La culture latine accorde beaucoup d’importance aux jeux d’alea, dont les implications métaphoriques sont attestées dans plusieurs contextes politiques, notamment vers la fin de la République. Au-delà des questions économiques et sociales, il conviendra d’explorer aussi les implications culturelles de l’alea. Cette contribution reprend certains aspects de la question, se concentrant sur les exemples d’intérêt pour le jeu de hasard chez César, Antoine, Auguste et Claude.

Abstract This chapter discusses the history and the geography of Media and Armenia during the Persian imperial period, from the conquest of Media to the campaigns of Alexander the Great. From the very beginning, epigraphic evidence and literary sources connect Media and Armenia, and it is likely that the satrapy of Greater Media was subdivided into two main administrative units: Media (Old Persian Mada) and Armenia (Old Persian Armina). In turn, Armenia was subdivided into two further subunits: Western Armenia and Eastern Armenia. Whereas there is scanty evidence on Media, one can trace certain aspects of local power in Armenia, especially at the end of the fifth century bc with the rise of the Orontid rulers, which does not seem to result in the Persian Empire reconfiguring the satrapal system. However, in the course of fourth century bc, the ethnogenesis of the sub-Caucasian peoples profoundly changed the region’s geopolitical order.

Some evidence points at the presence of Orientals in late Roman Italy: traders (labelled “Syrians”), petty sellers (the pantapolae in Nov. Val. 5), but also students, professors such as Ammianus Marcellinus, or pilgrims. Although being Roman citizens, nonetheless they were considered foreign individuals, subject to special restrictions. The actual strangers made a different case, especially the Persians. The situation of foreign individuals was quite different. Chauvinistic attitudes are widely attested, and they worsened in critical periods, for example after Adrianople. This may explain the laws of early 397 and June 399, promulgated during Stilicho’s regency, which prohibited the wearing of trousers (bracae) and some fashionable boots called tzangae. Of course, some protégés of the imperial court had the right to enter Italy, as it was the case of the Sassanian prince Hormisdas, who accompanied Constantius II in his visit of Rome in 357.

ELECTRUM » 2021 » Volume 28 » Federicomaria Muccioli (1965–2020) A A A

Literary scholars tend to regard the world evoked by the Major Declamations as a timeless society, a ‘Sophistopolis’ strongly influenced by the Greek tradition. In fact, within this collection, only the Miles Marianus (Decl. mai. 3) can be connected to a precise historical context. As a result, ancient historians usually pay little or no attention to these sources, despite their importance for social history (better appreciated by jurists). But more connections with Roman history can be gleaned from the Maiores than has hitherto been recognised, and it is to be hoped that the increasing scholarly interest in these speeches, and the safer assessment recently given to their dating, will appeal to ancient historians and draw their attention to this exceptional collection.

The history of the kingdom of Greater Armenia (after 188 BCE–428 CE) has been generally interpreted from two different standpoints, an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ one. Greater Armenia as a marginal entity or a sidekick of Rome during the endless war with Iran, and even Iranian scholars neglected or diminished the role of Armenia in the balance of power. This paper discussed some methodological issues.

The most common words to designate a marsh, a swamp, or a bog are helos in ancient Greek and palus in Latin; beside these terms, less common words were also employed. Literary and epigraphic texts give evidence for marshlands in the countryside, in the coastal areas, and also close to urban agglomerations. The sources often give evidence for drainage activity, but cases of extensive drainage are rare. In fact, they were possible only at public expense, by employing free or slave labor. On the other hand, several territories were characterized by a sort of marsh economy. Although rarely portrayed in literature, and despite the risk of malaria, marshy areas presented some economic potential: fishing, hunting, salt extraction, and farming. In many respects, the negative image of wetlands is a modern invention. The contrast between the rational order of the Roman countryside and the “barbaric” medieval landscape was introduced by the Enlightenment, and must be treated with caution.

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 407 The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia. By Rachel Mairs. Oakland: University of California Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 234. Classicists often label Bactria and northwestern India as the “Greek Far East.” In this thought-provoking book, Mairs proposes the more appropriate “Hellenistic Far East,” challenging the traditional perspectives expressed in the very titles of the two main works referencing the question: William Woodthorpe Tarn’s The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938), and Awadh Kishore Narain’s The Indo-Greeks (Oxford 1957). The former considered these regions as the outpost of Hellenism, while the latter claimed them as parts of Indian history. Arguing that “this material is exotic in a double sense” (3), Mairs proposes a more complex approach, focusing on the interaction between the Greeks and their neighbors after Alexander. In her criticisms she mostly takes aim at the traditional attitude of classicists. However, some late twentieth-century approaches, espousing acculturation, also need revision. Mairs’s methodological observations give a welcome complement to the more traditional, comprehensive monograph by Omar Coloru, Da Alessandro a Menandro: Il regno greco di Battriana (Pisa and Rome 2009). The book is structured as a sort of matryoshka doll. After a methodological “Introduction ” (1–26), two historical chapters provide the opening and the closing (Chapter One, “Administering Bactria: From Achaemenid Satrapy to Graeco-Bactrian State,” 27–56; Chapter Four, “Waiting for the Barbarians: The Fall of Greek Bactria,” 146–176), whereas the central chapters focus on two expanded case studies (Chapter Two, “Ai Khanoum,” 57–101; Chapter Three, “Self-Representation in the Inscriptions of Sōphytos [Arachosia] and Hēliodōros [India],” 102–145). A brief “Conclusion” (177–188) sums up the methodological achievements of the book, followed by an “Appendix” (189–193) with the texts of three inscriptions discussed in Chapters Two and Three, a sizeable “Bibliography” (195-225), and a general “Index” (227–231). There is no source index . Chapter One considers the continuity of Achaemenid institutions in Bactria, an aspect less developed by Coloru, who starts with the actual beginnings of the kingdom. Mairs draws on the archaeological and the epigraphic evidence, extracting “a few themes or pieces of pertinent information” (32). Some preserved administrative documents, still written in Aramaic, seem to show that Alexander’s conquest did not apparently produce an outright break, but no written evidence was found until the third century. The Seleucids may well have retrieved Achaemenid administrative know-how, but is it enough to label the Seleucid satrapy as a period of lengthy transition from the Iranian to the Hellenistic phase? Chapter Two deals with the center of Āy Ka ̄nom (usually known with the spelling Ai Khanoum) in Arachosia, present-day Afghanistan.1 Mairs criticizes an early article of the late Paul Bernard giving emphasis to the “Greekness” of the city, “whose colonists strove to maintain the integrity of the civilization they had brought with them” (91).2 1 Laurianne Sève-Martinez (in her review of the book in TopoiOrOcc 20 [2015] 579–588) suggests that this discussion ignores several relevant archaeological publications. 2 P. Barnard, “Ai Khanoum on the Oxus: A Hellenistic City in Central Asia,” PBA 53 (1967) 71–95; cf. G. Traina, “Notes on Hellenism in the Iranian East (Classico-Oriental Notes, 6-8),” Iran & the Caucasus 9 (2005) 1–14. 408 PHOENIX To support her argument, Mairs proposes a new interpretation of the inscription of Klearchos with the sayings of the wise men from Delphi from the pronaos of the heroon of Kineas.3 Following Narain against Louis Robert, she dismisses the latter’s identification of Klearchos with the philosopher Klearchos of Soloi, a pupil of Aristotle,4 and considers him a local citizen from the Bactrian-born generation. Refined texts such as Klearchos’ inscriptions were meant to enforce Ai Khanoum’s Greek identity in a sort of invention of tradition. Chapter Three compares two apparently opposite cases, dating from the same chronological context (second century b.c.e.): Sōphytos, a poet of Arachosia bearing a local name, who composed an extremely refined Greek acrostic funerary epigram found in Qandaha ̄r (SEG 54: 1568; Rougemont, no. 84), and...

ELECTRUM » 2017 » Volume 24 » L’Armenia di Ammiano Marcellino A A A