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Terentianus Maurus, a North African writing probably in the third century a.d., bequeathed to posterity a preface and three polymetric poems: De litteris, De syllabis and De metris. The poems' titles reflect their content, the first two covering the pronunciation of letters and syllables and the third discussing the details of a bewildering array of metres. Unpromising subject matter for poetry? On the contrary. Terentianus Maurus uses this raw material to display his extraordinary poetic skill, while also conveying useful technical information. This paper first examines the programmatic preface to his poems, which is studded with intertextual gems and shines with every kind of literary polish. It then turns to look at passages from the rest of Terentianus' poetry to see how he puts the ideals of his preface into poetic practice. The paper aims to show that Terentianus Maurus is not, or not just, a grammarian, but rather a consummate literary artist in the tradition of learned didactic verse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconstructs the history and meaning of a hitherto unexplained astronomical allusion recurring several times in Roman epithalamic poetry: the association of the evening star with Mount Oeta. By examining the iterations of this motif in surviving Latin literature (especially Catullus 62, Vergil's Eclogue 8 and the pseudo-Vergilian Ciris), I propose to explain the original meaning of this association as a mythological reference to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, offering a reconstruction of the Hellenistic epithalamic context where it was probably invented, and an interpretation of its function in each of the poems under consideration. The results of this analysis shed new light on some of the most well-known texts of Latin literature, allowing us to understand how this allusion was used to explore the relations between the genres of epithalamic poetry, bucolic and epyllion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a new framework for the historical study of Rome and Italy during the middle republican period. We argue that traditional approaches centred upon social struggles at home and battles abroad, res domi militiaeque, do not sufficiently capture the dynamism of Roman society during the early stages of imperial expansion. Recent scholarship has been rightly critical of the appropriateness of applying concepts of Hellenisation to the period, as Rome's interactions with Magna Graecia and the Greek East in the fourth and third centuries look very different than they would in subsequent centuries. Moving in a new direction, we sketch the contours of an approach that foregrounds the many connectivities (temporal, geographical, methodological, historical) apparent from the interdisciplinary study of middle republican Rome and Italy. The result encourages a new mode of historical inquiry into the development of middle republican Rome and Italy, one which sees Rome already in this moment as both expansively interconnected with and actively involved in wider Mediterranean and Eurasian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on recent advances in our knowledge (much of it owed to the proliferation of military diplomas) and a new analytical method to quantify the number of soldiers and their children who received Roman citizenship between 14 and 212 c.e. Although significant uncertainties remain, these can be quantified and turn out to be small relative to the overall scale of enfranchisement. The paper begins by reviewing what is known about grants of citizenship to soldiers, with particular attention to the remaining uncertainties, before presenting a quantitative model of the phenomenon. The total number of beneficiaries was somewhere in the region 0.9–1.6 million — significantly lower than previous estimates have suggested. It also emerges that the rate of enfranchisement varied substantially over time, in line with significant changes in manpower, length of service (and hence the number of recruits and discharged veterans) and the rate of family formation among soldiers. The Supplementary Material available online (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435819000662) contains a database of military diplomas (Supplementary Appendix 1), a mathematical model of enfranchisement implemented in MS Excel (Supplementary Appendix 2), a description of the model (Supplementary Appendix 3A) and a derivation of the model of attrition across service cohorts in Fig. 6 (Supplementary Appendix 3B). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the significance of names and naming in Catullus. Catullus’ use of proper names, and in particular his play on the connotations of the names of individuals who are attacked within his poems, has not been fully explored to date, and the paper identifies several examples of such play which have not previously been recognized. The paper examines Catullan wordplay in the context of both the iambic tradition and the public abuse culture of the late Roman Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will examine the claims of the excudent alii (‘others will hammer out’) priamel of Aeneid 6.847–53 within the immediate context of the parade's end, where Marcellus, parading the spolia opima, is used to exemplify the claims made about fine and speculative arts belonging to the Greeks, and war and the arts of empire to the Romans. It will be shown that certain, highly specific memories of the elder Marcellus are cued by the priamel that run directly counter to Anchises’ claims. The paper will look at how these claims are spoken in character, and driven by specific narrative motives, and it will relate the mismatch of exemplified to exemplifier to certain larger patterns within the Aeneid of things being left unsaid only to stand out all the more by being left unsaid. The paper concludes with a speculative essay on the necessary reductions and revisions that go into the making, and reading, of culturally instrumentalized monuments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contextualises and interprets a text seldom addressed in Anglophone scholarship: De die natali ('On the birthday'), written by Censorinus to celebrate his patron Caerellius' birthday in 238 c.e. By exploring both gestation (natalis) and time measurement (dies), the work seeks to elucidate and isolate Caerellius' birthday in time; it is the ultimate guide to his dies natalis. Despite a seemingly narrow focus, De die natali is best understood as part of a broad 'spectrum' of encyclopaedic texts, exemplifying the 'totalising' impetus of knowledge ordering in the Roman Empire, while simultaneously exposing the limits of such efforts. An interlocking set of tensions underlie the text, which resonate with other encyclopaedic projects — tensions between unity and plurality, centre and periphery, and the relationship between nature and culture. De die natali is both a product of, and commentary on, the conditions of human knowledge and the Empire's cultural diversity in the early third century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines marriage as a pathway to free status for enslaved women in the early imperial Roman world, arguing that women manumitted for marriage to their former owners experienced a qualified form of freedom. Analysis of a funerary altar from early imperial Rome alongside larger bodies of legal and epigraphic evidence shows that in this transactional mode of manumission, enslaved women paid for their freedom by foregoing certain privileges, including, to varying degrees, the ability to enter and exit the marriage at will and the separation of their property from that of their husbands. Through a close examination of one mode of manumission and the unequal unions that resulted from it, this paper offers further evidence that freedom was not uniform, but varied in its meaning depending on who achieved it and by what means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new manuscript of part of the Historia Augusta from Erlangen, which vindicates a more than century-old hypothesis by E. Patzig: that the 1489 Venice edition of the work is textually valuable. On this basis, and building on the recent work of R. Modonutti, I present five new passages that are not printed in modern editions of the HA, six lacunose passages restored, and propose that the lost Murbach manuscript is the source. Armed with this new evidence, I re-examine the question of the great lacuna between the Lives of Maximus and Balbinus and the Lives of the Two Valerians, showing that it is a codicological — and not authorial — feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Mommsen, it has been a tenet of Roman history that Augustus transformed the 'senatorial order' into a hereditary class, which encompassed senators, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the male line. This paper shows that the idea of a hereditary ordo senatorius is a myth without foundation in the evidence. Augustus and his successors conferred new rights and duties upon relatives of senators, but did not change their formal rank. Moreover, the new regulations applied not to three generations of descendants, but only to persons who stood under a senator's patria potestas during his lifetime. Emperors protected the honour and property of these filii familias of senators, in order to incentivise them to participate in politics and invest their wealth into munificence. The Supplementary Material available online gives all known early imperial holders of the title clarissimus vir in the province of Africa (Supplementary Appendix 1), all known early imperial clarissimi iuuenes (Supplementary Appendix 2) and all known early imperial clarissimi pueri (Supplementary Appendix 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores alternatives to analysing the political impact of Augustus in terms of the establishment of a new constitutional structure, the Augustan Principate. It starts by showing how the word principatus changed over time and explores the significance of the term statio. It considers how contemporaries viewed the political changes that occurred during Augustus' lifetime, analysing the ways in which power at Rome became increasingly embodied in the person of Augustus himself. It suggests that there was an increasing recognition that Augustus was an exceptional individual, whose position in the state was supported by powers granted formally by senatorial decree and popular vote as well as informally by acclamation, but whose authority was ultimately a personal quality, supported by the gods, and predestined by birth. It traces the ways in which Augustus' rule became increasingly personalised, with the result that one of the main challenges faced by Tiberius in a.d. 14 was how to take over Augustus' personal role as princeps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tabula Alimentaria of Veleia records the details of two second-century a.d. imperial alimentary schemes at the northern Italian town of Veleia, providing a rare insight into the workings of these schemes. Imperial loans are made to local landowners in exchange for pledges of specified property. Interest paid by landowners is used to fund cash subsidies for the upbringing of selected local children. In the early twentieth century, the French scholar Félix de Pachtere came close to demonstrating a consistent arithmetical relationship between a landowner's declared property value and the loan received. However, anomalies remained. This article proposes a revised formula which establishes a precise and consistent linkage between loan amounts and property declarations. Based on this arithmetical dataset, the paper proposes some hypotheses about how these fractional computations might have been performed in second-century Rome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its rediscovery in the late nineteenth century, the ' Ara of Domitius Ahenobarbus' has become a keystone in the history of Roman republican art. Following the seminal interpretation of Alfred von Domaszewski, the monument is usually understood as commemorating the key stages of the Roman census. This paper offers a fundamental reappraisal of the Ara 's imagery, based on an iconographic analysis which takes into account all relevant signs of rank and status such as shoes, clothing and other attributes. From this it becomes clear that none of the three protagonists on the Ara can be identified as a censor. Consequently, the monument neither commemorated a census nor was it a censorial location. Instead, I suggest that the Ara actually shows another important political event, namely the deductio of a Roman colony which I tentatively identify as the colonia Neptunia founded by Gaius Gracchus in 123 b.c. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the water imagery of two iconic passages of Roman satire: Horace's figuration of Lucilius as a river churning with mud at Sat. 1.4.11, and the transformation of that image at Juvenal, Sat. 3.62–8 (the Orontes flowing into the Tiber). It posits new ways of reckoning with the codifications and further potentials of these images by establishing points of contact with the workings of water in the Roman world. The main point of reference will be to the work of Rome's censors, who were charged not only with protecting the moral health of the state, but with ensuring the purity and abundance of the city's water supply as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to illustrate the practical application of myth in public life under the early Principate. It begins by sketching the deep historical affection of the people of Rome for the twins Castor and Pollux, and the great posthumous popularity of Nero Claudius Drusus for generations after his death in 9 B.C. Concentrating on the dedicatory inscription of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome, the paper argues that Tiberius Caesar, notoriously addicted to mythology, crafted a potent public association between the heavenly twins and himself and his brother Drusus, and it goes on to examine the effect of that association. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fresh water came from a variety of sources, streams and springs as well as aqueducts. Much of the Roman law on fresh water concerns its supply, regulating rights to use it with a variety of legal institutions from public and private law (e.g. ownership, servitudes, interdicts). The study of fresh water has usually followed the legal categories, segregating the public water supply from water that was private property, and consequently segregating different types of evidence. In this paper varied evidence is analysed using the ‘bundle’ approach, an analytical framework from legal scholarship on rights in the environment, in which water rights are not monolithic but are represented by component rights, including rights of access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation. Analysing component rights in fresh water reveals significant continuities in the Romans' regulation of it and the impact of this regulation. Although there was no centralized water administration in the early Empire, Romans took a systematic approach to regulating fresh water based on consistent working principles and policy priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mommsen — followed more recently by Brennan and Ferrary — proposed that laws were passed in around 228 and in 198 that constitutionally ‘fixed’ Sicily and Sardinia, and later Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior, as praetorian prouinciae. This paper challenges that theory. It first examines the ancient evidence, comprising two ambiguous passages from Livy's Ab Vrbe Condita. It then offers a counter-hypothesis that elucidates the people's rôle in forestalling and/or resolving political disputes over the allocation of provincial commands. It will show that this rôle was crucial for mitigating the harmful effects of élite competition and, in turn, maintaining political stability in Rome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper revises current understandings of the rôle of land in the economy of the Italian diaspora in the Greek East in the second and first centuries b.c., arguing that these Italians owned more land than has previously been assumed and that many of these Italian landowners practised a highly commercialized form of agriculture that focused on high-end products. This strategy shaped what empire meant both locally and in Italy and Rome, where the products they marketed fed into the ongoing consumer revolutions of the time. After discussing the evidence for the extent of Italian landholdings and examining their exploitation in three case studies, we conclude by reflecting on the long-term history of such landholdings in the provinces and the implications for our understanding of Roman imperialism more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the paper by Peter Brown that was published in 1961. Model for understanding the historical process; Influences of Brown's paper on the English-speaking world; Arguments on the Roman aristocarcy; Prosopographical study by Werner Eck.

The paper is a bibliographical and critical survey of the archaeological research on ancient Ostia and Portus in the decade 2004–2014. The first part deals with some general themes, such as cults, architectural typologies and urban history, decoration: wall-paintings, mosaics and marble, the guilds and their seats, trades, etc. The second part is a survey of individual monuments and buildings which have been the subject of recent excavations and interpretations. The critical problem of late antique Ostia is treated separately, as well as the archaeology of Isola Sacra and Portus, with the Imperial harbours. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes two arguments. The first is that Trajan deliberately orchestrated the dedication of his Column on 12 May, the anniversary of the dedication of the Temple of Mars Ultor, to coincide with the beginning of a new war against Parthia in a.d. 113. The second is that although most modern commentators focus on the function of Mars Ultor as avenger of Caesar, the evidence of his actual invocation from the late first century b.c. through the third century a.d. more strongly supports another interpretation: as agent of vengeance against foreign enemies, and against Parthia/Persia in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper takes as its point of departure two much discussed fifth-century artifacts, an uninscribed and undated consular diptych in Halberstadt (Fig. 9), and the inscribed and (on the face of it) exactly dated consular missorium of Ardabur Aspar in Florence (Fig. 15), both hitherto presumed issued by western consuls and manufactured in western workshops. After calling into question the established criteria for distinguishing western from eastern diptychs, I propose a new set of criteria and a new date and interpretation of both objects, mainly in the light of a more comprehensive examination of the iconography of city personifications, in literature as well as art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the language of power and authority in the Italian Alps, after the Roman pacification of the area in 14 b.c. The focus of the examination is an arch set up at Segusio to Augustus by a local dynast named Cottius, which allows us to consider how the incorporation of the region into the Roman Empire was perceived and presented from a ‘local’ point of view, and how we might use our interpretations to construct ideas of identity and power relationships integral to early imperial provincial administration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper situates Roman actions undertaken against Christians amidst an unofficial pattern of measures employed throughout the imperial period to manage the expanding influence of freelance religious experts. Questions about the historical circumstances of martyrdom or persecution tend to proceed from the assumption that Christians were perceived and dealt with as a distinct religious community. However, the penalties alleged by writers such as Paul and Justin were more commonly issued against self-authorized individuals (magi, astrologers, prophets, diviners, philosophers, and so forth) than against undifferentiated religious groups. Thus, I propose that Roman motivations for investigating and punishing Christians, at least in the first and second centuries, are best understood in relation to the wider phenomenon of freelance expertise and the range of concerns that it engendered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Concrete is regarded as a quintessentially Roman achievement. The spread of the technology is usually dated to the fourth or third centuries b.c., and interpreted as a symptom of Rome's early expansion in Italy. In this paper I offer a reappraisal of the available evidence for early concrete construction in Rome. On the basis of stratigraphic evidence, I conclude that a later date should be assigned to most of the remains. I situate the origins of the technological innovation within the radical change in architectural styles that unfolded in the middle of the second century b.c., affecting both domestic architecture and public building. The new chronology has an impact on current models of cultural diffusion in Roman Italy, linking the development of Late Republican architecture with the broader debate on the cultural implications of the Roman conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper revisits the political history of the Roman Republic in the third decade of the first century b.c. Its central contention is that the dominant feature of the period was neither a reshuffle of alliances within the ‘Sullan’ senatorial nobility nor the swift demise of Sulla's legacy. Attention should be focused instead on some crucial policy issues which attracted debate and controversy in that period: the powers of the tribunes, the corn supply of Rome, the rôle of the Senate, the revival of the census, and the full inclusion of the Allies into the citizen body. The political strategy of M. Aemilius Lepidus (cos. 78 b.c.) and its medium-term repercussions also deserve close scrutiny in this connection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Geography is a fundamental element of ancient ethnography, yet the account of the environment in Tacitus' Germania is notably sparse. Standard elements of geographic description are absent, or are presented in restricted (and subversive) ways. This paper examines the presentation and structuring of Germanic spaces against a backdrop of contrasting contemporary geographic writings, and considers the implications of Tacitus' rejection of geographic norms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among the most potent devices that Roman emperors had at their disposal to disavow autocratic aims and to put on display the consensus of ruler and ruled was the artful refusal of exceptional powers, or recusatio imperii. The practice had a long history in Rome prior to the reign of Augustus, but it was Augustus especially who, over the course of several decades, perfected the recusatio as a means of performing his hesitancy towards power. The poets of the Augustan period were similarly well practised in the art of refusal, writing dozens of poetic recusationes that purported to refuse offers urged upon them by their patrons, or by the greater expectations of the Augustan age, to take on projects. It is the purpose of this paper to put the one type of refusal alongside the other, in order to show to what extent the refusals of the Augustan poets are informed not just by aesthetic principles that derive, most obviously, from Callimachus, but by the many, high-profile acts of denial that were performed as political art by the emperor himself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Sermons of Leo the Great (a.d. 440–461) for their liturgical topography. Leo developed an annual cycle of set places on set days — the very definition of stational liturgy — in Rome as one means to assert papal authority over the city's Christian communities and especially over the resident Roman senatorial aristocracy. Leo's Sermons indicate that the bishop found new ways to centralize the liturgy at St Peter's in the Vatican, making St Peter's — not St John the Lateran — the religious centre and the symbol of the papacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Members of the late Roman élite commemorated the holding of certain offices by the distribution of ivory diptychs. This paper attempts to show how diptychs came to play this rôle; that they were not originally distributed by consuls but by any official who provided games; that they had nothing to do with the ecclesiastical diptychs that are first heard of at about the same time; that the custom spread from east to west, not from west to east; and that the earliest western consular diptychs are not illustrated with scenes from games because there were no multi-day consular games at Rome before the fifth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Non-orthodox Christian asceticism in Late Antiquity is known to us largely through the distorting lens of orthodox heresiology. This paper aims to reassess the character of the ascetic communities of rural Lycaonia in the fourth century A.D. in the light of the surviving funerary and ecclesiastical epigraphy, including three inscriptions published here for the first time. We are fortunate to be able to read these texts in the light of a neglected work of orthodox polemic, Amphilochius’ Against False Asceticism, the work of an embattled orthodox bishop at Iconium in the late 370s A.D. This treatise formed part of a successful campaign to stigmatize the Lycaonian ascetics as heretics, a position which was enshrined in Theodosius’ anti-heretical legislation of A.D. 381–3. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper re-examines the scholarly views about the beginning of Latin poetry that were current in the late second century b.c., and proposes that the earliest scholars, specifically Accius and Porcius Licinus, marked Livius Andronicus’ hymn to Juno Regina of 207 b.c., rather than a play in 197 b.c., as the fountainhead of Latin literature. Those histories would suggest that the dominant interpretation put poetry at the heart of the affairs of the state at war; when in the early 40s b.c. Varro and his contemporaries disproved Accius, they were both bringing out new facts about Livius’ earlier career, and rewriting the history of Latin poetry, so that it had its origins in peace, rather than in war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the words, pictures and shapes that people in the Roman provinces placed on the thousands of coins that were made by each of several hundred cities, and uses the patterns that can be found to discuss the contribution provincial coins can make to our understanding of how relationships developed between the early Roman emperors, especially Augustus, and their audiences in provincial cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper establishes a new date for the publication of Suetonius’ Illustrious Men through allusions to Suetonius’ Virgil in Pliny, Letters 5.10. These allusions are part of a much wider network of allusions, both within this particular letter and more generally in Pliny’s Book 5, that revolves around the theme of unpublished writings. It is a partial or full publication of the Illustrious Men that probably led to Suetonius’ award of the ius trium liberorum in A.D. 110, and he may now have published all of the Caesars before his dismissal by Hadrian in A.D. 122. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suetonius (Aug. 72.2) records among the habits of Augustus his inclination to retreat from time to time to a place he called ‘Syracuse’ or his ‘technophuon’ (workshop). These names have been variously explained, without agreement. The paper argues that ‘Syracuse’ evokes a complex of associations beyond the obvious connection with Archimedes and his inventions. By recalling other well-known figures, such as Marcellus and Dionysius, as well as Augustus’ own experiences in Syracuse, the name of his den effectively encapsulates the courses of action available to the emperor as ruler and as private citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]