The work we call the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was entitled in the lost manuscript that Xylander used for the first printed edition (1559) Μάρκου Ἀντωνίνου αὐτοκράτορος τῶν εἰς ἑαυτὸν βιβλίων. This title was apparently unknown to a Byzantine historian of the fourteenth century, and may rest merely on the impression the work made on one reader, who affixed it to his copy. But that impression was surely just; even Book I, of which more later, is an intimate document, and Books II to XII a kind of spiritual diary, which Marcus wrote in moments of leisure, probably with his own hand, just as he continued to the end of his life to send autograph letters to his friends (Dio lxxi, 36, 2), and on parchment books, to which he could most easily refer, like those used by Aelius Aristides (xlviii, 8 K) to record his dreams; such books, intended for his own eyes alone, need have had no title. If this view is correct, the Meditations provide evidence unique in antiquity and perhaps in any age for the inmost thoughts of a ruler. The most cursory perusal will indeed show that Marcus was mainly concerned with the divine order of the universe and with the place of man in that order; overt personal allusions are rare. Yet it would be strange if his reflections were not on closer inspection to reveal traces of his own personal experience. I shall argue later that the very frequency with which he recurs to certain topics indicates the preoccupations of the ruler and has historical implications that have not been recognized, even by those who see the work as a spiritual diary and not in any sense as a philosophical treatise. But since that interpretation has not gone without challenge or modification, more must be said to justify it. I shall first discuss Books II to XII and then Book I.

‘Appellatus sum vicies et semel imperator.’ So the Res Gestae of Augustus declare (4,1), and they are echoed by two historical writers (Tacitus, Ann. i, 9, 2; Dio lii, 41, 4). The emperor received the last fourteen of these imperatorial acclamations after he acquired the title of Augustus (16 January 27 B.C.), and their dates have long been recognized to provide valuable clues towards constructing a full military narrative of his reign. In his commentary on the Res Gestae, Theodor Mommsen was able to identify the date and occasion of most of the salutations to the satisfaction of subsequent investigators. Nevertheless, both greater chronological precision and something more important may emerge from a new examination of all the evidence now available.

In elucidating the history of Asia Minor it has always been profitable to examine the origin, background and influence of the wealthy families of the Greco-Roman cities, and the connections they established between themselves. As more information comes to light it becomes increasingly obvious how complex the relationships between the various families were, and how far the influence of any one family could extend. From this evidence we are beginning to be able to form a convincing, if sketchy, picture of a power structure, based on a close-knit network of dominant families, which produced the ruling élite of the cities, the dynasts of the Hellenistic period, and the senators and consuls who made careers for themselves in the eastern provinces and maintained their family traditions of power and influence within the framework of the Roman Empire. Fresh evidence now allows us to weave more threads into the pattern, linking two important families of the city of Perge on the south coast, one certainly of Italian descent, with the cities and families of the vast Anatolian hinterland, and suggesting an important source for the wealth which enabled members of these families to rise from a mercantile background to become senators in the first and second centuries A.D.

In this paper I wish to discuss the evidence of certain pragmatic calculations in Martial's Epigrams and Statius' Silvae, prescinding entirely from whatever literary qualities this kind of poetry may have. Specifically, the paper is concerned with the problem of presentation, and it has two parts. Part I argues that the poets' published books represent only the last and least important means of presenting poems to patrons, and collects evidence for the ways in which the poems were primarily communicated, via recitation, impromptu performance, and private brochure. Discussion of a special form of presentation, the book-dedication, is reserved for Part II. After attempting to redefine the status of the dedication in an ancient book, I will explore a contrast that is apparent between Martial's procedure and Statius'.

The battle of Bovillae on 18th January, 52 B.C., which led to Clodius' death, was literally treated by Cicero in a letter to Atticus as the beginning of a new era—he dated the letter by it, although over a year had elapsed. It is difficult to exaggerate the relief it afforded him from fear and humiliation for a few precious years before civil war put him once more in jeopardy. At one stroke Cicero lost his chief inimicus and the Republic lost a hostis and pestis. Moreover, the turmoil led to a political realignment for which Cicero had been striving for the last ten years—a reconciliation between the boni and Pompey, as a result of which Pompey was commissioned to put the state to rights. Cicero's behaviour in this context, especially his return to the centre of the political scene, is, one would have thought, of capital importance to the biographer of Cicero. Yet two recent English biographies have but briefly touched on the topic. It is true that, in the background of Cicero's personal drama, Caesar and Pompey were taking up positions which, as events turned out, would lead to the collapse of the Republic. However, Cicero and Milo were not to know this, nor were their opponents; friendly cooperation between the two super-politicians apparently was continuing. Politicians on all sides were still aiming to secure power and honour through the traditional Republican magistracies, and in this pursuit were prepared to use the odd mixture of violence, bribery and insistence on the strict letter of the constitution, which was becoming a popular recipe. In retrospect their obsession with the customary organs of power has a certain irony. Yet it is a testimony to the political atmosphere then. Their manoeuvres are also important because both the instability caused by the violence of Clodius and Milo, and the eventual confidence in the rule of law established under Pompey's protection, helped to determine the political position of the boni associated with Pompey in 49 B.C. Cicero's relationship with Milo is at first sight one of the more puzzling aspects of his career. What had they in common, except that Milo, like most late Republican politicians, was at one time associated with Pompey? Properly interpreted, however, this relationship may not only illuminate Cicero's own attitudes but illustrate the character of the last years of Republican politics.

The largest private donations to a municipality recorded in the Latin West are probably those which appear in an inscription from Castulo in Hispania Tarraconensis. The inscription, known only from a copy made in the sixteenth century, is very laconic; but its details are self-consistent, and its phraseology resembles that of another inscription from Castulo whose original survives. Huebner, who had to reject as forgeries many inscriptions from this town, accepted the text as genuine, and his judgement was endorsed by Dessau, who included it in his Inscripttones Latinae Selectae.

When Saint Chrysostom's Prayer asks that the petitions of the Lord's servants be fulfilled as may be most expedient for them, it expresses what, in traditional autocracies, was expected of every ‘good king’ by his subjects. St. Louis, the model of a medieval king, would go regularly with his courtiers to the Bois de Vincennes, there to hear his subjects' petitions, seated under an oak. Dr. Millar has pointed out that Roman emperors were expected to be accessible to their subjects, especially those of humble station, in much the same way. The evidence shows that much of the emperors' time was taken up with answering petitions (in the form of libelli) from private individuals or from groups of humbler people, and that it was only ‘bad’, lazy emperors who neglected this task. Not only was there a secretarial department for handling petitions, as distinct from epistles, but its head, the a libellis, was, according to Seneca, deluged with work. Literary sources, however, tell us little or nothing of value about the actual methods of accepting and handling petitions. For information on such topics we have to turn to the surviving texts of the ‘subscripts’ (subscripttones), the imperial replies to petitions (very few actual petitions survive). By far the largest number of these from the period of the Principate is to be found in the Code of Justinian, and they are mainly the work of the Severan and later third century emperors. In the process of transmission many of these texts have been abbreviated, and the formal elements have been omitted or garbled as a result, and it is from these formal elements that most can be learned about the procedures for handling petitions. One is therefore thrown back on the epigraphic and papyrus texts, in which these formal elements are often preserved.

τὰ γὰρ τὸ πάλαι (sc. ἄστεα) μεγάλα ἦν, τὰ πολλὰ σμικρὰ αὐτῶν γέγονε. The period of high prosperity in Roman Puteoli extended from the late Republic until the early years of the second century A.D., after which economic primacy in Italy passed from the great port city on the Bay of Naples to Ostia at the Tiber's mouth. Or so, at any rate, it is now commonly believed: Charles Dubois was the first scholar to develop the thesis that Puteoli declined in the second century, and his arguments have been accepted, with modifications, both by economic and social historians and in most recent investigations of the two Roman cities. But inevitably, given the nature of our sources, there are elements of subjectivity in the criteria used to measure historical change; ‘decline’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘growth’ are relative, and therefore often ambiguous, terms, particularly when applied to pre-industrial cities and towns. In this article I hope to modify the prevailing opinion by a closer scrutiny of the evidence for social and economic conditions in second-century Puteoli. In part one the various arguments for a decline are critically reviewed; parts two and three are attempts to exploit a substantial body of local evidence, which is largely inscriptional, to shed light on the nature of Puteolan society and on the economic conditions prevalent in the city; the results of the study are set forth in a brief conclusion.

Although a considerable amount of work has been devoted to the identification of the supporters and opponents of Tiberius Gracchus, the central feature of the prosopographical picture that emerges has not been given the attention it deserves. For Tiberius Gracchus, whose mother was both the sister of the adoptive father of Scipio Aemilianus and the niece of Scipio's natural father, and whose sister was married to Aemilianus, found his most notable noble supporters among those who were political opponents of Aemilianus. In the context of Roman politics as they operated in the pre-Gracchan era, that is a very remarkable situation, and one that merits further investigation. For if it is the case that Tiberius Gracchus broke away from his inherited connections to join the political opponents of those connections, it is worth asking what consequences and repercussions this action had. We might expect to find persons who could be put into the following categories: (a) other former supporters of Aemilianus, who joined Gracchus in his break-away, (b) friends of Aemilianus who remained loyal to him, (c) opponents of Aemilianus who would not accept the Gracchan programme, and (d) opponents of Aemilianus who supported Gracchus. What follows is an attempt to define the membership of the various categories. I restrict myself to this process of identification: I am not here concerned with the larger question of the extent to which the motives of those who supported Gracchus were purely factional and how far they genuinely backed the Gracchan programme. On these, and many other matters, one will naturally turn now to Badian's exhaustive survey in the first volume of Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt.

A reconsideration of the chronological data for Fronto's extant works is desirable on several counts, not least in providing a firmer base for the investigation of Antonine history. Various systems have been devised, but there is great room for improvement even in the little that is known. It is now almost forty years since the last full attempt, and much knowledge has accrued, notably from the Ostian fasti. Also, unfortunately, a ‘date’ has too often been engendered by simple horror vacui. More serious are the many misinterpretations, often quite small but some of wider significance, which have become lodged in print and then used by others as a firm base for other researches. Conflicting views on matters of some import, notably the year of Fronto's death (the main estimates vary by a decade), require examination. Most misleading of all, some investigators have wreaked Procrustean violence on the corpus by discerning and ruthlessly applying an alleged underlying editorial principle. On that account, an agnostic method of considering each piece on its own merit will be used here, letting that editorial principle emerge if it will. The evidence, where available, for each work will be set down in the manuscript order, preceded by a discussion of the date of Fronto's demise and followed by some remarks on the original edition of the corpus and a section tabulating the results.

Since the hurried journey of Hogarth and Yorke in 1894, the Euphrates limes has remained virtually unexplored, and uncertainty has continued to surround its geography and organization.

The basic structure, established under Vespasian and consolidated by Hadrian, and many of the details of its course, can now be located on the ground. Three legionary fortresses—at Satala (Plate IV, 1), Melitene and Samosata, with legionary vexillations (replaced under Diocletian by a new legion) at a fourth at Trapezus—blocked the major strategic routes from the east, and are already well known. They were linked by an eight metre military road, whose remains I have managed to trace on foot, almost without a break, for a hundred miles north of Melitene, along the right bank of the Euphrates: barely a fifth of the total distance from the Black Sea to the southern foothills of the Kurdish Taurus. A series of auxiliary forts seems to have stood on, or at points east of, the road at intervals of a day's march. Most of the sites hitherto proposed—by armchair inspection of inaccurate maps—should be dismissed, but genuine sites have proved elusive. Only at Dascusa has excavation been possible, to reveal fourth-century work, rather than the original fort. But an important inscription in re-use attests military activity under Titus or Domitian: along with the Pompeius Collega milestone, it provides confirmation of scattered literary and numismatic evidence for Vespasian's hand in the building of the frontier.

Reviewing Peter Sattler's Augustus und der Senat (1960), J. P. V. D. Balsdon remarked that the background to the events which marked the establishment of the principate is a field which has been ploughed, even deep ploughed times without number. This must be agreed, and the sceptical need go no further than Lothar Wickert's article s.v. princeps in Pauly's RE xxii, 2 (1953), esp. 2002–2004, to confirm the truth of the remark. Much of the ploughing however has been concerned with the question, ‘By what legal right did Octavian/Augustus govern before, during, and after the period in which he claimed to have “transferred the res publica into the discretionary power of the Senate and Roman people”?’ The interest of this particular question has somewhat declined recently, perhaps rightly so, in an age in which there is a score of Octavians in the world, governing by right of victory in a civil war, and the governed populations tolerate these rulers without constantly examining their constitutional credentials, because they have one all-important virtue—they have put a stop to civil war.

This article arises from a visit to Albania in September 1972, when I travelled up and down the valley of the Shkumbi river, and from recent discoveries by Albanian archaeologists which have been reported in Albanian periodicals, Monumentet 1971, i, 43–59, and ii, 25–35, and Studia Albanica 1972, i, 85–106. The new evidence has confirmed some views and overthrown others which I put forward in A History of Macedonia i (1972), 19 f., based as they inevitably were on the reports of Pouqueville and other travellers down to Praschniker and Schober. I have now seen part of the scene for myself and have had the advantage of conversations with the discoverers themselves, Hasan Ceka, his son Neritan Ceka and Llazar Papajani, to whom I am most grateful. The new evidence is in Section A 1–3 of the article, and some conclusions are given in Section B.

A new inscription discovered by some workmen at Cnidos during excavations conducted by Professor Iris Love preserves considerable portions of a Roman law in a Greek translation, in date and content closely related to (perhaps identical with) the text found at Delphi, commonly known as the ‘Piracy Law’. We give below the Cnidos text and a revision of the Delphi text which is necessitated by the new information, together with a brief commentary designed to bring out what seem to us to be the major implications for Roman historians. The original transcription of the Cnidos text was made by Hassall, but all three authors have checked and improved the readings, both from photographs taken by him and by Professor Love, and from the stones; the revision of the Delphi text, begun by Hassall, is in the event largely the work of Crawford. Archaeological information is contributed by Hassall; to the commentary we have all three made our contributions. The final integration of these and of our concluding remarks is due to Crawford.