The discovery two years ago, in Amiens, of an analogue of the famous Rudge cup has raised interest among the historians of the Roman world. The new patera has been summarily described in the Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1949, p. 125 ff.) and will be more completely surveyed in the next volume of the Monuments Piot. Nevertheless it was thought that some account of the main differences between the two vases would be appreciated by students of Roman Britain.

In the account which I gave in this Journal of the excavations carried out in 1925 at and near the east corner of the legionary fortress, I explained that the earliest defence there had consisted of a double ditch and a clay rampart, which appeared to have been laid out in the time of Petillius Cerialis (c. A.D. 71–74); that a stone wall subsequently built along the outer margin of this clay rampart probably dated from the reign of Trajan (about 108–9); that at some time this wall was destroyed, and that a second wall, built immediately inside the line of the wall which it replaced, belonged to the period of Commodus or Septimius Severus. Those conclusions were drawn from the evidence of trenches cut on either side of the corner. Of the corner itself enough was uncovered to prove that the tower here, as was to be expected from the date of the adjacent work, was of the internal type usual in the first three centuries. The complete excavation of the corner was the main task of 1926.

The puzzle of C. Julius Caesar's date of birth and cursus honorum has never been satisfactorily solved. The facts can be stated quite simply. All but two of the sources referring to his age imply 100 B.C. as the date of his birth, and the date of his quaestorship agrees with this; yet he held the senior magistracies two years earlier than, according to what we know of the normal cursus, that date would allow. Are nearly all the sources wrong (as Mommsen thought) ? Or did Caesar at some time get a special dispensation, which no one has bothered to mention (as the majority opinion would now hold) ? Or is there another explanation of a more general kind, fitting Caesar into a class of exceptions (as Afzelius proposed) ?

At first glance, L. Licinius Sura and Q. Sosius Senecio have many points of resemblance. Both were men of erudition and culture, like their mutual friend the younger Pliny. Both stood close to Trajan and participated in the two Dacian wars. Both received the rare honour of a public statue from the emperor. Together they gave their names to the year 107, sharing the fasces as consules ordinarii.

So many are the similarities, in fact, that the two are difficult to think of as separate and defined characters. There is another and graver reason for juxtaposing their careers. Sura's is often assumed to be largely known from an acephalous inscription found in Rome in the sixteenth century: that view goes back to Lipsius, but was first forcefully argued by Borghesi. In recent years doubts have been voiced, in the first place by Professor Syme: not Sura, but possibly Sosius Senecio. It is time to argue that the ignotus is indeed Sosius, and to draw the consequences for the early years of Trajan's reign.

In the study of decorated Terra Sigillata from a chronological point of view the work of the potter Butrio occupies an important place, for it is not only typical of the Trajanic period, especially of the decade of A.D. 110–120, but in many respects the style is transitional between the characteristics of Flavian and Hadrian-Antonine potters. Most of Butrio's figure-types reveal (as will be shown) a close association with Libertus on the one hand, both potters using many types in common; whilst on the other hand the Hadrianic potters of Blickweiler and the Hadrian-Antonine potter Paternus of Lezoux have in turn utilised figure-types occurring on the bowls of Butrio. In fact, out of 97 figure-types known to have been used by Butrio, as many as 49 occur on bowls signed by Libertus.

Seneca's Naturales Quaestiones explains the causes and functional mechanisms of natural phenomena, from common sights like rainbows to exotically out-of-reach ones like comets. The vividness with which he brings them all within the reader's grasp is certainly a literary feat as much as a scientific one, but the rhetorical power of his explanations does not cost them their epistemological validity. Analyses drawn from current philosophy of science reveal elements of fictionality omnipresent in scientific models and experiments, suggesting an approach to Seneca's ‘scientific fictions’ not as failed analogies but as a sophisticated expansion of the tradition of analogical scientific explanation.

This article offers an account of Roman imperial cameos as an archaeological category, and argues that the production of large high-quality cameos was more restricted in time than currently allowed; that the controversial dates and subjects of individual cameos need to be set in the wider sequence of the main examples; and that early imperial praise poetry sits in relationship to court cameos in a way that can be usefully investigated around their shared concern to understand the particular character of imperial divinity. An Appendix gives details of forty-one examples illustrated and discussed.

Modern students of Roman Britain have been taught to recognize the sharp line of cleavage, both social and regional, which intervened between the military and the civil zones of the province. Such recognition is essential both as a corrective to the indiscriminate marchings and counter-marchings of the earlier historians and as a safeguard against confusion in dealing with a comparatively restricted geographical area. The general validity of this distinction, however, is now so widely accepted that it is permissible to modify it in detail without risk of misunderstanding.

Building inscriptions are not a good proxy for building activity or, by extension, prosperity. In the part of Roman North Africa where they are the most common, the majority of surviving building inscriptions document the construction of religious buildings by holders of local priesthoods, usually of the imperial cult. The rise of such texts in the second century a.d., and their demise in the early third century, have no parallel in the epigraphic evidence for other types of construction, and should not be used as evidence for the pace of construction overall. Rather than economic change, these developments reflect shifts in the prospects of aspirational local elites, for whom priesthoods served as springboards to more prestigious positions. These positions were linked to Carthage through administrative arrangements that made this city the metropolis for scores of dependent towns and their ambitious elites.