The story that beavers self-castrate when cornered by hunters appears in a range of Roman sources, both poetry and prose, from the end of the Republic onward. This myth is a product of the rôle that ‘beaver testicles’ played in Roman luxury trade and medicine. At the same time, it serves as a literary figure for the fraught relations between Rome and the provinces from which these, and other, luxury goods were imported.

The service books of the Eastern Church contain a large number of monostrophic hymns, or Troparia, which originally followed a verse (στἰχος) from a psalm or canticle, and were therefore also called Stichera. As hymnography developed, their connexion with the content of the Stichos was loosened, and their number increased. The term ‘Sticheron’ was, however, maintained for this new type of Troparion, which was inserted into the Office so freely that it is not surprising to find a great authority on Eastern liturgy speaking of ‘the ivy of poetry’ which had strangled psalmody.

Investigations into the Stichera have not been carried out on a large scale by students of Byzantine hymnography, because they were mainly interested in the study of the two major forms, Kontakion and Kanon. These two, indeed, offered so many problems, both of structure and content, that the study of the vast number of short hymns was set aside. The prevailing opinion that the Stichera were of little or no poetic value contributed to this neglect; and, in fact, many of them are nothing more than slight variations of the text of the preceding verse, and it would be a long task to sort out those Stichera which have literary merit.

At the end of the first book of Cicero's De diuinatione there occurs a tantalising passage containing a specific mention of the ‘Isiac diviners.’ It used to be attributed to Ennius by the earlier editors of that author, but since the time of Bothe this view has not been generally accepted. The passage runs ‘non habeo denique nauci Marsum augurem, non vicanos haruspices, non de circo astrologos, non Isiacos coniectores, non interpretes somniorum; non enim sunt ii aut scientia aut arte divini.’ The text is sound and there is no variant reading for the words ‘Isiaci coniectores’ which interest us most particularly in this study. The Italian colour of the passage (cf. ‘Marsus augur, de circo astrologi’) excludes the possibility of a Greek origin, and the question is merely to whom, Ennius or Cicero, the words ‘Isiaci coniectores’ should be assigned. It must be admitted that the words ‘non habeo … divini’ are not metrical and it would be hopeless to defend them in their present form as the ipsissima verba of Ennius. But the possibility that they contain a more or less close paraphrase of Ennius is suggested by the use of ‘non habeo … nauci,’ a phrase which Cicero never used. ‘Isiacus’ too is a rare word, which does not appear elsewhere in Republican Latin (v. infra pp. 58, 59, n. 21 and 22).

This article discusses the most memorable works of art described in Virgil's Aeneid (the paintings at the temple in Carthage, the doors of the temple in Cumae, the shield of Aeneas, and the baldric of Pallas) as visual models for the poem's organization of its own intertextual memory. The multi-dimensionality of memory enacted in the viewing of these pictorial programmes emerges as a metaphorical visualization of the semantic density created by the overlapping intertexts within the narrative itself and, what is more, urges the reader to perceive works of Augustan monumental art as embodiments of a similarly complex universe of memory.

It is rapidly coming to be agreed among scholars that a re-dating of the earliest Roman coinage, centring round the transference of the denarius from 269 to circa 187 B.C., is now inevitable. Such a re-dating is bound to have very wide effects outside the coinage. The whole question of the expression of values in terms of money must come up for reconsideration. It is my object in this paper to concentrate on one part of the general question—the property qualifications of the Roman classes. The evidence is scanty and, for the earlier period, of problematic value. The figures of the Servian constitution, in particular, even if we admit them to have any real reference to early Roman history, must have been expressed in terms of money at a comparatively late date. Until we know when they began to be so expressed, we do not know what they really mean in value. Even our scanty records, however, if critically examined in their correct historical order, will yield definite results of a somewhat surprising character.

Mr. M. P. Charlesworth's Raleigh Lecture, ‘The Virtues of a Roman Emperor: Propaganda and the Creation of Belief,’ serves admirably to illuminate a new aspect of the history of the Roman Empire, in which the debt of pure history to numismatics (and notably to the work of Mr. Mattingly in the British Museum Catalogues) will be plain. From the numismatic point of view there is, indeed, one curious omission in Mr. Charlesworth's argument; and attempts to make good the omission have opened up a series of speculations which are here discussed.

During the last three years systematic application of air reconnaissance to Romano-British studies has continued: this paper provides a summary of the discoveries, bringing up to date accounts of earlier surveys already published in this Journal. The period included the remarkably dry summer of 1959, when a prolonged drought, comparable in recent years only with that of 1949, caused extreme parching of vegetation throughout July, particularly in the main river valleys of the Midlands, in the Welsh Marches and over wide areas of eastern England. This favoured archaeological air reconnaissance. Though 1960 was an exceptionally wet season, the broken weather beginning in July was in fact preceded by a dry spell in June, at least in central England, when for a few weeks the ‘crop-marks’ were very clear indeed.

Two attitudes, broadly speaking, are possible to the problem of dating the Notitia Dignitatum. (1) We may suppose that the original document from which our text is derived was from first to last an official copy kept in the principal chancellery of the Western Empire at Ravenna, that the text suffered no material alteration in its subsequent history, and that, in consequence, items, such as late military formations whose period can be fixed, may safely be used to date the picture of the Empire presented by the document as a whole. Or (2) we may regard the original as a copy (perhaps an early one) which had passed into private hands and had suffered interpolation of items of later date.

A reassessment of the problem of Vasa Murrina based upon a study of a fluorspar vase in A. Loewental's possession was recently published in this Journal (XXXIX, 1949, 31 ff.) by Loewental and myself. The late C. E. N. Bromehead very kindly added a ‘Mineralogical Note’, afterwards elaborated in Antiquity (XXVI, 1952, 65 ff.), supporting his view that the true Murrines were fluorspar. But even by 1952 Bromehead was unable to cite any actual fluorspar vase of Roman date whose present whereabouts is known, other than the two which Loewental and I had published. He did, however, refer to Corsi's mention (1845) of ‘two antique fluorspar vases found in Rome, one in the Museo Kircheriano… another in the possession of Signor Gillet-Laumont’. This Kircheriano specimen is also mentioned by Middleton as late as 1892. Bromehead also cites independent statements by Egglestone and Sheppard that ‘Blue John’ vases had been found at Pompeii and Herculaneum respectively.

A parchment codex of the early sixth century a.d., now in Vienna, contains a remarkable series of nearly 400 full-page illustrations of individual botanical species. These illustrations accompany an alphabetical recension of a pharmacological treatise on the medicinal properties of plants written by Dioskourides of Anazarbos, a Greek author of the first century a.d. Both the date of the codex and the style of its botanical illustrations have encouraged suggestions that the latter were modelled somehow on classical archetypes. This article presents new observations in support of the classical archetypes theory, but questions the traditional view that these archetypes were transmitted by ‘illustrated texts’ or ‘pattern books’ executed in papyrus or parchment. What follows is a new hypothesis concerning the nature of the artistic intermediaries used by painters, mosaicists and sculptors during antiquity.

This article discusses the votive dedications to the goddess Reitia at the sanctuary of Este-Baratella (Veneto) as evidence for the acquisition of literacy in Italy c. 350–150 b.c. These dedications, which take the form of bronze writing-tablets and styluses, are inscribed with Venetic dedicatory formulae, abecedaria and other writing exercises. This article shows how these texts function as writing exercises — some of the earliest evidence of elementary education methods in Italy. Many of the votives were dedicated by women, and this article argues that women were active participants in literacy and education in this period. It also sets the dedications in their Italian and Mediterranean context by comparing them to votive and funerary deposits of abecedaria from across Italy and the ancient world.

This article seeks to jumpstart the politico-historicist scholarship on Virgil's Georgics in the direction of Marxist criticism. I argue that the Georgics should be understood less as a battle site for intra-elite power struggles or civil strife, more as an ideological stomping ground to work out, and dig in, the particular relationships of slavery and imperialism disfiguring the Roman world in 29 b.c.e. After a brief analysis of the dynamics of labor in Books 1–3, I train on a close reading of Book 4, which sees the bees (et al.) as crucial to the new dominant logic of compelling others (whether slaves or provincial subjects) to produce and give up the fruits of their labour — all for the leisured enjoyment of the upper crust.

The scheme for an international Corpus of Sculpture of the Roman World (Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani) was launched in Paris in 1963. It was from the outset accepted by an encouragingly large number of countries, each of which is to contribute comprehensive and fully illustrated catalogues of Roman sculpture. These are to be in the form of regional fascicules, and each country is responsible for its own publication. A central committee, under the auspices of the International Association for Classical Archaeology, has laid down general rules governing the scope, format, and arrangement. Its present chairman is Prof. F. Braemer. All stone sculpture is included and large bronzes, but not figurines, whether of bronze or clay; unfigured architectural elements are omitted. The principle of some flexibility for each country in its interpretation of the rules is recognized.

Since Usener put prominently forward the theory of Sondergötter, the idea has been subjected to trenchant negative criticism by two experts in the fields of Greek and Roman religion respectively, Farnell and Wissowa. The former protests, and rightly so, against the cheerful assumption that, whenever a deity has a name describing a function, “Saviour,” “Queen,” “Victory,” for example, we should regard him or her as a primitive Sondergott; since many examples teach us that such figures are often the products of a developed polytheism. He would suggest, as a better test than the name, the non-anthropomorphic conception of the god, or rather daimon, in the minds of his worshippers. Thus he clears the field of Greek religion of a great many heroes and daimones who, whatever their names may be, are too developed and too late to have any claim to represent primitive thought. Wissowa attacks the question from a somewhat different standpoint. He sees in the formidable list of Roman Sondergötter nothing more recondite than Varro's attempt to arrange all possible deities under “di certi,” or at most the artificial “indigitamenta” of the pontifices which, in accordance with “die peinliche Genauigkeit in der Aufstellung der römischen Gebetsformeln,” endeavoured to call upon whatever god was addressed under all the names which applied to the actual petition.