Numerous inscriptions from different parts of the Empire, and particularly from North Africa, testify to the munificence of the urban aristocracy. By munificence I mean the spending of wealthy individuals on, for example, monuments or projects of construction of one sort or another for their cities, or handouts of money, food or other commodities to their fellow-citizens. The significance of munificence from an economic viewpoint can be readily appreciated: it would not be an exaggeration to say that the prosperity of the cities rested in large part on the generosity of their leading citizens. In this paper, however, I will be concerned with some of the political and institutional implications of munificence. If the cities were financially dependent on their aristocracies, then the possession of wealth and the willingness to spend would clearly hold the key to both the acquisition and the retention of power. At the same time, we might expect some form of public control to have been exerted over aristocratic spending. In this connection, it may be significant that much of the expenditure of which we have record was incurred by individuals when they assumed magistracies or priesthoods or entered the local council. When would the wealthy have more readily submitted to financial levies than in the context of election victories? On the other hand, would it have been necessary to exact contributions from successful politicians, who would perhaps have shown their gratitude—and self-esteem—without any prompting through some form of public expenditure ? If any were inclined to hesitate, would they not have responded when reminded of the liberality of their predecessors ? In fact, it is not difficult to show that the dictates of the law, the weight of custom, and personal considerations and motives are all relevant; to determine the relative importance of the three factors is a more formidable task.

What the Roman tradition, literary and artistic, has to tell us of the heavenly spheres is of Greek and Oriental origin, and it would be futile to go behind hellenized Rome: early Roman religion, though it had an extensive worship of heavenly gods, ignored the universe entirely. An examination of the Etruscan tradition leads to different conclusions. It offers, roughly speaking, three larger complexes to such an examination. One is the bronze model of a liver from Piacenza, used for extispicy and divided into many sections. The second is the doctrine about lightning, mainly to be found in Pliny and Seneca. The third is a list of gods, distributed among the sixteen regions of the heavens, in Martianus Capella (fourth-fifth century A.D.). The aim of this paper in its first part is to analyse this third complex (with occasional reference to the other two).

Cumae was the first city founded by Greek colonists on the mainland of Italy. It attained pre-eminence for a time in the Bay of Naples and its influence was exercised over a wide area for more than 500 years. Yet the detailed phases of its long history are still very nebulous and patchy. References in ancient writers deal mainly with its contacts with the rising power of Rome. Little excavation has been carried out on the site (apart from the cemeteries) and the published information is mostly of a general nature, more suited to tourist appreciation than to that of serious students. Serious students do not lack interest in the problems presented by Cumae, but they may perhaps lack familiarity with its topography. Whatever its faults of scholarship may be, this present study is at least the product of eight years' residence and assiduous delving into the archaeology of the Cuma/Bacoli Peninsula.

The story of Cumae is naturally divisible into two stages; the Greek and the Roman. Most accounts begin with a discussion about the date of its foundation, and where the colonists came from. But it is not the date that interests us here in this enquiry; it is the reason why exploring sailormen not only visited here but chose Cumae as their trading station, when there were apparently more attractive sites at Misenum and other places round the Bay of Naples; to say nothing of all the sites they will presumably have passed by on their voyage from Greece.

No aristocrat of the fourth century A.D. was so brilliantly successful or so widely hated as S. Petronius Probus. Greedy for public office when his peers preferred opulent leisure, more at home amid the intrigues of court than the salons of Rome, a Christian when most of his peers were still pagan, he rose to a pinnacle of wealth and power.

His unusually long career is abundantly documented by literary, legal and epigraphic sources. But the details have always been problematic. And in 1971 G. Barbieri published a new dedication from Capua that raised a whole new set of problems.

The pompa circensis, the solemn procession that marched to the Circus Maximus on the occasion of the ludi magni, was headed by the boys and young men of the state, those whose fathers had the census equester going on horseback and the others on foot. The object of the procession was, Dionysius says, depending on Fabius for his account, to show to strangers how numerous and powerful were the youths about to come to man's estate. The martial ceremony must have been a stirring preparation for the military service that in early times was the duty of every Roman citizen. There was further preparation for such service at Rome. Cicero tells us that in former times, for a year after the taking of the toga virilis, the young tiro was trained at Rome in exercitatio ludusque campestris. This preliminary training was restored for the young noble by Augustus who felt its importance as a preparation for the military service insisted upon for all who sought political preferment. Indeed, the old tirocinium, as Rostovtzeff has shown, seems to have been lengthened from one to two years.

There is hardly a more important character in the history of the Roman Republic than the young Patrician who first laid down the lines of Roman policy in Greece and the East—and hardly a more mysterious one, despite frequent discussion. It is only the first and perhaps the most puzzling of the problems concerning him that will occupy us here; but the very fact that it is the first gives it an importance quite independent of other considerations: we are not likely to solve the others as long as this one is ignored.

How did a young man of about twenty-nine come to be elected to a consulship and entrusted with a major war that had been going badly for Rome, after holding no office higher than the quaestorship—and holding even this lowly charge so inconspicuously that Livy does not even mention him in it? The very facts make it clear that we cannot give a certain answer: the evidence is not good enough.

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.

Sterrett mentioned long ago that there are twelve mahale (divisions) in the modern town of Yalowatch. Two of these are separate from the rest on the SW. I have often tried to get a list of the mahale; but no two persons agreed about them and, as the town has grown, the distinction seems to have been forgotten as inconsistent with modern ‘progress.’ Once I gathered a group of men, and instituted a regular ‘third degree’ questioning. There was general acquiescence in the number 12; it is a good number; but some maintained that some quarter of the town was a mahale, while others declared that it was not really a mahale. Probably the classification represents the persistence and gradual disappearance of a former condition. Yalowatch was in the fourteenth century one of the six great cities of Hamid (H.G.A.M. p. 390).

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.

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.

One of the most remarkable phenomena within the pattern of monetary circulation in antiquity is the presence of large numbers of Roman Republican denarii, for the most part struck between c. 130 and 31 B.C., on the soil of present-day Romania, roughly ancient Dacia. Absolute figures are impressive; it has been calculated that taking together isolated finds, hoards closing with Republican pieces, nuclei of Republican coins in Roman Imperial hoards and Republican coins in collections in Romania the total comes to something like 25,000 pieces. But absolute figures are themselves unable to convey fully the uniqueness of the phenomenon; this emerges most clearly from a comparison with neighbouring territories.

There are no known hoards of Republican denarii from the territory of the Moldavian S.S.R.; the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the north-west have produced between them a mere handful of Republican hoards; Jugoslavia and Albania to the west and Greece to the south are slightly more productive, but display no trace of the feature characteristic of Romania, a great block of hoards, the latest coin of which belongs in the first century B.C.

It has for a long time been recognized that a sharp decline in the prosperity and strength of municipal life in the Roman Empire took place during and shortly after the reign of Diocletian, and this has been attributed largely to his bureaucratic administrative system and heavy increases in taxation, with their consequent pressure upon the urban middle class—the curiales. Of the essential correctness of this view there can be no doubt; and apart from possible new evidence there is little more to be said on that phase of the subject. But there are other aspects of this important problem which seem to have received less attention than they deserve. Bureaucracies and crushing taxes have not always destroyed the middle classes of the countries in which they have existed, as the case of France under the Old Régime clearly proves; so there must be other contributory factors which helped to produce this result in the case under consideration. Some of these have been dealt with ; but one at least—the continuance under the new system of a type of internal municipal government suited only to the most prosperous period of the system which it replaced—seems to have been largely, if not entirely, ignored by investigators. Diocletian not only tried to make the municipia of his empire efficient agents of the central government, but in addition attempted to render them once more the energetic and prosperous organisms which they had been before the Military Anarchy ; and, as his efforts in the end contributed powerfully to produce exactly the opposite result, this portion of his work is worthy of note, if for no other reason than to serve as a warning for would-be benevolent despots in other ages.

The exchange of beneficia — gifts and services — was an important feature of Greek and Roman society at all periods. Its prominence was reflected in the number of philosophical works that analysed the phenomenon. From the fourth century B.C. onwards, εὐεργεσία and χάρις became subjects of moral discourse. Xenophon, particularly in his Socratic works and the Cyropaideia, and Aristotle, in his rhetorical and ethical writings, already anticipate much of what the Hellenistic schools were to elaborate. One of Aristotle's followers gave the first clear formulation we have of the idea that ‘the giving and interchange of favours holds together the lives of men’. Aristotle's successor Theophrastus wrote the first treatise we know of to deal wholly and specifically with the subject of χάρις. His On Gratitude (περὶ χάριτος: D.L. 5.48) had a long line of successors, including Epicurus' On Gifts and Gratitude (περὶ δώρων καὶ χάριτος: D.L. 10.28) and Chrysippus' Stoic treatments of the subject, both as part of a general work On Duties (περὶ κατορθωμάτων) and in a separate work On Favours (περὶ χαρίτων) (SVF 3.674; 2.1081 ).

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.

During a brief visit to Afyon Karahisar in central Anatolia in September, 1954, my attention was drawn by Bay Süleiman Gökce, Curator of the Vilayet Museum, to a large inscription which had recently been brought to him. It had been found at Sulmenli (Eulandra ?) some nine miles away, and salvaged by local officials. Thanks to the Curator's kindness I was able to make a copy on the spot and take a squeeze and photograph. The latter was improved upon considerably by Mr. Michael Ballance, former Fellow of the British Institute at Ankara, who visited Afyon in September, 1955, at my request, with the result that many of the difficulties in reading a battered and incomplete text have been resolved.

The inscription (pls. VII and VIII) had been carefully cut on a large slab of greyish-yellow marble with a moulded edge. It had been broken on the left-hand side and below. There was a hole in the right side approximately 0·64 m. from the top for a dowel about 2 cm. square in section. There were two more holes in the back, and it is clear that the inscription had been originally fixed to a wall, perhaps in the village which won the case. Height, 0·82 m.; width at widest point, 0·69 m.; thickness, 0·12 m.; letters, 1·4–1·5 cm. for the first twenty-nine lines, and thereafter approximately 1·6 cm. The greater part of the first forty-one lines have survived, the surviving portion containing between forty-eight and fifty-six letters on each line.

One of the effects of the defeat of king Antiochus, followed by a treaty of peace whose terms limited his fleet to ten vessels of war and prevented him from sending an armed vessel to the west of the Calycadnus, had been that the slight amount of control, which the kings of Syria had formerly exercised on the coast of Cilicia Tracheia, could no longer be maintained. As yet the Romans themselves had no interest in the districts outside the Taurus. Of the southern coast of Asia Minor, Lycia was handed over to the Rhodians, Pamphylia after some delay to Eumenes, and although western Cilicia remained a part of the Syrian kingdom, the terms of the treaty effectually prevented the nominal rulers from exercising any sort of control. It is scarcely surprising that the wild tribes which inhabited both sides of the Taurus once more betook themselves to occupations which had been natural to them from the earliest times. The piracy which, according to Strabo, now began in these waters, was moreover encouraged by the Rhodians and the kings of Egypt, in so far as it crippled the Syrian power, while Rome, if we may except a tour of inspection by Scipio Aemilianus without armed force, took no cognisance of its existence. Rather the operations of the pirates, as the purveyors of slaves, were regarded, together with the similar activities of the tax-farmers, as an integral part of the economic basis of life.

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.

On the second day of January 63 B.C. Cicero, with the full dignity of a consul, appeared in the Forum to address the Populus at a contio (assembly). This occasion, when he voiced his opposition to the agrarian legislation moved by the tribune Rullus and his colleagues, can be remembered because a text of the speech has survived as De lege agararia II. His words were apparently persuasive, since the bill was defeated in the subsequent voting of the tribal assembly. Eloquence was Cicero's greatest political asset and the De lege agraria II might be read as testimony to the power of words alone. Yet while it might be tempting for a literary critic to imagine that ‘when he stood before his audience, Cicero had at his disposal only words and the stylistic genius to construct from those words arguments that would shape men's opinions and move their hearts’, the words and genius, although powerful as political weapons, operated in conjunction with the physical presence and ideological pre-eminence that the consul brought to the Rostra. There Cicero engineered persuasiveness by presenting a congruence between his verbal argument and his dignity as speaker. Since knowledge of Rullus' legislation is wholly dependent upon Cicero's representation of it, Cicero's speech might best serve then to illustrate what this embodied rhetoric suggests about the relations between a political actor and those who heard and saw him.

More than thirty years — a generation of man — have passed since the chance discovery in 1968 of what has been referred to since as the collegium of the Augustales at Misenum. In addition to statuary and architectural elements of exceptional interest, the excavations, which presented formidable technical problems, have yielded a rich epigraphical dossier pertaining to the local Augustales, and to political, social, economic, religious, and administrative aspects of their organization from the Julio-Claudian and late Flavian periods to the end of the Antonine age. One of these inscriptions has at last received appropriate scholarly attention; it both whets the appetite for more and reveals the inadequacies of the cursory accounts of the dossier published previously. Now that all the material recovered from the site has been transported to the Castello Aragonese di Baia, and is attractively displayed in the new Museo Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei, one dares to hope that the entire complex and its contents will soon receive the comprehensive archaeological and historical treatment that they so richly deserve.