Conclusion

In his account of his father-in-law’s career under Domitian as provincial governor in Britain, Tacitus underlines the role that Cn. Iulius Agricola played in the urbanization of that province:

To ensure that men who were scattered and uncivilized and for this reason naturally inclined to war might become accustomed to peace and quiet through pleasures (volup-tates), Agricola encouraged individuals and assisted communities to build temples, forums and town houses by praising those who were eager and reprimanding those who were dilatory. Thus competition for honor (honoris aemulatio) took the place of compulsion. Furthermore he educated the sons of the local aristocracy in the liberal arts and ranked the natural talent of the Britons superior to the trained skills of the Gauls. As a result, those who had just recently been rejecting the Roman language now conceived a desire for eloquence. Then even our style of dress came to be favored, the toga was to be seen everywhere. Gradually people started to give in to the attractions of vice: porticoes, baths and the elegance of banquets. And this was called ‘‘civilization’’ (humanitas) by people who did not know any better, although it was in fact part of their enslavement. (Tac. Agr. 21)

These remarks develop some of the ideas articulated by Strabo in the passages discussed at the start of this chapter. The Romans were keen to reorganize peoples with scattered settlement patterns into communities with fixed limits and a clearly identifiable administrative center. A crucial element of each new civitas capital was a monumental urban center, adorned with buildings familiar from the urban landscapes of Rome and Italy. Significantly, Tacitus begins his list of such buildings with temples and, as we have seen, temples provided the focal point of most cities, reminding the local inhabitants of the importance of placating the gods to ensure the continuation of the Roman peace. Tacitus also emphasizes how crucial the local elites were to this civilizing process. It was often their personal interaction with an imperial administrator such as Agricola that sparked such building programs. Once the idea of the city had been planted in the minds of the local elite, it was fostered by their growing familiarity with central Roman concepts such as humanitas, gleaned from their reading of key Roman texts (not least Vergil’s Aeneid). But most of all it was their ambition to enhance their own status and outdo their counterparts in neighboring communities (honoris aemulatio, in Tacitus’ words) that provided the fuel to carry these projects through to fruition.

Tacitus’ words, however, obscure the fact that this was often a slow and gradual process. The civitas capitals of Britain could not suddenly boast a full panoply of Roman-style public buildings; it took time for their monumental centers to develop, and often ambitious schemes, clear from the initial grid-plans laid out on the landscape, were never fully realized. While most of the cities of Baetica and Gallia Narbonensis had fully-fledged monumental centers by the Flavian period, Britain, the Danubian provinces, and even Africa had to wait until the mid-second century or sometimes later still for these urban programs to be completed. In some areas monumental cities remained thin on the ground: settlements were designated as civitas capitals of a given territory and used by the Romans for the purposes of administration, but never developed the full physical fabric of a proper Roman city. In the interior of Gaul, for example, many continued to live in rural villages, only visiting the major centers once or twice a year at the very most (Woolf 1998: 135-41; for the smaller towns of Britain, see Burnham and Wacher 1990). So while it is generally true that urbanization was one of the most important consequences of Roman rule in the west, by no means was it experienced with equal intensity across the entire region. There were some clear similarities, to be sure, in the architecture to be found in urban centers as far afield as southern Spain and the interior of Gaul or Britain, but the texture of urban life was by no means identical. Much depended upon the local context and upon the needs of the local elite as they continued to negotiate a social and political relationship with the representatives of Rome sent to administer their province and, not least, with the Roman emperor himself.