This paper investigates the figure of the lena in the elegies of Tibullus (I.5; II.6), Propertius (IV.5), and Ovid (Amores I.8). While each poet treats the character of the lena in importantly different ways, each has in common a deep interest in contrasting his own position as both lover and poet with the activities of the lena, a bawd or procuress. All three poets curse the lena, denouncing primarily her malevolent magical powers, her carmina, which are directed against them and their carmina. The lena not only preaches an erotic code which in its emphasis on remuneration and the denigration of poetry directly opposes that of the poet-lover, she also usurps his role as instructor and constructor of the elegiac puella. It is the elegiac poet's prerogative to describe and construct the elegiac mistress. By usurping his role as praeceptor, the lena threatens the poet with both sexual and literary impotence. It is precisely because the lena challenges the male poet-lover's control over these terms that she is such a potent enemy; the woman with a pen, as Pollack writes in The Poetics of Sexual Myth, ‘threatens to undermine a system of signification that defines her both as vulnerable and as victim’. If the elegiac mistress can be said to play a more masterful role as domina in Roman love poetry than in conventional Roman ideology, it must nevertheless be qualified with the reminder that she only plays a role constructed for her by elegy's first-person narrator who demands complete control over the discourse of their relationship, of the rules of the amatory game.

The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures throughout the Empire — an epigraphic boom occurred, in Italy and in every province of the Empire. That explosion of new inscriptions, and the subsequent rise and fall of an epigraphic culture, was experienced by eastern and western provinces alike, in Greek as well as in Latin epigraphy. Many regional epigraphies remain to be characterized in terms of their chronology, but such local studies as have been done strongly suggest that, although there was certainly some inter-regional variation in the scale, rate, and timing of this phenomenon, in its broad outlines this pattern was very widespread. Across the entire Empire, the number of inscriptions set up each year began to rise from the Augustan period and increased more and more steeply through the second century. In every region that has been examined in detail, the majority of extant inscriptions were produced in the late second and early third centuries. The peak or turning-point seems to have been reached at slightly different times in each area. But everywhere the subsequent decline was much faster than the original rise, reaching a new low between the middle and the end of the third century A.D. Epigraphy does survive into the fourth century — in most areas of the Empire, if not in most cities — but late imperial inscriptions are very much rarer and differ markedly from early imperial examples in genre, form, and style.

A remarkable new consensus, recognized even by its critics, has emerged among classical historians that ‘the normal Roman family seems to have been a “nuclear family” like our own’. The consensus is remarkable because practically all historians who support it admit that the portrait of the Roman family that emerges from many literary accounts and is enshrined in Roman law and language is nothing like the modern nuclear family. Saller demonstrates that the Romans had no term equivalent to ‘family’ in the modern sense, that is, the father-mother-children triad of the ‘nuclear family’. The English word ‘family’ has almost no relation to Roman concepts of familia and domus. As Saller explains, ‘Domus was used with regard to household and kinship to mean the physical house, the household including family and slaves, the broad kinship group including agnates and cognates, ancestors and descendants, and the patrimony’. The Latin familia, while usually narrower in reference than domus, also had little relation to anything meant by the English ‘family’.

The Lex Irnitana is arguably the most important addition to the material for the study of Roman Law since the discovery of the text of Gaius' Institutes by Niebuhr in 1816. In terms of information about the working of the Roman legal system its importance far outstrips, for example, that of the new fragments of Gaius found in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular it gives us much fresh information on a topic about which we are really very badly informed, viz. the law of civil procedure during the classical period of Roman Law, say, during the first two centuries A.D. While one can debate whether the procedures at Irni were in all respects the same as at Rome, no-one who has studied the inscription can be in any doubt that in its essentials the Lex envisages that the institutions of Irni will use a system which is Roman in nature. So what we have is evidence which can be used to help reconstruct the procedure under the formulary system in the first century A.D.

Horace, reflecting on his relationship with Maecenas and the top men or ‘gods’ in Rome, complained that passers-by asked him questions about affairs of state, expecting him to be privy to the deliberations of the great. One question was: ‘What about the land allocations (praedia) that the emperor promised to the soldiers? Will they be on the three-cornered island (Sicily) or on Italian soil? When I swear that I know nothing about it they are amazed at me as the only mortal who knows how to keep a vital unfathomable secret’ (Serm. 11.6.51–8).

The poet strikingly illustrates how land distribution was a familiar and important aspect of Roman life and of great interest not only to soldiers but also to many citizens, perhaps partly because of their apprehension about expropriations, which had created great anguish during the civil wars. We see too how the whole business was viewed as under the personal direction of the emperor and his entourage, and incidentally how difficult it was for people to find out about decisions taken behind the scenes.

Within the last decade significant advances have been made towards a better understanding of the fundamental demographic regimes that characterized the Mediterranean world of Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Coincident with this improvement in our knowledge has come a renewed interest in the rituals and cultural practices associated with death and burial in the societies that were part of the Roman Empire. These divergent interests are reflected in two distinct approaches to the analysis of death in Roman society. The cultural method, which finds significance in reading the quality of a given death and burial, has tended to concentrate on eliciting connections between the archaeological remains of burial, the ritualistic celebration of death, and the social values of the living. The other approach to the phenomenon of death is more directly concerned with the crude biological facts of life and death: the historical demography of human mortality that has emphasized the analysis of quantitative data. In almost any consideration of death, however, the two approaches are pragmatically inseparable. This interdependence of the evaluative and quantitative aspects of death is apparent from the fact that it was a dramatic shift in cultural values that produced the consciousness and the recording of the temporal ‘quantity’ that made the writing of this study possible. What I propose to do is to track the seasonal variations of mortality in Roman society. Pronounced seasonal fluctuations in the demographics of any given human population are one of the most fundamental and enduring aspects of its characteristic profile. This applies not only to crudely biological processes such as birth and death, but also to practices, like marriage, that are apparently culturally driven. These annual oscillations rarely alter very much over the long term; they are one of the ‘deep structures’ that identify the main environmental and cultural factors that form a given population. As such, they mirror the interplay between the bare biological forces and the human decisions that give any population its peculiar shape. The delineation of a central diagnostic feature of a given population, in this case that of a vanished population of one and a half millennia ago, is something that will enable us better to understand its basic demographic structure.

O.Claud, inv. 4751; 14.5 × 10.5 cm; A.D. 136–146.

Instructions from Pachoumis for the month of Thoth. Wages: 47 drachmae. Deductions: advance 20 drachmae (you get a receipt); 3 cotylae of oil; I mation of lentils; I mation of onions; I amphora of wine; symbole: 3 drachmae. My wheat to the desert. Dapane: 4 obols. The rest to the desert.

Pachoumis worked in the imperial quarries at Mons Claudianus. He was either a quarryman, a stone-mason, or a smith. He belonged to the group of workers called pagani.

In 1968, Peter Brown read at the Society's Annual General Meeting a paper entitled ‘The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire’. Delivered at a time when little research was being carried out by British scholars either on Manichaeism or on the cultural and religious relationship between the Roman and the Sassanian Empires, it was for many a complete revelation. With consummate skill and vast erudition Brown placed the history of the diffusion of the sect against a background of vigorous and dynamic interchange between the Roman and the Persian Empires. He also mounted a successful challenge on a number of popularly held views on the history of the religion in the Roman Empire. Manichaeism was not to be seen as part of the mirage orientale which fascinated the intellectuals of the High Empire. It was not an Iranian religion which appealed through its foreigness or quaintness. Rather, it was a highly organized and aggressively missionary religion founded by a prophet from South Babylonia who styled himself an ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’. Brown reminded the audience that ‘the history of Manichaeism is to a large extent a history of the Syriac-speaking belt, that stretched along the Fertile Crescent without interruption from Antioch to Ctesiphon’. Its manner of diffusion bore little or no resemblance to that of Mithraism. It did not rely on a particular profession, as Mithraism did on the army, for its spread throughout the Empire. Instead it developed in the common Syriac culture astride the Romano-Persian frontier which was becoming increasingly Christianized consequent to the regular deportation of whole communities from cities of the Roman East like Antioch to Mesopotamia and adjacent Iran. Manichaeism which originally flourished in this Semitic milieu was not in the strict sense an Iranian religion in the way that Zoroastrianism was at the root of the culture and religion of pre-Islamic Iran. The Judaeo-Christian roots of the religion enabled it to be proclaimed as a new and decisive Christian revelation.

For the historian of the Roman period, the archaeology of Central and Southern Italy raises (and sometimes provides answers to) a fascinating variety of questions. The Pontine plain and the valleys of the Liri and Sacco were the areas first affected by Roman expansion beyond the Latial plain, and it was here that the Romans tested and perfected the techniques of organization and control of territory that were to be used with such success elsewhere in Italy and eventually throughout the Mediterranean: in particular, colonization, municipalization, and the transformation of the rural landscape which accompanied them. This area too saw the development of the villa system of agriculture, which came to be predominant in Central Italy during the first century B.C., and was imitated throughout the Empire; but there were also striking differences between agricultural practices in the plains and in the mountains above. This geographical diversity was paralleled by a complex cultural mix, as aspects of both Greek and Roman culture were adopted by the local populations, who themselves moved around an increasingly unified Italy with greater ease, leading to further cultural transformations.