After the suppression of Ti. Gracchus, the Roman establishment acted savagely. The bodies of the hundreds killed in the initial massacre were thrown into the Tiber, probably at night, setting a grisly precedent (in that use of the river) that would be followed by Opimius, the younger Marius and Sulla. The action was supervised by an aedile, a certain Lucretius, who thereby acquired the cognomen Vispillo (or Vespillo), no doubt a pejorative title, but one in which he or his family seemed to take pride. The motivations behind the undertaking were possibly various. Removal of the evidence with minimal fuss may have been seen as a desirable way of avoiding further clamour. Hence the night-time operation. If so, it was done from inexperience. Experience would demonstrate that the bodies might neither remain sunk nor float discreetly to the sea. The establishment might also have hoped that the gesture carried with it some of the symbolism of a procuratio prodigiorum—though the agency of an aedile was hardly appropriate for such a commission. Probably the denial of proper burial was foremost in the minds of the enemies of Gracchus.

Carm. 2.12 has often received attention because scholiasts observe that Licymnia is a pseudonym for Maecenas' wife Terentia. The poem is also interesting for the originality of the recusatio it contains, and for the comments it elicits from scholars on Maecenas. Horace begins with a polite refusal to incorporate epic themes into his poetry, and in lines 9-12 he announces that Maecenas will better tell of Caesar's deeds in prose (‘pedestribus historiis’). Rejections of grand themes are found in Greek poetry, but for Roman poets the recusatio acquired the added function of dismissing apparent requests for weighty poetry, and poets on occasion address Maecenas in recusationes that supposedly decline his requests. Typically the poet recommends another poet to undertake the rejected task in a more elevated style, usually because the other person's talent (ingenium) is better suited to the job. In the case of Carm. 2.12.9-12, however, Maecenas himself is the suggested alternate, and he is not asked to compose a poem, but to write about Caesar's deeds in prose. Interpretations of these lines tend to focus on Horace's motives for suggesting that Maecenas, whose literary style was notoriously bad, should compose anything, much less prose history, for Caesar. In fact there are no motives or hidden meanings concerning Maecenas as a writer. Horace merely turned to a genre that better represented both his patron's status and the weightiness of Caesar's deeds.

Until the second century A.D., the bodies of most people who died at Rome and in the western provinces of the Empire ended up on a funeral pyre, to be reduced to ashes which would be placed in a grave. The practical arrangements for this process have attracted some attention from archaeologists but virtually none from ancient historians. In this paper I shall try to combine literary and archaeological evidence to reconstruct how the pyre was prepared. I hope that this will provide a fuller background than currently exists for understanding the numerous brief references which can be found in Roman literature and the two surviving representations of a pyre (other than an emperor's) in Roman art. Cremation had different traditions in different areas, e.g. as an elite practice in parts of Gaul, even if ultimately it ‘may have been thought of as a sign of allegiance to Rome.’ There clearly were local differences, not just between provinces but between places quite close together, as well as changes over time, but many of the rites of cremation appear to have been similar throughout the Western Roman Empire, illustrating what Morris calls ‘a massive cultural homogenisation of the Roman world at a time when political and economic regionalism was increasing’.

In the pantheon of poets of all cultures and ages, Homer (however we respond to the ‘Homeric Question’) has a unique place. His primacy is due to the fact that his two epic poems encapsulated Hellenic culture, both for the Greeks themselves, and for others steeped in the ‘European tradition’ whether in antiquity or in subsequent ages. So much is this the case that the very name ‘Homer’ became an abstraction, summing up what it was to be Hellenic. All literature written by Greeks, in the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Imperial periods, and much that was produced by others (including in Latin), looks back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, takes its rise from them, finds its locus in them. A canonicity was conferred on these poems such as on no other Greek text in equal degree. If Shakespeare was representative of an entire age in one culture, Homer summed up a culture itself.

The First Tetrarchy was inaugurated in March 293 (all dates are A.D.) with the nomination of two Caesars to assist the existing two Augusti. In the west, Constantius I was named Caesar and immediately given the task of wresting Britain from the usurpers Carausius and Allectus. In the east, Galerius received imperial authority, although apparently entrusted with less specific labours. Scholars had once assumed that Galerius took up station defending the Danube frontier. Then, in 297, he was called forth from there to meet the threat of Narses, the Persian king, who had invaded Mesopotamia whilst Diocletian was busy elsewhere.