On Aeneid 7, 37, ‘Nunc age,’ Servius observes : ‘hinc est sequentis operis initium; ante dicta enim ex superioribus pendent.’ This is obviously correct. That ll. 37 ff. are to be regarded as the prelude to the whole second part of the Aeneid follows from the contents of these lines and also from the fact that the opening words ‘nunc age … Erato’ are a quotation from the beginning of the second half of Apollonius's Argonautica (3, 1) εἰ δ᾽ ἄϒε νῦν, Ἐρατὠ. It is with this exordium, then, that ‘l’Odyssée finit, l'Iliade d'Énée commence’ (Sainte-Beuve, Étude sur Virgile, 2nd edition, 174). We might expect to see the solemn introduction to Part II coincide with the beginning of the Seventh Book. If ever a poet was sensitive to the effects of symmetry and clearly marked arrangement, it was Virgil. And yet here, at one of the most conspicuous points of the Aeneid, he allows himself a glaring asymmetry. An attempt to remove the stumbling-block by means of violent textual criticism has been made, but is now justly forgotten. The difficulty, however, has still to be faced. Instead of pretending that everything is normal when it is not, we should try to answer the question why Virgil has here avoided what seems to be the most natural arrangement.

The Roman fort at Ribchester is one of the important strategic centres of Northern Britain (fig. 1), where a Roman road from south to north crossed the river Ribble, while another went eastwards to the legionary fortress at York through the Aire Gap and yet a third ran north-westwards to the Fylde. The Ribble, still tidal as far as Ribchester, may well have been navigable in Roman times as far as the lower crossing by a north-south road at Walton-le-Dale, though nowadays even small ships do not come further up river than Penwortham, three miles away. High fells, in Bowland and Croasdale, lie to north and north-east of the fort, which is itself situated in a deep valley. But the general formation of the neighbouring terrain is in wide sweeps of rolling plateau, suited to cavalry movements. In this respect the position has much in common with Stanwix, Corbridge, Binchester, or Lancaster, where Roman cavalry garrisons lay.

Ribchester does in fact appear to have been garrisoned by cavalry throughout the Roman occupation, and the name of the unit stationed there during the latter half of the period is well attested.

The origin and purpose of the centuriate organization are a subject for which the surviving evidence is too scanty to permit of any confident interpretation; and it might well be argued that, when so much has been written already about so little, it is idle to write more. Nevertheless, I have ventured to put down the remarks which follow because, unless I am wrong, there are still some relevant facts which have not been taken into account, and also because certain recent treatments of the matter, by concentrating on selected details without regard to the fundamental problem of the reason why the Servian system, was introduced, seem to me to have moved rather away from the truth than towards it. But for the conclusions suggested below at most I do not claim more than that they deserve consideration.

In dealing with so complicated a piece of history within the limits of an article it is obviously both necessary to be selective and more than usually desirable to be clear. So I have not hesitated either to pass by the less relevant detail in silence or to mention points on which opinion is now generally agreed when such points are essential to make the argument intelligible. For help in an attempt to attain these ends I owe my hearty thanks to four friends—Professors Buckland and de Zulueta, Dr. David Daube and Dr. Momigliano, and in particular also to the first three of them for their generosity in putting at my disposal their knowledge of recent literature in the field of private law. They must not, however, be assumed to share any of the views here outlined.

Twenty years ago my friend, Monsieur Georges Chenet, who had excavated several sites of Lavoye potteries in the Argonne, sent me a representative collection of fragments of moulds and bowls from these potteries. He had already published several articles on the rich material he had excavated, but he informed me that he intended to write a large and comprehensive monograph on the subject. However, he went with Professor C. F. A. Schaeffer to Syria to excavate the important site of Ras Shamra, and his Lavoye work fell into abeyance. It is, therefore, an opportune moment to publish this collection, which he so kindly sent me; for the account given by Fölzer was incomplete and not systematic enough in differentiating the work of the various potters, although the description was founded on material discovered by Dr. Meunier and M. Chenet. Unfortunately nearly all their material was looted or destroyed by the Germans in the last war and possibly M. Chenet's later collections may have suffered the same fate in this war.

In the settlement of Greece after the Third Macedonian War Roman policy was at times moderate, at times harsh. On occasion the difference might represent only an individual point of view: thus the terms imposed upon Macedonia might seem generous to a Roman who contemplated the grant of ‘freedom’ to the Macedonians, the reduction of taxation and the absence of territorial aggression on Rome's part, while they might equally seem harsh to a Macedonian who felt that his sense of nationhood had been violated by Rome's creation of the four independent Republics. But towards Epirus Roman policy seems to have been marked by two successive stages, the first moderate, the second brutal. It is the purpose of this note to attempt to consider the causes which determined this change and to examine what influence the Epirote Charops exercised upon the measures which turned his country into a playground for Roman brutality and ultimately into an abomination of desolation.

A paper by me on the same subject appeared in the Journal as long ago as 1929 (pp. 19 ff.). The criticism of the traditional datings there suggested seems in the main to have stood the test of time. But reconstruction should follow in due course on demolition; and, although no final scheme can yet be proposed, already it should not be premature to formulate some results to which research is pointing. Before we can produce a perfect figure we need a rough casting on which to work.

The earliest Roman tradition about coinage is of a very mixed character. A number of references to Roman coins—scattered at intervals over the period of the Kings and the Early Republic—may be dismissed as later intrusions. The golden prime of the Etruscan Kings will surely have known the precious metals—perhaps actual coins of foreign cities; but it has no coins of its own to show. A more trustworthy tradition tells of a form of reckoning in oxen and sheep—the ‘pecunia’ (from ‘pecus’, ‘flock’), which became the Latin word for money—only giving place officially to the currency of uncoined bronze (‘Aes Rude’) in the age of the Decemvirs.