Mommsen — followed more recently by Brennan and Ferrary — proposed that laws were passed in around 228 and in 198 that constitutionally ‘fixed’ Sicily and Sardinia, and later Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior, as praetorian prouinciae. This paper challenges that theory. It first examines the ancient evidence, comprising two ambiguous passages from Livy's Ab Vrbe Condita. It then offers a counter-hypothesis that elucidates the people's rôle in forestalling and/or resolving political disputes over the allocation of provincial commands. It will show that this rôle was crucial for mitigating the harmful effects of élite competition and, in turn, maintaining political stability in Rome.

This paper revises current understandings of the rôle of land in the economy of the Italian diaspora in the Greek East in the second and first centuries b.c., arguing that these Italians owned more land than has previously been assumed and that many of these Italian landowners practised a highly commercialized form of agriculture that focused on high-end products. This strategy shaped what empire meant both locally and in Italy and Rome, where the products they marketed fed into the ongoing consumer revolutions of the time. After discussing the evidence for the extent of Italian landholdings and examining their exploitation in three case studies, we conclude by reflecting on the long-term history of such landholdings in the provinces and the implications for our understanding of Roman imperialism more generally.

Fresh water came from a variety of sources, streams and springs as well as aqueducts. Much of the Roman law on fresh water concerns its supply, regulating rights to use it with a variety of legal institutions from public and private law (e.g. ownership, servitudes, interdicts). The study of fresh water has usually followed the legal categories, segregating the public water supply from water that was private property, and consequently segregating different types of evidence. In this paper varied evidence is analysed using the ‘bundle’ approach, an analytical framework from legal scholarship on rights in the environment, in which water rights are not monolithic but are represented by component rights, including rights of access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation. Analysing component rights in fresh water reveals significant continuities in the Romans' regulation of it and the impact of this regulation. Although there was no centralized water administration in the early Empire, Romans took a systematic approach to regulating fresh water based on consistent working principles and policy priorities.

Readings of Cicero's ad Fam. 15 commonly focus on Cicero's bid for a supplicatio in 51 b.c.e., which supplies this book of letters with one of its most dominant refrains. Yet this emphasis sits oddly with the book's position within the letter collection as a whole. This article argues that whoever organized the books of the ad Fam. into sequence has invested the idea of the supplicatio, and of Cicero's aspiration for a triumph, with a new metaphorical significance that it would not have had at the time of the letters’ writing. My reading attempts to locate this retrospective significance and to trace the portrait of Cicero that emerges from it.

This paper will examine the claims of the excudent alii (‘others will hammer out’) priamel of Aeneid 6.847–53 within the immediate context of the parade's end, where Marcellus, parading the spolia opima, is used to exemplify the claims made about fine and speculative arts belonging to the Greeks, and war and the arts of empire to the Romans. It will be shown that certain, highly specific memories of the elder Marcellus are cued by the priamel that run directly counter to Anchises’ claims. The paper will look at how these claims are spoken in character, and driven by specific narrative motives, and it will relate the mismatch of exemplified to exemplifier to certain larger patterns within the Aeneid of things being left unsaid only to stand out all the more by being left unsaid. The paper concludes with a speculative essay on the necessary reductions and revisions that go into the making, and reading, of culturally instrumentalized monuments.

Odes 4.1 is difficult to understand on a literal level. At its beginning Horace is complaining that Venus, after leaving him alone for many years, is attacking him, that is, he is feeling a reawakening of sexual desire. But after suggesting that the goddess go off to visit Paullus Fabius Maximus and describing the rewards the young man will give her, he returns to himself. Now, he says, he is delighted by neither woman nor boy nor by the prospect of mutuality in love, that is, he is not in the grip of eros. Additionally, the use of iuuare, ‘delight’, with a person as subject seems to be without any parallel. These problems disappear if in l. 29 we read mi for me: ‘I no longer have either woman or boy (as lover) nor do I have the hope of mutual affection.’ Horace's having no lover and no hope of one is compatible with his feeling a generalized desire for sex or a desire for someone unattainable. The tone of the last two quatrains is affected as well as the contribution of the poem to the fourth book of odes.

This article reconsiders the possible statuary of the Pantheon in Rome, both in its original Augustan form and in its later phases. It argues that the so-called ‘Algiers Relief’ has wrongly been connected with the Temple of Mars Ultor and is in fact evidence of the association of the Divus Julius with Mars and Venus in the Pantheon of Agrippa, a juxtaposition which reflects the direction of Augustan ideology in the 20s b.c. and the building's celestial purpose. This triple statue group became the focus of the later Pantheon, and its importance is highlighted by the hierarchized system of architectural ornament of the present building.

This article examines the burning of written material at Rome from the Republican period until the rise of Christianity, using the lens of book history. It considers why and how Romans burned written material, gathering for the first time all testimony of burning any kind of writing, and examines responses to these burnings in ancient discourse. A capacious, book-historical approach to Roman book-burning shows that differences in practice and uses — of books as opposed to documents, for example — account for the different consequences Romans saw for burning different written media.

In this article we present a new study of the Arch of Janus, analysing previously unpublished aspects of its architecture and chronology based on new data obtained from a recent research project. This study provides the first complete planimetric view of the monument, together with a stratigraphic reading of the structure, evaluating the different elements of spolia that were re-used in its construction. Also, the discovery of a new inscription that was re-used in building the arch finally confirms that it dates from the period of Constantius II (a.d. 357). Finally, we present a proposal for the reconstruction of the dedicatory inscription of the arch, preserved in the nearby church of San Giorgio al Velabro.

This article presents a new interpretation of the historiographical production of Jordanes by situating it in the political and social environment of Constantinople of the years 550–552. It argues that these years were a period of crisis in Justinian's reign and that this is reflected in the pessimistic view of Roman power and the critique of Justinian's military and religious policy we can see in Jordanes’ Romana. If this prevents us from understanding Jordanes as a mouthpiece of the court, he cannot be reduced to a mere reproducer of Cassiodorus either: while there is more evidence for a close interaction between Jordanes and Cassiodorus (in particular the use of the Historia Tripartita in the Romana) than usually adduced, this is balanced by Jordanes’ explicit attempts to keep his distance from the senator. If the latter can be explained by Jordanes’ much lower social and literary status and his Moesian rather than Italian origin, which made him only a marginal member of Cassiodorus’ circle in Constantinople, the agreement between both men is the result of a confluence of views caused by the turn of the Italian war in 540–550. Jordanes, then, appears as a unique voice in what must have been a polyphony of opinions in mid-sixth-century Constantinople.

The collection of four Latin bucolics ascribed to one Martius Valerius was only published in the twentieth century; they have been widely considered as twelfth-century compositions. Picking up on suggestions proposed by François Dolbeau, this study presents evidence that Martius drew directly on the bucolics of Theocritus, and that his poems are late antique, not medieval, literary productions, probably written in the sixth century. Such a conclusion will require a revision of the history of post-Virgilian Latin bucolic poetry.