The vocabulary of empire, as it has developed in European contexts since the period of the Roman empire, reveals clearly enough the significance of the inheritance of Rome for the regimes which have followed it. From Charlemagne to the Tsars, from British imperialism to Italian Fascism, the language and symbols of the Roman republic and the Roman emperors have been essential elements in the self-expression of imperial powers. Such communality of language, by creating a sense of familiarity in the mind of a modern observer of the Roman empire, may hinder a proper understanding of antiquity, because the importance of the after life of these words and symbols tends to obscure the nature of the contexts from which they originated. An obvious parallel instance can be seen in the case of the word ‘democracy’, where the adoption of the Athenian term to describe a series of political developments in the modern world which claim some connection with the Greek notion of demokratia has tended to make more difficult the modern understanding of what happened at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.

Summarizing Polybius' contribution to the study of Roman history, Mommsen paid him the following compliment: ‘His books are like the sun in the field of Roman history; where they begin, the misty veils which still cloak the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars are lifted, where they finish, a new and if possible still more vexatious twilight begins.’ Since Mommsen our understanding of Polybius' methods, his bias and omissions, his ideology and concerns, has progressed immeasurably, thanks largely to the work of Pédech and Walbank. Nevertheless, the idea that the Histories represent, at least in their conception, the illumination of an intrinsic reality persists. Polybius' supposed ‘poor style’ is often treated as in some way an absence of historiographical mediation. In this case, ‘transparency’ in a text, the sensation that it provides unmediated access to what it describes, is achieved not by a smooth and inconspicuous style, but by coarseness. Tarn compared Polybius' work to rescripts and despatches, as if he were only interested in an unobtrusive recording role, and this attitude to the historian, far from being in decline, has received some radical and authoritative support in recent years. One reappraisal of Roman imperialism has argued that Polybius was much closer to the reality of the process than many twentieth-century historians. Another study claims to ‘want to say no more than what Polybius said’. Ultimately, I have no argument with those who stress Polybius' honesty and reliability. More problematic, however, is an attitude to our use of Polybius' history which is often assumed in eulogies of his truthfulness: that when we read Polybius, we are enabled to gaze directly on the landscape of Roman history, a single substantial unitary reality, structured out of objective facts.

The subject of ekphrasis, and in particular of the ekphrasis of works of art, has recently begun to receive a great deal of attention from classical scholars. As will become clear, I believe that the reason for this is that many of the theoretical issues that are most pressing in classical studies — and indeed in cultural studies in general — are raised by the study of ekphrasis. The purpose of this note on the other hand is modest: I want to say a little about the narratological issues that are raised by set-piece description (I), and to look at one example in the Aeneid (II). But even so I have found it impossible not to offer some thoughts of a frighteningly general nature (III). I shall concentrate on the ekphrasis of works of art for reasons that will again become clear, but some at least of what I shall say will also be relevant mutatis mutandis to the ekphrasis of natural features and events.

Women are ‘perceived’. We speak often not just of ‘women’, but of ‘images’, ‘representations’, ‘reflections’ of women. Woman perceived is woman as art-object; and paradigmatic of this phenomenon is the myth of Pygmalion.

This article will consider Ovid's version of the myth, the story of the artist who loved his own creation. I shall suggest that the story reflects on the eroto-artistic relationship between the poet and his puella explored in Latin love elegy. The Metamorphoses myth of the art-object which becomes a love-object mirrors the elegiac myth of love-object as art-object. The elegists represent the puella as both art and flesh. Pygmalion deconstructs the erotic realism of elegy and by its frankness about the power of the male artist discloses elegy's operations. It tells us how to read the puella — as a work of art; and the lover — as an artist obsessed with his own creation. Pygmalion reflects and exposes the self-absorption of elegy, the heroization of the lover, and the painted nature of the woman presented in eroto-elegiac texts, that is, the way in which she is to be seen as an art-object.

On 30 January 9 B.C., two thousand years ago this year, the Senate dedicated the Ara Pacis Augustae. This paper celebrates that anniversary by putting forward a new interpretation of the altar's significance. Rather than focusing on a discussion of iconography or the identification of individuals portrayed on the altar, I shall explore the sacrificial implications of what was, after all, an important site for sacrificial cult in Rome. We may note that the earliest Roman accounts of the Ara Pacis both emphasize sacrificial rite. In the Res Gestae, Augustus comments (12.2):

Cum ex Hispania Galliaque, rebus in iis provincis prospere gestis, Romam redi, Ti. Nerone P. Quintilio consulibus, aram Pacis Augustae senatus pro reditu meo consacrandam censuit ad campum Martium, in qua magistratus et sacerdotes virginesque Vestales anniversarium sacrificium facere iussit.

On my return from Spain and Gaul, in the consulship of Tiberius Nero and Publius Quintilius [13 B.C.], after successful operations in these provinces, the Senate voted in honour of my return the consecration of an altar to Pax Augusta in the Campus Martius, and on this altar it ordered the magistrates and priests and Vestal virgins to make annual sacrifice.

The text here published has a claim to be the most important military document ever discovered in Britain. It was found during the 1988 season of excavation of the pre-Hadrianic area at Vindolanda. The archaeological context in which it was found is the earliest level in which tablets are present; it was located in the ditch by the west wall of the earliest phase of the fort, beneath four successive buildings of the later periods. The ditch appears to have been filled by A.D. 90/92 and the tablet is therefore most probably to be dated c. A.D. 90 (unless it was part of a deposit of rubbish put into the Period I ditch by the builders of the Period II structures). It would thus reflect the situation at Vindolanda only a few years after Agricola's departure from Britain, presumably just before the enlargement of the fort which made this area the site of the praetorium in the southern sector of the central range of buildings. The small amount of relevant evidence from other writing-tablets confuses rather than clarifies the picture. The commanding officer named in the strength report is Iulius Verecundus and there are five or six other texts associated with a man named Verecundus who may or may not be the same person (in only one case is the gentilicium (Iulius) preserved).

The procedural rules of civil courts stimulate interest among few except the lawyers who practise in them. The procedures of the courts of the Roman world may therefore not seem an enticing topic. But procedure lies at the heart of any legal system and the Roman legal system is no exception. So when the discovery of the Lex Irnitana brought us fresh material about the jurisdiction and procedure of the local magistrates and courts at Irni, it added greatly to our understanding of one of the central institutions of the first-century Roman world. But the information is not always easy to interpret. The purpose of this article is first to try to solve an apparent mystery in Chapter 90 of the Lex and then to use the new material to fill out our picture of procedure in this period. In this way it is hoped to contribute to a fuller understanding of the Lex Irnitana as a whole.

On 25 July A.D. 124 C. Iulius Demosthenes, the prytanis and secretary of the boule of the Oenoandians, made a promise to found a penteteric thymelic festival in Oenoanda to be called the Demostheneia. As part of that formal promise, Demosthenes set out terms about how the festival would be financed, how the prize money was to be divided, and how the agonothete, or president of the festival, was to be elected. At the same time, in the announcement of 25 July, the arrangement and dates of the competitions to take place at the festival over slightly more than a three-week period in July were spelled out in detail

Scholars have given much attention to the procedure for submitting private petitions to the Roman emperor. Literary sources suggest that emperors spent a lot of time answering petitions from private individuals, and papyri and inscriptions offer tangible evidence that this was so. But our richest evidence is provided by the Roman legal sources, which preserve over 2,500 of the replies written by the emperors, at least in theory, beneath the petitions themselves. The sheer quantity of these subscriptions, and the fact that some of them were addressed to petitioners of relatively humble status, have suggested that the emperors attended to their subjects in a surprisingly personal way. Even more important is the fact that subscriptions in our legal sources consist almost entirely of formulations of principle; it has been assumed that they were issued to clarify the law, for private petitioners who had questions about it.

The purpose of this article is to draw attention to what I believe to be the earliest surviving allusion to Constantine's porphyry column in Constantinople. Although the proposition that the Life of Elagabalus in the Historia Augusta alludes to the porphyry column is incapable of strict proof, it has, at the very least, considerable heuristic value. By focusing our attention on, for example, the column's Theban origin or the fact that it is not a monolith, it enables us to propose a narrative of the progress of Constantine's project which does much to illuminate the monument's significance. The passage under consideration also provokes a new look at the old debate about the origin of the statue on top of the column — had it or had it not once been an image of Apollo? This idea or suspicion has played an important role in all discussions of Constantine's ‘ambiguity’ in religious matters.

The preliminary aim of this paper is documentary: to clarify and confirm the dating of Gibbon's famous essay ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’. According to a new view, this essay may reasonably be read as if it were written in the early months of 1780. The obvious objection to this position is that, in a now familiar passage from his Memoirs, Gibbon explicitly assures us that the ‘General Observations’ were written before 1774, and thus in all probability before 1773, when he began writing his History. I argue that we should believe what Gibbon tells us. But though the discussion originates in the dry terrain of dates, important interpretative consequences follow. These stem from the interest of the ‘General Observations’ in their own right — a panoramic view of ancient and modern history as broad as the entire range of Gibbon's History — and from their insertion at the end of Volume III of that work (published in 1781). Were the ‘Observations’ so revised as to be virtually written in sequence (as the new view supposes), or do they present a more problematic case — being written before the beginning of Volume I but inserted at the end of an independent text completed eight years later? Consideration of this point raises issues fundamental to the understanding of Gibbon's compositional and intellectual processes, and is the principal justification for what follows.