This brief and summary survey of a large and complicated problem falls into three main parts: (I) Prolegomena, or general considerations; (2) remarks on the topography and history of the Vatican zone in ancient times; (3) an account of the pre-Constantinian shrine of St. Peter beneath the high altar of the Vatican Basilica.

The publication 1 of the fragment at first missing from the upper left-hand corner of the tabula Hebana (AE 1949, 215) so far confirms some conjectures which I made in a talk at Cambridge in 1951 that I am moved to print the briefest note about a point which does not seem so far to have been mentioned elsewhere.

Livy preserves two explanations of the Senatorial decision of 445 B.C. to suspend the election of consuls and to confer imperium consulare upon tribuni militum. One, which he himself accepts, is that it was a political compromise designed to appease agitation for plebeian representation in the consulship. The other is that the military situation demanded the appointment of at least three holders of imperium. Until some forty years ago the majority of scholars, even if ready to admit that the reform had military advantages, joined with Livy in laying the chief emphasis on the political motive. More recently, however, the tendency has been to disown the connection between the innovation and the struggle for office. The change is explained as necessitated wholly by growing military commitments or administrative needs. My purpose here is merely to defend once again the traditional account that the decision of 445 B.C. marked an important stage in the Struggle of the Orders and to remove the major difficulties which have discouraged its acceptance.

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).

Without attempting a serious commentary at this stage, I present two short inscriptions in Greek and Latin, from the Eastern Desert of Egypt. They are from the 1936–7 field notes of the late Dr. H. A. Winkler, author of Rock Drawings of Southern Upper Egypt (1938–9), and are published by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society, the Latin on fig. 14, the Greek from Winkler's facsimile which is clear and complete.

These two inscriptions come from a typical Eastern Desert cave-shelter, in the west rock-face of Wādi Menīh at the point in the Berenice road where it is crossed by the line of latitude 25° 37′ N.

Several versions of Constantius Chlorus' invasion and recovery of Britain in A.D. 296 have appeared in recent decades. These accounts agree in some respects, but differ widely in others, and the whole episode seems to need further study.

The literary evidence for the campaign is mostly contained in the contemporary panegyric addressed to Constantius by an unknown author and ascribed to Eumenius (Panegyrici Latini, ed. Baehrens, Incert. Pan. VIII, 11–19). To this may be added Incert. Pan. VI, 5; Aurelius Victor, De Caes. 39, 42; Eutropius 9, 22; and Orosius 7, 25.

Among the musings of Marcus Aurelius a recurrent theme is the narrow range of fame, which covers only a ‘corner’ of the entire earth, while the entire earth itself (the globe) is only a point in the universe. These ideas were not novel, but they are boldly worded and impressive as coming from a man who was obeyed from Clyde to Tigris. Just then ancient geography had reached its widest horizons: Ptolemy had stretched the known earth half-way round the globe from the Isles of the Blest (the Canaries) eastward to the capital of the Sinae beyond the port of Cattigara. One Alexander is named as sailing along this farthest eastern coast, and that there were other seamen like him is suggested by a Chinese notice of some merchants who arrived at the Tongking frontier in A.D. 166 and posed, or were mistaken, as envoys from An-tun, King of Ta-ts'in.

There survive from a number of places in Western Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean inscriptions recording census registrations. They are undated, but were probably engraved in the late third or early fourth century A.D., when Diocletian and his colleagues and successors are known to have been active in carrying out censuses to serve as the basis of their new system of taxation. All are fragmentary, but some are of sufficient length to yield results of some statistical value on the distribution of landed property, on the density of the agricultural population, and on the proportion of slave to free labour. In view of the extreme paucity of any statistical data for the ancient world they are worth analysis.

Although Cyrenaica ranked, under the earlier Empire, as a senatorial province, it was too exposed to barbarian attack to be left undefended; and there is ample evidence that it had its own garrison—probably a small one—from the first century A.D. onwards. This garrison was evidently inadequate to prevent the outbreak of the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 115, and may consequently have been strengthened; but it was the crisis of the mid-third century that showed all too clearly the insecurity of the isolated Cyrenaican plateau. The Marmaric tribes invaded the province, and Cyrene itself seems to have been overwhelmed. The Diocletianic reforms resulted in the creation of a new ‘middle-eastern’ command under the Dux Aegypti Thebaidos utrarumque Libyarum, but the loss of the chapter of the Notitia Dignitatum enumerating the units stationed in the two Libyas makes it difficult to reconstruct the military organization of these provinces at the end of the fourth century. The works of Synesius help to fill the lacuna and at the same time provide a vivid picture of life in an invaded area.

Three times Silius Italicus refers to the Gallic catastrophe in a somewhat startling manner : Pun. I, 525 f. ‘Gallisque ex arce fugatis Arma revertentis pompa gestata Camilli’; 4, 150 f. ‘ipse tumens atavis Brenni se stirpe ferebat Crixus et in titulos Capitolia capta trahebat’; 6, 555 f. ‘Allia et infandi Senones captaeque recursat Attonitis arcis facies.’ Taken individually each passage can be explained away: ‘ex arce fugatis’ may be a metrical substitute for ‘de arce depulsis’ Crixus may boast and exaggerate; and in their terror at the news of Lake Trasimene the Romans may see more than actually happened. Taken together, however, the three statements very strongly suggest that Silius had in mind a story according to which not only the city but the Capitol itself was captured. Or did Vergil's ‘Galli per dumos aderant arcemque tenebant’ (see below), though not actually misinterpreted by him, create a formal pattern in his mind, which he applied without considering its content ? Silius apart, tradition is unanimous in making the geese and the prompt action of Manlius save the Capitol; in fact the defenders do not even suffer any casualties.

Fragment XI of the Ostia Fasti relates to the early years of Vespasian. It contains a few letters entire from four lines, with the upper half of a fifth line, and reads:—

.. Caesarem Vespasianum…

…Sallinius…

..Vespasian…

(vacat) Licin…

…iusTr..

The fragment is one of the few which Degrassi was unable to trace, and the text depends on a MS. copy supplied to Wickert by Kristoferson.

This paper, a companion to one printed in vol. XLI of the Journal, describes discoveries made by air reconnaissance during the eight summers 1945–52 in the southern half of Roman Britain. The area concerned, extending from the English Channel to Yorkshire, embraces the whole of the civil district of the province and the highland regions of Wales and the Pennines that were throughout much of the Roman occupation under direct military control (pl. VIII). There is a broad difference, too, in the terrain of these two parts. The civil district corresponds to the lowland zone of Britain, which includes the most fertile soils and to-day the largest proportion of arable land. In Wales and the Pennines grass and moorland predominate. This difference is reflected in the results obtained by air reconnaissance. In the Midlands and the south, structures of the Roman period do not commonly survive above ground in open country, and by far the largest number of new discoveries have come from observation of crop marks, revealing features otherwise hidden. In Wales and the Pennines the aerial camera has recorded military remains, already known as they are visible on the surface as earthworks; and here additions to knowledge have come when such a site happened to be under a cereal crop rather than grass, or when earthworks were seen that escaped previous notice on the ground. The scale of the flying has varied much from one year to another in the period under review. In 1945 and 1946 the flying over southern Britain only amounted to a few hours; there were rather more in 1947, but most of the results here described were obtained in the years 1948–1951. This period included the exceptionally dry summer of 1949, when many features were seen that have not been visible at any other time.

Of all the Ptolemaic kings and queens of Egypt none met so intensely dramatic a fate as the last Cleopatra, and of none are the closing days more minutely described. In these circumstances it is all the more remarkable that there is no surviving record, even approximate, of the date of her death, nor, so far as I am aware, has any modern historian seriously attempted to determine it.

We may commence our investigation with the capture of Alexandria by Octavian. The date of this event is known from one literary source, Orosius (VI, 19, 16), who probably derived his information from Livy, and one inscription, the Fasti Antiates (CIL 12, p. 248= x, 6638). Both give the date as 1 August, and this may be taken as correct.

The Greek and Roman Department of the British Museum has acquired a Roman portrait head in alabaster of unknown provenience, 16·5 cm. in height (pll. XVII, XVIII, 1). The eyebrows and chin are chipped and the nose is missing. The colour varies from ivory to light brown, and the softness of the alabaster has permitted very delicate surface modelling. The head is that of an old man with short hair, which lies in concentric circles around the head, and a laurel wreath tied in a knot at the back. The worn face shows a pronounced asymetry which emphasizes its individuality. Under the broad rectangular forehead the eyes are deep set and underlined by dark shadows. The Adam's apple protrudes and is emphasized by the slack skin of the throat.