There were other outward and visible signs of the Republic’s new maturity and prosperity. The gods deserve their reward for fighting on the side of the biggest battalions, and so the expanding Republic built temples. In another age of arrogant expansion, in 1926, not long before Säflund began his work on the walls, slum clearance in front of the Argentina theater (on the site of the portico of Pompey’s theater, where Caesar was murdered) revealed the foundations of four Republican temples ([Fig. 3.10]), nowadays the haunt of countless tomcats. The gods to whom the temples were dedicated being unknown, they were named, with proper archaeological sobriety, Temples A, B, C, and D. The foundations of Temple C, the third from the north, are the deepest; it is therefore the oldest. It is set in the Italic manner at the back of a high podium, built of Grotta Oscura tufa; its mason’s marks match those on the “Servian” wall. Clearly it was built by the same masons or in the same tradition. The podium carries the distinction of being the oldest surviving datable public building in Rome. Terracotta revetments found in excavating are of fourth century type. Besides meanders, the so-called “Greek frets” or “key” design, an angular pattern of lines winding in and out, their decorative motifs include strigil patterns: parallel troughs, made by the workman’s thumbs in the wet clay, and then painted in contrasting colors. The strong curve of the profile resembles that of the strigil or scraper used by athletes in the gymnasium to remove caked oil and dirt from their bodies; hence the name. The roof’s peak and corner ornaments, called acroteria, have spikes set in the clay to discourage birds from perching and committing nuisances. This temple and its three later fellows are still a long way from the grandiose marble and gold of the Augustan Age, but they are an equally long way from the primitive wattle-and-daub huts of the Palatine village. They mark a stage in the painstakingly unravelled archaeological story of Rome’s expansion, which we shall follow at various newly-excavated sites in Italy.
4
Roman Colonies in Italy
Rome’s wall begun in 378 B.C. took twenty-five years to build. However secure she might feel behind it, immediately beyond the gates lurked enemies. To the north the Gauls, to the east and south, Italic tribes (whom Rome successively feared, rivalled, dominated, and invited to partnership; of these the Samnites were the most fearsome), on the seas the Syracusan and Carthaginian navies—all represented a clear and present danger. Rome’s population being inadequate to keep legions in the field, much less a fleet at sea, against all these threats at once, she evolved a system of advanced bases, called Latin colonies ([Fig. 4.1]), manned partly with trustworthy local non-Romans, though with a hard core of Roman legionaries. This avoided undue drain on the Roman manpower, and placed the responsibility for frontier defense upon frontiersmen who had the greatest interest in their own security.
During the last thirty years the efforts of archaeologists of several nations; for example, Italians at Ostia, Belgians at Alba Fucens, Americans at Cosa have added much to the sum of our knowledge of these frontier outposts: their fortifications, street plan, public buildings, housing arrangements, and the surveyed (“centuriated”) quarter-sections of land (allotments) stretching away from the walls into the countryside round about. From these brute facts inferences can be drawn, about what prompted the founding of these outposts (was the motive always military?), about relations with neighbors and with Rome, about communications, about economic, social, and cultural life.
Fig. 4.1 Roman colonization. (P. MacKendrick, Archaeology 9 [1955], p. 127)
At Ostia, at the Tiber’s mouth, historical tradition said that there had been Romans settled since the days of King Ancus Marcius, and that, even earlier, Aeneas had landed there and built a camp. In 1938 the great Italian archaeologist Guido Calza began soundings to ascertain the date of the oldest surviving stratum. The area he chose was beneath Ostia’s Imperial Forum, where the two main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, crossed. (The Via Ostiensis, from Rome to the river mouth, determined the line of the decumanus.) What he found ([Fig. 4.2]) was a set of walls enclosing a rectangle 627 feet long and 406 feet wide. The wall was built of roughly squared blocks of tufa in a technique not unlike that of Rome’s wall of 378 B.C., but since there was Fidenae stone in it, Calza dated the wall somewhat later than 378. The wall was pierced by four gates of two rooms each, with portcullis. The south gate was demolished in the early Empire to provide space for a temple of Rome and Augustus; the north gate gave way under Hadrian to the massive podium of a Capitolium, but the footings of the east and west gates survive, well below the level of the Imperial pavement. Calza found drains within the walls, and traces of four other streets (unpaved) besides the cardo and decumanus, but no identifiable buildings. Some terracotta revetments found in the area suggest an unidentified temple of the third century B.C. No traces earlier than the late fourth-century wall have been found in the excavated area of Ostia. Either Ancus Marcius’ foundation is a myth, or it was planted in some thus far undiscovered spot, of which all the plowing and digging in the neighborhood has left no trace.
Fig. 4.2 Ostia, castrum, plan. (G. Calza, Scavi di Ostia, 1, fac. p. 68)