Vergil's fourth Eclogue, foretelling a child whose coming would usher in the golden age, has often been supposed to be based upon eastern material; and it has even been suggested that, in the period of Roman history which ended with Octavian's final success at Actium, both East and West alike were expecting the Roman world to pass under the rule of one man, whether a Roman or a king from the east, to be followed by the birth of a child with whom should come the final kingdom of peace. But the ideas of the East in this matter have been deduced from western and Jewish material; and I hope in this paper to do a little toward ascertaining the view of the Greek East from a contemporary Greek document which has never been seriously examined, and considering its relation to the ideas of Vergil. I can only do a little, for most of the material vanished when Augustus later burnt 2,000 prophecies; but the secondary historians from whom we derive our current ideas of the East in the crucial years before Actium are so extraordinarily tendencious that every scrap of contemporary material, outside the circle of the victors' version, must be of value. My aim is to treat the matter solely from the historical standpoint; and the name of the boy Alexander Helios, son of Cleopatra and Antony, in whom East and West met, will serve to unite the two aspects of what I have to say.

On January 12th, 1732, John Horsley, Presbyterian divine and schoolmaster, died suddenly at Morpeth at the early age of 46. The following March or April witnessed the publication of his great book, in which real scholarship was for the first time brought to bear upon the interpretation of Romano-British antiquities. The occurrence of this double bicentenary seems to provide an appropriate opportunity for reminding readers of the Journal of the magnitude of the achievement represented by the Britannia Romana. A fully documented account of the author's career, together with an estimate of the value of his work, will appear in the forthcoming volume of Archaeologia Aeliana. For the present purpose, therefore, a brief summary will suffice.

The final settlement which began in A.D. 300 between the menacing power of Christianity and the forces of the state, was the unavoidable consequence of a long and slow development. The men who then stood at the head of the Roman Empire were compelled to become the protagonists in the last act of this great drama and, clearly as its final issue may have been indicated from the first, by the positions they adopted materially affected the course of the drama.

As all know, the climax was reached with the conversion of Constantine. Quite recently, however, so eminent a Byzantine scholar as H. Grégoire has disputed the belief that the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge was won in the sign of the Cross, and, as more than one serious student has accepted his view, we shall have to follow in rather closer detail his brilliant description of the political developments of these years. We shall readily admit with him that the account of Eusebius in the Vita Constantini, i, 28–30, is a highly-coloured romance and panegyric, marred by rehandling and later interpolation, and quite inconsistent with the information of Lactantius: yet, despite all this, it has a definite kernel of history in it, as I hope soon to show.

Of the names that follow it is impossible to say in general that they give any obvious or likely clue to their origin. These notes merely indicate what seem possibilities in each case. The same order is followed as in the preceding group.

Άϰύλιος

This is the Greek form of the nomen Aquilius or Aquillius. It occurs as the name of a gymnasiarch with the praenomen Γάϊος at Asine in Messenia. Tod says that the letters are late and carelessly cut. No date can be fixed for the document. The only Roman official of this name who seems to have been connected with Achaia in imperial times was L. Aquillius C. f. Florus Turcianus Gallus, who governed the province probably not later than the reign of Augustus. Gaius is a praenomen in his family.

The considerable literature that has already gathered round the Palestinian inscription on violation of sepulture published by M. Cumont in 1930 leaves little new to be said. There is, however, a gap to be filled for the English reader; moreover discussion has now cleared away certain initial misconceptions, so that a restatement may be useful. I have tried to acknowledge all substantial obligations, but beg to be excused the tedium of meticulous citation. Here, once for all, are the previous publications known to me; subsequent reference will generally be by author's name only.

More than a local military interest attaches to an inscription found in the fort at Birdoswald during the excavations of 1929, which records the restoration of the praetorium, the principia and the bath-house under Aurelius Arpagius, vir perfectissimus praeses, in the period A.D. 297–305. It sheds a fresh ray of light on the evolution of Diocletian's provincial re-organization, while another ray comes from the East in the shape of a fragmentary inscription which Sir William Ramsay copied at Laodiceia on the Lycus in 1926 and has. kindly placed at my disposal. A companion stone from Hierapolis, on the other side of the valley, was published with a few comments by Prof. Judeich in Altertümer von Hierapolis, 1898, p. 87, no. 43, from which it is reproduced in IGRR, iv, no. 814, but its significance has not been perceived. The two inscriptions supplement each other in a happy manner. They clearly relate to the same governor, whose name was afterwards erased.

When in the spring of 1929 the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society was about to begin excavations on the site of Venta Icenorum (Caistor-next-Norwich) Sir George Macdonald prophesied, in an article in The Observer, that among the results of the work would be a useful increase in our knowledge of the Roman pottery of the East Anglian area. It is not inappropriate, therefore, that an account of three pottery kilns found at Caistor in 1930 and of the pottery associated with them should be included in a publication dedicated to Sir George.

Many years ago it was the fortune of the writer to be present as a listener at a conversation between the architect, Sir Rowand Anderson, then at the height of his reputation, and a civil engineer of good standing in his profession. The Tay Bridge was the subject, and Sir Rowand was trying to make his interlocutor see that the existing bridge lacked one little touch, the addition of which would be of incalculable value but the absence of which made the bridge the most depressing thing of the kind that these islands hold. It must be explained that the bridge makes no pretension to be anything else but a pure work of utility and the following is its simple scheme. Starting from each bank of the Tay long ranges of girders, supported on simple metal piers, approach each other to within a short distance, the interval corresponding to the width of the main stream of the river. To give ample head room for the river traffic the trains are carried across the space of this interval on a special girder of suitable length, which is laid across this central gap, each end of it resting on the top of the other girders first described. In this position the bottom level of the special girder corresponds to the top level of the other girders, and the trains when they pass along this bottom level are at a greater clear height above the water than elsewhere on the bridge and so there is a free water-way for craft with masts.

Since the antiquaries of the eighteenth century—Hunter, Gordon, and Horsley—identified the forts on Hadrian's Wall with the stations per lineam valli by means of inscriptions found in them, further epigraphic material has accumulated, as a result of which all the forts except those at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Rudchester, as far west as Birdoswald, have produced evidence of the regiments assigned by the Notitia Dignitatum to the stations Segedunum-(C)amboglanna. But, in a number of instances, there have also come to light inscriptions set up by regiments that do not occur in the Notitia, or that are placed elsewhere in that list; the purpose of the present paper is to consider the significance of these inscriptions.

Four of the Saxon-shore forts—Richborough, Pevensey, Portchester and Burgh Castle—are now under the control of H.M. Office of Works. The first of these is being excavated by the Society of Antiquaries and any finds made by H.M. Office of Works are published in the Society's Reports; H.M. Office of Works is carrying out repairs to the masonry of the other three, and at Pevensey and Portchester the mediaeval moats have been cleared out and walls, etc., of the same period uncovered. During these operations certain discoveries of interest connected with the Roman occupation of the sites have come to light and I am taking this opportunity of placing them on record.

The products of a highly civilised community must always tend to drift across its political frontiers to less advanced peoples beyond. In the early centuries of our era the output of Roman workshops, following perhaps the older amber routes, was finding its way north of the Rhine and reaching Scandinavia. The same process was going on in Caledonia. The troops marching northward carried their supplies with them, and on the sites of their forts the excavator unearths their pottery and glass, their vessels of bronze, their ornaments, tools and weapons,—the familiar things of provincial Roman civilization. But out beyond the limits of the forts and camps the same products from time to time come to light—picked up near the lines of communication, gathered from the sites of native dwellings, or found far out among the hills or by coasts where the Roman soldier never penetrated, telling their tale of traffic or of plunder.

In no other part of the Roman empire are preserved so many camps and forts of Roman troops, in none is the preservation of their remains in general so excellent as in Great Britain. Nowhere else was the survey of these monuments undertaken so early, and nowhere else has their excavation been pursued with such perseverance and care down to the present day. But nevertheless the material to be examined is by no means exhausted. We may hope that by the further systematic exploration of Roman camps and forts in England and Scotland other countries may be greatly helped in the appreciation of these monuments.