Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World

Miko Flohr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367498788
• eBook ISBN: 9781000071474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the fi rst centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

The contributions explore how these cities developed landscapes full of civic memory and ritual, saw commercial priorities transforming the urban environment, and began to expand signifi cantly beyond their wall circuits. These interrelated developments not only changed how cities looked and could be experienced, but they also affected the functioning of the urban community and together contributed to keeping increasingly complex urban communities socially cohesive. By focusing on the transformation of urban landscapes in the Late Republican and Imperial periods, the volume adds a new, explicitly historical angle to current debates about urban space in Roman studies. Confronting archaeological and historical approaches, the volume presents developments in Italy, Africa, Greece, and Asia Minor, thus significantly broadening the geographical scope of the discussion and offering novel theoretical perspectives alongside well- documented, thematic case studies.

Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World will be of interest to anyone working on Roman urbanism or Roman history in the Late Republic and early Empire.

1From urban space to urban history—an introduction

Miko Flohr

It was around the end of the second century bce that a set of two monumental temples was constructed in the quickly growing port settlement of Ostia. Originally founded as a small castrum to keep the Tiber estuary firmly under Roman control, Ostia had begun a gradual, organic expansion along the arterial roads towards the coast and the harbour. To judge from the remains of domestic architecture from this period, the urban community was becoming increasingly prosperous, and had begun to develop a local elite of some means (cf. e.g. Perrier et al. 2007). The new temples were constructed outside the original castrum walls immediately north of the Via della Foce, which lead to the river mouth. Against the north end of the sacred area, which had a history going back to the third century bce, a small modest, tetrastyle temple was constructed facing the Via della Foce; closer to the road, a much larger podium temple with a hexastyle facade was constructed to face the city (Figure 1.1; Mar 1990, 147–149; Pavolini 2006, 117–121). When finished, this large temple loomed over the entire area outside the south-west gate of the castrum, which was otherwise still mostly empty. At the time, the construction of the two temples was the perhaps first real sign that Ostia was developing into a true city with an urban landscape full of public monuments: within a couple of decades, a range of other temples and a new wall circuit would follow. By the Augustan period, a small forum had been created inside the castrum, and a theatre had been constructed alongside the main road towards Rome (Pavolini 2006, 30–32).

Figure 1.1Ostia, Temple of Hercules (Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia).

The two late Republican temples were to have a long history. By the later second century ce, they were still standing, virtually unchanged, but their direct environment had been completely transformed (Figure 1.2; Mar 1990, 153–159). While a number of smaller structures had begun to appear around the east end of the sacred area over the course of the first century, the Trajanic period saw the construction of several large multistorey complexes between the temples and the old castrum. Later, one of these buildings was transformed into a bath complex, so that the smaller of the two temples was surrounded by a caldarium on one side, and a water wheel for lifting groundwater on the other. Within a few decades, the temple area became almost completely detached from the urban environment. While the large temple had previously dominated the extramural zone, it had now become visually marginalized, and even though the sanctuary remained accessible from the Via della Foce, the paved square in front of the temples now was situated on a significantly lower level than the street, which had been raised by about a metre in the late first century ce. Still, the temples continued to be used and maintained until the end of Ostia’s ancient life cycle (cf. Boin 2013, 181–182). Upon excavation, in the 1930s, inscriptions and statuary from the first century bce were found alongside inscriptions dating to the late third and fourth century ce, and restorations of the fifth century ce: in the large temple, the late Republican duumvir Cartilius Poplicola continued to be commemorated throughout the imperial period—his statue (Figure 1.3; AE 1941, 99) was found alongside an altar to Hercules dedicated by Hostilius Antipater, curator rei publicae Ostiensium under Diocletian (Figure 1.4; AE 1941, 65; cf. AE 1971, 66). Even if the inscription referring to a restoration under Theodosius and Arcadius (AE 1941, 66; Boin 2010, 258), once associated with the temple, is probably unrelated to it, traces of building activity have been dated to the fifth century ce; in late antiquity, the place had basically become a monument to Ostia’s long urban history (Boin 2010, 264).

Figure 1.2Ostia, Plan of the city in the Republican period (M. Flohr).

Figure 1.3Ostia. Statue of Cartilius Poplicola from the area of the Temple of Hercules (Sailko / Wikimedia).

Figure 1.4Ostia, Inscription on Altar for Hercules (AE 1948, 0126) (G. Alföldi / Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg, HD021714).

The history of the sacred area along the Via della Foce is exemplary of the urban history of Ostia, and it highlights both the spontaneous, unplanned urbanization processes of the late Republic and early Empire, and the dramatic transformation that the city underwent in the Trajanic and Hadrianic periods. Yet it also alludes to some of the larger issues at stake in Roman urban history. For instance, the way in which the sacred area continued to shape the topography of the eastern Via della Foce throughout the imperial period shows how urban development always remained dependent on what was already there—indeed, the presence of the late Republican sanctuary would result in a permanent gap in Ostia’s dense commercial landscape in one of the busiest locations of the city, and would restrict the development of large housing blocks in a place where they would have been more than desirable. Moreover, the fact that the temples were constructed in a relatively open area that only later became incorporated into the city’s densely built-up urban core shows how urban growth and expansion could lead to shifting urban boundaries, making urban what started off as suburban, and marginal what used to be central. Furthermore, the continued (and well-maintained) presence in the area of late Republican statuary and inscriptions shows how, over time, urban space could acquire multiple layers of meaning, which were not only defined by the functionality or connectivity of a place, but also by the particular historical narrative that the urban community came to construct around it.

Roman urban life after the spatial turn

It is in the broader questions about the built environment, everyday life, and urban history evoked by places like the late-Republican sanctuary along the Via della Foce at Ostia that the present volume is interested. The relation between urban life and the built environment has not been a marginal topic in classical studies in recent years: a substantial number of monographs, edited volumes and journal articles have seen the light of day, and there has been no lack of colloquia and conference sessions devoted partially or wholly to aspects of the ways in which the physical layout of the built environment of Roman cities both shaped and reflected the everyday social, political, cultural and economic processes that made up urban life (e.g. Laurence 1994; Kaiser 2000; 2011; Laurence and Newsome 2011; Stöger 2011; Haug and Kreuz 2016; Betts 2017; Poehler 2017). There have been several ‘turns’ and ‘revolutions’ that have added an increasing number of parameters to our analytical spectrum: from the ‘spatial turn’ of the 1990s (Laurence 2011; Newsome 2011, 2–4) to the ‘movement turn’ of the 2010s (e.g. Kaiser 2011; Laurence and Newsome 2011; Östenberg et al. 2015; Poehler 2017) and the ‘sensory turn’ of recent years (e.g. Toner 2014; Haug and Kreuz 2016; Betts 2017), scholars have broadened their conceptual apparatus and found new ways of looking at textual and material evidence for urbanism in the Roman world. This discourse has undeniably transformed our understanding of Roman cities: it has permanently shifted the focus of scholars away from individual buildings towards the way in which buildings worked together to create the urban environments in which everyday lives were lived, and it has resulted in a lasting emphasis on the way in which individual spatial environments were connected, giving pride of place to corridors and streets in a debate that for so long had mostly focused on buildings and rooms. In some way, Roman cities have changed, conceptually, from collections of buildings and monuments into complex networks of interconnected spaces, both reflecting and shaping everyday urban interaction. To a considerable extent, the increased emphasis on movement and sensory perception has also stimulated scholars to try to repopulate (and reanimate) urban space.

Still, there are challenges ahead. One of these clearly is that scholarship on Roman urban space has had a relatively limited impact on our understanding of the urban history of the Roman world: ever since the 1990s, approaches to Roman urban space have generally been more interested in conceptual innovation than in historical contextualization. To some extent, this has been very healthy, as it facilitated the integration of valuable ideas and approaches from the social sciences into Roman archaeology. Experiments with the application of space syntax at Ostia and Pompeii have decisively altered our way of thinking about the nature and the working of Roman urban landscapes, and have made scholars ask questions that otherwise would not have been asked (Laurence 1994; Grahame 2000; Stöger 2011). The shift of emphasis towards studying movement in the last decade, and the recent work on the sensory qualities of everyday urban processes have similarly expanded the conceptual apparatus of discourse on Roman urbanism. Yet an unintended consequence of this emphasis on conceptual innovation has been that approaches to Roman urban space have often remained relatively insensitive to historical change: there remains a significant gap between the study of Roman urban space and the study of Roman urban history. This, in fact, poses a problem, as Roman urbanism shows clear signs of continuing development and, indeed, change. There is a broad consensus that ancient Mediterranean urbanism reached its absolute peak in the Roman imperial period: in virtually all regions of the Roman world the number of cities reached its highest level in the second century ce.¹ It is also clear that many cities grew in size—both demographically and spatially—and became more densely monumentalized, particularly in the first two centuries of our era, and particularly in densely urbanized regions like Italy, Asia Minor, and Africa.² At the same time, the urban architectural vocabulary saw significant innovation in the late Republican and early Imperial period (see e.g. MacDonald 1986; Gros 1996; Laurence et al. 2011). These developments are broadly recognized, but the way in which they transformed the spatial configuration of everyday life in the Roman world has not generally been part of scholarly debate: there is a substantial amount of discourse about the basic parameters of Roman urban space and their relation to everyday urban life, but very little about the ways in which these parameters developed over time.

This volume attempts to diminish the analytical gap between urban space and urban history. It does so by further expanding the conceptual framework for studying Roman urban life and by discussing three historical developments that had a direct and transformative impact on urban space in the Roman world in the first centuries of our era, and which must be seen as a direct consequence of urban growth and prosperity in, particularly, the regions of the Empire bordering on the Mediterranean. The first of these concerns the increasingly dense urban landscapes of civic memory and identity: fostered by the accumulation of architecture, statuary, and epigraphy, cities became crowded with civic, imperial, and religious symbolism; even if the epigraphic and statuary habit had firm roots in the Hellenistic world (Ma 2013), they became considerably more widespread and visible in the cities of the Roman empire (Zuiderhoek 2009; Wilson 2011), and this fundamentally changed the character of urban landscapes. Secondly, alongside this increasingly complex spatial dialogue of memory and identity, the Roman Mediterranean saw an unprecedented commercialization of urban space: sharply increased levels of urban prosperity fostered a substantial growth in urban commerce, and in many places, particularly in Italy, this commerce also became extremely visible in the form of permanent commercial facilities, including tabernae, macella, horrea, and a range of other building types, as well as increasingly elaborate transport and transshipment infrastructure (cf. Rickman 1971; De Ruyt 1983; Ellis 2018; Flohr 2018). A third development was a more direct consequence of urban expansion: the increasing dimensions of urban areas led to shifting urban boundaries, and to a change in the relation between cities and their immediate environment. As cities grew, they began to develop zones of a semi-urban character around their original urban core; this encroachment of the city on the countryside became particularly visible in the early imperial period and created a new kind of semi-urban space that, arguably, played a key role in everyday urban life (Goodman 2007; Stevens 2017).

Approaching urban transformations and their impact on urban life

While in their specific spatial dynamics these three developments remain largely unrelated, they are all direct consequences of the continuing growth and the flourishing of urban communities in the late Republican and early imperial period, and in the context of this volume, they serve to explore the transformative effect of this growth on urban space and urban life. The volume has thus been divided into four parts. The three more theoretically oriented chapters immediately following this introduction focus on the ways in which individuals experienced the city. First, Amy Russell explores the changing relationship between architecture and the individual starting from Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’. Using the late Republican Forum Romanum and the Forum of Augustus as case studies, Russell argues that architecture, ideologically charged as it is, shaped the urban experience of its users, and forced them into certain patterns of behaviour, activating their social identity in the process. Thus, the mixed architectural assemblage of the late Republican Forum Romanum activated the role of most everyday visitors as citizens or as clients of the city’s ruling elite, while the much more controlled and closed environment of the Forum of Augustus, with its strongly symbolic imagery, interpellated them as the subject of one ruler: the emperor. This loaded relation between the built environment and its users is also central to the argument of Annette Haug, whose contribution starts from the idea that urban space has an ‘atmosphere’, which is constituted in the interaction between the built environment and its user. Haug uses this concept to explore the emotional qualities of urban space. Using Pompeii as a case study, she first outlines the experiences evoked by some sections of Pompeii’s urban landscape such as the busy Via dell’Abbondanza and the amphitheatre, before linking these to the perception and responses of individuals, who use these space on the basis of their own personal ideas about home, neighbourhood, and social affiliation: individuals had their own ‘emotionally charged geography’ of the city that profoundly coloured their urban experience, and Haug emphasizes how this geography worked differently for a craftsman spending his day in a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 From urban space to urban history—an introduction
• Part I Experiencing the city
• Part II Community, identity, and urban space
• Part III Commerce and the urban landscape
• Part IV Urban life beyond the city walls
• Index