In this paper I propose to limit myself strictly to one particular aspect of Romano-British ethnology, the physical type, and to consider what light the available evidence throws on the general problem of the ethnological affinities of the Romano-British population. The subject naturally falls into three parts, the actual physical type or types of the Romano-Britons, their origin, and their relation to the subsequent population of England. The question was first studied as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century by Thurnam, by him and Davis and by Davis alone in general, and, on a particular site, Frilford near Oxford, by Rolleston. Pitt-Rivers in his excavations in Cranborne Chase and elsewhere made a specially valuable contribution. These original contributions were discussed by Beddoe and Ripley amongst others.

Since Sir Henry Stuart Jones has included Mithraism among his many interests, it seems appropriate to offer to him on this occasion some remarks on its general significance. No phenomenon in Imperial paganism has attracted as much attention, and this is natural.

Virtus, Albine, est pretium persolvere verum

quis in versamur, quis vivimus rebus, potesse.

Let us make another provisional attempt to determine the pretium verum of Mithraism.

We see in it something of eastern worship detached from its native content and developed in a new milieu; apparently it had no oecumenical organization; certainly it tolerated other gods, and lent itself to an unchecked local diversification of forms. In all these respects it was essentially on a par with the other ‘oriental religions in Roman paganism.’ Nevertheless, it differed from them in various significant ways. The normal exclusion of women and the moral demands made of the initiate have often been remarked; but that is not all.

This article examines the implications of Galen's newly-rediscovered Peri Alupias (On Consolation from Grief) for our understanding of the function and contents of public libraries in late second-century a.d. Rome. As a leading intellectual figure at Rome, Galen's detailed testimony substantially increases what we know of imperial public libraries in the city. In particular, the article considers Galen's description of his use of the Palatine libraries and a nearby storage warehouse, his testimony on the contents, organization, and cataloguing of the books he found there, and his use of provincial public libraries for the dissemination of his own works.

Palladio's version of the Corinthian Order (fig. 6) is not, so far as one can see, taken directly from any Roman building but it is thoroughly Roman in inspiration and based on Palladio's careful study of ancient Roman buildings. The design and detail relate most closely to buildings of the time of Trajan and Hadrian but a similar order could have been found on any Roman building erected from the end of the Augustan period onwards. It may be seen that there are several elements in the design which are derived from Greek versions of the Ionic Order: the architrave with its three divisions and crowning mouldings, the plain continuous frieze and the cornice with dentils. One feature of the design, however, immediately distinguishes it from that of Greek Ionic and this is the presence of a series of brackets—modillions or consoles, as they are variously called—spaced at regular intervals below the projecting part of the cornice and serving to give it visible means of support. Between the modillions there are square panels or coffers, framed by a decorated moulding and each containing a rosette in relief.

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.

In A.D. 530 the Emperor Justinian gave orders that a commission of lawyers should take the 1,500 libri containing the works of the Classical Roman jurists, and condense them into a single work, the Digesta or Pandectae. His purpose was that the result should be a coherent whole, stripped of repetition and contradiction. Fortunately for us, what they actually produced was something which is quite different, and belongs to a type which is familiar to all modern students of the Ancient World: a sourcebook. For what the commission in fact did was to arrange the work by topics, and under each topic to assemble a series of examples of legal reasoning extracted from the surviving works of Classical jurists. Nearly all of these jurists had worked in the Antonine and Severan age, with a few belonging to the period of the Tetrarchy.

Modern writers have remarked with surprise upon the absence of a postal service under the Roman Republic. The fact that Latin literature makes no mention of any such service would not, taken alone, be sufficient to prove that it did not exist; but Suetonius in his account of the institution of the Imperial post by Augustus speaks as if it were a new departure in the history of Roman administration, and it is clear from many incidental references in Cicero's correspondence that in his time there was no government postal service which an official could make use of. A provincial governor sent his despatches by one of his own lictors or orderlies (statores) or by the tabellarii of the tax-farming companies, there being no other means of transmission available. “Your orderly has brought me two letters from you,” writes Cicero, then governor of Cilicia, to Sallustius, proquaestor of Syria. “I have thought it advisable to send my orderlies and lictors to you with despatches,” he writes about the same time to his own quaestor.

The stamps on Roman tiles found in Gloucestershire are sufficiently numerous and varied to make it worth while publishing an illustrated list of them with full details. They fall into two categories.

(A) Tiles stamped R P G (no. i below), = Rei publicae Glevensium, R P G I I V M E T P G, = rei publicae Glevensium duoviris M et P G (no. 2), R P G Q Q I V L FLOR ET C C R S M, = rei publicae Glevensium quinquennalibus Iulio Floro et C …. (no. 7), and also with other names (nos. 4-6), have been found in Gloucester, in the Roman cemetery at Barnwood near by, and at the Roman villas of Hucclecote and Ifold, near Painswick (fig. 3), and it has been suggested that their distribution should serve as a clue to the extent of the territorium of the colonia of Glevum in the surrounding country. They were first discussed by Haverfield and interpreted by him as municipal tile stamps, the R P G standing for ‘res publica Glevensium’ while the other letters indicate the names of the magistrates of the colonia who, in the municipal government, corresponded to the consuls of the Roman Republic.

In A.D. 385, after more than a decade together, Augustine parted from his in many ways mysterious first partner, ‘la mère d'Adeodat’. The woman (hereafter ‘Anonyma 1’) was taken away from him. She returned to Africa vowing never to have sexual relations with another man, and left the child with Augustine. But he was unable to tolerate celibacy and took another woman (henceforth ‘Anonyma 2’) to while away the two years until his marriage. In the meantime he still missed his first one, and the wound left by the separation failed to heal. Many scholars have cited and discussed Augustine's description of the episode, but few have commented on the language, which is highly significant, or its implications for Augustine's biography. This article will begin with a selective commentary on Conf. 6.15.25 and continue with a reinterpretation of a key text in Augustine's marital theology. It will then trace some of the broader legal and historical issues raised by Augustine's account in the Confessions to make some new suggestions about the chronology, constraints, and nature of his relationship with Anonyma 1. This study, it is hoped, will be of general interest to Romanists for the insight into the ambiguities of Roman marriage and quasi-marital relationships provided by Augustine's Confessions.

I. When a consular turned to the writing of history he had full years of experience behind him; and the reminiscences of elderly survivors, not missed by an alert youth, carried a man nearly a century into the past. The mass of knowledge thus accruing has not always been taken into account by adepts of Quellenforschung.

A senator's employment could hardly fail to affect his beliefs and opinions. It might be expected to leave traces here and there in his writings. For Cornelius Tacitus ascertainment comes against impediments: reticence all through. He even proclaimed a distaste for ‘iactantia’ when adducing his praetorship and priesthood on the occasion of the Ludi Saeculares held in 88. For occupations abroad he chose to reveal only the four years' absence from Rome not long after that season. That disclosure was likewise made in strict relevance to his theme. The command of a legion will be assumed without discomfort.

This conflict has for moderns a perennial interest, second only to that which is excited by the Peloponnesian war. The superior attractiveness of the struggle between the Greek cities, as felt by readers in general, is a supreme testimony to the genius of Thucydides; since in intrinsic importance for the world's history, his theme is far inferior to that which was handled by Polybius and by Livy. At the end of the Peloponnesian war few men can have foreseen the rise of the Macedonian kings, to which it contributed; when Second Punic war finished, it was obvious that the ultimate control by Rome of the whole area of ancient civilisation was assured. For those who care less for the form of historical records than for the value of events, the second and decisive long-drawn duel between Romans and Carthaginians must ever possess a fascination which belongs to few other periods in the history of mankind. There is a continual flow of publications dealing with its incidents and its manifold aspects.

Numerous inscriptions from different parts of the Empire, and particularly from North Africa, testify to the munificence of the urban aristocracy. By munificence I mean the spending of wealthy individuals on, for example, monuments or projects of construction of one sort or another for their cities, or handouts of money, food or other commodities to their fellow-citizens. The significance of munificence from an economic viewpoint can be readily appreciated: it would not be an exaggeration to say that the prosperity of the cities rested in large part on the generosity of their leading citizens. In this paper, however, I will be concerned with some of the political and institutional implications of munificence. If the cities were financially dependent on their aristocracies, then the possession of wealth and the willingness to spend would clearly hold the key to both the acquisition and the retention of power. At the same time, we might expect some form of public control to have been exerted over aristocratic spending. In this connection, it may be significant that much of the expenditure of which we have record was incurred by individuals when they assumed magistracies or priesthoods or entered the local council. When would the wealthy have more readily submitted to financial levies than in the context of election victories? On the other hand, would it have been necessary to exact contributions from successful politicians, who would perhaps have shown their gratitude—and self-esteem—without any prompting through some form of public expenditure ? If any were inclined to hesitate, would they not have responded when reminded of the liberality of their predecessors ? In fact, it is not difficult to show that the dictates of the law, the weight of custom, and personal considerations and motives are all relevant; to determine the relative importance of the three factors is a more formidable task.

John Mauropous, an eleventh-century Metropolitan of Euchaïta, has long been commemorated in the service books of the Orthodox Church. The Synaxarion for the Office of Orthros on 30th January, the day dedicated to the Three Fathers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom, tells how the festival was instituted by Mauropous and describes him as ‘the well-known John, a man of great repute and well-versed in the learning of the Hellenes, as his writings show, and moreover one who has attained to the highest virtue’. In western Europe something was known of him certainly as early as the end of the sixteenth century; his iambic poems were published for the first time by an Englishman in 1610, and his ‘Vita S. Dorothei’ in the Acta Sanctorum in 1695. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that scholars were really able to form some idea of the character and achievement of this Metropolitan of Euchaïta. Particularly important were two publications: Sathas' edition in 1876 of Michael Psellus' oration on John, and Paul de Lagarde's edition in 1882 of some of John's own writings. This last contained not only the works already printed, but a number of hitherto unpublished sermons and letters, together with the constitution of the Faculty of Law in the University of Constantinople, and a short introduction containing part of an etymological poem. But there remained, and still remains, one significant omission: John's canons have been almost consistently neglected.

Some apology may seem to be required for re-opening a question that has already been discussed by so many first-rate scholars. If so, it must be found in the hope that an examination of the points I propose to raise may possibly throw fresh light on the problem as a whole, and so bring about a greater measure of agreement as to the true date of the so-called evacuation of Britain.

To begin with, I should like to make it clear that, in my opinion, there must have been in fact something like a ‘departure of the Romans.’ It is difficult to see what justification there is for Haverfield's view that this departure did not mean any great departure of persons, Roman or other, from the island. If that had been so, we should have to suppose that all the Romans who were left, whether private individuals or military and government officials, were absorbed into the new régime, out of which there gradually developed a state that became England. Everything, however, indicates that there was a distinct break between Britain as a Roman province and Britain as it was under its Saxon rulers. It is almost a contradictio in adiecto to say : ‘No one went. Some persons failed to come.’ Why did they fail to come ? Obviously because nothing remained for them to go to. Thus the only point to be determined is exactly when this severance of the far northern province from the official western government took place. Was it in 407 or 410, as has usually been supposed, or was it at some later time ?