Saskia Stevens (University of Oxford, UK)

In Roman cities, boundaries were an important way of defining spaces. An urban context was marked by physical boundaries, such as city walls and gates, as well as immaterial ones such as the customs boundary and also the pomerium, a border related to city foundation rituals. The location of necropoleis in the urban landscape, moreover, served as an indirect marker of a city’s limits as the Romans, by law had to bury the dead outside the city. Laws and specific cultural rules mediated the meanings of such boundaries. In the process of urban development and expansion, conflicts between boundaries were inevitable.

This paper examines the civic boundaries of Rome in the late Republican and early Imperial period. The focus is particularly on how conflicts and constant negotiations between law, culture and tradition, political institutions and the dynamics of everyday urban life, all factors that are intrinsic to the use of space and boundaries, determined the Roman outlook and approach towards urban limits. The paper starts with an exploration of how civic boundaries were constructed and decided. Another aspect under examination is for whom the various boundaries were intended and at what time they were valid: were they of importance to all city dwellers or just to a particular group of people? Were they, moreover, of constant significance or did some of them had a more occasional character? In addition, the paper discusses the crossing of civic boundaries that often caused conflict situations. For example, when features initially located beyond city-limits, such as burial sites, suddenly became part of the urban fabric or when boundaries were literally destroyed, in spite of their legal or ritual protection.