Showing papers in "Journal of Roman Studies in 1989"

Abduction Marriage in Antiquity: A Law of Constantine (CTh IX 24.1) and its Social Context*

Abstract: On I April A.D. 326 the Emperor Constantine issued a strongly worded edict (CTh IX. 24. 1) violently attacking the practice of abduction marriage or bride theft. Addressed ‘to the people’ (‘ad populum’), the law demands the punishment of all persons involved in such cases, including even the girl herself and her parents, if they had later agreed to the marriage of their daughter with her abductor. This edict marks the first explicit recognition in Roman law of marriage by abduction, although it is clear from other literary sources that the phenomenon was not new to the age of Constantine.

Cassiodorus and the Rise of the Amals: Genealogy and the Goths under Hun Domination

Abstract: From the mid-third century, Gothic tribes inhabited lands north of the river Danube; they were destined, however, to play a major role in the destruction of the Roman Empire and the creation of the medieval world order. In the last quarter of the fourth century, in the face of Hun attacks, some Goths (those commonly known as Visigoths) fled into the Roman Empire, winning a famous victory at Hadrianople in 378 and sacking Rome in 410. They later moved further west to found a kingdom in southern Gaul and Spain. Of equal historical importance are those Goths (usually known as Ostrogoths) who remained north of the Danube under Hun domination from c. 375 to c. 450. They too then entered the Empire, and, under Theoderic the Great, established a kingdom in Italy which is known to us through Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Ennodius. Much less well known, however, is the formative stage of their history when the Ostrogoths endured Hun domination, and it is on our sources for this period that this study will concentrate.

Relations between Rome and the German ‘Kings’ on the Middle Danube in the First to Fourth Centuries A.D.*

Abstract: In recent years the ‘rex sociusque et amicus’ of the Roman Empire—frequently, if mistakenly, called a ‘client king’—has been the subject of much study, notably by D. Braund. Although ostensibly Braund and others are discussing the position and role of these kings on all the Roman frontiers, they concentrate in the main on those in the east. This is perhaps inevitable, since literary and epigraphic evidence abounds for the east, while it is scarce and often ambiguous for the west. Unfortunately direct comparison between east and west is meaningless: conditions which can be seen to apply to Rome's relations with her neighbours in the east cannot always be transferred to the west. Unfortunately direct comparison between east and west is meaningless: conditions which can be seen to apply to Rome's relations with her neighbours in the east cannot always be transferred to the west. In Greece and Asia Minor Rome was dealing with developed societies who could be integrated into a Roman administrative system; in the west, on the other hand, the peoples living beyond the frontiers, and indeed within them, were culturally less well-developed; here Rome had, on the whole, to negotiate with constantly changing tribal chiefs rather than with established monarchies.

Nerva, the Fiscus Judaicus and Jewish Identity

Abstract: In A.D. 96 Nerva courted popularity in Rome for his new regime by changing the way in which the special tax on Jews payable to the fiscus Judaicus was exacted. The reform was widely advertised by the issue of coins, under the auspices of the senate, with the proclamation ‘fisci Judaici calumnia sublata’. Precisely how Nerva removed the calumnia no source states, but it can be surmised. The tax did not cease to be collected, for its imposition was still in operation in the time of Origen and possibly down to the fourth century A.D. It is a reasonable hypothesis that Nerva's intention was to demonstrate publicly his opposition to the way in which his hated predecessor, Domitian, had levied the tax, and to procure release for those described by Suetonius (Dom. 12. 2) as particular victims of Domitian's tendency to exact the tax ‘acerbissime’. According to Suetonius, these unfortunates were those who either ‘inprofessi’ lived a ‘iudaicam vitam’ or ‘origine dissimulata’ refused to pay the tax: the people thus trapped by Domitian and, if the hypothesis is correct, exempted by Nerva were those who failed to admit openly to their Jewish practices and/or those who hid their origins (presumably as Jews). I shall argue in this paper that by removing such people from the list of those liable to the Jewish tax, Nerva may unwittingly have taken a significant step towards the treatment of Jews in late antiquity more as a religion than as a nation.

Mining in the Later Roman Empire and Beyond: Continuity or Disruption?

Abstract: One of the more tangible benefits that accrued to Rome from the conquest of an empire was the acquisition of significant mineral resources, significant because Italy, although rich in iron, could not provide a sufficient supply of the whole range of metals needed by the Roman state for coinage and by members of the elite for the luxury artefacts that helped to enhance their social status. Once Rome had gained control over metalliferous regions of the Mediterranean, Romans, and especially Italians, were not slow to become involved in mining overseas, while the state came to gain considerable revenue from the leasing of contracts for the right to exploit state-owned mineral resources.

Virgil and Arcadia

Abstract: There is an obstacle to our natural appreciation of Virgil's Eclogues which looms as large in their case as in that of any poetry whatever. The Eclogues form probably the most influential group of short poems ever written: though they themselves take Theocritus as a model, they were to become the fountainhead from which the vast and diverse tradition of pastoral in many European literatures was to spring. To use them as a model was in itself to distort their character: it is one of the greatest ironies of literary history that these elusive, various, eccentric poems should have become the pattern for hundreds of later writers. Moreover, the growth of the later pastoral tradition meant that many things were attributed to Virgil which are not in Virgil. Sometimes they were derived from interpretations which were put upon Virgil in late antiquity but which we now believe to be mistaken; sometimes they are misinterpretations of a much later date; sometimes they originated from new developments in pastoral literature which their inventors had not meant to seem Virgilian, but which in the course of time got foisted back on to Virgil nevertheless. It is hard, therefore, to approach the Eclogues openly and without preconceptions about what they contain, and even scholars who have devoted much time and learning to them have sometimes continued to hold views about them for which there are upon a dispassionate observation no good grounds at all. No poems perhaps have become so encrusted by the barnacles of later tradition and interpretation as these, and we need to scrape these away if we are to see them in their true shape. My aim here is to do some of this scraping by examining the use of Arcadians and the name of Arcadia in Virgil's work.

The Illyrian Atintani, the Epirotic Atintanes and the Roman Protectorate

Abstract: The distinction which is drawn in this article between Appian's Ίλλυριῶν τοὺς Άτιντανούς (Illyr 7) and Strabo's Ήπeιρῶται δ’ eἰσι… ‘Ατιντᾶνeς (326) is of both regional and general importanceIf the Atintani were an Illyrian tribe, they lived north of the Via Egnatia; for they were not one of the Illyrian tribes south of that line which were listed by Strabo (326) If the Atintanes were an Epirotic tribe, they lived inland of the Epirote coast which was defined as extending from the Ceraunian Mountains to the mouth of the Ambraciote Gulf by Strabo (324) The two tribes, then, were very far apart However, if the two tribes were one and the same, as many scholars have supposed, and if the Illyrian label and the habitat in Epirus are applied to the single (fused) tribe, then one at least of the Epirote tribes was Illyrian This second alternative appeals particularly strongly to writers in Albania, who regard themselves as descendants of the Illyrians and like to argue that the present border of southern Albania, which runs through the centre of ancient Epirus, was in part at least the border of the ancient Illyrians Thus the regional issue involves the pattern of Illyrian settlement, the extent to which there was an Illyrian element in the Epirotic tribes, and the Albanian claim that their ancestors lived in North Epirus

Image and Society in Archaic Etruria

Abstract: There are no direct visual representations of the city in Etruscan art, any more than there are in Attic art. Indeed the civic aspect of the Etruscan world is in general particularly elusive; even in inscriptions, references to political and social structures are rare and brief. In the case of Athens, the study of the imagery of Attic vase-painting as a unified and structured system of representations has revealed hitherto unsuspected significations. It is true that the basic places and occasions of social, institutional, political and religious life are not themselves portrayed; yet the social categories and essential functions of the city are displayed, through the medium of a kind of anthropological description.