The agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus is on any reckoning a significant piece of legislation in the history of the later Roman republic, and it is a measure of our ignorance of that critical period that it should still be possible to ask who he intended its beneficiaries to be without any immediate prospect of a clear answer. This is of especial concern because the problem affects not only the interpretation of Gracchus himself, and the evaluation of the sources for the period, but also our estimate of the whole complex of attitudes and actions which make up the turbulent half-century which followed his death in 133 B.C.

In so far as there is any agreement among modern scholars, opinion has favoured the view that Roman citizens alone were intended to profit from the law. I wish to suggest here firstly that the connection between land distribution and citizenship is more intimate and more complex than has sometimes been realised, and also that an inclusion of non-Romans among the beneficiaries of Gracchus' law may explain certain puzzling features in the historical tradition about the law itself and its aftermath.

The Vestal Virgins have often been the subject of close scrutiny by classical scholars. Indeed many articles have been devoted to a careful analysis of individual, apparently trivial, aspects of their legal rights, their privileges, their cult obligations and even their dress. In the same tradition I intend in this paper to consider just one element of their priestly position: their sexual status and its relationship to their sacred status. It is however an element which will be seen to have wider implications for their cult as a whole and for ancient religion in general.

Because men addressed him as Augustus in view of his claim to honour they revere him with temples and sacrifices over all the islands and continents, in cities and tribes requiting him for the magnitude of his virtue and his benefactions towards them.

This passage from a biography of Augustus by a contemporary writer, Nicolaus of Damascus, gives a rare picture of the way in which the emperor was honoured in his lifetime throughout the provinces of the empire. The temples and sacrifices to which it refers formed part of a nexus of cultic honours, classified by the Greeks as isotheoi timai, honours equivalent to those given to the gods, which also included priests, festivals and games. This form of royal ritual stretched back in the Greek lands three hundred years to the time of Alexander the Great and beyond and constitutes a fundamental aspect of the relationship between subject and ruler in the ancient world.

In general histories of the Principate a prominent place is often given to the growth of bureaucracy, characterized especially by the equestrian procuratorial service. Along with a growth in size, it is said, came the development of an organization regulated by guidelines—the ‘formation of the rigid framework of a civil service, one that was to a certain extent more and more impersonal’. Thus, with regard to promotion, ‘the procurator's career had a precise promotion ladder, on which the scale of remuneration conferred a surprisingly modern character’. This view carries with it wide-ranging general and specific implications. It suggests that Roman government of the early empire reached a fairly sophisticated level of rational organization in which friendship and patronage, so vital to the workings of Republican politics, declined in importance, as bureaucratic rules played an increasingly decisive role in the appointment and promotion of procurators. More specifically, it has been thought that once the rules have been discovered, missing steps in individual careers can be interpolated with confidence.

For a space of forty years, from 98 to 138, few praefecti occur on named attestation. In fact only six : two registered in isolation, four in collegiate pairs. Apart from seasons of disturbance, the holders of this useful and necessary office tend to evade notice in written history.

It was not until 2 B.C. that Caesar Augustus appointed commanders of the Praetorian cohorts, so Cassius Dio states. The occasion might excite curiosity: perhaps after the grave crisis in the autumn. The historian adds no comment. He had previously put emphasis on the dangers inherent in a single prefect. Not perhaps clear at first—and Seius Strabo was in sole charge when Augustus died. Named associate with his parent by Tiberius Caesar, Aelius Seianus managed almost at once to have him sent away to be governor of Egypt.

Some years ago I maintained that the common people in the city of Rome had to earn much of their living in casual employment, partly for instance in the unloading and porterage of goods that arrived by sea, partly in the building trade. This hypothesis cannot be established by the accumulation of literary or epigraphic testimony, nor from archaeological material, though I shall argue later that none the less it must be accepted; however, I did adduce two texts which, I thought, did not so much confirm as illustrate the use of free labourers in building. Professor Lionel Casson, who seems to disbelieve the hypothesis altogether, has recently shown that my inference from one of these texts (Cicero, ad Atticum XIV, 3, 1) was novel and somewhat arbitrary; though I do not concede that it was necessarily incorrect, I therefore withdraw it from the debate. I might of course have cited certain other texts considered below (n. 89); there remains in any case, however, the famous passage in Suetonius, of which I took a conventional view and of which he now proposes a quite new interpretation. This seems to me impossible. Let us start by examining it, before coming to more general considerations.

This essay is speculative and tentative, a preliminary attempt at exploring a broad territory of Roman economic history over a long period. For the sake of clarity, I have canvassed several probabilities in the form of propositions, but the evidence is so sparse that it is difficult to prove that each proposition is right. It is disappointing to confess at the outset that one's case is unproven and that the generalizations advanced are disproportionately large in relation to the supporting evidence. Even so, the experiments made here with both evidence and methods may stimulate others into refuting or reshaping the propositions. And besides, some of the methods can be usefully applied to other problems in Roman history.

It should be plain that important progress is to be made in the economic and social history of the Greco-Roman world through more systematic studies of the material remains. In the field of ancient manufacture and commerce, M. I. Finley has called for ‘a more sophisticated effort to approach quantification and pattern-construction’, and other historians too are well aware of what needs to be done. Doing it, however, can be difficult, for such projects, if approached with a scholarly desire for precision, bristle with complications, and the results can often be no more than tentative. Such is the case with this study of the terracotta lamp industry. For their part, the archaeologists who have studied groups of terracotta lamps, whether from particular sites or particular museums, have not altogether succeeded in fitting the material into the known framework of Roman life (this is not to suggest a primacy of written over material sources, simply that both are indispensable in economic history).

Although the name of Riotinto has become synonymous with mining throughout the world and the site was very clearly exploited in antiquity, the Roman mines have received relatively little archaeological attention at the analytical level. The reasons for this situation are complex, not least perhaps the impression amongst archaeologists that there now remains little or nothing from antiquity capable of examination. The two major expansions of large-scale open-cast mining by the old Riotinto Company have led to a general impression that modern mining has removed all worthwhile archaeological evidence. Furthermore, in the last century a massive study by Rua Figueroa appeared at the time to offer a comprehensive survey of all that was known of ancient and more recent exploitation.

In a recent number of this Journal, Edward Champlin called in question the dating of the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus, traditionally placed in the early years of Nero's reign. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the Neronian date fits the references in the poems much better than does Champlin's date in the reign of Severus Alexander, and that there is no valid reason for doubting it.

Some of the purely negative arguments may be dealt with briefly. When in 4.87 Calpurnius uses the phrase ‘facundo comitatus Apolline Caesar’, there is no need to take this as referring to the divine comes who becomes part of imperial propaganda in the third century (C., p. 96). Already in Nat. Deor. 2. 165–6 Cicero mentions Homer's attachment of various gods to great men as ‘discriminum et periculorum comites’; and in Rep. 2.44, ‘Fortuna comitata est’ Tarquin. For more specific activities, Propertius (4. 3. 16) makes Arethusa regret that she married ‘non comitante deo’; and this is brought into the realm of poetical composition in Prop. 3. 2. 13 and Ovid, Tr. 4. 1. 20, where the gods act as comites to the writers. This is precisely the context of Calpurnius' words, where Apollo's facundia is set beside the kingliness of Jupiter, as in Ecl. Eins. 1. 29–33, and provides poetic inspiration, just as Apollo does, ibid. 38, amplified in the following lines (39–42) with reference to Nero's poem on the Sack of Troy, and again in Apocol. 4, where there is a suggestion of Nero's identification with the god (‘ille mihi similis voltu similisque decore, nec cantu nec voce minor’). Nero was to exploit this idea much more as the reign proceeded, but Apollo's patronage of the poet-emperor was too firmly established at the beginning of the reign for any doubts to be raised.

In 1854 Moritz Haupt, in a classic exercise of the higher criticism, established that only the first seven poems of a collection of eleven which had all passed under his name could be attributed to Calpurnius, and that the last four belonged to Nemesianus (Opuscula I. 358–406). This division and attribution is beyond question now. Haupt then went on to show that Calpurnius was active in the Neronian age. Some of the evidence was philological. Indeed, it was the very evidence which he had used to distinguish the techniques of the two poets. E. Champlin, however, claims that ‘all the traditional indications of a Neronian date are based on circumstantial details which are equally appropriate to other periods in imperial history’. This is incautious. For Champlin, unlike Haupt, fails to consider such matters as prosody and diction, which are, after all, historical data that may prove to be as useful tools to the historian as an allusion to a barbarian invasion or to a consular year. In fact, all the ascertainable evidence was not put into the balance. We now turn to that evidence.