Buchner's reconstruction of the Horologium Augusti continues to be influential, despite fatal flaws demonstrated by Rodríguez-Almeida and Schütz; so we begin by reviewing the state of the evidence. There is no credible indication that Augustus or his successors built an extensive sundial, so we must conclude with Schütz that what Pliny described and what the excavations of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) uncovered was a solar meridian line. We then proceed to discuss its significance in the context of the Augustan building programme. Since the DAI in fact discovered a Flavian reconstruction, the final question to be addressed is what purpose it served Domitian to rebuild a largely symbolic Augustan instrument that had grown inaccurate over time.

Scholars over the last few decades have been unable to find a convincing explanation for the widespread practice of brother-sister marriage among the common people in Roman Egypt, a social practice seemingly disregarding one of the most fundamental taboos. This paper now argues that these ‘incestuous’ marriages were in fact marriages between a biological child and an adopted one, a practice documented also for other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Due to the severe mortality regime before the demographic transition, up to 30 per cent of all fathers did not have a male heir, and therefore adopting the son-in-law was a common succession and inheritance strategy in many pre-modern societies.

A biographical digression on the Cumaean tyrant Aristodemus Malacus in Dionysius' Roman Antiquities has elicited widespread speculation about the existence of an early Greek source for events in Italy contemporaneous with the origins of the Roman Republic. The communis opinion about the importance of this hypothetical ‘Cumaean chronicle’ warrants reconsideration on two grounds. First, the events in question fall well before the development of Greek historical writing concerned with contemporary events. Second, we must not overlook the potential impact on the tradition of Roman historians who wished to integrate their city's early history with that of the wider (Greek) world.

This paper examines the evidence for military activity in the Republican provincia of Sicily from the Punic Wars to the Civil Wars, and the implications of this for our understanding of Republican Sicily and Republican imperialism. After the Second Punic War there was very little use of Roman or Italian allied soldiers on the island, but extensive use, by Rome, of local Sicilian soldiers. The rich evidence for gymnasia suggests one way in which this use of local manpower was based upon existing civic structures and encouraged local civic culture and identity. These conclusions prompt a reassessment of the importance of auxilia externa under the Roman Republic and of models for Republican imperial control of provinciae.

Martial's Liber de Spectaculis is almost universally considered a work describing the remarkable 100-day games held by Titus on the inauguration of the new Flavian Amphitheatre in A.D. 80. There is in fact no internal evidence for this attribution, which has been justified by Martial's praise of the building (“it sounds new”) and the inexact parallels between the description of Titus' games in Dio and the events memorialized by Martial. The highpoint of animal activities in Martial concerns the rhinoceros, not mentioned at all by Dio. Under Domitian a sudden, extensive and unparalleled issue of coins with the rhinoceros type signals the advertisement of that rare beast in his games. The coins date to A.D. 83–85. It is to that period, and to the reign of Domitian, that Martial's work should be dated.

This paper allows Ovid to shape a reading of Martial, and Martial to shape a reading of Ovid. It proceeds through close readings of some 40 epigrams, and is organized into three large sections respectively addressing receptions in Martial of Ovid's poetry of elegiac love (I), of exile (II), and of myth (III). The final section offers sustained discussion of Martial's early Apophoreta (Book 14) and Liber Spectaculorum. Issues addressed include genre, intertextuality, sexual vocabulary and euphemism, exile as a figure for status anxiety, the metapoetics of book production, ecphrastic movement between art and epigrammatic text, and the aesthetics of myth in the Roman arena.

Building on recent scholarship concerning the ‘colonate of the late Roman Empire’, and focusing in particular upon the vocabulary used in the legal sources, this paper offers three propositions. First, the colonatus of the legislation was not a legal shorthand for the ‘colonate’ of modern historiographical debate. Second, the coloni of the legislation were not a discrete group of individuals subjected to a definable, articulated set of restrictions. Finally, it is not colonatus but rather the origo and the link it created between individuals and the land which is the key to the tax system of the late Roman Empire.

This paper surveys work relating to Roman inscriptions published during the period 2001–2005. The main aims are to signal important newly discovered inscriptions, significant reinterpretations of previously published texts, new trends in the scholarship on the subject and recent studies drawing heavily on epigraphic sources, as well as to report on the progress of major publishing projects.