The publication of a second fourth-century epitaph from Laodicea Combusta, engraved on the tomb of two of its bishops, Severus and Eugenius, calls for fresh study, from a new angle, of the epitaph of the persecuted bishop Julius Eugenius of the same city, which was first published (with a provisional text) in the Expositor in 1908, and has already become the subject of a considerable literature. An opportunity therefore offers itself to present English readers with a complete and (I hope) final text of the bishop's epitaph. This is all the more necessary that an English version, inaccurate in almost every detail, has been incorporated in a text-book issued by the Cambridge University Press.

This survey does not aim at completeness. It is a personal selection, on the one hand, of recent epigraphic work which is of significance and interest to an ancient historian, and, on the other hand, of those epigraphic ‘tools of the trade’ which are important for anyone trying to interpret an inscription. But we start with some more narrowly epigraphic topics.

If the death of Louis Robert and concern for the future of the Bulletin épigraphique overshadowed the last review, it is fitting that this should begin with the good news of the rebirth of the Bulletin, produced since 1987 by an international, although largely French, team of specialists and edited by Ph. Gauthier. The archicubal verve may be missing, but the coverage of the new version is good and adds usefully to that of the old.

The publication 1 of the fragment at first missing from the upper left-hand corner of the tabula Hebana (AE 1949, 215) so far confirms some conjectures which I made in a talk at Cambridge in 1951 that I am moved to print the briefest note about a point which does not seem so far to have been mentioned elsewhere.

That the lex Clodia of 58 B.C. repealed either in whole or in part the lex Aelia Fufia of c. 153 B.C. is adequately attested by our ancient authorities and universally admitted by modern scholars. The crux of the question is: was the lex Aelia Fufia wholly abrogated by the lex Clodia, and, if not, precisely what part of the former law was repealed by the legislation of Clodius? Despite the statement of Cicero—‘mitto eam legem, quae omnia iura religionum, auspiciorum, potestatum, omnes leges quae sunt de iure et de tempore legum rogandarum, una rogatione delevit’—which is obviously rhetorical and biased, no one, so far, as the writer knows, holds the view that all clauses of the lex Aelia Fufia were repealed by the lex Clodia. This inquiry, therefore, is an attempt to determine how much of the lex Aelia Fufia the lex Clodia repealed.

Now that my excavation of Margidunum (Castle Hill, Nottinghamshire) has come to an end and the site has been filled in, it may be opportune to give a detailed account of the last three buildings I explored; for they not only furnished results throwing light on the entire history of the camp but exhibit many unusual features of general importance. They form a material addition to the plan of one of the earliest forts of the Claudian conquest situated on the eastern edge of the Trent Valley, some 25 miles SW of Lindum (Lincoln) on the Fosse Way, the first strategic frontier across Britain; and the pottery found in excavating these buildings adds materially to the chronology of Romano-British pottery over a period of 350 years.

When we consider the information concerning the history of the earliest days of Rome which ancient authors have handed down to us, we have to ask ourselves : which parts of it are acceptable and which are not ? What, after all, do we really know about early Roman history ?

Modern scholars view these problems from very different psychological standpoints. Some of them ask why we should refuse credence to a venerable tradition which has been given an artistic form of great beauty by writers of genius, and which is full of lessons of political and moral importance. Others, however, seized with the full frenzy of the critic, and with uncompromising devotion to logic, discard all, or practically all, the tradition. Whatever the cost, they intend to reach the truth. These two conflicting tendencies prevail turn and turn about in accordance with the views dominating in different periods or with the different temperaments or ages of individual scholars.

Sound chronology is fundamental in any attempt to trace the development of the Roman imperial administration. This is especially true for those officials whose careers lay in the sub-equestrian ranks of the administration, as the funerary inscriptions, on which most of our detailed knowledge of them depends, are extremely difficult to date. For the Augusti liberti the main dating criterion is the imperial nomen gentilicium in their full nomenclature, which fixes their date of manumission, normally at the age of thirty or soon after, to the period in which the manumitting emperor or emperors reigned; the terminus ad quem for holding a post in the administration is, therefore, not more than forty years after the death of the last emperor bearing a given nomen, and normally a post is not likely to have been held later than about twenty-five years after the emperor's death. In the numerous cases, however, where the nomen of an Imperial freedman is not recorded, but only his cognomen and status-indication are given, the problem is much more difficult. External dating criteria are usually lacking; we are forced to make the best use possible of internal evidence.

In a paper on Justus Lipsius and the text of Tacitus's Annals, published in the last issue of this Journal, the present writer did not touch upon the difficult question of interpolations. It has been asserted that ‘there are not many glosses in Tacitus’. This can hardly hold for the Histories and Annals XI–XVI, that is, for the works contained in the Second Mediceus. In fact, the two codices unici differ in this as in other respects. As for the Med. no. II, that is, for Histories and Annals XI–XVI, I still feel convinced by W. Heraeus's and C. D. Fisher's arguments. Arguments are indeed hardly needed in a case like Hist. II, 98, where a snatch of verse has been thrust into the text, cutting one Tacitean word in two. There are not a few cases where interpolation of glosses can be proved, and the whole subject might usefully be gone over again in its own context.

Gnaeus Iulius Agricola was born on 13th June, A.D. 40, at an evil juncture in his family fortunes. His father, the senator Iulius Graecinus, had offended the Emperor Gaius in a matter which cost him his life. This dark affair is not chronicled in detail, and our scanty knowledge of Graecinus and his career permits no useful conjecture on the cause. Graecinus had been a procurator's son, able enough in the disillusioned eyes of Tiberius to merit promotion to the Senate: he was also an advocate, endowed with sufficient ability to be engaged by the Emperor to appear against the Empress's father and with sufficient temerity to refuse the task. His literary efforts comprised a learned study of viticulture, considered more elegant than its model, and perhaps reflecting real interest in land. Agricultural interest may also be mirrored in the cognomen of the son. None of these facts, however, provides any cogent reason for the execution of Graecinus, and it must be further confessed that the elevation of the family to senatorial rank was too recent, and its provincial original too obvious, to excite wide or searching interest in his death. The sole external comment, by Seneca, is purely conventional.