In October 1963 a deposit of pottery was exposed on the low ground below the Veii escarpment, south of the Cremera (Fig. 1), adjacent to the line of the Ponte San Silvestro (Formello) Etruscan road as it wound up to the gate (Carta d'Italia, 1:25,000, Istituto Geografico Militare, Sheet Formello, Grid Reference 845565).

The deposit superficially appeared to consist almost entirely of sherds of poorly made bucchero and of coarseware cooking pots. In order to verify this and to establish a type series, members of the British School, at the request of the Superintendancy of Antiquities, Southern Etruria, carried out a brief exploration of the site under the direction of Mrs. Anne Kahane and the writer.

The excavation showed (Fig. 2) that the sherds lay closely packed in dark soil, together with occasional tufa lumps, in a shallow pit dug into soft brown earth against a low vertical rock-face. Both this face and another low vertical edge above it give the general appearance of quarry faces and evidence of other quarrying can be seen in the tufa at the river's edge.

Dr. R. F. Paget discovered the Antrum in 1962, and has now published it, first in his In the Footsteps of Orpheus, Robert Hale, London (1967) and in PBSR, xxxv (1967), 102–112: The ‘Great Antrum’ at Baiae: A Preliminary Report; see also Vergilius, xiii (1967), 42–50: ‘The Great Antrum at Baiae.’ I made my first ’descent’ with him into his Underworld in September 1965, but I had been discussing it with him and working on it before that, and these discussions have continued since with him and various scholars in Oxford, to whom I am much indebted. I am not an archaeologist nor a specialist in the Greek and Roman mystery religions, but I hope that the suggestions of an amateur of literary underworlds, Homeric, Virgilian, Dantesque, may help towards the critical interpretation of this important discovery, and that my preliminary collection of what seems to me possibly relevant evidence may help others to test my hypotheses and improve on them.

Anglona is the site of a prehistoric, Hellenistic and medieval settlement overlooking the Ionian Sea, 60 km. south-west of Taranto (Fig. 1). In 1965 we carried out a short trial excavation at Anglona on behalf of the Soprintendenza alle Antichità for Lucania. The excavation was of an exploratory nature. The site has since been excavated on a larger scale by the German Archaeological Institute, but the results obtained by ourselves were sufficient to call for a brief report. Anglona is a hilltop site which today supports only one standing monument, a twelfth-century church.

However, it has long been known that a medieval settlement existed here and it is thought that the site was also that of Hellenistic Pandosia. Before excavation began, surface finds suggested that the site was also occupied in the prehistoric period. The suspicion was confirmed by the discovery of abundant Late Bronze or Early Iron Age material in securely stratified deposits.

Anglona is situated on a long narrow ridge which runs down to the coast, 12 km. to the east. The topography of the region falls into three distinct zones, each roughly parallel to the coast. Nearest the sea is a low coastal strip, up to 7 km. wide, composed of fossil dunes and alluvium. Behind the strip lies a zone of eroded sand and gravel hills. The loosely cemented deposits weather rapidly, creating low cliffs and steep-sided ravines. Finally, behind the hills, is the mountainous hinterland of Basilicata. Within the space of only 30 km., between Metaponto and Siri, no fewer than five rivers enter the Ionian Sea. The rivers drain a large area of Basilicata and, although sluggish today, at times of increased rainfall they carried a considerable volume of water. The rivers have cut broad valleys through the gravel hills, leaving a series of irregular ridges running at right angles to the coast.

There is nothing surprising about the fact that coin hoards are among the commonest material remains of classical civilisation. In the absence of anything like modern bank accounts it was inconvenient to hold money except in the form of coin. The uncertainty of life in the ancient world is an adequate explanation in general terms of the loss of caches of money and hence of their survival to be discovered in modern times. But there are great fluctuations from one period to another in the numbers of hoards known to us and it should be possible to point to the circumstances which led in certain periods to an increase in the number of caches buried and not recovered by those who had deposited them.

A cache of money was doubtless only buried in exceptional circumstances. The normal place to keep money was in an arca, armarium, loculus or olla somewhere in the house. It was thus available for use as need or opportunity arose. Burial was only undertaken for special reasons, vel lucri causa vel metus vel custodiae. Plautus' Aulularia illustrates burial because of fear, his Trinummus burial for safe-keeping. Burial (as opposed to simple holding of money) for the sake of gain is hard to envisage. The parable of the talents in the New Testament explicitly rejects the idea. That it was abnormal to bury a cache of money appears also from the fact that most of the hoards which have been discovered were not associated with traces of habitation. The evidence of Plautus shows that burial indoors and burial out of doors were both possible. But hoards are only occasionally found during excavations of settlements and those that turn up casually do not often seem to be accompanied by remains of buildings.

In an earlier volume of these Papers (xxxii, 1964), I tried to challenge a theory put forward by the late Professor Degrassi, that P. Popillius Laenas, cos. 132 B.C., began the building of two roads in his consulship—from Capua to Rhegium and from Ariminum to Aquileia—and that this programme was taken over and completed the following year by the praetor T. Annius T.f. My arguments have met with some opposition, and it is perhaps time to see to what extent they still stand up. Section I of what follows deals with the roads to Aquileia, section II with that to Rhegium.

The two fragmentary inscriptions presented herewith were unearthed at Aphrodisias in Caria during the 1963 and 1966 campaigns of excavation. Both, cut on panels of coarse-grained, white Aphrodisias marble, were found out of context in Byzantine fill, re-used as convenient building or paving blocks. The one (in two joining fragments) lay in the collapsed fill of a building complex subsequently suggested to have been a Bishop's Palace. The second fragment was discovered nearby in the excavation of the area adjoining the so-called Bishop's Palace, the Odeon and its porticus post scaenam. Their present interim and unedited publication is warranted by the significance of their contents for the history of Roman Asia Minor and the necessity of making them available without undue delay to interested scholars. Since a partial edition would be ill-advised at this point, and this writer lays noclaim to full expertise in Anatolian epigraphy, it has appeared judicious to offer merely an austere transcription of what can be read with certainty or reasonable probability, virtually without supplements. This publication does not therefore pretend to be an editio princeps.

The medical profession is probably the best represented of all occupational groups on inscriptions of the Roman empire and reveals great differences of wealth and status among its members. These five inscriptions, three from Asia Minor and two from Italy, are typical examples of doctors in their areas and provide useful information on the social composition of the profession of medicine in the Roman empire.

A. A marble plaque, broken to the right. 31·5 cm. X 33 X 1·6. Found in the court of the Serapeum at Ostia and kindly communicated to me by Professor G. Barbieri. Ostia inventory number n. 8544, Giornale di Scavo, IV, p. 170, n. 196.

In volume xxxiv of the Papers, pp. 131–50 (hereafter cited as ‘PBSR (1966)’), a short account was given of the site of Botromagno, overlooking the town of Gravina, on the western borders of the modern Apulia, and of the trial excavations which the British School conducted there in 1966 on behalf of the Superintendency of Antiquities for Apulia. As will have been evident from that account, the results were sufficiently promising to justify an extension of the work, and the report which follows gives some details of the three further seasons of work which were undertaken in 1967 and 1968 jointly by the British School, the University of Alberta and the Institute of Archaeology, London University. The first of these, covering five weeks in May-June of 1967, was directed by Dr. M. Aylwin Cotton and Mr. Halstead B. Vander Poel. The second and third seasons, both of five weeks, took place in August-September of 1967 and 1968 respectively, and were in both cases directed by Miss Joan du Plat Taylor of the Institute of Archaeology, London University.

While excavating a mausoleum associated with the destroyed church of Santa Rufina (beside the Via Cornelia, the modern Via di Boccea) in 1968, Lady Wheeler found several fragmentary inscriptions, including one which deserves separate publication because it contains part of an entry from the Arval Acta for the early second century A.D. Its presence there is of interest both for the history of the site and for that of the Arval monuments from the Vigna Ceccarelli, which seem to have been broken up and to some extent dispersed in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. Most of the dispersed pieces have been recovered in the city of Rome or its immediate neighbourhood, but this one went rather farther afield, presumably in a load of building material brought out from the city to the site. It is in fact valuable evidence for the use of material from the city in the Christian buildings of South Etruria at this date.

The traveller who leaves Spoleto in a north-easterly direction by the Norcia road soon comes to the village of Cerreto di Spoleto, most renowned as the birthplace of the famous humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano in 1429, but also the home of the Totti family for several centuries. The earliest member known to us by name is one Totto Totti, married to a lady named Isolda, whom Pontano addresses in one of his Tumulorum epigrammata, Book II, which was written about 1490 or 1500.

Pompilio Totti was born at Cerreto, presumably about 1590, and is in his books always proud to proclaim himself a native of ‘Cerreto nell'Umbria,’ as is also his kinsman Sebastiano. As an Umbrian, Pompilio is given a brief entry in the earliest published Umbrian bibliography, as follows:

‘Pompilius Tottus Ceretanus edidit Ristretto delle grandezze di Roma. Rome an. 1637. apud Vitalem Mascardum, & alia.’

The exact date of his arrival in Rome is unknown, but he makes his first appearance in print in 1622, or possibly 1623, when he writes the preface for an edition of the manual on the nature and care of horses originally written by Agostino Colombre, a native of San Severo, whose book had been first printed in Venice as early as 1536.