Roman Urban Street Networks: Streets and the Organization of Space in Four Cities (Routledge Studies in Archaeology)

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Author: Alan Kaiser

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Roman Urban Street Networks

Routledge Studies in Archaeology

1. An Archaeology of Materials Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe Chantal Conneller 2. Roman Urban Street Networks Alan Kaiser


Alan Kaiser

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Alan Kaiser to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaiser, Alan. Roman urban street networks / by Alan Kaiser. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in archaeology ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Rome—Social life and customs. 2. Rome—Antiquities. 3. Streets—Rome— History. 4. Plazas—Rome—History. 5. Street life—Rome—History. 6. City and town life—Rome—History. 7. Public spaces—Rome—History. 8. Cities and towns—Rome—History. 9. City planning—Rome—History. 10. Rome—History, Local. I. Title. DG78.K34 2011 937—dc22 2010041240

ISBN 0-203-82181-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88657-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-82181-7 (ebk)

Contents

List of Tables List of Graphs List of Maps Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

vii xi xiii xv xvii 1

1

Textual Evidence for Roman Perceptions of Streets and Plazas

16

2

Defining and Analyzing Street Networks in the Archaeological Record

47

3

Pompeii

67

4

Ostia

106

5

Silchester

140

6

Empúries

170

7

Streets, Space, and Roman Urbanism

199

Notes Bibliography Index

207 229 245

Tables

1.1

Latin Vocabulary for Plazas and Specific Sections of Streets

27

1.2

Generic Latin Vocabulary for Urban Streets

27

2.1

Categories of Urban Buildings Suggested by Vitruvius and the Regionaries

60

Example of the Use of the Chi-Square Test for Statistical Significance

64

3.1

Categories for Architectural Units at Pompeii

75

3.2

Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the City Gates

80

Subcategories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the City Gates

81

Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the Forum

86

Subcategories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the Forum

87

Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to the Number of Intersections

91

Subcategories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to the Number of Intersections

92

2.2

3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9

Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Type

101

Subcategories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Type

102

viii Tables 4.1

Categories for Architectural Units at Ostia

114

4.2


119


120


124


126


128


129


135


136

5.1

Categories for Architectural Units at Silchester

150

5.2


157


161


164


168

6.1

Categories for Architectural Units at Neapolis

176

6.2


183

Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the Agora

185


189

4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9

5.3 5.4 5.5

6.3 6.4

Tables ix 6.5


192

Graphs

3.1

3.2

4.1

4.2

5.1

5.2

6.1

6.2

Relationship between the depth of streets from Pompeii’s city gates and forum and the average number of intersections of streets at each depth.

79

Relationship between the depth of streets from Pompeii’s city gates and forum and the average distance between doors at each depth.

79

Relationship between the depth of streets from Ostia’s city gates and forum and the average number of intersections of streets at each depth.

118

Relationship between the depth of streets from Ostia’s city gates and forum and the average distance between doors at each depth.

118

Relationship between the depth of streets from Silchester’s city gates and forum and the average number of intersections of streets at each depth.

155

Relationship between the depth of streets from Silchester’s city gates and forum and the average distance between doors at each depth.

156

Relationship between the depth of streets from Empúries’ city gates and forum and the average number of intersections of streets at each depth.

181

Relationship between the depth of streets from Empúries’ city gates and agora and the average distance between doors at each depth.

181

Maps

3.1

Pompeii’s street network.

68

3.2

Plan of Pompeii showing sites mentioned in the text.

70

3.3

Depth of Pompeii’s streets from the city gates.

78

3.4

Depth of Pompeii’s streets from the forum.

84

3.5

Number of intersections each of Pompeii’s streets has with other streets.

90

Traffic patterns at Pompeii after Tsujimura (1991) and Poehler (2006) supplemented by the author’s observations.

94

3.6 3.7

Street types at Pompeii.

100

4.1

Ostia’s street network.

107

4.2

Plan of Ostia showing sites mentioned in the text.

108

4.3

Depth of Ostia’s streets from the city gates.

117

4.4

Depth of Ostia’s streets from the forum.

123

4.5

Number of intersections each of Ostia’s streets has with other streets.

127

4.6

Traffic patterns at Ostia.

130

4.7

Street types at Ostia.

134

5.1

Silchester’s street network.

142

5.2

Plan of Silchester showing sites mentioned in the text.

142

5.3

Depth of Silchester’s streets from the city gates.

155

xiv Maps 5.4

Depth of Silchester’s streets from the forum.

159

5.5

Number of intersections each of Silchester’s streets has with other streets.

163

5.6

Street types at Silchester.

167

6.1

General plan of Empúries with its ancient coastline.

171

6.2

General plan of Neapolis showing the street grid and sites mentioned in the text.

172

6.3

Depth of Neapolis’ streets from the city gates.

179

6.4

Depth of Neapolis’ streets from the agora.

184

6.5

Number of intersections each of Neapolis’ streets has with other streets.

188

6.6

Traffic patterns in Neapolis.

190

6.7

Southern third of the Ciudad Romana at Empúries.

195

Preface

Until recently, classicists and classical archaeologists have paid little attention to the streets within Roman cities. This lack of interest is peculiar because it is in stark contrast to the fascination in which they have held the extramural roads that connected cities. Numerous scholarly and popular works have been devoted to exploring the archaeological, philological, and epigraphic evidence in order to draw conclusions about their routes, their construction, and the legal and social implications of the Latin vocabulary referring to them.1 In contrast, only one author has focused on the streets of just one Roman city, Pompeii. 2 This observation is surprising, particularly as one considers that streets covered the vast majority of space devoted to public uses in any city from any time period. Yet a combined archaeological and philological analysis of ancient Roman city streets has never been undertaken. The reason for this may be that streets seem so simple to understand. We deal with them everyday as we go about our business, so it hardly seems necessary to explain them in any depth. In modern cities the main purposes of urban streets are to facilitate transportation and to divide the city into manageable units or blocks. The former purpose of the street, creating transportation corridors for cars and trucks, has been a primary concern of urban planners and government officials in the United States since the end of World War II, sometimes to the detriment of other factors that contribute towards making a city livable. Most archaeologists and classicists have assumed ancient streets can be interpreted in terms similar to those we use to understand their modern counterparts, existing for transportation and division. They have also superimposed modern concepts about urban planning and the importance of transportation via the ancient equivalent of the motorized vehicle, the horse, donkey, mule, or oxcart, in a surprisingly uncritical way in their analyses of ancient urban environments. Several years ago while working on an excavation at the Greco-Roman colony of Empúries, I noticed that the streets of the ancient city were decidedly narrow. Most streets were so narrow that only one cart at a time could have traversed them whereas some were of such a minimal width as to exclude cart traffic altogether. This observation struck me as extremely

xvi

Preface

peculiar. As I looked into this matter at Empúries and then at other Roman sites, I discovered that impediments to traffic, such as narrow roads and stone slabs or fountains blocking routes, were much more common than I would ever have expected based on the modern literature about Roman cities. These obstructions suggested that the ancient horse or mule-drawn cart was not as dominant a factor in determining the use of urban space as automobiles and trucks are in most cities today. Carefully studying plans of Empúries and then Pompeii, it became apparent to me that a cart driver must have had a very difficult time moving about these cities. Whereas the movement of traffic was one role of Roman urban streets, this clearly appears to have been of secondary, or perhaps even tertiary, importance to the Romans, in stark contrast to the attitude of most urbanites today. When this realization dawned on me, I began to question my own assumptions and the assumptions of other archaeologists and classicists about the role of streets in Roman cities and Roman perceptions of their streets. I began to wonder whether we really understood the streets of Roman cities at all. Seeking ways of understanding streets from an ancient point of view led me from the dusty streets of Empúries to Pompeii, Ostia, and fi nally Silchester. It also led me through centuries of works by ancient authors as well as the work of modern urban geographers and archaeologists. The pages that follow provide a new reading of the Latin terms for describing urban streets. It also presents techniques for describing and analyzing the role of streets and the placement of buildings along them based on evidence in the archaeological record. It is hoped that this work can take us one step closer to understanding the complexity of Roman streets and thereby advance the study of ancient urbanism.

Acknowledgments

In any project that develops over a period of more than a decade, there are many who play their part in helping to bring the project to fruition. I can only name a few individuals and groups to whom I am deeply grateful for all of their assistance. A number of people commented on aspects of this research at various points in its development and offered invaluable suggestions for improving it. Among them are David Newsome, Ray Laurence, James Wiseman, Murray McClellan, Eric Poehler, Kevin Cole, and Miko Flohr. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers from Routledge who offered excellent suggestions for refi ning and developing my ideas. Any faults or omissions remain my own and occurred despite the best efforts of these people. Among the groups that have supported my research I must thank the University of Evansville and the University of Evansville Alumni Association. I am also indebted to Getzel Cohen and the University of Cincinnati Department of Classics for their support. The site directors of Pompeii, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, and Empúries, Xavier Aquilué, were extremely gracious in giving me unfettered access to their sites. Finally, I am grateful to Christine Lovasz-Kaiser, without whom this book would never have been completed. I am deeply indebted to her for her patience in commenting on and editing early drafts and her help in overcoming obstacles both in the field and in the process of writing. It brings me great pleasure to be able to dedicate this book to her.

Introduction

Each year 2.6 million people visit the site of Pompeii.1 As they wonder at the houses, temples, and theaters, they rarely notice the streets through which they walk, stroll, and, by the end of the day, trudge. Tourists are not the only visitors who have taken the streets of Pompeii and other Roman cities for granted. Until recently, the complex relationship between streets and the buildings that lined them has been little studied by archaeologists and classicists. Instead, those interested in the study of created space have focused their attention on architecture. Buildings define space and regulate passage through it by the placement of walls and other obstacles that block movement as well as by the placement of doorways that allow one to pass. Architectural space forces people to move, and therefore behave, in a way the creator intended, something other material culture cannot.2 The space within a building does not just reflect the societal norms at the time of its construction; it also reproduces and reinforces those norms.3 Together, buildings within a city also help to shape the space outside their walls as well. Urban street space is more complex than building space because it is a collective creation. Urban planners, civic officials, residents, and users of the streets work together, and sometimes at cross-purposes, in order to create the use of the streets and the space along them. To fi nd one’s way to a specific location within a city, one must know or learn that society’s ideas about the proper use of space. Each trip to a shop at the edge of a city or a temple at its center reinforces cultural ideals and power relationships between the creators and users of urban space.4 In some recent studies of the Roman city it has been assumed that the organization of urban space with relation to the streets reflects elite interpretations of societal norms and that the elite were able to impose their ideals on the physical fabric of the city thanks to the coercive support of the civic or imperial government. 5 What has too often been forgotten is that residents of a city rarely agree completely on what societal norms should be. Class or ethnic divisions, for instance, can lead to competition as some people try using street space in new or opposing ways that are tolerated, accepted, or rejected. The great complexity of streets has only recently come to be appreciated by those who study ancient Roman urbanism. The purpose of the present

2


work is to examine one aspect of that complexity in depth. Using textual and archaeological evidence, this work explores the phenomenon of urban streets and how competing perceptions of streets influenced choices about the use of urban space in the western Roman Empire during the fi rst few centuries CE. In the past, classical archaeologists have taken streets for granted as they assumed their contribution to Roman urbanism was selfevident and thus warranted little attention. Whereas book-length studies of kindred subjects such as interurban roads, urban architecture, and ancient town planning are common, to date only one author has produced a book devoted exclusively to Roman streets.6 This neglect has caused us to overlook the unique contribution the study of streets can make to our overall understanding of Roman urbanism. The work that follows is intended to help fill the void in Roman street studies by providing techniques for analyzing street networks and the use of space within cities and showing how these techniques can be applied at four case-study sites, Pompeii, Ostia, Silchester, and Empúries, in order to illuminate the social processes that created the spatial layout of these sites.

APPROACHES TO URBAN STREETS Whereas urban streets have been the subject of much scholarly investigation, their role in organizing the use of space across the city has been little studied. For a long time archaeologists were fascinated with the orthogonal street plans of many Roman cities, particularly those in the west.7 The rigid grid surveyors laid out for new Roman colonies and for the new neighborhoods beside existing cities shaped the use of urban space for generations to come. The surveyors chose the location of the forum and the city gates, but beyond that residents decided how to use the space within the frame the surveyors created. Modern fascination with the grid form also influenced field archaeologists greatly. It is now a standard practice for those investigating a particular Roman city to locate and map the grid layout of that city as a prerequisite to understanding it, a process greatly facilitated through the use of aerial photography and other means of remote sensing.8 The end result of these types of investigations into the layout of specific Roman cities is usually a published plan showing the blocks and streets of uniform size arranged in a regular grid pattern. The outlines of standing architecture and excavated walls are usually added to these plans to create as complete a picture as possible of what is known about the site. As so little of most Roman cities has been excavated, rarely reaching even 10% of the total area within the ancient walls, most of the blocks and streets on such plans remain unexcavated blanks. Whereas scholars of ancient urbanism need these plans, they create a false impression of uniformity in which each empty street and block appears interchangeable and open to any use. Archaeologists reinforce the impression of the

Introduction

3

uniformity and interchangeability of urban streets in particular by the way they label the streets in their plans, designating each of the north-south streets decumanus and the east-west streets cardo, each followed by a letter or number.9 Whereas the question of the appropriateness of this nomenclature will be discussed in more detail in the fi rst chapter, the impression this creates is that Cardo A differs little from Cardo B and their only difference with Decumanus A is their orientation. The study of Roman streets made significant strides when archaeologists and classicists turned their attention away from the grid and began to explore the issue of movement along city streets. Only by going from one part of a city to another could an ancient urbanite begin to see which types of buildings, people, or activities were present and which were absent from certain neighborhoods and thus understand the role of specific buildings, monuments, and people in the larger physical and cultural context of the entire city. As one passed through an ancient Roman city he or she would either consciously or subconsciously “read” the individual elements, the grand temple, the shop displaying fruit, the stone blocking cart traffic, in order to understand the rules and larger cultural forces at work that led to the creation of that particular portion of the broader cityscape. Since the late 1970s, classicists and classical archaeologists seeking to elucidate how ancient residents and visitors would have interpreted the signs before them as they crossed a city have been heavily influenced by the work of modern urban geographer K. Lynch.10 Building on a structuralist theoretical framework, Lynch examined how people in three cities in the United States “read” the signs they saw in order to understand the cities. Lynch argued that people create a common culturally determined mental map that helps them navigate the city based on how it was they traversed it. Thus he argued modern urbanites form their perceptions of a city by interacting with the street network. Lynch described five elements of an urban network: “paths,” the streets that unite all areas of the city; “nodes,” points of intense focus such as shopping centers or busy intersections; “edges,” such as legal city limits and city walls; “landmarks,” distinctive architectural or natural monuments used as reference points; and “districts” or neighborhoods. A number of scholars of the Roman city have drawn on and modified Lynch’s ideas in order to gain insight into how ancient people interpreted urban environments. D. Scagliarini Corlàita examined the positioning of Augustan period (31 BCE–14 CE) honorary arches at several cities.11 She pointed out how their position within cities allowed them to mark the direction of paths, the edges of districts, and the location of nodes. Drawing on the archaeological evidence of Principate (late fi rst century BCE to midthird century CE) and early Late Antique period (mid-third to fi fth centuries CE) sites, W. MacDonald saw elements in Roman cities serving similar functions as those described by Lynch. He dubbed paths such as streets, plazas, and fora that facilitated movement “connective architecture,”

4


landmarks that helped guide people through the city and marked when one had come to a district edge “passage architecture,” and nodes, the places people needed or wanted to go, “public buildings.” MacDonald coined the term “armature” to describe the combination of these three elements in order to provide an organizational frame for not only passage through the city, but for a cognitive understanding of it.12 He argued an armature represents a shared image of what defi ned a city for a Roman and helped give citizens of a town and of the empire a common identity.13 P. Zanker was inspired by Lynch to produce three Stadtbilder, vignettes of what one would have seen passing through three different areas of Augustan Rome. Using a combination of literary and archaeological evidence, Zanker focused particularly on the impressions the various nodes and landmarks would have made on the passerby’s mind.14 F. Yegül examined the mile-and-a-half-long stretch of the main street at Ephesus in the same way by envisioning a person walking the street two millennia ago. Each building and monument he passed on his journey he described in terms of its architecture and position within the city fi rst, then how that architecture or placement would remind the pedestrian of historical events in Ephesus’ past or the contemporary religious traditions of the city.15 D. Favro wrote a much more ambitious description of two journeys across Rome, one during the civil unrest of 52 BCE and the other in 14 CE following the death of Augustus. Favro’s purpose in contrasting these two imaginary trips was to demonstrate how Augustus transformed the experience of traversing Rome and to clarify what message he was attempting to bring to the cityscape and thereby people’s understandings of the city as a whole and his place in it.16 S. Malmberg also wrote a description of what it must have been like to walk through the Subura district in Rome. He broadened the experience by adding details of not just what one would have seen but what one would have heard and smelled as well.17 K. Fridell Anter and M. Weilguni also described two visitors’ journeys through Pompeii, informing their accounts with statistical data from a space syntax analysis.18 They outlined how one visitor would interact with people in the city based on where she met them and how a second visitor would have found his way to an appropriate place to sell his produce. Lynch’s approach to understanding the city inspired other scholars of the Roman city who were investigating civic and religious processions. These scholars worked out possible processional paths through a variety of Roman cities by identifying the significance of various nodes and landmarks in the political and religious context of the city and determining what paths those engaged in a procession may have taken to pass all the points of significance.19 Lynch built his model from a complete data set; the cities he analyzed exist in their entirety and are fully populated. The data for Roman cities are much more fragmentary, forcing each of the studies mentioned above to focus on the evidence that was most easily available. As a result, all of the authors are quite consciously focused on the public sectors of the city

Introduction

5

and the role that public buildings and monuments constructed by the elite played in producing the form and image of the city. MacDonald’s armatures include only the main thoroughfares of a city whereas Favro’s imaginary pedestrians never stray from the primary routes through Rome to venture into the narrow, twisting side streets that were very common in the city, nor do they seem to notice anything except imperial monuments. Only Malmberg and Anter Fridell and Weilguni consider the role of private dwellings, shops, or workshops as nodes within the city; the others do not. 20 Yegül mentions a row of shops and a brothel at Ephesus only in passing and fails to explore the possible reaction he would have had to seeing these. 21 To date, the remains of seven temples and four arches have been excavated within the walls of Pompeii along the forum and the most important streets whereas more than 650 shops have been uncovered standing along the paths throughout the city. These nonelite structures must surely have had as great an impact on perceptions of the city and the creation of its identity as their much larger and richly constructed counterparts, if for no other reason than their sheer ubiquity across the urban core. Because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence, archaeologists and classicists tend to focus on just one or two of Lynch’s five elements. Whereas some have attempted to outline districts and their edges, 22 the authors mentioned above were primarily focused on how people reacted to the nodes and landmarks they would have passed while crossing the city along a specific path. In doing so, however, their primary interest was in the nodes and landmarks, not the paths. They rarely looked at how information about the paths helped to inform interpretations about the node or landmark. For instance, it would seem possible that ancient urbanites would view a temple located along a wide, busy thoroughfare differently from one along a narrow, quiet side street simply because of the context in which the temple was placed. Also, these scholars apply Lynch’s methodology to the data from Roman cities in a fairly descriptive and subjective way. 23 Whereas simply describing what they believe a contemporary person would see when walking past an arch or theater is interesting, such an approach makes it impossible to compare how one street compared to some other street in another part of the same city or with streets from a different city. This is not to say that the urban paths have been neglected in recent investigations. Since the 1990s, Roman streets, particularly those at Pompeii, have been the focus of some innovative research. B. Gesemann examined how the façades of all types of buildings would have been viewed from the streets of Pompeii. He was careful to consider the nature of the street when determining the impression the building façade would have made on passersby. S. Tsujimura concluded after a careful analysis of the ruts at Pompeii that carts did not have the freedom to travel along any street in the city but rather the routes of cart drivers were heavily circumscribed by narrow streets, corners with sharp angles, and intentionally placed blocking stones. 24 More than a decade later, E. Poehler extended Tsujimura’s work

6


by tracing how carts could have moved through Pompeii’s Regio VI utilizing overlooked wear patterns left by passing carts.25 Unfortunately, Poehler examined only one sector of Pompeii, and neither he nor Tsujimura placed their traffic patterns in context by discussing what types of buildings may have stood along a street that, for instance, allowed access to only one lane of cart traffic as opposed to two. All three of these authors also limited their observations to Pompeii only. R. Laurence took Roman street studies in new directions in the 1990s. 26 Like Gesemann, Laurence analyzed the location of many different types of architecture, not just public monuments, in relation to the streets of Pompeii. In addition, he was concerned with the entire street network, not just the main streets which interested his predecessors. Laurence also created ways to quantify data in order to describe and compare different streets at Pompeii. Going beyond selective descriptions of the main features of Roman urban streets, Laurence developed several simple statistics to categorize all streets. The earlier descriptive techniques based on Lynch’s methodology necessitated a limit on the amount of data to be analyzed, but Laurence’s statistical techniques allowed him to analyze a large amount of data and thereby explore the street network as a whole. For one statistic he divided the number of doorways along a street by its length. He did the same with the number of graffiti. Laurence also categorized different types of doorways and presented a ratio of two different doorway types along a street. 27 In addition to allowing him to describe and compare streets, these statistics allowed him to draw maps of Pompeii that gave the viewer information that anyone using that street would have noticed, giving the modern reader some feel as to the experience of traversing the city. 28 Most recently, studies have been focusing on the change to street networks over time within one location. R. Mar examined the evolution of traffic patterns in Ostia as the city grew and was rebuilt.29 He found over time the people of Ostia blocked vehicular traffic from some ritual areas while simultaneously facilitating cart movement between warehouses and the city’s gates and docks. D. Newsome traced the evolution of the street space around one house at Pompeii, demonstrating how rebuilding the Sanctuary of Apollo so that it narrowed an adjoining street had a ripple effect a block away leading to changes in access to one domestic building.30 Building on Lynch’s idea that perceptions of paths influence perceptions of nodes and landmarks by fi nding more statistical ways to describe streets and the buildings that line them provides some exciting possibilities for exploring Roman urbanism. Before we can investigate these possibilities, however, there is one central assumption that must be examined in a bit more detail. All the researchers mentioned so far assumed with very little critical evaluation that ancient Roman urbanites gained an understanding of their cities by traveling the paths in exactly the same way Lynch’s subjects did, observing nodes, landmarks, edges, and districts. Whereas it is certainly possible that there is continuity between how modern and ancient

Introduction

7

urbanites came to comprehend the city around them, we must be careful we are not imposing our modern views on the evidence from the past. Only MacDonald offered some evidence to show ancient and modern peoples shared a view of the city from the street.31 It is worth exploring the ancient written and pictorial evidence in some detail to demonstrate that Lynch’s approach actually does fit with surviving descriptions and representations of cities.

ANCIENT PERCEPTIONS OF PATHS, NODES, LANDMARKS, EDGES, AND DISTRICTS Ancient literary accounts dating to between the late fi rst century BCE and fourth century CE from a variety of genres that describe the perceived basic elements of cities as well as those that relate directions to particular destinations within cities bear a striking resemblance to Lynch’s subjects’ descriptions of what they perceived as they walked through modern cities. These similarities form a strong basis for the assumption that Romans of the Principate and early Late Antique period also came to understand their cities through culturally regulated responses to what they observed while walking in the streets. In the fi rst of his Ten Books on Architecture, written in the late fi rst century BCE, Vitruvius describes the establishment of a city and, in this way, also describes the importance of nodes, edges, and paths. He states that the city walls (edges) should be established fi rst, followed by the streets (paths) and then the “temples, forums, and other public places” (nodes and landmarks).32 Vitruvius appears to assume the streets will be arranged in a grid fashion but hardly discusses this aspect of urban planning. Similarly, in listing the basic elements of a city, the fi rst century CE philosopher Philo describes an architect who: . . . fi rst sketches in his own mind wellnigh all the parts of the city that is to be wrought out, temples, gymnasia, town-halls, market-places, harbours, docks, streets, walls to be built, dwelling houses as well as public buildings to be set up. Thus after having received in his own soul, as it were in wax, the figures of these objects severally, he carries about the image of a city which is the creation of his mind. 33 Thus the image of a city does not consist of a regularly planned grid for Philo, but rather nodes (gymnasia, town halls, marketplaces, harbors, docks, houses, and public buildings), paths (streets), and edges (walls). Second century CE authors also emphasize either the nodes or the paths of a city. The orator Aelius Aristides echoes Philo in describing a city as having “gymnasia, fountains, monumental approaches, temples, workshops [and] schools.”34 “Monumental approaches” is a reference to the streets that connect the nodes. In a famous and oft-quoted critique of the

8


claims of the Greek village of Panopeus to be a city, the travel writer Pausanias caustically remarks that the word city is inappropriate for a settlement whose citizens “ . . . possess no government offices, no gymnasium, no theatre, no market-place, no water descending to a fountain, but [who] live in bare shelters just like mountain cabins right on a ravine.”35 Again, his comments emphasize nodes, the government offices, gymnasium, and so on, and edges, the ravine, and a city wall which he mentions later in his comments. Pausanias assumes the existence of paths to connect them all, but fails to mention them specifically. By contrast, the novelist Achilles Tatius creates an image of Alexandria that emphasizes the paths through the city rather than the nodes describing them as straight and lined with colonnades. He mentions looking down every street to see the city’s many sights without ever specifying what any of those sights were. In a charming conclusion to the passage, he states his exasperation at being overwhelmed by the number of streets and their sights, exasperation intended as testimony to the greatness of such a vast city: “I explored therefore every street, and at last, my vision unsatisfied, exclaimed in weariness, ‘Ah, my eyes, we are beaten.’”36 This is an Alexandria of long, impressive paths and unspecified nodes and landmarks. The Late Antique teacher and orator Libanius penned several proud descriptions of his native city Antioch, again mentioning nodes such as baths, theaters, generic public and private buildings, markets, and council chambers, 37 all of which were linked by streets lined with colonnades.38 His contemporary, the poet Ausonius, describes Milan in similar terms.39 A pair of Late Antique catalogs or guides to the city of Rome, the Curiosum Urbis Regionum XIV and the Notitia Regionum XIV, known collectively as the Regionaries, gives a summary of the features of the city. Again, its organization emphasizes the city’s nodes, describing how many fountains or water-distribution points, bakeries, baths, shrines, warehouses or granaries, private homes, apartment buildings, public latrines, and brothels exist in each of the 14 regions of the city.40 Districts containing nodes and boundaries make up this view of the city. The idea of that people came to understand the ancient city by traveling its paths and noting its nodes and landmarks in particular appears in descriptions offering directions from one point to another within a city. It appears that very few urban streets, either in Rome itself or in other cities within the empire, had names.41 To compensate, authors had to rely on landmarks and nodes to help guide the reader or listener along the paths of the city when the author was offering directions. A fairly common landmark was one that pierces the boundary of the city wall, that is, the city gate. As early as the second century BCE, Plautus used a city gate as a reference point to direct his characters to a particular house.42 The comic playwright Terence wrote of a character who was given directions using not only a city gate but also a temple, a market, a pool, a wealthy man’s house, a bakery, and even a tree.43 Augustus erected the Golden Milestone in the Roman

Introduction

9

Forum, one of the purposes of which was to record the distances from the forum to each of the city’s gates.44 Vitruvius gave the location of the Temple of Fortune in Rome by stating it was near the Colline gate.45 Associations (collegia) of muleteers identified themselves by the nearest gate to which they were located.46 In the Vulgate, Christ also offered directions using the city gate as a starting point.47 A graffito confi rms the practice was in use at Pompeii as directions were given to a brothel from a city gate.48 Achilles Tatius described walking through Alexandria from one gate to another in a passage he probably wrote in the mid-second century CE.49 Other nodes guided those in an unfamiliar part of the city as well. Cicero described the location of a house to his brother in a letter by referring to a particular pool.50 A funerary inscription from Rome gave the location of the deceased’s shop with reference to a fountain.51 In a fanciful poem, Martial spoke to his newly completed book and instructed it how to fi nd the house in Rome of the person to whom the book was dedicated. He used prominent imperial landmarks and nodes as a guide such as the Temples of Castor, Vesta, and Cybele, the Palatine hill, and various prominent statues including the colossus of Nero.52 This great variety of literary and epigraphic evidence supports R. Ling’s conclusion that the street names or building numbers so familiar to those of us living in modern Western cities were not necessary for one to fi nd his or her way about an unfamiliar Roman city because the Romans were adept at navigating their urban environments using only paths, nodes, edges, and landmarks as clues.53 Not only do ancient images of Roman cities appear in literature, but also in sculpture, frescoes, and mosaics. These images rarely present a photographic view of the city. Instead, sculptors and mosaicists stripped cities of details until only the culturally perceived essentials remained and, as with the literary descriptions, edges, paths, landmarks, and nodes appear most commonly. A second century CE relief found near Alba Fucens, known as the Avezzano relief, probably depicts a generic cityscape because there are no strongly individualistic monuments indicated that may have been used to link the relief to a real city. 54 The viewer sees a city from a bird’s-eye perspective surrounded by a wall that is pierced by a large gate, the tallest single element represented on the relief. Its size indicates the importance of this node in defi ning both the edge of the city and the beginning of the urban street network. Beyond the wall are neat rows of buildings separated by wide streets. Most of the buildings have an individual appearance, although again not enough to suggest this represents a specific city. Despite the individuality of the buildings, it is difficult to determine any use for them. At three intersections stand elements probably denoting arches, landmarks that might be found in any major city. A fresco from the Oppian hill in Rome also represents a schematic rather than a photographic view of one city district. 55 It dates to the second half of the fi rst century CE and may represent the section of Rome that Nero rebuilt after the fi re of 64 CE. Again, like the Avezzano relief, we see a

10


district of a city from a bird’s-eye perspective enclosed by a city wall with towers. The wall is the most detailed element of the representation in that it is the only architectural form in the fresco in which the individual stone blocks that compose the wall are represented. Unlike the Avezzano relief, however, the city gate in this representation is very small and on the side farthest from the viewer, which downplays its prominence. Within the city wall is a theater and associated statue, possibly of Apollo, and to the right a large building with colonnades surrounding a courtyard and a tall room with a gabled roof opposite the entrance from the street. A statue stands in the middle of the courtyard. Between the theater and the colonnaded building is a large open space, probably a courtyard linking the two buildings. Other nondescript buildings appear in neatly arranged rows flanking nearly invisible streets. One of these streets leads to the gate whereas another crosses the main street at a right angle and passes in front of the colonnaded building and the theater. Here again we see nodes (the theater, colonnaded building, and gate), landmarks (the statues) linked by paths all enclosed by a boundary, the city wall. Whereas the Avezzano relief highlights private buildings and the fresco from the Oppian hill focuses on public buildings, both artists drew from the same perception of how to see and understand a city. This form of representing a city through its walls, gates, the streets within it, and occasionally a few buildings is a common motif throughout the history of Roman art. 56 In the illustrations accompanying the writings of the Roman land surveyors, cities appear again in this simplified form, although on a much smaller scale in order to fit on the page with the text. J. Carder has called this repetitive form for representing cities the “city vignette” and argues that it changed little from the end of the Republic to the Late Antique period. He offers a number of very similar examples from a variety of time periods and a variety of media to support his point. 57 The consistency of the city vignette suggests it was a powerful way of representing the basic image of a Roman city. The Torolonia relief is another marble representation, this time of a defi nitely known cityscape the Late Antique port of Rome, Portus. 58 In the relief, a ship sails into the harbor of the city represented in the lower righthand corner by a mooring ring and by various people engaged in unloading cargo. Behind these symbolic indications of the harbor stand various landmarks that probably once stood in Portus, including statues set on pedestals, columns, and an arch. In the background also looms the harbor’s lighthouse with flames and smoke billowing out the top. Like the city gate in the Avezzano relief, the lighthouse is the tallest single element and represents not only the boundary of the city, but also the point at which that boundary is pierced as the lighthouse would have stood at the entrance to the harbor. The form of representation is very different in this relief in that it is not a bird’s-eye view but instead all of these monuments are superimposed on one another in a kind of collage of urban nodes and landmarks.

Introduction

11

Another unusual representation that can clearly be identified as representing Rome is a plan carved in marble that is a cross between modern architectural plans and urban street maps known as the Forma Urbis Romae.59 Displayed in the Templum Pacis or Forum of Peace in Rome, the surviving fragments date to around 200 CE. The artists who carved the Forma Urbis depicted the city at a scale of 1:240.60 They outlined the footprints of buildings and fi lled in the internal details of walls, stairs, and doorways. The voids between the buildings represent streets. Unfortunately, none of the surviving fragments represent a section of the city walls, so we do not know whether or how these were represented. The artists clearly defi ned the pathways, or streets, as well as some selected nodes. In order to make public nodes such as temples,61 theaters, gladiatorial schools, and amphitheaters stand out from the other mass of buildings, the carvers marked these with special symbols.62 The modifications highlighted these nodes, helping viewers to orient themselves on the map just as they used these monuments to orient themselves while traveling within Rome. One last image of an identifiable city is particularly relevant because the city is represented as if one were walking through it. 63 The fifth century CE Megalopsychia Hunt Mosaic was found in the southeastern Turkish village of Yakto near the border with Syria and also near the ancient Roman town of Daphne, a suburb of the city of Antioch. Antioch was considered one of the four great cities of the Late Antique Roman Empire along with Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria. The majority of the mosaic sports various hunting scenes typical of Late Antique mosaics. The border of the mosaic, however, has a unique scene that appears to represent what one would see walking through Antioch and then along the road to Daphne. Although the mosaic is badly damaged, enough remains to see that there is no intention of representing all the buildings and monuments along the route in a comprehensive way. Instead, selected nodes (a forum or plaza, a racetrack, churches, and houses represented in a generic manner but labeled with their owner’s names) and landmarks (statues and perhaps an imperial palace) that a pedestrian could not have helped but notice line the route. This mosaic emphasizes the experiential nature of the Roman understanding of their cities further by placing generic pedestrians walking briskly in front of the buildings portrayed. The written and pictorial evidence supports the contention, which has formed the basis of so much recent work on streets and the urban environment, that the Lynchian model can be applied in the Roman context. Accepting this, however, only takes us so far in trying to understand how ancient perceptions of the paths in particular helped determine the use of space within the city: Lynch’s approach has some serious drawbacks. Lynch treats only the main through routes of cities and sees all of these paths as equal, but of course in a Roman city this was not so. Latin has a surprising variety of words to describe urban streets, which suggests recognition of different types of streets. Ancient cities differ from modern ones in that

12


they are often enclosed with a wall. Residents could have perceived streets that reached a gate and led out of the city differently than a dead-end street. Lynch’s approach is also descriptive, it has no quantitative element, making it difficult to use it to analyze large amounts of data presented by all the streets in a city. The descriptive approach makes it difficult to compare streets within the same city and between cities. The purpose of this work is to move beyond Lynch’s work to outline new ways we can analyze streets and understand their role in the creation and use of urban space.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN ROMAN STREET STUDIES The Latin language has a number of words that refer to streets and plazas. In the fi rst chapter it is argued that the defi nitions of some Latin terms for urban streets contain connotations as to whether a street was a major through route giving access to many parts of the city as well as a forum and/or city gate, or a minor side street that served to segregate some areas from the rest of the city. Latin vocabulary also distinguishes a central forum from other urban plazas. Roman authors deployed that vocabulary carefully, making it clear that they felt certain activities were more appropriate for one type of street or plaza than for another. Textual references also make it clear that ancient urbanites did not always agree along which types of streets some activities should be placed. The individual elements of the street network that can be identified in the Latin vocabulary can also be identified in the archaeological record in a standardized and quantifiable way. In Chapter 2 a methodology is suggested for quantifying data about the role of a street or plaza within the overall street network and about the use of space that lined each pathway through the city. Whereas this methodology is adapted from the work of modern urban geographers as well as classical archaeologists, it provides quantifiable techniques for describing the elements of the street network based on some of the key features identified from ancient authors discussed in the fi rst chapter. These methods also make it possible to search for patterns in the use of space to determine whether these elements were utilized in different ways, thus demonstrating that they had meaning to ancient urbanites and that perceptions of these elements and the proper use of space along them helped to create the ancient cityscape. This last forms a hypothesis that can be tested with real data. Four case-study cities provide sufficient data to test the hypothesis that different features of streets had meaning to Roman city dwellers and influenced how they made use of urban space. This number of examples allows for in-depth comparisons between the structures of different street networks and the use of space at the sites without making the scale of the project unwieldy. Chapters 3 through 6 present these case studies. To be selected as a case-study city, several criteria had to be met. The city had

Introduction

13

to have a majority of the area within the city walls completely investigated through excavation. This criterion eliminated most cities simply because few are excavated so extensively. Excavation costs are prohibitive and modern settlements on top of ancient cities often preclude the uncovering of a large portion of a given site. To excavate more than half of a Roman city usually required the work of different teams over a number of years. The publication of those excavations was another crucial criterion for inclusion as a case-study city. Excavations had to be published with sufficient data about the stratigraphy and architecture of the site to determine the use of each street, plaza, and building at a particular time in the site’s history. To facilitate research on the site, at least one comprehensive synthesis of that research had to have been published that summarized interpretations about the use of each space at the site over time. These syntheses provided a starting point for research and a baseline interpretation for the use of all spaces in the city that could be checked against the data of previous and subsequent investigations. The case-study cities also had to be available for current reconnaissance so that published interpretations of the use of buildings could be checked on the ground.64 Visiting each site also provided the opportunity to make observations and measurements of the streets that had not been made before and to experience the act of traversing the streets, providing a glimpse into what that experience must have been like roughly two millennia ago. Another criterion was that there had to be some type of epigraphic, historical, or archaeological evidence that suggested the city had been granted a designation such as colonia or municipium, proving the Romans considered the site to have been an urban environment. A street layout in the form of an orthogonal grid is another indication the Romans considered a settlement to be urban in nature.65 Grids only appear at Roman sites of a certain size; an orthogonal layout was an accoutrement of urban life that small towns did not enjoy.66 Finally, the sites had to be in the western half of the Mediterranean where Latin and Roman urban culture dominated. The structure of cities in the east was influenced by a variety of urban cultures, making it difficult to determine if there was a Roman structure to street networks and the use of space along them distinct from those of other cultures. Only a handful of Roman sites meet all of these criteria, the most obvious of which is Pompeii. Most of the site is laid out on a grid, large portions of the site have been uncovered, the site has been thoroughly published, and it is open to investigation. In addition, Pompeii’s streets have been the subject of more research than any other Roman city, making it an excellent place to begin a study of streets. Ostia has much in common with Pompeii, meeting all of the criteria outlined above, making it a good city to compare with Pompeii. The site also provides for some useful contrasts. Thanks to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, we see Pompeii as it appeared in 79 CE. Ostia was a city in use for centuries after Pompeii ceased to exist. Whereas constant building and rebuilding

14


subjected Ostia to much change, it is possible to determine how space in much of the city was being used in the Severan era (roughly the early third century CE). This opens up the possibility of comparing the use of street networks from different time periods to determine if and how they differed. For further contrast, sites outside of Italy were required. Like Pompeii and Ostia, the British site of Silchester also has a grid layout, is well published, and is one of only two Roman cities in which the entire area within the city walls has been excavated.67 The site offers some illustrative contrasts with its Italian counterparts, however. Unlike Pompeii and Ostia, the Roman city at Silchester was not a port city but rather was far inland at the crossing of two long-distance roads. It was also much less densely occupied than the other two cities, allowing us to examine the impact of intensity of land use on the street network and the use of space along it. Finally, Empúries again met all of the basic requirements mentioned above but is located in Spain, providing for more regional contrast. The site also gives us the opportunity to study potential cultural differences between Greek and Roman urban planning. Whereas Empúries had been part of the Roman Empire since the third century BCE, the inhabitants of an independently walled neighborhood at the site known as Neapolis maintained a strong Greek cultural identity while those in the adjacent Ciudad Romana neighborhood clearly identified more with Roman culture. One other unique advantage to Empúries as a case-study city is that whereas the Neapolis neighborhood is about 95% excavated, the Ciudad Romana is less than 10% excavated. The entire street network of the Roman neighborhood has been uncovered through aerial photography, presenting the opportunity to apply the techniques outlined in the second chapter to a portion of a site little excavated. This example will show what information can be obtained from the city’s plan and the little bit of excavation that has taken place there. Empúries was also attractive for this study, thanks to the author’s familiarity with the site. Although the author has published on Empúries before,68 the current work offered the opportunity to apply new techniques to familiar data. Cities are complex entities whose spatial organization at any given moment is shaped by topography, economics, history, technology, politics, and a myriad of other factors. The streets of Roman cities provided a frame that residents fi lled in with a variety of construction projects. Not all streets within this frame were equal because streets played different roles within the network. The following chapters explore the role of streets in the formation of the cityscape and how moving about those streets influenced what activities people felt were appropriate along specific parts of the street network. After exploring the Latin vocabulary for urban streets, outlining techniques for examining the archaeological remains of street networks, and applying those techniques, the fi nal chapter considers the implications of this work for the study of Roman urbanism. The study fi nds ways of arranging space within a city that are particularly characteristic of Roman

Introduction

15

urbanism. The fact that these ways of arranging space are found in provincial cities suggests one way in which cities helped acculturate the people of the provinces to a Roman way of life.

1


The introduction argued that streets played a major role in how people perceived of and came to understand the ancient Roman city. The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on this thesis by exploring the textual evidence. The chapter begins by addressing the question of who was responsible for deciding where to place buildings with specific uses and by outlining the limited role of civic government in those decisions. Zoning laws were lacking and laws for the maintenance of streets required the involvement of private property owners, demonstrating a public–private partnership in which individuals had a great deal of power to shape the urban landscape. We then turn to the issue of how Roman urbanities perceived of streets and how those perceptions shaped ideas about the proper use of space. The Latin vocabulary for urban streets and plazas illustrates a conception by which streets could be divided into categories based on their physical attributes. Ancient city dwellers deemed specific activities appropriate in the context of different types of streets and plazas, further influencing how they made decisions about the use of urban space. One caveat in dealing with textual evidence, familiar to classicists, is worth reiterating at the outset. The vast majority of the surviving literary evidence pertains only to Rome; literary evidence relating to urban life outside of Rome is scarce. It is difficult to determine how much urban life and law in Rome, an atypical Roman city in terms of size, history, and political role, reflected daily life and civic practices in other cities in the empire. Nonetheless, enough evidence does survive to allow us to take as a working hypothesis that at least from the late Republican through middle Late Antique periods, approximately from the fi rst century BCE through the fourth century CE, there was a common urban culture that can be called “Roman” from which citizens of all cities drew in order to create the form of their cities. Roman cities of the Principate and Late Antique period have a similarity in design and layout, which would seem to support this hypothesis.1 A handful of inscriptions that document charters for the founding of new cities also offer some supportive evidence. The Tabula Heracleensis, an inscription recording the municipal charter for the southern Italian city of Heraclea, repeats passages that are taken from the laws promulgated by


17

Julius Caesar for Rome.2 Several charters excavated in Spain that date to the Flavian era (69–96 CE) all share some provisions, and in some cases even the same wording, with one another.3 It seems clear that these charters, which established the organizational structure of a new city as well as some of its initial laws, were drafted from an original prototype, probably in Rome.4 The charters, and Roman urban culture in general, were adapted to fit local needs, but it is not unreasonable to assume that the urban culture and laws present in Rome had counterparts, albeit on a smaller scale, in the cities across the empire. The hypothesis that there was some form of Roman urban culture will be tested with the archaeological evidence from the case-study cities and evaluated in the fi nal chapter.

WHO DECIDED HOW TO USE URBAN SPACE? Today the decision for how to use an existing structure or what type of new structure to build at a particular location within a city is made by the individual property owner in consultation with representatives of the civic government. Careful study of Roman laws and the charters for founding new colonies reveals that Roman civic officials had a rather decided lack of interest in, or perhaps ability to, regulate and control the placement of buildings within cities. 5 The only passages that can be considered zoning laws come from a Flavian colonial charter found in Spain that probably repeats a text written more than a hundred years earlier, the Lex Coloniae Genetivae Juliae, also known as the Osuna bronzes.6 This charter forbids the burial of the dead within city walls,7 a statute that also applied to Rome,8 the construction of crematoria,9 and the operation of large kilns producing more than 300 roofi ng tiles per day.10 These fi rst two prohibitions relate to a fear of ritual pollution of having the dead and the living occupying the same space. They also represent the common practice around the Mediterranean at the time and so must have had little impact on the shape of cities. P. Goodman has cautioned against viewing the ban on large tile kilns as an attempt at civic zoning for reasons of safety because other industries that also used large kilns were not banned from the city. In addition, she points out the penalty for violating the ban was that the city could take over the kiln, not that it should be dismantled. She does not see this as a zoning law but as an economic one insulating large civic tilemaking operations from competition.11 In Rome we know of at least one prohibition against drinking establishments from a street or district with the resulting name of the Vicus Sobrium or either “Sober Street” or “Sober District.” The prohibition was not legal, however, but religious because a shrine of Apollo on the street required offerings of milk rather than wine.12 This is not to say that governments had no control over how a particular parcel of property was used. Civic governments controlled public space, such as that in and around the forum. Their permission also had to be

18 Roman Urban Street Networks sought for the construction of certain types of buildings. In a letter, Pliny records how he requested permission from both the emperor and the civic government of Tifernum for building an imperial-cult temple in the town. He asked the town council to choose a site for the temple, but they deferred to Pliny’s judgment in the matter.13 Despite examples such as these, individual property owners clearly had a great deal more power to shape the urban landscape than their modern counterparts. In Roman society, class was a major preoccupation and the worldview of different classes had a major impact on decisions about how to use urban locations. Roman class structure was complex and nuanced. Unfortunately, most of that nuance is lost in the surviving archaeological evidence to be examined in the following chapters. We can, however, discern at least two competing perceptions of the use of urban space in the textual record, although there were no doubt more: that of the ruling elite and that of the nonelite entrepreneurs, some of whom were freedmen.14 These two classes held differing worldviews, which had an impact on the appearance of the cityscape. Ancient literature informs us of an elite view that sees the purpose of organized urban space as a demonstration of civilization and good governance in opposition to the barbarity and lack of order in the wild.15 This view is most articulately outlined by Plato, whose thoughts on the ideal urban life and governance many elite Romans read and admired.16 Plato listed the types of buildings and public spaces necessary in the ideal city, including an agora, or central space for markets, and the discussion of laws, temples, schools for training the minds and bodies of the youth, houses, and workshops for craftsmen.17 Plato opposed all types of trade because this would lead to greed and direct citizens away from virtue.18 He also felt manual labor took time away from the contemplation of virtue and thus saw it as a necessary evil within his city-state. The Roman elite disdained manufacturing and retail trade, at least in public, even passing a law in 218 BCE forbidding senators from participating in certain types of commerce.19 It is perhaps no surprise that there is little mention of these aspects of civic life in surviving Roman literature. 20 The nonelite had a very different view of the use of urban space, particularly when it came to the issues of trade and manufacturing. Probably because these were important pursuits in which they engaged, the nonelite did not ignore or shudder at the mention of such activities; quite to the contrary, during the Principate such activities were an important element in their self-identification, particularly for freedmen and women. 21 Even a cursory examination of funerary monuments shows that far from being ashamed of their work in trade or manufacturing, the nonelite were proud of it and would record their vocations for posterity. One of the most flamboyant examples of a freedman proud of the work he did and the wealth it brought him can be found in the tomb of Eurysaces in Rome, built, according to one theory, to look like a giant bread-kneading machine. In the inscription over the entrance to the tomb, Eurysaces proclaimed his job


19

of baker and the reliefs on the sides of the tomb show many of the steps in the baking process. 22 Funerary reliefs from Ostia depict people selling vegetables and meats as well as sharpening knives and blacksmithing.23 In Mérida, Spain, a deceased woman is depicted as drawing wine from a large cask to serve customers; her role as barmaid is proudly immortalized for posterity. 24 Not only do the themes in nonelite art differ, but R. Bianchi Bandinelli has drawn attention to the way the elite and nonelite developed contemporary yet separate styles of sculpture. 25 Classicists have read elite Roman authors to portray the nonelite as outsiders longing to be like their elite counterparts, missing the active way they constructed their own separate identities by, among other ways, arranging the use of space within cities. 26 Roman cities had at least two subcultures that competed for the use of urban space. Admittedly the division between elite and nonelite ideals of the cityscape is more one of self-representation than actual economic reality. The elite did not hesitate to participate in commerce and industry, although they associated such activities with the nonelite class. The elite could rent out portions of their large homes to shopkeepers or bakers. 27 They were careful to mask this participation, however, by separating the entrances of their houses from morally shameful entrepreneurial pursuits such as bars, even if the bar was built into the actual fabric of the house. 28 They also used freedmen to carry out the work of building and renting out structures to others. 29 The elite wanted to present themselves as patrons of the city who built structures to benefit the civic and religious lives of citizens. Hence they placed inscriptions and statues commemorating their participation on, in, or in front of temples and governmental structures whereas such attempts at individual self-aggrandizement never appear in association with a row of shops or a laundry. In reality, the lives of elites and nonelites were intertwined, even though they strove to convince each other that they were separate. Three images of the forum at Pompeii bring out most dramatically the conflict between the elite and nonelite publicly espoused views of the uses of urban space. One is from an altar found in the House of L. Caecilius Iucundus and is famous for showing the destruction in the forum from the earthquake of 62 CE. In this image are temples, arches, and statues; the forum is the place of piety (the temple) and good government (a pair of equestrian statues probably depicting good administrators and arches dedicated to emperors). Nothing in the image indicates the commercial activity in the forum. One of a pair of frescoes from the House of Julia Felix at Pompeii also depicts the elite use of the forum whereas a companion fresco shows the nonelite use of the same space. 30 In the fi rst, four men clad in togas read notices posted at the bases of equestrian statues while a doubletiered colonnade festooned with garlands looms behind. Again we see a well-governed city in which elite citizens participate in civic government. The second panel also features a festooned colonnade helping to establish the location as the forum. The foreground is filled with a confusion of men,

20 Roman Urban Street Networks women, and even children engaged in buying, selling, and browsing items on display. 31 Toga-clad men do not dominate this scene; instead, at this point in time the forum has been taken over by the nonelite, who have no interest in civic governance; rather they desire to engage in commerce for their own benefit. The fact that these two diametrically opposed views of the forum appear together in the same house further shows the complex, interrelated nature of the relationship between elite and nonelite. Whether they belonged to the elite or nonelite class, property owners had the power, of course, to decide how their property would be used. We will never know how widespread property ownership was in a Roman city. Whereas the elite clearly owned property, we have evidence for the nonelite owning property and making decisions about how to use it as well. Juvenal wrote about a freedman entrepreneur who owned five shops.32 Deciding who or what type of businesses could use his shops gave this man some power over shaping the character of one or more neighborhoods. Ownership arrangements could be complicated, giving more than one person a say in how an individual property might be used. The jurist Scaevola mentioned 15 freedmen who inherited a portion of just one shop.33 One can only imagine how such a large group would have managed this property. Slaves could, occasionally, also have a hand in making the decision about to whom they should rent their masters’ property and how those renters could use that property. In Pompeii a rental advertisement for a house and shops directs the interested party to contact the slave Primus. 34 Renters also had a say in how they used urban buildings during the Principate and Late Antique period; the buildings’ owners were not the sole arbiters. Laurence argues rental properties dominated the housing market at Pompeii.35 If he is right, the number of renters was great. The wellknown rental notice from the House of Julia Felix advertised “shops with upper rooms” for rent. 36 Nowhere in the notice does it specify what types of activities the owner or her agent wanted to see in the shops; that was open to negotiation. A third century CE papyrus document found in Egypt was a proposal from a potential renter to the city government about how he would like to turn a city-owned workshop into a tavern. 37 We do not know how civic officials responded. The fourth-century orator Libanius bragged that he convinced a shopkeeper to move to another shop so that Libanius could open a school in what he perceived to be an excellent location. 38 The tale is particularly interesting because he failed to mention contacting the owner of the property to ask if the exchange was permissible. Elite and nonelite used urban space, and particularly urban streetscapes, as the place to assert their views of the city and contest those of others. The fi rst century CE poet Martial describes the struggle between the emperor and shopkeepers for control of Rome’s streets as the shopkeepers used them for displaying their goods while the emperor tried to keep the streets free for the passage of government officials.39 Three centuries later the struggle continued. The poet Ausonius lamented in Bordeaux the way nonelite


21

residents crowd the city’s otherwise splendid boulevards, bringing with them pigs, dogs, and oxen. He concluded “ . . . the broad streets lose their name of boulevard for the mob herded there.”40 The patrician Ausonius and the plebeian “mob” clearly had different ideas about the appropriate activities intended for a boulevard. At any given moment the Roman city of the late Republican through Late Antique periods was a grand compromise between these competing views of the purpose of the city and how space should be used. Elite and nonelite urbanites were dependent upon one another and the city could not exist without either class even if the discordant descriptions given above suggest otherwise. Despite their differing views of the city, each could tolerate the other and endure what the city became. In a passage from a letter to a friend, Seneca commented on this ability of Roman urbanites to accept the city as a whole, even if parts of it failed to live up to their class ideal: Naturally these eyes, which cannot bear marble unless it is colored and shining from recent polishing . . . which at home do not wish to see a floor under foot unless it is more costly than gold, these eyes observe with an even temper rough and dirty streets, fi lthy people, as are the greater part of those they see, and the crumbling walls of apartment buildings full of cracks and out of alignment. What, therefore, is different? Why do these things not offend us in public but disturb us at home? We have an even and patient temperament while out, but a fastidious and complaining temperament while at home.41

STREETS IN THE LAW The role of government in deciding the use of urban space was limited. Civic governments exerted more influence over the use of streets. According to the surviving Roman legal codes, the basic principle that guided laws with regard to streets was that whereas the civic government owned city streets, the individuals who owned street frontage were responsible for maintaining them.42 This public–private partnership was probably a result of the inability of governments to fully monitor and control what happened along city streets. The size of municipal staffs and their budgets were tiny when compared with modern Western cities. Civic officials, usually the aediles, must have spent all of their time simply trying to keep the city functioning as much as possible by enlisting or coercing cooperation from the city’s inhabitants.43 With these limitations in mind, Roman law with regard to civic streets was focused on two primary goals: keeping the streets passable and clean while controlling vehicular traffic. The Digest of Justinian is very explicit about the need to keep streets passable;44 nonetheless, this goal must have presented a huge challenge. Most cities lacked regularly scheduled garbage pickup and most homes did not have toilets;

22


people deposited waste in cesspits when the space was available.45 For those who had too little open space for this form of disposal, the streets provided a natural dumping ground. Urbanites lacking either the desire or the ability to visit a public latrine emptied their chamber pots into streets, sometimes from windows several stories up to the detriment of those walking below.46 Frontinus explained that the overflow from public fountains was intended to wash away some of the fi lth that collected in city streets and periodic rainstorms must have helped as well because drain spouts from roofs and overflow pipes from cisterns were frequently trained on the streets.47 Other types of waste also wound up in the streets. Residents used the street to discard broken pots and other garbage, again making it difficult for pedestrians.48 Comments on the garbage in city streets occur in ancient texts dating from the Republican through Late Antique periods. Personal letters and historical texts record specific examples of the waste that ended up in the streets, legal texts report attempts to control the problem, and satires and comedic plays mock the phenomenon. A notice in Herculaneum at the intersection of 4th Upper Cardo and the Decumanus Maximus, a prominent intersection near the forum, prohibited dumping. The fact that this notice was renewed twice49 shows that leaving refuse was a problem even in such a visible location. Roman law also had to deal specifically with the removal of beds that had been abandoned in public streets, a serious obstacle that must have played havoc with traffic flow.50 Draft animals added to the filth in the streets as well as domesticated animals being herded to market. We have casual references to pack animals, 51 cattle, 52 a young colt,53 and more than one “muddy sow” in the streets.54 Pliny even explained that the pigs leading their herds through cities were smart enough to learn their way to the city forum and back home again. 55 All of these references suggest that individual and herds of animals were not an uncommon sight in Rome and other cities. The remains of butchered animals, the carcasses of dead pets, semiferal dogs, and birds, as well as the bodies of impoverished and forgotten men and women, also appeared in the streets to such an extent that laws were enacted to attempt to control such pollution.56 Apuleius even reported on the bodies of dead bears intended for the arena being left in public streets.57 Although his account is fictional, it must have seemed plausible to his audience. Several sources emphasize the role of the aedile in cleaning up the streets as well as the overwhelming nature of that task. As early as the late third to early second century BCE, the playwright Plautus had a scene in which a slave began to busily clean up the façade of his master’s house and the street in front of it when he heard his master was returning from a long journey. A bystander watching the slave joked to the audience, “Without being elected he is serving as an aedile.”58 In a story from the fi rst century CE repeated by more than one source, the emperor Caligula, who became annoyed at the future emperor Vespasian when he was a civic official for failing to keep the streets clean, ordered soldiers to smear Vespasian’s toga with mud to


23

make his point. 59 Vespasian’s failure indicates dirty streets must have been a real problem in Roman cities despite the best efforts of civic officials. Complaints about dirty urban streets are standard in descriptions of urban life under the Principate.60 To attempt to control the filth in the streets that might block pedestrian and vehicular traffic, laws required property owners to make certain that the portion of the street that passed their houses was clean and in good repair.61 During the Principate in Rome, various civic officials, particularly the aediles, were in charge of making certain that people fulfi lled these duties and also of conducting major repairs to the roads.62 The civic code lex Irnitana discovered in Spain also suggests that among their other duties, two aediles in the provincial cities were in charge of constructing and maintaining urban streets.63 In Rome the curators of streets may have had a staff of public slaves to help them with their repair and cleaning work;64 in the province of Bithynia, Pliny reports that he put prisoners to work on such projects.65 Either practice may have prevailed elsewhere. Nonetheless, in Rome, and probably other places as well, the aediles were authorized to assess the property owner for repair and maintenance services. These assessments were probably based on how much street frontage a particular person owned along the street that was being repaired.66 Some aediles directed the paving of streets using funds voted for the purpose by the Roman senate, or even paid for it out of their own purses.67 As a service to their city, some wealthy residents, including at least one woman, paid for paving a street even though they were under no obligation to do so.68 A paved surface would have facilitated keeping the streets clean and clear for traffic, although not all streets in any given city, Rome included, were paved.69 Water from rain or the overflow of fountains could have washed the waste in the streets away more easily if the street was equipped with subsurface drains. At the same time, civic officials promulgated laws to keep streets clean specifically so that wheeled vehicles might pass.70 Roman law placed severe restrictions on the movement of vehicles. Julius Caesar banned heavy vehicles (plostra, singular plostrum) from Rome until 10 hours after sunrise, that is, around twilight and into the night, a ban that remained in effect during the Principate. This ban exempted carts carrying materials for public and religious construction projects and, as mentioned above, those removing cesspit waste from the city as well as carts used for special civil and religious ceremonies.71 Plostra, a variant of plaustra,72 is the only term mentioned in the ban; presumably lighter carts and gigs were exempt.73 A few other references indicate a concern on the part of the emperors to limit cart traffic within cities. Suetonius reported that Claudius required cart drivers and those riding horses to dismount and walk through cities in Italy.74 Other emperors limited the weight of a load carts were allowed to bring into the city75 and renewed Claudius’s ban on mounted horsemen and cart drivers from all cities across the empire, not just Italy.76 The fact that

24


later emperors had to renew many of these laws demonstrates the difficulty of enforcing them. Whereas we may not fully understand what the exact terms of these laws were, what is interesting about them is the disregard for the needs of cart drivers within Roman cities. Clearly their needs were of secondary interest to politicians. Authors during the Principate and Late Antique period deemed the presence of carts and the animals pulling them a nuisance and even an outright danger.77 Horace mentioned the noise and dust of carts.78 Pliny complained that the buildings shook violently when carts passed.79 Juvenal and Ausonius deplored the shouting and coarse vocabulary of cart drivers.80 Juvenal also feared that if an axle should break and a cart pours a heavy load on a passerby, “the poor man’s crushed body disappears completely, as does his soul.”81 His fear was not just poetic hyperbole; things did fall out of carts causing property damage82 and bodily harm.83 To make matters worse, Roman law provided little redress for physical injuries caused by a passing errant cart. When a slave was killed by a careless cart driver, the owner could seek compensation for the slave’s value from the driver. When a free person was killed, no compensation was available because Roman law provided no way of establishing a monetary value for anyone who had not been purchased.84 Libanius described an incident in which he was riding a horse down one of the streets in Antioch when a muleteer ahead tried to turn his team around, and presumably his cart. The street was so narrow and the mules so near that it startled his horse, who nearly threw Libanius to the cobbles. Fortunately the people nearby calmed the horse before it caused him harm.85 One can see why, when Libanius described a street scene in his panegyric on Antioch, he compared the pedestrian traffic to the unbroken flow of a stream. Nowhere in this description of a street scene did he mention a cart.86 In fact, in his entire panegyric, he never once mentioned vehicular traffic. Carts were not part of his ideal city. One very simple way around this prejudice against carts was the use of pack animals and human porters against which we hear few complaints and know of no legal restrictions.87

THE LATIN VOCABULARY FOR URBAN STREETS: A CAVEAT The way Romans used their vocabulary for urban streets provides further clues as to how they perceived them and what activities were appropriate for different categories of streets. Before discussing the vocabulary Romans used to designate streets, the expression of a caveat is in order. Any attempt to see ancient streetscapes through Roman eyes is clouded by the vocabulary archaeologists have chosen to describe the streets of excavated cities. Long ago, J. Ward-Perkins and F. Castagnoli88 independently called for the abandonment of the terms decumanus and kardo89 to describe urban streets at


25

archaeological sites, a call that has unfortunately gone unheeded. Modern archaeologists have adopted these two Latin words as a convenient shorthand to aid in the mapping and description of Roman cities that have been laid out in an orthogonal pattern. No ancient reference, however, sustains the use of decumanus in describing a street in a working city and only one inscription from Orange offers an example of the use of the word kardo in a city, albeit in the ceremonial context of civic display which does not necessarily represent the daily use of the term.90 Archaeologists have labeled decumani the parallel streets in the grid that run in an east-west direction whereas kardines are those that run north-south. Archaeologists refer to the two central streets that cross at or near the forum of a city the decumanus maxiumus and kardo maximus. 91 Roman surveyors borrowed these terms from augury and employed them to describe the boundaries that divided both rural land into plots and the streets that divided military camps. The surveyors did not use the terms as precisely and consistently as modern archaeologists because the kardo and decumanus could face any direction; orientation could be determined as much by terrain or existing road systems as it could by the cardinal directions.92 Because some Roman cities started out as military camps and because the surveyors who laid out Roman cities probably received the same training as ones who laid out the rural boundaries and the camps, archaeologists have assumed that surveyors used the terms decumanus and kardo in the planning and layout out of new cities. This assumption may be correct, but the usage of decumanus and kardo does not appear to have permeated beyond the world of surveyors to the general public who populated cities. These two terms have taken on a modern archaeological meaning that differs from their ancient Latin meanings, a point most archaeologists and classicists fail to mention as it simply came to be understood decades ago.93 Unfortunately the archaeological meanings of decumanus and kardo have entered the popular literature on Roman urbanism as ancient Roman terms, not modern archaeological ones, for parallel urban streets with a specific orientation.94 Below a new archaeological vocabulary for describing the role of a street in the urban network is purposed that makes our assumptions explicit, rather than hiding them behind Latin terminology that has been pried from its original context.

THE LATIN VOCABULARY FOR URBAN STREETS AND PLAZAS Anthropologists and linguists have long recognized that by analyzing the structure of language and its vocabulary they can gain insight into a culture. The vocabulary we use for urban streets in English reveals our tendency to conceive of streets in physical terms. Street is, of course, the most generic term we employ, but we use other more specific vocabulary as well. The narrow street between two buildings lacking sidewalks is an alley,

26


which is similar to a lane, a narrow street lined by buildings or walls with or without sidewalks usually found in the country. An avenue is an urban street wider than an alley or lane and is more formally planned. Buildings are typically set back from avenues and the intervening space is filled with sidewalks, lawns, and often trees. A boulevard is the widest urban street of all, also formally planned and with buildings separated from the street by sidewalks, lawns, and rows of trees and often including a median as well. Highways in the traditional sense were features of the countryside and only began to encroach on the modern cityscape after World War II, sometimes being raised on pylons or buried in tunnels but always lined with barriers separating them from the surrounding city. The Latin vocabulary for urban streets also has shades of meaning, shades that are frequently lost when words like via and vicus are translated with the generic term “street.” A careful analysis of how Roman authors use the Latin vocabulary for urban streets demonstrates that whereas the English vocabulary is based primarily on a physical description of the street, Latin terms, while certainly having that material component, were also based on how a street was perceived. This difference may seem minor, but in fact it is of vital importance in elucidating how the Romans understood their urban environments. The meanings of Latin terms that Romans used for urban streets bear some resemblance to their English counterparts, but there are subtle differences that give us insight into cultural differences in the perceptions of streets and streetscapes. The most common Latin vocabulary for urban streets and plazas is presented in Tables 1.1 and 1.2.95 The majority of sources that use this vocabulary date to the Principate, although their use by authors of the late Republic and Late Antique periods shows that the meaning of most, although not all, changed little over time. The evolution of some of these terms is discussed below. Table 1.1 lists the terms for plazas and specific parts of streets, such as a dead-end or the portion of a street that ascended a hill, whereas Table 1.2 lists the more generic terms for urban streets. As in English, the Latin vocabulary for urban streets also has a physical component, but this does not mean we can treat Latin words as culturally equivalent to the English words we use to translate them. In fact, deciding which English words best capture the meaning of the Latin originals is a much more knotty problem than has been commonly assumed. The Latin vocabulary for urban streets can be divided into two broad categories: words that indicate a specific subcategory or subsection of streets or plazas, those listed in Table 1.1, and words that can be used as generic terms for “street,” those listed in Table 1.2. The Roman use of the fi rst category of words was fairly straightforward as it was based exclusively on characteristics of a section of a street or path that differentiated it from the rest of the street. The word pons96 has a direct English equivalent in the word “bridge,” but the other words are not so easy to translate. The word fundula,97 for instance, requires several words to be rendered into English, that is, dead-end street, or we have to borrow words from French,

Textual Evidence for Roman Perceptions of Streets and Plazas Table 1.1

27

Latin Vocabulary for Plazas and Specific Sections of Streets

Latin Term

English Translation

Activities in Addition to Passage

pons

bridge

begging; fishing; religious ceremonies

fundula

street without an outlet, dead-end street, cul-de-sac

—

clivus

street ascending a slope, a ramp

—

gradus/ scalae

flight of stairs

exposure of executed criminals’ bodies

forum

forum, plaza, square

trials; elections; political campaigns; giving of speeches and eulogies; erecting statues; religious ceremonies; commerce; banking; impromptu street performances

campus

open space, plaza, square

voting; campaigning; political meetings; military exercises; entertainment; funerary rites; burying Vestal Virgins who broke their vows

area

open space, construction site, plaza

dancing; walking; playing games; socializing; parking country carts to exchange for litters to be used in city

Table 1.2

Generic Latin Vocabulary for Urban Streets

Latin Term

English Translation

Activities in Addition to Passage

Words Used in Opposition

via

street, broad way, boulevard, avenue

triumphal processions; erecting hon- semita; orary statues; religious processions; angiportum; wedding parties; social observation; vicus parading of criminals and executed bodies; prostitution; begging; main entrances to houses

platea

street, broad way, making public announcements; semita; boulevard, avenue, religious processions; wedding par- angiportum; courtyard in a house ties; social observation; parading vicus of criminals and executed bodies; prostitution; main entrances to houses

semita

alley, lane, sidewalk

commerce; industry; prostitution; feasting

via; platea

angipor- street, alley, lane tum or angiportus

rear entrance to houses; hiding of weapons, abandoning of babies; murder

via; platea

vicus

residence; commerce; industry; bath- via; platea; ing; parading of criminals; display angiportum of executed bodies; brawling; plays on temporary stages

street, quarter of a city, neighborhood

28 Roman Urban Street Networks cul-de-sac. The word clivus98 has no precise English equivalent, as English speakers do not recognize a difference between streets based on topography. A clivus was a street graded in such a way to allow a cart to ascend a hill.99 The English word “ramp” may come closest to translating clivus, but the English word is used exclusively in conjunction with architecture and construction and does not indicate a public thoroughfare. Whereas the words gradus and scalae100 have an equivalent in English, they do not have an equivalent in modern urban transportation networks. Stairs impede motorized traffic and so are not used as modern thoroughfares but in antiquity they were a perfectly acceptable option for addressing the problem of creating a pathway up a slope. In addition to these words for portions of streets, Latin has vocabulary for specific types of plazas. The word forum can be translated as plaza or city square but beyond that literary descriptions of fora are quite vague. Romans seem so familiar with the concept of a forum that they needed no description of it. Many Roman cities had a main forum that acted as the center for social, economic, and political activities even if it was not always in the exact center of the city. Vitruvius recommended the placement of the forum beside the harbor in seaside towns and in the middle of landlocked cities.101 In early Roman cities, the forum started out as simply an open amorphous area that later became regularized through the careful placement of buildings and sometimes a surrounding colonnade,102 as is the case with Pompeii, discussed below. According to our ancient authors, carts were allowed to enter the Roman Forum.103 They also mention the statuary and honorary monuments that fi lled these locations.104 We read of government buildings in the fora105 to help civic officials carry out their duties, and temples and shrines to help unite the city’s population.106 Frontinus also mentioned fountains in the Roman Forum.107 The forum was a place in which elite Roman urbanites took great pride not only for the beauty of the architecture but also for evidence of order which showed the city was managed well or, in the case of Rome, that the empire had been and was managed well. In describing Constantius’s only visit to Rome in the fourth century, Ammianus Marcellinus explained, He entered Rome, the home of the empire and of every virtue. When he had come to the rostra, the most famous forum of ancient power, he was struck dumb by everything on all sides. The density of marvelous sights his eyes beheld dazzled him.108 His sentence links directly the ideals of virtue with the physical place of the forum. Roman authors frequently mention the trials, speeches, and campaigning that went on in the forum, all of which contributed to good governance. When something uncivilized happened in the forum, it was a sign of a bad leader or poor governance. In one of Cicero’s attacks on Marc Antony, he castigated him not just for threatening a man with a sword,


29

but for doing it in the forum.109 Cicero also accused Antony of keeping the people from the forum with armed men, thus separating them from good governance.110 Livy used Marc Antony’s response of displaying Cicero’s bloody, severed limbs in the forum as an ominous warning that all was not well with the state.111 Finally, the terms campus and area were used most often in a rural context but do occasionally refer to urban space. A campus was an open area or plaza, often on the edge of a city, but occasionally within the city walls. The most famous campus, the Campus Martius, was originally outside the Servian walls, but was later included in the city with the construction of the Aurelian walls in the third century CE.112 Even before it was enclosed within Rome’s walls, the Campus Martius became the preferred location for new construction. During the end of the Republic and the early Principate, much of the open space was built over, leaving it less of a campus and more a neighborhood of Rome. Otherwise, campi were outside the boundaries of Rome, although because of their proximity to the city they could still play a role in urban life.113 Based on a combination of epigraphic and archaeological evidence, G. Devijuer and F. van Wonterghem argued the campi of most Roman cities in the west were outside city walls, were surrounded by a wall, and were supplied with paved pathways to and through them, and often had a pool, porticoes, sundials, and statues.114 The term area is ill-defi ned; it could refer to a site of construction or demolition,115 the open space adjoining or surrounding a building, in particular, the precinct around a temple,116 or simply an area without construction on it.117 Vitruvius uses area as a broad term whose meaning encompassed both fora and temple precincts.118 Several named areae are mentioned in the Regionaries, but the exact nature of these is not clear.119 Horace uses the words area and campus interchangeably.120 Because the Area Carruces was probably between the Porta Appia and the Temple of Mars and inscriptions indicate it was the seat of the Schola Carrucarum, a guild that dealt in matters connected to transportation, some have suggested that people entering Rome would leave their carts there and utilize the litters available in the Area to complete their journey about the city.121 Because of their great size, plazas could accommodate large crowds, which is why the Campus Martius in Rome and perhaps certain plazas in other cities were the place for political debate and elections as well as large trials.122 As an adjunct to this activity, they were also the location for honorary statues.123 We read of other activities involving large crowds in plazas. Mourners held funerals in plazas124 and religious processions passed through them.125 A campus could also be the location for temporary theaters and other entertainment.126 In the evening, according to Horace, the campus or area was the place for young people to slip away in order to dance and seek an amorous rendezvous.127 Similar activities may have taken place in the plazas of other cities as well.

30


When confronted with vocabulary so different from anything in our native language, it is easy for English speakers to recognize the cultural differences about which vocabulary like clivus and campus inform us. We fi nd it more difficult to recognize these differences when English has a convenient one-word equivalent to a Latin term. Via, platea, semita, angiportum,128 and vicus are all terms that could be used singly as a generic reference to urban streets, so we are tempted to simply translate them as “street” and assume the Latin vocabulary shared the same connotations in their culture as the English vocabulary does in ours. But some peculiarities in the use of those five Latin words for street force us to confront those differing cultural connotations. Latin authors from the late Republican through Late Antique periods did not feel one word was sufficient to describe all the streets in a city. In describing preparations for the war in Alexandria, Caesar mentions the blockade of the city’s streets with the phrase “omnibus viis atque angiportis.”129 This appears redundant to English speakers because Caesar used two words for streets where one would be sufficient in English. He was not the only Latin author to employ two Latin terms in order to refer to all the pathways through a city instead of just one. Some authors use via with angiportum,130 as Caesar did, whereas others use platea with angiportum,131 platea with vicus,132 via with semita,133 via with vicus,134 or vicus with angiportum135 when they refer to urban streets collectively. This tendency to pair words for streets indicates the Romans divided their vocabulary for urban streets into two categories; via and platea were main thoroughfares whereas angiportum and semita were side streets.136 Latin authors used both the words via and platea to describe the wide, grand boulevards of certain cities137 and on occasion some authors use the words interchangeably. One of the authors of the Historia Augusta, describing the construction of Carcalla’s baths in Rome, claimed Caracalla “ . . . also built a new via at the side of his baths . . . one more beautiful than which you could not easily fi nd among Rome’s plateae.”138 The wide nature of viae and plateae is confi rmed by descriptions of activities conducted on them such as triumphal processions,139 the movement of heavy equipment such as siege towers,140 and heavy loads such as marble blocks and timber,141 as well as the giving of a speech from a house balcony to a large crowd in the street.142 The elder Seneca used the word “narrow” (angusta) in association with via to describe streets in Rome, but his point is not to give an accurate description, but to show how greed and corruption were destroying both the moral and material fabric of the city. “Such is the height of buildings,” he railed, “and the narrowness of the streets [viae] that there is no protection against fi re . . . ”143 By placing angusta next to via he was trying to shock readers with words they would not normally have associated, demonstrating the degradation of the Roman character. In compiling his etymology of Latin based on the ancient sources available to him, the early medieval writer Isidorus of Seville also emphasized the width


31

of a platea. He claimed that a cart (carpentum) would cover only one-fifth of the width of a platea.144 The main difference between via and platea stems from their etymology. Via is a generic Latin term applied to any type of rural or urban road whereas platea comes from the Greek adjective for “wide” with a feminine ending to describe “street” introduced through translations of Greek New Comedies during the Republic.145 Originally the Latin word platea had a Greek cultural connotation to it, suggesting the wide magnificent boulevards of some Hellenistic cities. By the Late Antique period, however, platea had lost its foreign connotations and was used interchangeably with via.146 The citizens of Roman and Hellenistic Greek towns took great pride in having a wide and straight street embellished with porticos.147 In this they were following a practice common in Hellenistic town planning. In Roman literature, these showpiece streets are again referred to with the word via or platea. When Servius claimed that a via is necessary to make a “legitimate city” (legitimam civitatem), he was probably envisioning just such a street.148 Some Romans of the late-Republican era felt embarrassment by the fact that their city lacked the monumental streets of other cities.149 During the Principate, Nero took advantage of the destruction caused to the city by the fi re of 64 to build some monumental viae.150 The emperor Caracalla also did his part, building the monumental Via Antoniniana Nova leading to his new bath building; some ancient Romans considered this one of the most beautiful streets in Rome.151 Private individuals could also help improve a street so that it might appear even more monumental, as Pliny the Younger did while governor of Bithynia by offering to cover an open sewer that ran down what was otherwise a “very beautiful street” in the city of Amastris.152 When the terms angiportum or semita are placed in opposition to via or platea, they are clearly intended to indicate a more constricted street. A similar opposition exists in the Greek vocabulary for urban streets. The narrow street in a gridded city, the stenopos, is described as crossing the wider street, the plateia or hodos.153 The etymology of angiportum is a controversial matter; nonetheless, the Latin grammarian Varro claimed it was based on the adjective angustum or “narrow.”154 Varro stated further that a semita is half as wide as a via.155 Unfortunately, there is some ambiguity when it comes to the use of the term semita. Whereas in some contexts from a variety of periods it clearly was intended to mean a street,156 in others, primarily from the Republican period, semita was described as bordering a via, thus suggesting a more appropriate translation would be “sidewalk.”157 When semita is used alone, the author’s intended meaning is not always clear. When either via or platea are paired with semita or angiportum, they are usually translated as “streets and alleys,” which is not the optimal translation because alleys as they appear in modern Western cities did not exist in Roman cities.158

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The issue of street width mattered a great deal not only for the pride of a city but for practical reasons such as for the passage of cart traffic. The wider a street was, the easier it would be for a cart to pass or for two carts to pass moving in opposite directions. The law code of Justinian offers some very specific defi nitions for terms relating to right-of-way and the passage of cart traffic. In order to indicate a generic right-of-way open to all modes of transportation, the law code used the phrase via iter actus.159 Ulpian explained that an iter was the legal right to pass on foot, an actus was the right to walk and drive cattle or a vehicle, and a via was the right to walk or drive a vehicle down a particular road.160 Other jurists confi rmed these distinctions,161 as did Varro in his discussions of these same terms.162 Whereas these rights often appeared intended for roads in the country, the rights of iter and via were specifically extended to the streets of cities as well.163 The explicit linkage of the word via with the passage of cart traffic suggests that viae were wider than other streets such as angiporta and semitae. Roman authors of the fi rst century BCE and fi rst century CE often described the lively and noisy passage of carts through viae 164 and plateae165 but the mention of carts on semitae and angiporta is rare, although examples do exist.166 Varro may help explain the absence of carts on angiporta because he stated that it was difficult or impossible to drive through an angiportum, presumably because it was so narrow in comparison to the width of a via.167 Varro’s claim that a semita was half the width of a via would literally place the width of a semita at about 1.2 m, a width that would preclude the passage of nearly all cart traffic.168 Even if one does not take Varro literally, particularly because the Justinian code stated that only viae had a fi xed width,169 but accepts that the term semita was used for streets with a width narrower than that of a via, a street would not need to be too much more narrow in order to bar cart traffic. Seneca’s statement that he would dismount for a praetor passing in a semita may also indicate that a semita was as narrow as an angiportum. It would have been difficult for a pedestrian to pass a person on a donkey or horse gracefully while the rider was mounted in a space of less than 2 m; thus Seneca’s show of respect may have been born of necessity.170 Finally, in one passage Cicero mentioned the holding of feasts in semitae.171 The fact that Cicero mentioned no complaints or problems with these feasts suggests that they were not a particularly significant disruption to traffic within the city. Cart drivers must not have been accustomed to using the semitae because they were so narrow. In addition to recognizing their appearance, the Latin vocabulary contained implications about the role of the street within the urban transportation network. Roman authors from a variety of periods use via and platea to describe the streets that led to city fora 172 and gates;173 they do not use angiportum or semita. Those destinations, along with their openness to cart traffic, must have made viae and plateae central arteries of travel in


33

Roman cities whereas angiporta and semitae must have been side streets.174 In Plautus’s Persa, one character directed another to go to the forum following angiporta so that he might not be observed because he was engaged in a secret plot.175 This single exception to normal usage seems to involve a careful choice of words. The via/platea then was a main artery in the transportation network of the city connecting prominent and popular locations whereas the angiportum/semita was a local street often intended for pedestrian traffic.176 The only Latin word that does not fit neatly into this dichotomy of wide versus narrow is vicus. As can be seen in Table 1.2, vicus could be used opposite via or platea, suggesting it was a narrow street. This perception that a vicus was a side street is supported by adjectives such as “narrow,” “crooked,” “deserted,” and “formless” used in association with it.177 In one instance some men are convinced they have become lost by having missed a vicus, suggesting it was small, narrow, and unobtrusive.178 Tacitus used the word to help explain how the fi re in Rome in 64 CE spread so quickly; the vici of the city were so narrow that fl ames jumped easily from one building to the next.179 On the other hand, it was also used opposite angiportum, perhaps to indicate a broad road. Tacitus also used vicus to describe the straight, wide streets laid out by Nero after the fi re. In the Vulgate the term vicus is equated directly with platea.180 Several authors also noted carts traveling on vici 181 and Juvenal even used the adjective “narrow” to describe the vicus on which heavily laden carts traveled.182 The word vicus has several possible meanings, of which “street” is only one, a fact that complicates matters further.183 In a rural context, a vicus was a village; in an urban one it could be a loosely defi ned neighborhood.184 Varro claimed the term vicus originated from the Latin for “row of houses,” an etymology P. Harsh dismissed, pointing out it does not appear to be used this way by any other author.185 Augustus made the vicus an officially recognized administrative district with clearly defi ned boundaries.186 He assigned two magistrates to supervise the streets and the proper use of fi res in these districts and the vicus became an administrative unit for the dispensing of public services in Rome.187 It is possible that the Roman understanding of vicus as a type of street derived from a central pathway that passed through a neighborhood helping to defi ne the extent of that neighborhood.188 Harsh pointed out that all of the Latin words for urban streets cited above were surprisingly resistant to change and that they were used in a consistent manner throughout the Republic and Principate. The word vicus, he suggested, was the only one whose meaning was enlarged from “village” to “neighborhood/district” and fi nally “street.” He posited an Augustan date for this broadening of meaning and argues that as the empire wore on, vicus slowly became synonymous with angiportum, or a narrow street, although it failed to replace the latter word altogether. Latin authors of the Principate and

34


Late Antique period also often attached the adjective angustus to vicus, further suggesting that it indicated a narrow street.189 The term vicus must be translated with caution, therefore, as it is not always clear from the context whether an author who uses the word intends a street or district.190 To give just one example, the Justinian law code declared that anyone who appears on a stage incurs infamia whether the stage is in public, in private, or in vico.191 A. Watson translated this word as “street,”192 but because anything said in a street was consider public knowledge the use of in vico in this context would appear to be redundant. Perhaps here the intended meaning was anywhere in a village or urban neighborhood, thus tying together the terms “public” and “private,” although even this is not a wholly satisfactory solution to the translation problem. In some cases, whereas it may have been clear to the ancient author, we may never know for certain whether the word vicus in a particular context is intended to mean street or neighborhood.

STREET NAMES Among the duties of modern civic officials and urban developers is the naming of streets. This is considered vital to the proper functioning of a city because it helps people orient themselves. There is little evidence to support the notion that most Roman urban streets ever had names in the western, or Latin, half of the empire. The names of a number of extramural roads have survived from antiquity, for instance, the Via Appia, named for its builder, the Via Ostiensis, which connected Rome to Ostia, and the Via Praenestina, which led to the city of Praeneste.193 But this tradition of naming roads does not seem to have applied to urban streets; little evidence remains to suggest the Romans officially named the majority of streets that existed exclusively within the city. Extramural roads may have retained their names in the outskirts of the city, but the names did not apply once the roads passed within the walls of the city.194 The ancient names of less than a dozen streets within the city of Rome have survived, among them the Via Sacra,195 Nova Via,196 Alta Semita,197 Argiletum,198 and Via Antoniniana Nova.199 The Via Tecta in the Campus Martius200 may be another name for the Via Fornicata;201 both names indicate a covered street. When Livy mentions this latter name in the only ancient reference to it, he is referring to an area that was not included within the city walls at the time. 202 Curiously, in the third century CE after the building of the Aurelian Wall, the name of the portion of the Via Flaminia which reached inside the city walls was called the Via Lata. 203 There must have been hundreds if not thousands of streets in the ancient world’s largest city; if it was a common practice to name them, surely more names would have come down to us. This dearth of urban street names is a feature of other Roman cities as well. At Pompeii we know the names of four streets, the Via Pompeiana, Via Jovia, Via


35

Dequviaris, and the Via Mefira.204 Two inscriptions from Cales list street names, derived from temples located along them, used in conjunction with the term angiportum.205 The few other street names we know include two streets from Capua, the Seplasia, 206 and the Via Albana, 207 one from Ostia, the semita Horrearum, 208 and one from Velitrae, the Vicus Octavius. 209 The word via is used in conjunction with a street name much more frequently than semita or angiportum; again, we see a differential treatment of these two categories of words. Inexplicably, no instances of a named platea are found in the western half of the empire. Whereas we have scores of place names in Rome used in conjunction with the word vicus, it is rarely clear whether the author intends a street or neighborhood as previously explained. 210 In only a few cases is there an unambiguous reference to a street vicus with a proper name. 211 It is possible that the main street through a neighborhood was known by the name of the neighborhood and perhaps when an ancient author referred to the Vicus Tuscus in Rome, for example, he may have intended either the neighborhood, the main street within that neighborhood, or more likely both. Considering this marked absence of named streets, it is rather surprising that clivi were the only type of street that appear to have routinely received names, which is curious because the ramps were only one part of much longer streets. 212 Some clivi were named for their builders (Clivus Publicius, Cosconius, and Pullius)213 and location (Clivus Capitolium Vetus, Sacrum Clivum). 214 This special recognition of ramp streets may be the result of the great effort that went into creating them. The civic magistrates honored with the naming of a clivus may have contributed their own funds in addition to pushing for the state to fund and complete the project. In separate articles, Harsh and R. Ling assumed that all urban streets must have had at least informal names because these would have been necessary to help one navigate an ancient city. They admitted, however, the lack of evidence to support such a conclusion. 215 There is no need, however, to claim the evidence is missing; the surviving literature and inscriptions are indeed representative of ancient practice. Whereas a few main streets in Roman cities may have had names, either official or unofficial, there was no need for all streets to be so designated. People can give directions to different parts of a town without reference to street names. In modern towns where streets have been given names on an arbitrary basis, for example, using the names of musicians, poets, or politicians, residents usually give directions without reference to any street name whatsoever, fi nding it easier to use a variety of urban features instead.216 As will be seen below, ancient writers did not hesitate to ask for directions from strangers. In most of the instances where they describe the directions they received, distinctive features such as a person’s house, a fountain, or even a tree are central, whereas no one ever mentions a street name. 217

36


USES OF STREETS IN ROMAN LITERATURE Another way to approach defi nitions of the Latin vocabulary for streets is to look at the types of activities that were reported to have taken place along them. Use is an irrelevant part of the definition of most of the modern English vocabulary for streets, with the exception of the word “alley.” In English an alley has a physical component because it is generally narrower than the average street and buildings adjoin it without a sidewalk or lawn in between. But alleys are also the place where the unsightly but necessary activities of urban life are accomplished. Trashcans and dumpsters are kept in alleys and trucks load or unload products for stores and factories, allowing the front façades of apartments, stores, and office buildings to have a neat appearance. The association of alleys with hidden behavior gives them a sinister identity as well. Although it is probably not true in practice, most people see alleys as the place where criminals lurk and nefarious deals are completed. No other English word for urban streets has such a strong symbolic resonance. In Latin the activities associated with a particular type of street were a part of the defi nition and were far more important to ancient Latin speakers than they are to modern English speakers. This is probably because, unlike the modern peoples of English-speaking countries who use urban streets fi rst and foremost for transportation usually while isolated in their cars, the Romans did a variety of activities in their streets. Streets were, of course, used for the passage of both pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Authors described the hustle and bustle of people traversing the streets on foot, in litters and sedans, on horses and mules, as well as in carts, going about their business. Traffic, especially in Rome, could become so congested that one job of the lictors, who preceded important officials in public, was to clear the road for the passage of the official they were escorting. 218 But Romans did much more than simply go from one point to another in the street. Perhaps the closest modern Western equivalent to the Roman street can still be seen in the Spanish city of Seville. According to a Spanish saying, the people of Seville live in the streets. This saying could be applied equally well to the Romans, who lacked public parks and whose housing was so cramped and overcrowded that streets were a necessary extension of the home. Although all of the Latin words mentioned in Table 1.2 could be used as generic terms for streets, it appears that for the Romans certain activities were appropriate to streets labeled with specific vocabulary. The dichotomy stands between via/platea, or the wide streets, and angiportum/semita, the narrow ones, when it comes to the types of behavior one could expect to witness along these streets. A summary of the types of activities that took place along streets is also provided in Tables 1.1 and 1.2. As mentioned above, via and platea were sometimes used by the same author to describe the same street, so it is not surprising to see the same types of activities


37

taking place on both. Via was the more commonly used of the two and this word came to be used figuratively to indicate activities that occurred in the open, especially during the late Republic and the Principate.219 Cicero referred to the actions of the corrupt governor of Syracuse, Verres, who returned money for a bribe publicly, or by a via, but later extracted it again secretly, by a semita. 220 In another speech he told some accused conspirators that they were free to leave Rome and would not be harmed even if they leave in via. 221 Conversations overheard on a via were considered public knowledge and could even be admitted as evidence in court. 222 In this light the report of a divine voice warning a man on the Via Nova of the coming Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BCE seems most appropriate. 223 The via and platea were the places for public ceremony and announcements throughout Roman history. Religious processions snaked along these streets, 224 as did funerary processions. 225 A wedding party could take over a portion of a via226 or platea227 for their feast. Public announcements also took place along the plateae.228 One of the grandest public ceremonies of all, the triumphal procession for a victorious general, also took place on a via, the Via Sacra in Rome. Not only did the general and his soldiers march in a triumph, but they paraded captured royalty and prominent enemies as well as carts carrying the booty from the campaign. The exact pathway for a triumphal parade was not fi xed, but there were certain points past which every triumph had to pass, including the Circuses Maximus and Flaminius, the Via Sacra, the Roman Forum, and the Theater of Pompey. 229 The event was commemorated with the building of a triumphal arch along the path that the parade had passed, thus adding grandeur to these streets. Citizens who wanted to gain attention for themselves and their families through the fi nancing of construction projects often chose to locate their buildings at points along the route of the triumph so that future triumphant generals would have to pass them. 230 Thus the wide streets along which the triumphal parades passed became crowded with prominent buildings and monuments. The state could honor citizens for their contributions to the city in ways other than a triumph by having a statue of them placed on a via. With only one sarcastic exception discussed below, no author mentions an honorary statue along any type of street other than a via. The most common via on which to erect a statue in Rome was the Via Sacra.231 To some ancient authors, the crowds fi lling these wide streets seemed so large at times that they became overwhelming and oppressive. Cicero complained of being jostled by the pedestrians in the streets of Rome232 whereas Juvenal lamented not only the push of the pedestrian traffic but the pain to his head caused by inattentive people carrying wine casks and beams as well as the fate of his toes under a soldier’s hobnailed sandals. 233 Libanius stated the crowds in the streets of Antioch cover every inch of the street like the water in a streambed. 234 An ancestor of the emperor Tiberius was tried for treason for stating out loud, while her cart was caught in a traffic jam, that she wished for a military defeat to thin out the throng in

38 Roman Urban Street Networks Rome’s streets. 235 Indeed, one of the purposes of the lictors who preceded public officials was to clear the way through the people in the streets so the official could pass unhindered. Among these descriptions of crowded streets, it is clear that people were watching and judging one another and were quite aware that they were being watched and judged themselves. The via and platea were the place for social display and commentary; they were the place to establish one’s identity. A number of authors explained how important it was for a politician, particularly one seeking public office, to arrive in the forum or the Campus Martius surrounded by clients in order to display his political power. 236 Libanius reported with undisguised glee being followed by a large crowd to the baths after having delivered a successful speech. 237 In order to arrive with the greatest possible impact, a calculating politician must have been sure to follow a wide via or platea on the way to the forum.238 An attractive young man or woman could be the object of catcalls and other attention in the platea239 or via. 240 As early as the Republican period, one of the playwright Plautus’s characters worried about the comments that would be elicited if he allowed an attractive slave-girl to attend his wife through the streets (per vias), fearing people would assume his wife was trying to call attention to herself through the beauty of the girl. 241 Another character complains of mistresses flaunting the expensive garb paid for by their paramours while strolling the viae.242 Elite women also established their identities as adhering closely to social norms or flouting them while passing along viae.243 Horace reported the sneers of onlookers as a freedman walks proudly down the Via Sacra in a toga, a sign he had recently shed his servile status. 244 Ovid wrote of seeing a barefoot woman on the Via Sacra demonstrating her piety through conformity to an ancient custom.245 Ovid also represented the arrogance of a woman by claiming she rode down a via in a cart “erect and insolent.”246 The Vulgate chastises those who pray in a platea or offer alms in a vicus simply because they want others to see and praise them.247 Beggars sought to advertise their identity, using it to make a living along viae and on street corners where more than one via met. 248 Considering the strong connection between viae and plateae and social observation, it should come as no surprise that evildoers were paraded through the viae and plateae in order to receive public ridicule and scorn. The bodies of those who were publicly executed were also dragged through the streets, sometimes to a certain stairway where they were left for public abuse before they were eventually dragged into the Tiber.249 Plautus described what Romans felt they could and should not do in the viae and plateae during the Republic. Certain activities were shameful when they were done in the street, such as kissing250 and yelling loudly. 251 A man refused to run in the street because such behavior has a servile look to it. 252 Another man put an end to an argument over a slave-girl by threatening to drag her out into a via, thus making a private quarrel public.253 Plautus had one character chastise an old man for wearing too much perfume


39

in a via.254 Finally, in another play, Plautus represented a freedman as chagrined to meet his former master who is carrying a load in a via. The freedman offers to take the load from him so that people will not see them walking together with the freedman unburdened while his master is trudging under the load. 255 The freedman seems exclusively concerned with appearances and the reader is left doubting the same offer would have been extended had both been in private. When someone pushed the bounds of proper behavior too far, either from a desire to test the limits or from a mental inability to understand the rules, and their behavior became intolerable, those watching on the main streets might respond by throwing rocks to drive the offender from the street, making it clear what was unacceptable behavior. 256 While triumphant generals and wealthy citizens constructed grand public buildings along viae and plateae, many others built smaller private buildings in similar locations. The entrances to fi ne houses of some civic elite stood along these wide streets. 257 They were also excellent locations for the placement of a shop or workshop, although only a few ambiguous references from ancient literature survive in which the word for shop or market was used in conjunction with via. 258 Other literary references that mention, for instance, carpenters, saw sharpeners, blacksmiths, and machinists do not specify the type of street onto which their workshops opened. 259 Instead, one must turn to the epigraphic evidence for literary proof that some shops opened onto viae, even on to Rome’s most famous via, the Via Sacra, where dealers in fruits, flowers, jewelry, gold ornaments, metal work and other luxuries plied their trades. 260 The Republican authors Plautus and Terence placed brothels and prostitutes along plateae, 261 but, as will be discussed below, the location of this type of commerce seems to have been more strictly regulated under the Principate. Viae and plateae took on a different meaning once the sun went down. Western Roman city streets were not illuminated with streetlights as modern cities are, except on rare occasions when lamps were hung above doors in celebration. The darkness masked dangers to pedestrians, such as stairs and refuse, which made it difficult for people to fi nd their way, even while nursing a lamp. The streets became menacing places in the dark where muggers, burglars, and murderers lurked. Besides these malevolent people, the only other people who were out after dark were late-night revelers. 262 “You may well be considered rash,” Juvenal warns his readers, “if you go out to dinner without a will.”263 Most Romans chose to avoid these dangers by remaining safely in their homes at night, which may explain the curious ruling by the jurist Labeo that it was illegal to throw things out of windows during the day, but not at night. 264 For the most part the second group of Latin words that described streets, angiportum/semita or narrow streets, appear to be the opposite of via/ platea in the physical sense and in how they were used, although there is less evidence for the use of these words simply because they appear less

40 Roman Urban Street Networks frequently in the literature than via. A summary of the uses of these types of streets is given in Table 1.2. Like the wide streets, ancient authors also emphasize how crowded semitae were with pedestrian traffic and people of all classes; even important civic officials and rich citizens could be seen traversing them. 265 Like a via or platea, people could reside along a semita or angiportum. 266 Indeed, Propertius described the angry shouts of residents of a semita who are unexpectedly awoken by the loud late-night argument between Propertius and his girlfriend. 267 Occasionally an ancient author recorded the primary entrance to a wealthy house along an angiportum, 268 or semita269 but more frequently ancient authors mentioned the entrances to the gardens of wealthy houses or the rear doors open onto angiporta.270 This suggests an elite preference for the backs of houses to be turned towards angiporta while the fronts to face viae. 271 Unlike the terms for wide streets, ancient authors use those for narrow streets more freely in conjunction with shops, workshops, and commerce. Apuleius provided the only reference to a workshop on an angiportum;272 otherwise, commercial activity is associated with semitae. Livy described a street scene in the city of Tusculum in which one could see “ . . . the doors open, the shop shutters removed and all their goods on display, the craftsmen attentive to their work, in the schools the voices of students reciting, the streets filled with crowds . . . ” using the word semita for street. 273 In a telling poem, Martial equated commerce with semitae, stating that by placing their goods in front of their shops, shopkeepers had narrowed Rome’s streets, making them nearly impassable. He praised an imperial edict designed to keep shopkeepers from displaying merchandise in the street, thereby allowing the streets to become wide once again, and claimed the emperor had thereby transformed Rome’s semitae to true viae.274 Although he was writing in Greek and so does not use the term semita, Libanius claimed the sidewalks under the colonnades that lined the streets of Antioch “ . . . are turned into shops, so that there is a workshop facing almost each one of the buildings . . . and no space is without some handicraft; but if a man gets possession of a little strip of space, it at once becomes a tailor’s shop or something of that order . . . ”275 Finally, the Justinian legal code mentioned a case involving a shop on a semita. 276 Whereas prostitution is mentioned as taking place on angiporta as well as viae, 277 Horace’s reference to older prostitutes past their prime as inhabiting angiporta may indicate that the lower-class prostitutes who were unable to compete with younger, higher-class prostitutes for more choice commercial spots along the viae conducted their business from angiporta. 278 If this interpretation is correct, it makes Catullus’s invective against his former lover even more biting when he stated she now spends her time at street corners and angiporta;279 he may have been suggesting she is not behaving as just a prostitute, but as an old broken-down prostitute. In the Republican-era writings of Terence and Plautus, an angiportum was a term that also had discreet or private overtones. Whenever characters


41

wanted to escape notice, they say specifically they are going to follow an angiportum.280 In one scene, Plautus even had a man state he would rather travel an angiportum than a via because he did not want to be detected.281 W. Beare concluded in his study of the staging of Roman plays that the angiportum mentioned by comedy writers was not to be associated with any of the doors on stage nor with either of the exits on the wings. Rather, he argued that the playwrights and audiences understood as a convention that the angiportum was a street behind the pair of houses whose front façades the audience could see as a backdrop on the stage.282 If he is correct, then the audience could have seen neither the actions described by the characters nor even the angiportum where they took place, which would have physically reinforced the audience’s perceptions about the private nature of this street. Other passages from the Republic and Principate describe acts the perpetrator would not want witnessed that took place in angiporta, such as the hiding of an abandoned baby, 283 the caching of weapons in preparation for an uprising, 284 and attempted murder. 285 Apuleius even had a rabid dog enter a large house through the back gate from an angiportum and proceed to attack the inhabitants, 286 and, in another passage, dogs emerged from nearby angiporta to attack and help kill a thief trying to escape, 287 thus further associating this type of street with secretive and even dangerous forces. These uses suggest that the people walking down an angiportum did not expect to be widely observed and that semitae and angiporta did not play a role in social display. In an intriguing passage already mentioned above, the second century CE author Apuleius described the city streets as the stage for public display and uses the contrast between angiportum and platea to demonstrate a transformation of a character’s fortunes from private and gravely guilty to public and humorously innocent. As the scene began, magistrates entered a house to arrest a man for murder.288 He felt deep shame and guilt as they led him from the house, hanging his head before a curious crowd that began to grow, following him through the streets before all eventually come to the forum for his trial. Happily, the accused is exonerated as the tale takes a humorous turn. The literary point of the scene was to show the movement of the character from the private sphere, the house, to the public sphere, the forum. Simultaneously it showed the spreading of the story of the murder from the knowledge of the one man to the community as a whole. In addition, the story transformed from serious to ridiculous. Apuleius also seemed to intend to build the reader’s excitement and anticipation for the trial by showing the growing throng and foreshadows the happy and humorous resolution to the crisis by noting laughter among those in the crowd. One way he achieved these literary goals was through his choice of vocabulary. When the magistrates fi rst led the accused from the house, he stated they enter an angiportum. As the crowd grew, the story spreads, and all transition from private to public space, he stated the procession goes down every

42


platea in the city, the last of which leads them to the forum. That simple choice of vocabulary must have communicated a great deal of subtle information to a Roman reader which is lost on us. Harsh thought it unfair to imply from these references that Romans considered all angiporta to have secretive or even sinister overtones. He cited a passage from Cicero’s prosecution of Verres, in which Cicero stated that the former governor of Sicily set up statues of himself in every angiportum as proof that these streets were not secretive places, but rather places for public display.289 When one considers Cicero’s full statement, however, it becomes clear that the author’s intent is ironic: Nevertheless this is not to be born in any way, that so much money should be taken from our allies in order that statues of the shameless pirate could be placed in every angiporta, where it appears one could hardly pass in safety. 290 Cicero associated Verres with covert dealings by claiming he would erect a statue to himself, something normally done publicly in viae, in the angiporta, and he reinforced the irony of the placement of the statues by adding that these were not safe places to visit. Harsh believed that it is the statues that make the angiporta unsafe because Verres was so terrifying that even his image could intimidate people. But it is much more likely that it is the place, the angiporta, that make the statues seem sinister and unsafe. Cicero used the juxtaposition of a statue in an angiportum for sarcasm, a literary technique he used throughout the Verrine Orations, to further emphasize the furtive nature of Verres’s actions and personality. This is the only ancient passage referring to the placement of an honorary statue in an angiportum rather than a via. Indeed, virtually no public monument was mentioned as standing on an angiportum, making this type of street rather nondescript and easily confused; several authors from the late Republic and early Principate described becoming lost while seeking angiporta. 291 Cicero’s audience would have been aware that this was not the normal practice and that his vocabulary was instead a critique of Verre’s behavior. In addition, Cicero’s figurative use of semita, mentioned above, as the path by which Verres could transfer money to his own pockets also has a secretive hint to it. 292 Cicero was careful to place via opposite semita in this context, suggesting his audience understood that actions performed in viae were performed in public whereas actions performed in semitae were performed in secret. We should expect negativity from our elite sources when referring to secondary streets; they were creatures of the via, not the angiportum. But we should not make the mistake of assuming Romans of all classes shared this attitude, particularly as the archaeological evidence shows secondary streets to be useful for a variety of activities. The words semita and angiportum thus had a variety of meanings and shades of meaning that different authors chose to emphasize depending


43

on the context. Both could be used as generic words for urban streets. They could also have the connotation of a narrow street, particularly when used in juxtaposition with via or platea. Finally, they could indicate places where actions were performed that the actor expected or preferred others in the city not to see. Thus, in addition to the dichotomies of via and platea/semita and angiportum, wide/narrow, we can add public/private and open/secretive. Because of the ambiguity in the meaning of vicus, it is not always easy to determine whether activities described in relation to this word took place in a street or a neighborhood. Some references clearly indicate streets, but there is not a clear pattern to the types of activities that took place along these streets, further suggesting vicus was a generic term for the central street within a neighborhood. The activities mentioned in both viae, plateae and angiporta, semitae were also represented along the vici. including residence, 293 commerce, 294 cottage industries, 295 exposure of criminals’ bodies, 296 and bathing.297 In addition to these activities, Suetonius reported Augustus liked watching brawls in the narrow vici, a passage A. Scobie interpreted to indicate that violence in the streets of Rome was common, although Suetonius was not clear as to whether he is referring to spontaneous fights or planned sporting events.298 One type of activity that was clearly associated with vici, however, was religious ceremonies. Sources from the Principate in particular referred to processions, 299 shrines,300 altars,301 and other ceremonies and ceremonial structures along vici.302 A type of altar located within each neighborhood was a shrine dedicated to the spirits of that neighborhood or the Lares Compitales. These were erected at crossroads (compita), presumably at the edge of the neighborhood, helping to define its boundary.303 Worshipers sometimes held boisterous ceremonies at these shrines, 304 no doubt asking for general blessings for the neighborhood. At times of ill omens people sacrificed there.305 Propertius reported that these crossroad shrines were good places to meet new women to date, perhaps because they would be attracted by the ceremonies being performed there.306 Curiously, he also saw them as an excellent place for nighttime liaisons. 307 Augustus revived ceremonies at the crossroad shrines, which had become neglected in his day, by providing flowers for offerings twice a year.308 Of the vocabulary that indicates specific types of urban paths, scalae/ gradus, clivus, and pons are used so infrequently that it is difficult to see many patterns in how these types of streets were used. It could be that this vocabulary for streets was necessary due to topography and so that aspect dominated their definition. Most references that mention how the space along or near stairs, slopes, and bridges was used date to the Principate. The street-stairs, or scalae/gradus, called the “Stairway of Sighs” (Scalae Gemoniae) in Rome, were the place to display the corpses of executed criminals.309 Also, Augustus lived near the Scala Anularius, presumably the location of some ring makers’ workshops, a hint that stairs may have

44


been associated with commerce and light industry.310 Martial mentioned trains of donkeys hauling marble blocks up a sloped clivus, proving some clivi, if not all, were open to wheeled traffic. 311 One of the last acts of a triumphal procession occurred when the triumphant general or emperor led the defeated enemy leader up the Clivum Sacrum for eventual sacrifice in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill. 312 This was, of course, the use of a specific clivus and cannot be used to suggest that clivi in general had special religious significance. Because of their unique character, the bridges of Rome also had some specific uses associated with them. A pons was the place from which people caught fish313 and performed religious ceremonies that involved the throwing of ritual objects into the Tiber. 314 Considering the way bridges funneled traffic, it is perhaps not surprising that we also have reports of beggars stationing themselves at the ends of bridges because it would be difficult for a person who did not want to give them anything to move away from them in such constricted space. 315 The uses of a forum were numerous, of which the passage of pedestrian or vehicular traffic was only one insignificant part. In addition, they were the social, political, religious, and often economic center of a Roman city. In the Roman Forum, Rome’s oldest forum, courts tried legal cases, 316 politicians conducted business and canvassed for votes,317 citizens conducted religious ceremonies, 318 the state erected honorary statues,319 merchants and customers bought and sold goods, 320 bankers changed and loaned money, 321 and the elite sponsored games.322 The people of Rome centralized their commercial activities by creating a cattle market (Forum Boarium), a fish market (Forum Piscarium), a vegetable market (Forum Holitorium), 323 and the Forum Cuppedinis (Luxury Market), which some Romans referred to jokingly as the Forum Cupidinis (Greed Market).324 Nonetheless, these plazas were centrally located and were thus vital components in the street plans of most Roman cities, presenting a destination for many as well as a central node through which important paths passed. Without a doubt ancient shopkeepers recognized the value of such a location for attracting customers. Libanius reported that when he moved his school in Antioch from a room in a block of shops that was near the agora, the Greek equivalent of the Roman forum, to one that was directly on the agora, the number of his students doubled.325 As for the areae and campi, we have much less data from the literary sources describing their uses. The Campus Martius was the location for military exercises, 326 as its name implies, meetings of the senate,327 canvassing for votes and elections,328 trials,329 and funerals330 as well as a number of temporary entertainment complexes. 331 A campus could have a temple or shrine,332 honorary statues, and sometimes a pool.333 Nero also allowed refugees from the great fi re in Rome in 64 CE to camp in the open areas remaining in the Campus Martius. 334 In Rome the Campus Sceleratus was just inside the Colline gate and appears to have been an open space whose only use we know of was the execution of Vestal Virgins who broke their


45

vows through burying them alive, although presumably other activities took place there.335 Horace suggested that an area or campus was the place to sing, dance, and socialize. 336 As mentioned above, a transportation guild, the Schola Carrucarum, had its seat in Rome’s Area Carruces. 337

CONCLUSION Roman urbanites had much more freedom to choose where to conduct certain activities than do their modern Western counterparts. As long as they kept the streets in front of their buildings clean and in good repair, they were mostly free to employ those buildings and the street space in front of them as they wanted. Whether a street was called a via or angiportum, however, guided some of their decisions about how to use the space in and along those streets. It appears that, unlike English, the Latin vocabulary for urban streets was more nuanced, mixing a physical description of the street with an intimation of whether more public or private activities would be acceptable along them. Whereas Roman civic officials did not try to create or enforce zoning restrictions, social norms led to a socially zoned city. Romans conceived of wide, open streets as appropriate for activities that people wanted to occur in full view of the community. Plateae and viae were public streets, streets where actions could take place openly. They were the most commonly used streets and were clearly very crowded with people going about their business. At the same time, people observed others and were conscious of being observed themselves along viae and plateae. Public streets were adorned with porticoes and dotted with monuments, each vying for the attention of the passerby in order to glorify their builder or that person’s family. Despite their prominence within the city, Romans rarely displayed a desire to name a platea or via. The width of these streets and the fact that they reached central locations throughout the city ensured that they were used for cart traffic. Roman civic laws helped facilitate the movement of carts and pedestrians along urban streets by banning any activity which would have blocked or slowed passage and by requiring building owners to keep the streets around their buildings clear of obstructions. The other categories of street, the angiporta and semitae, were those that were narrow. Fewer people traversed these streets, following them only when they found it necessary. These were the places where activities that people did not want to make public took place. We need not assume that the reticence of people to be observed using these streets necessarily signals that they were engaged in activities that were either immoral or illegal, although this was sometimes the case. Angiporta and semitae were the streets people used to conduct more private activities that they did not want to share with the community by conducting them on the busy, wide, public streets. Plazas stood both inside and immediately beyond the walls of Roman cities. They provided city dwellers with a little bit of extra space

46


for religious and funerary processions, political events, and temporary theaters. The central forum served as an important place for civic identity and interaction. It was the place for civic religious and governmental activity and could also serve as a market. Other fora in Roman cities also served a commercial function. Several questions arise from these observations. One is whether this preference for locating certain activities on specifi c types of streets or plazas translated into a similar preference for the location of buildings with specifi c uses. In other words, did streets create streetscapes? The literary evidence seems to suggest they did, although the evidence is not unequivocal. Did elite and nonelite try to impose separate visions for a city onto the urban landscape by placing the different structures they controlled along the same types of streets? It is only by comparing the literary with the archaeological evidence that clearer answers can be formed to these questions.

2

Defining and Analyzing Street Networks in the Archaeological Record

The literary evidence indicates that during the late Republic and much of the Principate, Romans divided city streets and plazas into mental categories based on their structure and used these categories to help decide along which type of street certain activities should take place. This idea dovetails nicely with Lynch’s suggestion, discussed in the introduction, that the way one came to understand a Roman city was by moving from one location to the next along the streets. If we are going to examine streets in the archaeological record as part of a network, new methods for describing streets are required. Traditional approaches of excavating and analyzing just one street or of looking at all of the streets in a city simply as part of an orthogonal grid do not help us investigate the role of each street in relation to every other street. This chapter outlines ways of understanding the role of a street within the larger urban network. It begins by defi ning what a street and plaza are for the purposes of this study and by describing the physical makeup and features of an ancient Roman city street. The chapter then reviews some of the recent scholarship that has suggested ways of studying the street networks of Roman cities. Introducing some techniques of modern urban geographers, it finally lays out the methodology to be used to analyze the evidence from the four case-study cities.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF STREETS AND PLAZAS The purpose of this study is to examine the street networks of Roman cities and how the space along them was used. The word “street” is used as a convenient shorthand throughout the rest of this work even though the street network is actually made up of three elements: streets, plazas, and the central forum. Roman legal sources are very clear in describing the streets as public spaces with a fi xed width where the public was free to pass, having the right of via iter actus, discussed in the previous chapter.1 In special cases a public right-of-way could be established on private land, in which case one would imagine defi ned limits would be especially important. The main streets that ran between blocks were considered to be on public land

48 Roman Urban Street Networks and their paved surface, curbstones, and sidewalks clearly marked them as different from the buildings that lined them and from which they were separated by private building walls. Modern archaeologists have had little trouble recognizing streets based on their location within a grid or between buildings. They have a tendency, however, to see longer streets in terms of discrete sections rather than connected wholes. For instance, one straight street at Pompeii bears the name the Via delle Terme at its western end, the Via della Fortuna in the westcentral portion, and the Via di Nola in its entire eastern half. There is no reason not to treat the entire street as one entity because this seems to have been the practice for very long streets in Rome, where, for instance, the Via Sacra and the Via Nova both had a great length but kept the same name throughout their course.2 Romans did use adjectives to indicate different portions of these streets, particularly summus (top), 3 medius, and infi mus (bottom),4 but the name of the entire street did not change. For this reason long streets are considered as coherent entities in the analysis that follows. Some streets take bends, but as long as the bend is not too abrupt, that is, greater than 45°, for the purposes of this study both sides of the bend are considered to be part of the same street. A street that has too abrupt of a change in its direction, however, breaks the flow of traffic5 and so is considered as two streets. Other streets penetrated into the city blocks, often ending in dead ends rather than linking with another street. These streets gave people access to building doorways in the interior of the blocks. Whether or not these interior streets were on public or private land is unknowable and irrelevant.6 Even if the street was on private land, it most likely had a public right-of-way if it reached a public building or more than one private building within a city. Therefore, these short dead-end alleyways are also considered among the street networks of each of the case-study cities. The Romans are justly famous for the care they gave to the construction of the roads that connected cities, yet city streets lacked the careful planning and construction of their extramural counterparts. Surviving examples of interurban roads usually consist of layers of stones decreasing in size as they neared the surface and a top layer of dressed stones fitted together in a bed of mortar. Urban streets, on the other hand, usually consist of a shallow bed into which a leveling layer of rammed earth and stone was laid and topped with either stone, gravel, or cobbles mixed with clay, silt, or sand.7 Street builders in regions where stone was readily available, particularly those in Italy, used stone for the streets that were more heavily traveled. In Rome and Pompeii that stone was generally basalt, in Trier sandstone and limestone.8 These paving stones were irregularly cut and laid in a polygonal manner in the Roman cities of Italy and Gaul; in many of the North African cities paving stones were rectangular and laid regularly.9 The cities with less easy access to stone slabs relied on gravel or cobble for paving; an estimated 80% of the streets in Romano-British cities were so paved.10 As the paved surface wore out, workmen repaved gravel and cobble streets by

Defining and Analyzing Street Networks

49

simply laying and compacting a new stratum of dirt and stone a few centimeters deep on top of the old street surface and then adding a fresh layer of compacted gravel or cobbles.11 Stone surfaces could also be covered by a leveling layer and then be repaved, or the old surface could be removed and a new one could be laid. The streets at Pompeii contain examples of both methods.12 Repairs through accretion could, of course, raise the level of the street. At Silchester, over the course of the second century, repeated repaving episodes along one street raised the surface height by more than a meter.13 The rise in the level of the paved surface could create runoff and access problems for the buildings beside the street, a fact with which building owners had to contend.14 Despite the quality with which Roman streets were constructed and the effort put in to maintain them, they still suffered from much wear. Paved surfaces sometimes have ruts created by the repeated passage of carts as well as wear on curbstones or stepping-stones against which the carts rubbed. P. Sillières was the fi rst to propose standards for measuring, recording, and reporting ruts.15 His standards have been adapted by few other archaeologists. In independent studies of the evidence from Pompeii, S. Tsujimura and E. Poehler recorded information about ruts and wear patterns on curbstones and other construction lining the streets, extrapolating information about the passage of carts.16 This work has not yet been followed up in a systematic way at any other Roman urban site. Nonetheless, ruts provide valuable insight into traffic patterns, as will be seen below. When they could, the Romans altered the natural topography of a site. When they could not, urban street networks represent a compromise between available transportation technology and the shape of the landscape. When the ravines or hills of urban locations were too great to be filled in or leveled, the Romans would try to lay out streets so that they either paralleled contour lines or met them at right angles. Whereas this created challenges for those going up steep grades, a challenge urban planners could only meet sometimes with stairs, it made traveling along other urban streets fairly easy. Naturally cart traffic was hindered by stairs, but other routes could be established. At Lincoln the straight streets of the grid tackle a slope head on at one point with stairs. A secondary street disrupts the orderliness of the grid by veering off at a sharp angle and then doubling back, thus giving cart drivers the option of departing from the main street, bypassing the stairs, and ascending/descending the slope at a more manageable grade, before returning to the main road.17 When possible, adapting the street grid to existing topography facilitated the disposal of wastewater and runoff. The disposal of water presented great challenges to those constructing city streets. In addition to the rain that fell on streets, runoff from roofs as well as the overflow from cisterns and fountains had to be channeled away. Stone-paved streets were cambered and supplied with drains on the sides to aid in removing the water. Gravel-paved streets were usually level, having a better ability to

50 Roman Urban Street Networks absorb water, but often had an open, sunken drain down the middle.18 Some stone-paved streets, although not all, had subsurface drainage when the local topography and geography allowed.19 This helped to disperse excess water.20 Sidewalks flanked some streets, usually consisting of a row of curbstones approximately 30 cm high, that created a border into which earth was rammed for the walking surface. Romano-British urbanites sometimes used timbers as curbs.21 Stepping-stones at Pompeii allowed pedestrians to cross streets above the street surface, which must often have contained mud and garbage, especially after a rain, but this feature is not found at many other sites, especially outside of Italy.22 At Pompeii the sidewalks provided not only a path on which people could walk but an easily accessible place to lay lead water pipes for the distribution of fresh water from aqueducts. Because the pipes lay in the sidewalks and not the street, they were easy to repair without causing major disruptions to traffic.23 The streets of many Roman cities lacked sidewalks probably because of the expense of creating them or because some streets were reserved for pedestrians only, had a low volume of cart traffic, or were wide enough that they could safely accommodate vehicular traffic without danger to pedestrians. Without sidewalks, however, pedestrians would have had to negotiate the mud and filth in streets. Sidewalks were sometimes lined with porticoes that helped unify the façades of buildings and create a protected area for pedestrians to avoid rain and the hot Mediterranean sun. The colonnaded street developed in the Hellenistic east during the time of Augustus in the Syrian city of Antioch. The concept spread throughout the cities of Syria and much of the eastern empire, particularly with the help of imperial patronage during the second century CE.24 Although examples of colonnaded streets have been found in the western empire, their popularity in the east was never matched in the west. 25 Despite laws regulating the size of streets, their widths varied a great deal. City streets, however, were significantly narrower than extraurban roads.26 W. MacDonald records the minimum widths of some main city streets varying from 6 m (Djemila and Verulamium) to 22 m (Gersa) to an impressive 42 m (Leptis Magna). Augustan military colonies were to have main streets that were about 11 m wide. 27 In Britain the average width of a street was about 5.6 m, although 4.1 m was a very common width. 28 The Romans placed certain features necessary to urban life or useful for enhancing the standing of a city in the streets, including gates, arches, fountains, and shrines. City gates had an ideological significance but they also served the very obvious practical function of allowing officials the opportunity to control who exited and who entered the city. Gates could be open both day and night, even occasionally during times of conflict. 29 Guards stationed at these gates could not only monitor who entered and left the city, but could also collect taxes from those bringing goods into or out of the city, 30 although it is unclear how extensive the use of guards


51

at city gates was in antiquity. These taxes were paid primarily in cash but sometimes could also be extracted in the form of required services such as hauling rubble from construction sites in carts that had been emptied after the owner sold what he had brought into the city. 31 Commemorative and triumphal arches were another feature straddling streets. Freestanding, independent passages, they could have one central bay or a central bay flanked by two smaller ones, or even be open on all four sides. Arches commemorated military victory or recorded what an individual or family had done for the city. Their primary aesthetic function seems to have been to act as pedestals for large, elaborate bronze sculpture groups, but MacDonald has pointed out that they also mark transitions from one part of the city to another, acting both as a visual barrier, blocking the view, and also as a gateway to what lies on the other side through the unobstructed openings. Arches often stand at points where streets take angled bends, drawing attention to the change in urban layout.32 Fountains were also an important feature of streets because most dwellings lacked direct access to water. Placing them along city streets made them easily accessible to all whenever people needed them. A final feature of streets was the shrines to various gods and, in particular, the neighborhood Lares. They were probably common features but have left little archaeological trace. They often consisted of ephemeral material, did not need to be very large or impressive, and were probably built into walls above the height to which they are preserved at most sites, leaving us little to excavate. The purpose of these shrines was to identify and give focus to a neighborhood within the city. 33 Plazas and fora have some similarities with streets in that some people passed through these public spaces on their way to some other part of the city or they stopped in them to visit the buildings lining them. The similarities stop there. Plazas and fora were much wider, more open, and less crowded than the surrounding streets. This openness made plazas and fora much more spacious and sunny than the streetscapes throughout the rest of the city. Beyond this inherent difference, the Romans made certain that a forum in particular stood out from the urban street network. The paving was frequently of a finer stone and cart traffic was often either blocked completely or carefully controlled within the forum. The entrances to several of the imperial fora in Rome as well as that at Pompeii were marked by commemorative arches, another indication of their importance. Some cities had other plazas outside of the main forum. Despite modern names, such as the Triangular Forum at Pompeii, we do not know whether city residents referred to these plazas as fora, areae, or campi. Like the central forum in most Roman cities, secondary plazas provided routes to various points within the city, making them another component in the overall transportation network. To reach anywhere within the Neapolis neighborhood of Empúries, for instance, from the city’s main gate in the south wall, one had to pass through the southern plaza. Plazas were also surrounded by a variety of buildings, indicating they were open to the public intent on reaching them for various purposes. This

52 Roman Urban Street Networks characteristic distinguishes plazas from courtyards, which were part of a unified architectural whole and were intended for a more specific clientele. For the purposes of this study, the Foro delle Corporazioni at Ostia is considered to be a courtyard rather than a forum, despite its modern appellation. The Foro delle Corporazioni was of little significance in the transportation network of the northeastern sector of Ostia because it is still easier and quicker to follow the streets that line the Foro in order to pass from one point in that area to another; going through it would actually take one away from the most direct route. In addition, the Foro was built in one episode as part of a unified architectural whole. Finally, the Foro was built as a place for people to gather before and after performances in the adjoining theater and, when no performance was being given, as the place for traders to meet at various offices that line the portico on three sides. Only a very specific group of people used the Foro.

DESCRIBING AND QUANTIFYING URBAN PATHS Classical archaeologists working at Roman sites frequently label streets as “main streets,” “thoroughfares,” or “side streets” without ever defi ning what these terms mean. Such imprecision makes it difficult to compare streets with one another within and between sites. Fortunately it is possible to borrow from the work of urban geographers and archaeologists in order to fi nd ways to describe and quantify the role of a street within the entire urban network. Four methods have been adapted to the unique data of archaeological sites in order to describe each street. Three of these techniques are quantitative, allowing us to gather comparable data, whereas a fourth is qualitative, describing the potential movement of carts through the urban environment. The chapter concludes by explaining statistical techniques that can be used to analyze this data in order to determine how space along city streets was being used.

Depth from Outside the City Gates B. Hillier and J. Hanson, professors of architecture and urban morphology, developed some complex techniques for quantifying and describing the components of spatial networks, particularly urban street networks.34 The form of analysis they developed is known as space syntax or access analysis. They start with some very simple observations to gather numeric data such as the number of streets that enter into a particular street or how many streets one must pass through from a given street to exit a town. They then manipulate these observations in very sophisticated ways in order to draw conclusions about the role of each street within a city. Although not specifically designed for archaeological data, a few archaeologists applied their techniques to analyze the organization of rooms and space within


53

buildings35 as well as the spatial arrangement of buildings within sites.36 Whereas Hillier and Hanson’s statistical techniques are interesting, the way they manipulate those statistics makes them very difficult to explain or comprehend. The result is that their useful ways of describing streets become lost on anyone who has not had training in statistics. Some of the theoretical assumptions behind their statistical manipulations have also been called into question as well as their willingness to interpret plans without reference to the culture that produced the architectural space.37 Fortunately they provide some very simple ways for obtaining data that are useful on their own without their theoretical assumptions or complex statistical manipulations. Hillier and Hanson identified one type of quantifiable data presented by the street plans of cities. Hillier and Hanson coined the term “depth” to describe how many streets and plazas one must pass through in order to reach a chosen street within a city from the edge of that city.38 Whereas determining what, exactly, is the edge of a modern city can be difficult, this is not such a challenge for Roman cities. The city wall that surrounded most Roman cities presents a convenient physical, legal, economic, religious, and psychological barrier defi ning what is and what is not inside the city, although the religious edge of a city, the pomerium, did not always follow the exact line of the city wall.39 During the Principate, only the emperor could grant permission for the construction of city walls, further demonstrating their symbolic and legal significance and making them strong status symbols.40 City gates were also significant nodes and a starting point in the urban street network frequently mentioned by ancient authors and, as seen in the Avezzano relief, sometimes figuring prominently in visual representations of cities. Indeed, Servius claims a well-founded city had three gates and three connected streets, emphasizing the prominence of the streets that led to a city gate.41 Once a road entered a city through a gate, its cultural nature changed, military roads ceased their military nature when they reached cities,42 and some roads appear to have changed their names once they entered the city gates.43 In a Roman city, then, the street one enters as soon as one passes through the gate from outside the city has a depth of one. As one advances into the city and turns right or left, leaving the original street, the new street one enters would have a depth of two, the next street would be a three, and so on. Buildings that are located on streets with a depth of one are easy for strangers to the town to locate. Streets with a high depth, on the other hand, are more difficult for a stranger to fi nd. A street with a depth of four or higher would have been fairly complex for a stranger to town to fi nd because it would have required three turns on the visitor’s part. Depth from outside of a city thus presents an interesting opportunity to examine the attitudes of city residents towards outsiders. In theory, residents would have placed buildings they wanted outsiders to fi nd on streets with low depths, and ones they did not want strangers to fi nd on streets with high depths. Streets with a low depth also have a fairly

54


high profi le within the urban landscape because everyone, visitors and residents, who left or entered the city was channeled into the few streets that connect to gates. Buildings located along streets with a low depth would have shared that high profi le in the city. The buildings on streets with high depths, however, would have had a much lower profi le and would have had a fairly inconspicuous role within the urban landscape. Naturally this method treats all city gates as equivalent. No doubt this is a gross oversimplification and ancient people had a more complex hierarchy of gates based on where the regional roads issuing from them led, which we may or, more likely, may never fully understand. But the method is sufficient to allow us to test the hypothesis suggested above based on the use of Latin vocabulary that Roman culture differentiated streets that led to city gates from those that did not. Hillier and Hanson present some sophisticated ways of manipulating the depth statistic to create a fi ner-grained analysis of the role of specific streets within the urban fabric. What their techniques add in statistical complexity does not equal what they yield in information about the urban street network and so in the analyses that follow only the raw depth figure is used.

Depth from the Forum Hillier and Hanson were not concerned specifi cally with Roman cities, but their depth statistic can be adapted to the specifi c Roman cultural context. In addition to calculating depth from city gates, it is also possible to calculate it from the central forum of a Roman city. The forum was the political, economic, religious, and social center of a Roman city. The streets leading directly into the forum, therefore, must have been psychologically central in the urban landscape because they led to the practical center of the city. These streets must have been crowded with people coming and going from the forum, meaning that the buildings along them must have been highly visible to the residents of, and visitors to, the city. The placement of monuments and fountains at the intersections of streets where one led to the forum at Pompeii further confi rms that emphasizing the route to the forum mattered to the residents of that city.44 Using the forum, therefore, as the starting point, we can count the depth of streets from there with those leading directly into the forum having a depth of one and the streets opening off of those as having higher depths. Again, ancient urbanites may have had a more nuanced way of categorizing these streets which this method fails to recognize, but it is enough to establish a gross baseline for comparison. The tests for each city in the following chapters will determine whether or not there are patterns in the use of space that suggest the Romans recognized depth as a way of describing a street. Livy, however, offers a telling anecdote that hints the idea of depth from the forum did have some resonance, at least with Livy and his audience. In describing the Gallic sack


55

of Rome in the beginning of the fourth century BCE, Livy writes that the Gauls gathered in the Roman Forum and from there . . . they dispersed for plunder through the empty streets without meeting anyone. Part of the Gauls rushed along as a band into every building near the forum, part sought edifices more distant as if only those buildings would be untouched and full of plunder. Soon those further away became frightened by the solitude itself. Fearing that an enemy trap might ensnare their dispersed numbers, they returned as a group to the forum and places neighboring the forum.45 Livy has the Gauls recognizing a difference between locations with a low depth and those with a high depth from the forum. Whether or not the Gauls really did feel fear the farther they got from the forum is irrelevant. What is more important is that the difference in location was apparent to Livy and his audience. Depth from the forum is one way of describing this cultural perception that locations near the forum were more public and open whereas those far from the forum were more private and secluded. Hillier and Hansen’s idea of depth also implies that the end point of the street was of great importance to residents and visitors to cities. If a person went in one direction he/she would be going towards the center of town and the forum, whereas going in the other direction would lead one towards the city gates and destinations outside of town. Roman authors indicate that the end point of a street was an important factor when thinking about a street, making depth a culturally relevant statistic. Following the precedence set by Greek authors of New Comedy plays, the Republican-era playwrights Terence and Plautus almost always set the action of their plays in the city street in front of two houses. When characters use an entrance on the side of the stage to enter or exit, both authors were careful to have the characters explain to where they are going or from where they are coming. One side entrance always leads to the forum and the center of town whereas the other leads to either the harbor or the countryside through the unmentioned but clearly understood city gate.46 That the playwrights took care to orient their audience to the directionality of the street in which the play’s action takes place is a further indication that a street’s destination was a detail of interest to a Roman audience.

Number of Intersections Another type of data available about streets that Hillier and Hanson suggest is the number of intersections that a particular street may have with other streets.47 Roman urbanites seem to have been aware of the number of streets that intersected a given street. One way of giving directions was to count the number of streets from a given landmark, a method that would be very useful in the absence of street names mentioned above.48 Roman

56


authors from the late Republican through Late Antique periods also praise a street that intersected many others as a grand street.49 Comparing the number of street intersections within a city can present more useful data for describing how well a particular street integrates or segregates the streets of the city. A street that intersects many streets within a city is obviously important to the overall transportation network and helps to bind that network together or integrate all of the streets into the system. A street that intersects only one other street, however, does the opposite; it breaks up the street network and segregates itself from the rest of the network. People who choose to locate their buildings on streets with many intersections are raising their profi le within the city while inviting people to see their buildings, whereas those who choose to locate on streets with few intersections are setting themselves apart from the rest of the city. Again, Hillier and Hanson have more complex ways of manipulating this statistic which are not used here.

Access to Cart Traffic One fi nal way streets play a role in the entire urban transportation network is facilitating or impeding cart traffic. The literary evidence testifies to the degree to which the consul or emperor tried to limit the movement of carts in the city of Rome and the deep contempt the educated elite had for cart traffic. The archaeological evidence from the case-study cities confi rms that civic officials and/or residents sought to control and restrict cart traffic within some Roman cities by placing impediments to the passage of carts in certain streets. Often the easiest and most direct way for a cart driver to go from one point in the city to another was blocked. Public and private buildings spilt into the streets, narrowing them and occasionally blocking cart traffic, while curbstones, steps, and fountains closed portions of streets to the passage of a cart. In some Roman cities certain stretches of streets appear to have been purposely blocked to carts at two points in order to create pedestrian zones. Other streets might have one impediment, perhaps to discourage through traffic, but which left the street open for carts that might need to access one or more buildings on that street. Both literary and archaeological evidence offer some insight to help determine which streets were too narrow for cart traffic and which were wide enough for one or more lanes of traffic. Rome’s mid-fifth century BCE law code, the Twelve Tables, established the width of a via at 8 Roman feet or about 2.4 m.50 This legal width was repeated by subsequent jurists during the second century CE.51 The Theodosian Code established the distance between buildings at 10 Roman feet, or about 2.9 m, probably in order to allow space for the construction of balconies on the upper stories of buildings.52 The evidence from excavated carts and ruts suggests that a street built to the letter of Roman law would have been wide enough for the passage of only one cart at a time. Tsujimura estimates that the minimum


57

width necessary for a single cart to pass through Pompeii during its last phase was 1.42 m.53 Tsujimura argues that because the distance between the wheels on the cart excavated in the House of Menander at Pompeii had 1.42 m between them, this would be the minimum distance necessary between the curbs of sidewalks for a cart to pass. She assumes the hubs of the wheels would have gone over the sidewalks and so there is no need to account for the extra .37 m these added to the width of the cart. Tsujimura fails to take two issues into account, however. Considering the unevenness of the polygonal paving stones at Pompeii and Ostia, it seems highly unlikely that even the best cart driver could get his cart to go in an exact straight line on a street without ruts without sliding from side to side. Ruts at Pompeii rarely go in a straight line, further suggesting the difficulty presented by the irregular paved surface. A cart driver must have sought streets that were wider than the distance between his wheels to avoid damaging his cart on the curbstones. The other thing she fails to take into account is that the sidewalks were not always free of construction, people, and goods at the height of the hubs. Fountains and walls built into the street would have required a driver to have a wider distance than that presented by his wheel gauge. There were also pedestrians to worry about, as well as goods lining the street. Martial complains of sidewalks so choked with goods for sale that people could not use them. 54 A hub would have threatened this merchandise if the wheel was too close to the curb. The full width of the cart in the House of Menander, from hub to hub, was 1.79 m; drivers must have looked for streets slightly wider than this. Because it is a round number slightly larger than 1.79 m, 2.0 m is taken in the present study as the minimum width for a street that a cart driver was likely to use. This number accords well with the width of some of the more narrow gates at Empúries and other sites. A cart could have squeezed around an obstacle that cut that width for a short distance; for instance, ruts on the Via degli Augustali at Pompeii curve around a fountain near its intersection with the Vicolo Storto with a width of only 1.68 m between the fountain and the curb, but from the gouges on the fountain basin it was clear this was a tight fit. But for the overall width of an entire street, 2.0 m would have been the most attractive minimum width. This is simply doubled to 4.0 m for determining the minimum width of a two-lane street. Tsujimura suggests a smaller width of 3.21–3.53 m for the minimum width of a two-lane street, but again she assumes that the hubs could hang over the curb and that there need be no space between the hubs of the vehicles passing each other in opposite directions, assuming the carts could go in a straight line and would not slide at all on the paved surface. Thus 4.0 m is a more realistic minimum cutoff point. The great diversity of ways residents of Roman cities treated cart traffic makes it very difficult to conduct a statistical analysis of the distribution of streets that were open to cart traffic from those that were not in relation to the types of buildings that lined them. One street might be open to two lanes of traffic for part of its length and narrowed to one lane by a fountain

58


in another section. Some streets are open to carts for much of their length, but then blocked by a single standing stone along one section. A cart could go halfway up a street before encountering a pedestrian zone. The statistical techniques described above for examining the relationship between building types and depth from the city gates, depth from the forum, or the number of intersections simply cannot be done for access to cart traffic. Instead, in order to analyze the movement of carts through each of the case-study cities, maps were produced indicating whether the width of the street excluded carts or permitted one or two at a time to pass. These cart drivers’ maps of the case-study cities also included the location of impediments to cart traffic and, when available, the direction ruts turn at corners. A cart driver would have needed all of this information to know how to navigate each city. These maps make it possible to discern global attitudes towards the movement of carts across each city.

Primary and Secondary Streets, the Forum, and Plazas Based on the discussion in the previous chapter of the linguistic evidence for how Romans defi ned and categorized urban streets and plazas as well as the archaeological evidence discussed so far in this chapter, we can identify four different types of plazas and streets in the archaeological record. The forum and any additional plazas are fairly easy to recognize by their location and size. Identifying a via or angiportum is a different matter, although by combining the elements of depth from the forum or city gates and the number of intersections a street makes can provide the answer. Urbanites have only so much control over the cityscape they inherit from previous generations; some things are easy to change, some things are not, and some things cannot be changed at all. In terms of city streets, three factors were rarely open to negotiation: depth from the city gates, depth from the forum, and the number of intersections with other streets. The literary evidence cited in this and the previous chapters suggests Roman city dwellers were aware of these factors. The two types of depth and the number of intersections, therefore, provide the frame of the street network. Romans could then adapt their city to that frame by deciding where in relation to streets with certain depths or intersections to place their homes, shops, or temples and by deciding on which streets to allow cart traffic. In each of the case studies that follow, therefore, the streets that lead to the city gate or forum and intersect a specific minimum of streets are labeled as “primary” streets and those that lacked these qualities as “secondary” streets. Whereas it is impossible to know whether a Roman would have called all the “primary” streets a via or platea, primary streets do have the characteristics of a via whereas the secondary streets have the characteristics of an angiportum. With every street or plaza classified as either a primary street, secondary street, forum, or plaza, it becomes possible to explore whether the residents of the four case-study cities used them differently in terms of


59

which types of buildings they constructed and how they controlled the cart traffic along each type of street.

CATEGORIZING AND QUANTIFYING BUILDING TYPES Creating numeric data for describing streets is only one half of the data necessary for the type of analysis proposed. We also need to fi nd a way to quantify activities along those streets. Fortunately, buildings can stand as proxies for activity, so as long as we can categorize buildings into broad groups based on the activities that took place inside them, we can begin to quantify urban activities. An ideal statistical dataset will divide all buildings into six to eight categories based on how the building was used. This number of categories is admittedly arbitrary and is based solely on the maximum number of gray shadings that the average viewer can easily comprehend on a black-and-white plan or map. Such a consideration is primary because our data are spatial and one of the best ways to represent spatial patterns is through maps. It goes without saying, perhaps, that in the surviving literature no Roman ever presented a list of all buildings within a city broken down into so few categories. The creation of these categories is thus a modern academic one. It can be informed, however, by at least an elite perspective garnered from the surviving ancient literature. In this way, whereas categories we create may be a modern interpretation of the evidence, our categories may reflect some ancient attitudes towards the use of urban space. Two sources that appear at the beginning and after the end of the Principate, making nice bookends to the imperial period, provide us with the closest record we have from antiquity approximating a categorized list of buildings in a Roman city. Vitruvius wrote a manual for architects in the 20s BCE.55 The manual touches almost exclusively on urban architecture and organizes types of buildings into categories; unfortunately, Vitruvius’s list is not comprehensive. Of his 10 books, Vitruvius devoted half to a discussion of specific types of buildings. Books 3 and 4 focus on temples whereas books 6 and 7 cover elite urban and country houses, glossing over, as Vitruvius admits, nonelite housing.56 Book 5 is divided into 12 chapters, each of which examines specific types of public buildings. Chapters 1 and 2 of Book 5 discuss the administrative buildings found around a forum, including the treasury, prison, and senate house. Chapters 3 to 9 are devoted to theaters, a subject that Vitruvius obviously takes great delight in discussing. Chapter 10 describes baths and 11 gymnasiums, both structures designed for the health of the city’s residents. Ancient city planners, Vitruvius included, were particularly concerned with issues of public health and making certain that their cities avoided environmental conditions that might lead the city’s residents to poor health. 57 Finally, Chapter 12 considers harbors, a topic that will be overlooked here because none of the cities discussed in the following

60


chapters have a well-excavated and understood harbor. The other sources to categorize buildings are a pair of Late Antique catalogues describing Rome region by region. The catalogues are known together as the Regionaries and they give totals of certain structure types at the end of each region’s description. The Regionaries repeat some of Vitruvius’s categories such as religious buildings and baths. They also mention elite private homes (domus) as well as apartment buildings (insulae) most often occupied by the nonelite. 58 In addition to repeating Vitruvius’s categories, the Regionaries also count two types of buildings Vitruvius overlooked, including bakeries, the only type of building for production mentioned, and warehouses, the only type of commercial building. Curiously, aside from one oblique reference in Vitruvius, 59 neither source mentions the most common type of structure found in any Roman city, the simple shop. Despite some obvious omissions, when combined these two sources produce a fairly complete list of categories into which all the buildings found in a city can be placed, a list which, quite conveniently, has only seven categories. Table 2.1 summarizes these categories. Admittedly these categories are broad, allowing us to be ignorant of the very specific function of a structure. Yet these categories are focused enough to allow us to observe general patterns in the spatial composition of the case-study cites. The categories stand as proxies for commercial, religious, domestic, and other behavior. Each category in Table 2.1 is fairly self-explanatory, with the exception of health-related structures, which requires a bit more explanation. Despite Vitruvius’s insistence that city planners should consider the health of the urban population, there is little evidence for a coherent, coordinated policy in Rome or any other city for the provisioning of public health through the construction of bath buildings, public latrines, gymnasia, or palaestrae.60 Instead, urban elite often added baths, palaestrae, and elaborate fountains, sometimes called nymphaea, to the city in order to consolidate their

Table 2.1 Categories of Urban Buildings Suggested by Vitruvius and the Regionaries Architectural Category Examples of Buildings administrative

basilica, senate-house (curia), archive (tabularium)

commercial

bar/restaurant (caupona, popina, thermopolium), brothel (lupanar), shop (taberna), warehouse (horrea)

entertainment

theater, amphitheater

health-related

bath, gymnasium (palaestra), elaborate fountain (nymphaeum)

production

bakery, forge, kiln, workshop, market gardens

religious

temple, sanctuary

residential

elite house (domus), nonelite house, apartment building (insula)

unknown

—


61

position in society. Residents of the city benefited from these structures because they gave them a place to bathe, get water, or exercise as well as gossip, conduct business, be entertained, and establish their place in society. Such structures also brought prestige to the city, to the benefit of all.61 During the Principate, individuals often paid for the construction of these structures, particularly bath buildings, out of their own pockets and were rewarded with inscriptions and/or statues honoring them.62 In the socially competitive world of the Roman elite, such inscriptions were quite valuable. It is also possible that some bath buildings were intended to be moneymaking ventures.63 Despite the fact that these structures were constructed for a variety of purposes and served a number of different social and economic functions, there was an ancient recognition that bathing, exercising, and fresh water were good for health.64 Therefore, whereas bath buildings, paleastrae, and nymphaea had multiple purposes, they can be grouped under the admittedly loose category title of health-related structures. For the purposes of the analysis outlined in the following chapters, every architectural space in Pompeii, Ostia, Silchester, and Empúries was placed into one of the seven categories outlined in Table 2.1. In defi ning a unique architectural space, the building is not considered the basic unit. When a doorway from the street leads to an independent part of one building that has a separate use, following the example of Wallace-Hadrill, it is counted as a separate space.65 An elite house, therefore, which has two independent shops built into its façade, each of which has its own entrance from the street, is architecturally one unit counted as three different spaces, each with its own use. Wallace-Hadrill only considers these spaces as separate when they are completely independent, that is, when there is no internal doorway leading from one of the shops into the house. Because this study focuses on perceptions of buildings from the streets and each of the doorways from the street lead to a space with a unique use, they are still counted as three different spaces. Some buildings could have multiple functions, but each is categorized based on the function of the fi rst room one would enter from the street because this would influence a pedestrian’s understanding of the building from the street. Bowing to the realities of archaeological investigation, an eighth category, “unknown,” describes buildings for which no plausible interpretation has been offered. Some of these categories can be subdivided to allow for a more refined analysis of the use of space in Roman cities when the evidence is available at a particular site. For instance, domestic structures can be subdivided into elite and nonelite and commercial structures can be subdivided into taverns, warehouses, brothels, and so on. Pompeii, Ostia, Silchester, and Empúries are analyzed using the seven categories but only when the evidence warrants are fi ner divisions examined. Criteria for creating the subcategories are discussed in the chapter about each site because each has some unique architecture. The multistory apartment blocks found at Ostia, for example, are absent from Silchester whereas the buildings with space and equipment

62 Roman Urban Street Networks for processing agricultural produce and storing tools found at Silchester are absent from Ostia. A chart at the beginning of each chapter shows how the buildings found at each site are categorized. Note that English terms are used for the types of buildings listed in the chart above and throughout this work. Whereas the use of Latin terminology to identify structures can be enlightening, it also has led to confusion among scholars. R. Laurence has discussed the problems with the use of the terms caupona, popina, and thermopolium to identify the shops at Pompeii which served food and drinks.66 Some authors have invested much effort in trying to distinguish what structures fell into these categories whereas there is doubt that some of the terms, particularly thermopolium, were actually in use within the Roman Empire during the Principate. Thus, like the terms decumanus and kardo discussed in the previous chapter, modern archaeologists have infused Latin terms with their own assumptions, which may or may not have been shared by people in antiquity. To avoid confusion, therefore, English terms are used throughout this work in order to keep assumptions as explicit as possible. Classifying all buildings in an excavated Roman city in this way has some obvious disadvantages. For one thing, it glosses over the multiple uses to which some buildings were put; for instance, some shopkeepers lived in their shops.67 All buildings had a primary use, however, so whereas some of the fi ner subtleties of the data are lost using this method, still useful data are generated. A second problem is that many buildings had one use on the fi rst floor with very different uses on the floors above.68 By considering each separate doorway in the analysis, this variation can be taken into consideration. Stairways that led from the street to the upper stories of buildings are treated as independent units and are used in the analysis when there is evidence for the use of the upper story. For each of the four sites examined, a digitized plan based on published plans as well as a database for each city that listed every doorway that led to a unique space was created. In order to determine the use of each building, and the spaces within them that had their own street entrances, publications that synthesized the interpretations for buildings at each site were relied upon, but supplemented with information from other recent publications about specific buildings within each site. The author also visited all four cities in order to assess the validity of previous interpretations regarding the use of each building, paying particular attention to controversial architectural evidence with multiple interpretations. Visiting the sites also provided the opportunity to experience walking down the city streets themselves, getting as close to the ancient experience of passing along the streets as possible. Once the database and digitized plan for each site were complete, these were linked using a Geographic Information Systems computer program so that the spatial relationships between different types of buildings could be explored. Linking the databases and maps allowed for the creation of maps where buildings with different uses were shaded in


63

different ways or to display only those buildings in specific categories, making other types of buildings disappear. These capabilities greatly facilitated the analysis of the data.

CORRELATING STREETS AND ACTIVITIES Having assessed each street in each of the case-study cities based on depth from the city gates, depth from the forum, number of intersections, and the combination of these three factors, we can test a very simple hypothesis: there is no correlation between each of these characteristics and the eight categories of buildings listed above. In the study of Roman urbanism, this makes an excellent starting point because some have argued there was little organization of space in Roman cities,69 although such a contention has been challenged.70 If we accept as a working hypothesis that there is no pattern in the use of Roman urban space with relation to the city streets, there should be no correlation between the factors of street depth from city gate or forum, number of intersections, or the combination of all three of these factors. This, then, is the idea to challenge or, put another way, the hypothesis to attempt to falsify. The method applied to the question of whether or not we should accept or dismiss the idea that the Romans did little to organize their urban space with relation to streets is best elucidated through a pair of examples from the next chapter on Pompeii. At Pompeii all streets and plazas have depths of between one and four from the city gates, as seen in the fi rst column of Table 2.2. Using sources outlined above, 904 architectural units at Pompeii were categorized as having a commercial function. As the third column of Table 2.2 records, 529 shops were counted that have their primary entrance from a street with a depth of one from the city gates, 338 that are entered from streets with a depth of two, 37 on streets with a depth of three and zero are on streets with a depth of four. The large number of shop entrances on streets with a depth of one is impressive and seems to suggest that shopkeepers prized streets that led to city gates as locations for their shops. This impression is strengthened when we add together the total lengths of all streets and plazas at each depth, as can be seen in the second column of Table 2.2.71 At Pompeii the total length of street frontage at a depth of one is less than half of the street frontage at a depth of two, yet more commercial structures are squeezed into the streets with a depth of one than those with a depth of two. But are there enough shops beyond the expected amount for us to dismiss the hypothesis that Roman cities have little to no spatial patterning with relation to street depth from the city gates? One way to answer this question is to try to imagine what the distribution of shops at Pompeii would look like if there really was no patterning with relation to the streets and then compare it to what we can actually see. In theory, if there is no pattern to their distribution, shops should be fairly

64 Roman Urban Street Networks Table 2.2

Example of the Use of the Chi-Square Test for Statistical Significance

Street Depth from Pompeii City Gates

Sum of Street and Plaza Lengths

Category of Architectural Unit CommercialObserved Expected

ReligiousObserved Expected

1

3,174 m

529

238

6

4

2

7,766 m

338

583

8

10

3

1,075 m

37

81

1

1

4

20 m

0

2

0

0

904

15

15

Total Chi-square Probability (%)

12,035 m —

904 10–102

1

70

evenly located across the city. To simulate an even distribution of commercial structures across Pompeii requires two steps. In the fi rst step we take the total number of shops and divide by the total length of all streets and plazas at all depths in Pompeii to come up with a figure of commercial structures per meter of street (904 shops / 12,035 m = 0.075 commercial spaces per meter length of street). For the second step we can then multiply the number of commercial spaces per meter of street length by the total length of streets at a depth of one from the city gates (0.075 commercial spaces / meter × 3174 meters of streets with a depth of 1) to come up with a total of 238 commercial spaces that we would expect along streets with a depth of one if there really was no patterning in our data. Repeating this procedure for the lengths of streets at the other depths gives us the figures in the fourth column of Table 2.2. What we observe differs a great deal from what we would expect if there was no pattern to the distribution to shops with relation to street depth from the city gates. Indeed, the actual number of commercial structures on streets with a depth of one is twice what we would expect if there were no patterning. At a depth of two and three, the reverse is true: the number of observed structures is well below what we would expect if there was no pattern in the data. Interestingly, at a depth of four we see almost exactly the number of shops we would expect to see if street depth played no part in decisions about where to locate commercial structures. So do the observed counts of shops differ enough from the expected for us to reject the notion that they are distributed without patterning in relation to street depth and that we actually see in these data the active decisions of Pompeian shop owners? To help us decide how to answer this question, we can turn to the probability test called the chi-square.72 Using the chi-square formula73 to compare the observed number of shops at each depth with the number expected if they are distributed without pattern, the chi-square produces a figure


65

for the statistical probability that the observed distribution differs enough from the expected distribution for us to conclude that our null hypothesis that there is no patterning in the data lacks merit. Statisticians consider any chi-square probability of 5% or lower significant as it indicates there is a 5% probability the pattern occurred by chance, the “expected” outcome based on our hypothesis, and a 95% probability that it occurred due to intention. Any result lower than 1% is considered to be highly significant.74 In the tables that follow, a figure of 5% or lower figure in the “Chi-Square Probability” row indicates a result that is due to human activity; any figure above 5% probably occurred by chance. We must be careful when using probability to understand that there is always the possibility we are wrong. If one calculated only a 5% probability that a particular horse might lose a race, the horse could still lose. Nonetheless, most people would be willing to place a bet with a 95% chance of winning. Probability offers us a recommendation on whether to accept or reject a particular hypothesis; it does not prove that patterns do or do not exist. It is up to us to decide whether we are willing to accept that recommendation. The chi-square probability that commercial structures at Pompeii are distributed without pattern in relation to street depth from the city gates is 110–102% (Table 2.2). In mathematical notation an exponent of 10–102 means we must move the decimal point 102 times to the left of 1.0 in order to write the number in longhand. In other words, 110–102 is a very, very small number well below the 1% threshold of being considered highly significant. This tiny percentage represents the probability that the pattern of observed commercial structures at Pompeii was generated by chance or coincidence. With such strong odds, we should feel very comfortable rejecting the original hypothesis and concluding that Pompeians preferred to place commercial units on streets with a depth of one from the city gates. For the sake of comparison, columns five and six of Table 2.2 have the results for the distribution of observed and expected religious structures in relation to street depth from the city gates. Because the distribution of observed examples is quite similar to what we would expect if they were distributed without pattern, we probably do not need to run a chi-square test to see that there is no pattern in the data. Nonetheless, the chi-square probability for the location of religious structures is 70%, well above the 5% cutoff point. The chisquare test recommends what we probably would have concluded anyway. This last example demonstrates one of the frustrating difficulties of statistical methodologies. “Religious structures” seems like a terribly broad category. It would be interesting to look at the location of private cults at Pompeii such as the Sanctuary of Isis. For optimal results, the chi-square test should only be used when there are six or more examples available. Pompeii has only one Sanctuary of Isis; so even though it has its primary entrance from a street with a depth of three from the forum, this observation has no statistical significance. The creation of broad categories with more than five examples is an essential, if limiting, prerequisite for this method. That is

66 Roman Urban Street Networks not to say the placement of the Sanctuary of Isis was without significance; it has a high depth from the forum that is particularly intriguing. Statistically supported decisions about significance form the basis of much that follows, but we should not discount the equally powerful commonsense observations, even when no statistics can support them. Each of the four chapters that follows applies these techniques to four separate Roman cities as case studies. In addition to establishing the existence of patterns in the layout of each city, we will be able to compare the similarities in those patterns between those cities and see how they differ over space and time. We begin with the site that contains the richest data: Pompeii.

3

Pompeii

The Introduction and fi rst chapter made the case that one important factor ancient Roman urbanites had for defi ning a street had to do with its role in the larger street network. Some of their decisions about where to place buildings for specific uses hinged on the location of a plot within that street network. The obvious question that follows is whether or not the archaeological evidence supports this observation based on literary evidence. This chapter presents the fi rst of four case studies in order to show that the archaeological evidence also proves the role of a street in the network influenced how Pompeians decided to use the space along that street. Almost everyone has heard of the city buried by the eruption of Vesuvius on that fateful day in 79 CE. In addition to the fame it shares with Herculaneum as one of only two ancient cities preserved in its entirety, Pompeii is the longest excavated site in the history of archaeology. Roman archaeology was born at Pompeii. In more than two and a half centuries investigators have uncovered about two-thirds of the site. Nonetheless, the amount we do not know about Pompeii is rather startling. Much of the work completed at the site was done early in the history of archaeology when excavators were still developing methods for the recording of information and for the conservation of architecture and artifacts. As a result, valuable data were lost. In addition, the sheer volume of material that has come from the site has ensured that much of it has not been properly studied and published. Excavations at Pompeii could cease today, but enough material would remain unpublished to keep scholars busy for a generation to come, if not longer. Thus we may know more about Pompeii than any other ancient city, but our knowledge of the site is still frustratingly incomplete.1

LAYOUT, TOPOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY OF POMPEII Pompeii’s location within the regional transportation network of Campania influenced the direction of some of the city’s streets and the location of its gates. The Sarno River, which still passes to the south of the city, facilitated commerce by ship, linking the city with the interior of Campania to the east

68


and the Bay of Naples, giving access to the rest of the Mediterranean Sea to the west. To reach the city’s main port facilities, one followed the Via Marina2 west from the forum and exited through the Porta Marina in the southern part of the western city wall (Map 3.1). Two other gates led travelers to destinations southeast and south of Pompeii. The modern names for these gates indicate the major cities one could reach from them including the Porta Nocera, through which one would pass to reach ancient Nuceria, and the Porta di Stabia, which led to a bridge over the Sarno and from there on to Stabiae and Salerno (ancient Salernum). Reentering the city from this same gate and heading north brought one to the Porta del Vesuvio and a road heading toward the hinterland around the base of the volcano. To the east of the Porta del Vesuvio another gate opened onto the road that led north to Capua, whereas north of the forum the Porta di Ercolano pointed travelers to the road north to the cities of Herculaneum and Naples (ancient Neapolis). Two gates in the eastern city wall opened onto roads leading to the interior of Campania and to the city of Nola. The topography slopes down from the northwest to the southeast. The southwestern sector of the city, between the Via di Stabia and the end of the Via delle Terme, stands on a ridge with a fairly sharp drop defi ning the exterior of the city. The Pompeians built the line of their city walls on this ridge, reinforcing the natural strength of the site. Two streets, the Via Marina and the Via di Stabia, descend rather sharply as they approach the Porta Marina and the Porta Stabia, respectively. Besides these two streets,

Map 3.1 Pompeii’s street network. A Porta Marina; B Porta di Stabia; C Porta di Nocera; D Porta di Sarno; E Porta di Nola; F Porta di Capua; G Porta del Vesuvio; H Porta di Ercolano; I Tetrapylon of the Holconii; J Arch of Caligula; K Arch; L Arch.

Pompeii

69

most of the north-south streets incline gently as one heads north whereas the east-west streets are fairly flat with a slight increase in elevation as one heads west. Pompeii’s street system did not always have the shape it did at the time Vesuvius erupted; the original settlement was much smaller. The fi rst sign of what we can properly call a town at Pompeii dates to about the sixth century BCE. The oldest part of the city was constructed at this time in what is now the southwest corner of the site. Contrary to popular perceptions of the random nature of the streets in this oldest part of the city, most streets are usually straight and usually meet cross streets at, or close to, 90-degree angles.3 The irregular Via degli Augustali, Vicolo del Lupanare, and Via dei Teatri form a rough perimeter which may have marked the line of the fi rst city walls.4 In the fifth century a wall was built around the city, only to be replaced by one in limestone a century later. This wall is the one that still encompasses the city today. The city prospered as Oscan-speaking Samnites planned portions of the city to the north and east of the old urban core.5 These areas were laid out on two slightly different orientations, perhaps to correspond to variations in topography.6 Not until the second century, however, did Oscan-speaking families begin to build extensively within the city, creating both public and private buildings in the original urban core and in the areas laid out later. The theater was constructed at this time using a plan that was typical of Greek theaters (Map 3.2). A number of fi ne houses were also built. These houses appear in the areas of the city that were more open and less crowded than the original urban core, particularly in the northwestern sector of the city, allowing their builders to make them larger and more spacious than earlier houses had been. The ubiquitous shops found throughout the city and a market building (macellum), VII.9.17, built at the northeast corner of the forum in the second century BCE, indicate the vibrant commercial life of the city (Map 3.2).8 Sometime before 80 BCE the city had a new influx of residents as the Roman general and dictator Sulla settled his Roman veterans at Pompeii. Sulla’s veterans reworked the forum and its immediate environs to put their own Roman stamp on it by building Roman-style temples including the Sanctuary of Venus Fisica Pompeiana southwest of the forum and that of Jupiter at a strategic position dominating the northern end of the forum.9 In addition, the veterans rebuilt the Sanctuary of Apollo adjoining the forum (Map 3.2). These changes made the forum a much more formal plaza than it had been before. To accommodate Roman tastes for entertainment, Sulla’s veterans built an amphitheater in the southeast corner of the site and a small theater (odeum) adjacent to the larger Greek theater.10 During the time of Augustus, citizens of Pompeii added a palaestra beside the amphitheater (Map 3.2). The construction of the amphitheater and palaestra in Regio II was accompanied by a major reorganization of the street grid in the southeastern sector of the city as these

70 Roman Urban Street Networks

Map 3.2 Plan of Pompeii showing sites mentioned in the text. 1 Sanctuary of Venus; 2 Sanctuary of Apollo; 3 Temple of Jupiter/Capitolium; 4 Macellum (market); 5 Forum Baths; 6 Temple of Fortuna Augusta; 7 House of the Faun; 8 Sanctuary of Isis; 9 Theater; 10 Odeum; 11 Temple of Zeus Meilichios; 12 Central Baths; 13 Cult garden; 14 Palaestra; 15 Amphitheater; 16 Praedia of Julia Felix.

buildings covered three streets that disappeared completely. Meanwhile, the intervening space between the two buildings came to be used as a street even though it was not along the original path of the street grid. At the same time, what had been four blocks were combined into two by the construction of buildings over the intervening streets, a move that created blocks 4 and 5 in Regio II and eliminated two streets that communicated between the Via dell’ Abbondanza and the burgeoning entertainment district.11 From the arrival of Sulla’s veterans to the eruption of Vesuvius, Pompeii was transformed into a Roman city.12 The city’s prosperity suffered a major setback after an earthquake struck in 62 CE damaging and destroying many parts of the city. The temple of Jupiter in the forum and that of Venus Fisica Pompeiana were ruined as well as the sanctuary of the Egyptian goddess Isis that adjoined the theater (Map 3.2). A number of homes were destroyed and seriously damaged as well. Recovery from the disaster was slow. Whereas some homes, the theater, and the Sanctuary of Isis were quickly repaired, the Temple of Jupiter and the aqueduct still lay in ruins 17 years later when Vesuvius erupted.13 Pompeians took advantage of this disaster to rework part of their street network. For instance, the Central Baths encroached on the already narrow Vicolo di Tesmo, covering one side of ruts in the paving blocks and rendering the street impassable to cart traffic.14 Workers were in the process of putting the fi nal touches on this newly constructed bath building when the city was destroyed. This example should serve to remind us that Pompeii’s

Pompeii

71

street network evolved constantly and that the form it had in 79 CE was simply its most recent incarnation.

THE STRUCTURE OF POMPEII’S STREETS Thanks to the unique circumstances that led to the preservation of Pompeii, we have a fuller picture of the structure and nature of Pompeii’s streets than of any other Roman city (Map 3.1). Contrary to popular assumptions, we cannot assume that Pompeii’s streets were typical of how the Romans constructed their urban streets. The evidence from other sites, as will be seen in subsequent chapters, demonstrates that Pompeii had some of the most highly developed and well-laid streets of any excavated Roman city.15 Pompeii’s streets differ in width, but are generally wider than the 8 Roman feet, or approximately 2.4 m, required by the Twelve Tables in Rome.16 The process of paving the streets with fitted polygonal blocks of a volcanic stone (cocciopesto) began in the second century BCE and continued for many decades.17 Repairs to the streets were ongoing and some streets were undergoing reconstruction at the time of the eruption.18 The paved surface not only facilitated the movement of traffic and pedestrians, but it also was a more efficient way to drain rainwater and the overflow from cisterns and fountains. Paved streets prevented the ground from absorbing water and, following the basic topography of the site, channeled the water out the Porta Marina, Porta Stabia, Porta Nocera, and Porta Sarno gates on the south side of the city.19 When it rains heavily still today the volume of water in the streets can be great, which in antiquity must have helped flush the streets of some of the waste that ended up there. A few stretches of Pompeii’s streets had underground sewers that collected runoff and directed it under the city’s walls to the south, but these ran under only a few streets, apparently intended to drain the baths and the forum. 20 Not all of the streets, however, were paved with stone: some streets in the southeastern portion of the city, west of the amphitheater, remained unpaved throughout their existence.21 Their generous width made it possible for streets to have sidewalks on either side, although sidewalks are lacking on unpaved streets. C. Saliou has demonstrated that the length of some stretches of sidewalk paved in a similar manner correspond to the façades of buildings. She concluded that owners were responsible for the sidewalks in front of their buildings. 22 Her observation confi rms that Pompeians enforced Roman laws known from other cities assigning responsibility for sidewalk maintenance to property owners. Whereas individual building owners could make their own sidewalks, the unity of sidewalk construction along longer portions of a street suggest a communal effort. Perhaps a group of neighbors pooled their resources for the construction of these sidewalks or the civic government had a hand in the project. 23

72 Roman Urban Street Networks Sidewalks stand an average of 30 cm above the surface of the street and are typically edged with stone but filled with beaten earth. Many of the edging stones have holes drilled into them which were probably intended for the tethering of animals.24 A few owners drew attention to their buildings by paving the stretch of sidewalk in front of their buildings with marble, simple decorative mosaics, or, as in front of the House of the Faun, mosaics spelling out a greeting.25 Once Pompeii became connected to an extension of the Serino aqueduct in the time of Augustus, hydraulic engineers laid lead pipes in the sidewalks in order to distribute the water in the most efficient manner possible. The beaten earth composition of the sidewalks facilitated the laying and repairing of these pipes. 26 Indeed, at least some of the sidewalks appear to have been laid in order to provide beds into which the water pipes could be set. Engineers added other features to the streets to facilitate the distribution of water, including 14 water towers, whereas other individuals constructed over three dozen fountains to deliver the water to neighborhoods. 27 An unusual component of Pompeii’s streets is its stepping-stones. These were volcanic blocks laid perpendicular to the direction of the street to allow pedestrians to cross what could be dirty and muddy streets without soiling their clothes, shoes, or feet. None of the other sites investigated for this study have this feature, suggesting it was an unusual urban luxury. Some sets of stepping-stones appear at intersections, perhaps reflecting their installation by civic authorities, whereas others cross the street in the middle of a block and lead to the entrance of a specific building such as the Forum Baths and the House of the Faun (Map 3.2). These stepping-stones may indicate that the owners wanted to draw attention to their buildings. Curiously, stepping-stones are not distributed evenly across the city and are completely absent from Regio II, the southeastern sector of the city near the amphitheater.28 Sidewalks and, perhaps, stepping-stones occupy a unique liminal position in urban architecture as they straddle the public and private sphere, being both part of the building they front and the street they line. 29 Exterior benches also occupy this position. Much less common than sidewalks, benches offered one more option building owners had to draw attention to their buildings. B. Gesemann and J. Hartnett have both pointed out that both business and home owners placed benches in front of their buildings, offering pedestrians a place to rest and, hopefully, gaining thanks and recognition from the weary traveler.30 Another feature of Pompeii’s streetscapes was impediments to cart traffi c. These came in different forms, including curbs blocking the entrance to a street or standing stones set in the middle of the street. In addition, architectural construction, whether it was expanded buildings, fountains, or an arch, narrowed streets, some to such an extent that the passage of carts became impossible. 31 Many of these impediments appear to have been added sometime after the creation of the

Pompeii

73

Roman colony in 80 BCE. 32 As mentioned earlier, the Central Baths, which were still under construction at the time of Vesuvius’ eruption, spill into the Vicolo di Tesmo to the east of the building, covering up one half of a set of ruts in the street. This street, which had once been open to carts, became blocked to them because of this. The ruts in the paving of most streets as well as the width indicate that the majority of streets at Pompeii were one lane. Whether they were legally defi ned as one-way or not is a matter of dispute. 33 At the end of the Vicolo Storto where it meets the Via della Fortuna, a masonry construction provides a ramp that ends abruptly at the curb with no companion ramp leading back down to the surface of the Via della Fortuna. Vehicles going from the Vicolo Storto to the Via della Fortuna could go up the ramp at the end of the Vicolo Storto but then, to get to the surface of the Via della Fortuna, would have had to drop over the curb about 30 cm. This 30-cm curb would have prevented carts from going in the opposite direction from the Via della Fortuna to the Vicolo Storto. This ramp may have served as a way to indicate the one-way nature of this street and the direction cart traffi c was allowed to go. If this was meant to control the direction of traffi c, it appears to have been a singular ad hoc attempt. Pompeii’s streets were also decorated with five arches on which statues of prominent local or imperial politicians were placed. Of these, the inscription associated with only one survives at the intersection of the two busiest streets in the city, the Via dell’ Abbondanza and the Via di Stabia. It announces that the arch honored the Holconius family. 34 The remaining arches were stripped of their inscriptions after the eruption, so we do not know to whom they may have been dedicated, but because of their placement in the forum, the assumption that they were dedicated to emperors or members of the imperial family is probably sound. 35 One last feature of streets was street shrines dedicated to the Lares Compitales, discussed in Chapter 2. Most frequently these shrines consisted of a masonry or brick altar attached to the side of a building at a street corner. Above the altar was often a fresco representing the deity and offerings for that deity. A few shrines were more elaborate. The largest at Pompeii consisted of a small portico at the intersection of the Via degli Augustali and the Via di Stabia in which an altar stood. 36 In addition to the streets and their features, plazas are another component of Pompeii’s street network. The most obvious plaza is the forum at which a number of streets met, but was nonetheless closed to cart traffic. The so-called Triangular Forum in the southwestern sector of the city near the theater contained the Doric Temple, which was a ruin at the time of Vesuvius’ eruption. Still, it may have drawn people to it as a park draws people today in order to stroll, exercise, or socialize. Residents may have sought water from the well near the temple. It was also possible to take the wide stairway on the eastern end of the plaza down to the theater or its adjacent quadriporticus.

74 Roman Urban Street Networks Pompeii has one more feature in its street grid that is not typical of Roman urbanism. Although not all have been excavated, a series of roads appear to have joined one another in order to create a continuous ring around the exterior of the city.37 These roads must have made it easier for those who needed to pass the city but did not want to enter it to bypass the crowded interior of the city. A similar design can be seen in most modern Western cities as a ring road that helps to ease traffic congestion within the urban core.

IDENTIFICATION OF THE USE OF BUILDINGS Pompeii’s streets were lined by a thick density of buildings that provided a nearly continuous façade. Identifying the use of every building at Pompeii is not as easy a task as it might appear to be. Some buildings are clearly temples or shops based on analogies to excavated buildings from other Roman sites, the artifacts and features discovered in them, evidence from written texts, and occasional associated epigraphic or pictorial evidence. The use of some buildings, however, remains elusive and open to disagreement. In 1970, H. Eschebach brought together interpretations about every building uncovered at Pompeii and published a comprehensive list.38 His widow, L. Eschebach, continued this project and published an updated and much more thorough work in 1993. Her publication, Gebäudeverzeichnis und Stadtplan der antiken Stadt Pompeji, is an extraordinary resource. Eschebach gives a brief description of what lies behind each doorway and competing interpretations of the use of the building, describes the decorative motifs on the façade and interior, and offers bibliographic information. The book was ideal for the creation of a comprehensive computerized database listing every building in Pompeii and most likely use of each. These data were supplemented by consulting subsequent publications about Pompeii and those not cited by Eschebach in which some of the traditional interpretations for the uses of buildings given by Eschebach were challenged or updated based on new information.39 The author also spent three weeks at Pompeii in order to make observations of the buildings at the site, particularly those with disputed interpretations. Therefore, the database is based primarily, but not exclusively, on Eschebach’s 1993 work. Fortunately, the categories listed in Table 3.1 are broad enough that we do not need to fully understand the nature of an architectural space to categorize it. Also, considering the large number of structures at Pompeii, the number about which interpretations differ so much that it would cause a building to be moved from one of the categories in Table 3.1 to another, is relatively small. Once completed, the database was linked to digitized plans of the site made from the 1:1000 plans published by L. Eschebach as well as the 1:500 plans published by the Corpus Topographicum Pompeianum.40 Confl icts between these plans were investigated when the author visited the site.41 Because of the difficulty

Pompeii

75

in assessing whether a street ran between the city wall and buildings in the northeastern and southeastern portions of the city at the time of the eruption, such a street is not considered in the analysis that follows.42 With the database–map link established, it was possible to explore the data by displaying the locations of different categories of buildings. The uses of each building are displayed in a color map accessible at a Web site associated with this book.43 Because of the unique evidence present at Pompeii, we can subdivide a few of the broad categories for the use of buildings for a finer-grained analysis which is not always possible at other sites. Using Eschebach’s categories, supplemented by other publications focused on specific categories of buildings at Pompeii, the relationship was analyzed between a number of subcategories of architectural units that had at least six examples or more, the minimum number for establishing statistical validity. Lack of space precludes a presentation of all the data, but the tables that follow include results for subcategories for which comparable results exist from Ostia, allowing for a comparative discussion in the next chapter, including any commercial establishment that served food and/or drink, conveniently known as bars,44 fountains,45 bakeries,46 elite and nonelite residences. They also include results from types of structures we can only study at Pompeii but which have been the subject of some recent scholarly interest, including

Table 3.1

Categories for Architectural Units at Pompeii

Architectural Category

Examples of Structures

Number of Observed Examples at Pompeii

administrative

basilica, senate-house (curia)

commercial

bar/restaurant (caupona, popina, thermopolium), brothel (lupanar), shop (taberna), market building (macellum)

904

entertainment

amphitheatre, odeum, theater, quadriporticus attached to theater

4

health-related

bath, gymnasium (palaestra), latrine accessible from street, fountain

66

production

bakery, forge, kiln, workshop, mill, market garden, laundry/ dyeing facility

166

religious

shrine, temple, sanctuary, associated cultic building

residential

elite (domus), nonelite

unknown

—

8

15 542 11

76 Roman Urban Street Networks brothels47 and laundries/dyeing workshops48 as well as a feature found in front of many Pompeian buildings that represents an owner’s interaction with the street, benches.49 Identifying some of these features, such as benches, fountains, and bakeries, is a fairly simple matter. Deciding which of the residential structures can be considered to belong to the elite and which to the nonelite residents of Pompeii, however, has been a subject of controversy. D. Robinson provided the primary guide for differentiating elite and nonelite houses used here. He identified four types of dwellings at Pompeii. Type 1 are less than 100 m 2 and lack “status architecture” such as an atrium or peristyle. Type 2 are larger than 100 m 2 and can have or lack an atrium. Type 3 structures are 500 m 2 or more and have an atrium and, in some cases, a peristyle, whereas Type 4 dwellings are greater than 800 m2 and have both an atrium and a peristyle. 50 For the purposes of this study, any residential structure in Robinson’s Types 1 and 2 is considered nonelite and those in his Types 3 and 4 are considered elite. Unfortunately, not all of the houses at Pompeii fit into these categories, so the sum of elite and nonelite houses is smaller than the sum of all residential structures. Not everyone, however, lived in a space dedicated exclusively to domestic purposes. Another class of nonelite residence mentioned by ancient authors is the shop or workshop with rooms in the back or a mezzanine where a family could live.51 Because the primary use of such structures was for commerce or production, however, they are considered under those categories in the analysis, not as residences. The database also included only buildings within the walls of Pompeii. Whereas extramural buildings clearly played a role in urban life at Pompeii, the city wall provided a physical, legal, psychological, and sometimes even religious barrier defi ning and limiting the city proper. The only place where the Pompeians disregarded this wall and built over it was in the southwestern corner of the city. When the doors of these buildings open onto the streets within the city they are included in the analysis. Despite laws forbidding such construction practices, 52 people built over the city walls at other sites as well, 53 suggesting the active, or at the very least tacit, approval of the municipal government. 54 The southwestern corner of the city was an area where the topography was steep and the buildings tightly packed, thus preserving the function of the city wall by barring entrance to the city except through the previously established city gates. In addition, very few excavations have occurred adjacent to and outside the gates of the city, so our knowledge of these extramural areas and their relationship with the rest of the city is severely restricted. P. Goodman has demonstrated in a careful analysis of the use of extramural space around Romano-Gallic cities that these suburban areas were used in ways that differed from the areas within city walls.55 A comparison of the suburban areas around Pompeii with Goodman’s results is a promising area of research for future study. The analysis that follows examines the relationship of each of these categories of building with depth from the city gates, depth from the forum,

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77

and the number of intersections of each street. Whereas quantitative observations are not possible for examining how building types relate to access to cart traffic, qualitative ones are possible and reveal some previously unrecognized uses of space within the city. Combining depth from the city gates, depth from the forum, and the number of intersections makes it possible to identify primary and secondary streets at Pompeii in addition to the central forum and one plaza, the Triangular Forum. The analysis supports the conclusion from the previous chapter that these factors played a role in the organization of space at Pompeii.

STREET DEPTH FROM THE CITY GATES Map 3.3 shows a plan of Pompeii’s street network based on the depth of each street from outside the city. Several things are quite striking about this map. The majority of streets have a depth of only two from the gates, making it fairly easy to get to most parts of the city. This low depth is facilitated by the grids with which the northern and eastern parts of the site were equipped. Most of the streets with a depth of three are in the oldest part of the city, the southwest corner. The high depth and irregular streets still give visitors to this area a different impression from the low-depth, straight streets elsewhere in the city. The one pathway with a depth of four is a stairway that led from the Triangular Forum down into the area between the theater and the associated quadriporticus. This stairway was the most remote part of the street network in the entire city. Map 3.3 presents us with another intriguing observation. Most of the streets that lead to city gates appear to intersect the most other streets whereas those with higher depths appear to intersect fewer. Graph 3.1 confi rms this observation because the average number of intersections a street makes drops steadily the further a street is from the city gates. Streets that intersect the most other streets play an important role in the urban network as they help to integrate all streets together and facilitate travel across the city whereas those with few intersections tend to segregate streets and neighborhoods. At Pompeii this correlation between low depth and high intersections shows that at the time they laid out the streets, the Pompeians were making a conscious decision to make the streets that led to the city gates main thoroughfares within the city while they chose to make those streets that were farther from the city gates progressively less important for facilitating traffic throughout the entire network. As we will see with the example from Empúries, not all city planners made the same choice. Another way to measure the importance city dwellers placed on a street is to divide a street’s length by the number of doorways along that street. This is a numeric comparison fi rst suggested by R. Laurence which produces an average distance between the doors that is comparable across all streets in the network.56 The lower the distance between doors, the greater

78


Map 3.3

Depth of Pompeii’s streets from the city gates.

number of doorways there are. Assuming that these doorways are actually used, an assumption that is impossible to confi rm or deny, the more doors along a street indicate that more people should be coming and going whereas a street with fewer doors should have less activity. The average distance between doors, therefore, allows for another useful way to compare the amount of activity along a street. Graph 3.2 shows the relationship between the depth of a street from the city gates and the average distance between doors. Like the last graph, this one also shows that Pompeians chose to locate the most doorways on the streets with the lowest depths, resulting in the shortest distance between them. The one anomaly is the one “street” at a depth of four from the city gates which again is the stairway that leads from the Triangular Forum down to the theater and its adjoining portico. With only one example in this last category, it is difficult to generalize. Taking Graph 3.2 together with Graph 3.1, it seems clear that Pompeians treated streets with different depths from the city gates differently, thus recognizing these as having a unique nature. The differential treatment of streets based on depth from the city gates is also reflected in what types of buildings they were willing to place along those streets. Table 3.2 summarizes the relationship between depth from the city gates and the seven categories of building use whereas Table 3.3 highlights the subcategories of use available for examination at Pompeii. Structures in four categories (commercial, health, production, and residential) appeared on streets with lower depths from the city gates in greater than expected numbers if they were distributed randomly (Table 3.2).57 There are also fewer of these structures than expected on streets with

Pompeii

79

higher depths. That shopkeepers would prefer low-depth streets should not come as a surprise; the high profi le these streets had in the network would have guaranteed many potential customers passing along them. When we look at two subcategories of commercial structures, bars, and brothels, the picture gains a little nuance (Table 3.3). Bar owners follow the pattern of many other entrepreneurs in preferring locations on streets that led to

Graph 3.1 Relationship between the depth of streets from Pompeii’s city gates and forum and the average number of intersections of streets at each depth.

Graph 3.2 Relationship between the depth of streets from Pompeii’s city gates and forum and the average distance between doors at each depth.

37

0

3

4

Comments

Chi-square Probability (%)

904

338

2

Total

529

1

110–102

904

2

81

583

238

Exp.

Commercial

Obs.

0.07

66

0

6

43

17

166

0

15

107

44

0.0009

166

0

11

82

73

Exp.

Production Obs.

Statistically signifi cant results

66

0

7

28

31

Exp.

Health

Obs.

542

1

48

350

143

Exp.

0.000000004

542

0

42

284

216

Obs.

Residential

8

0

1

5

2

Obs.

4

0

0

4

0

Obs.

—

4

0

0

3

1

Exp.

Entertainment

15

0

1

8

6

70

15

0

1

10

4

Exp.

Religious Obs.

Not statistically signifi cant results

100

8

0

1

5

2

Exp.

Administrative

Category of Structure

Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the City Gates59

Street Depth from City Gate

Table 3.2


4

0

10

3

4

Total

Comments


6

2

0.7

10

0

1

6

154

0

14

99

41

Exp.

710–14

154

0

10

56

88

Obs.

3

Exp.

Obs.

0

Commercial: Bar

Commercial: Brothel

1


0.04

38

0

3

25

10

Exp.

45

0

5

17

23

Obs.

0.2

45

0

4

29

12

Exp.

Production: Laundry / Dyeing


38

0

4

13

21

Obs.

Health: Fountain

84

0

8

54

22

Exp.

0.0004

84

0

7

34

43

Obs.

Residential: Elite


100

0

9

65

26

Exp.

0.01

100

0

8

46

46

Obs.

Bench

Table 3.3 Subcategories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the City Gates

31

0

1

16

14

Obs.

317

0

29

190

98

Obs.

23

317

1

28

204

84

Exp.

Residential: Non-elite


8

31

0

3

20

8

Exp.

Production: Bakery

Pompeii 81

82 Roman Urban Street Networks city gates. Being near city gates in particular must have helped them gain business from visitors to the city as well as residents. 58 Of all the commercial structures, brothels do not follow the common pattern, appearing more often on streets with high depths from the city gates (Table 3.3). Laurence and A. Wallace-Hadrill have suggested that the brothels of Pompeii were hidden away because of the shame attached to prostitution and the middle depth of all brothels from the city gates would tend to confi rm their observation.60 The location of brothels was not ideal for business. It would have been difficult for strangers entering from the city gates to fi nd them, a strategy that would have certainly curtailed business. Following Laurence and Wallace-Hadrill’s interpretation, Pompeii may have presented its most moral face to the visitor entering the gates. Even if they were hidden away, however, they were centrally located. All of the brothels at Pompeii stand in the center of the city; none are at the edges, near the gates, or near other centers for entertainment such as the theater or amphitheater. Once one knew where the brothels were located, it was very easy to reach them. Presumably those who knew the location of brothels would have shared that information with others. A graffito found at Pompeii gives the location of a woman, assumed to be a prostitute, in the city of Nocera (ancient Nuceria) in relation to a city gate.61 Thus, whereas brothels could be hidden from sight, their locations were probably an open secret. Like shops, workshops also appear in greater than expected numbers along streets with low depths (Table 3.2). Such a location could have facilitated the delivery of raw materials and the movement of fi nished products. Some craftsmen sold their products from their workshops. The high-profi le location of some workshops, like those for dyeing and laundry, may reflect the same commercial influences as on shops. The lack of patterning suggests criteria other than street depth regulated the placement of bakeries. Pompeians had a clear preference for placing their homes on streets that led to the city gates (Table 3.2). When residences are divided based on whether they belonged to the elite or nonelite, the elite show a strong preference for living along a street that led directly to the city gates (Table 3.3). The motivation for the elite to live along central arteries in the street network seems fairly clear. As was discussed in the fi rst chapter, patricians demonstrated their social standing through public display.62 One way to recognize a powerful man was to observe him going to the forum surrounded by clients, especially if an election was approaching. If one lived in a part of the city where there were few people present, there would be little point in parading down empty streets with a large retinue because no one would see it. Another advantage to the elite building their houses along busy streets would be to allow people to see the great number of clients who came to see them. The Roman ritual of the salutatio required clients to visit their patrons in the morning to seek requests, to receive small presents, and to honor the patron.63 An elite man would gain in social prestige if a stream

Pompeii

83

of people came and went from his house in the morning or, better yet, if a line of waiting clients formed leading out into the street. Some of the fi nest houses in Pompeii have benches in front of them and perhaps one reason for their construction was to make waiting clients a little more comfortable, encouraging them to wait and at the same time putting them on display. With the idea of social display in mind, it is worth mentioning that the distribution of benches in front of buildings is highly statistically significant (Table 3.3). Hartnett suggested building owners created benches to gain the attention and goodwill of passersby.64 The very strong preference of people who owned buildings along streets with the lowest depths from the city gates to add exterior benches confi rms his hypothesis. Very few of the people who owned buildings on streets more distant from these locations bothered to build benches. Benches appear mainly on what would have been the busiest streets in Pompeii. Benches fronted homes as well as business establishments, offering the weary a chance to take a break from their daily routine. More importantly, however, they allowed waiting clients and customers a place to sit in public to await their turn or, in the case of eating and drinking establishments, a place to enjoy their purchases. A full bench in front of either an elite person’s home or a proprietor’s business must have helped advance the owner’s agenda. The distribution of health-related structures shows that they were easy to fi nd and had a prominent place in the urban landscape (Tables 3.2 and 3.3). They are clustered in larger than expected numbers if they were distributed without pattern on streets that led to the city gates and forum. These locations made them easily accessible to residents and visitors to the city. If we look at two of the individual components of this category, bath buildings and fountains, we can see that these repeat the pattern for depth from the city gates. Whereas there are only enough fountains to allow us to measure for statistical significance, it is still important that all of the public baths had an entrance along a street with a depth of one from the city gates. Everyone at Pompeii had fairly easy access to fresh water and bathing establishments. Not all categories show a statistically verifiable relationship with depth from the city gate, whereas some categories for which there are too few examples to test for statistical significance have intriguing distributions with relation to depth. The placement of the two theaters, the associated cryptoporticus, and the amphitheater bear striking similarities. All entertainment structures were at the edges of the city, near the city gates. The sloping topography in the area of the two theaters, and the earthen embankment built up against the corner of the wall near the amphitheater, may explain these locations because these features would have facilitated the large construction projects. Being the edges of the city, these places may have been less built up at the time these projects were begun, thus providing room for them.65 The close proximity to the city gates, however, would have given nonresident visitors easy access to these structures.

84


STREET DEPTH FROM THE FORUM Map 3.4 shows Pompeii’s street network based on the depth from the forum. A few observations are worth making by comparing this map with Map 3.3 showing the depth of each street from the city gates. When entering the city from outside or setting out from the forum one could have reached any building in the city by passing through four streets or less. Generally, streets that are easily accessible from outside the city are easy to access from the forum whereas those that are remote from the city gates are also remote from the forum. Streets leading to the forum played a similar role in the street network as streets leading to the city gates. This statement is supported by the striking similarity in the graph of the relationships between street depth from the city gates and forum with the average number of intersections (Graph 3.1). In both cases, the number of intersections drops the further one gets from both destinations; streets leading to the city gates or forum were main thoroughfares through the city. The graph that depicts the average distance between doorways with relation to street depth (Graph 3.2) shows a difference at the higher depths, but the one constant is that when measuring depth from both the forum and the city gates, the lowest distances between doors are at the lowest depth. In other words, the streets that led to the forum or city gates had the greatest density of doors and the greatest amount of activity. The number of intersections and the distance between doorways relate to the amount of activity that would have taken place along particular streets. Streets with a depth of one from either the forum or the city gates would clearly have attracted a greater number of people than those with a depth of three or four. People would have been funneled into these streets

Map 3.4

Depth of Pompeii’s streets from the forum.

Pompeii

85

in order to reach their destinations because streets that had the lowest depth had the highest number of intersections and therefore would have been central passageways within the city, integrating the entire network. Not coincidentally, the five streets with the highest depth from the forum had only one entrance or exit. These streets tend to segregate themselves and the buildings along them from the rest of the city because it would be difficult to get to another part of the city from them. This supports the converse idea that the further one got from the gates and the forum, the less traffic and fewer people one would have met. The smaller distance between doorways and increased number of intersections as one approached the gates and forum would also have given the street network at Pompeii what Lynch has called “directionality.”66 Strangers to town would have known whether they were approaching or leaving streets that led to the gates and forum based on the number of intersections, the amount of activity, as well as the close proximity of doors to one another. Navigating ancient Pompeii may have been easier than has been assumed if a stranger followed these clues.67 Turning to the categories of structures and their relationship with streets based on depth from the forum, again we see strong similarities with the patterns in relation to depth from the city gates (Tables 3.4 and 3.5). Structures devoted to commercial, health-related, production, and residential uses are located in greater than expected numbers along streets with the lowest depths from the forum and city gates than if they were randomly distributed. The low depth of bars, fountains, laundry/dyeing facilities, elite residences, and benches from the forum mirrors their low depth from the city gates. These identical patterns emphasize that Pompeians treated both of these types of streets with differing end points in the same manner. Despite the many similarities between the use of streets that reached the city gate and forum, there are a few differences that require some explanation, particularly when it comes to the location of administrative structures, brothels, nonelite residences, and religious structures. Administrative structures were clustered in the forum, hardly a surprising result because that is where our textual sources relate that city dwellers expected such buildings (Table 3.4). We must be careful, however, and realize that these data may represent more of modern archaeological interpretation than a complete understanding of ancient practice. Often we assume that a structure in the forum, even if we have no idea of its use, had to have been used by the city administration. This assumption is rarely made about structures outside of the forum where the city could, in theory, also have owned property that it put to use in the process of civic government. The placement of brothels shows patterning with relation to the city gates but shows no relationship with the forum. Brothel owners may have been symbolically divorcing themselves from the primary honorable location in the city through this placement decision, again as Wallace-Hadrill and Laurence have suggested.68

2

0

0

8

2

3

4

Total

Comments

110–49

8.0

0.3

2.3

4.0

1.3

0.1

13

904

27

263

455

146

210–48

904

3

166

419

307

9

Statistically significant results

1

1


5

Exp.

Commercial

Obs.

Exp.

Administrative

Obs.

In Forum


66

0

16

25

23

2

0.1

66

2

19

33

11

1

Exp.

Health Obs.

166

0

51

70

45

0

Obs.

0.02

166

5

48

84

27

2

Exp.

Production


15

0

2

4

5

4

15

0.4

4.4

7.6

2.4

0.2

Exp.

410–14

Obs.

Religious

Table 3.4 Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the Forum

542

16

158

273

87

8

0.000000006

542

8

172

221

140

1

Exp.

Residential Obs.

—

4

0

1

2

1

0

Not statistically significant results

4

0

4

0

0

0

Exp.

Entertainment Obs.


4

Comments


0.0004

154

5

0

154

45

42

3

Total

77

64

2

2

25

0

48

Exp.

1

Obs.

Commercial: Bar

In Forum


38

0

9

16

13

0

Obs.

3

38

1

11

19

6

1

Exp.

Health: Fountain

0.4

45

1

13

23

7

1

Exp.

84

0

24

28

32

0

84

3

24

42

14

1

Exp.

0.0002

Obs.

Residential: Elite


45

0

9

20

16

0

Obs.

Production: Laundry / Dyeing

317

9

92

160

51

5

Exp.

0.0007

317

7

113

123

74

0

Obs.

Residential: Nonelite


0

100

0

35

37

28

0.1

100

3

29

50

16

2

Exp.

Bench

Obs.

Table 3.5 Subcategories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the Forum

10

0

4

6

0

0

Obs.

12

1 31

0

9

4 31

16

5

0 18

9

0

Production: Bakery


64

10

0

3

5

2

0

Exp.

Commercial: Brothel

Pompeii 87

88


The general category of residences demonstrates a marked preference for Pompeians to place their homes along streets that led directly to both the forum and city gates. Nonelite residences, however, appear in greater than expected numbers along streets that led directly to the forum, but not the city gates (Tables 3.3 and 3.5). There can be no doubt that the nonelite also participated in social display and that these streets would have given them the perfect venue for such activity. The number of nonelite residences along streets leading to the city gates is not significantly larger than would be expected if locations for buildings were chosen at random. Unlike the elite, the nonelite may have been reserving their displays of status for fellow residents of the city, rather than for residents and visitors to the city alike. Despite these clear signs of a desire to live on prominent streets with a depth of one from the forum, a secondary trend is apparent in the nonelite residential data, which represents an opposing ideal. A greater than expected number of nonelite residences stand on streets with a depth of three from the forum, making them fairly distant from that location (Table 3.4). This may have been a product of real-estate prices; land fronting streets leading directly to the forum may have been more expensive than land on other streets because that land certainly was in high demand. This must have driven up rents as well. But economics cannot be the only explanation. These through routes were busy with vehicular as well as pedestrian traffic. Some of the city’s nonelite may have been escaping the dangers of cart traffic by choosing to live a more retired existence. Many structures associated with religious activity have a relationship with the forum, but not with the city gates.69 Proximity and access to the forum had symbolic resonance with those who decided where to place religious structures in the city; the temples and shrines dedicated to the most public deities have a close relationship with the forum whereas the cults of a more private nature are further away or harder to get to from the forum. Half of all the temples in Pompeii were accessible directly from the forum. The main entrance to the Sanctuary of Apollo stood on the Via Marina, almost at the point where the street entered the forum, but a secondary entrance made the precinct accessible directly from the forum. Of the remaining structures, three are on streets that enter the forum: the altar of Jupiter, the Temple of Fortuna Augusta, and its associated building. The Sanctuary of Venus Fisica Pompeiana is at a depth of one from the forum; it is also accessible from the Via Marina. Two shrines and the Temple of Zeus Meilichios70 are more distant from the forum, all standing at a depth of two from it on the Via di Stabia. Their location may have been chosen for the benefit of those passing through the city more than the city’s residents. Only three of Pompeii’s sacred areas appear to have had no relationship whatsoever with the forum. The Doric Temple in the Triangular Forum is one of these, but this temple predated the forum and had been an abandoned ruin for more than a century at the time of the Vesuvian eruption; the people of Pompeii may have no longer considered it to be sacred

Pompeii

89

space. The Sanctuary of Isis is also separated from the forum; one must pass through three streets to reach it from the forum. This separation probably has to do with the private nature of the mystery cult practiced within the precinct walls. The third precinct, a cult garden along the Via di Nocera, appears to have been a type of cult garden where people could seek magical remedies for their problems in private, probably for a fee. The location of the cult garden is particularly intriguing. This building was the farthest from the forum of all religious structures standing on the opposite side of the city. It too represents a cult that was neither sanctioned nor sponsored by the state. It stands near a place for public entertainment, a location often associated with magicians and fortune tellers.71 Potential customers may have expected a magician in such a location. The garden is also well sited from a commercial point of view on the Via di Nocera, which led directly to a city gate. Being near the amphitheater, it would have had a high profi le on days when games were being held. Commercial reasons may have played as much a role in locating this structure as religious ones. We have too few examples of entertainment structures and honorary arches to study them statistically; nonetheless, the scant data available suggest two opposing patterns. Entertainment structures are located at a fairly high distance from the forum. The close proximity to the city gates made it easy for visitors to the city to get into and out of the theaters and amphitheater. From the point of view of a city resident, this had a beneficial effect; it would have kept visitors out of the rest of the city, particularly the forum.72 Considering the riot of 57 CE in the amphitheater at Pompeii, which began as fans from rival towns fought, placing the entertainment structures near the city gates may have been one way of keeping potential ruffians from causing trouble elsewhere in town. Honorary arches show the opposite pattern. Five arches have been found at Pompeii, three in the forum, one at the intersection of the Via di Mercurio, known as the Arch of Caligula, another just north of the forum, and the fifth at the intersection of the Via di Stabia and Via dell’ Abbondanza, known as the Tetrapylon of the Holconii73 (Map 3.1). The arches have an association with the forum similar to public temples. The only two arches that are outside of the forum are on streets that lead directly to it. In fact, one can even discern the entrance to the forum while standing at the location of those two arches. The shallow depth from the forum helped to associate these arches with that location and may have also served to announce that one was nearing the social and political center of the city. NUMBER OF INTERSECTIONS Map 3.5 shows the street plan of Pompeii according to the number of intersections each street has with another. Despite a few exceptions, most of


Map 3.5

Number of intersections each of Pompeii’s streets has with other streets.

the streets with the greatest number of intersections reached the forum and the city gates, whereas those with the lowest numbers rarely reached these destinations. Like the streets with low depths, streets with the greater the number of intersections had a shorter distance between doorways. Streets that interacted with many other streets clearly were among the busiest in the city whereas those that met few other streets were the least busy. When looking at how the Pompeians chose to use streets with the different quantities of intersections, some patterns are quite apparent. The decision to locate shops and workshops along streets with a greater number of intersections and the avoidance of those with a lower number seems again like good business practice (Table 3.6). Among the subcategories for commercial and production-related structures, bar, bakery, and laundry/dyeing establishment owners appear to have been making location decisions based on access to the most potential customers (Table 3.7). The deviation among commercial structures is the brothels. The fact that brothel owners avoided the streets with the highest number of intersections (Table 3.7), but instead concentrated their establishments in higher than expected numbers along the streets that had a more moderate number of intersections, again suggests that they were trying to avoid some of the public spotlight, while still making their establishments fairly easy to reach. Again we see the uneasy balance between what Wallace-Hadrill has called “public honor and private shame.”74 Residences appear in greater than expected numbers on streets with the greatest number of intersections (Table 3.6). When we break the category of residences down into its two component parts, we see the statistically significant preference for placing elite residences along the busiest streets (Table 3.7). Again, these are locations that would get the owners

0

0

0

5

0

0

0

0

2

8

4

5

6

7

9

10

11

19

22

Total

Comments


2

0

0.000000001

8

1

1

1

1

0

0.3

0

0

1

1

1

3

0

0

2

Exp.

1

Obs.

Administration

904

149

160

168

101

5

20

59

39

76

82

41

4

210-121

904

59

61

88

72

28

39

34

33

136

172

131

51

Exp.

Commercial

Obs.

0.01

66

4

4

6

5

2

3

3

2

10

13

10

4

166

11

11

16

13

5

7

6

6

25

32

24

10

0.0003

166

14

21

31

17

4

6

8

8

14

30

12

1

Exp.

Production Obs.


66

9

12

7

7

1

5

4

2

4

10

5

0

Exp.

Health Obs.


15

1.0

1.0

1.5

1.2

0.5

0.6

0.6

0.5

2.2

2.8

2.2

0.9

Exp.

0.0003

15

0

0

3

1

0

5

0

2

1

0

3

0

Obs.

Religious

Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to the Number of Intersections.

Number of Intersections

Table 3.6

542

35

37

53

43

17

23

20

20

81

103

79

31

0.00000001

542

59

72

56

37

17

19

13

28

56

100

62

23

Exp.

Residential Obs.

—

4

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

1

0


4

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

3

Exp.

Entertainment Obs.

Pompeii 91

0

4

0

0

3

0

0

3

0

0

0

10

2

3

4

5

6

7

9

10

11

19

22

Total

Comments


0

1

10

0.6

0.7

1.0

0.8

0.3

0.4

0.4

0.4

1.5

1.9

1.4

0.6

Exp.

0.07

Obs.

Commercial: Brothel

154

10

10

15

12

5

7

6

6

23

29

22

9

Exp.

0.00000000008

154

17

25

35

13

2

3

9

6

16

17

11

0

Obs.

Commercial: Bar

31

2

2

3

3

1

1

1

1

5

6

4

2

Exp.

45

3

3

4

4

1

2

2

2

7

8

6

3

Exp.

0.00005

45

3

10

10

0

0

2

3

5

0

11

1

0

Obs.

Production: Laundry/Dyeing


0.0004

31

4

1

7

10

4

0

1

0

2

2

0

0

Obs.

Production: Bakery

84

5

6

8

7

3

4

3

3

12

16

12

5

Exp.

0.0002

84

12

18

9

5

2

1

2

6

6

12

9

2

Obs.

Residential: Elite




Table 3.7

100

6

7

10

8

3

4

4

4

15

19

14

6

Exp.

0.00000001

100

15

24

10

5

0

6

0

4

10

14

9

3

Obs.

Bench

38

7

7

5

5

1

2

0

1

3

3

4

0

Obs.

38

317

25

32

29

28

8

16

5

16

36

63

39

20

Obs.

10

317

21

21

31

25

10

14

12

12

47

60

46

18

Exp.



6

3

3

4

3

1

2

1

1

6

7

5

2

Exp.

Health: Fountain


Pompeii

93

the maximum amount of attention because this pattern is not so different from that which we saw in the analysis of residences in relation to depth. One rather curious anomaly stands out in both Tables 3.6 and 3.7. Streets with comparatively middling numbers of intersections have an unusually large number of residences. This comes out in the overall statistics for residences as well as in those for the elite. As with the group of nonelite who preferred to live a bit of a greater distance from the forum, this group of residents seem to have chosen quieter streets on which to place their homes. Apparently not everyone was eager for the great deal of attention and scrutiny that would have come from living along the busiest streets. Health-related structures are associated with streets having the most intersections (Table 3.6). As with depth, such a placement would have made them easily accessible to the greatest number of people and would have had a high profi le in the city. The distribution of fountains shows an interesting pattern even if it is not statistically significant (Table 3.7). Fountains seem to be fairly evenly distributed along streets that crossed a varying number of intersections. More do appear on streets with the higher number of intersections, but they can still be found on streets with lower numbers of intersections. Again, this distribution may have made it easier for Pompeians to reach a fountain and get fresh water from just about anywhere in the city. The distribution of religious structures in relation to the number of intersections differs from most of the other patterns observed so far. Admittedly this figure is heavily influenced by the fact that four of the city’s religious structures, just over one-quarter, were all located in the same place, the forum, so this figure may be slightly skewed. In locating religious structures, Pompeians show a marked preference for the streets with fewer intersections and, therefore, less activity. The placement of other religious activity on the quieter streets must have given these sacred areas added solemnity for the ceremonies carried out in them. Five religious structures (the temples of Venus, Apollo, Isis, and its two associated buildings) are in precincts surrounded by walls that have only one entrance, ensuring these courtyards had no through traffic and helping further to block out the noise and distraction of passing traffic. The privacy these walls provided was certainly significant for the worshipers in the mystery cult of Isis. Finally, benches are not exclusive to streets with a particular number of intersections; they can be found in nearly every category of street when they are sorted by the number of intersections (Table 3.7). Nonetheless, the data make it clear that building owners along the busiest streets with the greatest number of intersections were much more likely to build benches than those who owned property on streets less central to the network. Many took advantage of the popular streets on which they lived to draw attention to themselves and their businesses.

94 Roman Urban Street Networks CART TRAFFIC Traffic patterns are difficult to analyze statistically. As can be seen in Map 3.6 a street that admits two lanes of traffic may suddenly be narrowed at one point to only one lane and then widen again. Numerous obstacles also complicated a cart driver’s trip through the city from fountains that narrowed or blocked streets to the carefully placed curbstones. Drivers at Pompeii must have had a mental map similar to Map 3.6 to help them plan their trip through the city; otherwise they could be faced with the problem of running into a dead end or meeting another driver head on. Thanks to the unusual state of preservation at Pompeii, we can add details to this map that are not as readily available for the other case-study cities. In particular, blocking stones and the great number of ruts are rare at other sites. Rather than show all of the ruts noted at Pompeii in Map 3.6, only those that went around corners and appeared to still be in use in 79 CE are included.75 Map 3.6 deserves some reflection, therefore, because it proves that driving a cart through the city was a much more complex process than has been suggested before. Rarely did the simplest route from point A to point B in Pompeii lie along a straight line for a cart driver, even when one straight street links those points. One other thing to keep in mind while studying

Map 3.6 Traffic patterns at Pompeii after Tsujimura (1991) and Poehler (2006) supplemented by the author’s observations.

Pompeii

95

Map 3.6 is that this is a picture of traffic patterns on the day of the eruption. It is clear from the way buildings and blocking stones stand on top of ruts that Pompeians did not hesitate to change traffic patterns, apparently one block at a time rather than as one grand city-wide plan. One may note on one stretch of the Vicolo del Fauno, just north of the forum, obstructions to cart traffic stood at two ends of the street, making it completely inaccessible to carts for one block. These obstructions were part of a repaving project that was in progress at the time Vesuvius erupted.76 The older paving stones have wear marks made by carts, but we cannot know whether or not, once the project was completed, this street would have been opened again to cart traffic. A similar repaving project had just been completed one block to the east on the Vicolo del Labirinto and a blocking stone appears to have been added, creating an impediment to cart traffic that had not existed before. The newly built Central Baths blocked cart traffic. An expansion of the Sanctuary of Apollo during the time of Augustus77 and a separate construction project to enlarge the Praedia of Julia Felix after the earthquake of 62 CE both covered streets completely, making them inaccessible even to pedestrians (Map 3.2).78 D. Newsome has traced the impact the former project had on cart traffic in the southwestern sector of the city demonstrating how disruptive such changes could be to an entire neighborhood, not just one street.79 Cart traffic patterns at Pompeii in 79 CE certainly differed from those of a few years earlier and, had the city survived, would probably have differed from the traffic patterns of a few years later. Who placed these restrictions on the movement of carts? Clearly the civic government blocked the entrances to the forum and must have been responsible for blocking the Via dell’ Abbondanza at its intersection with the Via di Stabia. Steps blocking the entrances to many of the streets on the south side of the Via dell’ Abbondanza may also have been the result of attempts to direct water runoff.80 Whoever blocked these streets must have been intending to block access to carts at the same time; however, as in other parts of the city, raised paved surface accomplished the goal of directing water without blocking streets to cart traffic.81 Residents had a choice as to whether their construction to control water runoff would also block cart traffic; so when we see an extended curb also blocking cart traffic, we must assume it was intended to have a dual purpose. Additional impediments to traffic appear so haphazard, for instance a single stone laid in the center of an intersection or a private building expanded into a street, that official city-wide traffic planning could not have been involved, even if official permission was sought and granted for these one-off projects. A few features helped organize and facilitate cart traffic flow, easing congestion in the city. Laurence has claimed sidewalks helped to separate pedestrian and vehicular traffic.82 No doubt he is correct to an extent; however, the desire of shopkeepers to exploit the sidewalk for the display of their wares would have ensured that some people walked in the path of carts rather than on the sidewalks. It is also very difficult to believe that people would only walk on sidewalks and never in the street as he assumes. S. Tsujimura and E.

96 Roman Urban Street Networks Poehler demonstrated a preference for driving on one side of the street, probably the right, although a preference for driving on the left has been noted at at least one other site.83 In addition, the volume of cart traffic must have been small because few Romans could afford a cart and few locations within Pompeii offer facilities for storing them. Finally, Latin authors make references to cursores, or “runners,” who would go ahead of carts with a whip to help a cart get through the crowded city as easily as possible.84 At Pompeii a cursor could have preceded carts in order to make sure a one-lane street was clear of oncoming traffic in the next block the cart driver intended to traverse. If another cart was coming, the driver could simply wait on a side street until the cursor announced that there was no oncoming traffic. Several chief through routes for cart traffic are clear on Map 3.6.85 The Via di Stabia/Via del Vesuvio, which continued a regional north-south road through the city, must have carried the majority of through traffic. Other important routes included the eastern third of the Via dell’ Abbondanza and the parallel Via di Nola/Via della Fortuna/Via delle Terme. The Via Consolare leading to the Porta di Ercolano also seems to have been a main through street linking to the Via delle Terme and the Vicolo di Mercurio.86 The Vicolo di Mercurio seems a curious choice as a through street, but the deep ruts on it shows its importance in the street network for carts. The street connects the Via delle Consolare with the Via di Vesuvio. Oddly, though, it is only wide enough for one lane of traffic. Few of the buildings that line this street actually have doorways opening onto it, leaving one with the impression that Pompeians were channeling cart traffic into a street from which they had turned their backs. The widths and impediments to cart traffic must have made the remaining streets rather treacherous to drive through and drivers must have only chosen to use these streets when their destination lay along them. Because a cart being unloaded in a single-lane street would also have blocked that street, cart drivers must have been prepared to be flexible and fi nd alternative routes.87 Considering all of these difficulties, transportation of goods by donkey or porter may have been attractive when loads were not too great.88 One of the most striking things about Map 3.6 is the simple reality that the forum of Pompeii was closed to cart traffic. This complicated the process of driving to and from the Porta Marina, particularly as the one route leading there was filled with turns and was only wide enough for one cart at a time. This cannot have been a very popular route for bringing goods from the port into the city. The absence of carts from the forum must have made it a safe and quiet place where issues of civic import could be discussed with dignity. All buildings with an administrative use in Pompeii stand near or in the forum, as well as three of the city’s five arches, perhaps benefiting from the gravitas of the plaza created by the absence of cart traffic. Of the two arches found outside of the forum, one, the Tetrapylon of the Holconii, also stands near stairs that block cart traffic. Four of the city’s nine temples stand in the forum as well, allowing civic religious processions and ceremonies to be conducted without having to compete with carts. These four temples are

Pompeii

97

not the only ones whose street entrances stand along streets where physical impediments blocked cart traffic. The main entrances to the Sanctuary of Apollo and that of Venus are along the Via Marina in a section where carts are barred through a narrowing of the street by a sidewalk to the north and by an extension of the wall of the Sanctuary of Venus to the south. A faint rut can be detected along this stretch closer to the forum, but the reconstruction of the Sanctuary of Venus after the earthquake of 62 CE narrowed this street so that the last block leading to the forum and the sanctuaries became a pedestrian zone. The temenos of only three of the city’s nine temples could be entered directly from a street that allowed access to carts, including the temples of Zeus Meilichios, Isis, and Fortuna Augusta. The fi rst two of these were surrounded by a sanctuary wall, which must have helped block out some of the clatter of hooves and metal tires on paving stones outside. Only the Temple of Fortuna Augusta lacks a sanctuary wall, an omission that seems even stranger when one notes that it stood at the corner of two important streets prominent in the network, one of which must have had a constant stream of cart traffic coming from and heading to the Porta Ercolano. Besides this preference for placing administrative and religious buildings along streets and plazas that blocked cart traffic, few other categories of buildings have obvious patterns of clustering or avoidance with relation to cart traffic. Elite and nonelite housing, bars, latrines, shops, even three laundry/dyeing establishments can all be found along streets that blocked cart traffic, but structures with these uses are ubiquitous across the city. Mills, bakeries, and workshops are never found within the pedestrian zones, probably to facilitate the movement of bulky raw materials and fuels as well as fi nished products via carts. What is much more difficult to explain is the location of the amphitheater within the traffic network at Pompeii. As is apparent in Map 3.6, if one were entering Pompeii on the Via dell’ Abbondanza or Via di Nocera, six separate streets could lead one to the amphitheater. Curiously, five of these six streets were blocked to cart traffic through blocking stones, steps, and even gates.89 The one street that currently lacks traces of any stones laid out to block entry, the fi rst street one would pass after entering the city through the Porta di Sarno on the Via dell’ Abbondanza, is an unpaved street, which may not be fully excavated. Therefore we cannot be certain whether or not carts could have passed along this street.90 If this street was blocked, we have an extraordinary circumstance where a full nine-block area in Pompeii would have been closed completely to cart traffic and would have been an enormous pedestrian zone. Even if blocking stones or steps did not cut the one remaining street off from the Via dell’ Abbondanza, we are left with a neighborhood in which cart traffic was severely restricted. In this circumstance, carts could have only entered or exited by one street alone, a street that would have placed them on the Via dell’ Abbondanza about as far from the rest of the city as one could get while still being within the city walls. M. Koga has suggested that the curbs and steps blocking access to the streets around the amphitheater from the Via dell’ Abbondanza were

98


intended to direct water runoff towards the Via di Nocera.91 Even if this is a correct interpretation, the result would still have been to block cart traffic from entering the neighborhood. This nine-block neighborhood contains buildings used for just about all of the purposes outlined above, with the exception of administrative buildings. The presence of the amphitheater and the palaestra, however, must have dominated how people viewed this part of town because of their sheer size and because of the crowds that would have been attracted to events at either location. The palaestra in particular interacts with the street network in order draw attention to itself. Contrary to Eschebach’s 1993 plan, the two northern and one western entrances to the palaestra are aligned to streets; thus the buildings on either side of these streets frame the doorways to the buildings from a distance. All three entrances are decorated with pediments and pilasters92 that can be glimpsed from either the Via dell’ Abbondanza or the Via di Nocera, two of the busiest streets in the city that also led to gates. The main entrance to the palaestra lay off of the street between Blocks 8 and 9 and was particularly grand with a very tall porch supported by columns, also easily visible from as far as a block away. Two other features of the streets around this nine-block district unite the neighborhood. None of the streets are paved, and wooden gates across two streets at their intersection with the Via dell’ Abbondanza and one street at its intersection with the Via di Nocera provide the opportunity to block the streets completely. The lack of a paved surface is unusual. The combination of no paving and closure of this area to most or all cart traffic may be related; one purpose of a paved surface is to facilitate cart traffic and if this was restricted or lacking from this neighborhood, there may have been little point in providing paving stones. The gates are a bit more difficult to explain. As one could simply have gone down a block to a street lacking a gate and thus circumvented these obstacles, we cannot be certain how they were used. The neighborhood around the palaestra and amphitheater was the entertainment district at Pompeii.93 A closer look, however, reveals that several of the blocks were dominated by buildings with commercial uses, particularly bars, and garden restaurants.94 The city fathers at Pompeii, therefore, may have decided to severely limit or exclude cart traffic from these neighborhoods in order to limit the potential danger or annoyance posed by carts to the crowds of people going to view events at either location or participate in those at the palaestra. It is also possible that the residents of this neighborhood blocked off various streets for their own reasons and that the separation of this neighborhood from the rest of the city was not planned. Around the amphitheater and palaestra at Pompeii are associations with nature that may have signaled leisure-time activities to a Roman. Roman painting oftentimes strove to provide the illusion that a room was actually surrounded by a luxurious garden, thus associating it with Roman otium. The streets around the amphitheater and palaestra are unusually wide, providing space for the planting of plane trees around the time of Augustus.

Pompeii

99

These trees must have provided welcomed shade.95 Trees were also planted in the palaestra and must have stood high enough to gain attention above the city’s roofs. In addition, several garden triclinia were in the nine-block zone around the amphitheater, furthering the association between outdoor and leisure time. M. Della Corte suggested that the park-like space was used for the parking of carts that people from surrounding towns used to get to Pompeii for performances in the amphitheater.96 Such a conclusion seems highly unlikely, however, considering that there was only one way, or perhaps even no way, for carts to enter this neighborhood. The traffic jam of pedestrians and carts prior to and after a performance at the amphitheater would have made this a highly undesirable situation. In addition, carts are absent from the famous fresco found at Pompeii and now in the museum at Naples depicting a riot in the amphitheater.97 This omission is surely meaningful because the artist has gone to great lengths to indicate details about the amphitheater and palaestra so that there can be no doubt about the location of the scene. The fresco seems to confi rm that this area was a pedestrian zone.

IDENTIFYING PRIMARY AND SECONDARY STREETS, THE FORUM, AND PLAZAS Putting the data discussed so far together, we can start to identify streets at Pompeii that fit the categories of primary and secondary streets outlined in the previous chapter and discuss the uses of these streets as well as the forum and plazas. Map 3.7 shows Pompeii’s street network divided into categories of primary streets, equivalent to the Roman cultural concept of viae, secondary streets, the angiporta, as well as the distinct structures of the forum and the city’s one other plaza, the Triangular Forum. Each street was re-categorized based fi rst on whether or not it had a depth of one from a city gate or the forum and then by whether or not it had more than one intersection to show that the street played some role in integrating the street network. All those streets that reached one of these destinations and intersected more than one street are labeled a “primary” street, whereas all of the rest are labeled “secondary” streets. Because of their unique nature, a nature that Romans recognized as the literary evidence in the previous chapter shows, the central forum and the Triangular Forum form their own categories. Tables 3.8 and 3.9 lay out the data for the distribution of building types when arranged according to whether a building was on the forum, the Triangular Forum, or a primary or secondary street. When we combine the data in this way, the results are quite impressive; nearly all of the categories show that buildings were not distributed in a random way. In addition, the level of significance is often higher than when we examined the relationship between each category of building and the characteristic of the street.

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Map 3.7

Street types at Pompeii.

A primary street reached the forum or a city gate and intersected more than one other street or plaza. These qualities made primary paths the through routes in the city. That does not mean they were not also a destination, however. The Pompeians utilized primary streets quite heavily.98 They chose to place the main entrance to commercial establishments,99 structures dedicated to production and the community’s health, religious buildings, as well as their homes in greater than expected numbers on primary streets than if they simply chose the location for a building at random. Among the subcategories of buildings, Pompeians favored primary streets for the location of bars, fountains, bakeries, facilities for laundry and dyeing, elite100 and nonelite residences, and benches. Primary streets had not only the greater diversity of types of buildings but were also the busiest streets in Pompeii. Cart drivers must have gravitated towards the primary streets because these were the widest and had the fewest impediments to cart traffic.101 Pompeii’s primary streets must have frequently clattered with noise of passing cart traffic. As a primary street neared the forum, however, more impediments appeared; the forum and its immediate surroundings must have been a sensitive area that Pompeians went out of their way to protect from the ills associated with vehicular traffic. Pedestrians also flocked to primary streets. The average distance between doorways on primary streets is 7 m, nearly half the average distance between doors on secondary streets, which is 13 m. With nearly twice as many doors per meter, there may have been nearly twice as many people on the primary streets as compared with the secondary streets. Because of their great width and the number of people utilizing them, primary streets must have been the streets of choice for not only the patrician walking to the forum with his clients but also for civic and religious processions.

0

5

0

8

Secondary

Forum

Plaza

Total

Comments


3

8

0.1

0.1

4.9

2.9

Exp.

710–51

Obs.

Administration

904

2

9

224

669

Obs.

110–118

904

13

13

550

328

Exp.

Commercial

0.003

66

1

1

40

24

Exp.

166

2

3

101

60

Exp.

0.000007

166

0

0

70

96

Obs.

Production



66

0

2

22

42

Obs.

Health


Primary

Street Type

Table 3.8

15

1

4

1

9

15

0.2

0.2

9.1

5.5

Exp.

310–16

Obs.

Religious

543

8

8

330

197

Exp.

0.0000000009

543

3

1

263

276

Obs.

Residential

—

4

0

0

3

1

Exp.


4

0

0

4

0

Obs.

Entertainment

Pompeii 101

2

154

0

154

Forum

Plaza

Total

Comments


2

0

2

10–13

94

48

Secondary

56

Exp.

106

Primary

Obs.

Commercial: Bar

38

0

0

11

27

38

0

1

23

14

Exp.

0.02

Obs.

Health: Fountain

45

0

0

17

28

Obs.

0.2

84

1

1

51

31

Exp.

0.0004

84

0

0

30

54

Obs.

Residential: Elite

317

3

0

176

138

Obs.

1

317

4

5

193

115

Exp.

Residential: Nonelite

Statiscally signifi cant results

45

1

1

27

16

Exp.




Street Type

Table 3.9

31

0

0

9

22

31

0

1

19

11

Exp.

0.06

Obs.

Production: Bakery

100

1

0

48

51

Obs.

1

100

1

2

61

36

Exp.

Bench

8

10

0

0

6

4

Exp.

Not statiscally significant

10

0

0

10

0

Obs.

Commercial: Brothel


Pompeii

103

The location of the two Pompeian arches outside of the forum on primary streets would seem to confi rm this observation. One of those arches, the so-called Arch of Caligula on the Via di Mercurio (Map 3.1), seems located in an odd place as further to the north the Via di Mercurio ends at the city wall. At one time a gate did pass through this wall, which would have made the street very important as it linked the forum and a city gate. Even though it lost some of that importance when the gate was blocked, the street continued to be treated as a primary street.102 It is one of the wider streets in Pompeii, especially in its northern two blocks, and was one of the busier streets with an average of only 4 m between doorways, among the lowest in the city. The Arch of Caligula, however, limits access to the northern two blocks of this neighborhood to a degree by creating a bottleneck. The width of the street brought it some elegance, and the low volume of cart traffic helped maintain the street’s dignity in a way similar to the few blocks of the Via dell’ Abbondanza, Via Marina, and Via di Scuole as they neared the forum. Via degli Augustali and the Vico de Terme, both giving access to the forum from the north, are the narrowest of the primary streets. Both streets have traces of ruts, indicating they played a role in the movement of carts through the city, although an impediment on the Via degli Augustali near the forum shows a concern for controlling cart traffic in this location. Both streets also have twice as many commercial structures as one would expect if they were distributed without patterning, and the Via degli Augustali has twice as many production structures. Despite these typical features of primary streets, neither is very impressive because both are narrow and lack public monuments, similar to secondary streets. The mixture of elements of primary and secondary streets in these two streets may suggest they are better seen as transitional from one to the other. Secondary streets were much quieter than primary streets. Being farther from the city gates and forum and having fewer intersections, they were a destination. One may purposely have sought a particular shop along a secondary street. A variety of types of buildings could have attracted people to secondary streets. Although fewer than expected numbers of structures in each category can be found along secondary streets, examples of all structures in all categories stood along them. One did not need to go to a primary street to go shopping or get water for household use. Nonetheless, secondary streets had fewer options for these types of activities than the primary streets. Whereas secondary streets lack patterning overall, we can still make some observations about their individual components. Some residential structures were found in larger than expected numbers along streets with a middling number of intersections (Table 3.6) whereas larger than expected quantities of nonelite housing stood on streets with a high depth from the forum. Both of these locations indicate that secondary streets were attractive places to live for some people, particularly the nonelite. Perhaps these

104


people wanted to escape the hustle and bustle of the primary streets or perhaps some other reason not related to the streets guided their decision to locate along secondary streets. Whereas they bear no statistical significance, it is worth noting that the entertainment structures and brothels are limited to secondary streets. Considering the desire of visitors to Pompeii to attend performances at the theater and amphitheater, these locations seem strange. Perhaps the need for sloping topography to aid in the construction of these large structures was of more concern than their relationship to the streets. Whereas the location of brothels may not be statistically significant when we reclassify streets as primary and secondary, nonetheless it is hard to believe there is no meaning in the fact that all of the identified brothels at Pompeii stand along secondary streets. The fact that there was a correlation between streets with a depth of three from the city gates and the location of brothels would seem to confi rm this suspicion. Brothel owners seem to have been keeping a low profile within the city. The relationship between cart traffic and secondary streets is much more complex than on primary streets. Secondary streets were generally more difficult places for cart drivers to maneuver. They are generally narrower than primary streets and are littered with impediments to traffic, sometimes in seemingly random locations. Some people, presumably residents or property owners, appear to have taken matters into their own hands and blocked streets along their blocks. In most cases there is just one impediment blocking the entrance to a street, meaning it was open to cart traffic at the other end. This was a method of making certain cart drivers did not use a street for through passage while still giving drivers access to buildings along a street, if that was their destination. The Vicolo di Mercurio was one of the more heavily used secondary streets in the city, but few buildings have their primary entrance on this street (Map 3.1). It seems cart drivers were forced to utilize a street in which few Pompeians had an interest. The seemingly random nature of controlling cart traffic on secondary streets across the city suggests no master plan; in fact, we see quite the opposite. The legal texts indicate that one responsibility of civic officials was to facilitate traffic flow, but this seems to have only been a requirement on the primary streets. It appears that on the secondary streets residents could regulate traffic as they saw fit. The forum has its own character, which differentiates it from the streets. Visual clues along the primary streets would have indicated to pedestrians that they were approaching the forum. Roadblocks would have decreased some of the cart traffic, so the streets would have been quieter and safer. Honorary arches were another clue that a transition was occurring in the nature of the street. The forum would have been a lively place with candidates canvassing for votes, prosecutors and defendants preparing to present legal cases, the pious offering sacrifices or perhaps walking in processions on their way to do so, or buyers browsing goods at a temporary market in

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the middle of the forum, depending on the day of the week. Many of the people one would have seen in the forum or on the way there or back would have been fi nely dressed, suggesting an upper-class status. Table 3.8 presents an image of Pompeii’s forum that fits the descriptions we have of fora in the textual record well. The one unexpected feature based on written descriptions of fora is the exclusion of carts not only from the forum itself but also from some of the approaches to it as well. Because the exclusion of carts seems to have been desirable, their absence from the forum must have accentuated the special nature of this space. Pompeii has only one other example of a plaza outside of the forum, the Triangular Forum. Unlike most of the rest of the city, with very few structures to draw people to it, this must have been a quiet corner of the city. The Doric temple appears to have no longer been in use at the time of the eruption, so the main attractions of this plaza may have been either the well at one end or simply the quietness. The exclusion of cart traffic must have helped make this a serene oasis in an otherwise crowded city. Excavated Roman cities are not known for their parks, but Pompeians may have utilized this plaza in a way similar to how we use our parks. That, in and of itself, probably drew people to this quiet corner of the city.

CONCLUSION The analysis of the literary evidence suggested that the Latin vocabulary of viae and angiporta indicated categories of types of streets and that the Romans considered different types of activities appropriate in these different types of streets. The archaeological evidence from Pompeii confirms this analysis. When one was seeking to purchase property or was simply trying to fi nd a place to eat, street depth from the city gate, and from the forum, the number of intersections a street made with others, and the presence or absence of carts and impediments to carts all would have led astute observers in the general direction of what they were seeking at Pompeii. Analyzing the streets of Pompeii as a network, therefore, gives us insight into cognitive perceptions of the streets and how these influenced the use of space within the city walls. The implications of this type of analysis reach well beyond Pompeii and raise a central question. Are these patterns in the use of urban space with relation to the street type unique to Pompeii, or do they occur at other sites? To begin to answer this question, we will turn fi rst to another Italian site that has been thoroughly investigated, Ostia.

4

Ostia

Ostia was the famed port of Rome located just 26 km from the empire’s capital. The site provides some useful comparisons and contrasts with Pompeii, allowing us to explore the role of streets in the use of urban space in more depth. Both cities are in Italy, the center of the Roman Empire, and both are among the most thoroughly excavated and best published ancient cities in the Mediterranean. Nonetheless, Ostia differs in several significant respects from its sister city in Campania. The Romans constructed Ostia for a singular purpose, to facilitate the transportation and mercantile needs of Rome, unlike Pompeii, which grew over time, meeting a variety of needs. Because of its importance to Rome, the emperors lavished more attention and funds on the city than any other besides Rome itself. Ostia was also a larger and more densely occupied city than Pompeii. Finally, Ostia did not meet a catastrophic end, but rather grew, functioned, and was slowly abandoned over a period of more than a millennium. The continuous use of the site presents some chronological difficulties when trying to examine the street network and the buildings that lined it. By choosing to examine the city at its height at the end of the Severan era, the fi rst third of the third century CE, however, and including only those buildings known to have been standing and occupied at that time, some of the chronological problems recede, making it possible to compare some of the details of the street network of Ostia with that of Pompeii.

LAYOUT, TOPOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY OF OSTIA Ostia stands at the mouth of the Tiber River on a low and fairly flat floodplain. Its location made it a strategic place for Rome to control to ensure its own defense. Archaeological and historical evidence indicates Romans initially constructed a small castrum on the site sometime during the fourth century BCE, suggesting a military rather than a commercial interest in securing access to Rome.1 Later buildings in the center of the city incorporated some of the castrum walls. According to Livy, Ostia served as the base for Roman naval operations during the Second Punic War2 and was little utilized as a commercial port. During the Republic, Puteoli, modern Pozzuoli,

Ostia

107

about 210 km southeast of Rome, served as the main entrepôt for imported goods to the capital because it had the closest good harbor near Rome.3 Ostia was infamous in antiquity for being poorly suited for nautical traffic; ships moored in the Tiber because the town lacked a natural harbor and silt from the river added to sandbars in and around the river mouth, making sailing treacherous. The river mouth was only about 100 m across, which led to crowding and which made it very difficult for the enormous grain ships of the late Republic and Principate to maneuver.4 Nonetheless, the proximity of Ostia to Rome and its position in the regional transportation network guaranteed that interest in developing the location as a port remained, even if it was slow to be realized. Both the river and a road, which begins east of the Porta Romana, gave easy access to Rome, whereas another road led southeast from the port city, linking it to the towns, farms, and villas that lay along the coast (Map 4.1). During the second century BCE, the growing population of Rome, the shrinking amount of land near the capital available for agriculture, and the institution of the dole awakened interest in using Ostia for more than a naval base. Some politicians, merchants, and sailors were willing to brave the dangers of flooding and silting at the site in order to reap the benefits and profits from lower overland transportation costs to Rome and so they transformed Ostia into a commercial center. The city received new walls during the fi rst half of the fi rst century BCE which enclosed 30 times as much area as the old walls around the castrum. 5 These concrete walls, faced with opus incertum on the exterior and abutted by an earthen embankment on the interior, continued in

Map 4.1

Ostia’s street network.

108


use throughout the subsequent history of the city. Sometime between the fourth century BCE and the beginning of the Principate, Ostia received its own charter and became a city independent from Rome. The argument that this change in legal status occurred at the same time the walls were built is attractive although not proven.6 Few buildings have been found dating to this time period because much of Ostia was rebuilt during the Principate, destroying evidence of earlier eras. Two sacred areas constructed during the Republic, however, continued to be used. One of these areas west of the forum contained the so-called Temple of Hercules and two additional temples which a temenos enclosed (Map 4.2).7 The other area was east of the forum along the Decumanus Maximus and contained four temples on a podium whose dedications are not certain. A few atrium houses, not so different from contemporary houses at Pompeii, are at the core of larger houses remodeled during the Principate.8

Map 4.2 Plan of Ostia showing sites mentioned in the text. 1 Case a Giardino; 2 Temple of Hercules; 3 curia; 4 Capitolium; 5 Insula dei Dipinti; 6 Caseggiato di Diana; 7 Tempio Rotondo; 8 basilica; 9 Temple of Rome and Augustus; 10 Caseggiato dei Triclini; 11 Forum Baths; 12 Caseggiato Dei Molini; 13 Grandi Horrea; 14 Campo della Magna Mater; 15 Quattro Tempietti; 16 theater; 17 Foro delle Corporazioni; 18 barracks of the vigiles; 19 Horrea of Hortensius.

Ostia

109

During the early Principate, a number of emperors took an interest in the city. In the time of Augustus the emperor’s friend Marcus Agrippa built a large theater with an attached colonnaded portico known today as the Foro delle Corporazioni (Map 4.2).9 The theater was later enlarged by Commodus. Whether the theater’s portico was originally intended to be used in this way or not, at least by the time of Septimius Severus most of the 61 rooms that opened off the portico functioned as offices for various trading corporations. Most of these trading corporations were based in cities central to Ostian commerce at the time, primarily those in North Africa. The main entrance to the Foro delle Corporazioni was to the north along a street that has not yet been excavated. As a result, it is not considered in the analysis that follows. Despite later rebuilding, we know of some Julio-Claudian construction projects at Ostia that continued to be in use into the Severan period. Tiberius (14–37 CE) built a Temple of Rome and Augustus in the city’s forum. The Julio-Claudian emperors also built an aqueduct to supply the city’s residents with water. At least one warehouse, the Horrea of Hortensius, also dates to this time period (Map 4.2).10 It was Claudius (41–54 CE), however, who recognized the need to overhaul the infrastructure at Ostia. He began work on a large artificial harbor excavated on the opposite side of the Tiber beyond a small island, known as Isola Sacra, created by the river and one of its branches about two miles north of Ostia, which his successor, Nero, completed. This harbor also proved inadequate, forcing Trajan to build another basin further inland connected to the Claudian harbor and to the Tiber by canals. These new harbors made it possible for the annual grain fleet from Alexandria to dock at Ostia rather than Puteoli, spelling the beginning of the decline of that port and the ascension of Ostia as the primary supplier to the largest city in the ancient world. Both Claudius and Trajan built warehouses around their harbors and the new port began to take on a life of its own, separate from Ostia. It became known simply as “the port,” Portus, by the end of the second century CE.11 During the late fi rst and the fi rst half of the second centuries, Ostia experienced a time of major building and rebuilding.12 The emperor Domitian probably initiated this phase as the city underwent a massive project aimed at raising the ground level by about 1 meter across the site towards the end of the fi rst century CE.13 The scale of this project was so great that it could only have been undertaken with support from the imperial treasury, and it paved the way for the complete remaking of the city, which may have been the emperor’s intent. Unlike Pompeii, where the uneven topography affected the street layout and where some structures would be built, the topography of Ostia is a fairly level floodplain. The fill helped alleviate the threat of flooding to an extent; it may also have been intended to make deeper dry foundation trenches available which could be used to construct taller buildings, certainly a need in a growing city. Indeed, during the second century CE a large number of multistory apartment buildings (insulae)

110 Roman Urban Street Networks were built, some reaching as high as six stories.14 The emperors Trajan and Hadrian (117–138 CE), in particular, presided over the remaking of the city. In addition to insulae buildings, the second-century emperors built eight bath buildings and restored all the Republican temples. Several emperors developed the forum at this time; Domitian added the curia and basilica whereas Hadrian built a large Capitolium in a commanding position at the north end of the forum. Also during the reign of Hadrian, warehouses were built north of the forum and the emperor installed barracks for the vigiles, the ancient equivalent to modern fi re departments.15 Under Antoninus Pius and Commodus, more warehouses were built or rebuilt and enlarged. By the second half of the second century, Ostia reached its peak in terms of size and development; the population may have reached as high as 50,000 residents.16 Clear signs of trouble appear in the archaeological record in the beginning of the third century CE. Inscriptions dating to the second century are fairly common whereas those dating to the third century are exceedingly rare. The last major construction project was the Tempio Rotondo near the forum (Map 4.2), which was completed during the latter part of the Severan dynasty, perhaps under Alexander Severus (222–235 CE).17 Smaller projects were initiated after this, but these were generally only houses or other small private buildings added in the western, largely unexcavated, sector of the city near the sea; the halcyon days of imperial-sponsored projects were past. Some buildings fell into decay and were not repaired. Rome also suffered during the middle half of the third century as civil war wracked the empire, which accounts to some extent for Ostia’s decline, but the silting problem also continued. Portus eclipsed Ostia and grew into an independent city during the third through early fourth centuries, shaking off Ostian dominance. Occupation dwindled through the Late Antique and into the early medieval periods but did not disappear altogether. As late as the ninth century, raids by Muslim pirates were a concern to pope Gregory IV (827–844 CE), who built a new fortress just to the east of Ostia to which he gave the impressive name of Gregoriopolis. Whereas that settlement has evolved into the modern Ostia, it signaled the end of the use of the ancient site for anything other than a quarry.18

THE STRUCTURE OF OSTIA’S STREETS Traces of Ostia’s original castrum persist in the layout of the city’s streets (Map 4.1). Streets in the castrum were laid out in a rectilinear fashion, meeting at right angles. Beyond the castrum gates, however, this orderly system quickly broke down. South of the forum a street on line with the Cardo Maximus of the castrum branches off at an angle from the castrum’s orthogonal layout, heading to the southeast and the Porta Laurentina. The strange angle of this road may have been generated by the desire to link

Ostia

111

with the road that led south from Ostia along the coast. East of the old castrum, the Decumanus Maximus continues in a straight line, becoming the Via Ostiensis once it left the city’s Porta Romana (Map 4.2). Whether the straight line of this road was generated by conforming to that in the old castrum or by the line of the preexisting road to Rome is a question that is impossible to answer. The Decumanus Maximus leaves the castrum to the west, heading in a straight line briefly, then breaks into two separate streets, one heading southwest and the other northwest. Both led to the seashore. The southwest street, still labeled Decumanus Maximus, led to the Porta Marina. The other street, the Via della Foce, led to the western third of the city, the last major neighborhood within the city’s gates to remain unexcavated (Map 4.1). Investigators have partially excavated a so-called imperial palace19 in the northwestern sector of the city as well as detected a porttemple complex in the same area through geophysical prospection.20 Unfortunately it is not clear how the structures and street segments in this area fit into the rest of the known street network and so this area is not included in the analysis that follows. 21 Nonetheless, it is clear that the Via della Foce led to port facilities. Presumably there was at least one more major street running parallel to the river north of the areas that were excavated. Whereas no trace of this street, or possibly streets, has been excavated and we therefore have no way of knowing its course, it is counted nonetheless in the analysis of the number of intersections in the street network because certain north-south streets had to have intersected it. This hypothetical street is not considered in the analysis of depth, however, because it would have had minimal impact on this facet of the street network. A number of streets opened off the main arteries providing access to the interior of the city. Only the streets north of the Decumanus Maximus lay at a perpendicular angle to the main street; all the rest head off the main streets at skewed angles (Map 4.1). Also, in striking contrast to the three other cities considered in this study, the streets at Ostia do not stand at equal intervals from one another. Most scholars assume the peculiar angles of the main streets were designed to help them link with the harbor facilities and the most important preexisting local highways. R. Meiggs has interpreted the large number of irregular angles to mean that urban development was uncontrolled. 22 Like Pompeii, sidewalks line some streets and most of the excavated streets were paved. The stepping-stones for crossing the street found at the Campanian site, however, are missing from the Tiber city. Ostia had a much more extensive underground drainage system than Pompeii. The lack of cesspits and the fairly flat terrain must have necessitated the removal of rainwater and street waste in this way. 23 Ostia has more plazas than any of the other case-study cities. The forum stands in the middle of the old castrum and was the meeting place of several main streets in the city including two that led to city gates (Map 4.1). 24 Some of the city’s plazas are more closely aligned to the surrounding

112


architecture than in any other of the case-study cities. For instance, the plaza south of the Forum Baths certainly offered an open vista from the large windows in the bath building (Map 4.2). It may have also served as a palaestra for bathers. But this plaza also served the purpose of passage because it was the easiest way to get from the Cardo Maximus and the Via del Tempio Rotondo, south of the forum, to the Semita dei Cippi to the east (Map 4.1). This plaza also gave access to two small temples, a number of shops, a guild seat, and probably upper-floor apartments. 25 This last example brings up the question of whether a space should be considered a courtyard or a plaza for the purposes of this analysis. Two factors determined whether or not a group of buildings are considered to surround an internal courtyard or a plaza. If the easiest way to get from one street to another was through the space and the construction surrounding it was not one unified building, but instead several separate buildings, it is treated here as a plaza. Thus the Case a Giardino are considered to stand on a plaza, which is analyzed as part of the street network, whereas the Foro delle Corporazioni is not considered to be part of the street network because it is part of single building and it did not provide an easy way to get from one part of the street network to another.

IDENTIFICATION OF THE USE OF BUILDINGS Excavations at Ostia took place intermittently between the Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century with the excavators and their patrons measuring their success by the value of the statues, inscriptions, and mosaics they found. These early excavators concentrated on areas they felt would produce rich fi nds, they rarely completed the excavation of specific buildings, and they rarely published detailed accounts of their work.26 Not until the early twentieth century did D. Vaglieri start a new policy of excavating complete sectors of the city and digging below the imperial-period structures in order to trace the development of the buildings over time. G. Calza carried on his work from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s. Excavations at Ostia received a boost from Mussolini’s government, bent on impressing the world during a planned international exhibition to be held in Rome in 1942. He underwrote excavations on an enormous scale and between 1938 and 1942 Calza was able to nearly double the amount of area excavated at Ostia. Calza published the fi rst in a series of volumes dedicated to these excavations in 1946, which included the most complete plan of the site to date. Unfortunately the publications of these excavations focus primarily on the architecture and fail to give the kind of contextual data about artifacts that is standard excavation practice today. 27 Calza’s plans were digitized in order to connect them to the database of the use of every building at the site. The interpretations for the use of every building at Ostia by Calza, Meiggs, and C. Pavolini contributed to the database, supplemented

Ostia

113

by specialized studies on specific types of buildings or sectors of the city and the author’s own observations at the site. 28 The work of the joint German Archaeological Institute–American Academy in Rome project of geophysical prospection and excavation was particularly useful for identifying the location of streets in the southeastern quarter of the city, Regio V, and these streets were incorporated into the digitized map.29 Ostia presents some chronological challenges; the ruins we see today are a palimpsest of buildings from different time periods. For the type of holistic analysis proposed by this study, it is best to choose one time period and analyze the use of space and the street network in the city during that time period. The end of the Severan period represents the best period for analysis. Ostia reached its peak in the second half of the second century and then began a slow decline punctuated by the building of its last major public monument, the Tempio Rotondo, during the latter part of the Severan dynasty. The moment this temple was built represents the fullest expression of Ostia’s urban experience, making it the best time period for examining the city. Admittedly, archaeological chronology is not as precise as we might like it to be, so we cannot be certain whether some of the signs of urban decay evident during the beginning of the third century, such as the burning and abandonment of the bakery at the Caseggiato dei Molini, happened before or after the construction of the Tempio Rotondo. 30 The assumption, therefore, that all buildings continued to function up to at least the time the location was chosen for the construction of the Tempio Rotondo may be optimistic, but it allows for the most complete analysis of the city’s structure. Selecting this time period as the focus of this study has the added advantage that a clear understanding of the dating of postSeveran masonry types is lacking. 31 Table 4.1 shows the division of all fully excavated structures at Ostia into the eight categories presented in the second chapter based on their use in the beginning of the third century CE. This information is also displayed on a map available on a Web site associated with this work.32 Ostia has some of the same building types found at Pompeii, such as baths, public temples, one-room shops, bars, and so on. The site, however, does provide some unique types of buildings not found at Pompeii, which are worth mentioning briefly here. Insulae have received the most attention of any of these unique types of buildings found at Ostia. Apartment buildings represent the next phase in the evolution of crowded urban housing that began after the destruction of Pompeii. In Rome and Ostia people began to build up rather than out in order to house a growing population within the confines of preexisting city walls; insulae eventually came to house more people than one-family homes. Whereas the design details between apartment buildings at Ostia differed and they evolved over time, most have a few features in common. Most were between three and five stories high and provided living units for multiple families and individuals. Apartments were small by modern standards and could consist of one to several rooms. The

114 Roman Urban Street Networks Table 4.1

Categories for Architectural Units at Ostia



Number of Observed Examples

administrative

basilica, portico

6

commercial

bar/restaurant (caupona, popina, thermopolium), shop (taberna), market building (macellum), trade guild (collegium), warehouse (horrea)

entertainment

theater

health-related

bath, latrine, nymphaeum

30

production

bakery, workshop for cleaning or dyeing clothes (fullonica)

24

religious

temple, shrine, Mithraeum

39

residential

elite (domus or first floor of an insula), nonelite apartment (upper floors of an insula)

unknown

—

1,014

1

254

77

upper stories lacked running water and, usually, latrines. Larger apartment blocks centered on courtyards or plazas, and all in the building seem to have shared the amenities the building offered. Some apartment buildings had shops on their ground floors, taking full economic advantage of their street frontages.33 The ground floors of some apartment blocks were reserved for what appear to have been the most luxurious of all the apartments, such as in the Insula dei Dipinti, where the ground-floor apartment had tall ceilings, large windows looking out on a courtyard, and easy access to water, amenities not available in the apartments above. The vertical segregation of apartments is reflected in the analysis because large, well-decorated ground-floor apartments were labeled as belonging to the elite whereas the doors that led from the street to upper-story apartments were considered to lead to nonelite apartments.34 Also, considering the increased value of real estate indicated by the desire to build tall buildings, it is assumed that all one-family atrium and peristyle houses that survived from the Republic and early Principate must have belonged to elite as well.35 Another type of building not found at Pompeii is the horrea or warehouse. Again, the main purpose of Ostia was to act as the port of Rome and during the second and early third centuries to ensure the grain supply to the capital. The presence of more storage capacity than has been excavated

Ostia

115

at any other Roman city should hardly come as a surprise. The warehouses vary in size; the larger ones are assumed to have been constructed with help from the imperial treasury whereas the more modest were funded from private sources. Usually they consist of a series of individual rooms that open onto a central courtyard. The doors to these individual storage units are fairly narrow and windows, when they exist, are little more than slits, no doubt to protect the merchandise from potential theft and the withering effects of the sun. The warehouses stood more than one story high, thus maximizing the use of limited urban space. At least four warehouses at Ostia had floors raised on pylons, allowing air to circulate underneath in order to prevent grain from molding. Other warehouses stood at Portus and probably in the northern and western parts of Ostia, although these areas of the city have not been fully excavated and have been damaged by changes in the course of the Tiber.36 Warehouses are grouped under commercial structures for the analysis that follows. The schola or seat of a collegium, of which up to 11 buildings have been used in this analysis, is a type of building little mentioned at Pompeii. 37 Collegia were organizations of people with a common interest, usually related to business or religion. The imperial government regulated them heavily to ensure members did not engage in any activities that could be considered revolutionary. At Ostia, the majority of collegia brought together people involved in similar trades such as shipbuilders, ropemakers, and painters. Meetings of the collegia must have offered ample opportunities for business networking as well as socializing. Collegia had their own rules, elected officials, and could own real estate and slaves. 38 Many collegia met in a schola to celebrate festivals and for religious observances. The schola of the builders housed in the Caseggiato dei Triclini (see Map 4.2) is one of the more impressive of these types of buildings. It stands east of the forum in the center of town, where the value of real estate must have been great, indicating the wealth and power of this group. A number of rooms surround a courtyard, five of which were dining rooms. The building also had a shrine, kitchen, and latrine as well as stairs leading to another story which is no longer extant. Other scholae were built adjoining temples, indicating the special role their members had in tending to the needs of a particular deity.39 Taken as a group, these structures did not prove to be distributed along streets with any relationship to depth from the city gate or forum or number of intersections and so are not included in the tables that follow.40 The fi nal type of structure found at Ostia which is not found at Pompeii is the Mithraeum, or sanctuary dedicated to the worship of the Persian god Mithras.41 Sixteen have been found, but the location of only nine are considered here because these are within the walls of the city, can be entered directly from a street or plaza, and we understand how that street or plaza linked to the rest of the street network.42 The cult of Mithras was a mystery cult; membership, open to men only, required initiation and the rites were kept secret, leaving us with few clues as to the theology of the cult. Mithraea

116


are fairly easy to identify at Ostia; they are underground or in rooms that have had their windows blocked and usually have a small pronaos leading to a rectangular room lined on the long sides with benches for praying and feasting. The focal point of the room was a representation of Mithras, either in relief or fully sculpted in the round, dramatically riding on the back of a bull as he slays him. Other symbols surround this scene, most of which are difficult to interpret but some of which have clear astrological significance. Congregations were small. Meiggs suggests 40 men could have fit into the largest of the Mithraea at Ostia, whereas 20 could have fit into the smallest. The nine Mithraea at Ostia included in this analysis are evenly dispersed across the city, leading to the conclusion that they served congregations in particular neighborhoods.43 They were frequently set up in portions of buildings that had originally been designed for some other use; worshippers of Mithras installed cult rooms in the apartment complex known as the Caseggiato di Diana, closing off the windows in the rooms to create the cave-like darkness apparently necessary for a Mithraeum (Map 4.2). Other adherents turned the service corridor of a bath into a Mithraeum.44 Whether these odd locations were chosen for economical reasons or to hide the cult’s activities is difficult to say. Whereas these types of buildings add some new features to the study of Ostia’s cityscape in comparison with Pompeii’s, the analysis of Ostia is less fi ne grained than the one of Pompeii because of the nature of the evidence. Ostia’s buildings were not as well preserved as Pompeii’s, many of them were reused, and none had the number and variety of artifacts found in them as any building at Pompeii, making it difficult to identify structures very specifically. As incredible as it may sound for a port city, not one brothel has been securely identified, a lacuna that reflects more on our lack of evidence than on the moral character of the sailors, merchants, and inhabitants living in or passing through one of the busiest ports in the ancient world. Thus beyond the eight main categories for the use of space outlined above, there are only a few other building types that we can analyze. Several of these types of buildings show a relationship to the street grid based on the depth of a street from the city gates, depth from the forum, the number of intersections, the presence or absence of cart traffic, or a combination of these factors. Some of the patterns reflect those found at Pompeii whereas others are unique to Ostia, probably as a result of the use of Ostia as the port of Rome. As at Pompeii, however, the evidence clearly indicates that the people of Ostia recognized the difference between a primary street, a secondary street, the central forum, and a plaza.

STREET DEPTH FROM THE CITY GATES The depth of the street network at Ostia, seen in Map 4.3, is greater than the depth of the street network at Pompeii, suggesting more complexity. At

Ostia

117

Pompeii the maximum depth from the city gates was four as opposed to five at Ostia. When the depths of the streets are organized in relation to the average number of intersections, one may observe a tendency for the number of intersections to drop as one entered streets further from both the forum and the city gates (Graph 4.1). The drop in number of intersections between streets with a depth of one as opposed to two is quite precipitous at both Ostia and Pompeii. The average distance between doorways increases the further a street was from the gates, leveling off for streets with the higher depths (Graph 4.2). Streets with a depth of one had the least distance between doorways and so the building façades along these streets would have appeared the most crowded. As at Pompeii, the streets that gave access to Ostia’s city gates were central to facilitating traffic and were some of the busiest streets in the city. When we turn our attention to the distribution of building categories in relation to street depth, we can only be left with the impression that depth played a prominent role in the formation of the cityscape in ways very similar to Pompeii (Tables 4.2–4.3). Commercial structures in general at Ostia stand in greater than expected frequency than if they were randomly distributed on streets with the lowest depths from city gates.45 The placement of bars is also greater than expected at the lower depths from the city gates, similar to their placement at Pompeii. Ostian merchants and bar owners realized, like their Pompeian counterparts, that streets with a low depth were an excellent location for business. The street leading southwest to the Porta Marina, the Decumanus Maximus, seems to have been a particularly popular place to locate a bar. Six bars stand along this street whereas

Map 4.3

Depth of Ostia’s streets from the city gates.

118


Graph 4.1 Relationship between the depth of streets from Ostia’s city gates and forum and the average number of intersections of streets at each depth.

Graph 4.2 Relationship between the depth of streets from Ostia’s city gates and forum and the average distance between doors at each depth.

another three stand along streets that crossed this one and could be easily accessed near their intersection with the Decumanus Maximus. Many bar owners appear to have been bent on gaining the attention of visitors to the

0

4

5

Comments


5

119

320

402

168

Exp.

1,014

410–20

1,014

68

3

Total

381

285

2

280

Obs.

Commercial

5

30

0

4

9

12

5

Exp.

39

0

0

10

12

17

39

0

5

12

15

7

Exp.

0.045

Obs.

Religious


30

0

9

4

11

6

Obs.

Health

254

1

30

80

101

42

Exp.

0.0000002

254

6

51

84

77

36

Obs.

Residential

6

0

0

0

5

1

Obs.

—

1

0

0

0

0

1

Obs.

—

1

0

0

0

1

0

Exp.

Entertainment

24

0

3

13

6

2

Obs.

27

24

0

3

8

9

4

Exp.

Production


6

0

1

2

2

1

Exp.

Administrative



1


Table 4.2

Ostia 119

6

0

0

35

3

4

5

Total

Comments

0.5

16

2


13

1

Obs.

35

0

4

11

14

6

Exp.

Commercial: Bar

13

0

2

4

5

2

Exp.

0.009

39

0

15

10

8

6

Obs.

39

0

5

12

15

7

Exp.

Residential: Elite


0.04

13

0

7

0

2

4

Obs.

Health: Nymphaea

0.00006

213

6

36

73

68

30

Obs.

213

1

25

67

85

35

Exp.


85

8

0

0

4

3

1

Obs.

—

4

0

0

2

1

1

Obs.

4

0

0

1

2

1

Exp.


100

9

0

1

3

4

1

Obs.

9

0

1

3

4

1

Exp.

Religious: Mithraea


8

0

1

3

3

1

Exp.

Production: Bakery




Table 4.3


city, making it easy for them to fi nd their establishments as soon as they

Ostia

121

entered the city gates. The distribution of residences at Ostia demonstrates an interesting contrast with Pompeii. At Pompeii, residents clearly preferred to live along streets that led directly to the city gates. All residences at Ostia, on the other hand, as well as those in the subcategories of elite and nonelite stand in a greater than expected frequency along streets with the highest depths from both the city gates. Unlike many of the residents of Pompeii, those of Ostia expressed a desire to live on the most remote streets. No other category of building exhibits such a pattern. To get most of the things they may have needed, therefore, most residents of Ostia had to walk through more streets than their Pompeian counterparts. They may have been attempting to escape the clatter and even danger of passing carts by placing their homes away from the central arteries of the city. Streets with higher depths would not have been very useful to cart drivers trying to move heavy loads through the city either to the port or out of the city to Rome or another nearby inland destination, and so drivers must have avoided these streets when possible. For the same reason it would have made it a bit more difficult for strangers to the city to fi nd where the inhabitants of the city lived, which may have been another purpose of this placement. Although they may have been dependent upon the merchants, sailors, and agents who were always passing through Ostia, the inhabitants of the city may have wanted to shield their families from strangers. Religious structures seem to have had a higher visibility at Ostia than at Pompeii. Greater than expected numbers of religious structures stand on streets with the lowest depths from the city gates (Table 4.2). Unlike Pompeii, where individual temples and religious precincts were located along only one street that connected the forum to a city gate, at Ostia they are located along two such streets. The precincts along these main streets, the Campo della Magna Mater and the precinct of the Quattro Tempietti, also had multiple temples, which gives the precincts a busier feel than some of the temple precincts at Pompeii which had only one temple. The location of structures related to the health of the city’s inhabitants also shows a pattern different from Pompeii. These results rest primarily on the great depth of many nymphaea from the city gates (Tables 4.3). The seven nymphaea at a depth of four from the city gates and five from the forum are all part of the Case a Giardino complex and represent a convenient source of water for residents of these buildings. The association of these seven nymphaea with residences and nonelite housing explains the nearly identical patterns we see for all of these categories. Production structures as a group show no patterning at Ostia with relation to street depth. Bakeries also lack any patterning. Whereas the number of identified buildings dedicated to laundry or dyeing services is too low for statistical analysis, there is a very slight indication of a preference for streets with a medium depth from the city gates in contrast to Pompeii,

122 Roman Urban Street Networks where the lowest depths were preferred. This may be a result of the tiny number of such buildings we have to count, however. The placement of the theater at Ostia along one of the main streets that linked the Porta Romana with the forum contrasts with Pompeii, where entertainment structures were a little more difficult to fi nd from the city gate and had no relationship with the forum. The theater at Ostia had a higher profi le than any entertainment structure in any of the other casestudy cities. Because it is the sole entertainment structure whose location we can analyze with relation to the streets, it is difficult to make a blanket statement about Ostian attitudes towards the placement of entertainment structures as the choice of location may have come from the highest levels of Roman society because the emperor’s friend paid for the construction of the theater. The desire of Agrippa to advertise his generosity may explain the anomalous location.

STREET DEPTH FROM THE FORUM Ostia’s streets have five depths from the forum, exhibiting a similar complexity to the depth from the city gates (Map 4.4). Again, the central nature of streets with the lowest depths and the peripheral nature of those with the highest depths are evident from the number of intersections and the distance between doors when they are sorted based on depth from the forum (Graphs 4.1 and 4.2). Streets that led directly to the forum intersected the greatest number of other streets whereas those that were more distant intersected the lowest number of other streets. In addition, streets with a depth of only one from the forum were the most crowded with the least distance between doorways. These patterns repeat those for the depth from the city gates at Ostia as well as for the depth from the forum at Pompeii. Taken together, Graphs 4.1 and 4.2 indicate that the streets of Ostia had directionality, but the sense of direction was not as strong as it was at Pompeii. If a stranger were in a street or plaza with a depth of five and wanted to walk towards the forum or city gate, the change in depth would not have been easily noticeable based on the frequency of intersections along the streets. It would not be until that stranger fi nally left a street with a depth of two and entered a street that led directly to the gates or forum that he/she would notice a change in the number of intersections and distance between doorways. As with depth from the city gates, the data indicate different categories of building types at Ostia had different relationships with the forum; some building types were directly accessible from the forum whereas others were quite removed from it. Whereas not enough examples exist for a statistical comparison, the distribution of administrative structures is interesting simply because of the slight difference with Pompeii. Administrative structures

Ostia

Map 4.4

123

Depth of Ostia’s streets from the forum.

are concentrated in the forum, as we would expect, but also seem to spill out into the streets that linked to the forum (Table 4.4). This observation may simply be a relic of how we identify administrative buildings at both sites than about how the Romans chose to distribute them. The three categories of use that show patterning are commercial, health, and religious structures (Table 4.4). Streets with a low depth from the forum were popular with shop owners just as were the streets with a low depth from the city gates. The commercial advantage of these locations should be apparent and require little explanation. What is notable is the lack of patterning for bars (Table 4.5). Bar owners preferred to place their establishments closer to the city gates than the forum, perhaps in an attempt to service a clientele of visitors to the city rather than residents. The pattern for health-related structures and for nymphaea mirror one another; streets with either the lowest or the highest depth from the forum have a larger than expected concentration of these types of structures than did the streets with a medium depth. One could obtain water and get clean either very discretely away from the forum or very publicly very near the forum. The location for some health-related structures at a low depth, therefore giving them a high profile within the city, may also have been chosen by patrons who wanted people to see their names on the inscription above the bath or nymphaeum for which they paid. As with depth from the city gates, those who chose the location for religious structures show a marked preference for streets with a low depth from the forum. Walking from the forum on

273

93

16

3

4

5

Comments


30

1.1

4.7

9.4

10.0

4.3

0.5

Exp.

0.0000000001

30

9

3

3

7

7

1

Obs.

Health

39

0

3

7

11

16

2

0.04

39

1

6

12

13

6

1

Exp.

Religious Obs.


1,014

39

159

317

336

146

17

Exp.

810–19

1,014

415

2

Total

212

5

1

0 (In the Forum)

Obs.

Commercial

254

10

40

79

84

37

4

Exp.

410–12

254

35

48

62

78

30

1

Obs.

Residential

—

6

0

1

2

2

1

0

Exp.

1

0

0

0

0

1

0

Obs.

—

1

0

0

0

1

0

0

Exp.

Entertainment


6

0

0

0

2

1

3

Obs.

Administrative




Table 4.4

24

0

6

11

5

2

0

Obs.

47

24

1

4

8

8

3

0

Exp.

Production


Ostia

125

the Decumanus Maximus, one could enter an individual temple, the temple precinct with four temples, and even a Mithraeum near the Porta Romana. This close relationship between these religious locales and the forum must have added an aura of sanctity to the forum. Residences have a curious relationship with the forum. Both the elite and nonelite residents chose to live in greater than expected numbers in the streets and plazas most distant from the forum. This result is in complete contrast to the results for the distribution of residences at Pompeii. Many in Ostia appear to have had a desire to separate their homes from the crowds moving to and from the forum, perhaps to gain a little peace in a crowded city. This does not mean that the elite would fail to gain public attention while walking surrounded by a group of clients, as was so easy to do at Pompeii. The location of many homes so far from the forum simply means that they had farther to go and would, therefore, pass more people in the streets.

NUMBER OF INTERSECTIONS The people of Ostia seem to have considered, along with depth, the number of intersections a street made with other streets when choosing a location for some construction (Map 4.5). Commercial structures show a particularly strong pattern, appearing with greater than expected frequency along the streets with the highest number of intersections. No doubt shop owners wanted to try to gain the attention of the great number of people who must have passed along these streets. The relationship between the location of elite residential structures and the number of intersections in the streets giving access to those structures reinforces the suggestion made above that elite residents of the city preferred quieter and less busy locations for their homes than their counterparts at Pompeii. Many domestic structures stand on streets with fewer intersections and, therefore, less traffic. The greater than expected total of residences along streets with three intersections is rather large (Table 4.7). With regard to religious structures, again we see a preference for the busiest streets; the great number of religious structures at Ostia would have been more apparent to anyone traversing the streets than it would have been to anyone at Pompeii (Table 4.6). Whereas some temples and shrines did stand along the streets with the most intersections, there appears to also be a strong preference for placing religious structures inside plazas removed from hustle and bustle of the streets with the most intersections. A temenos wall was not required around a Roman sanctuary, but the Ostians preferred to give about a third of their city’s public religious structures the benefit of such a construction. The use of a temenos around sanctuaries that stood on these active streets may have been a necessity in order to keep the noise of all the people passing by from disturbing the ceremonies taking place before the temples.

5

0

0

0

7

13

1

2

3

4

5

Total

Comments


1

0 (In the Forum)

39

13

5

6

8

7

0

39

1

6

12

13

6

1

Exp.

110–28

Obs.

Residential: Elite

213

8

33

67

71

31

3

Exp.

0.0004

213

22

43

55

69

23

1

Obs.



13

0.5

2.0

4.1

4.3

1.9

0.2

Exp.

110–18

Obs.

Health: Nymphaea

35

0

4

8

16

7

0

Obs.

40

35

1

5

11

12

5

1

Exp.

Commercial: Bar

100

8

0

1

3

3

1

0

Exp.

4

0

0

2

1

1

0

Obs.

—

4

0

1

1

1

1

0

Exp.



8

0

1

3

3

1

0

Obs.

Production: Bakery




Table 4.5

9

0

1

3

4

1

0

Obs.

97

9

0

2

3

3

1

0

Exp.

Religious: Mithraea


Ostia

Map 4.5

127

Number of intersections each of Ostia’s streets has with other streets.

Of the remaining categories, structures devoted to production and health show no patterning in relation to the number of intersections a street made, a result very different from that at Pompeii. The placement of the one theater at Ostia also demonstrates a complete opposite pattern from what we see at Pompeii. At Pompeii several entertainment structures were located on streets that intersected only one other street. At Ostia the theater is on the street that has the most number of intersections. Again, the theater at Ostia had a much higher profi le in the street network than the theaters or amphitheater at Pompeii.

CART TRAFFIC The streets of Ostia facilitated traffic flow much better than those at Pompeii. There were many fewer impediments to traffic and many more wide streets capable of accommodating traffic moving in two directions. Cart traffic at Ostia would have been of a different nature than that at Pompeii. Considering Ostia’s importance as a port, and in particular that it was the point through which much of the grain supply bound for Rome passed, the city must have seen a great deal more commercial cart traffic than the city buried by Vesuvius. In addition, Ostia must have seen more large wagons pulled by multiple animals because the most economical way to move a high-bulk, low-value good such as grain overland is by putting as much in

53

128

59

143

1,014

7

10

13

20

Total

Comments

89

34

83

25

78

99

63

226

213

104

Exp.

1,014

10–27

39

10

3

1

1

6

3

1

6

5

3

Obs.

1

39

4

1

3

1

3

4

2

9

8

4

Exp.

Religious


3

72

6


27

103

155

3

5

190

2

4

84

1

Obs.

Commercial

6

1

0

2

0

0

3

0

0

0

0

Obs.

—

6

1

0

1

0

0

1

0

1

1

1

Exp.

Administrative

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Obs.

—

30

4

2

1

2

2

2

2

10

3

2

Obs.

71

30

3

1

2

1

2

3

2

7

6

3

Exp.

Health

24

0

0

3

0

2

1

4

6

6

2

Obs.

10

24

2

1

2

1

2

2

1

5

5

3

Exp.

Production


1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

Exp.

Entertainment




Table 4.6

254

14

7

22

6

16

18

15

64

69

23

Obs.

22

254

22

8

21

6

20

25

16

57

53

26

Exp.

Residential


6

0

2

0

0

0

0

4

13

3

4

5

6

7

10

13

20

Total

Comments

2

13

1

1

1

0

1

1

1

3

3

1

Exp.

39

1

2

1

0

7

2

3

15

5

3

Obs.

4

39

4

1

3

1

3

4

2

9

8

4

Exp.

Residential: Elite


1

2


0

1

Obs.

Health: Nymphaea

35

4

2

7

1

3

5

3

8

1

1

Obs.

7

35

3

1

3

1

3

3

2

8

7

4

Exp.

Commercial: Bar

8

0

0

2

0

1

0

0

2

2

1

Obs.

72

4

0

0

0

0

1

0

2

1

0

0

Obs.

—

4

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

1

1

1

Exp.


9

1

2

0

1

0

1

0

2

2

0

Obs.

7

9

0.8

0.3

0.7

0.2

0.7

0.9

0.6

2.0

1.8

1.0

Exp.

Religious: Mithraea


8

0.7

0.3

0.6

0.2

0.6

0.8

0.5

1.8

1.7

0.8

Exp.

Production: Bakery

Subcategories of Structures



Table 4.7

213

13

5

21

6

9

16

12

48

63

20

Obs.

8

213

19

7

17

5

16

21

13

48

45

22

Exp.


Ostia 129

130 Roman Urban Street Networks one cart as possible in order to limit the number of trips necessary. Large carts pulled by teams of four, six, even eight oxen or mules must have been a familiar sight in the city. From this perspective, the odd angles at which many of Ostia’s streets meet appear anything but random (Map 4.6). We can only conjecture about the routes of cart traffic through the city because ruts that were so useful in tracing these paths at Pompeii are difficult to locate at Ostia. Few are marked on published plans of the site and the growth of weeds through the space between paving stones and the covering of the paved surface with windblown sediments have obscured many streets. Ruts were observed on only three streets (Map 4.6). The Via delle Corporazioni has the only pair of ruts that can be measured; their width was 1.4 m, wide enough for a cart drawn by one or two animals. The dearth of ruts may be the result of the great width of most streets at Ostia. Unlike Pompeii, where the narrowness forced carts to drive over the same part of the street leading to the formation of ruts, at Ostia carts could range over a greater part of the paved surface. The most important points for the movement of large carts at Ostia would have been from the port facilities in the west and north of the city, to the Porta Romana, from which a road led to Rome, and the Porta Laurentina, from which a road led to the communities and villas south of Ostia (Map 4.1). Considering the difficulty with which a cart pulled by a line of draft animals would have had in making right-angled turns, the odd angles

Map 4.6

Traffic patterns at Ostia.

Ostia

131

of some of Ostia’s streets should not seem so peculiar. The Decumanus Maximus leads to the Porta Marina and the seaside beyond whereas the Via della Foce leads to the river port facilities. Both converge on the point where the Decumanus Maximus turns slightly, pointing east towards the Via Ostiensis. At this point they meet at broad angles, facilitating the wide turns required by large vehicles pulled by multiple animals. From that point these carts would have had an easy time passing through the rest of the city and reaching the Via Ostiensis. The kink in the Cardo Maximus as it exits the forum and leads southeast towards the Porta Laurentina may also have facilitated gentle turns. The construction of the Temple of Rome and Augustus in the fi rst half of the fi rst century CE on the southern end of the forum eventually blocked the route of the Cardo Maximus through the forum to the harbor and warehouses to the north, at which point this street lost its importance.46 No warehouses stand along this street south of the forum. Instead, the most important north-south route linking the river port facilities with the Porta Laurentina was the Semita dei Cippi,47 known in antiquity as the “Warehouse Path” (Map 4.6).48 Following this route one would need to make only one turn to reach the gate and that turn would have been, again, at an angle greater than 90 degrees. The ancient name of this street also indicates that it was a center for storage buildings and must also have been important in the overall transportation of bulk goods. The organic development of the street network outside of the original castrum does not deserve to be dismissed as erratic or explained away as connecting to preexisting streets. The position of the forum in the city’s transportation network was vital to the system. The easiest and most direct route between the eastern and western ends of the city passed through the forum, which explains why the forum was open to cart traffic. But the citizens of Ostia clearly clung to the ideal that grew up during the early Principate, and which was seen at Pompeii, that the forum was a place where the dignity of civic functions required the exclusion of cart traffic. The compromise the people of Ostia devised to uphold this ideal, while still bowing to the necessities of traffic flow, was to allow the Decumanus Maximus to pass through the forum, but to limit the movement of carts to the path of the Decumanus Maximus itself by building steps up on either side of the street. The street must have appeared to be set in a channel lower than the level of the forum, separating the carts passing through from the people conducting civic business. Even the materials used in the paved surface of the two areas differed for practical and perhaps ideological reasons; the forum was paved with marble whereas the Decumanus Maximus was paved with a less attractive but more resilient volcanic stone. As mentioned above, the citizens of Ostia may not have been concerned about the flow of traffic through the forum during the Republican era as the Cardo Maximus south of the forum may have once played an important role in connecting the harbor to the north with the Porta Laurentina to the south. But with the construction of the

132


Temple of Rome and Augustus, which blocked the street from the south from entering the forum, the Capitolium, which blocked the street from the north, and the steps, which kept carts from leaving the Decumanus Maximus as they crossed the forum, the people of Ostia were following a growing empire-wide trend that restricted carts and commerce from fora.49 The most important street in Ostia, in terms of destination/depth, width, number of intersections, number and type of public structures located along it, is the Decumanus Maximus (Map 4.1). Curiously, turning a cart north from the Decumanus Maximus onto at least three streets, the Via della Fontana, the Via dei Grandi Horrea, and the Via delle Ermette, would have been impossible. One of the most inexplicable roadblocks is the nymphaeum that prevents the Via dei Grandi Horrea from meeting the Decumanus Maximus (Maps 4.1 and 4.7). The east side of the Grandi Horrea, one of the largest and best constructed warehouses in Ostia, borders the Via dei Grandi Horrea whereas the warehouse’s west side borders the Via di Molini. Having two routes that permitted laden carts leaving the warehouse to enter the Decumanus Maximus would have facilitated traffic flow much better than just one. Nonetheless, the use of a nymphaeum to block the street suggests either planning on the part of the civic government or, at the very least, its tacit approval. Also, porticoes separate the Via della Fontana and the unnamed street two blocks west of the east gate from the Decumanus Maximus, again suggesting a construction plan approved by the civic government. The Via dei Vigili connects to the Decumanus Maximus, but one would have to have gone through a narrow portico and passed the entrances to flanking shops before getting onto a solid paved surface again. It would have been possible to drive a cart through this portico, and a ramp from the Decumanus Maximus encourages the attempt, but it would have been a fairly difficult task. More of the streets south of the Decumanus Maximus appear open to turns. In fact, the strange angles of nearly all these streets would have made a right-hand turn for a cart heading east much easier. The structure of the street facilitates eastbound traffic to turn south while all traffic was discouraged from turning north. The Via della Foce has a similar arrangement facilitating westbound traffic turning north. A few of the side streets at Ostia discourage carts from entering them by having narrower, one-lane entries at the point where the side street meets a central artery. These side streets widen out again after this point of meeting, but this would also seem to be a way to discourage cart drivers from utilizing them. Other streets, such as the Via della Caupona di Alexander, have impediments that would have blocked cart traffic. Pompeians, in contrast, managed the cart traffic more strictly than Ostians, mainly through sidewalks, steps, and curbstones that blocked the entrances to certain streets (Map 3.6). Pedestrian zones existed at Ostia, just as they did at Pompeii. The large open area near the Porta Laurentina around which several temples were arranged was blocked to cart traffic (Map 4.1). Several of the sanctuaries

Ostia

133

had entrances that blocked cart traffic, helping to add composure and quiet to their proceedings. Also, the large marble-paved plaza south of the Forum Baths, perhaps used as a gymnasium by the bath’s patrons, prohibited carts, although it was the only way to reach the entrances to several buildings not connected with the baths, including shops, shrines, apartments, and even a the seat of a corporation. Although this plaza was important to the transportation network within Ostia, the citizens may have conceived of it as more of a courtyard attached to the baths than a public plaza, which would explain the exclusion of cart traffic. What is interesting about the remaining pedestrian zones at Ostia is that they are affi liated with residential structures in the western part of the excavated city. The most famous of these is the Case a Giardino or Garden Houses which are sometimes described as being built around a courtyard. This is not a wholly accurate description, however, as the buildings surrounding this area are not a single contiguous structure but instead are a collection of buildings. Thus the open area between them is more aptly called a plaza. From that plaza one could access the Case a Giardino in the center as well as some shops arranged around the perimeter. In addition, nymphaea provided water to the people living in and visiting the plaza. The plaza where the Case a Giardino stand and the street north of them were both blocked to cart traffi c, making these quiet places to live as well as safe places to walk and to allow children to play. Similar arrangements can be seen in relation to other apartment complexes near the Case a Giardino. Whereas at Pompeii they were keen to exclude vehicles from the entertainment district, at Ostia the concern was more for isolating the residences from the dangers and annoyances of carts.

IDENTIFYING PRIMARY AND SECONDARY STREETS, THE FORUM, AND PLAZAS Map 4.7 presents a compilation of the above data in order to identify the primary and secondary streets of Ostia as well as the forum and plazas. Tables 4.8 and 4.9 indicate how the Ostians used these different categories of streets. Primary streets had the most activity at Ostia. Shops and bars fi lled these streets as did structures dedicated to the health of the population and places for them to get water. Individual temples and shrines as well as crowded temple precincts were common on primary streets and Ostia’s one theater stood on one of the city’s main streets. Administrative structures that could not fit in the forum seem to have wound up on primary streets with easy access to the forum. Adding to the crowded nature of primary streets would have been the carts passing through them. Primary streets are wide and roomy, allowing easy access to carts, and have few impediments to block their progress.

134


Map 4.7

Street types at Ostia.

Although one could have found buildings in most of the categories along secondary streets, none of the categories demonstrate any type of clustering. Secondary streets had less activity than primary streets; the average distance between doors on a secondary street is 10 m as opposed to 5 m along primary streets. Carts would have had an easy time navigating most secondary streets because they are generally wide enough for two lanes of traffic. Getting to some of the secondary streets from a primary street, particularly driving north from the Decumanus Maximus, may have been a bit challenging for cart drivers because of some construction that would have blocked their way, but Ostia has significantly fewer surviving impediments to traffic than Pompeii. Ostians concentrated their administrative buildings and central civic temples in the forum, as we would expect. Of more interest is the curious way they controlled traffic through the forum to make certain it would not disrupt civic business. They do not appear to have wanted carts to pass through the forum, but they had no choice because the Decumanus Maximus was the only east-west route connecting the eastern and western halves of the city. Whereas they could not exclude cart traffic from the forum as the Pompeians could, they did severely limit traffic by blocking the north and south approaches to the forum. North of the forum, the back of the Capitolium aligns to the Cardo Maximus, making it dominate the street even today in its ruined state. Yet only pedestrians coming down the Cardo Maximus could have gone to investigate the temple directly; cart drivers would have been required to take a circuitous route.

1,014

Total

Comments

1,014

64

17

663

270

Exp.

30

6

1

13

10

Obs.

0.7

30

1.9

0.5

19.6

8.0

Exp.

Health


310–16

41

Plaza


5

575

Forum

393

Secondary

Obs.

Commercial

24

5

0

14

5

Obs.

3

24

1.5

0.4

15.7

6.4

Exp.

Production

39

2

1

26

10

Exp.

0.000001

39

8

2

9

20

Obs.

Religious 58

68

254

16

4

166

0.0000002

254

41

1

154

Exp.

Residential Obs.



Primary

Street Type

Table 4.8

—

6

0

0

4

2

Exp.

1

0

0

0

1

Obs.

—

1

0

0

1

0

Exp.

Entertainment


6

0

3

0

3

Obs.

Administrative

Ostia 135

18

0

1

35

Secondary

Forum

Plaza

Total

Comments


16

Obs.

4

35

2

1

23

9

Exp.

Commercial: Bar

13

0.8

0.2

8.5

3.5

Exp.

39

14

0

15

10

1

Obs.

10–14

39

2

1

26

10

Exp.

Residential: Elite


0.0000001

13

6

1

1

5

Obs.

Health: Nymphaea

213

27

1

137

48

Obs.

0.2

213

14

3

139

57

Exp.


8

1

0

4

3

Obs.

4

0

0

3

1

Obs.

—

4

0

0

3

1

Exp.


9

0

0

6

3

Obs.

68

9

1

0

6

2

Exp.

Religious: Mithraea


87

8

1

0

5

2

Exp.

Production: Bakery



Primary

Street Type

Table 4.9


Ostia

137

Plazas receive a very different treatment from any of the other case-study cites. Plazas were the closest thing Ostians had to residential neighborhoods. The western sector of Ostia, bordered by the Decumanus Maximus and the Via della Foce, was a prime location for residences and had a large concentration of insulae. Insulae around plazas were the home of not only a larger than expected number of the nonelite but the elite as well. The Case a Giardino were the largest residential complexes in this neighborhood and were the best supplied with water. Over half of all the nymphaea of the city are associated with the complex. No doubt these supplied water to all in the neighborhood. Plazas also have a greater than expected number of religious structures, most of which were local neighborhood shrines as well as residential structures. Shops appear in most plazas, even if they are in lower than expected numbers than if they were randomly distributed across the city. More interesting is the concentration of production facilities in plazas. The association of structures for production and residence in the same plazas suggests that these were workshops for the benefit of the local population and that they were not producing goods for sale outside of Ostia. One gets the impression from the cellular nature of these neighborhood plazas that residents were trying to isolate themselves from interaction with visitors to the city.50 The commercial nature of Ostia must have brought a greater number of nonresidents to the city than to Pompeii or most other Roman cities. The people of Ostia were careful to structure their city so as to regulate their interactions with the nonresidents in ways that we did not see at Pompeii. The issue of directionality has already been mentioned. Visitors passing through the city gates would have noted that the number of people and amount of traffic decreased significantly on the secondary streets that led away from the primary streets; the direction of the flow of most traffic would have kept them on the primary streets. Those visitors who ventured away from the main thoroughfares, perhaps in search of the plaza where a friend or colleague lived, would have had a challenging time actually locating that house or apartment without a guide or very clear directions. The high depth of residences from both the city gates and the forum would require the visitor to take three or four turns to reach the proper street from either of these locations. The lower number of intersections of the streets with residences and the fact that the entrances to many stood along plazas closed to cart traffic would have ensured that the majority of the other people visitors saw as they neared their friends’ homes would have been residents of Ostia. As nonresidents would have had little reason to visit these parts of the city, visitors would have stood out and probably been monitored by the local residents. By locating their residences in plazas, the Ostians were trying to isolate themselves to an extent from the nonresidents of the city. The street layout in the residential sector in the western part of the city further reinforces the notion that the Ostians were trying to isolate themselves from nonresidents. Here a number of buildings could only be accessed from plazas, often closed to cart traffic and with only a few

138


specific points of entry. In addition, several of the streets were short, ending at a T-intersection. Today it can be challenging to navigate the ruins in this part of the site, particularly in the areas where the ruins or vegetation stand tall enough to block one’s view towards distant landmarks. It must have been even more difficult in the past when the buildings were standing to their full heights, blocking all long-range views. Nonresidents could easily have become lost in this part of the city and been unable to find where they were going without the assistance of a friendly Ostian they may have met in these streets. This layout would have discouraged any nonresident who lacked a specific destination and some determination from wandering about the residences of this neighborhood. The dearth of public buildings would have served as another deterrent to nonresidents who might consider traversing this sector of the city. In complete contrast to Pompeii, Ostians wanted the nonresidents to remain in the public, low-depth, more heavily trafficked sectors of the city and not come visit plazas without proper direction and supervision.

CONCLUSION Ostia is a very different city from Pompeii. The city on which Rome depended so heavily was much more crowded. Ostians strove to utilize every bit of land as best they could. Tall buildings are only one indication of the teeming nature of the city. Another is the lack of any street without doorways. Each of the other three case-study cities examined in this work had a few streets which were bordered by solid walls with no openings. Presumably fewer people had any reason to traverse or linger on these streets. Only at Ostia does every street have doorways and, therefore, a certain volume of people. Whereas identifying patterns in the use of space is interesting, noting the absence of patterns can also produce some useful insight into the layout of Ostia. Space devoted to the processing of materials and production of goods shows very little patterning. The eight bakeries identified in the city failed to demonstrate any organization to their locations. The placement of scholae, horreae, and baths also bears no apparent relationship to the street.51 Apparently considerations other than the nature of the street played a role in deciding these locations. Many religious structures were distributed across the city in such a way as to give them more prominence than at Pompeii. A greater than expected number appear on primary streets. More people would have passed a temple or temple precinct as they went about their daily business at Ostia than at Pompeii. The complete lack of patterning in the case of Mithraea, therefore, may actually be significant. As a mystery cult, worshippers may have purposely placed their sanctuaries at random to make them harder to fi nd. If one wanted to fi nd a shop at Ostia, the place to go was a street leading to

Ostia

139

the forum or city gates, with many doorways, and which intersected many other streets. Being unable to make such a blanket statement about Mithraea lowered their visibility. The layout of the street grids and the use of space at Ostia and Pompeii have some intriguing commonalities. In the next chapter we venture beyond the Italian peninsula to examine a Roman provincial city in Britain, searching for similar patterns there. Whereas the site of Silchester has many of the same features as Ostia and Pompeii, such as a forum, basilica, houses, and temples, we will explore whether these structures have the same relationship to the street network as they do at the Italian sites.

5

Silchester

Silchester may not share the same international fame as the sites of Pompeii or Ostia, but it is still one of the very important sites for the study of Roman urbanism as it is one of the few completely excavated and fully documented cities in the Roman world. Between 1889 and 1909 W. St. John Hope and G. Fox excavated the city and published nearly annual reports on the progress of their work. Whereas their excavation techniques may be rightly criticized, St. John Hope and Fox were very good at recognizing and recording masonry architecture built primarily during the third and fourth centuries. The following generations of excavators at the site have reinterpreted their plans in light of more recent fi nds at Silchester and other sites and supplemented them through the use of aerial photography. Re-excavations of some parts of the site have provided a treasure trove of information missed by the original excavators. As a result, we have a better understanding of the Roman city at Silchester in its entirety than we have of most other Roman cities and the picture that arises is decidedly different from those cities. Silchester was more of a farm town than any of the others we have looked at so far, providing a base for the agricultural exploitation of the surrounding countryside. The site is much smaller than Pompeii or Ostia. It was also a central place for the administration of government and was a node in the regional transportation network. All these factors conspired to make a very different Roman town well worth contrasting with its more famous Italian sister cities.

LAYOUT, TOPOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY OF SILCHESTER Because its foundation predates the Roman conquest of Britain by more than half a century, Silchester is a remarkable example of the impact Roman culture could have on Rome’s neighbors. A group of immigrants from Roman Gaul settled at the site in the last quarter of the fi rst century BCE. Silchester is one of a group of settlements in southeastern England founded in the decades prior to the Roman invasion by immigrants from the northwestern part of the empire. Artifacts from Silchester indicate a strong

Silchester 141 affi liation with Roman Gaul in the form of imported Roman fi ne wares and amphorae as well as new ways of exploiting the available resources that differ markedly from those used by the people already in southern Britain prior to the arrival of the newcomers.1 The settlers had a Belgic tribal name, the Atrebates, and called their settlement Calleva Atrebatum or “Town in the woods of the Atrebates tribe,” a reference to the thick forests once surrounding the site. 2 The choice of location for Silchester may have been governed more by political or ideological rather than practical urban considerations. The founders of the town chose to locate on a spur of plateau gravel near, but not on, two tributaries of the Thames, the Loddon and the Kennet, perhaps with defensive considerations foremost in their minds. G. Boon suggested that the Thames served as a tribal border and thus a location on that river would have been too exposed, despite the obvious benefits from trade, transportation, and communication.3 Water at the site had to be supplied by wells, a system that was later supplemented by at least one underground aqueduct entering the city near the southwest gate (Map 5.1).4 Little is known about the original Romano-Belgic settlement because few structural remains survive. The settlers encircled Calleva with a bank and ditch enclosure. Tantalizing architectural traces discovered beneath the basilica later built in the forum suggest the possibility of a street grid with streets meeting at right angles on an alignment very different from the later postconquest alignment. Between these streets the inhabitants placed small houses of ephemeral material, some round in plan and some rectangular. 5 Little beyond this can be said about the layout and architecture of the earliest settlement. After Claudius’s invasion of Britain in 43 CE, Silchester quickly became an important location within the transportation network created by the Romans. Silchester was a node in the regional road system throughout southern England connecting to Roman London to the east, St. Albans to the northeast, Cirencester and Bath to the west, and Winchester to the south. The city quickly acquired the trappings of a typical Roman urban center, including a street grid constructed on a new orientation. Because the site stands on a slight incline that slopes, for the most part, from a highest point in the north-northwest to the lowest in the south-southeast, east-west streets generally follow the contours whereas north-south streets meet the contours at nearly right angles (Map 5.1). In the southeastern portion of the city a stream cuts a gully through the site, making a continuation of the grid in this area difficult. In the 80s CE, around the time of the street grid’s completion, the Callevans built a forum with a fi ne basilica and a circular amphitheater that they later rebuilt in the traditional oval form (Map 5.1).6 The buildings of fi rst- and second-century Silchester were primarily of wood, including the original basilica; sources of good timber existed in the immediate vicinity whereas stone quarries were scarcer. During the mid-second century, however, a slow reconstruction process began as the

142


Map 5.1

Silchester’s street network.

Map 5.2 Plan of Silchester showing sites mentioned in the text. 1 Insula IX; 2 House IX.3; 3 apsidal hall; 4 Insula XXXVI; 5 amphitheater; 6 basilica; 7 “Block 2,” possible latrine; 8 sanctuaries in Insula XXX; 9 fourth-century church; 10 circular temple; 11 temple in Insula XXXV; 12 public baths; 13 shrine to a water deity (?); 14 House XVIII.3; 15 “mansio”/inn.

Silchester 143 Callevans rebuilt the basilica in stone. The stone basilica was impressively decorated with imported marbles. Bits of marble and bronze statuary from the basilica, some larger than life size, also indicate the grandeur of the building and its decoration. The project proved too ambitious, however, and it does not appear that it was ever completed. The floor was never paved and the southern of the two planned apses never rose above its foundation walls. Instead, a simple straight wall cut the projected apse off from the rest of the building.7 Despite the fact the basilica was not completed, this building, along with the surrounding forum, indicates that Silchester was an important town in the region. It probably was a regional capital which the Roman administration used to govern, as is evidenced by the forum and its associated buildings. Its citizens may also have been given Roman citizenship with the elevation of the town’s status to municipium sometime during or before the late fi rst or early second centuries CE, although the epigraphic and archaeological arguments for such a conclusion are involved.8 During the late second century a number of towns in southern Britain, including Silchester, received earthen bank fortifications which enclosed and defi ned cities’ limits.9 During the next century, perhaps in the 270s CE, the Callevans rebuilt the wall in stone utilizing fl int from quarries 10 km away and limestone from the area around Bath about 70 to 80 km away.10 The third century also witnessed the complete rebuilding of the amphitheater in stone, probably during the fi rst half of the century, utilizing locally available materials.11 It was also during the third and fourth centuries that many of the Callevans rebuilt the buildings within the city’s walls in stone.12 In the midst of all this building activity, the basilica saw a new use. During the mid-third century, after the rebuilding of the amphitheater but before the rebuilding of the city walls, iron-working forges were installed in the basilica. The processing of iron and working of copper alloy took place on such a scale as to suggest that metal production was being directed by a government official or agency at a level above that of the civil government. M. Fulford saw the hand of the regional diocese or even the provincial administration in these changes, possibly for the production of military equipment.13 Whereas it may strike us as odd to displace civic services from the fi nely decorated basilica only to replace them with the grime and smoke of metal production, the change certainly indicates the importance of this industry to the civic government and its probable sponsorship at the regional level. Rather than indicate a decline in the fortunes of the city, the tremendous amount of rebuilding in stone contemporary with the conversion of the basilica is a clear sign that the city reached new heights of prosperity. Other signs of the city’s rising fortunes include the rebuilding of the public baths for the last time in the fourth century, the construction of what may have been an early fourth-century church, as well as the addition of fi ne mosaics to some of the houses (Map 5.2).14 No doubt the government

144 Roman Urban Street Networks funding of the production in the basilica and the rebuilding of the wall in stone helped to create a boom in the local economy.15 Regional officials also made Silchester a stop on the cursus publicus, or government-funded post road. The tax burden associated with maintaining the cursus publicus must have offset the other gains from regional government activities at the city to an extent. People in other parts of the empire complained about the level of taxation to support the cursus as well as abuses in collecting it or in requisitioning animals or carts.16 But as a city at a crossroads, Silchester must have served as a base for collecting those taxes not only from within the city but also from the surrounding countryside, and the tax gatherers must have reinvested some of the proceeds back into the city’s economy. Once the city’s fortunes were tied so directly to that of the imperial government, the decline of the city became inevitable with the decline of Roman power in Britain. As the Roman military withdrew to the continent in the late fourth and early fi fth centuries, Silchester was rapidly abandoned. Whereas the early medieval occupation of the site was minimal, the economic value of ruined Silchester to the medieval residents of the region must have been great. Sometime before the twelfth century the abandoned buildings at Silchester experienced systematic dismantling. The buildings were robbed of their materials down to their foundations with only the city walls surviving aboveground.17

THE STRUCTURE OF SILCHESTER’S STREETS The street grid at Silchester is an excellent example of the application of Roman urban planning (Map 5.2). The streets meet at right angles on an orientation of just four degrees west of true north.18 Most of the city blocks, which the excavators referred to with the Latin term insula when identifying block locations,19 come in one of two sizes; squares of approximately 400 × 400 Roman feet or rectangles of approximately 400 × 280 Roman feet, although there is enough variation within the size of each block to argue against the conclusion that the surveyors adhered rigidly to one or two standard block sizes when laying out the street grid. 20 The streets that separate the blocks are wide and spacious, varying between approximately 3.5 and over 9 m in width with most measuring between 6 and 7 m. Within this well-laid plan, however, there are some intriguing anomalies. Whereas the forum lies at the center of the grid, it does not share the exact alignment of the streets, but instead is turned two degrees from the grid as is the street that leads east from its entrance. Boon noted that if the line of the street leading from the forum is extended through the complex of temples in Insula XXX, it would have easily linked with the Roman road leading to London. He assumed that the Callevans began construction on the forum and its street before they laid out the rest of the street grid with the intention of linking directly to the London road. Only after they

Silchester 145 had constructed part of it did they decide that the temple precinct through which the road would have to pass was inviolate, and therefore they simply ended the road at the temenos wall creating a fairly useless street that led directly to the forum, but nowhere else (Map 5.1).21 Presumably once they realized their attempt to connect to the London road had failed, they no longer felt bound to the orientation of that road and so shifted the orientation of the rest of the grid for some unknown reason. As it was necessary for one of the city’s streets to meet the London road, the city planners added a bend to the street just north of the forum so that it could make the connection. This street was then able to link to both the east and west gates (Map 5.2). Fulford questioned the assumption that the forum and its street were constructed fi rst and suggested the rest of the city’s street grid may predate them. 22 Admittedly, the evidence is scarce and one of the hopes of A. Clarke and Fulford’s current excavation in Insula IX is to uncover secure evidence for the date of the street grid. 23 Whichever predates the other, Boon’s theory of poor planning to explain the eastern termination of the street providing entry to the forum hardly seems credible. Surely those planning and constructing the street would have obtained whatever property or permission was necessary for their project prior to breaking ground for the construction of the street. Whereas they may have purposely aligned their street to the London road, they probably had no intention of ever actually joining the street to the road. Instead, the alignment of the road may have simply been an ideological statement, an acknowledgment of the importance of London in the province of Britannia. S. Esmonde Cleary offered an alternative interpretation. He saw in this road linking the forum and the religious precinct of Insula XXX a processional way that connected the most important religious and political centers at Silchester;24 the bend in the road could, therefore, also have had political-religious significance emphasizing this street as different from all others in the grid. If the construction of the street and forum postdate the laying out of the rest of the street grid, this deviation from that grid would appear all the more intentional. The main entry to the forum was through a double archway that cut through the outer and inner ambulatories on the east side and was wide enough to allow carts to enter. 25 Two other narrow doorways between the basilica and the northern and southern ranges of shops and offices probably gave access to the forum. St. John Hope and Fox found traces of jambs on the southern side of the southern entry, which indicates it was probably closed by a door.26 The northern entry probably had a similar arrangement. How frequently these doors were left open is impossible to say. The spaces are so narrow that it is difficult to imagine they were intended for anything other than secondary hallways, giving pedestrians access to the forum from the streets north and south of the forum. One other oddity about the street grid is the absence of two streets. As mentioned above, whereas the city blocks are not exactly the same size,

146


the similarity in their size is enough to predict that there should be a street on the west and south sides of the city paralleling the earthen ramp inside the city walls. St. John Hope and Fox found no trace of such streets in their excavations and do not include them on their master plan of the site, although they did fi nd some indications of the returns of walls enclosing the associated city blocks, which may suggest the streets were there. 27 Boon added these two streets to his master plan using dashed lines, suggesting he believed the streets should be there, but R. Bewley and Fulford found no trace of them in their analysis of the aerial photographs. 28 These streets are excluded from the analysis because even if the original Roman surveyors intended for these streets to be laid out, the project was never completed and buildings on the west side of the city were built directly over the path of the street. Other irregularities about the street grid that were probably not part of the original plan but were added by citizens of Silchester later for their own convenience include several narrow lanes which subdivide some city blocks. Most meet the regular streets at right angles, although in at least one case in the northern part of the city a lane branches at an irregular angle (Map 5.1). Although some of the lanes added within city blocks ended up being paved, not all were. The lack of a paved surface in some and their sometimes odd angles suggest the haphazard nature of their creation as the Callevans modified the original grid to meet their changing needs. The regular plan of the street grid breaks down completely in the southeastern sector of the city, Insula XXXII, the city block east of the public baths (Map 5.2). As mentioned above, the topography of most of the site is fairly flat, sloping gently down to the south and east. A stream originating in a small pond near the baths flows southeast, exiting the city through a sluice gate. This stream carved a streambed through this part of town, which the Callevans left unmodified, and no evidence of a bridge has been identified. In this block the streets end and buildings have seemingly random orientations. Insula XXXII has buildings dedicated to a variety of uses but the majority are domestic structures. One interesting exception is a very small structure with an apse of approximately a 6-m radius (Map 5.2). It had some architectural pretensions because the entrance was framed by either columns on piers or a small arch. Boon interpreted this as a shrine to a water deity because of its proximity to the streambed and because of fi nds he believed to be ritual in nature. In a well just 2 m from the back of structure, St. John Hope and Fox found the skulls of a horse, a sheep, and an ox as well as at least two pots.29 Insula XXXII represents the antithesis of the organized nature of the rest of Silchester as well as of Pompeii and Ostia. It is a disorganized city block dominated by the presence of the stream. Today a line of trees and untrimmed brush draw the eye to the streambed from much of the site, which is currently used for crops and livestock pasturage. The same was probably true in antiquity because the buildings were not tall and the large

Silchester 147 amount of open space between buildings would have allowed one to catch a glimpse of the tops of the trees marking the route of the streambed. It is unusual for Romans to build cities incorporating streams, although precedents exist. London had the Walbrook and perhaps other streams passing through it. Unlike the stream at Silchester, the Walbrook was canalized to an extent and provided with culverts to allow it to exit the city with little disruption.30 The apparent chaos of this area of Silchester may have been left that way for a purpose that has yet to be discerned. At Trier a sacred precinct was enclosed within the city wall but never regularized with the street grid; something similar may be happening at Silchester.31 Silchester was less densely occupied than Pompeii or Ostia; the city had a surprising amount of open space between the buildings. Although there were certainly some wooden structures between the masonry ones which were missed by the early excavators, a possibility discussed in more detail below, virtually no block in the city had adjoining buildings forming a continuous street frontage. Some Callevans seem to have missed the privacy such continuous façades provided and erected walls around some of the city blocks where there were no other buildings. They may also have been creating small pastures or fields within the city. The large amount of open space within the city allowed room for the very broad streets, most averaging between 6 and 7 m wide. Whereas wide streets served to impress Hellenistic Greeks and Romans with the grandeur of a city, as was discussed in Chapter 2, at Silchester, unlike the other two cities discussed previously, excavators uncovered many pens and barns for livestock and agricultural produce. Silchester was a farm town upon which Boon stated “ . . . the urban civilization of Rome was veneered.”32 The wide streets may have thus had an ideological purpose as well as a functional one, allowing shepherds to move their flocks and herds in and out of the city with minimal disruption. The streets were paved with rammed gravel in a clay matrix, which made for a very hard surface. At the north and south gates the street surface was comprised of flint cobbles that do not appear further from the gates (Map 5.1). The people of Silchester resurfaced their streets several times.33 During the last resurfacing, they added above ground drains in the middle of most streets.34 No street at Silchester had subsurface drainage. St. John Hope and Fox did not record the presence of ruts or potholes in the road surface, leading Boon to conclude the hard surface was resistant to the creation of such traffic menaces.35 Fulford, however, in his re-excavation of the north gate encountered deep ruts, features not noted by St. John Hope and Fox in their excavation of the same gate. 36 Such ruts may have been fairly common at Silchester even if they were overlooked by the early excavators, who do not seem to have deemed them worthy of recording. Of the five gates in the city wall open to cart traffic, the east and west gates were the largest, providing a double arched entry whereas the other gates had only a single arch (Map 5.1). In the fourth century one of the

148


arches in the west gate was purposely blocked. Buildings of a modern farm now cover the southern half of the east gate, so it is impossible to know whether this was also blocked. The width of the gates at their most narrow point is nearly identical at about 3.6 m for the east and west gates, 3.3 for the north gate, and 3.7 for the south gate. 37 The elaborateness of the east and west gates suggests that the regional roads linking Cirencester and Bath to the west of Silchester with London to the east were more important than the routes through the north and south gates. Nonetheless, the northern and southern routes may have held some importance in local trade because these would have led to the Kennet and Loddon rivers. Because the city did not have a harbor, these were the closest rivers that linked with the Thames and may have provided for river-borne trade, a mode of transportation much cheaper than overland trade. Most manufactured goods and natural resources probably entered the city through the north and south gates. Finally, the southwest gate stands two city blocks south of the west gate. The southwest gate could also admit cart traffic but has no mate in the east wall. The Silchester wall is pierced in three other places, but none of these openings are aligned to interior streets or exterior roads and so do not appear to have been used for the passage of traffic. Instead, two of the openings in the southeast portion of the wall were sluice gates allowing water to drain from the site whereas the third gave access to the amphitheater and was probably open only to pedestrians on days when games were being held.

IDENTIFICATION OF USE OF BUILDINGS Although several eighteenth-century antiquarians made the connection between the ruins of Silchester and the site mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary as Calleva, it was not until the 1860s that J. Joyce undertook the fi rst excavations at a number of points across the site. Later, A. Pitt-Rivers convinced the Duke of Wellington, the owner of the property, to allow representatives of the Society of Antiquaries to excavate the site. St. John Hope and Fox began the excavations in 1889 on behalf of the society with the goal of uncovering the entire city, consolidating important remains, and covering them with roofed structures to make them available to visitors and scholars.38 These were ambitious goals, but by 1909 the directors uncovered the entire area within the city walls and did some trenching outside of the city. Plans for consolidating remains, however, were never carried out and instead the excavators reburied nearly all the features they excavated at the end of each season after having drawn plans of the architectural remains. The data they generated were recorded in their annual publications in Archaeologia. They deposited the best examples of the artifacts they discovered in the Museum of Reading, where they can still be seen today. Unfortunately their excavation notebooks have been lost.39

Silchester 149 Because Fox did not live to see the completion of the project, St. John Hope may be the only archaeologist who can claim to have excavated an entire Roman city. This astonishing accomplishment came at a cost, however. Despite the fact that Pitt-Rivers, famed for the quality of his excavation techniques, helped initiate the excavations, St. John Hope and Fox made little effort to imitate Pitt-Rivers’s recording techniques. They made few stratigraphic observations and failed to record the exact provenance of many of their fi nds. Instead, the pair focused on the study and recording of architecture, something they were able to do very well.40 Without the stratigraphic data it is, of course, difficult to know either the relative or absolute dates buildings were constructed or in use. Fortunately enough clues exist that allow us to make chronological assumptions that make the type of analysis advocated in the previous chapters possible. During the rest of the twentieth century various archaeologists conducted intermittent targeted re-excavations at the site.41 Fulford has been very active during the last few decades re-excavating the city gates and walls, the amphitheater, and the forum basilica.42 Most recently he has joined Clarke to begin a reexamination of Insula IX. Fulford and Clarke have shown that new information can still come from the site which can be used to refine interpretations of the uses and dates of the buildings discovered by St. John Hope and Fox. They have also uncovered the remains of more ephemeral structures missed by the original excavators, the evidence of which, amazingly, was not destroyed during the earlier excavations.43 One other archaeological technique that has been used very successfully at Silchester is aerial photography. Although St. John Hope and Fox reburied the architectural remains they found, most can still be identified when photographed from the air. In addition, the footprints of other structures unrecorded by the early excavators appear in these photographs. Boon produced a new master plan of the site supplementing St. John Hope’s fi nal plan of excavated buildings with information gained from later excavations and a study of aerial photographs of the site.44 Bewley and Fulford published a plan of the site based solely on aerial photographs, further supplementing knowledge of the city.45 Boon’s master plan, based on excavations and aerial photography, formed the basis for the digitized plan of the site, which was updated using Bewley and Fulford’s plan as well as information from recent excavations. This plan was linked to a database with information and interpretations about each building that drew primarily from publications by Boon as well as St. John Hope and Fox, supplemented by the more recent work of others.46 Interpretations about the use of every structure at the site are displayed on a map available at a Web site associated with this work.47 The earliest manifestation of Silchester, from the end of the fi rst century BCE to the second century CE, seems to have consisted of wooden buildings. Construction stone was not easily obtainable in the immediate vicinity and a plentiful supply of wood made it unnecessary. Stratigraphic

150


excavations in the forum indicate the wooden basilica was one of the earliest structures to be rebuilt in stone during the second century with materials imported to the site, some from great distances.48 Considering the fact that the Kennet River is over 7 km north of the site and the Loddon is 3 km to the south, obtaining this stone must have been expensive because it would have required transportation overland from some type of river port. As no river port has been identified near Silchester, however, it is possible that cart transportation was necessary from much greater distances. Nonetheless, many Callevans took advantage of access to these sources of stone to rebuild their city in stone during the third and fourth centuries. The majority of buildings uncovered by the early excavators and recognized in aerial photographs, therefore, probably date to this later period.49 Because the city was abandoned in the fourth or fifth centuries, with very little activity postdating the abandonment, we can use the fi nal use of each building to analyze the urban structure of the fourth-century city. All the known buildings at Silchester, summarized in Table 5.1, are just a sample of the buildings that existed within the city walls during the fourth century. In their re-excavation of Insula IX, Clarke and Fulford discovered evidence for wooden structures missed by St. John Hope and Fox. 50 These wooden buildings left no perceptible traces in the aerial photographs. Thus the plan we have of the city shows only those buildings whose owners could afford to build in stone and we lack a good understanding of the wooden structures in the city, that is, structures whose builders either could not, or chose not to, build in stone. This lacuna makes it difficult to analyze the location of elite versus nonelite residences because we have no idea how

Table 5.1

Categories for Architectural Units at Silchester




administrative

One-room offices around forum

5

commercial

shop (taberna), inn (mansio or praetorium)

68

entertainment

—

0

health-related

baths, latrine

3

production

workshop for metal or stone, corn furnaces, barns, oxcart stalls

42

religious

temple, religious schola

12

residential

—

80

unknown

—

48

Silchester 151 many of the latter actually existed since it seems safe to assume they were built of the less-expensive material: wood. Therefore it is not possible to study the distribution of elite and nonelite residences across the site. Fox and St. John Hope uncovered shops similar to those located at Pompeii and Ostia.51 Unlike the other case-study cities where roughly half to two-thirds of the structures were devoted to commerce, only about onequarter at Silchester were. This disparity may be partially accounted for by the large percentage of structures whose use is unknown at Silchester, 19%; some of these structures may have been shops. The lack of wooden structures may also be a factor here because many shops may have been constructed in this cheaper material. We may not need to resort to missing data to interpret the low number of shops, however. The percentage of spaces devoted to production is higher than at the other sites. One way to explain this imbalance in the percentage of shops and workshops is to note that Silchester was the only city of the four case studies that was not a seaport. Pompeii and Ostia had easy access to products created somewhere else that were brought to their cities and sold in their shops. As all imported goods had to be brought to Silchester overland, the cost of many goods must have been much higher than their counterparts at the other sites. It made economic sense for the people of Silchester to produce more of the goods they consumed rather than rely on costly imports, hence the need for more structures devoted to production. Another explanation may have to do with the rural character of Silchester. The architectural units associated with the processing of agricultural produce are included under the category of production. There are more of these than at any of the other sites investigated, so they also may have an impact on the ratio of structures devoted to commerce versus those devoted to production. One unusual structure at Silchester is the inn that is the largest building in the southern portion of the site (Map 5.2).52 Variously labeled a mansio or praetorium, the large building had individual rooms for sleeping in the northern and southern ranges and dining in the western range. All of the rooms were arranged around three sides of a courtyard and some were equipped with hypocausts to combat the winter cold. Outbuildings provided stables for draft animals and storage for carts. The inn could easily have served as a residence and base for the governor when he was visiting this part of the province and certainly facilitated movement along the cursus publicus at other times, allowing those traveling across southern Britain on government business a place to stay during their journeys. Boon pointed out that the amount of this traffic could not have been great and that the local government must have raised revenue to support their obligations for the cursus publicus by allowing merchants or other visitors passing through Silchester to stay at the inn when the governor was not in residence.53 The one structure for entertainment at Silchester stood outside the city walls and so does not contribute to this analysis. Its location is interesting as the great amount of open space within the walls of the city indicates

152


that there was plenty of room for the amphitheater if that is where the Callevans would have liked to place it. As mentioned in Chapter 3, when the Pompeians decided to locate their amphitheater with the walls of their city, they flattened several blocks to do it; thus it appears that whether they had the space or not, a determined citizen could fi nd a place for such a large structure. Admittedly, the amphitheater at Silchester predates the city wall, but even before the wall was constructed no street ever led to it; the amphitheater was always outside the city on its very fringe before and after the wall was built.54 Three structures contributed to improving the health of the Callevans. East of the forum Fox posited a public latrine that served the needs of visitors to the forum and the shops in that area. 55 The well-appointed main city bath was just a few blocks away (Map 5.2). Drains from the bath building led to the streambed east of the structure. This stream flowed out of the city through a specially constructed sluice gate in the southeastern wall. 56 The inn was the location of another fi ne bath complex with separate areas for men and women (Map 5.2). 57 Although these baths share a wall with the courtyard of the inn, they were constructed independently with their own street entrances. It would appear the baths were intended for the use of the general public at Silchester, not just the guests at the inn. Silchester has produced a large number of religious structures, considering the size of the site. In addition to several public shrines, including at least one in the forum, 58 St. John Hope and Fox found no less than seven, and probably eight, temples, the dedication of none of which we can be certain. None of Silchester’s temples had the traditional rectangular floor plan typical of classical-style temples, but instead had plans in common with other nonclassical Roman-era temples in Britain and Gaul. Half of Silchester’s temples stood on the edge of the town in Insula XXX, 59 similar to the location of temples in the towns of Gaul.60 The block was surrounded by the city wall to the east and a temenos wall on the remaining three sides and thus stood on the edge of the city. St. John Hope and Fox failed to fi nd gates through the temenos wall giving access to the complex from the street west of the city block. They were also unable to trace the entire length of the temenos on the southern and northern sides of the precinct. Because we cannot be certain of whether people accessed the complex from the street to the north or the south, it is assumed that half of the structures in Insula XXX were accessed from the street to the north and half from the street to the south. None of the temples in the precinct are aligned to the street grid, and so are generally assumed to predate it, but each has a similar orientation to the other. East of these two temples in Insula XXX stands the medieval parish church of St. Mary’s (Map 5.2). The church has a peculiar orientation differing from the east-west alignment of other houses of worship from the medieval period; instead, it is aligned exactly to the other two pagan temples. It is highly likely that medieval Christians used the foundations of another pagan temple for the construction of their church.

Silchester 153 One last type of religious structure worth noting was that of a religious guild associated with the worship of particular deities known as a schola. An apsed hall in the northwestern part of Insula XXX was probably used for the activities of a religious guild. Unfortunately, this schola could not be fully excavated because part of it lay beneath a modern farm building.61 Boon identified one other building at Silchester as a schola used for religious activities by a guild. It is an apsidal hall in Insula XXI with entry from both the east and west sides, rather than from the south side, opposite the apse, which fronted a street (Map 5.2). Such an arrangement of doors indicates the activities within the structure were not meant to be seen by the general public passing by on the nearby street and were probably of a cultic nature.62 The variety of domestic structures found at Silchester is fairly typical of what one would expect within a Romano-British town. No apartment blocks have been found; instead, Silchester houses appear to have belonged to individual families. In their most simple form, these houses were a series of rooms arranged in a row, each room giving access to the next. These houses could be made more elaborate with the addition of a corridor along the exterior of each room that would provide the access. Finally, some domestic structures were enlarged through the addition of a single or a series of rooms in a row creating a wing. Some of the Silchester houses have wings on two or three sides, creating courtyards.63 The domestic structures at the site show a remarkable amount of remodeling over the centuries. Some owners added new rooms whereas most rebuilt their homes in stone. The owners of some domestic buildings that predated the street grid continued to use their homes, but occasionally they gave them a new porch or room in their façade that was aligned to the street grid to mask the different orientations. Over 30 of the domestic structures at Silchester were decorated with mosaics and St. John Hope and Fox found traces of painted plaster in a number of them.64 Many, but not all, were also heated with a hypocaust system.65 Evidence for agricultural workers using domestic complexes as the location to accomplish their tasks is also fairly common. Most domestic structures have associated outbuildings, some of which have the appearance of buildings used for the penning of livestock or the storage of grain. The city’s domestic complexes also have a great deal of open space between them, which may have provided a location for gardens or other agricultural activities. The wide entries into a few of the domestic courtyards may have facilitated the herding of sheep or cattle or the entry of large country wagons. In addition to the structure of domestic buildings, Boon pointed to the lack of evidence for villas in the countryside around Silchester to argue that most of the agriculture being carried out in the territorium of the town was managed from inside the city’s walls.66 Not every building excavated at Silchester is considered in the analysis below. Some are clearly earlier than others as the later buildings overlap the remains of the earlier ones. Other buildings excluded were those deep in the interior of a city block shielded from the streets by other structures. Often

154 Roman Urban Street Networks these interior structures are small and seem to be associated with those buildings that fronted the streets; they probably served as outbuildings for the larger structures. When the street from which one was able to gain entry into a building was uncertain, it was excluded. Some buildings predate the street grid, as is clearly seen from the odd angles they have in relation to the streets, but these were included in the analysis because they continued to be in use into the fourth century as is evidenced by their reconstruction in stone or realignment to the street grid by the addition of a vestibule. Finally, it is worth noting that the use of 19% of the structures at Silchester cannot be identified. This is the highest percentage of any of the case-study cities. With one in five of the structures at Silchester in the “unknown” category, the results could easily be distorted. If even half of those structures could be reclassified into one of the other categories of use, all of the results of this analysis could easily change. It is observations like this that must remind us archaeology is not exact science. With each building placed into one of the eight categories of use, it is possible to analyze their locations collectively in relation to depth from the city gates, depth from the forum, the number of each street’s intersections and access to cart traffic. Silchester provides an excellent comparison for Pompeii and Ostia. In some ways the use of space in relation to the streets resembles its Italian sister cities, suggesting a common cultural link between them. But in other ways we see some variations on themes introduced in the discussions of Pompeii and Ostia and some results that contradict the fi ndings at those other sites, which shows the flexibility of the Roman urban phenomenon.

STREET DEPTH FROM THE CITY GATES The depths of streets in relation to the city gates are presented in Map 5.3. The overall depth of streets at Silchester is lower than at any of the other sites, indicating that Silchester would have been an easier site for a visitor unfamiliar with the town to navigate. Yet unlike Pompeii, Ostia, and, as will be seen in the next chapter, Empúries, no street linked the forum directly to a city gate. Indeed, at a depth of three the forum at Silchester could not be more removed from the city gates. Comparing the depth of streets from the city gates with the average number of intersections for those streets, the same pattern emerges as at the other two sites examined thus far. When one reached streets and plazas further from the Silchester city gates the average number of intersections of those streets and plazas and, therefore, the amount of traffic, drops (Graph 5.1). The rise in the average distance between doorways as the depth of a street from outside the city increases is a pattern observed at Pompeii and Ostia; the farther one got from the city gates, the fewer the doors and, presumably, the people (Graph 5.2). Taken together, the decrease in the number of intersections and the increase in the

Silchester 155 distance between doorways would have given Silchester’s street network a strong sense of directionality, helping visitors to orient themselves and understand whether they were walking toward or away from a street that led to a city gate.

Map 5.3

Depth of Silchester’s streets from the city gates.

Graph 5.1 Relationship between the depth of streets from Silchester’s city gates and forum and the average number of intersections of streets at each depth.


Graph 5.2 Relationship between the depth of streets from Silchester’s city gates and forum and the average distance between doors at each depth.

Unfortunately, of the seven categories of buildings outlined in Chapter 2, only four have enough examples to allow for a testing of the significance in their distribution. Of these four, half prove significant (Table 5.2). Whereas the distribution of commercial units is statistically significant, in contrast to Pompeii and Ostia, Silchester has a greater than expected number of shops at high rather than low depths from the city gates.67 There were certainly many shops on the streets that led directly to city gates, but no more than would be expected if shops were fairly evenly distributed about the city. Instead, we see concentrations at a depth of three from the city gates. Most shops in the city are either in the forum itself or along the streets that led to the forum, most of which had a depth of three from the city gates. Taking the statistics for structures dedicated to production at face value (Table 5.2), they exhibit a pattern similar to that of Pompeii, where they were also located in greater than expected numbers along streets with low depths from the city gates. W. Bates noted, however, that workshops are clustered particularly along the west end of the street that reaches both the east and west gates. In this pattern she saw an avoidance of the forum and, perhaps, the competition of other businesses near that location.68 St. John Hope and Fox were the first to note the concentration of structures used for the purposes of production in the northwestern sector of the city, particularly in Insulae IX and X. Whereas a few structures dedicated to other uses are also placed in these blocks, and whereas workshops can be found spread throughout the town, these three city blocks do seem to form a small industrial park near the north and west gates.

27

68

3

Total

Comments

1

10–13

68

7

42

19

Exp.

42

2

19

21

Obs.

0.8

42

4

26

12

Exp.

Production


20

2


21

1

Obs.

Commercial

5

5

0

0

Obs.

—

5

1

3

1

Exp.

Admin.

0

0

0

0

Obs.

—

3

1

1

1

Obs.

—

3

0

2

1

Exp.

Health

12

3

5

4

Obs.

9

12

1

7

3

Exp.

Religious


0

0

0

0

Exp.

Entertain.




Table 5.2

80

6

46

28

Obs.

34

80

9

48

23

Exp.

Residential

Silchester 157

158 Roman Urban Street Networks An idiosyncratic lacuna, however, is the low number of shops and workshops lining the street that linked the north and south gates, which contrasts with the greater number of these structures on the street that linked the east and west gates. The reason for this difference may lie in the purposes of the two different streets. The east-west street seems to have been used as a thoroughfare for carts and people passing through the city as they headed to London, Bath, or Cirencester. The main destination of those heading north or south, however, was probably the two rivers, where there may have been ports for supplying manufactured goods and raw materials to the citizens of Calleva. Thus the people passing through the north and south gates would have been residents of the city for whom Silchester was a destination whereas for those entering the east and west gates the city was merely a node within the regional transportation system. The remaining results are not statistically significant, but may still have some meaning. The scattered nature of religious structures is similar to what we fi nd at Pompeii but differs from the pattern at Ostia (compare Tables 3.2, 4.2, and 5.2). The specifics of individual cults may have dictated the placement of each temple. The two baths and one latrine from the site are also scattered across Silchester. Again, there are too few for statistical testing; nonetheless, this scattered pattern repeats the patterns from Pompeii and Ostia. No matter where one went in Silchester, one still had easy access to a building related to community health. Although they are too few to allow for a test of statistical significance, the association of administrative structures with the forum only is a pattern similar to what we saw at Pompeii and Ostia. Finally, the distribution of residential structures is striking because of its lack of patterning. The results for residential structures recorded in Table 5.2 are about what we would expect if housing was randomly distributed with relation to depth from the city gates. Unlike at Pompeii and Ostia, Callevans had little interest in locating their homes with relation to the city gates.

STREET DEPTH FROM THE FORUM Map 5.4 shows the depth of each street from the forum. Map 5.4 makes an interesting comparison to Map 5.3. The highest depth of any component of the street network from the city gates was the forum at a depth of three. When counting from the forum, a total of five streets have a depth of four from the forum. Together these figures indicate how remote the forum was from much of the rest of the city. One could have passed from the city’s north to south gate or from the west to the east gate without ever having a glimpse into the forum, much less having passed through it. Thus it would appear that the forum’s position within the street network made it fairly remote from daily life within the city, an observation that has gained surprisingly little attention.69

Silchester 159 The comparison of the street depths from the forum to the average number of intersections shows a decreasing pattern similar to Pompeii and Ostia (Graph 5.1). The average distance between doorways shows a pattern that is opposite from Pompeii and Ostia; the further one got from the forum, the more crowded the streets became (Graph 5.2). Whereas this last result is odd in comparison to the other two sites, the street network at Silchester still has a strong sense of directionality. Clues such as frequency of doorways and the number of a street’s intersections could have led an ancient visitor to or away from Silchester’s forum. Commercial structures repeat the pattern from Pompeii and Ostia; they are located in greater than expected numbers in the forum and along the two streets that one could enter when leaving the forum (Table 5.3). Because commercial structures were not concentrated in a significant way along streets that led to gates, the largest concentrations of commercial structures in the city are in the forum and just east of the forum’s entrance. These commercial structures stand east of the forum at an intersection from which one could have entered the forum directly by going west or by going north or south, eventually entering a street that led to a city gate. A number of shops, an inn, a pair of workshops, one domestic building, and even a possible public latrine stand at this corner east of the forum, making this the most crowded corner in the city and one of the few places where buildings abut one another.70 This was the busiest and most commercial part of all of Silchester. Two speculative interpretations suggest the area east of the forum was even more intensely commercial than these data indicate. St. John Hope

Map 5.4

Depth of Silchester’s streets from the forum.

160


and Fox suggested that the open spaces south and east of the forum were obvious places for open-air markets (Map 5.1), with the exterior porticoes of the forum providing those attending the market some protection from rain and sun.71 If this interpretation is correct, these open-air markets would have been easily accessible from the shops east of the forum. It is also possible that the shops in the east range of the forum contributed to making the area outside of the forum a central market area. Because the buildings around the forum had been robbed of their stones down to their foundations, St. John Hope and Fox never found evidence to indicate which direction the doors of the shops faced. Two of the eastern shops, one at the northern and one at the southern corners of the forum, could not have faced into the forum because they had no wall space inside the forum; therefore, they were either accessible from outside or from another shop that opened onto the forum. Besides these two corner shops, the remaining shops in the eastern range could, in theory, have had doors either facing the interior or the exterior of the forum. The latter orientation would have made these shops face the commercial district east of the forum. It would not be unprecedented for all of the shops on the eastern range to have been accessible only from outside the forum, like the two corner shops, rather than from inside of it.72 In the analysis the generally held consensus that these shops opened into the forum was followed when calculating the statistics for the streets, but this alternative orientation would have made the area east of the forum the most important commercial center for the city, particularly considering the many other shops located in that area. Callevan merchants, then, were faced with a decision their counterparts at Pompeii and Ostia did not face because no street in Silchester links a gate to the forum. They had to decide whether it was better to build shops on the streets that led to the forum or the city gates and they clearly favored the former. Callevan entrepreneurs had to decide whether to cater to the needs of the city’s residents or visitors to the city. By ignoring the streets that led to the city gates, they indicate their preference for resident customers. As mentioned earlier, few villas have been found in the countryside surrounding Silchester, suggesting the territorium of the city was sparsely populated and explaining the preference to place shops closer to the forum than a city gate. The remaining categories of buildings are either just barely statistically significant or not significant at all, but again have some interesting data. Religious structures are related in some way to the depth from the forum, but that significance is right at the cutoff point for significance, making interpretation potentially fruitless (Table 5.3). Although there are not enough administrative structures to test for statistical significance, the grouping of all identified administrative structures in the forum is what we would expect. Health structures are again distributed evenly across the different depths from the forum, as they were for depth from the city gates. This distribution made it easy for anyone to reach a bath or latrine from

20

19

2

68

2

3

4

Total

Comments

2

10–54

68

12.0

27.9

22.3

5.4

0.4

Exp.

12

3

4

4

0

1

Obs.

5

12

2.5

4.9

3.9

1.0

0.1

Exp.

Religious


17

1


10

0 (In the Forum)

Obs.

Commercial

5

0

0

0

0

5

Obs.

—

5

1

2

2

0

0

Exp.

Administrative

0

0

0

0

0

0

Obs.

—

3

0

1

1

1

0

Obs.

—

3

1

1

1

0

0

Exp.

Health

42

5

22

13

1

1

Obs.

13

42

7.4

17.2

13.7

3.4

0.2

Exp.

Production


0

0

0

0

0

0

Exp.

Entertainment



Street Depth from Forum

Table 5.3

80

9

44

22

5

0

Obs.

12

80

14

33

26

6

1

Exp.

Residential

Silchester 161

162


most parts of the city. Production and residential structures show no patterning in their locations with relation to the forum.

NUMBER OF INTERSECTIONS A comparison of the different types of structures at Silchester with the number of intersections of the street on which they are placed is presented in Map 5.5 and Table 5.4. Three categories of building types are significant. The concentration of high numbers of commercial structures on streets with very high numbers of intersections is to be expected. The cluster of shops in streets with four intersections is heavily weighted by the fact that the forum with its great number of shops falls into this category. The forum and the streets which had intersections with the most others would have been the busiest places in the city, so we can see shopkeepers taking advantage of this traffic. Structures dedicated to production also appear in greater than expected numbers along streets with many intersections. Again, considering the dual commercial and industrial nature of these structures, such a location made good business sense and would have increased their visibility. The location of residences had no relation with the depth from the city gates or the depth from the forum, but they have a clear relationship with the number of intersections of each street. Callevans appear to have preferred to live on streets with the middling number of intersections. No doubt they could reap the benefits of being near streets with the most activity in terms of shops, workshops, and social display, but also be slightly removed from these streets in order to enjoy the quiet and security of the less busy streets. Many Pompeians wanted to live on the busiest streets with the most intersections whereas Ostians preferred the quieter streets with fewer. The Callevans fall in between. None of the other categories of structures show any statistically significant patterning with regard to the number of intersections a street has with others. Again, however, the clustering of the administrative structures in the forum is evident. Health-related structures are also on the streets with more intersections, again showing how easy they were to reach. Religious structures are the only category of structures with enough to measure statistical significance that have no relationship with the number of intersections.

CART TRAFFIC The carts used at Silchester were probably little different from those used at other Roman cities. No artifacts associated with carts have been unearthed at the site, but Fulford did record ruts in the north gate (Map 5.1). Whereas these ruts in the surface were fairly wide, a measurement from the middle

Silchester 163

Map 5.5 Number of intersections each of Silchester’s streets has with other streets.

of the deepest part of the ruts represented in his profi les yields a width of about 1.4 m,73 a similar figure to the width of ruts at Pompeii and other sites.74 Unfortunately, St. John Hope and Fox failed to record the presence or width of other ruts at the site, so it is impossible to know whether or not other vehicles with different axle widths passed through other parts of the town. They also failed to record impediments to traffic. For these reasons, no map of traffic patterns at Silchester is presented here because the data are simply too scanty. Nonetheless, we can have some idea of how those driving carts through Silchester must have viewed the streets of the city. The streets of Silchester were quite wide; most had a minimum width of more than 6 m whereas some were more than 9 m wide. Open drains running down the middle of most streets might trim between a half and a whole meter from the overall width of the street;75 nonetheless, two carts moving in opposite directions could still have easily passed one another with little difficulty. Indeed, the drains could even have helped to separate them, acting as a median, and provided a little extra room for their hubs to pass if they drove too close to the middle of the street. Only at the north gate did the drain cross the road surface in such a manner as to have made it difficult, although not impossible, for carts to pass.76 Cart traffic at Silchester differed a great deal from that at Pompeii and Ostia. We know of few places where only one cart could have passed, no

8

21

68

0.0000001

8

9

Total


Comments

3

7

42

18

6

2

5

8

1

2

0

0

Obs.

0.5

42

8

4

7

4

11

2

3

3

0

Exp.

Production

80

15

6

18

16

17

1

4

3

0

Obs.

0.3

80

14

8

13

8

20

4

5

7

1

Exp.

Residential


68

12

6

11

7

17

4

6

14

4

4

13

3

3

6

1

6

0

2

Exp.

5

0

1

Obs.

Commercial

5

0

0

0

0

0

5

0

0

0

Obs.

—

5

1

0

1

1

1

0

0

1

0

Exp.

Administrative

—

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Exp.

3

0

0

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

Obs.

—

3

0

0

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

Exp.

Health


0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Obs.

Entertainment




Table 5.4

12

4

0

3

0

2

1

0

2

0

Obs.

53

12

2.2

1.2

1.9

1.2

3.0

0.6

0.8

1.0

0.1

Exp.

Religious


Silchester 165 impediments to traffic, and virtually no pedestrian zones as at the other cities. The impressive width of the streets can be interpreted in light of several factors. As mentioned before, Silchester seems to have been the base for a number of farms; farm equipment and herds of domesticated animals must have passed through the city’s streets fairly regularly either as they moved from their owner’s home to pastures outside the city or for sale in the market. Cattle, sheep, goats, or pigs may also have grazed in some of the open spaces behind the buildings. Carts associated with rural farmwork were also quite large, but would have had no problem passing through, and turning on, the city’s streets. Being a hub in the regional transportation network and probably a stop on the cursus publicus, it is safe to assume that state-owned and requisitioned carts and carriages passed through the city fairly frequently. The drivers of these carts would also have found it easy to pass between the gates and reach just about any other destination they would have liked. Admittedly, their trek to the forum would have required the most number of turns because only one opening into the forum allowed them to pass, but the streets they traversed to get there had no impediments that would have slowed their progress. If they were just passing through the city, the fact that they could get from one gate to another without passing through the forum would have helped minimize the disruption to the town’s residents.77 Finally, it must again be noted that the Callevans had no port. Any goods imported into the site had to have been brought there by cart perhaps from fairly far away if there was no working port on the Loddon or Kennet rivers near the city. Indeed, in their examination of the distribution of pottery types across southern Britain, J. Allen and Fulford argued that the pottery merchants carried their wares approximately 100 km northeast from Poole Harbour to Silchester and then from there east into London.78 Alice Holt-Farnham Ware was produced in southeastern Britain but is found as far west as Bath and Cirencester, leading Allen and Fulford to conclude that Silchester played a role in the overland distribution of this ware from east to west.79 All of these factors must have combined to ensure that cart traffic was common and important to the town. Whereas the movement of large carts and herds through the town may have given the Callevans the incentive they needed to create their wide streets, the large amount of open space in the city provided them with the opportunity. If people wanted to expand the size of their buildings at Silchester, there was no need to encroach on the streets because there was usually plenty of room behind and adjoining most buildings. There are few examples of buildings narrowing the streets of Silchester, whereas there are many at Pompeii where crowded conditions made any space, even the public street, a tempting place for expanding the size of one’s building. The open conditions at Silchester also made large apartment blocks unnecessary. Thus the large courtyards blocked to cart traffic found in association with Ostian apartment buildings are not found at Silchester.

166 Roman Urban Street Networks The Callevans also treated their forum very differently from the people of Pompeii and Ostia. The residents of the two Italian cities carefully controlled cart access to their fora, blocking all carts from the forum at Pompeii and limiting the path they could follow through the forum of Ostia. At Silchester, carts were free to drive over any open part of the forum, although they could only enter and exit from the east side. The freedom of cart movement in the forum seems to have been necessary because of the decision to turn the basilica into a government-run workshop for the production of metal goods. The movement of raw materials and fuel into the forum and the removal of fi nished products and waste must have been necessary, explaining the wide opening and lack of recorded impediments to cart entry into the forum. Because the decision to convert the basilica into a workshop may have been taken at a governmental level above that of the city council, Callevans may have had no say in how their forum was going to be used and whether or not carts would be allowed to enter.

IDENTIFYING PRIMARY AND SECONDARY STREETS, THE FORUM, AND PLAZAS Silchester does have primary and secondary streets as well as a forum, and the Callevans treated them in similar ways to the residents of Pompeii and Ostia, although the unique location of the forum gives a few variations from the other sites (Map 5.6 and Table 5.5). Primary streets are those that lead either to the forum or a city gate and have the greatest number of intersections and the least restrictions on cart traffic. Because no route connects Silchester’s forum with the city gates directly, a greater proportion of streets are classified as primary than at the other sites where one or more streets served to link these two destinations. A greater number of commercial and production facilities appear on primary streets than would be expected if they were distributed without pattern, similar to their distribution at Pompeii and similar for the commercial structures at Ostia. Silchester had an impressive number of religious structures and a few more than expected were along primary streets. Two of the three structures related to health, one bath and the latrine, stand on primary streets. Finally, primary streets facilitated cart traffic throughout the city. Its very wide streets allowed for the passage of two carts without trouble and no impediments would have slowed their progress on the primary streets. Secondary streets do not have a concentration of any particular type of structure, although examples of structures from all categories except administrative can be found along them; even Silchester’s largest public bath building stands along a secondary street. As at the other sites, however, these streets had less activity; the average distance between doors on secondary streets is 48 m whereas on primary streets it is 30 m. The free movement of carts through secondary streets is quite impressive and very

Silchester 167

Map 5.6

Street types at Silchester.

different from both Pompeii and Ostia. Silchester has virtually no pedestrian zones and nearly every street was wide enough for two carts to pass one another. We know of no impediments to cart traffic. Because the excavators failed to record the ruts, however, they may also have missed or failed to record any type of impediment; the open appearance of cart travel through the city may be more illusory than real. In some ways the forum at Silchester is not so different from the others examined so far. It has a concentration of shops and administrative structures and is centrally located in the city. Beyond that, it has some peculiar features. Carts had free access to the forum, although with only one way in or out they would have had to make a wide arc to turn around. Despite its central location, it was one of the more remote places to get to in the city because of its relationship with the street network. Silchester’s forum also lacks a central temple, although it does appear to have one shrine among the shops of the forum’s northern side. The Callevans transformed their basilica into a large metal workshop, robbing their forum of much of its dignity. The remote nature of the forum and its basilica’s transformation may explain the concentration of much commercial activity east of the forum; it may have not been such a desirable location for transacting business by the fourth century but people still wanted to buy and sell near the forum. The corner east of the main entrance to the forum would seem to have challenged the forum as the commercial center of the city. At the same

12

10

68

Secondary

Forum

Total

Comments


46

42

1

15

26

1

42

0.3

24.1

17.6

Exp.

Production

Obs.

12

1

4

7

0.6

12

0.1

6.9

5.0

Exp.

Religious Obs.


410–55

68

0.4

39.1

28.5

Exp.

Commercial

Obs.

5

5

0

0

Obs.

—

5

0

3

2

Exp.

Admin.

—

0

0

0

0

3

0

1

2

—

3

0

2

1

Exp.

Health Obs.


0

0

0

0

Exp.

Entertain. Obs.


Categories of the Uses of Archetectural Spaces in Relation to Street Type

Primary

Street Type

Table 5.5

80

0

40

40

40

80

0

46

34

Exp.

Residential Obs.


Silchester 169 time, it may have become a center for daily life as people no doubt stopped to gossip and visit. Note as well the possible latrine, a sign that this was a well-used corner. Silchester differs from all of the other case-study cities in that it lacks plazas. It is also the least densely occupied of the four case-study cities, which could indicate that the plazas are a reaction to urban crowding and an attempt to preserve patches of open space across a city. At Ostia, the city with the highest population density by far, plazas almost seem to serve as a refuge from the busy streets filled with visitors to the city. Such a refuge may not have been necessary in a city with many fewer people. Indeed, the average distance between doors for all the streets and the forum at Ostia is about 10 m whereas at Silchester it is over four times that much: 42 m. If we really can take the distance between doors as a proxy for the amount of activity along the streets of a city, Ostia was a much more hectic place. For what it is worth, the average distance between doors at Pompeii is 14 m and Empúries about 11 m; life in Silchester appears sleepy in comparison with these other cities. Two other possibilities may explain the lack of plazas. One is that Silchester had one or two plazas, but they were not defi ned with masonry architecture and thus have gone undetected. The other is that plazas were informal affairs with only temporary architecture on market days and through which people could take a shortcut on other days. Fox and St. John Hope suggested the area south of the forum may have been just such a plaza.80

CONCLUSION The organization of space along the streets of Silchester has a number of similarities to Pompeii and Ostia. Unlike the two Italian cities, Silchester lay at the edge of the empire, did not have a harbor, and was much less densely occupied. Nonetheless, the underlying organizational principles that applied were not so different from the other two cities. To fi nd out whether similar spatial patterns can be found elsewhere, in the next chapter we turn to the fi nal case-study city. The Spanish site of Empúries provides us with the opportunity to look not only for similarities in the treatment of street space, but also at the impact of Roman urban culture on a city that existed long before the Roman arrival on the Iberian Peninsula.

6

Empúries

The site of Empúries,1 located about 60 miles north of Barcelona, provides an unparalleled opportunity for comparing the use of street space with the other three case-study cities because it was in fact a double city. The earliest part of the site was a Greek colony to which the Romans later added their own adjoining colony. The Greek colony, known as Neapolis, is the most thoroughly excavated part of the site and offers the best archaeological evidence for the types of analysis outlined in the previous chapters. The use of the street network in Neapolis could hardly differ more from the other cities examined so far. The Roman colony at Empúries, known as the Ciudad Republicana or Ciudad Romana, stands near Neapolis and the two parts of the site were eventually joined to form a united city. Therefore they share the same topography, climate, government structure, legal system, and history. Despite the fact that all of these variables were the same, it appears that the use of street space in the Ciudad Romana differs completely from Neapolis, but is very similar to the general patterns outlined for Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester. With the explanation of other temporal and contextual variables neutralized, we must conclude that the differences in the use of street space between Neapolis and the Ciudad Romana, and the similarities between the Ciudad Romana and the other sites explored in the previous chapters, are a result of cultural preferences. Primary streets, secondary streets, a central forum, and plazas are a Roman conception. Empúries offers another prospect for further developing some of the techniques discussed in Chapter 2. Unfortunately only a small part of the total area of the Ciudad Romana is excavated, so the type of rigorous statistical analysis used so far is not possible for these data. The partial nature of the excavation at the Ciudad Romana is typical of most Roman cities, however. Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester are extremely unusual for the amount of area that excavators have uncovered. Thus it is useful to show how the elements of primary streets, secondary streets, a central forum, and plazas can be identifi ed at a partially excavated site and how this information can allow us to compare the use of street space between sites.

Empúries 171 LAYOUT, TOPOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY OF EMPÚRIES Empúries was fi rst settled by Greek traders from the Ionian city of Phokia during the sixth century BCE. 2 The fi rst settlers chose an island in the mouth of the Fluvià River where it meets the Mediterranean Sea and this settlement came to be known as Palaiapolis, or the Old City (Map 6.1). The Greeks felt secure enough within a generation to establish a new settlement on the mainland, which archaeologists have come to call Neapolis, although its ancient name is unknown. Adjoining this settlement stood an as yet undiscovered Iberian town called Indika inhabited by native Iberians with an independent government. 3 According to ancient authors the Greeks and Iberians of Empúries had a sometimes hostile, sometimes cooperative relationship, but eventually the two populations fused into one.4 These three parts of the city, Palaiapolis, Neapolis, and Indika, became known collectively as Emporion, the Greek word for a trading center. The main public architecture at the site prior to the Roman arrival included a central

Map 6.1

General plan of Empúries with its ancient coastline.


Map 6.2 General plan of Neapolis showing the street grid and sites mentioned in the text. 1 bath building; 2 stoas; 3 towers; 4 defensive storeroom with cistern and water filter; 5 garum workshop; 6 group of four tabernae; 7 Sanctuary of Asklepios; 7a abaton; 8 defensive storeroom with excavated military equipment; 9 Sanctuary of Serapis.

market area, equivalent to the Roman forum, which modern archaeologists called the agora, and a temple of the healing god Asklepios (see Map 6.2). The location of Empúries facilitated its trading mission. The mouths of the Fluvià and Ter rivers empty into the Gulf of Roses just to the north and south of the site. Both rivers provided ships access to the interior, an area rich in minerals. The Gulf of Roses was an important stop for ships traveling the coast, providing a safe haven particularly for ships entering and leaving the notorious Gulf of Leon to the north. The territory around Empúries was filled with lakes and swamps, limiting its agricultural potential. The Via Augusta, the coastal land route leading into the Pyrenees, skirts the coast at Empúries to avoid the marshy terrain and therefore comes within only 12 km or 7 miles of the site.5 Empúries was more like Ostia than Pompeii or Silchester in that it was a destination, not a transit point in the regional overland transportation system.

Empúries 173 The Roman military became interested in the city during the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE) and used it as a landing place for forces sent to oppose the Carthaginians in Spain. After their successful completion of the war, the Romans used Empúries as a base for the consolidation of their newly gained territory on the Iberian Peninsula and to put down a revolt by native Iberians.6 Very little is known about the layout of the city at this time as, again similar to Pompeii, few excavations have probed beneath the existing ruins in order to gain a chronological understanding of the city’s development. Just west of Neapolis archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a Roman military fort that dates to the early second century BCE. This base grew into a civilian settlement literally a stone’s throw away from Neapolis. Spanish archaeologists have dubbed this part of the site the Ciudad Romana (Map 6.1).7 The Ciudad Romana was completely independent, with it own laws, government, and a wall separating it from the nearby Greco-Iberian settlement. The city developed in a haphazard fashion during the beginning of the second century BCE, but around 100 BCE the entire Ciudad Romana was reorganized and an orthogonal plan was laid over it.8 The structure of the Ciudad Romana grid is much more regular than those at Pompeii and Ostia (Map 6.1). Each block is about 35 × 70 m, the approximate size of the Roman acre called an iugera. It was at this time too that the city wall was built enclosing the Ciudad Romana. Most of the Ciudad Romana stands on a fairly even plateau with the eastern and northern walls on a ridge above Neapolis, its harbor, and the Fluvià River. The wall conforms to the rectangular shape of the grid plan. Eventually, during the time of Augustus, the two neighborhoods of the city, Neapolis and the Ciudad Romana, were joined and the walls separating them were torn down. Walls linking the two parts of the city were built so that the fortifications of the site were maintained. The newly united city was also given the status of a municipium, one of the few on the Iberian Peninsula at the time, with its own civic government and laws.9 At the same time the diverse populations became legally and culturally united. The Romans called the site Emporiae, a Latinized form of the Greek name for the site with a plural ending, perhaps reflecting the origins of the city in Palaiapolis, Indika, Neapolis, and the Ciudad Romana.10 The Greek and Iberian populations of Empúries were influenced by Roman culture to a degree over the 300 years between the coming of the Romans and the decline of the city. Julius Caesar settled a group of veterans at the site, adding to the numbers of Romans already there and perhaps overwhelming the other ethnic populations. In an unusual show of agreement between two ancient authors, both Livy and Strabo concur that the Greek and Iberian populations eventually gave up their own laws and ways in favor of Roman culture. Epigraphic evidence also demonstrates the introduction of Latin into the city. One intriguing inscription from the time of Augustus is bilingual in Greek and Latin.11 Coins issued originally with Greek legends, and later Iberian ones, were replaced by coins with Latin legends.12

174


The city prospered for the next several generations with much building and rebuilding. In particular, the owners of houses that backed onto the old city walls that had been torn down were able to build out into the intervening space that had once separated the cities, adding greatly to the size of their houses. During the Flavian era (69–96 CE) this prosperity came to an abrupt halt and the city went into a decline and was mostly abandoned.13 No one has proposed a satisfactory explanation for this rapid reversal of fortune, although unproven possibilities include the silting of the harbor, a change in regional shipping routes,14 or the loss of Empúries’ privileged position once Vespasian extended Latin rights to all cities in Roman Spain.15 Only Palaiapolis continued to be occupied continuously to the present, although once the harbor silted up the island was left a landlocked hill beside the sea. There was some intermittent building on the rest of the site, but the majority of the city was buried and preserved fairly well. Thus the ruins excavated at the site represent a Roman provincial city of the last half of the first century CE. Excavators have uncovered only about 10% of the Ciudad Romana and even less of Palaiapolis, but over the last century excavators have exposed about 95% of Neapolis, being unable to excavate only the extreme eastern edge of this neighborhood in the city, the harbor to the north, and the extreme northwestern corner where a former monastery building now stands housing the site’s museum.16 The limitations on the extent of the excavations make it difficult to study the site as a whole, but the completeness of excavations of Neapolis, as well as its long independent status, make it a good candidate for studying as a neighborhood, or a complete subset of a larger city. The Ciudad Romana also gives us the opportunity to examine how some of the techniques developed in the earlier chapters can be applied to a neighborhood or city that has experienced so little excavation.

THE STRUCTURE OF NEAPOLIS’ STREETS The streets of Neapolis lack the regular layout seen at Pompeii and Ostia.17 Neapolis was not planned using an orthogonal layout; rather, the streets follow the topography lying either parallel or perpendicular to the contours of the site, which slope towards the Gulf of Roses to the east and the city’s harbor to the north (Map 6.2).18 Two plazas complete the street network. The agora, a Greek word for a town square that served a similar purpose to a Roman forum, is in the central part of the city. The other plaza, the southern plaza, was directly accessible from the southern gate. Two sanctuary courtyards open off this plaza, giving access to Neapolis’ only sanctuaries. Whereas the excavated portions of the Neapolis street network indicate its appearance in the last half of the fi rst century CE, determining when the street network took on this form is difficult. Few excavations have probed below statigraphic layers dating to the fi nal major phase of use of the city during the Flavian era. Excavations in the agora and the southern

Empúries 175 plaza demonstrate massive changes in these areas in the beginning of the second century BCE, not long after the Roman establishment of the settlement that was to become the Ciudad Romana.19 At about that time houses were demolished to make room for the creation of the two plazas. Whether other parts of the street network were also modified at this or other times is currently beyond the scope of our knowledge. We can only analyze the street network at Empúries as it appeared in the Flavian era, but whether the network represents an adaptation of Roman culture or is a pre-Roman Greek or Greco-Iberian street network is an open question. The structure of the streets at Pompeii and Ostia represent a high point in ancient urban transportation engineering, particularly as the creation of the streets in the latter city were subsidized by funds from the imperial treasury. The structure of the Neapolis streets seems rather poor in comparison. The average width of the streets is significantly less than the width of the streets at Pompeii, Ostia, or Silchester, averaging slightly less than the 2.4 m or 8 Roman feet required in the XII Tables. This width precluded the use of sidewalks and, in their absence, made the use of stepping-stones superfluous. None of the streets appear to have had stone paving; instead, the street surfaces were covered in gravel. This may have been due to a lack of a good source for stone; most of the buildings at Empúries were constructed of mud brick on a stone socle. Other features missing from the streets at Empúries are honorary arches and street shrines. No foundations have been uncovered yet to indicate an arch was ever built at the site. In all likelihood some of the streets had shrines, but no evidence remains because virtually none of the mud brick walls upon which the shrines would have been built survive. Like Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester, the streets of Neapolis served to drain excess water from the neighborhood. Stone-lined channels in the center of many streets directed water downslope to the harbor and the shores of the Gulf of Roses. Rainwater alone washed the streets of Neapolis because the water supply at Empúries was not fed by an aqueduct. Only one fountain has been located at the site and the source for that water has not been identified. Otherwise, one public well and a series of public cisterns in the agora and the southern plaza, numerous private cisterns, and the Fluvià River all provided water for the residents of Empúries. 20 Whereas it is difficult for us to imagine, these sources were sufficient to not only meet the city’s water consumption needs but even to supply a bath building located north of the agora (Map 6.2).

IDENTIFICATION OF THE USE OF BUILDINGS Excavations at Empúries have been conducted on a nearly annual basis since 1908. R. Mar and J. Ruiz organized the data generated by these decades of excavation into their landmark work on the site, Empúries Romana (1993). Their book provides a detailed discussion of nearly every excavated

176 Roman Urban Street Networks structure and was essential to the creation of the database of Neapolis buildings that was linked to digitized versions of their site plans for analysis. This information was supplemented with other published accounts of work at the site as well as with the author’s observations there over the course of three field seasons in the mid-1990s. 21 The results are presented in Table 6.1 and in a color map accessible at a Web site associated with this book. 22 Because Neapolis is only one neighborhood of a city and is much smaller than any of the other sites, it offers fewer examples of buildings for analysis. The smaller overall numbers of buildings makes it impossible to analyze some categories of building types. Like Silchester, no structure devoted to entertainment stood within the walls of the city, but rather an amphitheater stands just outside the city (Map 6.1). We cannot, therefore, study the location of entertainment structures within the city. The same is true for health-related structures. Neapolis has only one bath building and only four public places for the city’s residents to collect water; five is too few for a statistical analysis. Despite the low numbers of these structures, it is still possible to comment on their location with relation to the streets. Fortunately, Neapolis has enough examples in the other categories of building types to make a statistical analysis possible. There are only seven structures that relate to the administration of Neapolis. Four administrative spaces relate to the city’s defense. These are classified under the category of administrative because it is assumed that the civic administration was responsible for the defense of the city. Excavator E. Gandía uncovered a pair of adjoining one-room structures inside the city walls near the

Table 6.1

Categories for Architectural Units at Neapolis




administrative

stoa, storage rooms for military equipment

7

commercial

shop (taberna), market building (macellum), warehouse (horrea)

64

entertainment

—

0

health-related

bath, fountain, well, public cistern

5

production

kiln, forge, garum workshop

9

religious

temple, ritual sleeping place (abaton)

7

residential

elite house, nonelite house

35

unknown

—

20

Empúries 177 southern gate that contained over 1,400 lead sling shot and the remains of one of the few ballistae ever excavated. 23 City administrators must have used these rooms to help prepare for the collective defense. Another pair of adjoining buildings with a defensive use stood at the apex of the same hill on which the Sanctuary of Asklepios stood, just to the north of the sanctuary. One of these buildings stood at the base of a tower in the defensive wall and contained a cistern (Map 6.2). The adjoining building to the east contained a large, curious tank made of amphorae that appears to have functioned as a water-purifying mechanism on a massive scale. The water to be purified probably came from the nearby cistern. As this was the most easily defensible part of the city, both of these structures appear to have been controlled by the civic administration with the tank and cistern offering a refuge of last resort and a desperate source for clean drinking water. 24 The city towers themselves were ignored in the analysis of Empúries and all case-study cities because their location was established with the building of the city wall, usually before the street grid was laid out. Also, in many cases the entrances to the towers do not correspond to any particular street, suggesting their location is divorced from the network of streets. These four defensive storage rooms represent half of the total seven administrative structures in Neapolis. The three other administrative buildings are stoas, one in the agora, another at the intersection of the southern plaza and the street leading to the agora, and the third is between these two (Map 6.2). 25 The dominance of the defensive storage units associated with towers will produce results different from the other sites because none of the towers at Pompeii, Ostia, or Silchester have such large associated storage rooms. When considering administrative spaces at Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester, therefore, defensive structures played no role. With over half of the administrative structures at Empúries consisting of these four storage rooms dedicated to defense, the nature of administrative space at the city will no doubt vary from the other sites. Whereas administrative structures demonstrate some unique features in Neapolis, commercial and production structures are fairly similar to their counterparts at the other cities examined so far. The one- or two-room shop is a common feature dominating several streets and the southern plaza. Two warehouses similar in layout but smaller in size to those at Ostia have also been identifi ed in Neapolis. Excavators have also uncovered forges and kilns typical of other Roman urban sites. Because of the limited number of examples of commercial or production buildings that we can associate with a more specific use, it is not possible to analyze any subcategories of these types of buildings as it was for Pompeii and Ostia. One unique structure dedicated to the production of the popular Roman fish sauce garum is worth mentioning because it stood nearly at the center of Neapolis along the main street.26 The smell associated with the production

178 Roman Urban Street Networks of garum was strong and this may explain the placement of garum factories excavated in the Roman city of Baelo Claudia (Bolonia) on the southern coast of Spain at the very edge of the city near the sea. Because the people of Neapolis did not prevent the placement of this building near the center of their city, the smell seems to have been of little concern to them. Seven structures in two sanctuaries are the sum total of all the religious structures excavated in Neapolis. The Sanctuary of Asklepios stands on the top of a steep hill in the southwestern corner of Neapolis (Map 6.2). Originally it stood outside the city, but the southern wall was extended in order to incorporate the sanctuary into the city. Once it was part of the city, it was reached only by a steep stairway from the southern plaza. Several small temples face the southern plaza from atop this hill and one other accompanying building may have been an abaton, or place for the ill to sleep and await a prescriptive dream from the god. 27 The only other sanctuary in Neapolis, dedicated to the Egyptian deity Serapis, dates to the Augustan era. Once the Emporitani moved the southern wall to incorporate the Sanctuary of Asklepios, they opened up more space in the southern part of the city where the Sanctuary of Serapis could be constructed. The sanctuary is Roman in style, consisting of a rectangular colonnaded courtyard with a tetrastyle temple at the west end. Behind the temple in the colonnade were several rooms of uncertain use. The temple was entered via fl anking stairs from the rear that led to the pronaos in an arrangement reminiscent of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii. 28 The concentrated nature of public religious activity off the southern plaza in Neapolis contrasts with the scattered distribution of temples at Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester. Residential structures at Neapolis show an interesting variety. 29 Some homes were square and small consisting of three or four rooms opening off a tiny open courtyard. Others were grander and exhibit Greco-Roman influence in having a peristyle and/or an atrium. Fragments of painted plaster and some fi ne geometric mosaics also indicate the wealth of decoration available to house owners. The tables below show the analysis for the location of residential structures only, not the categories of elite and nonelite. All residential structures in Neapolis were divided into these categories and analyzed for their relationship with the streets, but no significant patterns emerged; therefore, separate tables to illustrate this were not produced. Nonetheless, the lack of patterning is interesting and is discussed below. Once all the buildings in Neapolis were categorized, the same analysis was performed as for the other sites looking for patterns in the location of building types with the street characteristics of depth from the city gates, depth from the agora, number of intersections, and relation to cart traffic. As the description of some of the building types above hinted, Neapolis differs a great deal from the other sites analyzed so far. This difference stands out quite starkly in the results that follow.

Empúries 179 STREET DEPTH FROM THE CITY GATES Map 6.3 shows the depth of each street in Neapolis from outside the city. In the absence of excavation in the northern sector of the site in the vicinity of the harbor, it is assumed all three of the streets heading north into the unexcavated sector made a perpendicular intersection with a street that lined the edge of the harbor. Because this hypothetical street would have been the first one touched when entering the city from the harbor, a depth of two has been assigned to the three streets that would have intersected it. Contrasting Map 6.3 with those from the other case-study cities provides evidence that the Neapolis street network differs greatly from the previous three case-study cities. The maximum number of streets one had to pass through in order to reach all streets from one of the city gates was six at Neapolis, greater than at any of the other cities. This high depth indicates that the street layout was more complex than at the other sites, a very curious observation because the area of Neapolis is much smaller

Map 6.3

Depth of Neapolis’ streets from the city gates.

180


than that of the previously discussed cities. It would have been more difficult for visitors entering Neapolis from a city gate to find their way to the innermost neighborhoods than for visitors entering a city gate at Pompeii, Ostia, or Silchester. Graph 6.1 records the average number of intersections according to their depths from the city gates. In contrast to Pompeii (Graph 3.1), Ostia (Graph 4.1), and Silchester (Graph 5.1), streets that lead directly to the city gates do not intersect the greatest number of streets; instead, it is streets and plazas with a depth of two that have the greatest number of intersections. Setting aside the anomalous figure for streets with a depth of one from the city gates for the moment, the average number of intersections follows the pattern established by the other three sites, decreasing the farther one gets from a city gate. If visitors were cognizant of this difference, they could have used the number of intersections to help them navigate the city and figure out if they were heading towards or away from a street with a depth of two. If visitors did not realize they should ignore the number of intersections streets with a depth of one had, they may have felt a bit lost in Neapolis because then the streets one entered from the city gates would appear to lack directionality. The distance between doors might help them orient themselves a little bit, however. Graph 6.2 shows how the average distance between the doors relates to depth from the city gates. This graph is similar to that for Pompeii (Graph 3.2), Ostia (Graph 4.2), and Silchester (Graph 5.2) in that streets with a depth of one have one of the lowest average distances between doors whereas those with a depth of two have substantially more average distance. Noting this difference would have helped visitors to Neapolis determine whether they were moving toward or away from a street that led to the city gate. At the higher depths, however, the trend becomes muddled, and so observing the distance between doors would not help a visitor negotiate the interior streets of Neapolis. When one examines the distribution of the seven categories of structures in relation to the depth from the city gates in Neapolis (Table 6.2), fewer categories appear significant than were seen at Pompeii, Ostia, or Silchester. Nonetheless, we can still discern a few areas of overlap with the patterns from the other sites. For instance, the distribution of commercial structures across Neapolis is very similar to the distributions seen at the other sites. For now obvious reasons, shops are located in greater than expected frequency than if they were randomly distributed along streets with lower depths from the city gates. 30 The higher than expected number of shops standing on the one street with a depth of six from the city gates is probably the result of our inability to distinguish shops from storage units. The street is not particularly long and is lined on its north side by one structure divided into four identical one-room units, each with its own entrance from the street. 31 Considering their remote location and the lack of any other commercial structure around these four, it seems hard to believe that

Empúries 181 shopkeepers would expect customers to seek them out there. These four units were probably intended for storage. The rather strange results for administrative and religious structures require some explanation. Administrative structures stand in greater than expected numbers along streets with a depth of one and a depth of six

Graph 6.1 Relationship between the depth of streets from Empúries’ city gates and forum and the average number of intersections of streets at each depth.

Graph 6.2 Relationship between the depth of streets from Empúries’ city gates and agora and the average distance between doors at each depth.

182


from the city gates. This is due exclusively to the defensive structures mentioned above. Of the seven administrative structures, four are civic storage spaces related to Neapolis’ defense and are located at the periphery of the city. Because they represent more than half of the buildings identified as administrative structures, they dominate the results in this category. The strong results for religious structures comes from the fact that Neapolis’ only two religious precincts which contained all religious structures are both accessed from the same plaza at a depth of two from the city gates. Unlike the other case-study cities, religious activity was heavily concentrated in one area of Neapolis. Beyond these results, however, there is little patterning in the data. There are no entertainment structures and not enough health-related structures to allow for a statistical analysis. Nonetheless, the lack of any fountains or a bath building on a street that led to a city gate differs from the results of the other sites. Structures devoted to production are fairly randomly scattered about the site, as are residential structures. Although Table 6.2 does not contain the data for elite and nonelite residences, they also appear distributed without relation to depth from the city gates.

STREET DEPTH FROM THE AGORA Map 6.4 shows the depth of each street in Neapolis from the agora. The depth of the farthest street at Neapolis from the agora is five, topping the depth figure from the forum at Pompeii and Silchester, but matching the figure from Ostia. This high depth figure illustrates the complexity of the Neapolis street network, a complexity that is surprising considering that Neapolis covers a fraction of the area Ostia does. In terms of the number of intersections, the trend at Neapolis does follow that at the other sites with streets directly reaching the agora having the greatest number of intersections (Graph 6.1). The average distance between doors does not demonstrate much patterning in relation to depth from the agora (Graph 6.2). At Pompeii and Ostia the lowest average distance between doorways occurs on the streets that lead directly to the city gates and forum. At Neapolis, as at Silchester, these streets have the second lowest average distance between doorways, which is a similar although not identical result. Streets with a depth of one from the agora do have a much lower distance between doors than those with a depth of two, however. All of these results taken together indicate that visitors to Neapolis could have followed the clues of the number of intersections and distance between doors in order to fi nd their way back to the agora as long as they did not get too far from it. Once they wandered into streets with a higher depth from the agora, they could very easily have become disoriented and lost as the visual clues that may have helped them fi nd their way at Pompeii and Ostia in particular could not help them in Neapolis.

1

0

2

7

0.000003

4

5

6

Total


Comments

0

3

64

4

3

2

19

30

6

0.001

64

1

5

17

18

19

4

7

0

0

0

0

7

0

0.4

7

0

1

2

2

2

0

Exp.

Religious Obs.


7

0.1

0.5

1.8

2.0

2.1

2

2

0.5

2

1

Exp.

Commercial

Obs.

Obs.

Exp.

Administrative

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Obs.

—

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Exp.

Entertainment

—

5

0

0

1

2

2

0

9

0

0

4

2

3

0

55

9

0

1

2

2

3

1

Exp.

Production Obs.


5

0

0

1

1

3

0

Exp.

Health Obs.




Table 6.2

35

0

3

5

13

11

3

51

35

1

3

9

10

10

2

Exp.

Residential Obs.

Empúries 183

184


Turning to the building categories, a few patterns emerge, particularly with regard to commercial structures (Table 6.3). Shops stand in greater than expected numbers along streets that lead directly to the agora. What is more interesting, however, is that they also cluster along the end that is near the agora. 32 The portions of the streets leading west and south from the agora are crowded with shops in the block immediately preceding the agora. They become less concentrated in the blocks further from the agora and closer to the city gates. The agora and its immediate environs must have been a prime commercial location. The focusing of shops along streets that approached it would also have helped to give those streets directionality, pointing the visitor to town toward or away from the commercial agora, depending one what the visitor was seeking. Whereas Neapolis shares some similarities with its Italian sister cities, the difference in the location of religious structures is quite noticeable. At both Pompeii and Ostia, temples cluster in the fora and even Silchester has a shrine in the forum; in contrast, archaeologists have identified no temple in the agora at Neapolis. Instead, all religious structures in Neapolis were

Map 6.4

Depth of Neapolis’ streets from the agora.

12

2

4

3

64

.000000005

2

3

4

5

Total



64

1

5

15

25

15

36

1

3

7

Exp.

0 (In the Agora)

Obs.

Commercial

7

0

0

0

7

0

0

Obs.

10

7

0

0

2

3

2

0

Exp.

Religious

7

0

2

2

2

0

1

Obs.

29

7

0.1

0.6

1.6

2.7

1.6

0.4

Exp.

Administrative

—

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Exp.

5

0

0

2

1

1

1

Obs.

—

5

0

1

1

2

1

0

Exp.

Health


0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Obs.

Entertainment


Categories of the Uses of Architectural Spaces in Relation to Street Depth From the Agora

Street Depth from Agora

Table 6.3

9

0

1

4

0

4

0

Obs.

15

9

0

1

2

4

2

0

Exp.

Production

35

0

1

8

16

10

0

Obs.

53

35

0

3

8

14

8

2

Exp.

Residential

Empúries 185

186


concentrated in just two sanctuaries, both of which opened off of the southern plaza. In addition, both sanctuaries lack the relationship with the forum seen at the Italian sites. Departing from the agora, one would have to have passed through a street and a plaza to enter a sanctuary in Neapolis, making all temples detached from the agora. The locations of both sanctuaries were probably due more to history, opportunity, and function rather than urban planning. Once the people of Neapolis created the hallowed ground of the Sanctuary of Asklepios outside their city, they could not simply move it into the city when they desired it inside rather than outside of their city gates (Map 6.2). So they brought the city to the sanctuary by extending the southern wall. In addition, a healing sanctuary may have been very popular with people living in a marshy area with disease-carrying mosquitoes like that which surrounds Empúries and so its placement may have been intended to help strangers to the city find it easily.33 The Sanctuary of Serapis also owes its placement to the extension of the southern wall (Map 6.2). This extension brought a large space free from preexisting buildings into the city to allow for the construction of the sanctuary. The end result was that all of the city’s sanctuaries were clustered near one another in one sector of the city. This pattern differs from the other three sites where we have seen religious structures scattered over larger parts of each city. In addition to its lack of a temple or shrine, the Neapolis agora has other differences from the fora of the other three case-study cities, the most important of which is its lack of clearly identified administrative buildings. The stoa that stands on the northern edge of the agora has a line of small rooms facing the agora, but it is impossible to know which of these were used for public business and which had a commercial nature. Large cisterns under two of the rooms suggest they were open to anyone who wanted water, and thus had a public function, but beyond that the rooms are hard to classify. As with depth from the city gates, the location of production and residential structures show no relationship with the depth from the agora. This remains true when we divide the residential structures into the categories of elite and nonelite, although this is not shown in Table 6.3. The number of health-related structures is too small for statistical analysis; nonetheless, the placement of Neapolis’ one bath building fits the patterns seen at the two Italian sites. The bath at Empúries was constructed at the end of the second and beginning of the fi rst centuries BCE and was then remodeled during the time of Augustus. The building was reused as an early Christian church during the Late Antique period.34 It is a tiny and dark building when compared to the later imperial thermae of Rome and Ostia, but was similar in scale to the earliest bath buildings of Pompeii. Because Empúries lacked a connection to an aqueduct, all the water for the bath building must have been drawn from cisterns or possibly the nearby river. The main entrance to the bath in Neapolis stands along a street that leads directly to the harbor as well as the agora, thus making it well placed for the use of visitors

Empúries 187 and residents of the city. We noted a similar location for the bath buildings at Pompeii and Ostia.

NUMBER OF INTERSECTIONS Map 6.5 depicts the street network of Neapolis in terms of the number of intersections. As seen in Table 6.4, only the commercial and religious structures have any type of statistically significant distribution. Repeating the patterns at Pompeii and Ostia, there is a greater than expected number of shops along streets with more intersections, thus ensuring many people would pass these shops as they traversed the city. Whereas shops are located as we would expect with relation to the number of intersections along a street, religious structures are not. Both sanctuaries are accessed by only one staircase from the southern plaza, the stairs to the Sanctuary of Asklepios leading up whereas that to the Sanctuary of Serapis lead down. Because the southern plaza intersects only two other streets, it appears to be a bit off the beaten path within the city. Indeed, residents of Neapolis would most likely have had to make a special trip to the southern plaza to visit the shrines unless they had some business with one of the shops in the plaza. Because one had to pass through the plaza to get to the south gate and leave the city, however, these two sanctuaries would have had a higher profi le with visitors to the city than the numbers suggest. Whereas there are too few structures related to health in Neapolis to discuss them statistically, it is interesting that the bath building repeats the pattern of bath buildings at Pompeii being on a street that intersected many others. Beyond these results, however, administrative, production, and residential structures show no patterning.

CART TRAFFIC The movement of carts within the Neapolis neighborhood of Empúries was severely restricted (Map 6.6). The gravel road surface does not preserve ruts but rut marks in the threshold of the southern gate indicate carts did pass into Neapolis. Considering the small gauge of these ruts, between 1.0 and 1.2 m, however, it is likely that heavy oxcarts could not enter the city and, instead, all cart traffic was handled by donkeys and pushcarts.35 The most important nodes for carts would have been the harbor, the agora, and the two city gates, one on the west side of the city and the other to the south. The widest and straightest streets in Neapolis link these nodes. Because of the restricted width of the neighborhood’s streets, it would have been virtually impossible for any of the streets to have two lanes for traffic passing in opposite directions. Whereas some scholars have discussed the possibility that some of the streets in Pompeii were designated one-way,

188


Map 6.5 Number of intersections each of Neapolis’ streets has with other streets.

this would have been impossible for the streets in Neapolis; some of the most important destinations in the city are reached by only one street. The narrow width of the Neapolis streets meant that cart drivers had to check streets before they entered them in order to avoid a head-on meeting with traffic moving in the opposite direction. The agora and the southern plaza, therefore, must have played a prominent role in the passage of cart traffic through Neapolis. The agora stands at the center of the street network; from the agora a cart driver could have easily reached the harbor, the west gate, the southern plaza, and, from there, the southern gate. Cart drivers must have dealt with the difficulties of traveling the city by using the agora, the southern plaza, and any other wide points in the street network to wait for other carts moving in the opposite direction to pass. The quiet dignity of the forum at Pompeii created through the exclusion of carts would not have been possible in Neapolis’ agora. The types of buildings that were located along streets that had access to cart traffic are not so different from those we saw Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester. Most shops and workshops had easy access to carts, as would be expected. The two horrea at Neapolis, one north of the agora near the harbor and the other between the agora and southern plaza, also were

13

10

6

17

64

0.000002

4

5

6

7

Total


Comments

4

3

7

0

0

0

0

0

7

0

Obs.

0.8

7

1

1

0

1

1

2

1

Exp.

Religious


64

6

6

5

6

9

18

6

2

14

8

Exp.

1

Obs.

Commercial

7

0

0

0

1

0

2

4

Obs.

6

7

1

1

0

1

1

2

1

Exp.

Administrative

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Obs.

—

5

0

0

0

1

1

3

0

Obs.

—

5

1

0

0

1

1

1

1

Exp.

Health

9

2

0

1

0

2

0

4

Obs.

24

9

1

1

1

1

1

2

2

Exp.

Production


0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Exp.

Entertainment




Table 6.4

35

3

5

4

3

5

11

4

Obs.

71

35

3

3

3

3

5

10

8

Exp.

Residential

Empúries 189

190 Roman Urban Street Networks accessible to carts, as were the majority of houses. The two sanctuaries adjoined the southern plaza, which must have been one of the more important places for carts to wait as the cart drivers made certain they could drive to the agora without meeting any oncoming traffic. The walls surrounding the sanctuaries would have blocked out some of the noise of this activity. Finally, like the other sites, the bath in Neapolis opened onto a street that allowed for cart traffic, probably to facilitate the transport of fuel for the boilers and, perhaps, even water from the river. Several streets, or sections of streets, were closed to cart traffic either through impediments or because buildings along them were too close to one another to allow carts to pass. In a few cases the stretch of a street just before some impediment to cart traffic, and thus still open for the passage of carts, was only wide enough for one lane of traffic. The narrowness of these streets must have made it difficult for drivers to turn their carts around once they reached those impediments. Any one-lane street with an impediment to cart traffic at one end must not have been a very common place for cart drivers to go even if they had some type of delivery to make.

Map 6.6

Traffic patterns in Neapolis.

Empúries 191 They probably stopped at the nearest intersection and unloaded deliveries there to be carried by hand to their destination. The pedestrian zones in Neapolis are usually in areas where the topography is very uneven. At Pompeii and Ostia, the types of building that line pedestrian zones are residences. Either of these could have been a causal factor in the exclusion of carts. Considering the dangerous reputation carts had, however, one can see the appeal of living in a neighborhood where the streets blocked cart traffic.

IDENTIFYING PRIMARY AND SECONDARY STREETS, THE AGORA, AND PLAZAS At Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester, when streets are divided into categories of primary and secondary street as well as the forum and plazas, building types demonstrate a strong correlation with street type. This is not so in Neapolis; depth from the city gates, depth from the agora, and the number of intersections a street has played very little role in the organization of space at the site. Because primary and secondary streets are difficult to isolate in Neapolis, no map is presented here to indicate where these were. We can still discuss the layout of Neapolis in the terms used in the earlier chapters, but in truth other factors appear to have been at work shaping the city and its street network. What we might consider primary streets do not differ much from what we might consider secondary streets. The most prominent feature of primary streets is the commercial structures that lined them. As at the other cities, shopkeepers saw primary streets as a great location. Beyond that, however, we see buildings from all categories, except religious, lining primary streets. The same can be said for secondary streets. In fact, aside from the concentration of commercial buildings and their end destinations, primary streets do not appear so different from secondary streets. The average distance between doors on primary streets is about 10 m whereas on secondary streets it is about 12 m. At the three other sites, distance between doors on secondary streets was around twice the distance on primary streets. The distinction between primary and secondary streets so important at Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester appears irrelevant in Neapolis (Table 6.5). The difference in the use of the agora from the fora of Pompeii and Ostia in particular alters the spatial organization of the city dramatically. By placing temples outside of the agora, allowing a larger than expected number of shops inside it, and making that space essential to the movement of cart traffic through the city, the people of Neapolis made their central square much more lively, noisy, and commercial than their Italian counterparts. Even the Silchester forum, with its basilica turned into a production facility and carts driving into the forum to deliver raw materials and remove fi nished metal goods, would have seemed quieter because through traffic was


Comments

210–49

7

0.2

0.00000002

7

7

0.4


64

2

0

4.6

4

3

0

1.8

Exp.

64

7

Forum

43

0

Obs.

Total

17

Secondary

16

Exp.

Religious

Plaza

36

Obs.

Commercial

7

1

1

3

2

Obs.

20

7

0.2

0.4

4.6

1.8

Exp.

Administrative

0

0

0

0

0

Obs.

5

1

1

2

1

Obs.

—

5

0

0

4

1

Exp.

Health

9

0

0

5

4

Obs.

37

9

0

1

6

2

Exp.

Production


—

0

0

0

0

0

Exp.

Entertainment



Primary

Street Type

Table 6.5

35

0

0

25

10

Obs.

35

35

1

2

23

9

Exp.

Residential


Empúries 193 excluded; carts could enter and exit through only one access point. Unlike the fora of Pompeii and Ostia, the agora in Neapolis was dominated by a large stoa lining the entire north side of the plaza rather than a temple. A visitor from Pompeii would certainly have found the agora in Neapolis to be lacking in the dignity and civic focus that the forum at Pompeii had. The agora at Neapolis bears a stronger resemblance to the agora of other Greek colonial cities rather than a Roman forum; thus the differences between the spatial arrangement of Neapolis and Pompeii and Ostia are cultural.36 Neapolis has only one plaza at its southern end. Again, we see a completely different approach to the use of this space. At Pompeii and Ostia the plazas are separated from the rest of the street network by the blocking of traffic and by clear architectural markers that one was entering a plaza. This separation made them quieter refuges within a crowded city. The plaza in Neapolis was not just a livelier and noisier place; it was essential for the movement of carts and was the only place from which one could access Neapolis’ temples. The plaza also has a strong public character in that it lacks any residential structures. The lack of patterning in two categories of buildings warrants further comment. The random nature of the placement of industrial structures is also similar to their placement at Ostia. As in some of the industrial establishments at both Ostia and Pompeii, some of these structures at Neapolis appear to have been placed in buildings that had originally been built for some other purpose. When the opportunity arose, entrepreneurs reused those buildings. Thus their placement within the street network cannot have been a primary concern but rather the availability of a building for sale or lease. Industrial activity appears to have been excluded from this area so important to the political, social, and economic identity of the city. Residential structures also appear scattered across the site with little relation to the street network. Residential structures were divided into categories of elite and nonelite based on factors of size, decoration, and the presence/absence of a peristyle and atrium. No correlation exists between elite and nonelite housing and the characteristics of the street network. It has been noted in the past that no two elite residences share the same block, a pattern that is not related to the street network, however, but may have been an overriding concern here. 37 D. Robinson has suggested that the elite at Pompeii wanted to live away from one another in order to have room around their residences for the houses and shops of their clients.38 Something similar may have been happening here. One other categorization of domestic structures that proved to have no relation to the street network was based on the architectural style of the house. Mar and Ruiz divided the houses of Neapolis into categories based on the presence or absence of certain architectural features such as an atrium, a central or side patio, having only four rooms, and so on.39 None of these structures are distributed in any meaningful way along streets with particular depths, number of intersections, or specific average distances between doorways.

194


COMPARISON OF THE STREET NETWORKS IN NEAPOLIS AND THE CIUDAD ROMANA With only a few exceptions, the primary one being the commercial buildings, the spatial arrangement of Neapolis is not heavily dependent upon the street network. Instead, the residents of Neapolis seem to have considered other factors in creating their cityscape.40 The interesting question that arises is whether the contrast in the spatial conception of the Greco-Iberian site from the Italian and British ones can also be attributed to opposing cultural ideals about the use of urban space. Empúries allows us to answer this question in a way that is simply not possible at any other site because it is essentially made up of two cities, one the Greco-Iberian colony of Neapolis and the other Roman foundation of the Ciudad Romana. With all other factors of geography, topography, climate, and three centuries of history being equal, we can safely attribute differences in the use of space to cultural factors. The one drawback is that the Ciudad Romana at Empúries is only partially excavated and so the types of statistical analysis conducted on the data from Neapolis and the other sites are not possible here. Nonetheless, we can still make some qualitative statements about the street network from the evidence of aerial photography and excavation and illustrate how some of the concepts developed so far can be applied to a partially excavated city. Several differences between the streets in Neapolis and the Ciudad Romana are immediately evident even from the limited data available. The streets of the Ciudad Romana are twice as wide as the widest street in Neapolis, usually having a width of about 4 m. All of the streets appear to have been wide enough to admit cart traffic passing in two directions. As with Neapolis, the streets were paved with gravel, not with stone slabs, so no trace of ruts remains in the streets, but ruts in the threshold stone of the Ciudad Romana’s southern gate measure 1.45 m, wider than those in the threshold of Neapolis’ southern gate. The only other place ruts have been preserved is along Cardo B. An internal wall divides the city in two, separating the northern third of the city from the southern two thirds (Map 6.7). Cardo B is the only street that defi nitely passes through a gate in that wall and the threshold stone of this internal gate preserves ruts. These ruts are about a meter wide, suggesting smaller vehicles circulated inside the unexcavated northern third of the city, probably handcarts and small donkey carts.41 The difference in layout between Neapolis and the Ciudad Romana is evident in Map 6.1. At fi rst glance, the orthogonal layout makes the Ciudad Romana appear easier to understand than Neapolis, but a closer examination reveals the layout is more complex than it fi rst appears (Map 6.7). Although excavators have uncovered only part of the internal dividing wall, recent investigations using various remote-sensing equipment have revealed it spanned the entire width of the city.42 The results of these

Empúries 195 investigations indicate that the internal dividing wall had only one gate, at Cardo B, which allowed for communication between the two halves of the city (Map 6.7). This arrangement complicated movement through the Ciudad Romana significantly. Unfortunately, because no one has been able to investigate the wall around the northern third of the city through excavation, we cannot know if the northern third of the city had any gates leading out either to the countryside, the river, or the harbor. Indeed, there have been no excavations north of the dividing wall at all, and because we know very little about the use of space north of the wall, Map 6.7 focuses on the area south of the internal wall in the Ciudad Romana. Despite the incomplete nature of the excavation of the Ciudad Romana, we have enough information to assign streets to the categories of primary streets, secondary streets, the central forum, and plazas using the criteria outlined in the previous chapters (Map 6.7). The primary streets in the Ciudad Romana are those that give access to city gates and/or the forum, have the greatest number of intersections, and, when the evidence survives, have ruts indicating cart traffic. Secondary streets do not reach a gate or the forum, have few intersections, and lack evidence for cart traffic. Excavators long ago identified the central forum from its layout and the temples,

Map 6.7

Southern third of the Ciudad Romana at Empúries.

196


shops, and basilica that lined its edges and have excavated it thoroughly. No plazas have been securely identified, although the empty space south of the forum may have served that function with temporary booths erected on market days. Using these criteria it is fairly easy to assign the different components of the Ciudad Romana street network to these categories, unlike the Neapolis street network for which these concepts seem to have been irrelevant. Although the evidence is very fragmentary, the residents of the Ciudad Romana also appear to have been using the components of their street network in ways more similar to Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester than to Neapolis. Primary streets in the Ciudad Romana were the place for shops. All but three of the shops excavated in the Ciudad Romana opened onto primary streets. While excavating one small portion of the primary street Cardo C that leads directly from the southern gate to the forum, M. Almagro uncovered no less than 12 shops, a similar concentration to what we have come to expect from the other sites (Map 6.7).43 All of the shops in the forum did not actually open into the forum, but rather into the open area south of the forum or into the primary street to the east. North of the forum was a small market building with stalls for individual shops. This building had two entrances at the eastern and western ends, both of which opened off primary streets. This same market building had cisterns open to public use, the only excavated structure inside the city walls associated with health, which was then easily accessible from primary streets. The only known commercial spaces that did not open onto a primary street were the one shop built into the façade of Casa Romana 2b and the two built into the façade of Casa Romana 1, all of which opened onto secondary streets.44 Thus the vast majority of commercial activity as well as the only structure related to public health were all accessible from primary streets in a pattern identical to Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester. Excavators have uncovered only three buildings along secondary streets in the Ciudad Romana, all of which had a domestic purpose. Almagro excavated Casa Romana 1, 2a, and 2b, the latter two of which were combined to create one large domus. All of these structures adjoin one another and date to around the end of the second and beginning of the first centuries BCE.45 Whereas they are built of mud brick on a stone socle, typical of Iron Age Iberian architecture, the plans of all three buildings are so similar to some of the elaborate houses found at Pompeii that M. Santos Retolaza has suggested that the architects learned their craft in central Italy.46 When discussing the distribution of elite houses at Pompeii and Ostia, an elite preference on the part of some for living along streets removed from the hustle and bustle of urban life was noted because some placed their homes along secondary streets, just as these three structures are located. In addition, they are near the internal dividing wall at the point where Cardo A comes to an end. The owner of Casa Romana 1 also appropriated space from two streets, the easternmost block of Decumanus E at the point where it reached the eastern

Empúries 197 city wall, using the space to create a garden (Map 6.7). This must have been an out-of-the-way and quiet corner of the Ciudad Romana where there was no through traffic, not so different from the quiet neighborhoods some of the elite chose for themselves at Pompeii and Ostia. The treatment of the forum in the Ciudad Romana could not be more different from the Neapolis agora. Traffic was excluded from the forum by steps and also by gates. Shops were also excluded; originally rows of shops in the southern and western wings opened into the forum itself, but in a remodeling, the doorways were sealed up and new ones were created outside of the forum.47 Unlike in the agora, a centrally placed temple flanked by several smaller ones dominated the northern side of the forum. The northern wing of the forum was made up of a colonnade that created a backdrop for the line of temples. The forum is the only place in the Ciudad Romana where temples have been found. The eastern wing of the forum was reserved for a basilica, the only excavated administrative structure identified so far. The architect appropriated several meters of the adjoining street to make the basilica wider than the rows of shops on the other two sides of the forum. The Ciudad Romana forum carries on the Roman use of forum space seen at Pompeii and continued at Ostia and Silchester. This forum was a center of administrative and religious activity whereas commerce was excluded. The forum must have been shielded from the noise of passing carts and merchants, creating a solemn atmosphere for the proceedings that took place there. One last area of the Ciudad Romana worth mentioning, even though it is outside the city gates and, therefore, the internal street network, is the area south of the city wall where the palaestra and the amphitheater stand.48 The reason for the placement of these two buildings is generally assumed to be a lack of space for such large construction inside of the city walls, an assumption supported by a recent remote sensing investigation at the site which suggests it was densely occupied.49 This placement, however, would have required a visitor to the Ciudad Romana to pass the amphitheater in order to enter the city from its busiest gate. That street led straight to the forum. The direct connection of the forum and amphitheater may have been intended to be an advertisement of how well governed the city was. The amphitheater was not just a place for entertainment; it was also the place to punish criminals.50 An amphitheater could have served as a potent reminder of the rule of law within the walls of the Ciudad Romana. Neapolis and the Ciudad Romana are an oddly matched pair of cities. Everything about the Ciudad Romana, from the style of architecture to the spatial arrangement of the forum to the orthogonal layout and the relationship between the buildings and the street network, is similar to Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester and none of it is similar to Neapolis. Whereas some of the domestic structures in Neapolis have peristyles or atriums and the Sanctuary of Serapis is designed in a manner similar to other Roman sanctuaries, little else in the city can be labeled Roman. Instead, in the

198


Sanctuary of Asklepios and in the stoa in the agora, we see clear Greek influences. Neapolis is much older than the Ciudad Romana and appears to have retained in its layout an approach to the placement of buildings foreign to the Roman ideals explored in this work. Perhaps that logic was Greek, perhaps it was Iberian, or perhaps it was a mixture of both. Deciphering separate Greek and Iberian ideals about the use of street space, however, is a question beyond the scope of the present investigation. What is clear is that the relationship between the categories of buildings and the street network of Neapolis are clearly not Roman, whereas in the Ciudad Romana the opposite is equally clear.

CONCLUSION Empúries makes for a fascinating case study to place beside Pompeii, Ostia, and Silchester. Neapolis was a thriving city long before the Roman arrival on the Iberian Peninsula. As a result, its layout has an internal logic that differed from the Roman cities. The city probably retained much of its original layout even after the Roman arrival. When the Romans did arrive, they built their own city, the Ciudad Romana, in the form they chose, ignoring indigenous approaches to urban planning. The impression one gets from urban planning at Empúries, however, is that in terms of cities, the Romans had their way of laying out a city whereas the Greco-Iberian population had their own way, and one system seems to have had little impact on the other.

7

Streets, Space, and Roman Urbanism

For several decades the work of K. Lynch influenced the study of Roman urbanism. Various scholars sought to discover and describe the nodes, landmarks, edges, and districts of Roman cities and how the residents of and visitors to those cities would come to understand them while traveling along the paths that permeated the entire urban environment. Whereas this approach provided useful insights into architecture and its arrangement within a city, the study of the Roman city has been moving away from Lynch’s descriptive approach toward more quantitative techniques for describing streets and the use of urban space. Quantitative techniques allow for easy comparison of streets within and between cities as well as for the analysis of more data than is possible using a descriptive approach. The present work has demonstrated not only which techniques can be applied to the archaeological evidence from Roman sites dating to the Principate and early Late Antique periods, but also how those techniques can be interpreted with information from the ancient sources to help give us a view of the ancient Roman city from the street. Ultimately what this analysis demonstrates is that the streets in the four case-study cities can be divided into two types: those that integrated the use of space through the city and those that segregated it.1 Primary streets, fora, and some plazas fall into the fi rst category. These paths united all the residents of the city with each other and with visitors to the city. Primary streets provided easy access to many parts of the city as they led to either the forum or city gates and, in some cases, both locations, while they crossed many other streets. They often provided long vistas, thus facilitating navigation about the city. Fora and primary streets were wide spaces that were frequently well paved and provided with drainage. People were drawn to primary streets and fora because that was where they could accomplish many of their daily tasks; these urban paths had an unusually high concentration of doorways opening onto them. Cart traffic was also free to pass along most primary streets with the wide nature of these streets providing enough space for two carts to pass. The movement of carts could be restricted in and near the forum, but otherwise primary streets facilitated vehicular traffic.

200 Roman Urban Street Networks The nonelite and elite utilized primary streets for differing purposes. Shops clustered along primary streets at all of the sites examined because the nonelite sought the best places to attract customers. This may also have been their motivation for placing establishments dedicated to production along primary streets at Pompeii and Silchester. The elite saw primary streets as the place to establish their social standing. 2 They made certain that the forum served as a stage for municipal politico-religious activity, slowly pushing commercial structures from the forum during the fi rst centuries CE. 3 Pedestrians could also access fountains, baths, and public temples from primary streets; inscriptions above some of these testified to the munificence of the elite. Integrative paths were also an excellent place for social observation. At Pompeii, the unusually high number of benches along primary streets confi rms that watching people was a major pastime in city life. The main entrances to the houses of many urbanites, especially the elite, opened onto the primary streets, allowing them to make a show of their comings and goings. Primary streets and the forum were also the location for statues and arches that glorifi ed members of the community and their families while demonstrating their loyalty to the imperial government. Secondary streets and some plazas made up the segregating paths of Roman cities. All urbanites, regardless of class, seem to have used these paths in similar ways. The narrow nature of secondary streets and their shorter lengths often made it difficult to see very far and, therefore, to navigate them. The greater possibility for impediments to cart traffic along secondary streets made it more likely that people traveling through these areas could avoid some of the dangers and annoyances that accompanied carts and the animals that pulled them. Examples of all the categories for the use of urban space are found along secondary streets and in some plazas, with the exception of administrative buildings. One could probably fi nd whichever private homes, shops, workshops, or baths for which one might be searching along a secondary street. Secondary streets and some plazas isolated different parts of the city and kept out people who did not live or work in that area, allowing local residents some degree of privacy from visitors. How the residents of Roman cities perceived streets helped them decide where to place buildings with certain uses and so to create the unique phenomenon of Roman urbanism. The streets and the use of space in Pompeii, Ostia, Silchester, and the Ciudad Romana of Empúries vary, but they had enough in common, and bear a strong enough resemblance to, other Roman cities so that a person steeped in Roman culture could have entered one of these sites and been able to follow the clues to discover where the forum or even specific types of buildings would have been located. Naturally, to fi nd a particular person’s house or the temple of a specific god, a visitor would have to have asked for directions, but clues in the streetscape would have tipped the person off as to whether or not he/she was heading in the right

Streets, Space, and Roman Urbanism 201 direction. This uniformity suggests that the phenomenon of Roman urbanism went beyond the mere presence of distinctive architectural elements such as a forum or amphitheater. It also included the arrangement of space within the city.4 Two implications follow from this observation; one is of interest to archaeologists studying Roman urban sites that have been little excavated and the other to those investigating the role of Roman cities in acculturating the people incorporated into the Roman Empire.

STREETS AND SPACE AT PARTIALLY EXCAVATED SITES Archaeologists are often faced with a problem when investigating Roman cities. Pompeii, Ostia, Silchester, and Neapolis at Empúries are unusual in that so much of the area within their walls has been excavated. This is not the case at most Roman cities. Excavators often uncover individual or small groups of buildings in different parts of one site. The exact urban context of these different buildings is not always clear because the buildings that were around them have not been excavated. Thanks to aerial photography and geophysical prospection, however, the relationship of these excavated buildings to the street network is often apparent. The techniques outlined in the second chapter can aid in the interpretation of the spatial placement of the buildings in those disparate parts of the city and provide some urban context to them. Once we understand whether a domestic or commercial structure in a partially excavated city was placed on a primary or secondary street or even in a plaza or forum, we can begin to interpret some of the motives behind that placement, especially when their placement is compared to that of similar structures at the case-study cities. With the aid of aerial photography or geophysical data, we can count the number of intersections or analyze the depth from a city gate or forum of a street on which an isolated excavated atrium house or bath building stands. Comparing these results with the expected results outlined above has interpretive potential. The usefulness of these techniques at a partially excavated site was outlined with evidence from the Ciudad Romana at Empúries. The site provides an example of how knowing the location of an isolated building within the street network can provide insight into the decisions of at least one resident of the city. Casa Romana 1 has been fully excavated but, beyond the fact that it adjoins another domestic structure, little of its context within the larger urban environment is known because of a lack of excavation in the surrounding blocks. 5 Casa Romana 1 is an enormous building, the largest domestic structure excavated at Empúries to date, beautifully decorated with mosaics and wall paintings. Despite these obvious signs that the owner of the house was an important person in the community, evidence from aerial photography indicates that the entrance to Casa Romana 1 lies on what was clearly a secondary street. The street not only fails to reach

202


the forum or a gate; it is also blocked by the city wall at both ends. This street also intersects few other streets. It seems doubtful that many people would have passed by this house during the course of an ordinary day. At the case-study cities it was clear that two separate philosophies governed decisions about the proper location for domestic structures within the Roman urban context. Some wanted to live on primary streets where many would see them, allowing them to reaffi rm their social standing whereas others lived on secondary streets where they could avoid such attention and the attendant crowds, noise, and dangerous cart traffic. The builder of Casa Romana 1 appears to have shared the latter philosophy. Despite the builder’s probable prominence in political and social life of Empúries, this person desired a private life outside of the busiest parts of the city.

ROMAN URBANISM AND ACCULTURATION A second implication of the unity in the use of space described in the preceding chapters has to do with the spread of the Roman urban form across western Europe and north Africa. For a long time the presence of particularly Roman styles of buildings such as baths, basilicas, amphitheaters, and so on, was considered an indication of the imposition of Roman culture on the peoples of the provinces as well as an acceptance of Roman culture.6 Sites where these characteristic buildings could be recognized were considered to be “Romanized”7 whereas those that lacked them were considered to not be Romanized. In more recent years some scholars of the Roman city have begun to move away from the idea of unity in Roman urbanism and have focused instead on its diversity. They point out that whereas we may see similar structures across the Roman Empire, that does not mean that those structures were being used in identical ways. Diversity has become the watchword for the study of Roman urbanism in the provinces as various scholars set out to elucidate how people in the provinces were using urban structures in their own ways for their own purposes.8 Focusing on individual experiences in different cities has been a welcome change. But in focusing on diversity, we have lost sight of the power of not just Roman urban features, but how they were arranged as well. Material culture that shapes space is unlike any other type of material culture in that it also shapes the behavior of the user. In the case of Roman urbanism, this is obvious in one particular way. Constructing a city with a gridded street pattern in a place where the tradition of neither Roman-style cities nor orthogonal layouts existed before certainly introduced people to Roman culture in a very physical way. But the placement of buildings with particular uses in similar locations with relation to streets was a much more subtle and powerful way for people to become acculturated to Roman ways. L. Revel has pointed out that the layout of Roman buildings reinforces social structure.9 One must understand the social rituals that take place within

Streets, Space, and Roman Urbanism 203 a building and where to go in order to participate fully in the ritual.10 As one repeats these behaviors orchestrated by the spatial setting, the behavior becomes ingrained. Revel gives the example of the urban basilica. Someone visiting this public building for the fi rst time would have had to learn which areas and rooms to enter, which not to, and how to behave in each location. In this way the arrangement of space would shape the behavior of the person using it. People could choose, of course, not to participate in the proper behavior within a Roman building as a way of showing opposition to Roman culture, but they would still have to learn what the expected actions were so that they might avoid doing them or do them in a way that challenged behavior considered correct. The uniform arrangement of street space in Roman cities described above was not simply imposed on the city by the elite or the imperial government. Many urbanites also did their part to create Roman spatial arrangements that would then help accustom people to certain behaviors. Consider the organization of commercial space, an architectural type overlooked by many interested in urbanism, using the example of Empúries. Shops lining the primary street that linked the city gate and the forum in the Ciudad Romana represent more than just one way to arrange urban space; their placement represents an entire economic and social system. Prior to the arrival of Roman military forces in the late third century BCE, the spatial structure of Empúries was influenced by Greek and Iberian cultures. Commerce in Classical Greek cities focused on the agora. Whereas a few shops built into domestic structures might open onto an important street as at Olynthos,11 in many Hellenistic-era cities shops were clustered in the agora or near the harbor and were often confi ned to purpose-built structures12 like the stoa in the Neapolis agora. Iberian culture had a different attitude towards commercial exchange. The nearest well-excavated and documented Iberian town to Empúries is Ullastret, where no shops or market buildings have been identified.13 The Greeks inhabiting Empúries came from a culture where commerce was contained whereas the Iberian attitude towards commerce was that it was not conducted out of permanent shops in public locations. People entering the Ciudad Romana, on the other hand, would have encountered the street lined with one-room shops, wares spread for display on the edge of the street, and shopkeepers competing for their attention. The difference in the location, size, and shape of commercial structures also represents a difference in the economic role of merchants in the city and probably their social behavior as well. Those who chose to visit the Ciudad Romana and take advantage of its shops, not to mention those who chose to settle within the walls of the Roman neighborhood at Empúries, had to understand and adapt to Roman culture as it was practiced there. If they were already familiar with Roman culture, purchasing something in the Ciudad Romana would only have served to reinforce and reaffi rm specific social, economic, and commercial practices common to people within the empire.

204


The ideas about the placement of commercial space evident in the Ciudad Romana may have actually had an impact on the structure of space in Neapolis. The people of Neapolis clearly did not have a Roman model in mind when they were deciding how to use space in that neighborhood of the city. Because the foundation of Neapolis long preceded the Roman presence in this part of Spain, many of the decisions about how to allocate space had been made using a non-Roman model. Nonetheless, a powerful Roman presence stood within view of Neapolis for about three centuries, fi rst as a military camp and later as a full Roman-style city. Some Roman architectural influence did permeate the walls of Neapolis; this part of Empúries had a Roman-style bath and temple as well as houses with an atrium,14 peristyle,15 or both features.16 Roman-style commercial structures also appeared in Neapolis. The rows of shops in Neapolis lining the streets that linked the agora to the southern plaza, the western gate, and the harbor are unusual in Greek settlements and did not exist in Iberian ones. Indeed, as one approached the agora of Neapolis from the south, nearly every doorway led to a shop. This arrangement of commercial space is identical to what we see in the adjoining Ciudad Romana. Because dates of construction of the Neapolis shops are not known, we cannot be certain whether these shops predate or postdate those in the Ciudad Romana. Nevertheless, this could represent yet another way that Roman culture was having an impact on the existing culture of Neapolis, habituating the neighborhood’s residents and visitors to Roman ways of shopping and retailing and, more broadly, to economic and social constructs typical of contemporary Roman culture. It has been noted before that Roman urbanism of the Principate and early Late Antique period contained architectural elements that united it into a singular phenomenon. The evidence from Pompeii, Ostia, Silchester, and the Ciudad Romana demonstrates that Roman cities were more than just a collection of fora, baths, and atrium houses. It is the way that these features were arranged in relation to the primary and secondary streets as well as the fora and plazas that helped make Roman urbanism what it was. The organization of these features also organized the behavior of people in Roman cities, helping to steep them in Roman culture.

CONCLUSION The study of the street in Roman cities is still in its early stages. Nonetheless, this is an exciting time to be pursuing street studies as the field is developing rapidly. The analysis of the Latin vocabulary for streets shows that there is more we still have to learn about urbanism from ancient sources. The statistical techniques outlined demonstrate the possibility for wringing new information from old data without having to conduct the destructive process of excavation. As the analyses of Silchester, Ostia, and the Ciudad Romana

Streets, Space, and Roman Urbanism 205 demonstrate, these techniques can also provide a way to analyze information gathered from aerial photography and remote sensing. Streets played a bigger role in the Roman city than has been appreciated. It is hoped that this work will inspire others to delve into the study of streets and give streets their proper place in the scholarship on the ancient city. The conclusions outlined here about the use of space along primary and secondary streets, fora, and plazas can serve as hypotheses for testing at other sites. In addition, because these techniques can be applied at sites that are only partially excavated or that have been investigated primarily through aerial photography and remote-sensing techniques, we can also begin to bring many other Roman sites into the discussion. Rightly or wrongly, Pompeii has been at the center of much of our understanding of Roman urbanism simply because of the great extent to which it has been excavated. Using the techniques outlined here, we can employ the evidence from more sites and allow them to contribute to our knowledge of streets and the use of urban space.

Notes

NOTES TO THE PREFACE 1. E.g., Staccioli (2003); Davies (2002); Laurence (1999); Schneider (1982); Bagshawe (1979); Chevallier (1976); von Hagen (1967); Salama (1951). 2. Gesemann (1996).

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Nadeau (2008). 2. Hillier and Hanson (1984): ix; Lawrence and Low (1990): 466. 3. A few examples of recent studies of building space in Roman architecture include DeLaine (2004); Laurence (2007): 129–133; Stöger (2009); id. (2008); Wallace-Hadrill (1994): 3–64. 4. Hillier (1996) sees in this power relationship the opportunity to improve life in modern cities. 5. E.g., Laurence (2007): 82–101; Wallace-Hadrill (1995). See the rebuttal by McGinn (2004). 6. Gesemann (1996). 7. E.g., Owens (1991); Ward-Perkins (1974); Castagnoli (1971). 8. The use of aerial photography at Ostia, Empúries, and Silchester will be discussed further below. For an honest and humorous account of the challenges of photographing the Roman city of Stobi from the air, see Wesolowsky (2003). 9. Cf. Kipfer (2000): 94–95 and 150; Bahn, ed. (1993): 82 and 129; Whitehouse, ed. (1984): 86–87; Bray and Trump (1970): 48 and 71–72. 10. Lynch (1960). 11. Scagliarini Corlàita (1979). 12. MacDonald (1986): 3. 13. MacDonald (1986): 18–19. 14. Zanker (1987). The same year Zanker published his paper, Purcell (1987) published a similar description of walking out of ancient Rome in order to explore the role of gardens in the countryside around the city. Because his account is concerned primarily with the edges of the city and beyond, it is not considered here. 15. Yegül (1994). 16. Favro (1996). 17. Malmberg (2009). 18. Fridell Anter and Weilguni (2003). For a fuller description of space syntax, see chapter 2.

208

Notes

19. E.g., Benoist (2008); Esmonde Cleary (2005); Bayliss (1999); Favro (1994). 20. Malmberg (2009); Anter Fridell and Weilguni (2003). For a critique of Favro in particular on this issue, see Haselberger (2000): 522. 21. Yegül (1994): 101 and 103. 22. Lott (2004) provides the most extensive such study to date for Rome. Laurence (2007): 39–61 has done some useful work on defi ning districts using the archaeological evidence from Pompeii. 23. Malmberg (2009): 39 24. Tsujimura (1991). 25. Poehler (2006). 26. Laurence (1995) and (2007). The first edition of Laurence’s Roman Pompeii. Space and Society was published in 1994. The second edition appeared in 2007. 27. Laurence (2008); id. (2007): 103–116; id. (1995). 28. Interest in streets continues to grow; see the forthcoming Rome, Ostia and Pompeii: Movement and Space, D. Newsome and R. Laurence, eds., Oxford University Press: Oxford. 29. Mar (2008). 30. Newsome (2009b). 31. MacDonald (1986): 14–17. 32. 1.7.1. 33. Philo On Creation 17, Loeb translation. 34. Aelius Aristides The Roman Oration 97–98. Translation by Oliver (1958). 35. Paus. 3.4.1–2, Loeb translation. 36. Achilles Tatius, 5.1. Loeb translation. 37. Libanius To the Emperor Theodosius, After the Reconciliation 20.42; Oration on Antioch 212. 38. Libanius Oration on Antioch, 196–198, 201–202, 211, 215–219; To the Emperor Theodosius, After the Reconciliation 20.42. 39. Auson. Ordo nob. urb. 7. 40. Hermansen (1978) gives a good summary of the scholarship on the Regionaries. Wallace-Hadrill (2008): 296–297 argues these categories represent property divisions, which explains the absence of shops from the list; shops were part of the same architectural unit as a house or apartment building and so had already been counted. His argument does not necessarily invalidate the view that these categories represent nodes in the urban landscape. 41. The issue of street names is discussed at length in the fi rst chapter. 42. Plaut. Pseud. 594–597 and 960–962. 43. Ter. Adel. 570–582. 44. Plin. 3.66. 45. Vit. 3.2.2–3. 46. Cf. Laurence (1999): 133–134 for a discussion of this phenomenon along with references to the relevant epigraphic sources. 47. Mark 11.2. 48. CIL 4.8356. 49. Achilles Tatius, 5.1. 50. Cic. Q Fr. 2.3.7. 51. CIL 6.9671. 52. Mart. 1.70; additional ancient references to nodes and landmarks as providing a basis for ancient perceptions of Roman cities are discussed in MacDonald (1982): 14 and Favro (1996): 4–11. 53. Ling (1990). 54. Wallace-Hadrill (1991a): x; MacDonald (1986): 46–50. 55. Van der Meer (1998); La Rocca (2000); van Tilburg (2007): 156–157.

Notes

209

56. See Pappalardo and Capuano (2006) and particularly their discussion of the city that appears in the fresco depicting the fl ight of Icarus from the Casa del Sacerdos Amandus at Pompeii: 83–84. 57. Carder (1978): 189–195; see La Rocca (2000) for further examples of the “city vignette.” 58. Meiggs (1973): plate XX. 59. A Stanford University team has scanned and created 3-D models of nearly all the surviving fragments of the Forma Urbis; cf. Koller, Trimble, Najbjerg, Gelfand, and Levoy (2006). Their work is available online at http://formaurbis.stanford.edu. 60. Tucci (2004): 185. 61. Reynolds (1996): 75. 62. Reynolds (1996): 83–90. 63. Kondoleon (2000): 114–115 and fig. 6. 64. For two examples of the importance of checking published information against standing architectural remains, see Fridell Anter and Weilguni (2003): 32–33; Schoonhoven (1999): 227. 65. Woolf (2000): 120. 66. Reece (1985): 37. 67. The other fully excavated site is Timgad in Algeria, where civil unrest at the time of writing made a visit impossible. 68. Kaiser (2000a); id. (2000b).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

MacDonald (1986) 1–4. Nicolet (1987). González (1986): 148–149. Hardy (1912): 9. For a discussion of the lack of interest in, and inability to, zone brothels, see McGinn (2004): 134–147. Crawford, ed. (1996): 393–454; BJRA, no. 1; FIRA, no. 21. Crawford, ed. (1996): 404 and 424. Cic. Leg. 2.58; Dio Cass. 48.43.3. Crawford, ed. (1996): 404 and 424. Crawford, ed. (1996): 404 and 424. Goodman (2007): 107–108. Fest. Gloss. Lat. 382–383 L. Plin. Tra. 10.8. Joshel (1992): 46–49. Owens (1991): 1. For Cicero’s praise of Plato and Socrates’s views on urban economic activity, see Att. 14.9.1. Pl. Leg. 6.778 C-E; id. 7.804 C; id. 8.848C-E. Pl. Leg. 4.704 D-705B. Livy 21.63.3 While his work is in many ways now dated, Finley (1973): 40–61 still provides an excellent introduction to ancient elite attitudes towards economic activity based on the written sources. Joshel (1992): 25–61. See Peterson (2003) for a discussion of this tomb and several photos of it. See Descouedres (2001): 416 for images of these grave markers.

210 Notes 24. Edmondson, Nogales Basarrate, and Trillmich (2001) 65, fig. 3.1, M.N.A.R. inv. 676. 25. Bianchi Bandinelli (1970): 51–106. The impact of status on the creation and reading of Roman art continues to be of interest, see Clarke (2003). 26. Flohr (2009): 174 calls on us to set aside elite views of the nonelite and examine the lives of fullers and others who did not share the views of the elite on their own terms. 27. For a study of this phenomenon at Pompeii, see Robinson (2005). 28. Robinson (2005); Wallace-Hadrill (1991b). 29. Purcell (1999); D’Arms (1981). 30. For a discussion of the Earthquake Relief and this fi rst image from the House of Julia Felix, as well as photos of these scenes, see Pappalardo and Capuano (2006): 84–85. 31. For a drawing of this scene, see Mau (1899): fig. 16. 32. Juv. Sat. 1.106. 33. Dig. 32.38.5. 34. CIL 4.138. 35. Laurence (2007): 134. 36. CIL 4.1136=ILS 5723. 37. Hunt and Edgar (1932): 431–433. 38. Lib. Autobiography 102. 39. Mart. 7.61. 40. Auson. Ep. 6.21–31. 41. Sen. de Ira 3.35.5. 42. See the Lex Coloniae Genetivae Juliae, Crawford, ed. (1996): 425; BJRA, no. 1; FIRA, no. 21. 43. For a thorough description of the titles and duties of these officials and the evolution of their offices over time, see Robinson (1992): 59–82. 44. E.g., Ulpian, dig. 43.8.25; id. 43.8.32; Papinian, dig. 43.10.3. 45. Scobie (1986): 408 and 418; See Jansen (1997) and Wacher (1997): 110 for discussions of this phenomenon at Pompeii and Silchester, respectively. 46. Juv. 3.268–277; Dig. 9.3. 47. Front. 2.111. 48. Petron. Sat. 79; Apul. Met. 3.16; id. 3.17. 49. Pagano (2000): 64. 50. Paul, dig. 18.6.13 (12). 51. Hor. Epist. 2.2.65–75; Julian Mis.; Lib., For the Peasantry, About Forced Labour, passim; id. Autobiography 259; Plaut. Epidicus 208. 52. Auson. Ep. 6.21–31; Livy 21.62. We should also keep in mind that the Forum Boarium, or “Cattle Market”, was located in Rome; it would have been easiest to herd the cattle there even if they were eventually intended for slaughter. 53. Vulgate, Mark 11.4. 54. Auson. Ep. 6.21–31; Hor. Epist. 2.2.75. 55. Plin. HN 8.77.208. 56. Robinson (1992): 72; Scobie (1986): 419–420. 57. Apul. Met. 4.14. 58. Plaut. St. 351–352. 59. Dio Cass. 59.12; Suet. Vesp. 5.3. 60. E.g., Juv. Sat. 3.247; Mart. 7.61; Sen. De ira 3.35.5. 61. Papinian, dig. 43.10.1; CIL I.593: 20–55 / ILS 6085. Cf. Saliou (1999) for archaeological evidence that supports her argument this law was enforced at Pompeii. 62. Papinian, dig. 43.10.1; Venuleius, dig. 43.23.2; Callistratus, dig. 50.4.14.1–2; CIL I.593: 20–55 / ILS 6085. 63. González (1986): 153 and 182; id. 175 and 195; BJRA, no. 2.

Notes 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

211

Robinson (1992): 71. Plin. Tra. 10.32.2. Nicolet (1987): 7–10. Zaccaria Ruggiu (1995): 274. During the late Republic, Cicero accused Verres of embezzling funds intended for paving; cf. Verr. 2.1.59. Celsus, dig. 31.30. Stambaugh (1988) 188–189. E.g., Papinian, dig. 43.10.1. Tabula Heracleensis 56–61; Carcopino (1940): 49. Plostra was more common during the Republic but during the Principate mainly among the lower classes. Suetonius tells the story of how during the imperial period Vespasian used the variant pronunciation, only to have a man named Mestrius Florus correct him and point out that the word was properly pronounced plaustra. When Vespasian saw the man the next day, he addressed him as “Flaurus.” Robinson (1992): 75. Suet. Claud. 25.2; van Tilburg (2007): 132–134. SHA Hadr. 22.6; for a discussion of this passage, see Eck (2008): 65. SHA Hadr. 23.4.8. On the outright dangers posed by draft animals and carts, see; Libanius Autobiography 216–217; id. 259. Hor. Epist. 1.17.6–8. Pliny, Pan. 51.1. Juv. 3.235; Auson. Ep. 6.21–31. Juv. 3.255–67. Ulpian dig. 9.2.27.33. Alfenius, dig. 9.2.52.2. Martin (2000); Eck (2008): 59–61. Libanius Autobiography 216–217. 11.172. van Tilburg (2007): 132. Ward-Perkins (1974): 109–110, no. 10; Castagnoli (1971): 32. The word kardo could also be spelled cardo, although the former spelling is the more common among ancient Latin authors; André (1950): 116, n. 4; Dilke (1971): 231. Meiggs (1973): x; Ward-Perkins (1974): 28; Owens (1991): 110; Whitehouse, ed. (1984): 86–87; see Ward-Perkins (1955): 150 for a discussion of the epigraphic evidence for the use of the word kardo for city streets in Orange. Wheeler (1964): 35. Dilke (1971): 86–87; e.g., Frontin, 12.1–8; see the commentary on this passage in Campbell (2000): 326, n. 27. Woloch (1983): 332–333. E.g., Mumford (1961): 207; Macaulay (1974): 12–13; McKay (1975): 20, 269, 270; Schneider (1982): 81; Grimal (1983): 11; Gates (2003): 324. See van Tilburg (2007): 7–9 for further discussion of these terms. Juv. 4.116–118; id 5.4–9; id. 14.134; Macrob. Sat. 3.16.17; Ov. Ib. 218; Plut. Vit. Num. 9.2–4. Varro Ling. 5.145. Cic. Att. 2.1.7; Livy 27.37.15; id. 41.27.7; Mart. 1.70; Ov. Fast. 203–204; Val. Max. 1.1.10; Varro Ling. 5.158; for examples of clivi from Rome, see Haselberger, Romano and Dumser (2002): 90–92. Fest. Gloss. Lat. 275. Livy 41.27.5–12; Mart. 11.82; Plin. HN 8.61.145; Suet. Aug. 72.1; Tac. Ann. 3.14; Haselberger, Romano and Dumser (2002): 135 and 221.

212 Notes 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139. 140. 141.

Vitr. De arch. 1.7.1. E.g., Cic. Att. 4.17. Livy 1.48.5–7; id. 9.30.9. App. B Civ. 5.13.130; Cic. Phil. 5.15.40–41; id. Phil. 9.2.4; id. Phil. 9.7.16; Dio Cass. 43.49.1–3; Livy 8.13.9; id. 9.43.22; Plin. Ep. 1.17. Suet. Aug. 31.5. E.g., Cic. Att. 4.17; Livy 1.48.5–7; id. 5.7.7–10; id. 5.55.1–2; id. 8.14.12; id. 22.60.1–2. E.g., App. B Civ. 1.26; id. 1.54; id. 2.102; Frontin. Aq. 2.129; Livy 3.48.5. Frontin. Aq. 1.4. Amm. Marc. 16.10.13. Cic. Phil. 1.9.21. Cic. Phil. 3.12.31. Livy 120.50. Haselberger, Romano and Dumser (2002): 74–77. Richardson (1992): 4 and 33; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 72–78. Devijuer and van Wonterghem (1984): 199–200. Hor. Epist. 1.10.13; Vitr. De arch. 1.7.1; Cic. Att. 4.1; Livy 4.16; id. 1.55; Suet. Vesp. 8.5. Platner and Ashby (1965): 31–32; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 53–54. Varro Ling. 5.38; Fest. Gloss. Lat. 104 (10). Vit. De arch. 1.7.1. Platner and Ashby (1965): 47–51; Richardson (1992): 31–37. Hor. Od. 1.9.18. Platner and Ashby (1965): 50; Richardson (1992): 32. App. B Civ. 2.115; Cic. Att. 4.17; id. Mur. 44; id. Mur. 69; Hor. Carm. 2.1; Livy 6.20.9–12; id. 7.18.9. Suet. Gaius 34.1. Luc. 7.734; Suet. Iul. 84.1; Tac. Ann. 3.4. Livy 27.37.14–15. Dio Cass. 39.38.1–3; id. 51.23.1; id. 53.1.5; Suet. Aug. 43.1; id. Iul. 39.3. Hor. Od. 1.9.18–25. This word appears in Latin with both the neuter and masculine endings. The neuter is the more ancient form; see André (1951): 126. Caes. B Alex. 2. Cic. Div. 1.32.69. Vitr. De arch. 1.6.1; id. 1.6.7–8; id. 1.7.1; Apul. Met. 3.2. Vitr. De arch. 3. praef.4; id. 1.6.12; Caes. B civ. 1.27; Vulgate Can. Can. 3.2; id. Luke 14.21; August. De civ. D. 7.26. Cic. Leg. agr. 2.35.96; Mart. 7.61; Plaut. Rud. 212; id. Trin. 480–481. Caes. B civ. 1.27; Plin. Tra. 10.32.2. Cic. Mil. 24.64. Castagnoli (1971): 32–35. Cf. Cic. Verr. 4.119 on Syracuse; Cic. Leg. agr. 2.35.96 on Capua; Tac. Ann. 15.43 on Rome; Pliny Tra. 10.98.1 on Amastris; Procop. Aed. 2.10.19–25 on Antioch; references to two grand boulevards in Rome, the Via Nova and the Via Sacra, are ubiquitous in Latin literature; see below. SHA M. Ant. 9.9; for further examples, see Plaut. Cas. 240 and 799; Apul. Met. 3.2 vs. 3.10; Isid. Orig. 15.2.23. On the Via Sacra in Rome, see below. Caes. B Alex. 2. Juv. Sat. 3.249–267.

Notes 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181.

213

Livy 1.41.4. Sen. Controv. 2.1.11. Isid. Orig. 15.2.24. André (1950): 119 and 130–133; Bejor (1999): 123; Harsh (1937): 49–50; Lolos (2003): 157–160 and 167–169; see also entry in Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. André (1950): 132. Strabo 8.14.1.37; id. 17.1.8–1010; Procop. Aed. 2.10.19–25; Josephus AJ 16–145–6; Libanius To the Emperor Theodosius, After the Reconciliation 20.42; id. Oration on Antioch 11.196–198, 11.201–202, 11.211, 11.215– 219. Serv. Verg. A. 1.422. Cic. Leg. agr. 2.35.96 ; Livy 5.55.3–5; Diod. Sic. 14.116.8–9; Plut. Vit. Cam. 32.3. Tac. 15.43. SHA M. Ant. 9.9; Richardson (1992): 417; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 181–182. Plin. Tra. 10.98.1. Harsh (1937): 45; Lolos (2003): 156–157. André (1950): 124–129; Varro Ling. 5.145. Varro Ling. 5.35; see also Serv. Verg. A. 4.405 for a similar statement. E.g., Plaut. Rud. 212; Cic. Off. 2.58; Livy 6.25.8–10; Mart. 7.61; Sen. Ep. 64.10. Plaut. Curc. 278–298; id. Merc. 111–119. Harsh (1937): 56. E.g., Ulpian, dig. 8.3.1; Pomponius, dig. 18.1.66; Paul, dig. 20.1.12; id. 33.2.1; id. 39.3.17; Pomponius, dig. 43.7.1; Ulpian, dig. 43.8.2.23–25; id. 43.19.1.7; id. 45.1.72. Ulpian, dig. 8.3.1. Pomponius, dig. 8.1.13; Paul, dig. 8.3.7; Modestinus, dig. 8.3.12. Varro, Ling. 5.22; id. 5.34, id. 5.35. E.g., Julian, dig. 8.4.14. Varro Ling.7.15; Ov. Fast. 6.601–610. Caes. B Alex. 2. Mart. 5.22. Varro Ling. 6.41. Varro Ling. 5.35. The Twelve Tables sets the width of a via at 8 Roman feet, which is equivalent to about 2.4 m. For a fuller discussion of street widths, see the next chapter. Javolenus, dig. 8.3.13.2. Sen Ep. 64.10. Cic. Off. 2.58. E.g., Apul. Met. 2.27; id. 3.2; Suet. Vit. 17.1; Livy 5.41.5; id. 9.24.12; Ovid Fast. 6.395–408; Serv. Verg. A. 1.422. Cic. Cat. 2.273; Caes. B. civ. 1.27. Castagnoli (1971): 32–35. 443–446. Castagnoli (1971): 32–35. Hor. Carm. 1.25.9–10; Mart. 7.61; Petron. Sat. 61; Suet. Aug. 45.2–3; id. Ner. 38.1–2; Tac. Ann. 15.38–40; id. 15.43. Auct. ad Her. 4.51.64. Tac. Ann. 15.38–40. Matthew 6.2–5. Varro Ling. 5.159; Livy 1.48.5–7; Ov. Fast. 6.601–610.

214 Notes 182. Juv. 3.232–248. 183. For a history and discussion of the “vicus question” based on the evidence from Rome, see Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 17–18. 184. Laurence (2007): 40–42; Zaccaria Ruggiu (1995): 264–269. 185. Harsh (1937): 52. 186. Suet. Aug. 30; Laurence (2008): 99–104; Wallace-Hadrill (2008): 264–297; Stambaugh (1988): 184. See Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 266–272 for a catalog of Augustan vici in Rome. Lott (2004) and WallaceHadrill (2003) both explore Augustus’s use of vici in depth. 187. Nicolet (1991): 195–197. 188. Lott (2004): 13–18; Harsh (1937): 51. 189. Harsh (1937): 57; André (1950): 120 comes to a similar conclusion independently. 190. A similar ambiguity existed in Greek; cf. Lolos (2003): 165. 191. Ulpian, dig. 3.2.5. 192. Mommsen, Krueger, and Watson, trans. (1985): 82. 193. Richardson (1992): 413. 194. Carcopino (1940): 45. 195. Richardson (1992): 338–340; Steinby, ed. (1999): 223–228; Platner and Ashby (1965): 456–459; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 217–218. 196. Richardson (1992): 268–269; Steinby (1999): 346–348; Platner and Ashby (1965): 361–362. 197. Richardson (1992): 5; Steinby (1993): 30; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 44. 198. Richardson (1992): 39; Tortorici (1991): 32–37 argues Argiletum was the name of a district, not a street. 199. Richardson (1992): 417; CIL 6.450 = ILS 3618; Regionaries, Regio 6. 200. Ov. Fast. 6.191–192; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 263–264. 201. Richardson (1992): 416 and 419; Steinby (1999): 137–138 and 145–146. 202. Livy 22.36.8; see Richardson (1992): 416 for a discussion of this problem. 203. Steinby (1999): 139; Richardson (1992): 416; Regionaries, Regio 7. 204. Ling (1990): 207; Gesemann (1996): 161. 205. CIL 10.4650 and 10.4660; Harsh (1937): 48. 206. Auson. Epigr. 82; Cic. Leg. agr. 2.34.94; Cic. Sest. 8.19; Pliny NH 33.108; id. 16.16.40–41. 207. Cic. Leg. agr. 2.34.94; Livy 40.45.3. 208. Pavolini (2006): 204. 209. Suet. Aug. 1. 210. Fallou and Guilhembet (2008): 180–185; Richardson (1992): 413; Harsh (1937): 51; the certainty of Platner and Ashby (1965): 570–580 and Stambaugh (1988): 185 that anytime an ancient author used the term vicus with a proper name he meant to describe a street and not a neighborhood is not founded on any defi nitive evidence. 211. Varro Ling. 5.159; Livy 1.48.5–7; id. 27.37.14–15; Ov. Fast. 6.601–610; August. Conf. 6.9. 212. André (1950): 120. 213. Varro Ling. 5.158. 214. Hor. Carm. 4.2.35; Varro Ling. 5.158. 215. Harsh (1937): 51–52; Ling (1990). 216. Mounin (1980): 494. 217. See the introduction. 218. van Tilburg (2007): 44. 219. Although, see Catull. 15.7 for the use of platea in the same sense; as a place where public, open things occur.

Notes 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225.

226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242. 243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260. 261.

215

Cic. Verr. 2.56.22. Cic. Cat. 2.27. Cic. Verr. 1.7.19. Livy 5.32.6; Plut. Vit. Cam. 14.2. E.g., Apul. Met. 2.27; id. 8.24; id. 11.7; id. 11.9; August. De civ. D. 7.26; Cic. Verr. 2.1.59; Livy 1.26.13–14; id. 4.30.10; Ov. Fast. 4.183–186; id. 5.101– 102; Serv. Verg. A. 8.717. Ov. Met. 14.748–755; Ulpian, dig. 11.7.38; the emperor Julian promulgated an edict forcing such processions to take place at night because of the perceived annoyance to people going about their daily business; cf. Julian Edict on Funerals in Wright (1923): 192–195. Plaut. Cas. 856. Plaut. Cas. 799. Vulgate, Luke 10.10. Favro (1994). Favro (1994): 159. Cic. Verr. 1.154; Livy 2.13.11; Serv. Verg. A. 8.641; id. 8.646. Cic. Planc. 7. Juv. Sat. 3.245–248. Libanius Oration on Antioch 172. Suet. Tib. 2.3. Cic. Att. 1.18; id. Mur. 44; id. Mur. 69; id. Mur. 70; id. Comment. pet. 36; id. Comment. pet. 37–38; Hor. Carm. 3.1; Lib. 33.12; Plut. Mor. 78.6; id. Vit. Publicola 10.2–4; Tac. Dial. 6.4; id. Dial. 7.4; Dial. 9.2–3; Dial. 11.3. Lib. Autobiography 89. Laurence (2007): 163. Catull. 15.7; Apul. Met. 4.29. Prop. 2.23.15. Plaut. Merc. 406–410. Plaut. Epidicus 226. Prop. 2.23.15; id. 3.8.13–14. Hor. Epod. 4. Ov. Fast. 6.395–408. Ov. Fast. 6.601–610. Matthew 6.2–5. Vulgate, Mark 10.46; Apul. Met. 1.6. Dio Cass. 64.20.2–3; Plin. HN 8.61.145; Suet. Tib. 53.2; id. Tib. 61.4; id. Tib. 75.2–3; id. Vit. 17.1; SHA Heliogab. 33.7; id. M. Ant. 4.2; Tac. Ann. 3.14. Plaut. Poen. 1301. Plaut. Truc. 759. Plaut. Poen. 520–529. Several centuries later Propertius mocks a woman for running along the Via Sacra in shabby clothes; 3.8.13–14. Plaut. Merc. 797–799. Plaut. Cas. 240. Plaut. Asin. 690. Plaut. Poen. 520–529; Hor. Epod. 5.96–99. Cic. Att. 4.3; Livy 1.41.4; id. 24.7.2–6; Tac. Ann. 1.5; Aul. Gel. 16.5. Mart. 7.61; Ovid Amores 1.8.100; id. Ars. Am. 2.265–266. Sen. Ep. 56.4. E.g. CIL 1.3005; CIL 6.1974; CIL 6.9207; CIL 6.9212; CIL 6.9214; CIL 6.9221; CIL 6.9239; CIL 6.9418; CIL 6.9419; CIL 6.9435; CIL 6.9545– 9549; CIL 6.9283; CIL 6.9795; CIL 6.9935. Ter. An. 796; Plaut. Cist. 330–331.

216 Notes 262. Juv. Sat. 3.268–314 gives a good description of the streets of Rome and their nightly perils. See also Suet. Ner. 26.1; Oppian Halieutica 2.408–418; Petron. Sat. 79; Apul. Met. 2.32; id. 3.27–28. 263. Juv. Sat. 3. 272–275. 264. Paul, dig. 9.3.6; in citing this argument, the jurist Paul disagreed, arguing that people also passed through the streets at night. 265. Plaut. Merc. 111–119; id. Trin. 480–481; Livy 6.25.8–10; Sen Ep. 3.35.3; id. Ep. 64.10. 266. E.g., Apul. Met. 9.25; Livy 6.25.8–10. 267. Prop. 4.8.59–60. 268. Harsh (1937): 46; cf. Plaut. Pseud. 960–961; Rhet. Her. 4.64. 269. E.g., Perotti’s 20th tale of Phaedrus. 270. Plaut. Asin. 741; id. Mostell. 1043–1049; Apul. Met. 1.21; id. 9.2; Castagnoli (1971): 34. 271. Castagnoli (1971): 34. 272. Met. 9.25. 273. Livy 6.25.8–10. 274. Mart. 7.61. 275. Oration on Antioch 11.254, translation by Downy (1959). 276. Alfenius, dig. 9.2.52.1. 277. Plaut. Pseud. 594–597. 278. Hor. Carm. 1.25.9–10. 279. Catull. 58.4. 280. Ter. Eun. 844–846; Plaut. Mostell. 1043–1049; id. Persa 443–446; id. Persa 678. 281. Plaut. Pseud. 1233–1235. 282. Beare (1939), reprinted in Beare (1950): 256–263. 283. Plaut. Cist. 123–124. 284. Cic. Mil. 24.64. 285. Suet. Galb. 10.5. 286. Apul. Met. 9.2. 287. Apul. Met. 4.20. 288. Apul. Met. 3.2. 289. Harsh (1937): 47. 290. Cic. Verr. 2.141. 291. E.g., Petron. Sat. 79; Plaut. Pseud. 960–962; Rhet. Her. 4.51.64; Ter. Ad. 570–582. 292. Cic. Verr. 2.2.23. 293. Livy 10.23.6; Petron. Sat. 61. 294. Petron. Sat. 61; Suet. Ner. 26.1. 295. Livy 24.10.8; Mart. 11.27; August. Conf. 6.9; id. De civ. D. 7.4. 296. Suet. Calig. 28. 297. SHA Heliogab. 17.8–9. 298. Suet. Aug. 45.2–3; Scobie (1986): 433. 299. Livy 27.37.14–15. 300. Livy 1.48.5–7; Plut. QR 264C. 301. Suet. Aug. 1. 302. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 3.22.8. 303. Plin. HN 3.66; Laurence (2007): 39–61. 304. Serv. Verg. A. 8.717. 305. Livy 27.23.7; id. 38.36.4. 306. Prop. 2.22A.3. 307. Prop. 2.20.22.

Notes

217

308. Suet. Aug. 31.4. See Lott (2004) for a thorough discussion of how Augustus revived worship at these shrines. 309. Plin. HN 8.61.145; Suet. Tib. 53.2; id. Tib. 61.4; id. Tib. 75.2–3; id. Vit. 17.1; Tac. Ann. 3.14; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 135. 310. Suet. Aug. 72.1; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 221. 311. Mart. 5.22. 312. Hor. Carm. 4.2.35. 313. Plut. Vit. Num. 9.2–4. 314. Macrob. Sat. 3.16.17. 315. Juv. 4.116–118; id. 5.4–9; id. 14.134; Ov. Ib. 218. 316. Auct. ad Her. 2.13.20; Mart. 3.38; id. 5.20; Plut. Mor. 78.6; Suet. Ner. 17; Tac. Dial. 3. 317. App. B Civ. 1.121; id. Mac. 19; Cic. Mur. 44; id. Mur. 70; id. Verr. 1.15.50; Frontin. Aq. 2.129; Livy 1.48.5–7; id. 4.6.9; Plut. Mor. 78.6. 318. App. B Civ. 1.54; Livy 25.1.7–8; id. 27.37.14–15; id. 39.16.8. 319. App. B Civ. 5.13.130; Cic. Phil. 5.15.40–41; id. Phil. 9.2.4; id. Phil. 9.7.16; Dio Cass. 43.49.1–3; Livy 8.13.9; id. 9.43.22; Plin. Ep. 1.17. 320. App. B Civ. 1.54; Cic. Phil. 1.9.21; Livy 1.35.10; id. 9.7.8; Varro Ling. 6.59. 321. Livy 9.40.16; id. 26.11.7. 322. Cic. Phil. 9.7.16; Livy 23.30.15; id. 39.46.2–5; see also Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 129–131. 323. Morel (1987); Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 131–134. 324. Varro Ling. 5.146; Livy 24.10.8; id. 26.27–2-3; id. 35.40.7–8; id. 40.51.5; Plaut. Curc. 474. The Forum Piscarium and Forum Cuppedinis were located in the Argiletum; see Tortorici (1991): 36 and 90–92. 325. Autobiography 102. 326. Livy 1.44.4. 327. App. B Civ. 2.115. 328. E.g., Cic. Att. 4.17; id. Mur. 44; id. Mur. 69; Hor. Carm. 2.1; Livy 6.20.11– 12; id. 7.18.9. 329. Livy 6.20.9–12. 330. Luc. 7.734; Suet. Iul. 84.1; Tac. Ann. 3.4. 331. Dio Cass. 39.38.1–3; id. 51.23.1; id. 53.1.5; Suet. Aug. 43.1; id. Iul. 39.3. 332. Livy 24.10.8; id. 40.52.3. 333. Devijuer and van Wonterghem (1984): 200. 334. Tac. Ann. 15.39. 335. Livy 8.15.8; Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 78. 336. Hor. Carm. 1.9.18. 337. Platner and Ashby (1965): 50; Richardson (1992): 32.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. 2. 3. 4.

Ulpian, dig. 43.8.2.21. Haselberger, Romano, and Dumser (2002): 181–182 and 217–218. E.g., Livy 1.41.4; id. 2.13.11; Cic. Planc. 7. Varro Ling. 5.43; id. 6.24; Livy 1.19.1–2. For a discussion of all of these terms, see Tortorici (1991): 34. 5. Malmberg (2009): 45. 6. Zaccaria Ruggiu argues that the private roads legal sources mentioned in the countryside had no counterpart in the city (1995): 251–264 and 273– 274. 7. Davies (2002): 58–64.

218 Notes 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Forbes (1934): 155. Salama (1951): 91. van Tilburg (2007): 15–16; Davies (2002): 63. E.g., Almagro and Lamboglia (1959) at Empúries and Fulford, Rippon, Ford, Timby, and Williams (1997) at Silchester. Gesemann (1996): 55 and fig, 5. Fulford et al. (1997): 140. Davies (2002): 107. Sillières (1983). Tsujimura (1991) and Poehler (2006). Cf. plan in de la Bédoyère (2003): 27. E.g., Almagro and Lamboglia (1959); Fulford et al. (1997); Plin. Tra. 10.98.1. Jansen (2000). For a description of underground sewers in Rome, see Dodge (2000): 191– 193; Pompeii, Jansen (1997): 131; Koga (1992): 60–71; Richardson (1988): 61–62 and 152–153; and Ostia, Meiggs (1973): 142–143. Jansen (2000) compares the public drainage at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Ostia. For a lament over the absence of sewers at Smyrna, see Strabo 14.1.37. Davies (2002): 63. Gesemann (1996): 63, n. 89. Gesemann (1996): 57–63. Bejor (1999). Bejor (1999): 9, 91, 111. Davies (2002): 77. Zaccaria Ruggiu (1995): 272. Davies (2002): 77–78. van Tilburg (2007): 107–110. van Tilburg (2007): 86–88. Libanius describes this practices and its abuses; see his oration 50, About Forced Labor and for the Peasantry. MacDonald (1986): 75–86. Wallace-Hadrill (2008): 277–290; Laurence (2008): 99–104; id. (2007): 39–45; Lott (2004): 33–35, 101–106; Gesemann (1996): 43–47. Hillier and Hanson (1984). Stöger (2009); id. (2008); Laurence (2007): 129–133; DeLaine (2004); Smith (1999); Van Dyke (1999); Banning (1996); Gilchrist (1994): 160– 167; Morris, James, and Reynolds (1994); Osman and Suliman (1994); Bradley (1993): 29–32; id. (1992): 94–95; Fairclough (1992); Moore (1992); Bonanno, Gouder, Malone, and Stoddart (1990); Banning and Byrd (1989); Foster (1989); Hopkins (1987); Plimpton and Hassan (1987). Stockett (2005); Fridell Anter and Weilguni (2003); Kaiser (2000a); Potter (1998); Ferguson (1996). Stockett (2005): 389–391; Osman and Suliman (1994): 191–200. Hillier and Hanson (1984): 104. Robinson (1992): 5–7. Zanker (2000): 32; Goodman (2007): 12 and 60. Serv. Verg. A. 1.422. Ulpian, dig. 43.7.3. Carcopino (1940): 45; e.g., the Via Flaminia becoming the Via Lata; Steinby (1999): 139; Richardson (1992) 416; Regionaries, Regio 7. Westfall (2007): 132–138; Laurence (1995): 72.

Notes

219

45. Livy 5.41.5. 46. Beare (1950): 181. 47. Hillier and Hanson (1984): 109–113; see also King and Golledge (1978): 72. 48. E.g., Plaut. Pseud. 960–962. 49. E.g., Achilles Tatius, 5.1; Cic. Verr. 4.117–119; Lib. Oration on Antioch 11.196–198; id. 11.201–202; Strabo 17.1.8. 50. Varro Ling. 7.15; Adam (1994): 41 establishes the Roman foot at .2957 m, thus 8 Roman feet is 2.3656 m. 51. Gaius, dig. 8.3.8; Celsus, dig. 8.6.6.1d. 52. Cod. Theod. 4.24. 53. Tsujimura (1991): 62. 54. Martial 7.61. 55. See Rowland and Howe, eds. (1999): 3–5 for a discussion of the date of Vitruvius’s text. 56. Vitr. De arch. 6.5.2–3. 57. Scobie (1986). 58. Determining the exact meaning of the term insula in the Regionaries has been controversial. Storey (2002) makes a convincing argument that the term refers to apartment blocks or, using Storey’s terminology, architectural/residential unit (ARU). 59. Vitr. De arch. 6.5.2. 60. Fagan (1999): 119; Zajac (1999): 99. 61. Zajac (1999). 62. DeLaine (1999): 70–73; Fagan (1999): 137–154. 63. Fagan (1999): 126. 64. Fagan (1999): 85–103; Yegül (1992): 352–356. 65. Wallace-Hadrill (1994): 103. 66. Laurence (2007): 94–95. 67. Pirson (2007): 468. 68. Van Dyke (1999): 470. 69. Goodman (2007): 103; Anderson (1997): 331; Owens (1996): 20; WallaceHadrill (1994): 135–136; Raper (1977) and (1979). 70. E.g., Kaiser (2000a): 7–8; Robinson (1997). 71. Street length is not the same as the length of space available for building façades; because buildings can be on two sides of the street, we would have to multiply the street length by two to get the total amount of space available for building façades. Multiplying by a constant, however, does not yield any new information and the added step increases the opportunity for introducing errors; therefore, street length was used instead of façade length. Plazas present a different problem. Streets have doorways on only two sides but plazas could, in theory, have doorways on all four sides. This problem was accounted for by adding the length and width of plazas together to create a standardized number comparable to the street length. All measurements come from Eschebach (1993). 72. For an explanation of the functioning of the chi-square test, see Thomas (1986): 264–82; for an example of the application of the chi-square test to spatial data in an archaeological context, see Kaiser (2000a): 49. 73. This formula is given in Thomas (1986): 264–72 with an explanation of all terms and examples to help explain it. For the purposes of this analysis the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet CHITEST function calculated these values. 74. Thomas (1986): 216 and 264–272.

220

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. For a detailed description of how some of the excavation and recording techniques have imposed limitations on our knowledge of the site, as well as an excellent attempt to reach beyond those limitations, see Allison (1997). 2. Several of Pompeii’s streets have multiple names given to them by various excavators. Other streets have different names for different stretches of the street. Map 3.1 follows the names Laurence uses (2007): Map 1. 3. Gesemann (1996): 52. 4. Von Gerkan (1940). 5. For the early history of Pompeii, see Zanker (1998): 32–60; Owens (1991): 100–101; Lauter (1975); Riemann (1975); Von Gerkan (1940). 6. Laurence (2007): 16. 7. The nineteenth-century archaeologist A. Maiuri divided the plan of the city into nine regions, assigning each a Roman numeral to identify it, and gave each block within each regio a unique Arabic numeral. Maiuri counted each doorway around each block, giving these a unique Arabic numeral as well. In this way every exterior door of every building has a unique identification number. The number of the main entryway is commonly assigned as an identification number for the entire building. In addition, excavators have also attached popular names to some buildings so that door VI.12.2 leads to a fi ne house also known as the House of the Faun and VII.8.1 is the entrance to the Temple of Jupiter in the forum. 8. Dobbins (2007): 160–161; Richardson (1988): 198–202. 9. Dobbins (2007): 155–156. 10. Richardson (1988): 138–145; Zanker (1998): 61–77. 11. See Gesemann (1996): 283–284 and fig. 37. 12. Laurence (2007): 22–26. 13. For a detailed description of the impact of the earthquake on the architecture and the speed with which buildings were, or were not, rebuilt, see Richardson (1988): 261–346. 14. Laurence (2007): 35; id. (2008): 89–90. 15. Gesemann (1996): 33–34. 16. Gesemann (1996): 55; the Via dell’ Abbondanza is 14.53 m at its widest point; cf. Ciprotti (1962): 31. 17. Koga (1992): 57; Gesemann (1996): 55–56; Jones and Schoonhoven (2003): 133–134. 18. Koga (1992): 57. 19. Koga (1992): 61. 20. Jansen (2000): 38–42; id. (1997): 131; Koga (1992): 60–71; Richardson (1988): 61–62 and 152–153. 21. Gesemann (1996): 57. 22. Saliou (1999): 199. 23. Saliou (1999): 197–198. 24. The use of these holes is highly controversial. See Weiss (2010). 25. Mau (1899): 221–222; Saliou (1999): 171. 26. Newsome (2009a): 128; Gesemann (1996): 60. 27. Gesemann (1996): 75–81. 28. Gesemann (1996): 65. 29. Saliou (1999): 197. 30. Gesemann (1996): 142–145; Hartnett (2008).

Notes

221

31. Gesemann (1996): 66–67; some of the most narrow streets are 2.5 m wide from building to building. These same streets also have sidewalks, further narrowing the space available for cart traffic, Ciprotti (1962): 31. For a discussion of ripple effect that could occur as some streets were narrowed, see Newsome (2009a), particularly pp. 125–126. 32. Gesemann (1996): 232. 33. Salama (1951): 88 and (1994), Ciprotti (1962): 34, Tsujimura (1991), and Poehler (2006) have all argued for such control. One-way streets were unnecessary, however, because of the low volume of urban cart traffic and the presence of cursores to ensure carts would not meet head on in narrow streets. Laws creating one-way streets would have been unenforceable considering the small staff available for policing Roman cities. 34. Richardson (1988): 215–216. 35. Dobbins (2007): 160; Richardson (1988): 206–209. 36. Gesemann (1996): 82–90. 37. Ciprotti (1962): 33. 38. Eschebach (1970). 39. Additional information in the database comes from Ellis (2004); Eschebach (1984); Etienne and Mayet (1998); Hartnett (2008); Jashemski (1979); Koloski-Ostrow (1996); Peña and McCallum (2009); Laurence (2007); Mattingly (1990); Mayeske (1972); id. (1979); Richardson (1988); Robinson (1997); Rossiter and Haldenby (1989); Wallace-Hadrill (1994); id. (1995). 40. Van der Poel (1986). This series was begun by the University of Texas at Austin and is a fabulous resource for Pompeian studies. Unfortunately, the series is not yet complete. 41. On problems with current plans of Pompeii, see Fridell Anter and Weilguni (2003): 32–33. 42. For a discussion of this vexing issue, see Fridell Anter and Weilguni (2003): 34. 43. http://faculty.evansville.edu/ak58/streets. The color map displaying the use of space at Pompeii is available via the Web rather than in this work in order to avoid the high cost of printing a color plate and to allow it to be seen on a larger scale than would be possible here. 44. Based on Ellis (2004): 374. 45. Based on Laurence (2007): 47. 46. Based on Mayeske (1972) and (1979). 47. Based on Wallace-Hadrill (1995): 61, n. 69 and 70. McGinn (2004): 289–290 offered a competing list of brothels but Wallace-Hadrill’s list is preferable for the purposes of this study. Wallace-Hadrill focused on purpose-built brothels, which would be the structure’s primary use, whereas McGinn was interested in any location where prostitution took place, regardless of whether it was a central or ancillary activity in that structure. Wallace-Hadrill also laid out a set of criteria that the structure must meet in order to be labeled a brothel whereas McGinn was not so systematic in his defi nition. 48. Based on Eschebach (1993). All buildings in this category had some evidence for dyeing or cleaning cloth in the form of vats. 49. Based on Hartnett (2008): 96–98. 50. Robinson (1997): 140. 51. Allison (2001): 187 suggests excavators at Pompeii have erroneously claimed to have found evidence supporting the notion that people lived in shops, relying more on the literary than the archaeological evidence. 52. Dig. 1.8.8.2 and 1.8.9.4.

222

Notes

53. E.g., the Roman city at Empúries, see below. Goodman (2007): 42 cites other examples. 54. Tybout (2007): 407–408. 55. Goodman (2007). 56. Laurence (2007): 102–116. 57. The “expected” figure is based on an assumption that there is no pattern in the use of space at Pompeii. For a full explanation, see Chapter 2. 58. Schoonhoven (1999): 229. 59. As noted in the previous chapter, only a chi-square figure of .05 or lower is considered significant. Any chi-square figure below .01 is considered highly significant. 60. Laurence (2007): 82–101; Wallace-Hadill (1995). 61. CIL 4.8356; for a discussion of this graffito, see Della Corte (1960): 104. 62. Laurence (2007): 163. 63. Saller (1989): 57–58. 64. Hartnett (2008). 65. Zanker (2000): 39–40. 66. Lynch (1960): 54. 67. For a discussion of the difficulties faced by strangers trying to traverse Pompeii, see Ling (1990). 68. Laurence (2007): 82–101; Wallace-Hadill (1995). 69. In deciding which structures to count in this category, only those with substantial enough architecture to have received a number on Eschebach’s 1993 plan of the city and the CTP are included in the analysis. Shrines to the Lares Compitales are not considered in this analysis. 70. A recent theory suggests that this temple was actually dedicated to the healing god Aesculapius; thus its placement in such a public location may have been to facilitate its use by both residents and visitors to the city; see de Caro (2007): 79. 71. Cf. Juv. 6.582–591; Livy 39.16.8. 72. Ling (2007): 120. 73. For a good summary of these arches, see Richardson (1988): 206–209 and 215–216. 74. Wallace-Hadrill (1995). 75. The majority of the details on Map 3.8 are from the published maps of Tsujimura (1991) and Poehler (2006) supplemented by the authors’ observations at the site. 76. Poehler (2006): 63. 77. Ling (2007): 124. 78. Nappo (2007): 358. 79. Newsome (2009a). 80. Koga (1992): 59; van Tilburg (2007): 142. 81. Koga (1992); Jansen (2007): 264. 82. Laurence (2008): 87. 83. Tsujimura (1991); Poehler (2006); van Tilburg (2007): 124. 84. Matthews (1960): 24; for examples from ancient texts, see Sen. Ep. 87.9 and Mart. 3.47.14, which refers to an interurban context and id. 123.7, and Suet. Nero 30, both of which seem to refer to both an inter- and intraurban context. For a mosaic image of a cursor from the Baths of the Coachmen at Ostia, see van Tilburg (2007): 124–125. 85. See also Laurence (2008): 89 for a discussion of this phenomenon. 86. For an opposing interpretation, see Fridell Anter and Weilguni (2003): 36. 87. Laurence (2008): 87. 88. Laurence (2008): 87–88.

Notes

223

89. Laurence (2008): 89–90; van Tilburg (2007): 142; Laurence (2007): 171; Fridell Anter and Weilguni (2003): 36; Ciprotti (1962): 34. 90. Although the evidence is ambiguous, in one of the most thorough analyses of the streets of Pompeii to date, Gesemann concluded this street was also blocked to cart traffic (1996): 69. 91. Koga (1992). 92. Gesemann (1996): 228. 93. Parslow (2007): 218. 94. See the color map available at http://faculty.evansville.edu/ak58/streets. 95. Jashemski (1979): 161–162. 96. Jashemski (1979): 162. 97. Inv. 112222. 98. Laurence (2007): 116–120. 99. Packer (1975): 134. 100. Schoonhoven (1999): 233–234. 101. Compare Maps 3.6 and 3.7. 102. Fridell Anter and Weilguni (2003): 36.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. The exact date for the beginning of the Roman colony at Ostia is controversial. For a summary of the different arguments, see Zevi (2002); Pavolini (1988); Meiggs (1973): 20–22. 2. 22.11.6. 3. Meiggs (1973): 29–30. 4. E.g., Plut. Caes. 58.10; Ovid Fasti, 4.299; see Meiggs (1973): 51–52. 5. The exact date of the city walls is controversial; see Martin and Heinzelmann (2000): 28; Bauer, Heinzelmann, and Martin (2000): 389. 6. Meiggs (1973): 34–36. 7. On the identification of this temple, see Boin (2010). 8. Meiggs (1973): 37. 9. Pavolini (2006): 68. 10. Meiggs (1973): 45. 11. Meiggs (1973): 55–60, 87. 12. Heinzelmann (2002). 13. Mar (2008): 132. 14. E.g., I.xii.7, II.vi.7, IV.ii.4; Packer (1971) 81–85. 15. Meiggs (1973): 75. 16. Meiggs (1973): 76–79. 17. Meiggs (1973): 81. 18. Meiggs (1973): 100–101. 19. Spurza (1999) and (2002) has the best recent summary of this building. 20. Heinzelmann and Martin (2002); Heinzelmann, Mols, and McKinnon (2002); Martin, Heinzelmann, De Sena, and Granino Cecere (2002); Heinzelmann (2001); Bauer, Heinzelmann, and Martin (2000); Martin and Heinzelmann (2000); Heinzelmann, Becker, Eder, and Stephani (1997). 21. The AAR-DAI team published plans of the street network in the northwestern part of Ostia, Regio III, which could not be used here because they differ in significant ways. Of particular importance for the present study is the question of whether or not the navalia-temple complex the team identified was accessible from a street that led directly to a city gate. The team indicates

224

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Notes both that the street led to a city gate, Heinzelmann and Martin (2002): 14; Martin, Heinzelmann, De Sena, and Granino Cecere (2002): fig. 12, and that it did not, Heinzelmann and Martin (2002): 8; Heinzelmann, Mols, and McKinnon (2002): fig. 5; Heinzelmann (2001): 314. Meiggs (1973): 122–123; Heinzelmann (2005) concurs. Jansen (2000): 44–49. For evidence of drains emptying out under Ostia’s city gates, see Heinzelmann (2001): 320; Bauer, Heinzelmann, and Martin (2000): 413. Mar (2008): 127. Mar (2008): 139. Meiggs (1973): 102–110. Bakker (1994): 6. In addition to Calza, ed. (1953); Pavolini (2006); and Meiggs (1973) the database draws on the publications by Bakker (1994); Bakker, ed. (1999); Boersma (1985); Bollman (2001); Heres (1986); Hermansen (1982); Kocke and Ortisi (2000); Packer (1971); Poccardi (2001); de Ruyt (2001). Heinzelmann, Becker, Eder, and Stephani (1997) and Martin and Heinzelmann (2000). The AAR-DAI team also identified several buildings that were in use during the Severan period of interest here. Unfortunately they were not always able to identify where the entrances to these buildings were or how streets that passed near them linked with the rest of the known street network. DeLaine (2002) has made strides in refi ning the chronology of second century CE construction at Ostia using brickstamps. Bakker (1994): 6. http://faculty.evansville.edu/ak58/streets. For a brief, if somewhat dated, summary about the insulae at Ostia, see Meiggs (1973): 239–249; for a detailed description, see Packer (1971). For a recent description and discussion of the social status of people living in these large apartments, see DeLaine (2004). Bakker (1994): 21–43. Meiggs (1973): 115. On the internal structure of these buildings at Ostia, see Stöger (2009) and (2008). Meiggs (1973): 311–314; for more on collegia in general see Royden (1988). Meiggs (1973): 324–327. For one explanation for their location, see Stöger (2009). For a thorough yet concise description of these structures, see Bakker (1994): 111–117 and 204–207. I.iii.3, I.iii.5, I.x.4, I.xvi.2, I.xvii.2, III.i.6, III.i.10, IV.v.12, V.vi.6. Bakker (1994): 204–205; Schreiber (1967). Meiggs (1973): 370–374. The “expected” figure is based on the assumption that there is no pattern to the use of space at Ostia. For a full explanation, see Chapter 2. Mar (2008): 128. Mar (2008): 131. See Bakker (1994): 197–198 for more on this inscription. Mar (2008): 136. Mar (2008): 142; Stöger (2008): 323 and 326; id. (2007): 355. On reasons for the placement of scholae, see Stöger (2009).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. Fulford and Timby (2000): 562–563. 2. Rivet and Jackson (1970): 70.

Notes 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

225

Boon (1974): 36–37. Boon (1974): 88–89. Fulford and Timby (2000): 20–30. For information on the basilica, see Fulford and Timby (2000). For information on the amphitheater, see Fulford (1989). Fulford and Timby (2000): 573–576. Frere and Fulford (2002). The catalyst for this construction activity is unclear; see Wacher (1997): 71–80. Sellwood (1984). Fulford (1989): 55–56. Boon (1974): 72–73. Fulford and Timby (2000): 579. Boon (1974): 72–73; Frere (1975). Boon (1974): 138–147. van Tilburg (2007): 59–61. Fulford and Timby (2000): 581. Boon (1974): 92. E.g., St. John Hope and Fox’s Insula XXX = city block 30. Boon (1974): 96; for a thorough discussion of the sizes of Silchester insulae and the units used to lay them out, see Walthew (1987): 216–220 and particularly fig. 12A. Boon (1974): 55. Fulford, Rippon, Ford, Timby, and Williams (1997): 167. Clarke and Fulford (2002): 160. Esmonde Cleary (2005): 9–10. Boon (1974): 108. Fox and St. John Hope (1893): 548. St. John Hope (1909). Boon (1974); Bewley and Fulford (1996). St. John Hope (1903): 419; Boon (1974): 156. Wacher (1997): 100. The Altbachtal; cf. Scheid (1995); Wightman (1971): 215–219. Boon (1974): 54. Fulford, Clarke, and Eckardt (2006): 16. Fulford et al. (1997); see also the plan in Bewley and Fulford (1996). Boon (1974): 91. Fulford et al. (1997): 98. Fox and St. John Hope (1890): 751–755. Fox and St. John Hope (1891): 95. For the full history of archaeological investigations at Silchester, see Boon (1974): 19–35. Boon (1974): 30–31. Boon (1974): 32. Fulford (1984); id. (1989); Fulford and Timby (2000). This work is summarized in Clarke and Fulford (2002) and Fulford, Clarke, and Eckardt (2006). Boon (1974). Bewley and Fulford (1996). Sources for the database included Bewley and Fulford (1996); Boon (1974); Clarke and Fulford (2002); Cosh (2001); Ford (1994); Fox (1892); id. (1895); Fox and St. John Hope (1890); id. (1893); id. (1894); id. (1901); Fulford, Clarke, and Eckardt (2006); Fulford and Timby (2000); Fulford et al. (1997); Joyce (1881); St. John Hope (1897); id. (1902); id. (1903); id. (1905); id. (1906); id. (1907); id. (1908); id. (1909); id.(1910); St. John Hope and Fox (1896); id. (1898); id. (1899); id. (1900) and Walthew (1987).

226 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

Notes http://faculty.evansville.edu/ak58/streets. Fulford and Timby (2000): 83–113. Wacher (1997): 286–287. Clarke and Fulford (2002): 129. Mac Mahon (2005): 48 and 53. Boon (1974): 138–144; Fox and St. John Hope (1894): 222–232. Boon (1974): 144. For a full description of excavations at the amphitheater, see Fulford (1989). St. John Hope (1906): 153. For a general discussion of the baths, see Boon (1974): 121–130; St. John Hope (1905): 341–366. Boon (1974): 138–144; Fox and St. John Hope (1894): 222–232. Boon (1974): 54–55 and 108–116; Fox and St. John Hope (1893): 540–549. Boon (1974): 55, 72, 91, 154–157; Fox and St. John Hope (1890): 744–749; St. John Hope (1903): 414; Wacher (1997): 281–283. Goodman (2007): 134; see also the example from Trier, Scheid (1995). Boon (1974): 155; St. John Hope (1903): 414. Although Wacher identifies this as a temple (1997): 281–283. Boon (1974): 58, 158; St. John Hope and Fox (1900): 95–96. Boon (1974): 188–193. Boon (1974): 211–221. Boon (1974): 123–126. Boon (1974): 255. The “expected” figure is based on the assumption that there is no pattern in the use of space at Silchester. For a full explanation, see Chapter 2. Bates (1983): 141. Cf. Reece (1985): 39. For the shops, see Boon (1974): 55, 90, 188, 290; Fox and St. John Hope (1893): 569–570; workshops, Boon (1974): 90, 188, 290; Fox and St. John Hope (1893): 569–570; St. John Hope (1907): 155–156; domestic building, St. John Hope (1907): 151–2. Fox and St. John Hope (1893): 569. The shops in the forum of the Roman City at Empúries were actually reconstructed in the Augustan era, having the doors that opened onto the forum blocked and new doors opened to provide access to the shops from outside of the forum. Once the change was complete, one could not enter the shops from the forum but had to leave the forum to enter them. Cf. Aquilué Abadías, Mar Medina, Nolla i Brufau, Ruiz de Arbulo Bayona, and Sanmartí i Grego (1984): 90. Fulford et al. (1997): fig. 7. See Chapter 2. Fox and St. John Hope (1893): 545; St. John Hope (1906): 154–155. Fulford et al. (1997). van Tilburg (2007): 165. Allen and Fulford (1996): 239–240. Allen and Fulford (1996): 264. Fox and St. John Hope (1893): 569.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. The name of the site is spelled in two ways; Castilian Spanish speakers spell it “Ampurias” whereas Catalan speakers spell it “Empúries.” 2. A more detailed history of the site may be found in Mar and Ruiz (1993): 141–155 and Kaiser (2000a): 10–17.

Notes

227

3. For a discussion of the search for Indika, see Sanmartí (1978) and Kaiser (2000a): 12–13 and 65–67. 4. The two main ancient sources to discuss Greco-Iberian relations at the site include Livy 34.9.1 and Strabo 3.4.8. For a detailed discussion of these sources, see Kaiser (2000b). 5. Kaiser (2000a): 10–11. 6. Kaiser (2000a): 13. 7. For a discussion of the implications of this close physical relationship, see Kaiser (2000b). 8. Originally the construction of the forum was considered to date to the same time as the laying out of the street grid, but Aquilué, Castanyer, Santos, and Tremoleda (2002): 11 have revised the construction date of the forum to about a century later or the late fi rst century BCE. The implications of this revision for the dating of the street layout are unclear. 9. For a summary of the historic, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence for this change in status, see Kaiser (2000a): 13. 10. Kaiser (2000a) 13; Mar and Ruiz (1993): 329. 11. Fabré, Mayer, and Rodà (1991): no. 15. 12. For a more detailed explanation of the evidence for Romanization, see Kaiser (2000b). 13. Nieto (1981); for an alternative view on the process of the abandonment of the site, see Nolla (1993). 14. Puig i Cadafalch (1908): 193–194. 15. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 415. 16. Kaiser (2000a): 22–23. 17. The most thorough discussion in print of the street network at Empúries is Mar and Ruiz (1993): 331–333. 18. Kaiser (2000a): 42. 19. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 171–179; Sanmartí, Castanyer, Tremoleda, and Barbera (1986); Sanmartí, Castanyer and Tremoleda (1990). 20. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 345–346. 21. In addition to Mar and Ruiz (1993), the work of the following authors was incorporated into the database: Almagro (1951); Aguilue, Mar, and Ruiz de Arbulo (1983); Palauí, and Vivó (1993); Puig i Cadafalch (1920); Sanmartí and Nolla (1986); Santos Retolaza (1991). All of this work is summarized in Kaiser (2000a). 22. http://faculty.evansville.edu/ak58/streets. 23. Bosch Gimpera (1913–14). 24. Kaiser (2000a): 22–23. 25. Kaiser (2000a): 25–6. 26. Kaiser (2000a): 35. 27. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 171–183; Kaiser (2000a): 31–32. 28. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 285–294; Kaiser (2000a): 32–33. 29. For an excellent English summary of the structure of the domestic buildings at Empúries, see Tang (2005): 107–158. 30. The “expected” figure is based on the assumption that there is no pattern to the use of space at Empúries. For a full explanation, see Chapter 2. 31. See number 5 on Map 6.2; these are Mar and Ruiz (1993) Conjunts 11–14. 32. See http://faculty.evansville.edu/ak58/streets. 33. Sanmartí (1993): 21; Kaiser (2000b): 200. 34. Palauí and Vivó (1993). 35. Pike (1967): 601. 36. For an exploration of the idea that Neapolis is consciously modeled on other Greek colonial sites, see Kaiser (2000b). 37. Kaiser (2000a): 46.

228

Notes

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Robinson (1997). Mar and Ruiz (1993): 353–364. Elucidating what those concerns were is the focus of Kaiser (2000a). Pike (1967): 601. Aquilué, Castanyer, Jordan, Santos, and Tremoleda (2000): 275. Almagro (1962): 6. Kaiser (2000a): 38–39. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 390–397. Santos Retolaza (1991). Aquilué Abadías et al. (1984): 236 date this remodeling to the Augustan period, but more recent excavations have led to a revision in the date of construction of the forum from the end of the second century BCE to the Augustan era; see Aquilué, Castanyer, Santos, and Tremoleda (2002): 11. It is unclear what this re-dating of the original construction of the forum implies for the date of the remodeling episode. 48. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 341–343. 49. Aquilué, Castanyer, Jordan, Santos, and Tremoleda (2000). 50. Goodman (2007): 71.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. The idea of integrative paths through cities is adapted from Hillier and Hanson (1984): 82–142. 2. Laurence (2007): 163–166. 3. Zanker (2000): 33–36. 4. Fentress (2000): 15–8; MacDonald (1986): 30. 5. See map 6.7 for the location of Casa Romana 1. See also Mar and Ruiz (1993): 390–397. 6. Hingley (2005): 77; Perkins and Nevett (2000): 216–217 and 240–241; Zanker (2000): 40–41 and (1990): 332; MacDonald (1986): 111–142; Grimal (1983): 40–91. Romans in the imperial capital of the second century CE seem to have shared this view; see Wolfram Thill (2010): 36 for an example from art. 7. For two varying opinions on the appropriateness of this term, see Hitchner (2009): 655 and Hingley (2005): 2. 8. E.g., Goodman (2007); Hingley (2005): 91–116; Newsome (2005): 15–17; Mattingly (2004); Webster (2001); Woolf (1997); id. (2000); id. (2006). 9. Revell (1999). 10. Aitchison (1999); Hingley (1997). 11. Cahill (2002): 273–274. 12. Von Hesberg (2008): 83; Owens (1991): 153. 13. Martín i Ortega (1993); see also Martín, ed. (1999). 14. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 366–375; Santos (1991): 21. 15. Mar and Ruiz (1993): 387–390. 16. Tang (2005): 133–134 and 148–152; Mar and Ruiz (1993): 133; Santos (1991): 21.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate images.

A acculturation 202–204 Achilles Tatius 8, 9 aedile 21, 22, 23 Aelius Aristides 7 aerial photography 2, 14, 140, 146, 149, 150, 194, 201, 204–205 agora 18, 44, 172, 172, 174–175, 177, 178, 182–187, 188, 190, 191–193, 197–198, 203, 204 Alexandria 8, 9, 11, 30, 109 Alice Holt-Farnham Ware 165 Allen, J. 165 Almagro, M. 196 Alta Semita, Rome 34 Ammianus Marcellinus, historian 28 amphitheater 11, 60, 69, 70, 71, 72, 82, 83, 89, 97, 98–99, 104, 127, 141, 142, 143, 148, 149, 152, 176, 197, 201, 202 angiportum 27, 30, 31–33, 35, 36, 39–43, 45, 58, 99, 105 Antioch 8, 11, 24, 37, 40, 44, 50 Antonine Itinerary 148 apartment building 8, 21, 36, 60, 61–62, 109–110, 112, 113–114, 116, 133, 137, 153, 165 Apuleius, author 22, 40, 41–42 arch, honorary 3, 5, 9, 10, 19, 37, 50, 51, 68, 72, 73, 89, 96, 103, 104, 175, 200 area 27, 29, 44–45, 51 Area Carruces 29, 45 Argiletum, Rome 34 armatures, see urban armatures Augustus, emperor 4, 8–9, 33, 43–44, 50, 69, 72, 95, 98, 109, 173, 186 Ausonius, poet 8, 20–21, 24

Avezzano relief 9–10, 53

B Bakery 8, 60, 75, 76, 81, 82, 87, 90, 92, 97, 100, 102, 113, 114, 120, 121, 126, 129, 136, 138 Bath 141, 143, 148, 158, 165 bath building 8, 38, 59, 60, 61, 200, 202, 204 Empúries 172, 175, 176, 182, 186–187, 190 Ostia 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 123, 133, 138 Pompeii 70, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 83, 95 Rome 30, 31, 60 Silchester 142, 143, 146, 150, 152, 158, 160–162, 166 bar, tavern 19, 60, 75, 79, 81, 85, 87, 90, 92, 97, 98, 100, 102, 113, 114, 117–118, 120, 123, 126, 129, 133, 136 basilica 60, 202–203 Empúries 195, 196, 197 Ostia 108, 110, 114, 139 Silchester 141–144, 142, 145, 149–150, 166, 167, 191 behavior in streets 36–45 bench 72, 76, 81, 83, 85, 87, 92, 93, 100, 102, 116, 200 Bewley, R. 146, 149 Bianchi Bandinelli, R. 19 Boon, G. 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153 Bordeaux 20 brothel 5, 8, 9, 39, 60, 61, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 90, 92, 102, 104, 116

C Cales 35

246 Index Calza, G. 112 Campo della Magna Mater, Ostia 108, 121 campus 27, 29, 44–45 Campus Martius, Rome 29, 34, 38, 44 Campus Sceleratus, Rome 44–45 Caracalla, emperor 30, 31 Carder, J. 10 cardo 2–3, 22 Cardo A, Empúries 196 Cardo B, Empúries 194, 195 Cardo C, Empúries 196 Cardo Maximus, Ostia 107, 110, 112, 131, 134 Carts xv-xvi, 3, 5–6, 23–24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32–33, 36, 37, 38, 45, 48, 49, 50–51, 52, 56–59, 70, 72–73, 77, 88, 94–99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 116, 121, 127–133, 134, 137, 144, 145, 147–148, 150, 151, 154, 158, 162–166, 167, 178, 187–191, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 202 Casa Romana 1, Empúries 195, 196, 201–202 Casa Romana 2, Empúries 195, 196 Case a Giardino, Ostia 108, 112, 121, 133, 137 Caseggiato dei Molini, Ostia 108, 113 Caseggiato dei Triclini, Ostia 108, 115 Casegiato di Diana, Ostia 108, 116 Castagnoli, F. 24 Cicero 9, 28–29, 32, 37, 42 Cirencester 141, 148, 158, 165 city charters 16–17, 23, 108 city representations in fresco 9–10 in mosaic 11 in sculpture 9, 10–11 city vignettes 4, 10 city walls 3, 7, 8, 9–10, 11–12, 14, 29, 34, 45, 53, 68, 69, 71, 76, 103, 107–108, 113, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151–152, 173, 174, 176–177, 178, 186, 194–195, 197 Clarke, A. 145, 149, 150 Claudius, emperor 23, 109, 141 clivus 27, 28, 30, 35, 43–44 collegia 9, 115 colonia 13 Corpus Topographicum Pompeianum 74 curia 60, 75, 108, 110 cursor 96

cursus publicus 144, 151, 165

D dangers of streets 24, 39, 41, 88, 98, 121, 133, 191, 200, 202 decumanus 3, 22, 24–25, 62 Decumanus E, Empúries 196 Decumanus Maximus, Ostia 108, 111, 117, 118, 125, 131, 132, 134, 137 Devijuer, G. 29 Digest of Justinian 21, 32, 34, 40 Djemila 50 Domitian, emperor 109, 110

E Ephesus 4, 5 Eschebach, H. 74 Eschebach, L. 74, 75, 98 Esmonde Cleary, S. 145

F Favro, D. 4–5 Fluvià River 171, 171, 172, 173, 175 Forma Urbis Romae 11 Foro delle Corporazioni, Ostia 52, 108, 109, 112 fountain xvi, 7, 8, 9, 22, 23, 28, 35, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57–58, 60–61, 71, 72, 75, 76, 81, 83, 85, 87, 92, 93, 94, 100, 102, 114, 120, 121, 123, 126, 129, 132, 133, 136, 137, 175, 176, 182, 200 Fox, G. 140, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 159–160, 163, 169 Fridell Anter, K. 4, 5 Frontinus, author 22, 28 fundula 26–27 Fulford, M. 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 162

G Gandía, E. 176 garbage and waste in streets 21–22, 23, 50, 71, 111 garum workshop 172, 176, 177 Geographic Information Systems 62–63 German Archaeological Institute–American Academy in Rome project at Ostia 113 Gesemann, B. 5, 6, 72 Goodman, P. 17, 76 gradus, see scalae Grandi Horrea 108, 132

Index grid planning, see orthogonal planning gymnasium, see palaestrae

H Hadrian, emperor 110 Hanson, J. 52–54, 55, 56 Harsh, P. 33, 35, 42 Hartnett, J. 72, 83 Herculaneum 22, 67, 68 Hillier, B. 52–54, 55, 56 Historia Augusta 30 Hodos 31 Horace 24, 29, 38, 40, 45 horrea 6, 8, 35, 60, 109, 110, 114, 115, 131, 132, 138, 176, 177, 188 Horrea of Hortensius, Ostia 108, 109 House of the Faun, Pompeii 70, 72 House of Julia Felix, Pompeii 19, 20, 70, 95 House of L. Caecilius Iucundus, Pompeii 19 House of Menander, Pompeii 57

I Indika 171, 173 insula, see apartment building Insula dei Dipinti, Ostia 108, 114 Isidorus of Seville, author 30–31

J Julius Caesar 16–17, 23, 30, 173 Juvenal, poet 20, 24, 33, 37, 39 kardo, see cardo

K Kennet River 141, 148, 150, 165

L Lares Compitales 43, 51, 73 latrine, public 8, 22, 60, 75, 97, 113–114, 115, 142, 150, 152, 158, 159, 160–161, 166, 169 Laurence, R. xvii, 6, 20, 62, 77–78, 82, 85, 95 Leptis Magna 50 Lex Coloniae Genetivae Juliae 17 Lex Irnitana 23 Libanius, author 8, 20, 24, 37, 38, 40, 44 Lincoln 49 Ling, R. 9, 35 Livy, historian 29, 34, 40, 54, 55, 106, 173 Loddon River 141, 148, 150, 165 London 141, 144, 145, 147, 148, 158, 165

247

Lynch, K. 3–7, 11–12, 47, 85, 199

M MacDonald, W. 3–4, 5, 7, 50 Malmberg, S. 4, 5 mansio 142, 150, 151 Mar, R. 6, 175, 193 Marc Antony 28–29 Martial, poet 9, 20, 40, 44, 57 Meiggs, R. 111, 112, 116 Milan 8 Mithraeum 114, 115, 116, 120, 125, 126, 129, 136, 138–139 municipium 13, 143, 173

N Newsome, D. xvii, 6, 95 Nova Via, Rome 34, 37, 48 nymphaea 60–61, 114, 120, 121, 123, 126, 129, 132, 133, 136, 137

O Oppian Hill fresco, Rome 9–10 orthogonal planning 2, 3, 7, 13, 14, 25, 31, 47, 48, 49, 69–70, 74, 77, 110, 139, 141, 144–147, 152, 153–154, 173, 174, 177, 194, 197, 202 Osuna bronzes, see Lex Coloniae Genetivae Juliae

P palaestra 60, 69, 70, 75, 98–99, 112, 197 Panopeus 8 Pausanias, author 8 Pavolini, C. 112 pedestrian zones 56, 58, 97, 99, 132, 133, 164–165, 167, 191 Philo, philosopher 7 Pitt-Rivers, A. H. L. F. 148, 149 platea 27, 30–33, 35, 36–40, 41–42, 43, 45, 58 Plato 18 Plautus, playwright 8, 22, 33, 38–39, 40–41, 55 Pliny, author 18, 22, 23, 24, 31 Poehler, E. xvii, 5–6, 49, 94, 96–97 pomerium 53 pons 26, 27, 43–44 Poole Harbour 165 Porta Appia, Rome 29 Porta del Vesuvio, Pompeii 68, 68 Porta di Capua, Pompeii 68 Porta di Ercolano, Pompeii 68, 68, 96

248

Index

Porta di Nola, Pompeii 68 Porta di Sarno, Pompeii 68, 71, 97 Porta di Stabia, Pompeii 68, 68, 71 Porta Laurentina, Ostia 107, 110, 130, 131, 132 Porta Marina Ostia 107, 111, 117, 131, Pompeii 68, 68, 71, 96 Porta Nocera, Pompeii 68, 68, 71 Porta Romana, Ostia 107, 107, 111, 122, 125, 130 Portus 10, 109, 110, 115 Precinct of the Quattro Tempietti, Ostia 108, 121 processions 4, 27, 29, 30, 37, 41, 43, 44, 46, 96, 100, 104, 145

R Reading 148 Regionaries 8, 29, 60 rental property 19, 20, 88 Revel, L. 202–203 Robinson, D. 76, 193 Romanization 202 Rome 4, 5, 8–9, 10, 11, 16–17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30–31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37–38, 39, 40, 43–45, 48, 51, 54–55, 56, 60, 71, 106–107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 121, 127, 130, 131, 138, 186 Ruiz, J. 175–176, 193 Ruts 5–6, 49, 56–58, 70, 73, 94–96, 97, 103, 130, 147, 162–163, 167, 187, 194, 195

S St. John Hope, W. 140, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 159–160, 163, 169 Saliou, C. 71 Sanctuary of Apollo, Pompeii 6, 69, 70, 88, 93, 95, 97 Sanctuary of Asklepios, Empúries 172, 172, 177, 178, 186, 187, 197–198 Sanctuary of Isis, Pompeii 65, 66, 70, 70, 89, 93, 97, 178 Sanctuary of Serapis, Empúries 172, 178, 186, 187, 197 Sanctuary of Venus Fisica Pompeiana, Pompeii 69, 70, 70, 88 Sarno River 67 Scagliarini Corlàita, D. 3

scalae 27, 28, 43–44 schola 115, 138, 150, 153 Schola Carrucarum, Rome 29, 45 semita 27, 30, 31–33, 35, 36–37, 39–43, 45 Semita dei Cippi, Ostia 112, 131 Semita Horrearum, Ostia 35 Seneca, author 21, 30, 32 Seplasia, Capua 35 Servius, author 31, 53 shrine, street, see Lares Compitales sidewalks 25–26, 27, 31, 36, 40, 48, 50, 57, 71–72, 95, 97, 111, 132, 175 Sillières, P. 49 Society of Antiquaries 148 stairway, see scalae statistics in urban studies 4, 6, 52–56, 59–66 stenopos 31 stoa 172, 176, 177, 186, 193, 198, 203 street drainage 22, 23, 31, 49–50, 71, 95, 97–98, 111, 147, 148, 152, 163, 175, 199 names 8, 9, 34–35, 53, 55, 131 paving 23, 47–50, 51, 57, 70–71, 73, 95, 97, 98, 111, 130, 131, 132, 146, 147, 194, 199 Subura, Rome 4

T Tabula Heracleensis 16 Tacitus, historian 33 tavern, see bar Tempio Rotondo, Ostia 108, 110, 112, 113 Temple of Fortuna Augusta, Pompeii 70, 88, 97 Temple of Hercules, Ostia 108, 108 Temple of Jupiter, Pompeii 69, 70, 70 Temple of Mars, Rome 29 Temple of Rome and Augustus, Ostia 108, 109, 131–132 Temple of Venus Fisica Pompeiana, see Sanctuary of Venus Fisica Pompeiana, Pompeii Temple of Zeus Meilichios, Pompeii 70, 88, 97 Ter River 172 Terence, playwright 8, 39, 40–41, 55 territorium 153, 160 Tetrapylon of the Holconii, Pompeii 68, 89, 96

Index theater 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 29, 46, 52, 59, 60, 69, 70, 70, 73, 75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 89, 104, 108, 109, 114, 122, 127, 133 Torolonia relief 10 Trajan, emperor 109, 110 Triangular Forum, Pompeii 51, 68, 73, 77, 78, 88, 99, 105 Trier 48, 147 Twelve Tables 56, 71, 175 Tsujimura, S. 5–6, 49, 56–57, 94, 95–96

U Ullastret 203 urban armatures 4–5

V Vaglieri, D. 112 van Wonterghem, F. 29 Varro, author 31, 32, 33 Verres, Roman governor of Sicily 37, 42 Verulamium 50 Vespasian, emperor 22–23, 174 via 26, 27, 30–33, 35, 36–44, 45, 56, 58, 99, 105 Via Albana, Capua 35 Via Antoniniana Nova, Rome 31, 34 Via degli Augustali, Pompeii 57, 68, 69, 73, 103 Via dei Grandi Horrea, Ostia 107, 132 Via dei Teatri, Pompeii 68, 69 Via del Vesuvio, Pompeii 68, 96 Via dell’Abbondanza, Pompeii 68, 70, 73, 89, 95, 96, 97, 98, 103 Via della Caupona di Alexander, Ostia 107, 132 Via della Foce, Ostia 107, 111, 131, 132, 137 Via della Fontana, Ostia 107, 132 Via della Fortuna, Pompeii 48, 68, 73, 96 Via delle Consolare, Pompeii 68, 96 Via delle Corporazioni, Ostia 107, 130 Via delle Ermette, Ostia 107, 132 Via delle Terme, Pompeii 48, 68, 68, 96 Via Dequviaris, Pompeii 34–35 Via di Molini, Ostia 107, 132

249

Via di Nocera, Pompeii 68, 89, 97–98 Via di Nola, Pompeii 48, 68, 96 Via di Scuole, Pompeii 68, 103 Via di Stabia, Pompeii 68, 68, 73, 88, 89, 95, 96 Via dei Vigili, Ostia 107, 132 Via Fornicata, Rome 34 via iter actus, legal concept 32, 47 Via Jovia, Pompeii 34 Via Lata, Rome 34 Via Marina, Pompeii 68, 68, 88, 97, 103 Via Mefira, Pompeii 35 Via Ostiensis 34, 111, 131 Via Pompeiana 34 Via Sacra, Rome 34, 37, 38, 39, 48 Via Tecta, Rome 34 Vico de Terme, Pompeii 68, 103 Vicolo del Fauno, Pompeii 68, 95 Vicolo del Labirinto, Pompeii 68, 95 Vicolo del Lupanare, Pompeii 68, 69 Vicolo di Mercurio, Pompeii 68, 96, 104 vicus 17, 26, 27, 30, 33–34, 35, 38, 43 Vicus Octavius, Velitrae, 35 Vicus Sobrium, Rome 17 Vitruvius 7, 9, 28, 29, 59–60 Vulgate 9, 33, 38

W Wallace-Hadrill, A. 61, 82, 85, 90 Ward-Perkins, J. 24 water drainage 22, 23, 31, 49–50, 71, 95, 97–98, 111, 147, 148, 152, 163, 175, 199 supply 8, 50, 51, 60, 61, 70, 72, 73, 83, 93, 103, 109, 113–114, 121, 123, 132, 133, 137, 141, 175, 176, 177, 186, 190 warehouse, see horrea Watson, A. 34 Weilguni, M. 4, 5

Y Yegül, F. 4, 5

Z Zanker, P. 4 zoning laws 16, 17, 45

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