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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title State Impact in Imperial northern Italy Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bc5t6zj Author Roncaglia, Carolynn Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California State Impact in Imperial northern Italy by Carolynn Elizabeth Roncaglia A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Erich Gruen, Co-chair Professor Carlos Noreña, Co-chair Professor Dylan Sailor Fall, 2009 Abstract State Impact in Imperial northern Italy by Carolynn Elizabeth Roncaglia Doctor of Philosophy in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology University of California, Berkeley Professor Erich Gruen, Co-chair Professor Carlos Noreña, Co-chair How did the Roman state affect areas under its control? This dissertation addresses that question by examining one area, northern Italy, which was administered by the state at its most and least intensive. In the Republican and Late Antique periods the state frequently and directly intervened in the area. During the Republic changing Roman conceptions of northern Italy led the state to intervene dramatically in ways that remade the physical and demographic landscape of the region, while in the late Roman period similarly changing attitudes led to reformulation of the region’s purpose and position within the empire. In contrast, the Roman state’s presence in northern Italy in the early Imperial period was minimal, and this study explores the reasons for and effects of that minimalist approach on northern Italy in the first and second centuries AD. Explanations for this early Imperial policy towards northern Italy are to be found not just in the region’s late Republican history but also in the creation and evolution of Italian identities. Case studies of the Aemilia and the central Transpadana illustrate the intersection of these identities with state policy and ideology. These studies also examine the consequences of that intersection on everyday life in towns and in the countryside, on matters ranging from tombstones to taxes and from poetry to politics. Further case studies of Aquileia and Liguria look at how the state, even in its minimalist form, shaped the development of local economies and societies through the movement of people and goods around the empire. Together these studies examine the effects of the state on interregional networks as well as on individual communities. 1 For Eloise and Annibale i Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………….……...iii I: Cisalpine Gaul and Roman Italy…………………………………………………...…..1 II: The towns of the via Aemilia: imperial policy and administration………………..…19 III: Aquileia: imperial and regional networks……...........................................................37 IV: The central Transpadana: Culture and Identity……………………………………...54 V: Liguria: How Pollentian sheep got their colors and how Pertinax became emperor…72 VI: Ticinum: the Late Antique State………………………………………………….….89 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………….….114 Abbreviations………………………………………………………………………...…117 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..…..118 Appendix A……………………………………………………………………………..147 ii Acknowledgements I owe an incalculable debt to the encouragement, patience, and sage advice of my dissertation committee: Erich Gruen, Carlos Noreña, and Dylan Sailor. Their remarks have without exception guided this dissertation down fruitful paths. Ryan Boehm, Bill Carey, Tim Doran, Bob Ehrike, Emily Haug, Ray Hedberg, Noah Kaye, Rebecca Karberg, Nandini Pandey, Jeff Pearson, Paula Roncaglia, David Rosenberg-Wohl, Amy Russell, Jason Schlude, Kris Seaman, and Paulina Woo read drafts of individual chapters, and their careful readings and incisive comments have been invaluable. My understanding of certain issues of late Republican Italy in the first chapter has benefited greatly from observations made by Corinne Crawford, James Tan, and Nicola Terrenato, while on the opposite end of the spectrum in the early medieval period thanks are to be given to Maria Mavroudi and Paul Kershaw. This dissertation owes most of its virtues to their collected insights; any errors are of course my own. My research on Roman northern Italy has its roots in an undergraduate thesis on Roman Verona done at the University of Virginia, and in the course of its completion the university’s Harrison grant gave me my first opportunity to visit Italy, an opportunity for which I am exceedingly grateful, as I am for Elizabeth Meyer’s excellent supervision of that work. Special thanks are also to be given to the staff of Stanford libraries, who selflessly and consistently aided this Berkeley graduate student beyond the call of duty, and to Janet Yonan, whose great help on administrative matters in California left more time for work on Roman administration. iii I Cisalpine Gaul and Roman Italy Introduction What effects did the Roman state have on areas under its control? That is, what did the system composed of road-supervisors, emperors, financial secretaries, customs- collectors, senators, and centurions that administered by force and by law the territory of the Roman Empire actually do to that territory it administered? What impact did the Roman state have on local societies, economies, identities, and cultures? These next six chapters try to answer those questions by examining the impact of the Roman state on one area of the empire where the intensity of state intervention varied the most: northern Italy. Northern Italy was an area of the Roman Empire that saw three distinct phases of state involvement: (1) a period of frequent and invasive state intervention lasting from the beginning of the Roman conquest in the third century BC to the early Augustan era at the end of the first century BC, (2) a period during the first and second centuries AD where the state took a hands-off approach to governing the region, and (3) a period during the third, fourth, and fifth centuries that saw a return of direct, frequent, and invasive state intervention.1 These three phases make northern Italy particularly useful for studying the impact of the state, since they allow us to examine state involvement at both high and low levels. For this work, however, most of the emphasis will be on the Imperial period, in which direct state involvement was rare, because while the effects of the Roman state in the early (1) and later (3) periods are often readily apparent, those in the Imperial period are more indirect and more subtle. Hence the history of northern Italy in the Imperial period has often been neglected, even though it forms a necessary point of comparison for both the Republican and Late Antique periods and even though much of the evidence from this period—the letters of the younger Pliny, the remains of Aquileia, the inscriptions of Brixia and Verona, the Veleia alimentary tablet, and the amphorae from Genua—is rich and evocative. In addition to its unique administrative history, northern Italy also occupies a liminal zone between the Italian peninsula and the European provinces of the Roman Empire, in terms not just of physical geography but also of its history, its landscape, its relationship with the army, and its urbanization.2 Accordingly there are few better areas to look at the intersection between state actions, local identities, and Roman conceptions of the world than this place that was both Italian and provincial. With both this intermediate status and its history of alternating approaches to administration, northern 1 Here northern Italy is to be understood as roughly the four Augustan regiones VIII (modern Emilia- Romagna), IX (modern Liguria), X (comprising the Veneto, Friuli-Venezia, and Trentino-Alto Adige), and XI (Lombardy, Piedmont, and Aosta). These regions together form a unified, geographical unit dependent upon the Po river system and defined by mountainous and coastal borders. 2 On the problems of incorporating Cisalpine Gaul into narratives of integration into the Roman Empire and Italy, see Millar 1995: 211, Patterson 2006: 2, and Pallottino 1984: 3. 1 Italy offers an ideal laboratory in which to examine how the apparatus of the Roman state affected life in the Empire. Cisalpine Gaul This chapter examines the first phase of Roman northern Italy, during which the region was incorporated into the Roman Empire by a combination of arms and laws.3 From the beginnings of the conquest in the third century BC to the Augustan period, Roman intervention here was especially intensive, much more so than in Italy south of the Apennines, with the possible exception of Campania. The Roman conquest of the region radically reshaped its physical and demographic landscape, particularly in Liguria and the southern Po valley, where the Roman government moved entire populations, reordered land ownership, altered patterns of urbanization and reworked the routes of land and water transportation.4 In the Transpadana, or Italy north of the Po, Roman involvement was less invasive, but nevertheless the Roman conquest and subsequent administration dramatically reorganized local governments and settlement patterns. Even in areas like the Veneto, where the Roman government initially had little reason or incentive to involve itself in local activities, second and first century BC Roman