Fig. 4.5 Cosa. (J. B. Ward Perkins, loc. cit., Fig. 8)
In the two seasons preceding the discoveries on the arx just described, much work had been done. In the survey to set up the fifty-meter grid, Cosa’s own ancient rectangular grid of streets, with pomerial street running just inside the wall as at Marzabotto, came out clear enough to be plotted on the plan ([Fig. 4.5]), together with the standard blocks of housing, like the identical “ribbon-development” apartment blocks of a welfare state, which compensated the pioneers for whatever fleshpots they had given up in the metropolis or elsewhere. Housing was found to occupy two-thirds of Cosa’s thirty-three acres, while public buildings took just over twenty per cent, and streets the rest. The site, which is waterless, was found to be honey-combed with cisterns: over sixty-five were plotted. The mile-and-a-half of walls, with their eighteen towers, spaced an effective bowshot apart, had been closely examined. They were found to be built with two faces and a rubble fill. The outer face was handsomely finished, with tight mortarless joints, and sloped seven degrees back—this is called “batter”—from the perpendicular; the inner face was left rough. Potsherds of the Etrusco-Campanian style found in the rubble fill were of a period matching Livy’s date of 273 B.C. for the colony. It was clear that the walls, which show throughout no difference in technique, were built all at one go, at the time the colony was founded. Those impatient of the Roman reputation for perfect engineering will be pleased to know that the ancient craftsmen, when they came to close the ring of the wall, found they had made an error of from two to four Roman feet. (The Roman foot approximately equals the English.) The three gates were examined, and found to be of two rooms, with the main gate grooved on its inner walls with slots for the rise and fall of the portcullis, as at Alba. Bordering the roads leading from the gates were tombs. The director of the excavations, by skindiving, examined the outworks of the port, built to prevent silting, and established them as Roman. They were parallel jetties 350 feet long, supported on huge piers measuring twenty by thirty Roman feet, and forty-five Roman feet apart.[C]
[C] Undersea exploration, one of the most fascinating branches of archaeology, has not been carried as far in Italy as in France (see, e.g., P. Diolé, 4,000 Years under the Sea [New York, 1954]). But this is a convenient place to report a 1950 Italian operation off Albenga, on the Ligurian coast between Genoa and the French border. Along this stretch of the Italian Riviera fishermen’s nets had frequently brought up amphorae, presumably from an ancient wreck, which was soon located in twenty fathoms. The use of an iron grab damaged the sunken hull, but an impressive number and variety of objects were recovered. The ship yielded up over 700 more or less intact cork-sealed, pitch-lined amphorae, from a cargo of perhaps thrice that number; their shape was that current in the second and first centuries B.C. Some had contained wine, others still held hazel-nuts. Campanian black-glaze pottery, of a type datable in the last half of the second century B.C., was found in sufficient quantity to enable Professor Nino Lamboglia, who was in charge of the operation, to set up a whole typology of black-glaze ware, based on types, fabric, and glaze, a typology which proved a useful check for dating Cosan pottery, and for which the Cosan results have provided some corrections. Lead pipes and lead sheathing resembled those found in the ships from Lake Nemi (see Chapter 7), and a stone crucible with molten lead in the bottom suggested that running repairs could be carried out at sea. Fragments of three helmets, of unusual design, may have been intended for Marius’ army, which was campaigning in the north against Germanic tribes in the late second century B.C. The finds are on display in the Albenga Museum (see N. Lamboglia, “Il Museo Navale Romano di Albenga,” Rivista Ingauna e Intemilia [1950] Nos. 3 and 4).
The 1949 campaign concentrated on the Capitolium ([Fig. 4.6]), situated so that its central cella lay over a cleft in the rock, from which some kind of oracular fraud could be perpetrated. Between porch and cellae, running the width of the building, was a cistern lined with the waterproof cement called opus signinum, made of lime, sand, and pounded bits of terracotta. The temple walls, which stand on the south to an impressive height, visible far out to sea, were built of brick-like slabs of the local calcareous sandstone, set in mortar. On the north, the line worn in the rock by water dripping gives mute evidence of the wide overhang of the roof, Etrusco-Italic style. Some of the terracotta revetments belonged to the older, wooden temple. It must have made a brave show when it was new, covered with brightly painted tiles, its pediment and roof ornaments glittering in the sun.
The last four campaigns of digging attacked the Forum area, thickly overgrown with asphodel, acanthus, and thistles. Here lay the remains of an ungainly but monumental triple arch of about 150 B.C., the oldest dated arch in Italy. It had a central roadway for wheeled traffic, two side arches for pedestrians, and a stone bench attached to the outer face where old men could sit in the sun and gossip. There was a basilica, as big as a New England town hall, like Alba’s (but older: about 180 B.C.). It presented its long side to the Forum, had a nave and two side aisles, and a tribune for the presiding judge at the back, with a vaulted cell, perhaps the local lock-up, beneath it. At some time in the early Empire the basilica was abandoned as a legal center, and restored as a festival hall, or intimate theater.
Fig. 4.6 Cosa, Capitolium. (Fototeca)
Other buildings turned out to hold fascinating secrets. A complex beside the basilica turned out to be an Atrium Publicum, a public hall in the form of the central unit of an Italic house, which was rebuilt as an inn for the patrons of the adjoining festival hall. When, about A.D. 35 (on the evidence of pottery—the “Arretine ware” characteristic of the period), the basilica wall collapsed, it crushed and entombed in place the inn’s complete furnishings and equipment. The excavators suddenly found their hands full of tableware, kitchen crockery, and all sorts of household gear, in metal, glass, and stone; decorative pieces, including a lively marble statuette of Marsyas; and objects of personal adornment, including a fine engraved amethyst. For the first time outside of Pompeii an ancient building had yielded not only its structure but its contents.
On the other side of the basilica, excavation of what had been called Building C brought further surprises. When the workmen had stripped the surface humus off the area of the forecourt, the excavators found themselves looking at a perfect circle of dark earth enclosed by a sandy yellow fill. Further digging established this as a circular, theater-like structure, big enough to hold 600 people. There was an altar in the middle. This must have been the Comitium, the colony’s assembly-place ([Fig. 4.7]). Building C, behind it, must have been the Curia, or Senate House. The undisturbed fill under the Curia floor proved completely sterile; hence the curia must have been built at a date near the foundation of the colony. At this stage both Curia and Comitium were apparently of wood, replaced in a second phase, before the end of the third century B.C., with purple tufa from nearby Vulci.