In Western Europe to-day we tend to assume automatically that electoral bribery is pernicious, in that it distorts the democratic process, the selection by the people of their own representatives, by shifting whatever power lies in the generality of the electorate back into the hands of the people who seek office, so that a democratic procedure becomes in effect oligarchic. We even term bribery the presentation of attractive policies to the electorate by a person or party, which we believe will not be in the people's long-term interest or will be rapidly discarded in favour of policies which suit those in power. Such judgements may be superficial and too dependent on the presumption that without bribery elections will be free. It is arguable that in specific societies and in specific historical contexts bribery may on the contrary make elections less predictable, dissolving the existing ties by which the electorate are already bound to those seeking office, rather than reinforcing them. Alternatively, bribery may be regarded as an accepted part of the political scene, which does not materially affect the result of elections and thus the course of political history. In Roman politics it is hard to refute the suggestion that the sort of people who actually held magistracies was not seriously influenced by electoral bribery, even though on occasions this may have determined that one man rather than another should be consul or praetor.

Caesar returned to Rome from his African campaign on 25 July 46 b.c. (by the old calendar). Cicero felt comparatively secure at Rome at this time, both because of the assurances of safety he had received from Caesar and because of his intimacy with those who expected to play a role in the new administration: A. Hirtius, L. Cornelius Balbus, and the pardoned C. Cassius Longinus, M. Iunius Brutus, and P. Cornelius Dolabella. At Brutus's request he had composed a treatise on the role of oratory in the practice of republican politics (Brutus, published earlier in the year) and was at this very moment composing a panegyric on Cato. Cassius, Dolabella and Hirtius had been guests at his Tusculan villa engaged with the master in long-interrupted oratorical exercises (‘intermissis exercitationibus’, Fam. 9. 18. 3) for some time during the month, whence he ‘sent’ them to greet Caesar and put in a word for him with their familiaris.

The criticism of the eighth ode of Horace's fourth book has been bedevilled by three major uncertainties: probable interpolation in its text, confusion about the identity of its addressee, and doubt as to its literary quality.1 These issues will form the central concerns of this discussion. Earlier critics have been consistently scathing in their view of Odes. 4. 8: some editors have even gone so far as to deny Horatian authorship,2 many have made dismissive judgements, following the verdict of Wilamowitz (‘really very bad’), and a recent commentator has classed 4. 8 as ‘the least lyrical of the Odes … much of it, indeed, reads like prose—limpid, logical, but pedestrian’.3 I shall not claim that the poem is a previously unacknowledged masterpiece of inspiration, but that it has been underestimated as a poetic artefact: as a careful analysis will show, it is a well-conceived, well-finished and allusive piece, relevant to its addressee and cohering well both with the following ode to Lollius and with the purposes of Book 4 as a whole.

Tertullian, illustrating the sacrilegious nature of pagan religion, records that in an auditorium he saw a person being burned to death in the role of Hercules and another being castrated as Attis; both of these examples he adduces to substantiate his assertion to his pagan audience that ‘criminals often adopt the roles of your deities’ (‘et ipsos deos vestros saepe noxii induunt’). The practice that Tertullian here deplores is the subject of this paper: the punishment of criminals in a formal public display involving role-play set in a dramatic context; the punishment is usually capital.

It is now notorious that the production of inscriptions in the Roman Empire was not constant over time, but rose over the first and second centuries A.D. and fell in the third. Ramsay MacMullen pointed this out more than five years ago, with conclusions more cautionary than explanatory: ‘history is not being written in the right way’, he said, for historians have deduced Rome's decline from evidence that–since it appears only epigraphically–has merely disappeared for its own reasons, or have sought general explanations of decline in theories political, economic, or even demographic in nature, none of which can, in turn, explain the disappearance of epigraphy itself. Why this epigraphic habit rose and fell MacMullen left open to question, although he did postulate control by a ‘sense of audience’. The purpose of this paper is to propose that this ‘sense of audience’ was not generalized or generic, but depended on a belief in the value of romanization, of which (as noted but not explained by MacMullen's article) the epigraphic habit is also a rough indicator. Epitaphs constitute the bulk of all provincial inscriptions and in form and number are (generally speaking) the consequence of a provincial imitation of characteristically Roman practices, an imitation that depended on the belief that Roman legal status and style were important, and that may indeed have ultimately depended, at least in North Africa, on the acquisition or prior possession of that status. Such status-based motivations for erecting an epitaph help to explain not only the chronological distribution of epitaphs but also the differences in the type and distribution of epitaphs in the western and eastern halves of the empire. They will be used here moreover to suggest an explanation for the epigraphic habit as a whole.

‘Farm’ sites of various kinds have been a striking feature of survey archaeology in most areas of Greece and Italy in recent years, and a number of such sites dating to the Roman period have been located. In many parts of Greece there seem to be particularly large numbers of later Roman sites, with fewer which can be firmly dated to the earlier imperial period, while in a few areas the Imperial Roman period is one of dense occupation. In Italy, too, there seems to be considerable regional variation in peak periods of rural settlement, so that in some areas numbers of small sites are greatest for the Republican period (second to first centuries B.C.), while in other areas there are many small sites of the first century a.d. or even later. The tendency of archaeologists working in both Greece and Italy, especially in the early years of the survey boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was to categorize these smaller sites as peasant farms (generally assuming peasant free-holders), while larger, more opulent sites were classed as ‘villas’. This encouraged both archaeologists and historians to jump to the conclusion that the development of large estates attested in the literary record from the later second century B.C. onward had not effected the complete demise of small-scale, free subsistence farmers.

No contemporary account of Trajan's Parthian War survives, nor were any monuments set up to commemorate his exploits in the East in the same way that Trajan's Column in Rome and the trophy at Tropaeum Traiani (Adamclisi) do his Dacian Wars. We rely almost entirely on the excerpts of Dio Cassius' History preserved by Xiphilinus, together with a few fragments of Arrian's Parthica, in order to reconstruct the causes, objectives and strategy of the war. Because of the scant nature of the sources, all three aspects remain the subject of much scholarly discussion and dispute. Here, however, an attempt is made to address the problems raised by Trajan's eastern campaigns from a different perspective. References in fourth-century sources shed light not only on the purpose and execution of the war itself, but also on the way Trajan was perceived in late antiquity as a valuable paradigm for contemporary events and figures.

The rich finds of statues and inscriptions from Aphrodisias in Caria have done much in recent years to illuminate the world of the late Roman politician, the world of governors and local magnates. Aphrodisias has also recently provided important new evidence for the philosophical image of late antiquity. In 1981–2, the excavations under Professor K. T. Erim recovered a remarkable group of marble shield portraits and busts that represent both contemporary late antique philosophers and ‘classic’ figures of the hellenic past. These portraits add a new dimension to our knowledge of Aphrodisias as an intellectual centre and provide a vivid insight into the pagan culture and education of late antiquity. We are in the world of Eunapius’ Lives of the Sophists. We are probably in the context of a philosophical school, perhaps the philosophical school of late Roman Aphrodisias.

The question of the Christianization of Italy in the late fourth century has been much discussed in the recent past, but it has rarely been approached at local level, despite the fact that focusing upon local situations, where a wealth of material is available, makes it easier to follow the interplay between paganism and Christianity.

The geographical area broadly corresponding to Northern Italy offers a vast body of material, especially from the second half of the fourth to the first half of the fifth century. There are enough archaeological and epigraphic sources for us to get an idea of the changes in urban organization brought about by Christianity. In terms of literary sources, the North of Italy is a privileged region (as are Cappadocia at the time of Basil and the two Gregories and Syria at the time of John Chrysostom and Theodoret of Cyrrhus) in that we have the sermons of a number of bishops who were very close to Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. These texts have been used to study the economy of the region but they are also basic for elucidating Christian doctrine and practice at the time of Ambrose.

In 1889 Hermann Dessau published a revolutionary article in which he suggested that the six authors to whom the various biographies of the Historia Augusta are ascribed were merely masks behind which lurked a single author who lived at the very end of the fourth century. Ninety years later, an attempt was made to prove Dessau's hypothesis of single authorship on objective grounds. Ian Marriott's article, ‘The Authorship of the Historia Augusta: Two Computer Studies’, presents the results of two statistical tests conducted on the text of the HA which appear to show conclusively that the work was composed by one author rather than six. Marriott's findings have been hailed by a number of scholars as settling once and for all the question of the authorship of the HA. While I agree with Marriott's conclusion, and I share the consensus view that this curious work is indeed the product of a single mind, I should like to raise some questions concerning the validity of the procedure adopted by Marriott and to suggest that the tests conducted by him are in fact not conclusive.