Dispatched to settle new colonists in an already established but fragile colony, Luscus
will not have needed to draw the pomerium. He did, however, perform three acts,
each presumably essential to, and often well attested at, other foundations: he ded-
icated a temple; he gave the community its laws; and he enrolled its senate and so
gave its social structure juridical force and permanence. What role did these actions
play in establishing the Romanness of local religious life?
As it happens, the organization of public spaces, and the positioning of temples
(and basilicas) in relation to them, are one area in which Roman theory and Roman
practice not only harmonize, but harmonize across the centuries. This is as true of
early colonies as of later western ones; and Roman ideas about the proper organ-
ization of public spaces came to have very considerable influence in the gradual devel-
opment and occasional de novorebuilding of Greek city centers in the east, where
Roman practice diverged quite strongly from Greek (Hesberg 1985; Gros 1988; 1996a:
17–269; 1996b; Hölscher 1998). What is more, in describing early in the reign of
Augustus the principles according to which “sacred buildings, the forum, and the
other public spaces” were to be apportioned, Vitruvius famously gave pride of place
to the Capitoline triad: “For the sacred buildings of those gods who seem especially
to exercise guardianship over the city – to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva – plots should
be assigned in the loftiest location, from which the greatest part of the walls might
be seen” (Vitr. 1.7.1).
But it is not clear that Vitruvius intends a strictly normative statement. One might
advance three cautions against reading him in that way. First, he acknowledges through-
out that cities perforce develop in response to geographic, demographic, and polit-
ical contingencies: in this very chapter, he allows that principles of temple placement
vary if the city has no harbor, or gymnasium, or amphitheater. Second, in the books
he later devotes to the situation and design of temples, he as much as acknowledges
that while Rome offers exemplars of particular architectural styles, it does not offer
exemplars of all; what is more, it cannot, by virtue of its long development, in any
way serve as a paradigm of city planning. Third, it is by no means obvious that the
tutelary deities of all colonies were – or could be – the same. Not surprisingly, then,
Capitolia are rather less well attested in early and mid-republican colonies, but pro-
liferated in the western provinces in the imperial period (Capua, many times colo-
nized, acquired a Capitolium only under Tiberius: Suet. Tiberius 40) and there often
served as loci for state rituals, not least the empire-wide prayer-oath commanded
by Decius (Barton 1982; Ando 2000: 207– 8). As with the pomerium, so with Capitolia,
it may be that practice homogenized around a particular ideal in response to cul-
tural changes at work in Rome in the late republic and early principate.
Titus Annius Luscus also gave to Aquileia its colonial charter, its lex. The charter
of Aquileia does not survive. But even before we lament that loss, we must recall
that the very possession of a charter in itself distinguished colonies from Rome,
which famously resisted the codification of what the Severan jurist Ulpian called
ius publicum, the body of law governing its public affairs – its magistracies, priest-
hoods, and rites (Ando 2006). The attempt by the center thus to fix the structure
of colonial life, and to overdetermine any deliberations regarding innovation, was
thus both ahistorical and, after a fashion, untrue to Roman experience.
434 Clifford Ando