In dealing with so wide-ranging a subject, a remark of an American scholar, Mr. Hoey, on the intimate connection between the titles pius, felix, and invictus provides a convenient starting-point.

The first observation I would make is to call your attention to the consecutive (and almost causal) connection of these adjectives : because the Emperor is pius the gods will render him felix (for felicitas is their gift to their favourites) and his felicitas is best demonstrated in his being invictus. Nearly every nation of antiquity believed and hoped that its gods would bring it success : the Roman People, with seven centuries of expansion and increasing power to look back on, were convinced that their scrupulous attention to the due performance of the proper rites had won them this success, that their pietas had secured to them victoria; if the Emperor could be termed pius felix invictus, it was because he summed up and incarnated there the Roman People.

The recent discovery of a considerable fragment of the fourth Book of Gaius has shown us that the Veronese Codex, the only MS of the book that we possess, apart from some fragments, is not complete. A lengthy passage has dropped out, whether by accident or by intentional omission does not greatly matter. This has strengthened the hands of those who desire to insert passages on the ground of the fact that, in the opinion of the writers, they ought to be there. But additions of this kind should be made charily, for we do not really know the attitudes and the changes of attitude of the lawyers of the first three centuries of the Empire well enough to be quite sure of what they could and what they could not have said. This may be a justification for a renewed examination of an insertion, long ago suggested, and now widely if not universally accepted, in Gaius i, 166.

This ware is both hard and heavy. Its colour varies from creamy-buff through shades of orange-buff to a dark buff. The surface is commonly burnished. This was frequently done with a fast-spinning wheel and is, in consequence, very smooth. A large number of vessels, however, are hand-burnished, which tends to produce a ‘furrowed’ surface. Sometimes a similar effect can be observed on a wheel-burnished pot, e.g. in the platters (fig. 4, 51-5). The fabric contains a considerable quantity of mica, which is responsible for a not uncommon semi-metallic lustre.

It is the purpose of this paper to consider a few of the more outstanding contributions towards the solution of this familiar problem propounded since the publication in 1898 of Sir Samuel Dill's book on Roman Society in the last century of the Western Empire (2nd edn., 1899). It may well appear somewhat surprising that I should venture to speak on such a topic, since my own work, such as it is, has been concerned rather with the history of the Byzantine Empire. And yet for a student of Byzantine history the problem has a special interest: he is forced to consider that problem not merely as a West European issue, but rather to compare and contrast the historical development in the western and eastern provinces of the Empire. He is compelled to raise the question: why was it that the Roman Empire failed to survive in Western Europe while it endured for a further millennium in the East ? The very fact that he is primarily interested in the history of the Byzantine Empire enables him to approach the Western problem from a different angle and to treat that problem in a wider setting and not in isolation.

An altar with sculptured panels on all four sides of the capital was found in September, 1837, in digging a drain about 100 yards east of the north-east angle of the Roman fort at Whitley Castle, near Alston. It was 21 in. wide by 55 in. high and was set in a socket in a large slab, 48 by 28 by 8 in., which acted as a base and was itself supported on four pillars, each about a foot high. The die was even then extensively weathered and in the drawing published by Richardson the only decipherable letters are D[.]O l A[…]VS l […]VIVS though he gives traces of five more lines. Bruce in the Lapidarium amplified his original reading and gave in his text DEO l APOLLINI l [……l.]COH III NER l […] but added on his line-block as lines 3–4: VII[..]IVS NIIC[.]C[.]R. This was repeated by Hübner.

I. Beroea, in the church of ἡ Μακρὴ Kυριώτισσα, a marble plaque acting as a window sill within the ἱερόν. The plaque has been built into the structure of the church in such a way that the lower half of the inscription is now beyond recovery, while the upper half which projects has in its present position to be read upside down. To this fortunate accident of choice on the part of the builder we owe the preservation of the upper and, no doubt more important part of one of the most interesting inscriptions relating to the Macedonian Koinon yet reported. The inscribed surface is surrounded by a well-cut moulding varying in width from 0·085 to 0·10 m.

It is now some twenty years since an audience at St. John's College, Oxford, heard Mr. O. G. S. Crawford describe, with illustrations, some of the pioneer results in the application of air-photography to archaeology. The impression made was that he had not only cleared the air but conquered it; and for a brief hour we looked upon our old world through new spectacles of undreamt power. An entirely new point of view had been gained, and it was evident that we were upon the brink of a revolution in method and attitude in field-research. As time has passed, however, the limitations of the new instrument have become more apparent. Even at first the most striking results were obtained in southern England, and upon prehistoric material. But it is still true that results elsewhere, while often striking, are comparatively meagre. There are, in fact, specific conditions attached to successful archaeological photography from the air; and for everyone, airmen included, the question is first best studied from the ground, since the strongest limitations are imposed by factors on the ground itself.

5. After the praescriptio there followed the entries in chronological order, each entry under the date on which the professio had been made. Sometimes of course several professiones were recorded under one date, viz. whenever several professiones had been made on the same day. Sometimes each date seems to have had a progressive number, for in no. 5 we read the quotation loco XV, IIII Idus Iunias.

It is at least a tenable hypothesis that the acute phase of transition from classical to post-classic culture lies in the third century A.D. rather than in the fifth. The confused and tangled epoch between the accession of Septimius Severus and the accession of Diocletian seems either to foreshadow or to shape the future both for the Western Provinces and for the East. So much that had marked the civilisation of the Antonines, the sense of gravitas and the restraint of form, the tranquil acceptance of the interplay of individual privilege and obligation within a social structure conceived as effortlessly stable, the solid bourgeois standard of what was perhaps essentially a small-town culture, went down in the chaos of an economic collapse. The emergence of Neo-Platonism, the creation of the new conventions in Imperial portraiture and the triumph of the cult of Sol Invictus all seem to symbolise a change in the conception of the functions of personality and of the relationship of man with the Divine and of man with men.