The mystery of Ostia

Located at the mouth of the Tiber, Ostia is one of the greatest Roman treasures.

Perhaps it isn’t as well known as Pompeii, but Ostia has a few advantages. First, it’s easy to reach from Rome itself, just a half-hour train ride. It’s also roughly the same size as Pompeii, but with far, far fewer visitors – and the coach parties that do arrive tend to stay only a couple of hours to take in the major sights.

Map in the Museum of the Ostian Way, showing Ostia (lower left) and Portus in relation to Rome

Access off the beaten track is less restricted than in Pompeii, so it’s easy to wander into the ruins and not see another soul for an hour or more. Finally, while we know exactly how Pompeii met its end, Ostia’s story is much more mysterious.

Decline and fall

This is a melodramatic way of saying that archaeologists still don’t really know when Ostia was abandoned, or why. The traditional story is that the city lost its defining function as a port, partly because Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) constructed a massive artificial harbour at Portus to the north, partly because the Tiber itself shifted course and left Ostia’s wharves facing nothing but mudflats and sandbanks.

Apartment of the Aurighi

Through the fourth century, the city’s docks and massive warehouses were abandoned, the working classes moved out, and their apartment blocks were replaced with fancy town houses belonging to the well-to-do of Rome. For a brief period Ostia became a kind of luxury seaside resort.

Yet by the end of the fourth century, so the story goes, the city was in deep decline. ‘Its one remaining glory,’ wrote the poet Rutilius Namatianus in 416, ‘is to have welcomed Aeneas.’

He was alluding to the myth that the founder of the Roman race, having sailed across the sea from Carthage, first made landfall at the future site of Ostia; but in Rutilius’s day, the left branch of the Tiber was ‘inaccessible’.

As the political situation worsened over the following decades – Rome and Ostia were both captured by the Goths in 410, and by the Vandals in 455 – even the posh set moved out, and the few remaining citizens moved to a new settlement a little way upriver. The one-time commercial jewel of the empire, what had been a city of 50,000 people, was left to weeds, stone robbers, and ruination.

New questions, new answers

But is the whole story? In a recent study, Douglas Boin of Georgetown University argues that Late Antique evidence from Ostia has long been neglected by archaeologists. The first large-scale modern excavations took place under Mussolini in the 1930s; obsessed with the glories of the High Empire, these ideologically-driven investigators tended to pay scant attention to activity later than the second century AD. The circular logic developed that the city quickly collapsed after this period, and so any late evidence could be dismissed as unimportant.

Ostia in its heyday - model in the Museum of the Ostian Way

This imbalance continues with the modern presentation of the site. I bought an official guidebook which speaks of a ‘grave and irreversible crisis’ by the middle of the fourth century, and claims that ‘beginning in the V century A.D. the real and definitive decline of the city was evident in all its desolation, as recalled by the poet Rutilius Namazianus [sic]’. (In fact Rutilius only mentions that the river had silted up, and says nothing about Ostia itself.)

According to Boin, the picture emerging from modern excavations is much more interesting and complex than this. Proper attention paid to Late Antique evidence is showing that an awful lot was happening in the city through the fourth and well into the fifth century.

Continued life

The city Forum, for instance, was still the busy, bustling heart of the city. Members of the élite were installing new monuments and refurbishing older buildings right through the fourth century. There was fresh commercial investment, with the building of a new market space in the latest architectural style. In the fifth century shops around the Forum were still being repaved, and judging from recent pottery analysis more than half of the town’s imported wine was coming from the eastern Mediterranean.

The Capitolium, a massive temple to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, still stood proudly over the ancient civic space, its facade of mixed marble – purple-veined pavonazzetto, honey-coloured Tunisian giallo antico, the wavy green ribs of Karystian cipollino – still gleaming in the sun.

The Capitolium as it survives today

Religious communities, too, were investing in ambitious new projects. Ostia’s seafront synagogue was heavily refurbished in the fourth century, and in 1996 a team of German archaeologists discovered evidence of the earliest Christian basilica in the city, which was given a baptistry in the fifth century (and actually remained in use until about 800 A.D.).

Corridor in the Apartment of the Aurighi

Even as more and more Ostians left behind the traditional Roman cults for Christianity, there is no sense that they wanted a break with the past. On the contrary, in the fifth century it seems that the old sanctuary complex of Magna Mater (‘Great Mother’) was turned into a collecting space for statues and inscriptions – a kind of museum, or ‘a treasure chest of the town’s cultural heritage’, as Boin puts it. In the middle of the fifth century the citizens of Ostia were still holding their annual games in honour of Castor and Pollux.

A whimpering end

Gradually, over two hundred years, the rhythms of the traditional religious calendar were replaced with the cycle of Christian holy days, but the people of Ostia were no less Roman for it. The latest archaeological evidence for building work in the city dates from the sixth century.

At this point the city was in true decline, but this hardly marks it out from countless other Italian cities (including Rome itself) during the troubled decades of the Gothic Wars. Perhaps Ostia suffered more than most because of its strategic importance; it was used as a military depot and camp by the Byzantines. I also wonder if the bubonic plague of the sixth century also played its part – as an entry point into Italy, Ostia would have been on the front line when the deadly infection arrived.

In any case, by the ninth century it had been truly abandoned and replaced by a new, far smaller settlement just half a kilometre to the east. The rationale for this move was defensive, to provide security against worsening Saracen raids on the Italian coast.

By the twelfth century, the old city of Ostia was known as calcaria – the place of the lime kilns. Its sole function was now as a handy source for cheap building material. ‘Life at Ostia ended not with a Vesuvian bang,’ writes Boin, ‘but with a whimper.’

So, is the mystery of Ostia’s end finally answered? I doubt it; there are still so many gaps in the story, as Boin acknowledges. Much of the city has yet to be excavated (barely half of it is even visible), and there must be many more secrets waiting to be revealed by archaeologists. Only one thing is certain: the story of Ostia is not yet over.

• Douglas Boin, Ostia in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2013)
• Angelo Pellegrino, Ostia: Guide to the Archaeological Excavations (Rome, 2013)
• www.ostia-antica.org - an excellent online resource on Ostia and Portus