64 FRANCIS HAVERFIELD January immediate and lasting effect upon him. * Now at length ', he wrote,
- it became easy to appreciate the true character of the Roman empire.
Our horizon broadened beyond the back-stairs of the Palatine to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean, and we began to realise the great achievements of the empire — its long and peaceable administration of dominions extending into three continents, its gifts of civilisation, citizenship, and language to almost all its subjects, its establish- ment of a stable and coherent order out of which arose the western Europe of to-day.' ^ Mommsen became his master, and it was at Mommsen's instigation that he betook himself to the study of Roman inscrip- tions found in the province of Britain. The seventh volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, which had appeared in 1871, contained all known inscriptions from Britain up to that date. Its editor, Emil Hiibner, produced three supplements, which appeared in 1876, 1877, and 1879 respectively, and are to be found in volumes ii and iii of the Ephemeris Epigraphica. Mommsen invited Haverfield — still a young master at Lancing — to carry on the work. This he did, bringing out a fourth supple- ment in 1890 and a fifth in 1913.^ These two parts, taken together, provide a complete record of Roman inscriptions found in Britain during a period of thirty-three years (1879-1913) in which excavations greatly added to the number of those previously known. In addition he retrieved many forgotten inscriptions from neglected manuscript and printed sources, and supple- mented the often unsatisfactory accounts of earlier inscriptions given in the seventh volume of the Corpus. Unfortunately for the student of Roman Britain, that particular volume is the weakest in the series. Scholars have long recognized the need for a new collection of Romano-British inscriptions ; and now at length the preparation of such a volume has been taken in hand. It was the last work upon which Haverfield was engaged, and to which he devoted the latest months of his life, hoping in vain that he might be spared to complete it. He did not regard epigraphy as an end in itself : ' If an inscription can be combined with others like it to prove some fact, it possesses importance ; if not, it is unimportant.' But neither did he think that a historian who relies largely upon epigraphic evidence
- Ante, six. 85-6. See also the preface to Haverfield's revised translation of the
Roman Provinces ( 1909) : in an appendix to that work he hsis summarized the advances made in our knowledge of Roman Britain.
- Ephemeris Epigraphica, viL 274-354 ; ix. 509-610. Besides his contributions
to the Ephemeris, Haverfield published in the Archaeological Journal, vols, xlvii, xlix, 1, an account of Roman inscriptions found in Britain in 1888-93, in continuation of a series of similar articles by Mr. W. T. Watkin. . .
