Wars were once considered to be the essence of world history, but under the influence of social history, the histoire des mentalités, and the discourse of the ‘cultural turn’ their role has changed fundamentally. More interest is now paid to wars as part of cultural history than as highpoints of histoire événementielle.

Historians of the present generation stand in an ambivalent relation to the phenomenon of war. The ‘cultural turn’ in historical studies has generally focused on anthropological phenomena that are part of general human experience — love and death, body and soul, memory and hope, customs and emotions, mentality and ideologies. These phenomena, which are conceived as driving forces in history, are at the same time parts of the contemporary cultural furniture of those scholars who study their changing aspects as objects of research. The phenomenon of war, however, for the majority of contemporary historians and other observers in Europe and North America, has become a distant spectacle. So, what do we really know about war? And what do we want to know about war?

Let us start by considering a remarkable text. At the very beginning of the second half of his account of the reign of Nero, Tacitus tells at some length a tale about the emperor and a dream (Ann. 16.1-3): one Caesellius Bassus, ‘origine Poenus, mente turbida’, dreamt that there was a cavern full of treasure on his estates. He was so confident about the dream that (without identifying the cavern) he sailed from Africa to Rome, where he convinced the emperor; Nero accordingly expected new revenue and spent still more extravagantly. Later, before the disappointed and desperate Caesellius committed suicide, ‘posita vaecordia’, he expressed surprise, claiming that his dreams had never before been false (‘non falsa antea somnia sua … admirans’). An alternative version said that he did not commit suicide but merely had his property confiscated. Tacitus is in any case most disapproving, and tells the story at unusual length with the obvious intention of suggesting that Nero was as insane as Caesellius.

Throughout its history, Latin Satire was engaged in acts of impersonation and masquerade. While written by and for members of an élite and highly literate class, it continually affected a low style in metre and diction, an aggressive engagement with or pointed withdrawal from contemporary social realities, and the partial or wholesale adoption of an authorial voice at some rungs below the highest of society. All this is well-known and relatively uncontroversial. What is also well-known is the way in which Roman satirists, especially Juvenal, were engaged in a dialogue with epic and other literary genres (including earlier satire). What is less accepted is that Roman satirists, not least Horace, were equally engaged in a dialogue with other non-literary or ‘subliterary’ traditions of verse. I shall be arguing that a primary intertext for the definition of Horace's poetry and poetic persona was the rich and varied contemporary tradition of popular invective poetry. I suggest that he is attempting to erect a cordon sanitaire between the genre of satire and these ‘unofficial’ or ‘folk’ forms, to segregate elite and popular culture, and to define his poetry as what we may anachronistically call literature.

It is a familiar observation that Epic puts men first — from ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε to arma uirumque, and on to ‘Man's first disobedience’. Genres are gendered, and the epic genre is emphatically masculine, foregrounding males as protagonists and male preoccupations as its proper concerns, and in general validating and glorifying masculine spheres of activity and masculine values and priorities. Self-conscious commentary on this defining feature of epic is readily found within the genre — when Numanus Remulus advises the effeminate Trojans, ‘sinite arma uiris et cedite ferro’ (Aen. 9.620), the echo of arma uirumque has the effect of implicating the whole epic in his male chauvinism; only real men have a right to feature in the Aeneid, Remulus seems to suggest — but is most familiar from confrontation between epic and lower genres, love elegy in particular.

The exchange of beneficia — gifts and services — was an important feature of Greek and Roman society at all periods. Its prominence was reflected in the number of philosophical works that analysed the phenomenon. From the fourth century B.C. onwards, εὐεργεσία and χάρις became subjects of moral discourse. Xenophon, particularly in his Socratic works and the Cyropaideia, and Aristotle, in his rhetorical and ethical writings, already anticipate much of what the Hellenistic schools were to elaborate. One of Aristotle's followers gave the first clear formulation we have of the idea that ‘the giving and interchange of favours holds together the lives of men’. Aristotle's successor Theophrastus wrote the first treatise we know of to deal wholly and specifically with the subject of χάρις. His On Gratitude (περὶ χάριτος: D.L. 5.48) had a long line of successors, including Epicurus' On Gifts and Gratitude (περὶ δώρων καὶ χάριτος: D.L. 10.28) and Chrysippus' Stoic treatments of the subject, both as part of a general work On Duties (περὶ κατορθωμάτων) and in a separate work On Favours (περὶ χαρίτων) (SVF 3.674; 2.1081 ).

There are (at least) two ways to approach the history of religious art in Antiquity. One is to study what was going on in the ancient world, to tell the story as they (the subjects of our inquiry) saw it and as they did it. Another is to ask how we know how they saw it and did it. The first might be called ‘history’, the second ‘critical historiography’. Both are crucial to the historical enterprise, and I in no way intend to demean the first by saying that this paper is largely of the second kind. My project is to examine what are the grounds for our assumptions in creating the generalizations of ‘Late Ancient Jewish Art’ and ‘Early Christian Art’ as real categories of visual production in Late Antiquity with specific and discrete audiences and constituencies of patrons and producers. Both fields are venerable, with long historiographies and complex guiding-agendas of the sort that are perhaps inevitable given the kinds of ancestral investments made by scholars and indeed members of the general public (which is to say, also adherents of the two faiths) in both fields. In addition to prising apart the history of some of these investments, I want to question the methodological basis for many of the assumptions about what can rightly be classified under either the heading of ‘Jewish’ art or of ‘early Christian’ art.

Scholars have traditionally believed that the late antique city of Rome concretely reflected the organization of late Roman senatorial society in terms of gentes. It is assumed that grand senatorial houses, each occupied by the leader of a gens, and passed down from father to son, characterized the urban landscape. This has led to a number of conclusions about the diachronic and synchronic aspects of domestic property ownership in late antique Rome.

The Iberian peninsula is a key region that has the potential to transform fundamentally our understanding of the Roman Empire. The longevity of the Roman presence in Iberia, the huge geographical variety of its regions, and the cultural differences between its peoples make it ideal for understanding the genesis, development, and disintegration of the Roman Empire as a whole. The transformation of regional infrastructure in Spain and Portugal during the 1980s and 1990s has generated much new archaeological information. This is particularly true of the major cities, where intensive urban development has greatly enhanced our understanding of their layout and development during the historic periods. In the countryside too, the expansion of the road networks, EU-inspired changes in crop quotas, and the intensification of mechanized farming have all had a major impact and substantially increased the number of known villas and rural settlements.

The intention of this survey, as of its predecessors, is to assess the contribution to Roman studies of recent progress in epigraphy. Its aim is to draw attention to the more important newly-published inscriptions, to known or familiar texts whose significance has been reinterpreted, to the progress of publishing projects, and to a selection of recent work based upon epigraphic sources. It is mainly, but not exclusively, concerned with the implications of new work for Roman history and for that reason does not consider a number of otherwise interesting Hellenistic texts. It hardly needs to be said that there has been no publication remotely as significant as the SC de Cn. Pisone patre, which was reported in the previous survey, and to which we devote some further space here. But there are plenty of new or revised texts of sufficient interest: an honorific decree from Pergamon for a member of the city élite who clearly played a key part in the negotiations with the Romans at the time of the war with Aristonicus; the uncle of Cicero initiated into the Samothracian mysteries in 100B.C.; Octavian honoured at Klaros on account of his ‘quasi-divine exploits’; the Tessera Paemeiobrigensis or aes Bergidense, which appears to be an edict by Augustus of 15 B.C. alluding to a hitherto unknown Spanish province of this period — ‘Transduria(na)’; a startling re-interpretation of the significance of the ‘Tiberiéum’ inscription set up by Pontius Pilate at Caesarea Maritima; the splendid replacement for Henzen's Acta Arvalium; the foundation inscription of Sarmizegetusa; one of the very earliest references to waterwheels, called hydromēchanai (a word unknown to LSJ), in a long-known second-century A.D. text from Macedonia, where they were evidently employed on a large scale to produce income for the city; the transport by ‘barbarians’ of a Roman votive inscription, besides more obviously valuable booty, more than 200 km from the Roman frontier into what is now the Ukraine; and a re-reading suggesting that the well-known ‘milestone’ from Phoenicia honouring Julian as templorum restaurator was indeed, as Bowersock argued, erected immediately before the Persian expedition.