At Margidunum (Notts), halfway between Leicester and Lincoln, I have been carrying on excavations for several years, through the kindness of the owner, Mr. F. W. Dobson, J.P., in one of the three fields of the site, the only field at present available. Although much remains to be done, my results serve already to substantiate the surmise that this camp formed a link in the chain of Claudian frontier-posts established by P. Ostorius Scapula in A.D. 47, between the Severn and the Trent, when (according to Bradley's generally accepted emendation of Tacitus, Annals, xii, 31, 32) detrahere arma suspectis cunctaque cis Trisantonam et Sabrinam fluvios cohibere parat. Nothing was known of this camp beyond the name Margidunum, which occurs twice in the Antonine Itineraries (Iter 6 from London to Lincoln, and Iter 8 from York to London). It is about 8 acres in extent, and is rhomboidal in outline (plan, plate VIII), recalling in this respect the Claudian camp of Hofheim. The Fosse Way, which now traverses it diagonally, was not the original Roman road. In those days, undrained marshes protected the camp on the south, and the approach from this direction was by a short causeway (bordered by ditches), which can still be traced from a natural ridge that comes near the SE. angle of the camp. Thence the main road of the camp ran diagonally across it to NW., and from the NW. angle another well-marked causeway leaves the camp and can be traced for a considerable distance to the NE.; it is still so conspicuous that it is known locally as the ‘hump.’ The entrances to the camp have not yet been explored, for the fields in which they occur are unfortunately not available for excavation.

Tentative suggestions which conform to the conditions of a scientific hypothesis may play a useful part in furthering the slow and unending process of rediscovering antiquity. Proof or disproof of them must naturally await the discovery of fresh evidence, and such evidence may never come; but if it does, its appearance is doubly welcome when it furnishes proof. It is nearly forty years since my travels in Anatolia took me into the angle of north-western Galatia, lying between north-eastern Phrygia and the southern boundary of Bithynia, which ran along the watershed between the middle Sangarius and its chief tributary the Tembrogius or Tembris. The southern side of this watershed, immediately to the west of the junction of the two rivers, is an infertile and thinly populated district, but farther west, towards the Phrygian border, the mountain slopes open out into a broad plain which runs down to the Tembrogius; near its head are the two villages of Upper (or Great) and Lower Igde-agatch. Westward of this plain and separated from it only by a low ridge is a pleasant valley, watered by an affluent of the Tembrogius.

In the past five years there have appeared a number of collections of inscriptions relevant to Roman studies and a number of collected discussions of such inscriptions, and it may be useful to record the more important of these, though without comment except where the titles are insufficiently indicative of content, for they have been, or will be, the subject of reviews. Regional corpora: G. Mihailov, Inscriptiones graecae in Bulgaria repertae vol. III, fasc. 1, giving texts from Philippopolis (1961); G. Sotgiù, Iscrizioni latine della Sardegna (1961); W. M. Calder and J. M. R. Cormack, MAMA VIII, giving texts from Lycaonia, the Pisido-Phrygian borderland and Aphrodisias (1962); A. Degrassi, ILLRP vol. 11 (1963); A. and J. Šašel, Inscriptiones latinae quae in Iugoslavia inter annos MCMXL et MCMLX repertae sunt (1963); P. Wuilleumier, Inscriptions latines des Trois Gaules (1963); R. G. Collingwood and R. P. Wright, Roman Inscriptions of Britain vol. I (1965). Specialised corpora: H. Zilliacus, Sylloge inscriptionum Christianarum veterum Musei Vaticani (1963); A. Degrassi, Inscriptiones Italiae vol. XIII, fasc. 2, Fasti anni Numani et Iuliani, Ferialia, Menologia Rustica, Parapegmata (1965); M. H. Callander, Roman Amphorae, with an index of stamps on amphorae in the Western provinces (1965). Corpora of illustrations: A. Degrassi, ILLRP, Imagines (1965); A. E. and J. S. Gordon, Album of dated Latin inscriptions from Rome and the neighbourhood, vols. II (A.D. 100–199) and III (A.D. 200–525) (1965). Collected discussions: Akte des IV. Kongress für Epigraphik, Vienna 1962; A. Degrassi, Scritti vari di antichità (1962); L. Robert, Hellenica XI-XII (1960) and XIII (1965), the latter wholly devoted to a review of MAMA VIII; a second edition of his Villes d'Asie Mineure (1962) and Noms indigènes dans l'Asie-Mineure gréco-romaine (1963). One might also mention here H. G. Pflaum's Les Carrières procuratoriennes équestres sous le haut-empire romain (1960) and the Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae from 1963 onwards, largely devoted to epigraphic studies.

Now that Septimius Severus can no longer be credited with the original construction of any one of the lines which at various times marked the British frontier, it is necessary to ask what meaning, if any, can be attached to the statements of ancient writers who ascribe to him the building of the British Wall. It may therefore be worth while to collect the available evidence as to the state of the frontier in the time of Severus, and the structural work which he may have carried out upon it.

The quest of Vergil's birthplace has been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, but the nationality and social origin of the poet are still curiously obscure. He may have been Etruscan, Celtic, Venetian, Ligurian or even Greek; and he is variously described in the ancient biographies as ‘parentibus infimis’ and ‘dignitate eques Romanus.’ To this it may be rejoined that these things matter little in any man, and not at all in the case of a great poet: stemmata quid faciunt? Yet the circumstances of his birth play their part, like the scenery of his early home, in determining the growth of a poet's mind; and for this reason it seems worth while to investigate them afresh, and to attempt a new quest after the elusive facts of Vergil's family.

In three years' time, a hundred years will have passed since Luigi Rossini issued his series of plates illustrating Roman triumphal arches in Italy, delineations of interest not only for their accuracy and beauty, but also because Rossini made them the basis of the first detailed study of the Triumphal Arch as an artistic object in itself, treated apart from the surroundings which it embellished. All subsequent workers, Curtis, Nilsson, Loewy and Noack, took the same point of view: and the object of this study is to supplement their valuable research by reconstructing the surroundings of a group of arches connected with city gates, and seeing what light is shed by the relationship of the two structures upon the development of the decorative arch. It is not always possible to reconstruct the ancient grouping in full, nor can it be recovered so easily now as a century ago. But it will emerge that there is always something to be discovered which helps to determine the place of a given arch in the environment which it decorated.

It is my purpose in this article to discuss the interpretation of the relief from the Ara Pacis, now in the Uffizi Gallery, which is traditionally known as the “Tellus relief” (plate IV).

The most recent detailed discussion of the, Ara Pacis is the monograph of F. Studniczka, which marks a considerable advance on previous work. Studniczka shows that the west door was flanked by two reliefs having to do with legendary figures of Italic or Roman history; to the south, Aeneas sacrificing, and to the north, Mars gazing on the wolf and twins; while the east door was flanked to the south by the so-called “Tellus,” facing right, and to the north by a relief representing Roma and secondary figures, facing left. That the west end was the front of the structure is made clear by the fact that the figures of the north and south sides are facing in that direction.

The time is unripe for a new edition of the Lex Irnitana — more work is needed and more text might appear — but it seems desirable, given the availability via JSTOR of the text published in JRS 76 (1986), to publish a bare list of those places where that text is in serious need of correction. Most of the corrections are due to the sharp eye of Alan Rodger, who also observes that the action de sponsione in ch. LXXXIV is not an actio famosa, but an allegation that needs a causae cognitio and hence the intervention of the praetor.

The Roman remains at Bath, dominated by the stately thermal establishment, have always been associated in geography and in archaeology with the goddess Sulis-Minerva. The famous pediment of her temple, found when the eighteenth-century Pump Room was built, has long been accounted one of the most remarkable manifestations of Romano-British art; its richly carved reliefs have always invited restoration; and they at once received it, somewhat sketchily from Englefield and most ingeniously from Samuel Lysons in 1802 (pl. XXIII). So convincing, indeed, was the main outline of Lyson's reconstruction that it held the field and remained the basis of all subsequent proposals, including that so carefully elaborated by the late A. J. Taylor. The discovery of the stones carried with it the site of the temple; for the blocks cannot have fallen far. It lay below the Pump Room, on the north side of the sacred pool whose copious hot springs were enclosed by the Romans in an irregular polygonal basin. The sanctity of the spring, which seems only later to have been roofed, is proved by the many coins and the leaden tablet inscribed with a curse which it contained, but, unlike many sacred pools, for example, that of Nemausus at Nîmes, it was not itself frequented by bathers. It could be viewed from the Baths through three great open windows on its south side; and these were of some architectural pretensions, the central member having a true arch, and the flanking pair (of which one survives (pl. XXIV, 2)) joggled flat arches, while the corridor within was furnished, as was no other part of the Baths, with fluted pilasters (pl. XXIV, 1).