Discussion of the last century of the Roman Republic, now increasingly incisive and professional in the field of political and social history, if less so in the field of economic history, has so far taken little account of the evidence of archaeology, or rather of those historical investigations which make direct use of material objects as their primary source of evidence; the ‘material culture’ thus studied is naturally to be understood in the widest possible sense. Of course, a concern with material culture has not been wholly lacking in historians, who are perhaps now increasingly aware of it (it is here irrelevant whether they have rejected or accepted, however summarily, its relevance, provided they have done so explicitly). But the use of archaeological evidence, when it has occurred, has been for the most part conditioned by a traditionalist approach, which sees in a number of fields of study no more than ancillary disciplines to the science of history; fields of study concerned with material culture have been particularly vulnerable to being ranked in this hierarchical fashion and thus to being used to provide marginal support to theories based largely or exclusively on evidence of other kinds, for the most part literary.

In my earlier paper on the ‘Stanze di Venere’ (written in 1973), I referred to the progressive deterioration of the stucco and other decorations in the Roman remains at Baia. The following pages are an attempt to provide a full record of the Baian stucco-work not covered in the first article. The idea of compiling this record originated with Dottssa. Maria Elena Bertoldi and received the full support of Prof. Alfonso De Franciscis; while the actual drawings were begun in 1973 by Miss Shelagh Rixon and completed, with further visits to the site for checking in 1974 and 1975, by Dr. Lesley A. Ling. To all of these and to our sponsors (the University of Manchester and the Faculty of Classics in the University of Cambridge) I am deeply indebted. Since the drawings were completed, the task of studying stucco decoration in Roman Italy has been greatly simplified by the pioneer-work of Dr. Harald Mielsch of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, who has compiled a major corpus of surviving material and attempted to establish a detailed chronology. It only remains for me to provide a commentary on the drawings, to discuss the architectural contexts, and to enlarge upon or modify Dr. Mielsch's conclusions regarding the Baian stucco-work. The various decorations will be dealt with one by one, and the positions of all but two of them are shown on Fig. 1, which has been adapted, by kind permission of Dottssa. Bertoldi, from one of the plans executed for her volume in the Forma Italiae series.

Among the earliest buildings to be excavated at Pompeii, the large property known as the Villa of Julia Felix, regio II insula 4 no. 3, suffered particularly badly from the depredations of the pioneer explorers of the site. It was subsequently abandoned and re-buried, then excavated again and restored between 1936 and 1953. A complex and interesting structure, it still awaits definitive publication, though the garden triclinium whose painted decoration forms the subject of this article has been examined in detail by Dr. Friedrich Rakob in the Römische Mitteilungen.

The house is situated on the right-hand side of the Via dell'Abbondanza leading eastwards out of the city to the Porta di Sarno, and behind it is the amphitheatre. Along the street front is a group of rooms including private living apartments and a large bath, and behind these a long and elaborately laid out garden (see plan, Pl. XVII); on the long right (western) side of this a row of rectangular pillars forms a portico shading a set of rooms backed by a corridor, which communicates with the side-street at the west, and with a further complex of small rooms at the bottom right-hand corner of the garden.

After the abandonment of the Iron Age settlement during the third quarter of the seventh century, the area of Parco San Stefano was used as a cemetery. As has been described above, in the course of the bulldozing undertaken prior to the extension of the quarry, burials were found and this led to the rescue excavation of 1970. Supervision began after the bulldozer had stripped some of the area and, later, burials were often seen only after they had been exposed by the bulldozer. No accurate plans of the tombs could be made but identified burials were plotted on the plan and the finds recorded, as far as was possible in tomb groups. Tombs IV, V, VII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIV–XVI, XVIII–XXI were recorded by Jonathan Boutelle, while Signor Losindaco rescued the finds from Tombs I, II, III, VI, VIII, XIII, XVII.

Many tombs, particularly those found after the end of the excavation, were too destroyed by the bulldozer to warrant detailed description; tombs seen by Mr. Boutelle are described below. In the following report, the tombs have been arranged under tomb types and, as far as is possible, in their chronological sequence.

This report is a further contribution to the publication of the survey of the country surrounding Veii. The area is bounded in the north by the watershed of the Roman Via Clodia; on the east by the line of the Via Cassia, also a watershed; on the south by the Valle della Torre Spaccata and the stream it joins, the Fosso dell'Acquasona, to the latter's junction with the Fosso Galeria; and on the west by the river known from north to south as the Fosso di Cesano, Rio Galeria, Valle Galeria and Fosso Galeria. It is a compact area as the roads which originate in its north-east corner terminate within it, apart from the cross country Etruscan road which goes off across the Fosso Galeria towards the lower Arrone (Route I) and the Etruscan road down the long ridge to the Via di Boccea crossing of the Fosso Galeria (Route VI), neither of whose onward courses has yet been studied in detail. The Roman road down the last mentioned ridge may have been a useful link in local communication, but it was probably not a through road.

How far there was ever in classical antiquity a public health service, organised and paid for by the state, has been often debated by both doctors and classical scholars, with conflicting results. For fifth and fourth century Greece the amount of evidence available is insufficient to permit any certainty, but there can be no doubt that in the Hellenistic age individual cities offered special privileges in order to secure the residence of a qualified physician. But whether and in what ways such a system was carried over into the very different society of the Roman empire, and still more into that of late antiquity, are questions which have never been satisfactorily answered, and the authority of the Roman part of Pohl's dissertation De graecorum medicis publicis, despite its increasing age, has never been seriously challenged—indeed, some more recent studies have only highlighted by contrast its high level of accuracy, judgement and, for its time, comprehensiveness. However, the discovery of three new inscriptions of archiatri from Aphrodisias affords an opportunity to re-examine the institution of public doctors in the Roman empire and thereby to throw light upon a professional designation, archiatros/archiater, which has troubled scholars ever since Herodian the grammarian attempted to settle the position of its Greek accent. By surveying the evidence according to the varied societies in which the archiatri practised—the courts, the Eastern cities, the West and Rome in late antiquity, Constantinople and Roman and Byzantine Egypt—a much clearer picture of the spread of public doctors can be obtained without introducing anachronistic or extraneous attitudes and institutions to provide a single uniform pattern of development.

Investigations at the site of the Mura di Santo Stefano near Anguillara began as a study of the standing remains of the Roman period by the two authors of the present paper. Subsequently it became clear that some of the problems involved could only be elucidated by the excavation of selected areas of the site and more extensive researches. As a result a more general publication about the site is envisaged and further work is in progress, including a study of the inscriptions by Miss J. M. Reynolds, and of the classical and medieval settlement of the area by Dr. A. T. Luttrell. Excavations on the site conducted by Dr. D. Whitehouse commenced in September 1977, with financial support from the British Academy, the British Museum, the British School at Rome, and the University of Adelaide.

The present authors wish to thank Professor H. Burns, who generously advised on problems connected with the drawings and text of Ligorio and Palladio, and T. F. C. Blagg who produced the drawing of the south wall, and added a number of useful observations.

The British Academy, the British Museum, and the University of Adelaide generously made contributions to the expenses incurred in carrying out these researches.

The late P. Antonio Sartori published a great number of documents concerning the Chapel of S. Giacomo (now S. Felice) in the Santo, Padua, and the nearby Oratory of S. Giorgio. To him, they proved the sole authorship of Altichiero of both fresco decorations, and the final impossibility of Avanzo's having been his collaborator. However, although the crucial documents concerning Altichiero were published in his 1963 article, both the most recent major discussions of this subject have produced variations on the collaboration theory. The documents have still not been fully discussed. Such a discussion will result in a much clearer dating of the frescoes and in the clarification of the position concerning the possible intervention of Avanzo. This latter purpose will also be aided by a more thorough examination of the attributional history of the two chapels than has hitherto been undertaken.

Briefly, the most important of the documents show that in 1379 Altichiero was paid by Bonifacio Lupi for painting the Chapel of S. Giacomo and its sacristy, and that on 30 May, 1384, Altichiero and Bonifacio Lupi mutually agreed that each had fulfilled his part of the contract for Altichiero's decoration of S. Giorgio. This latter included the decoration of the tomb of the man who had originally commissioned the work from Altichiero, Raimondino Lupi, who had died on 30 November, 1379, leaving Bonifacio as his commissary. The initial contract for building the chapel of S. Giacomo is dated 12 February, 1372.

For Genoa the ‘crisis of the fourteenth century’ had political as well as economic reality; the strife within the city and its colonies of Guelfs and Ghibellines was mirrored in its diplomatic affairs, as Genoa searched for friends in Guelf Naples or Ghibelline Sicily. The appearance of Catalan naval power presented a direct threat to Genoese shipping, however peaceful the intent of the latter might be; and attempts at co-operation between Genoa and Venice foundered on the banks of suspicion and envy. Commercial recession brought serious worry to what was still a trading, rather than industrial, centre, and there was a reluctance to waste valuable naval resources in attempts to eliminate Venetian or Catalan rivals. This attitude was not confined to Genoa, and perhaps explains why the western trading cities were more anxious to settle their differences by negotiation and compromise than they had been in the thirteenth century. Severest problem of all was that of the ‘pestifferam mortalitatem mundo totali occursam’; in the years immediately following the arrival of the Black Death (1347) the maritime cities found themselves suddenly deprived of invaluable manpower, and yet, paradoxically, they were not without the means to pay for the services of sailors and ship-builders if only these men could be found. Money, the money of dead men, there was in plenty; but neither the Genoese nor the Venetians knew how to adapt to the rapid change in the structure of demand that the pestilence engendered.