The publication of a second fourth-century epitaph from Laodicea Combusta, engraved on the tomb of two of its bishops, Severus and Eugenius, calls for fresh study, from a new angle, of the epitaph of the persecuted bishop Julius Eugenius of the same city, which was first published (with a provisional text) in the Expositor in 1908, and has already become the subject of a considerable literature. An opportunity therefore offers itself to present English readers with a complete and (I hope) final text of the bishop's epitaph. This is all the more necessary that an English version, inaccurate in almost every detail, has been incorporated in a text-book issued by the Cambridge University Press.

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.

Gnaeus Iulius Agricola was born on 13th June, A.D. 40, at an evil juncture in his family fortunes. His father, the senator Iulius Graecinus, had offended the Emperor Gaius in a matter which cost him his life. This dark affair is not chronicled in detail, and our scanty knowledge of Graecinus and his career permits no useful conjecture on the cause. Graecinus had been a procurator's son, able enough in the disillusioned eyes of Tiberius to merit promotion to the Senate: he was also an advocate, endowed with sufficient ability to be engaged by the Emperor to appear against the Empress's father and with sufficient temerity to refuse the task. His literary efforts comprised a learned study of viticulture, considered more elegant than its model, and perhaps reflecting real interest in land. Agricultural interest may also be mirrored in the cognomen of the son. None of these facts, however, provides any cogent reason for the execution of Graecinus, and it must be further confessed that the elevation of the family to senatorial rank was too recent, and its provincial original too obvious, to excite wide or searching interest in his death. The sole external comment, by Seneca, is purely conventional.

In the early spring of 1937 I first visited the fort and quarries of grey granite (pl. V) at Mons Claudianus (Gebel Fitery) between the Nile at Qena and the Gulf of Suez at Sofaga, 33° 297prime; E., 26° 48′ N.—visited and described by Wilkinson, James Burton, Schweinfurth, and others, —and made notes and photographs of one very large column (pl. V, 3) and a part of another (8 ft. 6 in. and 7 ft. 9 in. diameter at the bottom and top respectively, and 59 ft. long), lying in the quarry from which they were hewn, and of the fragment of another of similar dimensions abandoned by the roadside on the way down from the quarries to wady level. There were several other columns, lying in the wady, of smaller dimensions (from 20 ft. long and 3 ft. diameter to 30 ft. long and 3 ft. 6 in. diameter).

Sound chronology is fundamental in any attempt to trace the development of the Roman imperial administration. This is especially true for those officials whose careers lay in the sub-equestrian ranks of the administration, as the funerary inscriptions, on which most of our detailed knowledge of them depends, are extremely difficult to date. For the Augusti liberti the main dating criterion is the imperial nomen gentilicium in their full nomenclature, which fixes their date of manumission, normally at the age of thirty or soon after, to the period in which the manumitting emperor or emperors reigned; the terminus ad quem for holding a post in the administration is, therefore, not more than forty years after the death of the last emperor bearing a given nomen, and normally a post is not likely to have been held later than about twenty-five years after the emperor's death. In the numerous cases, however, where the nomen of an Imperial freedman is not recorded, but only his cognomen and status-indication are given, the problem is much more difficult. External dating criteria are usually lacking; we are forced to make the best use possible of internal evidence.