The Roman polychrome mosaic, which forms the subject of this paper, came to light on 12th September, 1963, at the village of Hinton St. Mary in northern Dorset, 1½ miles north of Sturminster Newton. The field in which the pavement lies is the property of Mr. W. J. White, general engineer, blacksmith, and welder, who recognized as Roman the tesserae revealed by the postholes that were being dug for the foundations of a building near his forge. Mr. White immediately reported the discovery to the authorities of the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, and invited them to direct the clearance of the whole mosaic with the help of a group of local archaeologists and amateurs. Mr. R. A. H. Farrar, of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), also took part in the work of clearance; and the vertical photographs reproduced here, of which Mr. White holds the copyright, were taken at his request by the Commission with the aid of an 18-foot gantry.

The ninth book of the correspondence of Q. Aurelius Symmachus contains a number of letters lacking the names of their addressees. Otto Seeck once suggested that one of these letters might have been written to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. This suggestion has been accepted and built upon by most subsequent writers on Ammianus, and it has come to be generally agreed that he had connections among the senatorial aristocracy of Rome; connections, according to some scholars, that led to serious distortions in his history. A. Alföldi, in an attempt to rehabilitate his fellow-Pannonian, the brutal emperor Valentinian, maintained that Ammianus, ‘body and soul on the side of the senators’ (who hated Valentinian), presented ‘his dear Roman aristocrats’ with a picture of Valentinian ‘as black as one-sided hatred can contrive’. W. Ensslin suggested that Ammianus was a supporter of the usurper Eugenius whom Theodosius crushed in 394, and that the letter in question was deliberately published without his name to protect Symmachus' family—in which he has been followed by W. Hartke, and, with added refinements, by R. A. Pack.

The introduction of the denarius system—gold with the types Head of Mars / Eagle, denarii, bronze of sextantal standard and victoriati—can now be dated within the brief period between early 213 B.C., when the quadrigatus was still in issue and late 211 B.C., by which time coins of the denarius system had reached Morgantina. With this dating it becomes possible to give an exact account of the breakdown of Rome's earlier coinage system and add considerably to our understanding of the financial and monetary policy of the Roman Republic.

No analysis of the political character of the Empire can avoid the question of finance. The various sources of revenue of the Emperor and the res publica, the role of the private wealth of the Emperor, the nature of his control over public funds, the question of how and when various public revenues were taken by him—a satisfactory political interpretation of the early Empire must take account of all these.

This article attempts merely to take a second preliminary step towards such an interpretation. Its aim is to set out as clearly as possible the evidence as to the nature of the Aerarium and the functions of its officials, and, above all, to avoid the anachronistic approach which our language itself so readily invites. Not all anachronistic views of the subject have had the beautiful obviousness of Ramsay's contribution: even to speak of the ‘world-wide financial administration’ of the Aerarium will prove to be misleading.

Quinque consulates in 65 B.C. gave evidence against C. Cornelius, accused under the lex Cornelia de maiestate. One of them was an Aemilius Lepidus. Though not generally perceived, a problem of identity exists.

Until recent centuries, historians had to reckon with only limited social movement. I use the phrase in a very wide sense, to cover change of habitation, profession, or class; but even so defined, in a world dominated numerically by small farmers, people rarely moved around, or up or down, socially. This is as true of the thirteenth as of the third century.

But it is usual to say that, granted these limitations, social movement was still much more restricted after 250 than before. This has recently been challenged by A. H. M. Jones. ‘The late Roman empire is often conceived of as a rigid hierarchical society, in which every man was tied to the station in life to which he was born.’ But the laws directing this confess, in their repetitions and relaxations, that they could not really be applied. Society, he says, was actually less static after 250 than before. Despite what has become the almost canonical view of the question, Professor Jones is certainly in the right. Under three major headings, all perfectly well known, many people did change jobs and homes. Some fled from invasion, in numbers powerfully suggested by the thousands of coin hoards from Britain to the Black Sea—we must assume that for every treasure we find, a hundred are still hidden, and for every man who buried his money, a hundred took it with them—; another group, from one to two hundred thousand, joined an expanded army; an equal number in Egypt alone turned monk. If we say, then, that over the century 250–350, half a million people were taken from one life and newly rooted in another, we have a figure by no means fantastic, yet without parallel in any earlier era of the Empire.

The aim of this paper is to summarize the available information on the types of plough used in Roman Britain. There are a number of sources for such a study. Much of our knowledge of the basic structure of these early ploughs comes from the finely preserved Iron-Age examples which have been found in Scandinavian peat bogs. These also serve to supplement and clarify the most detailed surviving description of the Roman plough, which is given by Vergil in Georgics I. A few models of the Roman period have been found in Britain and Germany. Of major importance, of course, are the surviving parts of Romano-British ploughs (which are all, in fact, either shares or coulters), and material from Roman Europe can be used to amplify these. The Elder Pliny has a detailed, but difficult, section on the various types of share and occasionally he throws light on other aspects of the subject. Finally, a certain amount of information can be gained from comparisons with modern plough types.

‘Nova ea minus placebat sapientia’: that was the view that the ‘veteres et moris antiqui memores’ took of the diplomatic activity of Q. Marcius Philippus and his colleagues during their embassy to Greece and Macedonia in 172/1. For once we have evidence of a definite division in the Senate on a matter of policy, and if the political groupings established by prosopographers are to have any meaning beyond mere manoeuvring for office, it should be possible to discover the protagonists on each side, and to trace the division in the Fasti. Such an inquiry should make it possible to write a coherent political history of the years leading up to the Third Macedonian War. It has long been recognized that the decade after 180 was a period of sharp disagreement among the nobiles, but no satisfactory interpretation of the whole period between 179 and the end of the Third Macedonian War has yet been given. In this paper I shall attempt an analysis of the problem in two sections: firstly I shall discuss the diplomatic career of Q. Marcius Philippus and some related questions; secondly, I shall try to relate the conclusions of the first section to the political history of Rome in the 170's.

Among the many favours for which Ausonius thanked Gratian when he was designated consul in the autumn of 378 was ‘ad praefecturae collegium filius cum patre coniunctus’ (Grat. Act. 7). This favour, he goes on to say, preceded his nomination to the consulship, and was Gratian's own gift after his father's death; ‘et tui tantum praefectura beneficii, quae et ipsa non vult vice simplici gratulari, liberalius divisa quam iuncta, cum teneamus duo integrum, neuter desiderat separatum’ (Grat. Act. 11). This prefecture was apparently that of the Gauls (Grat. Act. 40: ‘agant et pro me gratias voces omnium Galliarum, quarum praefecto hanc honorificentiam detulisti’). In later poems he alludes to his ‘praefecturam duplicem’ (Protrept. 91), in which he was, before entering upon his consulship on 1 Jan. 379, ‘praefectus Gallis et Libyae et Latio’ (Epiced. 42).

‘Sit ergo nobis orator quem constituimus is qui a M. Catone finitur, vir bonus dicendi peritus, verum, id quod et ille posuit prius et ipsa natura potius ac maius est, utique vir bonus.’ (Inst. XII, 1, 1). Why did Quintilian insist so strongly on the moral qualities of the orator ? The question has not been persistently enough asked. Austin, for example, thinks that it is only ‘a steadfast sincerity of purpose throughout’ that redeems the first chapter of Book Twelve from ‘mere moralizing’. And it only takes the problem a stage further back to say that this is a matter of Stoic influence. Even if Posidonius did formulate in connexion with rhetoric a maxim on the lines of Strabo's οὐχ οἷόν τε ἀγαθὸν γενέσθαι ποιητὴν μὴ πρότερον γενηθέντα ἄνδρα ἀγαθόν, we must still ask why Quintilian troubled to give this Stoic view such new prominence. After all, ‘oratori…nihil est necesse in cuiusquam iurare leges’ (XII, 2, 26). And it is clear that Quintilian realized that he was innovating. Cicero, he writes, despite the width of his conception, thought it enough to discuss merely the type of oratory that should be used by the perfect orator: ‘at nostra temeritas etiam mores ei conabitur dare et adsignabit officia.’ (XII, pr. 4). This is perhaps to schematize the contrast a little over-dramatically. Cicero had certainly written in theDe Oratore: ‘Quarum virtutum expertibus si dicendi copiam tradiderimus, non eos quidem oratores effecerimus, sed furentibus quaedam arma dederimus.’ (III, 55). But there is no doubt that Cicero was not primarily concerned with the moral aspect. As the leading orator of his day, he may have thought it indelicate or superfluous to stress that the perfect orator must be a good man. Moreover, it was not clear that the troubles of Cicero's day were the result of morally bad orators: one had to look back to Saturninus and Glaucia for examples of the evils caused by unscrupulous use of words.

During the last two centuries of the Roman Republic, Italian business-men swarmed into newly acquired provinces and lands that had fallen under Roman influence. Sometimes they settled abroad with their families and, as landowners, obtained a form of wealth that raised them in the social scale. At the end of the second century B.C. Italians began to emigrate and become landowners in another way—by the foundation in the provinces of colonies, veteran and civilian. It was Gaius Gracchus who initiated colonization overseas, and it remained a radical, controversial policy—but an indispensable one. Both forms of emigration kept up their momentum until the Imperial age. As they passed through the empire or settled abroad, families of Italian negotiatores and colonists left evidence of their movements, mainly in the form of inscriptions. Under the Caesars we may, in some cases, trace their progress in reverse: the descendants of Italian émigrés—negotiatores, colonists, and landowners—returned to Italy and held posts to which some at any rate of their ancestors could never have aspired.

Augustine had to face the issue of religious coercion throughout his episcopate, and especially in his dealings with the Donatist schism. As far as I know, he is the only writer in the Early Church to discuss the subject at length. He even changed his mind on the issue, and he has told us of this ‘conversion’ with characteristic disarming frankness. It is a change which cannot fail to interest us, for whom the problem remains acutely relevant. He went on to justify religious coercion with a thoroughness and coherence which is quite as much part of his character as is his candour: and so Augustine has appeared to generations of religious liberals as ‘le prince et patriarche des persécuteurs’

In the study of social structure in the Roman world of the first and second centuries A.D. nothing is more important or more complex than the slave and freed-slave classes. Their numbers are indeterminately large and predominant in many urban and some rural areas. Most have a reasonable expectation of early manumission and enjoy a high rate of social advancement. But it is important to distinguish between the different social levels of the slave classes in general in order to isolate, if possible, those elements of exceptionally high mobility which are an example and incentive to the rest. Among the most important of these in the early Imperial period are the slaves and freedmen of the Emperor, the Familia Caesaris, itself comprising groups of differing legal and occupational status. By comparing different groups of Imperial slaves both with each other and with those of equivalent legal status outside the Familia Caesaris it is possible to illustrate the extent of social differentiation within the slave classes.

For the municipal jurisdiction of the Roman Republic, the bronze tablet found at Veleia, which is commonly and, as I assume, rightly called the Lex Rubria, is clearly important but it is not in all places intelligible. The law dealt with the conduct of a range of civil cases in the courts of Cisalpine Gaul, from the proceedings in iure and the granting of a formula to the appointment of a iudex (cf. ‘ex hac lege’ ch. xxi 24), the delivery of the iudicium (cf. ch. xx) and the methods of execution available to local magistrates. Together with another more carefully drafted fragment from Ateste, which is at least closely related and may be a portion of the same law (cf. ‘ex hac lege’ in lines 8–9), it offers a glimpse of the legal structure in a crucial period. The Lex Rubria is longer, less carefully drafted, and at the same time more obscure; whence some contributions are offered towards the meaning of the text (I, II, III) and its implications (IV).

Julian the Apostate is one of the best-known figures of Roman imperial history. Perhaps for this very reason, what is not known about him is all the more tantalizing. Some of the gaps in our knowledge of his life may be filled by analysis of the coins struck between 355 and 363, the eight years during which he was either Caesar or Augustus. The study of his coinage is in its infancy, but it is to be hoped that the forthcoming publication of the relevant volume of Roman Imperial Coinage will present to students a satisfactory corpus of coins, without which any study must be provisional.

Italica in the province of Baetica is the ‘patria’ of the Aelii. Hadrian duly bears the tribe of that municipium, the ‘Sergia’. However, the place of a man's birth is not always the same as the legal ‘origo’ of his family. A child may see the light of day somewhere else, according to the rank and occupation of his parent. The consular historian, probably Narbonensian by his ‘patria’, might have been born at Augusta Treverorum or Colonia Claudia: a Cornelius Tacitus is on record as imperial procurator in Belgica and the Germanies. Or, for that matter, Claudius Caesar. That infant was born at Lugdunum, a Roman colonia. Seneca, by a double denigration, labels him a ‘Gallus germanus’.

A fresh study of the diplomas found in Roman Britain for The Roman Inscriptions of Britain vol. II has produced further evidence for two new contingents. It may be helpful to other scholars if the evidence for these additions to the Army List is made available without awaiting the general publication.