A reference to recent grammars and histories shows that the famous inscription of the Columna Rostrata (Dessau I.L.S. 65) has again fallen into disrepute. It will be remembered that Ritschl and Mommsen pronounced it an antiquarian invention of the early empire. In 1890, however, Woelfflin by an able discussion' restored faith in it so that for a decade at least it was freely cited by historians and philologists. Woelfflin argued that so many ancient forms and phrases occurrect in the inscription that it must in the main be regarded as a fairly faithful copy of a third-century original, and that the forms which were obviously of a later date could best be explained as due to the mistaken attempts of a restorer to invent archaisms in order to replace parts of the original that had been broken or rendered illegible by age. This view seems to me not impossible, though at present it has been generally abandoned for Mommsen's theory. Woelfflin's enduring contribution to the discussion lies in having pointed out the real archaic character of several phrases that up to his time were classed as examples of late and rhetorical verbiage. He noticed for instance that the use of que to the exclusion of et was characteristic of early documents, especially documents of an official character like the lex Agraria, the lex Cornelia, and the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus;2 that the phrase clases navales3 was not redundant but a natural expression in the early day when classis meant "levy" whether of land or sea forces; that praesente .... dictatored preserved in the participle a legitimate old meaning which was conserved in various other verbal forms of praeesse, "to have charge of "; that the phrase inaltod mare could have been used only before altum became a substantive and a synonym of mare, a change