Prefatory Note.—My interest in Pavia goes back at least to 1951 when I was elected Rome Scholar in Medieval Studies. I began seriously to collect material for the history of the city in the early Middle Ages in the winter and spring of 1953 when I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Collegio Ghislieri, thanks to the efforts made on my behalf by the late Hugh Last, to whose memory this article is dedicated. The published proceedings of the Reichenau and Spoleto congresses on ‘The early medieval town’ in the 1950s clearly underlined the need for detailed studies of particular towns; but the lack of adequate archaeological evidence discouraged me from attempting such a study of early medieval Pavia. In 1964, however, Dr. A. Peroni, Director of the Museo Civico invited me to read a supplementary paper on this topic to the Convegno di Studio sul Centro Storico di Pavia held in the Università degli Studi at Pavia on July 4th and 5th of that year. The present article is an amplified and corrected version of that paper: I have made no substantial alterations to my account of the ‘urbanistica’ of early medieval Pavia—written for an audience of architects and art-historians as well as of historians—but have dealt more fully with the social history of the city in this period. Professor Richard Krautheimer read a draft of the revised version and made some pointed and helpful comments. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Peroni, not merely for the invitation to present the original paper but also for supplying illustrations and answering queries at a time when he and his staff were engaged in helping to repair the ravages of the Florence floods.

Africano is one of the most distinctive, although one of the most variable, of the ornamental stones commonly used by the Romans. It is a breccia containing lumps of white, grey or, most typically, pink marble, in which the crystals vary from minute to very large, the largest usually occurring in well-defined veins or patches. These lumps of marble, which may be of any size up to several feet long, are embedded in a black, dark green or greyish matrix that is usually harder than the marble itself. It probably derives its modern Italian name simply from its generally dark colour, rather than from any early speculation as to its origin, and since Corsi's attribution of it to Chios was disproved by the discovery that Chian marble was the Portasanta of Italian stonemasons, it has usually been listed as of unknown origin.

The first of these Studies was concerned chiefly with the history of Ostia during the period when the city was still growing and its prosperity increasing. Even so, during the period already considered, the prosperity of Ostia, though real, was to this extent artificial, in that it depended upon factors over which the citizens themselves had no control. Ostia was the port of Rome, and nothing else, and in consequence any lowering of the standard of living in, or reduction of imports into the capital city must have had immediate and marked repercussions upon her prosperity. She even lacked to a great extent those reserves of wealth which in other cities might be drawn upon to tide over bad times. The typical citizen of Ostia came to the city in the hope of making his fortune there; but when he had made it, he usually preferred to retire to some more pleasant town, such as Tibur, Tusculum, Velitrae, or Rome itself, where he could enjoy his leisure. Few families seem to have remained in the city for more than two, or, at the most, three generations. Whilst therefore fortunes were made in Ostia, wealth was not accumulated there.

Among the episodes of Dionysiac myth, one which acquires exceptional popularity under the Roman Empire is the scene of Dionysus riding in triumph in his chariot, accompanied by his exultant band of followers. The theme was not new: already on a pebble-mosaic from Olynthus Dionysus appears driving his leopard-drawn chariot, accompanied by a flying Eros and Pan; and very similar scenes appear on fourth-century Attic vases. In the Hellenistic period, the story of Dionysus' victorious campaign against the Indians was regarded as a prototype for the victories of Alexander, and the scene of his procession was re-interpreted as his triumphant return from India. Under the Empire, the ever-growing popularity of the Dionysiac religion favoured particularly the representation of the god in triumph, as an image of his victorious powers over his enemies and of the joy which he bestowed on his followers; the scene was, moreover, especially well suited to representation in Roman terms, since the iconography and the religious significance of the triumphal procession were so firmly established in the Roman tradition.

This paper utilises evidence for the size of public gifts in Roman Africa collected in a previous article to make a series of deductions about the classes from which the gifts came and about the gifts themselves. Because the questions asked here are for the most part different from those considered in the earlier paper, a reorganisation of the material has been necessary, and a table of African donations of known amount is given at the end of the article (pp. 173–5). The sample has been confined as far as possible to material from the period between the accession of Trajan and the death of Gordian III (A.D. 98–244), and gifts clearly belonging to other periods have been omitted.

The topics discussed are, firstly, the distribution of wealth among the monied class; the conclusions are based on observations about the background and nature of Roman munificence, as well as on the tabulation of gift-sizes. Internal evidence suggests that it is, in most cases, legitimate to make rough comparisons between gifts from different points in the period without practical compensation for the effects of inflation. The second part of the paper contains estimates of the total number of donors in the period discussed; the frequency of donation among the decurial class (i.e. the members of the town-councils); the total sum subscribed in the form of public gifts in Africa within the period; and the fluctuations in the amount given from reign to reign. The series of estimates depends critically upon assessing the rate of inscription–survival with as much accuracy as possible, and this subject has been discussed in a separate Appendix (pp. 176–7).

In questo articolo si tratta dei resti botanici raccolti durante gli scavi di D85, un insediamento collinare altomedievale nella valle del Biferno in Molise. Sono state raccolte grandi quantità di resti botanici carbonizzati. Sono stati trovate le seguenti piante: frumento, orzo, miglio, avena, ceci, fave, lino, fichi, uva e coriandolo. I risultati vengono messi a confronto con i dati etnografici sulle attività relative alla lavorazione dei raccolti. L'assenza di materiale di scarto della mietitura (pula e paglia) suggerisce che i cereali non venissero trasformati sul sito ma fossero portati da altri posti. Gli altri dati archeologici (ceramica, strutture, resti di fauna, ecc.), sebbene con qualche dubbio, suggeriscono anch'essi che il sito non fosse un normale villaggio agricolo.

At the time of the outbreak of the Social War in 91 B.C. there were many types of political organisation in Cisalpine Gaul. First, there were the Roman colonies of Mutina, Parma, and Eporedia. Secondly, there were the large areas of land south of the Po in Liguria and centred on the chief highway in Aemilia which were already occupied by Roman citizens in the Pollia tribe, but where urbanisation was a more or less spontaneous development and where there was certainly not the elaborate political organisation of the colonies. Thirdly, there were the Latin colonies of Ariminum, Placentia, Cremona, Bononia, and Aquileia. We may say that all this territory was occupied by settlers of Roman or Latin origin, with the reservation that in Liguria, where the colonised land was probably not so extensive or so continuous as in Aemilia, there may still have been a considerable number of the former inhabitants living in association with the Romans. Archaeological investigation has not yet told us whether there were two separate inhabited sites in each case, but the doubling of place-names (Industria—Bodincomagus, Potentia—Carreum, Sedulia?—Vardagate) may indicate that the Ligures were allowed some kind of separate political organisation and local centres near to, but distinct from, the centres created by the Romans to serve the needs of their ager. If there were two separate inhabited sites and organisations, however, these did not remain independent of each other for long. Certainly after 89 B.C. Romans and native peoples formed single communities.

Una pietra miliare scoperta nella valle di Albegna nomina M. Aemilius Scaurus e riporta la distanza per Rome come 91 miglia. Sembra che questa pietra miliare stia a indicare la via Aemilia Scauri, una continuazione della Via Aurelia, che sembra sia stata iniziata de Scaurus nel 115 a.C. e finita nel 109.

Two viae Anniae are known, in Etruria and near Aquileia; another has been reasonably conjectured between Capua and Rhegium. The Etruscan Annia was a minor road and is of only peripheral importance, but the relationship of the other two roads and the date (or dates) of their construction have provoked lively discussion in Italy in the last ten years. The question is a complicated one, and perhaps does not admit of a decisive solution. However, one answer to it has recently found widespread acceptance, and I believe that an alternative suggestion, even if not formally provable, may justifiably be put forward in order to prevent the current theory from crystallising into dogma.

The current theory, which rests on the powerful authority of Professor Degrassi, is that P. Popillius C.f.P.n. Laenas, cos. 132, built both the Capua-Rhegium road and the Via Popillia from Ariminum up the Venetian coast at least as far as Atria, where the milestone bearing his name was found; before his programme was fully carried out, however, Popillius' term of office ended and the commission was transferred to a praetor of the next year, T. Annius Rufus, who extended the Venetian road from Atria or Patavium to Aquileia and completed the road to Rhegium by setting up milestones, one of which was found near Vibo Valentia several years ago. Prof. Degrassi thus accepts Mommsen's identification of P. Popillius Laenas as the author of the acephalous elogium at Polla set up by the man who built the Capua-Rhegium road, and rightly rejects Mommsen's suggestion that the Venetian Via Annia ran northwards into Noricum.

This paper considers the small glass objects often called counters, which are common finds at Pompeii, and normally thought to have been used in playing games. An assemblage of over 500 stratigraphically dated examples from Insula VI.1 are examined, and the colour and size of this group are compared to a dataset of first-century ad glass counters found in graves where they can be shown with certainty to be part of gaming sets. The comparisons show that the bulk of the Pompeii counters are very unlikely to have been used in gaming, a conclusion that is supported by the types of counters that would have been necessary to play games such as ludus latrunculorum and ludus duodecim scriptorum. Other functions are considered and it is suggested that many of the Pompeiian counters might have been used for interior decoration. The rise of a specialist production of counters that could have been used in gaming is demonstrated, and it is suggested this might have implications for the development of craft specialization and demonstrate the rise of leisure time in the first century ad.

This article examines two ekphrastic digressions from book 2 of Flavio Biondo's Roma Triumphans (1459), both occurring in the section on the festivals of ancient Rome. The first is an eye-witness account of a celebration mounted in Piazza Navona in Rome to mark the defeat of the Turks at Belgrade in 1456; the second is an imaginative recreation of the horse race at the Equirria, as Biondo envisions it taking place in the streetscape of ancient Rome. Both digressions serve one of Biondo's most important purposes, the linking of ancient and modern Rome. The aim of the discussion is to demonstrate the importance of visualization in Biondo's framing of Roma Triumphans as a whole. In this aspect he was a powerful model for later antiquarian writing.

This article, divided into two main parts, first analyses the archaeological data for a return to the site of Herculaneum after its destruction in the ad 79 eruption. The evidence includes a necropolis above the Roman town, along with burials and other finds in the Herculaneum area up to the late antique period. The second part looks at how the medieval settlement of Resina grew up over ancient Herculaneum and how new archaeological research has demonstrated that tunnelling was already being carried out to retrieve marble and building materials from the Roman town in the fourteenth century. This occurred sporadically, but it seems to have continued, without being continuous, through the subsequent centuries and pre-dates by several centuries the so-called ‘re-discovery’ of Herculaneum in 1710, which took place over twenty years before the beginning of systematic excavations in 1738.

This paper discusses some of the insights that have been gained from the study of the textile tools from the Etruscan settlement of Poggio Civitate di Murlo and coeval textiles recovered from the adjacent cemetery site of Poggio Aguzzo di Murlo. Over 1,600 textile tools (including spindle whorls, loom weights, and spools) are analysed from a functional perspective, and results suggest that the textiles found in burials were likely produced at the site. This new information is discussed in light of other subsistence and craft activities documented at the settlement, all of which indicate an inward-oriented economy that catered to the local elites and the populations they controlled.

In recent years the investigation of Cyrenaica's Byzantine remains has proceeded apace. At the end of 1960 nine churches had been excavated, seven on city-sites, two in small towns; many others had been recognised, mainly in the surrounding countryside. A spectacular discovery has been a large palace at Apollonia, almost certainly that of the provincial governor during the last century and a half of Byzantine rule. Miss J. M. Reynolds has collected Cyrenaica's Christian inscriptions, and a comprehensive publication of the churches and their mosaics is being prepared by J. B. Ward-Perkins, R. G. Goodchild and E. Rosenbaum.

The excavation of the present church, conducted in 1961 by the Cyrenaican Department of Antiquities under the direction of the writer, was planned with specific reference to this forthcoming study. The selection of the site was determined on two grounds. First, the church is an isolated building surrounded by a talus, in these respects similar to a widespread type in Cyrenaica, no example of which had been examined in detail. Second, a single limestone block decorated in shallow relief lay near the church (pl. VII, c); it was hoped that more carving might be recovered, offsetting to some extent the hitherto uniform picture (derived from the richer, urban churches) of imported marble fittings.