Fragmentsof white marble slabs from the choir screen lifted from the shipwreck off Marzamemi.The drawingreconstructsthe designon the slabs; height, 74 cm. CHURCH WRECK continued a most fruitful founder of churches, palaces and other buildings throughout the entire empire. The intense activity in church architecture during his reign is to some extent marked by the wide diffusion of this type of ornament on the screen slabs- an ornamentation extremely common in basilicas of his time. No doubt the motif with the Christogram between two Latin crosses is not only decorative but expresses symbolically an ecclesiasticalconcept. The pillars in the choir screens are adorned on both faces with simple fluting and topped by small bases for columns above, of which many fragments were found. At least nine of these columns terminate in cubical capitals. Their shafts are smooth and the capi128 tals are decorated with four acanthus leaves at the corners. So far we have not been able to establish clearly whether the pillars and the columns are monolithic or not. We also found a monolithic fragment of the transitional portion of a pillar topped by a column. This pillar is of a smaller size, so it cannot belong to the choir screen but probably belongs to one of the four supports of a ciborium roofing the altar. Of this element of the architecture, only a few pieces have been found. Perfectly preserved are three fragments from the edge of the slab forming the upper part of the altar made out of fine white marble of a kind which seems to be insensitive to erosion in salt water. A