This paper explores, in a very preliminary fashion, the relationship in the ancient world between the design and use of mechanical technology, social or political patronage and investment, and economic return, using three main areas as case studies: water-lifting devices, the water-powered grain mill, and the diverse uses of water-power in mining. The emphasis is on the use of devices and techniques which replaced human power with alternative power sources, and especially on water-power for driving machinery and hydraulic mining techniques employing the erosive power of water. It is argued that water-power was used on a wide scale and in diversified forms at an early date (by the first century A.D.), and that the use of mechanical technology to perform economically critical work had an important impact on economic performance and the potential for per capita growth, especially in the latter centuries B.C. and the first two centuries A.D. Conversely, in the third century A.D. the cessation of the employment of hydraulic mining techniques enabling large-scale extraction of gold and other metals may have had an adverse economic impact on the economy as a whole. Growth and progress do not necessarily follow a linear pattern of advance; technologies are lost as well as adopted.

In 214 b.c., the army of Ti. Sempronius Gracchus defeated Hannibal's Carthaginian forces near the town of Beneventum. Gracchus, proconsul with imperium in Apulia, had led his troops from Luceria in the North-East, while Hanno, Hannibal's lieutenant, arrived with his forces from Bruttium in the South, and a pitched battle was fought by the river Calor. The Romans were victorious. According to Livy, the Carthaginian force of more than 18,000 was routed, less than 2,000 survived, and 38 standards were taken; but the truly striking fact about Gracchus' victory is that his army was largely comprised of slaves. This had been necessary, in contradiction of Roman law and custom, following the tragic and massive casualties suffered in the previous years' battles, most famously at Cannae. Exceptional circumstances called for exceptional measures: pueri donned men's armour; libertini were called to serve; criminals, too; then slaves, who were purchased to fight for the state. The status of such troops posed a significant problem, both legally as well as socially, a problem that was to have a long history.

In the Pro Archia Cicero writes that Alexander, looking upon the tomb of Achilles, cried out, ‘O happy youth, who found a Homer to sing your praises!’; words truly spoken, adds Cicero, since without Homer Achilles' tomb would have buried the great man's fame along with his body. And in the Tusculan Disputations he writes that the Athenian Themistocles, when asked why he spent his nights wandering about the city, replied that the trophies of Miltiades kept him awake. Juxtaposing one great man and the reminder of another, both anecdotes present vivid and memorable images of rivalry between the ambitious among the living and the high-achievers among the dead. A competition of this kind can be direct, between the man commemorated by a monument and the man viewing it, as are the rivalries of Alexander and Achilles, Themistocles and Miltiades, or it can be indirect, as in the Pro Archia, where with a sleight of hand Cicero replaces the rivalry between Achilles and Alexander with the competition between the Iliad and Achilles' physical monument. A great mound bears witness to Achilles' death at Troy, but the outburst of the competitive Alexander testifies that a poem is a better memorial than a tomb.

Orthodox historians have tended to dislike attempts to think counterfactually about the past, on the grounds that ‘virtual history’ offers little more than entertainment and degenerates too easily into banal trivialities. In addition, it provokes fears about the offending historian's commitment to the truth and the consequent effect on his readers’ historical memories; a recent essay in the New Statesman, deploring the increasing presence of counterfactual history in the syllabus for national exams in British schools, condemned it as an agent of ‘collective amnesia’. E. P. Thompson was more trenchant: ‘unhistorical shit’. Yet popular and professional interest in counterfactual history continues to grow, spawning a recent radio series and a number of books on the ‘what if?’ theme. It seems, then, an opportune time to reconsider the famous passage of counterfactual history in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, the Alexander digression at 9.17–19, a passage which, it so happens, one popular website lists as the first example of the genre. This paper offers, after a brief survey of previous scholarship (Section II), an account of Livy's allusions both to his sources and predecessors and to his own text (Section III), followed by an integrated reading (Section IV) which will argue more fully that the passage embodies central Livian ideas about the utility of historical writing, that it is thematically tightly woven into its place in Book 9, and, finally, that it offers a powerful critique of one-man rule which has important consequences for our understanding of the historian's view of Augustus.

This paper is organized as follows: (I) text; (II) translation; (III) problems and divergent readings; (IV) the ode's literary constituents; (V) interpretation.

The subject of this essay is not Roman gardens, their reconstruction or restoration, but Roman gardening. This must be found on the page, and specifically in the work of Columella, who has more to say on this aspect of Country Life than the rest of Classical Antiquity put together — literally more, in quantity, but also, and more to the point, more to the point.

Reference to Columella's Garden always means the poem of 436 hexameters that bursts into the prose De re rustica as Book 10. It appears on its own in a cluster of manuscripts, and has regularly been read as a free-standing composition. In this paper, I resist this sin of excerption, to explore the role of gardening on Columella's farm.

Ancient portraits are best interpreted with their busts or statue bodies and in the contexts in which they were set up and experienced, but such fully preserved monuments are not common. This article is the first publication of a new late antique portrait from Aphrodisias in Caria that has a statue body, an inscribed base, and a precise ancient setting. It was set up in honour of a provincial governor named Oecumenius, and his chlamydatus statue is now the most complete example around which others of this characteristic type of late antique statue can be understood. The monument also has wider connections outside Aphrodisias and raises interesting problems of historical interpretation in the period around a.d. 400.

In A.D. 385, after more than a decade together, Augustine parted from his in many ways mysterious first partner, ‘la mère d'Adeodat’. The woman (hereafter ‘Anonyma 1’) was taken away from him. She returned to Africa vowing never to have sexual relations with another man, and left the child with Augustine. But he was unable to tolerate celibacy and took another woman (henceforth ‘Anonyma 2’) to while away the two years until his marriage. In the meantime he still missed his first one, and the wound left by the separation failed to heal. Many scholars have cited and discussed Augustine's description of the episode, but few have commented on the language, which is highly significant, or its implications for Augustine's biography. This article will begin with a selective commentary on Conf. 6.15.25 and continue with a reinterpretation of a key text in Augustine's marital theology. It will then trace some of the broader legal and historical issues raised by Augustine's account in the Confessions to make some new suggestions about the chronology, constraints, and nature of his relationship with Anonyma 1. This study, it is hoped, will be of general interest to Romanists for the insight into the ambiguities of Roman marriage and quasi-marital relationships provided by Augustine's Confessions.