Rome's pre-Imperial circuit walls pose a particular problem of reconstruction: collectively, their 11 km course represents the largest single monument of the early city, but our understanding of this structure is based on an assemblage of several dozen disparate archaeological sites. After tracing the interpretation of these fragments from antiquity to the present, this article examines the literary, topographical and archaeological evidence for the wall's character and date. Ultimately, the non-archaeological data are inconclusive, and the material evidence seems to affirm an early phase (sixth century bc) focused on individual hilltops, rather than encompassing all hills within a full course. Following this logic, I continue to question the presence of a unified circuit wall at Rome prior to the mid-Republic (fourth century bc). A concluding section reviews the historical circumstances in support of this view.

This article examines the so-called ‘Africa’ dish, part of a treasure trove of silver table-ware discovered in a cistern at the Villa della Pisanella, a villa rustica destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. It proposes a new interpretation of the dish's iconography and argues that the woman in the centre of the emblema is Cleopatra Selene, while the attributes surrounding her reference her parents Cleopatra VII and Marcus Antonius, her brothers Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, her husband Juba II of Mauretania, and their mythological ancestor the demi-god Heracles. Thus the emblema serves as a meditation on the fates of Antony and Cleopatra VII, descendants of Heracles who chose the path of vice, a choice that resulted in their defeat by Octavian at the Battle of Actium. Octavian's virtue, victory and clemency, combined with his guardianship of their children, ensured the subsequent promotion of their daughter Cleopatra Selene as a key figure in his dynastic and political strategy, through her marriage to Juba II and the couple's appointment as client rulers of Mauretania. Also supposedly descended from Heracles, Juba II and Cleopatra Selene chose to follow in their illustrious ancestor's footsteps along the path of virtue. In common with other pieces from the treasure trove, the ‘Africa’ dish alludes to recent historical events and personages, utilizes death as a means of promoting the enjoyment of life, and incorporates popular elements of Greek mythology, all the while offering banqueters an erudite puzzle to solve during the course of their banquet.

The marble of seven under-lifesize sculptures of barbarians, now in the archaeological museums of Naples, Venice and the Vatican, commonly considered to be Roman copies of the Pergamene Lesser Dedication in Athens, comes from the Göktepe marble quarries near Aphrodisias, as is shown by isotopic, electron paramagnetic resonance, trace analyses, and of petrographic data. Since this marble was used mostly by Aphrodisian artists, this finding confirms, on the basis of scientific data, previous hypotheses on the origin of the sculptors who manufactured the statues. Reliable discrimination from similar fine-grained Asiatic marbles, such as Docimium, is possible primarily on the basis of the composition of the Göktepe marbles, which have unusually low concentrations of manganese and high concentrations of strontium. Present knowledge of the history of the quarries and the distribution of their marbles seems to rule out the possibility that the sculptures date from the late Republican period and supports the opinion, previously proposed on stylistic grounds, that they were manufactured in Rome by Aphrodisian sculptors probably during the first half of the second century ad.

This article considers a group of inscriptions, ranging in date from the late second to late third centuries ad, which indicates that low-ranked members of the Roman army gained access to equestrian rank in this period. The inscriptions attest two interrelated phenomena: (1) the promotion of soldiers to posts in the militiae equestres, a series of officer commands usually held by men from the ordo equester; and (2) grants of equestrian status to soldiers' sons, many of whom were only very young. These developments represent a marked departure from the circumstances that prevailed in the early Empire, when equestrian rank could be bestowed only by the emperor on men who possessed a census qualification of 400,000 sesterces. In this article, I propose that successive emperors gave soldiers greater access to the militiae equestres, and in some cases awarded equestrian rank to their sons, because they recognized the widespread desire for social mobility among the ranks of the army. The widening of access to equestrian rank within the Roman army contributed to the devaluation of this status over the course of the third century ad.

This article considers the writings of Saint Jerome as a source for writing a cultural history of the city of Rome in late antiquity. Jerome is of course, in many respects, an unreliable witness but his lively and often conflicted accounts of the city do none the less provide significant insights into the city during an age of transition. He provides a few snippets for the scholar of topography, but these do not constitute the main attraction. Jerome's city of Rome appears above all as a textual palimpsest: variously painted in Vergilian colours as Troy and frequently compared with the biblical cities of Babylon, Bethlehem and Jerusalem. In the final analysis, it is argued, Jerome's Rome is surprisingly unstable, indeed a ‘soft city’.

This article re-examines the topography of the late eighth-century monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno following a recent far-reaching reinterpretation of the ninth-century phases of the monastery. In particular, it proposes a hypothetical location for the monks' dormitory and a palace beside the river Volturno. As a result, it suggests the outlines of the first claustral plan for the monastery.

This paper illustrates some aspects of rural lordship in thirteenth-century north and central Italy, namely the territorial framework for the exercise of seigniorial powers and the seigniorial officials who administered the lords' dominions. How were seigniorial territories organized from an institutional point of view? How did the lords manage the adjustments and changes occurring in their lordships due to inheritance, purchases and sales of seigniorial rights? How was that framework connected to the institutional organization of rural communities? Who were the men who administered those lordships and how long did the connection between the families of those officials and the lords last? These are the questions I have tried to answer through the study of deeds (recorded in charters and notarial registers) regarding the Guidi counts, a family belonging to the upper aristocracy of north-central Italy. This study focuses on institutional matters, but in the section devoted to the relations between lords and seigniorial officials a prosopographical approach is adopted. The dynamics investigated in this study were fundamental in the historical evolution of the north-central Italian countryside, and their analysis provides useful material for further comparison with analogous phenomena in other parts of Europe.

Fragments of frescoes were found in the late nineteenth century on the medieval apse wall, hidden behind the fifteenth-century chancel, of the Dominican nunnery church of San Sisto Vecchio, Rome. They were painted in two phases, one in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, the other approximately a century later. When they were restored in 1990–2, two new scenes came to light. This paper reconsiders the murals of both phases, including the images uncovered during the restoration campaigns. Historical evidence shines new light on the medieval patrons of the nunnery, who were relatives of individual nuns, and reveals the social context in which buildings and paintings were provided for the convent. It is argued that the frescoes were designed for the Dominican nuns, whose religious ideals are reflected in their iconography. Up until now studies of these murals have not paid much attention to their socio-historical importance, nor the Dominican significance of the images, even in two scenes from the life of Saint Catherine of Siena. Accordingly, this study contributes to the discussion of the frescoes by placing them in a ‘Dominican’ framework, attempting to show what they may have meant to the medieval nuns in the convent.

This article argues that Onofrio Panvinio's 1571 study of the Roman triumph embodies a central innovation of sixteenth-century classical scholarship, the use of visual reconstructions alongside textual accounts to communicate the details of ancient ceremonies. Panvinio built on the work of predecessors, most notably Pirro Ligorio, to produce a densely-detailed image of the triumphal procession in the style of Roman bas-reliefs, using the evidence of coins, friezes and texts. This illustration can be seen as an alternative historical rendition, rather than as an accompaniment to a textual description of the triumph. More generally, it reveals the creativity of Renaissance antiquarianism, a movement usually seen as devoted to the dry accumulation of evidence about antiquity, not its imaginative interpretation.

The frontier between Gubbio (ancient Umbria) and Perugia (ancient Etruria), in the northeast part of the modern region of Umbria, was founded in the late sixth century bc. The frontier endured in different forms, most notably in the late antique and medieval periods, as well as fleetingly in 1944, and is fossilized today in the local government boundaries. Archaeological, documentary and philological evidence are brought together to investigate different scales of time that vary from millennia to single days in the representation of a frontier that captured a watershed of geological origins. The foundation of the frontier appears to have been a product of the active agency of the Etruscans, who projected new settlements across the Tiber in the course of the sixth century bc, protected at the outer limit of their territory by the naturally defended farmstead of Col di Marzo. The immediate environs of the ancient abbey of Montelabate have been studied intensively by targeted, systematic and geophysical survey in conjunction with excavation, work that is still in progress. An overview of the development of the frontier is presented here, employing the data currently available.

In 2010, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies achieved its centenary. In 2012, the British School at Rome, which was closely linked to the origins of the Roman Society, celebrates the centenary of its Royal Charter. This marked the formal establishment of the distinctively broad and interdisciplinary remit of the School by the inclusion of humanities, art and architecture in a single institution. The combination of these two anniversaries has given rise to this attempt to think through some of the paths that Roman studies have taken, and to understand them within the context of broader developments in particularly British and Italian historiography. The Roman Society and the British School at Rome have many points of connection, both in terms of individuals and in terms of research interest. Recent work on the development of a British historical tradition has shown that it remains important to ground the reading of historical scholarship within the intellectual trajectory of its practitioners. This is, therefore, an argument about how the research represented in the Journal of Roman Studies, and conducted at the British School at Rome, and ultimately more widely, should be seen in a historiographical context.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2011, but also in the first part of 2012), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.