This article examines the term ‘Byzantine’ as it appears in the 678 Sacra of Constantine IV to Pope Donus. Unlike most other late antique and medieval usages of the term, that is, to describe individuals from Constantinople, the Emperor used the term in relation to Palestinian, Cilician and Armenian monastic communities in Rome. The article considers a number of possible readings of the term and suggests that, in the context of distinction between Eastern and Western Romans, the term functioned as a designation for Eastern Romans.

On 19th March 2020, the Deputy First Minister of Scotland and Cabinet Secretary for Education John Swinney reported to the Scottish Parliament that, in light of the global coronavirus pandemic, schools across Scotland would close from 20th March, mirroring the policy of the UK government announced by the Secretary of State for Education Gavin Williamson the previous day. As part of this closure, Swinney announced that there would be no examinations set for the 2019-20 session, and that the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) would instead enact a certification model employing coursework, teacher estimates of grades and evidence of prior achievement. In outlining the Scottish Government's plan to Holyrood, the Deputy First Minister declared: ‘It is a measure of the gravity of the challenge we now face that the exams will not go ahead this year. With the support of the wider education system, a credible certification model can be put in place that can command confidence in the absence of the exam diet – to ensure that young people in our schools and colleges who through no fault of their own are unable to sit exams, are not disadvantaged.’ (Scottish Government, 2020).

This article argues that a holistic approach to documenting and understanding the physical evidence for individual cities would enhance our ability to address major questions about urbanisation, urbanism, cultural identities and economic processes. At the same time we suggest that providing more comprehensive data-sets concerning Greek cities would represent an important contribution to cross-cultural studies of urban development and urbanism, which have often overlooked relevant evidence from Classical Greece. As an example of the approach we are advocating, we offer detailed discussion of data from the Archaic and Classical city of Olynthos, in the Halkidiki. Six seasons of fieldwork here by the Olynthos Project, together with legacy data from earlier projects by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and by the Greek Archaeological Service, combine to make this one of the best-documented urban centres surviving from the Greek world. We suggest that the material from the site offers the potential to build up a detailed ‘urban profile’, consisting of an overview of the early development of the community as well as an in-depth picture of the organisation of the Classical settlement. Some aspects of the urban infrastructure can also be quantified, allowing a new assessment of (for example) its demography. This article offers a sample of the kinds of data available and the sorts of questions that can be addressed in constructing such a profile, based on a brief summary of the interim results of fieldwork and data analysis carried out by the Olynthos Project, with a focus on research undertaken during the 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons.

Since Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emerged into the realm of Continental philosophy in the late twentieth century, the pair have sustained a prominent and influential presence in the fields of cultural studies, politics and sociology, also literary, artistic and cinematic scholarship, spurred on by the appropriation of the arts in Deleuze and Guattari's own work. The contributions to this special edition bring to light how the rubble-strewn textual field of Classical antiquity also ineludibly invites a methodological framework informed by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. By its contemporary nature, the Classical ‘canon’ is a warzone of competing translations, fragments and fragmentary orders, de- and re-constructions, bearing a torrid resemblance to the flattened and interconnected plane of existence described in Deleuze and Guattari's work. The pair draw from multiple avenues of academic exploration and encourage the seed-like spread of their multifarious ideas. This article makes a case for employing one concept in particular as a practice for reading Classical texts: ‘multiplicity’.

This debate piece offers a critique of some recent ‘new materialist’ approaches and their application to Roman expansionism, particularly those positing that the study of ‘Romanisation’ should be about ‘understanding objects in motion’—a perspective that carries important political and ethical implications. Here, the authors introduce the alternative notion of a ‘predatory’ political economy for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. The aim is to illuminate the darker sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce more balanced and inclusive accounts. Two cases studies—the archaeology of the Roman conquest and of rural communities—illustrate the potential of such a perspective.

Nowadays, the antiquities-smuggling phenomenon seems more complicated than many researchers thought before. Antiquity looting is delinquent behaviour and a criminal activity. Hence, it is closely connected to many of the other problems that Greece is currently facing. This article tries to set the smuggling problem in a wider frame. More specifically, many researchers have pointed to the long-term inability of Greece’s tax services to detect income hiding. This has led to increased tax evasion and a shadow economic phenomenon. Moreover, researchers and institutions have made the conclusion that self-employed persons / freelancers in Greece have an increased capability for income hiding, irrespective of the origin of the money. A thorough examination of the occupations of 497 arrested people in Greece revealed that, indeed, the majority of them fall in the self-employed/freelance category. The results of this article are based on the 291 official arrests that took place from 1999 to 2015.

Sanctuaries remain important for the study of ancient Greek life and culture because they express the values and concerns of the communities where they were established and developed. The investigation of sanctuaries remains a fundamental aspect of research. The new data that have come to light clearly confirm that their study has in no way been exhausted. The Peloponnese has been at the centre of scholarly interest in this subject from the very start, and continues to be today. This article offers an overview of the excavations and publications of the last decade, recording also new trends in sanctuary research.

It has long been suspected that the eponymous heroine of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata was intended to evoke the historical Lysimache, priestess of Athena Polias at the time of the play’s first production. But the reasons for this (partial) identification have been relatively little discussed. This paper argues that the Lysistrata engages more closely than has traditionally been assumed with urgent political issues at Athens in late 412 and early 411 BC, in particular with the decision in summer 412 BC to broach the ‘Iron Reserve’ of 1,000 talents set aside at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 8.15.1). A possible intervention of the historical Lysimache in the controversy over the appropriate use of the ‘Iron Reserve’ would help account for various otherwise surprising features of the Lysistrata.

Alkaline glazes were first used on clay-based ceramics in Mesopotamia around 1500 B.C., at the same time as the appearance of glass vessels. The Roman Empire used lead-based glazes, with alkaline natron glass being used only to produce objects of glass. Chemical analysis has had some success determining compositional groups for Roman/Byzantine/early Islamic glasses because of the discovery of major production sites. Parthian and Sasanian glass and glazed wares, however, have been found only in consumption assemblages, which have failed to inform on how they were made. Here we reanalyse compositional data for Parthian and Sasanian glazes and present new analyses for Parthian glazed pottery excavated at the early third century A.D. Roman military outpost of Ain Sinu in northern Iraq. We show that some Parthian glazes are from a different tradition to typical Mesopotamian glazes and have compositions similar to Roman glass. We propose that Roman glass was recycled by Parthian potters, thereby suggesting that as yet undiscovered Mesopotamian glass production centres ordinarily supplied glass for indigenous glazed pottery. Furthermore, if recycling glass to make glazed pottery was extended to indigenous glassware, this may provide an explanation for the paucity of Parthian and Sasanian glass in the archaeological record.

In 1941, E. S. Forster wrote a short article, published in this journal, which compiled all of the instances he could identify in the ancient source material that described dogs being used in a military capacity. G. B. A. Fletcher, who had identified a few obscure references that Forster had not cited, responded to Forster's paper later that same year. The purpose of both papers was simply the compiling of a list, a purpose that had been inspired by Forster's interest in the French army's recruitment of dogs on the outbreak of the Second World War. The result was a thorough catalogue of known examples, showing the ancient dog being used for a variety of purposes such as patrol work or observation duties, or being used as combatants or despatch couriers. The primary aim, according to Forster was to ‘make a comparison with modern practice’ – that is, the French practice he had read about; the only exception for which he could find no ancient evidence was what he called ‘Red Cross’ work.