In JRS XL (1950), 77 f. P. M. Fraser published from a photograph a considerable but incomplete inscription comprising documents sent to the city of Cyrene by Hadrian (and possibly others during his reign). It seemed natural to relate them to the material and moral damage caused by the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 115–17, although Fraser thought that they had been inscribed much later. Subsequent discussion has been concentrated mainly on the opening sections, concerned with representation in the Panhellenion.

Although Palmyra is mentioned in several cuneiform texts, the oldest of which go back to the time of Sargon I of Assyria, it seems to have remained a mere village until the middle of the first century B.C. Its sudden growth to the size of one of the largest towns in the East coincides with the moment in history when the demand for oriental luxuries began to grow in Rome and its dominions, and it was due to the clever policy of its merchants and camel-riders who knew how to keep order in the desert between their town and the great factories and warehouses of Lower Mesopotamia. From that time caravans were able to cross the Syrian desert instead of skirting it, and the transit brought huge profits to the Palmyrenes. The desert therefore, whose barren waste, to our European eyes, would easily seem a barrier, was no such thing in reality, but acted on the contrary as a link with Mesopotamia, very much in the same way as the sea connected Venice by her merchant ships with the harbours of the Levant. Indeed, a comparison of Palmyra with the great commercial cities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Venice, Antwerp, Bruges, Lisbon, etc.), is one that in several respects helps us to understand its sudden and great prosperity, as well as its sudden decline. From the day when Aurelian put an end to Palmyra's command of the wilderness, the roads of commerce had to change, the caravans again resorted to the Euphrates route around the desert, and the fortunes of Aleppo and Chalcis began to rise.

Prostitution, it seems to be generally agreed, was a phenomenon firmly embedded in imperial Roman society. It has, however, yet to achieve a similar level of scholarly integration. Moves are undoubtedly being made in this direction. Several topics which have a direct bearing on patterns of prostitution, or in which prostitution is implicated, such as the complex hierarchy of male and female, the patterning of erotic desires and pleasures, the acquisition and dissipation of wealth, and the organization of urban life, can certainly be described as major preoccupations in present enquiries into the Roman world; and a couple of monographs on the subject, or aspects of it, have recently appeared. None the less, there is as yet no study that can really bear comparison with any of the substantial historical works on prostitution in a range of other times and places that have been published in the last two decades. In particular, there has not been any serious effort to take the perspective of the prostitutes themselves into account, which is one of the most emphatic developments in the new historiography of prostitution emerging elsewhere.

The constitutional position of M. Minucius as a result of the plebiscitum of Metilius in 217 B.C. has never been satisfactorily defined; this is due to the vagueness of the ancient authorities. Polybius does indeed make the explicit statement that there were two dictators appointed to carry on the same campaign, a thing unprecedented in Roman history. On the strength of this passage, it has often been assumed that the formal title of ‘dictator’, with all that it implied, was conferred on Minucius by the proposal of Metilius. But the other authorities are not so explicit, and their language seems to contradict Polybius. Livy, for example, refers to the rogatio of Metilius as a proposal ‘de aequando magistri equitum et dictatoris iure’ (XXII, 25, 10), or ‘de aequato imperio’ (26, 7). Nowhere does Livy refer to Minucius as Dictator; in fact, he seems deliberately to avoid doing so. In this respect Plutarch, too, seems to follow Livy. In his Life of Fabius he states that Metilius proposed that Minucius should share the command with Fabius and have equal authority in conducting the campaign; he concludes by saying that the People conferred on Minucius a power equal to that of the Dictator. To judge from the language of both Livy and Plutarch it would appear that whatever position Minucius may have held as a result of the rogatio it was not that of Dictator.

Mommsen in his Ostgotische Studien (Ges. Schr. VI, 362 ff.) enunciated the theory that Odoacer and Theoderic were kings of their German followers, but ruled their Roman subjects as commissaries of the emperors, holding the office of magister militum with certain precisely defined additional powers. Stein (Bas-Empire II, 116 ff.) and Ensslin (Theoderich der Grosse) have considerably modified this theory, admitting that Theoderic acted as king of all his subjects. They nevertheless still maintain that he was at the same time magister militum, and that his powers were limited in certain respects by a formal concordat with the emperor. In my opinion Odoacer and Theoderic were kings pure and simple, in the same position as the other barbarian kings.

The most widespread and best-known use of computers in stylistic analysis has been in the attempts to resolve questions of disputed authorship. Here, the computer's ability to store the whole known corpus of an author's work and to compare it with the disputed work in many ways which would be inexpressibly tedious, if not impossibly lengthy, by hand, is an invaluable aid. Many studies have been carried out on classical texts where the authorship is doubtful, but these studies have most often had undisputed texts against which a disputed work could be compared. The Historia Augusta presents a different situation: there are six ‘authors’ to whom varying amounts of the work are assigned.

Since Bury's magistral article in this Journal over thirty years ago (XIII, 1923, 127 ff.) no scholar has attempted a comprehensive study of the date and value of the Laterculus Veronensis. Various historians have in passing expressed a preference for this date or that. Ernst Stein argued for 293–305 in Rheinisches Museum LXXVII (1925), 367, but in his Geschichte des spätrömischen Reiches 1, 102, preferred 304–306. E. Schwartz in a rathe fuller treatment (Abh. Bayer. Akad., phil.-hist. Kl., 1937, 79–82) argued for a much later date, between 325 and 337 for the eastern dioceses, and under Valentinian I for the western dioceses. Others have more modestly confined themselves to certain areas. H. Nesselhauf has maintained a relatively early date (305–306) for Gaul (Abh. Preuss. Akad., phil.-hist. Kl., 1938, 8 ff.), while W. Seston has argued for a date after 306 for Africa (Dioclétien et la Tétrarchie, I, 327–8). It may be timely to reassess the problem, particularly as some new evidence has recently emerged.

Phaedrus, far from being a Greek freedman striving to inscribe himself among the élite of Latin letters, was a Roman aristocrat masquerading as a man of the people to say in fable what could not safely be otherwise said. Modern biographical constructions are mostly fantasy. In coded terms the poet playfully reveals his gentle birth in Rome itself; he parades a mastery of the two most Roman contributions to literature, (Horatian) satire and jurisprudence; and he proclaims his belief in life's unfairness and in resignation to it, his contempt for both monarchs and mobs, and his admiration for the wise individual.

The true history of Antony and Cleopatra will probably never be known; it is buried too deep beneath the version of the victors. But here and there a few broken words of the under-writing can, with care, be deciphered; and as regards the battle of Actium, chance has made it possible to get at something approaching the truth, provided that we follow the elementary rule of starting from the contemporary evidence and not from the secondary narratives. Except for Ferrabino's study, every historian known to me has drawn his account of Actium solely from the secondary writers—Plutarch, Dio, the epitomators of Livy—in varying proportions; and I have not found that their accounts convey any real meaning to me. My own conclusions, I imagine, may seem strange to some readers; but the method here followed is the right one, whatever be the imperfections in my handling of it.

In March 1973, a Roman milestone was discovered in a cultivated field, several hundred metres from the western edge of the town of Afula in the Valley of Jezreel. The stone was found broken into two pieces. The column was removed by a farmer belonging to the settlement of Balfouria, who transferred it to the garden of his home, where we had the opportunity to examine it. The base and lower part of the column remained on the spot. The inscription, incised on the column above the fracture, consists of six lines of irregular lettering.

The paper is a bibliographical and critical survey of the archaeological research on ancient Ostia and Portus in the decade 2004–2014. The first part deals with some general themes, such as cults, architectural typologies and urban history, decoration: wall-paintings, mosaics and marble, the guilds and their seats, trades, etc. The second part is a survey of individual monuments and buildings which have been the subject of recent excavations and interpretations. The critical problem of late antique Ostia is treated separately, as well as the archaeology of Isola Sacra and Portus, with the Imperial harbours.

When Saint Chrysostom's Prayer asks that the petitions of the Lord's servants be fulfilled as may be most expedient for them, it expresses what, in traditional autocracies, was expected of every ‘good king’ by his subjects. St. Louis, the model of a medieval king, would go regularly with his courtiers to the Bois de Vincennes, there to hear his subjects' petitions, seated under an oak. Dr. Millar has pointed out that Roman emperors were expected to be accessible to their subjects, especially those of humble station, in much the same way. The evidence shows that much of the emperors' time was taken up with answering petitions (in the form of libelli) from private individuals or from groups of humbler people, and that it was only ‘bad’, lazy emperors who neglected this task. Not only was there a secretarial department for handling petitions, as distinct from epistles, but its head, the a libellis, was, according to Seneca, deluged with work. Literary sources, however, tell us little or nothing of value about the actual methods of accepting and handling petitions. For information on such topics we have to turn to the surviving texts of the ‘subscripts’ (subscripttones), the imperial replies to petitions (very few actual petitions survive). By far the largest number of these from the period of the Principate is to be found in the Code of Justinian, and they are mainly the work of the Severan and later third century emperors. In the process of transmission many of these texts have been abbreviated, and the formal elements have been omitted or garbled as a result, and it is from these formal elements that most can be learned about the procedures for handling petitions. One is therefore thrown back on the epigraphic and papyrus texts, in which these formal elements are often preserved.

One of the most remarkable phenomena within the pattern of monetary circulation in antiquity is the presence of large numbers of Roman Republican denarii, for the most part struck between c. 130 and 31 B.C., on the soil of present-day Romania, roughly ancient Dacia. Absolute figures are impressive; it has been calculated that taking together isolated finds, hoards closing with Republican pieces, nuclei of Republican coins in Roman Imperial hoards and Republican coins in collections in Romania the total comes to something like 25,000 pieces. But absolute figures are themselves unable to convey fully the uniqueness of the phenomenon; this emerges most clearly from a comparison with neighbouring territories.

There are no known hoards of Republican denarii from the territory of the Moldavian S.S.R.; the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the north-west have produced between them a mere handful of Republican hoards; Jugoslavia and Albania to the west and Greece to the south are slightly more productive, but display no trace of the feature characteristic of Romania, a great block of hoards, the latest coin of which belongs in the first century B.C.

Milestones, they are more numerous than needed. They may tell very little, often merely certifying stages and intervals on roads already known, traced and trodden: or, less instructive, the names and titles of an emperor.

There are happy exceptions. From time to time the miliaria, by registering an imperial legate, contribute usefully to the study of the governing class. A new discovery can offer a sudden and welcome illumination. For example, the milestone set up on a strategic road in Palestine in the second half of the year 69: the road from Caesarea by Caparcotna to Scythopolis. At the head stands the name of the pretender, styled ‘Imp. Caesar Vespasianus Augustus’, and this stone was erected by M. Ulpius Traianus, the legate commanding the legion X Fretensis.

The document is variously instructive, not least for the career of that legate. In the narrative of Josephus, Traianus was last heard of in the early summer of 68 when, after the subjugation of Peraea, he brought his army corps to join Vespasian at Jericho. The next fact is his consulate in 70, revealed by a small fragment of the Fasti Ostienses. He followed as suffectus the great Licinius Mucianus (the second consulship of that person). The honour was deserved. Like another legionary legate, Aurelius Fulvus, who commanded III Gallica in Moesia, Ulpius Traianus (the inference is easy and painless) had a hand in the intrigue that led to the proclamation of Vespasian. Both were legates of some seniority. Fulvus is attested in 64, under Domitius Corbulo in Armenia (ILS 232).

On the second day of January 63 B.C. Cicero, with the full dignity of a consul, appeared in the Forum to address the Populus at a contio (assembly). This occasion, when he voiced his opposition to the agrarian legislation moved by the tribune Rullus and his colleagues, can be remembered because a text of the speech has survived as De lege agararia II. His words were apparently persuasive, since the bill was defeated in the subsequent voting of the tribal assembly. Eloquence was Cicero's greatest political asset and the De lege agraria II might be read as testimony to the power of words alone. Yet while it might be tempting for a literary critic to imagine that ‘when he stood before his audience, Cicero had at his disposal only words and the stylistic genius to construct from those words arguments that would shape men's opinions and move their hearts’, the words and genius, although powerful as political weapons, operated in conjunction with the physical presence and ideological pre-eminence that the consul brought to the Rostra. There Cicero engineered persuasiveness by presenting a congruence between his verbal argument and his dignity as speaker. Since knowledge of Rullus' legislation is wholly dependent upon Cicero's representation of it, Cicero's speech might best serve then to illustrate what this embodied rhetoric suggests about the relations between a political actor and those who heard and saw him.

Civil wars are not always murderous to the upper order in society. Many of the nobiles managed to weather the storm and prosper thereafter in the years of peace, happily exploiting the new dispensation. Some had ancient pedigree and nothing else to commend them, but the stock of the dynasts Sulla, Pompeius, and Crassus enjoyed high prestige and carried dynastic pretensions: peers and rivals to the Caesars of the Julian and Claudian line. Their alliances and vicissitudes are a large chapter in the annals of the first imperial epoch. Discreet, obscured or held down by Caesar Augustus, the descendants of Pompeius Magnus begin to come up again in the last decade of the reign (after A.D. 4), and enjoy favour with his successor.

During the 1965 and 1966 campaigns of excavation at Aphrodisias in Caria, conducted under the aegis of New York University, investigations of the large Theatre of the city were initiated. The Theatre lies mostly buried along the eastern slope of the ‘acropolis’, a conical hillock in the southeastern part of the site. Dr. Elisabeth Alföldi-Rosenbaum supervised four initial trenches and soundings (Theatre I to IV) excavated on the north side of the building, which revealed the proscenium, the adjacent lowest tiers of seats, the north parodos and the analemma. In August, 1966, two adjoining pieces of a large block of coarse-grained local marble inscribed with a letter from Gordian III were discovered. The lower piece of the inscription was found built into the analemma, facing the north parodos at a height slightly above eye-level. The upper fragment came to light on the parodos floor and was removed to the surface and photographed by Dr. E. Alföldi. Progress in the excavation of the parodos in 1967 and 1968 allowed careful inspection of the lower portion which remains in situ. The two fragments (inv. nos. 66–608 A and B) are well-preserved and constitute virtually the whole block, although some damage is evident on the upper left-hand corner of the face and along the break. The total measurements are 1·53 m. × 0·72 m. × 0·72 m. It cannot be entirely excluded that the block may have been reused in the analemma wall since there is some evidence of repairs in this area. The letters average 0·025 m. in height and are cut in a style typical of the later second and third centuries A.D. at Aphrodisias; particularly characteristic is the form of B, see Pl. I.