This brief enquiry concerns two main questions: how and why Sulpicius' law differed from a similar prior rogation of the same year, which he had vetoed; and the probable authorship of the latter.

Discussion starts from Tac. Ann. 4.56, where in a.d. 26 ambassadors from Smyrna, with those of other communities in Asia, present their city's case for selection as the site of the province's cult of Tiberius, and plead a lengthy record of loyalty and past officia to Rome, dating back to the foundation at Smyrna of a temple to Urbs Roma in 195 B.C. amid the tensions with Antiochus III of Syria. Tacitus proceeds.

On any view, the Aristotelian account of Athens' constitutional history between victory over the Persian invaders and Ephialtes' reforms of the Areopagus and indeed beyond must be regarded as factually grudging and difficult to follow. Worse, current orthodoxy1 convicts it of a major chronological blunder for assigning a part in those reforms, which it places securely and beyond doubt correctly in the archonship of Konon , to Themistokles, who had been ostracized from the city perhaps as early as 473/2 and (...) in any case by 467/62. (shrink)