A. Nature of the Roman Administration: 25 B.C. to A.D. 65—The province Galatia is a singularly obscure subject. Marquardt's chapter contains little information, because little was known; but what he states is correct, and he makes few, if any, unfounded or dangerous assertions. He knows and mentions the senatorial governor (praetorius leg. Aug. pr. pr.), the equestrian proc. Galatiae, and about the name of the province he expresses no hesitation: as a province of the Empire it was simply Galatia. Inherited by Augustus from Amyntas, the last king, it bore as the realm of a king the unifying name Galatia; no other name was possible, and this name was continued by the policy of Augustus. A friend points out to me that the idea of inheritance of the realm Galatia was only a sort of political or legal fiction; and that the relation of the Emperor to such client-kings as Amyntas was one of absolute power on his side and of absolute servitude on the other. That is true. Augustus bestowed authority and title on those pseudo-kings; he could at any moment resume what he had bestowed; and on the death of any of them the complete and absolute authority reverted to him. The question, however, is under what forms Augustus chose to clothe his absolute lordship. He was a master of the art of disguising hard unlimited despotism under legal or religious forms, and in this case the form was that of Will or Testament, as Strabo mentions. Augustus claimed to have inherited the realm of Amyntas in virtue of the latter's Will, and acted, after the latter's death, 25 B.C., as his heir (κληρονόος, heres). The Emperor must have accepted the inheritance formally within the legal interval, and treated his inheritance according to law as including the debts as well as the property of the deceased. It was not hereditas sine sacris. Augustus was bound to pay all obligations; and he paid in full.

The long and heated controversy on the site of the great battle seems drawing to a conclusion. The disquisitions of Dr. Rice Holmes first in the Classical Quarterly ii (1908) pp. 271-292, and secondly, improved and strengthened, in the third volume of his ‘Roman Republic’ (1923) pp. 452-467, and the topographical researches and arguments of Mr. F. L. Lucas, Annual of the British School at Athens, no. xxiv, pp. 34-53, have shown, I think, beyond cavil that it was fought on the north side of the Enipeus and that the theories of Leake, Mommsen, Heuzey, Stoffel, Kromayer and other advocates of a site to its south may be dismissed again to the obscurity from which they never should have emerged. Of these the reconstruction of Colonel Stoffel 1887 (against which I vainly protested in 1896, as Dr. Holmes records), had the longest reign, as might have been expected from the imposing confidence of its author and the excellence of the plans and views in his atlas. Sir Wm. Napier in Long's Decline of the Roman Republic, v, 220 sq., General von Göler, 1880, and Mr. B. Perrin, 1885 (American Journal of Philology, vi, pp. 170-189) had maintained that the battle could not have been fought to the south of the river; but the self-sufficient French Colonel knew or cared nothing about their contentions. The schemes of the two experts were vitiated by the lack of trustworthy maps; but Mr. Perrin's presentation of his results ‘that the camps both of Pompey and Caesar were on the side of the Enipeus toward Larissa and that the camp of Pompey was on the southern-slope of the hills bounding the northern edge of the Pharsalian plain’ needed but a little precision in details to bring it into exact accord with the most recent investigations.

There are moments when conscientious teachers, and those in particular who have the responsibility of instructing the picked young men and women who pursue higher studies at a University, feel some doubt as to the value of the work on which they are engaged. Could not our pupils, they ask themselves, be better employed in acquiring knowledge of another kind ? Is the subject-matter of their studies of sufficient importance to occupy so much precious time ? Is the training in method which they receive from us superior to what they would derive from pursuing some other line of work ? Such thoughts are particularly apt to occur to teachers of classical subjects, for the claim that a classical education provides the best general training for life has ceased to be regarded as a platitude, and is in many quarters considered to be almost paradoxical. If the classical teachers of our schools and universities are not to be content to live by taking in each others' washing, the schools providing the universities with undergraduates and receiving schoolmasters in return; if they hope in the future, as in the past, to co-operate in educating men whose main activities will not be concerned with Graeco-Roman antiquity, it is absolutely necessary that they should not only be able to find arguments with which to defend the faith that is in them, but that they should justify their confidence by the excellence of their results.

To all students and teachers of the political, administrative and constitutional history of the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries Professor Bury's volumes will be indispensable. This History of the Later Roman Empire (A.D. 395 to A.D. 565), though in name but a second edition of the book originally published in 1889, is in fact a new work, narrower in limit of period—it only extends to the death of Justinian—but ‘written on a much larger scale.’ Thus for the history of the centuries from Justinian to Irene the edition of 1889 must still be consulted; indeed, even for the sixth century that edition is not entirely superseded, since for the Lazic War of Justinian the reader is referred to the earlier account (ii, p. 113, n.). It is of course obvious that in a work of so wide a scope every student will regret the omission of matters which he would have wished to see included: some would have welcomed a fuller treatment of social conditions, of monasticism, of the barbarian legal codes, of the evidence of the papyri, of the questions recently raised by Dopsch concerning the survival of Roman culture in territories occupied by the barbarians—examples could easily be multiplied; but such criticism on the part of a reviewer would be beside the point, for the treatment of these subjects would have altered the character of Professor Bury's work: he has not sought to write a Kulturgeschichte; the great value of his work lies in the masterly clarity of his historical narrative and in his illuminating treatment of the problems of imperial administration.

The object of this paper is to indicate, by the aid of a few chosen examples, the kind of contribution that can still be made by Republican coins to history. Numismatic detail has, therefore, deliberately been curtailed: those who wish for more are referred to Grueber's Catalogue of the Coins of the Roman Republic in the British Museum, with its full index of moneyers' names in vol. iii, and to an article by the author of this paper, due shortly to appear in the Numismatic Chronicle, on ‘The Roman Serrati.’ A few words, by way of preface, on some points of numismatic method may, however, be in place here:

(a) From about B.C. 125, hoards of Roman coins supply us with invaluable evidence of date. A find buried in B.C. 100, for example, obviously should contain no coins of a later date than that year. Further, if it is at all a large hoard, it will probably present a fairly reliable picture of the coinage of the years just preceding. But there are two possible errors to be guarded against. Many hoards, as they reach the numismatist for description, contain a few ‘stragglers,’ i.e. coins of dates certainly later than the main body of the hoard, added, whether by accident or by intention, after the original burial. Again, there may have been special circumstances, often quite beyond our knowledge, which shut out from the hoard many issues of dates only a little earlier than the date of burial. Both these sources of error can, as a rule, be detected and allowed for, when we have a group of hoards of about the same date.