“Virgile,” Sainte-Beuve wrote between fifty and sixty years ago in words which have become classical, “depuis l'heure où il parut a été le poète de la Latinité toute entière.” The saying has long been noted as marking what may be called the reinstatement of Virgil as a poet, after a period in which he had suffered some partial eclipse under the ignorant and impatient attacks of the romantic school. But to us now it may bear a further and a larger significance. The position of Virgil as a poet stands at the present day in need of no defence, but it is only during the last generation that his importance has come to be realised as an interpreter and recorder of Roman history and of the Latin civilisation. Classical study has during that generation been revolutionised. Our knowledge and understanding of the ancient world have become not only immensely greater in amount, but different in kind; year by year, almost day by day, we are getting more into touch with that world as something alive and solid. The studies of this Society, defined by us as those dealing with the history, art, and archaeology of Rome, Italy, and the Roman Empire, bear directly on our appreciation of the most learned and most comprehensive of Roman or Italian poets; and conversely Virgil's poetry yields up to the new methods and new enthusiasm of historians, artists, and archaeologists material which is so far from being exhausted that we seem still only beginning to sort it out, co-ordinate it, and use it.

L'inscription que nous publions ici a été trouvée en 1976 en surface dans un terrain de la ville médiévale non loin du grand port antique (le port de commerce); elle est entrée alors dans la collection épigraphique du musée. Bien que les conditions de la découverte, n'excluent pas que la pierre vienne d'ailleurs, il n'est peut-être pas inutile de présenter brièvement la topographie du lieu de trouvaille. Dans le terrain en question ainsi que dans les deux terrains contigus à l'Ouest on a mis au jour, notamment, des restes de murs particulièrement épais appartenant à un grand bâtiment, public de toute évidence, qui a connu plusieurs phases de constructions. Le terrain situé le plus à l'Ouest a également livré des restes d'un autre édifice d'importance comparable. Il faut ajouter que dans la parcelle centrale on dégage actuellement un bâtiment rectangulaire dont l'orientation (NO–SE) ne s'inscrit pas, chose rare, dans le plan hippodaméen de la ville (N–S ou E–O). Mais l'importance de cet endroit pour la topographie de la ville antique en général a déjà été signalée: en mettant en rapport les deux grands bâtiments du terrain ouest avec le port commercial antique ‘on est amené à penser que nous sommes probablement dans la région de l'agora antique’.

In the course of this century fashions in classical scholarship have come and gone; out in the wider world the Victorians have fallen from grace and been restored to it again; but throughout this time there seems to have endured a picture of Virgil as a Victorian poet avant la lettre, a Tennysonian aesthete, languidly and compassionately melancholic, shedding warm soft tears as he contemplates the perennial sorrows of humanity. ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum’—we are wary of that phrase now, conscious that it cannot bear the significance traditionally attributed to it; but the idea persists that Virgil views the world as a vale of tears. The modern critics do not put it quite that way—they prefer longer and less perspicuous words–but that is none the less, I think, what many of them are really saying.

This paper is meant to strengthen Hermann Dessau's contention that one man composed the Historia Augusta, not six as the collection itself attests. In the first and positive part I have gathered the soundest of his arguments together with any other evidence that seemed cogent, and supported the whole with representative citations from the text. The next three sections expose basic weaknesses in the defence of multiple authorship offered by his opponents. I will show how criticism based upon linguistic differences and upon contradictions between Scriptores fails, or at least has so far failed, to confirm the traditional view; and I will also insist upon the shallowness of that compromise which postulates far-reaching interpolation rather than original falsification. The paper ends with some suggestions about argumentation which I hope will win the sympathy of anyone else who must deal with the problem of authorship.

In this article there is presented a small group of hitherto unpublished tax receipts from Egypt which belong to A.D. 309 and 314. They come from the archive of Aurelios Isidoros, a farmer and occasional local office-holder of the village of Karanis, and with the other papyri of the same collection are in the possession of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The chief interest which these texts hold for students of Byzantine Egypt lies in the picture which they provide of the tax-collecting process and of the handling of government grain in Egypt under the tax system introduced by Diocletian, and in particular the new information which they furnish on the matter of supplementary fees and transportation charges.

The receipts of the year 309 are for deliveries of barley; that of 314 is for the payment of money for the village quota of clothing requisitioned for military purposes. We shall take up the barley receipts first, and then that for the price of the clothing.

In December, 1948, there appeared in Antiquity an article by Lady Fox in which she hoped that ‘it should not be long now before a sequence of dated Roman house types is established for Britain’. At that time, the writer was engaged on a study of the Roman villas of Britain and hoped that from the mass of data collected there would emerge such a sequence of types. But the facts would not fit. It became apparent not only that houses of all types existed at all periods but also that the early types continued long in existence and that houses of every type were being built at all periods.

Among the inscriptions acquired in Italy by Sir Charles Nicholson in the 1850's or 1860's is a small group of sepulchral texts referring to seamen of the Praetorian Fleet at Misenum.

These texts were published in 1945, with a brief commentary, by Mr. G. R. Manton, to whom I am indebted for first drawing my attention to them. They had been previously published, very inadequately, by Reeves in the Catalogue of the Museum of Antiquities of the Sydney University (1870), and four of the seven which compose the group are included (in one case from a very imperfect copy) in CIL x. Of these two are described as found ‘in agro Puteolano’, one ‘in agro Neapolitano’, and one at Misenum. Of the provenience of the remaining three and their history before passing into the hands of Sir Charles Nicholson no record can be traced. It is reasonable to suppose that, like other inscriptions in the collection, they come from the Naples region and ultimately, directly or indirectly, from the naval cemetery at Misenum.

The following pages contain a brief review of the discoveries made by French archaeologists during the difficult years of the German occupation of France.

Caesar's Gallic campaigns have inspired several important pieces of work in the field. New excavations have been undertaken at Gergovia on the ‘large’ and the ‘small’ camps as well as on the line of the double ditch joining them. These control excavations have made it possible to demonstrate the correctness of statements made by Colonel Stoffel, who had been commissioned by Napoleon III to discover traces of field-works undertaken in Caesar's campaigns. Excavations begun in the large camp at Le Bois-Des-Côtes, on the plateau of Nointel, near Clermont-de-l'Oise (Oise), were interrupted by the war. The discoveries have furnished evidence on ramparts, entrenchments, siege-works, and strategic roads, contemporary with the conquest.