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 takeaway point vis-à-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 Forum 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 as the ascendance of brick as a facing,

which began, as you'll recall,

after the fire in A.D.

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 A.D.

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-fourth

century B.C., around 350 B.C.

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.

And 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 route, the street that

leads from Rome to Ostia; the Via Ostiense.

And actually the city road becomes the town--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 warehouses

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, a 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--

this area had been used since the mid-fourth century B.C.,

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 and 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 tourists 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 you'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 scene.

It looks very enticing, but I can tell you that it's

not, once you get there.

It's very polluted.

This is not one of the great beaches of the world.

So don't be seduced by Lido di Ostia.

Stay on the train and make your way to the site called Scavi di

Ostia, which is the excavations of

Ostia, the archaeological 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