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.

Livy wrote of the great Scipio at the conclusion of the second Punic war ‘primus certe hic imperator nomine victae ab se gentis est nobilitatus’. But already more than half a century earlier M'. Valerius Maximus, consul of 263 B.C., who captured Messana and was honoured with the cognomen ‘Messalla’, had received a title from a conquest in war. In the century and a half after Scipio became Africanus, many such honourable cognomina were acquired by others. In only six cases is there evidence of the cognomen descending within the family: Valerius Messalla, Scipio Africanus, Scipio Asiaticus, Metellus Creticus, Servilius Isauricus, and (with a slight difference) Pompeius Bithynicus.

Mr. Graham's article on the division of Britain in the early third century usefully collects much of the relevant evidence. He concludes that Herodian is wrong in claiming that Britain was divided in A.D. 197, and suggests that no division took place until the reign of Caracalla. But he fails to take into account the possibility that a division was indeed made in 197, on different lines from those which applied later.

The one piece of new evidence produced to help in refuting Herodian is an Ephesian inscription which mentions embassies to the emperors Severus and Caracalla in Upper Germany and Britain. The grounds are that, in the wording of the inscription, Germany is qualified as τὴν ἄνω, while Britain is not qualified. But Germania without qualification would be too vague to be allowed to stand; it could even lead to confusion with free Germany. Britannia, on the other hand, is clearly merely a geographical description.

The preliminary aim of this paper is documentary: to clarify and confirm the dating of Gibbon's famous essay ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’. According to a new view, this essay may reasonably be read as if it were written in the early months of 1780. The obvious objection to this position is that, in a now familiar passage from his Memoirs, Gibbon explicitly assures us that the ‘General Observations’ were written before 1774, and thus in all probability before 1773, when he began writing his History. I argue that we should believe what Gibbon tells us. But though the discussion originates in the dry terrain of dates, important interpretative consequences follow. These stem from the interest of the ‘General Observations’ in their own right — a panoramic view of ancient and modern history as broad as the entire range of Gibbon's History — and from their insertion at the end of Volume III of that work (published in 1781). Were the ‘Observations’ so revised as to be virtually written in sequence (as the new view supposes), or do they present a more problematic case — being written before the beginning of Volume I but inserted at the end of an independent text completed eight years later? Consideration of this point raises issues fundamental to the understanding of Gibbon's compositional and intellectual processes, and is the principal justification for what follows.

For the historian of the Roman period, the archaeology of Central and Southern Italy raises (and sometimes provides answers to) a fascinating variety of questions. The Pontine plain and the valleys of the Liri and Sacco were the areas first affected by Roman expansion beyond the Latial plain, and it was here that the Romans tested and perfected the techniques of organization and control of territory that were to be used with such success elsewhere in Italy and eventually throughout the Mediterranean: in particular, colonization, municipalization, and the transformation of the rural landscape which accompanied them. This area too saw the development of the villa system of agriculture, which came to be predominant in Central Italy during the first century B.C., and was imitated throughout the Empire; but there were also striking differences between agricultural practices in the plains and in the mountains above. This geographical diversity was paralleled by a complex cultural mix, as aspects of both Greek and Roman culture were adopted by the local populations, who themselves moved around an increasingly unified Italy with greater ease, leading to further cultural transformations.

The Gospel according to Luke contains two passages which allude, with some particularity, to a forthcoming siege and destruction of Jerusalem; viz. XIX, 42–4, XXI, 20–4.

The latter of these two passages (with which we may conveniently begin) stands in a context where Luke, to all appearance, is using the Gospel according to Mark as a source. The Marcan parallel to Luke XXI, 20–24 forms part of what is often called the ‘Synoptic Apocalypse’, or, more appropriately, the ‘Apocalyptic Discourse’, since its literary form is not that of an apocalypse; it is in the main a Mahnrede making use of apocalyptic motives, and concluding with a few sentences of straightforward prediction in the apocalyptic manner (XIII, 24–7).

‘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.

The Iberian peninsula is a key region that has the potential to transform fundamentally our understanding of the Roman Empire. The longevity of the Roman presence in Iberia, the huge geographical variety of its regions, and the cultural differences between its peoples make it ideal for understanding the genesis, development, and disintegration of the Roman Empire as a whole. The transformation of regional infrastructure in Spain and Portugal during the 1980s and 1990s has generated much new archaeological information. This is particularly true of the major cities, where intensive urban development has greatly enhanced our understanding of their layout and development during the historic periods. In the countryside too, the expansion of the road networks, EU-inspired changes in crop quotas, and the intensification of mechanized farming have all had a major impact and substantially increased the number of known villas and rural settlements.

‘The sovereign power of the dictator, the imperium, was … an unrestricted regal power, taken over ca. 504 B.C. by the 300 horsemen of the noblemen-bodyguard, who constituted then the patriciate, i.e. the closed circle of the potential holders of the imperium’. This is a quotation from A. Alföldi's latest book, Early Rome and the Latins (Ann Arbor), 1965, p. 44, and summarizes his theory of the origins of the Roman Republic. According to Alföldi the aristocracy of the monarchic period was an aristocracy of knights, and their coup d'état of about 504 B.C. brought about the end of the monarchy. As is well known, Alföldi developed this theory in a previous book, Der frührömische Reiteradel und seine Ehrenabzeichen (Baden-Baden, 1952) which is chiefly meant to prove that the various attributes of the senatorial order—including the special shoe for the patrician senators, the calceus patricius—were originally characteristic of the archaic knights. To the best of my knowledge, Alföldi never says explicitly that the senators of the monarchic period must have been identical with the 300 ‘celeres’ who were the king's bodyguard according to some of the ancient sources (Livy 1, 15, 8; Plut., Rom. 26; Zonaras 7, 3, 4). But this seems to be Alföldi's implication—in fact it was already Niebuhr's hypothesis.

This paper examines the political content and context of Seneca's Natural Questions. It argues that, on the one hand, Rome is marginalized in the context of the immensity of the cosmos; and philosophy is elevated above traditional Roman pursuits, including political activity and historical writing. But at the same time the work is firmly anchored in its Roman geo-political context; Seneca situates himself in a long and continuing tradition of investigation of the natural world, where Roman writers can stand alongside Greeks and others; and the current emperor Nero is presented not just as princeps and poet, but as sponsor of geographical and scientific investigation.

The idea that the dead were polluting — that is, that corpses posed a danger of making the living unclean, offensive both to their own communities and to the gods — has long occupied a fundamental position in Roman funerary studies. Nevertheless, what that pollution comprised, as well as how it affected living society, remain subject to debate. This article aims to clarify the issue by re-examining the evidence for Roman attitudes towards the dead. Focusing on the city of Rome itself, I conclude that we have little reason to reconstruct a fear of death pollution prior to Late Antiquity; in fact, the term itself has been detrimental to current understandings. No surviving text from the late republican or early imperial periods indicates that corpses were objects of metaphysical fear, and rather than polluted, mourners are better conceived as obligated, bound by a variable combination of emotions and conventions to behave in certain, if certainly changeable, ways following a death.

When the South Sea Bubble burst, a passionate member of the British Parliament called for the application of the Lex Pompeia on Parricides to those who had defrauded the nation. Just as the Romans, he argued, face to face with a monstrous and unprecedented crime, devised for it a monstrous and unprecedented punishment, so the British were invited to tie the directors of the South Sea Company into sacks with a dog, a cock, a viper and an ape in each, and sink them in the Thames.

‘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.

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.

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.

There is little need now to emphasise the importance of the declaration of war against Philip V of Macedon in the history of Roman imperialism, or to formulate the problem of the causes of the Roman decision to intervene in the East. The work of M. Holleaux has defined the problem and indicated its historical implications, and subsequent research has kept the issue clear. We have rather to justify a paper upon this subject which returns to details of reconstruction already fully treated. Yet the reconstruction of events has not received its final exposition, and a better understanding of the details is essential for the historical interpretation of the political situation in 200 B.C.

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.

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.