The republican art of Rome and Latium has been much neglected. Even the admirable article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which is signed by one of our foremost scholars, the same writer's Companion to Roman Studies, and the article on Roman art in the Cambridge Companion to Latin Studies begin the subject of Roman art with Augustus, or give only the briefest of indications for what precedes; yet more can be done in the way of reconstructing a picture of the earlier period than most archaeologists suppose, and it is my purpose in the present paper to show how the fictile decorations from the early Latin temples can be used to this end. My examples are taken mainly from the collection of terracotta recently arranged in the new wing of the Museo di Villa Giulia. These form a homogeneous group from sites in the immediate vicinity of Rome, and they are exhibited as far as possible in chronological order, so that the development of this branch of art can be studied from its earliest manifestations to its decay in the last century of the republic, when terracotta decoration had to give way to the marble sculptures introduced in the wake of Hellenistic art.

In the course of this century fashions in classical scholarship have come and gone; out in the wider world the Victorians have fallen from grace and been restored to it again; but throughout this time there seems to have endured a picture of Virgil as a Victorian poet avant la lettre, a Tennysonian aesthete, languidly and compassionately melancholic, shedding warm soft tears as he contemplates the perennial sorrows of humanity. ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum’—we are wary of that phrase now, conscious that it cannot bear the significance traditionally attributed to it; but the idea persists that Virgil views the world as a vale of tears. The modern critics do not put it quite that way—they prefer longer and less perspicuous words–but that is none the less, I think, what many of them are really saying.

L'inscription que nous publions ici a été trouvée en 1976 en surface dans un terrain de la ville médiévale non loin du grand port antique (le port de commerce); elle est entrée alors dans la collection épigraphique du musée. Bien que les conditions de la découverte, n'excluent pas que la pierre vienne d'ailleurs, il n'est peut-être pas inutile de présenter brièvement la topographie du lieu de trouvaille. Dans le terrain en question ainsi que dans les deux terrains contigus à l'Ouest on a mis au jour, notamment, des restes de murs particulièrement épais appartenant à un grand bâtiment, public de toute évidence, qui a connu plusieurs phases de constructions. Le terrain situé le plus à l'Ouest a également livré des restes d'un autre édifice d'importance comparable. Il faut ajouter que dans la parcelle centrale on dégage actuellement un bâtiment rectangulaire dont l'orientation (NO–SE) ne s'inscrit pas, chose rare, dans le plan hippodaméen de la ville (N–S ou E–O). Mais l'importance de cet endroit pour la topographie de la ville antique en général a déjà été signalée: en mettant en rapport les deux grands bâtiments du terrain ouest avec le port commercial antique ‘on est amené à penser que nous sommes probablement dans la région de l'agora antique’.

As long as poetry has existed, men. have wondered and argued about its relationship to reality. The Muses, meeting Hesiod beneath Mount Helicon, told him that they knew how to tell many lies that sounded like truth; Solon and Pindar echo the chastening refrain, and Plato and Aristotle are concerned to find new answers to the hoary problem. Poetry is in fact a very slippery stuff, which seems to turn into something else as we try to comprehend it; like Proteus, it can turn under our grasp into a raging fire—the revolutionary Marxist view, perhaps; or a wild beast—the Freudian id, as it might be; or, most commonly, into a stream of water, which flows away to nothing between our hands.

Tentative suggestions which conform to the conditions of a scientific hypothesis may play a useful part in furthering the slow and unending process of rediscovering antiquity. Proof or disproof of them must naturally await the discovery of fresh evidence, and such evidence may never come; but if it does, its appearance is doubly welcome when it furnishes proof. It is nearly forty years since my travels in Anatolia took me into the angle of north-western Galatia, lying between north-eastern Phrygia and the southern boundary of Bithynia, which ran along the watershed between the middle Sangarius and its chief tributary the Tembrogius or Tembris. The southern side of this watershed, immediately to the west of the junction of the two rivers, is an infertile and thinly populated district, but farther west, towards the Phrygian border, the mountain slopes open out into a broad plain which runs down to the Tembrogius; near its head are the two villages of Upper (or Great) and Lower Igde-agatch. Westward of this plain and separated from it only by a low ridge is a pleasant valley, watered by an affluent of the Tembrogius.

The dating of coarse pottery on Roman sites in the first and second centuries has been fairly well established, but there is still much uncertainty in the chronology of coarse ware during the third and fourth centuries. Hence it may be helpful to describe the pottery found in a Roman well which would appear, from the evidence to be adduced, to have remained open only during the third century. In my plan of Margidunum published in the Journal of Roman Studies, xiii, Pl. VIII, the position of this well, marked R, is shown to be situated halfway between the Via Quintana and the southern rampart. It lies just outside the eastern wall of a small building which may have been used as a stable, at any rate in the earlier occupation of the camp, for in the interior I found a pit (J) which had been filled up in the early part of the second century. The lower two feet contained brushwood, straw and horse-dung quite unaltered, owing to the pit having been hermetically sealed by clay. Doubtless this pit was closed when the camp was dismantled and the Fosse Way driven arbitrarily across it, over the old camp-roads and the foundations of the razed buildings.

In three years' time, a hundred years will have passed since Luigi Rossini issued his series of plates illustrating Roman triumphal arches in Italy, delineations of interest not only for their accuracy and beauty, but also because Rossini made them the basis of the first detailed study of the Triumphal Arch as an artistic object in itself, treated apart from the surroundings which it embellished. All subsequent workers, Curtis, Nilsson, Loewy and Noack, took the same point of view: and the object of this study is to supplement their valuable research by reconstructing the surroundings of a group of arches connected with city gates, and seeing what light is shed by the relationship of the two structures upon the development of the decorative arch. It is not always possible to reconstruct the ancient grouping in full, nor can it be recovered so easily now as a century ago. But it will emerge that there is always something to be discovered which helps to determine the place of a given arch in the environment which it decorated.

The harvest of new inscriptions from the past five years seems to be larger than ever, which is, no doubt, to be attributed to new developments in agriculture and building, especially in those countries which had hitherto changed little since antiquity; these are sharply increasing the number of monuments found (and sometimes destroyed) by chance, while more systematic search organized ahead of the machines in some areas (Italy is notable) has also increased the number found by design. It must be admitted that not all the new texts are being published very well; and that some are appearing only in sketchy or popular accounts and in newspapers or journals which are either irrelevant to Classical studies, or are mushrooms which die after a few numbers and so do not find their way into most Classical libraries. This is tedious, but better, surely, than that they should remain quite unreported. In any case, although the writer's own record in this matter is blacker than it should be, it seems reasonable to urge again that excavators and epigraphists should be more willing to give quickly an initial publication which does not aim to be definitive on the first round.