Roman History

El coneixement de la protohistoria del Magrib oriental –entenent com a tal l’edat del bronze i la primera edat del ferro, es a dir, el segon i el primer mil·lennis aC, de la zona que correspon a les actuals Tunisia i Algeria oriental– presenta un veritable buit. Aixo es evident si es compara amb l’estat de la recerca sobre el mateix periode a Europa, i potser encara mes amb el coneixement sobre el paleolitic i el neolitic al nord d’Africa. Per al final d’aquest periode, les fonts escrites gregues i romanes aporten dades abundants sobre els regnes numides i les seves relacions complexes amb Cartago i, mes tard, amb Roma. Si be existeix documentacio arqueologica sobre aquests regnes, el cert es que presenta llacunes molt importants, i que, remuntant en el temps, tenim un desconeixement gairebe absolut sobre aquesta zona des de finals del III mil·lenni aC.

La primera etapa dels nostres treballs al jaciment, fins a l’any 2010, ja va aportar resultats significatius sobre aquest món preromà, en mostrar que el jaciment d’Althiburos ja estava ocupat a principis del primer mil·lenni aC i que aquesta ocupació va continuar fluidament –potser amb una petita interrupció al s. VII aC– durant tota l’època preromana i, encara més enllà, fins a època bizantina. Van mostrar també que des del segle VI aC hi ha indicis que es tracta d’un assentament amb característiEn altres números de la revista AURIGA hem tingut ocasió de donar notícies sobre els resultats obtinguts en el projecte de recerca tunisianocatalà a la ciutat númida, i després romana, d’Althiburos, a la república de Tunísia. Ens limitarem, doncs, a recordar que l’objectiu dels nostres treballs és recuperar documentació rellevant que permeti plantejar hipòtesis mínimament sòlides sobre els processos de formació i desenvolupament dels estats númides que van tenir lloc durant el primer mil·le...

Various analogies can be drawn between architecture and literature. Thus,it is only natural if we assume that the spirit of a given age would be reflectedin the styles of both forms of art. John Ruskin said, `All architecture proposes aneffect on the human mind, not merely a service to the human frame\u27 (The SevenLamps of Architecture).The ruin of representation was mainly discussed in the context of literatureand paintings of the Romantic period. One of the reasons for this association wasWilliam Wordsworth\u27s famous poem `Tintern Abbey\u27, in which he expressed thefeeling of loss and beauty evoked by ruins. Wordsworth defined poetry as`emotion recollected in tranquility\u27 (Lyrical Ballads). As Ruskin aptly pointed out,`We may live without [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot rememberwithout her.\u27 Architecture is closely related to memory, which is passeddown from generation to generation. In 1917, William Butler Yeats (1865_1939)purchased the 16th - cen...

Institutt for rettsinformatikk (IRI) (tidligere Institutt for privatretts avdeling for EDB-spørsmål) har i mange år drevet forskning omkring tekstsøkesystemer. I ett av disse prosjektene har vi spesielt tatt opp ulike lingvistiske aspekter knyttet til denne type systemer. Foreløpig har arbeidet vært konsentrert omkring utvikling av en metode for gruppering av ord med felles rot på tvers av ordklassene. Prosessen har fått navnet ”auto­ matisk rotlemmatlsering” , bl.a. for å skille den fra den mer vanlige lemmatiseringsprosessen som opererer innenfor de tradisjonelle ordklassegrensene.

Procopius' Belisarius: “Parthicus Minimus”?
Christopher Lillington-Martin
Coventry University, Universitat de Barcelona & Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity
During his service under the Roman Emperor Justinian, General Flavius Belisarius is portrayed by Procopius (Belisarius' senior adviser, symboulos / paredros) as deeply involved in crises between the Roman and Sasanian Empires from 527-31 and 541-42. In the first episode Procopius characterises Belisarius as raiding Persarmenia. Then Belisarius defends Roman territory from Sasanian aggression with significant, if questionable, success. In the later campaigns Belisarius is represented as initially defending and then going on the offensive and invading Persia. From 533-40, Belisarius earned the victory titles of Vandalicus, Africanus and Geticus.[1] These honorific epithets commemorate Belisarius’ military achievements in the West.
The crises culminated in military conflict and diplomacy: the battles of Dara and Callinicum; manoeuvres resulting in the withdrawal of the Sasanian monarch Khusro and his army from Syria and finally Belisarius’ invasion of Persia. Procopius’ complex narration of Belisarius’ involvement in these events will be evaluated. Could Belisarius’ campaign of 542 be memorialised with the imaginary designation of “Parthicus Minimus”?
[1] Jordanes, Getica (60.315) Trans. Mierow, C.C., Jordanes, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths (Getica), Dodo Press (1908) based upon the text of Mommsen in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi. Berlin, 1882. http://www.harbornet.com/folks/theedrich/Goths/Goths2.htm#X60 (accessed 15 August 2016).

En este trabajo pretendemos estudiar y resaltar el papel de la infantería pesada en el ejército romano tardío, poniendo de manifiesto (gracias al ejemplo de la batalla de Estrasburgo) que tales unidades aún gozaban de relevancia y que a menudo realizaron un papel destacado, cuando no decisivo, en las batallas. Del mismo modo, se revisará la actuación del César Juliano ante lo que fue su primera batalla campal, llegando a la conclusión de que el personaje se había preocupado de recibir una excelente educación militar que quedó reflejada en sudesempeño como general en la Galia.

The archaeological elements subject of this study comes from an emergency digging made in 1994 on the occasion of the reform of a building located between Sa Drassaneta Square and the Alley of el
Gall, in the neighborhood of Sa Penya (Ibiza). Is mainly composed by vascular ceramics of very different origins, but also construction ceramics and other architectural elements, in addition to glass vessels.
Highlights in this context the presence of a balista missile and some human bones. The training chronology of the stratum that contained them, and meant the amortization of one of the cisterns, is located in
the first thirty years of the second half of the 3rd century AD. All in all, some questions arise in relation to the urban collapse of Ebusus and even the possibility of attacks performed by Germanic peoples at the beginning
of the late Roman imperial period.

In Protestant biblical scholarship, the Deuterocanonical books are in a rather disadvantaged position. It is a welcome fact that this year an ecumenical initiative has been launched to produce a series of commentaries on these works. In connection with this, I have begun to work on the first book of Maccabees, and in this paper I offer an introductory study of it.

When explaining allegorically a biblical passage which mentions animals, plants or minerals, Gregory the Great usually uses his knowledge of natural history to elaborate the allegory. In this article I explore Gregory’s sources and parallels in this regard, focusing on other Church Fathers on the one hand, and on ancient pagan authors (mainly naturalists) on the other. Augustine, Jerome, Eucherius, Servius and the Physiologus are valued as direct sources, but it is evident that Gregory had at his disposal other sources which have not been preserved, perhaps lost catalogs or treatises, perhaps oral sources.

During its expasion along the Black Sea regions between the Late Republic and the Early Empire, Romans adopted different solution to impose their tax system. In particular, the paper describes the cases of the former kingdom of Pontus and the Greek colonies in Western Black Sea coast putting in evidence the gradual provincialization of these regions and the duties according to publicans actives in this two areas.

The volume is composed of separate exhaustive studies devoted to a package of epigraphic monuments discovered in the legionary fortress of Apulum (Alba Iulia) in the last 20 years. Among them, the most spectacular are a series of altars and statue bases discovered in situ during archaeological research in the principia of the fortress, remarkable especially for their double value, historical and archaeological. Alongside these, other monuments discovered in the fortress also contribute, through their content, iconography and the context of their discovery, to the overall picture of the organization and military life in the most important military and urban centre of Dacia.

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It was the backdrop to a literary world of the lost Levant. Away from the sea, on a narrow street in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria, 10 Rue Lepsius was the home and creative sanctuary of Constantine Cavafy. For 26 years, it was here that the poet, a bureaucrat in British-run colonial Egypt, held court, treating writers such as EM Forster to long candle-lit nights of talk over liquors and what the English novelist later recalled as "small bits of bread and cheese". It was here, too, above a brothel on the building's second floor-for even then the neighbourhood was more louche than luxurious-that Cavafy wrote the masterpieces that would make him one of the world's most translated poets. The controversial writer Constantine Cavafy was unpublished in his lifetime, but revered by a host of artists. His archive and Alexandrian home are now on show for the first time Greek poet who inspired Forster, Hockney and Jackie Onassis emerges from the shadows

El presente estudio tiene como objeto, dar a conocer un broche de cinturon visigodo aparecido en Villanueva de Mesia, provincia de Granada. Fue hallado en el Cerro de Verdeja, por el obrero agricola Rogelio Luque Santiago al abrir unos hoyos para plantar almendros. Segun sus propios informes, el broche aparecio junto a unas "herramientas de hierro", asociado todo el conjunto a un esqueleto humano que se hallaba en una sepultura en forma de "caja de piedra" y que un amigo suyo se llevo a un cortijo cercano para ser utilizada como abrevadero de animales.

In three letters of March 49 BCE, in the midst of the civil war, Cicero accuses Pompey of a plan that he describes as criminal: the ‘maritime blockade’ of terra Italia and especially of Rome, a project conceived some time before. However, these are the only three hints of a plan that was never realised, attested in letters written by Cicero at a time of great emotional instability and strong temptation to abandon Pompey. Yet scholarship, hand in hand with the development of interest in the naval aspects of Roman power, seems to attach increasing credence to the supposed plan for a ‘maritime blockade’, in the light too of the later exploits of Pompey’s son Sextus. In contrast, our reconstruction of Pompey’s and Caesar’s naval strategy shows the objective difficulties
of such a plan. It would have required a tight coastal control of the Tyrrhenian areas, which was rendered impossible by the abandonment, by Pompey and his allies, of southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily. The blockade by a naval power against a land power was in fact, in the ancient
world, for technological reasons, a problematic strategy, requiring far more political cohesion than that of the composite anti-Caesarian coalition and requiring, above all, coastal control (which Sextus Pompeius, for some time, succeeded in maintaining). If Carl Schmitt has brilliantly sketched
the history of the modern world as a conflict between maritime and land powers, we must recognise that during the 1st century BCE, Leviathan, to suffocate Behemoth, needed to have its feet firmly planted on the ground.

Tiberius Claudius Germanicus was acclaimed emperor in AD41 after the murder of Gaius by members of the Praetorian Guard. Despite manifest handicaps that worried the imperial family enough to result in a career of education, scholarship and minor offices, Ti. Claudius Caesar emerged as princeps, a position which he held until his untimely death in AD54. Scholars have assessed the impact of Claudius' disabilities in a negative light, or, in a spirit of revisionism without producing evidence that would authentically refute the original allegations. This is a contradictory result; one is asked to accept as fact the brutality of the negative and satirical portrait of Claudius, but then be obliged by the sources to assume that he was in fact still capable this is not a tenable position. Past scholarship has given a cursory assessment of Claudius' illness, and promoted infantile paralysis (polio) or cerebral palsy as being consistent with his apparent eccentricities in the sources....

Dii Manes pertain to domestic and local cult, and are usually refered to as a collective of deifeid dead people, or as spirits of the deceased. Generally speaking, the epigraphically attested divine spirits of the departed have received an increased amount of scholarly attention in recent years. A variety of approaches and types of evidence has been deployed, with an aim to emphasize the general patterns that have been encountered across the Roman world. In an attempt to analize epigraphic evidence for Manes in the Roman province of Lower Pannonia, this paper will bear in mind the importance of local variations, more than try to fit general a picture over a vast area.

Short summary of recent findings on the climate history of the Roman Empire, published in "Circulare" (Nr 2/2024, pp. 16-19), the journal of Sodalitas - Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft klassischer Philologen und Altertumswissenschafter Österreichs

Tacitus‘ Schilderung der Schlacht am Angrivarierwall 16 n. Chr. (Tac. Ann. 2,19-21) kann schlüssig gedeutet werden, wenn man annimmt, dass die Germanen unter dem Cheruskerfürsten Arminius ein begrenztes Defileegefecht geplant hatten, das der energische römische Feldherr Germanicus jedoch erheblich auszuweiten verstand. Bisher geht die Forschung von einer großen, rangierten Feldschlacht um eine Blockadestellung aus. Dieser Ansatz führt jedoch zu unlösbaren Problemen bei der Quellendeutung.

This text has a complex scholarly history. Although it has never been published, it has in fact been subject to proper scholarly peer review. It started out as Chapter 1 in my manuscript for what ultimately became my book The Domus Aurea and the Roman Architectural Revolution, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The title below was simply the title for Chapter 1, the elimination of "Chapter 1" being the only modification throughout this text. The MS, including this chapter, passed CUP peer review, passed must with the NYC office of CUP and was then sent to the CUP syndicate in Cambridge for final approval. Their acceptance of the project, including the MS, stipulated a substantial reduction in wording and illustration, however. To meet the required standard, Chapter 1 was deleted entirely, and has sat in my computer as a relic ever since. Posting this text here does not in any way represent an imprematur of approval for the text as a stand-alone, ad hoc project. This is entirely on my initiative, in case anyone in the field might find an assessment of ancient texts associated with the Domus Aurea useful. In the meantime, my own scholarly focus has shifted to Pompeii, which means that I have not given this text any thought or editing since 2003. As with houses for sale, used cars and fine critters at the local Humane Society, it is provided "As Is", for anyone to whom it may appeal.-LFB.

Matasuintha, Amalasuintha's daughter and Theoderic's granddaughter, was forced to marry Vitiges in late 536, after the coup which had brought him to power. Her unwillingness was possibly due to the fact that the girl intended to lead a religious life. She tried to  plot against her own husband to reach a deal with the emperor during the Gothic War and, after the fall of Ravenna, she was exiled to Constantinople together with Vitiges, who died a few years later. In 549, she married Germanus, Justinian’s cousin, who at that time was seen as his most likely successor. The marriage was aimed at obtaining the loyalty of the Goths who were still opposing the Empire, yet it was also part of Justinian's dynastic policy, since he appointed her as “ordinary patrician”, like Theodora, thereby hinting at her future role as empress. Matasuintha's portait evolved over time from that of a pious Christian virgin similar to Demetrias and Radegund to that of a would-be empress, showing the existence of meaningful similarities in education and behaviour between late antique (East) Roman and Germanic elite women. Moreover, she played a role of paramount importance in the political communication of the Ostrogothic Kingdom and the Empire, strengthening the authority of both of her husbands. Ultimately, she never became empress, but few would have been surprised if it had happened.