A Roman Town in Africa

A ROMAN TOWN IN AFRICA It is no doubt a truism to say that the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome were based on the idea of the city state. Everyone would probably agree that it is possible to define the Roman Empire as a complex of municipalities, each one with its own government which administered the municipal property, had the right of jurisdiction over the citizens, and served as the agent of the central government for the collection of taxes and for various other purposes. Above these local units was the government of Rome, itself a municipality that had sur- rendered many of its sovereign rights to one man, the Emperor, and whose duty it was to protect the peace of the whole empire. It is this superstructure, the government of Rome, that has always engaged the special attention of students of ancient history. The lesser units, the municipalities, have never been studied as closely as they deserve to be. This is, indeed, a fact that is easily understood. Our chief sources of information, the writings of the Romans themselves, give heed only to what happened to the Roman state. The affairs of the provinces, when they did not directly affect the fortunes of Rome, were beneath notice. Yet the life of the provinces, and even the life of individual municipalities, is :certainly important for one who wishes to understand the social conditions of the Roman Empire. The affairs of these smaller units touched the lives of ordinary men infinitely more closely than did the affairs of Rome. If the central government saw to it that the inhabitants of the Empire were safe from the attacks of barbarians from without and of pirates and brigands from within, the life of the municipalities influenced all the more intimate relations of life, one's method of gaining a livelihood, one's social intercourse, one's pleasures. It was only an insignificant minority that was concerned even remotely with the larger aspects of the Empire's business--the Emperor himself, a few hundred senators, a few thousand knights, the personnel of the Imperial civil service--always A Roman Town in Africa 83 inadequate for its purpose--and the army--very small when one considers the stretch of frontier it had to defend. For the rest of the inhabitants of the Empire, the affairs of the municipalities were the boundaries of the horizon within which their interests lay. Modern writers who have dealt with the question of the life of the municipalities of the Roman Empire may almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. The general manuals on Roman institutions devote some sections to them. Liebenam, Stgdteverwaltung im rgmischen Reiche, discusses exhaustively the institutional side. J. S. Reid's Municipalities of the Roman Empire is a semipopular work. Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius has some chapters on social life in the municipahties. The writers of histories of individual provinces, such as ttaverfield for Britain, Camille 5ullian for Gaul, Cumont for Belgium, devote some space to the municipalities in these places, since the subject they discuss, the Romanization of the provinces, necessarily involves the spread of municipal institutions. In this connection Mommsen's The Provinces of the Roman Empire must not be forgotten. Finally, one may mention J. Toutain's Les citgs romaines de la Tunisie, which does for one part of Roman Africa exactly what should be done for all the provinces. There is one thing, however, which has practically never been done, and that is to take an individual city and subject it to close scrutiny to see what can be discovered in regard to the make-up of one of these bricks in the structure of the Roman Empire. There is, indeed, one case in which this is done regu- larly, and that is when an archaeologist publishes the results of his excavation of a town. A regular feature of such a report of excavations is a history of the place involved, but this history is only an incident of the report and not its main feature. Never- theless, it often happens that it is impossible to add anything further to these histories, some of which will be referred to below. Now, how may a history of one of these municipalities be written? As stated above, the historians of Rome were not interested in the municipalities. All that may be expected from documentary evidence is a passing mention, when a town happened to be involved in the general history of the Empire. 84 Roll Johannesen There remain two other kinds of sources, archaeological and epigraphic, that is, material remains and inscriptions. The second of these is more important if one seeks information about persons rather than things. Fortunately for the historian the Romans had the habit of recording all sorts of events on stone, though the inscriptions most frequently met with are from funerary monuments and record nothing but the name and age of the person involved. If a modern student of the Roman Empire be asked what part of the Roman world offers the most satisfactory material for the study of Roman municipalities, there is but one answer possible. The place that offers most remains, in the best state of preservation, is North Africa, where Algeria and Tunis are today, where were the Roman provinces of Africa and Numidia. In almost every other part of v(hat was once the Roman Empire, human occupation has been constant, the old has been removed to make room for the new, or has been used again and again so that its original form has been entirely lost. But in North Africa, when Roman life died, all culture died. From the seventh century to modern times, the Arabs occupied only the coast, while the flourishing towns of the interior were deserted and were covered by the drifting sands and the natural accumulation of the dust of the centuries, so that they remained as they were at the moment of their desertion until such time as the spade of the excavator uncovered them. In one other place did this happen, and that was in Asia Minor, but Asia Minor's ruins remain largely unexplored, while in North Africa--and here is the second reason for its desirability as a subject for study--the unflagging zeal of French explorers has uncovered town after town. In Italy, Mr. Vesuvius did the archaeologist the service of covering Pompeii and Herculaneum as exhibits for future generations, but in North Africa have arisen from the sands many Pompeiis, not perhaps as interesting as the Italian one, since they were not caught unaware in the full flush of life, but certainly deserving of close study. Indeed, they have one advantage over Pompeii in the fact that their careers were not suddenly cut off but were entirely completed, so that in them one may observe the full cycle of development of Roman municipalities. A Roman Town in Africa 85 Now, the cities of Africa did not differ very much from the cities of other provinces, or even from the towns in Italy. They were governed by officials elected in the town, and bearing the same titles as similar officials elsewhere; they constructed the same sort of public buildings, set up the same sort of honorific inscriptions, and were adorned with the same sort of triumphal arches, statues, fountains, public baths, and theaters as were to be found everywhere in the Roman world. One may well ask, why this similarity? Were the people who accomplished all this in Africa immigrants from abroad? Was it Italians who built up the African towns, and made them images of Italian towns? To answer these questions, it is necessary to understand something of the Roman methods of spreading their civilization in Africa. Rome gained her first possession on the southern shore of the Mediterranean at the conclusion of the Third Punic War, when she took over the former territory of her old enemy, Carthage. This territory became the province Africa. Julius Caesar added what was known as Africa Nova, and Augustus set up the province of Numidia. Finally, the two provinces of Mauretania were added at the beginning of the reign of Claudius. Thus, the acquisition of African territory was an accomplishment of the Roman Empire (counting Julius Caesar as the founder of the Empire), except for the land immediately surrounding Carthage. Even in this small territory that was taken over in the Republican period, the government of the Republic did nothing to advance Roman civilization. The land-owning aristocracy that ruled Rome during the last one hundred years of its existence as a republic had too wholesome a respect for the competition that the rich African fields might offer to their products to encourage the growth of any extensive exploitation here. Although in the valley of the Bagradas River (modern Medjerda) there had existed under the Carthaginian domination some hundreds of towns, yet in the Roman republican period there was not one here. This does not mean, of course, that all these towns were destroyed or disappeared, but o•y that the Roman government did not recognize the legal existence of any of them. All their territory was ager publicus (public land), and had no legal standing in Roman law. To be sure, some of the 86 Roll Johannesen opponents of the Senatorial regime did attempt to revive city life in Africa, notably Gaius Gracchus, with his plan to found the colony Junonia on the old site of Carthage, but their attempts misearried. It remained for the Imperial regime, which was interested in the welfare of the provincials as well as in .that of the Italians, to bring about in Africa a revival of civilization, synonomous in the minds of the ancients with urban life.

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