In 149 B.C. the tribune L. Calpurnius Piso proposed a law which was to have momentous consequences for the legal, political and administrative history of the Roman republic. It was his lex de rebus repetundis which first established the practice of trial before a quaestio perpetua, a jury, drawn from a panel of jurors who had always to be available, which became the standard procedure for criminal cases in the late republic. For over fifty years, from the first tribunate of C. Gracchus in 123 to the passing of the Lex Aurelia in 70, such courts were to provide a political storm-centre as various political figures attempted for their own ends to alter the criteria for the selection of the iudices who manned the juries. Moreover, from the late second century B.C. down to at least the second century A.D., the process de repetundis formed the most important means that was available to Rome's provincial subjects of bringing an action against a provincial governor for maladministration.

Normally, little attention is paid to the authors of military manuals in the imperial period. ‘Entertaining though trifling’ is a comment that can generally be heard. Frontinus is more familiar than most because of his distinguished career and other writings, but even his Strategemata is considered more as a source of historical anecdote than as an object of serious study in its own right. Yet the military textbooks fit into the tradition of didactic literature in antiquity and as such raise questions about their scope and purpose, and about what use could be or was made of them. This has special significance in relation to generalship and the evolution of tactics in the Roman empire.

The age at which girls tend to marry is one of the most important factors in determining the overall rates of fertility in a given population, and hence its general demographic profile. It also affects a whole range of social institutions of reproduction, above all the ‘shape’ of the family, the relationships between the mother and her children, between husband and wife, and the ways in which property can be redistributed through inheritance. It is the simple and restricted purpose of this paper to re-examine the data that have hitherto been used to determine the age at marriage of girls in Roman society. For the purposes of this study, ‘Roman society’ is defined as the conglomerate of urban-centred communities that developed in Europe west of the Adriatic, as well as in the lands of the Danubian Basin. It is conceded that family types and modes of family formation in the eastern parts of the empire were different from those in the west, and therefore require separate analysis. In performing this task, the analysis presented here also attempts to demonstrate the highly specific nature of the set of data employed in the ‘age-at-marriage’ debate, and to question its relevance to the age at first marriage of most girls in the western Roman empire. Having demonstrated the limited validity of these data, I shall then suggest another method that might usefully be employed to approach the problem. Finally, to complete the argument, a series of hypotheses will be advanced that seek to link the range and modes of age at first marriage of girls of various status groups and classes to other social and economic factors in the Roman world.

The narrative organization of Propertius' first poetry-book seems to encourage a practice of reading the characters and events of his love elegy as real. The predominantly autobiographical mode allows the reader to equate the lover of the text with the author Propertius. Direct addresses to a beloved ‘Cynthia’ who is allocated physical and psychological characteristics suggest that the narrative's female subject has a life outside the text as Propertius' mistress. The illusion of a real world populated by real individuals is then sustained by various other formal mechanisms such as the regular deployment of addresses to the historically verifiable figure of Tullus or occasional references to the landscape of Baiae, Umbria and Rome. Having established a recognizable setting, the poetry-book seems even to account for its own existence as literary discourse with the claim that composition is a method of courtship. Writing is subsumed within and subordinated to an erotic scheme: Propertius writes to woo a woman.

New discoveries are customarily hailed as events of the greatest importance; whether they always are is a matter more for the judgement of posterity than of the discoverer. But the Lex Irnitana is exceptional. Discovered in Spain in 1981, it has now been published for the first time with translation and commentary. It is the most complete copy yet discovered of the Flavian municipal law already known in more fragmentary form from Salpensa and Malaca. For Roman legal historians the detailed provisions on civil jurisdiction in the tenth and last tablet are of the greatest interest. They fall into three main areas: the first deals with the competence of local jurisdiction and the display of the relevant edictal remedies (chapters 84 and 85); next follow four chapters concerned with the selection of a pool of judges for each year and provisions on how to select them or recuperatores in any given case; finally the law regulates adjournments requested or required and the days on which cases may be heard or for which they may be adjourned. The law is notably well structured, an advantage for us since unexpected omissions may be regarded as significant rather than due to related material being scattered through many tablets, some not extant.

It is not the purpose of this paper to propose a new commentary on the legal provisions recorded in the Lex Irnitana, or to attempt to re-interpret as a whole what is certainly one of the major epigraphic discoveries of this century. Much more modestly, it employs an analysis of the diplomatic form to understand the imperial document called until now the ‘letter of Domitian’, which stands at the end of this copy of the Flavian municipal law.

In 1979, during his continuing excavation of the city of Aphrodisias, Professor K. T. Erim discovered a large temple and sanctuary complex dedicated to Aphrodite and the Julio-Claudian emperors (the Theoi Sebastoi). It had a remarkable sculptural display of which much has survived—there are about eighty relief panels. The complex would probably have been called a Sebasteion: we know from an unrelated inscription that there was one at Aphrodisias. It is of great interest to both the historian and art-historian of the early empire, giving a rare combination of buildings, sculpture, and inscriptions from a unified excavated context and providing an unrivalled picture of the physical setting of the imperial cult in a Greek city. The sculptured reliefs give a great range and combination of iconography quite unexpected in such a context—mythological, allegorical, and imperial. The myth panels seem to offer a missing link between the iconographic repertoire of the Hellenistic world and that used under the Roman empire, while the allegorical and imperial panels give a detailed plcture of the emperor and Rome as seen from the Greek East that is not available elsewhere.

One of the best episodes in Petronius' Satyrica involves the presence of the narrator, Encolpius, his lover Giton, and the rogue-poet Eumolpus, on board a ship owned by Lichas, of which another passenger is the flighty matron, Tryphaena. In an earlier episode of the novel, Lichas seems to have been the lover of Encolpius and Tryphaena of Giton, though both affairs had ended in enmity. There ensues a comic deliberation between Encolpius and Giton about ways of escape. One of them involves the ink which Eumolpus has brought aboard as a man of literature. Encolpius suggests that he and Giton dye themselves with it from head to foot and pretend to be Eumolpus' Ethiopian (that is, African) slaves. Giton contemptuously dismisses the idea, and proposes suicide. Eumolpus intervenes with what he considers a better idea. His manservant, who is a barber, will shave the heads and eyebrows of Encolpius and Giton, and then he himself 'will mark your faces with an elaborate inscription to give the impression that you have been punished with a mark. That way the same letters will both allay the suspicions of your pursuers and hide your faces with the appearance of punishment' ('sequar ego frontes notans inscriptione sollerti, ut uideamini stigmate esse puniti. ita eaedem litterae et suspicionem declinabunt quaerentium et uultus umbra supplicii tegent'). This is agreed to, and 'Eumolpus filled the foreheads of us both with huge letters, and with generous hand covered our whole faces with the wellknown inscription of runaway slaves' ('impleuit Eumolpus frontes utriusque ingentibus litteris et notum fugitiuorum epigramma per totam faciem liberali manu duxit').

A recent study of the Theodosian Code, which includes the identification of constitutions composed by Ausonius (A.D. 375 to 377) and Nicomachus Flavianus (A.D. 388 to 390) as quaestors prompts a fresh interpretation of the Historia Augusta and its author, whom I shall call Scriptor. On this interpretation his work is subtler than is generally conceded. The enigmatic series of biographies meant, and was intended to mean, different things to different people: to the vulgar it was an entertaining and often salacious series of lives interspersed with jokes; to the author an enjoyable exercise in teasing others and not least himself; to the insider a set of puzzles behind which lurked personal and political allusions, but also a reflection on certain political themes: the role of the Roman senate and urban prefecture, the importance of regular administration, the overriding need to defend Gaul and the west.