The following table sets out Roman military deployment, in geographical sequence according to Severan provinces, and lists modern/ancient name (where known), garrison unit (Severan), Notitia Command and individual entry with unit (references are to Notitia Dignitatum, ed. O. Seeck (Berlin 1876)).On Severan and earlier units of the auxilia listed in the Notitia, see Roxan (1976). Dash symbol (–) indicates that no military occupation is presumed, question mark (?) that a presumed occupation has left no record under that heading. Absence of any symbol indicates that no presumption is possible for military occupation or non-occupation.

The city of Rome is a tapestry of memory, a landscape lush with buildings and monuments that bear witness to attempts over the centuries to remember as well as forget. This is a crucial point to grasp when trying to appreciate the degree to which the Republic lingered in the Roman imagination. On a purely practical level it was impossible in the period under discussion to avoid reminders of pre-imperial Rome. It is a mark of the Roman veneration for the past and for tradition that old buildings and monuments were seldom deliberately destroyed to make way for the new. Rather, new buildings were squeezed in to sit cheek by jowl with their precursors, old ones regularly rebuilt or refurbished. Thus while it is true that beginning with Julius Caesar and, most dramatically, Augustus, the topography of Rome was transformed in some significant ways, in certain respects the city itself would have looked the same in ad 50 as it did in 50 bc. This was in part the point of the Augustan building program: while some new structures were built (RG 19), the name of the game was restoration (cf. the refeci of RG 20).

Armed with even a rudimentary knowledge of Rome's past, therefore, a person strolling through the city in the early imperial period encountered at every turn buildings and monuments associated with the men whose memory the exempla tradition perpetuated as well as with the political traditions of the Roman Republic.

On August 19, ad 14, at about three in the afternoon, Rome's first emperor quietly passed away at his family home in Nola, in the same room as his father had died. Preparations had been made for the event, above all to ensure that Augustus' death would not give rise to a constitutional crisis. His adopted son Tiberius would be his heir, both to a substantial portion of the estate and to the name “Augustus.”

Augustus' corpse was still warm when Tiberius made it clear that controlling memory would be as high on his agenda as it had been on his stepfather's. When the Senate requested that some of their members be allowed to convey the body of the dead emperor to his funeral pyre, Tiberius balked and pointedly instructed that this would not be necessary. Remembering the disturbances accompanying the funeral of Julius Caesar over half a century earlier, he issued an edict forbidding the cremation of Augustus in the Forum rather than in the Campus Martius. Tacitus quotes the edict: “ne, ut quondam nimiis studiis funus divi Iulii turbassent, ita Augustum in foro potius quam in campo Martis, sede destinata, cremari vellent”, “[he warned them,] ‘Do not repeat the disturbances – due to over-enthusiasm – at the funeral of Julius Caesar by pressing for Augustus to be cremated in the Forum instead of the Campus Martius, his appointed place of rest’” (Tac. Ann. 1.8.5; cf. Dio 57.2.2).

“optanda erat oblivio”

The emperor Tiberius was once approached by a man who addressed to him a question beginning with the word meministi – “do you remember …?” (Sen. Ben. 5.25.2). Scarcely had he uttered that one word when the emperor brusquely interrupted, non memini … quid fuerim, “I do not remember what I was.” Tiberius was merely feigning a memory lapse; he doubtless remembered perfectly well what the man was inquiring about – evidently, a previous encounter between the two – but chose to consign it to oblivion. As Seneca puts it, optanda erat oblivio (ibid.). Loosely rendered, “it was the emperor's wish to forget.”

If, to borrow Millar's succinct definition, the emperor was what the emperor did, he was equally what he remembered. As this small episode illustrates, however, his memory could be entirely selective, with decisions large and small hinging on what the emperor chose to remember … and forget. Indeed, memory lay at the very heart of power under the Principate; the phenomenon of damnatio memoriae – the (usually) posthumous ‘erasing’ of someone's memory by having all references to their names removed from inscriptions, portraits defaced, and the like – provides one familiar illustration of how such control might be exerted and, as importantly, why it needed to be exerted. Memories, Romans knew, can be dangerous. For that reason the ability to control and even suppress memory became a crucial component of political authority.

“Not this time,” or “dignus eram a quo res publica inciperet”: Galba and the Flavians

Upon the death of Nero and shortly after his accession, in ad 69 Galba met with his chosen successor, Piso Licinianus, to discuss the handover of power. In the speech Tacitus concocts for him, Galba remarks on Piso's illustrious Republican heritage: he was descended from Pompey the Great and Marcus Crassus, as well as being affiliated with the Sulpicii and Lutatii. Piso himself, Tacitus adds, seemed to look and act the part of an “old school” Roman (vultu habituque moris antiqui, Hist. 1.14). But far from adducing these as advantages on which to capitalize, Galba deems Piso fit for rule in spite of such qualifications. In the political arena, it seems, such things no longer possess any meaning (cf. 1.15); when it comes to choosing a princeps, what matters instead are “outstanding character and patriotism” (praeclara indoles … et amor patriae). Galba, whose coinage had declared the restoration of “freedom” (libertas restituta), then makes a surprisingly frank admission:

In the De clementia, addressed to the nineteen-year-old Nero, Seneca expresses relief that the freshly minted emperor has shown that he will not ‘forget himself’:

The De clementia, in which this passage appears, and the De beneficiis, the source of the passage quoted at the beginning of Chapter 1, are the two most substantial texts written by Seneca in the first couple of years of Nero's reign and prior to his retirement in ad 62; both most likely date to 55 and 56, the second and third years of the Neronian Principate. The De clementia, explicitly, and the De beneficiis, implicitly, offer advice to the young emperor. Whatever one may conclude about the nature and aim of that advice, Seneca considers what the emperor remembers – or forgets – to be of some importance. As it turns out, this is true not only of the emperor; Seneca regards memory as vital to individuals and society at large. But memory of what? At least in the case of the De clementia, Seneca is quite clear about this.

BOOKS AUTHORED OR CO-AUTHORED

1974 (repr. 2004). Jesus of Nazareth in New Testament Preaching. SNTSMS 27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1978. Interpreting the New Testament Today. An Inaugural Lecture in the Chair of New Testament Studies, delivered on 14 November 1978 and published by King's College, London. Repr. in Ex Auditu 1 (1985): 63–73.

1989. The Gospels and Jesus. Oxford Bible Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Translated into Japanese and Korean.)

1992. A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

1995. Gospel Truth? New Light on Jesus and the Gospels. London and Valley Forge: HarperCollins and Trinity Press International. (Translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian.)

1997. Gospel Truth? Today's Quest for Jesus of Nazareth. 2nd edn. London: Fount.

2002. The Gospels and Jesus. Oxford Bible Series. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2003. (With Patrick Collinson and Richard Rex.) Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge: 1502–1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2004. Jesus and Gospel. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

BOOKS EDITED OR CO-EDITED

1983. The Interpretation of Matthew. Issues in Religion and Theology 3. London and Philadelphia: SPCK and Fortress.

1994. (With Stephen C. Barton.) Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden. London: SPCK.

1995. The Interpretation of Matthew. SNTI. 2nd revised and expanded edn. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

INTRODUCTION

Three basic questions arise with regard to any attempt at communication: Where does it arise from? Where is it directed? and What is being communicated? Such a model of communication theory, often associated with the name of Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), stresses the importance of analysing the transmitter, message and receiver for anything one person is communicating to another. Thus one can speak of a TV transmitter or station which sends out a broadcast which television sets (equipped with the right aerial, cable or satellite dish) can receive and decode so that the programme can be played. A troupe of actors who perform a play before a live audience are using the same process, albeit with a different medium.

For written communications, these three basic elements can be worked out in various forms around the model of author–text–reader, as when someone writes a letter for someone else to read. Naturally, this three-fold understanding applies much more widely than just to letters – it applies to poems, plays, books, stories: somebody has to produce them, and someone has to read them. Of course, the ‘author’ may involve a lot more than just the one who writes; there may be several authors or editors involved in the production of the text, and still others in its delivery or transmission. Meanwhile at the other end of the process, our use today of the term ‘reader’ must not blind us to the fact that personal, silent reading ‘within the head’ is relatively modern.

What exactly did Matthew have on his table when he composed the gospel? One wonders. Strewn upon his tabletop would no doubt have been a copy of some form of Mark, possibly another document or a collection of written traditions (Q), and papyri and other items upon which were inscribed bits of the Jesus tradition, sayings, miracle stories, parables, etc. Additionally, he would have had scrolls of OT texts (e.g., MT, Aramaic, LXX or some other Greek translation of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms, etc.) or, at the very least, testimony collections. But to limit his resources to texts alone is to bias Matthew's composition. As Ong, Kelber, Gerhardsson and, more recently, Dunn remind us, such a view results from the technologizing of the word that is the cultural residue of Gutenberg's press. A purely textual focus is restrictive and misrepresents the culture of the first century. Of equal or, if Papias is correct, greater importance would have been the communal Jesus narratives that were recounted as part of his community's corporate story (oral tradition). Furthermore, one wonders where the creative energy and impulse to write derived from and whether he wrote in isolation or others in his community somehow participated. Would communal worship have affected his writing (e.g., the Lord's Prayer in 6.9–15)? Furthermore, to what extent might the social setting of the Matthean church have influenced the gospel's content and tone? All told, the question of how Matthew wrote contains within it a complexity that is staggering.

The gospel of Jesus, i.e., the gospel Jesus preached, is quite different from the gospel about Jesus which the early church preached. The church's gospel is rightly summarized as the proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus; but as crucial as that focus is, it makes little sense apart from the gospel Jesus proclaimed. The preaching of Jesus is not inferior to the preaching about Jesus and is not merely an antecedent necessity or presupposition for the church's message. The message of Jesus was and had to be the foundation of both the thought and the life of early Christians, a reality attested by the existence of the canonical and apocryphal Gospels, even though outside the Gospels reference to the sayings of Jesus is not as direct as we would expect. It is a privilege to address this topic in honour of someone whose career has contributed so much to the discussion.

The concern must be for the message, the good news, of Jesus and not for his possible use of the Aramaic word besora' or some other equivalent to our word ‘gospel’. Whether he used such an equivalent to refer to his message cannot be determined, given the freedom with which the evangelists framed their material.

The choices of the evangelists with regard to the Greek noun euangelion and the verb euangelizesthai merit attention.