Until recent years, Roman art had not seriously engaged the attention of the historians of art. It had been regarded as a sort of supplementary chapter to Greek art. In his great history of Greek sculpture Overbeck had inserted two or three chapters on the monuments of the Roman age. Collignon in France and Ernest Gardner in England in their works on Greek sculpture only briefly touched on the sculptural monuments of Rome.

The publication of a second fourth-century epitaph from Laodicea Combusta, engraved on the tomb of two of its bishops, Severus and Eugenius, calls for fresh study, from a new angle, of the epitaph of the persecuted bishop Julius Eugenius of the same city, which was first published (with a provisional text) in the Expositor in 1908, and has already become the subject of a considerable literature. An opportunity therefore offers itself to present English readers with a complete and (I hope) final text of the bishop's epitaph. This is all the more necessary that an English version, inaccurate in almost every detail, has been incorporated in a text-book issued by the Cambridge University Press.

This survey does not aim at completeness. It is a personal selection, on the one hand, of recent epigraphic work which is of significance and interest to an ancient historian, and, on the other hand, of those epigraphic ‘tools of the trade’ which are important for anyone trying to interpret an inscription. But we start with some more narrowly epigraphic topics.

If the death of Louis Robert and concern for the future of the Bulletin épigraphique overshadowed the last review, it is fitting that this should begin with the good news of the rebirth of the Bulletin, produced since 1987 by an international, although largely French, team of specialists and edited by Ph. Gauthier. The archicubal verve may be missing, but the coverage of the new version is good and adds usefully to that of the old.

The noteworthy discovery which I have the honour of illustrating for the Journal of Roman Studies is a very recent one, and it was unlooked for because one would not expect to find a rich and beautiful series of small artistic bronzes among the ruins of a great bakehouse. This building consisted of a double series of rooms in which are gathered together the machines for crushing the grain, the machines for kneading the flour (machinae quae farinae subiguntur), and, lastly, two enormous ovens for the making of the bread. This great bakehouse, placed in the heart of the city, near the temple of Vulcan, was destroyed by a fire in the third century, as is proved by certain coins, and it was never re-built. The small bronzes, touched but not destroyed by the fire, were found among the ashes covering the pavement of the ground floor, and since they have nothing in common with the great bakehouse, they come assuredly from the first floor of the building, which was perhaps the dwelling-house of the miller, and it may be supposed from this that they were the religious and artistic furniture of his private chapel.

The notes which follow, on topics connected with Roman religion, have been put together from old note-books of mine in the course of reading with care Mr. W. Warde Fowler's work which bears the title given above. Needless to say, it is always a pleasure to greet him afresh in his peculiar domain. Although the themes with which he deals are much the same as those treated in his Gifford Lectures, entitled ‘The Religious Experience of the Roman People,’ much will be found in the later volume which is fresh or freshly put. Of course the mode of presentation is excellent, and equally of course, bright as the writing is, there is no straining after novelty, such as has often led inquirers in the same field far beyond the bounds of sober judgment. Many obiter dicta are striking and are the ready fruit of long familiarity with the subject. It bristles with difficulties, and at many points there has been great diversity of opinion.

The Nerva Inscription in Beroea still lies, where Delacoulonche first reported it, on the right hand of the entrance to the Orta Cami. During a visit to Beroea in 1936, in the company of Mr. C. F. Edson of Harvard University, I was enabled to gather some fresh information about this dedication.

The slab of marble which bears the inscription is embedded in the ground on its side, so that the left half of the inscription has not been seen since the building of the Mosque, the raising of the heavy marble flags of the entrance being a formidable task without some mechanical aid. A rough-surfaced margin surrounds the smooth inscribed field. The lettering is elaborate Imperial, with many ligatures. H. 116 m. Exposed W. at top 0.53 m. Exposed W. at bottom 0.50 m.

That the lex Clodia of 58 B.C. repealed either in whole or in part the lex Aelia Fufia of c. 153 B.C. is adequately attested by our ancient authorities and universally admitted by modern scholars. The crux of the question is: was the lex Aelia Fufia wholly abrogated by the lex Clodia, and, if not, precisely what part of the former law was repealed by the legislation of Clodius? Despite the statement of Cicero—‘mitto eam legem, quae omnia iura religionum, auspiciorum, potestatum, omnes leges quae sunt de iure et de tempore legum rogandarum, una rogatione delevit’—which is obviously rhetorical and biased, no one, so far, as the writer knows, holds the view that all clauses of the lex Aelia Fufia were repealed by the lex Clodia. This inquiry, therefore, is an attempt to determine how much of the lex Aelia Fufia the lex Clodia repealed.