Reviewing Peter Sattler's Augustus und der Senat (1960), J. P. V. D. Balsdon remarked that the background to the events which marked the establishment of the principate is a field which has been ploughed, even deep ploughed times without number. This must be agreed, and the sceptical need go no further than Lothar Wickert's article s.v. princeps in Pauly's RE xxii, 2 (1953), esp. 2002–2004, to confirm the truth of the remark. Much of the ploughing however has been concerned with the question, ‘By what legal right did Octavian/Augustus govern before, during, and after the period in which he claimed to have “transferred the res publica into the discretionary power of the Senate and Roman people”?’ The interest of this particular question has somewhat declined recently, perhaps rightly so, in an age in which there is a score of Octavians in the world, governing by right of victory in a civil war, and the governed populations tolerate these rulers without constantly examining their constitutional credentials, because they have one all-important virtue—they have put a stop to civil war.

No aristocrat of the fourth century A.D. was so brilliantly successful or so widely hated as S. Petronius Probus. Greedy for public office when his peers preferred opulent leisure, more at home amid the intrigues of court than the salons of Rome, a Christian when most of his peers were still pagan, he rose to a pinnacle of wealth and power.

His unusually long career is abundantly documented by literary, legal and epigraphic sources. But the details have always been problematic. And in 1971 G. Barbieri published a new dedication from Capua that raised a whole new set of problems.

Scholars have given much attention to the procedure for submitting private petitions to the Roman emperor. Literary sources suggest that emperors spent a lot of time answering petitions from private individuals, and papyri and inscriptions offer tangible evidence that this was so. But our richest evidence is provided by the Roman legal sources, which preserve over 2,500 of the replies written by the emperors, at least in theory, beneath the petitions themselves. The sheer quantity of these subscriptions, and the fact that some of them were addressed to petitioners of relatively humble status, have suggested that the emperors attended to their subjects in a surprisingly personal way. Even more important is the fact that subscriptions in our legal sources consist almost entirely of formulations of principle; it has been assumed that they were issued to clarify the law, for private petitioners who had questions about it.

Tacitus described tribunician power (tribunicia potestas, trib. pot. hereafter) as the title of the highest pinnacle (sc. of power) in the Roman world (summi fastigii vocabulum), and Augustus counted his years of trib. pot. from 23 B.C. So much may be stated with confidence and without dispute. In 23 B.C. however trib. pot. was introduced quietly, so quietly that the exact date of the law by which it was conferred (if it was conferred in 23 B.C.) is unknown; and the title itself made so little impact on contemporary opinion that the reaction of the common people of Rome, for whose protection Tacitus says Augustus took the power, was negative—so negative that they spent the next five years trying to re-elect Augustus to the consulate which he had resigned at or about the time that the era of trib. pot. began. We must conclude that the conferment of trib. pot. (if there was any ceremony at all in 23 B.C.) was not made the subject of a great celebration designed to win popular acclaim for this new institution (if it was a new one), nor was it immediately advertised widely as a new formula for the government of the Roman world.

In this paper I propose to consider Ovid's poem as a document of literary criticism, which offers us a striking treatment of the role of the audience in reception. Ovid's concerns are twofold: on the one hand he is concerned with the ostensible manner in which his own works have been read, but he also discusses a wide range of other texts, and in doing so, offers readings of them, which, I will argue, illustrate the open-ended nature of reception and meaning.

Now, undoubtedly we are sometimes too willing to label works as ‘anti-Augustan’ or ‘Augustan’, as if that was all that could be said about them; the glib use of such terms often seems to obscure more complex and more interesting questions (the Aeneid and the Georgics are familiar examples). But with Ovid, however, such issues are at least raised by the poet himself, since the exile poems do deal with Ovid's attitude to Augustus, and the twin possibilities of writing poetry which can offend the emperor, or which can please him. Now while Ovid's famous explanation of the causes of his exile as ‘carmen et error’ (Trist. 2.207) may perhaps be a smokescreen — Ovid adducing the Ars Amatoria as his fault in order not to have to go into the details of what the error was that had offended Augustus — Tristia 2 must still be considered on its own terms; Ovid writes as if it is possible for Augustus to be offended by his poetry, and therefore the issue is an important one.

The considerable literature that has already gathered round the Palestinian inscription on violation of sepulture published by M. Cumont in 1930 leaves little new to be said. There is, however, a gap to be filled for the English reader; moreover discussion has now cleared away certain initial misconceptions, so that a restatement may be useful. I have tried to acknowledge all substantial obligations, but beg to be excused the tedium of meticulous citation. Here, once for all, are the previous publications known to me; subsequent reference will generally be by author's name only.

Codex Theodosianus 3.14.1, issued in the early 370s, has been understood in the past to indicate a ban on all marriages between ‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians’. But this interpretation contradicts evidence that Roman-barbarian marriages occurred with great frequency, and the lack of any other evidence for such a ban. This study argues that the specific wording of the law, referring to gentiles (barbarian soldiers) and provinciales (residents of provinces), suggests that the ban was imposed to ensure the continued performance of specific duties incumbent upon these two classes of individuals, and had nothing to do with ethnicity-qua-ethnicity.

The decline of late Roman paganism could hardly be said to have been an under-studied subject in the past, nor one which currently lacks appeal among late Roman historians: indeed, one has the impression that it is often through this, and the broader question of the ‘conflict’ between paganism and Christianity in the fourth century, that students of Roman history have acquired their interest in the late imperial period. This is all for the best: at the same time, it may be that in this, as in other aspects of late Roman history, there is a danger of ‘over-familiarity’ in the interpretation of well-known evidence.

I. Introduction.—The dating of building materials at Pompeii presents a problem which is in several ways peculiar. Although more than half the city has by now been uncovered and has provided a wealth of epigraphic material almost without parallel among Italian towns, yet the number of buildings which it is possible to date from such evidence can be counted on one hand, since for the most part the inscriptions concern events which are too trivial, or persons who are too obscure, to offer any indication of their date. Furthermore, the procedure adopted in the past for excavating the town has precluded all but the most meagre help being given by pottery. Till a few years ago, Pompeian excavators for the most part stopped digging as soon as the uppermost (and latest) level had been reached, and earlier buildings, of which the foundations presumably survive under the later floors, were left unexplored. Hence, the pottery which is most useful for purposes of dating (that occurring in association with structural foundations) is not forthcoming. Pompeii, in fact, has been too much a show-piece for visitors, too little a site to be scientifically explored.

The Italian town of Corythus, which Virgil makes the home of Dardanus and the cradle of the Trojan people (Aen. iii, 170; vii, 209; ix, 10), has long been identified with Cortona, between Arezzo and Chiusi. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that this identification is false; in reviving an alternative suggestion, which has not been current since the Renaissance, I hope to show too that the vexed question of whether or not the story is a Virgilian innovation admits of a decisive answer. The Aeneid itself provides our earliest evidence; it is remarkable that Virgil's own topographical indications, oblique, but not obscure, should have been so completely ignored by earlier writers on the topic.

From his ancestral throne, King Latinus addresses the Trojan embassy (vii, 195 f.): ‘dicite Dardanidae (neque enim nescimus et urbem et genus, auditique advertitis aequore cursum’. He speaks of Dardanus, ancestor of Aeneas, as ‘his ortus ut agris’ (206): the old story relates that, ‘Corythi Tyrrhena ab sede profectus’ (209), Dardanus made for Samothrace, and then Troy (207 f.). The location of Latinus’ city is indeed left uncertain, but we are clearly to envisage it as standing somewhere between the Tiber mouth and Ardea. That is about 120 miles from Cortona—enough to impose a great strain on his (206). It would be far more satisfactory if we could discover a Tyrrhenian location for Corythus that was easily reconcilable with ‘his … agris’. The fama which Latinus relates is obscurior on account of anni (205) and not because the story has percolated with difficulty through the length of Etruria.

In the Antiquitates Romanae, Dionysius of Halicarnassus presents the Romans as a nation of Greeks. Throughout his narrative, Dionysius shows how the Romans have surpassed other Greek nations in the quintessentially Greek areas of morality and conduct. However, this assessment of Rome's cultural and ethnic identity proves to be much more nuanced when read side by side with the narrative of the concluding books of the Antiquitates Romanae, a largely unexplored section of the work dealing with the war between the Romans and Pyrrhus. The culturally-based definition of Roman ‘Greekness’ is accompanied, particularly in the last portion of the narrative, by a troubling awareness of its inherent instability as the Romans increasingly display the tendencies which eventually caused the ‘barbarization’ of Greece.

When Vespasian sought to give new vitality to the decadent aristocracy of Rome by admitting the local gentry of the Italian towns to the senate, he was drawing upon a class which was destined to play an important part in the government and defence of the Empire. The municipal nobility, first of Italy and later of the provinces, not only managed the affairs of all the smaller communities, but also came to fill most positions of authority, both military and civil, in the imperial administration. To understand the Empire, therefore, we must know something of this aristocracy, and must study it in that local setting which our literary authorities despise. Here Pompeii affords valuable evidence, through the comparative abundance of the material presented, and through the tragic definiteness of its chronological lower limit. It is true that this evidence, for all its copiousness, is defective, since a large part of Pompeii remains unexcavated; and our lists of magistrates and of candidates for office are compiled from casual finds, not from official sources, so that negative evidence cannot safely be used. It is true also that Pompeii, owing to its unusually favourable economic conditions, is less representative of other Italian municipia than could be wished. Within these limits, however, a study of its ruling Ordo should throw some light upon the character of these bodies in and even beyond Italy.

The campaigns of Caesar and Augustus gave Italian merchants an opportunity of establishing relations with the free Germans. Intercourse was maintained after the withdrawal of the legions to the west of the Rhine, and literary references to the trade which grew up, though few in number, testify to its continuance throughout the time here to be considered. The conception of an illimitable forest primeval stretching unbroken from the borders of the empire into the furthest recesses of barbarism is very far from the truth. Great as were the forests, there existed open or lightly-wooded areas suitable for the settlements of primitive man, and communication between such inhabited regions can be traced from very early times.

When the word ‘party’ became obscene in the context of the history of the Roman republic, it was frequently replaced by ‘faction’—or factio, to give an air of authenticity. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the occurrences of factio in writers of the republic and early principate in order to discover to what extent the usage of modern historians is justified by the sources. It will not be denied that there are numerous occasions when factio functions as a collective, with the meaning ‘group, clique, faction’. But originally factio had a verbal force, sometimes active—‘way of doing things’—sometimes potential—‘capacity to do things or get things done’. This verbal force is retained in many instances, including some where the rendering ‘faction’, i.e. ‘group’, has become standard. The precise shade of meaning may vary, but three principal connotations can be discerned: influence, concerted action, and intrigue.

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.

The affinities of the group of Spanish town-walls now to be described are little known, and the walls themselves are of small fame outside Spain. Mélida's book containing a short account of the Lugo wall is rare; Astorga, Barcelona, León and Zaragoza have not been described in detail. Yet they form a distinct group, with common peculiarities which deserve attention, apart from the date and significance of the whole.

‘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.

ὁ δὲ Σεβῆρος … διοικήσας δὲ τὰ κατὰ Βρετανίαν καì

διελὼν ἐς δύο ἡγεμονίας τὴν τοῦ ἔθνους ἐξουσίαν….

Thus Herodian (III, 8, 1–2), referring to the time after the Battle of Lugdunum in 197. It is a sign of our imperfect knowledge of the history of Roman Britain that the character of this division, its purpose and even its date, are all matters of doubt. Not only is there no evidence to confirm Herodian's statement until a considerably later period, but there are several contrary indications which suggest that his date, at least, is wrong. Such a conflict of ancient testimony leads, not surprisingly, to differences in modern authorities. It is not necessary, however, for it to lead to such a confusing picture as they now seem to present. Ritterling and E. Birley drew attention to the problem, and S. N. Miller set out all the evidence in the Cambridge Ancient History. It therefore seems unfortunate that eminent authorities in more recent works continue to accept Herodian's date, or, more rarely, offer an alternative, without any warning that they are handling dubious or hypothetical material. My aim in this paper is, therefore, partly one of clarification and restatement. But I also wish to draw attention to a small addition to the evidence on the subject, and to treat the whole problem anew in the light of recent additions to our knowledge of Roman Britain in Severan times. Until a fortunate epigraphic discovery solves the problem for us, all such discussions are bound to be inconclusive; but while we wait for a British Julius Cerealis, an interim statement may crave a hearing.