Ostia was one of the first Roman colonies established during the early days of Rome that provided port access to the city of Rome itself at the mouth of the Tiber and opened the Tyrrhenian Sea and the greater Mediterranean beyond to eventual Roman expansion. Ostia would come to serve as the principal port destination of the massive amount of resources needed to sustain the Imperial city of Rome, fed by the abundance produced from all corners of the Roman world. Given the significance of Ostia’s role in facilitating the flow of resources into the center of the Roman world, it is interesting to examine archeological evidence and visual reconstructions of this once great Roman port city.
The Roman motto “Order, Structure, Power” implies a sense of organization and rigidity that personified the Roman psyche and can be seen in the building designs of Roman cities such as Ostia. With the symmetrical design even in the construction of an extensive harbor, as seen in the visual reconstruction, a design built to purpose with a certain pragmatism can be seen, while maintaining the grandiose Roman style of an Imperial power whose might and culture were supreme, at least in the eyes of Rome. The design of Ostia, as displayed through the excavations, was based on two main roads, a main east to west road and an intersecting north to south road, that provided reliable access to gridded neighborhoods and civic buildings and maintained a reliable trade system through a connected road system that provided safe travel to Rome and further into the Roman hinterland. Ostia typified a Roman city, in that it used a gridded building system, adopted from the Greeks and expanded, as the Romans often did, and provided the necessities that the Romans became accustomed to, such as an amphitheatre for entertainment and temples for religious needs. Ostia also seems to have had a defensive wall encompassing the city not facing the river Tiber, possibly built to protect Ostia in its earlier history, as once the Roman Republic increasingly committed to preemptive “defensive” invasions and established itself as the sole Mediterranean superpower, the need for a wall in a city so close in proximity to Rome would seem non-essential. The visual reconstruction also presents an orderly, free-flowing city that was clean and visually appealing, which was a fairly momentous accomplishment seeing as how the standards of living decreased significantly once the guiding light that was Rome faded into history, prevailing to a millennia of comparably darker, less sophisticated standards of living, at least in the splintered remnants of the Western Roman Empire. Overall, the city of Ostia represents what the Romans ultimately sought to accomplish through their expansive history as historical trend setters and as the premier city planners of the ancient world. The city of Ostia represented the Roman ideals of “Order, Structure, Power” through the thoughtful planning that provided a functional, prosperous city that probably epitomized the glory that was Rome, or at least was an example of the grand possibilities of the ancient Roman world.
Please reblog this and write 500 words of discussion about what you see and how it relates to the lecture we had on classical and ancient cities last week. Your thoughts should be posted by midnight on Sunday January 26th. Feel free to comment on each others’ posts…
crainer2014 Urban Geography 