This article explores the significance of sculptural and painted representations of ‘overweight’ and ‘underweight’ body types in the visual culture of Roman Italy from the fourth century bc through to the late Empire, and considers the relationship of this imagery to Greek and Hellenistic precedents. In spite of the topical character of fat in 21st-century sociology, anthropology and medical science, obesity and emaciation in the ancient world remain almost completely unexplored. This article sets out to examine the relationship of fat and thin bodies to power, wealth, character and behaviour, and seeks to identify patterns and continuities in the iconography of fleshiness and slenderness across a stretch of several hundred years. Such bodies could be evaluated in a number of different ways, and this article exposes the diverse — and sometimes contradictory — responses to body fat in the art and culture of the Roman world. It first examines the significance of obesity and emaciation in language, literature and medicine, and then discusses visual representations under three headings: ‘Fertility’; ‘The marginal and the ridiculous’, examining the relationship between body fat, humour and figures at the edge of civilized society; and ‘Portraits’, exploring fat and thin in the portraiture of real-life individuals in the realms of philosophy, Hellenistic rulership, Etruscan funerary art and Roman public sculpture.

This article contains five notes on Roman topography. The first three briefly argue (1) that the uia Tecta supposedly to be placed in the Campus Martius has perhaps arisen from corruption of uia Recta; (2) that the temple of Juturna, placed by Ovid near the arches of the Aqua Virgo, could not have stood where Largo Argentina now is, but further north, perhaps in the grounds of Santa Maria in Via; and (3) that the rites of Anna Perenna described by Ovid in Fasti 3 took place near the Mausoleum of Augustus, and not at the recently discovered spring near Piazza Euclide. Note (4) exhibits the evidence for regarding the twin summits of the Capitol and the Arx as the duo luci between which the Asylum was set up, and goes on to suggest that Vergil and Ovid may have used the name Ianiculum to refer to the Arx; (5) demonstrates that in with the name of a hill can refer to any site from the foot up, and builds on this in arguing that the phrase Concordia in Arce refers to a temple constructed where the slope rises from the Forum.

The article argues that the passages typically employed to document the Romans' exploitation of chained slaves in the Italian countryside from the mid-Republic into the Principate actually have a quite different meaning. The servus vinctus mentioned by Columella, Pliny and others is a label that became attached to slaves who were subjected (at least once) to punishment through chaining. The punishment reduced the value of the slave and, hence, it was a requirement upon sale to indicate whether a slave had been subjected to such chaining, that is whether they were servi vincti or servi soluti. What the passages in question do not show is how the Romans worked these or other slaves. Whatever their working conditions, the fate of servi vincti became worse in the Empire as a result of the lex Aelia Sentia that decreed that servi vincti could not receive Roman citizenship upon manumission: they had thus become men without hope.

Begun in 2009, the Roman Peasant Project was designed to excavate the smallest sites found in field survey and to analyse the diet, economies, land use and landscapes of the Roman peasant. The Project's excavations at the site of Pievina are presented here, and suggest a more complex image of Roman peasant life in the late Republic and late antiquity than current assumptions would anticipate, including surplus production, a high degree of monetization and ties to urban markets.

This paper explores the ceramic assemblage of the Nepi Survey Project from the third century bc to the seventh century ad. The surface collection allows the detailed characterization of chronology, ware, fabric supply and functional characteristics. The assemblage shows a settlement explosion in the early second century bc, with another major rise from the Augustan period. The sharp decline in the late second to early third centuries ad is visible here, as it is throughout the region. The later peaks of the late fourth to mid-fifth and the mid-sixth centuries ad conform to the late Roman sequence from Mola di Monte Gelato. The dominant pottery class is oxidized coarse-wares, at 73%. The distribution of the different fabrics, including some of regional supply, suggests a number of different marketing mechanisms. Fine-wares and terra sigillata combined at 3% is what would be expected in the fringes of the Empire. The amphora class makes up over 5% of the assemblage, with the most variety exhibited at large villas and suburban halos. The most important supply originated from North Africa, with fish sauce as the main import. The functional analysis allows the definition of a ritual structure in the proximity of the cemeteries of the Massa area with highly varied types related to eating and drinking. The ceramic building material shows the importance of Campanian contacts, although the lack of imbrices suggests that many tile scatters derive from reused material.

Coinage remains one of the best resources from which to gain an insight into the public image of empresses in the Roman Empire. This article employs a quantitative approach to the coinage of the Severan women, utilizing coin hoards to gain an idea of the frequency of particular coin types. The result offers a nuanced and contextual assessment of the differing public images of the Severan empresses and their role within wider Severan ideology. Evidence is presented to suggest that in this period there was one workshop at the mint dedicated to striking coins for the empresses. The Severan women played a key connective role in the dynasty, a position communicated publicly through their respective numismatic images. By examining the dynasty as a whole, subtle changes in image from empress to empress and from reign to reign can be identified. During the reign of Elagabalus, the divergence in imagery between Julia Soaemias and Julia Maesa is so great that we can perhaps see the influence of these women on their own numismatic image.

This article examines two ekphrastic digressions from book 2 of Flavio Biondo's Roma Triumphans (1459), both occurring in the section on the festivals of ancient Rome. The first is an eye-witness account of a celebration mounted in Piazza Navona in Rome to mark the defeat of the Turks at Belgrade in 1456; the second is an imaginative recreation of the horse race at the Equirria, as Biondo envisions it taking place in the streetscape of ancient Rome. Both digressions serve one of Biondo's most important purposes, the linking of ancient and modern Rome. The aim of the discussion is to demonstrate the importance of visualization in Biondo's framing of Roma Triumphans as a whole. In this aspect he was a powerful model for later antiquarian writing.

The article explores how, when and why Pirro Ligorio (c. 1513–83) chose to link a sanctuary dedicated to Minerva Medica, listed in the fourth-century ad Regionary Catalogues of the monuments of Rome as being on the Esquiline, with the late antique decagonal pavilion, near Termini, which had the second largest dome in Rome after the Pantheon. It establishes that the catalyst was the unearthing of several statues, including one of Minerva, in 1552. The fate of these finds is examined, as well as Ligorio's attempt to locate the mysterious Schola Medicorum on the same site.

The article begins by looking at the body of written and visual material that was produced on the colonial world in the interwar years. It considers various reading strategies that can be applied to this body of work and how it can be addressed through post-colonial criticism. The article argues that the work of the sociologist Peter Berger offers a series of insights into the way in which this material represents the social world, and the notions of collective identity and alterity that are central to that world. In the light of Berger's thinking on the socially constructed nomos, the essay examines some of the definitions of the relation between metropolitan and subject communities that recur in writings on the reality of colonialism. The essay explores the relationship of an individual author to the nomos of his or her time by looking in detail at one text: the journalist Ciro Poggiali's diary of the time he spent in Ethiopia in the immediate aftermath of the Italian conquest of the country. It examines how Poggiali's diary can be interpreted as a complex account of how the coerciveness of the social world is experienced by individual consciousness and how its definitions of racial and cultural belonging can be appropriated or challenged. The essay concludes by arguing that the analysis of strategies for defining identity and otherness within the Italian colonial context can be taken further by working within a comparative framework.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2010, but also in the first part of 2011), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.