Our perspectives on ancient history can sometimes be significantly affected by contributions from scholars of other disciplines. An obvious example from the military field is Edward Luttwak's 1976 book on The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. Luttwak is a respected and insightful commentator on modern strategic issues, and his distinctive contribution was to analyse Roman military affairs in terms of modern concepts such as ‘armed suasion’ and the distinction between ‘power’ and ‘force’. His book has prompted considerable debate among specialist ancient historians, and although much of this has been critical of his ideas (largely due to the alleged anachronism of applying them in the Roman context), there is no doubt that the injection of this new dimension has helped to influence subsequent thinking on Roman imperial defence.

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequences.

The historical record of the Roman civil wars gives an unusual prominence to C. Asinius Pollio (76 b.c.–a.d. 4). There is more than one reason for the anomaly, not the least being that Pollio was himself largely responsible for creating that record in the form of his celebrated Historiae of the civil wars. It was this work which provided the authors we read — Appian, Dio, Plutarch, and Suetonius — with their major source for the period, and a characteristic feature of the work, as these later texts attest, was the emphasis which Pollio placed on his presence on the scene and immediate, eyewitness knowledge of much of the historical material he narrated.

And yet Pollio had earned for himself at least a small place in history, independently of his historiographical activity. After the death of Caesar he played an important role in the manoeuvring which brought Mark Antony to power (three letters to Cicero survive from the period), and held the consulship in 40 B.C. (cf. Ecl. 4.1–17). Whilst consul he acted as co-sponsor of the pact of Brundisium between Antony and Octavian, and subsequently celebrated a triumph over the Parthini, a Balkan tribe.

The appearance in 1998 of F. E. Romer's English translation of Pomponius Mela's De Chorographia has helped to raise further the profile of this previously rather obscure author. Indeed, since the publication a decade previously of the Budé edition by Alain Silberman, interest in Mela seems to have grown quite steadily. Important contributions in German by Kai Brodersen have widened our appreciation of Mela's place within ancient geography as a whole, and his role within the history of cartography has been the subject of a number of shorter pieces.

One element common to all these works, however, is a continuing tendency to disparage both Mela himself and the work he created. This is typified by Romer, for whom Mela was ‘a minor writer, a popularizer, not a first-class geographer’; one ‘shocking reason’ for his choice of genre was simply poor preparation, ‘insufficient for technical writing in geography’. Similar judgements appear in the works of Brodersen and Silberman. Mela's inaccuracies are, for these critics, typical of the wider decline of geography in the Roman period. Perhaps such negative views sprang initially from a sense of frustration: it was counted as one of our author's chief defects that he failed to list many sources for his work. For scholars interested in Quellenforschung it makes poor reading. Yet, quite clearly, the De Chorographia has also been damned by comparison. Mela's work has been held against the best Graeco-Roman learning on geography during antiquity—against Strabo, Ptolemy, or Pliny—and it has usually been found wanting. Set against the achievements of his peers, his work does not stand close scrutiny. Thus, for most scholars, the text has been read as a failed exercise in technical geography, or a markedly inferior document in the wider Graeco-Roman geographical tradition.

The theme of this paper is geographical space as intellectual, as symbolic space. Recent scholarship has had much to say about the ways in which the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean interacted with one another, created myths of affinity or established identity by emphasizing what distinguished them from their neighbours. What though is the significance of a landscape where there is next to no human cultivation, which you can never hope to inhabit and across which only a very few can wander? What finally is the meaning of a landscape offering nothing but heat, dust, thirst, and a profusion of magical, homicidal serpents? I propose therefore a journey into the desert, a journey into the Greco-Roman imagination.

In his discussion of natural slavery in the first book of the Politics (1254a17–1254b39), Aristotle notoriously assimilates human slaves to non-human animals. Natural slaves, Aristotle maintains (1254b16–20), are those who differ from others in the way that the body differs from the soul, or in the way that an animal differs from a human being; and into this category fall ‘all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service’. The point is made more explicit in the argument (1254b20–4) that the capacity to be owned as property and the inability fully to participate in reason are defining characteristics of the natural slave: ‘Other animals do not apprehend reason but obey their instincts. Even so there is little divergence in the way they are used; both of them (slaves and tame animals) provide bodily assistance in satisfying essential needs’ (1254b24–6). Slaves and animals are not actually equated in Aristotle's views, but the inclination of the slave-owner in classical antiquity, or at least a representative of the slave-owning classes, to associate the slave with the animal is made evident enough. It appears again in Aristotle's later statement (1256b22–6) that the slave was as appropriate a target of hunting as the wild animal.

More than thirty years — a generation of man — have passed since the chance discovery in 1968 of what has been referred to since as the collegium of the Augustales at Misenum. In addition to statuary and architectural elements of exceptional interest, the excavations, which presented formidable technical problems, have yielded a rich epigraphical dossier pertaining to the local Augustales, and to political, social, economic, religious, and administrative aspects of their organization from the Julio-Claudian and late Flavian periods to the end of the Antonine age. One of these inscriptions has at last received appropriate scholarly attention; it both whets the appetite for more and reveals the inadequacies of the cursory accounts of the dossier published previously. Now that all the material recovered from the site has been transported to the Castello Aragonese di Baia, and is attractively displayed in the new Museo Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei, one dares to hope that the entire complex and its contents will soon receive the comprehensive archaeological and historical treatment that they so richly deserve.

Despite the wealth of the cult's material remains, we still know relatively little about the ritual of the Mithraic mysteries. What was it, in the sense of liturgy performed, that Mithraists actually did in mithraea? How did it relate to myth, to the story of the god, which, by contrast, is singularly well documented on the monuments? Was it, in some way, a mimesis or re-enactment of that story? How, if at all, was it an expression of the initiate's progress, an actualization of his ‘salvation’, and thus of cult doctrine on these matters.

There are three major pieces of this puzzle already in place. First, and most important, we know that the cult meal, shared by the initiates on the banquet benches of their mithraeum, replicated the feast of Mithras and the Sun god at a table draped with the hide of the newly slain bull. We know this primarily from representations on the Konjic relief and the Sa. Prisca frescoes, where we see the initiates participating in roles defined by their positions within the hierarchy of grades: the Father (Pater) and the Sun-Runner (Heliodromus) represented Mithras and Sol reclining at their feast, the remaining grades their ministers. It is worth noting that there is no known counterpart in ritual to the central mythic act which precedes the feast, the bull-killing itself. Nevertheless, since the bull-killing in some sense effected ‘salvation’, we may suppose that the feast of the initiates, replicating the feast of the gods, celebrated this salutary effect for mortals. That the divine feast follows, and follows from, the bull-killing is assured by (1) the fact that it was served on the hide of the slaughtered bull, and (2) its depiction on the reverse of tauroctony reliefs, at least some of which could be rotated at the appropriate ritual moment. Finally, the ubiquity of the mithraeum's distinctive banqueting benches implies the ubiquity of the cult meal as the ‘liturgie ordinaire’.

The shift from a traditional polytheistic dispensation for empire to a Christian-oriented ‘commonwealth’ is unarguably one of the most significant historical processes that took place in the Roman world. Its ramifications were manifold, and not least in the arena of how empire and its territory would come to be conceived within Late Roman and Byzantine culture. In this paper I want to explore the ways one text, written in the lifetime of Constantine, takes a series of traditional forms within the established genres of Graeco-Roman travel-writing and transforms them into a new Christian paradigm not only of travel (in the form of Christian pilgrimage) but also of empire as a territorial concept defined by particular privileged places and their privileged mythologies. The surprise lies, in part, in how swiftly a Christian author was willing implicitly to re-arrange and redefine deeply entrenched institutional norms, while none the less writing on an entirely traditional model. The text I shall be exploring, the Itinerarium Burdigalense (henceforth IB), is an account of a journey to the Holy Land made by an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux in A.D. 333.

In 1993 Michael Winterbottom remarked that we have reached ‘what may be the last decades of the systematic editing of classical texts’. If he was right, what has been dwindling: capacity, interest, scope, or confidence?

When editors' prefaces include such Latin as ‘ad huius operis finem … longdudum exspectatum’ (1983), ‘non solum hominibus, sed ne libris quidem non pepercit’ (1991, of the War), ‘ex Italia, ut Munk Olsen videtur, ortus’ (1997), or ‘latet uel peritus’ (1997, of an untraced manuscript), it is tempting to blame incapacity, and to blame that in turn on a decline of interest in Latin and more narrowly in textual criticism. Not just a laudator temporis acti se puero could document the decline by looking at statistics and syllabuses; but there would be widespread agreement that in so far as textual criticism has given way to greater concern with content its proportional decline is no bad thing. Relevant too, some would say, is the decline of composition; but I am not convinced by either the obvious or the deeper reason that they give. Obviously, a preface should not be the first thing, or the first thing for thirty years, that the editor composes in Latin. Need it be, though? Lloyd-Jones and Wilson chose English in their O.C.T. of Sophocles (1990), and Green has now followed their example in a Latin O.C.T., his very handy editio minor of Ausonius (1999). Anyone who takes the view expressed to me by a distinguished German Latinist, that by abandoning Latin in prefaces one cuts off the branch that one is sitting on, should answer Merkelbach's charge that the policy of writing the notes in Latin has held up Inscriptiones Graecae. At a deeper level, composing in a language is said to be the best way of learning it; but surely reading large amounts of it observantly is just as good or better, unless the distinction between active and passive knowledge of a language holds only for the modern languages that one reads comfortably and sometimes makes a pitiful attempt to speak. Even without mystical claims for the value of composition, declining knowledge of Latin is quite enough of a threat to editing.