In 1889 Hermann Dessau published a revolutionary article in which he suggested that the six authors to whom the various biographies of the Historia Augusta are ascribed were merely masks behind which lurked a single author who lived at the very end of the fourth century. Ninety years later, an attempt was made to prove Dessau's hypothesis of single authorship on objective grounds. Ian Marriott's article, ‘The Authorship of the Historia Augusta: Two Computer Studies’, presents the results of two statistical tests conducted on the text of the HA which appear to show conclusively that the work was composed by one author rather than six. Marriott's findings have been hailed by a number of scholars as settling once and for all the question of the authorship of the HA. While I agree with Marriott's conclusion, and I share the consensus view that this curious work is indeed the product of a single mind, I should like to raise some questions concerning the validity of the procedure adopted by Marriott and to suggest that the tests conducted by him are in fact not conclusive.

The inscription of Iconium published on p. 37, no. 19, gives us our first certain example of an east-Phrygian variety of the early Christian formula against violation of the tomb, which Professor Callander and I had already restored in a small group of inscriptions.

The Tabula Alimentaria of Veleia records the details of two second-century a.d. imperial alimentary schemes at the northern Italian town of Veleia, providing a rare insight into the workings of these schemes. Imperial loans are made to local landowners in exchange for pledges of specified property. Interest paid by landowners is used to fund cash subsidies for the upbringing of selected local children. In the early twentieth century, the French scholar Félix de Pachtere came close to demonstrating a consistent arithmetical relationship between a landowner's declared property value and the loan received. However, anomalies remained. This article proposes a revised formula which establishes a precise and consistent linkage between loan amounts and property declarations. Based on this arithmetical dataset, the paper proposes some hypotheses about how these fractional computations might have been performed in second-century Rome.

In the early spring of 1937 I first visited the fort and quarries of grey granite (pl. V) at Mons Claudianus (Gebel Fitery) between the Nile at Qena and the Gulf of Suez at Sofaga, 33° 297prime; E., 26° 48′ N.—visited and described by Wilkinson, James Burton, Schweinfurth, and others, —and made notes and photographs of one very large column (pl. V, 3) and a part of another (8 ft. 6 in. and 7 ft. 9 in. diameter at the bottom and top respectively, and 59 ft. long), lying in the quarry from which they were hewn, and of the fragment of another of similar dimensions abandoned by the roadside on the way down from the quarries to wady level. There were several other columns, lying in the wady, of smaller dimensions (from 20 ft. long and 3 ft. diameter to 30 ft. long and 3 ft. 6 in. diameter).

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.