On 15 February, two days after the Ides, there took place at Rome the mysterious ritual called Lupercalia, which began when the Luperci sacrificed a goat at the Lupercal. There was evidently a close conceptual and etymological connection between the name of the festival, the title of the celebrants, and the name of the sacred place: as our best-informed literary source on Roman religion, M. Terentius Varro, succinctly put it, ‘the Luperci [are so called] because at the Lupercalia they sacrifice at the Lupercal … the Lupercalia are so called because [that is when] the Luperci sacrifice at the Lupercal’.

What is missing in that elegantly circular definition is the name of the divinity to whom the sacrifice was made. Even the sex of the goat is unclear — Ovid and Plutarch refer to a she-goat, other sources make it male — which might perhaps imply a similar ambiguity in the gender of the recipient. Varro does indeed refer to a goddess Luperca, whom he identifies with the she-wolf of the foundation legend; he explains the name as lupa pepercit, ‘the she-wolf spared them’ (referring to the infant twins), so I think we can take this as an elaboration on the myth, and not much help for the ritual.

‘Can I fix Rome for you on this poor sheet of paper?’ Something like Petrarch's lament must precede any attempt to sum up Rome in words; only an Atlas could do justice to the vast weight of such a city. But there is at least one compensation: we are describing a city that we all know, or think we know. For Montaigne, it was the first city that entered his consciousness: ‘I have had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long time before I had knowledge of those of my own house. I knew the Capitol and its platform before I knew Louvre, the palace of our kings in Paris; the river Tiber before Seine’. And for him it remained the ultimate city: ‘And therefore can I not look so often into the situation of their streets and houses, and those wondrous-strange ruins, that may be said to reach down to the Antipodes, but so often must I amuse myself on them. Is it nature or by the error of fantasy, that the seeing of places we know to have been frequented or inhabited by men whose memory is esteemed or mentioned in stories doth in some sort move and stir us up as much or more than the hearing of their noble deeds or reading of their compositions?’ For Freud, the city provided the best analogy for the human consciousness itself, an overlayering of past and present events, all capable of being experienced simultaneously. He asks us, in a flight of fancy, to ‘suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past — an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into being will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one’.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the great astronomer Kepler wrote to his patron, the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II:

Most noble lord, I have now for several weeks on end devoted my utmost efforts to the nativity of Caesar Augustus, about which your kingly majesty wishes to know, but, as I see, it has been almost in vain. For although it is no specially difficult task to calculate the configuration of the heavens for a particular time, nevertheless, what is lacking in the nativity we are now considering is that we no longer today know the correct time of it.

The unfortunate astronomer had spent considerable time combing the evidence of the ancient authors available to him about the date of Augustus' birth. He attempted to sift through the conflicting evidence about which day would have been Augustus' birthday, before performing complex calculations of the planetary movements, in order to assess the role Capricorn might have played in his horoscope. His ingenious solution to the problem failed to impress Rudolf, as we can see from Kepler's second letter on the subject (the emperor's letters are not extant):

Most noble lord, your kingly majesty has suspected me of a lack of diligence, as though I had not sufficiently reported the nativity of Augustus…

The traditional problem of Silver Latin poetry, and Silver Latin epic especially, has been its attraction to the extravagant, the grotesque, the infinite, the absurd, in other words, its propensity for excess. Statius' Thebaid in particular has been considered guilty of this offence. Recent criticism, however, has tended to see Silver Latin poetry not simply as being excessive, but as being deeply concerned with excess—cultural, ideological, and poetic. In this paper I hope to demonstrate that such a concern is a prominent characteristic of Statius' Thebaid, by exploring perhaps the most important manifestation of excess in the poem, madness. I will argue that the Thebaid's excessiveness is fundamental and necessary, rather than detrimental, to its overall effect. But this paper, like the Thebaid, will not concentrate exclusively on excess, for it will prove to be only the starting-point for a specific interpretation of the patterns of action and madness in the Thebaid.

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).

The recent publication by A. K. Bowman and J. D. Thomas of The Vindolanda Writing Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses II) (1994) provides another substantial corpus of Latin from a military outpost in the early Empire. The tablets take their place alongside such important military finds as the letters of Claudius Terentianus, which are roughly of the same date, the ostraca from Bu Njem, and the ostraca from Wâdi Fawâkhir, which again are dated to the first/second centuries.

The Latin of the Vindolanda tablets has recently been discussed by H. Petersmann as a specimen of ‘Vulgar Latin’, at a conference devoted to Vulgar and Late Latin. But while the influence of spoken varieties of the language can be detected in some misspellings, and in aspects of the syntax, morphology, and lexicon of the tablets, one must resist the temptation to find ‘Vulgar Latin’ (however one defines that problematical term: see below, IX.4) as the sole or principal element of the tablets. Many of the documents were not composed by free composition, but have a formulaic structure which made little or no demand on the linguistic competence of the writer (e.g. applications for leave (166–77), the daily reports of a type found at Bu Njem, which have certain distinctive features of syntax (155–6)). Accounts and lists (178–209) too may in their syntax and format, if not necessarily in their spellings, be heavily influenced by the conventions of their genre. Moreover record-keeping of this type usually falls to individuals with a degree of education and numeracy, and their writing may have little or nothing to reveal about the spoken language which they used or heard.

In a justly famous paper published in 1961, Peter Brown set out a model for understanding the historical process whereby the formerly pagan aristocracy of imperial Rome became overwhelmingly Christian during the course of the fourth and fifth centuries. Brown's paper has deeply influenced all who have subsequently studied this historical phenomenon, at least in the English-speaking world. Since this article argues that the Roman aristocracy became Christian significantly earlier than Brown and most recent writers have assumed, it must begin by drawing an important distinction. Brown's paper marked a major advance in modern understanding because it redirected the focus of scholarly research away from conflict and confrontation, away from the political manifestations of paganism culminating in the ‘last great pagan revival in the West’ between 392 and 394, away from episodes which pitted pagan aristocrats of Rome against Christian emperors, away from ‘the public crises in relations between Roman paganism and a Christian court’, towards the less sensational but more fundamental processes of cultural and religious change which gradually transformed the landowning aristocracy of Italy after the conversion of Constantine. This change of emphasis was extremely salutary in 1961, it has permanently changed our perception of the period, and it entails a method of approaching the subject which remains completely valid. Unfortunately, however, Brown also adopted prevailing assumptions about the chronology of these changes which are mistaken, on the basis of which he asserted that the ‘drift into a respectable Christianity’ began no earlier than the reign of Constantius. The evidence and arguments set out here indicate that the process began much earlier and proceeded more rapidly than Brown assumed, but they in no way challenge the validity of his approach to understanding the nature of the process.

While Gibbon's Roman History and his Memoirs are established as classic works in any canon of English or historical literature, the first of his three books, the youthful Essai sur l'Étude de la Littérature (1758–61), remains the victim of comparative neglect. There has been no edition of this work since 1814, but we can ill afford to ignore a text which is at once the first fruit of Gibbon's intellectual ‘creation’ at Lausanne in the 1750s, and also serves as an indispensable general and methodological introduction to his History. One symptom of our casual attitude lies in the fact that, although the Essai is the only one of Gibbon's works which can be traced from its manuscript conception through to final publication, no attempt has been made to explore his compositional and intellectual processes by this route. Furthermore, in an age where every scrap of new text by the great historian has become a precious relic worthy of immediate publication, we have overlooked thereby the last really significant cache of his unpublished writing. Given its subject matter, one may say that the omission is not merely significant but spectacular. In a series of cancelled passages from the Essai's first draft of 1758, Gibbon dealt with topics such as the need for philosophic detachment, rather than sentimental alignment, in discussing Roman history; the role of ‘general’ or profound causes in explaining Rome's rise and fall; and the significance of Pagan corruption for the rise of Christianity.

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.

Not all students of the Roman world may have realized that, following extensive discoveries in the last few years, Egypt has ceased to be the only part of the Empire from which there are now substantial numbers of documentary texts written on perishable materials. This article is intended as a survey and hand-list of the rapidly-growing ‘papyrological’ material from the Roman Near East. As is normal, ‘papyrology’ is taken to include also any writing in ink on portable, and normally perishable, materials: parchment, wood, and leather, as well as on fragments of pottery (ostraka). The area concerned is that covered by the Roman provinces of Syria (divided in the 190s into ‘Syria Coele’ and ‘Syria Phoenice’); Mesopotamia (also created, by conquest, in the 190s); Arabia; and Judaea, which in the 130s became ‘Syria Palaestina’. These administrative divisions are valid for the majority of the material, which belongs to the first, second and third centuries. For the earlier part of the period we include also papyri from Dura under the Parthian kings (Nos 34, 36–43, and 166), since they belong to the century before the Roman conquest and illustrate the continuity of legal and administrative forms; and five papyri from the kingdom of Nabataea, which after its ‘acquisition’ in 106 was to form the bulk of the new province of Arabia, on the grounds that in some sense dependent kingdoms were part of the Empire (Nos 180–184). Both groups are listed in brackets. We also include the extensive material from the first Jewish revolt (Nos 230–256) and from the Bar Kochba war of 132–5 (Nos 293–331), even though it derives from regimes in revolt against Rome. The private-law procedures visible in the Bar Kochba documents are continuous with those from the immediately preceding ‘provincial’ period (that of the later items in the ‘archive of Babatha’ and other documents). What changes dramatically after the outbreak of the revolt is language use: Hebrew now appears alongside Aramaic and Greek. But even as late as the third year of the revolt we find contracts in Aramaic. Our list at this point will supplement and correct that given by Millar in The Roman Near East, App. B.