The Roman Surveyors

Abstract

It is curious that so little has been written in English about the Roman land surveyors and their work. Most of the nineteenth-century study of the subject was carried out by German scholars. In 1812 Niebuhr stressed the importance of the extant writings of the agrimensores and suggested that field-work in Italy would contribute to our understanding of them. In 1833 a Dane, Captain Falbe, noticed that the squares into which the land round Carthage was divided had sides corresponding to 2,400 feet and thus equalled a normal centuria. The standard edition of the agrimensores, edited by Blume, Lachmann, and others, appeared in 1848 and 1852. Mommsen contributed to this work, and he and other German scholars extended the study of Roman surveying. Before the First World War it was a Swede, Thulin, who furthered research on the ancient writings. Apart from that in German the bulk of the work on the subject is in Italian.