[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Early in the 19th century, in the depths of the Latin countryside, an area then still part of the great estates of the Colonna family, Giuseppe Tambroni and Luigi Poletti found monuments, statues, parts of Roman roads and inscriptions, and realised they had definitely discovered the ancient site of Bovillae.
It is hard to recover the excitement of those heady days when one thinks of the sprawling suburb near Ciampino airport which has buried any vestiges of the old Campagna. Hatlie and his contributors do their best in this exceptionally well edited volume, which is a perfect example of the best of Italian scholarship and its intersection with largely American passion for Italy.
The volume starts the Julii appropriating Bovillae for a spectacularly dodgy claim of divine ancestry and ends with the image of a section of Roman road leading to the Frattochie McDonald’s restaurant, a sort of bathetic collapse into another myth of cultural supremacy. Along the way however, there are some moments of high drama and surprise.
Bovillae is not especially well favoured in terms of textual evidence. The most famous event is a crime with significant consequences. Milo and his gang meet Clodius and his mob in a classic show down. As befitted the self-publicizing rabble rouser, his death was a cause célèbre; whether Milo intended to kill Clodius or not, he was caught in the spiralling violence of a republic falling out of control (Berry runs through the story and speculates on the exact place the deed was done). Cicero lost his nerve in court, Milo in exile whiled away his disappointed days amidst the fish restaurants of Marseille before war gave him another chance, and a stone hurled from the walls of Compsa took it away. Hatlie’s Bovillae is the kind of place where one can hear the noise of disapproval across the years. Small town propriety and a sensitivity to imperial nudges seem more the order of the day. But there is enough here to dig beneath the surface, and reveal other stories.
Inevitably there are some essays here which pad the little we know about Bovillae with context. Robinson takes us up the Via Appia, but leaves us a little disappointed; the grand monuments are all closer to Rome. There may though have been a significant mansio and we are reminded that how much of a leap of imagination we have to make to fully grasp the economy of road traffic in the empire; its need for fast food, cheap accommodation, the simulacra of luxury and the reality of hard travel. Biella wrestles with the wretched evidence of the Alban League (though incidentally brilliantly skewering the use of Thiessen polygons to work out territories). Potter comes closest to understanding the weird cosplay that is going on in Bovillae’s claims to be a revived Alba Longa, but before we come back to that, we need to look a little harder at the evidence.
The early archaeological record here is scanty indeed. There is some protostoric material but the conditions are unfavourable for recovery. It would be unlikely if there was no activity down in the flatlands beneath the looming Alban Hills, but the via Appia was surely a gamechanger. Bovillae was now at the end of what would become a sort of commuter line into the city of Rome.
What did that entail? Potter tentatively suggests a classic late second first century BCE trajectory of growing wealth and concentration of resource, some fortifications and possibly a theatre, but the small farmers squeezed out in favour of rose gardens and monocultures. The city was like so many a bit of a façade. It was a place on which an aspirant aristocratic elite could inscribe the elegant fictions of genealogical descent, as the Julii did on an altar. According to Cicero, no-one lived there. But Caesar probably rattled through on his way back to Rome as did others after visiting that other construction of memory and invented tradition, Monte Cavo, the Mons Albanus, the home of the Feriae Latinae. The rural economy is largely unknown until villas take over.
The key achievement of the essays of Liverani (reassessing the early discoveries, to be read against Hansson’s broader contextual essay, Angle and others on the more recent archaeology and Granino Cecere on the inscriptions) is to give us the evidence for what a Disneyfied landscape this was. Bovillae’s miniature version of the Circus Maximus, imitating some of its oddities, can be read as a sort of Romulean version. The priesthoods and offices that are discovered here in imperial inscriptions, a rex sacrorum, the Alban Vestals, might be of long-standing, though it feels to me as if some in the late Republic and early empire were experimenting with what it might feel like to live in Romulus’ Rome, but with amenities (see Angle, et al for baths, Liverani for a possible priestly schola).
If this is right, it does not follow that Bovillae was a trivial place. Rather it betokens some genuine effort to invest the place with meaning. Was this all, as the volume rather suggests, the product of high elite games? The place was well endowed with Imperial family sculptures (see Picozzi for the early finds and Calandra and others for the more recent discoveries, including a bust of Titus). Someone was seeing an advantage and grasping it. By the second century we have at least one name, Dissenius Fuscus and his sons, to whom the Albani Longani Bovillenses offered a dedication in the theatre.
With its hinterland of villas, Bovillae was victim and beneficiary of its vicinity to Rome, too close to develop an independent and thriving civic life, but close enough to see the flow of wealth and the wealthy. As elsewhere, it was a good time while it lasted, but the experience economy is an unreliable wealth creator.
However, the story doesn’t end here and it is enormously to Hatlie’s credit that he has included superb articles by Spera and Fiocchi Nicolai which explore the continued history of the area in the late Imperial and early medieval period. For Spera, the story is partly about a surprisingly strong Late Antique revival including the reversion to the connection to early Rome. For Fiocchi Nicolai, it is another story which is spreading, that of a saviour god. Albano is the centre now, Bovillae the outskirts, but the evidence is there if one looks hard enough in marks, columns, images of the whale of Jonah. And as time goes on, the ancient villas were despoiled to build the new churches of a different hierarchy.
Hatlie is due credit for a significant contribution to our understanding of Latium. Unusually for such a book, the translations are properly done into English, making it easier for students to access important scholarship. The black and white photographs are somewhat disappointing in the print version, but it is a very well edited and thoroughly enjoyable read. The only absence I felt was a little more on what we might surmise of its likely agricultural and productive economy, the geographical underpinnings.
In his introduction, Hatlie speaks of Bovillae as the threshold of Rome, with a relational identity and as a space of encounters. He concludes with modern Boville, a frazione of Marino, discontented, but clinging to a notion of importance that relates, ironically, to an archaeological inheritance that has been almost entirely dispersed and destroyed. Maybe there are commonalities. Ancient Bovillae was too much “in between” to function as more than an occasional theme park, but sufficiently productive for the countryside to tick over. What was it like when the games in honour of the Julii in the Romulean-sized circus were over? The book touches only lightly on the villa economy of suburban Latium. Decline there may have been, but Spera shows that it is not uniform. The Tabula Iliaca that comes from the Tor Messi Paoli villa, which continued right into the late Empire, suggests someone somewhere was capable of advanced mythological parlour games. Bovillae displays all the awkwardness of the middle Imperial transitions.
Hatlie concludes with grim certainty of how unlikely it is that Bovillae will rise again. He and his contributors have given us as much as we could possibly expect of the excitement of Tambroni and Poletti, as well as the despair of Tomassetti and others as the finds so recently discovered were degraded before their eyes. Yet what they found may have been closer to a visitor attraction with a McDonald’s attached than they could have imagined.
Authors and Titles
Introduction: Bovillae, Its Long History and Its Many Stories (Francesco de Angelis)
- Rome and Bovillae: A Centuries-Long Dialogue between City and Suburb
- Rome and Bovillae through the Early Decades of the Empire (David Potter)
- Rome, Bovillae, and the Alban Hills during the Roman Monarchy and Republic
- Origins and Development of the Appia Antica from Rome to Bovillae (Elizabeth C. Robinson)
- The Latin League and Bovillae: Between History and Archaeology (Maria Cristina Biella)
III. Late Republican and Early Imperial Bovillae: History and Archaeology
- Clodius, Milo, and the Battle of Bovillae (D. H. Berry)
- The Remains of Bovillae—New Evidence from Old Research (Paolo Liverani)
- Important Archaeological Finds at Bovillae
- Ancient Sculptures from the Area of Bovillae (Maria Grazia Picozzi)
- Inscriptions from the Area of Bovillae (Maria Grazia Granino Cecere)
- Recent Archaeological Discoveries along the Appia Antica in the Area of Bovillae (Micaela Angle, Pamela Cerino, and Andrea Pancotti)
- Sculptural Finds from Bovillae: New Directions (Elena Calandra, Micaela Angle, and Pamela Cerino)
- Bovillae’s Transformation, Decline, and Disappearance
- History and Archaeology of Greater Bovillae between the Ninth and Thirteenth Roman Miles of the Appia Antica in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Lucrezia Spera)
- Archaeological Evidence for the Origins of Christianity from the Ninth to Thirteenth Roman Miles of the Appia Antica in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai)
- Bovillae Rediscovered and Removed: Antiquarians and Treasure Hunters South of Rome in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Ulf R. Hansson)