The triumph, to a Roman of the later Republic and Empire, seemed sacred and all of a piece. Its venerable antiquity was more important than its origin or development. So on the one hand Roman antiquarians agreed the triumph was as ancient as Romulus himself; and on the other its antiquity was felt to be confirmed rather than impaired by the connection of many details with the Etruscans—though the ancients never claimed, as modern scholars have done, that the institution itself was borrowed from the Etruscans. It was simply neither important nor desirable to pin down precisely the dates or phases of such a hallowed celebration.

Of course it is not true that there were no changes. Yet the Roman attitude may have also affected modern historians, who until rather recently have been satisfied with a kind of ‘unitarian’ view of the triumph as something permanent and immutable, untouched by history; discussions of particular problems, such as the alleged divinization of the triumphator or the location of the porta triumphalis, have taken very little account of changes in the triumph itself. Many Roman rituals did, indeed, continue practically unchanged, and it is a peculiarity of Roman history that our most reliable documents for the early period are religious festivals celebrated year after year, rather than written records or histories. But the triumph was, more than other religious festivals, a part of the political life at Rome.

The remarkable resemblance between Rufinus, adv. Hieron., 2, 36 ( = Migne, PL xxi, 392, col 614 f.) and Isidorus, Etym. 1, 24, was noticed by the Renaissance scholars, but no explanation of this resemblance appears to have been attempted. The purpose of the present note is to elucidate certain points of difficulty in the two passages, and to assess the value of their evidence on the practice of Roman military bookkeeping.

When, under the Flavian dynasty, the Senate began to be opened to men of outstanding ability and wealth from the eastern provinces, the Roman colony of Pisidian Antioch was sure of representation. The rise of the Caristanius family at Antioch has been discussed by Cheesman; their startlingly sudden disappearance from the colony at the end of the first century A.D. left a gap which was partially filled in the second century by another colonial family of note, the Flavonii.

Text I (Vergil). Found by Petrie at Hawara eighty years ago, P(apyrus) Hawara 24 is now in the collection at University College, London. It has writing on both sides. On one side is a line of Latin verse repeated over and over; on the other side is other Latin, also repeated over and over. The first editor, A. H. Sayce, whose publication was merely two lines in a check-list, recognized, however, that the line on one side is Vergil, Aeneid 2, 601:

Text I Non tibi Tyndaridis facies [invisa Lacaenae]

The last two words are torn away and are wholly missing, but all of the rest is plain. Certainly both sides were written for practice. Scholars commonly felt that exercises of this sort have little interest, and so the papyrus had received only a few mentions (bibliography with complete references infra).

The dating of coarse pottery on Roman sites in the first and second centuries has been fairly well established, but there is still much uncertainty in the chronology of coarse ware during the third and fourth centuries. Hence it may be helpful to describe the pottery found in a Roman well which would appear, from the evidence to be adduced, to have remained open only during the third century. In my plan of Margidunum published in the Journal of Roman Studies, xiii, Pl. VIII, the position of this well, marked R, is shown to be situated halfway between the Via Quintana and the southern rampart. It lies just outside the eastern wall of a small building which may have been used as a stable, at any rate in the earlier occupation of the camp, for in the interior I found a pit (J) which had been filled up in the early part of the second century. The lower two feet contained brushwood, straw and horse-dung quite unaltered, owing to the pit having been hermetically sealed by clay. Doubtless this pit was closed when the camp was dismantled and the Fosse Way driven arbitrarily across it, over the old camp-roads and the foundations of the razed buildings.

The excavations carried out by the Lincoln Archaeological Research Committee during 1953 dealt with two sites of a very different nature, although of the same period. Yet together they provide a useful illustration of the two principal aspects of the history of Roman Lincoln and also of two types of archaeological investigation demanded in an urban centre. The first excavation, in East Bight, was deliberately undertaken in an attempt to find answers to certain problems relating to the early military and quasi-military occupation of Lincoln and was excavated methodically and without haste; the second was a hasty examination during building operations at no. 292 High Street where a structure, apparently connected with the communal life of the town in its later period of expansion, demanded immediate investigation, without the opportunity for unhurried and detailed examination.

The first excavations of the Research Committee, in 1945–6, at Westgate and North Row (fig. 2), resolved once and for all the question of the general siting of the Claudian fortress of the Ninth Legion and, in particular, demonstrated that on north and west the legionary defences underlay those of the later Colonia. These conclusions suggested the possibility that the defences might similarly coincide on south and east also, where the line of the Colonia wall was known; but, as Professor I. A. Richmond pointed out, if this was so, the area of the legionary fortress would only have been approximately 42 acres whereas a minimum of 50 acres might have been expected.

In the past five years there have appeared a number of collections of inscriptions relevant to Roman studies and a number of collected discussions of such inscriptions, and it may be useful to record the more important of these, though without comment except where the titles are insufficiently indicative of content, for they have been, or will be, the subject of reviews. Regional corpora: G. Mihailov, Inscriptiones graecae in Bulgaria repertae vol. III, fasc. 1, giving texts from Philippopolis (1961); G. Sotgiù, Iscrizioni latine della Sardegna (1961); W. M. Calder and J. M. R. Cormack, MAMA VIII, giving texts from Lycaonia, the Pisido-Phrygian borderland and Aphrodisias (1962); A. Degrassi, ILLRP vol. 11 (1963); A. and J. Šašel, Inscriptiones latinae quae in Iugoslavia inter annos MCMXL et MCMLX repertae sunt (1963); P. Wuilleumier, Inscriptions latines des Trois Gaules (1963); R. G. Collingwood and R. P. Wright, Roman Inscriptions of Britain vol. I (1965). Specialised corpora: H. Zilliacus, Sylloge inscriptionum Christianarum veterum Musei Vaticani (1963); A. Degrassi, Inscriptiones Italiae vol. XIII, fasc. 2, Fasti anni Numani et Iuliani, Ferialia, Menologia Rustica, Parapegmata (1965); M. H. Callander, Roman Amphorae, with an index of stamps on amphorae in the Western provinces (1965). Corpora of illustrations: A. Degrassi, ILLRP, Imagines (1965); A. E. and J. S. Gordon, Album of dated Latin inscriptions from Rome and the neighbourhood, vols. II (A.D. 100–199) and III (A.D. 200–525) (1965). Collected discussions: Akte des IV. Kongress für Epigraphik, Vienna 1962; A. Degrassi, Scritti vari di antichità (1962); L. Robert, Hellenica XI-XII (1960) and XIII (1965), the latter wholly devoted to a review of MAMA VIII; a second edition of his Villes d'Asie Mineure (1962) and Noms indigènes dans l'Asie-Mineure gréco-romaine (1963). One might also mention here H. G. Pflaum's Les Carrières procuratoriennes équestres sous le haut-empire romain (1960) and the Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae from 1963 onwards, largely devoted to epigraphic studies.

Now that Septimius Severus can no longer be credited with the original construction of any one of the lines which at various times marked the British frontier, it is necessary to ask what meaning, if any, can be attached to the statements of ancient writers who ascribe to him the building of the British Wall. It may therefore be worth while to collect the available evidence as to the state of the frontier in the time of Severus, and the structural work which he may have carried out upon it.

The potters who left the declining South Gaulish Samian factories in order to start their own workshops at Lezoux, in Central Gaul, experienced in their turn the loss of potters who, after learning the craft, went away to start the many small Samian factories which existed in East Gaul and Germany during the second and early third centuries. Many of these were so successful that their products were used in quantity in north-east Gaul and the Rhineland, and even reached many sites in Britain. To mention only a few, the wares from Lavoye and La Madeleine are notable at Corbridge and South Shields, and much Trier ware has been found at Corbridge.

The original purpose served by this curious panel of mosaic and marble (plate I), which is decorated with scenes from the life of Achilles, has not yet been determined, nor has any successful attempt been made either to date it or to assign it definitely to any school or centre of art. The mosaic which occupies the centre and corners is probably rightly attributed to the Cosmati, who made the ‘ambon’ in S. Maria in Ara Coeli, of which this panel formed a part. The circular band of marble, decorated in relief, is generally regarded as the top of a puteal or well-head although, as has been observed, it is hardly consistent with the practical sense of the Greeks and Romans to cover with decoration a surface of marble so liable to rough usage. More probably the band formed the border of a large shallow bowl, a possibility not considered heretofore owing to the difficulty of close examination arising out of its post-classical use.