It is a striking fact that the years in Gibbon's life about which we know least—the years 1765–72, between his return from the Grand Tour and the commencement of his History—are precisely those in which we are most interested, if we wish to study the genesis of his great book. The years 1758–64 are covered with increasing fullness in the journals which Gibbon began to keep in August 1761. From this source, for example, we can trace in detail the somewhat complex evolution of his first published work, the Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature—detail enhanced by reference to the manuscript draft which survives. Again, for the period 1773–87 we know exactly what Gibbon was doing: his intellectual course was finally settled, and the six ample quartos of the Decline and Fall provide the best possible comment on that course, supplemented and confirmed by increasingly full correspondence and the terse outline in Memoir E of the autobiography. But between these two periods we have only meagre and uninformative letters; one apparently unimportant publication, the Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid of 1770; and the help we can glean from Memoirs C and D of the autobiography. These were Gibbon's Dark Ages, and it is this obscure passage in his life which I wish to lighten.

L'inscription que nous publions ici a été trouvée en 1976 en surface dans un terrain de la ville médiévale non loin du grand port antique (le port de commerce); elle est entrée alors dans la collection épigraphique du musée. Bien que les conditions de la découverte, n'excluent pas que la pierre vienne d'ailleurs, il n'est peut-être pas inutile de présenter brièvement la topographie du lieu de trouvaille. Dans le terrain en question ainsi que dans les deux terrains contigus à l'Ouest on a mis au jour, notamment, des restes de murs particulièrement épais appartenant à un grand bâtiment, public de toute évidence, qui a connu plusieurs phases de constructions. Le terrain situé le plus à l'Ouest a également livré des restes d'un autre édifice d'importance comparable. Il faut ajouter que dans la parcelle centrale on dégage actuellement un bâtiment rectangulaire dont l'orientation (NO–SE) ne s'inscrit pas, chose rare, dans le plan hippodaméen de la ville (N–S ou E–O). Mais l'importance de cet endroit pour la topographie de la ville antique en général a déjà été signalée: en mettant en rapport les deux grands bâtiments du terrain ouest avec le port commercial antique ‘on est amené à penser que nous sommes probablement dans la région de l'agora antique’.

In December 1979, a Latin inscription on bronze came into the hands of Professor Guillermo Fatás of the department of Ancient History in the University of Zaragoza. It had been found by an unauthorized excavator on the site of the excavations on the hill known as Cabezo de las Minas, just outside the village of Botorrita, some 20 kilometres south of Zaragoza, on the banks of the river Huerva. The tablet, 438 mm. from side to side and 208 mm. from top to bottom, had clearly been attached to a wall or some other substantial object by means of six holes, three along the upper and three along the lower edge, and has been preserved in its entirety. However, the bronze is badly warped, and although the back of the tablet is quite smooth, the inscribed face has suffered considerable damage, apparently from fire and corrosion. After preliminary cleaning, Fatás published, with exemplary speed, a notice of the find in the Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia CLXXVI (1979), 421–38, and then, after further treatment by the archaeological laboratory in the Museo Arqueologico de Barcelona, a monograph on the inscription in 1980.

From the first Augustus employed Equites in military and civil posts (Dio LIII 15). The number of such posts multiplied in the course of time, and finally in the third century Equites supplanted senators in positions of the highest responsibility. In general ancient authors almost ignore the inception and development of the equestrian service. Dio makes Maecenas advocate the use of Equites by arguing that the emperor needed numerous assistants and that it was advisable that as many persons as possible, evidently from the higher classes, should feel that they had a share in the government (LII 19; 25). Modern scholars offer various explanations. It is clear that there were too few senators to fill the army commissions that went to Equites. Some equestrian posts were also below senatorial dignity. But others equalled or surpassed in importance those still reserved to senators. On one view the emperors, aiming at greater efficiency, found among the Equites more professional expertise; on another, they could better rely on the political loyalty of the lower order. Stein combined these theories: Augustus ‘called to life an admirable profession of officials (Beamtenstand) which performed its functions with distinction and which could at the same time unlike the senate never threaten the Princeps’; it was ‘an efficient and willing instrument of the autocrat’. For Hirschfeld its triumph in the third century marked the culmination of ‘the three hundred years’ long struggle between senate and emperor’. Individual emperors to whom the creation of particular posts is assigned (often with little justification) are supposed to have deliberately furthered this process. I can find no deep design nor overall plan, either in the arrangements made by Augustus (some of which were suggested by practices of the previous generation), or in those of his successors, but only a series of expedients to meet varying needs and the development of precedents, which ultimately produced the appearance of a system.

The early Roman Empire rested on a network of cities, which were capable both of conspicuous expenditure locally, in the form of public buildings, shows and festivals, and of carrying many of the functions of government; but by the fourth century their capacity to perform these roles had drastically declined. Both the capacity and the decline depended in part on the availability or inavailability of the richer classes to undertake expenditures associated with public offices or with liturgies. These remarks are of course mere commonplaces. They have become so, in the first place, because precisely these changes were noted, and the issues relating to them consciously formulated, in the fourth century itself. So Libanius writes in his Funeral Oration for Julian:

He showed the same care also in relation to the councils in the cities, which formerly flourished in both numbers and wealth, but by that time had come to nothing, since their members, except for a very few, had switched course, some into military service, some into the Senate … The remainder were all but sunk, and for the majority of them undertaking public services (to leitourgein) ended in beggary. Yet who does not know that the vitality of its council is the soul of a city ? But Constantius, while in theory aiding the councils, in practice was their enemy, by moving elsewhere men who sought to evade them, and granting illegal exemptions (ateleiai).

Three points should be noted here: Libanius assumes an evolution which was, if not universal, at any rate general throughout the Empire; the crisis is regarded as having been caused by the availability of roles or statuses which offered an alternative to the obligations of city councillors ; and this availability itself is seen as a product of imperial actions, which (as Libanius goes on to say) Julian had taken steps to reverse.

A bronze tablet found at Larinum (near modern Larino), in the territory of the Frentani, and published in 1978, carries part of an SC of A.D. 19 that embodies measures against public performance on stage or in the arena by members of the upper classes.

This tablet poses a variety of interrelated problems which are the concern of this paper: it is itself incomplete; there are gaps in the history of the measures taken against public performance by members of the upper classes (the offence dealt with on the tablet); it is uncertain whether that was the only offence it dealt with or whether, as the testimony of Suetonius might suggest, it catered for the sexual misconduct of matrons; and there is a paradox about the penalty voluntarily incurred by would-be performers, in that it does not seem to have differed from the original penalty for performing. The solutions to each of the problems are mutually dependent, but I shall deal with them in the above order.

The ‘foundation’ in the juridical sense, ‘the establishing of an institution, together with an endowment or provision for its perpetual maintenance’, is a conspicuous phenomenon of the Hellenistic and imperial periods. Though ancient foundations vary widely in form, purpose, and organization, two kinds predominate. One, of which the fullest examples are Hellenistic, is funerary. The founder forms an association, or endows one already formed, for the cultivation of his and his family's memory by means of ceremonies conducted at the family tomb. The organization is essentially private, and those responsible for the conduct of the foundation are the members of the constituent association. An elaborate and perfectly preserved example is that of Epicteta of Thera, dated about 200 B.C. The other notable form is characteristic of the civic revival of the principate. Here the founder establishes an endowment of which the direct or indirect beneficiary is the city, or some subdivision of the citizenry such as the boule or gerousia. This foundation is essentially public, and the responsibility for administering it rests with the city officials. This type is illustrated by one of the longest of all known foundation-deeds, the dossier relative to the foundation of C. Vibius Salutaris dated to A.D. 104. As well as other kinds of foundation, such as those endowing libraries, salaries for schoolmasters, the maintenance of freeborn boys and girls (the alimenta), there are also hybrids between the two principal types already described. Thus T. Flavius Praxias of Acmoneia provides both for a college of six of his freedmen, presumably intended as a funerary association similar to Epicteta's, and for the boule and archontes of Acmoneia to see to the overall management of the foundation, including the protection of the freedmen.

In any discussion of the relationship between Fiscus and Patrimonium, the inscription from Saepinum dealing with incidents on the callis or tratturo from the Abruzzi to the Tavoliere which passed through the town must play a part. The inscription comprises three documents: a report from the Imperial freedman Septimianus to his superior, the freedman a rationibus Cosmus, on the maltreatment alleged by the conductores gregum oviaricorum in the region of Saepinum and Bovianum, at the hands of local magistrates and stationarii; a request from the a rationibus to the Praetorian Prefects; and a warning letter from these to the magistrates of Saepinum, placed at the head of the dossier.

The standard interpretation of the Saepinum inscription explains the place which it holds in discussions of the Patrimonium; for let us suppose that the conductores gregum oviaricorum are the contractors for the Imperial flocks, the oves dominicae, and that the intervention of Cosmus is justified on the basis of his position, the flocks being sub cura mea; it would follow that at any rate under Marcus (the affair belongs to the years 169–72), the possessions of the Emperor were in the hands of the a rationibus and hence of the Fiscus.

It has usually been held that the shield emblems in the Notitia Dignitatum (Not. Dig.) were based upon an official pictorial register or pattern book, containing the unit emblems of the late Roman army. Thought to have been based upon an official source, as the text was, the shield emblems of the Not. Dig. are imagined to have been accurate in the original manuscript. It was only later, according to this view, that errors crept in during the transmission of the text and illustrations, so that the emblems now appear to be somewhat debased. For example, it is held that some of them no longer accompany the titles for which they were apparently intended.

Shifts in the relationship between the emblems and titles have long been noted. But there are other, more fundamental, inconsistencies that have escaped the attention of scholars. These previously led me to raise doubts about the truth of the conventional view above and to entertain the possibility ‘that the artist's sources were so impoverished that he was reduced to relying upon his own powers of invention’. I should now like to explain in greater detail my reasons for rejecting the conventional view and advancing the alternative explanation that the shield emblems of the Not. Dig. were largely ad hoc fabrications. The consequences for our understanding of the Not. Dig. and of the art of the later Roman Empire are obviously considerable.

The question of the degree of continuity in urban life from antiquity into later times has recently emerged as a preoccupation among scholars of the late antique and early medieval periods. Considerable attention is currently being devoted to the fate of the classical city and of the traditional patterns of urban life, with special reference to features such as reduction of physical area in individual cities, decline of population, changes in use or physical decay of classical buildings and the emergence of new social organizations as reflected in urban topography and development. Attempts to refine and analyse these issues with greater precision have largely stemmed from the recent upsurge of interest in late Roman archaeology, well demonstrated in such major excavations as those at Sardis, Aphrodisias, Caesarea, Carthage, Ephesus and Thessalonika. Yet the archaeological evidence can only tell part of the story. We must still rely a great deal on literary evidence, and the interconnection of the literary and the archaeological material is the subject of this article.

For all studies of late antique cities the single most important contemporary literary text is the Buildings, or De Aedificiis, of Procopius of Caesarea. Where it provides (as often) the only literary evidence for a particular site we need to be able to evaluate its contribution critically. So far there have been remarkably few detailed discussions of the value of its evidence either from the literary or the archaeological standpoint. As a result, the traditional view that the reign of Justinian witnessed a major effort to secure and refortify the defences of the eastern frontier, based on the information provided by Procopius, still largely holds the field, despite the availability of other sources of information which could be used to clarify Procopius' picture.