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.

Odes 4.8 is anomalous: its thirty-four lines are not a multiple of four. Most editors delete two or six lines, but this involves deleting at least one blameless line and disturbing the stanzaic structure of the poem. Instead mark a lacuna of two or six lines before the final couplet. The missing lines will have contained a prayer for Censorinus' immortality and some words of praise, thereby fulfilling the expectations raised earlier in the poem. Vota in 34 refers to Horace's prayer, which Bacchus fulfils as god of poetry. Finally, the conceit that uates potentes can in real terms immortalize or deify their subjects chimes in with a feature of Roman religion noted by A. D. Nock.

Despite the wealth of the cult's material remains, we still know relatively little about the ritual of the Mithraic mysteries. What was it, in the sense of liturgy performed, that Mithraists actually did in mithraea? How did it relate to myth, to the story of the god, which, by contrast, is singularly well documented on the monuments? Was it, in some way, a mimesis or re-enactment of that story? How, if at all, was it an expression of the initiate's progress, an actualization of his ‘salvation’, and thus of cult doctrine on these matters.

There are three major pieces of this puzzle already in place. First, and most important, we know that the cult meal, shared by the initiates on the banquet benches of their mithraeum, replicated the feast of Mithras and the Sun god at a table draped with the hide of the newly slain bull. We know this primarily from representations on the Konjic relief and the Sa. Prisca frescoes, where we see the initiates participating in roles defined by their positions within the hierarchy of grades: the Father (Pater) and the Sun-Runner (Heliodromus) represented Mithras and Sol reclining at their feast, the remaining grades their ministers. It is worth noting that there is no known counterpart in ritual to the central mythic act which precedes the feast, the bull-killing itself. Nevertheless, since the bull-killing in some sense effected ‘salvation’, we may suppose that the feast of the initiates, replicating the feast of the gods, celebrated this salutary effect for mortals. That the divine feast follows, and follows from, the bull-killing is assured by (1) the fact that it was served on the hide of the slaughtered bull, and (2) its depiction on the reverse of tauroctony reliefs, at least some of which could be rotated at the appropriate ritual moment. Finally, the ubiquity of the mithraeum's distinctive banqueting benches implies the ubiquity of the cult meal as the ‘liturgie ordinaire’.

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.

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.”

At the period when, after a process of development extending over almost five centuries, the road-system of ancient Italy had attained to its maturity, we find that Rome was connected with the central and southern stretches of the Adriatic coast by four highways, the Via Appia, the Via Salaria, the Via Valeria and the Via Traiana. All of these roads were of republican origin, though the Via Claudia Valeria (the extension of the earlier Valeria to the Adriatic) and the Via Traiana did not become viae munitae until the first and second centuries of the empire respectively. It may be desirable to begin with a brief sketch of these roads, in order to make plain the part played by my proper subject, the Claudia Nova.