As curator of laws and morals (curator legum et morum), a charge bestowed by the Senate and the Roman people on three separate occasions (19 BCE, 18 BCE, 11 BCE, cf. RGDA 6, Dio Cass. 54.30.1, Suet. Aug. 27), Augustus legislated marriage, using the mos maiorum as guidance for a new Roman society that was his to fashion (RGDA 8; Eck 2022). The Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus (LIMO) of 18 BCE became a centerpiece legislation with socio-politically comprehensive and enduring impact, leading to subsequent legislative interventions on the Roman institution of marriage from the Augustan period down to the Age of Constantine (Treggiari 1991, 13-36; Grubbs 1993). In some interpretations, the legislative interventions of marriage effectively "collapsed" Roman private life (Raditsa 1980), merging it with a new Roman state apparatus that "officially made proper family behavior part of a citizen's duty," including the obligation "to marry and procreate in a chaste and respectable manner" (Severy 2003, 55). Legislating marriage was effectively a social engineering project (Dolganov 2022), and not without risks to the legislators. Direct evidence of opposition can be found in historial and biographical accounts, and the equestrian order was particularly vocal (Suet. Aug. 34; Dio Cass. 56.4-10). Recently, Warner Eck's study on the commentarius of 5 CE integrated into the Lex Troesmensium provided convincing evidence that significant socio-political resistance against legislative intervention forced Augustus to retract a commentarius of 5 CE which the Lex Papia Poppaea of 9 CE was based upon (ex quo lex P(apia) P(oppaea) lata est), though with noticeable differences in the numbering of chapters (Eck 2022, 2019, 2016).
Eck also made the interesting observation that known resistance efforts were not necessarily direct public agitation, but rather could be described as "ingenious attempts" (ingeniöse Versuche) to frustruate the utility of the legislation (Eck 2022, 73). The observation highlights the potentially simplistic approach in describing the range of reactions and counter-reactions associated with Augustan marriage laws as resistance and counter-resistance. The difficulty in taking this approach to study complexities in the range of responses towards the legislating of marriage lies in the availability of sources and the quality of those available. Shades of commentary and other complex reflections on Augustan marriage legislations – for example Horace's Carmina of 23 BCE (C. 3.6, 3.24) and 13 BCE (C. 4.15), Propertius's elegies of 28 BCE (2.7) and 18 BCE (4.11), and Ovid's Ars Amatoria of 2 CE, the latter of which has recently received particular treatment (Hutchinson 2017) – can be elicited from Augustan literary evidence, but hardly straightforward firsthand reports. Historical and biographical accounts may be vivid, as those from Cassius Dio's (54.16; 56.1-10) and to a lesser extent Suetonius (Suet. Aug. 34) and Tacitus (Ann. 3.25-28), but much more removed from immediate context. To extend the scope of discovery, this paper asks what other Augustan inscriptions can inform us on the shades of reactions in the Augustan period. Inscribed texts were more than verbatim transcriptions of documents produced in response to and within the context of social movements. The act of inscribing and setting up were performative aspects of immediate socio-political importance, acting as the legislator/reformer's attempt to impress and opress on the one hand, and responses from those who can afford to engage in a public and formal dialogue regarding an issue.
This paper argues that the performative acts seen on inscribed texts in the Augustan period that specifically respond to marriage legislation or the institution of marriage ought to be understood as persuasive acts. Two inscriptions are discussed in this paper: the SC de ludis saecularibus of 17 BCE and the so-called Laudatio Turiae of 8 CE. Hugh Lindsay (2009) and Josaiah Osgood (2014) focused on aspects of social response regarding the latter, and Warner Eck (2019) has highlighted social resistance regarding the former. This paper seeks to combine the two strands of study on two inscriptions that seem to speak to Roman audiences with deeply entrenched positions on the question of legislating marriage, and read them as attempts of persuasion, both to convey the concerns of their respective parties and impressing upon their respective oppositions on the importance of their approaches toward social order under the curator legum et morum.
In literary sources we find Amastris a thriving second-century civitas with a much frequented port and an intellectual community (cf. Plin. Ep. 10.98; Luc. Alex. 26ff; Luc. Tox. 57ff), but what of the land that supported it? The Amastriane, as Strabo calls it (Ἀμαστρίανη", Strab. 12.3.10), had a lot of good boxwood, but beyond this much is unclear. This paper takes an epigraphic perspective to discuss observable dynamics in the Amastriane, in two steps.The first step attempts to visualize Christian Marek's hypothetical Amastrian territorium – an administratively defined Amastriane – with Google Earth Pro, using epigraphic findspot information and geographical features Marek identified for the representation. GPS coordinates of field surveys collated by Peri Johnson are added to identify potential settlement locations active in the first to third centuries CE within Marek's proposed territorium. Through the cross-referencing attempt one can observe a cluster of twelve "Amastrian" inscriptions and two settlement mounds (Ören Höyük & Çengelli) in the Eflani Plateau south of the Küre Mountains. This correlation between two sets of data seems to have gone previously unnoticed in relevant scholarship. This paper assumes that inquiry into this cluster of inscriptions and settlement mounds may lead to further insights on the dynamics of an extensive and rugged territory under the control of a civitas during the Principate.The second step interrogates this group of evidence: what can we learn from the assemblage regarding communal diversity, social relations, institutional participation, and connectivity on the periphery of the Amastriane? Of importance is an inscription that specifically refers to an Amastrian archon who was also a genearch of what appears to be a local clan, found at Meyre (approx. 70 km southeast of Amastris; Marek Kat. Amastris no. 95). Scholars have focused more on the cult that the genearch's family worshipped and naos they built, and less if any on the genos' involvement with Amastrian civic institutions. The second key inscription is for a nomikos Demetrios son of Kyrenios (Marek Kat. Amastris no. 97). He was perhaps related to a Chrestes son of Kyrenios and a self-designated Amastrian of the tribe Halicarnassus, who set up a funerary monument at Deresameail (Marek Kat. Hadrianopolis no. 29; 10 km northeast of Hadrianopolis) for his brother-in-law Sextus Vibius Epaphroditus, perhaps related to the Trajanic primipilarius Sextus Vibius Gallus from Amastrian Kytoros. While Corsten and Ruscu have suggested and commented on these relationships, there remains considerable potential to discuss how such relationships formed despite geography, territorial boundaries, institutional divisions, and other inhibiting factors.This paper wishes to suggest that Marek' expansive Amastrian territorium would have initially been a highly fragmented social and political space, but familial recruitment, manumission, intermarriage, and mobility between significant urban centers gradually created common ground for integration. Also, the clan at Meyre may have benefited from intensifying interaction between Amastris, Hadrianopolis and Pompeiopolis, leading to its increased importance and greater participation in Amastrian institutions and norms.
This paper looks at how the Ephesian gubernatorial edict (Ephesos 231 = IK 12.215 p. 27) found near Magnesia ad Maenandrum can be an adequate response to a state of public disorder (ταραχή) and madness (ἀπονοία) caused by bakers refusing to supply the city with the necessary production of bread. The goal of the gubernatorial edict was to restore sense to the demos by edict (διατάγματι σωφρονίζειν) without having to arrest, try, and punish offenders. Specific measures include forbidding bakers to gather according to association (μήτε συνέρχεσθαι κατ᾽ ἑταίρα), and forbidding those who stood as bakers' representatives from behaving rashly (μήτε προεστηκότας θρασύνεσθαι), along with the specific demand that leaders are to obey authority (πειθαρχεῖν) and produce bread. The reference to an agreement, and the subsequent result clause, may suggest that one party to the agreement defaulted and led to widespread discontent, though the fragmentary nature of the inscription makes it difficult to speculate further. But the edict only resorted to banning gatherings, with no comment on the root causes of dissent. Additional assistance provided by the boule would have been necessary and likely given, though the part of the stone has been lost. Recent discussions on how governors dealt with issues pertaining to public order (Fuhrmann 2012) and the eirenarchate (Rife 2002) can be of some guidance. In addition, this paper explores mechanisms and tools accessible to praesidial governors based on the corpus of known gubernatorial edicts collected as part of a larger project to consider possible scenarios.
Forecast combination integrates information from various sources by consolidating multiple forecast results from the target time series. Instead of the need to select a single optimal forecasting model, this paper introduces a deep learning ensemble forecasting model based on the Dirichlet process. Initially, the learning rate is sampled with three basis distributions as hyperparameters to convert the infinite mixture into a finite one. All checkpoints are collected to establish a deep learning sub-model pool, and weight adjustment and diversity strategies are developed during the combination process. The main advantage of this method is its ability to generate the required base learners through a single training process, utilizing the decaying strategy to tackle the challenge posed by the stochastic nature of gradient descent in determining the optimal learning rate. To ensure the method’s generalizability and competitiveness, this paper conducts an empirical analysis using the weekly dataset from the M4 competition and explores sensitivity to the number of models to be combined. The results demonstrate that the ensemble model proposed offers substantial improvements in prediction accuracy and stability compared to a single benchmark model.