At a critical period of European history a princess of the Theodosian house played a brief but conspicuous and outrageous part. Her relations with Attila have secured a scandalous notoriety to the princess Honoria, who would otherwise have been as mere a name to us as her cousins Arcadia and Marina; for her action, if it did not alter the main course of events, determined the Hun king's policy during three critical years. But the true facts of an extraordinarily interesting episode have been obscured, as I hope to prove, by a curious error in one of our sources. Honoria cannot be dismissed as a perverse or romantic schoolgirl, nor, with Mommsen, as ‘eine lüderliche Prinzessin.’

In 1917 Dr. M. R. James, now Provost of Eton College, discovered in a manuscript belonging to St. Catharine's College Cambridge, and printed in the English Historical Review, a description by a certain Magister Gregorius of the most remarkable sights or ‘wonders’ of the city of Rome. The manuscript appears to be English, of the last years of the thirteenth century; and Dr. James thinks that the author was an Englishman, and lived in the twelfth century. Though this is the only copy of the work that is known, it is not the first that we have heard of it, for it was used in the fourteenth century by Ranulf Higden (d. 1364) in the description of Rome in the first book of his Polychronicon. We now know that he passed over some of the most curious and interesting of Gregory's statements, so that the discovery of the original is a real addition to our knowledge.

Of all the products of ancient Roman civilisation, few were more distinctive than the great villas which, especially in the last century of the republic and the first of the empire, sprang up in obedience to the owners' will, not only on the outskirts of the capital, on the lower slopes of the Alban Hills, and along the fair and salubrious shores of the gulfs of Baiae and Neapolis, but at many a remote point where pure air, fertile soil, broad views and running water, with, if possible, the proximity of a frequented highway, combined to attract the weary administrator or business man in search of repose and to offer the most fascinating of problems to the architect and dillettante.

The controversy regarding the treaties between Rome and Carthage is almost as ancient as the Punic Wars themselves, and unlike these it has not the merit of having come to an end. Strangely enough, the battle of dissertations has chiefly raged round a point of minor importance, and the key position has been the scene of nothing more than some desultory skirmishing. The question whether the first treaty between Rome and Carthage was contracted in 509 B.C. or in 348 B.C. has little or no bearing on the history of the Punic Wars. On the other hand, our judgment on the rights and wrongs of these wars must turn largely on the question whether at the outbreak of the first war there was a treaty in force which bound the Carthaginians not to interfere in Italy, and the Romans not to interfere in Sicily. This latter question was raised in the age of the Punic Wars themselves by the Greek historian Philinus, who argued that the Roman occupation of Messana was a breach of the aforesaid treaty. And the importance of this contention was realised by Polybius, who seized upon Philinus' accusation in order to polemise against it. But the success of Polybius' apparent refutation of Philinus has been so complete that the treaty invoked by Philinus has been generally discredited, and those few modern scholars who have raised the question of the treaty afresh have generally been snubbed for their pains. Nevertheless the point at issue is one which requires to be settled. The present article is an attempt to review the evidence and to make a definite pronouncement upon it.

On the 21st of April, 1917, the embankment of the Rome-Naples railway gave way a short distance outside the Porta Maggiore: the works undertaken to repair the damage led to the discovery of a subterranean building of the greatest interest. One may say, without fear of exaggeration, that this is one of the most important discoveries ever made in Rome, and it raises a formidable number of problems archaeological, historical and artistic. It is impossible in a brief article to describe the building fully or to attempt an interpretation of the stucco reliefs that decorate it, especially as it has not yet been published in detail. I will therefore, in this short study, merely point out some of its most important characteristics and summarize the result of recent studies.

On p. 55 the persistence of the diocesan system under Vespasian in Hither Spain was assumed, perhaps too readily, on the authority of Marquardt, Mommsen, Domaszewski, and Kornemann. But on p. 87, n. 2, a suggestion was made which leads to a different view, and should have been developed further.

The publication by Gatti in 1908 and 1910 of two bronze fragments containing the record of the gift of citizenship to the equites Hispani of the Turma Salluitana by Cn. Pompeius Strabo in the course of the Social War was welcomed by scholars as providing a valuable piece of contemporary evidence on a period of Roman History for which such evidence is almost entirely lacking. It is perhaps unfortunate that the inscription deals with a subject on which, thanks mainly to Cicero's speeches Pro Balbo and Pro Archia, our information was relatively good, but more can, I think, be extracted from it than was at first thought to be the case, and a few remarks suggested by it may not be out of place.

The current view of the Agricolan occupation of Scotland is conveniently summed up in Furneaux's declaration that ‘it is impossible to suppose that the conquest had been as thorough as is suggested [by Tacitus].’ York is sometimes alleged to have been the farthest point that was permanently secured, and a German historian has solemnly rebuked the Roman general for the fundamental fault of pushing forward without consolidating the ground that he had won. This scepticism as to Agricola's military capacity and achievements was justifiable enough so long as the historical notices stood alone. Moreover it appeared to be perfectly consistent with the ‘perdomita Britannia et statim missa’ of Tacitus himself. And, when archaeology made its first contribution to the discussion, the new evidence promised to be merely corroborative. The little Agricolan fort on the Bar Hill, discovered by a happy accident in 1903, was garrisoned for only a brief period, and had been abandoned fifty or sixty years before Lollius Urbicus built the wall from Forth to Clyde.

Colchester lies at the head of an inland promontory which emerges from the undulating Essex lowlands to meet the tidal waters of the Colne estuary. On the northern and eastern sides this promontory is clasped by the winding course of the main stream, and on the south by a tributary known as the Roman River which, bending northwards, slightly restricts the otherwise open approach from the west. The eastern end of the area thus enclosed rises commandingly above the sharply-cut river valleys and the seaward marshes, which are of sufficient extent to seclude it from the risks of an open shore. The combined accessibility and security of the site at an early date attracted both the landsman and the sea-going trader, who doubtless unloaded his Gallic cargoes at wharves not far from those still frequented by a modest coastal traffic. It is no longer disputed that somewhere within the natural limits of this favoured region lay the great oppidum of the Trinovantes.

Antiquarian research in the Renaissance period was unfortunately not always free from the reproach of deliberate falsification. It seems strange, at first sight, that the amount of genuine material discovered did not suffice to occupy the minds of archaeologists, and that they should have found it necessary to add to it by purely gratuitous inventions. But, given a certain knowledge of the subject, it was easy for a fertile brain and a facile pen to fabricate inscriptions, coins, plans of buildings, etc., whether in order to prove a favourite theory or to attain an ideal completeness which could not be attained by more prosaic, though more honest, means.

The location of the battle of the Trebia is still a matter of dispute despite the thirty-two discussions of it cited in Kromayer's Antike Schlachtfelder (1912) and several offered since. There is more at stake in the problem than mere curiosity about the place, more even than a desire to appraise rightly the military judgment of Scipio and Hannibal. There is involved the reputation for reliability of Polybius and Livy, faith in whom is severely shaken if we must adopt any of the views hitherto offered.