The capitals are preserved on the fragment in the Lateran Museum, the minuscules were read from the stone in the fourth century by the Writer of the Life. In 1. 7, the MSS of the Life give βασιλείαν or βασίλειαν; the former is printed by most editors in defiance of Ramsay's report that ΒΑΣ[ι]ΛΗ was on the stone when he and Sterrett saw it at Hieropolis in 1883. No disputed reading in the whole range of ancient Christian epigraphy has aroused keener controversy; no reading affects so vitally the whole purport of a document. If we read βασιλῆαν, the Pure Shepherd sent a second-century Phrygian Bishop to Rome to look upon the Emperor and Empress. If we read βασιλείαν, Avircius was sent to Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius to look upon Sovereignty and a Sovereign Church. The reading βασίλειαν of some MSS, implying a visit to the Empress and Princess, need not be considered. It has the advantage of βασιλείαν in point of metre, but the Epitaph elsewhere (lines 8, 14, 15, 18, to say nothing of 21, 22) is irregular in its scansion.

When a tag from a colophon usurps the place of a title, a word of apology may be in season. In this instance, then, the motive for the choice was a desire to allay at the outset any alarm that might be felt lest the Journal should be caught in the maelstrom of a never-ending controversy. Those who are apprehensive on that score may rest assured that, unless fresh facts of real moment come to light, this will be my last word upon the subject. Indeed, it is with the greatest reluctance that I have intervened now. Thanks to the indulgence of long-suffering editors, my views have already been set out so fully, partly in these pages and partly elsewhere, that I had believed myself free to stand aside and await the verdict of informed opinion. But I was too sanguine. My arguments, as reflected in ‘The Fate of Agricola's Northern Conquests’, are sometimes so grievously distorted and obscured, doubtless through my own failure to state them clearly, that one more effort to be intelligible is imperative. The obligation is all the stronger because my critics announce that they are ‘reserving fuller treatment for another place’; it would be unfair to leave them in any dubiety as to the case they have to meet. Unfortunately one cannot be explicit without some expenditure of words. I will do my best, however, to be economical in that respect and, as an earnest of my good intentions, I will refrain from touching upon the various ‘general grounds’ to which the opening pages of the article that has set my pen in motion are devoted. They are too nebulous for brief debate. I cannot, however, leave unchallenged the attempt to rule out my interpretation of a crucial phrase.

A new military diploma, acquired by the Hungarian National Museum (pls. ii, iii, I), furnishes us with fresh evidence of Dacian settlements south of the Danube. We publish this new document with the kind permission of Professor Paulovics, Keeper of Roman Antiquities in that museum. Only the front leaf of the diploma has been discovered; the statement of the dealer, that it was found in the Danube near Nicopol in Bulgaria, is trustworthy. The tablet is slightly damaged on the right top of the front side, but this does not obscure the reading; it measures 94 by 118 millimetres and is 1·5 millimetres thick. It weighs 113·15 grammes.

According to Polybius, Philip V of Macedonia and Antiochus III of Syria, after the death of Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt, ‘each encouraging the other,’ agreed together to do away with Philopator's heir, the later Ptolemy Epiphanes, then a young child, and to divide his kingdom between themselves. This story appears twice in the historian's narrative. It is told in a brief form in the author's résumé of the contents of his history as given in his third book, where we are informed that, as the result of an agreement to divide the Egyptian Empire, Philip laid his hands on Samos, Caria and the region of the Aegean, while Antiochus seized the region of Syria Coele, and Phoenicia. It appears at greater length in the historian's fifteenth book, where he moralises on the subject, likening the two monarchs to the fish who devour the smaller members of their own kind and delivering a homily in which he shows that Nemesis, by arousing the Romans, brought on the two evil-doers the fate they had designed for their neighbour, and so visited on them the penalty they deserved, thereby teaching a lesson to posterity also.

The rapid progress of archaeological research and discovery in Italy has made it difficult to appreciate the importance and interest of many of the results. Full reports of the more recent excavations are seldom available and many of the provisional accounts have appeared in publications not easily accessible to the English scholar. These notes attempt to call attention to some of the more important discoveries of the classical period and to indicate the sources from which further information may be drawn. The area covered is Rome and Latium, the Sabina and Samnium, Picenum, Umbria, the Ager Gallicus and north-east Italy, including Istria. It is hoped later to publish a second article covering the other provinces of Italy. While the greater number of the excavations and studies belong to the period since 1935, a few of earlier date have been included. Within these limits I have attempted to note all the more important discoveries. Less extensive finds or those about which little information is available have been omitted, as a full list is published in the Archäologischer Anzeiger of the German Archaeological Institute and elsewhere.

(i) Introduction

For a hundred years, ancient historians have been seeking to determine the date at which Caesar's Gallic command legally expired—a date which, curiously, no ancient writer has troubled to record. Little has been added, save repetition, to the arguments used by Mommsen in favour of 1st March, 49 B.C., by Zumpt in favour of 13th November, 50 B.C., and by Hirschfeld in favour of 1st March, 50 B.C. A few ‘freaks’ have sprouted, 29th December, 50 B.C., from Judeich, and an uncertain date between 31st July and early October, 50 B.C., from Stevens. And now, instead of offering a strange or even a familiar device for untying the Gordian knot, I want to suggest that it should be cut; that there was no exact terminal date for Caesar's tenure of his command. This I can only do by challenging what most scholars are content to accept, the foundations on which Mommsen placed his own discussion of the problem. Before I proceed to the problem itself, I hope to establish, in order, the following three points : (1) that Sulla did not, as Mommsen thought, make a clean severance between magisterial office and provincial government; (2) that it was not in the nature of long-term commands under the Republic to have a specific terminal date ; and (3) that sections 36 f. of Cicero's De provinciis consularibus do not supply incontrovertible evidence for certain facts and constitutional principles, for which their evidence is often assumed to be authoritative.

Mommsen left the date of the first treaty between Rome and Carthage a crux, and a crux it has remained. For many years the fires of dispute have burned fiercely, but of late they have gradually been dying down, smothered, it may be, by acquiescence in the idea that the degree of certainty for which it is legitimate to look in early Roman history is very small. Yet the question calls as imperatively for a decisive answer as ever it has done since Mommsen wrote his Römische Chronologie. It is, therefore, remarkable that the most cogent argument for the Polybian dating of the first treaty has barely been suggested, and never presented in any detail; and it is in the belief that a sixth century date can be decisively confirmed that this paper has been written.