Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/267

 i2s.x.MAR.i8,i922.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 217 conduct. The wife of Pilate was with him (Matt. 27, 19), Brasilia with Felix (Acts 24, 24), Calpurnia with Pliny (Epp. 10, 120, 121). Csecina failed to carry his motion. In Annals, iv. 20, we read of a proposal introduced in the Senate by Cotta Messalinus to the effect that magistrates, though guilt- less themselves and having no knowledge of the offence, should be punished for their wives' illegal acts in the provinces, just as if they had personally committed them. This is given by Tacitus among the events of A.D. 24. Furneaux notes that This decree was still in force in the time of ! Ulpian, who dates it (Dig. i. 16, 4, 2) in the year of ! Cotta's consulship [A.D. 10]. I know of no authority for the wife's mis- conduct necessarily involving the severe penalty suggested by MB. SOULBY'S last! question. Under the Empire, exile and ai fine were the usual punishments for oppres- i sion in the provinces ; a death-sentence was exceptional. EDWARD BENSLY. Much Hadham, Herts. Her name, Claudia Procula, is, I believe, j first given in the Gospel of Nicodemus, j but I am not in a position to verify this refer- ence. As to the general question of pro- vincial governors taking their wives with them, our extant first-hand information comes from the Annals of Tacitus, and from Ulpian. In A.U.C. 773, A.D. 20, the consuls (Annals, iii. 2, 5) were M. Valerius and M. Aurelius, concerning whom Furneaux' s note ('Annals of Tacitus,' vol. 1, p. 357) runs : The first of these is son of the person mentioned in i. 8, 5, and, like his father, has the cognomen The other is styled by Dio (1.1.) " M. Aurelius M. f . Cotta," and is generally taken to be the Cotta Messalinus of ii. 32, 2, &c. (of whom no other con- sulship is recorded). The first consul would thus be nephew of the second. In A.U.C. 777, A.D. 24, as Tacitus informs us (Annals, iv. 20, 6), Messalinus Cotta proposed that the Senate should pass aj decree providing that provincial governors, however innocent themselves, and however unacquainted with the mismanagement of others, should be punished for their wives' offences committed in the provinces, as much as for their own. On this Furneaux observes (p. 470) that " This decree was still in force in the time of Ulpian, who dates it (Dig. i. 16, 4, 2) in the year of Cotta's Con- sulship." It appears from a debate held in the Senate in A.U.C. 774, A.D. 21, that by that time the old rule that women were not to go to allied or foreign countries had fallen into desuetude, and the proposal of Severus Cfecina that it should be revived was de- feated (Annals, iii. 33-5). When Livia went abroad with Augustus it was considered odd (Suetonius, ' Aug.' 24), but in the N.T. we find not only Pilate's wife mentioned, but in Acts xxiv. 24, Drusilla, the wife of Felix, procurator of Judsea, though of course she was a daughter of Herod Agrippa I. 'Agrippina, the divorced wife of the Em- peror 1 iberius, accompanied her second hus- band, Germanicus, to Syria, and, when he was poisoned at Daphne by Piso in A.D. 19, she brought his ashes back to Italy. Piso, too, had his wife Plancina with him. The younger Pliny, also, took his wife Cal- purnia with him when he was proconsul of Pontus and Bithynia (Epp. x. 120, 121). Mgr. A. S. Barnes, writing in the ' Catholic Encyclopedia ' on Pontius Pilate, says : The Abyssinian Church reckons him as a saint, and assigns 25 June to him and to Claudia Procula, his wife. The belief that she became a Christian goes back to the second century, and may be found in Origen (Horn, in Mat. xxxv.). The Greek Church assigns her a feast on 27 October. JOHN B. WAINE WRIGHT. PICTURES IN THE HERMITAGE AT PETRO- GRAD (12 S. ix. 528; x. 114, 175). In the list of Murillo's pictures in Calvert's ' Murillo,' published by the Bodley Head, there are two pictures, No. 31, ' Flight into Egypt,' and No. 35, ' Repose during the Flight into Egypt.' A few months ago, when I was in England, a printseller showed me a reproduction of, I think, the latter (but it may have been the former), and told me that the original was in the Glasgow Gallery, although I declared that it, at any rate, had been in the Petrograd Hermitage, but I omitted to verify his statement. And if such is a fact, I do not know when the picture may have been transferred. E. A. G. STUART. Kedah, Malay States. NIGGER MINSTRELSY (12 S. x. 169). I do not know on what authority the writer in The Evening Standard based his assertion that Mr. Gladstone " became proficient on the banjo," not that it would require any great proficiency to vamp an accompani- ment for the old song ' Camptown Races.' The two or three chords necessary for this purpose could be readily mastered by anyone with an ear for music in half an hour or less. The legend is probably based on the
 * ' Messala" (Dio, Arg. to B. 57), or " Messalinus."