A geoarchaeological coring survey of the Forum Boarium has shed considerable light on Rome's archaic landscape. We present the first empirical evidence that substantiates ancient and modern assumptions about the existence of a river harbour and ford in early Rome. Prior to the growth of the city, the riverbank — reconstructed as a high ledge at the base of the Capitoline Hill and a low-lying shore north of the Aventine — was particularly advantageous for river-related activities. However, the river valley changed significantly in the sixth century b.c.e., as a result of complex fluvial processes that were arguably spurred by urbanisation. Around the beginning of the Republic, Rome's original harbour silted up, and a high, wide riverbank emerged in its place. The siltation continued until the Forum Boarium was urbanised in the mid-Republic. In order to build their city and maintain river harbour operations, the Romans therefore had to adapt to dynamic ecological conditions.

This article argues that Virgil's First Eclogue naturalises the power discourse of the future Augustan Principate. Throughout the poem, Virgil not only presents the iuvenis as a libertas-restoring benefactor who is treated as a god by his beneficiaries, but even imagines his elevated status as crucial to maintaining social cohesion and civic stability, and idealises the beneficiaries’ dependence on his efficacious authority. The poem thus produces the grammar of the discourse of authoritarianism, subtly articulating what will eventually become the central tenets of Augustan ideology. I suggest that it is precisely this process of naturalisation which has led readers since antiquity to identify the iuvenis of Virgil's First Eclogue as the future Augustus. However, in this paper I am interested in transcending this question of individual identification to focus instead on how Virgil's poetic anonymisation is no simple pastoral obfuscation, but rather does the hard graft of ‘soft launching’ a new political system.

Horace's MAECENAS ATAVIS (Hor., Carm. 1.1) is shown to enumerate nine allusive icons whose attributes evoke signature elements in the works and biographical traditions of the nine canonical Greek lyric poets. In his first ode the Roman poet thus announces the commencement of a lyric programme synthesising the distinctive styles and subjects of his illustrious predecessors. In so doing, Horace figuratively and literally inserts himself among these nine ‘lyric bards’ in ironic fulfilment of his own request for canonisation, with which the poem concludes. His programmatic priamel therefore harmonises archaic subject-matter and Hellenistic method in a manner which sets the tone for the entire project to follow.

This article offers an account of Roman imperial cameos as an archaeological category, and argues that the production of large high-quality cameos was more restricted in time than currently allowed; that the controversial dates and subjects of individual cameos need to be set in the wider sequence of the main examples; and that early imperial praise poetry sits in relationship to court cameos in a way that can be usefully investigated around their shared concern to understand the particular character of imperial divinity. An Appendix gives details of forty-one examples illustrated and discussed.

This paper re-examines the role of ‘client kings’ in the Roman east in the early Principate. Contrary to previous emphasis on continuity with the republican past, it proposes that Octavian-Augustus enacted a set of measures that fundamentally changed the relations of certain eastern monarchs with the imperial centre. These ‘provincial monarchs’ became a new elite of Roman administrators, personally loyal to the domus Augusta and distinct from ‘client kings’ earlier and elsewhere. This Augustan systemisation complemented the provincial division of 27 b.c.e., creating a ‘divide and rule’ dynamic between provincial monarchs and imperial legates which was expedient to the Julio-Claudians. This model is then used to challenge the view that the Flavians systematically ‘provincialised’ the east as part of a reorganisation of the frontier. It raises the alternative possibility that provincial monarchy gradually died out, following the Flavians’ realisation that its continued maintenance was detrimental to their public image in Rome.

In discussion over the dating of the Bucolics of Calpurnius Siculus, an important role has always been played by attempts to identify the character of Meliboeus, who is to be read as a bucolic allegory of the poet's patron. By providing a new interpretation of the description of Meliboeus’ literary production, I argue that he must be the agricultural writer Columella. A consideration of other aspects of Meliboeus confirms this identification, as does the analysis of a number of significant allusions to De cultu hortorum, the poem that makes up the tenth book of Columella's De re rustica. I then establish the date of Columella and discuss the consequences for dating Calpurnius, placing some parts of his book later in the reign of Nero than has been customary.

In 1987, nine groups of graffiti written in Safaitic were published from Pompeii's theatre corridor (VIII.7.20). Safaitic, a south Semitic script used to record a dialect of Old Arabic, had never previously been documented in the West, and the appearance of these inscriptions at Pompeii since their publication has largely remained a mystery. I argue that Pompeii's Safaitic graffiti were inscribed by nomads from the Ḥarrah who had been incorporated into the Roman army, and who marched into Italy with Legio III Gallica during its campaign to install Vespasian as emperor.

Sir Ronald Syme, whose appreciation of the greatest of Roman historians remains vivid, insightful and compelling more than sixty years after the publication of his monumental work, thus highlighted one of the most challenging and enriching aspects of our own engagement with this author—the simultaneous difficulty and resonance of his language. Any reader will recognise Syme's characterisation of a Latin language bent to Tacitus’ will. Difficult for students, testing for experienced academics, Tacitus’ Latin defies the morphology of the primer and the syntax of the grammar. Everything we learned from Cicero about Latin forms, balanced clauses, rhetorical crescendos and word-order is thrown by Tacitus into disarray. His use of Latin jars and disrupts. Even the call for variatio is subverted, with a conservative and limited vocabulary in play, involving frequent repetition of key abstract terms, but conversely little pattern or regularity in the syntax of sentences. The ‘verbal disharmonies’ both challenge the reader and enrich the meaning. The highly charged nature of Tacitus’ Latin and its capacity, in his ‘possession’, to encapsulate the political complexities of the period is well established. No word is casually or carelessly chosen; phrasing carries resonance; echoes are significant.

Frankness is not a quality one naturally associates with Themistius, that most sinuous of the fourth century's official spokesmen, but the opening of his first speech (‘On the Love of Mankind’) is disarmingly frank. Invited to address Constantius II at Ancyra in the spring of 342, the young orator had an unusually difficult brief: violent riots in Constantinople had recently seen Hermogenes (a senior general) killed by a mob, relations with Constans (emperor in the west) were tense and war with Persia was rumbling away on the eastern frontier. The situation surely called for cliché — the familiar refuge of the panegyrist in a tight spot — but Themistius responded with a rather daring candour. Not for him some faltering introduction of the various themes set out in the rhetorical handbooks. Instead, he opened by offering his listeners an expert's guide to the tropes of conventional panegyric: those familiar descriptions of magnificent armies, glittering imperial adornment and the emperor's physical vigour (Or. 1.2a–b) to which his courtly audience must have been almost numb. With these curtly dismissed as so much hackwork, he delivered a boldly original oration: a philosophical treatment of the emperor's inner virtue. It is quite a performance. One can see why so many and such different emperors found themselves in need of Themistius’ eloquence.