Since the end of 1935, when my Paestan Pottery was written, well over a hundred vases belonging to this fabric have come to light. Many of them have been found as a result of excavations carried out in recent years in and around Paestum itself, notably at Arenosola, Oliveto Citra, Altavilla and Pontecagnano, and are therefore of considerable importance as confirming the location of the manufacturing centre in Paestum. Other previously unknown vases have come into the market from private collections and several ‘lost’ vases have reappeared. Further, an opportunity to revisit during 1951 most of the ‘major collections in the museums of Western Europe and America has enabled me to add several vases to the list as well as to correct a number of errors. There have also been some important new publications on the subject. In 1935 Marzullo published a preliminary study of the painted tombs discovered at Paestum three years earlier (Tombe dipinte scoperte nel territorio pestano), and a fuller and better illustrated account of the pottery finds, together with a publication of related material from other nearby sites, appeared in two articles by Giovanni Patroni, entitled ‘Vasi Pestani’, in the Rassegna Storica Salernitana ii (1939), pp. 221–258 with figs. 1–37, and in (1940), 3–36 with figs. 38–72, to which, for the sake of convenience, I shall in future refer as VP. A bell-krater acquired by the Ashmolean Museum in 1942 was published by Beazley in AJA xlviii (1944), pp. 357–366, in an article entitled ‘A Paestan Vase’, in which he made some important observations on the workshop of Asteas and Python. The time, therefore, seems ripe for the issue of a supplement to my original publication in order to incorporate the new vases, of which many of the most significant are here illustrated, and to make such revisions to the text and lists of attributions as seem called for in the light of the new evidence now to hand.

Rome first penetrated into the plain of the Po in 268, when, after the Senones had been defeated and the tribe exterminated, a Latin colony, Ariminum, was founded in their former territory (Livy, Per. XV; Vell. I, 14). For many years Ariminum remained only a defensive bastion of Roman rule, closing the gap between the Apennines and the sea, and thus denying entrance to Picenum and Umbria from the north. It was later that the role of Ariminum was changed into that of a springboard for the offensives that subdued the Po country. This development was at once made possible and probable, however, by the location of the colony and the orientation of its territorium.

The original size of the colony is open to dispute. What is more important for our purposes is to attempt to determine its extent to the north and the west; to know how far it stretched into the Aemilian plain. On the south the boundary was the Crustumius (CIL XI, p. 77; Pliny, HN III, 115). On the north, the boundary with Ravenna and then with Caesena was certainly the Rubicon in the late Republic and afterwards. At the time of foundation, however, there was probably a greater area under the administration of Ariminum, but perhaps not settled by colonists.

The history of the relations of the Roman Republic with the kings, tribes, and cities of Illyria cannot at present be written, as the evidence does not permit the construction of a coherent and comprehensive account. This, perhaps, is why scholars have often tended to neglect the subject, and have thereby been led into serious errors in dealing with the history of Roman expansion and early imperial organisation. It is the aim of this paper to set out what conclusions can be reached on some important aspects of the subject, and to indicate the way in which these conclusions may be related to the general study of Roman foreign policy during its most interesting period.

From antiquity down to the present century the shores of the Greater Syrtis (the modern Gulf of Sidra) have had the ill fame of constituting the most desolate and inhospitable part of the Mediterranean seaboard. Absence of landmarks, scarcity of water, and abundance of venomous serpents are all attested by the ancient writers, who spared no pains to paint as terrifying a picture as possible of this unhappy region. The child-devouring Lamia did well to select as her residence a cave in this very area, somewhere not far west of Automalax.

Yet where horror is greatest there will heroism shine the most brightly, and we may recall that the Syrtic Gulf was the scene not only of the epic marches of Ophellas and of the younger Cato, but also of the supreme sacrifice of the Philaeni brothers, who gave their lives to secure for Carthage a favourable eastern frontier against the rival claims of Cyrene, and whose tombs later served to mark the political and cultural boundary between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire.

During the summer of 1951, the British School undertook an examination of the remaining unexcavated Byzantine levels within the Severan basilica at Lepcis Magna. In converting the basilica to Christian use, Justinian's architects had raised the floor-level at a number of points, and it was hoped that the deposits stratified between the two floor-levels might yield evidence of the condition of the building immediately before the Byzantine reconquest of Tripolitania. In this respect the excavations proved uninformative. A section cut through the low platform built out from the south-east apse into the first two bays of the nave, to house the sixth-century chancel, revealed a uniform and deliberate fill of earth and rubble lying directly on the cement basis of the earlier floor, which here, as everywhere else, had been previously stripped of its Severan paving of slabs of Proconnesian marble. A section in the southernmost of the four chapels that fill the angles of the building, flanking the two apses, revealed a similar fill, the only difference being that, in this case, the original paving slabs were found re-used at the sixth-century level and had evidently been prised up from the earlier pavement at the time of the sixth-century reconstruction. By the sixth century, the pavement of the adjoining forum had already been buried beneath half a metre of flood-sand, and we may suspect that the Byzantine architects had to remove a similar accumulation from the basilica before putting it into repair.