Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo fama Marcelli: so it was with Posidonius from 1878 for forty years, with no voice raised to the contrary save by A. E. Housman in his caustic asides. Had we not found a figure lesser in dimensions than only Plato or Aristotle, the principal intellectual influence of two succeeding centuries, the fountainhead of Neoplatonism ? In retrospect the element of exaggeration is clear, and yet the quest must not be counted as labour in vain; for there came of it a great enlargement of the frontiers of scholarship. So in the familiar fable the sons did not find the buried treasure for which they dug, but their digging bore rich fruit.

In his play Dido Queen of Carthage, compassing Troy's fall, Aeneas' wanderings, and Dido's passion (with the curtain falling not on one corpse but on three), Marlowe makes his Dido say as she begs for the tale of Troy:

‘Many tales go of that city's fall,

And scarcely do agree upon one point:

Some say, Antenor did betray the town;

Others report, 'twas Sinon's perjury;

But all in this, that Troy is overcome,

And Priam dead.’

A papyrus in the British Museum (2851) furnishes detailed information about an auxiliary regiment in Moesia Inferior, a cohors equitata, namely Cohors I Hispanorum veterana. Conveniently known from its first editor as ‘Hunt's Pridianum’, the document has much to reveal about military life, army book-keeping—and imperial history. A revised text had long been needed. It is now to hand, with new and decisive readings, edited with exemplary care by R. O. Fink. Further, a new date appears to emerge. Not 115, but 99.

One of the mosaics of the villa at Piazza Armerina, which are generally dated to the early fourth century A.D., depicts in connection with a contest a table on and under which are what are evidently prizes, crowns, palms, and bags labelled , that is 12,500 denarii. I suggest that these bags are the folks, which were at this date and later units of currency. A follis was, as its name implies and as various metrological writers confirm, a purse, and these purses, according to literary and epigraphic sources, contained bronze coins or denarii. The follis is first attested in 308–9, but was probably introduced at an earlier date, somewhere between the great debasement of the antoninianus by Gallienus and the reform of the coinage by Diocletian, when the antoninianus or Aurelian's piece marked XXI were the only coins in circulation and their value had sunk so low that some higher denomination was essential. If this is so, the coins which the follis contained cannot have been denarii, which had ceased to be minted, though the value of the follis was reckoned in denarii.

In 1944 Father Joseph Jarzebowski, M.I.C., now headmaster of a school for Polish boys at Fawley Court, near Henley, acquired, at an antique-dealer's (Galeria Ordáz) in Mexico City, a draped marble bust of an Antonine boy, which is now displayed in the hall of the Court. It is by Father Jarzebowski's kind permission that I am able to publish the portrait here (pls. 1, 1, 2, 11, 1, 2).

The piece is certainly antique, cleaned, but not reworked, and carved, it seems, in Luna (Carrara) marble. It stands 1 ft. 11 in. high, including the base and pedestal, which appear to be modern. At the back a new portion has been inserted at the bottom of the column that runs up inside the hollow of the bust, so that the sculpture can rest steadily upon the base.

Among the collection of documents on limitation in the ‘Corpus agrimensorum Romanorum’, a very rare and strange piece of writing has been handed down as it were by miracle: the fragment, in Latin, of an Etruscan prophecy which is supposed to have been delivered by Vegoia to Arruns Veltumnus. Vegoia was an Etruscan ‘nymph’ to whom a part of the Etruscan revelation was attributed. There were libri Vegoici, which were kept together with the libri Sibyllini in the temple to Apollo on the Palatine. As Egeria had inspired Numa, so Vegoia had communicated the secrets of Etruscan discipline to Arruns Veltumnus, who seems to have been a seer or a prince from Clusium.

If any ancient historian—either Greek or Roman—made any systematic comment on the principles observed in the choice of coin types in the classical world his account has not come down to us. Aristotle, indeed, in his Politics, made a theoretical reference to coin types when he wrote ὁ γὰρ χαρακτὴρ ἐτέθη τοῦ ποσοῦ σημεῖον. This reference, though it is of characteristic Aristotelian brevity, in reality goes beyond the theory and implies the almost invariable principles of choice everywhere. For, as scholars have often noted and now generally agree, when Aristotle defined the addition of a type to a coin as a means of indicating its value, he was saying not that the type showed how great the value of the coin is, but that its very presence gives an assurance that the proper value of the coin—whatever that value might be—can be safely assumed. As G. F. Hill pointed out, and as will be seen later, ‘the importance of this apparently subtle distinction lies in its bearing on the significance of types.’

Among much else that has been written on Sallust recently, we have been informed or reminded of his ‘deep antipathy’ for Cicero among the political figures of his own day (Syme, Tacitus, 1958, 203), whilst it is Scaurus ‘whom he hates especially’ (K. von Fritz, TAPh. A 74, 1943, 145) of the nobility of the Jugurthine War period. We believe these two judgments to be essentially correct, although ‘hatred’ for one who was not a contemporary is perhaps too strong a term in the case of Scaurus. In the case of Cicero, indeed, it is still a matter for argument how far a dislike on Sallust's part is revealed in the Catilina, which we do not propose to re-argue; for us, not only Sallust's ‘curious and elaborate creation of an anti-Ciceronian style’ (Syme, l.e., cf. E. Sikes, CAH IX, 769), but still more the way in which he deliberately proceeds to glorify Caesar and Cato in Cicero's annus mirabilis seems sufficient evidence of his attitude to the latter; nor should the –Invective necessarily be rejected as evidence, however much we may doubt its authen-ticity, since even a bogus document must be basically plausible if it is to gain any acceptance. Our purpose here, rather, is to seek the common ground of Sallust's dislikes; to suggest that the attitude of Sallust to Cicero may help to explain his hostile representation of Scaurus and that, by a corollary, the latter confirms the former.

The excavations that have been conducted since 1931 by the American School of Classical Studies in the Athenian Agora have illumined virtually all phases in the development of the civic centre from its modest beginnings in the time of Solon to its dramatic end in the third century of our era. The exploration has also made it possible to trace the history of habitation in the area from Neolithic times down to the present day. One of the periods for which the excavations have yielded especially abundant documentation is late antiquity, more specifically the centuries from the third through the sixth. The new evidence has led to the correction of various misapprehensions that had arisen because of the paucity of evidence previously available for the study of this period. The results are the more interesting because our detailed knowledge of what happened in the Agora now helps in understanding contemporary developments in the city as a whole. Athens in fact has become a useful ‘case history’ for the study of the actual way in which ancient civilization went to pieces in one of the best known and most characteristic communities of the ancient world.

The discovery in 1928 of what are now known as the Tablettes Albertini threw a flood of new light on economic conditions in late Roman imperial times. The Tablettes consist of a potful of legal documents, written on wooden tablets and dating from the last three years of the reign of the Vandal king Gunthamund (484–496), which were found at some not precisely ascertainable spot on the frontier between Algeria and Tunis. They include the details of a marriage settlement, a contract for the sale of a slave, a number of deeds relating to the sale of olive trees and other agricultural property, and a list of personal names with sums of money noted against each. Many of the tablets are no more than fragments and their decipherment and interpretation involve problems of great complexity. Two of them, and an assessment of the extent and value of the whole collection, were published in 1930 by Professor Eugène Albertini, of the University of Algiers, and he continued to collect material for their definitive study up to his death in 1941. In 1952 they were elaborately published by four French scholars, who subjected every aspect of their material features and their contents—epigraphy, language, law, economic significance—to minute analysis and review.

The puzzle of C. Julius Caesar's date of birth and cursus honorum has never been satisfactorily solved. The facts can be stated quite simply. All but two of the sources referring to his age imply 100 B.C. as the date of his birth, and the date of his quaestorship agrees with this; yet he held the senior magistracies two years earlier than, according to what we know of the normal cursus, that date would allow. Are nearly all the sources wrong (as Mommsen thought) ? Or did Caesar at some time get a special dispensation, which no one has bothered to mention (as the majority opinion would now hold) ? Or is there another explanation of a more general kind, fitting Caesar into a class of exceptions (as Afzelius proposed) ?

Twenty years after its publication the present writer's Criminal Trials and Criminal Legislation under Tiberius has now been laid under attack, in general and in particular, by C. W. Chilton. He endeavours to establish the following major conclusions:

(1) That Ulpian's word ‘perduellio’ for certain offences of treason was as obsolete as ‘the clumsy ritual and barbarous punishment’.

(2) That the author of Trials and ‘Ignorance of the Law in Tacitus and Dio’ should not have rejected the clear evidence of Tacitus and Dio that suicide by a defendant would avoid the confiscation of his property.

(3) That Roman law was ‘constantly changing’ and so a jurist affords no evidence except for his own time.