That the close connection between military organization and state-organization has received little attention in this country is less to be wondered at, because this country is an exception to the rule. Being protected by its insular situation, it has had no need of a large standing army within its boundaries. On the Continent the connection appears clearly. Feudal organization was bound up with the art of fighting by knights, and was upset as much by the invention of guns and gunpowder as by economic development: monarchy was supported by mercenary armies, and the men who introduced compulsory service have more than others contributed to the founding of democracy.

But I leave it to others to judge modern history according to their own opinions, and turn to ancient history, which I know better and where the connection is more obvious, because warfare was an almost constant occupation in ancient states and military service a duty imposed upon the citizens.

Discussion of this law (of which the text, so far as it survives, will be found in Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani, 7th ed., pp. 95–6, or in C.Q. 1925, pp. 185–6) has recently been revived in a remarkable paper by E. Fabricius, in which it is contended that the measure did not form part of the agrarian and colonial legislation of Julius Caesar, as commonly supposed. According to Fabricius, the Lex Mamilia was carried in 109 B.C. by the tribune C. Mamilius Limetanus and by four of his colleagues of the above names; its purpose was primarily to delimit the whole ager privatus of Italy, so far as it had not been marked of by the Gracchan land-commissioners, and incidentally to regulate jurisdiction concerning disputed titles or boundary lines.

The circumstances surrounding one of the most grievous disgraces which ever befel a Roman army are familiar. In 321 B.C. the so called Second Samnite War was at its height. The Roman consuls, while at Calatia with their armies, received news that the enemy forces were in Apulia under the new Samnite general, Gavius Pontius. Pushing forward, either in the hope of winning a decisive victory on the Apulian plains, or in order to relieve the pressure on the allied city of Luceria, they advanced into a valley which had but two exits: on trying to get out of this defile, they found both entrances blocked. Doubtless the army made attempts to fight its way out of the encircling Samnite ring, but they proved unavailing. To avert death by starvation, the consuls surrendered. Pontius, being in a position to dictate his own terms, demanded that Roman garrisons should be withdrawn from territory which the Samnites regarded as theirs, while the Romans were not to re-open the war: in addition he took six hundred Roman knights as hostages, disarmed the Roman army and sent it ‘under the yoke.’

An interesting bowl in terra sigillata (form 37) with the cursive signature ACAVNISSA was found last year in excavating Birdoswald; and, since the only other known bowls by this potter, were found at Mainz and Cologne, a description of these two bowls may be of some interest, especially from a chronological point of view.

The glaze of the Birdoswald bowl is poor and the figures are in places somewhat blurred. The decoration consists of an alternation of two panels separated by bead-rows ending in rosettes (pl. IV, nos. 1 and 2). In the first panel there is a medallion of ‘cog-wheel’ pattern with inner concentric ring; it encloses a bird (to right) with upstretched wings, similar to Déch. 1010, but slightly smaller. This bird was first used at Lezoux by the Trajanic potters LIBERTVS and BVTRIO and later by the Hadrian-Antonine potters ALBVCIVS, ADVOCISVS, MERCATOR (not the South Gaulish potter of this name), PAVLLVS, PATERNVS, SERVVS and CINNAMVS; in its smaller form it occurs on a bowl by MAPILLVS (37 MAPILL OF at Corbridge).

The Romans of later times knew very little about the origins of their coinage. Thus, Pliny the Elder could assign the first issue of bronze to Servius Tullius, and the mint-master of Trajan could mistake denarii of somewhere near 200 B.C. for issues of Horatius Cocles and Decius Mus. Apart from isolated notices in metrological and other writers, we have a limited amount of coherent tradition, notably in Pliny the Elder, Varro and Festus, which increases in value as it approaches the Empire. But, even here, we do not find the sure ground on which we should choose to construct our system. The tradition, we all agree, has some relation to facts, and therefore some value: but it is impossible to trust it blindly—it must be checked and criticized and, if need be, adapted to fit the evidence of the coins themselves.

Many sections of the Vita Aureliani are clearly based upon earlier sources of considerable historical value, which, unfortunately, are no longer extant. These sections lie embedded in large quantities of matter which do not possess the historical virtues to which they pretend but which, nevertheless, seem to have been written with a purpose. This article is an attempt to disentangle these two elements in the Vita; to reconstruct and discuss the sources followed by the historical parts; and to examine and determine the purpose of the others.

The writer of the Vita, as every one must admit, was not a good or original historian. He did nothing but copy or distort statements in the sources which he used. From this it follows that, in any attempt to separate his worthless additions from the passages which deserve consideration as sources for the history of Aurelian, we must adhere to one or other of two canons of criticism. These may be stated as follows:

(a) Passages which can, by comparison with relevant passages in other authorities, be traced to the sources used by the Vita and the other authorities, or which can be shown to give the kind of information which these sources may have contained, must be supposed to be derived from them.

(b) Statements which are intrinsically plausible, or which can be supported by inscriptional or other good evidence, must be accepted as being derived from these early lost sources, even though the connexion cannot be traced.

This collection of miscellaneous objects of very varying date and provenance, though mostly of the early Christian period, was formed by the late Mr. C. Wilshere, and bequeathed by him to Pusey House, Oxford, where it was installed about three years ago, having been previously at its owner's house in Hertfordshire. It was formed by purchases made at various times and places, though chiefly in Rome. The present writer was invited by Dr. Darwell Stone, the Principal of Pusey House, to catalogue the collection: through his kindness the present note is published. The most interesting parts of the collection are the inscriptions, mostly tombstones, some unpublished, and the gold glass, all published, but better plates are given here. I should like to take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to Professor J. D. Beazley, Mr. M. N. Tod, Mr. D. Talbot Rice, and Mr. R. P. Longden, for the help they gave me in making the catalogue. The numbers are those of my Ms. catalogue.

The careers of Roman senators born in the Eastern half of the Empire are interesting and worthy of study for several reasons. They include men who influenced affairs in such different ways as Herodes Atticus and Avidius Cassius, and the rarity of the honour, in the earlier cases at least, led to an unusually large output of inscriptions which form a good source of information as well as an attractive field for conjecture. Besides this, the purely prosopographical interest, it is possible by following up and seeking to account for the gradual increase of the number in connection with other evidence, to supplement our rather meagre knowledge of life in the Greek East, and also, in the period before the death of M. Aurelius, to watch the working of the diarchy at a time when the Senate's prestige was at its highest and the emperors were most concerned to maintain its efficiency.

The following corrections and additions are required in Section III of this article (J.R.S. xviii, p. 187, the last nine lines). Any reader is requested to delete the last nine lines, and to substitute the following.

The important inscription published by Buckler and Calder in J.R.S. xvi, p. 74 shows that cohors I Sugambrorum came from Moesia to Eumeneia somewhere about A.D. 130: apparently Eumeneia was the goal of this march, and vows became payable on arrival. It has elicited valuable comments from Atkinson (loc. cit.) and Ritterling (J.R.S. xvii, p. 28), who have, however, not exhausted the evidence. This coh. I Sug. quing. was intended to replace another cohort, which was moved up to the East, probably coh. I Raet.

The paintings in the triclinium of the Villa Item, a dwelling-house excavated in 1909 outside the Porta Ercolanese at Pompeii, have not only often been published and discussed by foreign scholars, but they have also formed the subject of an important paper in this Journal. The artistic qualities of the paintings have been ably set forth: it has been established beyond all doubt that the subject they depict is some form of Dionysiac initiation: and, of the detailed interpretations of the first seven of the individual scenes, those originally put forward by de Petra and accepted, modified or developed by Mrs. Tillyard appear, so far as they go, to be unquestionably on the right lines. A fresh study of the Villa Item frescoes would seem, however, to be justified by the fact that the majority of previous writers have confined their attention almost entirely to the first seven scenes—the three to the east of the entrance on the north wall (fig. 3), the three on the east wall and the one to the east of the window on the south wall, to which the last figure on the east wall, the winged figure with the whip, undoubtedly belongs.

A remark which I made in regard to Tenney Frank's article on the first and second temples of Castor at Rome, to the effect that its conclusions are based on inaccurate drawings, seems to call for some justification on my part. I may say that I had fully intended to discuss the matter in print long before this, and that it was only the impossibility of offering a more satisfactory solution that prevented me from doing so. But, if the truth is ever to be reached in this difficult problem, we must first clear away mistakes and misunderstandings; and it is with this object in view that I am publishing this note at the present time.

A careful examination of the existing remains seems to establish the following points with regard to the earliest temple. (As I have not been able to give a fresh series of drawings, I have adhered closely to the order of Frank's argument.) The first point of divergence is in regard to the interpretation of the walls e and d. The former is no less than 3·24 metres in thickness, the latter 1·54 m.; and they are supposed each to carry a line of four wooden columns only 0·77 m. in diameter. The adaptation of means to ends is entirely out of all proportion.

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.