I will next briefly enumerate the evidence for the separate poems, beginning with the Trojan series.

The Pavian inscription (C.I.L. v. 6416), which is usually interpreted as indicating Augustus' last settlement of the succession, contains the name of Claudius besides those of the Julian line. Mommsen (Ber. d. säcks. Gesellsch. 1850, pp. 315 ff.) takes this fact as indicating that Claudius, though not adopted into the Julian line, was still in some way considered a member of the imperial household. I think that there is good ground for suspecting the part relating to Claudius as probably added by him at a later day, and that all arguments regarding his early life which are based upon its presence on the arch should submit to a resifting.

If in the various books of the Iliad and Odyssey the speeches or personated lines are separated from the rest, the metrical phenomena will, when tabulated, be found to show a perceptible divergence from those of the narrative verse. The differences are worth some notice. They throw into sharp relief the subtle rules that control the narrative type; and, what is more important, they do to some extent suggest the principle, of which these rules are the necessary outcome. There is also involved another point of considerable interest; for the contrast between narrative- and speech-verse exactly coincides, it must be remembered, with a very remarkable difference in the use of the augment; and the more this coincidence is considered, the less easy it will be found to dismiss it as accidental.

Was there a second legion in Palestine at all ? Mommsen has raised a doubt. In his note on C.I.L. iii 6641 ‘M. Iunio Maximo Leg. Augg. Leg. X Fr….’ he says ‘Quo tempore titulus positus est (about 200 A.D.) provinciam Palaestinam una sola legio obtinuerit necesse est X Fretensis; nam Augustorum vocabulum legatis legionis non solet addi nisi simul provinciae praesunt. Legio VI Ferrata quamquam a Dione (lv 23) in Iudaea collocatur, vide ne castra habuerit in Batanaea (quo ducunt milites eius duo Capitoliade oriundi, C.I.L. vi 210 anni 208 et x 532) quae fuit sub legato Syriae Phoenices.’ On C.I.L. iii 6703 similarly he says ‘legatus legionis Augusti vocabulum raro adsumit’ But the title ‘leg. Aug.’ does seem to be used with sufficient frequency of a simple ‘legatus legionis’ to invalidate Mommsen's argument: e.g. Dessau 1026 ‘leg. Aug. leg. xi C. p. f.’; 1036, 1055, 1070, 1141 etc: and the soldiers of Capitolias might just as easily have served across the border in Palestine. Zangemeister, who first published the inscription of Iunius Maximus {Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins x 1887, 49–53) took the same view as Mommsen, that he was the provincial legatus; but later (ib. xi 138) he admitted that in that case the words ‘pro praetore’ would have been added.

Menander Gallograecvs, as one may call the text constructed by the joint labours of Messrs Gustave Lefebvre and Maurice Croiset, did not come into my hands till three months after its publication, and I am not surprised to find that over sixty of the corrections which I made on a first reading were proposed by Mr Leo in November last, five-and-twenty more by Mr Wilamowitz in December, and another five-and-twenty by other scholars at other dates. The remainder, and the fruits of a second perusal, are the following:

The latest elaborate work on the Saturnian goes back definitely to the view that the metre is quantitative in character, not accentual, or halfaccentual. This theory then, which is at the same time the oldest, may at present be considered to hold the field, and the burden of proof will presumably lie on those who advocate a counter-theory. In putting forward such a theory I shall make two, as I think, justifiable assumptions: (a) that that theory should be accounted the best which throws most light on the origin of the Saturnian, and (b) that the Saturnian is an exceedingly primitive metre, and that an explanation of a primitive metre need not be very complicated to be intelligible.

In the following pages the references are to the lines of Immisch's text (Teubner 1897), and the MSS and groups of MSS are indicated by his lettering.

People are beginning to think of Manilius as the spoilt child of Latin Scholarship. In England alone there have appeared editions of, or works upon, Manilius, in the seventeenth century by Sherburne and Creech, in the eighteenth by Bentley and Burton, in the nineteenth by Ellis and Postgate, and in the current century by Housman. The contribution of France also has been considerable in quality, if not in quantity—Scaliger, Huetius, Pingré: though to-day there is no eminent French student of Manilius. Of the German editors we might say what Aristophanes says of the Athenian generals:

only that Prof. Breiter, whose recent recension of the text of Manilius lies before me, has rendered services to the student of the Astronomica which entitle him to be mentioned only with respect. He is mentioned with something approaching respect even by Mr. Housman, who respects few scholars save Bentley and never fails to lay ‘significant stress upon the difference between himself and a jackass’—by which he usually means a German.

Since the date of my last report upon this subject there has been little to chronicle in regard to the excavations in the Forum. The work of clearing the superficial strata which cover the remainder of the site of the Basilica Aemilia is proceeding somewhat slowly, and the level at which interesting discoveries may be expected has not yet been reached. Nor is the Forum Museum as yet ready. New discoveries have been confined to small excavations on the S.E. and the S.W. sides of the Arch of Titus, where large blocks of travertine, which originally belonged to some other building, and floors in concrete and opus spicatum, with foundations and drains below them, have been found, orientated more or less in correspondence with the older Sacra Via. Two parallel walls at a lower level, however, of large blocks of tufa may well be connected with the earlier temple of Jupiter Stator, which preceded the massive concrete foundation of the temple as we have it, which is orientated with the temple of Venus and Rome and the Arch of Titus.