The Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome available in Hardcover
- ISBN-10:
- 0521828279
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521828277
- Pub. Date:
- 04/19/2004
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521828279
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521828277
- Pub. Date:
- 04/19/2004
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521828277 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2004 |
| Pages: | 278 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.75(d) |
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Cambridge University Press
0521828279 - The Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome - by J. Bert Lott
Excerpt
INTRODUCING NEIGHBORHOODS AT ROME AND ELSEWHERE
The first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus (reigned 31 B.C.E.-14 C.E.), boasted that he had turned Rome from a city of brick into one of marble, a claim that neatly encapsulated the emperor's desire in the wake of the destructive civil wars of the Late Republic to create an imperial capital worthy of the new regime (Suet. Aug. 28.3; cf. Dio 56.30). The enormous influence the first emperor had on the built environment of ancient Rome is easiest to see today in such impressive public monuments as the Theater of Marcellus, the Forum of Augustus, or the Altar of Peace, but it is also evident in the city's streets, sewers, and aqueducts, which Augustus repaired and improved (Figure 1). Indeed a contemporary of Augustus praised the emperor and his family for surpassing all others in such public munificence (Strabo Geo. 5.3). The transformation of the imperial capital was, however, more than a purely physical or aesthetic change in city form. Augustus' attention had important social, political, economic, and administrative consequences both at Rome and across the empire. Urban planners and social theorists have long recognized that a complex relationship exists between spatial organization and group life, and that the importance and impact of this relationship is often magnified in urban settings (La Gory and Pipkin 1981). As one pair of scholars succinctly put it, "space is a major social force literally shaping the lives of those within the urban container." Rome was no exception. Indeed nowhere is it more evident that urban planning is a political activity than in Augustan Rome, where the emperor's building program served to signal the end of the disastrous civil wars of the Late Republic, to declare the new emperor's superiority over his aristocratic rivals, to demonstrate his stewardship and care of the Roman people, and finally to legitimize a new imperial ideology that endured for 400 years.
A great deal of attention has been given to the positive and negative effects of Augustus' rise to power on Rome's wealthiest citizens. (It is undoubtedly easiest to see changes in the patterns of urban life at the highest levels of Roman society.) In particular, historians point critically to how the advent of Augustus limited the traditional career paths, expectations, and freedoms of the senatorial elite, not least in the areas of public building and personal display in the capital. Senators who had earlier celebrated triumphs in the city's streets and erected new temples and public monuments to beautify and improve the city found themselves slowly but inexorably deprived of such avenues for self-promotion. Augustus replaced and redirected the competing and somewhat chaotically arranged monumental public structures of Republican Rome to create a more coherent order that communicated a single imperial vision with a single voice (cf. Favro 1996). However, if the Principate curtailed the opportunities available to noble men, for other segments of society the advent of the new regime actually opened up new opportunities. For example the reign of Augustus saw the first monumental public building at Rome undertaken by women. It is thus important to recognize that Rome's population at the turn of the millennium comprised the entire spectrum of Roman society, and Augustus' program of urban renewal affected and involved not just Rome's political leaders and the monumental edifices associated with them but every level of society down to the city's lowliest residents and every urban place down to local neighborhoods and streets.
In fact Augustus systematically reorganized the city's neighborhoods (vici) and carefully created a place for neighborhood leaders (magistri vici) in the new rituals and administration of the imperial capital. Across the Augustan urbs neighborhood associations of lower-class freedmen and slaves began to take responsibility for such services as fire fighting and the distribution of food and water to residents; public religious observances in the neighborhoods were expanded
1. Map of Augustan Rome showing the new fourteen regions. After Stambaugh 1988: 83 fig. 6 drawing by E. H. Riorden.
and regularized around new imperial ideals; and wealthy residents commemorated their collegial terms as administrative officers with valuable public gifts to beautify their neighborhoods. Memorials for Stata Mater, a goddess of urban conflagrations, placed where neighborhoods successfully stopped a fire became an everyday part of the cityscape. This book examines the history and society of Rome's neighborhoods and neighborhood residents in order to examine their place in the imperial capital and the Augustan revolution.
NEIGHBORHOODS AT ROME
During the Republic, Rome consisted of four regions and numerous neighborhoods (vici), which according to the Romans' own traditions had been cultural and institutional divisions of the city since time immemorial. The regions corresponded originally to the four urban voting tribes of Roman citizens, but by the end of the Republic they had lost this association and served primarily as administrative divisions for the management of the city itself. The neighborhoods within each region were geographic, religious, and social entities that each encompassed a small area of the urban space corresponding to a single street and its adjoining houses, apartment buildings, and businesses. At the physical and social center of each neighborhood was a crossroads (compitum) where the vicus maintained a shrine for its two tutelary spirits, the Lares. While everyone who physically resided within the boundary of a neighborhood was a neighbor (vicanus), active participation in the local cult of the compital Lares and other neighborhood activities was limited traditionally to inhabitants from the lowest social ranks of Roman society, the slaves, ex-slaves, and poorer free-born citizens (servi, liberti, and ingenui) who together made up the "urban masses" (plebs urbana, multitudo, and other phrases). Moreover, the neighborhoods were officially recognized and regulated entities that each chose officers (magistri vici) who participated in civic administration as well as civic religion. These officers worked closely with the overarching municipal government, especially the aediles, on issues like the city's food supply, the prevention of fire and crime, and the regulation of businesses. In sum, the neighborhoods both provided social organization and opportunity to those who could not participate more broadly in hierarchal Roman society and mediated between the local communities and the larger structures of city and empire.
In the first century B.C.E., the neighborhoods were caught up in the tumultuous civil strife and political instability that accompanied the final years of the Roman Republic. Like many other segments of Roman society around the Mediterranean, the capital's neighborhoods consequently fell on hard times, in part due to political persecution at the hands of conservative senatorial aristocrats, and the public spaces and cults that they maintained deteriorated from neglect. The neighborhood communities, however, proved difficult to suppress entirely for two reasons. First, the vici were important governmental divisions that the urban administration could not easily abrogate. Second, strong but informal bonds, like physical proximity, ethnic identity, and religious background, cemented the neighborhood communities together even after some aspects of their religious celebrations had been outlawed.
In recognition of, and in contrast with, the civil strife at Rome that characterized the Late Republic, the solid alignment of the city's residents behind the new regime was an important aspect of the political transformation from Republic to Principate. Augustus consciously reversed the physical decline of the capital's neighborhoods as part of his larger campaign to improve the capital. He beautified individual neighborhoods with valuable statues, for example, but he also reorganized the neighborhoods and took steps to integrate their populations, shrines, and rituals into imperial society. As a result of the emperor's patronage, local neighborhood organizations thrived in the early Empire, participating in local, civic, and imperial affairs. The co-optation of the old vici into a new system of civic administration gave the neighborhoods a vested interest in the new regime and an official public standing that they had not before held. For example, the neighborhoods and their officers were made responsible for local fire brigades, a task important to both neighborhoods and the city at-large. The neighborhoods also continued to worship their tutelary gods, but the two spirits were now renamed Lares Augusti in honor of the emperor and in celebration of the neighborhoods' link to the new regime. As an outward sign of their changed status, the officers of the revived neighborhoods quickly adorned the physical spaces of their vici with new shrines, altars, clubhouses, and other monuments. These new monuments taken all together across the city reshaped the cityscape of Rome in a more quotidian, if less impressive, way than better-known massive imperial building projects. The remodeling appropriated local organizations and substantial resources that in earlier times might have been directed toward partisan political activity. Individually and collectively the new neighborhood monuments became the physical manifestation of an active local political culture that existed within, and interacted with, the larger political structures of city and empire.
Although subject to substantial organizational changes over the years, the Augustan system of neighborhoods, neighborhood religion, and neighborhood officers survived at Rome as a cultural institution and administrative tool until the final days of the Western Empire. However, despite their importance to the social and physical fabric of the city, there is no comprehensive modern treatment of Rome's neighborhoods and neighborhood society during this crucial period in the cultural and spatial development of the imperial capital. Therefore the present book aims first to enable further work on the vici by calling attention to the extent and limits of our knowledge of the vici as social communities and not just physical places within the city. A lengthy Appendix arranging all the epigraphic and monumental evidence for the Augustan neighborhoods according to the local era of the neighborhoods themselves accomplishes this. The body of the text sets out a more complex and nuanced understanding of the historical development and cultural significance of the neighborhoods than has previously been assumed. I have endeavored in particular to accomplish four things: first to locate the rejuvenated neighborhoods and neighborhood associations within the broader context of the history of urban Rome; second to identify them as important physical and cultural divisions of the city; third to illuminate the dynamic and unique local communities that existed within each vicus; and finally to investigate the distinctive relationship between the neighborhoods and the first Roman emperor. These last two cannot easily be separated from one another. The nuanced interaction of imperial honorific and personal promotion on a local scale was a hallmark of the political culture of the early Roman Empire that has only recently come to be recognized and investigated, mostly in connection with the boom in municipal construction in communities like Pompeii that accompanied the advent of the new imperial regime. A similar phenomenon, bridging a social rather than physical gap, can be identified in the rejuvenated neighborhoods and neighborhood communities in the imperial capital itself.
Recent work on the neighborhoods has not investigated the vici as communities in their own right, distinct from one another and from the new imperial regime. This oversight has been enabled by a long-standing misunderstanding of the nature of the religion that was practiced at the heart of each neighborhood. In her seminal work on the divinity of the Roman emperor, Lily Ross Taylor argued that the neighborhood cults of the Lares Augusti, always joined in her view by the Genius Augusti, were no more than the private gods of the emperor's family made public (1931: 180-191). Based largely on the new epithet augustus, Taylor equates the newly renamed Lares Augusti with the Lares Domestici and Genii that were important figures in the domestic cults of the Roman aristocratic household and house. The worship of a family's Lares and a father's Genius by lower class members of the household legitimized and reinforced the social hierarchy of the familia. Following Taylor, the vici ceased under Augustus to worship local gods and became a part of an amalgamated symbolic household of Augustus; the freedman and slave participants in compital cult became members of the emperor's family rather than members of individual local places. Taylor's thesis has been widely accepted and the Augustan neighborhood reforms have consequently been classified simply as a manifestation of what Diana Favro calls Augustus' "paternal posturing" (1996: 123). This book does not explore deeply the religion of compital Lares - a topic fraught with difficulties of its own - but rather investigates the social aspects of the organizations that had charge of compital religion. Nevertheless I set out my reasons for disputing that the Lares Augusti were Augustus' Lares Domestici writ large on the urban landscape in Chapter 4. My objections are based on the nature of Roman Lares as guardians of bounded physical spaces, the use of the epithet Augustus with early imperial rather than domestic gods, the continuity between Republican and Augustan neighborhoods, and the local focus of many neighborhood activities. In general, understanding the neighborhood associations as extensions of Augustus' familia ignores both the inherent communities of the vici, which were historically based in physical, ethnic, and religious solidarity, and the integral role of the vici in the Republican and Augustan systems of urban administration.
The importance of the reformed vici and their monuments to Augustan studies has not entirely escaped the notice of more recent scholars. The Augustan altars that survive from several neighborhoods reveal much about the production and diffusion of "imperial ideology" by the way in which they mimic imperial decorative motifs. M. Hano (1986) and Andreas Alföldi (1973) have catalogued and studied the iconography of the neighborhood altars, and Paul Zanker (1970-1971) has investigated their technical workmanship and the workshops that produced them. Tonio Hölscher also treats several altars in Kaiser Augustus und die verlorene Republik, the catalogue from an exhibition in Berlin in 1988 (KA: 390-400 nn. 217-224). In an important study of the relationship between the early imperial family and the urban spaces of Rome, Augusto Fraschetti has shed light on the transition of the neighborhoods from Republic to Empire (1994: 204-273). Available in English, Zanker (1988a: 129-136), Karl Galinsky (1996: 300-312), and Favro (1996) have all touched upon the vici briefly in works on early imperial history and ideology; O. F. Robinson (1992: 11-13) and John Stambaugh (1988) also treat the vici in studies of the urban planning and administration of Rome. Elio Lo Cascio has also edited a valuable collection of essays on ancient Rome, several of which touch briefly on the neighborhoods (2000). Jerzy Linderski (1968) and Jean-Marc Flambard (1981) continue to dispute with great wisdom the existence of "neighborhood clubs" (collegia compitalicia) in the Late Republic, an important but peripheral issue for my argument. The articles on individual vici recently published in the final volume of the Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, mostly written by Claudia Lega, are invaluable additions to our knowledge of the topography of individual vici (LTUR 4 sv. Vicus). Robert E. A. Palmer (1974b, 1976, 1978, 1990, 1997) and Silvio Panciera (1978, 1980, 1987) have also studied many individual neighborhood monuments and communities in depth, not just from the reign of Augustus. The valuable maps and gazetteer of Mapping Augustan Rome, recently produced by Lothar Haselberger and David Romano (2002), appeared too late to be used for this study, although I have adapted a section of one map as Figure 10.
More generally, this book depends on, and adds to, a growing body of literature that treats Rome and other ancient metropolises as functioning cities which, faced with difficult issues of urban planning and maintenance, developed complex administrative solutions. In particular, ancient urban studies have often been tacitly predicated on the belief that accurate long-term records were kept or consulted relatively rarely. Claude Nicolet pioneered the position that the Romans did regularly maintain complex administrative archives and that regular access to, and use of, these archives was vital to the administration of the city (1991: 123-208). Three recent collections, all published in Collection de l'Ecole Française de Rome, L' Urbs: Espace urbain et histoire (Urbs 1987 vol. 98), La Rome impériale: Démographie et logistique (Rome impériale 1997 vol. 230), and La Mémoire Perdue: Recherches sur l'Administration Romaine (Mémoire Perdue 1998 vol. 243), have also influenced my understanding of how ancient Rome functioned. The Augustan neighborhoods were not just religious entities but also administrative ones closely linked to the maintenance of city and urban society over time.
The present work concerns society in Rome's neighborhoods, not Roman urban planning, religion, or public art. Nevertheless neighborhood society at Rome was differentiated along spatial as well as class lines; it was focused on religious observances; and it expressed itself - at least as we can see it - through the artistic beautification and monumentalization of its special public spaces. These other topics have therefore been impossible to ignore, both as background material and as integrated pieces of the argument. Indeed my interpretive method is enthusiastically comparative, pointing to the social and political circumstances for the production of political monuments, the spatial arrangement of physical objects placed within a planned urban space, and the artistic composition of objets d'art to provide a structure for the analysis of neighborhoods at Rome. The argument also relies on modern conceptions of neighborhoods and voluntary associations developed by twentieth-century urban sociologists, anthropologists, urban planners, and urban geographers. These modern discussions, while based in urban systems different in many ways from ancient Rome, nevertheless provide a valuable theoretical context within which to study the vici. Indeed both traditional approaches and modern theoretical models are necessarily invoked throughout, although a general shift from more traditional to more theoretical can be detected as the argument progresses. The evidence for Rome's neighborhoods is multiform and has not been the subject of much earlier scholarship. To develop a clear and rigorous taxonomy of the data requires the application of close readings, historiographical analysis, and detailed examination of material remains using the traditional methods of the classical historian and archaeologist. On the other hand, we cannot rely on close readings of ancient sites and ancient authors alone to tell us about urban life outside the political elite in general or the activities of Rome's neighborhoods specifically. Our knowledge of nonmonumental Rome is too imperfect, and neither the Augustan vici and neighborhood communities nor their Republican forerunners were of more than passing interest to ancient authors, whose works focus exclusively on the upper echelons of Roman society. Therefore, the present work relies on traditional methods to collect and understand data but appeals to modern urban theory to suggest possible frameworks in which to interpret it.
The evidence for the Augustan neighborhoods is almost entirely material, the inscribed altars, statues, buildings, and other monuments that the neighborhood officers themselves commissioned for public display in their vicus. Indeed, the officers' desire to quickly commemorate their restoration in lasting ways has provided us with a surprisingly large body of controllable evidence that can be closely dated and considered within its proper historical context. I have tried throughout the text to integrate two discordant methods of organization, spatial (topographical) vs. chronological (historical), with results that I hope are not too inharmonious. Indeed the use of the material evidence of city and monument to produce a historical study presents a particular difficulty: History is linear in time and space, but cities are not. The argument moves forward with as much chronological precision as possible, but the evidence at hand often lends itself more readily to topographical interpretation. This is especially true since the monuments of Rome's neighborhoods were inseparably and intimately woven into Rome's urban fabric, as the people who produced them were woven into the city's social fabric. Neighborhood compita and monuments must be set against the backdrop of the neighborhoods they represented. They were utterly permeable and constantly changing spaces centered on streets where people regularly came and went. Such topographical interpretation is naturally ahistorical, setting monuments built at different times against one another. Even a building that no longer existed could affect the way people thought about later constructions. Moreover, different inhabitants of the same urban space often conceive of their city and neighborhood in very different ways at the same time.
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