The wide circulation of Stoic ideas among Romans of the upper class from the time of Panaetius in the second century B.C. to the reign of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161–80) is a familiar fact. Few Romans of note can indeed be marked down as committed Stoics, and even those like Seneca who avowedly belonged to the school borrowed ideas from other philosophies. Still, even if eclecticism was the mode, the Stoic element was dominant. Stoicism permeated the writings of authors like Virgil and Horace who professed no formal allegiance to the sect, and became part of the culture that men absorbed in their early education. One might think that it exercised an influence comparable in some degree with that which Christianity has often had on men ignorant or careless of the nicer points of systematic theology. It has often been supposed that it did much to humanize Roman law and government. That is a contention of which I should be rather sceptical, but it is not my present theme.

Among Roman families of the late Republic and early Principate few are so intriguing to the cultural historian as those who had interests in the Eastern Mediterranean, and contributed in one way or another to the gradual Hellenization of Rome, and even, to some extent, the Romanization of the East; while it must be of interest to those concerned with social and economic history to see what can be established about the organization of architectural work and artistic production during this period. It is clear that systems of some complexity did exist; it has been pointed out that the farming of public contracts, which could be on a large scale, required a representative of citizen status, able to give praedes and praedia, while the skilled workmen involved were likely to be, at least some of them, his slaves or freedmen.

It is a commonplace that slaves in upper-class Roman households of the imperial period were numerous and specialised. The elaborate entourage of the slave civil servant Musicus (5197=EJ 158) implies the far greater luxury of his imperial master, Tiberius. But detailed discussions of Roman domestic arrangements tend to generalise, to take examples from widely separated areas and from any epoch between Augustus and the Severi, and thus to obscure chronological development and class differences. Freedmen in charge of bejewelled gold plate are attested in the imperial house in the Flavian period and later: we cannot infer that they existed before, or in other houses. Conversely, the earliest inscription known to us does not give us the date for the introduction of a post, only a terminus a quo. Some posts are confined to the imperial house. Numbers of slaves and the variety of their functions are dictated by the rank, wealth, family connections, requirements, sex and age of their owner.

Among the antiquities in the collection of the Department of Archaeology and Ethnography in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, are four bronze mirrors. Three have not previously been published and the fourth, although first noted in 1838, had been lost from sight since the early years of this century. This note has been compiled at the suggestion of the Keeper as a record of one aspect of the Birmingham collection. The writer also hopes that it will remind other students that excellent material may as often be found in the provincial museums of Britain, as in the national collections.

Mentions of wall and vault mosaics were rare (Ronczewski 1903 and Ricci 1914) until Carlo Cecchelli wrote the first definitive work on the subject (Cecchelli 1922). Since then scholars such as Bovini (1954) and Stern (1959) have sought the origins of wall mosaics. Others, like Parlasca (1959, 66–8) and Becatti (1961, 274–6, 291–4) have made valuable contributions to the subject in the form of essays within longer works. Neuerburg's (1965) work on fountains and nymphaea is particularly useful as a source because so many nymphaea are decorated with wall and vault mosaic. Another recent contribution to the subject is that of D. Joly (1965). A study of these works and of the monuments themselves reveals the following broad facts:

that wall mosaics, as distinct from floor mosaics, are largely composed of glass rather than stone tesserae;

that the earliest wall mosaics (those of the first half of the first century A.D.) incorporate, in addition to glass tesserae, a number of other materials, such as shells, pumice, twisted glass rods, pieces of glass and a substance known as Egyptian blue (Sear 1972–3, 29, n. 2);

The area under study comprises the southeastern section of Lucania bounded on the north by the high land separating the Bradano and Basento valleys, on the south by the Agri River, on the west approximately by a line from Vaglio to Grumento and on the east by a line from Tursi to Miglionico. This paper forms a part of a general survey of the ancient routes of Lucania and Apulia.

The literary sources offer in the area under consideration very limited assistance in ascertaining the location of any routes, but they may shed some light on the date and distribution of some settlements and their road networks. The main tools are air photography and autopsy.

The extremely rugged terrain imposes stringent limits on possible locations of the ancient roads, so that many are fairly easy to follow. Erosion, however, has been extensive, and in some areas the precise line of an ancient road is impossible to recover.

1. Description of the Area

The area covered by the survey is that in the triangle of land bounded on the southwest by the Via Braccianese from La Storta to Vigna di Valle, on the east by the Valchetta-Cremera and on the northwest by the southern edges of the craters of Bracciano, Martignano and Baccano. The present report follows naturally in the series of articles begun by the publication in the 1968 volume of these Papers of the Ager Veientanus record (Kahane, Murray-Threipland and Ward-Perkins, 1968).

2. Acknowledgements

The material for this survey has been gathered over many years by many people. I should like to thank, in particular, John Ward-Perkins and Anne Kahane for the clear and accessible records of material from the sites which they found along the Via Cassia, the Baccano ridge and the country north of Veii, which have been so easy to work from. Ellen Kohler and Sheldon Judson should be thanked for the support and help which they gave in the early stages of the work, and Joanna Bird for her recent prompt and thorough report on the Terra Sigillata wares found in the area sites. The American Philosophical Society should be thanked for the grant which made it possible to do the necessary and final gathering together of the survey material.