The Roman fort at Ribchester is one of the important strategic centres of Northern Britain (fig. 1), where a Roman road from south to north crossed the river Ribble, while another went eastwards to the legionary fortress at York through the Aire Gap and yet a third ran north-westwards to the Fylde. The Ribble, still tidal as far as Ribchester, may well have been navigable in Roman times as far as the lower crossing by a north-south road at Walton-le-Dale, though nowadays even small ships do not come further up river than Penwortham, three miles away. High fells, in Bowland and Croasdale, lie to north and north-east of the fort, which is itself situated in a deep valley. But the general formation of the neighbouring terrain is in wide sweeps of rolling plateau, suited to cavalry movements. In this respect the position has much in common with Stanwix, Corbridge, Binchester, or Lancaster, where Roman cavalry garrisons lay.

Ribchester does in fact appear to have been garrisoned by cavalry throughout the Roman occupation, and the name of the unit stationed there during the latter half of the period is well attested.

‘Nova ea minus placebat sapientia’: that was the view that the ‘veteres et moris antiqui memores’ took of the diplomatic activity of Q. Marcius Philippus and his colleagues during their embassy to Greece and Macedonia in 172/1. For once we have evidence of a definite division in the Senate on a matter of policy, and if the political groupings established by prosopographers are to have any meaning beyond mere manoeuvring for office, it should be possible to discover the protagonists on each side, and to trace the division in the Fasti. Such an inquiry should make it possible to write a coherent political history of the years leading up to the Third Macedonian War. It has long been recognized that the decade after 180 was a period of sharp disagreement among the nobiles, but no satisfactory interpretation of the whole period between 179 and the end of the Third Macedonian War has yet been given. In this paper I shall attempt an analysis of the problem in two sections: firstly I shall discuss the diplomatic career of Q. Marcius Philippus and some related questions; secondly, I shall try to relate the conclusions of the first section to the political history of Rome in the 170's.

In Roman poetry of the late Republic and the Augustan age, allusiveness was an essential element in poetic technique. In Virgil in particular there is an immense debt to earlier writers for words, phrases and rhythms, all contributing to the poet's effect; although the reader's understanding of the basic meaning of the lines suffers little from his limited awareness of the more erudite allusions. The same thing is true of Horace, with the added consideration that in satire, as in Athenian Old Comedy, burlesque and parody play an important part. Only occasionally is there reason to suspect that our ignorance of Lucilius or other lost writers, Greek or Latin, prevents us from recognizing the whole tone of a passage. It is difficult to ascertain whether Lucilius himself had made literary borrowing an essential element in the satirist's technique; but it must be accepted as such from Horace onwards.

The careers of Roman senators born in the Eastern half of the Empire are interesting and worthy of study for several reasons. They include men who influenced affairs in such different ways as Herodes Atticus and Avidius Cassius, and the rarity of the honour, in the earlier cases at least, led to an unusually large output of inscriptions which form a good source of information as well as an attractive field for conjecture. Besides this, the purely prosopographical interest, it is possible by following up and seeking to account for the gradual increase of the number in connection with other evidence, to supplement our rather meagre knowledge of life in the Greek East, and also, in the period before the death of M. Aurelius, to watch the working of the diarchy at a time when the Senate's prestige was at its highest and the emperors were most concerned to maintain its efficiency.

The two problems to be discussed here are :—

(1) Under what law or laws were charges brought in cases of treason during the first years of the Principate?

(2) What were the penalties prescribed by that law or those laws?

The answer to the first question raises no serious difficulties. It is true that apart from any consideration of perduellio no fewer than four laws de maiestate (to be discussed more fully later) were passed in the seventy years before the reign of Augustus. But it is clear that for all practical purposes these laws were comprehended and superseded by the Lex Julia of Augustus. Tacitus always speaks of a single law, e.g.

Ann. 1, 72, 3: ‘nam legem maiestatis reduxerat,’ and

Ann. 2, 50, i: ‘adolescebat interea lex maiestatis’

and the jurists always refer to a Lex Julia which must have been that passed by Augustus and not that of Caesar.

The answer to the second question also was until recently regarded as practically certain. It was held by all authorities, both Continental and English, that the only legal penalty was ‘interdictio aquae et ignis’, though with the establishment of the Principate there began a process of arbitrarily worsening the conditions of exile and even substituting the death penalty. But during the present century another view has been put forward—a view developed in most detail by R. S. Rogers in his Criminal Trials and Criminal Legislation under Tiberius (1935). In this book Rogers asserts positively and often that the Lex Julia embraced two different kinds of treason—high treason, which he calls by the old name of Perduellio, and Maiestas, which often amounted to no more than slander of the Princeps or his family—and that two different penalties were prescribed, viz. death (with confiscation of property and damnatio memoriae) for Perduellio, exile for Maiestas.

There are many periods of history—and unfortunately not always the least important—that survive, for us, entirely or mainly in one version. Ever since the development of modern critical historiography it has been recognized that it is the historian's duty to test that version, and highly skilled methods in the use of evidence have been worked out in order to enable him to do so. We all know some of the outstanding results in our field: the age of Augustus, once seen through the eyes of court literature; the ages of Tiberius and Claudius, once known only through the resentment of those who had suffered under tyranny; one could name many other periods that have gained a new reality in the last few generations and that now stand out in three dimensions.

‘Ceteris in rebus statim ab initio principatus usque ad exitum civilis et clemens, mediocritatem pristinam neque dissimulavit umquam ac frequenter etiam prae se tulit. quin et conantis quosdam originem Flavii generis ad conditores Reatinos comitemque Herculis … referre irrisit ultro’ (Suet. Div. Vesp. 12).

Vespasian came of peasant stock; he succeeded to a position which had been occupied by men of the noblest birth. For the Julio Claudians no proofs need be produced; of their successors Galba boasted descent from Jupiter and (strangely) Pasiphae, and Otho from Etruscan princes; even Vitellius had a pedigree going back to Faunus and a local goddess, Vitellia. Vespasian was far too shrewd to make similar claims; he deliberately rejected the attempts of flatterers to find him a noble ancestor. Much of the Life of Suetonius is evidence for the statement ‘mediocritatem pristinam neque dissimulavit umquam ac frequenter etiam prae se tulit.’ His reign marked a return to simpler ways of living, and emphasised a contrast with the pomp and extravagance of a Nero, wealthy and degenerate (see infra, p. 55). It was a realistic and sensible policy, and likely to win support from the lower classes of population in Italy, whether peasants or city proletariate.

This article explores the religious importance of Cicero's De Haruspicum Responso against the background of prodigy-handling in Republican Rome. Comparing the prodigy in question to an ‘auditory epiphany’, it argues that key issues raised by the speech include the nature of the divine voice, the relationship of the prodigious ‘rumbling and clattering’ to the gods themselves, and the ambiguous temporalities implied by Roman practices of divination. The article also suggests that De Haruspicum Responso proposes a significant overlap between religious and political speech, and it questions the radical split often assumed between the religious ideology of Cicero's philosophical and his more ‘public’ works.

After giving a six-months' emperor to Rome and setting the example of successful usurpation, the Spanish provinces took but little active part in the long agony which followed. It was, indeed, a contest not of provinces but of provincial garrisons, and the Spanish army was too small and remote again to take the lead; Cluvius Rufus, who succeeded Galba in Hither Spain, was not distinguished as a soldier. After a brief hesitation he recognised Vitellius, wishing perhaps to avenge Galba, and influenced by the strength and proximity of the armies of the Rhine. He proved his loyalty to his new allegiance by the measures he took against Albinus, the procurator of Mauretania, who threatened to rise for Otho. Fearing an invasion of Spain, he moved the Legio X Gemina southward to the coast of Baetica, and at the same time by active propaganda he won over the Mauretanian garrison to Vitellius; Albinus and his chief supporters were slain. Then being accused by Hilarus, an imperial freedman and probably a subordinate procurator of Hither Spain, of aiming at independent authority, he went to meet Vitellius in Gaul. His services procured him an easy acquittal; he was granted the privilege of governing his province through his legati, while he himself, attached to the imperial suite, returned to Italy and Rome.

That Roman politicians function neither in splendid isolation nor in durable groups with common policies is a lesson we have grasped in large part through the imagination of the scholar who is honoured in this volume. Therefore a study aiming to put a tribune of 67 B.C. in his immediate context may be thought an appropriate offering, especially if the author does not fail ‘to keep the absent Pompeius in mind’ (Syme, Sallust 102).

If Sallust in his Histories reached the tribunate of C. Cornelius, he probably treated him as one of a number of sincere tribunes crusading against Optimate corruption; similarly, W. McDonald, writing in 1929 the first separate treatment of Cornelius' tribunate, saw him more as a representative of the Popular Party than as an agent of the ambiguous Pompey, whose quaestor he had been and who, McDonald thought, had put him forward to defend his own interests.

The part played by Christianity in the downfall of the Roman empire in the west has fascinated historians for more than two centuries. The Encyclopaedists in the person of Montesquieu opened the debate, but the latter's subtle anti-Christianity in his Considérations sur la Grandeur et la Décadence des Romains (published 1734) was succeeded by the thorough-going attack of Gibbon who singled out Christianity as the main cause for the change and decadence in the empire's structure. Since then the debate has continued. New factors have been brought into play, such as the annihilating effect of the barbarian attacks or the sense of social injustice so graphically described by Salvian in Gaul and Spain that drove many provincials to welcome the rebel Bagaudae and the Germanic invaders as liberators from Roman tyranny. Salvian, however, was not unpatriotic. He was a far greater laudator temporis acti than Augustine and Orosius, and unlike them found positive merit in the poverty and virtue of the Old Romans. What he criticized was the heartless wealth, luxury and oppression of his own day and the failure of the Catholic clergy to do anything about it.

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.

Fiscal explanations often given for Rome's first coins fail to account for the shape of monetary development. Nothing in the mid-republican budget matches the small scale and sporadic production of Roman coins during the early third century, or coinage's rapid expansion in the lead-up to the Second Punic War. Instead, I locate early Roman coinage within a broader reconfiguration of wealth and political power during the early phases of imperial expansion. Coins facilitated the exchange of wealth in the absence of strong social ties; conquest opened up Roman society to vast wealth of this order while also sparking debate about wealth's integration into the political community. Archaeological and textual evidence permits us to trace the contested and uneven development of elite accommodation to impersonal wealth during the third century. This context, I argue, offers the best explanation for Rome's initial coins.

When L. Aemilius Paulus visited Delphi after the crowning victory of Pydna his eye rested on a lofty pedestal, upon which his vanquished enemy, Perseus, was intending to set up a golden statue of himself. He determined that his own figure should occupy the vacant place, and his orders to this effect were carried out. No trace of the statue (or group) has been recovered, but there are considerable remains of the sculptured frieze, representing the cavalry skirmish which formed the prelude to the battle of Pydna, and it has been possible to reconstruct the monument in the Museum at Delphi with the surviving blocks and a free use of plaster to fill the gaps (fig. 54 and plate xx).

I. Cato's title and commission: the problem.

II. Cic., fam. XIII, 48: C. Sextilius Rufus, quaestor in Cyprus, and his family.

III. The arrangements for annexation and administration.

IV. The precedent: P. Lentulus Marcellinus and Cyrene.

In 58 B.C. M. Cato, then of tribunician standing, was sent to Cyprus to confiscate and realize the King's property. The mission, with its political context, has been frequently discussed—best by S. I. Oost, with his usual historical insight and critical acumen. The present article proposes to base itself on Oost's discussion and investigate some further matters that did not come within the scope of his enquiry.

I

We must start with Cato's title, on which the truth has only quite recently been recognized. Amid dozens of references to the famous mission, we have only two that purport to give his title accurately. The author of de uiris illustribus tells us that Cato was sent to Cyprus as quaestor. Since he is notoriously inaccurate in such matters, to the confusion of much modern scholarship, this would not be worth a great deal by itself. But it is fully supported by Velleius, who in fact gives more details: Clodius passed a law that Cato, as quaestor with praetorian status, and with a quaestor to assist him, should be sent to Cyprus to strip Ptolemy of his kingdom.

Ovid's narrative of Phaethon's failed attempt prematurely to emulate his father in his unique expertise can be read as a reflection on the virtues and limits of Lucretius' philosophical poetry. The paper suggests that, while he gives much credit to the De Rerum Natura's literary quality and its striving for the sublime, Ovid also critiques the hubristic connotations of Lucretius' rejection of divine authority and agency from the workings of nature. The second part of the article explores how this particular version of the myth touches upon issues of poetic authority, political positioning, and Oedipal competition.

This article summarizes some of the results of an inquiry into third-century rescripts which has been proceeding for the last seven years but of which nothing has so far been published. The main source, the Codex Justinianus, contains some 2491 items dated between A.D. 193, when we first have a substantial number of texts, and 305, which are certainly or probably private rescripts, as I shall call them, i.e. subscriptiones. These were written answers given by the emperor to petitions by private individuals on points of law. If these written answers, which were in some sense the concern of the imperial office a libellis, are reassembled from the titles under which they are grouped in the Codex, and are read in complete chronological order, the reader is struck by the fact that their style is consistent over a period which varies from a few months to several years.The periods of consistent style, however, do not coincide with the reign of a particular Augustus or Augusti. Some twenty such periods and hence some twenty third-century composers of rescripts, who are clearly not emperors, can be distinguished in this way. In half a dozen cases there is evidence, again drawn from the style of composition, that the composer is one of the jurists known to us independently from the pages of Justinian's Digest; for example, Papinian, Ulpian, Menander, Modestinus or Hermogenianus. In two cases the evidence for the identification is set out in some detail below. It seems, therefore, that the composition of rescripts of any importance was the responsibility of professional lawyers, acting in their capacity of imperial secretaries a libellis, an office which Papinian at least is known to have held.

While lately engaged with an edition of the ‘Agricola,’ it occurred to me to enquire how far Tacitus was read, and his works copied, during the period between his lifetime and the introduction of printing. Such an enquiry is more necessary than is always realised, if one is to appreciate properly the character and importance of the manuscripts of an ancient author. One needs not only to know their dates, relationships and general merits or demerits, but also to understand what may be called their ‘background,’ that is to know how far the author in question was seriously studied and his works copied during the centuries between his own day and the Renaissance. I therefore tried to work out some account of the history of Tacitus in this respect. I have been able to do this only very briefly, but the sketch, though short, may interest some readers of our Journal, and, being more or less historical, is not alien to its proper scope. Moreover, no quite similar sketch seems to exist, either in English or, so far as I am aware, in any language.

In JRS LVI (1966) I gave a description of the Aoi Stena which was based on autopsy, and I discussed the campaigns of Rome against Philip V of Macedon in the years 200 to 198 B.C. In this paper I am concerned with the area farther north which Rome acquired in 229 B.C. and with the actions which took place there before 200 B.C. Many scholars have discussed Rome's early activities in Illyris but practically none of them has trodden the ground. My knowledge of most of the area may help me to advance more down-to-earth views of the extent of Rome's sector in Illyris and of Roman and Macedonian policies. I include some new evidence on the position of Dimallum.

The salient feature of Central Albania is the belt of coastal plain which extends from north of Lesh (Lissus) to north of the Gulf of Valona (see fig. 1). The widest and richest part of this plain is in the Myzeqija, which extends southwards from Kavajë. The Myzeqija in particular is integral to the economy of Central Albania, the area which was called Southern Illyris in the third century B.C. The transhumance of sheep has always been practised in this part of the Balkans, and the coastal plain of Albania with months of very heavy rainfall in October and March affords exceptionally fine pasturage for the winter period.