ProQuest Dissertations - Historia Antigua

As illustrated by these passages from Livy and Appian, the Romans conceived ofa city as a combination of the people and their possessions, which could be removed at aRoman general's discretion, and the material and religious landscape of the city itself,which could not, or at least should not, be removed. The material landscape wascomprised of the fields, the waterways, and the physical structures, including secularstructures like naval yards and walls, and sacred structures like temples and tombs. Theconceptual landscape included the human-imposed divisions of the space, such as thecommissioners' original designation of sacred and secular space, as well as the socialdefinitions affirmed through the landscape: citizenship of the city, self-identification asworshippers of the gods, and a connection to the land itself through honoring ancestralgraves. Through Censorinus' response, Appian highlights the way in which theCarthaginians, as colonists in a different location, were intended to adapt their newlandscape: they should appropriate the physical elements of their new home and recreatethe conceptual elements of the city they left behind, and thereby they would create a newpatria.This view of colonization acknowledges the relationship between colonists, theirmother city, and their new home. There are two further, interrelated considerations in therelationship between colonists and their landscape, however. First, there is the localpopulation and their relationship with the landscape to take into account. Second, thecolonial landscape, in whatever form its original inhabitants had given it, was not ain literary or pictorial sketches of a city, (such as on glass vessels depicting Puteoli (Laurence (1996), p.118 fig. 1)) one temple of great importance to the city came to act as a focus for civic identity. Laurenceconcludes that "these major temples can be seen to be the places where the inhabitants could express theirdistinctive qualities and feel the continuity with their ancestors who had worshipped there."151