The notes which follow, on topics connected with Roman religion, have been put together from old note-books of mine in the course of reading with care Mr. W. Warde Fowler's work which bears the title given above. Needless to say, it is always a pleasure to greet him afresh in his peculiar domain. Although the themes with which he deals are much the same as those treated in his Gifford Lectures, entitled ‘The Religious Experience of the Roman People,’ much will be found in the later volume which is fresh or freshly put. Of course the mode of presentation is excellent, and equally of course, bright as the writing is, there is no straining after novelty, such as has often led inquirers in the same field far beyond the bounds of sober judgment. Many obiter dicta are striking and are the ready fruit of long familiarity with the subject. It bristles with difficulties, and at many points there has been great diversity of opinion.

The noteworthy discovery which I have the honour of illustrating for the Journal of Roman Studies is a very recent one, and it was unlooked for because one would not expect to find a rich and beautiful series of small artistic bronzes among the ruins of a great bakehouse. This building consisted of a double series of rooms in which are gathered together the machines for crushing the grain, the machines for kneading the flour (machinae quae farinae subiguntur), and, lastly, two enormous ovens for the making of the bread. This great bakehouse, placed in the heart of the city, near the temple of Vulcan, was destroyed by a fire in the third century, as is proved by certain coins, and it was never re-built. The small bronzes, touched but not destroyed by the fire, were found among the ashes covering the pavement of the ground floor, and since they have nothing in common with the great bakehouse, they come assuredly from the first floor of the building, which was perhaps the dwelling-house of the miller, and it may be supposed from this that they were the religious and artistic furniture of his private chapel.

In 1889 Hermann Dessau published a revolutionary article in which he suggested that the six authors to whom the various biographies of the Historia Augusta are ascribed were merely masks behind which lurked a single author who lived at the very end of the fourth century. Ninety years later, an attempt was made to prove Dessau's hypothesis of single authorship on objective grounds. Ian Marriott's article, ‘The Authorship of the Historia Augusta: Two Computer Studies’, presents the results of two statistical tests conducted on the text of the HA which appear to show conclusively that the work was composed by one author rather than six. Marriott's findings have been hailed by a number of scholars as settling once and for all the question of the authorship of the HA. While I agree with Marriott's conclusion, and I share the consensus view that this curious work is indeed the product of a single mind, I should like to raise some questions concerning the validity of the procedure adopted by Marriott and to suggest that the tests conducted by him are in fact not conclusive.

Discovered by a lucky accident, a Roman bronze head of remarkable quality was unearthed in 1969 in the village of Boleč near Belgrade (Plates V–VII).

Roman portraits in the Danubian provinces, where they are of above-average quality, invariably represent emperors or members of the imperial family. In the case of this bust, the type of beard and the general style show that we are dealing with a personage of the Severan period. The appearance of the beard may suggest a certain resemblance to the emperor Pupienus, but the identification does not bear further inspection, since his portraits differ from the new head significantly in most other details.

There are published several examples of a bronze medallion of Antoninus Pius, dated A.D. 140–144, with the following reverse (fig 33):

AESCVLAPIVS in exergue.

Ship to right under arched structure; one man is visible on ship; at prow, serpent springing to right; to right, river-god facing left with right hand extended in greeting; above him, indications of rocks; above them, three buildings and a tree.

The casual observer would naturally interpret the scene as follows : “From under a bridge comes a ship in motion, from the prow of which a serpent leaps to the land; a river-god greets him; the inscription AESCVLAPIVS identifies the scene as the arrival of the sacred snake of Aesculapius at the Insula Tiberina, the Insula Tiberina being represented to the right, and a bridge across the Tiber (Pons Aemilius?) to the left; the river-god being the Tiber.”

Among the monuments erected by Augustus at Rome were two obelisks, about which the elder Pliny gives fairly full information. They had originally been erected in Egypt by two different monarchs, and, when Augustus had them transported to Rome, the one was placed in the Circus Maximus, the other in the Campus Martius. Moreover, the latter was put to practical use by being an essential part of the large solarium erected by the Emperor. Somewhat earlier in the same book Pliny attributes the setting up of the first obelisk to Mespheres at Heliopolis. The king had been warned to do this in a dream. In his chapter on obelisks Isidore also attributes the institution of this form of monument to this king, whom he calls Mesfres. He further gives more precise reasons for the dedication, and then passes on to the obelisk in the middle of the Circus; though his description is somewhat obscure, it is implied that the obelisk was used for a sun-dial. This passage from Isidore is reproduced in the Liber Glossarum, together with a sentence which is not in the MSS. of Isidore, and which occurs between sections 1 and 2 of the chapter in question:– ‘unum quippe fecit pedibus septuaginta quinque, alterum septuaginta sex quos Augustus ab ultima Aegypto deportatos alterum ex his Circo, alterum in Campo Martio posuit.’

That the lex Clodia of 58 B.C. repealed either in whole or in part the lex Aelia Fufia of c. 153 B.C. is adequately attested by our ancient authorities and universally admitted by modern scholars. The crux of the question is: was the lex Aelia Fufia wholly abrogated by the lex Clodia, and, if not, precisely what part of the former law was repealed by the legislation of Clodius? Despite the statement of Cicero—‘mitto eam legem, quae omnia iura religionum, auspiciorum, potestatum, omnes leges quae sunt de iure et de tempore legum rogandarum, una rogatione delevit’—which is obviously rhetorical and biased, no one, so far, as the writer knows, holds the view that all clauses of the lex Aelia Fufia were repealed by the lex Clodia. This inquiry, therefore, is an attempt to determine how much of the lex Aelia Fufia the lex Clodia repealed.

This survey is intended primarily to assess the impact on Roman studies in general of recent work in Roman epigraphy — whether newly published inscriptions, revised editions, or texts that have been reconsidered or newly analysed in the light of specific themes. We mean to draw attention to those epigraphic studies that make a significant contribution, in particular, to Roman history. Hence the considerable space we devote below to the newly published Senatus Consultum on Cnaeus Piso, of which any future study of the reign of Tiberius (or of the relations between senate and emperor in the early Principate) will have to take account. Other highlights include a centurion's own reflections (in verse) on his unit's building works at Bu-Njem in Tripolitania; a major revision of the inscribed texts of Roman laws; the first known letter of Lucullus; and a new text from Messene orchestrating the city's responses to the death of Augustus. At the same time, in this introduction, we note one or two developments in recent epigraphic practice. Though these aspects are necessarily more technical, we include them in order to help readers to find the epigraphic data they might need (publication is increasingly diverse, and in an ever wider range of media); and then to assess the texts, the dates, and the conclusions the epigraphists are offering. ‘What you get’ in epigraphy is not necessarily ‘what you see’.

Now that my excavation of Margidunum (Castle Hill, Nottinghamshire) has come to an end and the site has been filled in, it may be opportune to give a detailed account of the last three buildings I explored; for they not only furnished results throwing light on the entire history of the camp but exhibit many unusual features of general importance. They form a material addition to the plan of one of the earliest forts of the Claudian conquest situated on the eastern edge of the Trent Valley, some 25 miles SW of Lindum (Lincoln) on the Fosse Way, the first strategic frontier across Britain; and the pottery found in excavating these buildings adds materially to the chronology of Romano-British pottery over a period of 350 years.

A paper by me on the same subject appeared in the Journal as long ago as 1929 (pp. 19 ff.). The criticism of the traditional datings there suggested seems in the main to have stood the test of time. But reconstruction should follow in due course on demolition; and, although no final scheme can yet be proposed, already it should not be premature to formulate some results to which research is pointing. Before we can produce a perfect figure we need a rough casting on which to work.

The earliest Roman tradition about coinage is of a very mixed character. A number of references to Roman coins—scattered at intervals over the period of the Kings and the Early Republic—may be dismissed as later intrusions. The golden prime of the Etruscan Kings will surely have known the precious metals—perhaps actual coins of foreign cities; but it has no coins of its own to show. A more trustworthy tradition tells of a form of reckoning in oxen and sheep—the ‘pecunia’ (from ‘pecus’, ‘flock’), which became the Latin word for money—only giving place officially to the currency of uncoined bronze (‘Aes Rude’) in the age of the Decemvirs.