Conclusion

Let us return to the question posed in the title of this paper, what was the Roman cognitive understanding of the term via? The literary and archaeological evidence provide us with complementary answers. As argued above, the literary evidence suggests that Roman urbanites divided their city streets into two broad mental categories, the via/platea and the angiportum/semita. A via orplatea was a wide street with physical amenities such as porticoes, statues, and triumphal arches. It was the place for religious and funerary processions and triumphal parades. They were filled with activity as people set out to establish their social identity in the place where they would be seen. The via or platea was also filled with shops and the entrances to fine houses. In archaeological terms, the streets that fit this literary description also led directly to city gates and/or the forum. They had greatest number of intersections, least amount of space between doors and, therefore, the most activity. For the Pompeians, the via type of street was the ideal location for shops, workshops, health-related structures, and some residences.

While the via or platea was the area for highly visible activity in Roman cities, the semita or angiportum was for less visible activities. Roman authors list activities taking place in these streets as those which people did not wish, or expect, to be observed. Archaeologically, the streets that fit this description were those that did not integrate the street network very well, but instead tended to break it up. Having fewer intersections, they would have made it more difficult to reach a distant point in the city. They did not lead to gates or the forum and had fewer intersections. They also had a greater distance between doorways and less activity. It is significant that a number of elite residents chose to locate the main entrance to their homes along these streets, avoiding the hustle and bustle of the main streets preferred by some of the city’s other residents. Equally interesting is the decision to locate many religious structures along streets that seem to have fallen in between the two extremes, perhaps to seek the quiet of the angiportum while benefiting from the accessibility of the via.

A via, then, was more than just a street; it was a cultural construct which helped define preferred locations for specific building types within the city. Whether a street was perceived to be more like a via/platea or angiportum/semita impacted how ancient Pompeians organized the use of space within their city. Since the textual evidence complements the archaeological evidence so well, it seems safe to assume that the via/platea and angiportum/ semita constructs may represent a broader Roman conception important in the organization of urban space. Such an observation raises many questions worth trying to answer. Many of the ancient authors cited above lived in Rome, the empire’s largest city. This difference in size created a difference not only in scale but also complexity of Rome’s street network. Surely some streets had depths of five, six, or even more from the city’s gates and fora, and had many times the number of intersections and doorways of the busiest streets at Pompeii. Such a variety must have led Roman urbanites to have a more subtle way of understanding a street’s role within the greater network and, perhaps, how buildings along that street should be used. We see Roman orthogonal planning in many places, particularly among the Roman colonies of the west. Whether or not these cultural perceptions of the role of a street in creating the cityscape were imported with the idea of orthogonal plan is another intriguing question. Perhaps some of the same patterns I have recorded at Pompeii can be found at other Roman cities in the provinces. In addition, this study looks at the situation in Pompeii in AD 79, but cities are constantly changing and evolving. Anderson (this volume) teases out some of the dynamic process of change in response to the earthquake of AD 62 and possible other tremors, but dramatic change like this was certainly punctuated by slower, evolutionary change. It may be possible to trace the evolution of the use of space at Pompeii and other cities by studying how the uses of buildings and lots changed over time. While this study raises many new questions about urban streets, it seems clear that when an author like Caesar uses a phrase like ""omnibus viis atque angiportis” we must acknowledge that he and his audience had a more culturally specific and interesting understanding of the phrase than our standard translation of “all the streets and alleys” can possibly convey.