The famous inscription (pl. iii, I) from Orange, forming part of a tabula censualis and enumerating parcels of land called merides, together with their lessees, sureties and land-tax, has been the subject of several learned commentaries since its discovery in 1904. These have established that the merides are not plots of agricultural land, but of urbanised property. Their position in the urban area is, however, less certain. It has been thought that they fronted upon the kardo of the surveyors; but this interpretation of the abbreviation ad K, which concludes the tabulation of each plot, is convincingly shown in an article to be published in this Journal to be supplanted by the expansion ad k(alendarium), meaning the ‘municipal register of debtors’.

Of the five great lead-producing districts of Roman Britain, the limestone uplands of the Mendips in Somerset have yielded evidence of Roman mining activities which, however incomplete, is still the richest and fullest from a material and chronological point of view so far discovered in this country. To the Mendip mines we owe not only the earliest and latest dated specimens in the British series of inscribed pigs of Roman lead, but also the heaviest. Since the appearance at the beginning of this century of the classic article by Gowland, the full number of the Mendip pigs has been listed by various authorities, but a recent examination of two of them shows that the existing accounts need supplementing and correcting in certain important details. Furthermore, a re-examination of the remains of Roman mining in another district, in the light of the evidence thus revealed, shows that some interesting features have hitherto escaped notice.

In 49 B.C., on 23rd January by the contemporary calendar, now running over six weeks ahead of schedule, nearly a fortnight after Caesar had crossed the Rubicon and nearly a week after the Republican exodus from Rome, Cicero at Minturnae wrote to Atticus, who had remained behind, as follows (VII, 13a, 2):

L. Caesarem vidi Minturnis a.d. VIII Kal. Febr. mane cum absurdissimis mandatis, non hominem sed scopas solutas, ut id ipsum mihi ille [sc. Caesar] videatur irridendi causa fecisse, qui tantis de rebus huic mandata dederit; nisi forte non dedit et hic sermone aliquo arrepto pro mandatis abusus est.

When, in 1911, the first volume of JRS appeared it contained among other matter an article by W. Warde Fowler on ‘The Original Meaning of the word Sacer’. This was later (1920) reprinted in Roman Essays and Interpretations, 15–24, and is characteristic of its author, not only because of its keen insight into Roman ways of thought and full acquaintance with the relevant passages in Latin authors, but in its cautious and moderate use of the Comparative Method in dealing with the history of an ancient and imperfectly known religion. A scrap of Polynesian information on the meaning of ‘tabu’ was got from R. R. Marett, whose Threshold of Religion was then a new book (1909), and whom Warde Fowler knew and appreciated. About this time, Fowler, who was meditating an elaborate edition of Plutarch, a project which his failing sight compelled him to drop, passed on to me some notes on the Roman Questions (see below, p. 163), a typical piece of readiness to help and advise a young scholar. So far as his contributions to Roman religion went, the first two decades of this century were his flowering-time. Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic had appeared in 1899; his Gifford Lectures of 1909–10 appeared in book form (The Religious Experience of the Roman People) just in time to have a cordial and appreciative review from E. R. Bevan in the first number of JRS.

H. Peter briefly stated the reasonable opinion that Trajan did not draft the rescripts himself or manage the details of law and administration which they involve, that being the work of the secretary Ab epistulis. This widely accepted view was established on a firmer basis by the investigations of A. Henneman into the ‘outer and inner style’ of the rescripts. His general conclusion was that Trajan settled the more important problems himself from material prepared by his secretariat, by giving a verbal decision which the secretary worked up into the drafts which we have. These were written in a uniform chancery style, but personal interventions and comments of Trajan are recognizable within the formal texts. Henneman used two main arguments to establish the secretarial manner.

Among much else that has been written on Sallust recently, we have been informed or reminded of his ‘deep antipathy’ for Cicero among the political figures of his own day (Syme, Tacitus, 1958, 203), whilst it is Scaurus ‘whom he hates especially’ (K. von Fritz, TAPh. A 74, 1943, 145) of the nobility of the Jugurthine War period. We believe these two judgments to be essentially correct, although ‘hatred’ for one who was not a contemporary is perhaps too strong a term in the case of Scaurus. In the case of Cicero, indeed, it is still a matter for argument how far a dislike on Sallust's part is revealed in the Catilina, which we do not propose to re-argue; for us, not only Sallust's ‘curious and elaborate creation of an anti-Ciceronian style’ (Syme, l.e., cf. E. Sikes, CAH IX, 769), but still more the way in which he deliberately proceeds to glorify Caesar and Cato in Cicero's annus mirabilis seems sufficient evidence of his attitude to the latter; nor should the –Invective necessarily be rejected as evidence, however much we may doubt its authen-ticity, since even a bogus document must be basically plausible if it is to gain any acceptance. Our purpose here, rather, is to seek the common ground of Sallust's dislikes; to suggest that the attitude of Sallust to Cicero may help to explain his hostile representation of Scaurus and that, by a corollary, the latter confirms the former.

Two poets addressed by Propertius in his first book are in fact pseudonyms. Ponticus was formed on the model of Horace's Alpinus to designate someone who embodies the antithesis of the poet's Callimachean sensibilities. Bassus is none other than Horace himself, who was then in the course of writing iambics. In the eleventh epode, Horace responded in kind by creating the pseudonyms Pettius, Lyciscus and Inachia, all of which derive from aspects of Propertius' first book. This exchange between Horace and Propertius has echoes in their later work. We conclude by examining why Ovid seems to treat Ponticus and Bassus as real poets in the Tristia.