It has been widely held since the days of Aretino (1369-1444) and more scientifically since those of Niebuhr, that the Patricians and the Plebeians were in origin two different peoples or races. I propose to show, firstly, that the Plebeians were never a people or a race at all; secondly, that the differences to which attention has been drawn are differences within the Patrician body itself, the result of its development from at least three stocks. My grounds for the former view are largely negative—the inadequacy of the arguments adduced by Niebuhr and his supporters, down to and including Binder and Piganiol; for the latter, I think strong positive arguments may be found, some of which, well observed but ill interpreted, form the most respectable props of the view which I discard.

In this article there is presented a small group of hitherto unpublished tax receipts from Egypt which belong to A.D. 309 and 314. They come from the archive of Aurelios Isidoros, a farmer and occasional local office-holder of the village of Karanis, and with the other papyri of the same collection are in the possession of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The chief interest which these texts hold for students of Byzantine Egypt lies in the picture which they provide of the tax-collecting process and of the handling of government grain in Egypt under the tax system introduced by Diocletian, and in particular the new information which they furnish on the matter of supplementary fees and transportation charges.

The receipts of the year 309 are for deliveries of barley; that of 314 is for the payment of money for the village quota of clothing requisitioned for military purposes. We shall take up the barley receipts first, and then that for the price of the clothing.

In December, 1948, there appeared in Antiquity an article by Lady Fox in which she hoped that ‘it should not be long now before a sequence of dated Roman house types is established for Britain’. At that time, the writer was engaged on a study of the Roman villas of Britain and hoped that from the mass of data collected there would emerge such a sequence of types. But the facts would not fit. It became apparent not only that houses of all types existed at all periods but also that the early types continued long in existence and that houses of every type were being built at all periods.

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.

The harvest of new inscriptions from the past five years seems to be larger than ever, which is, no doubt, to be attributed to new developments in agriculture and building, especially in those countries which had hitherto changed little since antiquity; these are sharply increasing the number of monuments found (and sometimes destroyed) by chance, while more systematic search organized ahead of the machines in some areas (Italy is notable) has also increased the number found by design. It must be admitted that not all the new texts are being published very well; and that some are appearing only in sketchy or popular accounts and in newspapers or journals which are either irrelevant to Classical studies, or are mushrooms which die after a few numbers and so do not find their way into most Classical libraries. This is tedious, but better, surely, than that they should remain quite unreported. In any case, although the writer's own record in this matter is blacker than it should be, it seems reasonable to urge again that excavators and epigraphists should be more willing to give quickly an initial publication which does not aim to be definitive on the first round.