Rome under the Republic, from its beginnings as a small barbarian community, gradually took over the Greek world. It then transformed itself and its subjects into an Empire of remarkable stability and continuity of institutions. Similarly, the Roman Republican coinage, modelled originally on that of the Greek citystates of S. Italy, became under Augustus the coinage of the Empire. It would be interesting to know to what extent, if at all, the Republican mint anticipated or foreshadowed the ultimately very sophisticated organisation of the Imperial mint and its systematic use of control-marks forming part of the coin-type.

Certainly for the Republic the problems caused by the need to produce an enormous bulk of coinage already existed and a number of issues display series of marks which can be regarded as controls. For instance, the issue of L. Iulius Bursio displays such marks and alone used nearly as many obverse dies as the entire Athenian New Style silver coinage. It would be surprising if the process of striking was not in some way systematised and controlled by the marks, as it was in the case of the Athenian coinage.

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.

The first casts of the forms of Pompeian victims of the AD 79 eruption of Mt Vesuvius were successfully achieved under the directorship of Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1863. To date, 104 individuals have been cast by restorers and archaeologists during the course of excavation. The methods used to obtain these casts were not well documented. It was always assumed that plaster or lime cement was merely poured into voids which preserved the impression of organic remains buried in the ash that covered the site during the catastrophe. It was also assumed that the undisturbed skeletal remains of victims were encased within the casts. The initial aim of the Pompeii Cast Project was to study these bones to build on and test the results of an earlier study of the large sample of Pompeian human remains that were disarticulated by post-excavation activities. Apart from providing information about the people who did not manage to escape the eruption, the project aimed to challenge previous interpretations of the lives and activities of these victims that were solely based on superficial inspection and circumstantial evidence.

Twenty-six casts were subjected to CT scanning or X-ray analysis in 2015. The results were unexpected. It was clear that the casts had been considerably manipulated. Bones were often removed prior to casting, and other elements had been introduced. This ongoing project has now been expanded to establish how these casts were achieved, to better understand nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeological and restoration practice.

In 2010, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies achieved its centenary. In 2012, the British School at Rome, which was closely linked to the origins of the Roman Society, celebrates the centenary of its Royal Charter. This marked the formal establishment of the distinctively broad and interdisciplinary remit of the School by the inclusion of humanities, art and architecture in a single institution. The combination of these two anniversaries has given rise to this attempt to think through some of the paths that Roman studies have taken, and to understand them within the context of broader developments in particularly British and Italian historiography. The Roman Society and the British School at Rome have many points of connection, both in terms of individuals and in terms of research interest. Recent work on the development of a British historical tradition has shown that it remains important to ground the reading of historical scholarship within the intellectual trajectory of its practitioners. This is, therefore, an argument about how the research represented in the Journal of Roman Studies, and conducted at the British School at Rome, and ultimately more widely, should be seen in a historiographical context.

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.

The financial affairs of the younger Pliny are of particular interest for the social and economic history of the Roman Empire, because Pliny was one of the largest municipal benefactors in-the West (almost the largest known) and because unusually full information has survived about both his gifts and the resources that lay behind them. Almost every corner of Pliny's life as revealed by his Letters and by inscriptions is well-trodden ground, and his generosities are no exception. But the standard treatment of Pliny's gifts (Gentile's article published in 1881) is somewhat out of date and deals fully only with the gifts made to Comum. The only extensive discussion of Pliny's public and private generosities together with his resources appears in a popular work which is marred by too many uncertainties of method to allow justice to be done to the subject. No more than three of the 103 pages of Mommsen's biographical study of Pliny are devoted to his gifts, and the question of his resources is not considered. Since a number of points remain controversial, there are grounds for attempting a fresh analysis of Pliny's financial affairs as a whole.

The complex of tunnels and buildings described in this article was discovered by Keith W. Jones of the United States Navy and myself in the course of our general exploration of the underground antiquities of the Phlegrean Fields, made with the kind permission of Professor Alfonso de Franciscis, the Superintendent of Antiquities for Campania. They are the subject of a book recently published by myself (In the Footsteps of Orpheus, Hale, London 1967), but in view of their very unusual nature I have gladly accepted an invitation by the Director of the British School to contribute to the Papers a short factual account, together with the plans we made in the course of our survey (fig. 1).

When the terraced structures overlooking the bay and port of Baia were excavated in 1956–58, many tunnel entrances were uncovered. With the exception of the one short tunnel leading to the hot spring at the rear of the so-called Temple of Mercury, and a few obvious drainage ducts, the tunnels are all concentrated in the areas marked III and IV on the plans in the guide book, The Phlegrean Fields by A. Maiuri (3rd ed., 1958).

During the fourteenth century the Latins' hold on those fragments of the great empire of Romania which they had acquired after the overthrow of the Byzantine emperor in 1204 became increasingly precarious. In the Morea, as the Peloponnese was then known, the foremost Frankish houses, the Villehardouin, the Courtenay, the de la Roche and others, were extinguished. The French magnates faced hostility not only from the Greeks and Turks, but also from the Catalans and the Italianate elements to whom their lands passed through conquest, marriage or princely favour. A turning point in this process was the slaughter of many male members of the old Frankish aristocracy by the Catalan companies and their Turkish allies in a great battle near Thebes in 1311, at which Gautier de Brienne, who had succeeded his kinsman Guy de la Roche as Duke of Athens and Neopatras in 1309, was killed. Gautier's duchies were occupied by the Catalans, who were acting independently of the Aragonese King of Sicily, though they subsequently rendered a vague formal allegiance to a line of Siculo-Aragonese dukes. The Catalans did not take Corinth, which lay on the isthmus separating the Duchy of Athens from the Morea, and the Brienne family retained effective possession of its lands beyond Corinth, around Argos and Nauplia, which continued to form part of the Principality of Achaea.

According to Mommsen the various laws de repetundis, from, the Lex Acilia of the Gracchan period to the Lex Iulia of 59 B.C., never attached any heavier political penalty to the offence than infamia, with consequent exclusion from the Senate, and the exile of those condemned for extortion was solely due to the difficulty of repayment. Mommsen also held that the penalty of twofold restitution introduced by the Lex Acilia was abandoned by the Sullan Lex Cornelia in favour of the simple repayment established by the original Lex Calpurnia of 149 B.C. Only during the Julio-Claudian principate and later were severe penalties in the form of relegatio and exilium inflicted in special circumstances (extra ordinem) by the authority of the senatorial court and not by any remodelling of the Lex Iulia, which continued to inflict only the lesser penalties.

This general doctrine has caused considerable uneasiness for three reasons. First, there is an apparent contradiction between Mommsen's view and two statements of Cicero, which assert that the penalties for extortion were increased in severity by successive laws. Second, Cicero constantly speaks in cases of extortion, whether as prosecutor or in defence, as though the caput of the accused were at stake.

Un capitello romano decorato, attualmente in Vaticano, può essere identificato come proveniente dal sito di Mura di Santo Stefano, vicino al lago di Bracciano, fu disegnato dal Ligorio e dal Palladio e da un artista fiorentino. La decorazione di questo capitello di marmo non ha stretti paralleli; consiste di quattro foglie d'acanto sotto gli angoli dell'abaco, congiunte da cornicioni orizzontali: un ovolo, astragali, scanalature e cimae rectae. I cornicioni, in particolare, sono caratteristici del risveglio della decorazione augustea del primo secondo secolo visibile nella decorazione del Foro Traiano, ed alcuni degli elementi meno comuni richiamano quelli dei capitelli della Villa Adriana a Tivoli. E' indicata una data risalente ad Adriano. Si pensa che l'uso del capitello fosse probabile all'interno dell'edificio. Un recente esame dei disegni del sedicesimo secolo dimostrarono che il Palladio, come in altri suoi disegni del sito, fu copiato dal Ligorio con poche variazioni, mentre la versione del fiorentino risultò indipendente, probabilmente realizzata dopo che il capitello venne portato a Roma. Le circostanze dello spostamento ed i disegni sono discussi nel contesto della carriera del Ligorio e della contemporanea attività archeologica.

In presenting the material that is the subject of this paper, it should be stressed at the outset that this is in no sense a full excavation report. The circumstances of the excavation itself and of its interruption, the subsequent loss or destruction of much both of the material itself and of the records of its discovery, and the death of Professor Ugo Rellini, who conducted a part of the excavation—the combination of all these circumstances means that such a report can never now be written. Nevertheless, the intrinsic interest of the material that survives and the preservation by Dr. Baumgartel of her own excavation notes have seemed to justify a more limited publication; and the main purpose of the present article is to present a type-series of the pottery and of such of the other material as has survived, and at the same time to record something of its stratigraphy and of the observed chronological sequence.

During the summer of 1951, the British School undertook an examination of the remaining unexcavated Byzantine levels within the Severan basilica at Lepcis Magna. In converting the basilica to Christian use, Justinian's architects had raised the floor-level at a number of points, and it was hoped that the deposits stratified between the two floor-levels might yield evidence of the condition of the building immediately before the Byzantine reconquest of Tripolitania. In this respect the excavations proved uninformative. A section cut through the low platform built out from the south-east apse into the first two bays of the nave, to house the sixth-century chancel, revealed a uniform and deliberate fill of earth and rubble lying directly on the cement basis of the earlier floor, which here, as everywhere else, had been previously stripped of its Severan paving of slabs of Proconnesian marble. A section in the southernmost of the four chapels that fill the angles of the building, flanking the two apses, revealed a similar fill, the only difference being that, in this case, the original paving slabs were found re-used at the sixth-century level and had evidently been prised up from the earlier pavement at the time of the sixth-century reconstruction. By the sixth century, the pavement of the adjoining forum had already been buried beneath half a metre of flood-sand, and we may suspect that the Byzantine architects had to remove a similar accumulation from the basilica before putting it into repair.

The Cemetery at Sphagion was excavated during the last week of August 1951, under the auspices of the Ashmolean Museum—Sydney University expedition to Cyprus with the aid of funds contributed jointly by the University of Sydney and the Australian Institute of Archaeology, Melbourne, which now possesses the finds allotted to the expedition by the Department of Antiquities. Tomb 17 is in the Cyprus Museum. The University of Sydney has made a generous grant towards the cost of illustration.

The site at Sphagion (so called because of a nearby slaughter-house) lies on the outskirts of the village of Myrtou (Kyrenia District) in North-west Cyprus (fig. 1). It is situated immediately to the North of the main Myrtou-Nicosia road, within a few metres of the 20-mile post from Nicosia. The narrow, flat tract of land, now used for the cultivation of vines and olives, has a shallow surface soil overlying the soft white limestone into which the graves were cut. The land belongs to Eleni Hadji Sophokli of the village of Myrtou.

In the pre-Julian Roman calendar there were two cycles of festivals to mark the end of the year, in December and in February, and also residual elements of the decimal scansion of Roman metrology. Together, these elements confirm the traditional hypothesis of a year composed of ten months (the so-called ‘Romulian’ year) prior to that of twelve months (the so-called ‘Numan’ year). The ‘Romulian’ calendar was modified quite considerably during the times of the first Etruscan kings, associated with profound socio-political, and perhaps also metrological, reforms. From then, the two ‘missing’ months in the ‘decimal’ calendar, periods in which work would have been concentrated within the home rather than outside, with the exchange of the surpluses which had been accumulated, were incorporated. The new months were called Mercedonius (?) and Februarius, the latter being the last month of the year. A radical revision of the calendar, which resulted in the last two months becoming the first two, appears to have occurred at the time of the dramatic move to the Republic, as the old festival was too closely related to the figure of the rex. It can be concluded that the archaic calendar of Rome reflects a stratified series of various religious, political and ideological elements evolving over the centuries.

‘Amphorae of Spello type’, produced in inland central Italy during the first and second centuries AD, form part of the Italic production of wine containers of the early and middle Imperial periods, alongside production in the central-southern tyrrhenian area (‘Falernian amphorae’) and in the central-southern adriatic area (‘Forlimpopoli amphorae’). In this paper the preliminary results of an archaeological and archaeometric study undertaken of fragments of amphorae of Spello type, found in various locations in Regiones VI and VII, are presented. This is the first phase of a research project aimed, firstly, at the morphological characterization of Spello amphorae, through the construction of a typological classification, and, secondly, at the identification, in mineralogical terms, of the vessels produced at Spello, the only certain centre of production, and in other possible production areas in the central part of peninsular Italy. The data which have emerged from this research allow us to map the areas of production and the distribution of this particular ceramic vessel, and also to create a reference database which will form an invaluable starting-point for further research in the near future.

This article describes the discovery of an area of habitation of the domus of the Valerii, a family with yen ancient origins, said to descend from the first consul, Valerius Publicola. The excavation, undertaken in 2005, investigated deposits beneath the Ospedale dell'Addolorata where, in the early years of the twentieth century, the construction of the southeast block destroyed the upper levels and a complex row of structures along the northern side, towards via Santo Stefano Rotondo. Since the middle of the sixteenth century, uncontrolled excavation and research have recovered an important inheritance of knowledge and of high-quality finds — often sold or dispersed in some way. The excavation has revealed part of a frescoed corridor, 3.8 m wide and originally c. 3 m high, with a pavement in black mosaic, with windows opening onto a garden. Of this imposing structrure, datable to the late Hadrianic period, various phases of building activity, abandonment and reuse have been identified, amongst which the construction of a hidental is of particular interest.