Concrete is regarded as a quintessentially Roman achievement. The spread of the technology is usually dated to the fourth or third centuries b.c., and interpreted as a symptom of Rome's early expansion in Italy. In this paper I offer a reappraisal of the available evidence for early concrete construction in Rome. On the basis of stratigraphic evidence, I conclude that a later date should be assigned to most of the remains. I situate the origins of the technological innovation within the radical change in architectural styles that unfolded in the middle of the second century b.c., affecting both domestic architecture and public building. The new chronology has an impact on current models of cultural diffusion in Roman Italy, linking the development of Late Republican architecture with the broader debate on the cultural implications of the Roman conquest.

This paper examines the language of power and authority in the Italian Alps, after the Roman pacification of the area in 14 b.c. The focus of the examination is an arch set up at Segusio to Augustus by a local dynast named Cottius, which allows us to consider how the incorporation of the region into the Roman Empire was perceived and presented from a ‘local’ point of view, and how we might use our interpretations to construct ideas of identity and power relationships integral to early imperial provincial administration.

A conventional certainty is that the first state-driven persecution of Christians happened in the reign of Nero and that it involved the deaths of Peter and Paul, and the mass execution of Christians in the aftermath of the great fire of July 64 c.e. The argument here contests all of these facts, especially the general execution personally ordered by Nero. The only source for this event is a brief passage in the historian Tacitus. Although the passage is probably genuine Tacitus, it reflects ideas and connections prevalent at the time the historian was writing and not the realities of the 60s.

Current scholarship on élite munificence in the Roman Empire often sees architectural benefactions as being at least partially driven by the élite desire for personal commemoration. I use juristic opinions from the Digest and other textual evidence related to building gifts to argue that there was an ancient understanding of the physical and symbolic ephemerality of architectural benefactions. In contrast, I present legal and epigraphic evidence to argue that there was an explicit expectation for gifts of spectacles and monetary distributions to be lasting memorials for their donors, and that the perpetuation of identity was also a motivating factor in the euergetic choice of a spectacle.

A remarkable blue-grey marble horse with a white marble rider, found in the Basilica at Aphrodisias, has been a focus of recent research. The article describes the archaeology and history of the monument — how it can be reconstructed, with its base and in its precise setting in the Basilica. The group was a daring composition that had already fallen and been restored once in antiquity. What emerges is firstly a new full-size hellenistic-style statue group whose subject can be identified as Troilos and Achilles, and secondly a striking example of the long second lives of classical statues in Late Antiquity. The horse was a great public monument of the early imperial period that was moved to the Basilica probably in the mid-fourth century a.d., where it has a well-documented context. The subject of the group can be identified both from epigraphy and from its iconographic antecedents, and its version of the subject can be related to a particular strand in the rich later literary representations of the story.1

This paper situates Roman actions undertaken against Christians amidst an unofficial pattern of measures employed throughout the imperial period to manage the expanding influence of freelance religious experts. Questions about the historical circumstances of martyrdom or persecution tend to proceed from the assumption that Christians were perceived and dealt with as a distinct religious community. However, the penalties alleged by writers such as Paul and Justin were more commonly issued against self-authorized individuals (magi, astrologers, prophets, diviners, philosophers, and so forth) than against undifferentiated religious groups. Thus, I propose that Roman motivations for investigating and punishing Christians, at least in the first and second centuries, are best understood in relation to the wider phenomenon of freelance expertise and the range of concerns that it engendered.

This article presents an English translation and analysis of a new historical fragment, probably from Dexippus’ Scythica, published by Gunther Martin and Jana Grusková in 2014. The fragment, preserved in a palimpsest in the Austrian National Library, describes a Gothic attack on Thessalonica and the subsequent preparations of the Greeks to repel the barbarian force as it moved south into Achaia. The new text provides several important details of historical, prosopographical and historiographical significance, which challenge both our existing understanding of the events in Greece during the reign of Gallienus and the reading of the main literary sources for this period. In this article we look to secure the Dexippan authorship of the fragment, identify the individuals named in the text, and date the events described in the text to the early 260s a.d.

An inscription found in Aphrodisias in 2014 is recognized as a fragment of a dossier concerning Diocletian's currency regulation. This dossier, probably consisting of two edicts and a letter, was inscribed on two blocks of the civic basilica wall. The new fragment belongs to the letter that accompanied the edicts. The reference to the diocese suggests that the letter was addressed to the rationalis of the diocese of Asia. The new fragment belongs to the bottom right corner of the upper block. Thus, it provides new possibilities for the reconstruction of the fragments of the upper block.

This article argues that Oration 1 by Themistius was prompted by violence at Constantinople in 341–2, and that the likeliest date for the speech is as early as March 342. Detailed arguments are presented in support of this correlation, which contrasts with the usual assignment of Themistius' speech to either 347/348 or 350/351. The wider significance of these arguments is also highlighted. In particular, there are implications for our understanding of the chronology and overall trajectory of Themistius' early career; and implications for the development of imperial ideology in the 340s.

This paper takes as its point of departure two much discussed fifth-century artifacts, an uninscribed and undated consular diptych in Halberstadt (Fig. 9), and the inscribed and (on the face of it) exactly dated consular missorium of Ardabur Aspar in Florence (Fig. 15), both hitherto presumed issued by western consuls and manufactured in western workshops. After calling into question the established criteria for distinguishing western from eastern diptychs, I propose a new set of criteria and a new date and interpretation of both objects, mainly in the light of a more comprehensive examination of the iconography of city personifications, in literature as well as art.

Two ancient pastoral poems were published by Hermann Hagen in 1869 from a manuscript at Einsiedeln and were soon dated to the reign of Nero. In this study, I show that these poems are related to the Bucolicon Olybrii listed in a library catalogue of Murbach from around 850, and demonstrate on internal and external grounds that the poems were likely composed around the end of the fourth century by Anicius Hermogenianus Olybrius, the consul of 395. This attribution enhances our understanding of the literary culture of the age of Claudian and contributes to the on-going debate on the extent and import of Neronian literature.

Even in these unclassical times, the sack of Rome by the Goths in a.d. 410 remains entrenched in Western collective memory as a ‘key date’ in history. For a scholarly audience, its sixteen-hundreth anniversary in 2010 was commemorated by no fewer than three conferences in Rome. The resulting volumes illustrate the ambivalent relationship historical scholarship entertains with commemoration. While the conferences draw their appeal from the construction, in late ancient and modern tradition, of the sack as an event of world historical importance, the three volumes collectively lead one to conclude that nothing much really happened between 24 and 27 August 410. The schizophrenic situation is summed up in the following two statements by Philipp von Rummel, the organizer of the conference held by the German Archaeological Institute. In an interview with the BBC, he is quoted as saying: ‘I don't know if people will still be talking about 9/11 in 2,000 years time, but the events of that August day still influence our contemporary view of history.’ In the introduction to his volume, co-edited with J. Lipps and C. Machado, he approvingly notes that scholars ‘have moved away from the traditional narrative of collapse with which the sack was associated’ (11), and his own contribution opens by stating that, without lapsing into ‘historical instrumentalization and projections’, one cannot say much more than that an army under the leadership of Alaric plundered the city of Rome for three days (17: ‘Diese drei Sätze geben präzise das wieder, was abseits historischer Instrumentalisierungen und Projektionen über das Ereignis gesagt werden kann’). Even if the two statements need not be contradictory, they convey two rather different views of the events: a hyperbolic one highlighting long-term repercussions and a rather terse one that remains strictly within the bounds of the factual. It is a phenomenon that can be observed elsewhere: critical scholarship seeks to undermine traditional historical narrative, while at the same time failing to escape entirely the story it rejects.