Livy i, 18, 6, describing the accession of the second King of Rome, provides food for much thought on the part of those who are interested in the religious ideas of early Italy, and gives us the material for a brisk controversy which is far from being settled. Despite therefore the familiar contents of this passage, I quote the part of it which is most important for our purpose.

Accitus … de se quoque deos consuli iussit. inde ab augure, cui deinde honoris ergo publicum id perpetuumque sacerdotium fuit, deductus in arcem, in lapide ad meridiem uersus consedit. augur ad laeuam eius … dextras ad meridiem partes, laeuas ad septentrionem esse dixit.

Numa then is facing south ; the augur is facing east. Both are engaged in the same important ceremony. Why do they not look the same way, but at right angles to each other, and what is the significance of their respective attitudes ?

Two sharply contrasted views are held about the duration of Roman government in Britain and in the West generally. The traditional view, which I believe to be substantially correct, dates the abandonment of Britain early in the fifth century. The late Professor Bury put forward in 1920 a theory that the occupation was maintained down to A.D. 438. The theory was based primarily on a later dating of the Notitia Dignitatum, and on a mistaken estimate of the numismatic evidence.

During the fifty years that have elapsed since the great cycle of Dionysiac paintings was unearthed in the villa named after them at Pompeii, the search for their understanding has made reassuring progress. This search will never lead us out of ultimate ignorance about the deepest meaning which such visual imagery had within the context of an ancient mystery religion and we may resign ourselves to awareness of our own limitations in this respect. The best we can hope for is that we may learn to understand the surface meaning of images, whose full significance was only made clear to the initiated, to the degree to which, in antiquity, an uninitiated person could understand them. The last two published extensive discussions of this cycle of murals show clearly, however, that we are still far from having achieved even that degree of understanding. The impasse that has been reached can be overcome only by introducing new evidence and it is my hope that some progress can be made by doing so in the following pages.

When Ovid was relegated in A.D. 8, he left a notorious problem for scholarship. Some attribute his downfall to the Ars Amatoria, whose second edition appeared about 1 B.C., but that raises questions about the time-lag as well as about the misunderstanding of literature. Others emphasize the disgrace of Augustus' grand-daughter Julia, banished for adultery in the same year as Ovid, but doubts remain about the degree of complicity needed to explain the poet's punishment. Again it has been supposed that the domestic scandal masks a political plot, a possibility that has also been canvassed over the disgrace of the elder Julia in 2 B.C. Unfortunately the evidence for the various theories is so scattered that it may distract attention from the tone of particular poems, yet in this psychological drama over-all impressions ought to count as well as fragments of fact. Here I shall try to interpret a single elegy, Tristia 4. 3, looking at it in sections as it comes; though the debate about the exile will not be repeated in detail, a view will emerge at the end about what happened.

The series of Roman inscriptions with which the present paper is concerned belongs to a familiar and extensive class, examples of which will be found in any handbook of epigraphy—stones that were erected to commemorate the completion of some more or less important undertaking of a public character. But a peculiar, if not a unique, interest has always attached to this particular group because of its intimate association with one of the great historical monuments of the Empire. Ever since the dawn of the seventeenth century, when the foundations of our knowledge of Roman Britain were being laid, the fact of this association and its broad significance have been universally recognized.

While Gibbon's Roman History and his Memoirs are established as classic works in any canon of English or historical literature, the first of his three books, the youthful Essai sur l'Étude de la Littérature (1758–61), remains the victim of comparative neglect. There has been no edition of this work since 1814, but we can ill afford to ignore a text which is at once the first fruit of Gibbon's intellectual ‘creation’ at Lausanne in the 1750s, and also serves as an indispensable general and methodological introduction to his History. One symptom of our casual attitude lies in the fact that, although the Essai is the only one of Gibbon's works which can be traced from its manuscript conception through to final publication, no attempt has been made to explore his compositional and intellectual processes by this route. Furthermore, in an age where every scrap of new text by the great historian has become a precious relic worthy of immediate publication, we have overlooked thereby the last really significant cache of his unpublished writing. Given its subject matter, one may say that the omission is not merely significant but spectacular. In a series of cancelled passages from the Essai's first draft of 1758, Gibbon dealt with topics such as the need for philosophic detachment, rather than sentimental alignment, in discussing Roman history; the role of ‘general’ or profound causes in explaining Rome's rise and fall; and the significance of Pagan corruption for the rise of Christianity.

A. Nature of the Roman Administration: 25 B.C. to A.D. 65—The province Galatia is a singularly obscure subject. Marquardt's chapter contains little information, because little was known; but what he states is correct, and he makes few, if any, unfounded or dangerous assertions. He knows and mentions the senatorial governor (praetorius leg. Aug. pr. pr.), the equestrian proc. Galatiae, and about the name of the province he expresses no hesitation: as a province of the Empire it was simply Galatia. Inherited by Augustus from Amyntas, the last king, it bore as the realm of a king the unifying name Galatia; no other name was possible, and this name was continued by the policy of Augustus. A friend points out to me that the idea of inheritance of the realm Galatia was only a sort of political or legal fiction; and that the relation of the Emperor to such client-kings as Amyntas was one of absolute power on his side and of absolute servitude on the other. That is true. Augustus bestowed authority and title on those pseudo-kings; he could at any moment resume what he had bestowed; and on the death of any of them the complete and absolute authority reverted to him. The question, however, is under what forms Augustus chose to clothe his absolute lordship. He was a master of the art of disguising hard unlimited despotism under legal or religious forms, and in this case the form was that of Will or Testament, as Strabo mentions. Augustus claimed to have inherited the realm of Amyntas in virtue of the latter's Will, and acted, after the latter's death, 25 B.C., as his heir (κληρονόος, heres). The Emperor must have accepted the inheritance formally within the legal interval, and treated his inheritance according to law as including the debts as well as the property of the deceased. It was not hereditas sine sacris. Augustus was bound to pay all obligations; and he paid in full.