This paper asks how much money Republican aristocrats could make from agriculture and approaches the question from the perspective of supply rather than demand. Potential growers of wheat, wine, and grain were so numerous in second- and first-century B.C. Italy that its urban population could not have provided a market large enough to enable each of them to derive a substantial income from meeting its demand for staple foods. Agriculture is not likely to have furnished the economic foundation for most senators' lavish life-styles. Instead, money-lending and other commercial activities were where the profits were, while prestige and similar non-economic factors guided their decisions about investments in land.

An analysis of the parallel accounts in Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch shows that the seemingly Augustan traits of Livy's Camillus already featured in late annalistic sources. Camillus' speech at Livy 5.51–4 condenses and expands late annalistic themes and fuses them with Ciceronian reminiscences. One reason for this fusion is Cicero's own self-fashioning as a new Camillus (particularly, in his post-exilic speeches). The accounts of the Civil War suggest that Pompey and Caesar, too, exploited the Camillus paradigm. The parallels between Livy's Camillus and Augustus probably result from the latter's attempt to silence the Republican opposition by appropriating one of its most powerful paradigms.

In JRS 97 Sabine Huebner argued that the brother-sister marriages in Roman Egypt could be explained as marriages between an adopted son and a natural daughter, a widespread family strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Remijsen and Clarysse now return to the traditional view that Egyptians did marry their full sisters. Ancient authors considered brother-sister marriages as a peculiarity of the whole Egyptian population and, moreover, papyrological sources do not prove any connection between adoption and brother-sister marriage. Neither the household size nor the onomastic pattern in families with brother-sister marriages are consistent with the usual adoption practices of the Eastern Mediterranean.

This article surveys three important and interlinked aspects of Justinian's policy in his first decade: reconquest in the West; the establishment of a set of fundamental texts of Roman Law; and the achievement of unity of belief within the Church. In that context, it looks at the remarkable record preserved in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum III, of five successive sessions of a synod held at Constantinople, and one synod in Jerusalem. Its purpose is both to illustrate contacts and influences across the Mediterranean and, more particularly, to bring out distinctive features of the Church in the Near Eastern provinces.

This article reconsiders a set of Late Roman inscriptions which record the tax liabilities of dozens of landowners in terms of post-Diocletianic fiscality. The stones, from eleven cities in the Aegean and western Asia Minor, are evaluated as evidence for the social and economic history of the Late Empire, challenging Jones' fundamental study in which the inscriptions are read as a sign of structural crisis. With their non-Egyptian provenance, the inscriptions offer unique, quantitative insights into land-ownership and labour. The inscriptions reveal surprising levels of slave labour in the eastern provinces, particularly in a new inscription from Thera. This last document allows, for the first time, an empirical analysis of the demographics of an estate-based population of slaves in antiquity.

Justinian's codification may be considered a coherent aggregate of all the law existing in A.D. 530–534. On the basis of this and his subsequent legislation it appears that the condicio coloniaria existed in his reign in two forms. One, the adscripticiate, based on a contract by which a person fixated his origo from a town onto an estate. This implied his coming under the potestas of the estate owner and the treatment of his possessions as if peculium, while his descendants were tied to this origo and its implications. The other, a colonate with the origo also fixed to an estate, but without the implications mentioned before: hence ‘free’ coloni. This latter colonate came primarily into existence if an adscripticius had performed services during thirty years.

This article examines the context in which Caesar, enthroned in state, attended the Festival of the Lupercalia of 44 B.C. at which he was offered and rejected a diadem; it asks the question what the ritual had to offer to Caesar. An examination of the Festival's character and tradition suggests (a) that it took the form of a street carnival, (b) that it was concerned simultaneously with the purification, fertility and protection of the people of Rome, and (c) that it had no element of a coronation in its rituals. The suggestion is offered that Caesar's prime motivation was to associate himself with the founders of the city, since he and his family were receiving the honour of a new group of Luperci, set up to parallel those of Romulus and Remus. If Antony's offering of the diadem was pre-arranged, the light-hearted and provocative atmosphere of the occasion strongly suggests that the plan must always have been that Caesar should publicly reject the offer, as he did. But the whole incident illustrates the vigour and creativity of religious life at the time.

This article examines the Contra Andromachum, the open letter in which Gelasius of Rome (A.D. 492–496) condemned the continued involvement of members of the now Christian élite in the Lupercalia. It is suggested that the Pope's argument is less straightforward than has been supposed: the current status and recent history of the festival are left unclear, and the Pope's allegations about the motives of its sponsors are of dubious credibility. Of more significance is the public aspect of the festival, and in particular the opportunities it provided for those who organized it to advertise a connection with the heritage of Rome.

As a postscript to the two articles on the Lupercalia, and to bridge the gap in time between them, it is argued that there is no evidence to suggest a major reform of the festival in the period of Augustus' principate and that the traditional celebration continued into the Empire. There does, however, seem to be artistic evidence that from the third century onwards the celebrations became more dramatic, perhaps, violent, implying that there was some reform, perhaps to be connected with the suggestion inferred from Gelasius' text that the Luperci or those who took over responsibility from them started to employ actors instead of the original priestly runners. We bring evidence to support this theory.

The time is unripe for a new edition of the Lex Irnitana — more work is needed and more text might appear — but it seems desirable, given the availability via JSTOR of the text published in JRS 76 (1986), to publish a bare list of those places where that text is in serious need of correction. Most of the corrections are due to the sharp eye of Alan Rodger, who also observes that the action de sponsione in ch. LXXXIV is not an actio famosa, but an allegation that needs a causae cognitio and hence the intervention of the praetor.