Of the campaigns of Domitius Corbulo, not much remains to be said at so late a date in the annals of erudite investigation. His significance for social and political history is another matter. Corbulo's early career excites curiosity. And, later, the effort is not vain to look for links between Corbulo and certain persons, families, or groups destroyed by Nero in 65 and 66, in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy; and scrutiny of the legates who had served under Corbulo during the dozen years of his activity in the eastern lands also proves remunerative. In the winter of 66/7 Nero summoned Corbulo to Corinth and ordered him to put an end to his life. The general had become ‘capax imperii’.

In JRS XL (1950), 77 f. P. M. Fraser published from a photograph a considerable but incomplete inscription comprising documents sent to the city of Cyrene by Hadrian (and possibly others during his reign). It seemed natural to relate them to the material and moral damage caused by the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 115–17, although Fraser thought that they had been inscribed much later. Subsequent discussion has been concentrated mainly on the opening sections, concerned with representation in the Panhellenion.

Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo fama Marcelli: so it was with Posidonius from 1878 for forty years, with no voice raised to the contrary save by A. E. Housman in his caustic asides. Had we not found a figure lesser in dimensions than only Plato or Aristotle, the principal intellectual influence of two succeeding centuries, the fountainhead of Neoplatonism ? In retrospect the element of exaggeration is clear, and yet the quest must not be counted as labour in vain; for there came of it a great enlargement of the frontiers of scholarship. So in the familiar fable the sons did not find the buried treasure for which they dug, but their digging bore rich fruit.

The ostraca of Bu Njem come from a military outpost on the North African fringes of the Empire. Vernacular languages were spoken in the area. The ostraca record, among other things, contact between soldiers and the local population, and contain various African (Punic or ‘Libyan’) words and names, some of them previously unrecorded. The soldiers themselves have in many cases African names, or names with a special African connection, and it is likely that many were recruited locally. If so they may not have been fluent Latin speakers, and consequently the Latin which they wrote raises unusual questions. Is it Latin at all, or perhaps a pidgin or Creole? Or, on the contrary, is the language merely bureaucratic and formulaic Latin of no great interest? Do we, at last, have some hard evidence for a regional variety of Latin, in this case perhaps influenced by a substratum language or languages?.

Prostitution, it seems to be generally agreed, was a phenomenon firmly embedded in imperial Roman society. It has, however, yet to achieve a similar level of scholarly integration. Moves are undoubtedly being made in this direction. Several topics which have a direct bearing on patterns of prostitution, or in which prostitution is implicated, such as the complex hierarchy of male and female, the patterning of erotic desires and pleasures, the acquisition and dissipation of wealth, and the organization of urban life, can certainly be described as major preoccupations in present enquiries into the Roman world; and a couple of monographs on the subject, or aspects of it, have recently appeared. None the less, there is as yet no study that can really bear comparison with any of the substantial historical works on prostitution in a range of other times and places that have been published in the last two decades. In particular, there has not been any serious effort to take the perspective of the prostitutes themselves into account, which is one of the most emphatic developments in the new historiography of prostitution emerging elsewhere.

The outbreak of the Social War brought in its wake a furious succession of criminal prosecutions with important political implications. The wheels of ‘justice’ were set in motion by the notorious lex Varia, a criminal law passed on the motion of the tribune Q. Varius Severus Hybrida. It was not long before numerous prominent individuals came under attack and the Roman political scene was thrown into turmoil. The lex Varia will repay close scrutiny.

Modern scholarship has been content with the analysis of this measure delivered by Appian. Some time after the death of M. Livius Drusus, the tribune of 91 B.C., the equites endeavoured to make his liberal policy towards the Italians a ground for malicious prosecution of their enemies, and to this end they induced Q. Varius to pass his law. The purpose was to bring the entire senatorial oligarchy under the odious charge of sympathy with the Italian insurgents and to entrench equestrian control of the state. Such is the version of Appian. It is certainly true that, as was by now customary, external crises were made the pretext for attacks upon political opponents. The charge of bearing responsibility, in some sense, for the outbreak of war could be stretched to fit a wide variety of activities. But a careful examination of the lex Varia and of the cases heard under it will demonstrate that Appian's judgment leaves much to be desired. Legal and political consequences have never yet been fully understood or analysed, and the law can shed much light on Roman internal struggles in this period.

The legislation of the Roman Empire, as exemplified in the two great Codes, may often be regarded as the consolidation in law of practices already current. This tendency, however, is most obvious in respect of those practices which were of administrative utility in the eyes of the government. Thus, while there is much information concerning the organization or regimentation of certain sections of the population in which the government, for good or ill, showed its interest, the more unofficial expressions of bias and prejudice arising from existing social convention tend to escape notice. Yet even the convention of snobbery has its place in the history of a society, and the purpose of this paper is to examine it, in certain aspects, in the life of the East in the fourth century.

This paper had its origin in an attempt to elucidate the connexions of three fragmentary mould-blown glasses in the Ashmolean Museum (infra, pp. 172–3, nos. F i d and e and ii c) which bear the complimentary motto ΚΑΤΑΧΑΙΡΕ ΚΑΙ ΕΥΦΡΑΙΝΟΥ, ‘Your very good health.’ The first two of these on close examination proved to be so much alike in every detail that they must have come out of the same mould.

The paper by Saller and Shaw in JRS 1984 calls for some comment on its treatment of epigraphic evidence, and especially on the question of what we can expect inscriptions to tell us about the people of a given area.

A first point to make in relation to their argument is that the poorer classes throughout the empire could not in any case afford stone inscriptions. If, then, the extended family is (as could be argued) an adaptation of the nuclear family induced by poverty, rather than its biological or cultural predecessor, evidence for it will naturally tend to be absent from the epigraphic record, even if it is in fact quite common at the lowest levels of society.

But my present purpose is to consider a different aspect of the use of inscriptions—the question of habit, a subject recently raised by Ramsay MacMullen. After examining the relevance of this matter to the claim by Sailer and Shaw that there was little or no local recruitment to the Roman army in Britain, it will be argued that the epigraphic evidence cannot be used to support this view.

In the decade or so before the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus the Roman political scene was bristling with perplexing problems: the relation of Senate and People; the claims of the business classes; Rome's attitude to the allies; declining standards in provincial administration and military conduct; threats from Greece to traditional Roman ways of thought; deteriorating moral standards; the influx of wealth; the supersession of peasant husbandry by latifundia; land as an object of speculation; slave labour; the decline in the absorption of provincial corn by the armies abroad after 167 B.C. and its importation to Rome, which thus needed less from Latium; and behind all the changing conditions of agriculture was the steady decline after 164 of the free population, attested by the census figures, provided that these are admitted to have any demographical value at all. Although the first radical attempt to grapple with some aspects of this Hydra-headed monster was made by Ti. Gracchus, his was not the first mind to apply itself to the challenge even though it was his will and courage that first promoted resolute action. Earlier attempts at reform loom dimly through the mists that hide from us any proper understanding of the preceding years. The evidence is fragmentary, but one obvious way of trying to unify the surviving scraps of information is to try to view the period through the eyes of one of its dominant leaders: thus an examination of some aspects of the political career and thought of Scipio Aemilianus and his supporters and their attitude towards the problems of their day and towards reform, together with the views of their opponents, may help to throw some light on the revolution that flared up, with such apparent suddenness, in 133 B.C.

The great honour, which the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies has done me in entrusting me with this first ‘M. V. Taylor Memorial Lecture’, is the last, not the least, benefit for which I am indebted to our venerable and most regretted friend. I do not think it is my duty, indeed I think it would be very improper for me to set about reminding you here of who she was and what she did. I suppose I am expected to try to dedicate to her memory a paper which would not be too unworthy of her. I shall try to do my best. But I must confess at once that I am not quite sure that my subject is one of those she would have entirely approved of. Not that she had confined herself to Roman Britain. Of course I am sorry not to be able to present her today with a new enameled patera enumerating all the forts of the Wall, like the Amiens patera which, fifteen years ago, inspired her benevolence towards me. I am sorry not to be able to guide her through the halls of the Baths of Cluny, as I had the pleasure of doing in September, 1963, when she came to Paris for the last time on the occasion of the Archaeological Congress. I know her range of curiosity and learning was limitless indeed. Only I wonder whether Etruscan matters would not have raised in her a sort of smiling and sceptical reluctance, as something which is not altogether serious. I might plead, with Professor Momigliano's authority, that the Emperor Claudius, though the father of these queer researches, did something after all for Roman Britain. Still, as I cannot help imagining Miss Taylor sitting here in the front of my audience, I shall be exceptionally careful not to say anything which could arouse her sometimes passionate severity. If I fail, as is probable, I appeal in advance to her, and your, indulgence.

Although Palmyra is mentioned in several cuneiform texts, the oldest of which go back to the time of Sargon I of Assyria, it seems to have remained a mere village until the middle of the first century B.C. Its sudden growth to the size of one of the largest towns in the East coincides with the moment in history when the demand for oriental luxuries began to grow in Rome and its dominions, and it was due to the clever policy of its merchants and camel-riders who knew how to keep order in the desert between their town and the great factories and warehouses of Lower Mesopotamia. From that time caravans were able to cross the Syrian desert instead of skirting it, and the transit brought huge profits to the Palmyrenes. The desert therefore, whose barren waste, to our European eyes, would easily seem a barrier, was no such thing in reality, but acted on the contrary as a link with Mesopotamia, very much in the same way as the sea connected Venice by her merchant ships with the harbours of the Levant. Indeed, a comparison of Palmyra with the great commercial cities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Venice, Antwerp, Bruges, Lisbon, etc.), is one that in several respects helps us to understand its sudden and great prosperity, as well as its sudden decline. From the day when Aurelian put an end to Palmyra's command of the wilderness, the roads of commerce had to change, the caravans again resorted to the Euphrates route around the desert, and the fortunes of Aleppo and Chalcis began to rise.

In March 1973, a Roman milestone was discovered in a cultivated field, several hundred metres from the western edge of the town of Afula in the Valley of Jezreel. The stone was found broken into two pieces. The column was removed by a farmer belonging to the settlement of Balfouria, who transferred it to the garden of his home, where we had the opportunity to examine it. The base and lower part of the column remained on the spot. The inscription, incised on the column above the fracture, consists of six lines of irregular lettering.

The most widespread and best-known use of computers in stylistic analysis has been in the attempts to resolve questions of disputed authorship. Here, the computer's ability to store the whole known corpus of an author's work and to compare it with the disputed work in many ways which would be inexpressibly tedious, if not impossibly lengthy, by hand, is an invaluable aid. Many studies have been carried out on classical texts where the authorship is doubtful, but these studies have most often had undisputed texts against which a disputed work could be compared. The Historia Augusta presents a different situation: there are six ‘authors’ to whom varying amounts of the work are assigned.

The constitutional position of M. Minucius as a result of the plebiscitum of Metilius in 217 B.C. has never been satisfactorily defined; this is due to the vagueness of the ancient authorities. Polybius does indeed make the explicit statement that there were two dictators appointed to carry on the same campaign, a thing unprecedented in Roman history. On the strength of this passage, it has often been assumed that the formal title of ‘dictator’, with all that it implied, was conferred on Minucius by the proposal of Metilius. But the other authorities are not so explicit, and their language seems to contradict Polybius. Livy, for example, refers to the rogatio of Metilius as a proposal ‘de aequando magistri equitum et dictatoris iure’ (XXII, 25, 10), or ‘de aequato imperio’ (26, 7). Nowhere does Livy refer to Minucius as Dictator; in fact, he seems deliberately to avoid doing so. In this respect Plutarch, too, seems to follow Livy. In his Life of Fabius he states that Metilius proposed that Minucius should share the command with Fabius and have equal authority in conducting the campaign; he concludes by saying that the People conferred on Minucius a power equal to that of the Dictator. To judge from the language of both Livy and Plutarch it would appear that whatever position Minucius may have held as a result of the rogatio it was not that of Dictator.

Since Bury's magistral article in this Journal over thirty years ago (XIII, 1923, 127 ff.) no scholar has attempted a comprehensive study of the date and value of the Laterculus Veronensis. Various historians have in passing expressed a preference for this date or that. Ernst Stein argued for 293–305 in Rheinisches Museum LXXVII (1925), 367, but in his Geschichte des spätrömischen Reiches 1, 102, preferred 304–306. E. Schwartz in a rathe fuller treatment (Abh. Bayer. Akad., phil.-hist. Kl., 1937, 79–82) argued for a much later date, between 325 and 337 for the eastern dioceses, and under Valentinian I for the western dioceses. Others have more modestly confined themselves to certain areas. H. Nesselhauf has maintained a relatively early date (305–306) for Gaul (Abh. Preuss. Akad., phil.-hist. Kl., 1938, 8 ff.), while W. Seston has argued for a date after 306 for Africa (Dioclétien et la Tétrarchie, I, 327–8). It may be timely to reassess the problem, particularly as some new evidence has recently emerged.

The true history of Antony and Cleopatra will probably never be known; it is buried too deep beneath the version of the victors. But here and there a few broken words of the under-writing can, with care, be deciphered; and as regards the battle of Actium, chance has made it possible to get at something approaching the truth, provided that we follow the elementary rule of starting from the contemporary evidence and not from the secondary narratives. Except for Ferrabino's study, every historian known to me has drawn his account of Actium solely from the secondary writers—Plutarch, Dio, the epitomators of Livy—in varying proportions; and I have not found that their accounts convey any real meaning to me. My own conclusions, I imagine, may seem strange to some readers; but the method here followed is the right one, whatever be the imperfections in my handling of it.

Mommsen in his Ostgotische Studien (Ges. Schr. VI, 362 ff.) enunciated the theory that Odoacer and Theoderic were kings of their German followers, but ruled their Roman subjects as commissaries of the emperors, holding the office of magister militum with certain precisely defined additional powers. Stein (Bas-Empire II, 116 ff.) and Ensslin (Theoderich der Grosse) have considerably modified this theory, admitting that Theoderic acted as king of all his subjects. They nevertheless still maintain that he was at the same time magister militum, and that his powers were limited in certain respects by a formal concordat with the emperor. In my opinion Odoacer and Theoderic were kings pure and simple, in the same position as the other barbarian kings.

When Saint Chrysostom's Prayer asks that the petitions of the Lord's servants be fulfilled as may be most expedient for them, it expresses what, in traditional autocracies, was expected of every ‘good king’ by his subjects. St. Louis, the model of a medieval king, would go regularly with his courtiers to the Bois de Vincennes, there to hear his subjects' petitions, seated under an oak. Dr. Millar has pointed out that Roman emperors were expected to be accessible to their subjects, especially those of humble station, in much the same way. The evidence shows that much of the emperors' time was taken up with answering petitions (in the form of libelli) from private individuals or from groups of humbler people, and that it was only ‘bad’, lazy emperors who neglected this task. Not only was there a secretarial department for handling petitions, as distinct from epistles, but its head, the a libellis, was, according to Seneca, deluged with work. Literary sources, however, tell us little or nothing of value about the actual methods of accepting and handling petitions. For information on such topics we have to turn to the surviving texts of the ‘subscripts’ (subscripttones), the imperial replies to petitions (very few actual petitions survive). By far the largest number of these from the period of the Principate is to be found in the Code of Justinian, and they are mainly the work of the Severan and later third century emperors. In the process of transmission many of these texts have been abbreviated, and the formal elements have been omitted or garbled as a result, and it is from these formal elements that most can be learned about the procedures for handling petitions. One is therefore thrown back on the epigraphic and papyrus texts, in which these formal elements are often preserved.

Within the last decade significant advances have been made towards a better understanding of the fundamental demographic regimes that characterized the Mediterranean world of Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Coincident with this improvement in our knowledge has come a renewed interest in the rituals and cultural practices associated with death and burial in the societies that were part of the Roman Empire. These divergent interests are reflected in two distinct approaches to the analysis of death in Roman society. The cultural method, which finds significance in reading the quality of a given death and burial, has tended to concentrate on eliciting connections between the archaeological remains of burial, the ritualistic celebration of death, and the social values of the living. The other approach to the phenomenon of death is more directly concerned with the crude biological facts of life and death: the historical demography of human mortality that has emphasized the analysis of quantitative data. In almost any consideration of death, however, the two approaches are pragmatically inseparable. This interdependence of the evaluative and quantitative aspects of death is apparent from the fact that it was a dramatic shift in cultural values that produced the consciousness and the recording of the temporal ‘quantity’ that made the writing of this study possible. What I propose to do is to track the seasonal variations of mortality in Roman society. Pronounced seasonal fluctuations in the demographics of any given human population are one of the most fundamental and enduring aspects of its characteristic profile. This applies not only to crudely biological processes such as birth and death, but also to practices, like marriage, that are apparently culturally driven. These annual oscillations rarely alter very much over the long term; they are one of the ‘deep structures’ that identify the main environmental and cultural factors that form a given population. As such, they mirror the interplay between the bare biological forces and the human decisions that give any population its peculiar shape. The delineation of a central diagnostic feature of a given population, in this case that of a vanished population of one and a half millennia ago, is something that will enable us better to understand its basic demographic structure.