Harry Sidebottom - Blood and Steel

Prefect of the City : Senior senatorial post in the city of Rome, commander of the Urban Cohorts.

Prefect of the Grain Supply : See Praefectus Annonae.

Prefect of the Imperial Camp : See Prefect of the Camp.

Prefect of the Poor Relief : Senator in charge of a rather haphazard project for alleviating rural poverty in Italy, instituted under the Emperor Nerva (AD96-98).

Prefect of the Vigiles : Equestrian officer in charge of Rome’s watchmen (the Vigiles ), a paramilitary force for policing and firefighting.

Prefect of the Watch : Equestrian officer in charge of Rome’s Vigiles .

Prefect : Flexible Latin title for many officials and officers.

Priapus : Roman rustic god; always portrayed with a huge erection.

Primus Pilus : The most senior Centurion in a Roman Legion.

Princeps Peregrinorum : Officer in command of the frumentarii ; the Emperor’s spymaster.

Princeps : Latin, leading man; often used as a means of referring to the Emperor, maintaining the polite fiction that he was first among equals, rather than an absolute monarch.

Principia : Headquarters building of a Roman army camp.

Pro-Consul : Title of the senatorial governors of some Roman provinces.

Procurator : Latin title for a range of officials, under the Principate typically appointed by the Emperor to oversee the collection of taxes in the provinces and keep an eye on their senatorial governors.

Providentia : Latin, ‘providence, foresight’; an abstract deity playing an important part in imperial propaganda, guiding the actions of the Emperor for the benefit of his subjects.

Pueri : Latin, ‘boys’; used to refer to adult male slaves, and by soldiers of each other.

Pupput : Modern Hammamet on the northeastern coast of Tunisia.

Quadrantaria : Something costing a small amount, a quarter of a copper as; slang for a cheap whore.

Quaestor : Roman magistrate originally in charge of financial affairs, first of the ‘higher magistracies’, those elected became Senators.

Quantum libet, Imperator : Latin, ‘whatever pleases, Emperor’.

Quirites : Archaic way of referring to the citizens of Rome; sometimes used by those keen to evoke the Republican past.

Ravenna : Base of the Roman fleet on the Adriatic Sea in northeastern Italy.

Res Publica : Latin, ‘the Roman Republic’; under the Emperors, it continued to mean the Roman empire.

Resaina : Town in northern Syria, modern Ra’s al-’Ayn.

Retiarius : Type of lightly armoured gladiator armed with a net and trident.

Rhetor : Greek term for a professional public speaker; equivalent to orator in Latin.

Rider God : A provincial deity worshipped in Pannonia, Moesia, and Thrace, based on elements of Roman and local religious traditions.

Roma : Ancient name for Rome; also worshipped in abstraction as the tutelary deity of the city.

Romae Aeternae : ‘To eternal Rome’; a political slogan found on coins of the Gordiani.

Romanitas : Roman-ness; increasingly important concept by the third century, with connotations of culture and civilization.

Rostra : Speaking platform at the western end of the Roman Forum; took its name from the beaks ( rostra ) of enemy warships with which it was decorated.

Roxolani : Nomadic barbarian tribe living north of the Danube and west of the Black Sea.

Sacramentum : Roman military oath, taken extremely seriously.

Sacred Way : At Rome, a processional route running below the northern flank of the Palatine and passing south of the Temple of Venus and Rome, ending at the Roman Forum to the west; at Ephesus, main road paved with marble passing the Library of Celsus and leading down to the major shrine of the city.

Saldis : A small town in the Salvus valley, located in modern Croatia.

Salus : ‘Health!’; a Roman expression of greeting or farewell.

Salutatio : An important Roman social custom; friends and clients of the wealthy and influential were expected to wait on their patrons at daybreak, being admitted into the atrium to greet them and see if they could be of any service in the day’s business.

Samos : Island in the eastern Aegean; it has retained its ancient name.

Samosata : City on the right bank of the Euphrates in southeastern Turkey protecting an important crossing point; now flooded by the Atatürk Dam.

Santicum : Roman town on the banks of the river Dravus; modern Villach in Austria.

Sarcophagus : From Greek, literally ‘flesh eater’; a stone chest containing a corpse and displayed above ground, often highly decorated.

Sarmatia : Tribal lands of the Sarmatians.

Sarmatians : Nomadic peoples living north of the Danube; see Iazyges and Roxolani.

Sassanid : Name for the Persians, from the dynasty that overthrew the Parthians in the 220sAD and was Rome’s great eastern rival until the seventh century AD.

Satyr : In Greek and Roman mythology, half-goat half-man creatures with excessive sexual appetites.

Satyrion : Ragwort, common ingredient of ancient aphrodisiacs; named from the licentious Satyrs.

Savus : Ancient name for the Sava river, a tributary of the Danube rising in the Julian Alps.

Saxa Rubra : Roman village on the Via Flaminia , some miles north of Rome.

Sciron : In Greek mythology, a divine-born bandit living on the Isthmus of Corinth, who enslaved travellers and disposed of those he tired of by throwing them into the sea. Fittingly, he met his own end in the same manner.

Scythian : Term used by the Greeks and Romans for peoples living to the north and east of the Black Sea.

Securitas : ‘Security’; personified as a tutelary goddess of the Roman state.

Senate House : See Curia.

Senate : The council of Rome, under the Emperors composed of about six hundred men, the vast majority ex-magistrates, with some imperial favourites. The richest and most prestigious group in the empire and once the governing body of the Roman Republic; increasingly side-lined by the Emperors.

Senator : Member of the senate, the council of Rome. The semi-hereditary senatorial order was the richest and most prestigious group in the empire.

Servitium : Roman town whose name literally means servitude, slavery. Modern Gradiška on the northern border of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Sestertius : Roman coin denomination; used as standard in ancient accounts.