The conservatism of the Romans in matters of religion is a generally accepted truth and it is in many ways a very obvious truth. I have no intention of denying it. They set a very high value on their religious tradition; they sought to preserve and reproduce the ceremonies and customs inherited from their ancestors; they thought it wrong and even dangerous to abandon or neglect the many gods, goddesses and sacred places of which the city was full; they had no ideological framework which would have enabled them to think in terms of reforming and improving the national cult, as opposed to reviving and restoring it.

I say that this is an obvious truth, because some degree of conservatism in this sense seems to be an inevitable feature of the type of Graeco-Roman paganism of which the Roman State cult is one example. A system in which the emphasis falls primarily on the performance of ritual acts—not on the worshippers' belief, or religious emotions and experiences, or on theology or ethics—such a system inescapably makes it a primary value, though not necessarily the only value, that the known ritual should be successfully repeated. This in turn must imply some implicit respect for the past and for the tradition from which the ritual emerged. For the Romans of any generation, the real validation of their religion lay in the fact that it had worked: that their ancestors had won battles, survived crises, eaten dinners, begotten children and expanded their power by the practice of the self-same rites and ceremonies as they practised themselves. For the Romans of the last generation of the Republic, it was a fact that their ancestors had won more battles and eaten better dinners than anybody else.

Strabo called Mediolanum (Milan) an ἀξιόλογος πόλις and classed it above all other cities in the region of Cisalpine Gaul, with the exception of Patavium (Padua). Patavium in its prime, the Augustan period, could register five hundred equestrians in a census, a number equalled only by Gades (Cadiz) among cities in the West. The presence of so many equestrians indicates a substantial population-base. Cisalpine cities as a whole impressed Strabo as being larger and richer than those of the rest of Italy.

Thus, if Strabo is any guide, Mediolanum was already in his time (the beginning of the Principate), an important city, perhaps not far behind Patavium in size. Moreover, the fortunes of Mediolanum, unlike those of Patavium, were not on the wane. No contemporary of Augustus could have forecast that Mediolanum would be chosen as a seat of emperors in the fourth century. But seen in the light of the city's development in the early empire as an administrative, cultural and economic centre, this was a logical choice.

The nineteen stones described below form a small collection of Latin inscriptions now housed in the City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. They have been acquired since the Second World War from older collections assembled at various places in the United Kingdom. With the exception of two, all are recorded as found in Rome and sixteen have been published in volume VI of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL). The findspot of one (no. 6) is not recorded, while that of another (no. 13), although not attested, was almost certainly Rome. The publications in CIL were based in most cases on manuscript copies made between the fifteenth and ninetenth centuries; in the case of eight stones this republication (nos. 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 12, 17 and 18) provides corrections or amendments to the relevant entries in CIL. All measurements are metric.

Were ludi circenses ever held in the Circus Flaminius as they were in the Circus Maximus?

The evidence is as follows.

1. Varro LL v 153–4: Locus idem circus maximus dictus, quod circum spectaculis aedificatus ubi ludi fiunt, et quod ibi circum metas fertur pompa et equi currunt…item simili de causa circus Flaminius dicitur, qui circum aedificatus est Flaminium campum, et quod ibi quoque ludis Tauriis equi circum metas currunt.

The ludi Taurii were unlike other games in being celebrated only every five years; they were in honour of the di inferi, and therefore could not be held within the walls. It is clear from Varro that they were the only games that took place in the Circus Flaminius, at least in his day: despite the deliberate parallelism of his two explanations, he cannot invoke a pompa at the Flaminius to make it like the Maximus in that respect as well. The parallelism may in fact be misleading, merely Varro's attempt to justify his etymology by finding spurious similarities between circi that were in reality not alike at all. Certainly the fact that he speaks of horses in both cases does not entitle us to infer that the ludi Taurii took the form of chariot-races, like the ludi circenses proper that were held in the Circus Maximus. It is quite possible that they were simply horse-races, and that Varro emphasises the horses rather than the chariots in section 153 in order to achieve a further similarity.

The exploration of the site of Parco S. Stefano began as a rescue operation following the extension of Signor Lorusso's quarry on the right bank of the Gravina. Tombs were known to exist in this locality and a sarcophagus and other burials were found in the first area to be stripped. Signor Losindaco and Professor Vinson, who was working in the area, recovered what sherds they could between 13 and 15 July 1970 and reported the finds to the Soprintendenza alle Antichità of Taranto.

The Soprintendente, Professor Lo Porto, requested the assistance of the British School at Rome and Jon Boutelle and his wife were sent down to supervise the rescue work from 20 July 1970, under the direction of the Soprintendenza. They continued in charge until the end of the excavation on 12 September. Dottoressa Lattanzi and Signor Campi visited the site and advised on the work.

In 1974 I began a survey and excavation project in the province (or Regione) of Molise, southern Italy. Until 1974, comparatively little research had been carried out on the prehistoric archaeology of this province compared with the rest of Italy, but the 1974 survey produced abundant evidence (over four hundred sites) for early settlement, from the Middle Palaeolithic until the Italic or Samnite Iron Age (Barker, 1976a). The survey concentrated on three areas: at the head, midway down, and in the lower part of the Biferno valley, the principal valley of Molise. The Bronze Age site discussed in this paper was discovered in the second area midway down the valley (Fig. 1).

The goal of the Molise project is the study of the changing relationship between man and his environment in the Biferno valley from palaeolithic times until the classical period. It is hoped to achieve this goal by (i) excavating settlements of each major phase of occupation, (ii) combining the economic and environmental data from the excavations with the survey evidence showing the distribution of sites in each period, and (iii) integrating the archaeological evidence with geomorphological and related studies of environmental change in the valley. The Petrella excavation discussed in this paper is therefore just one part of the total project, but the importance of the site—the first Bronze Age site to be excavated in Molise—justifies the publication of the preliminary results achieved to date.

This article reconsiders a group of medieval glazed wares from central Italy, to which (in Whitehouse 1967: 60–6) I gave the cumbersome name ‘Pottery with plant and abstract decoration’. The material of this type from Rome is the subject of a new study by the Italian scholar, Otto Mazzucato (1976a), under the title ‘Ceramica laziale’. As a result of this and other recent research, it appears now that a homogeneous group of wares decorated with brown and green stripes, ‘arcades’ and vegetal motifs under a yellowish or greenish lead glaze was produced in several parts of Lazio and Umbria in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In most, if not all, of these areas it was the earliest locally made medieval glazed pottery with painted ornament. It was superseded by Archaic maiolica in the thirteenth century. Mazzucato makes a convincing case for regarding Ceramica laziale as a local product inspired by pottery imported from Sicily or the eastern Maghreb. Although influence from the south would explain the geometric ornament of Ceramica laziale, it does not account fully for the frequent use of leaf scrolls and other vegetal motifs, for which a local origin appears probable.