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

The highs and lows of Roman Lyon

Good times and bad, Lugdunum saw them all. 

Its first citizens were refugees, Romans expelled by the Gauls of Vienne in 43 BC. They retreated north up the Rhône to the confluence with the Saône, where they pitched camp on the rocky heights overlooking the rivers.

Happy, Abundant Colony 

This was where, by senatorial decree, a new Roman colony was to be founded. The natives called the place Lugodunon, ‘the Hill-Fort of Lug’, Lug being a Gallic deity; but the city was given the more cheerful name of Colonia Copia Felix Munatia, or ‘Happy, Abundant Colony of Munatia’, named after the main founder, Governor Lucius Munatius Plancus.

Model in Lyon's Musée Gallo-Romain, looking south

Despite inauspicious beginnings, the city came to deserve its Roman name as it prospered and grew over the following century. Four great aqueducts were built to serve the expanding population, the longest of them bringing water from more than 40 kilometres away. Temples, government offices, a forum, theatres, and all the other organs of a Roman city crowded the Fourviere Hill, as wharves and docks bustled on the river bank below.

Most impressively, Lugdunum (as the Romans came to call it) was chosen as the site of the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls, a political-religious temple complex that also hosted the annual Gallic Council. Every year, on the first day of August, tribal delegates from all over Gaul would converge on the city, making it the most important Roman centre north of the Alps.

Imperial favour 

The high point came under Emperor Claudius (AD 41-54). Lugdunum was the city of his birth, so of course he had a fondness for it, and in 48 AD he even convinced the snooty Roman Senate to open up its membership to citizens of Lugdunum (provided they met the property requirements, of course).

Claudius had a transcript of his speech to the Senate inscribed on bronze plates and sent to Lugdunum, where it was proudly displayed in the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls. There it remained for hundreds of years, until the temple itself fell into ruin and was forgotten. Eventually a vineyard grew over the site; and this is where, in 1528, a section of the long-lost tablets was accidentally ploughed up.

Image from Wikipedia Commons

The outstanding Musée Gallo-Romain in Lyon has a lot of archaeological treasures, but the Claudian Tablets are surely the greatest.

Outside the museum lie the remains of what one might call the 'theatre district' of Lugdunum - the impressive odeum and the even larger theatre, built right next to one another.

On the image to the right you can see the theatre and the odeum, along with some government offices and shops. The entire site is free to access, the only charge being for the museum itself.

The stage facades are long gone, of course, as are the roofs and upper tiers of wooden seating. Originally they would also have been largely clad in gleaming marble, long since stripped away; the only marble remaining is in the pavements of the orchestras, around which is the area demarcated for 'posh' seating - so the fancy folk didn't have to mix with hoi poloi. My favourite part of the complex is the multi-coloured marble of the odeum pavement - each different colour is a specific type of marble sourced from a different part of the empire.

The large theatre

The smaller odeum

The odeum orchestra, showing the elaborate pavement and posh seating area (they brought their own cushioned chairs)

Painted wall plaster on a staircase leading up to the odeum

The surviving theatre at Bosra in Syria gives some notion of what the theatres would have looked like in their heyday, as does the scale model in the Musée Gallo-Romain. They were built into the slope of Fourviere Hill, and the odeum even had an upper gallery behind the stage facade so the well-to-do could promenade between performances with clear views of the Alps to the east.

Model in the Musée Gallo-Romain - note the upper promenade behind the odeum facade

Imperial disfavour 

Lugdunum prospered for another 150 years before the wheel of fate brought it down.

During the civil wars of 193-197, the citizens of this ‘Happy, Abundant Colony’ made the fatal error of choosing the losing side. The final battle of the wars took place on the doorstep of the city on 19th Feburary 197.

This was remembered as one of the largest and most terrible battles ever fought between Romans, involving – even by modern estimates – upwards of 100,000 men.

When the ultimate victor, Septimius Severus, rode into the city, he was not in the mood for clemency. Lugdunum had supported his enemy, and needed to be punished.

The good days were over. With the loss of imperial favour, and later administrative reforms that reduced the city’s political importance, Lugdunum, once the heart of Roman Gaul, sank into provincial obscurity.

Twilight of the empire

As money dried up, so did the aqueducts; the city could not afford to maintain them. People began to flee the Fourviere Hill for the lower ground by the river.

Slowly the vast hilltop citadel became a haunted wasteland. Over time the marble-decked temples crumbled, roofs fell through, columns toppled into the weed-choked streets. Even the great facades of the theatres fell to ruin.

Certainly by the fifth century, the much-reduced population was huddled on the right bank of the Saône and the peninsula between the Saône and the Rhône. Their new focus was the cathedral of Saint John the Baptist.

The only places still used up on the hill were the funeral churches of Saint-Just and Saint-Irénée, outside the old city walls.

In 428 the monk Eucherius wrote In Praise of the Wilderness, a hymn glorifying the monastic island of Lérins, off the south coast of Gaul. ‘Faithful to her reputation,’ he wrote, ‘she takes in her faithful arms those who come to her from being shipwrecked in the stormy world.’

The haunting death-mask of a young girl

This idea of retreating from the ‘stormy world’ appealed strongly to religious-minded people of the time. During these twilight years of the western Roman empire, men and women sought refuge in the promise of the next world. It was in 435 that a monk named Romanus left his monastery near Lyon and ventured into the deep valleys of the Jura Mountains to become a hermit.

Eucherius was elected Bishop of Lugdunum about the same time. For him, the looming ruins of the old citadel must have been a potent reminder of earthly transience.

Yet even among the most religious, the dream of Rome lived on. Eucherius himself owned a miscellany which included not only a calendar with the traditional Roman festivals recorded alongside the Christian ones, but also lists of Roman emperors and provinces, a breviary of Roman history, and a sort of compendium of must-see sights in Rome itself.

Eucherius, who died about 449, did not live to see the end of Roman Gaul. This came in 476, with the deposition of the last western emperor. By now Lugdunum was well and truly part of a barbarian kingdom, ruled over by the Burgundians from their court in Geneva.

Ursus ‘of good memory’ 

But still the people of Lugdunum considered themselves Roman. For another generation at least, Christians buried their dead in the graveyards of Saint-Just or Saint-Irénée and dutifully inscribed the tomb slabs with the date of death – giving not the regnal year of the Burgundian king, but the names of the eastern Roman consuls, as though they were still a full part of the empire.

IN THIS TOMB RESTS URSUS OF GOOD MEMORY, WHO LIVED IN PEACE ?40 YEARS [AND] DIED ON THE SECOND DAY BEFORE THE NONES OF MARCH IN THE YEAR AFTER THE CONSULATES OF THE MOST ESTEEMED ANASTASIUS AND RUFUS (6th March 493) 

This grave slab feels as though it is teetering between worlds. On the one hand, it is so Roman: the tidy Latin script, the traditional formula, the reference to the consuls. But then there is the Christian imagery of the birds and the twisting vines, and the little slips in grammar (bone for bonae; annus for annos; obiet for obiit).

Most telling, though, is the way the grave is dated by the previous year’s consuls. The consuls were officially appointed on 1st January every year; in 493 they were Albinus and Eusebius. Ursus died in March, and when he was buried news of these latest appointments had still not reached the city.

For Ursus and his fellow-citizens of Lugdunum, the empire, now based in distant Constantinople, was well and truly beyond the horizon. What we now call 'the Middle Ages' had begun.