Perhaps the most significant feature of the end of paganism in Rome is that we do know about it; in the words of one of the earliest students of this death of a religion, Beugnot, ‘L'histoire n'a daigné qu'assister aux funérailles du paganisme.’ That this is so is due largely to the central position occupied in the religious history of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, by the senatorial aristocracy of Rome.

‘Audax venali comitatur Curio lingua’ wrote Lucan in a familiar line of his Bellum Civile, at a time when C. Scribonius Curio the younger had been a hundred years in his grave. Lucan was not the first to describe Curio as audax; Velleius Paterculus did so before him: ‘bello autem civili … non alius maiorem flagrantioremque quam C. Curio tribunus plebis subiecit facem, vir nobilis, eloquens, audax,’, 11, 48, 3. It seems, indeed, that the attribute audax was traditional for Curio and, if this is so, the tradition may well have originated in Curio's own time. His title to a place in Roman history rested on the fact that he changed sides at a critical juncture—‘momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum’ (Lucan IV, 819). And what earned him, whether in his lifetime or posthumously, the derogatory attribute audax was, I think, his political career, notably the record of his tribuneship, no less, if not more, than his character. Audax, as originally applied to Curio, was very probably a conventional partisan appellation which classified him more effectively as a political type than it characterized him as an individual. For the derogatory audax, as I shall presently try to show, belongs in the late Republican period to the current phraseology of political backbiting and it carries a distinctly political connotation. It is the purpose of this paper to consider what audax denotes in the vocabulary of Roman political life in the late Republic as well as who are regarded as audaces in Roman politics.

When Cilicia for a season was a province of consular rank, governed in succession by P. Lentulus Spinther, Ap. Claudius Pulcher and M. Tullius Cicero, what held it together was the high-road from Laodicea to the Syrian Gates. Those proconsuls never strayed very far from the road. Cicero, coming up from Tarsus early in February of 50 B.C., encountered an unexpected welcome. P. Vedius had journeyed out some way from Laodicea to meet him, that ‘magnus nebulo’, a friend of Pompeius Magnus. Vedius was escorted by a large and motley retinue. With him paraded a baboon in a chariot—no doubt congenial company, and perhaps a reminder of absent friends or a high dignitary like Ap. Pulcher, the recent proconsul, whom the outspoken Caelius Rufus likened to an ape. Vedius also had some wild asses (the bleak upland plains of Lycaonia and Cappadocia were their peculiar habitat). For what purpose no man can say, though the breeding of high-grade mules had become a lucrative pursuit in this age. The dubious credit of introducing the flesh of young onagri to Roman tables was reserved for the great Maecenas.

In any reconsideration of the meaning of the phrase ‘lustrum condere’ the first stage must be to decide its approximate antiquity. If it were shown to be an antiquarian imposture, it would have to be regarded in a very different light from a genuine survival of religious language. Three passages are relevant to this first point.

The Roman aureus exchanged for 25 denarii. The evidence for the equation, all literary, has reached us rather indirectly. The earliest preserved source is Claudius Didymus (first century A.D.), quoted in Priscian; in the second century Lucian equated 30 aurei with 750 denarii; in the third, Dio 55, 12, 3–5, a lost passage entirely reconstructed from the epitomes of Xiphilinus and Zonaras, put the exchange directly (p. 41, [3] below). In addition, the exchange can be inferred from two parallel passages: Suetonius relates that when Otho entertained Galba at dinner he regularly gave each member of the guard an aureus (Otho 4, 2 = Plutarch, Galba 20, 4, χρυσοῦς); Tacitus tells the same story, using the words ‘centenos nummos divideret’ (Hist. 1, 24).

The poem begins with a passionate cry. ‘To my aid, little poems, every one, all of you from everywhere, every single one of you, all!’ When Catullus says adeste, hendecasyllabi, he is not of course summoning representatives of one metrical genre only. Since by far the greater part of those short poems which now make up the first section of his book (I–LX) has as its metre the hendecasyllable (phalaeceus), he can readily use this name for his short poems in general without excluding an occasional iambic or choliambic piece. Catullus has to summon his poems undique, for they are scattered over a wide area, which proves, if proof were needed, that, like other poets in antiquity, he was in the habit of sending first, before publication, individual poems to individual addressees.

Before the accession of Vespasian it is rare to find anyone outside the imperial family holding the consulate more than once. From A.D. 70 onwards the pattern is established whereby prominent lieutenants of the emperor are distinguished in this way. Mucianus, of course, is outstanding: consul first c. 64, he appears in the Fasti again in 70 and 72, as a fitting honour for the architect of Flavian supremacy. The great general Plautius Silvanus, consul as long before as 45, is consul again in 74, on his return from governing Tarraconensis, a province which Vespasian evidently wished to render secure beyond doubt. In the inscription of Silvanus' career (ILS 986), Vespasian states his reasons, apparently based simply on a recognition of merit long unrewarded, rather than for services to the Flavian cause. A more obvious supporter is Q. Petillius Cerealis, consul in 70, probably after his departure to the Rhine, and again in 74, after settling the Batavian revolt and governing Britain: he had taken an active part in hostilities against the Vitellians, and was also connected to Vespasian by a propinqua affinitas (Tac., Hist. 111, 59). Eprius Marcellus, a less clearly military figure, but active on behalf of the Flavians, in opposition to the intransigent Helvidius Priscus, likewise goes straight to an important province, Asia (CIL X, 3853; XIV, 2612; P-W VI, 263–4; PIR E, 84), and returns to a second consulate in 74.

Le diplôme a été découvert, à I'occasion de travaux de fondation, à Gherla (département de Cluj), sur le territoire de l'ancien castram romain, vers le début du mois d'août 1960. Des deux tablettes, seule la tabella I a été retrouvée. Elle est assez bien conservée, étant encore pourvue du fil de fer en bronze qui la rattachait à la tabella II, laquelle n'a pas été retrouvée. Sa longueur est de 147 mm., la largeur de 117 mm. et l'épaisseur de 14 mm. La tablette dégrossie pèse 146·20 grammes. Le texte, nettement lisible, est écrit en lettres hautes de 3·5 mm sur la face externe et de 4 mm. sur la face interne.

The Lex Valeria Cornelia of A.D. 5, known to us only from the Tabula Hebana of 19, provided that the senators and those Equites who were enrolled in the judicial decuries should henceforth vote in ten centuries, named after the dead princes, C. and L. Caesar, for the ‘destinatio’ of consuls and praetors. In 19 these same voters were redistributed into fifteen centuries, and in 23 into twenty centuries; the new units were named after Germanicus and Drusus respectively.

Professor Tibiletti has virtually established that these ‘destining’ centuries were an integral part of the comitia centuriata. Candidates who received the majority of their votes were credited with all of them, before the remaining centuries voted. Furthermore, the ‘destining’ centuries must have taken over the role of the old centuria praerogativa; before A.D. 5 the vote of that century, composed of iuniores of the first class, was declared before the proceedings were carried further and the Comitia had been apt to follow its lead.

There are two formidable arguments against the authenticity of the Commentariolum Petitionis. In the first place its purpose is not clear. It is too rhetorical to be a private letter (and the last sentence actually invites suggestions for improvements); but equally it is too cynical to have been published during an election campaign (cf. especially §§ 5, 19, 35, 42, 45–7, 52). Secondly, in several passages the commentariolum bears a close resemblance to the in toga Candida, which on the face of it was written later; and there are conspicuous objections to the view that M. Cicero borrowed from his younger brother. Other suspicious circumstances can also be mentioned, notably the silence of Asconius and the transmission side by side with the undoubtedly spurious epistula ad Octavianum.

The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is often dismissed as a mere slavish panegyric of Rome, written with no other purpose but to persuade her Greek subjects to acquiesce in her domination. Thus Schwartz, in his Pauly-Wissowa article (v, 934 f.), after describing the work as ‘ein trauriges Dokument dafür, wie tief die geistige Potenz noch mehr als die Bildung der Griechen gesunken war’, accuses Dionysius not only of incompetence as a historian, but also of a lack of the feeling proper to a Greek. Comparing him with Polybius and Posidonius, he writes ‘die tragischen Schmerzen, die jenen echten Hellenen das Begreifen des römischen Primats gekostet hatte, sind dieser kleinen Seele fremd’. He further suggests that Dionysius chose his subject because it was remote from contemporary events and he was not likely to meet much competition.

Widely ranging arguments, and often equally wide perplexity, have now for a long time been aroused by the internal monetary problems of Diocletian's coinage reform, as a glance at any recent bibliography will show. Two primary factors connected with the reform are now generally recognized: first, that gold and silver coins of the reformed series were marked with their weight as bullion by numerals which defined them as fractions, respectively, of the gold and silver pound (Ξ = 60 on gold, and XCVI = 96 on silver), and secondly that by A.D. 301, when Diocletian issued his Maximal Edict, the prices for an enormous variety of commodities were quoted in terms of the ‘denarius communis’, of which the Edict rating (which was, it should be emphasized, a maximum rating and by no means necessarily general) gave 50,000 as the price of a pound of gold. What has remained most in dispute is the denominational value of Diocletian's new large copper coin (with laureate head on obverse and Genio Populi Romani reverse, weighing about 10 gm.), now commonly termed the ‘follis’, and its relationship both downwards with the new and smaller radiate-obverse copper piece and upwards with the XCVI silver. Interpretations have varied very widely indeed, and the 10 gm. coin has been equated with as little as 2 ‘denarii communes’ at one end of the scale and as much as 20 or 25 at the other.

Our knowledge of the Jewish Revolt in A.D. 115–117, derived formerly from scanty literary sources only, has been considerably enriched during the last few decades by new evidence, papyrological, epigraphical, and archaeological and the course of the events in the countries of the Jewish Diaspora can now be ascertained in fuller detail than was possible before.

The purpose of this paper is to inquire into the general aspects of the revolt.