Presumably the initials of an owner. The letters were at first read O·D·D, but the tail of the Q is discernible.
I am indebted to the Post Office authorities and to Mr. F. Lambert for a sight of Nos. 11 and 12. The objects are preserved at the General Post Office.
(13) I add here a note on a Roman milestone found in 1694 near Appleby and lately refound.
Among the papers of the antiquary Richard Gough in the Bodleian Library—more exactly, in his copy of Horsley's Britannia, gen. top. 128 = MS. 17653, fol. 44 v.—is recorded the text of a milestone of the Emperor Philip and his son, 'dug out of ye military way 1694, now at Hangingshaw'. The entry is written in Gough's own hand on the last page of a list of Roman and other inscriptions once belonging to Reginald Bainbridge, who was schoolmaster in Appleby in Elizabeth's reign and died there in 1606.[8] This list had been drawn up by one Hayton, under-schoolmaster at Appleby, in 1722 and had been copied out by Gough. There is, however, nothing to show whether the milestone, found eighty-eight years after the death of Bainbridge and plainly none of his collection, was added by Hayton, or was otherwise obtained by Gough and copied by him on a casually blank page; there is nothing even to connect either the stone or Hangingshaw with Appleby.
The notice lay neglected till Hübner undertook to edit the Roman inscriptions of Britain, which he issued in the seventh volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum in 1873. He included the milestone as No. 1179. But, with his too frequent carelessness—a carelessness which makes the seventh volume of the Corpus far less valuable than the rest of the series—he christened the stone, in defiance of dates, No. 17 in Bainbridge's collection; he also added the statement (which we shall see to be wrong) that Hangingshaw was near Old Carlisle. Fortunately, in the autumn of 1914, Mr. Percival Ross, the Yorkshire archaeologist, sent me a photograph of an inscription which he had come upon, built into the wall of a farm called Hangingshaw, about 200 yards from the Roman road which runs along the high ground a little east of Appleby. It then became plain—despite Hübner's errors—that this stone was that recorded in Gough's papers, although his copy was in one point faulty and on the other hand some letters which were visible in 1694 have now apparently perished. A rubbing sent me by the late Rev. A. Warren of Old Appleby helped further; I now give from the three sources—Gough's copy, the photograph, and the rubbing—what I hope may be a fairly accurate text. I premise that the letters RCO in line 2, LIPPO in 3, PHILIPPO in 8, IMO in 9, and I in 10 seem to be no longer visible but depend on Gough's copy.
The chief fault in Gough's copy is the omission of line 6, Augusto. This misled Hübner into treating line 7 (ERP) as a blundered reading of that necessary word. In reality, line 7 is the most interesting item in the inscription. It shows that the Emperor Philip was, here at least, styled perpetuus Augustus. That is an appellation to which I find no exact parallel in Philip's other inscriptions or indeed in any other imperial inscriptions till half a century after his death. It fits, however, into a definite development of the Roman imperial titles. In the earliest Empire, phrases occur, mostly on coins, such as Aeternitas imperii or Aeternitas populi romani. Soon the notion of the stability of the Empire was transferred to its rulers. As early as Vespasian, coins bear the legend aeternitas Augusti, and in the first years of the second century Pliny, writing to Trajan, speaks of petitions addressed per salutem tuam aeternitatemque and of 'works worthy of the emperor's eternity,' (opera aeternitate tua digna). Late in the second century such phrases become commoner. With Severus Alexander (A.D. 221-35) coins begin to show the legend Perpetuitas Aug., and before very long the indirect and abstract language changes into direct epithets which are incorporated in the emperors' titulature. The first case which I can find of this is that before us, of Philip (A.D. 244-9); a little later, Aurelian (A.D. 270-5) is styled semper Augustus and, from Diocletian onwards, aeternus, perpetuus, and semper Augustus belong to the customary titulature. Constantine I, for example, is called on one stone invictus et perpetuus ... semper Augustus, on another perpetuus imperator, semper Augustus. That Philip should have been the first to have applied to him, even once, the direct epithet, is probably a mere accident. One might have wished to connect it with his Secular Games, celebrated in 248. But by that time his son was no longer Caesar but full Augustus (since 246), and our stone must fall into the years 244-6.
The ideas underlying these epithets were perhaps mixed. Notions of or prayers for the long life of the Empire, the stability of the reigning house, the long reign of the current emperor, may have jostled with notions of the immortality of the emperors and their deification, and with the eastern ideas which poured into Rome as the second century ended and the third century began.[9] The hardening despotism of the imperial constitution, growing more and more autocratic every decade, also helped. As the emperor became unchecked and unqualified monarch, his appellations grew more emphatic; perpetuus Augustus, semper Augustus connoted that unchecked and autocratic rule.