On the 21st of April, 1917, the embankment of the Rome-Naples railway gave way a short distance outside the Porta Maggiore: the works undertaken to repair the damage led to the discovery of a subterranean building of the greatest interest. One may say, without fear of exaggeration, that this is one of the most important discoveries ever made in Rome, and it raises a formidable number of problems archaeological, historical and artistic. It is impossible in a brief article to describe the building fully or to attempt an interpretation of the stucco reliefs that decorate it, especially as it has not yet been published in detail. I will therefore, in this short study, merely point out some of its most important characteristics and summarize the result of recent studies.

An analysis of the formal features of the ‘epitaph’ of the poet Naevius reveals the handiwork of a later author who admired the older style of poetry represented by Naevius and used the allusive features of that style to reflect on the changing character of Latin poetics and its relationship to Hellenism. The very poetics of the epigram reveal a thoughtful attempt to admit Hellenic affect without sacrificing Roman sensibilities. Especially important is the relationship between divine and mortal and the proper hierarchy of the social world. The epigram is, in short, one literary reflection of the cultural and social struggles of the mid-second century b.c.

This paper revisits the political history of the Roman Republic in the third decade of the first century b.c. Its central contention is that the dominant feature of the period was neither a reshuffle of alliances within the ‘Sullan’ senatorial nobility nor the swift demise of Sulla's legacy. Attention should be focused instead on some crucial policy issues which attracted debate and controversy in that period: the powers of the tribunes, the corn supply of Rome, the rôle of the Senate, the revival of the census, and the full inclusion of the Allies into the citizen body. The political strategy of M. Aemilius Lepidus (cos. 78 b.c.) and its medium-term repercussions also deserve close scrutiny in this connection.

This article examines marriage as a pathway to free status for enslaved women in the early imperial Roman world, arguing that women manumitted for marriage to their former owners experienced a qualified form of freedom. Analysis of a funerary altar from early imperial Rome alongside larger bodies of legal and epigraphic evidence shows that in this transactional mode of manumission, enslaved women paid for their freedom by foregoing certain privileges, including, to varying degrees, the ability to enter and exit the marriage at will and the separation of their property from that of their husbands. Through a close examination of one mode of manumission and the unequal unions that resulted from it, this paper offers further evidence that freedom was not uniform, but varied in its meaning depending on who achieved it and by what means.

The case of the early imperial small rural settlement of Marzuolo, in south-central Etruria, paints a micro-history of arrested developments: a couple of decades into the site's existence, an abandoned wine-production facility was converted into a blacksmithing workshop, which in turn burnt down and was abandoned soon after. But were both these endings failures? This article uses the concept of failure as an epistemic lens to examine inequality: who could fail in the Roman world, and for whom was failure not an option? It argues that failure was tied up with particular notions of the future, which were not equally distributed. Yet in contrast to modern paradigms, in the Roman world even the privileged seem not to have embraced failure as a stepping-stone towards growth.

A parchment codex of the early sixth century a.d., now in Vienna, contains a remarkable series of nearly 400 full-page illustrations of individual botanical species. These illustrations accompany an alphabetical recension of a pharmacological treatise on the medicinal properties of plants written by Dioskourides of Anazarbos, a Greek author of the first century a.d. Both the date of the codex and the style of its botanical illustrations have encouraged suggestions that the latter were modelled somehow on classical archetypes. This article presents new observations in support of the classical archetypes theory, but questions the traditional view that these archetypes were transmitted by ‘illustrated texts’ or ‘pattern books’ executed in papyrus or parchment. What follows is a new hypothesis concerning the nature of the artistic intermediaries used by painters, mosaicists and sculptors during antiquity.

The story that beavers self-castrate when cornered by hunters appears in a range of Roman sources, both poetry and prose, from the end of the Republic onward. This myth is a product of the rôle that ‘beaver testicles’ played in Roman luxury trade and medicine. At the same time, it serves as a literary figure for the fraught relations between Rome and the provinces from which these, and other, luxury goods were imported.

The hippodrome at Thessaloniki is well known as the scene of the bloodbath of A.D. 390, so vividly described by Gibbon. This occurred when the emperor Theodosius, enraged that his magister militum Buthericus had been killed in a riot, enticed people into the hippodrome by the promise of games, and had between 7,000 and 15,000 put to death. But apart from the events connected with this incident, the ancient sources are silent concerning the hippodrome (with the exception of a single inscription which will be discussed below). This important monument of the ancient city must be reconstructed indirectly, therefore, by employing the accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, and by examining recent archaeological finds in the light of the mediaeval city-plan and of what is known of hippodromes elsewhere in the Roman world.

The theme of this paper is geographical space as intellectual, as symbolic space. Recent scholarship has had much to say about the ways in which the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean interacted with one another, created myths of affinity or established identity by emphasizing what distinguished them from their neighbours. What though is the significance of a landscape where there is next to no human cultivation, which you can never hope to inhabit and across which only a very few can wander? What finally is the meaning of a landscape offering nothing but heat, dust, thirst, and a profusion of magical, homicidal serpents? I propose therefore a journey into the desert, a journey into the Greco-Roman imagination.

This article discusses the most memorable works of art described in Virgil's Aeneid (the paintings at the temple in Carthage, the doors of the temple in Cumae, the shield of Aeneas, and the baldric of Pallas) as visual models for the poem's organization of its own intertextual memory. The multi-dimensionality of memory enacted in the viewing of these pictorial programmes emerges as a metaphorical visualization of the semantic density created by the overlapping intertexts within the narrative itself and, what is more, urges the reader to perceive works of Augustan monumental art as embodiments of a similarly complex universe of memory.

During the fourth century A.D. the coins issued from the different mints of the Roman empire commonly bore, in addition to the name of the city where the mint was situated, a letter or number indicating the particular shop of the mint in which each coin was struck. In a recent article I made a study of the tetradrachms issued at Alexandria during the first twelve years of the reign of Diocletian— i.e. till the date when the Egyptian currency was assimilated to that of the rest of the empire—to see what evidence could be found as to the existence of marks distinguishing the shops in this series: and I propose now to pass the whole of the Roman tetradrachm issues of Alexandria in brief review for the same purpose.

At the end of the first book of Cicero's De diuinatione there occurs a tantalising passage containing a specific mention of the ‘Isiac diviners.’ It used to be attributed to Ennius by the earlier editors of that author, but since the time of Bothe this view has not been generally accepted. The passage runs ‘non habeo denique nauci Marsum augurem, non vicanos haruspices, non de circo astrologos, non Isiacos coniectores, non interpretes somniorum; non enim sunt ii aut scientia aut arte divini.’ The text is sound and there is no variant reading for the words ‘Isiaci coniectores’ which interest us most particularly in this study. The Italian colour of the passage (cf. ‘Marsus augur, de circo astrologi’) excludes the possibility of a Greek origin, and the question is merely to whom, Ennius or Cicero, the words ‘Isiaci coniectores’ should be assigned. It must be admitted that the words ‘non habeo … divini’ are not metrical and it would be hopeless to defend them in their present form as the ipsissima verba of Ennius. But the possibility that they contain a more or less close paraphrase of Ennius is suggested by the use of ‘non habeo … nauci,’ a phrase which Cicero never used. ‘Isiacus’ too is a rare word, which does not appear elsewhere in Republican Latin (v. infra pp. 58, 59, n. 21 and 22).