On the 21st of April, 1917, the embankment of the Rome-Naples railway gave way a short distance outside the Porta Maggiore: the works undertaken to repair the damage led to the discovery of a subterranean building of the greatest interest. One may say, without fear of exaggeration, that this is one of the most important discoveries ever made in Rome, and it raises a formidable number of problems archaeological, historical and artistic. It is impossible in a brief article to describe the building fully or to attempt an interpretation of the stucco reliefs that decorate it, especially as it has not yet been published in detail. I will therefore, in this short study, merely point out some of its most important characteristics and summarize the result of recent studies.

The remarkable hoard of Roman gold coins found at Corbridge, Northumberland, in September, 1911, was discovered under circumstances which did not admit of any very obvious archaeological interpretation. The point as to whether it had been “of ancient time hidden” was of considerable practical importance, inasmuch as under the law of England gold or silver objects so hidden belong to the king, while such objects if they have been accidentally lost or deliberately abandoned may belong to the person who is fortunate enough to find them. Last December, in view of the situation that had arisen, the Crown authorities requested me to look carefully into the archaeological aspects of the matter for their guidance. The result was the following report which was addressed to the Solicitor to the Treasury, by whose permission it is here printed. The coins were surrendered as treasure trove to the Crown.

The largest private donations to a municipality recorded in the Latin West are probably those which appear in an inscription from Castulo in Hispania Tarraconensis. The inscription, known only from a copy made in the sixteenth century, is very laconic; but its details are self-consistent, and its phraseology resembles that of another inscription from Castulo whose original survives. Huebner, who had to reject as forgeries many inscriptions from this town, accepted the text as genuine, and his judgement was endorsed by Dessau, who included it in his Inscripttones Latinae Selectae.

In July, 1924, we travelled from Afion-kara-hissar through the district of the Pentapolis to Dineir (Apameia), and thence to Chivril on the edge of the Eumeneian plain. After visiting most of the villages near Ishekli (Eumeneia) we went northward via Seljukler to join the railway at Ushak; the objects mentioned below were seen in the course of this journey.

Mrs. I. Henderson has recently presented a novel interpretation of the function of the Quaestio Repetundarum, partly in contradiction of my own discussion elsewhere of the evidence for the penalty of the extortion laws. I there argued that the penalty remained financial from the Lex Calpurnia to the Lex Cornelia, and that the frequent, but not universal, withdrawal into exile of condemned persons was due mainly to fear of fresh prosecution on more serious charges arising from the extortion case and reinforced by the praeiudicium, and that only the Lex Iulia transformed custom into law by specifying the capital penalty for the more heinous forms of extortion. Against this Mrs. Henderson maintains that the penalty for extortion under the Acilian and later laws was normally capital, though some-times less than capital, and explains this dualism by a new interpretation of the powers of the Gracchan Judices, which if accepted calls for a general change of ideas about the development of the Quaestio system.

In the most southerly group of desert routes between Syria and Mesopotamia Palmyra lies at the cross-roads. The north-eastward route from Damascus to Circesium is crossed by the eastward route from Emesa, now Homs, to Babylonia. Palmyra owes this key-position first to its precious springs and secondly to the fact that here the natural traffic lines from west to east debouch from the Syrian mountains into the head of the eastwardlooking basin of the Wadi el Khorr, a winter tributary of the Euphrates. Nor were these obvious routes the sole possibility. At Circesium the Euphrates may be crossed: at its eastward turn the lower river and its valley-dwellers become dominant—here runs the modern frontier between Syria and Iraq. Avoiding this control, caravan routes, negotiable solely by those with intimate knowledge of the waste and its people, lead direct to the heart of Mesopotamia and onwards to the Persian Gulf. As between East and West, Palmyra, an island in the desert, offered both a mart for exchange and an essential staging-point for direct through traffic. Its possessors were by nature masters of the situation; and, while they might be subject to the cultural or political influences of either East or West, their geographical isolation secured for them an independence founded upon pre-eminent experience of desert ways, which constituted them the natural masters and middlemen of the caravan routes that met and branched or crossed in their oasis.

The document which forms the subject of this article is from the collection of papyri in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. It is published here by kind permission of the Museum authorities in advance of its appearance as no. 24 in the Catalogue of Brooklyn Museum Papyri, which is being prepared by Dr. John Shelton. We are very grateful to Dr. Shelton for drawing our attention to this papyrus and for generously allowing us, because of its exceptional importance, to publish it separately in this article.

The papyrus contains a Latin document relating to a unit of the Roman army stationed in Egypt. It is written in three columns on the recto of a piece of papyrus measuring approximately 27 × 18 cm. The verso, which according to Dr. Shelton contains a Greek private letter, has no apparent connection. Although the papyrus shows damage on all four sides, it is probable that the right-hand edge is preserved in lines 12 f. of the third column (see the notes ad loc). As it can be demonstrated that not much is lost at the left of the first column, what survives is likely to be the greater part of the original width. All three columns are incomplete at both top and bottom, and the loss here is much harder to estimate. Format and date are discussed in detail in section iv. It is here sufficient to say that it belongs in or near the year A.D. 215, and that in content it closely resembles two known papyri classed as pridiana, which have recently been re-edited as RMR 63 and 64.

The find in Roman Britain of a Latin writing tablet bearing a still legible ink inscription is of so unusual a nature that it has seemed worthwhile to offer a provisional account of it to readers of the Journal. It is probable that more of the text will eventually prove readable than I have managed to decipher; for I have failed to obtain a continuous text. Apart from the difficulties inherent in reading Latin cursive writing, the faintness at many places of the ink, discoloration of the surface, and above all, the frequently misleading horizontal grain of the wood offer obstacles that I have failed to surmount. It is also possible that laboratory treatment will succeed at some future date in separating the ink more clearly from its background, at least for photographic purposes. Experiments to achieve this are in progress, but they must inevitably proceed cautiously and therefore slowly. I believe, however, that enough of the writing has been made out to establish with reasonable certainty the type of text concerned, and that further success in decipherment, while it will fill in details, will not change the essential framework into which those details are to be fitted. It has seemed right, in consequence, not to delay longer but to submit the results achieved so far to the judgment of colleagues and hope that their criticisms and suggestions will make good the writer's failings. The accompanying plate (XII) will supply a means of check and supplement.

When in the spring of 1929 the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society was about to begin excavations on the site of Venta Icenorum (Caistor-next-Norwich) Sir George Macdonald prophesied, in an article in The Observer, that among the results of the work would be a useful increase in our knowledge of the Roman pottery of the East Anglian area. It is not inappropriate, therefore, that an account of three pottery kilns found at Caistor in 1930 and of the pottery associated with them should be included in a publication dedicated to Sir George.

In the year 13 of our era C. Silius and L. Munatius Plancus held the fasces, known characters. But the inscribed record presents a double and intricate problem. First, nomenclature. Is Silius by his full and proper style to be registered as ‘C. Silius Caecina Largus’ ? Second, was there also a consul suffect—and was there perhaps another suffectus or a pair of suffecti ?

That Silius was polyonymous, Borghesi claimed, and so did Mommsen. The persuasion obtained in the standard works of reference. Recently, however, a firm and reasoned negation was issued. It seemed cogent. None the less, it failed to win the assent of the scholar whose authority stands paramount in this field. And somebody else has essayed a refutation, reinstating ‘C. Silius Caecina Largus’. It is expedient to look into the matter again. That can be done briefly, thanks to the arguments already adduced—and no fresh evidence accrues.

It is now some ten years since Sir Flinders Petrie entrusted to me, with the wish that I would edit them, one Latin and seven Greek tablets acquired by him in Egypt and placed among the collections of University College, London. The Greek tablets I edited in the 1927 volume of Ancient Egypt. I began the decipherment of the Latin tablet at the same time but then laid it aside, and its publication has remained ever since in abeyance, one of the tasks to be attempted ‘at a more convenient season.’ The primary cause of the delay was the pressure of more urgent work; but I must confess that a contributory factor was the difficulty of decipherment. Not only is the hand by no means among the easier examples of Latin cursive (the writer makes little distinction in form between certain of his characters) but, more seriously, the outside of the tablet had been so much rubbed and defaced as to obscure the writing in many places.

Widely ranging arguments, and often equally wide perplexity, have now for a long time been aroused by the internal monetary problems of Diocletian's coinage reform, as a glance at any recent bibliography will show. Two primary factors connected with the reform are now generally recognized: first, that gold and silver coins of the reformed series were marked with their weight as bullion by numerals which defined them as fractions, respectively, of the gold and silver pound (Ξ = 60 on gold, and XCVI = 96 on silver), and secondly that by A.D. 301, when Diocletian issued his Maximal Edict, the prices for an enormous variety of commodities were quoted in terms of the ‘denarius communis’, of which the Edict rating (which was, it should be emphasized, a maximum rating and by no means necessarily general) gave 50,000 as the price of a pound of gold. What has remained most in dispute is the denominational value of Diocletian's new large copper coin (with laureate head on obverse and Genio Populi Romani reverse, weighing about 10 gm.), now commonly termed the ‘follis’, and its relationship both downwards with the new and smaller radiate-obverse copper piece and upwards with the XCVI silver. Interpretations have varied very widely indeed, and the 10 gm. coin has been equated with as little as 2 ‘denarii communes’ at one end of the scale and as much as 20 or 25 at the other.

The interpretation of the figure-scenes from the big hall of the villa of Publius Fannius Synistor, near Boscoreale, built and decorated probably soon after the middle of the first century B.C., has been much discussed during the half-century since their discovery. No theory yet put forward, however, has met with general acceptance; and indeed there is no general agreement on the question whether the characters are taken from Greek religious mythology, Hellenistic history, or Roman daily life. The theory here advanced is in many points conjectural, but it does, I think, take one step forward on solid ground. If that step be accepted, it becomes virtually certain that the subject is historical.

The surviving figures and groups have been wrenched from their decorative setting, which has been largely destroyed; but it was described and partly drawn by Barnabei, and its character and place in the decoration of the villa as a whole have been admirably interpreted by Beyen.

Vindonissa, the only Roman legionary fortress in Switzerland, was occupied during the first century A.D. to guard the frontier against Germany. Because of the exactly defined period of habitation the pottery of this place is of special importance.

The legionary fortress at Vindonissa is situated on a plateau between two rivers and on the north side the ground slopes steeply down to the R. Aare. Some time after the foundation of the fortress, which is probably to be dated shortly after the Varus catastrophe of A.D. 9, perhaps after the third decade of the first century, the soldiers began to throw all the rubbish of the fortress down this slope.

This paper revisits the political history of the Roman Republic in the third decade of the first century b.c. Its central contention is that the dominant feature of the period was neither a reshuffle of alliances within the ‘Sullan’ senatorial nobility nor the swift demise of Sulla's legacy. Attention should be focused instead on some crucial policy issues which attracted debate and controversy in that period: the powers of the tribunes, the corn supply of Rome, the rôle of the Senate, the revival of the census, and the full inclusion of the Allies into the citizen body. The political strategy of M. Aemilius Lepidus (cos. 78 b.c.) and its medium-term repercussions also deserve close scrutiny in this connection.

The papyrus which bears the Yale inventory number 1528 (pl. i) was purchased from an Egyptian dealer in Paris in the summer of 1933. Nothing is known of its place of origin. It is a rectangular sheet of good quality and colour, frayed but not seriously damaged. The writing is confined to the recto. The presence of a heading, and the long vacant space below the three lines of the second column shown that the document is complete. Paragraphing is indicated in lines 4 and 17 of the first column by the projection to the left of the first two letters of the name Τοῦσϰος. Otherwise the left margin is even, and the right margin fairly so. There is a natural fold between the two columns, indicating that the papyrus was handled as a diptych.