Fig. 4.7 Cosa, Comitium. (L. Richardson, Jr., Archaeology 10 [1957], p. 50)
A healthy site, an orderly plan, a water supply, strong walls, housing, provision for political and religious needs: the basic necessities are all here, at Cosa, and all as early as the founding of the colony. By hard work, painstaking accuracy, and intelligent inference, Brown and Richardson, the excavators of Cosa, have given us the clearest possible picture of the physical structure of a Roman colony well on in the first intense period of history in the planting of advanced bases. Cosa is clearly the fruit of long practice and Etrusco-Italic tradition, untouched by Hellenism (no Greek architectural language in sculptural or ornamental marble) or by new-fangled techniques (no brick or concrete in the early phases). When we carry down Cosa’s architectural history to the early Empire, we infer the death of freedom of speech from the remodelling of the basilica into a theater. And when freedom of speech and public life died, the colony lost its sense of community. Its thirty-three acres would have held 3000 to 3500 settlers comfortably. But the first draft of settlers numbered probably 2500 families. (We infer families, not soldiers only, from the discovery of loomweights, hardly appropriate for Roman legionaries.) 2500 families make a population of at least 7500, and probably more, given Italian philoprogenitiveness. Some of these must have lived well outside the colony; only those whose centuriated allotments, explained below, lay nearest the walls would have lived in the colony proper. The holders of more distant plots would come to town only for market, worship, litigation (as long as the basilica lasted), or refuge from raiding parties of Gauls or other enemies. And so, under despotism, the community disintegrated. The temples held on longest. “Only the gods, in the end,” writes Professor Brown, “held steadfastly to their ancient seats.”
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By derivation, a colonia is a place where men till the soil. Colonists were assigned centuriated allotments. Since traces of centuriation have been found both at Alba Fucens and at Cosa (Figs. [4.8] and [4.9]), as well as at nearly fifty other certain and half as many possible sites in Italy, this seems an appropriate place to discuss the subject. Wherever colonies were planted, wherever land was captured, confiscated, redistributed to the poor or to veterans, the surveyor with his groma, or plane-table, was on hand. Air photography is a great help in revealing traces of the Roman surveyor at work, for modern land-use has often overlaid the ancient traces, leaving ancient crop-marks as the only clue. The standard surveyor’s unit was the centuria of 200 iugera (the iugerum, five-eighths of an acre, being the area an ox could plow in a day), and a side of twenty actus (776 yards), its corners marked by boundary stones, some of which survive. There has been too little digging to confirm the results of air reconnaissance, but it seems clear that some centuriation goes back to the late third century B.C. Dr. Ferdinando Castagnoli, the Italian expert, is inclined to date that of Alba and Cosa at least this early, as well as large stretches in the fertile Campanian plain northwest of Naples.
Fig. 4.8 Alba Fucens, centuriation.
(F. Castagnoli, Bull. Mus. Civiltà Rom. 18 [1954–1955], p. 5)
Fig. 4.9 Cosa, centuriation. (F. Castagnoli, loc. cit., p. 6)