The last half-century has seen a remarkable advance in our knowledge of the magical beliefs and practices of later antiquity. But in comparison with this general progress the special branch of magic known as theurgy has been relatively neglected and is still imperfectly understood. The first step towards understanding it was taken more than fifty years ago by Wilhelm Kroll, when he collected and discussed the fragments of the Chaldaean Oracles. Since then the late Professor Joseph Bidez has disinterred and explained a number of interesting Byzantine texts, mainly from Psellus, which appear to derive from Proclus' lost commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, perhaps through the work of Proclus' Christian opponent, Procopius of Gaza; and Hopfner and Eitrem have made valuable contributions, especially in calling attention to the many common features linking theurgy with the Greco-Egyptian magic of the papyri. But much is still obscure, and is likely to remain so until the scattered texts bearing on theurgy have been collected and studied as a whole (a task which Bidez seems to have contemplated, but left unaccomplished at his death). The present paper does not aim at completeness, still less at finality, but only at (i) clarifying the relationship between Neoplatonism and theurgy in their historical development, and (ii) examining the actual modus operandi in what seem to have been the two main branches of theurgy.

Our knowledge of the pottery industry in ancient Egypt has so far been derived from sculptured reliefs showing potters at work, from a few excavations of kilns and from chemical analyses of pottery wares. Documentary evidence has now come to light in the form of three pottery leases from Oxyrhynchus, all dated to the middle of the third century a.d.

They are so closely related in subject-matter, terminology, date and the names of the contracting parties that I publish in full only the earliest and most complete (which I shall refer to as A); but I include references to the more significant details of the other two (B and C). Their importance lies in the fact that they reveal a remarkably large scale industry, and also much concerning the techniques and terminology of the pottery industry, especially the names of the clays used and the sizes of the jars.

The hilltop fortress town of Qaṣr Ibrîm is situated in Egyptian Nubia, some 150 miles south of Aswan. Transformed into an island by the rising waters of Lake Nasser, it has been excavated under the aegis of the Egypt Exploration Society since 1963. Until 1976 work was under the direction of Professor J. M. Plumley (University of Cambridge); the 1978 season was led by Professor W. Y. Adams of the University of Kentucky (site director) and R. D. Anderson, honorary secretary of the E.E.S. (administrative director and epigraphist). A site that attracted Egyptian interest at least as early as the New Kingdom and formed part of the district under the special protection of Horus of Mi'am, Qasr Ibrîm was for much of its history a military stronghold, administrative centre, and place of religious pilgrimage. Occupation can be traced for some 3,500 years till the expulsion in 1811 of the ‘Bosnian’ mercenaries stationed at Ibrîm soon after 1517 by the Ottoman Selim I. Ideal conditions of preservation, only now threatened by the lake, have combined with this long history to provide an astonishing wealth of documents from a wide variety of periods.

From the mid-third century, Gothic tribes inhabited lands north of the river Danube; they were destined, however, to play a major role in the destruction of the Roman Empire and the creation of the medieval world order. In the last quarter of the fourth century, in the face of Hun attacks, some Goths (those commonly known as Visigoths) fled into the Roman Empire, winning a famous victory at Hadrianople in 378 and sacking Rome in 410. They later moved further west to found a kingdom in southern Gaul and Spain. Of equal historical importance are those Goths (usually known as Ostrogoths) who remained north of the Danube under Hun domination from c. 375 to c. 450. They too then entered the Empire, and, under Theoderic the Great, established a kingdom in Italy which is known to us through Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Ennodius. Much less well known, however, is the formative stage of their history when the Ostrogoths endured Hun domination, and it is on our sources for this period that this study will concentrate.

With the increasing sophistication of excavation and exploration our knowledge of the provinces of Rome has grown stunningly in recent years. It will, one may hope, continue to grow; but the prospect of further advances ought not to be a deterrent to periodic reassessment and synthesis. Specialization, inevitable and productive, nevertheless runs the risk of a loss of perspective. The study of the Roman provinces involves widely divergent skills, and this is especially true for regions at the fringes of the empire. The pages which follow constitute a gathering together of new material on the history of Roman Arabia. Incorporated in this report are various observations and discoveries of my own,—some the result of a profitable visit to the Middle East in January of 1970. In writing I have had particularly in mind the needs of Roman historians, including myself: this paper represents a preliminary stage in the preparation of a history of the province of Arabia. Obviously there can be no continuous narrative history here or a balanced consideration of all aspects of the province. New evidence and important problems (old or new) are at issue.

The greatest legal monuments to Late Antiquity are the Code of Theodosius II, published in 438, and the Code, Digest and Institutes of Justinian, produced between 529 and 534. The men on whose shoulders the main responsibility for their compilation rested were two imperial quaestors, each backed by teams of experts. Antiochus Chuzon, quaestor in 429, saw the Theodosian Code from its inception in the year of his quaestorship through a second stage in 435 to its completion in time for the marriage of Valentinian III and Theodosius' daughter Eudoxia in October 437 and publication in the following year. century later, under Justinian, Tribonian, perhaps the most famous and powerful of all quaestors, proved his organizational and legal ability during the production of the first edition of Justinian's Code in 529 and became the moving force behind the Digest of the works of the Roman jurists, the Institutes (an update of Gaius on the principles of law) and the second edition of the Code, all of which were crammed into the five years that followed.

My intention is to base the present summary on the discoveries which have been made in the field during the past twenty years, but obviously within the limits of the space at my disposal I can only indicate the main outlines. My main concern is with the provinces of Germania Superior and Raetia, but I shall also refer from time to time to the results of recent research in Germania Inferior. The main Map B (opposite p. 176) is supplemented by Map A (fig. 16), which shows the military sites of the Augustan-Tiberian period, and by Map C (fig. 23), which indicates the sites of the late-Roman period. Each map is supported by its own bibliographical list; these should be consulted when specific footnote-references are lacking in the text. These lists and footnotes, wherever possible, give references only to the most recent literature and have been reduced to a minimum. For the General Works to be consulted, and for the Abbreviations used, see lists below (pp. 196 ff.).

In A.D. 249 the emperor Trajan Decius issued an edict requiring the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to sacrifice to the gods. With this decree, he also inaugurated the first empire-wide persecution of Christians. Previously, persecutions of Christians had always been local affairs determined by local conditions. Thereafter, persecutions were largely instigated by emperors and took place on an imperial scale. It has consequently become common to distinguish pre-Decian persecution, characterized by its local and ad hoc nature, from the centrally organized persecutions of Decius in A.D. 249–50, Valerian in A.D. 257–60, and Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximinus in A.D. 303–13. The importance of the decree as a turning point in the history of Christian persecution is thus widely recognized. Beyond this, discussions of the decree have usually focused on its precise nature and the motivations behind it; given the limited evidence, however, these discussions have tended to be inconclusive. In this paper I will return to a consideration of the decree's effects, but in the context of traditional religion rather than that of Christianity. I will argue that, seen from this perspective, the decree was a highly innovative and important step towards a radical restructuring of religious organization in the Roman world.

Capitolia, temples to the triad of divinities Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, Iuno Regina and Minerva Augusta, are often considered part of the standard urban ‘kit’ of Roman colonies. Their placement at one end of the forum is sometimes seen as schematizing and replicating in miniature the relationship between the Capitolium at Rome and the Forum Romanum below it. Reliably attested Capitolia are, however, rarer in the provinces than this widespread view assumes and there seems to be no relationship between civic status and the erection of a Capitolium. Indeed, outside Italy there are very few Capitolia other than in the African provinces, where nearly all known examples belong to the second or early third century a.d., mostly in the Antonine period. This regional and chronological clustering demands explanation, and since it comes too late to be associated with the foundation of colonies, and there is no pattern of correlation with upgrades in civic status, we propose that the explanation has to do with the growing power and influence of North African élites, who introduced the phenomenon from Rome. Rather than being a form of temple imposed from the centre on the provinces, Capitolia were adopted by provincial élites on the basis of their relationship with Rome.

‘Sit ergo nobis orator quem constituimus is qui a M. Catone finitur, vir bonus dicendi peritus, verum, id quod et ille posuit prius et ipsa natura potius ac maius est, utique vir bonus.’ (Inst. XII, 1, 1). Why did Quintilian insist so strongly on the moral qualities of the orator ? The question has not been persistently enough asked. Austin, for example, thinks that it is only ‘a steadfast sincerity of purpose throughout’ that redeems the first chapter of Book Twelve from ‘mere moralizing’. And it only takes the problem a stage further back to say that this is a matter of Stoic influence. Even if Posidonius did formulate in connexion with rhetoric a maxim on the lines of Strabo's οὐχ οἷόν τε ἀγαθὸν γενέσθαι ποιητὴν μὴ πρότερον γενηθέντα ἄνδρα ἀγαθόν, we must still ask why Quintilian troubled to give this Stoic view such new prominence. After all, ‘oratori…nihil est necesse in cuiusquam iurare leges’ (XII, 2, 26). And it is clear that Quintilian realized that he was innovating. Cicero, he writes, despite the width of his conception, thought it enough to discuss merely the type of oratory that should be used by the perfect orator: ‘at nostra temeritas etiam mores ei conabitur dare et adsignabit officia.’ (XII, pr. 4). This is perhaps to schematize the contrast a little over-dramatically. Cicero had certainly written in theDe Oratore: ‘Quarum virtutum expertibus si dicendi copiam tradiderimus, non eos quidem oratores effecerimus, sed furentibus quaedam arma dederimus.’ (III, 55). But there is no doubt that Cicero was not primarily concerned with the moral aspect. As the leading orator of his day, he may have thought it indelicate or superfluous to stress that the perfect orator must be a good man. Moreover, it was not clear that the troubles of Cicero's day were the result of morally bad orators: one had to look back to Saturninus and Glaucia for examples of the evils caused by unscrupulous use of words.

The rich finds of statues and inscriptions from Aphrodisias in Caria have done much in recent years to illuminate the world of the late Roman politician, the world of governors and local magnates. Aphrodisias has also recently provided important new evidence for the philosophical image of late antiquity. In 1981–2, the excavations under Professor K. T. Erim recovered a remarkable group of marble shield portraits and busts that represent both contemporary late antique philosophers and ‘classic’ figures of the hellenic past. These portraits add a new dimension to our knowledge of Aphrodisias as an intellectual centre and provide a vivid insight into the pagan culture and education of late antiquity. We are in the world of Eunapius’ Lives of the Sophists. We are probably in the context of a philosophical school, perhaps the philosophical school of late Roman Aphrodisias.

What we know of Roman political life under the early Empire we owe mostly to senatorial writers, and to an eques, Suetonius; a single Imperial freedman, Phlegon of Tralles, has left some scraps of information about the Court in his own time and before. It is therefore worth paying some attention when we have a lengthy text which reproduces the observations on human life and fortune of a man who was himself the slave of an Imperial freedman. Epictetus has been little used as a historical source; it is the aim of this paper to bring out both the extent and the value of his references to Roman society and politics in his own time.

Before we can assess the value of these references, we must examine both the experience on which they are based and the authenticity of the text in which they occur. Epictetus originated from Hierapolis in Phrygia; according to an inscription he was born a slave. Either by birth or sale, he belonged to Epaphroditus, the freedman and a libellis of Nero, who after Nero's death survived unharmed until relegated, and then (in 95) executed, by Domitian. Whether Epaphroditus remained a libellis under the Flavians is not clear, though the likelihood is that he did not. This view would be supported if we could be sure that it was the same Epaphroditus who encouraged Josephus in the writing of his Antiquitates, completed in 93–4.

In recent years the ‘rex sociusque et amicus’ of the Roman Empire—frequently, if mistakenly, called a ‘client king’—has been the subject of much study, notably by D. Braund. Although ostensibly Braund and others are discussing the position and role of these kings on all the Roman frontiers, they concentrate in the main on those in the east. This is perhaps inevitable, since literary and epigraphic evidence abounds for the east, while it is scarce and often ambiguous for the west. Unfortunately direct comparison between east and west is meaningless: conditions which can be seen to apply to Rome's relations with her neighbours in the east cannot always be transferred to the west. Unfortunately direct comparison between east and west is meaningless: conditions which can be seen to apply to Rome's relations with her neighbours in the east cannot always be transferred to the west. In Greece and Asia Minor Rome was dealing with developed societies who could be integrated into a Roman administrative system; in the west, on the other hand, the peoples living beyond the frontiers, and indeed within them, were culturally less well-developed; here Rome had, on the whole, to negotiate with constantly changing tribal chiefs rather than with established monarchies.

Perhaps the most significant feature of the end of paganism in Rome is that we do know about it; in the words of one of the earliest students of this death of a religion, Beugnot, ‘L'histoire n'a daigné qu'assister aux funérailles du paganisme.’ That this is so is due largely to the central position occupied in the religious history of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, by the senatorial aristocracy of Rome.

I. No Roman definition of nobilis or novus homo exists. Mommsen held that the nobiles comprised:

(a) all patricians;

(b) those descended from patricians who had effected a transitio ad plebem;

(c) those descended from plebeians who had held curule offices, viz. the offices of dictator, magister equitum, censor, consul, praetor, curule aedile. They were thus identical with the persons who had the ius imaginum. (On this footing Mommsen ought to have included plebeian aediles, at least for the post-Sullan era.) All others, including those who were the first of their lines to hold curule office, were novi. This theory has been generally abandoned in favour of Gelzer's; Afzelius argued that it corresponded to the conception of nobility in the second century, but not to that prevalent in Cicero's time. Yet it may after all be right.

It is a well-established view that in the century following the Hannibalic War the Italian countryside saw the expropriation of its free peasantry and the introduction of slave-staffed villas. This assumption of fact underlies much modern historical research. As one recent study put it: ‘When we compare Roman with American slavery, the growth of slavery in Roman Italy seems surprising. In the eighteenth century, slavery was used as a means of recruiting labour to cultivate newly discovered lands for which there was no adequate local labour force…. In Roman Italy…slaves were recruited to cultivate land which was already being cultivated by citizen peasants. We have to explain not only the import of slaves but the extrusion of citizens'. The usual answer has been that land was the largest single available investment for the wealth which the upper classes had derived from imperialism and was also the most socially acceptable investment. But despite postulation of a largely economic motive, the approach taken by historians has been mainly social and political. The explanation, however, and the type of approach involved owe much of their plausibility and hence popularity to what is also their greatest weakness, namely somewhat circular argumentation. The evidence on which the phenomenon and its explanation have been constructed is above all that of the literary sources, and the context in which this information is given is almost invariably political—the obvious and major instance is the Gracchan reforms. It should hardly surprise us, then, that this view of Republican agrarian history provides a neat socio-economic explanation for the political upheavals of the later Republic for which we again take our main evidence from the very same sources. Such validation is only apparent. Perhaps it speaks for the internal consistency of these literary sources; certainly it illustrates our pathetic imprisonment within the ‘facts’ and ‘interpretations’—one could say tout court the bias—of these sources. There is little to be gained from further introspective critique of this type of evidence.

The aim of this article is to consider three questions which seem to me to be crucial to the understanding of the late-republican and Augustan censuses: (a) Why was only one lustrum—that of 69—performed between 86 and 28 B.C.? (b) Does this mean that there was only one census of the Roman people held in that period ? (c) Why was the figure of civium capita published in 28 B.C. (4,063,000) so much larger than that for 69 (900,000 or 910,000) ? The third question was re-opened recently when Professor Arnold Toynbee, in a long Annex on the republican census-figures in the first volume of Hannibal's Legacy, endorsed Beloch's view, which Tenney Frank had rejected, that Augustus used radically different criteria for his enumeration from those employed by the censors of the Republic. Moreover, P. A. Brunt has indicated his adherence to Beloch's view in several places, and defends it in detail in his forthcoming book on Italian manpower.

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.