Sixteen years ago, in an article entitled ‘Polybius and Rome's eastern policy,’ F. W. Walbank raised and examined aspects of what seemed to be an absolutely central flaw in the fabric of Polybius’ account of Roman expansion in the Greek world. The situation that he saw both then and a decade later in his Sather Lectures on Polybius may be put briefly, and I hope fairly, as follows. Polybius believed that Rome's eastern expansion came as the conscious execution by Rome of a consciously adopted plan. Such a view, however, is altogether at odds with the interpretation worked out by Maurice Holleaux on the basis of Polybius’ own narrative (and its survivals in Livy). This state of affairs could come about because of a fundamental contradiction between Polybius' general statements and his own detailed narrative.

In 23 B.C. the first three books of Horace's Odes appeared. In the years which followed, up to the completion of Epistles 1, his work took a new direction, and the ethical themes which had had a marked place in his lyric verse became his entire concern: in his own words (Ep. 1.1.10–11),

nunc itaque et versus et cetera ludicra pono;

quid verum atque decens euro et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum.

What Horace describes in this context, at the very beginning of the book, is a kind of conversion to philosophy; and so the reader is at once drawn to ask what philosophy means to the poet. Before considering this question by scrutiny of the poems, two more general ones should be raised: first, what are the dominant features of ancient ethics as a whole and how far does it differ from modern ethical systems or moral thinking? Second, what part did moral philosophy play in the life of Romans in Horace's time? The answers I shall give to these very large questions are pragmatic and limited: they are meant simply as preparation for considering Horace's Epistles.

Tacitus described tribunician power (tribunicia potestas, trib. pot. hereafter) as the title of the highest pinnacle (sc. of power) in the Roman world (summi fastigii vocabulum), and Augustus counted his years of trib. pot. from 23 B.C. So much may be stated with confidence and without dispute. In 23 B.C. however trib. pot. was introduced quietly, so quietly that the exact date of the law by which it was conferred (if it was conferred in 23 B.C.) is unknown; and the title itself made so little impact on contemporary opinion that the reaction of the common people of Rome, for whose protection Tacitus says Augustus took the power, was negative—so negative that they spent the next five years trying to re-elect Augustus to the consulate which he had resigned at or about the time that the era of trib. pot. began. We must conclude that the conferment of trib. pot. (if there was any ceremony at all in 23 B.C.) was not made the subject of a great celebration designed to win popular acclaim for this new institution (if it was a new one), nor was it immediately advertised widely as a new formula for the government of the Roman world.

There has long been accepted as a fact in the study of the cult of Sabazius an ostensible reference to Jews who, as early as 139 B.C., worshipped Sabazius, and were expelled from Rome by the praetor peregrinus Cornelius Hispalus. The source of this information is often given without qualification as Valerius Maximus, 1, 3, 2. Even Eisele's thorough and generally sceptical article, s.v. ‘Sabazius’, in Roscher's Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (1909), accepts the statement and gives the usual indication of its source. The passage is generally cited as follows:

Cn. Cornelius Hispalus praetor peregrinus, M. Popilio Laenate, L. Calpurnio consulibus, edicto Chaldaeos citra decimum diem abire ex urbe atque Italia iussit, levibus et ineptis ingeniis fallaci siderum interpretatione quaestuosam mendaciis suis caliginem inicientes. Idem Iudaeos, qui Sabazi Iovis cultu Romanos inficere mores conati erant, repetere domos suas coegit.

The two letters of recommendation, Ad Familiares XIII, 26 and 28, were addressed in 46 B.C. to Ser. Sulpicius Rufus, the foremost jurist of the day, and at the time the governor of Achaea. They were written on behalf of Cicero's former quaestor, L. Mescinius Rufus, in anticipation of legal difficulties in the succession of the latter to the inheritance left to him in Achaea by his cousin(?) M. Mindius.

Cicero's request, ‘ ut … eos (i.e. Mescinius' opponents) … Romam reieceris ’, backed, as he informed his correspondent, by a letter (litterae quasi commendaticiae) from the consul in Rome (Fam. XIII, 26, 3) has received the most contradictory and mutually exclusive interpretations. Whereas some see in it a perfect example of an appeal launched before trial, others firmly deny this, or reject the very existence of this form of appeal. In its stead a little-used right of Roman citizens in the provinces to request a remittal of their case to Rome is invoked. The alleged appeal or right is variously designated revocatio Romae, revocatio Romam, reiectio Romae or most recently, reiectio Romam.

This article summarizes some of the results of an inquiry into third-century rescripts which has been proceeding for the last seven years but of which nothing has so far been published. The main source, the Codex Justinianus, contains some 2491 items dated between A.D. 193, when we first have a substantial number of texts, and 305, which are certainly or probably private rescripts, as I shall call them, i.e. subscriptiones. These were written answers given by the emperor to petitions by private individuals on points of law. If these written answers, which were in some sense the concern of the imperial office a libellis, are reassembled from the titles under which they are grouped in the Codex, and are read in complete chronological order, the reader is struck by the fact that their style is consistent over a period which varies from a few months to several years. The periods of consistent style, however, do not coincide with the reign of a particular Augustus or Augusti. Some twenty such periods and hence some twenty third-century composers of rescripts, who are clearly not emperors, can be distinguished in this way. In half a dozen cases there is evidence, again drawn from the style of composition, that the composer is one of the jurists known to us independently from the pages of Justinian's Digest; for example, Papinian, Ulpian, Menander, Modestinus or Hermogenianus. In two cases the evidence for the identification is set out in some detail below. It seems, therefore, that the composition of rescripts of any importance was the responsibility of professional lawyers, acting in their capacity of imperial secretaries a libellis, an office which Papinian at least is known to have held.

The most widespread and best-known use of computers in stylistic analysis has been in the attempts to resolve questions of disputed authorship. Here, the computer's ability to store the whole known corpus of an author's work and to compare it with the disputed work in many ways which would be inexpressibly tedious, if not impossibly lengthy, by hand, is an invaluable aid. Many studies have been carried out on classical texts where the authorship is doubtful, but these studies have most often had undisputed texts against which a disputed work could be compared. The Historia Augusta presents a different situation: there are six ‘authors’ to whom varying amounts of the work are assigned.

Friedrich Marx in the Prolegomena to his edition of Lucilius in 1904–5 proposed that the earliest books of Lucilius, viz. Books 26–30, were composed between the years 132 and 129 B.C. Conrad Cichorius, in his distinguished work Untersuchungen zu Lucilius (1908), advanced a lower date of 123 B.C. for the first collection, arguing his case with such skill and supporting it with such a quantity of apparently indisputable historical material that many scholars have for the last seventy years accepted many of his conclusions. The late dating of Books 26–30 is based primarily on three fragments, one in Book 26 (671–2M/650–1W/656–7K), and two in Book 30 (1088M/1017W/1054K and 1089M/1018W/1055K). In the survey of the datable fragments of Books 26–30 which follows the aim will be to demonstrate how the historical work of the last seventy years has affected our conclusions about the date of these fragments, and how these lines, which have been assigned late dates by Cichorius, in fact conform to the generally accepted pattern of early datable references in the first collection of Lucilius' satires.

There are two approaches to universal history: a structural one and one which may be called ‘real’ or ‘practical’. The former compares and draws general conclusions; it is theoretical history. The second is concerned with causality, relating dispersed occurrences, where possible, by determining their interdependence and establishing priorities in time. There can be no doubt, however, that an understanding of the whole of the history of mankind, from its earliest beginnings to the recognizable process of total acculturation in our present world, is the ultimate, if unattainable, goal towards which all its efforts are directed. Certain aspects of this ‘real’ or ‘practical’ universal history are the subject of this paper. The Ancient Historian can advance several arguments to justify his special claim to a universalist point of view. Three observations will be selected and briefly considered anew.

To judge from written sources, by about the year 300 imperial portraits painted on wooden panels must have been common. Yet only one example has survived to represent them. Portraits of emperors and empresses painted on wooden panels are not the only underrepresented imperial portraits. Imperial portraits were used to decorate an unexpected variety of objects, including consular sceptres, curule chairs, gabled pediments, triumphal togae, reed cases, and shields. That these portrait-bearing objects, many of which served as insignia, are known at all is largely because they are represented in images that decorate official ivory diptychs, mostly consular diptychs, and in some of the surviving copies of the Notitia Dignitatum.

The hilltop fortress town of Qaṣr Ibrîm is situated in Egyptian Nubia, some 150 miles south of Aswan. Transformed into an island by the rising waters of Lake Nasser, it has been excavated under the aegis of the Egypt Exploration Society since 1963. Until 1976 work was under the direction of Professor J. M. Plumley (University of Cambridge); the 1978 season was led by Professor W. Y. Adams of the University of Kentucky (site director) and R. D. Anderson, honorary secretary of the E.E.S. (administrative director and epigraphist). A site that attracted Egyptian interest at least as early as the New Kingdom and formed part of the district under the special protection of Horus of Mi'am, Qasr Ibrîm was for much of its history a military stronghold, administrative centre, and place of religious pilgrimage. Occupation can be traced for some 3,500 years till the expulsion in 1811 of the ‘Bosnian’ mercenaries stationed at Ibrîm soon after 1517 by the Ottoman Selim I. Ideal conditions of preservation, only now threatened by the lake, have combined with this long history to provide an astonishing wealth of documents from a wide variety of periods.