These notes are designed to supplement, rather than to supplant, existing accounts of the Parthian campaigns of Trajan. I have therefore not tried to include an account of such matters as did not seem to me to be essential for an understanding of the main course of events and which are adequately and picturesquely reproduced elsewhere. But it is not too much to say that the times, places and purposes of Trajan's campaigns are alike obscure. The evidence is, of course, fragmentary; it is scattered, and much of it is of inferior quality; but since the scope of general histories has not allowed their authors to present a detailed argument, their handling of these important campaigns has of necessity been somewhat cursory. There is thus some reason to look at the evidence again. The first of these notes reviews the difficulties of the chronology, and continues with a partial reconstruction of the sequence of the campaigns based on the chronology adopted. The second discusses the antecedents of the war and attempts to probe the causes which were at work both before and during the campaigns.

Ten years ago I had the honour of laying before this Society a paper in which I attempted to summarise the results of the work done up to that time on the problems of Hadrian's Wall. This work had been done almost exclusively by local antiquaries, amateurs in archaeology and unsupported by any organisation more powerful than their local antiquarian societies. Even when, as had sometimes happened, professional scholars took a hand in the work, they brought little to it but what they carried in their heads: little, I mean, of the aid which might have been given by the great universities and learned societies of the country. It needed an organised staff of trained workers; it needed funds on a scale permitting the systematic solution of problems as they arose; and it needed a method of publication by which its results could be presented to the learned world and, through the learned world, to the world at large. Ten years ago, in spite of the few professional scholars to whom I have referred, there was not even the nucleus of an expert staff; the bulk of the work remained where it had always been, in the hands of the amateur and the local antiquary. The funds employed to carry it on were almost entirely local, and were raised, in great part out of the pockets of the directors themselves, as special emergencies required. And the results were published, or, I might rather say, buried, in local transactions, where it was practically certain that no professional student of Roman history would see them.

Tacitus declares in a well-known passage that a large proportion of the nobility of the Roman Empire was descended from freedmen. The assertion, if true, is of great historical importance; indeed, it has recently been maintained that the penetration of Roman society by men of servile descent was one of the chief causes of the decline and fall of the Empire. Such an introduction of fresh blood from below is not in itself unusual or undesirable. What made it without parallel in the case of Rome was that this new blood was derived from foreigners and slaves. But the statement of Tacitus may be a rhetorical exaggeration, especially for the reign of Nero to which he ascribes it. We can to some extent test its truth by a study of the inscriptions relating to the lesser aristocracy of the Italian towns, since it was from this that the senatorial and equestrian orders were largely recruited, while in these small communities humble origin was less carefully and less easily concealed. The present discussion is based upon a collection of more than a thousand such inscriptions, which record the names of town-councillors and holders of municipal offices, including priesthoods other than those open to freedmen. The parts of Italy from which they are taken display the greatest diversity of local conditions.

The object of this paper is to trace the administrative development in Roman times of the Judaeo-Samaritan territory proper, that is of Galilee, Peraea, Samaria and Judaea as delimited by Josephus, excluding the tetrarchy of Philip and the cities of the Decapolis and of the coast. My reasons for choosing this region are that it affords a highly interesting, because singularly well-documented, example of that development from a centralised bureaucratic administration to a régime of autonomous city-states, which was generally promoted by the Roman government, and that it incidentally throws some light on that subject of perennial interest,—the attitude of the Roman authorities to the Jews.

During the first century of our era, each of the four regions enumerated above formed an administrative unit. Each had its capital and was subdivided into smaller units, termed toparchies. The evidence is fullest for Judaea. Here Jerusalem was the capital, and there were eleven toparchies. The list according to Josephus is Jerusalem, Gophna, Acrabatta, Thamna, Lydda, Emmaus, Pella, Idumaea, Engaddi, Herodium and Jericho. A similar list is given by Pliny who, however, omits Idumaea and Engaddi and calls Pella Bethleptapha.

The affinities of the group of Spanish town-walls now to be described are little known, and the walls themselves are of small fame outside Spain. Mélida's book containing a short account of the Lugo wall is rare; Astorga, Barcelona, León and Zaragoza have not been described in detail. Yet they form a distinct group, with common peculiarities which deserve attention, apart from the date and significance of the whole.

The site on Middle Hill at Woodeaton, known as the ‘Roman field,’ has long been famous locally for the number of objects which have been picked up on its surface: and a detailed account of the chief finds, so far as they could be traced, was given by Miss Taylor in vol. vii of the Journal. In regard to coins, however, a good deal can now be added to her account from the collections that have come to the Ashmolean Museum since it was written: and it will be seen that there is some evidence to be derived from them as to the currency in use during the period when the place was a centre of activity.

It is not easy to say exactly what this activity was: though numerous coins and small articles, especially fibulae, have been found on the surface, there are hardly any traces of permanent buildings on the site. The Oxford University Archaeological Society, in the course of its trial excavations, came on some fragments of painted plaster which look as if they had belonged to a substantial erection, but there were no foundations of a corresponding character discovered. Potsherds are not uncommon, but are nearly all of late and rough ware, and seem to be distributed irregularly about the field. In fact, there is nothing to suggest that the place was continuously inhabited by a population of such importance as would be expected from the multitude of small finds.

The remains of 39 villas have been discovered, up to the present, in the region which was covered by lapilli and ash during the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Twelve of these were excavated between the years 1749 and 1782, in the vicinity of Castellammare di Stabia; the rest have been excavated during the last half-century, either in the immediate neighbourhood of Pompeii or in the territory of the modern comuni adjoining it (Boscoreale, Scafati, Gragnano). A list of 36 of the villas arranged in the chronological order of their excavation is given in Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. Rostovtzeff concludes his note with the words ‘Useful work could be done by a scholar who would devote a little time and care to a study of the Campanian “villae rusticae,” and endeavour to investigate the history of the buildings.’ Unfortunately all of the villas were buried again after their excavation, and, in investigating the history of the buildings, we have only the scanty information furnished by the reports, which, often amounts to nothing at all. Inability to see the buildings, however, would not be such a great disadvantage if, at the time of the excavation, adequate records had been made of the building materials used, and the methods of their use.

A recent number of the Journal (vol. xx, p. 78) contains an article by Mr. Harold Mattingly, under the title given above, dealing with the reckoning of the tribunician power of the Roman emperors. He starts from the thesis of Mommsen, that ‘in the early empire, from Augustus to Nerva, the tribunician power was renewed year by year on the day of its first conferment, but that from Trajan onwards it was renewed instead at the beginning of the new year of the ordinary tribunes, December 10th.’ The second part of this thesis has been attacked in the past and Mr. Mattingly sets out to re-examine the evidence on the subject.