The games in the amphitheatre, whether beast hunts or gladiatorial contests or both, have become the iconic feature of Roman culture. This is true not just in popular culture, whether in film or on television, but also in academic scholarship. Keith Hopkins did much to elucidate a vision of Roman culture that was defined by means of the gladiatorial games in the amphitheatre (fig. 10.1). However, we need to remember at the outset that at Rome there was no stone amphitheatre until 29 BC, when Statilius Taurus constructed one in the Campus Martius (later destroyed in the fire of AD 64), and it was only surpassed by the building of the Colosseum, which was opened by the Emperor Titus in AD 80 – a structure that would remain the largest amphitheatre in the Roman world. It was not in Rome that the stone-built amphitheatre was developed, but in the cities of Italy that contained veterans. We need to look first at the cities of Italy to understand the presence of the amphitheatre in the Roman city, what this new structure meant and when it was adopted as a desirable addition to the fabric of these cities. From there we will examine the rather patchy adoption of the amphitheatre in the western provinces (fig. 10.2). It will also be important to consider the amphitheatre as an expression of Romanness. Did an amphitheatre make a city more Roman? Did the new monumental form developed in the cities of Italy give a distinctively Roman character to the cities of the West that was absent in the cities of the Greek world?

The town or city has been recognised as playing a vital role in the government of the Roman Empire. It was characteristic of the developed geography of the Roman West and was a feature that differentiated the Empire from the barbarian cultures beyond its frontiers. In this chapter we seek to outline the interplay between the city as a place of government and the city as a distinct geographical formation that was defined by means of its existence in time and space. We will begin by investigating the legal and geographical distinctions between the various types of towns, and then move on to examine the myths of town foundation that helped to define new cities and to create a sense of their past once they were established in the landscape. There follows a detailed examination of the rules of government found in the town charters: our focus will be on the charter from Urso in Spain. These charters give us a picture of the limits of government and the opportunities given to annually elected magistrates to develop their communities. The cities of the Empire were not, however, just places of politics and government. We will examine the holding of periodic markets and auctions which, quite apart from their economic functions, were a fundamental and jealously guarded legal privilege of the cities. The city also played a role as a place of justice, both locally for the community and for traders dealing with that community, and at a regional level where some cities gained status as the locations to which the provincial governor came to dispense justice. This takes the discussion of the city up to the level of the province and reveals two important roles for the city as a place from which tax was collected and from where recruits to the Roman army originated. These topics reveal the ways in which the local city was integrated into a wider vision of the Roman Empire as a territory held in common. Some cities, most notably Lyon, ancient Lugdunum, did develop as regional centres through their role as a meeting place for the worship of the deified emperors and the holding of sessions of the provincial council. We shall demonstrate that the cities of the Empire may have possessed local autonomy and a very local form of government, but could be integrated into a larger political geography at the level of the province or, more fundamentally, as part of a Roman territory that encompassed both the western and the eastern Empire.

Preface

The city is widely regarded as the most characteristic expression of the social, cultural and economic formations of the Roman empire, perhaps especially in the Latin-speaking areas of the empire where urbanism was much less deeply engrained than in the Greek East. Yet there is no textbook (or book for that matter) that provides students with an overview of the city in the western Roman Empire. There are numerous reasons for this, one being that most academics focus on the study of the city in a single province or within a limited geographical region. We took a step to overcome this limitation to our understanding of the Roman city and began a dialogue that shared our expertise on the Roman city in North Africa (Sears); in Italy (Laurence) and in the North-West provinces (Esmonde Cleary). This three-way discussion produced some unexpected results that altered the way we conceived of the Roman city: certainly all of us gained from the experience. What it showed was that any single region could not encapsulate the variation in form, time and space associated with the Roman city. The results of our discussion are presented here.

This book began with an account of the formation of Roman urbanism in the late third and early second centuries BC and the following chapters, as in other books on the Roman city, have focussed on the dates of the establishment of cities and monumental development. The latter could be regarded as having produced an urban culture across the Empire, but the previous chapters have shown a dramatic variation in the adoption, deployment and building of monument-types across the provinces of the Roman West. We must now turn to the outcome of this process of urban formation and account for the variations within Roman urbanism across the western Empire. More important, perhaps, is our intention to produce an understanding of the overall pattern of urbanism and to develop a macro-theory of Roman urban development that includes cities from right across the Roman West, rather than focussing on a single monument-type or province or the evidence from a single modern geographical region that coincides with a nation state. Unlike other accounts of the pattern of urbanism, we are less concerned here with the initial phase or adoption of the idea of having a town, and focus our discussion on the sustainability of Roman urbanism over the longer term or longue durée.

The theatre as an element of urbanism has its origins in the Greek cities of the fifth century BC and was to become an important feature of the cities of Campania and other parts of central Italy by the end of the second century BC. Combined with the fact that the first stone theatre, that of Pompey, was not built in Rome till the 50s BC and was followed by the construction of two further stone theatres, those of Marcellus and Balbus, by the close of the first century BC, this might suggest that the theatre was a building that was not characteristic of the Roman city. Indeed, the theatre does not seem to have become an essential urban element in the cities of Roman Spain or Britain. Yet, in Italy, North Africa and Gaul, the theatre was a feature of the urban landscape and one recognised by Vitruvius as a structure to be erected in the cities of the empire of Augustus. In Chapter 7 we examined the link between the forum and basilica complexes, which are prominent in Vitruvius’ text, and their civic and religious functions in the political landscape of the Roman city. That space was shown to be part of the urban formation that created a sense of urbanness that was reproduced across the Roman Empire in the West. The forum was a sacred space, but there were others in the city too. Traditional approaches and ideas as to how to understand or approach theatres and their part in the creation of sacred space and the performance of the sacred in the Roman city have been subject to revision, with new viewpoints emerging. Traditionally, the theatres of the Roman city have been treated separately from the temples. The reason for doing so was probably that today we see the events of the theatre as outside the realm of the sacred and located in what we might call leisure (source-books such as Cooley and Cooley’s Pompeii: A Sourcebook maintain this division).

The city is a wonderfully complex entity; it can be defined as either a physical space of architecture, or as a people living in a single place, or as both of these. Within these definitions a myriad other elements emerge that make the city a very slippery object of analysis. This is as true of the multiple entities categorised as ‘the Roman city’ as it is of any other urban form. Indeed, the idea that there was a single category, ‘the Roman city’, in the western half of the Mediterranean basin throughout the period of almost half a millennium that is the subject of this book, does not stand up to more than a few seconds’ scrutiny. Indeed, one of the central tenets of this book is that what we see across this huge area and long time-scale is the working out by numerous local communities of their relationship to Rome as expressed through the almost infinite variations on common themes of urban form and urban structures which were first generated in Italy and then adopted and adapted in the provinces. Moreover, analysis of the Roman city has been shaped by a series of explicit and often implicit theoretical positions rather than by any single agreed narrative or type of explanation. Some of these positions have been articulated with reference to social theory, although much that is written on the Roman city has relied on empiricism and reference to an undefined ‘common sense’. The Roman city has also featured in debates among scholars of the Roman Empire over Romanisation (and resistance), imperialism, the economy, cultural identity, discrepant experience, and phenomenology, to name but a few. We do not intend to rehearse these general debates here, nor to summarise the views of other authors (references are provided and these can be read at first hand). Instead we wish here to explain our view of the Roman city in the light of these discussions in order to articulate the conceptual and theoretical positions which underpin the chapters that follow.

The forum in texts

By the time Vitruvius came to write De architectura (On Architecture) in the early first century AD, the forum had become a central feature of every city in both Italy and Greece. He explains the difference in form within these two distinct urban cultures: in Greek cities the forum was square with double colonnades, whereas in Italian cities it was rectangular because it was in this space that spectacula and gladiatorial games were held according to ancestral custom. The size of this rectangular space would have varied according to the size of the population, so that at the games the space did not appear half-empty or too crowded. Earlier examples from Italy demonstrate some variation – Alba Fucens: 142×44 metres; Cosa: 90×30 metres – and do not conform to Vitruvius’ suggested 3:2 proportion of length:breadth. The forum, as Vitruvius shows in his text, was very much a place of negotium, or business, with provision for tabernae (shops/offices) to be let out to the argentarii (money changers/bankers) and the positioning of an adjacent basilica in a warm location for use by negotiatores (traders) during winter. Another series of buildings adjacent to the forum were those of local government: the treasury, the curia and the prison. Vitruvius’ text concerns the meaning or use of a forum – as a place for traders and negotium, but also as a place for government. He makes no mention of a temple dominating the central piazza of the forum, and indeed the association need not have been central to the urban form that we understand as a space surrounded by public buildings. None of the early fora constructed in Latin colonies had a temple dominating the space, as can be seen at Paestum, Cosa and Alba Fucens. Instead, what was included at these sites conformed to the emphases already highlighted – a basilica for trade and a curia or Senate house for government. The latter, for Vitruvius, should have reflected the dignitas of the municipium or civitas and its acoustics should have enabled the assembled parties to hear the discussion within its interior. The whole forum was a place for public and private business controlled by the magistrates of the city.

In trying to understand the Roman cities that appeared and developed in Italy and in the western provinces from 200 BC, we need to begin our discussion with an investigation of what the Romans thought urbanism was about, the forms it should take and what were they trying to make when they placed a new building in a city. To understand these concepts, we need to look at the developments within the city of Rome that were to alter the shape of that city, alongside a series of initiatives taken by the state in the coloniae (colonies) across Italy in the early second century BC, a period we see as crucial to the definition of a ‘Roman’ style of urban form and urban buildings (see fig.1.1). However, the developments in Rome and its coloniae did not occur in isolation. Contacts between Rome and the Hellenistic monarchies were intensifying from the late third century BC. This contact between the world of Rome and that of the eastern Mediterranean would ultimately result in the conquest of Macedonia and the incorporation of the cities of Classical Greece into the Roman Empire in 167 BC. The attitude of the Roman aristocracy towards Hellenism was complex, but can be illustrated by the fact that we find a number of senators sporting knowledge of the Greek language but refusing to use it in an official capacity. The Roman elite recognised that culturally the Hellenistic world had much to offer them and so drew on Hellenism and tended to absorb the culture, but deployed it selectively. Through diplomatic missions and warfare members of the Roman elite were exposed to a tradition of urbanism very different from that manifested at Rome, one marked by elements of formal planning, a range of public buildings and monuments and the use of elaborate architectural forms along with materials such as marble. This was particularly true of the leading political centres of the Hellenistic world such as Alexandria, Antioch and Pergamum, and of the great cultural centre of Athens, with all of which the Roman elite would have become progressively more familiar. The impact of contact with the East and Greek culture can be seen in those independent cities of Italy such as Pompeii (see fig.1.2) that were themselves developing or adopting new building types and styles of architecture. These would have influenced Rome’s view of the nature of urban life, whilst the acquisition of provinces, especially in the Iberian peninsula, provided new challenges to its definition. What we wish to examine in this first chapter is the development of an urban culture in the Roman West from about 200 BC down to the middle of the first century BC.

Bath-buildings are one of the commonest types of building in Roman cities, more common indeed than all other classes of urban building apart from houses. Furthermore, across the western provinces and North Africa they are to be found in all sorts of settlements, be they forts, villas or lesser towns; with the result that they are one of the most recognisable of Roman building types and could be said to be as characteristic of Roman-style living as any of the more famous markers of the Roman presence such as forts, towns or villas. Their ubiquity and their presence at such a wide range of places should make it clear that baths and bathing were intimately linked to becoming and being Roman; by the same token, not to have baths or not to have ready access to them suggests a level of disengagement from Roman-style practices. Yet despite the importance of bathing proclaimed by this ubiquity, bathhouses have until recently been rather the poor relations of other building-types in the attention paid to them by modern scholars. In part, this is probably because, at a very simple level bath-buildings seem self-explanatory. From the simplest to the grandest, they all display the same essential features. There was a suite of three rooms of varying temperatures: the frigidarium (cold room), tepidarium (warm room) and caldarium (hot room), the last two heated by underfloor hypocausts and provided with basins for water to humidify the air. In these the bather got progressively hotter so that the pores opened and the sweat carried away dirt, and cleaning was aided by scraping the skin with a curved strigil and by rubbing in oils. This would be all that the simplest type of bath-suite – what the German tradition calls Reihentyp (row type) – would provide for.

The Romans of the Augustan Age identified the phenomenon of colonisation within their own history, according to which citizens or veteran soldiers were settled in captured cities or in cities established on new green-field sites. The legal status of a city as a colony or a municipium was important for the listing of cities by category. The first emperor attached greater importance to the colony than to the municipium. Contemporary historians, such as Livy or Velleius Paterculus, could look back and see colonisation as part of a process of Roman imperial expansion and as a way of understanding the spread of the Roman people across the Italian peninsula – something that needed to be remembered rather than forgotten. City foundation was a key aspect of Roman history and thus also of Roman identity.

From ‘town planning’ to a new urban aesthetic: armature

One of the most distinctive and widely remarked elements of the Roman city is the presence at very many sites, from the middle Republic in Italy onwards, of a regular, orthogonal grid of streets; particularly noticeable of course to modern scholars working from two-dimensional plans of these sites. Because of the ubiquity of such sites with street-grids and the way in which those grids control the placing of buildings and other features of the urban landscape, they have been accorded great importance in the modern literature on Roman urbanism.

Mysterious and austere, dressed in white linen, head shaved, wise in the ways of magic and divination, the Egyptian priest, known since Herodotus as a fount of ancient wisdom, reappeared in a new literary guise when Egypt, the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms, was made into a province of the Roman empire. Greek and Latin texts – some purely fictional, some professing to tell of actual events – revealed the Egyptian priest as a learned magician, capable of foretelling the future, making the dead speak, consorting with gods, and producing all kinds of powerful effects with spells and magical substances. He could also, at times, impart his esoteric knowledge to others. Egypt became not only a place of deep history and of the distant origins of gods, rites, and doctrines, it was also an archive and school of the occult for those who sought magical knowledge in the present. That, at any rate, was the claim made by the author of a treatise De virtutibus herbarum, a work on astrological botany and one of the more unusual documents to acquire importance in the history of Hellenism. Though one of several technical works on the magical properties of plants and stones preserved from antiquity – works rarely studied outside of specialist disciplines – this particular one has long had a prominent place in the study of religious life in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

Early in the seventeenth century, J. J. Scaliger published his Thesaurus temporum, a book which combined critical editions of major Christian world chronicles with a manual of universal chronology, the Canones isagogici. In this work, unlike his previous chronological study De emendatione temporum, he sought to integrate the long past of Egypt into his scheme for synchronizing the histories of different nations, a scheme based on the innovative creation of a 7,980-year Julian Period. Scaliger derived his Egyptian chronology of kings and dynasties from the Aegyptiaca, a fragmentary history written in Greek by the Egyptian priest Manetho. This work satisfied his critical requirements far better than Herodotus' treatment of Egyptian history and chronology: “we find these dynasties more worthy of belief than Herodotus, a foreigner. For Manetho, an Egyptian by descent and dwelling, and a priest, dug them out of the ancient records of the Egyptian religion.”

Two centuries before the decipherment of any hieroglyphic texts, the Aegyptiaca possessed a unique authority because of Manetho's peculiar identity: an indigenous priest with direct access to Egyptian records, who nevertheless wrote in Greek. These luculentissima fragmenta (most brilliant fragments), as Scaliger called them, revealed to him “in an elegant order” (pulchro ordine) the long chronology of Egyptian records of the past. But as Anthony Grafton has shown, the fragments of the Aegyptiaca also cast light on the new context in which they were used, and especially the unresolved conflicts in Scaliger's approach to historical chronology.