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The Insula of the Paintings at Ostia 1.4.2–4 Paradigm for a City in Flux1

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5 The Insula of the Paintings at Ostia 1.4.2–4 Paradigm for a city in flux1 Janet DeLaine Introduction The life of a city is complex and ever changing, but archaeological and particularly structural evidence by its nature often tends to represent urban development as a series of static tableaux. Ostia is a case in point, despite the fact that here, as at Pompeii, we are dealing with a city more than two-thirds laid bare by excavation. Although the city existed for some 13 centuries, the fabric is predominantly that of the 2nd century AD, with some 3rd and 4th century buildings of note and pockets of construction going back to the original castrum walls of the 4th century BC; as a result we tend to assign all aspects of its development into a very few broad phases—five or six at the most—lasting several generations, while forgetting the dynamics of change which conspired to bring it about. Thanks to Russell Meiggs’s heroic work of synthesis, the overall picture is familiar;2 what eludes us are the nuances of the changing city, the city in flux. Meiggs himself was aware that the picture he presented was painted with a broad brush on a coarse canvas; when discussing the changes in the 4th century AD, his comment that “if we were better informed we should see a more complex picture” (p. 96) could be applied to almost any aspect and almost any period of Ostian life. My intention here is to trace the changing nature of one structure, the Insula of the Paintings (1.4.2–4, Fig. 5.1), against the accepted outline of Ostian history from its earliest days into the 4th century AD. Built as a single unit in the 130s AD at the height of Ostia’s expansion, the complex consists of three self- contained apartments—the twin Houses of the Paintings and of the Infant Bacchus, and the House of Jove and Ganymede—and a large garden; the joint and several lives of these apartments can be traced right through to the 4th century and beyond. In addition, thanks mainly to limited excavation below the floor of the imperial building, it is possible to trace the history of the site back at least to the 1st century BC, and beyond that to the 4th century since the House of Jove and Ganymede lies over the line of the old castrum wall. Here then is an opportunity, rare enough in Ostia, to trace the development of a single site over some 700 to 800 years. A small number of studies, notably the excavation of the 84 THE INSULA OF THE PAINTINGS AT OSTIA 1.4.2–4 Figure 5. 1 Insula 1.4, ground plan, final state. Baths of the Swimmer and the Dutch programme of documentation and analysis of the House of the Porch and the rest of Insula V.2, have shown the potential gains from such an exercise.3 By concentrating on the multiplicity of minor changes, rarely in themselves datable with any kind of accuracy, within a framework of a few major building phases, it is possible to highlight the rôle of the incidental and individual elements within the more sedate sweep of the city’s changing fortunes. Often the small changes—the blocking of a door here, the opening of a door there—are our only guide to changes in property usage and property boundaries, and this is particularly important in the context of private building. Indeed, such signs of frequent alterations and adaptations of pre- existing buildings often provide the major evidence for the continued vitality of the urban environment in periods not distinguished by extensive new constructions. The location of the Insula of the Paintings is an added attraction. Lying between the north wall of the castrum and the Tiber just east of the Cardo Maximus, close to the later forum and within a stone’s throw of the Hadrianic capitolium, the site in question must have partaken fully of the active life of the city, and shared some at least of its changing fortunes. At the same time, as we shall see, its story can hardly be considered typical for Ostia in all its details, and the accidental and idiosyncratic will serve to remind us of the non-uniform nature of the urban pattern. From the point of view of documentation—always a problem at Ostia—the insula is also an excellent subject for such an analysis. While a great deal of what follows is based on a new and detailed survey of the existing remains, much detail has been lost through decay since the original excavations and all evidence for the earlier and later phases can of course come only from excavation reports. In this we are relatively fortunate. Although the excavations conducted in the PREHISTORY 85 north and the southwest corner of the site between 1878 and 1905 were at best haphazard and poorly recorded, the major campaign carried out under the direction of Guido Calza between 1915 and 1919 was a vast improvement. An account of the excavations was published in some detail, including the late phase when the ground floor of the block was deliberately filled in and the ground level raised by several metres, and the excavation daybook (the Giornale degli Scavi) provides invaluable supplementary material.4 Because of the height of the surviving structure (to the start of the third-floor level in the south part of the site) the Insula of the Paintings was much studied as an exemplar of the Roman insula and its place in the development of domestic architecture in Italy.5 The well preserved wall-paintings, one of them bearing a convenient graffito giving a terminus ante quem in the reign of Commodus, ensured a continuing scholarly interest in the complex and in dating the paintings it contained.6 If the excavations of the 1960s, carried out when some of the mosaics in the House of Jove and Ganymede were lifted for repair, still await formal publication, enough information has emerged to show phases going back at least to the early 1st century BC.7 Needless to say, gaps do remain in the record, especially for the early and late phases, and there are problems in interpretation. Nevertheless there is sufficient material to make a reassessment worthwhile. Prehistory As we have already noted, the earliest activity which can be assumed on the site of the later insula is the building of the castrum wall. The line of this runs just south of the north wall of Rm 29 in the House of Jove and Ganymede (Fig. 5.1), while the Via di Diana which forms the southern boundary of the block is a survival of the inner pomerial road. Although the outer pomerial road on the north side of the castrum does not survive, a reflection of it may possibly be seen in the north boundary of the House of Jove and Ganymede and the passage (Rm 22) into the communal garden.8 Thus the whole of the area on which the House of Jove and Ganymede was later built would have been free from any structures except the wall (and just possibly an agger 9 ) until its defensive rôle was no longer required, according to Meiggs not earlier than the early 2nd century BC, although the excavations in the taberna of the invidiosus (V.5.1) may allow this date to be pushed back into the second half of the 3rd century.10 No trace of the castrum wall is mentioned in the brief account of the excavations carried out in the House of Jove and Ganymede (Rms 24, 25, 29) during the 1960s published by Squarciapino.11 The earliest identified structure consists of a couple of walls in opus quasi-reticulatum, dated vaguely to the 1st century BC, although the construction technique would fit better in the earlier part of the century, if not the late 2nd.12 Squarciapino suggested that the structure may have been related to the corn supply; certainly a building of commercial character would suit both what little of the structure was uncovered and the location between the river harbour and the town. The north wall of this structure seems to 86 THE INSULA OF THE PAINTINGS AT OSTIA 1.4.2–4 respect the boundary of the presumed outer pomerial road, but there is simply no evidence to indicate whether there were other buildings between here and the Tiber at this date. On the other hand, the diagonal north boundary of the whole block (north wall of 1.4.4, Rm l; south wall of I.4.5) appears to run parallel to a much earlier road leading to the Tiber mouth and bypassing the castrum.13 The continuation of this alignment strongly suggests that property boundaries at least had been fixed long before the early Hadrianic reorganization of the area, quite probably by the 1st century BC. The next event in the structural development of the site was the demolition of the quasi-reticulate building and its replacement by a court, identified by paving and a surface gutter in tufa leading into a drain, with associated traces of minor walls. To this was later added what may have been a perimeter wall in brick-faced concrete, perhaps already fixing the west boundary of the insula, while it is clear that the court now extended further north than the House of Jove and Ganymede. The construction of this wall should be no earlier than the late Augustan period,14 giving a maximum chronological range for the phase from Sulla to the Julio-Claudians.
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