bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Organization of the Legion: The First Cohort and The Equites Legionis
Authors: Breeze David
Published: May 2006

It is generally recognized that the first cohort of a legion in the Principate was larger than the other nine cohorts. It consisted of five centuries, each double the size of each of the six centuries of cohorts II to X. Literature, epigraphy and archaeology all agree over this point. Vegetius, in the Epitoma rei militaris, probably quoting a third-century source, says that the first cohort was twice as large as each of the other cohorts, but he disagrees with himself over the number of men in the cohort. At one stage (II, 6) he states that the first cohort had 1,105 pedites and 132 equites and was called a cohors miliaria, compared to the 555 pedites and sixty-six equites of each of the other nine cohorts, cohortes quingenariae. But two paragraphs later (II, 8) this number has been reduced to 1,000. This is made up of 400 men in the first century, 200 in the second, 150 in the third and fourth and 100 in the fifth. Although none of Vegetius' figures is to be trusted, his basic point remains—the first cohort of a legion was double in size. This is supported by epigraphic evidence. III, 6178, dated to about A.D. 134, lists, by cohort, the soldiers of legio V Macedonica discharged at one time. The first cohort contains at least forty names, the second seventeen, the third at least fourteen, the fourth at least ten and the ninth at least twelve. A similar situation is found on III, 14507, a laterculus, which is a dedication by veterans of VII Claudia discharged in 195. In this case the first cohort discharged forty-seven men, the second twenty-two and the third eighteen. These two inscriptions point to the fact that the first cohort was about twice as large as each of the other nine. Excavations at Inchtuthil have provided the most eloquent testimony. Here the barracks of the first cohort, ten in number, compared to the six of each of the other nine cohorts, have been revealed, in association with five large centurions' houses, situated next to the headquarters building. This is where it is placed by ‘Hyginus’ in the liber de munitionibus castrorum (3; 4), probably dated to the sole reign of Marcus Aurelius.
Air Reconnaissance in Britain, 1965–68
Authors: St Joseph J. K.
Published: May 2006

The results of the air reconnaissance here summarized continue from earlier surveys already described in this Journal. The weather was not particularly favourable for archaeological reconnaissance during any of these four summers, while the period May to October 1968 was, over much of England, one of the wettest of this century. In Scotland, however, the summer of 1968 was comparatively dry with correspondingly favourable development of crop marks.

Most of the new information has been gained in the military districts of Wales and the north. Roman military remains tend to be standardized and to form part of a system. Thus both temporary and permanent works may often be identified from a minimum of evidence without the necessity of the whole site being visible, while the geographical distribution, so far as it is known, often suggests where further reconnaissance may profitably be made. Descriptions of military sites and their full significance in the system to which they belong, call for continual reference to local geography, so that the text is best considered in conjunction with appropriate maps such as the 1 inch to a mile series of the Ordnance Survey. Nearly all the features described have been examined on the ground: except when noted otherwise, no remains are ordinarily to be seen on the surface. The records and photographs on which this account is based are housed in the offices of the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge.
The Two Republican Laws of the Tabula Bembina
Authors: Mattingly Harold B.
Published: May 2006

Since Mommsen's magisterial publication, no one has seriously attempted to rearrange those fragments of a Roman bronze tablet that were once in the collection of Cardinal Bembo. There can be no doubt but that Mommsen placed most of the fragments correctly, both in relation to each other and to the preserved top and left side of the tablet. Only three variables remain: the extent of the gaps between the A and B fragments, the width of the tablet and its original height. Mommsen's arrangement leaves awkward discrepancies between lacuna lengths in lines 12–15 and 16–18 of the extortion law, where whole clauses are repeated virtually verbatim. Tibiletti boldly proposed to remedy this by shifting the B fragments some 14 letter-spaces towards A, whilst making no change in Mommsen's estimate of the tablet's width. This is, at first sight, a very attractive solution. But Tibiletti did not probe its consequences for the agrarian law on the reverse—and Badian has rightly insisted that this simply must be done. Rigorous study of both laws will, indeed, show that Tibiletti was not radical enough. Yet he must be honoured as a pioneer, and I am glad to acknowledge that my present paper owes much to his example.
Studius and the Beginnings of Roman Landscape Painting
Authors: Ling Roger
Published: May 2006

Non fraudando et Studio divi Augusti aetate, qui primus instituit amoenissimam parietum picturam, villas et porticus (portus?) ac topiaria opera, lucos, nemora, colles, piscinas, euripos, amnes, litora, qualia quis optaret, varias ibi obambulantium species aut navigantium terraque villas adeuntium asellis aut vehiculis, iam piscantes, aucupantes aut venantes aut etiam vindemiantes. Sunt in eius exemplaribus nobiles palustri accessu villae, succollatis sponsione mulieribus labantes trepidis quae feruntur, plurimae praeterea tales argutiae facetissimi salis. Idem subdialibus maritimas urbes pingere instituit, blandissimo aspectu minimoque inpendio.

(Pliny,NHxxxv, 116–17)

Studius too, of the period of the Divine Augustus, must not be cheated of his due. He first introduced the most attractive fashion of painting walls with villas, porticoes (harbours?), and landscape gardens, groves, woods, hills, fish-pools, canals, rivers, coasts—whatever one could wish, and in them various representations of people strolling about, people sailing, people travelling overland to villas on donkey back or in carriages, and in addition people fishing, fowling, hunting, or even gathering the vintage. His pictures include noble villas reached across marshes, men tottering along with women, trembling burdens, on their shoulders, carried for a wager, and very many such lively and witty subjects besides. It was the same man who introduced the practice of painting seaside cities in open terraces, producing a charming effect with minimal expense.
The Tabula Contrebiensis: Roman Law in Spain in the Early First Century B.C.
Authors: Richardson J. S.
Published: May 2006

In December 1979, a Latin inscription on bronze came into the hands of Professor Guillermo Fatás of the department of Ancient History in the University of Zaragoza. It had been found by an unauthorized excavator on the site of the excavations on the hill known as Cabezo de las Minas, just outside the village of Botorrita, some 20 kilometres south of Zaragoza, on the banks of the river Huerva. The tablet, 438 mm. from side to side and 208 mm. from top to bottom, had clearly been attached to a wall or some other substantial object by means of six holes, three along the upper and three along the lower edge, and has been preserved in its entirety. However, the bronze is badly warped, and although the back of the tablet is quite smooth, the inscribed face has suffered considerable damage, apparently from fire and corrosion. After preliminary cleaning, Fatás published, with exemplary speed, a notice of the find in the Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia CLXXVI (1979), 421–38, and then, after further treatment by the archaeological laboratory in the Museo Arqueologico de Barcelona, a monograph on the inscription in 1980.
Procopius and Dara
Authors: Croke Brian , Crow James
Published: May 2006

The question of the degree of continuity in urban life from antiquity into later times has recently emerged as a preoccupation among scholars of the late antique and early medieval periods. Considerable attention is currently being devoted to the fate of the classical city and of the traditional patterns of urban life, with special reference to features such as reduction of physical area in individual cities, decline of population, changes in use or physical decay of classical buildings and the emergence of new social organizations as reflected in urban topography and development. Attempts to refine and analyse these issues with greater precision have largely stemmed from the recent upsurge of interest in late Roman archaeology, well demonstrated in such major excavations as those at Sardis, Aphrodisias, Caesarea, Carthage, Ephesus and Thessalonika. Yet the archaeological evidence can only tell part of the story. We must still rely a great deal on literary evidence, and the interconnection of the literary and the archaeological material is the subject of this article.

For all studies of late antique cities the single most important contemporary literary text is the Buildings, or De Aedificiis, of Procopius of Caesarea. Where it provides (as often) the only literary evidence for a particular site we need to be able to evaluate its contribution critically. So far there have been remarkably few detailed discussions of the value of its evidence either from the literary or the archaeological standpoint. As a result, the traditional view that the reign of Justinian witnessed a major effort to secure and refortify the defences of the eastern frontier, based on the information provided by Procopius, still largely holds the field, despite the availability of other sources of information which could be used to clarify Procopius' picture.
Roman Epigraphy, 1961–65
Authors: Reynolds Joyce
Published: May 2006

In the past five years there have appeared a number of collections of inscriptions relevant to Roman studies and a number of collected discussions of such inscriptions, and it may be useful to record the more important of these, though without comment except where the titles are insufficiently indicative of content, for they have been, or will be, the subject of reviews. Regional corpora: G. Mihailov, Inscriptiones graecae in Bulgaria repertae vol. III, fasc. 1, giving texts from Philippopolis (1961); G. Sotgiù, Iscrizioni latine della Sardegna (1961); W. M. Calder and J. M. R. Cormack, MAMA VIII, giving texts from Lycaonia, the Pisido-Phrygian borderland and Aphrodisias (1962); A. Degrassi, ILLRP vol. 11 (1963); A. and J. Šašel, Inscriptiones latinae quae in Iugoslavia inter annos MCMXL et MCMLX repertae sunt (1963); P. Wuilleumier, Inscriptions latines des Trois Gaules (1963); R. G. Collingwood and R. P. Wright, Roman Inscriptions of Britain vol. I (1965). Specialised corpora: H. Zilliacus, Sylloge inscriptionum Christianarum veterum Musei Vaticani (1963); A. Degrassi, Inscriptiones Italiae vol. XIII, fasc. 2, Fasti anni Numani et Iuliani, Ferialia, Menologia Rustica, Parapegmata (1965); M. H. Callander, Roman Amphorae, with an index of stamps on amphorae in the Western provinces (1965). Corpora of illustrations: A. Degrassi, ILLRP, Imagines (1965); A. E. and J. S. Gordon, Album of dated Latin inscriptions from Rome and the neighbourhood, vols. II (A.D. 100–199) and III (A.D. 200–525) (1965). Collected discussions: Akte des IV. Kongress für Epigraphik, Vienna 1962; A. Degrassi, Scritti vari di antichità (1962); L. Robert, Hellenica XI-XII (1960) and XIII (1965), the latter wholly devoted to a review of MAMA VIII; a second edition of his Villes d'Asie Mineure (1962) and Noms indigènes dans l'Asie-Mineure gréco-romaine (1963). One might also mention here H. G. Pflaum's Les Carrières procuratoriennes équestres sous le haut-empire romain (1960) and the Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae from 1963 onwards, largely devoted to epigraphic studies.
Caesar, Cicero and the Problem of Debt
Authors: Frederiksen M. W.
Published: May 2006

The purpose of the following pages is to study the problem of debt in Rome of the Ciceronian age. A part of this argument will be uncontroversial or at least familiar; that is, the way in which Roman politicians lived in prolonged states of indebtedness. The rest of the argument will be frankly more speculative; it will suggest that Caesar's arrival in Rome in 49 B.C. provoked a crisis that was in some degree inevitable; but that Caesar in consequence undertook certain remedial measures that were of an importance for the future developments of Roman law.
Cuius in Usum? Recent and Future Editing
Authors: Reeve Michael
Published: May 2006

In 1993 Michael Winterbottom remarked that we have reached ‘what may be the last decades of the systematic editing of classical texts’. If he was right, what has been dwindling: capacity, interest, scope, or confidence?

When editors' prefaces include such Latin as ‘ad huius operis finem … longdudum exspectatum’ (1983), ‘non solum hominibus, sed ne libris quidem non pepercit’ (1991, of the War), ‘ex Italia, ut Munk Olsen videtur, ortus’ (1997), or ‘latet uel peritus’ (1997, of an untraced manuscript), it is tempting to blame incapacity, and to blame that in turn on a decline of interest in Latin and more narrowly in textual criticism. Not just alaudator temporis acti se puerocould document the decline by looking at statistics and syllabuses; but there would be widespread agreement that in so far as textual criticism has given way to greater concern with content its proportional decline is no bad thing. Relevant too, some would say, is the decline of composition; but I am not convinced by either the obvious or the deeper reason that they give. Obviously, a preface should not be the first thing, or the first thing for thirty years, that the editor composes in Latin. Need it be, though? Lloyd-Jones and Wilson chose English in their O.C.T. of Sophocles (1990), and Green has now followed their example in a Latin O.C.T., his very handyeditio minorof Ausonius (1999). Anyone who takes the view expressed to me by a distinguished German Latinist, that by abandoning Latin in prefaces one cuts off the branch that one is sitting on, should answer Merkelbach's charge that the policy of writing the notes in Latin has held upInscriptiones Graecae. At a deeper level, composing in a language is said to be the best way of learning it; but surely reading large amounts of it observantly is just as good or better, unless the distinction between active and passive knowledge of a language holds only for the modern languages that one reads comfortably and sometimes makes a pitiful attempt to speak. Even without mystical claims for the value of composition, declining knowledge of Latin is quite enough of a threat to editing.
Trajan's Parthian War and the Fourth-Century Perspective
Authors: Lightfoot C. S.
Published: May 2006

No contemporary account of Trajan's Parthian War survives, nor were any monuments set up to commemorate his exploits in the East in the same way that Trajan's Column in Rome and the trophy at Tropaeum Traiani (Adamclisi) do his Dacian Wars. We rely almost entirely on the excerpts of Dio Cassius' History preserved by Xiphilinus, together with a few fragments of Arrian's Parthica, in order to reconstruct the causes, objectives and strategy of the war. Because of the scant nature of the sources, all three aspects remain the subject of much scholarly discussion and dispute. Here, however, an attempt is made to address the problems raised by Trajan's eastern campaigns from a different perspective. References in fourth-century sources shed light not only on the purpose and execution of the war itself, but also on the way Trajan was perceived in late antiquity as a valuable paradigm for contemporary events and figures.
Ambrose's Contemporaries and the Christianization of Northern Italy
Authors: Lizzi Rita
Published: May 2006

The question of the Christianization of Italy in the late fourth century has been much discussed in the recent past, but it has rarely been approached at local level, despite the fact that focusing upon local situations, where a wealth of material is available, makes it easier to follow the interplay between paganism and Christianity.

The geographical area broadly corresponding to Northern Italy offers a vast body of material, especially from the second half of the fourth to the first half of the fifth century. There are enough archaeological and epigraphic sources for us to get an idea of the changes in urban organization brought about by Christianity. In terms of literary sources, the North of Italy is a privileged region (as are Cappadocia at the time of Basil and the two Gregories and Syria at the time of John Chrysostom and Theodoret of Cyrrhus) in that we have the sermons of a number of bishops who were very close to Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. These texts have been used to study the economy of the region but they are also basic for elucidating Christian doctrine and practice at the time of Ambrose.
The World of the Panhellenion II. Three Dorian Cities
Authors: Spawforth A. J. , Walker Susan
Published: May 2006

The first part of this study (hereafter Panhellenion I) considered the nature of Hadrian's Panhellenion by looking at its known membership and activities and its social context, and reviewed the impact of the league's foundation on Athens, its capital city, and Eleusis, Attica's most prestigious sanctuary.

Here we concentrate on three Dorian member-cities: Sparta and Argos in the province of Achaia, and Cyrene in Crete-and-Cyrene. In doing so we sometimes need to go beyond the evidence relating specifically to the Panhellenion, since certain features of Greek city-life under the Antonines are best explained in the larger framework of Hadrian's initiatives in the Greek world: in particular a pre-occupation with civic origins, relations of kinship (syngeneia) and recognition through ‘diplomacy’ of the historic primacy of Achaia's most famous cities. In the archaeology of Cyrene and Argos it is possible to discern, as at Athens, a phase of urban development which owed its impetus to Hadrian and which, at Cyrene, embraced a marked archaism of style.
Festive Satire: Julian'sMisopogonand the New Year At Antioch
Authors: Gleason Maud W.
Published: May 2006

One morning early in the year 363, the citizens of Antioch awoke to find, prominently displayed outside the imperial palace, a lengthy and vehement communication from their emperor. He begins with an attack on his own beard, and we know the satire today as theMisopogon, or ‘Beard-Hater’. But it also bore the title ‘Oration on Antioch’ (Antiochikos). The double title is indicative of a parodox in its rhetorical strategy. Normally anAntiochikoswould be a panegyric, and normally a rhetorical description of an emperor's person and achievements should conform to the encomiastic formulae of thebasilikos logos. But Julian in his satire turns the panegyricaltopoiupside down, and abuses the city by joining its citizens in abuse of himself. In so doing he paints a vivid contrast between the emperor, breast shaggy like a lion, beard alive with vermin, fingers stained with ink, and the smooth-skinned Phaeacians of Antioch. Scholars have been embarrassed at the spectacle. Was Julian sufficiently conscious of the dignity of his position?
Monumental Writing and the Expansion of Roman Society in the Early Empire
Authors: Woolf Greg
Published: May 2006

The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures throughout the Empire — an epigraphic boom occurred, in Italy and in every province of the Empire. That explosion of new inscriptions, and the subsequent rise and fall of an epigraphic culture, was experienced by eastern and western provinces alike, in Greek as well as in Latin epigraphy. Many regional epigraphies remain to be characterized in terms of their chronology, but such local studies as have been done strongly suggest that, although there was certainly some inter-regional variation in the scale, rate, and timing of this phenomenon, in its broad outlines this pattern was very widespread. Across the entire Empire, the number of inscriptions set up each year began to rise from the Augustan period and increased more and more steeply through the second century. In every region that has been examined in detail, the majority of extant inscriptions were produced in the late second and early third centuries. The peak or turning-point seems to have been reached at slightly different times in each area. But everywhere the subsequent decline was much faster than the original rise, reaching a new low between the middle and the end of the third century A.D. Epigraphy does survive into the fourth century — in most areas of the Empire, if not in most cities — but late imperial inscriptions are very much rarer and differ markedly from early imperial examples in genre, form, and style.
Teach Yourself how to be a General
Authors: Campbell Brian
Published: May 2006

Normally, little attention is paid to the authors of military manuals in the imperial period. ‘Entertaining though trifling’ is a comment that can generally be heard. Frontinus is more familiar than most because of his distinguished career and other writings, but even his Strategemata is considered more as a source of historical anecdote than as an object of serious study in its own right. Yet the military textbooks fit into the tradition of didactic literature in antiquity and as such raise questions about their scope and purpose, and about what use could be or was made of them. This has special significance in relation to generalship and the evolution of tactics in the Roman empire.
Wine and Wealth in Ancient Italy
Authors: Purcell N.
Published: May 2006

This account of viticulture in Italy during the period from the Punic Wars to the crisis of the third century A.D. is written in the conviction that the ‘economic’ history of the ancient world will remain unacceptably impoverished if it is written in isolation from the social and cultural history of the same period. The orthodoxy which sees a revolution in Italian agriculture in the age of Cato the Censor and a crisis in the time of the emperor Trajan seems to me to be an example of this. It is based on a traditional and limited selection of evidence, and is unable to answer many of the questions which are increasingly being asked about production and exchange in the ancient world, questions about the social background and cultural preferences which underlie production strategies and the evolution of demand. I hope that this study may show some other possibilities, which have still been only partly explored by researchers, of illuminating the changing patterns of Roman agriculture and trade, through the use of comparative evidence and the re-examination of the relevant literary texts for data that are more than simply ‘economic’ in the most restricted sense.
The Bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View
Authors: Eck Werner
Published: May 2006

When in A.D. 130 Hadrian journeyed to Egypt through Judaea, the latter province seemed altogether peaceful and calm. The imperial coinage pronounced the adventus of the Emperor to be a cheerful and blessed event in much the same terms as in other parts of the Empire. Hardly anyone in the company of the Emperor could have guessed that a few years later a revolt would break out in this very province — a revolt which would cast a shadow over Hadrian's later years. The slogans on the Bar Kokhba coins proclaimed the ‘Freedom of Israel’ and ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem’. The war which followed the uprising was cruel and heavy in losses for both sides.

The scholarly debate over ‘The Bar Kokhba revolt and its consequences’ has intensified in recent decades. The papyrological finds in the Judaean Desert, the large-scale archaeological surveys resulting in the discovery of scores of ‘hiding places’ at different sites, and the evaluation of the coinage and the coin-hoards all extended our knowledge, but failed to create more unanimity regarding different aspects of the revolt — its causes, its course, and finally its result for the history of Judaism and for that of Rome. It can hardly come as a surprise to find that the point of view of the ‘modern beholder’ has played a significant role in the interpretation of events. Above all it has been maintained that the threat to Roman power constituted by the revolt has been grossly exaggerated. But this critique pays little heed to powerful evidence which comes from Rome itself and expresses its reaction to the revolt.
The Greek East and Roman Law: The Dossier of M. Cn. Licinius Rufinus
Authors: Millar Fergus
Published: May 2006

In A.D. 530 the Emperor Justinian gave orders that a commission of lawyers should take the 1,500 libri containing the works of the Classical Roman jurists, and condense them into a single work, the Digesta or Pandectae. His purpose was that the result should be a coherent whole, stripped of repetition and contradiction. Fortunately for us, what they actually produced was something which is quite different, and belongs to a type which is familiar to all modern students of the Ancient World: a sourcebook. For what the commission in fact did was to arrange the work by topics, and under each topic to assemble a series of examples of legal reasoning extracted from the surviving works of Classical jurists. Nearly all of these jurists had worked in the Antonine and Severan age, with a few belonging to the period of the Tetrarchy.
The Poets Of Bu Njem: Language, Culture and the Centurionate
Authors: Adams J. N.
Published: May 2006

A good deal has been written about the origin and recruitment of centurions, but their language use has not been analysed as an index to their literacy, culture, educational levels, and (in some cases) bilingualism. This paper will be about the sociolinguistics of the centurionate. I take as my starting point two poems from Bu Njem in the African desert, one of which has only recently been published for the first time.

The military outpost of Bu Njem (Golas, Gholaia) lay 200 km south of Cape Misurata in the desert of Tripolitania. The fort, the construction of which began some time after 24 January 201, was garrisoned by auexillatioof thelegio III Augusta, and later by anumerus collatus. From here there survive ostraca of various kinds dated mainly to the 250s, but in this paper I am going to deal with the unlikely topic of poetic activity within the camp. Curiously, we have poems set up on stone in the name of two centurions, both of them acrostichs which spell out the centurions' names. The first, in iambic senarii and dated 202–3, has the name of Q. Avidius Quintianus, the second, dated to early 222, that of M Porcius Iasucthan;Iasucthanis of Libyan origin. This poem, on a charitable view, is composed in hexameters. The poems provide remarkable evidence for the cultural and linguistic level of centurions, if one can make the assumption that the texts were the responsibility of the two centurions themselves.
The Mysteries of Mithras: A New Account of their Genesis
Authors: Beck Roger
Published: May 2006

In 1896 Franz Cumont published, as the second volume of hisTextes 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.
Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire
Authors: Harris W. V.
Published: May 2006

The exposure of infants, very often but by no means always resulting in death, was widespread in many parts of the Roman Empire. This treatment was inflicted on large numbers of children whose physical viability and legitimacy were not in doubt. It was much the commonest, though not the only, way in which infants were killed, and in many, perhaps most, regions it was a familiar phenomenon. While there was some disapproval of child-exposure, it was widely accepted as unavoidable. Some, especially Stoics, disagreed, as did contemporary Judaism, insisting that all infants, or at least all viable and legitimate infants, should be kept alive. Exposure served to limit the size of families, but also to transfer potential labour from freedom to slavery (or at any rate tode factoslavery). Disapproval of exposure seems slowly to have gained ground. Then, after the sale of infants was authorized by Constantine in A.D. 313, the need for child-exposure somewhat diminished, and at last — probably in 374 — it was subjected to legal prohibition. But of course it did not cease.
Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians
Authors: Rives J.
Published: May 2006

In Minucius Felix' dialogue on the value of Christianity, written in the late second or early third century C.E., the character Caecilius, who presents the anti-Christian arguments, recounts a story about their initiations, ‘a story as loathsome as it is well known’: after the initiate has struck a baby concealed under a covering of flour, those present drink the blood from its wounds and so seal their union (Oct.9.5). Later in the dialogue, Octavius, the defender of Christianity, refutes this slander. The alleged crime, he argues, is so terrible that ‘no one could believe it except the sort of person who would attempt it’. He goes on to point out that pagans, not Christians, are the ones who practise actual human sacrifice. He supports his claim by citing specific examples: the Africans who used to sacrifice their children to Saturn, the Taurians and the Egyptian Busiris who sacrificed foreigners, the Gauls, and lastly the Romans themselves, who in the past would bury alive two Greeks and two Gauls and who in his own day sacrifice men to Jupiter Latiaris (Oct.30.1).
Roman Africa: An Archaeological Review
Authors: Mattingly David J. , Hitchner R. Bruce
Published: May 2006

The significance of the African provinces is well-appreciated in historical studies of the Roman Empire, but there is a distinct lack of good summaries in English on recent developments in the field of study. Some introductory books sacrifice readability in favour of detail, others offer a more synthetic view, but lack depth. The bibliography is now vast and ever more intimidating for the uninitiated; we hope that what follows will serve both as a useful introduction for those new to the field and as a refresher for others. In this review we have concentrated on developments which seem to us to be of particular importance, whilst directing the reader's attention to basic references in other areas. The emphasis throughout is on archaeological work and this will explain short measure having to be given to some important historic and epigraphic studies. Another choice had to be the geographical limits of the study and, mostly, we have restricted our coverage to Africa Proconsularis and Numidia, though certain themes demand expanding the horizons to sites in the Mauretanian provinces and Cyrenaica also. We have considered 1970 as an appropriate start-date for our survey, allowing us to review developments across the last twenty five years, though necessarily with greater emphasis being placed on publications of the last decade.
Virgil and Arcadia
Authors: Jenkyns Richard
Published: May 2006

There is an obstacle to our natural appreciation of Virgil'sEclogueswhich looms as large in their case as in that of any poetry whatever. TheEcloguesform probably the most influential group of short poems ever written: though they themselves take Theocritus as a model, they were to become the fountainhead from which the vast and diverse tradition of pastoral in many European literatures was to spring. To use them as a model was in itself to distort their character: it is one of the greatest ironies of literary history that these elusive, various, eccentric poems should have become the pattern for hundreds of later writers. Moreover, the growth of the later pastoral tradition meant that many things were attributed to Virgil which are not in Virgil. Sometimes they were derived from interpretations which were put upon Virgil in late antiquity but which we now believe to be mistaken; sometimes they are misinterpretations of a much later date; sometimes they originated from new developments in pastoral literature which their inventors had not meant to seem Virgilian, but which in the course of time got foisted back on to Virgil nevertheless. It is hard, therefore, to approach theEcloguesopenly and without preconceptions about what they contain, and even scholars who have devoted much time and learning to them have sometimes continued to hold views about them for which there are upon a dispassionate observation no good grounds at all. No poems perhaps have become so encrusted by the barnacles of later tradition and interpretation as these, and we need to scrape these away if we are to see them in their true shape. My aim here is to do some of this scraping by examining the use of Arcadians and the name of Arcadia in Virgil's work.
Landholding in Late Roman Egypt: The Distribution of Wealth
Authors: Bagnall Roger S.
Published: May 2006

One of the most revealing aspects of any society is the distribution of wealth. In the ancient world, the stratification of landholdings essentially determined the stratification of wealth. There were, to be sure, many other kinds of wealth: funds and commodities for lending, urban rental property, productive enterprises, slaves, ships, and so on. To some extent these were no doubt owned by the same people who owned agricultural land, but the almost total absence of quantifiable data makes generalization difficult. Land, moreover, occupied a unique position in the economy and government of the Roman Empire, both practically and ideologically. The great bulk of taxation fell on the land, and almost all of the burdens of public service both in the cities and in the villages were attached to its ownership. That these disadvantages of land as a form of wealth were insufficient to deter the élite from desiring land is in some measure the result of the enormous ideological preference that all of classical antiquity attached to land as a form of wealth, an ideology connected in part to the relative stability of returns from landed property compared to those from other, more volatile, forms of wealth.
‘Levi quidem de re …’: Julius Caesar as Tyrant and Pedant
Authors: Morgan Llewelyn
Published: May 2006

AtDivus Julius76 Suetonius begins his account of the circumstances which led to the murder of Julius Caesar. He describes those actions committed by Caesar which were considered heinous enough to justify assassination: his acceptance of excessive honours, many of them inappropriate to a mere mortal, and his scorn for traditional procedure. In ch. 77 Suetonius passes from Caesar's unacceptable deeds to his scandalous utterances:

nec minoris inpotentiae uoces propalam edebat, ut Titus Ampius scribit: nihil esse rem publicam, appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie. Sullam nescisse litteras, qui dictaturam deposuerit. debere homines consideratius iam loqui secum ac pro legibus habere quae dicat. eoque arrogantiae progressus est, ut haruspice tristia et sine corde exta quondam nuntiante, futura diceret laetiora, cum uellet; nec pro ostento ducendum, si pecudi cor defuisset.

No less arrogant were his public utterances, which Titus Ampius records: that the state was nothing, a mere name without body or form; that Sulla did not know his A. B. C. when he laid down his dictatorship; that men ought now to be more circumspect in addressing him, and to regard his word as law. So far did he go in his presumption, that when a soothsayer once reported direful inwards without a heart, he said: ‘They will be more favourable when I wish it; it should not be regarded as a portent, if a beast has no heart’.
The Internal Organization of the ArretineTerra SigillataIndustry: Problems of Evidence and Interpretation
Authors: Fülle Gunnar
Published: May 2006

If the field of ancient economy is a battlefield, arguments based on pottery research certainly belong with the best of the weapons. Among the various kinds of pottery serving ancient historians as sources, red-gloss pottery (terra sigillata) manufactured in several parts of the Roman Empire plays an outstanding role. This special kind of pottery bears inscriptions in the form of stamps referring to persons involved in its production. In combination with the archaeological contexts of stamp finds, such as excavated sites of production, transportation, storage, and consumption, these inscriptions enable us to gain an insight into the structures of production and distribution. An additional reason why Roman red-gloss pottery is of very great interest to students of the ancient economy is that it was mass-produced, and exported to all parts of the Empire. Results of research in this field are, therefore, frequently used as weighty arguments in the discussion of the character of the Roman economy as a whole.
Roman Age Structure: Evidence and Models
Authors: Scheidel Walter
Published: May 2006

For many Romans, life was short. In consequence, the young greatly outnumbered the elderly. Historians have long accepted these basic truths, even if they are only beginning to come to terms with the social implications of an alien demographic regime. But how short is ‘short’, and how many Romans were children, how many adults? Does it matter, and can we know?

The importance of demographic structure is not in doubt. High mortality causes scarce energy resources to be wasted in pregnancies and nursing, and poses a disincentive to investment in education. It destabilizes families and households, exposes orphans and widows to risk and potential hardship, and shortens the time-horizons of economic activity. In the long term, average life expectancy is the principal determinant of fertility. Poor chances of survival trigger high birth rates to ensure genetic survival. High fertility, in turn, is negatively correlated with the status and well-being of women, and constrains female participation in economic and public affairs. Overall age structure, in conjunction with cultural practices from marriage to child care, determines the prevalence of orphans and widows, and affects the age-specific distribution of fertility. In sum, age structure is instrumental in framing and shaping expectations and experiences. For this reason alone, our understanding of life in the Roman world is critically dependent on our knowledge of demographic conditions.
The Representation of Literary Materiality in Martial'sEpigrams
Authors: Roman Luke
Published: May 2006

Around the world, covers have become advertisements for their books. The dignity that characterizes something self-contained, lasting, hermetic — something that absorbs the reader and closes the lid over him, as it were, the way the cover of the book closes on the text — has been set aside as inappropriate to the times. The book sidles up to the reader; it no longer presents itself as existing in itself, but rather as existing for something other, and for this very reason the reader feels cheated of what is best in it. Theodor Adorno

In his last book, at the end of a successful, literary career, Martial asks in regard to his own genre of epigram: ‘quid minus esse potest?’ (‘What can be humbler?’, 12.95). Such self-disparagement is not necessarily surprising, since there is no reason to imagine that Martial's success as an epigrammatist would alter his genre's place in the traditional hierarchy of literary seriousness. Martial's denigration of his ownoeuvre, however, goes beyond consciousness of epigram's status as a low genre. The epigrammatist not only registers his genre's formal rank, he develops fully articulated fictional scenarios depicting the nature of his writing and its role in society. According to the most salient and pervasive fiction characterizing Martial's work, epigram is an ephemeral form of literature embedded in specific, social contexts, and dedicated to immediate uses.
The Communication of the Emperor's Virtues
Authors: Noreña Carlos F.
Published: May 2006

The Roman emperor served a number of functions within the Roman state. The emperor's public image reflected this diversity. Triumphal processions and imposing state monuments such as Trajan's Column or the Arch of Septimius Severus celebrated the military exploits and martial glory of the emperor. Distributions of grain and coin, public buildings, and spectacle entertainments in the city of Rome all advertised the emperor's patronage of the urban plebs, while imperial rescripts posted in every corner of the Empire stood as so many witnesses to the emperor's conscientious administration of law and justice. Imperial mediation between man and god was commemorated by a proliferation of sacrificial images that emphasized the emperor's central role in the act of sacrifice. Portrait groups of the imperial family were blunt assertions of dynasty and figured the emperor as the primary guarantor ofRoma aeterna.Public sacrifices to deified emperors and the imagery of imperial apotheosis surrounded the emperor with an aura of divinity. An extraordinary array of rituals, images, and texts, then, gave visual and symbolic expression to the emperor's numerous functions and publicized the manifold benefits of imperial rule.
A Market Economy in the Early Roman Empire
Authors: Temin Peter
Published: May 2006

The economy of the early Roman Empire has been an object of study for at least the last century. The discussion has been marked by continuing debate, known sometimes as the primitivist/modern debate and at other times as the Finley debate, following his famous Sather lectures, The Ancient Economy. This paper is a contribution to this debate, written by an economist rather than an ancient historian. My purpose is to define the concept of a ‘market economy’, and to see if it fits the evidence we have for the early Roman Empire.

Finley declared that, ‘ancient society did not have an economic system which was an enormous conglomeration of interdependent markets’. He drew implicitly on research by Polanyi to oppose the views of Rostovtzeff within the field of ancient history and those of Fogel and Engerman in economic history, but he did not explicitly join their conceptual apparatuses. Morris has summarized the debate fuelled by Finley's dramatic lectures in his foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition and argued that the controversy is still vigorous today. I hope to clarify the issues in this debate and even resolve the debate for the period of the early Roman Empire.
Livy's Alexander Digression (9.17–19): Counterfactuals and Apologetics
Authors: Morello Ruth
Published: May 2006

Orthodox historians have tended to dislike attempts to think counterfactually about the past, on the grounds that ‘virtual history’ offers little more than entertainment and degenerates too easily into banal trivialities. In addition, it provokes fears about the offending historian's commitment to the truth and the consequent effect on his readers’ historical memories; a recent essay in the New Statesman, deploring the increasing presence of counterfactual history in the syllabus for national exams in British schools, condemned it as an agent of ‘collective amnesia’. E. P. Thompson was more trenchant: ‘unhistorical shit’. Yet popular and professional interest in counterfactual history continues to grow, spawning a recent radio series and a number of books on the ‘what if?’ theme. It seems, then, an opportune time to reconsider the famous passage of counterfactual history in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, the Alexander digression at 9.17–19, a passage which, it so happens, one popular website lists as the first example of the genre. This paper offers, after a brief survey of previous scholarship (Section II), an account of Livy's allusions both to his sources and predecessors and to his own text (Section III), followed by an integrated reading (Section IV) which will argue more fully that the passage embodies central Livian ideas about the utility of historical writing, that it is thematically tightly woven into its place in Book 9, and, finally, that it offers a powerful critique of one-man rule which has important consequences for our understanding of the historian's view of Augustus.
Plant species associations in alpine‐subnival vegetation patches in the Central Caucasus
Authors: Kikvidze Zaal
Published: May 2006

Abstract. Patches of herbaceous vegetation found at the boundary of the alpine and subnival belts in the Central Caucasus (3000 m) were analysed for species composition, interspecific associations, as well as for relations between age, size and diversity of the patches. 34 plant species were recorded. Positive and negative associations were found among the most frequent species. A model is presented that describes the cumulation of species in patches during succession. In the final and stable successional stage, the maximum number of species within a patch was nine.

Species composition varies in patches of different age, typical alpine species being more frequent in older ones. The results are interpreted as evidence for niche differentiation and selection of species composition through the 'sieve’ of interspecific relations, taking place during succession in the studied patches.
Subarctic forest‐tundra vegetation gradients: The sigmoid wave hypothesis
Authors: Timoney K. P. , La Roi G. H. , Dale M. R. T.
Published: May 2006

Abstract. Spatial changes in tree and upland tundra cover in response to a complex environmental gradient and to landscape factors were investigated in the high subarctic forest‐tundra of NW Canada. Vegetation and terrain studies provided ground truth for a grid of 1314 air photos which covered 24 % of the Canadian high subarctic and some of the adjacent low subarctic and low arctic. Across the high subarctic, gradual spatial change in % cover of tree and upland tundra vegetation is typical at both high and low cover values, with more rapid change occurring at intermediate cover. Cover gradients of zonal tree and tundra vegetation in the forest‐tundra region in general follow a sigmoid pattern. Tundra and tree patch sizes increase in area and variability with higher tundra and tree cover, respectively.