From Republic to Empire: Reflections on the Early Provincial Architecture of the Roman West

Abstract

Nobody who has worked in the field of late Republican and early Imperial Rome can fail to be aware how remarkably little archaeological evidence we have of any specifically Roman presence in the provinces of which Rome was in political and military control during the last century of the Republic. In the east, where she was faced with a civilization older and richer than her own, this is intelligible enough. But for the student of the spread of Roman institutions and ideas in the west the gap is embarrassing. In Roman Britain we have no difficulty whatever in identifying the Gallic precedents for the settlement that followed the Roman conquest. But what lay behind the Caesarian and Augustan settlement in Gaul itself? In terms of the recent history of the area it would be reasonable to expect that in the south, at any rate, it should have been rooted in local Republican Roman practice; and yet there is remarkably little evidence of any such roots in the surviving remains. Much the same is true of Spain and Africa. Why is this? Is it that the impact of the early Imperial settlement was so strong that it swept away all trace of what had gone before? Or is it simply that the Republican Roman presence in these territories was not of a character to leave any substantial mark on the archaeological record?