The remarkable hoard of Roman gold coins found at Corbridge, Northumberland, in September, 1911, was discovered under circumstances which did not admit of any very obvious archaeological interpretation. The point as to whether it had been “of ancient time hidden” was of considerable practical importance, inasmuch as under the law of England gold or silver objects so hidden belong to the king, while such objects if they have been accidentally lost or deliberately abandoned may belong to the person who is fortunate enough to find them. Last December, in view of the situation that had arisen, the Crown authorities requested me to look carefully into the archaeological aspects of the matter for their guidance. The result was the following report which was addressed to the Solicitor to the Treasury, by whose permission it is here printed. The coins were surrendered as treasure trove to the Crown.

It is very remarkable, though quite intelligible that, while the province of Britain belonged for centuries to the Roman empire, its inhabitants took practically no share in the administration of the empire. No evidence suggests that a native of one of the municipalities, whether colonia or municipium, of Britain ever made his way into the Roman senate or the higher ranks of the equestrian order, and yet, if that had happened, inscriptions would exist among the monuments of Britain recording such honours won by Britons. The literary life of the empire was equally strange to the Britons; as Mr. J. R. Green says, “none of the poets or rhetoricians of the time is of British origin.” So too the lower military commands are never held by Britons. No cohort or ala is known to have been commanded by a man born in the island. Even the lower officers, the centurions, were rarely taken from the province, either for the legions quartered in the island or for those in other parts of the empire. Baehr and I had actually denied the existence of any legionary centurion of British origin, but Mr. Haverfield has pointed out to me a centurion of the XXIIth Legion stationed at Mainz, who appears to have been born in Lincoln (Lindum); and my attention has now been called to a legionary centurion whose British origin is not, indeed, absolutely certain, but who belongs in one way or another to Britain, and deserves to be introduced to the Britons of to-day.

The mundus of Rome was believed to be a hole or underground pit or vault on the Palatine. It was said to be closed by a stone called the lapis manalis, which same name, oddly enough, is also given to an entirely different kind of stone, with which the pontifices occasionally worked some sort of magic in a drought. Plutarch, in the chapter in which he describes the foundation of Rome, says that the mundus, like the process of marking out a city, was of Etruscan origin; that firstfruits of all kinds were thrown into the pit, and that each new settler brought a bit of earth from his own country and cast it into the pit; he places the pit in the Comitium instead of the Palatine, but notes the word mundus as applied to it there, and the identity of this word with that for the heaven or universe.

There is in Pliny, xxviii, 12, seq. a famous statement to the effect that his own age had seen human sacrifice carried out in the Forum Boarium: “nostra aetas vidit.” The whole subject of the ritual offering of men's lives to the gods at Rome in the historical period is full of interest and has been, of course, much discussed, but statements about it continue to be made by writers of authority, which appear to be very dubious when the ancient evidence is rigorously scrutinised. Pliny introduces the theme in a curious manner, not directly, but in order to illustrate the practical efficacy of the precatio when a venerable religious formula is uttered with all the due accompaniments. He instances the devotio of Decius, father and son, and the story of the vestal Tuccia, who, when accused of impurity, addressed a deprecatio to her goddess, and successfully carried a sieve full of water from the Tiber to the forum. (Unfortunately Livy seems to have recorded her condemnation.) Pliny then proceeds: “boario vero in foro Graecum Graecamque defossos aut aliarum gentium cum quibus tum res erat etiam nostra aetas vidit. Cuius sacri precationem qua solet praeire quindecimvirum conlegi magister si quis legat, profecto vim carminum fateatur, omnia ea adprobantibus octingentorum triginta annorum eventibus.”

A first examination of the evidence, literary, epigraphic, and archaeological, upon which our present knowledge of the Mithraic grades is based, is apt to leave us with an impression of finality. The facts themselves reveal hardly a trace of their underlying complexity; and of these facts modern authorities have unanimously propounded what appears to be the one and obvious interpretation. It is only when we realise that part of our evidence is conflicting and part apparently ignored, that we begin to experience doubt as to the successful solution of the problem.

Since the appearance of C. Hoffer's dissertation De personarum usu in P. Terenti comoediis (Halis Saxonum, 1877) the view that masks were not worn at the original performances of the plays of Plautus and Terence has become universally accepted. This dissertation is usually cited by recent writers, who have for the most part been content to accept Hoffer's conclusions in their entirety, and the only independent investigators since the publication of the dissertation have also arrived at very similar conclusions.

I visited Antioch twice in the summer of 1911. On the first occasion our party, including Sir W. M. and Lady Ramsay, Miss M. M. Hardie of Newnham College, Cambridge, and the writer, divided its attention between the modern town of Yalowadj and the Hieron of Mên Askaênos, on the neighbouring peak of Karakuyu, which we had the good fortune to find at last. The discovery was primarily due to the hospitable agent of the Ottoman Railway at Yalowadj, M. Kyriakides, who had heard from a Turkish peasant of ”written stones” on a neighbouring mountain-top, and who persuaded the man to guide us to the long-looked-for holy place. The first of many inscriptions which we copied on the summit ran : Φ(λάουιος) Νεικήτης Μηνὶ Ἀσκαηνῷ μετὰ τέκνων εὐχήν. No traveller ever gave a Turkish guide his backsheesh with a better will!

The collection of casts lately prepared by the Roman Society, and described in the following pages, was designed to include representative sculptures and architectural decorations of the Roman period in Britain. It had originally been hoped that these casts might find a place in the Archaeological Exhibition held in Rome in 1911 and eloquently described by Mrs. Arthur Strong in the first number of this Journal. Unfortunately, it was found wholly impossible to prepare the series in time for the exhibition; only a few pieces, brought together by the personal exertions of Dr. Ashby, could be included in it. The Society has, however, now completed the series, has put the casts on sale and has found enough purchasers to make the scheme financially self-supporting. In all, 165 casts have been purchased by various museums and institutions in these islands and abroad, and valuable illustrations have thus been provided of the character and meaning of the sculptures of the Roman period in Britain. Even the illustrated sale catalogue drawn up by one of the present writers has had the honour of being cited and used by M. Reinach in the most recent volume of his Répertoire.

The west coast of Italy between the gulf of Spezia, once the harbour of Luna, and the bay of Gaeta does not at the present day offer a single safe anchorage for ships of any size, and even in early days, when ships were smaller, its harbours and landing places must have seemed very deficient. The cities of south-western Etruria had indeed developed a flourishing seaborne trade by the seventh century B.C. when they were importing freely from Greece, but the ports of their two leading towns, Tarquinii and Caere, which seem to have been at Graviscae and Pyrgi, were merely roadsteads. Strabo, in his summary of the ports along this littoral, mentions none between Monte Argentario and Ostia, and none again between Ostia and the bay of Gaeta. Such ports as there ever were, are of later origin. Centumcellae, the modern Civitavecchia, is a foundation of Trajan; the harbour of Antium, such as it was, was due to Nero, and the port of Terracina is the work of Pius. Even Ostia itself was in Strabo's time deemed a bad harbour and the Tiber estuary hard to enter. Good or bad, however, it was the one approach to a natural harbour on all this coast.