Some fifty miles north-east of Jerusalem, on the rugged plateau between the Jordan and the desert to the east, lies a ruined city whose striking remains have attracted the interest of hardy travellers ever since the beginning of the last century—Jerash, the ancient Gerasa, in Transjordania. This district was the Decapolis of the Romans, though its cities numbered more than ten. Since that time war and the centuries have obliterated all trace of many of them; but Jerash, with its temples and theatres, its paved and colonnaded market and streets, its almost intact walls and its many Christian churches, is still beautiful and imposing. None the less, it is only very recently that its full significance has begun to be realised. Heretofore it has been usual to assume that Jerash attained prosperity and importance only under the Antonines, beginning with Trajan's annexation of Arabia in A.D. 105–6, and his assignment of Jerash to that province. This opinion was supported by the fact that the inscriptions supply dates of the second century or later for most of the public buildings; but a reconsideration of the archaeological and epigraphic evidence shows that the present plan of the city and the present form of the public buildings are due merely to alteration and rebuilding under the Antonines. From the materials which we now have it is possible to reconstruct a good picture of the flourishing and active city of the first century—further, to show that this prosperity was itself not new, but firmly based on a long and continuous past.

Work continues in Rome with the same energy as before, and a fresh impulse may be said to have been given to it by the publication of the new ‘Piano Regolatore’ for Rome, which is providing for the growth of the city to double its present size so that it will have a population of two millions. There is no doubt at all that numerous demolitions are necessary, if the scheme is really to be carried into effect.

That the necessity is regrettable, few will deny; but it cannot be too often repeated that the fundamental mistake was made long ago, when modern Rome was allowed to grow upon every side of the old city, instead of being put on the high ground to the east of it, as Quintino Sella and Haussmann had suggested. The old city must, therefore, inevitably be traversed by important arteries of traffic (pls. I, II); and we can only hope that as little as possible of beauty and interest will be removed, as we are assured will be the case. And critics of the scheme, whether benevolent or not, must do their best neither to minimise nor to exaggerate the importance of what must inevitably disappear.

A papyrus dated to the year 8 B.C. attests the existence of the legion XXII Deiotariana and, indirectly, that of the other legions as well in the series with numbers running from XIII to XXII. It is therefore no longer necessary to say anything about the theory of Mommsen, that eight of them were raised all at once at the time of the Pannonian Revolt, and the other two after the disaster of Varus, or about the milder form in which Hardy served it up. Nobody could now wish to depart very far from the estimate of Emil Ritterling, that Augustus began his Principate with twenty-six or twenty-seven legions, or from that of Mr. Parker, that in 15 B.C. he had twenty-eight. But a general acquiescence does not preclude debate about details which, if they appear small, are never to be despised when they cast light upon imperial principle, or at least practice, and add coherence to a narrative or harmony to a picture.

I. Introduction.—The dating of building materials at Pompeii presents a problem which is in several ways peculiar. Although more than half the city has by now been uncovered and has provided a wealth of epigraphic material almost without parallel among Italian towns, yet the number of buildings which it is possible to date from such evidence can be counted on one hand, since for the most part the inscriptions concern events which are too trivial, or persons who are too obscure, to offer any indication of their date. Furthermore, the procedure adopted in the past for excavating the town has precluded all but the most meagre help being given by pottery. Till a few years ago, Pompeian excavators for the most part stopped digging as soon as the uppermost (and latest) level had been reached, and earlier buildings, of which the foundations presumably survive under the later floors, were left unexplored. Hence, the pottery which is most useful for purposes of dating (that occurring in association with structural foundations) is not forthcoming. Pompeii, in fact, has been too much a show-piece for visitors, too little a site to be scientifically explored.

The bronze head of the Emperor Tiberius, here reproduced (pl. vl) from new photographs, was found in 1759 near Mahon, in the island of Minorca. The exact spot is not recorded; but as the Duc de Crillon damaged the megalithic buildings at Trapuco, two kilometers from Mahon, while erecting a defensive wall round his guns, that may have been the finding-place. The head was acquired by the Marquis de Lannion, the Governor of the island; after his death it was bought by the Comte de Caylus, who gave it to the French king. It is now in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The bronze is covered with a black patina, and is well preserved. The eyes are made of sheet-silver. The head is life-size, 38 cms. high.

‘Epistulae quoque ejus ad senatum extant, quas primum videtur ad paginas et formam memorialis libelli convertisse, cum antea consules et duces non nisi transversa charta scriptas mitterent.’ The form that Caesar used in writing his dispatches to the Senate is still a matter of dispute: the object of this note is to suggest that an old interpretation of this passage, to be found implicit in Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, s.v. ‘libellus,’ has more in its favour than recent critics have admitted and to claim for the papyrus codex, or rather for a crude precursor of that form, an antiquity reaching back to the middle of the first century B.C. The sentence in question occurs towards the end of the chapter, after the description of the literary works and before that of the private papers; consequently the position of the sentence does little to support Sir F. G. Kenyon's view that ‘the point of the passage must be that Caesar's dispatches to the Senate were in such a form that they could be enumerated among his literary works.’ The obvious meaning of the passage is that, of the contrasted methods described by ‘transversa charta’ and ‘paginas et formam memorialis libelli,’ Caesar was the first to adopt the latter in official correspondence.

Some apology may seem to be required for re-opening a question that has already been discussed by so many first-rate scholars. If so, it must be found in the hope that an examination of the points I propose to raise may possibly throw fresh light on the problem as a whole, and so bring about a greater measure of agreement as to the true date of the so-called evacuation of Britain.

To begin with, I should like to make it clear that, in my opinion, there must have been in fact something like a ‘departure of the Romans.’ It is difficult to see what justification there is for Haverfield's view that this departure did not mean any great departure of persons, Roman or other, from the island. If that had been so, we should have to suppose that all the Romans who were left, whether private individuals or military and government officials, were absorbed into the new régime, out of which there gradually developed a state that became England. Everything, however, indicates that there was a distinct break between Britain as a Roman province and Britain as it was under its Saxon rulers. It is almost a contradictio in adiecto to say : ‘No one went. Some persons failed to come.’ Why did they fail to come ? Obviously because nothing remained for them to go to. Thus the only point to be determined is exactly when this severance of the far northern province from the official western government took place. Was it in 407 or 410, as has usually been supposed, or was it at some later time ?

In a very persuasive article in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy (1931, p. 772 ff.) Wilcken has argued that Augustus in the third section of his Res Gestae enumerated only the expenses that he paid out of his patrimonium ,his privatum, and the manubiae, and that Mommsen, Hirschfeld, and Rostovtzeff were probably in error when they supposed that some of these payments derived from the Fiscus. To Wilcken's argument, which I accept in the main, I wish only to add some calculations of the amounts attributed to the various chests, in order to see how far his theory stands the test of practical application. And before doing this I wish also to call attention to some slight matters in his article that may need closer examination.

In three years' time, a hundred years will have passed since Luigi Rossini issued his series of plates illustrating Roman triumphal arches in Italy, delineations of interest not only for their accuracy and beauty, but also because Rossini made them the basis of the first detailed study of the Triumphal Arch as an artistic object in itself, treated apart from the surroundings which it embellished. All subsequent workers, Curtis, Nilsson, Loewy and Noack, took the same point of view: and the object of this study is to supplement their valuable research by reconstructing the surroundings of a group of arches connected with city gates, and seeing what light is shed by the relationship of the two structures upon the development of the decorative arch. It is not always possible to reconstruct the ancient grouping in full, nor can it be recovered so easily now as a century ago. But it will emerge that there is always something to be discovered which helps to determine the place of a given arch in the environment which it decorated.

Few mythological names are more familiar than that of Vulcan; and few cults present more puzzling difficulties than his. I propose to review the chief points connected with this god and one or two of the main theories concerning him, ending by putting forward the view which seems to me the most likely.

What may be called the orthodox theory concerning him is to be found in the works of the late Professor Wissowa, and is as follows. He was a genuinely Roman god, a deus indiges. His department was fire, considered, not as the flame of the hearth or of the smith's forge, but as the destroying element, pure and simple. Hence, he was regularly worshipped outside the city walls, or at all events outside the pomerium. For this reason the Volcanal at Rome was at one end of the Forum, outside the original Palatine settlement and the ‘Servian’ city ; the later temple of the god, of date about 540/214, was in the Circus Flaminius ; perhaps also at Perusia he was worshipped outside the walls ; at all events, the fire of 714/40, which destroyed all the rest of the city, spared his temple and, according to Cassius Dio, that of Juno likewise.

In JRS xiii, 1923 (pp. 1–55), Dr. E. Nischer published a paper on ‘The Army Reforms of Diocletian and Constantine,’ in which, in opposition to the opinions of other scholars, including Mommsen, Seeck and Grosse, he attempted to prove that a proper appreciation of the reforms of the two Emperors could only be attained if a sharp distinction were drawn between their respective policies. According to this theory, Diocletian is the augmenter, Constantine the reformer, of the Roman military system, in the sense that the former doubled the number of existing legions, while the latter created the field-army of palatini and comitatenses by disbanding some of the frontier-legions and withdrawing detachments from others to form independent units in his new mobile army. In a note in JRS xv, 1925, Professor Norman Baynes suggested some general grounds for caution in the acceptance of Nischer's opinions, and it is the purpose of this paper to examine more closely the latter's arguments and, while rejecting part of his conclusions, to consider what inferences may safely be drawn from the evidence which we possess for the work of Diocletian and Constantine.

Two sharply contrasted views are held about the duration of Roman government in Britain and in the West generally. The traditional view, which I believe to be substantially correct, dates the abandonment of Britain early in the fifth century. The late Professor Bury put forward in 1920 a theory that the occupation was maintained down to A.D. 438. The theory was based primarily on a later dating of the Notitia Dignitatum, and on a mistaken estimate of the numismatic evidence.

In connexion with the preceding paper, a summary of the numismatic evidence as to the currency of Britain, in its relation to that of the Continent, till the establishment of the Saxon scheme, based on the silver penny, may be found useful. It is derived almost entirely from published material.

1. Greek and Roman coins of the third to first centuries B.C. are found sporadically in England: there is no sign that they were used for the purpose of currency, or related in any way to the British and Gaulish money.

2. Late Republican and Augustan coins occur fairly often, and their types are borrowed by British mints.