This paper is concerned with the geographical setting of Roman Algeria and the relation between human settlement and geographical factors, and will contain some comments on the writing of Roman provincial history. The present may be a suitable moment for those who are no longer occupied directly with scholarship to review the first principles and method of provincial history writing, which were perhaps not altogether sound in the published works, and particularly in the general histories, of the pre-war decade. There were two main types of study. The first were monuments of learning and minute scholarship, but tended to convey no general impression at all. The second type were so broad in outline as to be mainly false, a fault particularly marked in the various economic histories and general surveys of the Roman Empire. It is extraordinary that for Roman Africa, with its tens of thousands of inscriptions and superficial ruins and its dozens of town sites, there still exists no coherent or detailed study of part or whole except Toutain's old and excellent account of Tunisia published in 1896. Instead, scholars have concentrated either on particular town sites or on the military frontiers and military stations. The military studies are all linked to Cagnat's monumental work about the Roman Army in Africa. The result is that there exists a coherent body of knowledge about this great topic.

By the beginning of the second century B.C. Italy was developing from federal conditions towards full social unity. Vital political issues were involved in these social changes. Earlier the local autonomy allowed by Rome had made the Roman domination in foreign policy and military organisation seem less pressing to the Italians, and in any event the Roman policy in the Gallic and Punic Wars had been closely connected with the immediate security of Italy. Now, in the common interest, Rome was extending her control gradually to Italian affairs where these were no longer purely local in their effect, and in foreign policy the overseas campaigns in East and West offered less obvious advantage to the Italians. The confederation began to lose its federal character. This was a natural development, due to its very success; but it called for a conscious response of statesmanship. As Roman and Italian politics came to coincide, the Senate needed to adjust the balance of rights and representation by an extension of Roman citizenship.

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.

Amongst the coins bequeathed by Sir Arthur Evans to the Ashmolean Museum there were, in addition to the extensive series of late Roman currencies and their derivatives, on which he had been working for some years, many others of various groups which he had acquired and put aside as raising points of interest or requiring further investigation. From time to time he brought such coins down to the Museum and discussed them; and one of them may serve not only as a text for this paper, but as an illustration of his keen outlook in wide fields of archaeology. There is a well-known class of Tarentine coins which have as their obverse type the head of a nymph, in this resembling the coins of Neapolis, instead of the normal Tarentine type of Taras on a dolphin : they are struck on the standard, not of Tarentum, but of the cities on the west coast of Magna Graecia; and Evans adopted the view that they had been intended for circulation alongside of the Neapolitan coins in Campania. As no specimens of this class were found in the Beneventan hoard, buried probably about 310 B.C. in the district where they might have been expected to occur, he also concluded that they originated after that date, although he recognised that, so far as style is concerned, some of them might have been struck earlier. But the coin mentioned above, which is illustrated on Plate ii, 1, 2, doubtless suggested to him that his conclusions might require revision in some details : the types are those illustrated on Plate vii, 13, of his ‘Horsemen’ of Tarentum, except that the nymph's head is turned to the right instead of to the left; but by the head are. the letters BP ET, which indicate that the nymph represented was one known in Bruttium, not Parthenope of Neapolis, and therefore the objective of the coins was more likely to be the toe of Italy rather than Campania. If this is accepted, the absence of examples from the Beneventan hoard does not really affect the question of the date of the series, since Beneventum is well outside the area in which they were designed to circulate; and thus the consideration of style becomes more important for dating purposes.

If the reading of the oldest manuscript of Pliny, in the passage where he deals with the first issue of the denarius nummus at Rome, is accepted, a problem arises centring round the term bigati. Briefly, the difficulty is this :—

Pliny says that the denarius nummus was first struck at a date which works out as 217 B.C.

Livy states that thousands of bigati were taken as booty in Cisalpine Gaul in 197 and 196 B.C., and in Spain in 195 and 191 B.C.

There is no doubt as to what the denarius nummus was : it was the silver coin bearing the mark X which gave it the official currency-value of ten asses, and was the prototype of the long series of coins which were known and current as denarii under the Republic and Empire. Having a face-value, it was rightly distinguished as a nummus from the earlier silver coins whose currency-value might and did vary in relation to the bronze nummus, the as : these had in the first instance been rated at ten asses and called denarii, but by 217 their exchange rate was sixteen asses.

In the first part of his comments on Mr. P. W. Duff's study of Personality in Roman Private Law (Cambridge, 1938) Dr. Daube remarks (JRS 33, 1943, 88) that ‘the Fisc, as Mr. Duff explains,… was owned by the emperor. (This view, established by Mommsen, was attacked by Hirschfeld who maintained that the Fisc from the first belonged to the State. Mr. Duff, pp. 51 ff., argues convincingly in favour of Mommsen.).’ Dr. Daube's summary of Mr. Duff's account may be accepted; for Mr. Duff, though he is less dogmatic than Mommsen, begins his attempt ‘to reconstruct the Roman view’ (o.c. 59) with the words ‘it seems clear that Augustus regarded as his all taxation, confiscated property and the like, which did not go into the aerarium’. He is unmistakably on Mommsen's side; and his adhesion to a doctrine, entitled indeed by its authorship to respectful consideration but still somewhat surprisingly described by Mr. Duff (o.c. 51) as ‘orthodox’, invites some brief notice. The observations which follow will not be long; for they may be unnecessary.

The unique character of Roman law has been treated for centuries; hymns enough have been sung. My purpose is different: I restrict the problem to Roman classical law and therefore have intentionally added this adjective to the title. Roman private law—and I have only private law to consider here—is not the same throughout the thousand years of its history. Modern research distinguishes in the legislation of Justinian what belongs to the Byzantine epoch from what is genuinely classical. Secondly, we now know more about pre-classical law so that we are better able to contrast classical with archaic law. A third reason for a revision of our view is the developed study of the oriental, the cuneiform, law, and some new research in Greek law. Owing to this threefold progress we can try to sketch the unique character of Roman classical law in comparison with other laws. I discern three periods of Roman law: archaic (or pre-classical) up to 150 B.C., classical from 150 B.C. to A.D. 300, Byzantine (or post-classical) from A.D. 300 to 565. These are the usual periods, except that I carry back the classical period to 150 B.C. I know that there are transitions; but if we take the years 150 B.C. and A.D. 300, we shall roughly mark the turning points and have before us three distinct periods of Roman law.

True medallions, in the sense in which the Roman bronze medallions proper have been defined, were unknown to the classical and Hellenistic Greeks. We have no evidence that their governments ever adopted, the practice of striking special coin-like pieces for distribution to selected individuals on special or solemn occasions. When they struck coins of unusually large size, such as the 50-litra Demareteia, to take the most obvious example, they appear to have done so because sudden wealth—that of Carthage, in Gelon's case—had come their way and lured them into ostentatious and reckless coining. In spite of their abnormal size these pieces formed part of the regular coinage and share their commemorative types with smaller pieces of the same series : they were essentially media of exchange; and neither in style nor content do they display that special character which distinguishes the majority of Roman money-medallions, or multiples in the precious metals, from the ordinary gold and silver currency. It was to commemorate his victory over Demetrius, probably in 167 b.c., and the annexation to Bactria of the Indus country that Eucratides minted his vast gold pieces of 20 Attic staters, known from the example in the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris—the most hybristic display of opulence ever perpetrated by a minting authority in ancient times.

Scholars have long discussed whether the Golden Gate is a monument of Theodosius I, as the inscription which formerly adorned it strongly suggests, or whether if was built at the same time as the walls under Theodosius II. The inscription must in the latter case apply to a minor rising of the Primicerius Iohannes in 423. However, Schneider, the last scholar who has examined the walls, points out that they were nearly complete in 422, when a rescript assigned to travelling soldiers the lower stories of the towers. Iohannes' rising was not crushed until 425; and not even Schneider has maintained that the Golden Gate was built later than the walls.

It seems more natural to suppose that the inscription refers to the conquest of Maximus by Theodosius I. In this case the gate may be assumed to have been comparable to the triumphal arches of Roman colonies, and to have stood on the original pomerium. Its existence may account for the line of the wall, which joins the Sea of Marmara after the shore has turned south-west; for the line of the fortifications is thus made considerably longer without much gain of interior space.