The Roman Forum appears to the casual observer a tangled mass of walls superimposed one upon another without rhyme or reason. After a careful elimination, however, of the confusing elements brought in by later restorations, it is possible to establish certain common levels not only for the Forum but also for the smaller areas closely united to it. Of these levels, that which we may again, after the lapse of many centuries, call the present level may best serve as a fixed point of reference in our discussion, since all the greater monuments of the Golden Age in and about the Forum were built or rebuilt in conformity to it. A clearly defined, though much broken, pavement of travertine slabs, which is clearly traceable throughout the whole Forum, renders it more easily recognizable. Though badly sunken in many other places, the height of this pavement along the line of the main axis of the central area is 12·50 to 14 metres above sea level.

The Ashmolean Museum was so fortunate as to acquire at the sale of the Hope Collection, in 1917, by the generous gift of Sir Arthur Evans, the fine portrait which I have the pleasure of publishing. It is of life size. The restorations are : the lower part of the nose, the bust with the ends of the hair at the back, and the greater part of the remarkable crown or stephane of open work, which is made up of palmettes of two types, which come alternately (enough of this crown remained to make the completion in plaster safe); also the rim of the right ear. The curls of hair are arranged as ringlets, two tiers over the right temple, three over the left; the rest of the hair comes down in heavy curls, confined by a band at the back. To the crown are attached on each side three woollen fillets, of which only the beginnings remain. The marble of the head is Italian. Some of the curls are somewhat oxidized (plate VII).

One of the effects of the defeat of king Antiochus, followed by a treaty of peace whose terms limited his fleet to ten vessels of war and prevented him from sending an armed vessel to the west of the Calycadnus, had been that the slight amount of control, which the kings of Syria had formerly exercised on the coast of Cilicia Tracheia, could no longer be maintained. As yet the Romans themselves had no interest in the districts outside the Taurus. Of the southern coast of Asia Minor, Lycia was handed over to the Rhodians, Pamphylia after some delay to Eumenes, and although western Cilicia remained a part of the Syrian kingdom, the terms of the treaty effectually prevented the nominal rulers from exercising any sort of control. It is scarcely surprising that the wild tribes which inhabited both sides of the Taurus once more betook themselves to occupations which had been natural to them from the earliest times. The piracy which, according to Strabo, now began in these waters, was moreover encouraged by the Rhodians and the kings of Egypt, in so far as it crippled the Syrian power, while Rome, if we may except a tour of inspection by Scipio Aemilianus without armed force, took no cognisance of its existence. Rather the operations of the pirates, as the purveyors of slaves, were regarded, together with the similar activities of the tax-farmers, as an integral part of the economic basis of life.

The account of the military operations of Agricola in his fifth year as governor of Britain, A.D. 81 (or possibly A.D. 82), has caused much perplexity and discussion. The account is extraordinarily brief and vague; it is contained in the first three lines of c. 24, the rest of which is occupied with Agricola's motives for his action, a short notice of Hibernia, Agricola's opinion as to the ease with which it could be conquered, and the information that he had received and detained a fugitive prince from that island (not, it is to be observed, necessarily in that particular year). The three lines run:—

Quinto expeditionum anno naue prima transgressus ignotas ad id tempus gentis crebris simul ac prosperis praeliis domuit; eamque partem Britanniae quae Hiberniam aspicit copiis instruxit.

A list of the governors of Britain has been published by Hübner in the Rheinisches Museum, vol. 12 (1857), and information about many of them is to be found in Liebenam, Die Legaten in den römischen Provinzen and Untersuchungen zur Verwaltungsgeschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit, in the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, and in Sagot, La Bretagne romaine. Many also are dealt with under their own names in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie; but there does not appear to be anything like a complete list easily accessible to English students. Moreover, fresh discoveries of inscriptions and the revision of some of those already known have made it possible somewhat to increase the size and improve the accuracy of such a list.

Professor Bury has recently put forward a new theory as to the date at which the Roman occupation of Britain came to an end. Hitherto this event has commonly been assigned to the years 407-410. When in 407 Constantine III took a great part of the British army to Gaul, he left behind ‘a civil administration and a garrison, which subsisted till 410, when the indignation of the provincials that their nominee’ (Constantine) ‘had failed both to conquer the whole West and to bring better times to Britain caused them to abandon his cause and establish a provisional government of their own.’ This government was nominally loyal to Honorius, who had authorised the Britons to rebel against Constantine's representatives; but neither Honorius nor any later emperor actually re-established his control over the British provinces.

When Dr. Rice Holmes' Roman Republic came to hand and I began to turn over at random the pages of vol. i, the first passage which caught my eye was the discussion of Pompey's short campaign against Mithradates. It occurs in one of those numerous and lengthy appendices, attached to each of the three volumes, which the author calls ‘Part II,’ and in which, with regal disregard of the prices and prejudices of publishers, he seeks to probe to the bottom every difficulty that arises in the course of his investigations. This Second Part, which the author hopes some may not find tedious, is, I think, the section to which most scholars will turn first. The discussion of the campaign (p. 428 ff.) revived memories of old studies of my own in which I seemed to have reached somewhat more definite conclusions, at any rate on some points, than Dr. Holmes offers to his readers. In the description of the campaign which he gives in the narrative portion of his work (p. 206 f.) he takes, in my opinion, the correct view about its general course, but the discussion of details does not seem to me to be quite satisfying nor to dispose of the main difficulty which arises out of Strabo's localization of one of the places concerned.

It has been widely held since the days of Aretino (1369-1444) and more scientifically since those of Niebuhr, that the Patricians and the Plebeians were in origin two different peoples or races. I propose to show, firstly, that the Plebeians were never a people or a race at all; secondly, that the differences to which attention has been drawn are differences within the Patrician body itself, the result of its development from at least three stocks. My grounds for the former view are largely negative—the inadequacy of the arguments adduced by Niebuhr and his supporters, down to and including Binder and Piganiol; for the latter, I think strong positive arguments may be found, some of which, well observed but ill interpreted, form the most respectable props of the view which I discard.