The collected philosophical essays of Plotinus—to which we still unfortunately give the senseless and unplotinian title Enneads—constitute a nodal point in the evolution of Western ideas. In this book converge almost all the main currents of thought that come down from 800 years of Greek speculation; out of it there issues a new current, destined to fertilize minds as different as those of Augustine and Boethius, Dante and Meister Eckhart, Coleridge, Bergson, and Mr. T. S. Eliot. And the historian cannot but ask himself what is the secret of this transmutation by which the old is taken up in the new and given a fresh direction and significance. Such a question admits of no complete answer and none is offered here. The present paper seeks merely to illustrate a few aspects of the problem for the benefit of readers who are not deeply versed in Plotinus. It omits much that a Plotinian specialist would rightly think important; and it uses broad terms where an expert might well insist on the need for qualification.

In 1958 Edward Drummond Libbey presented the helmet published here to the Toledo Museum of Art (pls. I, II). Its importance warrants at least a brief notice. The helmet is lifesize, that is it can be readily worn by a present-day person of average size. Excepting the possible loss of two ornaments (rosettes) at the sides of the browpiece or area where the pivots of the visor would be, if the helmet had one, the helmet is in nearly perfect condition. The metal is silver of good quality; the ornaments on top, on the browpiece and on the cheekpieces are also silver, with goldfoil coverings.

Civil wars are not always murderous to the upper order in society. Many of the nobiles managed to weather the storm and prosper thereafter in the years of peace, happily exploiting the new dispensation. Some had ancient pedigree and nothing else to commend them, but the stock of the dynasts Sulla, Pompeius, and Crassus enjoyed high prestige and carried dynastic pretensions: peers and rivals to the Caesars of the Julian and Claudian line. Their alliances and vicissitudes are a large chapter in the annals of the first imperial epoch. Discreet, obscured or held down by Caesar Augustus, the descendants of Pompeius Magnus begin to come up again in the last decade of the reign (after A.D. 4), and enjoy favour with his successor.

The circumstances in which Roman rule over Britain came to an end have always been something of a puzzle to historians. There is of course no contemporary record giving a continuous narrative of the relevant events, and the few brief notices in ancient sources about British affairs in the first two decades of the fifth century come from writers of various dates and degrees of authority, none of whom seems to have had any first-hand knowledge of what took place. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that what they say should be subject to wide differences of interpretation, differences all the wider because some of the interpreters have been viewing the events from the standpoint of later English history and without an intimate knowledge of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. And it must further be admitted that, among scholars familiar with the conditions of this age, there has been something of a gap between those concerned with matters of history, whether political, administrative, social, or economic, and those concerned with thought and opinion, and primarily, of course, as theologians with the development of Christian doctrine in the great age of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. It is easy for theologians to forget that the immense creative achievement of these thinkers was carried out at a time when the foundations of the society they knew were collapsing under external pressure and internal strain, and it is easy for historians to forget that a society riddled with corruption and precariously held together by the barbarous methods of a repressive tyranny was yet the seed-bed for an extraordinary flowering of the human spirit. It is difficult for either to remember that the forms which that flowering took and the imagery within which it found expression inevitably reflected the social and political conditions, the legal and judicial practices, familiar to those who gave it birth.

In the opening scene of Plautus' Amphitruo the slave Sosia, sent ahead in the night to announce his master's return, approaches Amphitruo's house, where Mercury is awaiting him. In the course of the prologue (113–4) Mercury has already explained that Jupiter has lengthened the night to allow himself a longer stay with Alcumena. Sosia, soliloquizing, suddenly looks up and notices that the stars are not moving; unheard by Sosia, Mercury comments on his words:—

Sosia: Certe, edepol, si quicquamst aliud quod credam aut certo sciam, credo ego hac noctu Nocturnum obdormiuisse ebrium. nam neque se Septentriones quoquam in caelo commouent, neque se Luna quoquam mutat atque uti exorta est semel, nee Iugulae neque Vesperugo neque Vergiliae occidunt. ita statim stant signa, neque nox quoquam concedit die.

We call a monument Ara Pacis without any support from ancient tradition. It was Friedrich von Duhn who first so called it in 1879 and he justified it in the briefest fashion. He considered three sacrificial slabs and three processional slabs. He did not produce any analysis but based his case on the fact that some of those reliefs were discovered in the grounds of the Palazzo Fiano, that is on the Campus Martius, and that the Ara Pacis was built on the Campus Martius. That was all. Nevertheless, his conjecture was enthusiastically received: it was the golden age of classical archaeology, when numberless monuments were assigned to great Greek artists and great historical events and thus the foundations were laid for a more critical and sceptical study of Greek art. This scepticism destroyed many identifications but it never reached the Ara Pacis, and that I believe for special reasons. There was great excitement in the years after 1873 when Carl Humann discovered the great altar of Pergamum ; excavations began in 1878 with sensational results. Friedrich von Duhn made his ‘discovery’ in the following year and it concerned another great altar, but this time in Rome. He was clearly spellbound and so were his contemporaries. They did not ask for proof. In that atmosphere such credulity was natural. Yet however much the altar has been studied during the last eighty years the question has never been asked why it should be the Ara Pacis. My answer is that it is not. My first task, however, is to reconsider the evidence about Pax and I shall do this as if our altar did not exist. I shall return to it in the second part of my paper and end with the interpretation of a specimen relief, the sacrifice of Aeneas which seems to me the most revealing of the reliefs.

In the decade or so before the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus the Roman political scene was bristling with perplexing problems: the relation of Senate and People; the claims of the business classes; Rome's attitude to the allies; declining standards in provincial administration and military conduct; threats from Greece to traditional Roman ways of thought; deteriorating moral standards; the influx of wealth; the supersession of peasant husbandry by latifundia; land as an object of speculation; slave labour; the decline in the absorption of provincial corn by the armies abroad after 167 B.C. and its importation to Rome, which thus needed less from Latium; and behind all the changing conditions of agriculture was the steady decline after 164 of the free population, attested by the census figures, provided that these are admitted to have any demographical value at all. Although the first radical attempt to grapple with some aspects of this Hydra-headed monster was made by Ti. Gracchus, his was not the first mind to apply itself to the challenge even though it was his will and courage that first promoted resolute action. Earlier attempts at reform loom dimly through the mists that hide from us any proper understanding of the preceding years. The evidence is fragmentary, but one obvious way of trying to unify the surviving scraps of information is to try to view the period through the eyes of one of its dominant leaders: thus an examination of some aspects of the political career and thought of Scipio Aemilianus and his supporters and their attitude towards the problems of their day and towards reform, together with the views of their opponents, may help to throw some light on the revolution that flared up, with such apparent suddenness, in 133 B.C.

My friend Mr. M. R. Popham, of the Government of Cyprus, was kind enough to inform me in a letter dated 9th July, 1959, of his discovery in the village of Nikoklia, some 2 km. to the north of Kouklia, site of the ancient Palaipaphos, of this important inscription.

A slab of fine white marble, 0·545 m. high, 0·605 m. wide, and 0·08 m. thick (pl. x), found during the spring of 1959 in the renovation of a floor of the village church and removed on 3rd May to the Epigraphic Museum at Kouklia: undoubtedly transported from the famous site of the Aphrodite temple of Palaipaphos, the source of so many inscriptions alike of Ptolemaic and of Roman date, it has thus now been restored approximately to the place from which it came. The stone preserves original surfaces above, to right and left, but below it is broken away.

In 49 B.C., on 23rd January by the contemporary calendar, now running over six weeks ahead of schedule, nearly a fortnight after Caesar had crossed the Rubicon and nearly a week after the Republican exodus from Rome, Cicero at Minturnae wrote to Atticus, who had remained behind, as follows (VII, 13a, 2):

L. Caesarem vidi Minturnis a.d. VIII Kal. Febr. mane cum absurdissimis mandatis, non hominem sed scopas solutas, ut id ipsum mihi ille [sc. Caesar] videatur irridendi causa fecisse, qui tantis de rebus huic mandata dederit; nisi forte non dedit et hic sermone aliquo arrepto pro mandatis abusus est.

The publication in 1934 of the second edition of Sir George Macdonald's Roman Wall in Scotland marked the end of an era in the study of the Antonine Wall. The interest in systematic exploration aroused by the Glasgow Archaeological Society's investigations of 1890–3 gained momentum during the years that followed; and by 1934 the structural nature of the Wall had been determined and its course for the most part accurately mapped, while excavation, often on an elaborate scale, had been carried out in the majority of the known forts along its line. With much of this activity Macdonald was personally associated, and his masterly synthesis of the results will always be an indispensable reference-work for those who labour in the same field.

In a recent paper N. J. Miners has challenged the view that Gaius Gracchus' law ‘ne quis iudicio circumveniatur’ should be interpreted as part of his attempt to reform the quaestio de rebus repetundis and has maintained that it cannot therefore be used as evidence for a stage in Gaius' legislative activity when he envisaged the retention of senators as indices in this court. Mr. Miners states well the principal objection to this theory, that Gaius' law, to judge from the references to it in Cicero, pro Cluentio, was concerned with unjust condemnations, while Gaius' preoccupation, as far as the extortion court was concerned in 123–2 B.C., was with unjust acquittals. Mr. Miners shows that our scanty information about the law will bear a very different interpretation and he returns to the view of Mommsen, that it should be associated with the Gracchan law de provocatione (and perhaps even identified with it).

The seventeen pieces of wood which together form the tablet here described (Guildhall Museum E.R. no. 444) were found on 10th February, 1959, 15 feet below street level in a timber-lined pit on the site of Temple House, Queen Street, in the City of London. Ink writing on the wood was at once recognized. Even in the wet and sodden state of the tablet Latin words could be made out and a preliminary copy was taken. The surface which showed writing was twice photographed by Mr. M. B. Cookson, of the Institute of Archaeology of London University, using infra-red light. The other surface, on which no writing could be discerned, was not photographed, unfortunately, since when the wood was bleached some traces of ink appeared on this side too, but were subsequently lost. The wood was then dried out, using the carbo-wax process, in the laboratory of the Guildhall Museum; to everyone's disappointment the ink was found to have vanished, and it seems as though the gum adhesive of the carbon ink must have been interfered with. The account given here of the contents of the tablet therefore rests entirely on a preliminary examination of the wood while it was still wet and on the photographs. One of the latter, together with a line drawing, is reproduced in plate XI.