Excavations were resumed at Vindolanda in the pre-Hadrianic section of the site in the summer of 1985. The prediction that the area was likely to contain further deposits of writing-tablets was strikingly confirmed and it can now be confidently stated that the publication, by the present authors, of the tablets discovered in 1973-5 was only the first instalment. It is as yet unclear when the full publication of the new finds can be expected or what precise form it will take. This is the justification, if any is needed, for presenting this summary account of the 1985 material. The inventory numbers under which the new tablets are catalogued run to almost 340; many contain several fragments; most, but not all, have at least traces of writing. It is at present envisaged that three more seasons of excavation will be undertaken in 1986, 1987 and 1988, investigating an area which extends some 15–20 metres to the north of the present terminus. There is some reason to think that the writing-tablet deposit may cover the whole or a substantial part of this area and it is therefore possible that the subsequent seasons may yield as many tablets as that of 1985.

When Dr. Rice Holmes' Roman Republic came to hand and I began to turn over at random the pages of vol. i, the first passage which caught my eye was the discussion of Pompey's short campaign against Mithradates. It occurs in one of those numerous and lengthy appendices, attached to each of the three volumes, which the author calls ‘Part II,’ and in which, with regal disregard of the prices and prejudices of publishers, he seeks to probe to the bottom every difficulty that arises in the course of his investigations. This Second Part, which the author hopes some may not find tedious, is, I think, the section to which most scholars will turn first. The discussion of the campaign (p. 428 ff.) revived memories of old studies of my own in which I seemed to have reached somewhat more definite conclusions, at any rate on some points, than Dr. Holmes offers to his readers. In the description of the campaign which he gives in the narrative portion of his work (p. 206 f.) he takes, in my opinion, the correct view about its general course, but the discussion of details does not seem to me to be quite satisfying nor to dispose of the main difficulty which arises out of Strabo's localization of one of the places concerned.

The written history of the Roman operations in Caledonia is incomplete and shadowy. In the Agricola the legions march across the stage fighting victoriously, but the natives, except in the battle of Mons Graupius, hardly emerge from the forests and the marshes. In recent years not a little has been done to shed clearer light on the Roman campaigns. Roads have been traced, remains of forts have been recovered and laid bare, periods of occupation have been worked out, and the collection of relics becomes daily larger and of greater importance. Looking over the material which has been gathered together in the past ten years, the question naturally suggests itself: has the investigation of Roman sites in Scotland resulted in any corresponding increase in our knowledge of the native population against whom these campaigns were directed? To this, it seems, the answer must be in the affirmative.

This article argues for a ‘reciprocal intertextuality’ between Catullus 64 and Lucretius anticipating the poetic interplays of Augustan poets with the De Rerum Natura. Catullus’ wedding guests (proto-readers), Ariadne (proto-Narcissus), and Aegeus (proto-Dido) are interpreted here as errantes in the Lucretian sense: through their erroneous gazes presented in Poem 64, they all exemplify how not to gaze at the structure of the universe. In the Lucretio-Catullan intertextual space — generated, as it seems, by the Catullan text — a reciprocal way of reading emerges: while, on the one hand, ‘Catullus’ uses ‘Lucretius’ to show that the aesthetic experience he offers is dependent upon an erroneous, unLucretian gaze/reading which deprives us of the external spectator position, ‘Lucretius’, on the other hand, uses ‘Catullan’ characters as deterrent examples in order to teach us how not to submerge in ‘Catullus’ poetics of illusion’.

In seventh-century Wiltshire, a scholar-monk began to write classicising Latin poetry. In bold terms he describes himself as the first of the Germanic peoples to write Latin poetry (‘neminem nostrae stirpis prosapia genitum et Germanicae gentis cunabulis confotum in huiuscemodi negotio [i.e. poetry] ante nostram mediocritatem tantopere desudasse’). His programmatic statements cite Virgil explicitly, and allude to Prudentius and Sedulius. His is a poetry that sets out a stall for the beginning of something new, but does so by making clear his predecessors. For Aldhelm, as for much of the Middle Ages, the canonical models of Latin poetry included classical Latin authors as well as the Christian Latin poets of Late Antiquity.

Since Mommsen, it has been a tenet of Roman history that Augustus transformed the ‘senatorial order’ into a hereditary class, which encompassed senators, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the male line. This paper shows that the idea of a hereditary ordo senatorius is a myth without foundation in the evidence. Augustus and his successors conferred new rights and duties upon relatives of senators, but did not change their formal rank. Moreover, the new regulations applied not to three generations of descendants, but only to persons who stood under a senator's patria potestas during his lifetime. Emperors protected the honour and property of these filii familias of senators, in order to incentivise them to participate in politics and invest their wealth into munificence. The Supplementary Material available online gives all known early imperial holders of the title clarissimus vir in the province of Africa (Supplementary Appendix 1), all known early imperial clarissimi iuuenes (Supplementary Appendix 2) and all known early imperial clarissimi pueri (Supplementary Appendix 3).