The Buildings of the Imperial Administration
The study of the city of Rome as administrative center of a worldwide and centralized empire raises specific epistemological, historical, as much as methodological problems: first of all, this type of installation received for a long time scarce attention from specialists. A reason for that is the state of the available documentation: on the one hand, we know from textual sources that each important service received a specific setting and proper archives; on the other, we are most of the time unable to identify in the preserved buildings the concrete services because of the total destruction of the archives themselves and also because of the pluri-functionality of the buildings designed to house these activities: the administrative centers were often located in the exedras of the major basilicae. Moreover, these services have regularly been removed during imperial times. Finally, in archaeological terms, it is difficult to differentiate them from the numerous libraries of Imperial Rome.
Naturally, the most important activities were concentrated in the area of the forum. The most famous structure is the Tabularium, whose monumental substructions on the Capitolium still dominate the present-day Forum’s valley (Figure 12): this central archive building was part of a complex which comprised also the officinae of Roman coinage until Domitian related to the temple of Moneta and the state treasury near to the temple of Saturn. The imperial fora soon became essential for administrative as well as judiciary activities: the Templum Pacis was probably one of the headquarters of the Praefectura Urbis, and the forum Augustum could house processes. The large porticoes located on Campus Martius also housed numerous vital complexes: for instance, the Crypta Balbi was not only a portico related to the stone theater, it probably was the place for the praefectura vigilum, and the temples today visible on the area of Largo Argentina were part of the porticus Minucia that housed the list of the citizens who could benefit from free grain distributions. Recently, excavations made on the slopes of the Palatine Hills have suggested that the monumental substructions of the imperial residence could have been used as offices of the imperial bureaucracy.
Structures for the Food Supply System
Aelius Aristides claimed that it was impossible to find outside Rome something that could not be found in Rome. The role of the city as final destination and ‘cellar’ of all types of goods available over the
Figure 12 Reconstruction of the Tabularium and the temples of forum Romanum in imperial times, design by C. Moyaux.
Mediterranean sea is not only a literary commonplace of Panegyrics of Rome: the complexity and the sophistication of the structures related to the trade and the food supply of the ancient city, both in administration and in building, reveals that it was obviously a central and perpetual concern of the Roman State to be able to provide food to a million people (the estimated population for the imperial period). The major problem was that Rome had no good natural harbor; Ostia became the river port of the capital and merchandises were transhipped to Rome.
As for the offices of the Roman bureaucracy, the archaeological remains of those vital activities raise important methodological problems. One of the most impressive testimonies of the commercial activity of the city, considered as a major symbol of ‘the consumer city’ that was Rome, is the present-day Monte Testa-ccio, an artificial hill, 35 m high, built exclusively with empties of Roman amphoras from the port. The hill is massively composed from olive-oil amphoras from Spain whose production ranges from AD 150 to 250. This concentration raises the question of the conservation of other goods from other periods but gives an idea of the scale of the imports in Rome’s emporium. The commercial harbor, which included huge warehouses like those of the Porticus Aemilia or the horrea Galbana, was built to the southwest of the Aventine Hill: some structures are still visible on the banks of the Tiber as well as stone quays. In the city center were developed general and specialized markets: most of the imperial fora also housed commercial activities, but the best-preserved structures are the so-called Trajan’s markets, a multistoried semicircular building.
The Water Supply System : Baths and Aqueducts
The first drainage works on the Forum’s valley date back to the Etruscan period with the construction of the cloaca maxima which remained in use for centuries. The water requirements of the rapidly expanding city, but also the cultural and ideological importance of water as symbol of Rome’s domination over nature, necessitated the creation of an always more sophisticated supply system that included an extraordinary variety of installations: sewers, aqueducts, fountains, and various basins.
The baths built by Agrippa and those of Nero on Campus Martius probably constitute the paradigm for the ulterior imperial baths, although on a minor scale. These huge and luxuriously decorated monuments without compare constitute a building type unto themselves, designed from a very similar pattern, whose major characteristic is an interior division into two symmetrical parts: besides a central building-block including the most monumental structures, notably giant halls and piscinae of cold and hot water, the imperial baths included a double series of secondary rooms set into a garden precinct. Among the imperial baths mentioned by written sources, only a few examples are well preserved: those of Caracalla and those of Diocletian (Figure 13), a part of which has been transformed into churches in Renaissance times: S. Maria degli Angeli was designed by Michelangelo who transformed one of the main halls of the complex, which houses nowadays part of the Museo Nazionale Romano. Moreover, others have recently provided new evidence: the baths of Titus built on the Oppian Hill and those of Trajan which partially replaced them. The constantly increasing capacity of these complexes shows that this type of infrastructure was considered an absolute priority by the emperors of the third century AD.
World History
