Building inscriptions are not a good proxy for building activity or, by extension, prosperity. In the part of Roman North Africa where they are the most common, the majority of surviving building inscriptions document the construction of religious buildings by holders of local priesthoods, usually of the imperial cult. The rise of such texts in the second century a.d., and their demise in the early third century, have no parallel in the epigraphic evidence for other types of construction, and should not be used as evidence for the pace of construction overall. Rather than economic change, these developments reflect shifts in the prospects of aspirational local elites, for whom priesthoods served as springboards to more prestigious positions. These positions were linked to Carthage through administrative arrangements that made this city the metropolis for scores of dependent towns and their ambitious elites.

The famous inscription (pl. iii, I) from Orange, forming part of a tabula censualis and enumerating parcels of land called merides, together with their lessees, sureties and land-tax, has been the subject of several learned commentaries since its discovery in 1904. These have established that the merides are not plots of agricultural land, but of urbanised property. Their position in the urban area is, however, less certain. It has been thought that they fronted upon the kardo of the surveyors; but this interpretation of the abbreviation ad K, which concludes the tabulation of each plot, is convincingly shown in an article to be published in this Journal to be supplanted by the expansion ad k(alendarium), meaning the ‘municipal register of debtors’.

In the annals of archaeology on Hadrian's Wall the decade 1929-1939 will always stand out as the time when the principal periods in the history of the monument were firmly fixed and the complicated relationship between its component parts was securely defined. The decade which has followed and is now due for summary, broken by war and still hampered by peace, cannot claim to rival the preceding ten years. Nevertheless, the fixing of the main lines of the design has made it possible to establish some important secondary points which present their own special problems, some solved and others yet to be so, and all much affecting the interpretation of the remains.

At the root of many doubts that obscure our understanding of the manner and timing of Tiberius' accession to the principate there lies a chronological puzzle whose solution is perhaps not altogether beyond conjecture. On what date fell the dies imperii of the new emperor? Three (perhaps four) precise, but incorrect, answers are provided by Josephus, Dio and Tertullian. The difficulty is not removed by the brief or tendentious narratives of Velleius, Tacitus and Suetonius which offer us no such date, or of Dio himself. It is the purpose of this paper to argue that Tiberius accepted the principate at the hands of the Senate on a date between 1st and 3rd September, A.D. 14, and that his reluctance to do so is unlikely to have been a consequence of the receipt of news of the Pannonian revolt.

Among much else that has been written on Sallust recently, we have been informed or reminded of his ‘deep antipathy’ for Cicero among the political figures of his own day (Syme, Tacitus, 1958, 203), whilst it is Scaurus ‘whom he hates especially’ (K. von Fritz, TAPh. A 74, 1943, 145) of the nobility of the Jugurthine War period. We believe these two judgments to be essentially correct, although ‘hatred’ for one who was not a contemporary is perhaps too strong a term in the case of Scaurus. In the case of Cicero, indeed, it is still a matter for argument how far a dislike on Sallust's part is revealed in the Catilina, which we do not propose to re-argue; for us, not only Sallust's ‘curious and elaborate creation of an anti-Ciceronian style’ (Syme, l.e., cf. E. Sikes, CAH IX, 769), but still more the way in which he deliberately proceeds to glorify Caesar and Cato in Cicero's annus mirabilis seems sufficient evidence of his attitude to the latter; nor should the –Invective necessarily be rejected as evidence, however much we may doubt its authen-ticity, since even a bogus document must be basically plausible if it is to gain any acceptance. Our purpose here, rather, is to seek the common ground of Sallust's dislikes; to suggest that the attitude of Sallust to Cicero may help to explain his hostile representation of Scaurus and that, by a corollary, the latter confirms the former.