The Aurelian Wall and the refashioning of Imperial Rome, A.D. 271--855.

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between the city of Rome and its enceinte during the centuries between the construction of the circuit in the 270s and the major restoration undertaken under Leo IV (847-55), after whose pontificate it would largely disappear from the written record for almost three centuries. The Aurelian Wall is a chronically underappreciated element of the Roman landscape which was fundamentally implicated <italic>inter alia </italic> in shifting sacred topographies, pagan and Christian; in changes in urban infrastructure, and the evolving mechanisms of trade, communications, and settlement reflected therein; and in the political, military and ideological agendas of the city's ruling elite. The work is divided into two thematically distinct sections, which however overlap considerably in practice. The first deals with what might be called the 'Intentional Wall'; with what people did to it, in short: how it was built and rebuilt, why, by whom, with what. The second part of this work is concerned with the history of the Wall as agent, an imposing presence that came to mould both its physical surroundings and the cognitive landscapes of the Romans themselves in increasingly pronounced ways. I conclude that with the passage of time, the 'Intentional Wall' increasingly gave way to the Wall as agent. The circuit grew in prominence---physical and conceptual---in inverse proportion to Rome's contracting political, social, economic and topographical horizons; and it increasingly embodied the city as a whole, as the enduring and physically most ubiquitous symbol of Rome's past greatness, and its greatest remaining claim to fame. Thus, the entirety of the circuit was preserved, long after the reduced size of the population within ceased to make its upkeep strictly practical, for the face it presented to the world, and its representation of the continuing vitality of Romans and their institutions, among which the Church was paramount. The Wall encapsulated for a later age all that had once made Rome special, and into the ninth century, it was the city's most fundamental guarantor of community in ways both practical and intangible, representing 'Rome' as much as protecting it.