Our present knowledge of Ostia, extending far beyond the early castrum discussed in Chapter IV, is due in large part to the devoted skill of Guido Calza. Under some pressure from Mussolini, who wanted the dig finished for an exposition scheduled for 1942 (but never inaugurated), he supervised the removal in four years of over 600,000 cubic yards of earth, recovering some seventy of the 170 acres enclosed within Ostia’s Sullan wall. What he uncovered he rejuvenated but did not falsify: his method was much the same as Spinazzola’s in Pompeii. This was his principle: “Better to brace than repair, better repair than restore, better restore than embellish; never add or subtract.” His aim was not to suppress inconvenient ugliness, but to remove impediments to study and understanding. He restored mosaics, making a clear distinction between the old tesserae and the new; re-erected columns, put balconies back in place, rebuilt wooden ceilings to protect houses from the weather. He detached wall-paintings, reinforced them with cement and wire mesh, and replaced them, covered with glass, and protected against mold by the insertion of lead plates into the wall below the painting, to retard the spread, by capillary action, of dampness. He sealed the tops of walls, freed flights of stairs from rubble, opened out windows which had been bricked up in late antiquity. He planted trees, and set a privet hedge to mark the line of the city wall. He restored the ancient drainage-system. The result of all this careful work was to present to the modern world a picture of Roman life under the Empire only a shade less vivid than Pompeii. And the picture is not of a provincial town, but of the very vestibule of Rome itself, in fact a Rome in miniature, for Ostia gives an excellent notion of what life in the metropolis was like at the height of the Empire. And thanks to the careful work on the brick stamps by Professor Herbert Bloch of Harvard, most of the buildings excavated can be dated with a very fair degree of precision, so that Ostia’s development can be accurately traced from end to end.
We know from an inscription that Trajan’s artificial harbor, whose completion marked the beginning of Ostia’s peak of prosperity, was built in A.D. 104. Ostia proper was at the very mouth of the Tiber, but silting, which today has put the beach of modern Ostia (Ostia Lido) three miles beyond the seawall of the ancient town, early made the city docks impracticable for any but the smallest vessels, so that Trajan built his harbor beside (indeed over the necropolis of) Claudius’, two-and-a-half miles northwest of the town. The traffic in grain and luxury goods to feed and pander to the more or less refined tastes of the largest and richest city in the world made Ostia vastly prosperous. The evidence is building activity, dated by brick stamps, impressed on building tiles, and bearing the names of consuls, tile manufacturers, or both. There was a slight time-lag, while prosperity built up. Only twelve per cent of the datable buildings in Ostia belong to Trajan’s reign; forty-three per cent were built or restored under Hadrian. Then activity tapers off again: seventeen per cent of the buildings are of Antonine date (A.D. 138–192), while only twelve per cent belong to the age of the Severi (A.D. 193–235). Thereafter Ostia, whose fortunes rose with Rome’s, declines with her also.
The most illuminating way to describe what archaeology has to tell us about Ostia is to follow the plan used for Pompeii, treating in order the town and its population, municipal life and public amenities, housing arrangements, trade and industry, and the evidence for Ostia’s religious life. Art in Ostia hardly deserves separate treatment: it is, naturally, less well-preserved than at Pompeii, and what there is seldom rises above the level of pure documentation.
The plan of Ostia (Figs. [10.1] and [10.2]) is regular but not regimented. It has unity in variety; it combines utility, a monumental quality, and the scenic. Its backbone is the major east-west street, the decumanus, nearly a mile long, and once colonnaded, which runs from the Porta Romana straight to the Forum. Beyond the line of the west castrum wall it forks sharply to the left, ending at the Porta Marina, which once fronted directly on the sea. The main north-south street, the cardo, began at the Porta Laurentina on the south—Ostia’s triplicity of gates is an Etruscan heritage—and ran, shaded and porticoed, northwestward to the dazzling whiteness of the colonnaded, marble-enriched Forum. Then it split in two on either side of Hadrian’s Capitolium and passed north between balconied houses to the river. Sixteen per cent of Ostia’s total area, exactly the same proportion as a modern city such as Madison, Wisconsin, was devoted to streets. Twelve per cent of Ostia was taken up by baths, fifteen per cent by warehouses (for Ostia was first and foremost a commercial town), and fifty-seven per cent by houses, most of which are middle-class apartment blocks. Knowing the total housing area available, and calculating twenty-six square meters of space for each person, Calza reckoned the maximum population at 35,000 to 40,000.
Fig. 10.1 Ostia. (G. Calza, Scavi di Ostia, 1)
Fig. 10.2 Ostia, air view. (H. Kähler, Rom und seine Welt, Pl. 199)
The evidence for Ostia’s municipal life comes mostly from inscriptions, over 6000 of them, many unpublished. They show that Ostia, like most Italian towns, imitated Rome: since Rome had a pair of chief municipal officers, the consuls, Ostia had a pair also, the duoviri. There was a town council of 110 members, which met in a marble-floored council house facing the Forum. Legal activity went on across the street in the basilica, also paved with marble, and with a pleasant portico facing the Forum. It had a charming frieze of Cupids carrying garlands. Both buildings are of Trajanic date; the prevalence of marble in them can be explained by the ease with which the stone could be brought by ships in ballast. There was a municipal plutocracy, whose names occur and recur on honorific decrees (praising them for benefactions), and on tombs near the Porta Romana and Porta Marina. The names are those of businessmen and freedmen, not of the old Roman aristocratic families. And as the years wear on men seldom hold office more than once, for it grew to be an expensive honor. If taxes assessed by the Imperial treasury were not collected in full, town officers had to make up the deficit out of their own pockets.
Public amenities included a theater, baths, and a fire department. The theater, built in Augustus’ reign (about 12 B.C.), and often restored and enlarged, seats 2700, and is used nowadays for outdoor performances of Greek and Roman plays. Behind it is a portico where theater patrons might saunter, with a temple in its midst built by Domitian. In a combination of business with pleasure typical of Ostia, seventy offices face the four sides of the portico. These offices, to be discussed in more detail below, were maintained by local branches of firms from all over the Empire.