The practice of depicting the life of a locally celebrated saint within a typological scheme of decoration is of great antiquity. The old basilicas of S. Peter and S. Paul at Rome and other influential churches like Desiderius' Monte Cassino have been destroyed and their decoration with them, but derivative schemes may still be studied at S. Piero a Grado, at S. Angelo in Formis, or in the frescoes and tapestries of the Sistine Chapel.

A variation of the Petrine-Pauline schemes can be seen at Florence where the patron of the city and of the church is celebrated in the mosaics of the dome of the Baptistery. Here four cycles are arranged in parallel—a Creation series, the story of Joseph, the life of Christ, and the life of the Baptist himself. Similarly the windows and walls of the basilica at Assisi show how the story of S. Francis is related to the familiar scenes from the Old and New Testaments; these Biblical scenes are arranged in the traditional Roman manner. Assisi has problems of its own too complex and controversial to attempt in this article but indications for such a study may be outlined by reference to Anagni. As at the Collegiata at San Gimignano and in so many other examples, typological thought is basic to the interpretation of the scheme as a whole.

The financial affairs of the younger Pliny are of particular interest for the social and economic history of the Roman Empire, because Pliny was one of the largest municipal benefactors in-the West (almost the largest known) and because unusually full information has survived about both his gifts and the resources that lay behind them. Almost every corner of Pliny's life as revealed by his Letters and by inscriptions is well-trodden ground, and his generosities are no exception. But the standard treatment of Pliny's gifts (Gentile's article published in 1881) is somewhat out of date and deals fully only with the gifts made to Comum. The only extensive discussion of Pliny's public and private generosities together with his resources appears in a popular work which is marred by too many uncertainties of method to allow justice to be done to the subject. No more than three of the 103 pages of Mommsen's biographical study of Pliny are devoted to his gifts, and the question of his resources is not considered. Since a number of points remain controversial, there are grounds for attempting a fresh analysis of Pliny's financial affairs as a whole.

The eminent Patrician family of the Cornelii Dolabellae under the early Empire is descended from Cicero's unsatisfactory son-in-law, the consul of 44 (141). It has been adequately traced and plotted in PIR. The young man's ancestors have been less fortunate in their records. Though they produced several consuls and triumphators, we have only two complete filiations: those of the consul of 159 and the triumphator of 98. Moreover, despite Asconius' (insufficiently helpful) warning, homonymity between two men holding office in 81 has produced confusion. Drumann, in his stemma and treatment, without argument forged a pedigree for one of them (134: the cos. 81), and this has passed into modern tradition, being accepted (e.g.) as probable by Degrassi and as certain by Broughton. Sheer bad luck seems to pursue this man. At last fairly safely identified by an inscription found in Thasos, he had the misfortune of having it misreported in the Supplement (1960) to MRR. Yet the fact that has emerged about him not only clarifies his own place in the line of descent, but goes far towards enabling us to reconstruct the stemma of the whole family with fair plausibility. Confirmation or refutation will have to wait for further finds.

The present survey, like its African predecessor, is an attempt to collect all the epigraphic evidence for costs that has survived from a single area of the Roman Empire; Sicily has been included here as well as Italy, but its contribution to the present survey is negligible (9 out of 875 costs). As before, the only chronological limit imposed is the omission of the few post-Diocletianic costs, on the grounds that price-levels and the nature of the currency had changed so much by the fourth century that costs from that period cannot meaningfully be correlated with those from the earlier Empire. But it has also been necessary to adopt two geographical restrictions, because of the profusion of cost evidence from Italy. Costs from the city of Rome (which survive in some numbers among the 40,000 inscriptions from the capital), together with costs mentioned in the wax tablets and graffiti of Pompeii and neighbouring Campanian cities have been omitted from the survey. A minor generic omission has also been made: the financial penalties for rifling tombs, which have already been recorded in some detail by Liebenam and are of doubtful economic significance. The total number of costs and numerate gifts included in the survey approaches 900 nevertheless.

The excavations described in the following pages were sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and have been carried out by members of the Institute in collaboration with members and associates of the British School at Rome. The enterprise is under the general direction of two of the undersigned and the third, Mrs. M. Aylwin Cotton, is the Field Director. The work has been financed by grants from the Batchelor Foundation and from New York University.

The warm thanks of the excavators are due to the Superintendent of Antiquities for Campania, Professor Alfonso de Franciscis, for his generous support and for much valuable assistance afforded by himself and by members of his staff. The possibility of examining a site in the Ager Falernus was first suggested by the late Professor Maiuri, and the sites finally selected for examination were proposed by Dr. Werner Johannowsky. Permission to excavate at the site of S. Rocco was generously granted by the Comune of Francolise, through the kind offices of the Deputy Mayor, Signor Del Giacomo; and at Posto by the owner, Signor A. Mesolella of Formia.

1. THE GOVERNMENT OF CYRENAICA IN THE THIRD CENTURY A.D.

In PBSR XXX (1962) p. 37 f. R. G. Goodchild and I published two inscriptions that mention procurators operating in Cyrene in the early third century A.D. In the earlier, the procurator of three Augusti (one of whom was subjected to damnatio memoriae) is described by the garrison commander at Cyrene as praeses optimus et benignissimus, a description which would be appropriate to a governor; in the later, dated in the reign of Gordian, a procurator is presented as himself conducting the ceremonial dedication of a monument erected by the garrison in honour of the emperor, an action appropriate to a governor. In our notes we dealt much too briefly with the position of these men, simply stating our view that the title praeses, if not purely honorific, might indicate a temporary interruption of the normal system of administration by the proconsul Cretae et Cyrenarum, and that the basic work of a procurator in Cyrenaica was probably in the ager publicus. I do not believe that there is good reason to change this view; but in the light of questions that have been put to me about it, I would like to offer a supplementary note in order to justify it.

The Roman road-system between Bolsena and Chiusi is for several reasons one of particular interest. It was detectably influenced by changes in the pattern of settlement; it was the scene of an ambitious engineering project under Trajan; and it covers three different types of country, the tufa hills of Northern Lazio, the clay and limestone ridges to the north of the River Paglia and finally the flood-plain of the upper Val di Chiana.

In the third century B.C. the importance of the Etruscan town on the site of Orvieto sharply declined and Bolsena became the leading town of the area. Orvieto is probably the site of Etruscan Volsinii. This identification, which goes back to K. O. Müller, has been assailed by R. Bloch in a series of articles on the archaeology of Bolsena. It is, however, supported by the evidence of both sites: the finds at Orvieto, notably the rich groups of sixth-century and fifth-century tombs recently excavated by Bizzarri in the Crocefisso del Tufo cemetery, easily outweigh the small quantity of early material which has emerged from the Bolsena site.

The ancient Sabine town of Eretum is said by the Peutinger Tabula to lie on the Via Salaria 14 m.p. from Fidenae (the modern Castel Giubileo) and by the Antonine Itinerary 18 m.p. from Rome. The distance is corroborated by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (A.R. 11.3) who puts it 140 stades = 17½ m.p. from Rome. Strabo (5.228) adds that it was close to the Tiber (ὑπὲρ τοῦ Τιβέρϵως κϵιμένην) where the Via Nomentana joins the Via Salaria. This last piece of evidence is misleading, since the Via Nomentana after Nomentum ran due north-east towards Monte Libretti and did not in fact join the Via Salaria.

In 1958, an archaeological field survey located a Roman pit 2¾ km. south-east of Sutri (at grid reference 737789 on the 1: 25,000 Carta d'ltalia, Istituto Geografico Militare, sheet ‘Sutri’) (fig. 1). The pit had been dug on the south side of a narrow spur, near its point, there only 2–3 m. high. Surface finds showed it to be full of black-glazed ware (ceramica campana) and other Roman pottery. In 1959 it was excavated, with the courteous permission of the Soprintendenza alle Antichità per l'Etruria Meridionale and of the local land-owner, Sig. Sansoni, and with the kind assistance of friends. This article deals mainly with its contents.

The excavation achieved its aim, to collect a comprehensive group of Republican pottery. The deposit could date from the last half of the second century B.C., but this is the earliest possible date and it may well fall entirely in the first century B.C.

The pit was roughly oval, just over 2 m. long and 1 m. deep as it survived (fig. 1). It had been enlarged, not long after it was initially dug, by an extension on the north side. Erosion since antiquity had then removed much of it and clandestine digging had disturbed its contents. This helps to explain why in no instance was any vessel recovered in its entirety.