The Journal of Roman Studies has now lasted sixteen years longer than the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and is showing no particular signs of incipient senectitude. The one hundred and eleventh issue of the Journal (2021) is now available in its entirety on the Cambridge Core website, and the print edition will be mailed to subscribers very shortly. This volume is my first as Editor, and I very much hope that you will enjoy reading this year’s selection of cutting-edge research in Roman studies. It has been a real pleasure, and an education, bringing this year’s volume through to publication. 

The 2021 JRS kicks off with a paper which sheds new light on the early development of the city of Rome. ‘On the Banks of the Tiber: Opportunity and Transformation in Early Rome’, by Andrea L. Brock, Laura Motta, and Nicola Terrenato (Open Access), sets out to reconstruct the geomorphology of the Forum Boarium district of Rome from prehistoric times to the middle Republic. The authors show that the riverine landscape around the Forum Boarium saw remarkably rapid sedimentation in the sixth century, partly as a result of large-scale human intervention and urban development. A substantial rise in the height of the river banks necessitated the construction of artificial quays and port installations in place of the earlier ‘natural harbour’ in the area of the Forum Boarium, where boats could be beached on the low-lying banks. The effect of this, together with artificial drainage of the valleys between the hills by means of canalised ditches (such as the Cloaca Maxima), was to cause seasonal inundations to reach much higher levels than previously, with devastating effects on life and property. The paper offers a luminous demonstration of how to integrate archaeological and historical sources, and raises wider issues about the development of Rome in its early centuries that ought to be of huge interest to anyone working in Roman studies.

Bobby Xinyue’s ‘(Un)Seeing Augustus: Libertas, Divinisation, and the Iuvenis of Virgil’s First Eclogue’ is a ground-breaking treatment of the politics and political aesthetics of Eclogues 1. Xinyue argues that the poem should not be read as a riddle to which ‘Octavian’ is the answer, but that it instead lays out and naturalises a novel system of power. At the centre is the image of the youthful godlike man, the ‘present deity’, who creates the conditions for a new discourse of libertas ‘that not only presumes the subject’s lack of agency, but even idealises external intervention as salvific power’. Xinyue compellingly argues that the iuvenis’ anonymity (and multiplicity of literary and real-life models) is in fact central to the poem’s meaning, and shows how the power-dynamics of Eclogues 1 play out across the rest of the book (particularly in Eclogues 4 and 9). This is a dense and powerful paper, which adds new depths to ‘political’ readings of the Virgilian corpus.

For sheer audacity, wit, and ingenuity, Michael B. Sullivan’s ‘Horace’s Programmatic Priamel’ is hard to beat. Sullivan starts, and ends, with Horace’s aspiration at the end of Odes 1.1 that he should be ‘enrolled’ by his readers among the nine canonical Greek lyric poets. Sullivan argues that Odes 1.1 is in fact a learned and playful ‘catalogue’ poem which alludes to all nine of these canonical poets in sequence: Pindar the charioteer (lines 3–6), Stesichorus the demagogue (lines 7–8), Bacchylides the grain-importer (lines 9–10), and so on. In the final lines of the poem, Horace gently shunts Sappho into the tenth position in the canon (claiming the ninth space for himself), thus neatly elevating her to her proper place as the ‘tenth Muse’ alongside Euterpe and Polyhymnia. Argued with grace and a good deal of low-key humour, this article is a delight to read, and it is hard to imagine a reader who could fail to admire the vigour and unobtrusive scholarship with which Sullivan builds his case.

Long-term readers of the Journal will need no introduction to the work of R. R. R. Smith, whose numerous essays on Roman portrait sculpture in the JRS over the past forty years have transformed our understanding of Roman art. I am biased (of course): but Smith’s ‘Maiestas serena: Roman court cameos and early imperial poetry and panegyric’ does seem to me perhaps the most exciting and consequential of all his many JRS papers. Its range and breadth of ambition are breath-taking: not just a comprehensive reassessment and catalogue of the exquisite court cameos depicting the emperor and his family; not just a new and convincing argument about the chronological distribution of these amazing objects (almost entirely Julio-Claudian); but a bold and brilliant hypothesis about the relation of court cameo-portraiture to the themes and ideologies of early imperial poetic panegyric. No-one has ever before drawn out with such clarity and precision the distinctiveness of Julio-Claudian ideas about monarchy and divinity, and the way these ideals were played out in Palatine art and literature. And the colour plates are something else.

In ‘Provincial Monarchs as an Eastern arcanum imperii: ‘Client Kingship’, the Augustan Revolution and the Flavians’, Tal A. Ish-Shalom has achieved the hardest of tasks: finding something both new and wholly convincing to say about ‘friendly kings’ in the early imperial Roman East. Ish-Shalom shows that the reorganisation of the eastern dynastic territories by Augustus after Actium was considerably more systematic and coherent than previously thought. By the wholesale grant of Roman citizenship to client kings west of the Euphrates, the encouragement of intermarriage between these dynasties, and the raising of royal children at the imperial court, Augustus and his Julio-Claudian successors ‘transformed a diverse group of eastern potentates into a new, socially cohesive and distinct class of Roman administrators’. Ish-Shalom terms this class of men ‘provincial monarchs’, clearly distinct from friendly kings outside the empire (and local monarchs in the Roman West) through their personal loyalty to the domus Augusta. This allows him to offer a new and compelling explanation for the gradual disintegration of the system under the Flavians.  

The date and political context of the bucolic poet Calpurnius has been a long-standing concern of contributors to the Journal of Roman Studies, beginning with Edward Champlin’s influential ‘The Life and Times of Calpurnius Siculus’ way back in JRS 68 (1978). Is it too much to hope that Ruurd Nauta has finally settled this age-old debate? ‘In Praise of Meliboeus: Calpurnius Siculus and Columella’ (Open Access)is an exceptional piece of close reading and scholarship, convincingly showing that Calpurnius’ poetic patron ‘Meliboeus’ must be identified with the Neronian agricultural writer Columella, to whose poem De Cultu Hortorum Calpurnius repeatedly and programmatically alludes. Nauta draws out some of the consequences for the precise dating and internal chronology of Calpurnius’ poetry-book, arguing that parts of his book must be dated considerably later in the reign of Nero (the early or mid-60s) than previously thought. Quite aside from the empirical consequences of the argument, the paper is a model demonstration of how a cluster of near-contemporary poetic texts can be used to illuminate the politics of a particular historical moment.

Last but not least, Kyle Helms’ ‘Pompeii’s Safaitic Graffiti’ introduces readers to a little-known but deeply absorbing corner of Roman epigraphy: a handful of graffiti in Safaitic script scratched into the plaster of the theatre-corridor at Pompeii. Helms starts from the key observation that these Safaitic texts are situated very close to a cluster of graffiti cut by a group of persons called the Tertiani. Helms plausibly identifies these men as soldiers in the legio III Gallica, known from Tacitus to have wintered in Campania in late AD 69 and early AD 70. Crucially, this legion had previously been stationed in Syria, and Helms brilliantly argues that the Safaitic graffiti at Pompeii are best explained as the work of nomads from the Ḥarrah (the basalt desert of southern Syria) who had been recruited as auxiliaries attached to the legio III Gallica. This is a tightly argued paper with dramatic implications for our understanding of mobility and language-use in the early imperial Roman army; it is also, as Helms elegantly concludes, testimony to ‘a strikingly imperial moment: when nomads walked on the Bay of Naples’.

Does anyone other than the Editor still read the JRS cover to cover? I do hope so: this year’s Journal magnificently demonstrates the vitality and creativity of Roman studies (archaeological, literary, historical, art-historical) in the early twenty-first century. If I have a lingering regret about this year’s issue, it is that we have not published more papers by female scholars. This reflects significant under-representation of women among authors who submit papers to the Journal: the JRS would be vastly enriched by having a wider range of scholarly voices in its pages. If you have a paper which you think might be suitable for publication in the Journal, do get in touch: it would be great to hear from you.