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Roman Cities in Italy and Dalmatia By A. L. Frothingham To know Rome well you must go elsewhere. This would not be true of Greece, ruled by individualism; but Rome with her tenacious traditions, her pervasive and reconstructive imperialism, her unalterable plan of stamping her impress wherever she set foot, Rome both mirrored the cities from which she sprang and was mirrored in each of her colonies. The early cities of Latium and Etruria with which she was surrounded not only furnished the elements out of which her civilization was constituted but for several centuries developed along parallel lines with her, and kept in touch with her, so that we can logically turn to their ruins to fill in the gaps in Rome itself and to recreate the atmosphere of the drama of early Roman history. Then, even closer was the unity of her colonial system: in each colony the sacred pomerium line around town and territory, the laws and organization, the memorial arch, the forum and Capitoline temple, reproduced the archetypes of the mother city. Even her seven hills, her four regions, the elevated site of her Capitol were copied as faithfully as local conditions allowed. A series of composite pictures, made from the best-preserved buildings of these early contemporary cities and of the colonies of Rome sent out at various times, would give an idea not only of ancient Italy but of the Rome of each successive epoch, such as Rome herself, in her mutilated state, is now powerless to conjure. We need these pictures. Livy is vivid reading, but he gives us only an indirect vision, and in the ruins of Rome the concrete realities for the seven centuries before Augustus are so fragmentary and few as to give us little to grasp; and then, after all, a large part of the activities of Rome were outside of Rome. Should we sum up in historic order what is left in Rome what would it amount to, compared with what we can find outside Rome of the same kind? The early tombs found in the forum, on the Palatine, Esquiline, Quirinal and elsewhere cannot compare in numbers, wealth or extent of time to the similar material in the necropoli of Alba, Praeneste, Falerii, Narce, Caere, Veii, Vetulonia and other cities, from which we can deduce what the necropoli of Rome originally contained in the royal and early republican centuries, and consequently what the early Romans wore, used and decorated themselves and their houses with, what were their religious rites and their customs. ROME AND THE LATIN LEAGUE / EARLIEST STRUGGLES Several races claim precedence as sponsors for Rome: the Latins in most every field; the sabines in a number of religious institution and primitive agricultural customs; the etruscans in ritual augury and cult, in the advanced manners and customs of civilization. Each race has found modern protagonist, but Latin preponderance had seemed quite secure until the last decade, when the results of excavations, slowly digested. have been tending to show how close was the union with the neighboring cities of Southern Etruria, even before the Etruscan kings of Rome, and also how direct, in some ways, the influence of archaic Greece. THE CITIES OF THE HERNICAN LEAGUE There are some ancient cities in the hills along the railroad line from Rome to Naples that have been most successful in keeping their attractions concealed. They have not decorated the pages of any author who believes himself to have discovered the hill towns of Italy, nor have they slipped into any fugitive sketch of Italian highways and byways. One might believe the cause to be the regrettable absence of comfortable inns, were there not every reason to be skeptical as to this state of affairs ever having been made a subject of investigation. These towns still keep their antique names,-Anagni, Alatri, Ferentino, Veroli; and they belonged to the tribe of the Hernici, who gave its name to the range of hills which rise on the north side of the railway as soon as it has passed the Alban mount on the right, the end of the Praenestine ridge on the left and enters the valley of the Sacco, the ancient Trerus or Tolerus. THE VIA APPIA AND THE CITIES OF THE PONTINE PLAIN The Via Appia intersects the happy hunting grounds of the Latin people, as it takes its way in wavy straightness from Rome toward Alba and then after leaving the first spurs of the Volscian hills on its left shoots straight as a bullet across the Pontine plain to the southern boundary of Latium at Terracina. Built by Appius Claudius in 312 B.C., it was the first of the great highways inaugurated by Rome to bind her yoke on an already subjugated region. It marked the close of the long struggle with the Volscians, the dissolution of the Latin league and the subjugation of Campania. To pass along it even now, as we easily can in an automobile, or on a long-tailed horse, loping and Campagna bred, or in an antique diligence, is to see on either side nearly all the ancient sites that made the drama of earliest Roman history. ROME AND ETRURIA On entering the Etruscan borders a veil of mystery as alluring and as baffling as the Sphinx seems to descend and make every step uncertain. In presence of the immense variety of material and of conjecture, it would be easy to pass beyond what is necessary to illustrate the central purpose of this book, which is to elucidate Rome and her relations to ancient Italy. The temptation to discuss "origins" is almost irresistible; we feel that the antiquities of Etruria have a more direct bearing upon the outward form of early Roman civilization than any other group in Italy. After granting Latin supremacy in internals, we concede Etruscan supremacy in externals. THE UMBRIANS AND THE FLAMINIAN WAY North of the Sabines and of Picenum, and east of the Etruscans, was Umbria, reaching up the Adriatic seaboard as far north as Ravenna and bisected, at the time we shall visit it, by the Via Flaminia. One has an instinctive sympathy for the Umbrians because from the time we begin to know them, they are always the under dog in the clash of races, the plaything of circumstances. In earlier centuries, before Rome was, they are said to have possessed a large part of Northern and Central Italy, from sea to sea, from Alps to Apennines. Pliny remarks, with misty exaggeration, that the Etruscans had annexed three hundred of their cities. The Ligurians to westward, and the Senonian Gauls and other tribes to the eastward, had destroyed their supremacy in the north; and the Etruscans had deprived them of their possession west of the Tiber, though they continued to live in the districts they had lost. NORTHERN ITALY / ARIMINUM We will now enter Northern Italy by way of northeast Umbria at Rimini. In early days this was in the northern part of Umbria, where the purity of the race was impaired by invaders. In the large Umbrian area extending from Ravenna down to the river Aesis above Ancona, was included the Ager Gallicus, occupied for a time by the Senonian Gauls, with Ravenna, Ariminum ( Rimini), Pisaurum (Pesaro), Fanum (Fano), and Sena Gallica (Sinigallia) as important coast cities. It was reached from the heart of Umbria across the Scheggia Pass. At the top, on Monte Petrara, only eight miles from Iguvium, was the famous temple of Jupiter Apenninus, which even as late as imperial times remained the national oracle of the Umbrian race. And here we will take leave of the Umbrians and pass northward into the great plains of Emilia and Lombardy. Rome had passed through Umbria in cometlike fashion in the first decade of the third century B.C., using it as a stepping-stone for the occupation of the Adriatic coast--especially the ager Picenus and ager Gallicus. ISTRIA AND DALMATIA In these days of Italia Irredenta, when Italy is seething with the repressed desire to annex Southern Tyrol and Istria, it is quite in point to note that Augustus pushed the Italian border forward so as to include Istria. He rebuilt and beautified Aquileia, which then occupied as important a commercial position as Venice did later. The Via Popillia had been run through to it in 132 B.C. The Via Postumia had already been brought across northern Italy to it in 148, so that Aquileia was equipped to become the focus for the land traffic of Italy with the north. From it roads led by various routes, especially through Noricum, toward the vast regions of the Danube as well as the east shores of the Adriatic. The city of Julia Concordia, between Aquileia and Altinum, has been excavated and its plan made out, as that of an early Augustan colony. Home