Aeclanum
A road center and market town of the Hirpini, situated on the Via Appia, 24 km E of Benevento, near Mirabella Eclano, at the point where the Via Aeclanensis left the Via Appia to join the Via Traiana Nova at Herdoniae. Besieged and sacked by Sulla in 89 B.C., it rapidly recovered, becoming successively a municipium and, in the 2d c., a colonia. Later the seat of a bishopric, it was captured and destroyed by Constans II in 660, after which it disappears from history.
The town occupied an irregular promontory, with modest natural defenses on the S side, overlooking the river Calore, and open to the N towards the crest of the ridge that carried the Via Appia. The principal remains above ground are those of the circuit of walls and towers, in opus quasi-reticulatum. They date from the second quarter of the 1st c. B.C. with substantial repairs at a slightly later date, and are important because unusually well documented epigraphically. Excavation within the town has revealed a long history of pre-Roman settlement. It has also exposed two quarters of the Roman town, of which the most noteworthy monument is a bath building, probably Augustan with later modifications.
BIBLIOGRAPHYI. Sgobbo, Atti del II Congresso di Studi Romani (1931) 394ff; EAA 3 (1960) 207 (G. Colonna); G. O. Onorato, La ricerca archeologica in Irpinia, Naples, 1960.
J. B. WARD-PERKINS