Any account of ancient Veii is almost bound to start with a reference to what is today the most conspicuous surviving feature of the ancient landscape, the network of roads which led from the town out into the surrounding countryside and, across country, towards the neighbouring cities of Etruria. The onward courses of these roads will be described and discussed in a later article. All that is attempted here is to trace their course in the immediate vicinity of Veii, where they were an important factor in the siting both of the streets within the town and of the cemeteries outside it.

Of these roads, some undoubtedly go right back to Villanovan times. To this group belong the ridgeway to Nepi and the Monti Sabatini; the track leading from the Valle la Fata Gate, almost certainly the earliest road between Veii and Rome; one or more of the tracks leading across country from the North-east Gate in the direction of Capena; and (presumably) the earlier of the two roads leading to Caere. Others, at any rate in their present form, belong to a later phase of the city's development, when there were the means and organisation to undertake the considerable feats of engineering that their construction represents.

The roads and gates described in the previous section are of very varied dates, and many of them were in use over a long period. They have been described first because they constitute the essential framework for any serious topographical study of Veii. Within this framework the city developed, and in this and the following sections will be found described, period by period, the evidence for that development, from the first establishment of Veii in Villanovan times down to its final abandonment in late antiquity.

Whatever the precise relationship of the Villanovan to the succeeding phases of the Early Iron Age in central Italy in terms of politics, race or language, it is abundantly clear that it was within the Villanovan period that the main lines of the social and topographical framework of historical Etruria first took shape. Veii is no exception. Apart from sporadic material that may have been dropped by Neolithic or Bronze Age hunters, there is nothing from the Ager Veientanus to suggest that it was the scene of any substantial settlement before the occupation of Veii itself by groups of Early Iron Age farmers, a part of whose material equipment relates them unequivocally to the Villanovan peoples of coastal and central Etruria.

About the internal topography of the Etruscan city we know sadly little. That it was very largely determined by the natural configuration of the ground there is little room for doubt. It is true that on the Piazza d'Armi Stefani found what may have been an open square with a straight street leading out of one corner of it and a second street running for a short distance at right angles to it. But the regularity of plan extends only a very short distance back from the main façade, and it bears all the marks of being a later rationalisation of an existing irregular plan; nor is there any suggestion of a regular layout elsewhere in the city. The main lines of the street-plan are clear enough, and these indicate a radial layout, with the city-centre occupying roughly the same site as the centre of the Roman town. This was, and still is, the natural focus of the plateau. Here the crest divides into two distinct ridges, the southern one running the full length of the promontory, right down to the Piazza d'Armi, the northern one bearing off to the left and then swinging right again towards the modern Casale Cabrioli, ending on the cliffs overlooking the Fosso della Valchetta, opposite the Vacchereccia tumulus. The layout of the south-eastern part of the town was very largely determined by the course of the roads which followed these two ridges and of a third road which probably ran down the bottom of the valley between them. Two other roads, those from the Formello and the Millstream Gates, converge directly on the centre, and that from the Capena Gate joined the northern ridge-road about 500 m. to the east. The Caere road probably joined the axial road some distance to the west of the centre.

‘O Veii veteres, et vos tum regna fuistis

Et vestro posita est aurea sella foro:

Nunc intra muros pastoris bucina lenti

Cantat, et in vestris ossibus arva metunt.’

(Propertius IV, 10, 27–30.)

So the Roman poet Propertius, writing in the closing years of the first century B.C., only a very short time before the establishment of the Augustan municipality on the site of the ancient town; and it is the conventional reading of the history of Veii that the four hundred odd years intervening between the sack of the town in 396 B.C. and the foundation of the Municipium Augustum Veiens were years of abandonment and desolation. This view has been challenged recently by Dr. Maria Santangelo in her publication of two small jugs of the third century B.C. with archaic latin dedicatory inscriptions, the one from the Portonaccio cemetery, inscribed L(ucius) Tolonio(s) ded(et) Menerva(e), the other from the Campetti votive deposit Caere (or Crere) L(ucius) Tolonio(s) d(edet). These two dedications are evidence not only of the survival of at least two of the sanctuaries, but also of the continuing residence at or near Veii of a descendent of the Velthur Tulumne who dedicated a bucchero cup in the same Portonaccio sanctuary three centuries earlier (Not. Scav., 1930, pp. 341–343), and of the Lars Tolumnius who was killed in battle and whose armour hung, for all to see, in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius (Prop. loc. cit.).

The principal source of our knowledge of Veii during the Imperial age is that contained in the inscriptions found on the site itself and in the immediate neighbourhood, supplemented to some extent by the surviving remains. Veii lay off the main road and, while enjoying a modest prosperity under the early Empire, it never achieved sufficient importance to leave any mark upon the larger historical scene. It is hardly mentioned in the contemporary literature; nor, so far as we know, did any son of Veii ever achieve prominence in the outer world. Almost its only claim to contemporary distinction seems to have lain in the evil reputation of its wine.

Such as it is, the literary and epigraphic evidence is well summarised in the introduction to the section on Veii in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (vol. XI, 1, p. 557) and need not here be repeated in full. It will be sufficient to call attention to a few points that have a particular bearing on the historical topography of the city and on the character and scope of the surviving remains.

It is very unlikely indeed that any substantial urban community survived the events which culminated in the fall of the Western Empire. If the inscriptional evidence has been read aright, Veii was already in full decline in the fourth century. The reasons may well have been in the first place economic, namely the concentration of such wealth as there was in the hands of the well-to-do landlords whose villas are so conspicuous a feature of the local countryside, at the expense of a township which, lying off the main road and lacking any particular resources, had already begun to be something of an anachronism two or three centuries earlier. At the same time it lay near enough to the main road to be vulnerable to any marauding army; and, unlike so many other ancient Italian towns, it had no impregnable hilltop fortress to which its inhabitants could withdraw. As a functioning community Veii may well have ceased to exist by the fifth century.

The villas were less exposed, those of them at any rate that lay off the main roads; and representing as they do a less complex economy than that of the towns, they were more resilient in the face of disaster. Even at an earlier date there are very few traces of any intensive agricultural specialisation, and a great many of them were certainly still functioning in Late Antiquity.