Roman Urban Street Networks

Streets and the Organization of Space in Four Cities

Alan Kaiser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415717519
• eBook ISBN: 9781136760068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The streets of Roman cities have received surprisingly little attention until recently. Traditionally the main interest archaeologists and classicists had in streets was in tracing the origins and development of the orthogonal layout used in Roman colonial cities. Roman Urban Street Networks is the first volume to sift through the ancient literature to determine how authors used the Latin vocabulary for streets, and determine what that tells us about how the Romans perceived their streets. Author Alan Kaiser offers a methodology for describing the role of a street within the broader urban transportation network in such a way that one can compare both individual streets and street networks from one site to another.

This work is more than simply an exploration of Roman urban streets, however. It addresses one of the central problems in current scholarship on Roman urbanism: Kaiser suggests that streets provided the organizing principle for ancient Roman cities, offering an exciting new way of describing and comparing Roman street networks. This book will certainly lead to an expanded discussion of approaches to and understandings of Roman streetscapes and urbanism.

1 Textual Evidence for Roman Perceptions of Streets and Plazas

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 first 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 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 final 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 roofing tiles per day.¹⁰ These first 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 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 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 spac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Graphs
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Textual Evidence for Roman Perceptions of Streets and Plazas
• 2. Defining and Analyzing Street Networks in the Archaeological Record
• 3. Pompeii
• 4. Ostia
• 5. Silchester
• 6. Empúries
• 7. Streets, Space, and Roman Urbanism
• Notes
• Bibiliography
• Index