The literary genre of the Res Gestae has always been a source of perplexity. Over a century ago Mommsen compared efforts to categorize it with attempts to pin a literary label upon Dante's Divina Commedia or Goethe's Faust. That did not prevent his arguing that the work was a ‘Rechenschaftsbericht’, a formal report of Augustus' achievements as princeps. Nowadays it can perhaps be accepted that the document has a multiplicity of models and many purposes, all of them propagandist in nature. However, the complexity of the work is even now insufficiently appreciated. It is, for instance, well accepted that world conquest is a primary and pervading theme, and Augustus' imperial ideology has been well documented and discussed in recent years. But world conquest suggests another theme, that of apotheosis. The two motifs are inextricably linked in Hellenistic literature after Alexander, and the linkage was inherited by Roman authors, not least by the poets of the Augustan age. As for Augustus himself, his propaganda owes much to the Hellenistic ruler cult. His victory issues after Actium show a startling similarity to the famous tetradrachms commemorating Demetrius Poliorcetes' naval triumph at Cypriot Salamis; he adopted the same pose, and assimilated himself to Neptune, just as Demetrius had recalled Poseidon. Augustus may have been directly influenced by Demetrius' issues. He was possibly aware of the divine honours which the Athenians had conferred upon Demetrius a few months before his victory, and made similar claims in his own right. But the relationship was probably more indirect — Augustus used motifs which had become familiar during the previous centuries, emphasizing simultaneously the protection of the gods and his own godlike status. Demetrius' issue helped inspire the general pattern of thought, but there was no direct imitation.

In this paper I propose to consider Ovid's poem as a document of literary criticism, which offers us a striking treatment of the role of the audience in reception. Ovid's concerns are twofold: on the one hand he is concerned with the ostensible manner in which his own works have been read, but he also discusses a wide range of other texts, and in doing so, offers readings of them, which, I will argue, illustrate the open-ended nature of reception and meaning.

Now, undoubtedly we are sometimes too willing to label works as ‘anti-Augustan’ or ‘Augustan’, as if that was all that could be said about them; the glib use of such terms often seems to obscure more complex and more interesting questions (the Aeneid and the Georgics are familiar examples). But with Ovid, however, such issues are at least raised by the poet himself, since the exile poems do deal with Ovid's attitude to Augustus, and the twin possibilities of writing poetry which can offend the emperor, or which can please him. Now while Ovid's famous explanation of the causes of his exile as ‘carmen et error’ (Trist. 2.207) may perhaps be a smokescreen — Ovid adducing the Ars Amatoria as his fault in order not to have to go into the details of what the error was that had offended Augustus — Tristia 2 must still be considered on its own terms; Ovid writes as if it is possible for Augustus to be offended by his poetry, and therefore the issue is an important one.

Prostitution, it seems to be generally agreed, was a phenomenon firmly embedded in imperial Roman society. It has, however, yet to achieve a similar level of scholarly integration. Moves are undoubtedly being made in this direction. Several topics which have a direct bearing on patterns of prostitution, or in which prostitution is implicated, such as the complex hierarchy of male and female, the patterning of erotic desires and pleasures, the acquisition and dissipation of wealth, and the organization of urban life, can certainly be described as major preoccupations in present enquiries into the Roman world; and a couple of monographs on the subject, or aspects of it, have recently appeared. None the less, there is as yet no study that can really bear comparison with any of the substantial historical works on prostitution in a range of other times and places that have been published in the last two decades. In particular, there has not been any serious effort to take the perspective of the prostitutes themselves into account, which is one of the most emphatic developments in the new historiography of prostitution emerging elsewhere.

Where did a large-scale Roman slave-owner obtain new slaves? Varro in effect tells us: Ephesus. And the answer would probably have been the same for many generations after his time. But can we work out more systematically and more thoroughly the relative importance of different kinds of sources? The sources which most require consideration are: (1) children born to slave-mothers within the Empire; (2) persons enslaved in provincial or frontier wars; (3) persons imported across the frontiers; (4) the ‘self-enslaved’; and (5) infants abandoned at places within the Empire.

Several years ago, I argued on a number of grounds that the last of these sources, child-exposure, was more important than had previously been recognized. Subsequent reconsideration of the problem has led me to suspect that the source-material under-represents the amount of slave-importation across the frontiers, but not to doubt that child-exposure was very widespread or that it made an important contribution to the slave supply. Of the many subsequent discussions, the most original is that of Ramin and Veyne, who, in an article of 1981 too little attended to in the Anglo-Saxon world, made it appear very likely that those who voluntarily sold themselves into slavery were a larger category than scholars usually imagine. More recently, Scheidel has attempted to revive the case, previously propounded by Shtaerman among others, in favour of the self-reproductivity of the slave population.

When in A.D. 130 Hadrian journeyed to Egypt through Judaea, the latter province seemed altogether peaceful and calm. The imperial coinage pronounced the adventus of the Emperor to be a cheerful and blessed event in much the same terms as in other parts of the Empire. Hardly anyone in the company of the Emperor could have guessed that a few years later a revolt would break out in this very province — a revolt which would cast a shadow over Hadrian's later years. The slogans on the Bar Kokhba coins proclaimed the ‘Freedom of Israel’ and ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem’. The war which followed the uprising was cruel and heavy in losses for both sides.

The scholarly debate over ‘The Bar Kokhba revolt and its consequences’ has intensified in recent decades. The papyrological finds in the Judaean Desert, the large-scale archaeological surveys resulting in the discovery of scores of ‘hiding places’ at different sites, and the evaluation of the coinage and the coin-hoards all extended our knowledge, but failed to create more unanimity regarding different aspects of the revolt — its causes, its course, and finally its result for the history of Judaism and for that of Rome. It can hardly come as a surprise to find that the point of view of the ‘modern beholder’ has played a significant role in the interpretation of events. Above all it has been maintained that the threat to Roman power constituted by the revolt has been grossly exaggerated. But this critique pays little heed to powerful evidence which comes from Rome itself and expresses its reaction to the revolt.

In A.D. 530 the Emperor Justinian gave orders that a commission of lawyers should take the 1,500 libri containing the works of the Classical Roman jurists, and condense them into a single work, the Digesta or Pandectae. His purpose was that the result should be a coherent whole, stripped of repetition and contradiction. Fortunately for us, what they actually produced was something which is quite different, and belongs to a type which is familiar to all modern students of the Ancient World: a sourcebook. For what the commission in fact did was to arrange the work by topics, and under each topic to assemble a series of examples of legal reasoning extracted from the surviving works of Classical jurists. Nearly all of these jurists had worked in the Antonine and Severan age, with a few belonging to the period of the Tetrarchy.

A good deal has been written about the origin and recruitment of centurions, but their language use has not been analysed as an index to their literacy, culture, educational levels, and (in some cases) bilingualism. This paper will be about the sociolinguistics of the centurionate. I take as my starting point two poems from Bu Njem in the African desert, one of which has only recently been published for the first time.

The military outpost of Bu Njem (Golas, Gholaia) lay 200 km south of Cape Misurata in the desert of Tripolitania. The fort, the construction of which began some time after 24 January 201, was garrisoned by a uexillatio of the legio III Augusta, and later by a numerus collatus. From here there survive ostraca of various kinds dated mainly to the 250s, but in this paper I am going to deal with the unlikely topic of poetic activity within the camp. Curiously, we have poems set up on stone in the name of two centurions, both of them acrostichs which spell out the centurions' names. The first, in iambic senarii and dated 202–3, has the name of Q. Avidius Quintianus, the second, dated to early 222, that of M Porcius Iasucthan; Iasucthan is of Libyan origin. This poem, on a charitable view, is composed in hexameters. The poems provide remarkable evidence for the cultural and linguistic level of centurions, if one can make the assumption that the texts were the responsibility of the two centurions themselves.

In A.D. 249 the emperor Trajan Decius issued an edict requiring the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to sacrifice to the gods. With this decree, he also inaugurated the first empire-wide persecution of Christians. Previously, persecutions of Christians had always been local affairs determined by local conditions. Thereafter, persecutions were largely instigated by emperors and took place on an imperial scale. It has consequently become common to distinguish pre-Decian persecution, characterized by its local and ad hoc nature, from the centrally organized persecutions of Decius in A.D. 249–50, Valerian in A.D. 257–60, and Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximinus in A.D. 303–13. The importance of the decree as a turning point in the history of Christian persecution is thus widely recognized. Beyond this, discussions of the decree have usually focused on its precise nature and the motivations behind it; given the limited evidence, however, these discussions have tended to be inconclusive. In this paper I will return to a consideration of the decree's effects, but in the context of traditional religion rather than that of Christianity. I will argue that, seen from this perspective, the decree was a highly innovative and important step towards a radical restructuring of religious organization in the Roman world.

Aphrodisias in Caria is an unusually well preserved site that offers exceptional material for a case-study of the impact of changed social, political, and religious structures on the urban centre of a medium-sized prosperous city of the Late Empire, probably typical of others in Asia. Against the background of the city's well preserved late antique townscape and the (relatively modest) architectural reconfiguring of its classical fabric, this paper looks at the public statuary of the period, its context and significance.

It is by now obvious that Ovidian studies have ‘arrived’, apologies are no longer issued, nor are defences launched at the beginning of books. The nineties alone have seen so far the appearance of over fifty new books on Ovid in English, French, Italian, and German, and not just on the Metamorphoses, but on the Fasti, the Amores and Ars Amatoria, and the exile poetry, including the little known Ibis. Most importantly, there is a flourishing growth industry in commentaries on all of Ovid's works, with a greatly anticipated forthcoming commentary from Italy on the Metamorphoses authored by an international team, new Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics commentaries, including a recent excellent edition on Fasti 4 by Elaine Fantham (with an extremely useful and much-needed section on Ovid's style), the vastly learned commentaries of J. McKeown on the Amores, among others (all seemingly getting longer and longer). The appearance of a series of excellent English translations has made Ovid’s works more widely available for teaching. A number of companion volumes on Ovid are also forthcoming. N. Holzberg's recent impressive German introduction to Ovid evidently made the author, for a while at least, a sort of celebrity in Germany, and the book has already been reissued in a second edition. The rehabilitation of later Latin epic of the first century has more than anything served to place Ovid's work within a vigorous post-Vergilian literary tradition.