Can these dichotomies between wide and narrow, observed and unobserved, open and secret, via and platea versus angiportum and semita be detected and elaborated in the physical evidence from one of the best preserved Roman cities, Pompeii? How might we identify a street as having the characteristics of a via or an angiportum mentioned in literature? By combining concepts developed by urban geographers and archaeologists with statistical techniques for analyzing spatial data, it is possible to decipher Romans’ perceptions of their streetscapes from the archaeological as well as the literary evidence.
It is worth taking a moment, however, to mention some parameters of the study of the physical remains at the outset. Roman jurists considered any public urban space that had the legal right of iter, the right for anyone to walk through it, or via, the right to drive a vehicle through it, as a public thoroughfare whether or not it was what we might call a street, plaza, forum, or simply the open space between buildings (Digesta 8.4.14). When using the term “street” collectively below, I have just that definition in mind. Any street that follows a fairly direct path with no bend greater than 40° is considered as one unit, even if traditionally it is subdivided. Thus, the Vicolo del Lupanare and the Via dei Teatri are one complete unit. On the other hand, the Vicolo delle Regina is subdivided since it has a significant jog where it crosses the Vicolo dei dodici Dei and the two ends of the street simply do not line up with one another. Similarly, while it may appear on a plan that one may exit the city through the Porta Vesuvio from either the Via del Vesuvio or the Vicolo dei Vettii, in reality one must go from the the Vicolo dei Vettii to the Via del Vesuvio before exiting the city as the Vicolo dei Vettii does not align directly with the city gate.
One factor mentioned over and over in ancient literature that separates a vial platea from a angiportum/semita is the amount of activity along the street. For a street to be as busy as a via or platea, it would have had to lead to popular destinations. Two prominent destinations for people at Pompeii that are easily studied using statistical techniques are the forum and the city gates. The streets that lead to these end points should have been busier and perceived as more via-like, while those that did not reach them would have been seen as more angiportum-like. Indeed, the explicit association of the terms via and platea with streets leading to city gates and fora has already been mentioned. To test this idea, information about a street’s destination can be quantified using a statistic known as depth (Hillier and Hanson 1984, 104; Kaiser 2000, 48—49). This term refers to how many streets one would need to pass through from the city gate in order to reach a given destination. Thus, a street that led directly to a gate would have a depth of one. Any street that crossed a street that led to a gate would have a depth of two, and so on. Depth from the city gates can be seen in Figure 8.1; the lighter shades indicate low depth and therefore a via type of street and the darker shades indicate high depth or an angiportum type of street. The same method can be employed using the forum as the beginning point of the street rather than the city gates. In Figure 8.2 the lighter shades indicate a street that led directly to the forum while the darker shades indicate streets that were distant from the forum. Naturally this method treats all routes leading to a city gate or the forum as equivalent. No doubt
This is a gross oversimplification and Pompeii had a more complex hierarchy of streets which we may never fully understand. But the method is sufficient to allow us to test the hypothesis suggested above based on the use of Latin vocabulary that Roman culture differentiated streets that led to city gates and fora from those that did not.
Another way to measure the amount of activity along a street is to look at its role within the entire street network. Streets with many intersections would serve to integrate the network and have much more traffic while those with fewer intersections would tend to segregate the network and have less traffic (King and Golledge 1978, 72; Hillier and Hanson 1984, 109-113; Kaiser 2000, 49-52). Figure 8.3 represents a map of Pompeii’s streets depicting this characteristic with the darker shades indicating more intersections and the lighter shades indicating fewer. Based on the descriptions cited above from the ancient authors one would expect a via to have more intersections than an angiportum.
Ray Laurence (1994, 88-103) developed one more method for quantifying the amount of activity along a street. He counted the number of doorways along each street and divided by the length of the street creating an index of the amount of activity along that street. The smaller the average distance is between doorways and the greater the number of doorways along a street, the greater the number of people coming and going through those doorways should be, at least in theory. The reverse would be a greater average distance between doorways and a smaller number of doorways which should indicate a smaller number of people utilizing that street. Figure 8.4 reproduces Laurence’s maps (1994, 92-93): darker shades indicate streets with much social activity, and therefore streets closer to the via end of Roman perceptions of city streets, while the lighter shades indicate those with less social activity and, therefore, streets closer to the Roman definition of an angiportum. Figure 8.4 differs slightly from Laurence’s original maps in that it combines his four maps into one. It also represents all streets and plazas in the city while Laurence chose to ignore some. In addition Figure 8.4 offers more categories allowing for a more nuanced depiction of the amount of social activity at Pompeii including a separate category for any street with no doorways as I suspect these had a very different feel from those with even one doorway, although admittedly this conclusion is based on modern analogy as I have found no reference to a street without doors in the ancient sources.
One thing worth noting while studying each of the maps is how much overlap there is between the different descriptive techniques. For instance, the Via dell’Abbondanza, the main east-west corridor in the city, leads directly to both the forum and a gate, has a high number of intersections, and had a low average distance between doors; surely it was one of the busier streets in the city. This combination of features fits many of the characteristics cited above to describe a via. Meanwhile, the street between insulae I 1 and I 5 (east of the Via Stabiana near the Porta Stabiana) had no doorways, only one intersection, and high depth from both the forum and the city gates. It would have been among the least traversed streets in the city. This street fits the description of an angiportum elucidated from the literature above.
While it would be convenient if all the streets at Pompeii fell as neatly into these categories as the two just described, archaeological evidence is always much more complex. Nonetheless, trends in the data suggest that streets leading directly to the forum or a city gate had more traffic and activity than streets with the highest depth from these locations. Table 8.2 presents the average number
Of intersections and average distance between doorways for the streets at Pompeii arranged by depth from the city gates. The drop in the average number of intersections is quite dramatic between streets with a depth of one and two from the city gates when compared to the difference between streets with depths of two and three. Because of the greater average number of intersections, streets leading to the city gates must have had more traffic than those that did not. The same break between streets with a depth of one and those with depths of two and three is apparent in the average distance between doorways. This distance is relatively small for streets that led to city gates but is much greater and nearly the same in streets with depths of two and three. Streets that led to the city gates tended to intersect the greatest number of streets and have the highest concentration of doorways; they must have been the busiest streets in Pompeii. This is precisely the combination of factors we would expect of a via/platea based on the literary uses of these words. Streets that did not lead directly to the city gates had significantly fewer intersections than those that did and significantly less traffic. The same streets had fewer doorways and, as a result, were less used. Again this fits the literary uses of the terms angiportum and semita.
Taking the forum as the starting point rather than the city gates, Table 8.3 demonstrates remarkably similar trends to Table 8.2. Again, streets that enter the forum have the highest average number of intersections and the most doorways, while those most distant from the forum in terms of depth have the least. The streets one follows to reach the forum fit the description of a via while those most distant from that location appear more like the description of an angiportum. The gap in Table 8.2 for the average number of intersections and distance between doorways is quite dramatic between the depth of one and the depths of two and three from the city gates. This gap is not repeated in Table 8.3 where the changes in the averages are more gradual. Nonetheless the trends in Table 8.2 are repeated in Table 8.3 as the average number of intersections decreases while the average distance between doors increases when depth from the forum increases. It is difficult to see a street with a depth of two or three from the forum fitting the definition of a via or angiportum based on this evidence alone; not every street can be so easily categorized and may represent a transition from one extreme to the other.
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