BaBesch 75 (2000) Landscape archaeology and Livy: Warfare, colonial expansion and town and country in Central Italy of the 7th to 4th c. BC. Peter Attema THE AIM OF THIS PAPER topographical investigations of the historical land- scape have been a fashionable and very fruitful prac- The aim of this paper is to compare the present state tice in the past, which has furnished us with a good of archaeological knowledge of the landscape of idea of the ancient topography of Central Italy. Central Italy between the 7th and the 4th c. BC with Modern excavation and surveying have over the the way the Central Italian landscape is depicted in years added considerable physical detail to the liter- Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita books I-X, in which Livy ary classical landscape of Central Italy. The archae- relates the story of early Rome and its expansion.* ological record now shows us that Livy’s war-ridden The early expansion of Rome was directed at the landscapes of the early Roman expansion between neighbouring proto-urban settlements along the the 7th and the 4th c. BC may have been there in Tiber, the area of the Veientes to the northwest of reality. The physical structure of the Etruscan and Rome on the right bank of the Tiber in South Etruria, Latin city-state organization existed in the landscape the Roman Campagna south of the Tiber and the and the communities inhabiting town and country adjacent Pontine Plain further south. The Roman were indeed socially stratified and included a war- historians referred to the latter two areas as ‘Latium rior-class of aristocratic stock. Such data should not Vetus’. Over recent decades, large parts of both South merely serve as a static geographical and socio-eco- Etruria and Latium Vetus have been the subject of nomic backdrop to the history of early Rome, but substantial landscape-archaeological projects (Enei should be used to activate a chronological model of 1993; Carafa in prep.; Attema 1993), while current interaction between the perennial Central Italian projects aim at synthesizing existing data, notably landscape, a medium-term history based on archae- the Tiber Valley Project in South Etruria (Patterson ological data and Livy’s history of events in the and Millett 1998) and the Regional Pathways to Braudelian sense (cf. Bintliff 1991, Knapp 1992). Complexity Project (Attema et al. 1998a and b). Their results allow tentative socio-economic and political interpretations of the settlement and land-use pat- AN OUTLINE OF THIS PAPER terns identified in these landscapes, that relate to the formative period of Roman power between the 7th In my contribution I shall first outline the shift in c. and the 4th c. BC (as, for instance, described in interest in topographical studies from the early days Cornell 1995). of historical cartography to modern surveying prac- However, it is not my intention to test topographical tices. This development has seen the disappearance and historical particulars in Livy’s narrative against from the academic agenda of topographical infor- the wealth of new archaeological data derived from mation present in the ancient sources as a means to landscape-archaeological projects; both the archae- contextualize the archaeological data in a historical ological and the ancient literary sources are too sense (cf. Cambi and Terrenato 1994). Likewise, ambiguous for that. A quote from the article ‘Illusion attempts at using data from landscape archaeology and reality in Latin topographical writing’ by Nicholas to contextualize the ancient literary sources in a Horsfall may serve to underscore this. The quote con- socio-economic and geographical sense are now cerns a warning by Horsfall against the use of Livy scarce for Central Italy (but see e.g. de Neeve 1983). as an interpretative guide in topographical research. Attempts at accommodating events can be said to be He writes that ‘the attempt to bring Livy and Virgil non-existant. Nevertheless, human actions taking into a state of agreement with the terrain causes par- place in the landscape are omnipresent in Livy’s ticular alarm; for it is an easy but very dangerous step books I-X, in the form of military campaigns involv- from exploring the countryside of Italy yourself to assuming that Livy or Virgil likewise thought it their business to explore the ground in their narratives’ * Translations used of Livy’s books I-X were those (Horsfall 1985, 197). Yet we should not forget that by A. de Sèlincourt (1960) and B. Radice (1982). 115 Fig. Sites mentioned in the text. ing Rome and her neighbouring city-states, and in evenly spread over the landscapes of South Etruria the form of raids undertaken by inland mountain and Latium Vetus. Archaeologists and ancient his- folk on the farmland in the plains. Both excavation torians agree that these settlements can be inter- data from sites and regional settlement data from preted in economic terms as proto-urban centres and intensive surveying show that Livy’s scenario of politically as city-states, while convincing evidence recurrent warfare between city-states and the dev- for an economically well-developed and socially astation of farms and cropland was by no means stratified countryside has emerged from settlement- unlikely, despite Livy’s frequent use of topoi and pattern analysis of survey data and excavations of rhetoric. Landscape archaeology and excavations rural architecture. A short review of the available have shown that under the monarchy and in early data will serve to illustrate this. Furthermore, the Republican times substantial settlements were social and geographical analysis of burial mounds 116 (tumuli) indicates that in the 7th c. BC an ‘aristoc- temporary landscape. Although Horsfall (1985, 199) racy’ developed that can be related to ownership of states that ‘no expectation existed in Augustan Rome land in both the countryside immediately surround- that the geographical information contained in a ing the proto-urban settlements and land in the work of literature should be precise’ and that ‘items periphery of city-state territories. of apparent geographical information in, for exam- From the available data it appears that we should ple, Virgil and Livy cannot be treated by topogra- envisage the communities living in the Central phers, archaeologists and historians as facts, as Italian landscape of the 7th and 6th centuries BC as being in themselves substantive pieces of informa- part of an early urbanising society that was spatially tion’, partially successful attempts were made at the and politically structured in autonomous city-states cartographical identification of sites mentioned in and their territories. Livy’s narrative indicates that the ancient literary sources. By treating the more the proto-urban society of Central Italy was under obvious geographical information contained in the constant internal and external threat of warfare ancient sources as facts, topographers and cartogra- brought about by rival city-states and inland moun- phers were the first to recreate the literary land- tain peoples that were attracted by the prospering scapes of the ancient writers in coherent, though far lowland settlements. As Victor Davis Hanson has from geographically exact, cartographical images argued in his book (1998 [1983]) on warfare and (Attema 1999). They were the first to provide agriculture in Classical Greece, in societies organ- ancient toponyms with spatial correlates. Their maps ised along these lines, war is likely to have been meant the start of a long tradition of ‘pasting’ ancient endemic. This would also hold for Republican Italy, place names onto sites and features in the landscape, according to T.J. Cornell. This autor states that be it often without sound reference to any actual ‘Under the Republic, therefore, warfare was part of archaeological remains. But even today attempts are the normal experience of all Italians, and was being made to equate topographical information in embedded in the fabric of their society’ (Cornell the ancient sources with archaeological sites in the 1995, 122). It is at this point that I would like to contemporary landscape that lack direct evidence in make archaeology’s socio-economic history con- the form of epigraphy. verge with Livy’s political history and human In the case of Latium Vetus, present-day South Lazio, drama. the general point of departure in topographical stud- This paper, then, is not so much concerned with the ies is Pliny’s statement that 53 peoples of Latium role of Rome in the period of early Roman expan- Vetus had disappeared from the face of the earth sion and colonization, as with an attempt at bring- ‘without leaving any traces’ (Plin. NH 3. 69). A good ing together two currently unrelated classes of data number of sites mentioned in the ancient sources that in 19th-century scholarship used to be closely have over time been plausibly identified, a fair num- linked. ber of proposed identifications are still doubtful, and identification of a number of others must remain purely hypothetical (Attema 1993, 60-65). In the FROM RENAISSANCE HISTORICAL CARTOGRAPHY TO days of de la Blanchère and Ashby, South Etruria MODERN SURVEY PRACTICES and Latium Vetus were only sparsely settled, and it was hard to imagine that Latium Vetus in Archaic In the wake of Renaissance cartography, scholars and Roman Republican times had ever known a like W. Gell and A. Nibby started at the beginning flourishing population of country dwellers. The 19th of the 19th c. to systematically document archaeo- c. settlement density may not have been all that dif- logical remains in the field, a tradition which cul- ferent from the extent to which the landscape in minated in the work of such scholars as Marie-René Imperial times was settled, given the fact that in both de la Blanchère, the French topographer of the periods much land was given over to latifundiae at Pontine Region, and Thomas Ashby, the topogra- the expense of small-holders.