One of the measures carried by Gaius Gracchus in the course of his first tribunate in 123–2 B.C. provided for the regular sale of grain to citizens of Rome at the price of 6⅓ asses per modius. Gracchus also, presumably by the same law, provided for the construction of state granaries.

The sources for the law are meagre. None of them is contemporary, and those later writers who do comment on the law furnish few details. What is known of its content is conveyed in a brief sentence from Livy's Epitomator supported by a scholiast on Cicero's pro Sestio, and in a few words of Appian. The Epitomator and Scholiast give the price at which the grain was sold.

There is no need to emphasize the fundamental importance of landholding patterns for the understanding of the ancient economy. The present article attempts to make a contribution to this aspect of the history of Egypt in the fourth century. But the importance of the major issue is not, of course, peculiar to Egypt. The notion of the growth of large estates in the later empire is a familiar one, and the fourth century A.D. is generally thought to be an important period for their development. But Roman historians conditioned to be wary of an unqualified application of the model of great slave-worked latifundia to Italy in the second century B.C. might now also think it appropriate to ask exactly how far our evidence for the fourth century will take us.

With three volumes of E. Gjerstad's Early Rome still outstanding we are exactly in the middle of the new phase of the research on the origins of Rome. Other works due to appear very soon (perhaps they will already have appeared by the time these pages are published) include A. Alföldi's T. S. Jerome Lectures on Early Rome and the Latins, R. Werner's Der Beginn der römischen Republik and a new volume by H. Müller-Karpe, the author of Vom Anfang Roms (Heidelberg, 1959). Furthermore, historians and archaeologists most actively engaged in this field of research, such as M. Pallottino, R. Bloch, R. Peroni and P. Romanelli, have still much to contribute. In these circumstances any attempt to draw conclusions is clearly premature. But Gjerstad, Alföldi and Bloch have already presented their theories in outline with the explicit or implicit purpose of having them discussed before they are given their final shape. The present paper, which represents two of the three J. H. Gray lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge in March, 1963, is intended as a contribution to this preliminary discussion.

In Western Europe to-day we tend to assume automatically that electoral bribery is pernicious, in that it distorts the democratic process, the selection by the people of their own representatives, by shifting whatever power lies in the generality of the electorate back into the hands of the people who seek office, so that a democratic procedure becomes in effect oligarchic. We even term bribery the presentation of attractive policies to the electorate by a person or party, which we believe will not be in the people's long-term interest or will be rapidly discarded in favour of policies which suit those in power. Such judgements may be superficial and too dependent on the presumption that without bribery elections will be free. It is arguable that in specific societies and in specific historical contexts bribery may on the contrary make elections less predictable, dissolving the existing ties by which the electorate are already bound to those seeking office, rather than reinforcing them. Alternatively, bribery may be regarded as an accepted part of the political scene, which does not materially affect the result of elections and thus the course of political history. In Roman politics it is hard to refute the suggestion that the sort of people who actually held magistracies was not seriously influenced by electoral bribery, even though on occasions this may have determined that one man rather than another should be consul or praetor.

In A.D. 249 the emperor Trajan Decius issued an edict requiring the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to sacrifice to the gods. With this decree, he also inaugurated the first empire-wide persecution of Christians. Previously, persecutions of Christians had always been local affairs determined by local conditions. Thereafter, persecutions were largely instigated by emperors and took place on an imperial scale. It has consequently become common to distinguish pre-Decian persecution, characterized by its local and ad hoc nature, from the centrally organized persecutions of Decius in A.D. 249–50, Valerian in A.D. 257–60, and Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximinus in A.D. 303–13. The importance of the decree as a turning point in the history of Christian persecution is thus widely recognized. Beyond this, discussions of the decree have usually focused on its precise nature and the motivations behind it; given the limited evidence, however, these discussions have tended to be inconclusive. In this paper I will return to a consideration of the decree's effects, but in the context of traditional religion rather than that of Christianity. I will argue that, seen from this perspective, the decree was a highly innovative and important step towards a radical restructuring of religious organization in the Roman world.

The purpose of this article is to draw attention to what I believe to be the earliest surviving allusion to Constantine's porphyry column in Constantinople. Although the proposition that the Life of Elagabalus in the Historia Augusta alludes to the porphyry column is incapable of strict proof, it has, at the very least, considerable heuristic value. By focusing our attention on, for example, the column's Theban origin or the fact that it is not a monolith, it enables us to propose a narrative of the progress of Constantine's project which does much to illuminate the monument's significance. The passage under consideration also provokes a new look at the old debate about the origin of the statue on top of the column — had it or had it not once been an image of Apollo? This idea or suspicion has played an important role in all discussions of Constantine's ‘ambiguity’ in religious matters.

Tacitus declares in a well-known passage that a large proportion of the nobility of the Roman Empire was descended from freedmen. The assertion, if true, is of great historical importance; indeed, it has recently been maintained that the penetration of Roman society by men of servile descent was one of the chief causes of the decline and fall of the Empire. Such an introduction of fresh blood from below is not in itself unusual or undesirable. What made it without parallel in the case of Rome was that this new blood was derived from foreigners and slaves. But the statement of Tacitus may be a rhetorical exaggeration, especially for the reign of Nero to which he ascribes it. We can to some extent test its truth by a study of the inscriptions relating to the lesser aristocracy of the Italian towns, since it was from this that the senatorial and equestrian orders were largely recruited, while in these small communities humble origin was less carefully and less easily concealed. The present discussion is based upon a collection of more than a thousand such inscriptions, which record the names of town-councillors and holders of municipal offices, including priesthoods other than those open to freedmen. The parts of Italy from which they are taken display the greatest diversity of local conditions.

Only the learning, the wisdom, and the wit of Professor N. H. Baynes could do full justice to the influence of Tacitus on modern political and historical thought. As no ancient historian of our time is so interested in the legacy of Classical Antiquity as Professor Baynes, it has seemed not inappropriate to bring to him from my native Piedmont the following contribution to the history of Tacitus' influence. An earlier chapter of the same history was written in this Journal (VI, 196 ff.), by Professor F. J. Haverfield.

Pontano, at the end of the fifteenth century writes: ‘Curtium ac Taciturn quasi mutilatas videmus statuas; licetque suspicari potius ac coniicere quam omnino de iis iudicium aliquod absolutum ac certum tradere.’ After the editio princeps of the first books of the Annals (1515), it became evident that Tacitus had a message for contemporaries. As Guicciardini said: ‘Insegna molto bene Cornelio Tacito a chi vive sotto a' tiranni il modo di vivere e governarsi prudentemente, cosi come insegna a' tiranni e' modi di fondare la tirannide.’

A new inscription discovered by some workmen at Cnidos during excavations conducted by Professor Iris Love preserves considerable portions of a Roman law in a Greek translation, in date and content closely related to (perhaps identical with) the text found at Delphi, commonly known as the ‘Piracy Law’. We give below the Cnidos text and a revision of the Delphi text which is necessitated by the new information, together with a brief commentary designed to bring out what seem to us to be the major implications for Roman historians. The original transcription of the Cnidos text was made by Hassall, but all three authors have checked and improved the readings, both from photographs taken by him and by Professor Love, and from the stones; the revision of the Delphi text, begun by Hassall, is in the event largely the work of Crawford. Archaeological information is contributed by Hassall; to the commentary we have all three made our contributions. The final integration of these and of our concluding remarks is due to Crawford.

To judge from written sources, by about the year 300 imperial portraits painted on wooden panels must have been common. Yet only one example has survived to represent them. Portraits of emperors and empresses painted on wooden panels are not the only underrepresented imperial portraits. Imperial portraits were used to decorate an unexpected variety of objects, including consular sceptres, curule chairs, gabled pediments, triumphal togae, reed cases, and shields. That these portrait-bearing objects, many of which served as insignia, are known at all is largely because they are represented in images that decorate official ivory diptychs, mostly consular diptychs, and in some of the surviving copies of the Notitia Dignitatum.

Even to-day, twenty years after its discovery in September 1957, the great corpus of sculptures from the grotto by the sea-shore at Sperlonga still retains many of its secrets. The sheer quantity and richness of the material, its clearly programmatic character, and the enigmatic personalities and affiliations of its sculptors cannot but prompt any visitor to the cave and museum, specialist or no, to ask: what was the purpose of this great complex of Odyssean themes? When were they carved and for whom? Only recently, with the preliminary publication of the major fragments and their replicas by Conticello and Andreae, have their subjects and positions been satisfactorily determined, and the groundwork laid for a solution to such problems as these.

All four major groups had, as their protagonist, Odysseus. First of all, at the mouth of the cave on the left, he was shown dragging the limp corpse of Achilles away from the battle before Troy (Pl. IX, 1), and on the right, standing thwarted of his plan to snatch the Palladion away from Diomedes (Pl. IX, 2 and 3); in the centre of the pool the scene shifted to his wanderings, with his ship, its helmsman still clinging desperately to the stern, enmeshed in Scylla's coils (Pl. IX, 4–X, 2), while in the dim light of the cavern at the rear to the right, he appeared for the last time to direct his companions in the blinding of a gigantic Polyphemus (Pl. X, 3–XI, 4; cf. Pl. XII, I).

This paper deals with the relationship between Latin poets and their wealthy friends at Rome, and it has a mildly polemical aim. I will begin by noticing some embarrassments which arise when one approaches the subject in the light of conceptions like ‘patronage’ and ‘patron’. Then I will show that poets and their great friends conducted themselves according to a characteristically Roman code of manners, and will argue that this familiar code of amicitia fully explains the treatment of poets in Roman society. In part two I will describe the advantages—social visibility, literary backing, and material support—which poets sought by associating themselves with the life of the upper classes, and I will try to connect these objectives with the equestrian status which so many Roman poets seem to have held.

More than thirty years after its publication The Roman Revolution still stands unrivalled, not as the ‘definitive’ account of the emergence of a monarch from the ruins of the Republic but as something far more than that, the demonstration of a new method in the presentation of historical change. The aspect of this method, which has found most imitation, is of course prosopography; and it is indeed essential to it. But far more important is the use made of contemporary literature to mirror events, and to analyse and define the concepts and the terms in which the events were seen by those who lived through them.

It is the common characteristic, perhaps even the definition, of great works of history that they invite imitation and offer a challenge, not just to apply their methods and standards to other areas, but to pursue their own conclusions further. The present paper is gratefully offered as an attempt to portray with a different emphasis some aspects of the establishment of Octavian as a monarch, first by demonstrating the extent to which the institutions of the res publica remained active in the Triumviral period, and secondly by redefining the change which culminated in 27 B.C., precisely by asking again in what terms it and the novus status which emerged from it were seen by contemporaries.

Roman methods of fortification in the north-western portions of the Empire change significantly during the second half of the third century, the difference from the Principate being more apparent in military building than in civil. We may accept the universal view that these changes were due to increasing insecurity in Dacia, on the Rhine and Danube frontiers, and along the coast. From its beginnings in the first half of the century, the threat to the north-west by Germans and tribes from the steppes reached such a pitch in and after the 250's that it seriously endangered Roman rule in Europe. The Goths broke through the Danube frontier into Moesia several times from 238 onwards, and Roman morale was gravely affected when they killed Decius and his son in the disastrous battle of Abrittus (251). The northern barbarians fell upon towns in Greece and Asia Minor, and plundered them; only in the years following 268 did some emperors succeed in mastering the danger.