Original DocumentsExtracts from The Bursar’s Accounts,Preserved Among The Muniments of Winchester College

This paper challenges the interpretation of late Roman Verulamium which has stood since Frere's excavations in 1955–61. A quantitative analysis of construction work and occupation phases forms the basis of two new interpretative conclusions. First, in contrast to a view which sees urban vigour continuing to the end of the Roman period, it is suggested that the town experienced a sharp decline in both construction and occupation from the early fourth century onwards. Second, the late town is portrayed as radically different in character from that of the second century—a defended ‘post-classical’ outpost of the decaying empire rather than a garden-city of romanizing local gentry.     

ROMAN HISTORY,THEN AND NOW

The argument here is that despite the many similarities of writing the history of ancient Rome, whether the Republic or the Empire, there are stark and significant differences between Edward Gibbon and Mary Beard. In part this is a matter of style and literary genius. It is also evidence of a vast cultural difference, reflected in changing attitudes about writing history and its importance. Beard is impatient with Gibbon's oratorical formality and conceits. Her own writing is easy and unmannered. These literary habits are determined by audience as well as personality. Gibbon addresses the English ruling class and enlightened opinion. His concerns are politics, religion, and law—the interests of his readers who governed and shaped opinion. Beard is more interested in the private and personal, subjects that until recently had only a marginal place in historical writing. She relies heavily on sources that were unknown to Gibbon, and might not have interested him anyhow. Her style mirrors these concerns. She does not assume her readers have had a Classical education nor that they know the general outlines of Roman history. She has little or no tolerance for Gibbon's obsession with religion, and, at least in SPQR, slight interest in either paganism or the rise of Christianity. Her thousand‐year slice of history—Gibbon also tackled a millennium—stops well short of Gibbon's broad philosophical vision of Rome as the cradle of Europe. These contrasts in style, taste, sources, and personality are not offered in judgment, but as commentary on the continuing vitality of Roman history.     

Original Documents

The end of Roman London has too often been discussed using models that are poorly rooted in empirical evidence. This paper utilizes data from archives and commercial contractors to plot the distribution of activity in London at the end of the fourth century. This challenges the notion that much of the Late Roman city was deserted. However, a brief consideration of Early AngloSaxon London and Southwark demonstrates that by the late fifth century the City and Southwark were abandoned.     

Veiling the Late Roman House

The period of late antiquity, c. ad 200–500, saw a dramatic increase in the social, political and religious significance of domestic textiles, as is revealed in references in literature and art, as well as in the finds of archaeological textiles in Roman Egypt. This paper explores the roles of textiles, particularly hangings and curtains, in such domestic settings in the late Roman period from a social perspective — how they served the increased concerns with privacy, visibility, mystery, boundaries and shifting gender relations that are amply attested in late Roman culture. I argue that, alongside more permanent forms of permeable boundaries, textiles were exploited for their unique inherent qualities in order to serve diverse needs in the late Roman house, and filled a central role in late Roman domestic life that was more far significant than their scant remains suggest today.     

Housing in Late Antique Augusta Emerita: The End of The Peristyle House

This article presents the archaeological evidence for a comprehensive change in the residential pattern of late antique Mérida, Spain (Augusta Emerita) in the second half of the fifth century AD. By the fourth century AD, the peristyle house had become the fundamental unit of aristocratic late Roman housing, offering the ideal setting for high‐status interactions, aristocratic ceremony, and even private and public business. The peristyle house was gradually replaced by subdivision housing in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, in a trend seen throughout the late Roman world. In Emerita, however, the transition was quite sudden. Here, a destructive event in the middle of the fifth century paved the way for the rapid introduction of subdivision housing, over just a few decades. While this new style of housing was typical of the late antique world, the evidence from Emerita highlights the role that a local catalyst might play in the adoption of new cultural forms.     

Walter Moyle's Machiavellianism,declared and otherwise,in An Essay upon the Constitution of the Roman Government

Walter Moyle's work, An Essay upon the Constitution of the Roman Government, is much more Machiavellian than it initially announces itself to be. Informed by James Harrington's and Niccolò Machiavelli's earlier commentaries on Rome, Moyle readily embraces that on which both of his predecessors agree—the desirability of a republic that seeks armed increase. Harrington, though, explicitly disagrees with Machiavelli's embrace of a tumultuous republic that seeks a return to its beginning through fostering fear. In contrast to Machiavelli, Harrington looks to economic and institutional arrangements that will render a republic so serene and stable that he claims immortality for it. Although initially Moyle forthrightly endorses Harrington's analysis, he ultimately relies on the harshest teachings of Machiavelli to maintain a republic, a reliance which finds him endorsing the distinctively Machiavellian directives to suspect, accuse, and punish its leaders in such a way as to return the republic to its beginnings. These teachings make Moyle's work a vessel for the transmission of a stern, aggressive republicanism. Even in this eventual enthusiastic embrace of Machiavelli's teachings, however, Moyle still displays some hesitation in citing him as the sole source for them as his attributions couple the Florentine's name inaccurately with other, more reputable republicans.     

Imperial Geography and the Medieval Peutinger Map

The Peutinger map is an extraordinary world map drawn c.1200 and long considered a copy of a Roman road map made for late antique travellers. This paper presents arguments against these assumptions and concludes that the lost original was more likely to be a Carolingian display map. Ninth‐century scribes had the expertise and resources necessary for creating an antiquarian work based on Roman itinerary lists, while Carolingian rulers had ample motivation for commissioning a map to display their Roman imperial ambitions.     

The image of authority in Carolingian coinage: the image of a ruler and Roman imperial tradition

This article examines the influence of Roman imperial symbols of authority on Carolingian coinage. During the brief period of a specific &1squo;renewal' in Carolingian coinage in the 810s, there was an evident turn to the Roman tradition of demonstrating authority. As a result, the image of a peace-making emperor on Roman coins during the late third to early fourth century was employed on Carolingian coins for the purpose of legitimizing the new imperial authority of the Carolingians. This image, however, was not long-lived and gradually disappeared in the 820s to 830s.     

Recent Archæological Researches in Rome

Luminescence dating has been applied to ceramic bricks sampled from a selection of English medieval ecclesiastical and secular buildings in Essex, Kent and Lincolnshire, ranging in age from the fourth to the late sixteenth centuries. The results obtained for the Anglo-Saxon churches, which included Brixworth, confirmed the reuse of Roman brick in all cases. The dates for the earliest medieval brick type indicate that brick making was reintroduced during the eleventh century, a century earlier than previously accepted, and dates for bricks from the same secular Tudor building indicate that the practice of recycling of building materials during the late medieval period was also applied to brick.     

Regional Survey and the Boom-and-bust Countryside: Re-reading the Archaeological Evidence for Episodic Abandonment in the Late Roman Corinthia

This paper reexamines the archaeological evidence for three episodes of rural abandonment and resettlement in the countrysides of Late Roman Greece (200–700 CE): an abandoned Late Hellenistic-Early Roman countryside (second century BCE to third century CE), a decline in the third to early fourth centuries CE, and the Dark Age beginning in the seventh century CE. The first and third episodes of abandonment, especially, have sharply defined Late Antiquity (250–700 CE) as a healthy period of new rural settlement and economic resurgence, and the entire pattern has been described in the terms of “boom-and-bust” demographic and economic cycles. Closer readings of the archaeological data can contribute to more sensitive pictures of continuity and change in settlement and connectivity in the late antique Corinthian countryside and other regions in Greece.     

Anchoring Pontifical Authority: A Reconsideration of the Papal Employment of the Title Pontifex Maximus

It is a common assumption that the title of supreme priesthood or pontifex maximus is included in the official papal titulature, and it has been supposed that the Roman bishop adopted it from the Roman emperor in late antiquity. In fact, however, it was probably not until the fifteenth century that the designation was first used by the papacy, and it has continued to be part of papal representation ever since. The title was deeply rooted in the Roman imperial past. At several stages in papal history the papal agency felt the need to draw back (again) on this ancient, traditional title and managed to successfully (re‐)introduce the title by anchoring it in the cultural biography of the papacy.     

The origins of mercury gilding

A survey of almost 50 gilded objects in the British Museum has traced the occurrence of the mercury gilding technique from the later Roman and Sasanian Empires of the third and fourth centuries AD to the late Chou period in China of the third century BC. The technique appears to have been unknown during the Hellenistic period and under the Roman Republic and early Empire. Mercury gilding was identified by microscopic examination and qualitative emission spectrographic analysis.     

The Lance of St Maurice as a component of the early Ottonian campaign against paganism

The so‐called Holy Lance that formed part of the Holy Roman imperial insignia from the middle of the tenth century was for a time believed to be identical with that carried by the early Christian soldier‐martyr, St Maurice. While the earliest documentary evidence for a Maurician identification dates to 1008, I argue that Otto I (936–73) already associated the blade with this saint in the context of his anti‐pagan campaign along the empire's eastern borders, in which the figure of the saint played a significant role. Construed as the lance of St Maurice, this weapon was a potent visual tool of early Ottonian proselytism.     

Andreas Kalvos and the Eighteenth-Century Ethos

Abstract

In the space of a few years the small isle of Zante, one of the Ionian group, produced three important poets: Hugo Foscolo, Dionysios Solomos, and the subject of this present study, Andreas Kalvos. Kalvos was born in 1792, fourteen years after Foscolo and six years before Solomos. His father's family may originally have come from Crete. His mother's family was one of the aristocratic families of Zante—the family name had been inscribed ever since the Venetian occupation of the island in the Gold Book of the island nobility. The marriage of the poet's parents does not seem to have been a success, for not many years after the birth of his younger brother in 1794, the father, taking the two children with him, left Zante for Leghorn, where his brother was consul for the Ionian Islands, and where there was a considerable Greek colony. In 1805 Andreas' mother obtained a divorce fron her husband on the grounds of desertion, and shortly afterwards she married for the second time. She died in 1815, never having seen her children again after their departure from Zante.     

The environment of northeast England during Roman times as shown by pollen analysis

Data from nine radiocarbon-dated pollen diagrams from the northeast of England are considered and it is argued that much of the area was deforested and used for farming during the late pre-Roman Iron Age. This farming continued throughout the Roman rule (approximately AD 80–AD 410) and lasted until at least the sixth century, implying a measure of political stability after the Roman withdrawal.     

Law,memory, and priestly office in Rome,c.500

This essay sets the development of Christian thinking about law and clerical office in the wider context of the discussion of office in the later Roman empire. It offers a reassessment of the work of Dionysius Exiguus, a well‐known translator from Greek into Latin of the Acts of the fourth‐ and fifth‐century church councils, and a compiler of papal decretals. The essay attempts to place Dionysius’ work in its immediate Roman context, in the context of fifth‐century canonical activity, especially in North Africa, and in the more general context of the political culture of office‐holding in the late Roman polity. Central here is the tension between bureaucratic regulation and autocratic room for manoeuvre. Dionysius did not attempt fully to resolve this tension, though he did attempt to contain it.     

A survey of the Nabataean/Roman Site,Umm at-Tawabin,Ghor as-Safi,Jordan

Umm at-Tawabin is an extensive Nabataean/Roman site overlooking Wadi al-‘Arabah in southern Jordan. The site, as a whole, consists of a number of buildings, circular stone structures, a roadway and other features that are fortified, for the most part, by a lengthy wall and with a predominance of Nabataean and Roman surface pottery on the ground. Up until now, the site has only been documented in brief in a handful of survey reports since its discovery in the late nineteenth century and its chronology has since been the subject of some conjecture among scholars. With a grant from the Palestine Exploration Fund, the author has sought to better understand the occupational history of this undoubted historically important site through survey and by extension, a study of its surface pottery and architectural remains.     

劳伦佐·瓦拉的生平与思想

苏伦佐·瓦拉是 15世纪意大利人文主义者 ,以撰写《君士坦丁伪赠礼考证》而闻名世界。他多次撰文攻击罗马教廷的主流哲学 ,因此曾被判处死刑 ,然而他不仅没有惨死于狱中 ,晚年还获得了罗马教皇的提拔、委任和宠幸。瓦拉“非圣”而不死 ,且为罗马教廷器重 ,主要原因在于意大利文艺复兴时代的社会价值观念以及罗马教廷倚重发展人文主义的政策