ProQuest Dissertations - Historia Antigua

colonial charter and appointed the colonial magistrates and priests, perhaps as early asjust after enrolling the colonists, and these new authority figures for the colony createdtheir own calendar, laws, and religious tenets that may have been an interpretation ofRoman customs, but were nonetheless particular to the colonists themselves. Theexpertise of the commissioners as former magistrates applied more to the initial spatialarrangement of the colony, including the basic form of the town and influence over thevowing of new temples.Commissioners and the Spatial Organization of a ColonyIn terms of defining the colonial landscape, the commissioners were directly responsiblefor the division of the territory into sacred and secular areas and the distribution ofallotments to the colonists (see Figure 3.1). At least one of the commissioners on eachcolonial board had been a consul or praetor; those men had possessed the ius publicorumprivatorum locorum, a responsibility of the highest magistracies. 102Gargola and othershave also described in detail how the commissioners and their staffs demarcated andallotted the plots for the colonists.Thus, the section below explores instead thegeneral's experience with camp building and military religion, including the role ofgenerals in vowing temples in Rome and how this impacted colonial religion.Polybius 6.26-42 describes the grid structure for the camp of a two-legionconsular army dating to about the 160s BCE. 104The layout of the camp seems similar toGargola (1995), p. 120 and Livy 4.8.2.Gargola (1995), pp. 87-97; Laffi (2007), p. 19 (with bibliography); Salmon (1970), pp. 19-25.Richardson (2004), p. 3.131