The bronze bust reproduced in fig. I and on plates I and II, from photographs supplied by the kindness of Mr. Wright, director of the Colchester Museum, was found along with two others, a statuette of Iupiter and a fine mask of Silenus, at Colchester in October, 1845. All three bronzes were described by the late Sir Charles Newton, then quite a young man, in a letter to Sir Henry Ellis. Newton's account of the find is as follows:

The three bronzes … were discovered on the line of railway now running between Colchester and Ipswich, about a mile to the east of the Colchester terminus and half a mile west of the town. They were dug up at the depth of about five feet from the surface; portions of red pottery, bronze and lead, were found near them, and, at a distance of about six feet, a human skull and some horses' teeth. The spot presented no indications of having been a place of dwelling or of sepulture, but two or three hundred yards nearer the terminus is a small rising ground, in cutting through which the railway labourers are said to have found urns containing bones.

No ruins of the ancient world outside Italy are more famous than the beautiful romantic remains of Queen Zenobia's city—the desert-city of caravans. No city of the Near East has yielded such an abundance of inscriptions, sculptures and fragments of painting. For more than a century and a half collectors and dealers have found in Palmyra a happy hunting ground; almost every museum has its Palmyrene bust or Palmyrene inscription or some small object such as the common clay tessera. A considerable number of the antiquities found at Palmyra have been published—most of the inscriptions in the Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic or in Greek, numerous sculptures, and many paintings found in tombs. The most important Palmyrene texts have been translated and will shortly be available to those historians who are not acquainted with Semitic languages.

The fifth-century Christian writer Sozomen of Constantinople preserves a story told by certain pagans about the philosopher Sopater of Apamea, whom the emperor Constantine put to death in a.d. 333 on the advice of the Christian Flavius Ablabius, then Praetorian Prefect of the East. Constantine had consulted the philosopher — so the story goes — in an attempt to redress his guilt at having ordered the murder of some of his nearest relations, among them his son Crispus. But Sopater replied that such moral defilement could admit of no purification. Afterwards, on meeting some Christian bishops, Constantine was delighted to learn that the sins of those who truly repented could be washed away in Christian baptism. It was this that led him to adopt the faith, and to encourage his subjects to do the same.

This essay offers a survey of the history of the Roman Society during the 100 years since its foundation in 1910. It discusses relations with other classical bodies, especially the Hellenic Society and the Classical Association; the Society's fragile finances until the 1950s; and the key role played over several decades by its Secretary, Margerie Taylor. Separate sections deal with the Society's library; its journals, the Journal of Roman Studies (1911) and Britannia (1970); membership and finance; and relations with schools, amateur archaeologists and the University of London, whose Institute of Classical Studies has housed the Society's office and library since 1958.

This paper concerns the water imagery of two iconic passages of Roman satire: Horace's figuration of Lucilius as a river churning with mud at Sat. 1.4.11, and the transformation of that image at Juvenal, Sat. 3.62–8 (the Orontes flowing into the Tiber). It posits new ways of reckoning with the codifications and further potentials of these images by establishing points of contact with the workings of water in the Roman world. The main point of reference will be to the work of Rome's censors, who were charged not only with protecting the moral health of the state, but with ensuring the purity and abundance of the city's water supply as well.

Early one bright afternoon, seventeen centuries ago, Constantine stood staring at the sun. According to his self-appointed biographer Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, who claimed to have heard the story from Constantine himself, the emperor was on campaign, when, ‘around midday, as the day was declining’ he saw a shining cross of light over the sun, with the attached text ‘By this conquer’. The understandably startled ruler slept on the matter, whereupon Christ appeared in a dream and instructed him to fashion himself a copy of the holy sign, which would protect him against his enemies. He did as he had been told, took Christian clerics as his advisers and, not long afterwards, set off for Italy to fight his rival, Maxentius. The rhetorician Lactantius, writing about twenty years before Eusebius, presented a different tale in his De mortibus persecutorum: Constantine, on the eve of his decisive battle against Maxentius in a.d. 312, at the Milvian Bridge to the north of Rome, was instructed in a dream to ‘mark the heavenly sign of God’ on his shields. Constantine's moment of epiphany, sometimes equated with his ‘conversion’, has traditionally been seen both as one of history's great turning-points and as one of its most enduring enigmas. The interpretation of Constantine's vision(s) is further complicated by an anecdote that appears in an anonymous panegyric of the emperor, delivered in a.d. 310. Having turned off from the road to visit ‘the most beautiful temple in the world’, Constantine was greeted by a remarkable sight: ‘For you saw, I believe, Constantine, your Apollo, accompanied by Victory, offering you laurel crowns, which each brought an omen of thirty years [of life or rule]’.