Olympiodorus even cuts, to modern eyes, an eccentrically buccaneering figure. And above all, as a historian he claims a central place in a continuous tradition of Greek writing on Roman affairs—a tradition notoriously lacking in western historiography.

The ancient historian is used to dealing with texts that are fragments through the accident of transmission. This paper is concerned with a deliberate fragment: a work that is notionally complete, in that it is written and presented as something finished and whole, but which at the same time draws the reader's attention in a more or less systematic fashion to the fact that it is incomplete; it shows itself to be only part of the whole. The mode was especially popular in the Romantic period; the best-known example for English readers is Coleridge's Kubla Khan, but it also revealed itself in such diverse forms as the aphoristic writings of thinkers like Friedrich Schlegel, or the widespread admiration of the ruins of ancient buildings. I intend to argue that Sallust's Jugurtha is a work of this sort.

The theories that have been advanced concerning the Roman Wall in England and its attendant works have been so many, so divergent, and at times so rapid in their succession as almost to justify the favourite taunt of irresponsible criticism, that their sequence is a matter of fashion or caprice rather than of rational development. Such a criticism, whether directed against historical, scientific or philosophical thought, hardly merits refutation. The object of this essay is rather to tell a plain tale, the story of the process by which, in the three centuries that have elapsed since Camden took it up, the problem of the Wall has been attacked first in one way and then in another till finally, within the last generation, a complete solution seems to have come within the range of possibility.

Reflecting on present unease about structural biases in the discipline, and aiming to offer a data-rich response to some recent criticisms of this Journal, the Editorial Board has undertaken a study of the representation of female scholars in the Journal of Roman Studies. To that end, we have gathered data on publications, submissions and JRS Editorial Board membership for the past fifteen years, from Volume 95 (2005) through to the present volume, Volume 109 (2019). The data are set out in the final section (VII), following a brief review of the main results. Our goal here is neither to present a definitive analysis, nor to offer a commentary on the underlying causes of the patterns revealed (on which we expect much fruitful discussion elsewhere). Rather, the JRS Editorial Board aims to make key data available both to inform a much wider debate within the profession as a whole and, importantly, to inform this Journal’s policies, procedures and active outreach. The Board is also acutely aware that any analysis of gender bias needs to be framed carefully — both by an awareness that there are other under-represented groups in the discipline (on which our data in their current form would regrettably only offer a most imperfect picture), and by a sensitivity to the limitations of a conception of gender as a simple binary.

Scholars over the last few decades have been unable to find a convincing explanation for the widespread practice of brother-sister marriage among the common people in Roman Egypt, a social practice seemingly disregarding one of the most fundamental taboos. This paper now argues that these ‘incestuous’ marriages were in fact marriages between a biological child and an adopted one, a practice documented also for other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Due to the severe mortality regime before the demographic transition, up to 30 per cent of all fathers did not have a male heir, and therefore adopting the son-in-law was a common succession and inheritance strategy in many pre-modern societies.

The north-west corner of Spain was long neglected by Roman archaeologists, who have tended to concentrate on the more spectacular remains to be found in the south and east. However, recently more attention has been directed there by workers of several nationalities, who have now produced a quite extensive literature on the gold mines, as well as on wider aspects, chiefly in connection with the activities of the legion VII Gemina. Yet there has been little attempt in all this to examine why a substantial military force was maintained in the region for so long. This paper aims to review that problem to about the end of the second century A.D. The evidence available is almost entirely epigraphic, chiefly consisting of epitaphs and religious dedications. Building inscriptions are scarce. For convenience all the epigraphic material from the north-west of Spain that is relevant to the disposition of the army is collected in the appendix, and in the main text reference will be made to the numbers given there. In addition a few historical passages are of importance, but the archaeological site evidence is very slight. The nature of the evidence is such that most attention must be devoted to the units attested in the region and their deployment, with little to be said about their actual bases. Previous work on the subject has been dominated by the late Antonio García y Bellido in several masterly papers. However it has tended to concentrate more on the history of the units themselves than on questions of topography and the reasons behind their presence.

Since Sir Henry Stuart Jones has included Mithraism among his many interests, it seems appropriate to offer to him on this occasion some remarks on its general significance. No phenomenon in Imperial paganism has attracted as much attention, and this is natural.

Virtus, Albine, est pretium persolvere verum

quis in versamur, quis vivimus rebus, potesse.

Let us make another provisional attempt to determine the pretium verum of Mithraism.

We see in it something of eastern worship detached from its native content and developed in a new milieu; apparently it had no oecumenical organization; certainly it tolerated other gods, and lent itself to an unchecked local diversification of forms. In all these respects it was essentially on a par with the other ‘oriental religions in Roman paganism.’ Nevertheless, it differed from them in various significant ways. The normal exclusion of women and the moral demands made of the initiate have often been remarked; but that is not all.

Whether or not Syme made a convincing case for revolution at Rome, his Roman Revolution did not effect a revolution in Roman history. To be sure, his choice of where to start and where to end his discussion was unorthodox (if orthodoxy was the old edition of the Cambridge Ancient History or Rice Holmes or the periodization of Oxford Greats), but his relentless focus on individual political actors and their relations with one another differs from the emphasis of earlier scholars only in its priorities and intensity. Whether or not Wallace-Hadrill makes a convincing case for revolution at Rome, Rome's Cultural Revolution is revolutionary. To be sure, the individual parts of the book have been variously anticipated in particular studies, but the insistence that what happens in the history of buildings, instrumentum domesticum, dress, and monuments constitutes not simply the background to a political story, but is itself the story of Late Republican Rome — in W.-H.'s own words ‘that the political transformation of the Roman world is integrally connected to its cultural transformation’ (xix) — challenges the assumptions on which Roman historians have built the history of the Republic ever since Asinius Pollio.