Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 4.djvu/44

32 been lately reproduced; he conjectured that the legend of the reverse was a translation of the inscription on the obverse, and that Tasciovani was the Romanized British word for prince: in order to establish this, he recurred to the old philological argument of Tag prince, and its derivations. In April 1845, I gave my analysis of the inscription founded on an impression of three coins in the national cabinet, but No. 2. in Mr. Wigan's collection, who most kindly forwarded it to me, left a transient doubt on the subject, the last letter being apparently uncertain; yet I felt so convinced that F. after a genitive name must be filius, that I read a short paper on the subject. About the month of June 1846, I received a cast of, and subsequently saw, Mr. Neville's coin, which entirely confirmed what I had advanced, because on this excellently preserved specimen the last letter was decidedly an L, and consequently could be no other than Tasciovani filius, the son of Tasciovanus. Mr. Akerman in his work on the "Ancient Coins of Cities and Princes," not only recognised the reading as applicable to Cunobelin and Tasciovanus, but also adopted it as proposed by me for Eppillus, and extended it proprio motu to two other princes. The Rev. Mr. Beale Post recurs to the old system of supposing the name of the reverse to be Tasciovanus fircombretus, "the monarch the legislator;" here he closely follows Whitaker, the portion that is his own being the doubtful explanation of fir on Mr. Wigan's coin. He observes that Fircombretus appears on a coin of Lexovium, which cannot be doubted, but as the Romans never mistook or interchanged the V and F, nor the not too learned moneyers of Gaul, they wrote it Vercombretos. The difficulty which he experienced in the admission of filius was the doubt that Cunobelin could claim the crown in right of his father, but why not? Although Tasciovanus may as one of the reguli of Britain have escaped the pages of the Roman historians, it is evident that he was a prince in the strictest alliance with Rome, and we know, from a passage in the Anecdota of Dr. Cramer, that the British princes enjoyed their respective thrones by the right of hereditary descent. The sons of Cunobelin, who fled to Rome at the time of Caligula, gave their father trouble enough, and paved the way for the subsequent expedition of Claudius, yet this at least implies an hereditary principle. As for the difficulty of the name of Tasciovanus, it is of inferior consequence. How should we