Jupiter, in his prophetic speech to Venus (Aen. i. 257 ff.) foretells that Aeneas will rule for three years in Italy, that Ascanius will complete the thirty years of rule at Lavinium, and that he will then found Alba, under whose kings' rule 300 years will elapse until the birth of Romulus. The sequence 3–30–300 is unmistakeable: tertia (265) and temaque (266) … triginta (269) … ter centum (272); no effort is required to see that the total of these numbers is 333 and the total is clearly more significant than the antiquarian associations of the individual numbers

All the extant letters of Seneca are addressed to a single correspondent, Lucilius. They are among the latest of his writings and are entirely taken up with the discussion of philosophical questions, principally to do with Ethics1—hence the title Epistulae Morales. The 115th letter could, one supposes, be taken to exemplify this particular kind of epistolary composition at its best. The objectof the following discussion is twofold: first by a detailed analysis of the letterit self to establish precisely in what its distinctive literary excellence consists, and secondly by attending to its more representative qualities to form a clearer view of the genre to which it belongs.

It is my intention in the first section of this paper to examine the available evidence in order to determine the lengths of tenure of the ordinarii and known suffecti for the reigh of Nero. According to the latest published fasti, twentyeight ordinarii and some sixty suffecti are attested for the reign, although not all of the latter can be definitely placed in a particular year. It will prove most convenient for our investigation if, first of all the relevant evidence is set out in full.

(I) In I910 the bookseller Hiersemann of Leipzig bought at Sotheby's a manuscript of Metamorphoses described as a ‘manuscript of the twelfth century, finely written on vellum, bound in oak boards, covered with stamped leathe’ it was one of the many manuscripts of Ovid owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Phillippicus 1038. Its whereabouts since 1910 are unknown. Also unknown are the whereabouts of Phillippicus 2709, a thirteenth-century manuscript of Metamorphoses.

Tacitus' portrayal of the emperor Tiberius has called forth a superabundance of comment. This note, therefore, will be brief and directed to a single question, provoked by some of this recent work; namely, how far are we entitled to draw conclusions as to Tacitus' powers of psychological analysis or as to his philosophical outlook on the basis of this portrayal? A generation ago Marsh concluded that Tacitus' psychology was superficial: ‘That a man could successfully conceal his real character till he was nearing seventy and then throw off the disguise did not seem to Tacitus in any way improbable.’ Arruntius, he concluded, must be regarded ‘a better psychologist than Tacitus’ in view of his different judgement of Tiberius as recorded by the latter.

The precise nature of the relationship between Lucan's epic De Bello Civili and Petronius' essay on the same theme1 has proved one of the most intractable and perplexing interpretative problems of the Satyrica. Some have regarded Petronius' version as a straightforward parody of Lucan's; others have adopted the almost contrary view that Petronius is offering a ‘fair copy’ designed to show how Lucan might have treated his material in a more appropriate (i.e. more Virgilian and traditional) manner.

In the year 1970, during excavations at Aphrodisias in Caria, fragments of an inscription were discovered, beginning with the words: BICHARACTA Mİ [—, The editors suggest this should be read: BICHARACTA MONETA. The inscription may be dated to the year 301, and is part of an edict of the Emperor Diocletian dealing with his monetary reforms. The editors further suggest that ‘Bicharacta moneta’ perhaps refers to ‘the new coinage of A.D. 294, created by a grand recoinage (i.e. second striking) of old pieces’

In his magisterial Religion und Kultus der Römer Georg Wissowa made the statement that a Roman man or woman seeking a priesthood had, among other things, to be free of physical defects. This has since become the communis opinio, sometimes in the form in which Wissowa expressed it, sometimes involving rather the idea that a priest or priestess could be deposed for such defects acquired after entry into the priesthood, and sometimes embracing both concepts simultaneously.

It is well known that mitto comes to mean ‘put’ in late Latin and that it shows reflexes with this sense in the Romance languages (e.g. It. mettere, Fr. mettre, Sp. meter). But the nature of this semantic change has not been fully explained, nor has the relationship of the word with other placing-terms in Latin. E. Löfstedt has stated simply that it ‘takes over the meaning ot ponere’.2 But as pono itself remains common in all types of Latin, the question arises whether the two words did really come into conflict. It is the purpose of the first two sections of this article to show that for a considerable period pono and mitto occupied complementary places in a lexical system. This system exhibits a definite structure which remains unaltered from early Latin to at least the sixth century A.D., though its component terms undergo some changes. In section I pono and the words which in earlier Latin performed the functions later assumed by mitto will be discussed. In section I I we shall move on to mitto itself. It will be necessary to consider the nature and motivation of the transition ‘throwput’ as it appears in Latin.