It was probably in the agora at Athens and possibly in the seventieth Olympiad (i.e. 499–496 B.C.) that a wooden grandstand collapsed while a play by Pratinas was being performed. The Athenians responded quite sensibly to this disaster by moving their dramatic performances to the precinct of Dionysus Eleuthereus, where the audience could be more safely accommodated on the south slope of the acropolis. Or so it appears: no fact of this early period in ancient theatre history is ever entirely secure. By the time of Aeschylus, however, what we call the Theatre of Dionysus was certainly the place where Athenian tragedies and comedies were performed, and the facility grew in size and grandeur along with the festivals it served. One result of this continuity has been a great boon to the performance-based criticism of Greek drama.

The manuscripts of Propertius present us with a single, massive ‘Book 2’ over thirteen hundred and sixty lines long. Like many before me, I am convinced that this ‘Book 2’ is a mistake of transmission and actually preserves the remnants of two ancient books. In this article I identify and discuss the poem which I believe closed the first of the ancient books; for convenience's sake we can call this book ‘Book 2a’. I shall be saying something, too, about the structure and content of both ancient books — of Book 2b as well as Book 2a.

It was Lachmann who first made the — to me — irresistible suggestion that our ‘Book 2’ is the product of two ancient books. There has been strong support for this view. For example, a succinct case is put forward by Otto Skutsch; and highly convincing and detailed support has been offered in an important recent paper by Heyworth. There are intricacies of evidence to consider (for example, Nonius Marcellus' citation of our 3.21.14), but I shall set these to one side. I shall simply cite two crucial and probably familiar facts, which are in summary as follows.

In situations in which understanding is disrupted or made difficult, the conditions of all understanding emerge with the greatest clarity. Thus the linguistic process by means of which a conversation in two languages is made possible through translation is especially informative. (Gadamer)

This article was prompted by a reading of Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius, and, in particular, by a basic question: why might the argumentative, edgy poet Pound have been drawn to Propertius? What might he have seen in him? Some of the attraction, no doubt, lay in Propertius' slightly marginal status as a Classical author, part of the main tradition but on the edge. But it does not seem to have been the romantically agonized version of Propertius that Pound saw. Nor the merely clever, witty, light and playful Propertius – though he saw more of the second figure than the first.

The towns of the Middle Roman Empire have left an array of grand columned marble architecture that makes classical sites, from Merida to Ephesus, still so imposing for the modern viewer. The great benefactors who paid for this strange marble culture and for everything else thought worthwhile in an ancient city received large public portrait statues set up on tall elegant moulded bases, set either in columned façades or posted around town at focal points of urban life (see below, Figs 1–2). In their method of signification these statue monuments shared more with poster hoardings than the gallery objects we think of as art. That is, they combined a commanding image with a loud complementary text. They were also different from the public statues of our own times in at least three other important respects — in their prominence, in their sheer quantity, and in that they mostly represented living persons. They were not isolated memorials but potent markers in local politics and aristocratic competition. Architectural setting, inscribed base, statue costume, and styled portrait head all combined to make sometimes complex statements about the subject.

The aim of the present paper is to reassess the events connected with the Romanization of the Etruscan metropolis of Volaterrae in the light of recent archaeological findings. The results of the Cecina Valley survey and of other related fieldwork have prompted a full reconsideration of the issue: indeed, they show a very different picture when compared with some of the recent mainstream reconstructions of the making of central Roman Italy; in particular, they are in sharp contrast with what was found in other Tyrrhenian regions, such as Southern Etruria or Campania. In line with these developments, recent local work in various parts of Italy now strongly suggests the need to consider each area, almost each civitas, individually, leaving aside for the moment overarching models based on insufficient data. This appears to resonate with a wider and growing realization that the process of Romanization, all over the Empire, exhibits a very heterogeneous and dialectic character, so much so that the appropriateness of the very term has often been put in question. For this reason, Romanization will be used here only in its weakest sense, simply as a convenient term covering the events involved in the creation of a new and unified political entity, disclaiming any assumptions concerning the acculturation of non-Roman ethnic groups. What is clearly emerging is a need for a new generation of regional studies, with the aim of carefully charting the trajectory of each community towards incorporation in the Roman state and working towards the creation of far more robust and informed syntheses. The present paper strives to make a contribution in this direction.

In 1896 Franz Cumont published, as the second volume of his Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, the dossier of documents on the basis of which he was to render, three years later, the first truly historical account of the transformation of Mithra-worship from a branch of Iranian Mazdaism to a Roman mystery cult.

This transformative process, as he envisaged it, was long and evolutionary. He used a geological metaphor to describe its stages, as theology and practice were passed down the ages and across the lands from Iran to Rome:

Le fond de cette religion, sa couche inférieure et primordiale, est la foi de l'ancien Iran, d'où elle tire son origine. Au-dessus de ce substratum mazdéen, s'est déposé en Babylonie un sédiment épais de doctrines sémitiques, puis en Asie Mineure les croyances locales y ont ajouté quelques alluvions. Enfin, une végétation touffue d'idées helléniques a grandi sur ce sol fertile, et dérobe en partie à nos recherches sa véritable nature.

Central to Cumont's scenario was Anatolia and the Mazdean diaspora that survived (and flourished) there after the fall of the Achaemenian empire. It was there during the Hellenistic Age that ‘Mithraism received approximately its definitive form’, although Cumont hesitated to pinpoint the precise time and area.

Did the events surrounding Diocletian's persecution of 303–311 launch a debate over religious toleration? The first suggestion that they did occurs in Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles, a defence of traditional religion and theology in three books. Writing before the persecution, the celebrated Neoplatonist philosopher from Tyre, a man whom several Christian emperors and church councils would soon condemn, asked the question that stood at the heart of the persecution:

How can these people [i.e., Christians] be thought worthy of forbearance (συϒϒώμη) ? They have not only turned away from those who from earliest time are referred to as divine among all Greeks and barbarians … and by emperors, law-givers and philosophers—all of a common mind. But also, in choosing impieties and atheism, they have preferred their fellow creatures [i.e., to worshipping the divine]. And to what sort of penalties might they not justly be subjected who … are fugitives from the things of their fathers?

One of the most peculiar features of Roman law was the father's dominant position. In theory, he exercised an almost absolute authority, patria potestas, over his descendants until his own death. The uniqueness of their family system did not escape the Romans themselves. In his mid-second-century legal textbook Gaius explained:

Item in potestate nostra sunt liberi nostri quos iustis nuptiis procreavimus. Quod ius proprium civium Romanorum est; fere enim nulli alii sunt homines, qui talem in filios suos habent potestatem, qualem nos habemus. Idque divus Hadrianus edicto, quod proposuit de his, qui sibi liberisque suis ab eo civitatem Romanam petebant, significavit. Nec me praeterit Galatarum gentem credere in potestate parentum liberos esse. (Inst. 1.55)

Again, we have in our power our children, the offspring of a Roman law marriage. This right is one which only Roman citizens have; there are virtually no other peoples who have such power over their sons as we have over ours. This was made known by the emperor Hadrian in an edict which he issued concerning those who applied to him for Roman citizenship for themselves and their children. I have not forgotten that the Galatians believe that children are in the power of their parents. (Translated by W. M. Gordon and O. F. Robinson, The Institutes of Gaius (1988))

This account immediately raises at least one fundamental question: If patria potestas was a distinctive feature of Roman society, how did the other peoples of the Empire react to it after the universal grant of the Roman citizenship in A.D. 212?

Our knowledge of the city of Rome after the fall of the Western Empire is largely determined by its position as the seat of the Papacy. Historical studies are based principally upon the Liber Pontificalis and the writings of the popes themselves, while architectural and archaeological research has concentrated on the city's numerous churches, many of which for the period A.D. 500–850 are remarkably well-preserved. The best known modern syntheses in English from each field are probably Peter Llewellyn's Rome in the Dark Ages (1971) and Richard Krautheimer's Rome. Profile of a City (1980). If we look beyond the purely ecclesiastical, however, we find very little Archaeological studies of Rome's urban infrastructure—walls, roads, bridges, aqueducts, sewers, housing—tend to stop, at the latest, with the Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century. The lack of research, and therefore lack of data, have in turn been interpreted as a sign that early medieval Rome was a city bereft of an artificial watersupply, and of the resources necessary to maintain such structures as the Aurelianic Walls. Studies of medieval urbanism have been affected by this dearth of evidence proposing, for example, settlement models with the population of the city crowded into the Tiber bend in order to obtain water.