Outside the Porta Ercolanese at Pompeii was discovered in 1909, in the triclinium of a dwelling-house, a painting which is unique both in style and in subject. This at once excited great interest on the continent, and has been the subject of several articles, but in England it has hitherto not received the attention which its importance warrants.

This conflict has for moderns a perennial interest, second only to that which is excited by the Peloponnesian war. The superior attractiveness of the struggle between the Greek cities, as felt by readers in general, is a supreme testimony to the genius of Thucydides; since in intrinsic importance for the world's history, his theme is far inferior to that which was handled by Polybius and by Livy. At the end of the Peloponnesian war few men can have foreseen the rise of the Macedonian kings, to which it contributed; when Second Punic war finished, it was obvious that the ultimate control by Rome of the whole area of ancient civilisation was assured. For those who care less for the form of historical records than for the value of events, the second and decisive long-drawn duel between Romans and Carthaginians must ever possess a fascination which belongs to few other periods in the history of mankind. There is a continual flow of publications dealing with its incidents and its manifold aspects.

In spite of the amount which recent publications have added to our knowledge of Roman building methods and materials, there is still some inaccuracy to be noted in the use of terms due very often to a misconception of the chemical constituents of the materials in question. In the present article will be discussed the confusion which still exists between the words sand and pozzolana. In Daremberg and Saglio, s.v. arena, Guillaume states that in the composition of hydraulic cements, “le sable fossile, noir, blanc ou rouge preféré par Vitruve, est probablement la pouzzolane.” In the recent articles by Miss Van Deman on Roman construction, one finds frequently the term pozzolana-arena, and the statement is made that “mortar is composed of pozzolana, which is called by Vitruvius arena fossicia, and lime.” In the new translation of Vitruvius, by J. Prestel, while the word pulvis is correctly translated in the text as “eine staubartige Erdmasse,” in the notes pulvis is translated as “sandreiche Erde.” Moreover, further on in the text, this same pulvis is described as a kind of sand, “Sandart.” Finally may be mentioned the reference in Delbrück's Hellenistische Bauten in Latium where it is stated that in the construction of opus caementicium, the Romans employed a “sharp volcanic sand.” This I shall hope to show to be a contradiction of terms, as “sharp” sand has nothing to do with volcanic activity.

At the period when, after a process of development extending over almost five centuries, the road-system of ancient Italy had attained to its maturity, we find that Rome was connected with the central and southern stretches of the Adriatic coast by four highways, the Via Appia, the Via Salaria, the Via Valeria and the Via Traiana. All of these roads were of republican origin, though the Via Claudia Valeria (the extension of the earlier Valeria to the Adriatic) and the Via Traiana did not become viae munitae until the first and second centuries of the empire respectively. It may be desirable to begin with a brief sketch of these roads, in order to make plain the part played by my proper subject, the Claudia Nova.

Since Usener put prominently forward the theory of Sondergötter, the idea has been subjected to trenchant negative criticism by two experts in the fields of Greek and Roman religion respectively, Farnell and Wissowa. The former protests, and rightly so, against the cheerful assumption that, whenever a deity has a name describing a function, “Saviour,” “Queen,” “Victory,” for example, we should regard him or her as a primitive Sondergott; since many examples teach us that such figures are often the products of a developed polytheism. He would suggest, as a better test than the name, the non-anthropomorphic conception of the god, or rather daimon, in the minds of his worshippers. Thus he clears the field of Greek religion of a great many heroes and daimones who, whatever their names may be, are too developed and too late to have any claim to represent primitive thought. Wissowa attacks the question from a somewhat different standpoint. He sees in the formidable list of Roman Sondergötter nothing more recondite than Varro's attempt to arrange all possible deities under “di certi,” or at most the artificial “indigitamenta” of the pontifices which, in accordance with “die peinliche Genauigkeit in der Aufstellung der römischen Gebetsformeln,” endeavoured to call upon whatever god was addressed under all the names which applied to the actual petition.

In a remarkable chapter on the Roman Campagna Sir Archibald Geikie has given the facts relating to the geological formation of those hills, which were to become later the cradle of the Roman civilisation, when the volcanic platform of the Campagna, no longer increased by fresh eruptions, was carved by subaërial agencies into the topography which it presents to-day. Among such agencies, which were both chemical and biological, may be mentioned those which prepared the vegetable soil and clothed it with oaks and beeches on the hills, with laurels and myrtles along the sea-coast, and with reeds and equiseta on the banks of the river. Then came Man, who may have watched the last gigantic natural fireworks of the Alban volcanoes from Mount Soracte, which had by that time ceased to be an island.

The following inscriptions from the Roman colony of Antioch in Pisidia, which form part of the fruits of expeditions made in 1912 and 1913, have been kindly communicated to me by Sir W. M. Ramsay. I am indebted to him and to Mr. J. G. C. Anderson for helping me to elucidate several of the points discussed below, and I have also to thank Mr. W. M. Calder for suggestions made at a later stage.

In the following article I propose to discuss a series of inscriptions discovered in the course of the excavations conducted in 1912 by Sir W. M. Ramsay, with the aid of Mr. W. M. Calder and myself, at the sanctuary of Mên on the hill of Karakuyu, which lies a little distance to the south of Pisidian Antioch. At first sight the subject might seem to lie outside the scope of a journal devoted to Roman studies: the documents are almost entirely Greek, and Mên was not a Roman god. But the Roman empire transcended nationality: it carried out in the east the work of civilisation which the Hellenic race did no more than begin, and that part of its history is the most varied and not the least important which deals with the diffusion of western culture over lands little affected, or wholly unaffected, by Hellenism. The foundation of Roman colonies was one of the means employed by the early empire to help on that work. In doing it these colonies lost themselves: they gradually lost their individuality and their Roman character; they adopted the local religion, as they were bound to do, and their descendants forgot the old Roman gods. Yet they left their mark behind, and the history of their fortunes is one of peculiar interest. Antioch was one of those Roman colonies, and my subject is a chapter of that history.

Sir W. M. Ramsay has honoured me with a commission to publish in the Journal of Roman Studies the following fragmentary inscription which he discovered under various difficulties, in July, 1913, close to Yalowadj, the site of the ancient (originally Phrygian) Antiochia Caesarea, which belonged to the Roman province of Galatia. The text of the inscription is given on page 302; the circumstances of the discovery are thus described to me by the finder:

The inscription is on a block of stone built into the pier of a bridge at the village of Gemeu, about two hours by road south-east from Yalowadj. The stone is broken on the right, complete on the other three sides. When we found the stone it was almost wholly covered by the soil of the river-bank, but a few letters of the right-hand titulus stood clear. In front of the left-hand titulus is a column which forms part of the bridge. It was very difficult to cut away the soil, as the column stands close to the letters, and after the soil was removed, it was not easy to read the letters, as one had to look at them sideways from a little distance. The letters are, fortunately, as sharp and distinct as when they were first engraved; had it not been for this, it would not have been possible to attain certainty about many of the letters in the left-hand titulus. At least one line of each titulus has been lost at the top. The missing line or lines were engraved on another stone, which stood upon this one. Part of the left-hand titulus is lost; this also must have been engraved on an adjoining block. The entire inscription, therefore, was incised on a wall of some building.