In a recent important article on the mosaics of the basilica of St. Demetrius at Thessaloniki, R. S. Cormack proposes a list of churches in the city with mosaics ‘for which a late fifth century date must be considered.’ The list comprises the Acheiropoietos basilica, the first phase of the basilica of St. Demetrius, and Hosios David. The purpose of this article is to show that the mosaics of the second phase of the Rotunda (now known as the church of St. George) should be included in Cormack's list.

The first thing to note about the Rotunda mosaics is that there has been less than unanimity concerning the date of their construction. Volbach, Lazarev and Cormack, amongst others, follow Dyggve and Torp in dating the mosaics to c. 400 or slightly earlier; Diehl and Dalton dated them to the fifth century, Weigand to the sixth and Holtzinger to the seventh or eighth century, all on largely stylistic grounds. What are obviously needed are some objective dating criteria, and these are to be found, not so much in the mosaics themselves, but rather in the building fabric and the furniture of the converted Rotunda. The conversion of the Rotunda, incidentally, consisted of the blocking of an opaion in the cupola and the addition of an ambulatory, a monumental entrance to the south, an apse to the east (Plate XXIII) and various subsidiary buildings to east and west. The mosaics were placed in the cupola and in the niches which connected the main body of the Rotunda with the ambulatory.

The first part of the paper reviews the evidence for prehistoric, Samnite and Roman settlement and land-use in the Tappino valley region, and discusses in detail two sites at Cercemaggiore-Gildone: a Samnite farmstead abandoned probably in the second century BC, and a nearby cemetery of the fifth to fourth centuries BC, which may be associated with the first phase of occupation at the farmstead.

The demography, dental pathology, nutritional state and work-induced lesions of the cemetery population (23 individuals) are analysed in the second part of the paper. High frequencies of oral lesions, especially in females, can be related to a poor, high-carbohydrate diet. Diseases of the joints and bone fractures indicate heavy physical activities, particularly in men.

The evidence suggests that agriculture was the most important economic activity of this population. The sample is compared with others from central-southern Italy and a number of close correspondences emerge. It would appear that socio-economic changes, including differences in territorial organisation and subsistence activities, brought about a worsening of the general health of the human population.

The present is the second instalment of a description of the Classical Topography of the Roman Campagna, which I hope to complete in the course of time. The scale upon which it is written demands, perhaps, some explanation—and for English readers some apology. I can understand that, for those who are not well acquainted with the localities of which I am treating, it may seem that there is a quite unnecessary fulness of detail, which may tend to obscure the points at issue. But my ambition is, so far as possible, to produce a description which shall be complete up to date (more I cannot claim) and which I shall then supplement as occasion arises —as indeed I am now doing for Part i, the Viae Collatina, Praenestina, and Labicana, which appeared in Papers, i. 125 sqq.

Our expedition of 1909 to Sardinia lasted throughout the month of October. Mr. F. G. Newton was present all the time, and after our work upon the Megalithic Monuments was at an end, he even found time to study and draw many of the interesting Pisan churches in the island.

The Archaeological Authorities at Cagliari followed our work with their usual cordial interest. Important archaeological investigations in another part of the island prevented Professor Taramelli from saluting us at Macomer as he had wished; while Cavaliere Filippo Nissardi was kept at Cagliari by official duties, which did not leave him time to meet us at Nuoro or elsewhere on our way.

Our hunt for dolmens, in which as will be seen we had considerable fortune, would have been all the keener for the company of veterans like these.

The article argues that the passages typically employed to document the Romans' exploitation of chained slaves in the Italian countryside from the mid-Republic into the Principate actually have a quite different meaning. The servus vinctus mentioned by Columella, Pliny and others is a label that became attached to slaves who were subjected (at least once) to punishment through chaining. The punishment reduced the value of the slave and, hence, it was a requirement upon sale to indicate whether a slave had been subjected to such chaining, that is whether they were servi vincti or servi soluti. What the passages in question do not show is how the Romans worked these or other slaves. Whatever their working conditions, the fate of servi vincti became worse in the Empire as a result of the lex Aelia Sentia that decreed that servi vincti could not receive Roman citizenship upon manumission: they had thus become men without hope.

A large sample of animal bones and shells was recovered from the excavations of medieval deposits carried out in the centre of Tuscania in 1971 and 1972. The main part of the sample came from a series of pits or pozzi filled with domestic refuse. The six pozzi discussed in this report, designated Pits P1, P2, P3, P4, M4 and M20, span the greater part of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Table 1 gives the basic analysis of the sample: the numbers of identifiable fragments are listed for the pozzi, which are arranged in chronological order.

Virgil's poetry has frequently appeared in illustrated editions, and has regularly provided subjects for other works of art, including some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the western tradition. In view of its constant appropriation in literary contexts over the course of the centuries, we might expect the famous fourth Eclogue (the so-called ‘messianic’ eclogue) to have exerted more of an impact on visual culture than it appears to have done. This paper considers some of the possible reasons for the apparent scarcity of engagement with Virgil's poem beyond the literary sphere, and examines the uses to which the poet's text is put when it does make an appearance in visual media — perhaps more often than has sometimes been supposed.

The ruins of the ancient Phoenician colony of Motya, well known to history as one of the three main Phoenician settlements in Sicily (Thucydides vi.2,6), are situated on the small island of Mozia (S. Pantaleo) within the shallow lagoon which stretches from Marsala towards Trapani. The city had an eventful history as one of the mainstays of Punic power in Sicily; but it was destroyed by Dionysius of Syracuse after an epic siege in 397 B.C., and thereafter, ceding place to Lilybaeum on the mainland nearby, its ruins remained virtually deserted. The object of some scientific curiosity during the late seventeenth and eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, the site had to wait for systematic exploration until the beginning of the twentieth. It was then that the little island passed into the hands of Mr. Joseph Whitaker, and was partly excavated by him: he revealed large stretches of the circuit walls, two monumental gateways, ruins of a big public building or temple, and several cemeteries.

Rome first penetrated into the plain of the Po in 268, when, after the Senones had been defeated and the tribe exterminated, a Latin colony, Ariminum, was founded in their former territory (Livy, Per. XV; Vell. I, 14). For many years Ariminum remained only a defensive bastion of Roman rule, closing the gap between the Apennines and the sea, and thus denying entrance to Picenum and Umbria from the north. It was later that the role of Ariminum was changed into that of a springboard for the offensives that subdued the Po country. This development was at once made possible and probable, however, by the location of the colony and the orientation of its territorium.

The original size of the colony is open to dispute. What is more important for our purposes is to attempt to determine its extent to the north and the west; to know how far it stretched into the Aemilian plain. On the south the boundary was the Crustumius (CIL XI, p. 77; Pliny, HN III, 115). On the north, the boundary with Ravenna and then with Caesena was certainly the Rubicon in the late Republic and afterwards. At the time of foundation, however, there was probably a greater area under the administration of Ariminum, but perhaps not settled by colonists.

The great landed wealth of the Roman Church both before and after the foundation of the papal state in the eighth century is well known. It is also well known that the Muslim invasions and the political breakdown which took place in Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries destroyed the ancient organisation of Roman Church lands, and that in the succeeding two centuries a new and partly feudal landowning organisation emerged in the Roman territory. But it is not at all clear what this decline of the Carolingian system meant in terms of the administration and extent of church property, and of the connected changes in the relations of the Roman Church with the local landowning nobility. The present short notes have been compiled in an attempt to shed a modest amount of light on this matter.

Our possession of the letters of Gregory the Great has given us some knowledge of the ancient organisation of the papal patrimonies. But even before the papal state came into being in the eighth century, there had already been two big changes since Gregory's time—the organisation of corn supply and charitable works in Rome through the Roman diaconates, and the re-organisation of many of the papal estates into larger aggregates known as domus cultae. Both these measures tended to centralise papal control over the economic life of Rome and the District, but it it with the second that I am mainly concerned here. My business, however, is with the decline and not with the growth of the new economic system, and to its earlier nature and development I refer only briefly.

This article demonstrates how a contextual approach to material culture can help us think about the link between Roman hegemony and cultural change in Republican Italy. It does this by focusing on a particular set of artefacts — anatomical votive terracottas — that have been seen to indicate the spread of Roman and/or Latin culture in central Italy. Although the use of anatomical terracottas may have begun in the vicinity of Rome, communities in central Italy actively engaged with these artefacts according to their own cultural dispositions. Such signs of local agency are especially visible in the way that worshippers in the Apennine areas of central Italy favoured votive terracottas depicting legs, feet and hands, instead of reproductive organs, which were more popular in the Tyrrhenian zone. These findings emphasise the key role of local cultural practice in shaping the effect of accelerated political change on the micro-level.

Le mura leoniane furono costruite intorno alla zona vaticana dopo il sacheggio di S. Pietro da parte dei Saraceni nel 846. Lunghi tratti di queste mura sono ancora conservati. In un primo articolo (Gibson and Ward-Perkins, 1979) gli autori hanno descritto in modo dettagliato il tratto ora racchiuso nei giardini vaticano. In questo articolo forniscono una descrizione ed una documentazione grafica e fotografica della parte che nel sec. XV era inglobata nel ‘Passetto’, che porta da Castel S. Angelo ai palazzi pontifici. Lungo il Passetto, della costruzione originale del nono secolo sono ancora in piedi vari tratti di cortina, quattro torri ed una latrina; il tutto costruito in laterizi di rimpiego coll'uso occasionale di filari in grandi blocchi di tufo. In un secondo momento, databile dalla tecnica muraria, che sembra quella del sec. XII, fu aggiunto alla costruzione originale un rialzamento con un'arcata aperta verso l'interno della città vaticana. Nella parte conclusiva del articolo le mura leoniane vengono confrontate con quelle tardo romane di Roma: un confronto che dimostra sia la loro derivazione stilistica da quelle romane, che la grandezza minore e la tecnica molto inferiore della costruzione leoniana.

In this paper the problem of the chronology of early Iron Age (ninth-eighth century BC) burials in Latium is considered. Since the beginning of the sixties many scholars have considered this problem from different points of view. Müller-Karpe suggested a relative chronology which, in general terms, is still in use. In recent years a considerable increase in the amount of archaeological evidence has made it necessary to revise the chronological sequence. It has been possible to design a table which associates graves with metal and pottery types. In this table Müller-Karpe's phases are divided into two subphases which are related to different stages in the development of the early Iron Age in the Italian peninsula. On the basis of this chronology it seems that use of the necropolis of the Forum ceased at the end of phase IIA1, with an early moving of burials of the Esquiline area.

A short account is also given of the questions which relate to absolute chronology, and an attempt is made to relate the phases of the early Iron Age in Latium, and in the Italian peninsula in general, to recent dates proposed for the late Urnfield culture in central Europe.