The spread of religions throughout the Roman world may be explained partly as a consequence of the movements of peoples, partly in terms of the emergence of new elective cults. Understanding these processes entails exploring the kinds of contacts and exchanges established between individual worshippers, and the contexts — local and imperial — within which they took place. These developments culminated in the emergence of new cults that spilled over the boundaries of the Roman Empire to create the first global religions.

This article explores the religious importance of Cicero's De Haruspicum Responso against the background of prodigy-handling in Republican Rome. Comparing the prodigy in question to an ‘auditory epiphany’, it argues that key issues raised by the speech include the nature of the divine voice, the relationship of the prodigious ‘rumbling and clattering’ to the gods themselves, and the ambiguous temporalities implied by Roman practices of divination. The article also suggests that De Haruspicum Responso proposes a significant overlap between religious and political speech, and it questions the radical split often assumed between the religious ideology of Cicero's philosophical and his more ‘public’ works.

This article reconsiders one of the best-known examples of Oscan epigraphy — the inscription which commemorates the testament of Vibius Adiranus to the vereiia- of Pompeii. It has been widely accepted that this inscription is a first-century a.d. copy of a second-century b.c. original, and is therefore the latest extant example of Oscan in a formal public inscription. This is challenged here with an analysis of both the linguistic detail and archaeological context, and it is shown that this inscription itself is more likely to be the original. The re-dating suggested here has implications for our understanding of language use at Pompeii; it also facilitates more accurate estimates of when the deaths of the Italic languages took place.

There exists a strong link in modern thinking between letter collections and biographical or historical narration. Many ancient letter collections have been rearranged by modern editors along chronological lines, apparently with the aim of realizing the biographical and historiographical potential of these ancient collections. In their original format, however, non-fictional Greco-Roman letter collections were arranged predominantly by addressee or by theme (often without the preservation of chronology within addressee or thematic groupings), or they might be arranged on the principle of artful variety and significant juxtaposition. Consequently, some purpose or purposes other than biographical or historical narration must be attributed to ancient letter collections. This paper asks what those purposes might be.

The Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus poses numerous structural puzzles for the historian, among them the anomalous final book, numbered 31 in the manuscript tradition. This book, which treats the Gothic rebellion of a.d. 376–378 and the campaign of Adrianople, is loosely connected to the other extant books, which conclude with events of a.d. 375. The present article argues that Book 31 was in origin a separate monograph, drafted in Greek at Antioch in the aftermath of the Roman defeat at Adrianople. Perhaps modelled on the Scythica of Dexippus, its contents reflect the Antiochene and Constantinopolitan polemic of its moment. For reasons that must remain speculative, Ammianus later translated his work into Latin and appended it to a finished draft of the Res Gestae.

The epigraphic evidence from the Forum of Trajan shows that this forum was the most important public venue for the honorific statues of senators in the city of Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries a.d. These dedications celebrated the achievements of individual senators, and thereby helped to promote an image of a coherent senatorial order whose members were defined by their civil offices, literary accomplishment, outstanding personal virtues, and the approbation of their peers and the emperor. In contrast, statuary honours in the Roman Forum continued to be largely restricted to emperors and, in the fifth century, to the powerful generals who increasingly controlled imperial policy. This pattern in the distribution of statues suggests a basic differentiation in the use of the two most important representational spaces of late antique Rome.

This paper discusses the widely held view that politics in fifth- and sixth-century Italy were largely driven by rivalry between the two great families of the Anicii and the Decii, supposedly following distinctive policies (pro- or anti-eastern, philo- or anti-barbarian, etc.). It is probable that individual members of these (and other) families had feuds and disagreements from time to time, but there is absolutely no evidence for continuing rivalry between Decii and Anicii as families, let alone on specific issues of public policy. Indeed by the mid-fifth century the Anicii fell into a rapid decline. The nobility continued to play a central rôle in the social and (especially) religious life of late fifth- and early sixth-century Italy. Their wealth gave them great power, but it was power that they exercised in relatively restricted, essentially traditional fields, mainly on their estates and in the city of Rome. The quite extraordinary sums they spent on games right down into the sixth century illustrate their overriding concern for popular favour at a purely local level. In this context there was continuing competition between all noble families rich enough to compete. Indeed, the barbarian kings encouraged the nobility to spend their fortunes competing with each other to the benefit of the city and population of Rome.

The aim of this quinquennial survey remains the same as its predecessor, as for the most part does the format, though the team is regrettably reduced by one. With an eye to the study of the Roman world, we hope to signal the most important newly published inscriptions, significant reinterpretations of previously published material, new trends in scholarship, recent studies that draw heavily on epigraphic sources, and noteworthy developments in the various aids to understanding inscriptions (both traditional printed material and electronic resources). In the context of this journal, the geographical range and chronological scope reflect the contours and history of the Roman state from its beginnings down to the end of the seventh century. As such, not only does the survey naturally take in Greek as well as Latin texts, but also epigraphic material in other languages relevant to the Roman world. In the hope that they might usefully reflect the various fields of primary interest to readers of this journal, we have maintained the categories established in the last survey. These comprise, after material of general interest and significance, principal divisions under the headings of (II) Government, law, and authority, (III) Cities, (IV) Funerary epigraphy, (V) Religions, and (VI) Language, literature, and onomastics. The structure of the first section has been changed somewhat in order to give greater prominence to those inscriptions here singled out as historical highlights. The organization of the discussion within each section (or subsection) generally moves between the thematic, chronological, and geographical, as seems to suit the material best.

Early one bright afternoon, seventeen centuries ago, Constantine stood staring at the sun. According to his self-appointed biographer Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, who claimed to have heard the story from Constantine himself, the emperor was on campaign, when, ‘around midday, as the day was declining’ he saw a shining cross of light over the sun, with the attached text ‘By this conquer’. The understandably startled ruler slept on the matter, whereupon Christ appeared in a dream and instructed him to fashion himself a copy of the holy sign, which would protect him against his enemies. He did as he had been told, took Christian clerics as his advisers and, not long afterwards, set off for Italy to fight his rival, Maxentius. The rhetorician Lactantius, writing about twenty years before Eusebius, presented a different tale in his De mortibus persecutorum: Constantine, on the eve of his decisive battle against Maxentius in a.d. 312, at the Milvian Bridge to the north of Rome, was instructed in a dream to ‘mark the heavenly sign of God’ on his shields. Constantine's moment of epiphany, sometimes equated with his ‘conversion’, has traditionally been seen both as one of history's great turning-points and as one of its most enduring enigmas. The interpretation of Constantine's vision(s) is further complicated by an anecdote that appears in an anonymous panegyric of the emperor, delivered in a.d. 310. Having turned off from the road to visit ‘the most beautiful temple in the world’, Constantine was greeted by a remarkable sight: ‘For you saw, I believe, Constantine, your Apollo, accompanied by Victory, offering you laurel crowns, which each brought an omen of thirty years [of life or rule]’.