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Scholarship on Sulpicius Rufus has long been guided by an old paradigm of prosopography, which dictated that political events in the Roman Republic were based on long term alliances built through kinship ties and mutual ideology. While modern scholarship has changed to view Roman political alliances more fluidly, views of Sulpicius have not changed. Most scholars accept the view that Sulpicius was little more than a lackey of Marius, who switched to Marius' side after a bitter split with his former comrades, the optimates. Sulpicius' tribunate was a time of great change in Rome, at the eve of the Social War and the dawn of a new era of civil wars. Thus it is key to re-evaluate his actions and motives in light of more recent studies that give evidence of independent agency among Roman politicians, and especially among tribunes. Thus, this paper discusses the nature of power politics and the institution of the tribunate in the late Republic as well as argues that Sulpicius Rufus acted as an independent agent who made his own decisions rather than be the tool of another.

This account of viticulture in Italy during the period from the Punic Wars to the crisis of the third century AD is written in the conviction that the 'economic' history of the ancient world will remain unacceptably impoverished if it is written in isolation from the social and cultural history of the same period. The orthodoxy which sees a revolution in Italian agriculture in the age of Cato the Censor and a crisis in the time of the emperor Trajan seems to me to be an example of this. It is based on a traditional and limited selection of evidence, and is unable to answer many questions which are increasingly being asked about production and exchange in the ancient world, questions about the social background and cultural preferences which underlie production strategies and the evolution of demand. I hope that this study may show some other possibilities, which have still been only partly explored by researchers, of illuminating the changing patterns of Roman agriculture and trade, through the use of comparative evidence and the re-examination of the relevant literary texts for data that are more than simply 'economic' in the most restricted sense.

Drawing on scholarship in cultural anthropology on gift economies, I interrogate in several Horatian poems the rhetoric that suggests the following related concepts. First, the public service (or munus) that the poet performs by writing his political poems constitutes a form of sacrificial expenditure, and ultimately a sacrifice of self, that the philosophically oriented first book of Epistles reclaims: as a priest of the Muses, or sacerdos Musarum, Horace's political poems provide the "gift" of purification for a people corrupted by the civil wars. Second, though many of the poems serve to reinforce a certain ideology of voluntarism in Augustan literary patronage, they also expose its contradictions. Just as gift-exchange societies conceal economic interests behind the concept of the disinterested gift, so the rhetorical language concerned with benefaction similarly occludes but may also reveal calculation in regard to the return gift of verse. Horace deploys different registers of imagery to expose the conflict between the "philosophy" of voluntary benefaction and the often-distorted reciprocity ethic by which the practice in fact operated in the upper echelons of Roman society. And third, Horatian poetic rhetoric often draws on larger cultural practices of expenditure in a way that produces an ideological effect sympathetic to his patrons even as it simultaneously provides the ground for the poet's gestures of autonomy. At the risk of simplification, my inquiry may be summed up by this question: if the gifts of patronage symbolically expropriate the poet's self, obligating him to make the return gift of poetry as the embodied or "reified" form of his labor, then ― 4 ― in what ways and to what degree does the figurative language concerned with this exchange permit resistance to that same patronal discourse? During the 20s B.C.E. the Augustan regime solidified its power by transforming political structures and by communicating a coherent-if ne