The objects described below were found near Ardea in Latium during the digging of a gun-position in June 1944. The site was in a valley bottom about one mile SSE of the modern town, and the area dug was an L-shaped trench two feet wide and with arms four feet and six feet long. Unfortunately military duties prevented continuous observation, but the following points are clear. Work began on the shorter arm of the trench; and there were found sherds of bucchero and of coarse wares (nos. 10, 11, 23–26, 28, 29), and a ‘red pot’ which was removed and lost. Three days later, digging was resumed and yielded first a bucchero cup (no. 15) and oinochoe (no. 9), then sherds of coarse brownish ware (no. 27), and farther on at a depth of two and a half feet two bucchero oinochoai (nos. 7, 8). Next day three bucchero amphoriskoi (nos. 12–14) were found still farther on in the same section of trench. An offset trench was then started to the right, with a depth of two and a half to three feet. In this offset were found six alabastra (nos. 1–6), all lying together, and close to them two bucchero cups (nos. 16, 17); a little beyond were two bucchero kantharoi (nos. 21, 22); nothing else had been found when orders to advance put an end to the work. Apart from the pottery no objects were observed, nor any traces of structures or of discoloration in the soil.

According to Mommsen the various laws de repetundis, from, the Lex Acilia of the Gracchan period to the Lex Iulia of 59 B.C., never attached any heavier political penalty to the offence than infamia, with consequent exclusion from the Senate, and the exile of those condemned for extortion was solely due to the difficulty of repayment. Mommsen also held that the penalty of twofold restitution introduced by the Lex Acilia was abandoned by the Sullan Lex Cornelia in favour of the simple repayment established by the original Lex Calpurnia of 149 B.C. Only during the Julio-Claudian principate and later were severe penalties in the form of relegatio and exilium inflicted in special circumstances (extra ordinem) by the authority of the senatorial court and not by any remodelling of the Lex Iulia, which continued to inflict only the lesser penalties.

This general doctrine has caused considerable uneasiness for three reasons. First, there is an apparent contradiction between Mommsen's view and two statements of Cicero, which assert that the penalties for extortion were increased in severity by successive laws. Second, Cicero constantly speaks in cases of extortion, whether as prosecutor or in defence, as though the caput of the accused were at stake.

It is one of the saddest losses of history that of Antioch and Alexandria, two of the great early centres of Christian art and learning, hardly a stone should now be standing above ground. Of the two, Alexandria is in the worse case. Antioch can at least boast the magnificent series of mosaics unearthed before the war by the Princeton Expedition. At Alexandria on the other hand there is little chance that excavation can ever reveal any substantial remains of the classical city, which was ruthlessly destroyed in the last century to make way for the expansion of its modern successor; and whereas in the case of the minor arts the contribution of Alexandria to the contemporary art of the Mediterranean, whether in its relation to the Byzantine world or to the nascent Coptic art of Upper Egypt, can at least be usefully discussed in the light of surviving ivories, textiles, manuscript illustrations, and the like, in the field of architecture and of architectural ornament any such enquiry is hampered by a vacuum at the heart of the problem. The questions so well defined by Kitzinger in regard to Coptic sculpture are capable of wider application.

The church of San Salvatore, on the outskirts of Spoleto, is a monument as familiar as it is puzzling. Together with the closely related Clitumnus temple, 10 km. distant between Spoleto and Trevi, it has been the subject of at least one monograph and of numerous articles, and it figures in all the standard works on late antique and early medieval art in Italy. It first appears in history in a document of 815, confirming to the abbey of Farfa certain possessions, including monasterium sancti Salvatoris situm prope eandem civitatem (i.e. Spoleto). The majority of writers have regarded both it and the Clitumnus Temple as the product of a late antique, classicising revival, and have assigned them to dates ranging from the late fourth to the sixth centuries. Recently Deichmann has advanced the novel, but attractive, suggestion that they belong rather to the latter part of the eighth century, and are the work of the Dukes of Spoleto, produced under Carolingian domination and under strong Carolingian artistic influence.

The deliberate, senseless destruction of the documents belonging to the Grande Archivio di Stato of Naples is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single crime against history committed by the German army during the late war. The circumstances and the results of the act which reduced to ashes this vast collection of records of Southern Italy, covering more than a thousand years, are not as widely known among scholars, much less the general public, as they should be, and they seem therefore to call for some brief account in order to explain the reason of the present publication. Evacuated because of the dangers of air-warfare over Naples from the Archivio to the Villa Montesano near to S. Paolo Belsito some thirty kilometres away, and packed for the most part into 866 solid cases, this priceless treasure of over 30,000 MS. volumes and 50,000 documents under the charge of a keeper of Archives remained undiscovered by the German command until the Allied troops were already approaching.

On 28 September, 1943, however, a foraging party came to the Villa in search of calves wanted for food and found instead cases of records stored for safety. Next morning an officer accompanied by a single soldier arrived; he ordered one of the chests to be opened and carefully inspected the volumes packed within. After the purely historical nature of the deposit had been explained to him and its immense importance from this point of view, he professed himself satisfied and departed.