Gods Outside the Walls

“Gods outside the Walls” approaches the chief exception to the standard patterns of suburban development. Temples for the gods appeared outside Rome’s early colonies at Minturnae, Ostia, and Cosa already in the mid-Republican period, and certain examples, including a sanctuary at Hispellum and the shrine to Magna Mater in Rome’s Transtiberim, thrived through the fourth century CE. These spaces functioned in various ways, but indicate above all the enduring need for gods to protect and define all parts of a city, through even dramatic alterations to urban space. Early colonial sanctuaries oversaw not just urban expansion, but the active transformation of military outposts to urban centers, while the later temples survived the contraction of cities by reserving space for traditional modes of worship, even as a new force—Christianity—rose up to dominate Italy’s suburbs.

Waste Management from Center to Suburb

“Waste Management from Center to Suburb” investigates how one humble activity illuminates multi-faceted relationships between city and suburb. It begins by reconsidering the infamous “puticuli” of Rome’s Republican Esquiline, arguing that these were not—as has long been believed—mass graves that marked the zone as a nightmarish no man’s land. The fixtures uncovered in nineteenth-century excavations are better interpreted as public cesspits, one of many contemporaneous investments in urban infrastructure, installed in a busy and well-connected district outside the growing city’s first wall. The second section moves forward in time to the early Imperial period, exploring waste management at Pompeii and elsewhere. Drawing on the results of recent excavations, it contends that the garbage mounds commonly found in Italy’s suburbs were not abandoned deposits of unwanted materials, akin to modern landfills, but active sites in an intense economy of use, reuse, and recycling, in which suburbs played a key role.

Life and Death, City and SuburbThe Transformations of Late Antiquity

“Life and Death, City and Suburb: The Transformations of Late Antiquity” is a brief epilogue considering urbanism of the fifth century CE and beyond. As Rome’s population shrank, the city reoriented itself into a constellation of small settlements, scattered within the Aurelian Wall and surrounded by cultivated land. The residents of these settlements buried their dead within the wall, a development that has been seen to represent a sea change in mentality, but which is better read as a result of the city’s new topography and demography. Suburbs, furthermore, did not disappear in this period. Late Antique suburbs grew up around the suburban shrines of Christian martyrs, not only at Rome, but also in other Italian cities like Mediolanum and Nola. This period was marked by both continuity and change, but through it the dead remained present in urban life, continuing relationships carried through all stages in the history of Italy’s cities.

Death in the Suburb

“Death in the Suburb” aims to understand tombs as urban phenomena in Roman cities. Focusing on Rome itself, the only site where a detailed and diachronic examination is possible, it charts the relationship of the city with its tombs as it grew from a settlement of scattered villages into the bustling capital of a vast empire. Above all, the investigation indicates complexity; at no point were the dead clearly separated from the living city. Past work has emphasized the residual nature of suburban funerary monuments, arguing that they had been present outside the wall before the city expanded and so recalled vigilant separation even as they stood in the midst of developing suburbs. This chapter finds a different situation: monumental tombs emerged along with suburbs, with buildings for the living and the dead growing side by side to create districts that assumed the presence of both life and death.

Three Suburbs

“Three Suburbs” examines the three best-preserved Roman suburbs—located at Pompeii, Ostia, and in a recently excavated neighbouhood of Rome itself—to find patterns in their form and development, as well as to understand the forces that first shaped and later dismantled them. Alongside comparative evidence drawn from cities across the peninsula, the case studies indicate that suburbs emerged under Augustus and continued to grow through the early and mid-Imperial periods, before declining in the third and fourth centuries CE. The chapter argues for various factors that determined their rise and fall—not limited to changing population sizes, waxing and waning prosperity, and vicissitudes in Italy’s security—but above all identifies the primary role of changing ideals: inspired by the capital, the ideal city of the Augustan period was open and expansive, while that of the Late Empire was ornamented and defended by impressive fortifications.

Italy’s Suburban Amphitheaters

“Italy’s Suburban Amphitheaters” traces the benefits that a city might derive from placing a major entertainment building in the suburb, concentrating on examples at Verona, Capua, Herdonia, and Ocriculum. Not least, suburban amphitheaters took advantage of the zone’s open space to manage large festival crowds that included locals as well as the residents of neighboring cities. At the same time, the Italian highway system brought many regional and long-distance travelers to the suburbs, making a suburban amphitheater a particularly effective means of communicating competition with neighboring cities while at the same time expressing participation in a larger shared culture. Nearby monumental tombs, moreover, reinforced an amphitheater’s message, enhancing the urban façade while celebrating the city’s most prominent residents. In some cases, this interaction could even recall the architecture of the capital and declare a local endorsement of imperial power.

Shops, Workshops, and Suburban Commercial Life

“Shops, Workshops, and Suburban Commercial Life” focuses on the commercial structures that proliferated in Italy’s suburbs in the Augustan and early Imperial periods, with case studies highlighting Rome, Pompeii, Patavium, and Puteoli. Echoing a pattern also evident inside city walls, shops and workshops arose in the busiest areas of suburbs, where they took advantage of traffic to attract customers. At the same time, the chapter identifies suburban resources that encouraged commercial investment and distinguished the zone from the center. Suburbs brought opportunities for profit and display, not least due to the presence of tombs, which were absent in the center. Placed alongside funerary monuments, shops and workshops benefited from incorporation into prestigious neighborhoods that stimulated traffic and activity while also encouraging visitors to linger. Moreover, a location among tombs invited owners and workers to participate in types of communication and monumentalization that often were unavailable to them in other parts of the city.

City and Suburb in Roman Italy

“City and Suburb in Roman Italy” introduces the book’s approach to Roman suburbs. It discusses the laws and practices that surrounded various urban boundaries, and highlights the concept of “death pollution,” the idea that Romans feared a contagious of uncleanliness that radiated from the dead. A long tradition has attributed the Roman ban on interment within the city to concerns with death pollution, and today most work on Roman urbanism begins from the assumption that tombs stood outside the religious boundary of the pomerium in order to preserve a city’s ritual purity. Nevertheless, no source prior to Late Antiquity mentioned death pollution. This chapter argues that the concept has unnecessarily separated tombs from suburban neighborhoods, and that reintegrating the dead into their urban contexts is necessary for understanding how an ancient city worked, both inside and outside its official boundaries.