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Article

Augusta Vindelic(or)um  

John Frederick Drinkwater

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Roman Material Culture
Augusta Vindelic(or)um (mod. Augsburg), probably originated in a civil settlement around an Augustan military base protecting an important crossroads-site, and was designated capital of *Raetia by *Tiberius. Its early prosperity was noted by Tacitus (Germ. 41). *Hadrian raised it to municipal status (see municipium), and after reorganization under *Diocletian it remained the civil capital of Raetia Secunda.

Article

Ausonian culture  

D. W. R. Ridgway

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture

The name commonly used to describe the late bronze age manifestations on Lipari (see aeoliae insulae) and, more widely, certain late bronze and early iron age assemblages in Sicily. The relevant archaeological evidence encountered in both areas shares a number of features with the *Apennine culture of the Italian peninsula; it thus coincides with the legend (Diod. Sic. 5. 7) that Liparus, son of the king of the Ausonians (see aurunci) in central Italy, founded a city on the island named after him. ‘Ausonian I’ is virtually confined to the Lipari acropolis. ‘Ausonian II’ is represented by villages and cremation cemeteries at Lipari and Milazzo (Mylae in NE Sicily); the cemetery at Milazzo has much in common with proto-*Villanovan cemeteries on the mainland. See also sicels.

Article

auxilia  

Brian Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture
In the 1st cent. bce Rome often employed men recruited outside Italy as cavalry and light infantry, or in specialist roles, and during the Civil Wars Gallic and German cavalry and the forces of local kings, especially in Asia Minor and Syria, were important. Some of these were temporary formations serving under their own leaders near their homeland in accordance with their treaty obligations to Rome, and this practice continued, e.g. the Batavians (see batavi) serving under C. *Iulius Civilis. But *Augustus formally incorporated many ethnic auxiliary units into the army; they comprised non-citizens from the less developed provinces, and often took their title from a district or tribe (Britannorum, ‘of British’), or a city (Antiochensium, ‘of the people of Antioch’), or from their armament (Sagittariorum, ‘of archers’), sometimes with the addition of an imperial name (e.g. Flavia). Subsequently men were recruited to supplement existing units, firstly from areas with plentiful manpower, especially Belgica (see gaul (transalpine)), *Pannonia, and *Thrace, and then locally from areas close to the camps of the auxilia units, or from adjacent provinces.

Article

Auximum  

Edward Togo Salmon and T. W. Potter

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Roman Material Culture
Auximum (mod. Osimo) with well-preserved ancient walls, hill-town of *Picenum, 17 km. (10 ½ mi.) from the Adriatic. Becoming a Roman colony (128 bce?), it developed into a flourishing place, which supported *Caesar against *Pompey. Much later it and four other cities constituted the Pentapolis under the *Ravenna Exarchate.

Article

Aventicum  

John Frederick Drinkwater

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Roman Material Culture

Aventicum, civitas-capital of the *Helvetii, modern Avenches, destroyed by the *Alamanni in the 3rd cent. ce. Vespasian established a colony of *veterans here (Colonia Pia Flavia Constans Emerita Helvetiorum Foederata); the relationship of coloni and incolae is disputed. Much survives, including defences (of the Flavian colony), east gate, theatre, forum, amphitheatre, baths, and private houses.

Article

Baiae  

H. Kathryn Lomas

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Roman Material Culture
Baiae, dependency of *Cumae, said to have been named after Baios, a companion of *Odysseus. It never became a *municipium, but flourished as a fashionable spa and resort, thanks to volcanic hot springs. By the mid-1st cent. bce, many of the Roman élite owned houses there. Several imperial palaces were built and it remained fashionable until the 3rd cent. ce, when *earthquakes and malaria (see disease) sent it into a decline.

Article

baking, Roman  

Jared T. Benton

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 November 2016
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Economy
  2. Science, Technology, and Medicine
  3. Roman Material Culture
The earliest Roman bakers almost certainly made bread for their own households, but not for sale to the public. Pliny the Elder tells us in his Natural History (18.28) that among the quirites of Rome’s past, women baked the family’s bread, an observation he bases on comparisons with contemporary non-Roman peoples. Yet modes of domestic production were probably as diverse as the families themselves; early terracotta figurines from the eastern Mediterranean show women, men, and children all participating in the production of bread (Fig. 1).Moreover, the figurine shows both milling and baking, processes that remained interlinked until the end of antiquity. Even later commercial bakers seem also to have been millers. Medieval bakers, however, rarely milled their own grain. To some extent, this resulted from the advent of new technologies such as watermills and windmills, but the watermill, at least, was available from the 1st century bce onward (Vitr.

Article

Bantia  

H. Kathryn Lomas

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Roman Material Culture

*Lucanian city on the border with Apulia (25 km. (15 ½ mi.) south of Venosa). It flourished in the 4th–3rd cents. bce, and became a *municipium in 89 bce. The material culture shows strong Greek and *Daunian influence. The *tabula Bantina was found there, as was an augural temple.

Article

Barcino  

Simon J. Keay

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Roman Material Culture
Barcino (mod. Barcelona), Colonia Iulia Augusta Paterna Faventia, founded by Augustus on a coastal branch of the via Augusta, possibly around 15 bce. There was no earlier native occupation and excavations have revealed traces of its early walls, street-grid (see urbanism), the *mosaic floors of houses, an early imperial cemetery, and part of an *aqueduct.

Article

bars (taberna, popina, caupona, thermopolium)  

Jeremy Hartnett

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 August 2017
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture
Street-side enterprises providing food and drink offered a hallmark of Roman urbanism, and were described by any number of terms. Repeated endeavors to tease out distinctions among the names and to match them with evidence on the ground have largely met with frustration. Aside from caupona and taberna, which often indicate a place where lodgings, in addition to food and drink, were on offer, Romans appear to have used the terms relatively indiscriminately. (Thermopolium, a term used often in site guides and the like, appears only in Plautus as thermipolia.1) Moreover, some of these establishments’ activities, such as furnishing temporary accommodations, are difficult to trace archaeologically, since they featured few architectural forms to distinguish them from residences.To judge from the evidence of Pompeii and Herculaneum, bars typically opened directly onto the street, being separated by a broad doorway whose shutters could be stowed during hours of operation, thus minimizing any interior-exterior distinction (Figs.

Article

basilica  

Richard Allan Tomlinson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture
The name applied to a wide range of Roman building forms, most commonly and characteristically to the large, multi-purpose public halls which regularly accompanied the *forum in the western half of the Roman world, and corresponded roughly in function to the Greek and Hellenistic *stoa. The earliest known was built in Rome by M. *Porcius Cato (1) in 184 bce. The name came, by extension, to be used for any large covered hall in domestic (Vitr. De arch. 5, 5, 2; Sid. Apoll. Epist. 2, 2, 8), commercial (basilica vestiaria, basilica argentaria), military (Veg., Mil. 2. 23), or religious (Basilica Hilariana, CIL 6. 30973) use.The origin is uncertain. The name suggests the Greek area, and the first basilicas may have been the administrative halls of the Hellenistic kings. There is an enclosed hall, the roof supported by an internal row of columns, called the Basilike Stoa on *Thera, put up in the period of Ptolemaic control.

Article

baths and bathing  

Fikret Yegül

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Greek Material Culture
  2. Science, Technology, and Medicine
  3. Roman Material Culture

In Homer’s world, bathing in warm water was a reward reserved for heroes. Ordinary Greeks bathed at home or in public baths characterized by circular chambers with hip-baths and rudimentary heating systems. Public bathing as a daily habit, a hygienic, medicinal, recreational, and luxurious experience belonged to the Romans. The origins of Roman baths can be traced in the simpler Greek baths and the bathing facilities of the Greek gymnasium and palaestra, as well as the farm traditions of rural Italy. The earliest Roman baths (balneae), which show the mastery of floor and wall heating, and a planning system based on controlled and graded heating of spaces, emerged in Latium and Campania by the early 2nd century bce. There is little doubt that bathing as an ultimate luxurious experience was epitomized by the imperial thermae first developed in Rome and spread to the provinces. These grand bathing palaces combined exercise, bathing, recreation, and quasi-intellectual activities in vast, park-like precincts, as best exemplified by the Thermae of Caracalla in Rome. The tradition of public bathing and baths passed on to Early Christian, Byzantine, and Medieval Islamic societies across Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean.

Article

books, Greek and Roman  

H. Maehler

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Greek Material Culture
  3. Latin Literature
  4. Roman Material Culture
Books existed in *Egypt long before they came into use in Greece. Systems of writing had been invented and developed for administrative purposes in both Egypt and *Mesopotamia by c.3000 bce. While the Sumerians (see sumerian) and Babylonians used clay tablets for their *cuneiform scripts, the Egyptians used papyrus. A blank sheet of papyrus was found in the tomb of the vizier Hemaka in Saqqara of c.3000 bce. The oldest surviving inscribed papyrus texts are the temple accounts of Abusir of c.2450 bce. A number of fine statues of seated scribes of the same period suggests that this profession was already well established and that writing had been practised for centuries, long enough for the ‘hieratic’ script to develop through the adaptation of hieroglyphs to the use of reed-brush and papyrus. The hieroglyph for ‘book-roll’ is first attested in the first dynasty (c.

Article

Boscoreale  

Nicholas Purcell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Roman Material Culture

Boscoreale, former hunting-reserve of the Angevin kings of Naples (*Neapolis) and part of the Naples conurbation, 2 km. (1 ¼ mi.) from Pompeii, is famous for the excavation of several villae rusticae, buried in the eruption of *Vesuvius in ce 79. They combine efficient equipment for investment-agriculture (especially oil and wine), and clear evidence of slave-labour, with comfortable appointments: from one (‘Pisanella’) came the 94 pieces of silver plate known as the Boscoreale treasure (in the Louvre); from another, perhaps once an estate of *Agrippa Postumus, came the fine paintings in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The recently excavated Villa Regina preserves the fittings and surroundings of a more modest farm in eloquent detail. See villa.

Article

brickstamps, Roman  

Herbert Bloch and Hazel Dodge

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture
Brickstamps bearing the names of kings occur already in ancient *Egypt. Stamped bricks began to be used in Rome during the 1st cent. bce. Except for the brickstamps of military units throughout the Roman empire, these inscriptions became historically and archaeologically important documents only after the fire of Rome in ce 64, when there was an unprecedented demand for fired bricks as a great rebuilding programme was instituted. For more than a century the building activity in the city made large-scale production of bricks profitable. The raw materials were available close at hand, especially in the lower Tiber valley on estates largely owned by members of distinguished Roman families, often of senatorial rank. From the mid-1st cent. ce the content of the stamps becomes more exact and more complex, indicating the praedia or figlinae where the bricks were produced, and eventually including the names of the dominus or owner, the foreman, and the workers employed there. In ce 110 the names of the consuls appear in a brickstamp for the first time (CIL 15.

Article

bridges  

Richard Allan Tomlinson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture
Remains of causeway bridges are associated with bronze age road systems in the Argolid (see argos(1)). Some of the bridges had water-passages with ‘arches’ composed of horizontal overlapping stones, and the type survived into the Classical period. Timber bridges must have been built from an early period, and stone bridges constructed on the pillar-and-lintel principle are known from the 5th cent. bce. The bridge over the sacred stream at *Brauron has five parallel rows of orthostats spanned by lintels (BCH1962, 681). A bridge on the military road to *Marathon, probably of the 4th cent. bce, is 5. 2 m. (17 ft.) wide and 14 m. (46 ft.) long, but the opening for the stream a mere 0.4 m. (1¼ ft.) wide by 1.4 m. (4 ½ ft.) high. It is built of well-fitted rubble. In the Hellenistic period bridges up to 300 m. (980 ft.) long were built, for instance, in northern Greece and in Asia Minor. There is a splendid example near *Cnidus.

Article

Britain, Roman  

Martin Millett

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Roman History and Historiography
  3. Roman Material Culture
The province of Britannia. The oldest name of the island known to us is *Albion; the earliest form of the present name, Πρεττανία, was used by the Greeks. The Latin Britannia was in use by the 1st cent. bce. It has no direct Celtic origin and is probably a Latin abstraction from an earlier form.The iron age communities of Britain showed a variety of social organization, although all were agrarian peoples organized into tribal territories dominated by a range of enclosed settlement sites. Many were agriculturally sophisticated and had developed an impressive Celtic art style (see celts). The peoples of the south-east had a long history of shared culture with northern Gaul. The islands were known to the Mediterranean world from at least the 3rd cent. bce. After 120 bce, as trading contacts between Transalpine Gaul and areas to the north intensified, Britain began to receive goods such as wine *amphorae, and Gallo-Belgic coinage was introduced.

Article

bronze vessels, Roman  

James Frederick Gerrard

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture
During the Roman period vessels were manufactured from many different materials, including pottery, wood, bone, glass, stone, rock crystal, and metal. For metal vessels a useful distinction can be made between precious plate (gold and silver) and base-metal vessels usually manufactured from copper alloys (bronze, brass) or tin/lead alloys (pewter).Various alloys of copper are mentioned in Roman-period texts,1 and scientific analysis (such as x-ray fluoresence) allows the composition of ancient vessels to be ascertained with relative ease.2 Roman metalworkers clearly appreciated the different properties of alloys, and the various elements of an individual vessel may be manufactured from various alloys.The properties of copper alloys allowed vessels to be produced by both casting and beating.3 Many exhibit traces of hammering, or a central hole in the base where they were mounted on a lathe for finishing. Additional elements (such as feet, handles, and decorative mounts) could be applied to a vessel with solder or rivets (Figure 1).

Article

building materials, late Roman  

Bryan Ward-Perkins

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture
Roman building practice was everywhere based on locally available materials. The only building materials widely transported in the Roman empire were *marble and *timber for roofing. In Rome itself the plentiful local supplies of soft, easily dressed, volcanic tufa were used from the 6th cent. bce onwards and remained in use at all periods as a general-purpose building material (see quarries). From the 2nd cent. bce travertine was quarried near *Tibur. This was a fine building stone, used particularly in the later republic for architectural decoration; it continued to be used in the imperial period, e.g. for the facades of the Theatre of Marcellus and the *Colosseum. For much domestic architecture the use of timber-framed unfired brick (see brickstamps, roman) was widespread in Rome before the fire of ce 64. The major Roman contribution to architectural development was the exploitation and perfection of opus caementicium, Roman concrete.

Article

building materials, Roman  

John Bryan Ward-Perkins and Hazel Dodge

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Roman Material Culture

The bulk of materials used in buildings of the 4th to 6th cents. ce continued to be those most readily and cheaply available. The monuments of the two principal capitals, *Ravenna and *Constantinople, were mainly in brick; but other areas, such as much of Asia Minor and Syria, had a flourishing tradition of fine, cut stonework. Humbler buildings were often of more perishable materials, timber and wattle in the north, mud-brick in the south.

In the east, vaults and domes came to be built in brick; whereas in the west more traditional concrete was still used, sometimes lightened with interlocking hollow tubes of terracotta. In many parts of the empire *mosaics were common, both in rich private houses and in the new churches. For floors, mosaicists generally used stone cubes for their durability, while on walls they attained a richer sparkling effect through the use of gilt and coloured glass cubes.