The theme of this paper is geographical space as intellectual, as symbolic space. Recent scholarship has had much to say about the ways in which the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean interacted with one another, created myths of affinity or established identity by emphasizing what distinguished them from their neighbours. What though is the significance of a landscape where there is next to no human cultivation, which you can never hope to inhabit and across which only a very few can wander? What finally is the meaning of a landscape offering nothing but heat, dust, thirst, and a profusion of magical, homicidal serpents? I propose therefore a journey into the desert, a journey into the Greco-Roman imagination.

During the fourth century A.D. the coins issued from the different mints of the Roman empire commonly bore, in addition to the name of the city where the mint was situated, a letter or number indicating the particular shop of the mint in which each coin was struck. In a recent article I made a study of the tetradrachms issued at Alexandria during the first twelve years of the reign of Diocletian— i.e. till the date when the Egyptian currency was assimilated to that of the rest of the empire—to see what evidence could be found as to the existence of marks distinguishing the shops in this series: and I propose now to pass the whole of the Roman tetradrachm issues of Alexandria in brief review for the same purpose.

The hippodrome at Thessaloniki is well known as the scene of the bloodbath of A.D. 390, so vividly described by Gibbon. This occurred when the emperor Theodosius, enraged that his magister militum Buthericus had been killed in a riot, enticed people into the hippodrome by the promise of games, and had between 7,000 and 15,000 put to death. But apart from the events connected with this incident, the ancient sources are silent concerning the hippodrome (with the exception of a single inscription which will be discussed below). This important monument of the ancient city must be reconstructed indirectly, therefore, by employing the accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, and by examining recent archaeological finds in the light of the mediaeval city-plan and of what is known of hippodromes elsewhere in the Roman world.

The service books of the Eastern Church contain a large number of monostrophic hymns, or Troparia, which originally followed a verse (στἰχος) from a psalm or canticle, and were therefore also called Stichera. As hymnography developed, their connexion with the content of the Stichos was loosened, and their number increased. The term ‘Sticheron’ was, however, maintained for this new type of Troparion, which was inserted into the Office so freely that it is not surprising to find a great authority on Eastern liturgy speaking of ‘the ivy of poetry’ which had strangled psalmody.

Investigations into the Stichera have not been carried out on a large scale by students of Byzantine hymnography, because they were mainly interested in the study of the two major forms, Kontakion and Kanon. These two, indeed, offered so many problems, both of structure and content, that the study of the vast number of short hymns was set aside. The prevailing opinion that the Stichera were of little or no poetic value contributed to this neglect; and, in fact, many of them are nothing more than slight variations of the text of the preceding verse, and it would be a long task to sort out those Stichera which have literary merit.

During the last three years systematic application of air reconnaissance to Romano-British studies has continued: this paper provides a summary of the discoveries, bringing up to date accounts of earlier surveys already published in this Journal. The period included the remarkably dry summer of 1959, when a prolonged drought, comparable in recent years only with that of 1949, caused extreme parching of vegetation throughout July, particularly in the main river valleys of the Midlands, in the Welsh Marches and over wide areas of eastern England. This favoured archaeological air reconnaissance. Though 1960 was an exceptionally wet season, the broken weather beginning in July was in fact preceded by a dry spell in June, at least in central England, when for a few weeks the ‘crop-marks’ were very clear indeed.

A reassessment of the problem of Vasa Murrina based upon a study of a fluorspar vase in A. Loewental's possession was recently published in this Journal (XXXIX, 1949, 31 ff.) by Loewental and myself. The late C. E. N. Bromehead very kindly added a ‘Mineralogical Note’, afterwards elaborated in Antiquity (XXVI, 1952, 65 ff.), supporting his view that the true Murrines were fluorspar. But even by 1952 Bromehead was unable to cite any actual fluorspar vase of Roman date whose present whereabouts is known, other than the two which Loewental and I had published. He did, however, refer to Corsi's mention (1845) of ‘two antique fluorspar vases found in Rome, one in the Museo Kircheriano… another in the possession of Signor Gillet-Laumont’. This Kircheriano specimen is also mentioned by Middleton as late as 1892. Bromehead also cites independent statements by Egglestone and Sheppard that ‘Blue John’ vases had been found at Pompeii and Herculaneum respectively.

The story that beavers self-castrate when cornered by hunters appears in a range of Roman sources, both poetry and prose, from the end of the Republic onward. This myth is a product of the rôle that ‘beaver testicles’ played in Roman luxury trade and medicine. At the same time, it serves as a literary figure for the fraught relations between Rome and the provinces from which these, and other, luxury goods were imported.

In JRS XXXV, 1945 (p. 98), Mr. Hugh Last proposed that any further discussion of the SC Calvisianum appended to the fifth edict of Cyrene should start from a review of the Republican law of repetundae and of Mommsen's doctrines in Röm. Strafrecht (SR) 705 f. This service was performed by Mr. A. N. Sherwin-White in PBSR 1949, 5 f. The object of the present article is not to re-argue the controversy (Mommsen's errors have too often been the dragon's teeth), but to inquire into the terms of the problem.

At the end of the first book of Cicero's De diuinatione there occurs a tantalising passage containing a specific mention of the ‘Isiac diviners.’ It used to be attributed to Ennius by the earlier editors of that author, but since the time of Bothe this view has not been generally accepted. The passage runs ‘non habeo denique nauci Marsum augurem, non vicanos haruspices, non de circo astrologos, non Isiacos coniectores, non interpretes somniorum; non enim sunt ii aut scientia aut arte divini.’ The text is sound and there is no variant reading for the words ‘Isiaci coniectores’ which interest us most particularly in this study. The Italian colour of the passage (cf. ‘Marsus augur, de circo astrologi’) excludes the possibility of a Greek origin, and the question is merely to whom, Ennius or Cicero, the words ‘Isiaci coniectores’ should be assigned. It must be admitted that the words ‘non habeo … divini’ are not metrical and it would be hopeless to defend them in their present form as the ipsissima verba of Ennius. But the possibility that they contain a more or less close paraphrase of Ennius is suggested by the use of ‘non habeo … nauci,’ a phrase which Cicero never used. ‘Isiacus’ too is a rare word, which does not appear elsewhere in Republican Latin (v. infra pp. 58, 59, n. 21 and 22).

Two attitudes, broadly speaking, are possible to the problem of dating the Notitia Dignitatum. (1) We may suppose that the original document from which our text is derived was from first to last an official copy kept in the principal chancellery of the Western Empire at Ravenna, that the text suffered no material alteration in its subsequent history, and that, in consequence, items, such as late military formations whose period can be fixed, may safely be used to date the picture of the Empire presented by the document as a whole. Or (2) we may regard the original as a copy (perhaps an early one) which had passed into private hands and had suffered interpolation of items of later date.