The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Delphi victory monument, on display in the archaeological museum at Delphi: see now Michael J. Taylor, Hesperia 85 (2016), pp. 559–76.

  ‘stratagem and deceit’: Polybius 37, 1.

  ‘retained their own habits and principles uncontaminated’: Polybius 18, 35.

  15 Hail Caesar!

  ‘The Italians and Greeks who do business on Delos’: Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae nos. 8961a–b.

  ‘Delos, which could both admit’: Strabo 14, 5, 2.

  ‘barbarian’ slaves: Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 8, 7.

  ‘The men who fight and die for Italy’: Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 9, 5.

  ‘posted writings on porticoes’: Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 8, 7.

  ‘This is said to have been the first sedition’: Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 20, 1.

  Tiberius Gracchus: Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 19–20, 1.

  ‘That which is necessary for keeping alive’: Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 9, 14, 16–17.

  ‘He busied himself most earnestly’: Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus 7.

  ‘One hundred and twenty years ago’: Velleius Paterculus, Roman History 2, 15.

  ‘The Romans abundantly repaid his loyal zeal’: Velleius Paterculus, Roman History 2, 16.

  Seats at the games: Gaius Julius Victor, Ars rhetorica, p. 402, lines 12–15 in C. Halm, ed., Rhetores Latini Minores (Leipzig, 1863), trans. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2008), p. 446.

  ‘Homoloïchos and Anaxidamos’: Plutarch, Sulla 19, 5. Jeremy McInerney and others, American Journal of Archaeology, 96 (1992), pp. 443–55.

  ‘I’m amazed, O wall’: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 4, 1904 translated in Jennifer Baird and Claire Taylor, eds, Ancient Graffiti in Context (New York, 2011), p. 2.

  ‘His hair was inclined to lift itself’: Plutarch, Pompey 2.

  ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts’: Caesar, Gallic War 1, 1.

  ‘For although it was not full ten years’: Plutarch, Caesar 15, 3.

  ‘The civil wars which he waged were five’: Suetonius, Divus Augustus 9.

  ‘Those murders by proscription’: Cassius Dio, Roman History 47, 3.

  ‘At the age of nineteen’; ‘All Italy’; ‘about 3,500 beasts’; ‘By new laws passed on my proposal’; ‘by decree of the senate’: Peter M. Brunt and John M. Moore, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1967), sections 1, 1; 25, 2; 22, 3; 5; 34, 2.

  ‘The essence of civilization’: ‘Empedocles on Etna’, Inquirer (27 August 1853), pp. 548–9, an anonymous article attributed to Walter Bagehot by Robert H. Tener, Biographical Society of the University of Virginia 29 (1976), pp. 349–53.

  16 ‘Fierce Rome, Captive’?

  ‘convivium’/‘symposion’: remarks in Alan Wardman, Rome’s Debt to Greece (London, 1976), p. 144.

  ‘humble abode’: Palatine Anthology 11, 44.

  ‘There is no index of character’: Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred: Or, the New Crusade (Leipzig, 1847), book II, chapter 1.

  ‘the good man skilled in speaking’: Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 12, 1, 1.

  ‘to speak [Latin] in the Attic way’: Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 12, 10, 26.

  ‘glory in war’: Cicero, Pro Flacco 64.

  Demosthenes portrait in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/257882 (accessed 25 January 2018).

  Painfully obvious joke: Michael Fontaine, Funny Words in Plautine Comedy (Oxford, 2010), p. 41.

  ‘In my sixth consulship’: Augustus, Res gestae 20, 4.

  ‘I built the temple of Mars’: Augustus, Res gestae 21, 1.

  ‘Arms and the man I sing’: Virgil, Aeneid 1, lines 1–11.

  ‘The man, for wisdom’s various arts renown’d’: Homer, Odyssey 1, lines 1–5 (lines 1–7 in the 1801 edition of Alexander Pope’s translation).

  ‘Of Trojan stock illustriously sprung’: Virgil, Aeneid 1, lines 290–293.

  ‘Greekling’: Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Hadrian 1, 5.

  ‘like a woman’: Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Hadrian 14, 5.

  17 What Did the Romans Do for Their Empire?

  ‘The Shades of L[ucius] Calpurnius Piso’: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 6, 31723.

  ‘Piso was the son of Marcus Crassus’: Tacitus, Histories 1, 14.

  ‘side by side with the eagle of the legion’: Tacitus, Histories 1, 44.

  ‘The Doom of the Nobiles’: chapter 32 of Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939, reprinted from 1960 on), pp. 490–508.

  ‘His brother Magnus’: Tacitus, Histories 1, 48.

  ‘Seneca . . . begged’: Tacitus, Annals 15, 64.

  Patara granary: Marie-Brigitte Carre in Javier Arce and Bertrand Goffaux, eds, Horrea d’Hispanie et de la Méditerranée (Madrid, 2011), pp. 28–30.

  Patara pillar monument: Mustafa Adak and Sencer Şahin, Stadiasmus Patarensis. Itinera Romana Provinciae Lyciae (Istanbul, 2007). For an English summary see the presentation by Professor Nalan Eda Akyürek Şahin (with bibliography) on the website of Akdeniz University, Antalya, Turkey: http://adkam.akdeniz.edu.tr/sp-en-text (accessed 22 March 2017).

  Patara theatre inscription: Tituli Asia Minoris 2, no. 420.

  ‘and gave orders that no one be allowed to leave: Suetonius, Caligula 26, 5.

  Sanitation: lecture by Heikki Vuorinen of Helsinki University at the Finnish Institute at Athens (20 March 2014).

  ‘Veranius, after having ravaged’: Tacitus, Annals 14, 29.

  Isca website: Welsh Government Website, page for Caerleon Roman Fortress and Baths, http://cadw.gov.wales/daysout/Caerleon-roman-fortress-baths/?lang=en (accessed 21 March 2017).

  ‘The Britons are unprotected by armour’: A. K. Bowman and J. D. Thomas, The Vindolanda Writing Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses II) (London, 1994); Vindolanda Tablets Online, tablet 164: http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/4DLink2/4DACTION/WebRequestQuery?searchTerm=164&searchType=number&searchField=TVII (accessed 22 March 2017).

  ‘To accustom to rest and repose’: Tacitus, Agricola 21.

  ‘To Neptune and Minerva’: the most up-to-date edition of the Chichester inscription is the website Roman Inscriptions of Britain Online, no. 91: https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/91 (accessed 22 March 2017).

  Onyx ring: John Manley and David Rudkin, ‘Fishbourne Roman Palace Final Interim 1995–9’: https://sussexpast.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/FBE–95–99.pdf (accessed 25 January 2018).

  ‘puellam’: Francis Haverfield, The Romanization of Roman Britain, 4th edn (Oxford 1923), p. 30 with Figure 2.

  Diet: Gillian Hawkes, ‘Beyond Romanization: The creolization of food. A framework for the study of faunal remains from Roman sites’, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 10 (1999), pp. 89–95.

  ‘The courts . . . bring together’: Dio Chrysostom, Oration 35, 15–17.

  ‘To Valerius Firmus’: James Keenan and others, eds, Law and Legal Practice in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab Conquest (Cambridge, 2014), no. 3, 3, 5.

  18 ‘Barbarians’ at the Gate

  Augustus ‘won over everyone with the sweetness of repose’: Tacitus, Annals 1, 2, 1.

  ‘[Work] of Emperor Caesar’: Roman Inscriptions of Britain Online, no. 1638: https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/1638 (accessed 29 March 2017).

  ‘An encamped army’: Aelius Aristides, Oration 14 (Dindorf), 219–20.

  ‘They would eat the flesh’: Cassius Dio 68, 32.

  ‘because they were forbidden to practise circumcision’: Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Hadrian 14, 1–2.

  ‘Hadrian the blasphemer’: Jerusalem Talmud Taan 4, 8, folio 69a.

  ‘placed in a river so deep’: Cassius Dio 68, 13.

  ‘the Black Sea and the Caspian’: Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (London, 2004), pp. 183–4.

  ‘among the one hundred most dangerous books’: Arnaldo Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), p. 112.

  ‘The Harii’
: Tacitus, Germania 4.

  ‘transplanted – and forced to pay tribute’: Latin inscription in Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae no. 986.

  ‘the names of the young soldiers’: Greek inscription in Paul Roesch, Les Inscriptions de Thespies, Fascicule I (2007, revised 2009), no. 37: www.hisoma.mom.fr/sites/hisoma.mom.fr/files/img/production-scientifique/IT%20I%20%282009%29.pdf (accessed 25 January 2018).

  ‘besides clothes and goblets’: Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Marcus 21, 9.

  ‘when suddenly many clouds gathered’: Cassius Dio 71, 8.

  ‘The Germanic drought was removed’: Tertullian, Apologeticus 5. I follow the interpretation of the divinity on the Column of Marcus Aurelius argued by Ido Israelowich, ‘The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: (Re-)Construction of Consensus’, Greece & Rome, 55 (2008), pp. 83–102.

  ‘Our history now descends from a kingdom of gold’: Cassius Dio 72, 36, 4.

  Spartan inscription: Antony Spawforth, ‘A Severan Statue Group and an Olympic Festival at Sparta,’ Annual of the British School at Athens 81 (1986), pp. 313–32.

  ‘by his birth and normal behaviour’: Herodian 7, 1, 2.

  ‘With great daring’: Herodian 8, 5, 9.

  ‘Your ancestors, fighting in this place’: Vienna manuscript translated by Christopher Mallan and Caillan Davenport, ‘Dexippus and the Gothic Invasions: Interpreting the New Vienna Fragment (Codex Vindobonensis Hist. gr. 73, ff. 192v–193r)’, Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015), p. 206 (7).

  ‘Franks, Sarmatians by the thousand’: Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Aurelian 7, 2.

  ‘To whom, at this rate’: Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Aurelian 31, 5.

  ‘to clear the sea, which the Franks’: Carausius: Eutropius, Breviarium 9, 21.

  ‘Expectate veni’: this particular coin recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme (UK) as with the unique ID: BH-059652. Virgil, Aeneid 2, lines 282–3.

  ‘Carausius and his brothers’ (CARAVSIUS ET FRATRES SVI): see N. Shiel, ‘Carausius et fratres sui’, British Numismatic Journal 48 (1978), pp. 7–11.

  19 The ‘Jesus Movement’

  John Moles, ‘Jesus the Healer in the Early Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and Early Christianity’, Histos 5 (2011), pp. 117–82.

  List of gold and silver images: see Guy Rogers, The Sacred Identity of Ephesos (London, 1991), pp. 83–5, discussing the detailed information contained in the long Greek inscription published as Die Inschriften von Ephesos no. 27.

  ‘All soldiers and sailors were ready to die’: New Zealand’s The Northern Advocate (Tuesday 24 September 1912), p. 2, citing a letter to the Daily Mail from the expatriate Japanese artist and author Yoshio Markino, who lived in Edwardian London: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NA19120924.2.3 (accessed 25 January 2018).

  ‘the temple raised to the deified Claudius’: Tacitus, Annals 14, 31.

  ‘Whether she was innocent or not’: Pliny, Letters 4, 11, 8–9.

  ‘Take a sprig of laurel’: H. D. Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (Chicago, IL, 1986), p. 14, citing PGM II, 65–8.

  ‘Ye treachery and malice’: John Timbs, Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the Most Rare and Remarkable Objects in the Metropolis; With Nearly Sixty Years’ Personal Recollections (London, 1867), p. 571.

  ‘To get rid of the rumour’: Tacitus, Annals 15, 44. The translation is that of Brent D. Shaw, ‘The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,’ Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015), pp. 73–100, whose larger argument I follow.

  ‘It is not possible to lay down any general rule’: Pliny, Letters 10, 97.

  Early Christians as freelance experts: Heidi Wendt, ‘Ea superstitio: Christian Martyrdom and the Religion of Freelance Experts’, Journal of Roman Studies, 105 (2015), pp. 183–202.

  Lyon ‘martyrs’: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5, 1.

  ‘in consequence of which they despise death’: Lucian, On the Death of Peregrinus 13.

  ‘To the commissioners of sacrifices at Oxyrhynchus’: Alan Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs, 332 BC – AD 642: From Alexander to the Arab Conquest (London, 1986), p. 191, citing P. Oxy. 1464.

  ‘how many things he endured’: Origen: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6, 39, 5.

  ‘In the nineteenth year of the reign of Diocletian’: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8, 2, 4.

  ‘neither gold nor silver nor money’: P. Oxy. 33, 2673 with the discussion by Annemarie Luijendijk in Journal of Early Christian Studies 16 (2008), pp. 341–69.

  ‘A most marvellous sign appeared to him’: Eusebius 1, 28, 2.

  ‘God’s heavenly sign’: Lactantius, De morte persecutorum 44, 5.

  Saint Peter’s: Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Pontiffs), trans. Raymond Davis (Liverpool, 1989), pp. 16–24.

  ‘bearing a baulk of timber’: Evelyn Waugh, Helena (Penguin, 1963), p. 154.

  20 United We Stand

  ‘Who therefore can be ignorant’: Edict of Diocletian, trans. Roland G. Kent, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 69 (1920), p. 43.

  ‘The assembled veterans cried out’: Theodosian Code 7, 20, 2, trans. N. Lewis and M. Reinhold, Roman Civilization: Sourcebook II: The Empire (New York, 1966), p. 530.

  ‘Constantine did something else’: Zosimus 2, 34.

  Arch of Khosrau: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arch_of_Ctesiphon_assessment_DVIDS221914.jpg (accessed 6 June 2017).

  ‘shining with all kinds of precious stones’: Ammianus Marcellinus 16, 10, 6.

  ‘Dazzling the people’: Karl Lagerfeld in Fastes de Cour et cérémonies royales (Paris, 2009), p. 13.

  ‘For though he was a man of short stature’: Ammianus Marcellinus 16, 10, 10, cited by Rowland Smith in A. Spawforth, ed., The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies (Cambridge, 2007), p. 210.

  ‘one would expect of an enemy of God’s religion’: Lactantius, De morte persecutorum 11.

  ‘under cruel tortures’: Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 4, 2.

  ‘to sacrifice by the altar the foetus’: lines 4–5 of the Vera inscription, with new readings by Tibor Grüll: Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 39 (1989), no. 855. An English translation and commentary are available in that author’s Patmiaka (Budapest, 1989). See also George Deligiannakis in The Dodecanese and the Eastern Aegean Islands in Late Antiquity, AD 300–700 (Oxford, 2016), pp. 318–20.

  ‘not history but imaginative re-creation’: Dudley Fitts’s review of Gore Vidal, Julian (1964) in the New York Times, www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-julian.html (accessed 25 January 2018).

  ‘ordered the temples to be opened’: Ammianus Marcellinus 22, 5.

  ‘Mantiklos donated me’: John Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period (London, 1991), p. 30, no. 10.

  ‘those who wear the long cloak’: Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 4, 2.

  ‘His voice . . . was such as one might have heard’: Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists 427.

  ‘He burned a grain of incense’: Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists 435.

  ‘Forgetting’: Ammianus Marcellinus 25, 3, 3.

  ‘of any animal whatsoever’; ‘monstrously ugly’; ‘exceed every degree’; ‘seizing and destroying everything’: Ammianus Marcellinus 31, 2, 1–3.

  ‘They were ferried over’: Ammianus Marcellinus 31, 4, 5.

  ‘the most frequently contested spot’: John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London, 2004), p. 70.

  Olympic victories of AD 381 and 385: Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 45 (1995), no. 412.

  ‘No person at all, of any class’: Theodosian Code 16, 10, 12.

  ‘The Emperor, who was full of faith’: Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5, 17–18, trans. William Stearns Davis, ed., Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources (Boston, 1912–13), vol. 2: Rome and the West, pp. 298–300.

  Butheric and the cupbearer: Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7, 25 with the discussion of Robert M. Frakes in Robert M. Frakes and others, eds, The Rhetoric of Power in Late Antiquity (New York, 2010), pp.
47–62.

  Bearing arms a ‘serious matter’: Moses Finley in Journal of Roman Studies 48 (1958), p. 159.

  21 Divided We Fall

  ‘Everything cedes to Theodosius’: Latin inscription on the Obelisk of Theodosius: Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae no. 821.

  ‘Visigoths’: Jordanes, Getica 5, 42.

  ‘Some most flagrant and wicked desires’: Augustine, City of God 1, 28.

  Acilius Glabrio Sibidius and family: Alan Cameron, Journal of Roman Studies 102 (2012), pp. 148–50.

  ‘[he] was a man of moderate height’: Jordanes, Getica 168.

  ‘He [Gaeseric] robbed the rest of the Libyans’: Procopius, History of the Wars 3, 5.

  ‘He was short, with a broad chest’: R. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire, vol. 2 (Liverpool, 1983), Priscus fragment 12.

  ‘The British provinces’: Gallic Chronicle of 452, Chronica minora 1, 660 (c. 126).

  Dorchester pottery: James Gerrard in Britannia, 41 (2010), pp. 293–312.

  Hadrian’s Wall: Rob Collins, Hadrian’s Wall and the End of Empire (New York and Abingdon, 2014), chapter 2.

  ‘Then he entered Ravenna, deposed Augustulus’: Anonymus Valesianus 8, 38.

  ‘This Emperor was insincere’: Procopius, Secret History 8, 24; 17, 5–6.

  ‘And often even in the theatre’: Procopius, Secret History 9, 20–21.

  ‘Theodora also concerned herself’: Procopius, Secret History 17, 5–6.

  American translator: Timothy G. Kearsley, Law Library Journal 99 (2007), pp. 525–54.

  ‘Whereas then, nothing in any sphere’: Alan Watson, The Digest of Justinian, revised edn, vol. I (Philadelphia, PA, 1998), p. xxxiii.

  ‘golden dome suspended’: Procopius, On Buildings 1, 1, 46 (Great Church).

  ‘Light of light’: Timothy Gregory, Isthmia, vol. 5 (Princeton, NJ, 1993), pp. 12–13, no. 4.

  ‘who dare to practise abominable lust’: Institutions 4, 18, 4.

  ‘The emperor ordered that all those found guilty’: Malalas, Chronographia 18, 168 (PG 97: 644).