Tentative suggestions which conform to the conditions of a scientific hypothesis may play a useful part in furthering the slow and unending process of rediscovering antiquity. Proof or disproof of them must naturally await the discovery of fresh evidence, and such evidence may never come; but if it does, its appearance is doubly welcome when it furnishes proof. It is nearly forty years since my travels in Anatolia took me into the angle of north-western Galatia, lying between north-eastern Phrygia and the southern boundary of Bithynia, which ran along the watershed between the middle Sangarius and its chief tributary the Tembrogius or Tembris. The southern side of this watershed, immediately to the west of the junction of the two rivers, is an infertile and thinly populated district, but farther west, towards the Phrygian border, the mountain slopes open out into a broad plain which runs down to the Tembrogius; near its head are the two villages of Upper (or Great) and Lower Igde-agatch. Westward of this plain and separated from it only by a low ridge is a pleasant valley, watered by an affluent of the Tembrogius.

Romano-British archaeologists are now generally agreed in supposing that the final abandonment of Hadrian's Wall occurred about the time of the usurpation of Maximus in 383. This theory was first put forward by Dr. H. H. E. Craster in 1914, and it is supported by the results of the Birdoswald Excavations of 1929. It rests mainly on negative evidence, but it is evidence which was formidable in 1914 and is still more formidable to-day, since no coin later than 383 has ever been reported from the Wall—except the one which is the subject of this paper. Moreover it becomes evident that the reason for the cessation is historical and not numismatic, when it is realised that at other sites, some quite close to the Wall, the coin-series extends beyond 383. Romano-British archaeologists, therefore, impressed by the weight of the evidence, have assumed that the one exception to Dr. Craster's rule, the coin of Arcadius from Heddon-on-the-Wall, is a stray, the presence of which does not imply a garrison on the Wall at the time of its issue. Dr. Schultz, however, writing in this Journal, seems to imply that it is not a stray, but a testimony to the maintenance of a garrison on the Wall down to the fifth century.

This paper re-examines the role of ‘client kings’ in the Roman east in the early Principate. Contrary to previous emphasis on continuity with the republican past, it proposes that Octavian-Augustus enacted a set of measures that fundamentally changed the relations of certain eastern monarchs with the imperial centre. These ‘provincial monarchs’ became a new elite of Roman administrators, personally loyal to the domus Augusta and distinct from ‘client kings’ earlier and elsewhere. This Augustan systemisation complemented the provincial division of 27 b.c.e., creating a ‘divide and rule’ dynamic between provincial monarchs and imperial legates which was expedient to the Julio-Claudians. This model is then used to challenge the view that the Flavians systematically ‘provincialised’ the east as part of a reorganisation of the frontier. It raises the alternative possibility that provincial monarchy gradually died out, following the Flavians’ realisation that its continued maintenance was detrimental to their public image in Rome.

The time is unripe for a new edition of the Lex Irnitana — more work is needed and more text might appear — but it seems desirable, given the availability via JSTOR of the text published in JRS 76 (1986), to publish a bare list of those places where that text is in serious need of correction. Most of the corrections are due to the sharp eye of Alan Rodger, who also observes that the action de sponsione in ch. LXXXIV is not an actio famosa, but an allegation that needs a causae cognitio and hence the intervention of the praetor.

This article investigates the use, in Pliny's official writings of imperial praise, of the theme of ‘divine comedy’ – the idea that everything is for the best in the imperial world under the ideal emperor. An examination of this prominent theme can help us understand how Pliny handled the inevitable tensions in an imperial ideology which was grounded in the opposing figures of the ‘good’ emperor who deserved deification, and the ‘bad’ emperor who deserved tyrannicide.

Romanization in the province of Asia did not manifest itself in linguistic or cultural changes, but is very visible in a trend towards corporate organization. In the cities of western and southern Phrygia, professional associations developed that were able to gain a prominent position alongside the civic institutions. It is possible to relate this process to incentives provided by Roman law. In the villages surrounding these cities, and especially in the rural areas of northern and eastern Phrygia, the conditions were different, but there are several indications that a new preference for formal organization and its epigraphic representation developed here as well.