The decision to produce maps covering the whole of the Roman Empire at a uniform scale of 1/1,000,000 was first made at a meeting of the International Geographical Union at Cambridge in July 1928. The proponent of the idea was O. G. S. Crawford, then Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey, and since he was also mainly responsible for its early development, the model adopted was that of the second edition of the O.S. Map of Roman Britain, but the physical base chosen was that of the International Map of the World, which was then in production. Considerable progress was made in the 1930s—it was in 1934 that the title Tabula Imperii Romani was adopted—but wars interrupted matters and it was not until 1957 that the work was formally taken over by the Union Académique Internationale. Professor G. Lugli became the first President of the Permanent Committee of the TIR, to be succeeded in 1968 by Professor J. B. Ward-Perkins; on his death in 1981 the Presidency was assumed by Professor E. Condurachi, with Professor G. Carettoni as Vice-President taking over most responsibility for the western half of the Empire.

The introduction of the denarius system—gold with the types Head of Mars / Eagle, denarii, bronze of sextantal standard and victoriati—can now be dated within the brief period between early 213 B.C., when the quadrigatus was still in issue and late 211 B.C., by which time coins of the denarius system had reached Morgantina. With this dating it becomes possible to give an exact account of the breakdown of Rome's earlier coinage system and add considerably to our understanding of the financial and monetary policy of the Roman Republic.

In Roman religious law the word sacer indicated that the object to which it was applied was the property of a deity, taken out of the region of the profanum by the action of the state, and passed on into that of the sacrum. We have an exact account of it which can be traced through Verrius Flaccus to a scholar apparently of the age of Cicero, Aelius Gallus. “Gallus Aelius ait sacrum esse, quodcunque more atque instituto civitatis consecratum sit, sive aedis sive ara sive signum sive pecunia sive quid aliud quod dis dedicatum atque consecratum sit: quod autem privati suae religionis causa aliquid earum rerum deo dedicent, id pontifices Romanos non existimare sacrum.” This very explicit passage makes it plain that the state, through its religious authorities, had appropriated the word, and fixed it to a definite meaning, at some period when there were already temples in which deities could dwell and enjoy the possession of their own property, made over to them by the state to do them honour and propitiate them.

A century and a quarter of controversy is a dubious distinction for any historical problem. When opinion has been so divided as on the hastiferi and when direct evidence, though double what it was, is still restricted to a few inscriptions, it would be wise for any new appraisal to set itself a limited goal. This paper aims to reconsider the office of the hastiferi in the light of the important discoveries within the sanctuary of Magna Mater at Ostia. The most I hope to achieve is to block out the main lines of a possible solution. Finality is out of the question.

It is well known that in the various collections of imperial legislation there is only one enactment specifically addressed to Britain, Cod. Theod. XI, 7, 2, of 20th November, 319, to Pacatianus, Vicar of the Britains. It is a short text and may be at one point corrupt, but the general sense is clear: a decurion is liable to pay tax on his own property (whether held ‘in hand’ or occupied by coloni), he is not liable for the property and coloni of another decurion. The text is normally cited by students of Roman Britain to prove that the institutions of the colonate applied to Britain, and this it certainly proves. The purpose of this paper, however, is to inquire whether something more may not be extracted from it.

The principle contained in the law is actually established by legislation of more recent date also included in the Codex Theodosianus. That it appears in the Code at all is due to the hasty and unsystematic way in which the compilers of the Code went to work; legislation was simply collected with little regard to whether it had been repeated or even superseded.

An altar with sculptured panels on all four sides of the capital was found in September, 1837, in digging a drain about 100 yards east of the north-east angle of the Roman fort at Whitley Castle, near Alston. It was 21 in. wide by 55 in. high and was set in a socket in a large slab, 48 by 28 by 8 in., which acted as a base and was itself supported on four pillars, each about a foot high. The die was even then extensively weathered and in the drawing published by Richardson the only decipherable letters are D[.]O l A[…]VS l […]VIVS though he gives traces of five more lines. Bruce in the Lapidarium amplified his original reading and gave in his text DEO l APOLLINI l [……l.]COH III NER l […] but added on his line-block as lines 3–4: VII[..]IVS NIIC[.]C[.]R. This was repeated by Hübner.

I. Two manuscripts of the fifteenth century—Cod. Bruxellensis (Pulmanni), bibl. regia 9755–63 and Cod. Oxoniensis (Bodl. Canon. Class. Lat. 131)—have preserved for us a ‘corpus’ including three pamphlets: (1) the so-called ‘Origo gentis romanae’ (a title, we shall see, not supported by evidence); (2) the ‘Liber de viris illustribus urbis Romae’; (3) ‘Aurelii Victoris Historiae abbreviatae,’ more commonly known as ‘Caesares’. The ‘Liber de viris illustribus’ has also been transmitted to us in a different tradition which omits the last nine lives (Caesar, Octavianus, Cato, Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Sextus Pompeius, Marcus Antonius, Cleopatra) and differs in other respects as well.

The Exhibition of 1938, held in honour of the bimillenary of the birth of Augustus (‘Mostra Augustea della Romanità’), magnificent though it was, represented only one phase in a continuous scheme for displaying by means of monuments the full extent of the Roman dominion—its origin, growth, development and the abiding effect of its culture on the modern world. Hardly has it closed but a grandiose scheme is shaping rapidly for reconstructing it on a vast and permanent basis. This new ‘Mostra’ will form part of the International Exhibition of the year 1942— the ‘E. 42’, as it is already commonly called—a large model of which has now been set up in a pavilion outside the Exhibition grounds together with numerous plans and views of details.

According to Polybius, Philip V of Macedonia and Antiochus III of Syria, after the death of Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt, ‘each encouraging the other,’ agreed together to do away with Philopator's heir, the later Ptolemy Epiphanes, then a young child, and to divide his kingdom between themselves. This story appears twice in the historian's narrative. It is told in a brief form in the author's résumé of the contents of his history as given in his third book, where we are informed that, as the result of an agreement to divide the Egyptian Empire, Philip laid his hands on Samos, Caria and the region of the Aegean, while Antiochus seized the region of Syria Coele, and Phoenicia. It appears at greater length in the historian's fifteenth book, where he moralises on the subject, likening the two monarchs to the fish who devour the smaller members of their own kind and delivering a homily in which he shows that Nemesis, by arousing the Romans, brought on the two evil-doers the fate they had designed for their neighbour, and so visited on them the penalty they deserved, thereby teaching a lesson to posterity also.

In a recent review of Professor A. C. Johnson's Roman Egypt to the Reign of Diocletian, Dr. J. G. Milne, after issuing a very apposite warning against too implicit reliance on the evidence of papyri and inscriptions, remarks:

‘The well-known rescript of Tiberius Julius Alexander is often quoted as proof of the misgovernment of Egypt under Nero and the reform under Galba: but the date of its issue, when news of the death of Nero could only have reached Alexandria by exceptionally speedy transmission … and certainly no communication could have been received from Galba, makes it probable that the rescript was really a manifesto of the anti-Neronian party at Alexandria, headed by the prefect, which was designed to paint the administration of Nero as black as possible and to hold out bright hopes for the future; and its value as economic evidence is about that of a modern election address.’

This verdict is so contrary to the impression I had formed when preparing my chapter for volume x of the Cambridge Ancient History that I felt bound to re-examine the evidence ; and this Congress offered a convenient opportunity for presenting my conclusions. I must confess that, apart from one unpublished papyrus, I have no new evidence to submit ; but a re-statement of existing knowledge may be useful.

The Tabula Hebana already has a bibliography more than six pages long, in which figure the names of most of the eminent scholars of Europe. It may seem, therefore, both superfluous and presumptuous to add to it. But very few of the studies hitherto produced have attempted to deal with the political implications of the document, and of these few only one, Professor Tibiletti's monograph, Principe e magistrati repubblicani, has tackled them seriously. As will appear, I owe much to Professor Tibiletti's acute analysis of the procedure laid down in the Tabula, but as I differ profoundly on several points from his interpretation of the political background, I have thought it worth while to propound my views.

It is almost accepted doctrine that Augustus throughout his reign systematically gerrymandered the elections, those at any rate for the higher offices, especially the consulate. What I may call the prosopographical school of historians, in particular, assume that the consuls were de facto the nominees of Augustus, and regard the consular fasti as a barometer of his personal policy or that of the narrow group which controlled affairs. I would challenge this view. The liberty of the elections was, I would agree, to some extent limited by the predominant influence of the Princeps, but the evidence, I maintain, strongly suggests that genuine electoral contests continued, not only for the lower offices, but for the praetorship and the consulate, with which alone the Tabula Hebana is concerned.

Without attempting a serious commentary at this stage, I present two short inscriptions in Greek and Latin, from the Eastern Desert of Egypt. They are from the 1936–7 field notes of the late Dr. H. A. Winkler, author of Rock Drawings of Southern Upper Egypt (1938–9), and are published by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society, the Latin on fig. 14, the Greek from Winkler's facsimile which is clear and complete.

These two inscriptions come from a typical Eastern Desert cave-shelter, in the west rock-face of Wādi Menīh at the point in the Berenice road where it is crossed by the line of latitude 25° 37′ N.

This paper investigates the figure of the lena in the elegies of Tibullus (I.5; II.6), Propertius (IV.5), and Ovid (Amores I.8). While each poet treats the character of the lena in importantly different ways, each has in common a deep interest in contrasting his own position as both lover and poet with the activities of the lena, a bawd or procuress. All three poets curse the lena, denouncing primarily her malevolent magical powers, her carmina, which are directed against them and their carmina. The lena not only preaches an erotic code which in its emphasis on remuneration and the denigration of poetry directly opposes that of the poet-lover, she also usurps his role as instructor and constructor of the elegiac puella. It is the elegiac poet's prerogative to describe and construct the elegiac mistress. By usurping his role as praeceptor, the lena threatens the poet with both sexual and literary impotence. It is precisely because the lena challenges the male poet-lover's control over these terms that she is such a potent enemy; the woman with a pen, as Pollack writes in The Poetics of Sexual Myth, ‘threatens to undermine a system of signification that defines her both as vulnerable and as victim’. If the elegiac mistress can be said to play a more masterful role as domina in Roman love poetry than in conventional Roman ideology, it must nevertheless be qualified with the reminder that she only plays a role constructed for her by elegy's first-person narrator who demands complete control over the discourse of their relationship, of the rules of the amatory game.

Even in these unclassical times, the sack of Rome by the Goths in a.d. 410 remains entrenched in Western collective memory as a ‘key date’ in history. For a scholarly audience, its sixteen-hundreth anniversary in 2010 was commemorated by no fewer than three conferences in Rome. The resulting volumes illustrate the ambivalent relationship historical scholarship entertains with commemoration. While the conferences draw their appeal from the construction, in late ancient and modern tradition, of the sack as an event of world historical importance, the three volumes collectively lead one to conclude that nothing much really happened between 24 and 27 August 410. The schizophrenic situation is summed up in the following two statements by Philipp von Rummel, the organizer of the conference held by the German Archaeological Institute. In an interview with the BBC, he is quoted as saying: ‘I don't know if people will still be talking about 9/11 in 2,000 years time, but the events of that August day still influence our contemporary view of history.’ In the introduction to his volume, co-edited with J. Lipps and C. Machado, he approvingly notes that scholars ‘have moved away from the traditional narrative of collapse with which the sack was associated’ (11), and his own contribution opens by stating that, without lapsing into ‘historical instrumentalization and projections’, one cannot say much more than that an army under the leadership of Alaric plundered the city of Rome for three days (17: ‘Diese drei Sätze geben präzise das wieder, was abseits historischer Instrumentalisierungen und Projektionen über das Ereignis gesagt werden kann’). Even if the two statements need not be contradictory, they convey two rather different views of the events: a hyperbolic one highlighting long-term repercussions and a rather terse one that remains strictly within the bounds of the factual. It is a phenomenon that can be observed elsewhere: critical scholarship seeks to undermine traditional historical narrative, while at the same time failing to escape entirely the story it rejects.

When literary records are few and faulty, the movements of legions win a certain importance as historical evidence, not least for the wars of Domitian. Whole legions were not displaced for purposes trivial or temporary; it might almost be said that in Flavian times, when a legion leaves a province, it leaves it for good. The aim of the present enquiry is, therefore, to narrow as far as may be the margin of dangerous error that fringes the subject and to propose a theory of the number and position of the permanent Danube garrisons in the interval of peace and stability that followed the wars of Domitian and preceded those of Trajan. The choice of the latter topic may be excused by the variety of the views expressed by historians, and by the fact that both the monumental work of Ritterling and a recent English book seem rather to have avoided the problem.

If this note should prove persuasive, the credit will not belong to me; if not, I must accept the blame for publishing something not published by its author.

Recently I acquired an offprint of Cumont's article ‘La plus ancienne géographie astrologique’ (Klio ix, 1909, 263–273) which deals with the doctrine that divides up the various countries among the signs of the zodiac. On p. 265, where the list of Paulus Alexandrinus (which I reproduce below in the left column) is given, I found a marginal note (here on the right) in the hand of the late Professor F. C. Burkitt:—

Burkitt's opinion obviously was that, if we want to understand this list of the Acts, we must turn to astrological geography. This seemed a convincing suggestion and became even more convincing when I found how this passage had puzzled the commentators. Some of them felt that the writer meant to say ‘the whole oecumene’, but they could not explain why he mentions just these countries. What follows is intended to show that Burkitt's suggestion is sound.

On finding that I was to share in the tribute which we are bringing to Sir George Macdonald, I vowed, as do those who mean to give of their best, the first thing that should meet me on my way home. Such vows have a way of turning out badly—or, at least, awkwardly— for the vowers, and this has been no exception to the general rule. The first subject that met me on my next appearance at the British Museum was the question of Roman coins found in Britain, and I felt, as Jephthah might have done if, instead of his daughter, his pet mongrel had come out to meet him: was the offering good enough ?

The results of the air reconnaissance here summarized continue from earlier surveys already described in this Journal. The weather was not particularly favourable for archaeological reconnaissance during any of these four summers, while the period May to October 1968 was, over much of England, one of the wettest of this century. In Scotland, however, the summer of 1968 was comparatively dry with correspondingly favourable development of crop marks.

Most of the new information has been gained in the military districts of Wales and the north. Roman military remains tend to be standardized and to form part of a system. Thus both temporary and permanent works may often be identified from a minimum of evidence without the necessity of the whole site being visible, while the geographical distribution, so far as it is known, often suggests where further reconnaissance may profitably be made. Descriptions of military sites and their full significance in the system to which they belong, call for continual reference to local geography, so that the text is best considered in conjunction with appropriate maps such as the 1 inch to a mile series of the Ordnance Survey. Nearly all the features described have been examined on the ground: except when noted otherwise, no remains are ordinarily to be seen on the surface. The records and photographs on which this account is based are housed in the offices of the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge.

Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes is the first queen in British history to play a determining part in a policy for the whole island. She does not hold the stage with the outraged fury of Boudicca: no description of her appearance, terrifying or otherwise, has come down to us. But until the moment when the neglectful terms of a husband's will and the tactlessness and bestiality of Roman officials drove Boudicca and her nobility into revolt, Cartimandua was in her own right much the more important figure and certainly counted for very much more in Roman eyes. Nor in reality is the story of Cartimandua less dramatic: but its elements are at once more peculiar to Britain and more personal to the Queen.