The Seneca family came to Rome from Spain, the province that Rome took from Carthage in the Second Punic War, acquiring thereby great mineral wealth, splendid soldiers, and a war of conquest that took nearly two centuries to complete. Rome's motive in acquiring Spain was strategic, yet she had been impressed by the wealth that had recently sustained Hannibal's armies and with the abilities of the Spanish troops that both sides had used. But nothing so impressed the Romans with the military talents of the Spaniards as the resistance they put up to their rule. By the second half of the second century Baetica was already pacified, so that the main trouble there came from the raids of Lusitanian brigands; at that time horrific stories were being told of the Celtiberians who fought at Numantia; they in their turn were becoming τογᾶτοι when similar tales were being told, more than a century later, of the Astures and Cantabri with whom Augustus had to deal.

One of the most frequently attested facts concerning M. Porcius Cato, cos. 195 B.C., ‘the Censor’, is that his place of origo was Tusculum. Tusculum was a Latin town which had long since acquired the status of a municipium and the full privileges of Roman citizenship: Cato was a ‘new man’ in the political sense, but we might naturally infer that he came from a long line of Roman citizens. Yet some of the most eminent of modern scholars, and in particular P. Fraccaro, have held that the inference is false. Instead it has been argued that his family was Sabine, had received Roman citizenship only in his father's generation, and only recently had taken up residence in Tusculum. Although several writers have rejected these conclusions—some by silence rather than explicitly—the arguments for them, which are weighty and at first sight convincing, have not been subjected to the detailed examination which they merit. The present paper seeks to supply such an examination.

The hippodrome at Thessaloniki is well known as the scene of the bloodbath of A.D. 390, so vividly described by Gibbon. This occurred when the emperor Theodosius, enraged that his magister militum Buthericus had been killed in a riot, enticed people into the hippodrome by the promise of games, and had between 7,000 and 15,000 put to death. But apart from the events connected with this incident, the ancient sources are silent concerning the hippodrome (with the exception of a single inscription which will be discussed below). This important monument of the ancient city must be reconstructed indirectly, therefore, by employing the accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, and by examining recent archaeological finds in the light of the mediaeval city-plan and of what is known of hippodromes elsewhere in the Roman world.

Cicero's views on history and historians, and his general conceptions of the past, have received a good deal of attention—some, most recently, in Rambaud's short book Cicéron et l' Histoire Romaine; but his historical practice has had less consideration. True, practically every passage in which he refers to an event of the past has been somewhere thoroughly elucidated, and the sources to which he turned in any particular work have been investigated by a crowd of commentators. But the general accounts of Cicero's knowledge of and relation to the historiographical tradition of his time are either antiquated or disappointing, and estimates of Cicero's scholarship range from the enthusiastic admiration displayed, but hardly justified, by most recent writers, to the contempt of older ones, most extravagantly Münzer, who stigmatized the De senectute as a historical fantasy, or Zingler, who even accused Cicero of inventing his exempla. The subject is important both for Cicero's own sake, and in order to throw light on the historiographical standards and activities of his time. Advance can perhaps be made by distinguishing more carefully than has usually been done between the kinds of approach that he made to different types of historical subject at different stages in his career and in different literary genres.

Almost nothing is known of the provincial temple at Lugdunum beyond the bare fact of its existence within the federal sanctuary. For this information we are dependent upon the titles of the provincial sacerdotes, which at some undetermined period begin to define the high priesthood as ad templum; until then the priest had served ad aram: that is, at the celebrated altar dedicated by Drusus in 12 B.C. at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saône. Apparently the temple stood in the near vicinity of the altar, for inscriptions from the turn of the second century now give the priestly title as ad aram … apud templum … or a variant. But confirmation depends in the long run upon archaeological exploration, which has so far been precluded by the circumstance that the presumed site of the temple now lies beneath an area of dense habitation. The only other possible evidence is a medallion from the Rhone Valley that depicts games (a venatio) in progress around a central podium, bearing a small round temple, a larger gabled temple, and a column supporting a statue. Alföldi stresses the abstract nature of this composition and has suggested that the complex may represent provincial monuments at Lugdunum. If this identification is correct, the medallion would appear to confirm the existence of these structures under Hadrian or very shortly after.

When the word ‘party’ became obscene in the context of the history of the Roman republic, it was frequently replaced by ‘faction’—or factio, to give an air of authenticity. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the occurrences of factio in writers of the republic and early principate in order to discover to what extent the usage of modern historians is justified by the sources. It will not be denied that there are numerous occasions when factio functions as a collective, with the meaning ‘group, clique, faction’. But originally factio had a verbal force, sometimes active—‘way of doing things’—sometimes potential—‘capacity to do things or get things done’. This verbal force is retained in many instances, including some where the rendering ‘faction’, i.e. ‘group’, has become standard. The precise shade of meaning may vary, but three principal connotations can be discerned: influence, concerted action, and intrigue.

Recent studies of Roman gold-mining, in Britain at Dolaucothi, and in Spain at las Médulas, Montefurado and Puerto del Palo, have shown that many valuable results can be obtained at such sites by a careful programme of field-work. The present article is the result of field-work in the region of the Rio Duerna in 1970. It was also possible to undertake a special in-depth survey of one of the mines, the working known as los Castellones. This mine was chosen as one of the most important and interesting in the valley.

Previously attention has centred on the hard-rock mines of the south of Spain and Portugal, and there are few sources referring to the gold-mines of the north in any but very general terms. O. Davies has compiled a list of most of them and thus rendered a valuable service, in spite of some errors. Strangely he does not give the most comprehensive source as his reference for the mines of the Duerna area (which he calls ‘Quintanilla’ on his map IIIa), although he makes use of it elsewhere.

In a short article in the Zeitschrift für Numismatik for 1887, entitled ‘Die fünfzehn Münzstatten der fünfzehn diocletianischen Diöcesen’, Mommsen drew attention to what he considered to be a parallelism confirming his conclusions on the date of the Laterculus Veronensis and the origins of the diocesan system. It was not, in its details at least, one of his more distinguished contributions, and its shortcomings were mercilessly exposed by Mispoulet in a communication to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1908. Mispoulet's verdict—that no parallelism between mint and diocese had existed under Diocletian, and was indeed not to be expected—was accepted by Seston in 1946 in his monograph on Diocletian and the tetrarchy, and despite the occasional subsequent comment implying limited support for Mommsen this verdict seems to have won general acceptance.

In two articles published in this Journal in 1969 and 1970, Dr. Mattingly has made a new and systematic assault on the identification of the Lex Repetundarum of the Tabula Bembina with any law of the Gracchan period, and has argued at length for its possible identity with both the recovery law of Servilius Glaucia and the law of the Tabula Tarentina. The question is of importance not only for the politics of the Gracchan period, but for the whole history of the development of the only means which the Roman Republic created for the redress of wrongs which provincials suffered at the hands of Roman officers and governors, while the history of the extension of the Roman citizenship is also involved. The Lex Repetundarum (as the law of the Tabula Bembina will be called henceforth) reveals great political ingenuity in its elaborate devices of procedure, intended to eliminate the undue influence of interested parties and to secure the conviction of the guilty and the effective compensation of the injured. Whether the mind so revealed is that of Gaius Gracchus or a later politician is a matter of some moment.

According to tradition Rome was founded by Romulus in 753 B.C. and was ruled by seven kings until the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud in 509. Later writers, particularly Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch, attribute a considerable volume of legislation to these kings, especially to Romulus, Numa Pompilius and Servius Tullius.

The story of this legislation is doubted by modern scholars in two ways. First it is maintained that at such an early time law would not be created by legislation. Secondly it is claimed that law such as is described for the period could not then have existed, but is either an invention of the history writers or is the law of a later period which has been pushed back in time. The doubts are so profound that it has been said we know as good as nothing about law before the decemviri.

In 1964 there was found in Temple C at Hatra a life-size marble head with cleanshaven face (PI. V, 1 and 2), now in the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. It was lying on the podium behind the altar at the south end of the temple, and would seem to have fallen there from the place in which it had been set. The head, of which the face is extremely well preserved, appears to have been deliberately cut from the body across the neck, just below the chin. But of the body no trace has as yet come to light in Temple C or elsewhere.

The head, with its heavy, fleshy countenance, its lack of moustache and beard, its furrowed brow, facial folds, and full chin, is clearly the portrait of an elderly Roman. These features immediately distinguish it from the rather lean, smooth, flat-cheeked, moustached and bearded portraits of Hatrene kings, noblemen and so forth. Furthermore, it must be the portrait of a Roman prior to Hadrian's time, when, as is well known, thick curly hair and thick curly beards and moustaches came into fashion for men in the West.

In 1962 the late Professor Kraft put forward a new interpretation of the letters SC on the aes coinage of the principate, claiming thereby to remove the difficulties that sprang from the traditional interpretation of the formula. In brief, his theory was that the letters S(enatus) C(onsulto) did not refer to a senatorial decision authorizing the coinage (meaning ‘geprägt auf Senatsbeschluss’), as had been generally assumed as a matter of course; rather, the reference was to the type-content of the coinage: to the decision by which the senate had voted Augustus the honours depicted on the coinage itself (the oak-wreath of 27 B.C.). Although the late H. Mattingly reacted to this theory with scepticism, it was supported by C. H. V. Sutherland, who adduced in its favour further arguments from Augustan issues in the provinces. There discussion has stopped. However, there are reasons for not leaving the problem at this stage, as the solution of Kraft can hardly be the right one; instead, it should be possible to suggest another one harmonizing better with the evidence.

The student of the Roman Empire cannot do without the HA. For the years 117–284 it is the sole Latin source of any compass. Hence a double challenge. First, to segregate fact from fiction. Second, to ascertain the purpose and date of the enigmatic product. If that were done the result would contribute to understanding another period of imperial history.

In the process, in the long controversy that began in 1889 (the epochal year of Hermann Dessau) the literary approach suffered neglect and obscuration. It would have been advisable to start from structure, composition and authorship. The larger part of the HA is fabrication. If the inventions were put under scrutiny, the path lay open to uncover the manner and methods of the imposture, to deduce a personality—and to divine a purpose, if any.

A short speech preserved among the writings of Aelius Aristides is addressed to an unnamed emperor. At present, it is generally agreed to be spurious, spoken by an unknown orator before the emperor Philip the Arab. It has been called ‘the only preserved specimen of the oratory of the third century’, ‘perhaps the only speech preserved in the corpus of Aristides of which the authenticity can be denied with confidence’, and it has been used as a primary document for the history of Philip's reign.

It was not always so. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, the authenticity of the speech was never questioned, though there was disagreement about the identity of the emperor.