A Brief Review of the Centuriation and Land Division in Roman Coloniae

Ancient Rome is one of the world’s oldest, or at the very least, most famous cities. The epicenter of a republican and imperial empire that stretched across the Mediterranean and lasted almost 1000 years, the history of Rome itself is written in the organic layout of its streets, interspersed and divided by the heavy hand of the Roman state. In contrast to its festive and disorderly capital, a city that in the Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome Lesley and Roy Adkins suggested “grew without restriction,” the urban colonies of Rome — its Coloniae — reflected both the concrete and abstract might of the city and empire.[1] Instead of the semi-organic colonies of the Greeks in the south, or the semi-planned settlements of the Etruscan’s in the north, the Roman’s used a deliberate orthogonal plan for most, if not all, of the settlements it founded in its many years of expansion.[2]

Roman colonial planning, called centuriation, was a means of distributing land to colonial settlers using a grid system demarcated by two primary axes called the decumanus maximus and the cardo maximus.[3] In her analysis of the Formae of the Roman Land Surveyors, Jen Lawrence notes the purposeful Roman influence on “the spatial organisation…a distinct stamp on the spatial, territorial, and network realities of conquered landscapes.”[4] Visible in many places from the air, centuriation is the vestigial schemata of control exercised by republican and imperial authorities in Rome that, as Lawrence puts it, “reorder[ed] the world of the subjects” and continues to influence land division to this day.[5]

Despite its enduring influence, the Roman grid was not an original idea. The urban grid can be found in much older Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese cities. According to Spiro Kostof in The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, the grid “is by far the commonest pattern for planned cities in history.”[6] As he puts it, “no better urban solution recommends itself as a standard scheme for disparate sites, or as a means for equal distribution of land or the easy parceling and selling of real estate.”[7] Kostof might as well be describing Roman limites when discussing the orderly rows of buildings and squares that typify the colonial city of Savannah, Georgia.[8] Be it the grid, or centuriation, or as Lawrence puts it so eloquently, a “geometrically constrained system of land allotment,” the orthogonal design of urban areas acted as a simple demarcation for the use of urban space.[9] What Kostof calls, “the most practical way to plan new cities…[for] the kind of life the grids are designed to play host to.”[10]

Consider Lawrence’s description of “Roman ‘cognitive maps’,” as she puts it, a “mental frameworks within which the Romans made sense of their surrounding world” and the near identical coloniae found throughout Italy, Tunis, Spain, Syria…even far away Britain is stamped with Rome’s orderly grid.[11] In analyzing satellite data of Roman centuriation, Amelia Carolina Sparavigna notes the exactness of Roman design — Lawrence’s mental map made real — while drawing a direct link between Rome’s colonial administration and its military history. Torino, Italy is an excellent, still occupied example of centuriation, which began as one of Caesar’s military camps, or castrum. In her analysis, Sparavigna laid a map of Torino over the Roman ruins of Timgad some 1500 kilometers away across the Mediterranean in Algeria. Using the umbilicus of each town as a reference — literally the navel, or center where the decumanus and cardo intersected — and rotating the towns to align the intersection, the orderly and almost identical hands of the agrimensores (Rome’s professional surveyors) can clearly be seen.[12] Amazingly, despite very different local topography, the towns are within a few meters of being an exact match. Centuriation was Rome’s not so subtle way of saying to their new subjects that they were in the neighborhood to stay. For the colonists and the conquered alike, from the umbilicus emanated Roman power and all it entailed, seemingly the exact opposite of the capital — order, discipline, and accountability — while directly linking those subjects to Rome itself.

It is possible that Roman colonial planning was a result of its cultural psyche. With organized, rigid land division and a grid referenced mental map, the Roman’s controlled not only the levers of the state but also the nearby populace. To take the concept further, it seems centuriation was a very Roman solution to avoid the messy synoecism that typified not just Greek settlements, but Rome itself. Not only was there nothing organic about Roman conquest, but centuriation also meant there was no need to abduct whoever served as the local version of the Sabine women to secure a city’s future.[13] In both the umbilicus of the town and in Rome, the original navel, you found a copy of the town’s formae, a municipal map demarcating the colony’s centuriation. Lawrence suggests that these maps are more than just technical devices to account for land ownership and the work of the agrimensores, instead, the formae are another representation of Roman control.[14] As if more were needed in an empire dominated by the everlasting imperial symbols of Roman control…straight roads, orderly streets, legions, and later, a single religion.

The Roman world, centered on the city itself, represented a cavalcade of peoples brought to order by the straight-edged symbols of the empire. It is fitting the middle of a coloniae was called the umbilicus. Connected to the mother city, these bastions of Roman ideals marched like grown children in lockstep as the legions conquered much of Europe. Even where the influence of Rome can barely be seen today within the lines of soil outside faraway places like Rochester, England. Irrespective of organic boundaries or causes, the old measurements of the agrimensores still dictate our routes through the countryside and through the city. The Roman world, and as Kostof calls, “the progressively rigid application of the [grid]…developed its own identity…the crossing of axes…the State’s prerogative.” To this day, irrespective of local, we seem to continue the legion’s march along the decumanus or the cardo towards the umbilicus.

[1] Lesley Adkins and Roy Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, 1 vols. (New York, NY: Facts on File, 1994).

[2] Adkins and Adkins; Jenn Lawrence, “The Formae of the Roman Land Surveyors: Colonial Landscapes and Cognitive Maps” (Yale University), accessed June 5, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/25482563/The_Formae_of_the_Roman_Land_Surveyors_Colonial_Landscapes_and_Cognitive_Maps; Josep Maria Palet and Hèctor A. Orengo, “The Roman Centuriated Landscape: Conception, Genesis, and Development as Inferred from the Ager Tarraconensis Case,” American Journal of Archaeology 115, no. 3 (2011): 383–402, https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.115.3.0383; Mauro De Nardis, “The Writings of the Roman Land Surveyors: Technical and Legal Aspects” (University College of London, 1994).

[3] Adkins and Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome. State Street and Madison Avenue would likely serve as the umbilicus of Chicago. Depending on the source, cardo is sometimes spelled kardo.

[4] Lawrence, “The Formae of the Roman Land Surveyors.”

[5] Lawrence.

[6] Spriro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, 7th ed. (New York, NY: Bulfinch Press, 1991).

[7] Kostof.

[8] Kostof.

[9] Lawrence, “The Formae of the Roman Land Surveyors.”

[10] Kostof, The City Shaped.

[11] Michael D Nightingale, “A Roman Land Settlement near Rochester,” Archaeologia Cantiana 65 (1952), https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/Research/Pub/ArchCant/Vol.065%20-%201952/065-12.pdf.

[12] Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, “Roman Centuriation in Satellite Images,” ResearchGate, December 2015, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325617144_Roman_Centuriation_in_Satellite_Images.

[13] Appianus Alexandrinus, “Kings, Fragments,” 96 165AD, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0230:text=Reg.:chapter=1&highlight=sabine; William Shakespeare and Nahum Tate, “The Tragedie of Coriolanus,” 1682, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.03.0106:section=dramatic%20versions&highlight=sabine.

[14] Lawrence, “The Formae of the Roman Land Surveyors.”

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