The plateau on which the site of Veii stands is bounded by the steeply eroded valleys of the Fosso Piordo and the Torrente Valchetta, the ancient river Cremera. A kilometre to the north-east of their confluence near the Piazza d'Armi, the site of the bath-house serving the Roman municipium Augustum Veiens was exposed by river erosion in November 1959 (fig. 1). It lies across the narrow floor of the Valchetta ravine, where the river has changed course frequently since classical times. The ancient approach probably lay along a small track leading from the edge of the main town plateau immediately above the baths. This choice of position, which certainly had pre-Roman associations, was determined by the presence of a number of hot springs which break through the valley floor at this point. They are the result of quiescent volcanic activity; another example occurred on the opposite side of Veii, in the Vignacce area of the Fosso Piordo.

The site was known to antiquarians of the last century. Canina mentions the baths briefly (p. 73) and reproduces an engraving of them (Tav. XX) in Antica cittá di Veio (1847), which presumably shows the outer shell of the building before the river broke into it (pl. XX, a). It illustrates a vital point in understanding the remains as they stand at present.

The seven inscriptions described below were recorded by O. Brogan during journeys made in the Tripolitanian hinterland in 1958, 1959 and 1960, and are published here with the kind permission of Dr. E. Vergara-Caffarelli of the Department of Antiquities in Tripoli.

Brown limestone block, broken away at the right side (0·94 × 0·56 × 0·17) inscribed on one face within a moulded border (panel, 0·88 × 0·47); as a result of re-use the face is badly damaged and in part obscured by mortar which it has proved impossible to remove without danger to the surface. Found in 1958, south of the Jefren-Zintan road (map 1/100,000, sheet Giado, 1672, U788719) midway up the hillside above the wells; now in Tripoli Museum.

This paper presents an innovative study of the port system of Rome in Imperial times through the application of an integrated approach to both archaeological analysis and material evidence. Specifically, it seeks to provide a more complete contextualization and understanding of the port system of Rome by focusing on the exploration of the physical geography of the river Tiber and its transformations in connection with the organization of the port system between the late first century BC and early third century AD. Methodologically, this study is based on the compilation, re-evaluation and analysis of published archaeological and geoarchaeological data and on the application of modelling and simulations techniques within a GIS environment. These foundations and means allow us to reconstruct the development of the river Tiber's historical course in antiquity and its impact on specific organizational aspects of Rome's port system. In this sense, this study provides new insights and avenues of research (applicable to other geographical areas and periods of time) to evaluate the system's changing capacity for transport and the potential existence of a signalling system, in contrast to previous hypotheses on the organization of river traffic along the Tiber.

Many of the wars of the Late Republican period were largely civil conflicts, and there was thus a tension between the traditional expectation that triumphs should be celebrated for victories over foreign enemies and the need of the great commanders to give full expression to their prestige and charisma, and to legitimate their power. Most of the rules and conventions relating to triumphs thus appear to have been articulated as the development of Roman warfare brought new issues to the Senate's attention. This paper will examine these tensions and the ways in which they were resolved. The traditional war-ritual of the triumph and the topic of civil war have both received renewed interest in recent scholarship. However, attempts to define the relationship between them have been hampered by comments in the ancient evidence that suggest the celebration of a triumph for victory in a civil war was contrary to traditional practices. Nevertheless, as this paper will argue, a general could expect to triumph after a civil war victory if it could be represented also as over a foreign enemy (the civil war aspect of the victory did not have to be denied); only after a victory in an exclusively civil war was this understood to be in breach of traditional practices.

There is a widespread idea that the people we call ‘Phoenician’ called themselves ‘Canaanite’. This article argues that the only positive evidence for this hypothesis, a single line in the standard editions of Augustine's unfinished commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans, where he claims that ‘if you ask our local peasants what they are, they answer ‘Canaanite’', is prima facie highly unreliable as historical evidence, and on closer inspection in fact is almost certainly an editorial error: our examination of all the manuscripts — the first to have been carried out — established that what the peasants were really asked in the archetype was not quid sint — ‘what they are’ — but quid sit — ‘what is it’, a phrase that would most obviously refer to their language. While this new reconstruction of the archetype does not necessarily mean that quid sit was what Augustine originally wrote, this passage cannot be used as positive evidence for Canaanite identity in late antique North Africa, or anywhere else.

I 125 anni tra le guerre civili della tarda Repubblica e la fine del periodo Giulio-Claudio testimoniarono un cambiamento drammatico nel personale delle legioni romane: i posti occupati dagli Italiani vennero gradualmente occupati da uomini provenienti dalle province dell'Impero, che quindi provenivano dalle più diverse culture. La prospettiva di lunghi anni di servizio su distanti frontiere aveva alienato le tradizionali fonti di forza lavoro. Questo articolo suggerisce che il cambiamento era in atto prima di quanto fosse generalmente supposto. Pochi Italiani ritornavano a casa dopo il servizio. In genere i legionari non avevano alcun legame emotivo con la città di Roma, al punto che ben pochi avevano mai la possibilità di visitarla.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2010, but also in the first part of 2011), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.

This paper analyses the manuscripts of Diego de Revillas in the British School at Rome Library regarding the Severan marble plan and its arrangement in the Capitoline Museum, in 1742. They offer some insight into how this much discussed work was undertaken by Giovanni Battista Nolli, under the supervision of Alessandro Gregorio Capponi and Revillas. Specifically, Revillas’ documents throw new light on the way the scale reduction of the Forma Urbis was (incorrectly) figured out.

A recently published history of naval power and trade in the Mediterranean in the early medieval period provides a reminder of that vital but little-explored change in the balance of maritime power which preceded the Crusades and of the movement which won back for the Christians of the West, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta, threatened the shores of Africa and Albania, and was both a rehearsal and an essential preliminary for the great Drang nach Osten which was to follow. Little is known of the shipping used in these operations or of the tactics employed, but an attempt has been made to investigate the scanty sources for the Norman naval operations in the early stages of their conquest of southern Italy and Sicily, not merely because some of these operations were important in their immediate results, but also as an example of the naval technique of the Latin Christian military commanders in southern Europe. The subject derives additional interest from the spectacle it affords of Vikings finding their sea-legs again after many decades as farmers and cavalrymen in Normandy. It also offers one explanation for the conquest of the considerable area of southern Italy and Sicily by a comparatively small force, and once again demonstrates the eclecticism and adaptability of the Normans.

In his historical study of Roman Cyrenaica, published in 1942, Professor Pietro Romanelli brought together the rather scanty information then available regarding the military garrisons of the Roman province. The loss of the page of the Notitia Dignitatum listing the units under command of the Dux Libyarum makes us dependent almost entirely on epigraphic evidence; and whilst Cyrenaica has been proved rich in ancient inscriptions, only few of them refer to military matters. In the following paper are published some recently-discovered texts which help, if in somewhat limited fashion, to fill this void.

There can be little doubt that down to the beginning of the Early Iron Age the greater part of the Ager Veientanus, in common with the adjoining territories, was still covered by the primeval forest of which the Ciminian Forest of early Roman history was the still-considerable surviving remnant. There were doubtless trails through the forest, and the activities of hunters and charcoal burners would account for sporadic finds of stone implements (in so far as these have been correctly identified as of Neolithic or Bronze Age date). But the main centres of settlement at this early date lay elsewhere, along or near the coast and a few of the larger river valleys. One of these was, inevitably, the Tiber itself; another the river Fiora and the uplands around Lake Bolsena, forming a link between the coast and the middle valley of the Tiber. Outside these clearly defined areas of settlement the prehistoric archaeological record is largely a blank.