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Two: Urban Institutions in the Principate
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Two Urban Institutions in the Principate 17 ˘ nce it had taken root in the various parts of the peninsula , urban living had a dynamic of its own and came very rapidly to seem not only normal, but normative. By the end of the Flavian era, with the peninsula structured around its three hundred or four hundred civitates , every Spaniard lived within the territorium of one city or another, regardless of his own individual legal status.1 After 212, a population composed entirely of Roman citizens dwelt in civitates within which no legal distinction was made between those who resided in the titular conurbation and those—the majority of the non-elite population— who lived in the countryside, whether in villages or more dispersed settlements. The result was a startlingly homogeneous political landscape , with several hundred autonomous urban centers structured like miniature Romes, governed by a variety of magistrates drawn from the local ordo decurionum and ruling over civitas-territories that were quite small by the standards of the Latin West. This homogeneity is all the more surprising for having grown out of very diverse origins. Roman urbanism rested on different foundations in different parts of Spain, whether indigenous, Punic, or Greek in the south and the Ebro valley, or as a novelty in the center, the north, and the west.2 Other differences went back to differing circumstances of foundation, whether as coloniae or municipia of Roman citizens, or as indigenous peregrine cities granted the Latin right along with promotion to municipal status. Despite this variety, the constitutional structure of the Spanish citizen coloniae was not dramatically different from those of the Flavian municipia, as the fragments of the lex coloniae genetivae Iuliae from Urso suggest, and whatever distinctions there had once been had disappeared by the third century.3 During the second century, cities ceased to pay much attention to the titulature of status so that in all of third-century Spain we possess only one example of a city that retained its full early imperial titulature.4 Regardless of their distant origins as coloniae, municipia, or stipendiary communities, most cities called themselves civitates or respublicae indiscriminately.5 These basically similar cities were, with their territories, the fundamental units of organized existence and they were generally small enough that the Spanish landscape, unlike that of much of Gaul, really was defined by its network of cities. This Hispano-Roman urbanism was perhaps the most significant legacy of the early empire, because the city remained central to the life of Spain even after the monumental trappings that had accompanied its creation fell by the wayside and even after the imperial structure that had brought it into being disappeared. Spaniards, in other words, had internalized the desire to live together in towns. What this meant is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of Munigua, located in the hills of the Sierra Morena and today 10 kilometers from the nearest paved road. This mountainous region just north of the Guadalquivir valley had not held much interest for Roman settlers, but was instead exploited for its mineral wealth. Some of the earliest materials found at Munigua are the remains of ironworks and, during the high empire, Munigua was a cult and administrative center for the mining encampments in the surrounding mountains. When the site was granted municipal status and Latin rights under Vespasian, the whole city was rebuilt to match its new status. Lavish, Roman-style houses and public buildings—forum, basilica, temple, baths—were built up the side of a steep hill, its western face shored up still further and supported by an enormous stonework capped by a large temple. Despite these impressive structures, early imperial Munigua probably had a tiny population, though it included the wealthy Late Roman Spain and Its Cities 18 [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:14 GMT) owners of the townhouses around the forum that lay at the foot of the great hill.6 The forum and much of the rest of the monumental city center had been built thanks to the munificence of the local worthy L. Valerius Firmus shortly after the site was granted municipal status.7 An imposing sight even today, during the early empire Munigua was a powerful symbol of imperial prestige. Yet whatever its symbolic importance in the early empire, Munigua was an isolated settlement in a zone where Roman urban habits had as yet made little impact and where the existence of Munigua...