Activity and Rhythms in Roman Fora in the Republican and Early Imperial Periods

Abstract

Piazzas have long been places of community, interaction, and conflict within urban environments. This was certainly the case in Roman Italy, where the forum was the economic, political, and social center of most towns. Nevertheless, when fora are discussed in current scholarship, the focus is almost always on the political messaging and identity-forming elements within these spaces. This emphasis results in reconstructions nearly void of personal engagement or activity, particularly for anyone not claiming an elite male identity. My dissertation aims to create a new framework for how we examine open public spaces in Roman society (4th century BCE – 1st century CE) and the variety of lived experiences possible within them, an objective accomplished through an interdisciplinary approach combining textual, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence. After exploring possible reasons why scholars of Roman urbanism have overlooked the subject of piazza spaces in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 I review a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative theories which have been applied to the open public spaces of the Roman world and discuss how each has affected my own approach. Central to my framework is a mixture of a form of A. Rapoport’s architectural-communication approach with H. Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre’s consideration of rhythm introduces the notions of cyclical and linear time as important elements for understanding the nature of spatial environments; meanwhile, Rapoport’s division of urban features into different types allows a categorical separation based on permanence and spatial influence that lends itself to an archaeological consideration. Importantly, to Rapoport’s division I add the concept of transitory-feature elements, which includes aspects of the urban environment that may appear and disappear within a rhythmic cycle. Chapter 3 delves into the primary ancient sources discussing activities and interactions in piazza spaces, including military functionality, information gathering, and daily life events involving taverns, banks, auctions, markets, bookshops, gambling, slave auctions, brothels, games, punishments, protest, omens, and general leisure. The collection of these activities provides an initial framework and catalog of concrete actions which may then be combined with what may be understood from the specific built environments of these spaces themselves. These physical environments are the subject of Chapter 4, where I outline different examples of framing-feature, local-feature, and transitory-feature elements from archaeological and textual sources and suggest future avenues for expanded research. The next two chapters explore how we might use the concept of rhythm to expand how we research and explore piazza spaces and the events which take place within them. These are by necessity experimental, and each takes a different approach to interpreting lived experiences. Chapter 5 explores the possibilities available for further research into a subject well-studied both textually and archaeologically: the Roman triumph. In moving away from a purely elite viewpoint, I address the triumph in terms of its rhythmic qualities over time. This new approach both affects how we view the triumphal event and allows us to shift our consideration to the differential spaces and, most importantly, people who engaged with the procession over the course of their lives. Chapter 6, meanwhile, takes an archaeological approach to considering the rhythms of an open public space at the site of Gabii outside Rome, with a focus on how its rhythms reflect the larger cultural changes taking place in Roman Italy.