In 1889 Hermann Dessau published a revolutionary article in which he suggested that the six authors to whom the various biographies of the Historia Augusta are ascribed were merely masks behind which lurked a single author who lived at the very end of the fourth century. Ninety years later, an attempt was made to prove Dessau's hypothesis of single authorship on objective grounds. Ian Marriott's article, ‘The Authorship of the Historia Augusta: Two Computer Studies’, presents the results of two statistical tests conducted on the text of the HA which appear to show conclusively that the work was composed by one author rather than six. Marriott's findings have been hailed by a number of scholars as settling once and for all the question of the authorship of the HA. While I agree with Marriott's conclusion, and I share the consensus view that this curious work is indeed the product of a single mind, I should like to raise some questions concerning the validity of the procedure adopted by Marriott and to suggest that the tests conducted by him are in fact not conclusive.

In situations in which understanding is disrupted or made difficult, the conditions of all understanding emerge with the greatest clarity. Thus the linguistic process by means of which a conversation in two languages is made possible through translation is especially informative. (Gadamer)

This article was prompted by a reading of Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius, and, in particular, by a basic question: why might the argumentative, edgy poet Pound have been drawn to Propertius? What might he have seen in him? Some of the attraction, no doubt, lay in Propertius' slightly marginal status as a Classical author, part of the main tradition but on the edge. But it does not seem to have been the romantically agonized version of Propertius that Pound saw. Nor the merely clever, witty, light and playful Propertius – though he saw more of the second figure than the first.

A now conventional model, developed by Robert Markus, sees late Roman cities as fundamentally secular landscapes. Focusing on Augustine's sermon against a feast of the genius of Carthage (Sermo 62), this article argues that narratives of ‘secularity’ have neglected pagans’ own attitudes and the circumstances that drove ordinary Christians’ participation in civic rites. Behind Augustine's charges of ‘idolatry’ lay the religious convictions of the feast's non-Christian sponsors and behind their expectations of Christian attendance lay the recent destruction of a pagan shrine on church property. For Augustine's listeners to construe the feast as religiously irrelevant was an expression not of routine social solidarity, but of fear before powerful patrons. What was ‘secular’ was open to doubt and negotiation, both here and in empire-wide celebrations such as the Kalends of January; the boundary between the ‘pagan’ and the ‘secular’ can be located only with careful attention to the diversity of opinions about each particular rite.

Whilst the Scriptores Historiae Augustae have given rise in the last twenty-five years to lively debate, and their historical value has been tested in various ways, the other authors who treat of the same period have less frequently been made the subject of investigation. In the discussions of the Historia Augusta they have been indeed commonly considered, but works of scholars who are mainly concerned with the corresponding parts of Dio Cassius' History or with Herodian's History of the Emperors, and who consequently make these authors the centre of their researches, are comparatively rare. Hence it is all the more gratifying that the history of Herodian at least should recently have been discussed in two elaborate monographs, one by Erich Baaz, and another by Dr. J. C. P. Smits. Unfortunately these two investigators in many respects arrive at greatly different results. The following remarks will, I hope, throw fresh light on at least one of the controversial points.

This paper concerns the water imagery of two iconic passages of Roman satire: Horace's figuration of Lucilius as a river churning with mud at Sat. 1.4.11, and the transformation of that image at Juvenal, Sat. 3.62–8 (the Orontes flowing into the Tiber). It posits new ways of reckoning with the codifications and further potentials of these images by establishing points of contact with the workings of water in the Roman world. The main point of reference will be to the work of Rome's censors, who were charged not only with protecting the moral health of the state, but with ensuring the purity and abundance of the city's water supply as well.

The creation of curatores rei publicae is a very important factor in the history of local government in the Roman Empire. For it cuts across the division of administration into the central and professional on the one hand and the local and amateur on the other. It brought an imperial official into the heart of that local governing body which presided over the affairs of its community, and gave to him the supervision of its property and financial arrangements. That this interference was caused not by a doctrinaire desire on the part of an emperor for the enlargement of the sphere of the central service, but by the needs of the communities themselves, is indicated by the varying times at which curatores appear in the various provinces. The first known curator in Africa belongs to A.D. 196—nearly a century after the office was initiated.