It would be a waste of our time if in this lecture we concerned ourselves solely with the old question whether or no it was Virgil who wrote the Culex. More than enough has been written on this subject to guide those who know an argument when they see it. I should, of course, fail in my duty if I concealed my personal view on the problem of the authorship, and I shall, perhaps, be able to add to the discussion a point or two of my own. But I also want to use this queer problem to illustrate certain minor phenomena in the literary history of the Augustan period. It is the chief value of the so-called Appendix Vergiliana that it provides us with a variety of works of different origin and very unequal quality. Among them some are early products of Virgil himself, some are poems written several decades after his death; some never had anything to do with Virgil, claimed no relation to his works and got into this collection by mere accident, others were conceived as deliberate fakes, i.e. pretended to be written by Virgil.

The Latin text of the final sentence of chapter 34 of the Res Gestae is now beyond any serious doubt. It runs ‘Post idtempus auctoritate omnibus praestiti potestatis autem nihiloamplius habui quam ceteri qui mihi quoque in magistratu conlegae fuerunt’.(The Greek version, as preserved in the Monumentum Ancyranum is quoted later.) The purpose of this note is to determine as precisely as possible what these Latin words mean and to discuss their significance.

The riot at Antioch in the early spring of A.D. 387 is described in two eye-witness accounts, that of Libanius—in particular Orations 19–23—and that of John Chrysostom—in particular the 21 Homiliae ad populum Antiochenum de statuis. Consequently, it has often been studied in more or less detail by modern scholars, each approaching it from his own point of view. It might seem that all that could be said has been said. Nevertheless, certain features of the disorders, which have some interest for the social history of the period, have not been adequately dealt with. It is as a contribution to the understanding of these that the present study is written.

Among the individual objects of antiquity that have been seen and copied by the artists of later generations, few have had a stranger history than the columns that once formed a screen in old St. Peter's, around the site of the tomb of the apostle. Their singular and distinctive form was in itself enough to attract attention; and the fact that, since the later Middle Ages, they were universally believed to have come from the Temple of Solomon, secured them an important place in the art and iconography of the Renaissance. Their character and early history, however, have never been adequately discussed; and now that the publication of a part of the results of the excavations undertaken since 1940 underneath St. Peter's has cleared up several important points that were previously obscure, the time seems to be ripe for such a discussion. It is the purpose of this article to try to determine their place in the history of classical art, and to say something of their significance in the history of the art of later times.

An important find, quickly and competently published by Professor Margherita Guarducci, deserves immediate comment, however provisional it may be. It is the inscription on a bronze-tablet, found at Pratica, the site of ancient Lavinium, together with some clay objects (female heads, parts of the human body, oxen and pigs, the hoof of an ox), the remains of a stips votiva, all of the third century B.C.

In the Journal of Roman Studies, XL, 1950, 88–90, Mr. S. Applebaum published a number of inscriptions from Cyrene recording Hadrian's work in restoring the city after the devastation caused by the Jewish revolt late in Trajan's reign. One of these (D 1) consists of fragments of an inscription from the Caesareum, which Mr. Applebaum read as follows:—

[– –DIVI N]ER[V]AE NE[POS] TRAI[AN]VS H[ADRIANVS] AVGV

[STVS – –]/TP I[I COS] II BASILIC[AM – –]

The inscription was carved on the re-used limestone blocks of the Doric architrave which crowned the longitudinal porticos of the Basilica. But traces of the earlier, erased inscription are still visible in several places between the letters of the inscription now under discussion, and it is in the light of this fact, which was not noticed by Mr. Applebaum, that two alterations are here suggested in his reading of the inscription.

In a paper on Justus Lipsius and the text of Tacitus's Annals, published in the last issue of this Journal, the present writer did not touch upon the difficult question of interpolations. It has been asserted that ‘there are not many glosses in Tacitus’. This can hardly hold for the Histories and Annals XI–XVI, that is, for the works contained in the Second Mediceus. In fact, the two codices unici differ in this as in other respects. As for the Med. no. II, that is, for Histories and Annals XI–XVI, I still feel convinced by W. Heraeus's and C. D. Fisher's arguments. Arguments are indeed hardly needed in a case like Hist. II, 98, where a snatch of verse has been thrust into the text, cutting one Tacitean word in two. There are not a few cases where interpolation of glosses can be proved, and the whole subject might usefully be gone over again in its own context.

Mrs. I. Henderson has recently presented a novel interpretation of the function of the Quaestio Repetundarum, partly in contradiction of my own discussion elsewhere of the evidence for the penalty of the extortion laws. I there argued that the penalty remained financial from the Lex Calpurnia to the Lex Cornelia, and that the frequent, but not universal, withdrawal into exile of condemned persons was due mainly to fear of fresh prosecution on more serious charges arising from the extortion case and reinforced by the praeiudicium, and that only the Lex Iulia transformed custom into law by specifying the capital penalty for the more heinous forms of extortion. Against this Mrs. Henderson maintains that the penalty for extortion under the Acilian and later laws was normally capital, though some-times less than capital, and explains this dualism by a new interpretation of the powers of the Gracchan Judices, which if accepted calls for a general change of ideas about the development of the Quaestio system.

The remarkable resemblance between Rufinus, adv. Hieron., 2, 36 ( = Migne, PL xxi, 392, col 614 f.) and Isidorus, Etym. 1, 24, was noticed by the Renaissance scholars, but no explanation of this resemblance appears to have been attempted. The purpose of the present note is to elucidate certain points of difficulty in the two passages, and to assess the value of their evidence on the practice of Roman military bookkeeping.

The striking and enigmatic stone head reproduced on plate IX, nos. 2, 3, and fig. 3 (p. 64), was presented to the Dumfries Burgh Museum in September, 1951, along with two Roman altars. These three objects had been preserved at Burnfoot House, Birrens, Annandale, for over a century, and had always been together within the memory of living members of the Irving family, which owned the property until 1950. One of the altars, that of Minerva, was dug up in 1810 during stone-robbing in the vicus of the Birrens Roman fort: the smaller altar, that of Fortuna, came to light on the same site in 1886. There is further a local tradition of the finding of a head, described as being that of Jupiter, at Birrens c. 1816, also in the course of stone-robbing; but no evidence exists for equating with it the head which is the subject of this note, since the provenance of the latter is not recorded.

Recent discussion in this Journal has reviewed the evidence for the material of which vasa murrina were composed, and few will wish to appeal against the triumviral judgement there given in favour of fluorspar. But perhaps something further may be said from the literary and linguistic side. It is now clear that (apart from the difficulty that glass imitations existed and are sometimes referred to in the ancient texts) the identification of vasa murrina as natural in origin or as manufactured articles has been unduly complicated because they do in fact fall within both classes; they were composed of a natural substance—as Pliny's statement suggests—but that substance could only be given artistic shape by a very highly skilled and extremely laborious process, namely, the recurrent surface treatment of the fluorspar by heating and impregnation with natural gum-resin in order to prevent the splitting of the crystals along their natural lines of cleavage, as would otherwise happen.

The potters who left the declining South Gaulish Samian factories in order to start their own workshops at Lezoux, in Central Gaul, experienced in their turn the loss of potters who, after learning the craft, went away to start the many small Samian factories which existed in East Gaul and Germany during the second and early third centuries. Many of these were so successful that their products were used in quantity in north-east Gaul and the Rhineland, and even reached many sites in Britain. To mention only a few, the wares from Lavoye and La Madeleine are notable at Corbridge and South Shields, and much Trier ware has been found at Corbridge.

Among a number of inscriptions which I recorded in Turkey in 1950–1951, while travelling as Wilson Fellow of the University of Aberdeen, is the following fragment of the Edict of Diocletian. Brought as long ago as 1937 from Ṣuhut ( = Soǧut Kassaba, Synnada) to the museum at Afyonkarahisar, it is, so far as I am aware, hitherto unpublished. The stone, of white marble, (H. 0.358 m.; W. 0.9; Th. 0.15), was re-used by Byzantine builders, whose diamond-and-circle decoration on the top, and channelling on the underside can be clearly seen. The stone, pitted in places, is broken at the edges, as indicated in the transcription. The inscription (pl. x, 1) is irregularly, sometimes carelessly, but clearly cut in letters 0.013 to 0.02 high, which vary considerably in slope.

When the Achaeans, in 197 B.C., sent an embassy to Rome, they asked for the conclusion of a formal treaty of alliance, but the matter was held over by the Senate. In 183 we find an Achaean embassy in Rome to ‘renew the alliance,’ and from then on there is frequent mention of it; but we do not know when the treaty was actually concluded. Täubler thinks that the ‘renewal’ was really the first signing of a formal treaty; but this view is generally rejected, as he cannot demolish all the evidence for its existence before that date. Holleaux believes it was signed in 196, and this view is widely held. Aymard puts it in the winter of 194–3, Larsen between 196 and 193, and Horn some time before 189 (with a preference for an earlier date). It is the contention of this paper that careful examination of the evidence enables us to reject some of these proposed solutions as impossible; and that, within the resulting range of the possible, although we have not sufficient evidence for a positive conclusion, there are strong indications pointing towards a particular date.