What Calza found at Ostia was a coastguard station, or castrum, planted by the Romans at the river’s mouth once their control of the sea was established by their victory over Antium’s navy (which produced the bronze beaks on the Rostra). The normal complement of such a station was 300 men. A contingent of that size could have manned Ostia’s castrum wall with one soldier every six feet. Thus the prime motive of the founding was military, and the castrum plan is like the familiar and standard plan of a Roman army camp. But the civilian plan antedated the military: Polybius in his description of the Roman camp of about 150 B.C. says that it was planned like a town (i.e., with a rectangular grid like Marzabotto). And Ostia’s function must from the beginning, or soon after, have been commercial as well as military. Its site at the river mouth was as ideal for collecting the customs as for guarding the coast. Grain from Egypt and Sicily to feed Rome may from the earliest days have been landed here and stored in warehouses for later shipment upriver by barge. At all events history records the appointment as early as 267 B.C. of a special finance officer or quaestor for Ostia, and Calza found the footings of warehouses of Republican date. The terracotta revetments mentioned above date from this period. The houses and shops remained humble for seven generations, but those generations saw the departure of many a fleet, and the arrival of many a consignment of grain. An inscription dated in 171 B.C. marking the limits of public land in Ostia shows that by then it had expanded far beyond the castrum walls. But the story of Ostia’s development, her new wall under Sulla, new theater under Augustus, new port under Claudius, new garden apartment houses under Trajan, and the rest, belong to later chapters.
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In the last half of the fourth century Rome fought two wars against the Samnites. Alba Fucens ([Fig. 4.3]) in the Abruzzi, one of her advanced bases in the Second Samnite War, has been explored since 1949 by the Belgians. It lies 3315 feet above sea level, on the Via Valeria sixty-eight miles east-northeast of Rome. (The sixty-eighth milestone of the Valeria was found in situ inside the colony wall.) Alba’s site dominates five valleys. The Latin colony of 6000 families planted here in 303 B.C. assured Rome’s communications on two sides of Samnium, eastward to the Adriatic and southeastward through the Liris valley.
Fig. 4.3 Alba Fucens, plan. (J. B. Ward Perkins, “Early Roman Towns in Italy,” Fig. 9)
The pride of Alba is its walls, nearly two miles of them, surrounding the three hills on which the colony lies. The material is limestone, which breaks at the quarry into irregular, polygonal blocks. These are set without mortar. The excavators distinguished four different building techniques in the wall. They assumed that the roughest sectors, built of enormous blocks, were the oldest, coeval with the foundation of the colony. These polygonal walls, common all over central Italy, used to be called Pelasgian or Cyclopean, and were formerly assumed to be of immemorial antiquity, but recent archaeological work has pushed the dates of most of them down into the late fourth century or later. At Alba the techniques involve the use of smaller blocks and more careful workmanship in successive phases, until finally with the use of cement we reach the 80’s B.C. and the age of Sulla. On the northwest, where the hill has the gentlest slope, the circuit is triple, and the outermost is the latest. The loop to the north was the arx; it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1915. The wall is pierced by four gates, some with portcullis and bastions. The Via Valeria entered at the northwest, made a right-angled turn, passed the civic center, and emerged at the southeast; that is, it was made to conform to a grid plan within the colony, a grid plan laid down despite the hilly terrain, which made terracing necessary.
Excavating Alba’s civic center, the Belgians found a Forum, with altar and miniature temple, buried under many feet of earth. They also found a basilica (a rectangular roofed hall with nave and two side aisles, used as a law court and commercial center), presenting its long side, with three entrances, to a portico facing the Forum. Beside the basilica, a market, with baths on one side and a temple on the other, with early revetments, repeatedly restored. An adjoining street, parallel to the Valeria, was lined with shops, including a fuller’s drycleaning establishment and at least one wine shop. The doorsills still show slots for the shutters. In front of the shops ran a portico supported on high pilasters. In the curb were holes where customers might tie their mules. At the corner of the decumanus, the excavators found charming statuettes of elephants, used as street signs. Under the market were revealed subterranean chambers accessible only by manholes; the excavators suggest that these are the very dungeons, dark underground oubliettes, where prisoners of state like King Syphax of Numidia in 203 B.C., King Perseus of Macedonia in 167, the Gallic chief Bituitus in 121 were incarcerated, for the Romans often used their colonies as detention points.
Levels, construction techniques, and artifacts assigned various dates to these buildings, but their earliest phases fall in the Republican period, in the age of Sulla or earlier. To the age of Sulla belongs also a handsome rock-cut theater. There is an amphitheater of the early Empire; as we know from a new inscription, its donor was Macro, the notorious informer under the Emperor Tiberius, who brought about the fall of the Emperor’s ambitious and scheming favorite, Sejanus.
Walls, grid, civic center, public buildings: these made of Alba a smaller and more orderly replica of Rome. The general layout is repeated so often in so many places that it suggests a master plan made in the censors’ office in Rome. By the time Cosa was founded, in 273 B.C., the Romans already could draw on the experience of founding at least eighteen colonies.
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