The Roman City and its Periphery

From Rome to Gaul

Penelope Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134303342
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The first and only monograph available on the subject, The Roman City and its Periphery offers a full and detailed treatment of the little-investigated aspect of Roman urbanism – the phenomenon of suburban development.

Presenting archaeological and literary evidence alongside sixty-three plans of cities, building plans, and photographs, Penelope Goodman examines how and why Roman suburbs grew up outside Roman cities, what was distinctive about the nature of suburban development, and what contributions buildings and activities in the suburbs might make to the character and function of the city as a whole.

With full bibliography and annotations throughout, this will not only provide a coherent treatment of an essential theme for students of Roman urbanism, but archaeologists, urban planners and geographers also, will have an excellent comparative tool in the study of modern urbanism.

1
EXPLORING THE EDGES OF A ROMAN CITY

A Roman city, like a text, a vase or a statue, is an artefact of the society which produced it. Its buildings, its infrastructure and its spatial organisation can therefore give us, as modern observers, an insight into the nature of that society. Working back from the material remains revealed by archaeology, and in the light of other forms of evidence such as art, literature, legal documents or coinage, we can seek to identify the social customs and processes which shaped the character and appearance of the urban fabric.¹ We may observe, for example, the effects of the efforts of the ruling elite to maintain their elevated social status through their use of public buildings, statues and inscriptions to impress and to court popularity.² Similarly, we may detect the desire of craftsmen and small traders to maximise trade in the clustering of shops and workshops along main roads.³ We can also ask how the fabric of the city, once established, might in itself shape the day-to-day lives of its inhabitants.⁴

This book sets out to explore the organisation and use of a particular section of the Roman urban fabric – the urban periphery – as a means of better understanding the nature and workings of Roman urban society. Chapters 2 and 3 will offer a detailed exploration of what constituted the periphery of a Roman city, and how it might be identified. For the purposes of introducing the concept, however, a basic definition of an urban periphery may be offered here. A city’s periphery can be taken to mean any occupation on the fringes of a city which is neither fully urban nor fully rural in character.⁵Although the urban periphery is intimately connected with the city, an observer familiar with Roman urbanism should be able to distinguish it not only from the centre of the city but also from the countryside beyond. Such an observer, of course, could be an ancient inhabitant of the Roman empire or a modern researcher.

To date, the Roman urban periphery has received relatively little attention from scholars. Yet it is clear that the concept of occupation which was neither fully urban nor fully rural did exist in the ancient world. Both literary texts and legal documents, for example, refer to such land-use with a variety of specialised words and phrases. Amongst the most common are the Latin adjective, ‘suburbanus’, the adjectival phrases, ‘extra urbem’, ‘extra moenia’ and ‘extra murum’, and the Greek noun, ‘proast(e)ion’ and its related forms. The very use of these terms indicates that something which cannot be defined as either urban or rural is being described, while, as chapter 2 will show, the contexts in which they occur reveal much about ancient perceptions of periurban occupation. Meanwhile, archaeological evidence shows that the organisation of space and the use of land in the urban periphery was indeed different in certain respects from that in the urban centre or the countryside. Burials, for instance, were almost never made in the urban centre, while in the countryside they tended to be widely dispersed. Yet, on the periphery of the city, they were often concentrated into cemetery zones, or lined the edges of the main roads out of the urban centre. Thus, conventions differed between the city, the urban periphery and the countryside. This suggests that the people making the burials considered there to be a real distinction between the three.

It is clear, then, that the urban periphery was a widely recognised and meaningful feature of Roman urbanism in the past. If this was the case, it is of course important for us to examine and understand it, as an essential element in wider explorations of Roman urbanism and Roman urban society. This book offers such an investigation. It asks why periurban development arose at Roman cities; how, why and to what extent it differed from occupation and land-use in the city and in the countryside; what were its distinguishing characteristics; what factors and processes shaped those characteristics; and what it meant to choose to build a structure such as a house or a public building in the urban periphery. The goal of these questions will partly be to arrive at an understanding of the urban periphery in its own right. But the answers that they bring about will also be applied to wider debates. These include in particular the nature of the relationship between city and country in the Roman world, as well as the nature of the relationship between urban-based provincial elites and the metropolitan elite at Rome. The aim is to demonstrate the potential contribution of periurban evidence to the debates surrounding these issues, and to add fresh perspectives.

It will already have been noted that the terms used here to describe the intermediate zone between city and country are not the seemingly obvious choices: ‘suburban’ and ‘suburbs’. Instead, throughout this book I use the phrase ‘urban periphery’ to describe the zone as a whole, and the adjective ‘periurban’ to describe individual features belonging to it. Although perhaps slightly cumbersome, there are two reasons for preferring these terms.

First, the Latin adjective, ‘suburbanus’, and the rarer noun, ‘suburbium’, carried specialised connotations in the ancient world, as chapter 2 reveals. Although both could be used in any context, in practice they are most frequently used to describe a specific landscape of private villa properties around the city of Rome. The goal of this book, however, is to explore the phenomenon of periurban development on a wider level than this. For this reason, the term ‘suburbanus’ and its modern derivatives are reserved for discussing features around Rome itself, and alternative terms are used when discussing other cities. This approach is in keeping with an established modern convention of using the word ‘suburbium’ as a technical term for the region around Rome.⁶ Meanwhile, the other Latin terms which were used to describe the urban periphery either assume that it is distinguished from the urban centre by walls (‘extra murum’ and ‘extra moenia’), or define it only in relation to the city without necessarily implying that it is in any way different from the countryside (‘extra urbem’). Although these have given rise to modern derivations such as extra-mural and extra-urban which could be used here, their roots again make them problematic. The cities of Roman Gaul, which are central to this book, amply demonstrate that walls were not necessary to create a clear distinction between the urban centre and its periphery. It is also crucial to the identity of the urban periphery that it was different from the countryside, and did not simply mean ‘anything outside the city’.

The second major reason for rejecting the terms ‘suburban’ and ‘suburbs’ lies in their modern associations. For most westerners, these terms carry connotations derived from two related contexts: a knowledge of medieval and early modern urbanism in Europe, and an experience of modern European and American cities. Ideas of the suburban drawn from these contexts, however, are at odds with the reality of the Roman urban periphery in several important ways. First, the medieval or early modern city. ‘Suburbs’, wrote Braudel of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe, ‘housed the poor, artisans, watermen, noisy malodorous trades, cheap inns, posting-houses, stables for post-horses, porters’ lodgings.’⁷ The vision is of suburbs as a second-rate space, where people and activities expelled from the urban centre ‘washed up’ alongside one another. The Roman urban periphery was indeed home to traders and artisans, but it also featured monumental public buildings and wealthy elite housing. The idea of the suburb as a lower-class overspill zone is an anachronism for the Roman world: and, as we shall see, has arguably given rise to misinterpretations of its economic activity.

Medieval and early modern cities, though, did share with their Roman predecessors a tendency to have a distinct centre marked out by visible urban boundaries: either city walls, or, in the Roman period, other alternatives which will be introduced in chapter 3. The distinction between centre and suburbs in modern European and American cities is not usually so sharp. The transition from their centres to older, ‘inner’ suburbs,⁸ and more recent ‘outer’ suburbs,⁹ is usually detectable through changes in the character of the occupation and the age of the buildings, rather than because visible boundary markers are passed. Both inner and outer suburbs in Europe and America are also often the result of planned urban expansion, and as such tend to have a very homogeneous character. This gives rise to the endless landscape of identical houses and white picket-fences portrayed in films such as American Beauty (and parodied in Edward Scissorhands), or, in a British context, a neighbourhood of cul-de-sacs and semi-detached houses satirised in sitcoms like The Good Life and Birds of a Feather. But Roman periurban development was rarely planned, and tended to be varied in character and appearance. Finally, land-use in the outer suburbs of modern cities is usually heavily ‘zoned’. Outer suburbs are known for their commuter villages, industrial estates and, increasingly, retail parks. Although Roman periurban development could sometimes be dominated by a single type of land-use, this was not widespread. It was far more common for land outside a Roman urban centre to host a variety of structures and activities which existed side by side.

For all of these reasons, then, ‘suburb’ and ‘suburban’ are somewhat misleading terms to use in a Roman context, and especially of provincial cities. They evoke either the specific context of metropolitan Rome, or the suburbs of later cities, very different from their Roman equivalents. The words ‘periurban’ and ‘urban periphery’ are less loaded with existing connotations, and yet aptly describe occupation which is neither fully urban nor fully rural. Using these terms allows development on the fringes of Roman cities to be examined on its own terms, with less danger that the picture will be clouded by images drawn from elsewhere.

What is certain is that the need for such an examination is pressing, whatever term is employed to describe its subject. To date, the peripheries of Roman cities have received all too little attention. Past approaches to the study of Roman urbanism have frequently been based on the implicit assumption that the relationship between city and country was antithetical, with a sharp line dividing them both physically and conceptually. This is especially true of economic approaches: indeed, the polar division between city and country is an underlying principle of the ‘consumer city’ debate.¹⁰ Such a viewpoint is not surprising, since it is in keeping with expressions of the same antithesis to be found in the ancient world (see chapter 2). But it leaves little scope for scholarly investigations of anything falling between the two poles. As a result, much work on Roman urbanism has overlooked the urban periphery, and the contribution which it can make to a richer understanding of the relationship between a Roman city and its rural surroundings.¹¹Meanwhile, closer examinations of Roman literary texts and archaeological evidence reveal that the relationship between city and country was not as starkly opposed as it might at first appear. In fact, it was ambiguous and open to inversion: and the urban periphery is only a particularly vivid illustration of this.

This is not to say that no work at all has been done on Roman periurban development. Much has been written on the suburbium of Rome, partly because it is especially prominent in our literary sources, and partly because of the degree of archaeological attention which Rome in general has received.¹² The indispensable Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae is even now being supplemented by a second series devoted to the Roman suburbium under the title Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae: Suburbium.¹³ There have also been studies of periurban occupation outside specific provincial cities, such as Lincoln or Bologna,¹⁴ and some more detailed works aiming to review periurban development across a whole province. In 1987, Simon Esmonde Cleary published a monograph on the subject of extra-mural development at towns in Roman Britain,¹⁵ while a conference held in France in 1997 focused on periurban occupation outside Gallo-Roman cities.¹⁶

These latter two publications have been particularly important steps forward in expanding the study of Roman urban peripheries into the provinces, and away from the special circumstances of Rome.¹⁷ However, their scope could have been wider. Esmonde Cleary took a strictly archaeological approach to the towns of Roman Britain, employing textual evidence only when discussing the legal and administrative aspects of extra-mural occupation. He was able to produce an extremely comprehensive account of the physical form of extra-mural occupation in Roman Britain. But some conclusions which could have been drawn by comparing this account with evidence from other parts of the empire fell outside the scope of his work. He was unable to comment, for instance, on whether Romano-British cities were influenced by Roman literary treatments of the urban periphery. Meanwhile the papers of the French conference were written by many different authors, covering either specific periurban issues or individual sites. This encouraged a valuable range of ideas, approaches and regional studies. But it meant that the opportunities to draw comparisons between findings from different sites, or present an overall account of periurban development across Gaul, were limited.

Here, I shall again focus on one particular region – the four provinces of Gaul – but will seek explicitly to set the periurban development observed there into the wider context of urbanism throughout the western provinces of the Roman empire. My intention is to strike a balance between a detailed treatment of periurban development in a meaningful regional context, and an overview of the phenomenon of the Roman urban periphery as a whole. I shall examine both archaeological and non-archaeological evidence from a range of geographical contexts, and use this to draw direct comparisons between different cities within Gaul, and between Gallo-Roman cities and those in other parts of the empire.

Chapters 2 and 3 will begin by examining periurban development as an empire-wide phenomenon. Chapter 2 explores the ‘thought-world’ associated with this type of occupation: in Rome itself and in the places touched by Rome. Chapter 3 then goes on to look at the archaeology of the urban periphery, asking in particular how periurban occupation can be identified from a modern perspective. Chapters 4 to 6 will then move on to a detailed examination of the character and function of periurban development in the specific context of Roman Gaul. As these chapters will establish, Gallo-Roman cities have enough coherence as a group of related sites to allow meaningful comparisons to be drawn between them, and for an overall picture of periur-ban development in this region to be constructed. Finally, the concluding chapter considers the contribution of the periurban evidence from Gaul to our understanding of Roman urbanism as a whole, and especially to debates concerning the city–country relationship and the relationship between Rome and the provinces.

2
THE URBAN PERIPHERY IN ROMAN THOUGHT

Introduction

Much of the rationale behind setting out to study the Roman urban periphery rests on the fact that it was a recognised entity in the ancient world, and thus had meaning within Roman society. The evidence which indicates that this was so, however, can tell us much more than this. Legal documents, literary texts, and visual images provide an insight into the thought-world of the urban periphery, as well as the various means by which Roman observers distinguished the periurban from the urban or the rural.¹ This evidence comes primarily from an elite perspective: it was chiefly produced by and for individuals who held a dominant...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Plates, Figures and Tables
• Illustrations: Sources and Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Exploring the Edges of a Roman City
• 2. The Urban Periphery In Roman Thought
• 3. The Archaeology of the Urban Periphery
• 4. Gaul In the High Empire: Administrative Cities
• 5. Gaul In the High Empire: Secondary Agglomerations
• 6. Gaul In Late Antiquity
• 7. Some Wider Questions
• Notes
• Bibliography