At Divus Julius 76 Suetonius begins his account of the circumstances which led to the murder of Julius Caesar. He describes those actions committed by Caesar which were considered heinous enough to justify assassination: his acceptance of excessive honours, many of them inappropriate to a mere mortal, and his scorn for traditional procedure. In ch. 77 Suetonius passes from Caesar's unacceptable deeds to his scandalous utterances:

nec minoris inpotentiae uoces propalam edebat, ut Titus Ampius scribit: nihil esse rem publicam, appellationem modo sine corpore ac specie. Sullam nescisse litteras, qui dictaturam deposuerit. debere homines consideratius iam loqui secum ac pro legibus habere quae dicat. eoque arrogantiae progressus est, ut haruspice tristia et sine corde exta quondam nuntiante, futura diceret laetiora, cum uellet; nec pro ostento ducendum, si pecudi cor defuisset.

No less arrogant were his public utterances, which Titus Ampius records: that the state was nothing, a mere name without body or form; that Sulla did not know his A. B. C. when he laid down his dictatorship; that men ought now to be more circumspect in addressing him, and to regard his word as law. So far did he go in his presumption, that when a soothsayer once reported direful inwards without a heart, he said: ‘They will be more favourable when I wish it; it should not be regarded as a portent, if a beast has no heart’.

It is generally recognized that Rome of the early Republic offers a good example of the correlation between military and political organization. The ordering of the Roman citizenry in centuries, classes and age-groups was in origin and essence a military system. The Comitia Centuriata was the exercitus urbanus—the army on parade in the Field of Mars.

But by the third century B.C. the Roman army and the centuriate assembly were manifestly two different systems, even if vestiges of their interconnection lingered on. The process whereby this differentiation had come about is, unfortunately, not so clear. The traditional accounts of early Roman history generally failed to devote much attention to questions of that order. Yet the effort to tackle and, if possible, solve this complex of problems can hardly be evaded. The answers given, or assumed, by modern historians are bound to determine how the whole history of early Rome is interpreted and represented.

Two poets addressed by Propertius in his first book are in fact pseudonyms. Ponticus was formed on the model of Horace's Alpinus to designate someone who embodies the antithesis of the poet's Callimachean sensibilities. Bassus is none other than Horace himself, who was then in the course of writing iambics. In the eleventh epode, Horace responded in kind by creating the pseudonyms Pettius, Lyciscus and Inachia, all of which derive from aspects of Propertius' first book. This exchange between Horace and Propertius has echoes in their later work. We conclude by examining why Ovid seems to treat Ponticus and Bassus as real poets in the Tristia.

The discovery two years ago, in Amiens, of an analogue of the famous Rudge cup has raised interest among the historians of the Roman world. The new patera has been summarily described in the Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1949, p. 125 ff.) and will be more completely surveyed in the next volume of the Monuments Piot. Nevertheless it was thought that some account of the main differences between the two vases would be appreciated by students of Roman Britain.

Of the five great lead-producing districts of Roman Britain, the limestone uplands of the Mendips in Somerset have yielded evidence of Roman mining activities which, however incomplete, is still the richest and fullest from a material and chronological point of view so far discovered in this country. To the Mendip mines we owe not only the earliest and latest dated specimens in the British series of inscribed pigs of Roman lead, but also the heaviest. Since the appearance at the beginning of this century of the classic article by Gowland, the full number of the Mendip pigs has been listed by various authorities, but a recent examination of two of them shows that the existing accounts need supplementing and correcting in certain important details. Furthermore, a re-examination of the remains of Roman mining in another district, in the light of the evidence thus revealed, shows that some interesting features have hitherto escaped notice.

When, in 1911, the first volume of JRS appeared it contained among other matter an article by W. Warde Fowler on ‘The Original Meaning of the word Sacer’. This was later (1920) reprinted in Roman Essays and Interpretations, 15–24, and is characteristic of its author, not only because of its keen insight into Roman ways of thought and full acquaintance with the relevant passages in Latin authors, but in its cautious and moderate use of the Comparative Method in dealing with the history of an ancient and imperfectly known religion. A scrap of Polynesian information on the meaning of ‘tabu’ was got from R. R. Marett, whose Threshold of Religion was then a new book (1909), and whom Warde Fowler knew and appreciated. About this time, Fowler, who was meditating an elaborate edition of Plutarch, a project which his failing sight compelled him to drop, passed on to me some notes on the Roman Questions (see below, p. 163), a typical piece of readiness to help and advise a young scholar. So far as his contributions to Roman religion went, the first two decades of this century were his flowering-time. Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic had appeared in 1899; his Gifford Lectures of 1909–10 appeared in book form (The Religious Experience of the Roman People) just in time to have a cordial and appreciative review from E. R. Bevan in the first number of JRS.

In the study of decorated Terra Sigillata from a chronological point of view the work of the potter Butrio occupies an important place, for it is not only typical of the Trajanic period, especially of the decade of A.D. 110–120, but in many respects the style is transitional between the characteristics of Flavian and Hadrian-Antonine potters. Most of Butrio's figure-types reveal (as will be shown) a close association with Libertus on the one hand, both potters using many types in common; whilst on the other hand the Hadrianic potters of Blickweiler and the Hadrian-Antonine potter Paternus of Lezoux have in turn utilised figure-types occurring on the bowls of Butrio. In fact, out of 97 figure-types known to have been used by Butrio, as many as 49 occur on bowls signed by Libertus.