Recent discoveries at Ostia

Abstract

The west coast of Italy between the gulf of Spezia, once the harbour of Luna, and the bay of Gaeta does not at the present day offer a single safe anchorage for ships of any size, and even in early days, when ships were smaller, its harbours and landing places must have seemed very deficient. The cities of south-western Etruria had indeed developed a flourishing seaborne trade by the seventh century B.C. when they were importing freely from Greece, but the ports of their two leading towns, Tarquinii and Caere, which seem to have been at Graviscae and Pyrgi, were merely roadsteads. Strabo, in his summary of the ports along this littoral, mentions none between Monte Argentario and Ostia, and none again between Ostia and the bay of Gaeta. Such ports as there ever were, are of later origin. Centumcellae, the modern Civitavecchia, is a foundation of Trajan; the harbour of Antium, such as it was, was due to Nero, and the port of Terracina is the work of Pius. Even Ostia itself was in Strabo's time deemed a bad harbour and the Tiber estuary hard to enter. Good or bad, however, it was the one approach to a natural harbour on all this coast.