Introduction

In the opening book of Vergil’s Aeneid the Trojan prince Aeneas, fleeing the ruins of his native city, arrives on the shores of North Africa to find another group of fugitives, Phoenicians from Tyre, establishing a new settlement on the site that will become Carthage. On a reconnaissance mission he and his companion Achates catch their first sight of the new city and its leader, Dido.

They now started to climb the hill which loomed large over the city and looked down over the citadel opposite. Aeneas was amazed at the massive structures, where once there had been simply huts; he was amazed at the gates, the din of activity and the paved streets. The Tyrians were hurrying about busily, some tracing a line for the walls and manhandling stones up the slopes as they strained to build their citadel, others choosing the best site for a building and marking its outline by ploughing a furrow. They were establishing their laws and selecting their magistrates and respected senate. At one spot some were excavating the harbor, and at another a group of men were laying out an area for the deep foundations of a theater. They were also extracting from quarries mighty pillars to stand tall and handsome on the stage which was still to be built.... In the center of the city there was a grove of trees that provided a wealth of shade.... Here Dido the Sidonian was in the process of building a huge temple for Juno; already the offerings dedicated there made it opulent and the goddess’s powerful presence could be felt. Its threshold was made of bronze, raised high upon steps; bronze-plated were its beams, bronze were its doors that hung on creaking hinges.... Then alongside the folding doors that led to the goddess’s inner sanctum Dido took her seat beneath the temple’s dome upon her raised-up throne, surrounded by armed guards. She was already giving her people new laws and statutes and deciding by her own balanced judgment, or by lot, a fair division of the toil required of them. (Vergil, Aen. 1. 419-29, 441, 446-9, 505-9)

Dido is here depicted as the very model of a Roman leader. She is busy framing laws, making important political decisions and, not least, supervising the construction of a monumental urban center on a site that had previously been occupied by just a few simple huts. The paved streets, the wall-circuit and its gates, the citadel, harbor, theater and large sumptuous temple of Juno all gave this new community a striking visible presence on the landscape and announced that a civic community worthy of that name was being founded. Not least Aeneas witnessed the ploughing ofthe sacred furrow (the sulcus primigenius) around a building, a ritual that the Romans would come to deploy for marking the outer limits (pomerium) of a city; consequently, this act, more than any other, came to symbolize the foundation of a new city.

As Vergil was writing these lines in the 20s bce, the Punic city of Carthage, in ruins since its destruction by the army of Scipio Aemilianus in 146 bce, was being refounded as a Roman colony, the Colonia Concordia Iulia. A massive urban grid encompassing 300 hectares was being laid out and a large forum, 190 meters long by 165 meters wide, was under construction on artificial terracing on the Byrsa hill (Gros 1990a; Rakob 2000). Vergil’s words thus had plenty of contemporary resonance. But they also encapsulate the Roman belief that a city, that is, an autonomous civic community that controlled a clearly defined territory, needed to be equipped with a monumental center just as much as it required laws, a constitution, local magistrates, and a local senate. Any city worthy of its name had to have a built environment for the proper functioning of its political, religious, and social life.

Julius Caesar had made much the same connection, if more laconically, when he mentioned how in 49 bce his legate T. Labienus ‘‘had given a constitution to and provided at his own expense a monumental center for’’ the new municipality of Cingulum in the hitherto under-urbanized region of Picenum in central-eastern Italy (BC 1.15.2). Thus it is not surprising that when Roman artists came to represent a city in visual form, they stressed its monumentality. A fresco from a Flavian-period building on the Oppian hill in Rome shows a city ringed with a set of walls crowned with circular towers (La Rocca 2000; Caruso and Volpe 2000). It has a fortified harbor with two protective moles, while a river or canal flows into its urban center through an arched entrance flanked with towers. Visible inside the city are a theater with a portico behind its stage-building (a porticuspostscaenam), several temples, and a large square forum with surrounding colonnade and impressive entrance arch. The city is laid out on a regular grid with the main cross-streets, the kardo and decumanus, clearly delineated. A fragmentary relief from Avezzano (now in the Museo Nazionale at Chieti) emphasizes many of the same ideals (Gros 2001: 21). It shows a city once again proudly equipped with ashlar masonry walls and a gate, its houses neatly organized within a rectilinear grid (Figure 13.1a). Another fragment has a public building adorned with statues (Figure 13.1b). On the first fragment, immediately outside the walls we can glimpse the surrounding countryside with its fields, trees, villas, and tombs. The clear implication is that a city’s territory was perceived as being an integral part of any civic community.

There can be little doubt that in their conceptualization of cities the Romans required them to have a monumental center in order to qualify for civic status. This idea was not unique to the Romans. The Greeks had long since held it and continued to expound it now that they found themselves under Roman rule. Pausanias, for example, writing in the mid - to later second century ce, questioned whether

Figure 13.1a and b Relief from Avezzano, Italy, showing city and surrounding countryside (DAI, Rome, Inst. Neg. 79-2757)

Panopaeus in Phocis in central Greece deserved the title of ‘‘city’’ ‘‘when it has no public buildings, no palaestra, no theater, no market-place, when it has no running water linked to a fountain and its inhabitants live on the edge of a ravine in hovels like mountain huts’’ (10.4.1; cf. Finley 1977). Vergil’s Dido, we will recall, had demolished African huts ( magalia-. Aen. 1.421) to build her new city. Huts and hovels were simply not commensurate with urban civilization.

But cities were more than just monumental spaces; they also helped to spread the political and cultural ideals of Rome in areas brought under Roman control. Strabo, who wrote a geography of the known world during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, emphasized this repeatedly in his discussion of Rome’s western provinces. Cities allowed the Romans to settle in a fixed location previously mobile, and hence dangerous, peoples, who could then be expected to turn to the civilized practice of agriculture in the territory of that city. This occurred, for example, in the area to the north of Massilia (modern Marseilles)-

The barbarians who are situated beyond the Massiliotes were already becoming more subdued and instead of brigandage they had already turned towards civic life (politeia) and settled farming (georgia) because of the sovereignty of the Romans. (4.1.5; cf. 4.1.11 and 4.1.14 for similar sentiments about the Allobroges and people around Tolosa respectively)

Strabo spells out the benefits of an urban lifestyle in even clearer terms in discussing the region of southern Spain known as Turdetania, which formed much of the Roman province of Baetica-

Together with the fertility of the land, civilization and an urban lifestyle have developed among the Turdetanians.... The Turdetanians, especially those who live along the (river) Baetis (modern Guadalquivir), have completely changed over to the Roman way of life, not even remembering their native language any longer. The majority have become Latins and they have received Romans as colonists, with the result that they are now very close to becoming completely Roman. (3.2.15, C151)

For Strabo, therefore, the growth of cities and civic life were central to the process of becoming Roman. Cities facilitated cultural transformation as centers of Roman-style education, but they also allowed Roman models of law and local government to spread into areas that had not previously experienced strong centrifocal control. It is the importance of cities for the administrative and cultural history of the western provinces under Roman rule and the social milieu of these cities that will be the focus of this chapter.