LAKE NEMI AND LONDON: TWO RETRACTIONS
H o w a r d C o m f o r t
Haverford College, Pennsylvania — USA
A palinode is an embarrassing exercise which I would willingly spare myself, but since 
I have twice blundered in the presence of our Vereinli, it is only fitting that I should make 
a clean breast of it before the same audience and should say with Ovid, Confiteor, si quid 
prodest delieta fatevi.
1 In Vol. II of our Acta, pp. 5— 12, I presented twenty-five fragments of sigillata, most 
of them signed, allegedly from the ships at Lake Nemi but at that tim e in the Terme Museum. 
In discussing their chronology, which in the nature of the case was their most significant 
aspect, I relied heavily upon Uccelli’s 1940 publication of the ships, not knowing that 
after the W ar the same author had issued a second edition with the same title but a substan­
tially different text. It was A nn Brown of Oxford who first alerted me to the error of assign­
ing these fragments to the ships at all, and others have subsequently dealt with me kindly 
but deservedly. In the summer of 1972 I attem pted to clear up the m atter at the Terme 
Museum itself, where Prof.ssa Lisa Lissi C aronna personally escorted me through the 
records attem pting to locate these sherds and another smaller group, briefly noted in the 
same article, which really is from the ships. Alas, none of them were in the Terme. Signora 
Lissi C aronna kindly volunteered to pursue the m atter out to the new small museum at 
Nemi, and did so, but with equally negative results; in a letter of March 1973 she wrote, 
»Per il momento non so proprio come fare per trovarli, m a non escludo che un giorno, 
quando orm ai ho perso tutte le speranze, vengano fuoii«, — a hope which, in gratefully 
acknowledging her trouble in this matter, I share. The sherds which I published are from 
Lake Nemi all right, but presumably from the shore-line as the lake was being drained 
in the 1930’s, and are quite independent of the ships and their chronology.
2 The other m atter is a trifle less painful only because it has not actually appealed in 
print, though I have given occasional intim ations of it in Hommages Grenier, Collection 
Latomus 58 (1962) pp. 448—456, and elsewhere. Some may recall that at Speyer I proposed 
that the sigillata found in London and, by inference, on some other British sites, — though 
not all, — had to be dated in or after A. D. 43, the year of Claudius’s conquest. A great 
deal o f the evidence is to be found in the British Museum Catalogue o f Roman Pottery 
and in the article on eaily Rom an London by O s w a l d and P r y c e in Archaeologia 
78 (1928) pp. 73— 110. Once more alas! Digging into the evidences of provenance at the 
British Museum with the generous assistance o f Catherine Johns and in the library of the

Society of Antiquaries of London, 1 found one after another of the principal exhibits rest­
ing on poorly documented foundations, including the very interesting moulded bowl alle­
gedly from Wraxall Villa which G. Simpson had unearthed in the Devizes Museum and 
which I showed in another connection also at our Nijmegen meeting. I do not mean to 
assert that all, or even any, of these sherds are modern intrusions from the Continent, 
dressed up with a persuasive provenance and passed off upon collectors, and there are 
indeed a few modernly and solidly excavated bits of reliable British evidence from other 
sites, — most of which are unfortunately ambivalent chronologically. N or am I yet prepared 
to abandon the theory that Publius Cornelius and others were in fact active as late as Clau­
dius. But I must confess that most of the evidence hitherto accepted as having London 
and some other British sites as provenance has, as we say, a fishy smell. One may not be 
wholly free to reject this evidence, but neither can one build an honest case upon it.
This is not the time to go into further detail, as I hope to do elsewhere. The present 
purpose is merely to tell those whose thinking may have been influenced, not to say misled, 
by anything that they heard at Speyer to lay it away on a shelf because we have to start all 
over again with a different set of data. If the answers should happen to be the same, the 
reasons will be different.
JEZERO NEM I IN LONDON: PONOVNO
Povzetek
1 Žigi na aretinski sigilati iz jezera Nemi, objavljeni v RCRF Acta 2 (1959) 5—12, so domnevno 
z obalnega pasu jezera, ki je bilo ok. leta 1930 izsušeno, in nimajo prav nobene zveze z ladjami in 
njihovo kronologijo.
2 Za aretinsko keramiko iz Londona, ki je večinoma objavljena v British Museum Catalogue 
o f Roman Pottery in v članku Osvalda in Prycea o zgodnjerimskem Londonu v Archaeologia 78 
(1928) 73—110, in podobno keramiko iz raznih drugih najdišč v Britaniji (seveda ne vseh), manjkajo 
zanesljivi podatki o provenienci. Del te keramike — ali pa celo vsa — je lahko prišel v Anglijo 
preko prekupčevalcev s starinami, zato je treba biti skrajno previden pri postavljanju teorij, ki 
bazirajo na ustanovitvi Londona po Klavdijevi invaziji leta 43 n. e.