On the second day of January 63 B.C. Cicero, with the full dignity of a consul, appeared in the Forum to address the Populus at a contio (assembly). This occasion, when he voiced his opposition to the agrarian legislation moved by the tribune Rullus and his colleagues, can be remembered because a text of the speech has survived as De lege agararia II. His words were apparently persuasive, since the bill was defeated in the subsequent voting of the tribal assembly. Eloquence was Cicero's greatest political asset and the De lege agraria II might be read as testimony to the power of words alone. Yet while it might be tempting for a literary critic to imagine that ‘when he stood before his audience, Cicero had at his disposal only words and the stylistic genius to construct from those words arguments that would shape men's opinions and move their hearts’, the words and genius, although powerful as political weapons, operated in conjunction with the physical presence and ideological pre-eminence that the consul brought to the Rostra. There Cicero engineered persuasiveness by presenting a congruence between his verbal argument and his dignity as speaker. Since knowledge of Rullus' legislation is wholly dependent upon Cicero's representation of it, Cicero's speech might best serve then to illustrate what this embodied rhetoric suggests about the relations between a political actor and those who heard and saw him.

At Divus Julius 76 Suetonius begins his account of the circumstances which led to the murder of Julius Caesar. He describes those actions committed by Caesar which were considered heinous enough to justify assassination: his acceptance of excessive honours, many of them inappropriate to a mere mortal, and his scorn for traditional procedure. In ch. 77 Suetonius passes from Caesar's unacceptable deeds to his scandalous utterances:

nec minoris inpotentiae uoces propalam edebat, ut Titus Ampius scribit: nihil esse rem publicam, appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie. Sullam nescisse litteras, qui dictaturam deposuerit. debere homines consideratius iam loqui secum ac pro legibus habere quae dicat. eoque arrogantiae progressus est, ut haruspice tristia et sine corde exta quondam nuntiante, futura diceret laetiora, cum uellet; nec pro ostento ducendum, si pecudi cor defuisset.

No less arrogant were his public utterances, which Titus Ampius records: that the state was nothing, a mere name without body or form; that Sulla did not know his A. B. C. when he laid down his dictatorship; that men ought now to be more circumspect in addressing him, and to regard his word as law. So far did he go in his presumption, that when a soothsayer once reported direful inwards without a heart, he said: ‘They will be more favourable when I wish it; it should not be regarded as a portent, if a beast has no heart’.

Among that select band of philosophers who have managed to change the world, and not just to interpret it, it would be hard to find a pair with a higher public profile than Brutus and Cassius — brothers-in-law, fellow-assassins, and Shakespearian heroes. Yet curiously little is understood of the connection, if any, between the fact that they were philosophers and their joint decision to form the conspiracy against Caesar. It may not even be widely known that they were philosophers.

What work has been done on this question has been focused on Cassius' Epicureanism, thanks above all to a famous review published by Momigliano in 1941 which included a seminal survey of the evidence for politicized Epicureans. I shall myself have less to say on that topic than on the richer, and less explored, evidence for Brutus. For the present, we may note that at the time of the assassination, March 44 B.C., Cassius had been an Epicurean for just three or four years; that he had already prior to that been actively engaged in philosophy; but that his previous allegiance is unknown. His conversion to Epicureanism seems to have been timed to reflect his decision in 48 B.C. to withdraw from the republican struggle and to acquiesce in Caesar's rule, expressing his hopes for peace and his revulsion from civil bloodshed. This sounds in tune with a familiar Epicurean policy: minimal political involvement, along with approval of any form of government that provides peaceful conditions. We may, therefore, plausibly link Cassius' withdrawal to his new-found Epicureanism. In which case it becomes less likely that his subsequent resumption of the political initiative in fomenting conspiracy against Caesar was itself dictated purely by his Epicureanism. Yet he did remain an Epicurean to the end.6 At its weakest then, the question which we must address might simply be how, when he became convinced that Caesar must be eliminated, he managed to reconcile that decision with his Epicureanism. I shall have a suggestion to make about Cassius' Epicurean justification, but it will emerge incidentally during the examination of the evidence for Brutus, who is the real hero of this paper.

It was the main contention of a book published a few years ago that the material and the attitudes which we find in the works of the Augustan poets are intimately connected with the realities of Roman life. The poems are not to be amputated, as too often happens, from the society in which they were produced and enjoyed. Literature is not a balloon floating in the air, but a plant with its roots firmly fixed in the earth. It was argued there that ‘the same material can be observed at different levels of stylisation in different poetical contexts’, and that we can learn a great deal about the poems and their authors by following the ways in which they employ and vary the same subject matter. That was illustrated in connection with such elements of the life of pleasure as drinking and singing, bathing and nakedness; and also with the topic of death. Those ideas are carried further in this paper, which extends that approach to another area: that of religious cult. It concentrates on the poet Horace and aims to show how he uses and varies the theme of religious festivals and ceremonies, and what contrasts are offered by the work of Propertius and Ovid.

What is the most plausible connection which can be constructed between the various scenes from Roman history selected for depiction on the Shield of Aeneas, described in Aeneid 8.626–728? This question has found a variety of answers since Warde Fowler raised it in 1918, but none is entirely satisfactory. The order of presentation of the individual scenes is evidently chronological, from the beginnings of Rome to the poet's own day, but the poet's own explicit programme, that the Shield contains res Italas Romanorumque triumphos (626), is very general, and could apply equally well to the Show of Heroes in Aeneid 6. The reader feels that a more specific criterion of selection is in operation — why these particular pieces of Roman military history?

The most significant modern proposals for such a criterion are reviewed by West in an important article. For instance, Drew's argument that the scenes represent the four imperial virtues of virtus, clementia, iustitia, and pietas ascribed to Augustus on the golden shield presented to him by the Senate in 27 B.C. (Res Gestae 34.2, CIL VI.876), a stone copy of which survives at Arles, laudably makes the connection with a real, contemporary, and ideologically significant shield, but (as West points out) it is too schematic and does not account for all the details (how are the she-wolf and the rape of the Sabines to be accommodated under those labels?). West's own answer, that the scenes chosen are those particularly suited to depiction in plastic art, has many attractions, but it is difficult to see it as the sole criterion for selection: this is too important an ideological moment in the Aeneid for such a purely aesthetic explanation.

Criticism of Propertius 2.7 has usually centred around the elegy's role as evidence for the poets's attitude towards Augustus. Treated as such, it has been used to support a surprising variety of conclusions. For Stahl and Lyne the poem represents a courageous defence of individualism under a repressive and intolerant regime. At the other end of the spectrum, Cairns has tried to show that the poet's deliberate presentation of himself as ‘a morally tainted individual’ undercuts his argument to such an extent that the poem is effectively an endorsement of the legislation which it purports to attack. Between these two extremes, Baker detects ‘a cautious blend of levity and gravity’ and suggests that, while emphasizing the value of amor, the elegy hints at a tension between Propertius' personal inclinations and the demands of others or his own sense of duty; Boucher, who believes that Propertius is generally pro-Augustan, reads 2.7 as an open and straightforward critique of the princeps' attempts at moral reform, which, by its very openness, militates against the reading of subtle irony into apparently patriotic elegies such as 3.11 and 4.6; and Camps speaks of ‘a certain extravagance, even shrillness, in the manner in which Propertius expresses his defiance of ordinary Roman values’ which ‘may reflect tensions within the poet himself’. More recently, Cloud has argued that Propertius has simply used the marriage law as a peg on which to hang his working out of a collection of Hellenistic erotic topoi, and that the poem cannot be read as a serious statement of opposition to the princeps.

‘As intellectuals and academics we are constantly engaging in projects of representation, but in the dominant epistemologies that guide our work, our role as representers is effaced’.

‘At the heart of the issue lies a fundamental insistence on the contextualised nature of all forms of knowledge, meaning and behaviour. There is a further recognition of the partial and partisan edge to inquiry, theory construction, and scholarly (re)presentation, as well as an explicit acknowledgement of the importance of the author's biography in this creative process’.

The assertions of two modern geographers, Katz and Merrifield, are symptomatic of an underlying, but persistent, debate within their field of study. To what degree should academic prose aim at impersonality? The discipline of modern geography, perhaps more than any other academic subject at pains constantly to justify and redefine itself, has taken on this problem, formulated its history, and posited some solutions.

If the field of ancient economy is a battlefield, arguments based on pottery research certainly belong with the best of the weapons. Among the various kinds of pottery serving ancient historians as sources, red-gloss pottery (terra sigillata) manufactured in several parts of the Roman Empire plays an outstanding role. This special kind of pottery bears inscriptions in the form of stamps referring to persons involved in its production. In combination with the archaeological contexts of stamp finds, such as excavated sites of production, transportation, storage, and consumption, these inscriptions enable us to gain an insight into the structures of production and distribution. An additional reason why Roman red-gloss pottery is of very great interest to students of the ancient economy is that it was mass-produced, and exported to all parts of the Empire. Results of research in this field are, therefore, frequently used as weighty arguments in the discussion of the character of the Roman economy as a whole.

The relative importance of different sources of slaves in the Roman Empire during the Principate cannot be gauged from ancient texts. However, simple demographic models show that, for purely statistical reasons, natural reproduction made a greater contribution to the Roman slave supply than child exposure, warfare, and the slave trade taken together and was in all probability several times as important as any other single source. The most plausible projections also suggest that on average the incidence of manumission was rather low. By implication, overall fertility of ex-slaves in general and of freedwomen in particular would be low as well, which must have reduced their chances of acquiring legal privileges that accrued from sexual reproduction.

Ancient history, it could be said, is composed of long and broad bands of unchanging social and political culture, punctuated in the upper levels by periods of upheaval and re-orientation. Ancient art works document and make visible both aspects: numbing continuity and static production on the one hand and sudden shifts and sharp turns in representation on the other. This paper takes as an example one of those periods of highly-charged visual re-orientation, the early fourth century A.D., and is intended as an alternative to the discussion and explanation of ancient images in this period in terms of artistic and formal processes. It aims to set an unusual and fat-faced late antique portrait (Pl. I) in its proper context alongside the thin-faced portraits of a better known figure (Pl. XII), and looks at the wider implications of this for the interpretation of imperial portrait sculpture as a significant expression of political ideology. The leanfaced man is Constantine, the other it will be argued is Licinius.

This survey is intended primarily to assess the impact on Roman studies in general of recent work in Roman epigraphy — whether newly published inscriptions, revised editions, or texts that have been reconsidered or newly analysed in the light of specific themes. We mean to draw attention to those epigraphic studies that make a significant contribution, in particular, to Roman history. Hence the considerable space we devote below to the newly published Senatus Consultum on Cnaeus Piso, of which any future study of the reign of Tiberius (or of the relations between senate and emperor in the early Principate) will have to take account. Other highlights include a centurion's own reflections (in verse) on his unit's building works at Bu-Njem in Tripolitania; a major revision of the inscribed texts of Roman laws; the first known letter of Lucullus; and a new text from Messene orchestrating the city's responses to the death of Augustus. At the same time, in this introduction, we note one or two developments in recent epigraphic practice. Though these aspects are necessarily more technical, we include them in order to help readers to find the epigraphic data they might need (publication is increasingly diverse, and in an ever wider range of media); and then to assess the texts, the dates, and the conclusions the epigraphists are offering. ‘What you get’ in epigraphy is not necessarily ‘what you see’.