In any attempt to understand Roman history the first half of the second century B.C. must have a special place. Victory in the Hannibalic war had laid the foundations of a general dominance of the Mediterranean world, but had hardly yet produced an Empire. Outside Italy, only Sicily, Sardinia and two commands in Spain were normally allotted as provinciae for annual magistrates; and this list was not increased by the famous victories in the Greek East, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia and Pydna. Roman imperialism is too crude a term for what we can observe between 200 and 151 B.C. Roman dominance was felt everywhere, from Spain to Carthage, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch and Ankara; Roman militarism was demonstrated consistently in N. Italy and Spain, at various periods in Greece and Macedonia (200–194, 191–187, 171–168), and for one period of three years in Asia Minor (190–188). Roman colonialism was still confined, with one very marginal exception, to the Italian peninsula.

One fundamental question is already implied in the use of the word ‘policing’. A glance at the scholarly literature shows that ‘policing’ is used in the context of Roman history with respect to the aediles and the tresviri capitales, or as an equivalent of magisterial coercitio; or it is applied to the vigiles, the cohortes urbanae or the cohortes praetoriae of the Principate as well as to the respective praefecti; and, of course, to the various controlling bodies and agents of the Later Roman Empire. This is at least partly due to the fact that the fundamental nineteenth-century works reflect a usage of ‘policing’ which oscillates between the description of a function, i.e. securing public order, on the one hand and the designation of a specialized agency to fulfil this function on the other hand. This is due to the fact that the establishment of a specialized law-enforcement apparatus only took place during the (eighteenth and) nineteenth century. The institutionalization of a professional police force represents a fundamental change in societal as well as individual attitudes towards and demand for public order. It may easily be overlooked that the indisputable gain in security and public order had to be paid for with a considerable loss of flexibility in the interaction between rulers and ruled (which was now mediated by a bureaucratic organization), and with an intensification of control and discipline in the everyday life of most members and strata of society.

In a speech attributed by Xenophon to Jason of Pherae, Thessaly is described as an exporter of grain, in contrast with Athens which was obliged to supplement its own foodstocks with the surplus of others. The ancient sources record the dispatch of Thessalian grain to a few Greek cities; but Thessaly must have been a resource for other Greeks in peacetime, as it was in wartime to Roman armies operating in the region in the middle and late Republic. A newly published inscription from Larisa indicates that on one occasion in the middle of the second century B.C. the Thessalians actually provided grain for the Roman populace itself, in response to a request delivered to the Thessalian koinon by a Roman magistrate. Our main objective in this paper is to place this inscription in a suitable historical context and explain its significance for Rome and Thessaly.

In this article we explore, in more detail than was possible for Richardson in his paper published last year, some of the issues raised by the tabula Contrebiensis. Since this discussion is intended to complement Richardson's article, we have not dealt with matters discussed by him upon which we feel that we have nothing fresh to add. We have modified some of the points made by Richardson, and the reader will soon notice that we raise more questions and doubts than we are able to answer or settle, so that the picture which emerges from this article may appear less clear-cut than the picture drawn by Richardson. It is hoped none the less that by drawing attention to the problems which we have encountered we may at least alert other scholars who may be able to solve them.

When in the autumn of 44 Octavian embarked on his perilous journey as heir to Caesar's mantle he and his soldiers were branded as brigands or extolled as saviours of their country. What was their legal status ? Most modern historians, fascinated with naked power, tacitly dismiss this question as utterly frivolous. They are fully satisfied with Ciceronian epithets. Octavian and Cicero were not. The Roman doctrine of the genera militiae afforded Octavian a comfortable legal niche at each stage of his career. It allows us to comprehend the intricate manoeuvres in the senate at the turn of 44 and 43 B.C.; it also sheds light on the crowning coup of Octavian when he led Italy as a dux against Antonius and the Queen. But this antiquarian doctrine, attested only in late authors, could easily be dismissed as an artificial construct far removed from real life. Historical puzzles lie dormant and insoluble until a spark of insight creates an instant enlightenment. And the spark comes from Aphrodisias, from the new documents published in an exemplary way by Joyce Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome (1982). It comes in the shape of a new puzzle.

Chapter Seventeen of Plutarch's Life of Numa is well known to students of early Rome for the statement that it was the second king of Rome who created collegia for the craftsmen of Rome. Nor is Plutarch alone in his belief: two passages of Pliny's Natural History attribute the collegia of the bronze workers and brick makers to Numa (XXXIV, I; XXXV, 159); Pliny indeed seems to refer to an actual list of collegia in which these two figured. On the other hand, neither Cicero in the Republic nor Livy nor Dionysius displays any knowledge of such an initiative by Numa; an entirely different tradition indeed appears in Florus, according to which it was Servius Tullius who distributed the Roman people between collegia, in the general context of his timocratic organization of the census classes (1, 6, 3).

Les deux premiers livres du De re publica de Cicéron traitent de la meilleure forme de gouvernement. Protagoniste du dialogue, Scipion Émilien fait d'abord un exposé théorique sur les trois constitutions simples, leurs déviations, leur instabilité profonde, et indique à plusieurs reprises qu'aucune d'entre elles, pas même la monarchiquc qu'il place au-dessus des deux autres, ne saurait égaler celle qui unit les principes monarchique, aristocratique et démocratique en une constitution mixte et tempérée. C'est ce qu'il se propose de confirmer dans le second livre, en prenant cette fois l'exemple de la cité romaine, et en montrant comment les Anciens ont su mettre progressivement en place cette forme idéale de gouvernement, pendant les trois premiers siècles de l'histoire de la ville. De cette ‘archéologie romaine’, le palimpseste de la Bibliothèque Vaticane publié en 1822 par A. Mai nous a conservé de très importants fragments, qui permettent d'en reconstituer les grandes lignes. Le but de la présente étude n'est pas tant d'apporter une nouvelle contribution à la Quellenforschung du De re publica que de préciser, en les confrontant avec celles de deux auteurs qui figurent incontestablement au nombre des sources du dialogue, les conceptions de la constitution mixte et du rôle de l'homme politique qui se trouvent exprimées dans l'archéologie du livre 2.

How, in books of Roman poetry, are poems related to each other and to the book as a whole? The question is approached with divergent preconceptions. On the one hand, many assume that the design of a book will be symmetrical, and should be represented in a diagram. In such a scheme, every connection must be plausible—which is never the case; and it must be supposed that ancient readers were given to making diagrams, through which alone such symmetry can be perceived. It is also remarkable how seldom such schemes illuminate the most salient questions about the books. Thus in Book I of Propertius it is the last three poems whose presence most needs to be explained. Skutsch detaches them from his scheme and refers to them as a ‘coda or superstructure’.

In the cities of the pre-Christian Roman empire, Jewish groups were in general free to pursue their own religious and social practices and, at any rate until Hadrian, they were not persecuted by the Roman government; even the exceptional and provocative demands for worship which came from a tyrannical emperor such as Gaius Caligula do not amount to planned persecution. There is a contrast with the subsequent fate of the early Christians, whose cult was, of course, often suppressed by the emperor and his governors. There is also a contrast with the later plight of the Jews themselves under Christian rule.

Since, at the local level, Jews on the one hand and Greeks and natives on the other were often profoundly hostile to one another, the fact that the central government was on the whole proof against anti-Jewish pressure coming from below is indeed noteworthy. The edict of L. Flaccus as proconsul of Asia, by which in 62/1 B.C. he had confiscated the Jewish Temple contributions collected for export from his province, was never repeated, so far as we know (Cic., Flac. 66–9). Not only that: the Romans appear at times to have chosen to put their influence behind Jewish communities in dispute with their neighbours, as occurred to some extent in the cases which we shall discuss here, and did not cease even after A.D. 70.

Tombstones furnish perhaps three-quarters of the entire corpus of Latin inscriptions. Many of these give no more than the name of the deceased, but tens of thousands also offer the historian a few additional details, such as age at death and the name and relationship of the commemorator. Previous studies of the tombstones en masse have focused on nomenclature and age at death. In this study we wish to ask what conclusions can be drawn from the data about the commemorator's relationship with the deceased.

In the year A.D. 137 the council of the city of Palmyra in Syria agreed to revise and publish the tariff and regulations according to which dues were levied on goods brought into and exported from the city and services provided within it. This was done in order to avert in future the disputes that had arisen between the tax collectors and the merchants, tradesmen and others from whom the taxes were due, and to make the situation absolutely clear the council ordered to be inscribed and displayed in a public place both the new regulations and the old ones which they superseded. The result is one of the most important single items of evidence for the economic life of any part of the Roman empire, and, especially in the taxable services mentioned in the regulations, a vivid glimpse also of the social life of a great middle-eastern city. In ordering the publication both of the old and the new regulations, the council also caused to be preserved crucial evidence for the development of the administrative position of Palmyra in the Roman empire, the old regulations being an accumulation of pronouncements and agreements affecting the city over a period of many years. And lastly, being inscribed both in Greek and in the dialect of Aramaic used in Palmyra and its region, the inscription is an important document in the relations between Classical and local cultures in an eastern province of the empire.

This article has been engendered by yet another important discovery made during the current excavations at Aphrodisias in Caria, of a unique series of acclamatory texts in honour of a local benefactor, Albinus. The texts were inscribed, probably in the first half of the sixth century, on the twenty columns of the west portico of the Agora, nineteen of which survive. They provide relatively little information either about Albinus or about the history of Aphrodisias; but they are of outstanding interest as the fullest series of inscribed acclamations which has yet been identified anywhere. The purpose of this article is to consider the status and function of acclamations in late Roman society, and their relationship to earlier practice, in order to assess the full significance of the texts presented here.

The decision to produce maps covering the whole of the Roman Empire at a uniform scale of 1/1,000,000 was first made at a meeting of the International Geographical Union at Cambridge in July 1928. The proponent of the idea was O. G. S. Crawford, then Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey, and since he was also mainly responsible for its early development, the model adopted was that of the second edition of the O.S. Map of Roman Britain, but the physical base chosen was that of the International Map of the World, which was then in production. Considerable progress was made in the 1930s—it was in 1934 that the title Tabula Imperii Romani was adopted—but wars interrupted matters and it was not until 1957 that the work was formally taken over by the Union Académique Internationale. Professor G. Lugli became the first President of the Permanent Committee of the TIR, to be succeeded in 1968 by Professor J. B. Ward-Perkins; on his death in 1981 the Presidency was assumed by Professor E. Condurachi, with Professor G. Carettoni as Vice-President taking over most responsibility for the western half of the Empire.