under Roman control and is termed "Roman Veii" as opposed to "Etruscan Veii" by scholarly literature. Under the empire the Romans called the city the Municipium Augustum Veiens. The city never recovered its former wealth or its population after the Roman conquest. Nevertheless, after Rome's defeat in the battle of the Allia, many Roman soldiers fled there, and a project was proposed for abandoning Rome for Veii; this project was successfully opposed by Camillus. The Romans built wealthy villas in the region and Livia had an estate there, according to Suetonius. Veii was eventually abandoned after Roman times, and everything of value or utility was removed by anyone with access to the site. Finally it was filled and smoothed for ploughland and was forgotten until its rediscovery in the 17th century by the antiquarian Raffaello Fabretti. Ager Veientanus The territory of a city-state anywhere within the Roman domain was, in Roman legal terminology, an ager. The law made a number of fine distinctions, but by ager it meant primarily ager publicus, "public territory", the land belonging to the state, which in those times was primarily agricultural (ager is "field"). The ager Veientanus (i.e. of Veii) covered the entire region between the right bank of the lower Tiber river and the coast; that is all of southern Etruria. The northwest border was probably as far west as the Monti Sabatini and Lake Bracciano in the north. In Etruscan times the ager Veiantanus shared the countryside with the Silva Ciminia, the remnant of an ancient forest, of which the Romans stood in superstitious dread. The ager Veiantanus remained for the most part agrarian until it became evident after World War II that the city of Rome was going to expand into and develop that area as a suburb. Moreover, a new method of ploughing was turning over the soil a metre deep, destroying all surface evidence. John Bryan Ward-Perkins, then Director of the British School at Rome, set into motion the South Etruria Survey (1954–1968), which cataloged all the visible antiquities in the ager Veientanus. It was published in 1968. Nearly 30 years later, in 1997, the Italian government moved to protect a part of that area, creating the Veio Regional Natural Park of between the Via Cassia on the west, the Via Flaminia on the east, the Via Campagnanese on the north and the city of Rome on the south. Within