The surveyor liked to link up his centuriated grid with a colony plan. Thus at Cosa the groma, for siting the allotments, could have been set up in the Porta Romana (the northeast gate), and at Alba the line of the Via Valeria inside the walls, if projected, would cut the lines of centuriation at right angles. The four sides of the centuria were usually marked by roads, the inner subdivisions by narrower roads, trees, hedges, or drainage or irrigation ditches. Modern land-use often follows the line of the ancient: one stretch recently laid out and now in use at Sesto, west of Florence, deliberately follows the traces of Roman centuriation, restored by a classically trained engineer for modern man to admire. As with the grid inside a colony wall, the centuriated grid of allotments was laid out from a basic cardo and decumanus. The Roman surveyors were balked by no natural barriers. Bradford cites one line of centuriation running as high as 1600 feet above sea level (though within the centuriae the furrows might follow the contours) and another, in Dalmatia, continues from a peninsula across to the mainland, spanning an arm of the Adriatic Sea three miles wide. In north Italy, where the flatlands of the Po Valley made the survey easy, one can ride from Turin (Roman Augusta Taurinorum) to Trieste (Roman Tergeste), three hundred miles, through centuriated systems all the way. The same air photographs which revealed neolithic sites to Bradford in Apulia showed Roman centuriation, too, and subsequent digging turned up pottery of Gracchan date (about 133–122 B.C.). A particularly extensive stretch, outside of Italy, is found in Tunisia. It has been traced from the air 175 miles from Bizerta to Sfax, and southwestward from Cape Bon for 100 miles inland. It probably goes back to ambitious plans of Gaius Gracchus, about 122 B.C., to resettle Rome’s urban proletariat.
Fig. 4.10 Paestum: Roman grid of streets (air-photograph).
(Italian Ministry of Aeronautics)
The examples of colonized and centuriated sites mentioned here hardly even scratch the surface of the subject. Dozens of others remain to be explored, on hilltops and headlands, by rivers and crossroads, the length and breadth of Italy. Recent excavation at the Latin colony of Paestum, on the coast fifty miles southeast of Naples, has traced the Roman grid ([Fig. 4.10]), identified yet another Comitium, and produced over 1,000,000 small finds. And still other colonial sites lie under populous modern towns and cities: examples, in chronological order of planting, are Anzio, Bimini, Benevento, Brindisi, Spoleto, Cremona, Piacenza, Pozzuoli, Salerno, Vibo Valentia, Bologna, Pèsaro, Parma, Modena, and Òsimo. Their foundation-dates span the years from about 338 to 157 B.C., the expanding years of the Roman Republic, the years of “Manifest Destiny.” Their continued existence compliments the Roman founders’ nice eye for a promising site, but makes large-scale investigation of Roman levels difficult or impossible, for residents of flourishing modern cities naturally resist resettlement in the interests of archaeology. Excavation in these populated areas must wait upon repair of war damage, urban improvements (as when laying new sewer mains reveals Roman ones that follow the grid of the Roman streets), or new building to bring new facts to light. No colony has been completely excavated. At least forty per cent of ancient Ostia and Pompeii remains to be dug. But generations of archaeologists of many nations have dealt patiently and intelligently with the evidence. Perhaps, considering the long span of two-and-a-half millennia since the earliest tradition of the planting of Roman colonies, the wonder is not that we know so little but that we know so much.
What archaeology has revealed is the story of the exploitation of a frontier, with much that is exciting, and much that is sordid. There are many points of resemblance to the history of the American West, though two differences should be emphasized: the Romans often planted their outposts in the territory not of savages but of their cultural equals, and the Roman frontier was settled not by private but by government enterprise. But the likenesses are striking. Centuriation produces something like quarter-sections; land grants to veterans resemble grants under the Homestead Act; the Roman grid town-plans were reproduced in our Spanish settlements of the Southwest. And perhaps, on the Roman as on the American frontier, the atmosphere was less democratic than Frederick Jackson Turner thought.
What archaeology digs up in the colonies is material remains, brute facts, but what it infers is men; men marching out in serried ranks under their standards for the formal act of founding (deductio); Romans and local Italians living side by side with some degree of amity and equality; Romans impressing their ways and speech on the peoples round about; Roman slum-dwellers given a new chance in the new territory; large estates broken up to give land to the landless; grizzled veterans settled in the quiet countryside after a lifetime of hard campaigning; Romans homesick in strange places; undergoing the rigors of frontier existence; subject to the ferment of success and failure; forging a cultural life (the epic poet Ennius, the dramatist Pacuvius, the satirist Lucilius, all came from Roman colonies).
The grid plans, in town and country, as Bradford has pointed out, show, if not genius, then strong determination and great powers of organization. The grids are, like the Romans themselves, methodical, self-assured, technically competent. They are also regimented, arbitrary, doctrinaire, and opportunist. This was the price the Mediterranean world had to pay for the security of the Roman peace.
But before that peace-without-freedom could be enjoyed, the Roman Republic was to suffer its death throes. That blood-bath was the work of the nabobs of the last century before Christ, who left their stamp, as nabobs will, on the buildings they erected to testify to their glory.