This paper discusses the survey evidence from the Orientalizing and Archaic settlement and funerary sites at Nepi (ancient Nepet), one of the first Latin colonies outside Latium adiectum. The comparison of its pre-Roman, pre-colonial developments to the Roman patterns from the Nepi Survey Project and the trends from other Latin colonies in southern Etruria allows the examination of the local effects of Roman colonialism. The evidence shows that Nepi seemed to develop as an independent city state in the Orientalizing period, peaked in the Archaic period and weakened before the capture of Veii in 396 bc, making it easier to defeat. Rural settlement all but disappeared afterwards with similar hiatus apparent at the sister colony at Sutri as well. In the third century bc the first few villas near the town appeared as a sign of the establishment of a Roman settlement pattern. The extensive ‘rural colonization’ at Nepi, similarly to Sutri and Cosa, started only in the second century bc when all southern Etruria had entered a colonial phase and could develop alongside Rome. Thus, Latin colonization disrupted earlier patterns and the colonies appear to have been originally outposts set up to secure new territory.

The article discusses the date, content and historical context of the lapis Pollae, a Latin inscription set alongside the road from Capua to Regium, recording the distance to various places and listing the achievements of an unknown Roman magistrate. Comparison with a milestone associated with the same road prompts a dating earlier than 131 bc, and internal evidence suggests a date prior to the Servile Wars, which broke out around 138 bc. It is further argued that by listing his achievements the magistrate was attempting to secure the political support of the colonial elites of Lucania. The article also uses the inscription as evidence for three historical themes: (1) the role of local communities and Italian entrepreneurs in the exploitation of public land in Sicily; (2) the role of local and Roman elites in southern Italian agricultural intensification; (3) Rome's use of road building to support colonization.

This paper provides a new assessment of Caesar's activity in northeast Italy, both in the 50s bc and in the aftermath of the Civil War, and discusses it against the background of the earlier Roman presence in the region and of the developments that intervened in the following generation. Its main contention is that Caesar carried out a number of important political and administrative interventions, both in Histria (chiefly through the foundation of the colony of Pola) and in the Alpine and pre-Alpine regions, marking a fundamental shift in the quality of the Roman presence in the area. The discussion follows five lines of enquiry: the value of the evidence of Caesar's Commentarii for his activity in northeast Italy; an overview of the problems for which inadequate documentation survives (such as the early history and legal status of Tergeste); the date and background of the colonization of Pola; the changes in the administrative and agrarian set-up of Histria and northeast Italy in the late Republican period; and the resulting economic and social developments in the region. The conclusions summarize the main insights emerging from a very fragmentary body of evidence, and seek to explain the inclusion of Histria in the Augustan discriptio of Italy with the exceptional prosperity of the region, which Caesar's interest had made possible to chart and exploit more effectively.

Prompted by Chrystina Häuber's seminal work on the eastern part of the mons Oppius, this article offers a radical reappraisal of the evidence for the ‘gardens of Maecenas’. Some very long-standing beliefs about the location and nature of the horti Maecenatiani are shown to be unfounded; on the other hand, close reading of an unjustly neglected text provides some new and unexpected evidence for what they were used for. The main focus of the argument is on the relevance of the horti to the development of Roman performance culture. It is intended to contribute to the understanding of Roman social history, and the method used is traditionally empirical: to collect and present whatever evidence is available, to define as precisely as possible what that evidence implies, and to formulate a hypothesis consistent with those implications.

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 takes its lead from research into the ‘language’ of Roman portraiture. More specifically, it explores a work that literalizes the idea of ‘reading’ a Roman portrait (to quote Sheldon Nodelman's classic phrase): a picture-poem by Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius — a much maligned poet active in the first decades of the fourth century ad — that purports, through its iconotextual form, to visualize the countenance of the emperor Constantine (uultus Augusti). After a brief introduction to Optatian and his œuvre, the article offers a close reading of his third poem, demonstrating the sophisticated ways in which it probes the latent iconic potential of written script. What particularly interests me about this case study is its underlying paradox: on the one hand, Optatian boasts that his painted page will outstrip antiquity's most celebrated painter (it ‘will dare outdo the waxes of Apelles’, uincere Apelleas audebit pagina ceras); on the other, the actual form of the picture seems to eschew mimetic modes of representation, rendering Constantine's ‘portrait’ a geometric pattern. So how should we make sense of this image? What does the poem reveal about ideas of portraiture in the fourth century? And how might we contextualize Optatian's abiding fascination with the limits of ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’?

The Liber pontificalis, the serial biography of the popes running from Saint Peter to the end of the ninth century, first compiled in Rome during the ‘Gothic Wars’ in the sixth century and continued at various stages in the next three centuries, offers a distinctive narrative of the history of Rome and of the papacy in the early Middle Ages. This paper argues that the seventh- and early eighth-century sections, too often simply mined for nuggets of information about church buildings, represent the pope in a particular way both in relation to Byzantium in theological and political terms, and as the successor to Saint Peter in Rome. The papal narrative undermines the usual assumptions about the so-called ‘Byzantine Reconquest’ and the Roman perception, if not the reality, of the degree to which ‘Byzantine rule’ was exercised in Italy between the middle of the sixth and first half of the eighth century. Lastly, these ‘continuations’ have important implications for any interpretation of the purpose and construction of the Liber pontificalis, and of its dissemination beyond Rome in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Elections and voting were of great importance in the constitution and the politics of the Roman Republic. They also presented challenges to a Renaissance reader who wanted to know where, when and exactly how they took place, challenges that appealed deeply to Biondo Flavio, the mid fifteenth-century historian of Roman institutions. In book III of Roma triumphans, the first on the government of Rome, he devotes considerable attention to them. This paper is an analysis of this first early-modern attempt to understand the Roman voting assemblies (comitia). In it I compare Biondo's approach in Roma triumphans with his earlier statement on the importance of the comitia in his topographical treatise on the city of Rome, Roma instaurata. After surveying Biondo's treatment as a whole I focus on his understanding of the Comitium, the comitia and the century chosen to vote first (centuria praerogativa).

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2015, but also in the first part of 2016), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.