This article has no more ambitious purpose than to sow doubt. As an inquiry into the policy of Rome in declaring war on Philip V in 200 B.C., it cannot pretend to be anything but superficial.

In England at least, studies of the question are based nowadays on the brilliant writings of M. Holleaux and the scholarly work of F. W. Walbank and A. H. McDonald, which in the main derives from Holleaux. Within thirty years or so what started as paradox has become respectable orthodoxy—which De Sanctis has resisted, but few others.

In a remarkable chapter on the Roman Campagna Sir Archibald Geikie has given the facts relating to the geological formation of those hills, which were to become later the cradle of the Roman civilisation, when the volcanic platform of the Campagna, no longer increased by fresh eruptions, was carved by subaërial agencies into the topography which it presents to-day. Among such agencies, which were both chemical and biological, may be mentioned those which prepared the vegetable soil and clothed it with oaks and beeches on the hills, with laurels and myrtles along the sea-coast, and with reeds and equiseta on the banks of the river. Then came Man, who may have watched the last gigantic natural fireworks of the Alban volcanoes from Mount Soracte, which had by that time ceased to be an island.

Colonia Caesarea was the oldest and the chief among the Pisidian coloniae which were founded by Augustus. The emperor briefly refers in the Monumentum Ancyranum to one or more colonies in Pisidia; but the reference is so slight as to give no evidence of their number or of the time or circumstances of foundation : it only shows that he planted in Pisidia at least one colony of soldiers. Strictly these garrison cities were ’Pisidian,’ not ‘in Pisidia’: they were founded on the Pisidian frontier of the empire, but the Romans expressed themselves with geographical looseness, and the looseness had a political meaning and purpose : Rome did not trouble herself about barbarian geography, but intended to substitute a Roman geography and classification.

In the course of a paper on ‘Roman Colchester’ in volume ix of this Journal, Mr. Philip Laver and the writer drew attention to the vaults which underlie Colchester castle, and claimed for them a Roman origin. The claim is based primarily upon constructional evidence which is readily appreciated in the presence of the actual remains, but the published summary perhaps requires some amplification for the reader who is unacquainted with these. Until its recent acquisition for the Colchester Corporation, the castle was in private possession, and was only partially known to the public; nor does the mass of literature which has gathered round the structure include any detailed study of its architectural problems. Hence the dark and comparatively barren vaults have hitherto escaped more than passing notice.

The following dedications are for the most part written in Greek, and made to a god who bears apparently a Greek name; but their value lies mainly in the light that they throw upon the circumstances and fate of a Roman colony in a land where the educated spoke Greek, though the uneducated rural population long retained the use of the Phrygian language. Various writers have spoken about the inevitable fate of such a small settlement of colonists originally speaking Latin. They melted gradually into the surrounding population. After a certain lapse of years they lost the Latin language, and adopted Greek. The evidence for this formerly was fragmentary; but in the series of dedications at the Sanctuary an opportunity is offered of studying the process as it evolved itself through the centuries.

That the close connection between military organization and state-organization has received little attention in this country is less to be wondered at, because this country is an exception to the rule. Being protected by its insular situation, it has had no need of a large standing army within its boundaries. On the Continent the connection appears clearly. Feudal organization was bound up with the art of fighting by knights, and was upset as much by the invention of guns and gunpowder as by economic development: monarchy was supported by mercenary armies, and the men who introduced compulsory service have more than others contributed to the founding of democracy.

But I leave it to others to judge modern history according to their own opinions, and turn to ancient history, which I know better and where the connection is more obvious, because warfare was an almost constant occupation in ancient states and military service a duty imposed upon the citizens.

A Roman funerary monument was found in 1970 in the area of ancient Corinth, in a part of the village called Kranion (κράνιον), where no other finds have yet been made. Eventually it was acquired by the Corinth Museum, where it now stands in the portico of the courtyard.

At the outset the question may well be raised whether there is any real justification for the inclusion of a paper on such a theme in the programme of a Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. Is Byzantine civilisation—in any true sense of the word—Roman at all? To judge from not a few modern studies of the life of the East Roman Empire, the answer to that question could only be in the negative. Take what is perhaps the best known brief presentment of Byzantine history—that of Professor Diehl of Paris—and the reader will not long be left in doubt. The preface proclaims the character of the Empire: Byzantium very quickly became, and was essentially, an oriental monarchy. In the sixth century, before Justinian's accession, one could well believe that the dream of a purely oriental empire was near its realisation.

This article reconsiders one of the best-known examples of Oscan epigraphy — the inscription which commemorates the testament of Vibius Adiranus to the vereiia- of Pompeii. It has been widely accepted that this inscription is a first-century a.d. copy of a second-century b.c. original, and is therefore the latest extant example of Oscan in a formal public inscription. This is challenged here with an analysis of both the linguistic detail and archaeological context, and it is shown that this inscription itself is more likely to be the original. The re-dating suggested here has implications for our understanding of language use at Pompeii; it also facilitates more accurate estimates of when the deaths of the Italic languages took place.

The year 63 has always been regarded as Cicero's year, the year in which he gained some of his most striking political successes, and in the course of which he saved the republic. Nevertheless a careful scrutiny of the evidence will convince an impartial observer that, with all his hopes of proving himself a consul popularis, Cicero was throughout the year on the defensive, that the initiative was never for a moment in his hands, and therefore that in determining the real causes of the excitements and crises which shook Rome during his consulship we must search for other agents more truly responsible for the issue of events than anything that Cicero said or planned or carried into action.

Ancient portraits are best interpreted with their busts or statue bodies and in the contexts in which they were set up and experienced, but such fully preserved monuments are not common. This article is the first publication of a new late antique portrait from Aphrodisias in Caria that has a statue body, an inscribed base, and a precise ancient setting. It was set up in honour of a provincial governor named Oecumenius, and his chlamydatus statue is now the most complete example around which others of this characteristic type of late antique statue can be understood. The monument also has wider connections outside Aphrodisias and raises interesting problems of historical interpretation in the period around a.d. 400.

This paper allows Ovid to shape a reading of Martial, and Martial to shape a reading of Ovid. It proceeds through close readings of some 40 epigrams, and is organized into three large sections respectively addressing receptions in Martial of Ovid's poetry of elegiac love (I), of exile (II), and of myth (III). The final section offers sustained discussion of Martial's early Apophoreta (Book 14) and Liber Spectaculorum. Issues addressed include genre, intertextuality, sexual vocabulary and euphemism, exile as a figure for status anxiety, the metapoetics of book production, ecphrastic movement between art and epigrammatic text, and the aesthetics of myth in the Roman arena.