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 to de facto slavery). 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.

The importance of Beloch's Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt and its influence on subsequent research in ancient demography can hardly be overstated. This book represents the key-stone of all modern investigation on size, structure, and, to a certain extent, dynamics of ancient populations. It was the first overall scientific treatment of the subject and it is still unparalleled in its scope. An attempt at its critical evaluation is not just an historiographical exercise: we must come to terms with Beloch's Bevölkerung, because its detailed treatment of most of the topics concerning the population of the ancient world is at the root of all modern debates and controversies.

Much recent criticism of Roman love elegy, especially Propertian love elegy, has been concerned with the exposure of elegy's ego and puella as poetic constructions whose ‘partially realistic’ characteristics and actions serve as metaphorical representations of the poet's writing practice and poetic ideals. As Duncan Kennedy has pointed out, however, this discourse of representation has already threatened to create its own limitations of applicability, as it privileges the ‘partial realism’ of love elegy's first-person narratives, in which an authorial male narrator (ego) writes of his female subject (puella), at the expense of the more openly unrealistic representational strategies of works such as Ovid's Heroides and Fasti or, the more immediate concern of this article, the fourth book of Propertius' elegies.

With the publication of the Greek part of the Babatha Archive in 1989 and some of the documents from the Greek-Syriac archives of Mesopotamia and the Middle Euphrates in 1989–1991, the contribution of perishable material from places other than Egypt to the study of the Roman Near East and the Roman Empire in general has become obvious. But this is just the tip of an iceberg that has been surfacing for a while. The parchments and papyri from Dura Europus, discovered in the 1920s, were published in final form in 1959: they range from the first century C.E. to the middle of the third century C.E. with texts mainly in Latin and Greek, a few in Aramaic and Iranian and one in Syriac.

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

In a recent issue of this Journal, M. Alexander Speidel published a new document concerning Roman military pay, a receipt from Vindonissa dating to A.D. 38. This document, he claims, provides the missing link, which allows him to present a table of pay rates for legionaries and auxiliaries from Caesar to Diocletian and prove finally the proposition resurrected by M. P. Speidel that soldiers of the auxiliary cohorts were paid five sixths of the annual pay of legionaries. From a re-examination of the texts and documents traditionally used as evidence for the pay rates of the Roman military, I conclude that, although we can establish the rates of legionary infantry pay from the date of the increase under Caesar until A.D. 197, we have little evidence for legionary pay rates in the third century and, since most of the documents provide us with figures which are unknown proportions of the annual pay of the soldiers concerned, the evidence for auxiliary pay is not sufficient to allow the calculation of exact pay rates for any period. There are, therefore, no grounds for believing either the five-sixths theory as elaborated by M. Alexander Speidel or, indeed, any of the many other theories that have been proposed. Nevertheless, the documentation can be interpreted to establish likely minimum figures for auxiliary pay rates in the first century A.D. This interpretation of the documents suggests that there was, in fact, no difference between the rates of pay of auxiliary and legionary infantry and the cavalry of the legions and alae, a controversial conclusion that has previously been avoided for reasons central to much of Roman imperial military historiography.

Perusal of over a thousand years of the fasti of the Romans' eponymous magistracy is sufficient to demonstrate that Roman onomastic practice did not stand still. Why, then, is there a tendency to see the system of three names (tria nomina, i.e. praenomen, nomen gentilicium, and cognomen) as the perfection and culmination of the Roman naming system rather than as a transitory stage in an evolutionary process? The simple answer is probably that usage of the tria nomina happens to be typical of the best documented class in one of the best documented, and certainly most studied, eras of Roman history — the late Republic and early Empire. This perspective tends to pervade discussion of post-classical developments, the basic outline of which is clear from a glancing comparison of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, which catalogues eminent persons of the first to third centuries A.D., with the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, covering the fourth to seventh. The difference in their very organizational structure betrays the change since, while the entries in PIR are classified alphabetically by nomen, those of PLRE are arranged by last name, usually cognomen. The major problem requiring explanation is why the nomen gentilicium, the central element of the classical tria nomina, should have been displaced by the cognomen as the one most consistently attested element.

The earliest surviving account of Constantine's last days, April to May 337, was written by Eusebius of Caesarea as instant history, since Eusebius died in May 338 or 339. Parts of this concluding section of the Vita Constantini, for example the paragraphs about the first Christian emperor's baptism and mausoleum, have attracted scholarly curiosity, others less so. Here I would like to investigate systematically, for the first time, the versions of Constantine's abortive Iranian campaign provided by Eusebius and others, and then move on to consider the origins of a famous account of Constantine's baptism. Both exercises will show how oppositional versions of Constantine's last days influenced the formation of conventionally accepted narratives—or, more specifically, how polytheist historiography helped to mould the Nicaean or ‘orthodox’ perspective, parts of which have prevailed to the present day. Discussion of the fictional accounts of Constantine's baptism by ‘Eusebius of Rome’ and Silvester of Rome will also provide an opportunity to underline the truth of Michel van Esbroeck's observation that ‘the historical aspect of propaganda literature eludes positivist history, of which it is, even so, a part’.