Although Palmyra is mentioned in several cuneiform texts, the oldest of which go back to the time of Sargon I of Assyria, it seems to have remained a mere village until the middle of the first century B.C. Its sudden growth to the size of one of the largest towns in the East coincides with the moment in history when the demand for oriental luxuries began to grow in Rome and its dominions, and it was due to the clever policy of its merchants and camel-riders who knew how to keep order in the desert between their town and the great factories and warehouses of Lower Mesopotamia. From that time caravans were able to cross the Syrian desert instead of skirting it, and the transit brought huge profits to the Palmyrenes. The desert therefore, whose barren waste, to our European eyes, would easily seem a barrier, was no such thing in reality, but acted on the contrary as a link with Mesopotamia, very much in the same way as the sea connected Venice by her merchant ships with the harbours of the Levant. Indeed, a comparison of Palmyra with the great commercial cities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Venice, Antwerp, Bruges, Lisbon, etc.), is one that in several respects helps us to understand its sudden and great prosperity, as well as its sudden decline. From the day when Aurelian put an end to Palmyra's command of the wilderness, the roads of commerce had to change, the caravans again resorted to the Euphrates route around the desert, and the fortunes of Aleppo and Chalcis began to rise.

The document called by its author commentariolum petitionis, though not transmitted in the Codex Mediceus of the Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem, appears at the end of these letters in the Codices Berolinensis and Harleianus, and in minor and deterior texts, under two alternative headings: ‘Incipit commentarium consulatus petitionis feliciter’ (Harl.), and ‘Q. Ciceronis de petitione consulatus ad M. Tullium fratrem’ (dett.). The work itself begins with the regular epistolary superscription, ‘Quintus Marco fratri s.d.’ Its diction has often been disparaged on aesthetic grounds, but the best editors have found no reason of Latinity or of stemmatology sufficient to exclude it from the corpus of Ciceronian correspondence.

Early imperial arrangements must have been to some extent based on late Republican practice. I will therefore first set out the financial machinery of the last half-century of the Republic, as revealed in Cicero's speeches and correspondence, supplemented by secondary sources. The Aerarium at Rome was the central repository of the moneys of the Roman People. It was managed by the two urban quaestors, or rather by a body of scribae quaestorii under their nominal direction. Normally the Polybian rule that no payment might be made save under the authority of a senatusconsultum seems to have held: it does not appear that the old right of a consul to draw of his own initiative still survived. Magistrates proceeding to a province were voted a block grant to cover their estimated expenses: ornare provinciam is the technical term. On leaving his province a magistrate was obliged to account to the Aerarium for this sum. These accounts seem to have been somewhat summary. Those which Verres sent in on laying down his quaestorship were no doubt unusually brief, but if it was possible for a proconsul to distribute the unexpended balance of his grant among his staff—and Cicero's refusal to follow this practice was resented by his subordinates —auditing cannot have been very exact.

In a previous article in this Journal the writer and Mr. J. B. Ward Perkins gave a summary historical and archaeological sketch of the Roman Limes in Tripolitania, illustrated by the two sites, Ain Wif and Gasr Duib, investigated in 1948. Further evidence of the character of this Limes was obtained in the summer of 1949 when air and ground reconnaissances were made over a considerable area of the frontier zone, with the aid of the Royal Air Force and of the military authorities in Tripolitania. Since this new information relates particularly to the indigenous elements in the Tripolitanian frontier army, and to the types of fortified homesteads occupied by the limitanei—aspects which were referred to very briefly in the former article—it has seemed desirable to incorporate it in a supplementary paper, preceded by a note on the historical regio Arzugum, which is evidently to be identified, at least in part, with the Tripolitanian frontier zone.

I. Dio Cassius mentions Augustus' plans to conquer Britain under the years 34, 27, 26 B.C. (49, 38, 2; 53, 22, 5; and 53, 25, 2). Dateable literary evidence supports Dio. Before 36 B.C. and after 23 B.C. there is no clear allusion in contemporary poets to any intention or desire to attack the Britons.

In the annals of archaeology on Hadrian's Wall the decade 1929-1939 will always stand out as the time when the principal periods in the history of the monument were firmly fixed and the complicated relationship between its component parts was securely defined. The decade which has followed and is now due for summary, broken by war and still hampered by peace, cannot claim to rival the preceding ten years. Nevertheless, the fixing of the main lines of the design has made it possible to establish some important secondary points which present their own special problems, some solved and others yet to be so, and all much affecting the interpretation of the remains.

With considerable topicality A. Vogliano published in 1940 a scrap of papyrus describing an engagement between Romans and Ethiopians. Since his book is difficult to procure I reproduce his text and restorations:—

Vogliano jumps to the conclusion that π is a fragment of a literary work (to be fathered on to the historian Nicolaus of Damascus), from which it follows that it deals with the Ethiopian expedition under Augustus. He paraphrases its sense thus: ‘The Ethiopians are in line. The Romans advance, the infantry under command of a certain Rufus, cavalry under a certain Trogus. Other persons must have been named first.’

In their recent paper on the Limes Tripolitanus (JRS xxxix, 81–95), Mr. Goodchild and Mr. Ward Perkins have published an inscription from the centenarium now known as Gasr Duib, recording its erection in A.D. 244–246—when M. Iulius Philippus was emperor and his son of the same names still (nobilissimus) Caesar—and naming Cominius Cassianus as governor; and they note that the well-known governor of Numidia, M. Aurelius Cominius Cassianus, is customarily dated A.D. 208, so that ‘unless there has been an error in the reading of the consular names on the significant Lambaesis inscription, we can only conclude that the Cominius Cassianus of the Gasr Duib inscription was a son or relative of the earlier Legatus’ (op. cit. 92). It so happens that the customary dating can now be shown to be wrong, and the governorship in question can demonstrably be assigned to the decade A.D. 240–250 even without the assistance of the new discovery; and so many points of interest arise from a consideration of the evidence, that it seems worth while to set it forth at some length. At the same time, it seems desirable to put forward a revised list of the governors of Numidia from the accession of Severus in 193 to the time of Gallienus, under whom the last of the senatorial governors and commanders-in-chief of that province were appointed; for the list given by Pallu de Lessert is nowhere in need of such considerable revision as for that period, as a result of the fresh epigraphic evidence which has come to light in the past half-century. It will be convenient to take the case of identity first, and to deal with the succession of governors thereafter.

Ever since that day when Michal, the daughter of Saul, looking out from a window saw her husband, David, ‘leaping and dancing before the Lord,’ and despised him in her heart (II Sam. 6, 16), it has been orthodox to scoff at the productions or performances of royal or imperial artists. Even more does this prejudice apply to Nero, and the world has agreed to accept the verdict of the unsuccessful rebel Vindex that he was a poor artist. I come neither to praise nor whitewash him, but simply to ask you to consider with me certain aspects of his reign and personality, which have been scantily treated, and which may throw light upon certain political tendencies of his time. The topics I wish to take are (1) Nero's voice and art; (2) the Domus Aurea and the reception of king Tiridates; and (3) Nero's tour of Greece, and the survival of his memory.

The inscription here published was first seen by Mr. Applebaum in 1945, when he was in charge of Antiquities in the newly-acquired territory of Cyrenaica. It was at that time standing by the Museum at Cyrene, and its provenience is unknown.

Almost exactly half a century ago—on 13th January, 1900—the University of Berlin celebrated the beginning of the fateful twentieth century. Only after lengthy discussions had the date been chosen. Many authorities had argued that the new century started only in 1901—an innocuous argument, indeed, by the standards of our days.