Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 9.djvu/490

 392 NOTICES OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL PUBLICATIONS. merits of the new edition, it is of consequence to know the present state of inquiry about the supposed origin of the work.^ The period at which it was composed is still uncertain ; but internal evidence will enable us to form a conjecture. For a long time it was almost generally received that a statement of Aethicus ^ referred to this work. The preface to the remarkable book on ancient geography which bears this author's name says, that in the consulship of Julius Cassar and Mark Antony, four persons began to measure the whole of the known world ; Nicodoxus, the East ; Didj-mus, the West ; Theodotus, the North ; and Polycletus, the South ; a work which they finished in thirty-two years. That something of the kind was done at that time is evident from the extracts from M. Vipsanius Agrippa's Commen- taries, which Pliny has preserved in his Natural History, III. 2. They refer, however, merely to measurements of the length and extent of the various provinces of the Roman Empire. The object and the origin of our Itinerary was very different, and no Greek sui'veyors were required to compile it. Wherever the Romans went and conquered, they never omitted to erect castles at measured distances, and set mile-stones between the various places. Lines of these milliaries ran along the principal roads from the far north-west to the south-eastern extremity of the Empire. It can scarcely be doubted, that a guide of this systematic network of postal communica- tion was kept in the capital at an early time. Our document must have sprung from such an official source. There being, however, no evidence of its existence in the days of Agrippa or Augustus, it is only fair to con- jecture, from the title it bears in all the MSS., that it was written under the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who, if we may believe his historian Julius Capitolinus,^ took a very praiseworthy care for the roads of his vast Empire. There is, however, another Antoninus, whose title seems better — Cara- calla, whose father Septimius Severus, as it has been supposed, erected that wall, which we trace across the North of England, from the Solway Frith to the shore of the German Ocean ; and from which in the Itinerary all the great roads and highways through Britain start. A Roman inscription, now preserved at Vienna, states that both Severus and Caracalla had given orders to erect new mile-stones, where they had been broken or decayed.* At the time of these Emperors therefore something like the Itinerary must have existed. Yet our most ancient MSS. contain indications of a period, as recent as that of Diocletian : for instance, the town of Diocle- tianopolis and the substitution of Heraclea, for Perinthus. On the other hand we find only in the more recent MSS., the name of Constantinopolis added to Byzantium ; and here the proofs increase in number, that the Itinerary was completed before the reign of Constantine the Great. It is, therefore, an erroneous opinion of Mannert, in his preface to the - Prsefatio, i. — ix. materials necessary for a perfect edition. ^ The Cosmographia Aethici is found We soon hope to see tlie first-fruits of a in many MSS., together with the Itin- young scholar who has taken up the sub- erary. A critical elucidation of this sin- ject, and who has also made use of two gular book has never been undertaken e.xcellent MSS. in the British Museum as yet ; but we believe that Dr. Pertz, amongst the Cottonian and Harleian MSS. the learned editor of the Monumenta ^ Vita M. Aurelii Antonini, c. II. Historiac Gcrmaiiicae, has collected dur- * Scipio Matfei, Museum Veronense, p. iug his travels through Europe all the 241.