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16.1 Ostia: Rome's First Colony
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來自 Yale University 的課程
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從本節課中
The Roman Way of Life and Death at Ostia, The Port of Rome
Tour of Ostia, characterized by multi-storied residential buildings and widespread use of brick-faced concrete. The city's public face features the Forum, Capitolium, Theater, and Piazzale delle Corporazioni with its black-and-white mosaic shipping company advertisements. The Insula of Diana, a four-floor brick apartment building, and warehouses like the Horrea Epagathiana highlight the Ostian appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of exposed brick facing.
與講師見面
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
Good morning, all.
The title of today's lecture is The Roman Way of Life and
Death at Ostia, the Port of Rome.
On Tuesday, we spoke about architecture under the emperor Hadrian,
the extraordinary Emperor Hadrian.
We talked about the buildings that he commissioned, and
some of which he also had a hand in designing, since as we mentioned,
he was an amateur architect himself.
We spoke about that Greek import, the Temple of Venus and Roma.
And also about the two major commissions during his principate,
the Pantheon in Rome and Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli.
The main take-away point, vis-a-vis both of these buildings, and
you see them once again now on the screen at left and right,
is that Hadrian followed the lead of Trajan before him.
What Trajan had done, and Apollodorus of Damascus had done,
in the form of Trajan, and in the markets of Trajan.
And that is to combine in one building complex, both the traditional and
the innovative strands of Roman architecture.
The traditional that goes back to Greek and Etruscan architecture, and
is marked by the traditional elements, the traditional vocabulary of architecture,
namely columns and walls and the roofs that they support.
And then more innovative Roman architecture, which is predicated
on concrete construction faced with a variety of materials from stone,
to what we'll see today is the ascendant of brick.
As a facing which began, as you'll recall, after the fire in AD 64 in Rome.
Again, looking at these two buildings as examples of what Hadrian,
he and his architects, tried to do.
The Pantheon, you'll recall, on the left has a traditional porch.
A porch that looks very much like a typical Greek, Etruscan, or
Roman temple, but then a revolutionary body.
When you walk inside the building a revolutionary cylindrical drum and
hemispherical dome.
And then, with regard to Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli,
I show you a view of the Canopus, and
you'll recall that the Canopus makes use of columnar architecture.
There are columns that border one end of the pool.
Although they are columns with a twist,
because you can see they support a straight and an arcuated lintel,
which we saw in Second Style Roman wall painting, in painting.
And then eventually it begins to infiltrate,
built architecture comes to the fore under Hadrian.
So that's a playing around with those lintels in a way you wouldn't have seen in
Greek and Etruscan architecture, but
still relies in the main on the traditional vocabulary of architecture.
But then you'll recall on the other end of the pool, a building that was meant to
conjure up the Serapeum in the Temple of Serapis in Canopus, in Egypt.
But that was made out of concrete construction and
that had a segmented dome.
A kind of pumpkin dome that we believe that Hadrian designed himself.
So this extraordinary combination of traditional and
innovative Roman architecture, that we see the hallmark of Hadrianic architecture,
and a gift that he gave to the future evolution of architecture.
The other major contribution of the Hadrianic Period that Hadrian himself
had less to do with because it was already bubbling up after the fire in AD 64.
Is the move that we're going to see today toward multi-storied housing.
We saw that begin already at the last gasp of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
You'll remember, after the earthquake of 62, and before the eruption of Vesuvius,
the Pompeians, and those who lived in Herculaneum, began to build,
began to add additional stories to their residential structures.
And that meant for the most part,
a second story being added to their residential structures.
But they never went beyond that.
What we see beginning to happen, especially under Hadrian, is
an increased taste for multi-storied buildings, multi-storied domiciles.
But multi-storied residences that had more than two stories,
even up to as many as five stories, essentially apartment houses.
And our best example for
such apartment houses are in the city of Ostia, the port city of Rome.
And it's, therefore, to the city of Ostia that we are going to turn to today.
And in fact, we'll spend the entire lecture on the city of Ostia because like
Pompeii and Herculaneum before it, especially like Pompeii.
We have an extraordinary array of not only private domiciles,
but also public architecture from the city of Ostia,
that gives us an outstanding sense of what this city looked like in antiquity.
I show you a plan of Ostia in its heyday.
You'll remember that the city was actually founded very early on.
At the very beginning of the semester, we looked at the town plan of Ostia,
which dated to the mid 4th century BC, around 350 BC, and you'll recall, and
I'll remind you of this plan in a moment.
You'll recall that it was founded as, it was actually Rome's first colony.
Although, it was a colony in Italy obviously, not outside the mainland, but
its first colony in Italy, or anywhere for that matter.
And it was founded, as so many of these first colonies were, as a military camp.
It was laid out as a castrum, as you'll recall.
And that castrum, one can see in the very center,
I'm going to show you a better view of this from Ward-Perkins in a moment.
But you can see that kernel of the castrum plan,
right here in the center of this plan.
But what this plan shows you is the way in which the city grew over time.
Again, it began in the Republic,
it continued to be developed during the Republic.
It was under Augustus, that some new buildings,
some public buildings were added.
To the locale including the theater and we're going to look at the theater today.
And then ports were added, as you'll remember, and
I'll review that momentarily.
Ports were added at Portus, by Claudius and also by Trajan.
It was after the Port of Trajan that the city really began to take off,
in terms of its commercial activity.
And much of the building that we see in the city,
as it looks still today, belongs to the Hadrianic period and
into the time of the successors of Hadrian, the so-called Antonine emperors,
whose architecture we'll also be studying this semester.
While this plan is on the screen, let me just point out the location of Rome,
the arrow points this way, the so-called Via Ostiense,
the street that leads from Rome to Ostia, the Via Ostiense.
And actually the country road,
the country thoroughfare becomes the city street,
the main city street, the decumanus of the city of Ostia.
You can also see in this plan,
the location of a place called Isola Sacra up there.
Which we will see was the main cemetery for Ostia.
Yes, there are tombs outside the city walls, also elsewhere in the city but
our most best preserved tombs are from this area called Isola Sacra and
I'll show that to you also today.
And here you can see the Tiber River, the Tevere,
the Tiber River wending its way from Rome to Ostia.
And it is, of course, along the Tiber that we'll see where houses
were located and where the ships went back and forth to export or
import material products from Rome to Ostia and back again.
Again, we talked about the building of ports at Ostia.
We talked especially about the port that Claudius commissioned at Portus.
And I remind you of it, on the back of a Neronian coin, the coin of Nero,
obverse with Nero's portrait, reverse representing that Claudian port.
And we see it there,
you'll remember it had curved breakwaters which you can see in that coin depiction.
And a river god at the bottom, boats in the center, as well as the lighthouse.
We see all of that on the coin.
And you'll remember that the breakwaters were made up of columns that partook
of that rusticated masonry that Claudius so favored.
Down here, a painting that I've shown you before,
that is on the walls of the Vatican.
In Rome, the Vatican museums in Rome, where you can see Claudius' port
with its curved breakwaters, and its lighthouse over here.
And then, the port that was added by Trajan, during his reign.
A multi-sided additional port right here.
And it was again, the construction of that particular port.
That really brought commerce, even more, I mean it had been used up,
this area had been used since the mid 4th century BC.
But it begins to really take off, there's a real efflorescence during this period,
and it is therefore not surprising that with commerce booming, there was more
need for residential architecture, for those who lived there, for the traders.
So on and so forth who lived there, and
we see this, the building of not only civic buildings,
but especially of private domiciles begins to move very rapidly apace.
The city becomes more crowded, and there becomes this need to build up vertically
as well as horizontally, and we'll see that development today.
Tourists who go to Rome really miss the boat, by not going out to Ostia in larger
numbers, because most tours don't tend to take the trip out to Ostia, but
it's well worth it and it's very easy to get to.
It only takes about 25 minutes to a half an hour on a suburban train
to get from Rome to Ostia, so it's a not-to-be-missed experience.
And I show you one of these trains in the upper left that takes you very
easily from Rome to the site of Ostia.
There are a number of stations in Ostia, one of them is Ostia Centro,
the downtown of Ostia, which you see in that view in the upper left.
And the other is Lido di Ostia, which means the beach.
And I show you a view of Lido di Ostia down here.
Now looking at that nice view of the ocean, I know we've all been,
you're back from spring break, but
still it's nice to reminisce about what some of you may have been doing.
During spring break, and see this wonderful view of the sea and
it looks very enticing, but I can tell you that it's not, once you get there.
I mean, it's very polluted, this is not one on the great beaches of the world.
So, don't be seduced by Lido di Ostia, stay on the train and make your way to
Scavi di Ostia, which is the excavations of Ostia, the archeological excavations.
Where you can see, as you saw, as one sees in Pompeii,
an ancient Roman city, extremely well preserved.
And you see a glimpse of it over here, and you can tell even just from this glimpse
that we are dealing here with a city that is not unlike Pompeii.
It has streets and sidewalks, and
it has buildings along the side of either of those.
But there is one main difference between this and what we saw at Pompeii, and
you can see it very well in this image.
And that is, that these houses that are along the street look different than
those did in Pompeii, in that they are made out of concrete faced with brick.
A very different kind of appearance and
one that is quintessentially Ostian and makes this city well worth a visit.
In fact, if we think of Pompeii as the quintessential 1st century AD Roman city,
we should think of the city of Ostia as the quintessential 2nd century AD city,
the best example that we have of what a 2nd century, a Hadrianic and
Antonine city would have looked like and that is what makes it so important to us.
