4Roman Colonies in Italy

Rome’s wall begun in 378B.C.took twenty-five years to build. However secure she might feel behind it, immediately beyond the gates lurked enemies. To the north the Gauls, to the east and south, Italic tribes (whom Rome successively feared, rivalled, dominated, and invited to partnership; of these the Samnites were the most fearsome), on the seas the Syracusan and Carthaginian navies—all represented a clear and present danger. Rome’s population being inadequate to keep legions in the field, much less a fleet at sea, against all these threats at once, she evolved a system of advanced bases, called Latin colonies (Fig. 4.1), manned partly with trustworthy local non-Romans, though with a hard core of Roman legionaries. This avoided undue drain on the Roman manpower, and placed the responsibility for frontier defense upon frontiersmen who had the greatest interest in their own security.

During the last thirty years the efforts of archaeologists of several nations; for example, Italians at Ostia, Belgians at Alba Fucens, Americans at Cosa have added much to the sum of our knowledge of these frontier outposts: their fortifications, street plan, public buildings, housing arrangements, and the surveyed (“centuriated”) quarter-sections ofland (allotments) stretching away from the walls into the countryside round about. From these brute facts inferences can be drawn, about what prompted the founding of these outposts (was the motive always military?), about relations with neighbors and with Rome, about communications, about economic, social, and cultural life.

Fig. 4.1Roman colonization. (P. MacKendrick,Archaeology9 [1955], p. 127)

At Ostia, at the Tiber’s mouth, historical tradition said that there had been Romans settled since the days of King Ancus Marcius, and that, even earlier, Aeneas had landed there and built a camp. In 1938 the great Italian archaeologist Guido Calza began soundings to ascertain the date of the oldest surviving stratum. The area he chose was beneath Ostia’s Imperial Forum, where the two main streets, thecardoand thedecumanus, crossed. (The Via Ostiensis, from Rome to the river mouth, determined the line of thedecumanus.) What he found (Fig. 4.2) was a set of walls enclosing a rectangle 627 feet long and 406 feet wide. Thewall was built of roughly squared blocks of tufa in a technique not unlike that of Rome’s wall of 378B.C., but since there was Fidenae stone in it, Calza dated the wall somewhat later than 378. The wall was pierced by four gates of two rooms each, with portcullis. The south gate was demolished in the early Empire to provide space for a temple of Rome and Augustus; the north gate gave way under Hadrian to the massive podium of a Capitolium, but the footings of the east and west gates survive, well below the level of the Imperial pavement. Calza found drains within the walls, and traces of four other streets (unpaved) besides thecardoanddecumanus, but no identifiable buildings. Some terracotta revetments found in the area suggest an unidentified temple of the third centuryB.C.No traces earlier than the late fourth-century wall have been found in the excavated area of Ostia. Either Ancus Marcius’ foundation is a myth, or it was planted in some thus far undiscovered spot, of which all the plowing and digging in the neighborhood has left no trace.

Fig. 4.2Ostia,castrum, plan. (G. Calza,Scavi di Ostia, 1, fac. p. 68)

What Calza found at Ostia was a coastguard station, orcastrum, planted by the Romans at the river’s mouth once their control of the sea was established by their victory over Antium’s navy (which produced the bronze beaks on the Rostra). The normal complement of such a station was 300 men. A contingent of that size could have manned Ostia’scastrumwall with one soldier every six feet. Thus the prime motive of the founding was military, and thecastrumplan is like the familiar and standard plan of a Roman army camp. But the civilian plan antedated the military: Polybius in his description of the Roman camp of about 150B.C.says that it was plannedlike a town(i.e., with a rectangular grid like Marzabotto). And Ostia’s function must from the beginning, or soon after, have been commercial as well as military. Its site at the river mouth was as ideal for collecting the customs as for guarding the coast. Grain from Egypt and Sicily to feed Rome may from the earliest days havebeen landed here and stored in warehouses for later shipment upriver by barge. At all events history records the appointment as early as 267B.C.of a special finance officer orquaestorfor Ostia, and Calza found the footings of warehouses of Republican date. The terracotta revetments mentioned above date from this period. The houses and shops remained humble for seven generations, but those generations saw the departure of many a fleet, and the arrival of many a consignment of grain. An inscription dated in 171B.C.marking the limits of public land in Ostia shows that by then it had expanded far beyond thecastrumwalls. But the story of Ostia’s development, her new wall under Sulla, new theater under Augustus, new port under Claudius, new garden apartment houses under Trajan, and the rest, belong to later chapters.

*****

In the last half of the fourth century Rome fought two wars against the Samnites. Alba Fucens (Fig. 4.3) in the Abruzzi, one of her advanced bases in the Second Samnite War, has been explored since 1949 by the Belgians. It lies 3315 feet above sea level, on the Via Valeria sixty-eight miles east-northeast of Rome. (The sixty-eighth milestone of the Valeria was foundin situinside the colony wall.) Alba’s site dominates five valleys. The Latin colony of 6000 families planted here in 303B.C.assured Rome’s communications on two sides of Samnium, eastward to the Adriatic and southeastward through the Liris valley.

Fig. 4.3Alba Fucens, plan. (J. B. Ward Perkins, “Early Roman Towns in Italy,” Fig. 9)

The pride of Alba is its walls, nearly two miles of them, surrounding the three hills on which the colony lies. The material is limestone, which breaks at the quarry into irregular, polygonal blocks. These are set without mortar. The excavators distinguished four different building techniques in the wall. They assumed that the roughest sectors, built of enormous blocks, were the oldest, coeval with the foundation of the colony. These polygonal walls, common all over central Italy, used to be called Pelasgian or Cyclopean,and were formerly assumed to be of immemorial antiquity, but recent archaeological work has pushed the dates of most of them down into the late fourth century or later. At Alba the techniques involve the use of smaller blocks and more careful workmanship in successive phases, until finally with the use of cement we reach the 80’sB.C.and the age of Sulla. On the northwest, where the hill has the gentlest slope, the circuit is triple, and the outermost is the latest. The loop to the north was thearx; it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1915. The wall is pierced by four gates, some with portcullis and bastions. The Via Valeria entered at the northwest, made a right-angled turn, passed the civic center, and emerged at the southeast; that is, it was made to conform to a grid plan within the colony, a grid plan laid down despite the hilly terrain, which made terracing necessary.

Excavating Alba’s civic center, the Belgians found a Forum, with altar and miniature temple, buried under many feet of earth. They also found a basilica (a rectangular roofed hall with nave and two side aisles, used as a law court and commercial center), presenting its long side, with three entrances, to a portico facing the Forum. Beside the basilica, a market, with baths on one side and a temple on the other, with early revetments, repeatedly restored. An adjoining street, parallel to the Valeria, was lined with shops, including a fuller’s drycleaning establishment and at least one wine shop. The doorsills still show slots for the shutters. In front of the shops ran a portico supported on high pilasters. In the curb were holes where customers might tie their mules. At the corner of thedecumanus, the excavators found charming statuettes of elephants, used as street signs. Under the market were revealed subterranean chambers accessible only by manholes; the excavators suggest that these are the very dungeons, dark undergroundoubliettes, where prisoners of state like King Syphax of Numidia in 203B.C., King Perseus of Macedonia in 167, the Gallic chiefBituitus in 121 were incarcerated, for the Romans often used their colonies as detention points.

Levels, construction techniques, and artifacts assigned various dates to these buildings, but their earliest phases fall in the Republican period, in the age of Sulla or earlier. To the age of Sulla belongs also a handsome rock-cut theater. There is an amphitheater of the early Empire; as we know from a new inscription, its donor was Macro, the notorious informer under the Emperor Tiberius, who brought about the fall of the Emperor’s ambitious and scheming favorite, Sejanus.

Walls, grid, civic center, public buildings: these made of Alba a smaller and more orderly replica of Rome. The general layout is repeated so often in so many places that it suggests a master plan made in the censors’ office in Rome. By the time Cosa was founded, in 273B.C., the Romans already could draw on the experience of founding at least eighteen colonies.

*****

Cosa, where the writer did his first excavating, may be used to supply a little more detail on materials and methods in field archaeology. Seven eight-week spring seasons of excavation there (1948–1954), modestly intended as laboratory training for young American classicists, have in fact resulted in a remarkably complete picture of an old-style Latin colony. The site was chosen for excavating because it looked attractive from air photographs, because it was convenient to Rome (ninety miles up the Via Aurelia on the Tyrrhenian Sea), and because its walls were almost perfectly preserved, great gray masses of polygonal limestone looming up as high as a four-story building on a 370-foot hill that rises out of the reclaimed swamplands of the Tuscan Maremma. For Cosa was planted, carved out of the territory of the once proud Etruscan city of Vulci, to mount guard over Rome’s newly acquired marches, andto affirm Rome’s name and supremacy in a restive neighborhood.

A large assortment of gear is necessary for a modern scientific dig, even a modest one: for surveying and levelling, clinometer (which measures slopes), plane-table (which measures angles), alidade (which shows degree of arc), prismatic compass with front and back sights (for taking accurate bearings; the prism brings the object being sighted, the hair-line of the front sight, and the reading on the compass card all in a vertical line together), leveling staves marked in centimeters (for measuring elevations); templates for recording the curves of moldings; brooms, brushes, and mason’s tools for cleaning the architectural finds; zinc plates and sodium hydroxide pencils for electrolysis of coins; measuring tapes of all sizes, mechanical drawing instruments, trowels, marking-pegs, cord, squared paper, large sheets of filter paper for taking “squeezes” of inscriptions, catalogue cards, India ink, shellac, cardboard boxes, small cloth bags, labels, journal books, field notebooks, and a small library of technical manuals. The gear was divided between the villa where the staff lived and an abandoned Italian anti-aircraft observation post on the site itself, whose concrete gunmounts made excellent drying floors for freshly washed potsherds.

Ambitious excavations use a light railway for carting earth to the dump, but at Cosa, which ran on a shoestring budget ($5000 for eight weeks), the vehicle was the wheelbarrow, the track a set of boards bound at the ends with iron to keep them from splitting. Twenty of the local unemployed formed the corps of workmen. The foreman, in better times a master carpenter, used a pick with all the delicacy of a surgeon with a scalpel.

The first step in excavating a site is to lay down a grid—fifty-meter squares are convenient—marked with wooden stakes set in cement and levelled. During the ten months of the year when there was no digging and Cosa was abandoned to the shepherds, they operated on the conviction that thestakes marked the spot where the treasure lay buried. They would overturn them and dig like badgers, and each new season would have to begin with a partial re-survey.

A typical excavating day would begin with the removal of surface earth in wheelbarrows. As large objects came to light—bits of amphora, roof-tile, terracotta revetments—they were placed in shallow yard-square wooden boxes calledbarrelle, equipped fore and aft with carrying shafts, and labelled accurately with the precise designation of the area from which the finds came: Capitolium Exterior South, Level I; Arx North Slope, Surface, and the like. Small objects—bonestyli, small sherds, loomweights (pierced terracotta parallelepipeds, whose weight held the threads hanging straight down on an ancient vertical loom), lamps, fragments of inscriptions—went into separate marked cloth bags. Thus the horizontal and vertical findspot of each object was precisely known, so that when a dated or datable object was found in a level, the whole level could be automatically dated, and so the whole mosaic painstakingly put together and the history of the site analyzed, or, as the archaeologist says, “read.” The meanest potsherd, accurately defining a context, thus becomes more valuable historically than a whole museum shelf full of gold jewelry from an unstratified dig.

When abarrellaand a set of cardboard boxes had been filled, they were carried to the excavation shack and sorted. Objects that could not be “read”—shapeless bits of rubble, parts of coarse pots without profile of base or rim—were discarded, the rest sent to be washed. After washing and drying, cataloguing began. Every object was painted with a small square of shellac, on which its catalogue number was written in India ink and then shellacked over to preserve it. A letter indicated the dig, another the season, a number showed the place of the object in the chronological sequence of finds. A typical entry might read like the card, p.101. Leica or plate photographs were taken of all important findsand separately indexed for ready reference in the final publication.

CC 1487Capitolium Exterior SouthLevel IMoulded terra-cotta revetmentWidth 0.17 (centimeters)Height 0.14Thickness 0.03Pale pink terra-cotta, much pozzolana. All edges preserved, slight crack lower right corner. Nail-holes each corner. Strigillated cornice moulding above, finishing in a half-round moulding, enriched thunderbolt pattern in field. Thunderbolt runs from upper left to lower right, tapering to points at ends, hand grip in center; enriched on either side of hand grip with seven-point sword-and-sickle palmettes. Photograph.

CC 1487Capitolium Exterior SouthLevel IMoulded terra-cotta revetmentWidth 0.17 (centimeters)Height 0.14Thickness 0.03

Pale pink terra-cotta, much pozzolana. All edges preserved, slight crack lower right corner. Nail-holes each corner. Strigillated cornice moulding above, finishing in a half-round moulding, enriched thunderbolt pattern in field. Thunderbolt runs from upper left to lower right, tapering to points at ends, hand grip in center; enriched on either side of hand grip with seven-point sword-and-sickle palmettes. Photograph.

After the workmen’s day (7:00A.M.to 4:30P.M., with a half-hour for lunch) was over, there was still much for the staff to do. Pottery, spread out on trestle tables, had to be examined, joins made where possible, types distinguished. (Careful attention at Cosa to plain Roman black glaze has led to an arrangement of types in a dated series which will be useful for future dating on other sites.) Evenings were devoted to writing up the journal, studying the manuals, making drawings, planning the next day’s dig, and shop talk. The results of a typical season’s work, in 1950 on thearxat Cosa (Fig. 4.4), were to isolate a second temple at right angles to the Capitolium, restore on paper the design of several sets of terracotta revetments, follow the line of the Via Sacra from thearxgate to the Capitolium, clear thearxwall, get down to bedrock beside the Capitolium, discover a terracotta warrior who was part of the pedimental sculpture of an older temple under the excavation shack, and in general get a pretty clear idea of the religious center of the colony as it was, perhaps, in the time of the elder Cato, in the early second centuryB.C.

Fig. 4.4Cosa,arx. (F. E. Brown)

Fig. 4.5Cosa. (J. B. Ward Perkins,loc. cit., Fig. 8)

In the two seasons preceding the discoveries on thearxjust described, much work had been done. In the survey to set up the fifty-meter grid, Cosa’s own ancient rectangular grid of streets, with pomerial street running just inside the wall as at Marzabotto, came out clear enough to be plotted on the plan (Fig. 4.5), together with the standard blocks of housing, like the identical “ribbon-development” apartment blocks of a welfare state, which compensated the pioneers for whatever fleshpots they had given up in the metropolis or elsewhere. Housing was found to occupy two-thirds of Cosa’s thirty-three acres, while public buildings took just over twenty per cent, and streets the rest. The site, which is waterless, was found to be honey-combed with cisterns: over sixty-five were plotted. The mile-and-a-half of walls, with their eighteen towers, spaced an effective bowshot apart, had been closely examined. They were found to be built with two faces and a rubble fill. The outer face was handsomely finished, with tight mortarlessjoints, and sloped seven degrees back—this is called “batter”—from the perpendicular; the inner face was left rough. Potsherds of the Etrusco-Campanian style found in the rubble fill were of a period matching Livy’s date of 273B.C.for the colony. It was clear that the walls, which show throughout no difference in technique, were built all at one go, at the time the colony was founded. Those impatient of the Roman reputation for perfect engineering will be pleased to know that the ancient craftsmen, when they came to close the ring of the wall, found they had made an error of from two to four Roman feet. (The Roman foot approximately equals the English.) The three gates were examined, and found to be of two rooms, with the main gate grooved on its inner walls with slots for the rise and fall of the portcullis, as at Alba. Bordering the roads leading from the gates were tombs. The director of the excavations, by skindiving, examined the outworks of the port, built to prevent silting, and established them as Roman. They were parallel jetties 350 feet long, supported on huge piers measuring twenty by thirty Roman feet, and forty-five Roman feet apart.C

CUndersea exploration, one of the most fascinating branches of archaeology, has not been carried as far in Italy as in France (see,e.g., P. Diolé,4,000 Years under the Sea[New York, 1954]). But this is a convenient place to report a 1950 Italian operation off Albenga, on the Ligurian coast between Genoa and the French border. Along this stretch of the Italian Riviera fishermen’s nets had frequently brought up amphorae, presumably from an ancient wreck, which was soon located in twenty fathoms. The use of an iron grab damaged the sunken hull, but an impressive number and variety of objects were recovered. The ship yielded up over 700 more or less intact cork-sealed, pitch-lined amphorae, from a cargo of perhaps thrice that number; their shape was that current in the second and first centuriesB.C.Some had contained wine, others still held hazel-nuts. Campanian black-glaze pottery, of a type datable in the last half of the second centuryB.C., was found in sufficient quantity to enable Professor Nino Lamboglia, who was in charge of the operation, to set up a whole typology of black-glaze ware, based on types, fabric, and glaze, a typology which proved a useful check for dating Cosan pottery, and for which the Cosan results have provided some corrections. Lead pipes and lead sheathing resembled those found in the ships from Lake Nemi (see Chapter 7), and a stone crucible with molten lead in the bottom suggested that running repairs could be carried out at sea. Fragments of three helmets, of unusual design, may have been intended for Marius’ army, which was campaigning in the north against Germanic tribes in the late second centuryB.C.The finds are on display in the Albenga Museum (see N. Lamboglia, “Il Museo Navale Romano di Albenga,”Rivista Ingauna e Intemilia[1950] Nos. 3 and 4).

The 1949 campaign concentrated on the Capitolium (Fig. 4.6), situated so that its centralcellalay over a cleft in the rock, from which some kind of oracular fraud could be perpetrated. Between porch andcellae, running the width of the building, was a cistern lined with the waterproof cement calledopus signinum, made of lime, sand, and pounded bits of terracotta. The temple walls, which stand on the south to an impressive height, visible far out to sea, were built of brick-like slabs of the local calcareous sandstone, set in mortar. On the north, the line worn in the rock by water dripping gives mute evidence of the wide overhang of the roof, Etrusco-Italic style. Some of the terracotta revetments belonged to the older, wooden temple. It must have made a brave show when it was new, covered with brightly painted tiles, its pediment and roof ornaments glittering in the sun.

The last four campaigns of digging attacked the Forum area, thickly overgrown with asphodel, acanthus, and thistles. Here lay the remains of an ungainly but monumental triple arch of about 150B.C., the oldest dated arch in Italy. It had a central roadway for wheeled traffic, two side arches for pedestrians, and a stone bench attached to the outer face where old men could sit in the sun and gossip. There was a basilica, as big as a New England town hall, like Alba’s (but older: about 180B.C.). It presented its long side to the Forum, had a nave and two side aisles, and a tribune for the presiding judge at the back, with a vaulted cell, perhaps the local lock-up, beneath it. At some time in the early Empire the basilica was abandoned as a legal center, and restored as a festival hall, or intimate theater.

Fig. 4.6Cosa, Capitolium. (Fototeca)

Other buildings turned out to hold fascinating secrets. A complex beside the basilica turned out to be an Atrium Publicum, a public hall in the form of the central unit of an Italic house, which was rebuilt as an inn for the patrons of the adjoining festival hall. When, aboutA.D.35 (on the evidence of pottery—the “Arretine ware” characteristic of the period), the basilica wall collapsed, it crushed and entombed in place the inn’s complete furnishings and equipment. The excavators suddenly found their hands full of tableware, kitchen crockery, and all sorts of household gear, in metal, glass, and stone; decorative pieces, including a lively marble statuette of Marsyas; and objects of personal adornment, including a fine engraved amethyst. For the first time outside of Pompeii an ancient building had yielded not only its structure but its contents.

On the other side of the basilica, excavation of what had been called Building C brought further surprises. When the workmen had stripped the surface humus off the area of the forecourt, the excavators found themselves looking at a perfect circle of dark earth enclosed by a sandy yellow fill. Further digging established this as a circular, theater-like structure, big enough to hold 600 people. There was an altar in the middle. This must have been the Comitium, the colony’s assembly-place (Fig. 4.7). Building C, behind it, must have been the Curia, or Senate House. The undisturbed fill under the Curia floor proved completely sterile; hence the curia must have been built at a date near the foundation of the colony. At this stage both Curia and Comitium were apparently of wood, replaced in a second phase, before the end of the third centuryB.C., with purple tufa from nearby Vulci.

Fig. 4.7Cosa, Comitium. (L. Richardson, Jr.,Archaeology10 [1957], p. 50)

A healthy site, an orderly plan, a water supply, strong walls, housing, provision for political and religious needs: the basic necessities are all here, at Cosa, and all as early as the founding of the colony. By hard work, painstaking accuracy, and intelligent inference, Brown and Richardson, the excavators of Cosa, have given us the clearest possiblepicture of the physical structure of a Roman colony well on in the first intense period of history in the planting of advanced bases. Cosa is clearly the fruit of long practice and Etrusco-Italic tradition, untouched by Hellenism (no Greek architectural language in sculptural or ornamental marble) or by new-fangled techniques (no brick or concrete in the early phases). When we carry down Cosa’s architectural history to the early Empire, we infer the death of freedom of speech from the remodelling of the basilica into a theater. And when freedom of speech and public life died, the colony lost its sense of community. Its thirty-three acres would have held 3000 to 3500 settlers comfortably. But the first draft of settlers numbered probably 2500 families. (Weinfer families, not soldiers only, from the discovery of loomweights, hardly appropriate for Roman legionaries.) 2500 families make a population of at least 7500, and probably more, given Italian philoprogenitiveness. Some of these must have lived well outside the colony; only those whose centuriated allotments, explained below, lay nearest the walls would have lived in the colony proper. The holders of more distant plots would come to town only for market, worship, litigation (as long as the basilica lasted), or refuge from raiding parties of Gauls or other enemies. And so, under despotism, the community disintegrated. The temples held on longest. “Only the gods, in the end,” writes Professor Brown, “held steadfastly to their ancient seats.”

*****

By derivation, acoloniais a place where men till the soil. Colonists were assigned centuriated allotments. Since traces of centuriation have been found both at Alba Fucens and at Cosa (Figs.4.8and4.9), as well as at nearly fifty other certain and half as many possible sites in Italy, this seems an appropriate place to discuss the subject. Wherever colonies were planted, wherever land was captured, confiscated, redistributed to the poor or to veterans, the surveyor with hisgroma, or plane-table, was on hand. Air photography is a great help in revealing traces of the Roman surveyor at work, for modern land-use has often overlaid the ancient traces, leaving ancient crop-marks as the only clue. The standard surveyor’s unit was thecenturiaof 200iugera(theiugerum, five-eighths of an acre, being the area an ox could plow in a day), and a side of twentyactus(776 yards), its corners marked by boundary stones, some of which survive. There has been too little digging to confirm the results of air reconnaissance, but it seems clear that some centuriation goes back to the late third centuryB.C.Dr. Ferdinando Castagnoli, the Italian expert, is inclined to date that of Alba and Cosa at least this early, as well as large stretches in the fertile Campanian plain northwest of Naples.

Fig. 4.8Alba Fucens, centuriation.(F. Castagnoli,Bull. Mus. Civiltà Rom.18 [1954–1955], p. 5)

Fig. 4.8Alba Fucens, centuriation.

(F. Castagnoli,Bull. Mus. Civiltà Rom.18 [1954–1955], p. 5)

Fig. 4.9Cosa, centuriation. (F. Castagnoli,loc. cit., p. 6)

The surveyor liked to link up his centuriated grid with a colony plan. Thus at Cosa thegroma, for siting the allotments, could have been set up in the Porta Romana (the northeast gate), and at Alba the line of the Via Valeria inside the walls, if projected, would cut the lines of centuriation at right angles. The four sides of thecenturiawere usually marked by roads, the inner subdivisions by narrower roads, trees, hedges, or drainage or irrigation ditches. Modern land-use often follows the line of the ancient: one stretch recently laid out and now in use at Sesto, west of Florence, deliberately follows the traces of Roman centuriation, restored by a classically trained engineer for modern man to admire. As with the grid inside a colony wall, the centuriated grid of allotments was laid out from a basiccardoanddecumanus. The Roman surveyors were balked by no natural barriers. Bradford cites one line of centuriation running as high as 1600 feet above sea level(though within thecenturiaethe furrows might follow the contours) and another, in Dalmatia, continues from a peninsula across to the mainland, spanning an arm of the Adriatic Sea three miles wide. In north Italy, where the flatlands of the Po Valley made the survey easy, one can ride from Turin (Roman Augusta Taurinorum) to Trieste (Roman Tergeste), three hundred miles, through centuriated systems all the way. The same air photographs which revealed neolithic sites to Bradford in Apulia showed Roman centuriation, too, and subsequent digging turned up pottery of Gracchan date (about 133–122B.C.). A particularly extensive stretch, outside of Italy, is found in Tunisia. It has been traced from the air 175 miles from Bizerta to Sfax, and southwestward from Cape Bon for 100 miles inland. It probably goes back to ambitious plans of Gaius Gracchus, about 122B.C., to resettle Rome’s urban proletariat.

Fig. 4.10Paestum: Roman grid of streets (air-photograph).(Italian Ministry of Aeronautics)

Fig. 4.10Paestum: Roman grid of streets (air-photograph).

(Italian Ministry of Aeronautics)

The examples of colonized and centuriated sites mentioned here hardly even scratch the surface of the subject. Dozens of others remain to be explored, on hilltops and headlands, by rivers and crossroads, the length and breadth of Italy. Recent excavation at the Latin colony of Paestum, on the coast fifty miles southeast of Naples, has traced the Roman grid (Fig. 4.10), identified yet another Comitium, and produced over 1,000,000 small finds. And still other colonial sites lie under populous modern towns and cities: examples, in chronological order of planting, are Anzio, Bimini, Benevento, Brindisi, Spoleto, Cremona, Piacenza, Pozzuoli, Salerno, Vibo Valentia, Bologna, Pèsaro, Parma, Modena, and Òsimo. Their foundation-dates span the years from about 338 to 157B.C., the expanding years of the Roman Republic, the years of “Manifest Destiny.” Their continued existence compliments the Roman founders’ nice eye for a promising site, but makes large-scale investigation of Roman levels difficult or impossible, for residents of flourishing modern cities naturally resist resettlement in the interests of archaeology. Excavation in these populatedareas must wait upon repair of war damage, urban improvements (as when laying new sewer mains reveals Roman ones that follow the grid of the Roman streets), or new building to bring new facts to light. No colony has been completely excavated. At least forty per cent of ancientOstia and Pompeii remains to be dug. But generations of archaeologists of many nations have dealt patiently and intelligently with the evidence. Perhaps, considering the long span of two-and-a-half millennia since the earliest tradition of the planting of Roman colonies, the wonder is not that we know so little but that we know so much.

What archaeology has revealed is the story of the exploitation of a frontier, with much that is exciting, and much that is sordid. There are many points of resemblance to the history of the American West, though two differences should be emphasized: the Romans often planted their outposts in the territory not of savages but of their cultural equals, and the Roman frontier was settled not by private but by government enterprise. But the likenesses are striking. Centuriation produces something like quarter-sections; land grants to veterans resemble grants under the Homestead Act; the Roman grid town-plans were reproduced in our Spanish settlements of the Southwest. And perhaps, on the Roman as on the American frontier, the atmosphere was less democratic than Frederick Jackson Turner thought.

What archaeology digs up in the colonies is material remains, brute facts, but what it infers is men; men marching out in serried ranks under their standards for the formal act of founding (deductio); Romans and local Italians living side by side with some degree of amity and equality; Romans impressing their ways and speech on the peoples round about; Roman slum-dwellers given a new chance in the new territory; large estates broken up to give land to the landless; grizzled veterans settled in the quiet countryside after a lifetime of hard campaigning; Romans homesick in strange places; undergoing the rigors of frontier existence; subject to the ferment of success and failure; forging a cultural life (the epic poet Ennius, the dramatist Pacuvius, the satirist Lucilius, all came from Roman colonies).

The grid plans, in town and country, as Bradford has pointed out, show, if not genius, then strong determination and great powers of organization. The grids are, like the Romans themselves, methodical, self-assured, technically competent. They are also regimented, arbitrary, doctrinaire, and opportunist. This was the price the Mediterranean world had to pay for the security of the Roman peace.

But before that peace-without-freedom could be enjoyed, the Roman Republic was to suffer its death throes. That blood-bath was the work of the nabobs of the last century before Christ, who left their stamp, as nabobs will, on the buildings they erected to testify to their glory.

Back to Index Next