Bryn E Ford (University of Pennsylvania)
Modern scholarship often presents the ancient Cisalpine region, between the Alps and the Apennines, as a controlled and rationalized space. According to this standard narrative, from the second century B.C. Rome transformed a wild, Gallic world of forests and marshes into drained, arable, and geometrically ordered land through processes of colonization and centuriation (e.g. Purcell 1990). This narrative, however, sits in tension with the local literary record. None of the Po Valley’s many significant first century B.C. authors – like Catullus, Livy, and Virgil – make geometry or drainage central to their vision of the local landscape, instead emphasizing natural aquatic features like rivers, wetlands, and lagoons. While an external author, Strabo, does focus on ideas of marshland drainage and landscape control, the local authors totally overlook this seemingly central characteristic of their environment.
I seek to explain this phenomenon of overlooking by situating these differing accounts in environmental and historic context. Recent scholarship has established that Roman-era riverine landscapes like the Po Valley were complex mosaics in which drained, arable land sat alongside extensive fluvial and wetland features (Frassine 2013, De Haas 2017). Thus, both the Strabonian and local narratives reflected some elements of a larger geographic truth, highlighting components that resonated with the authors’ ideological priorities. Strabo’s presuppositions are easy to identify: his stress on the artificially controlled and drained aspect of the region related to his general program of celebrating Rome’s imposition of political and geographic order on the world (Dueck 2000). The local authors’ approach, on the other hand, grew out of the persistent anxiety felt by Cisalpine elites about their place in the Roman-Italian cosmos. The Cisalpine region had long been marginal in the Roman metropolitan worldview, its territory administered as a quasi-foreign province and its people viewed as an ungainly mix of colonists, Gauls, and economic migrants (Ando 2016). Its landscape had the potential to reinforce this marginality: while centuriation was not unknown in peninsular Italy, the enormous scale of its imposition in Cisalpina would have been reminiscent of Roman operations in conquered provincial territories like Gaul and Africa (Roncaglia 2018).
The Cisalpine elite therefore overlooked centuriation features because they were inconsistent with a developing local understanding of the region as a component of tota Italia, rather than a foreign province. Instead, mythological content presented by local authors – like Livy’s story of the defeat of Cleonymus in the Venetian lagoons (AUC 10.2) and Virgil’s river-centered mythic history of Mantua (A. 10.198-206) – suggests that the regional aristocracy was building a new identity around the premise that the Cisalpine peoples were uniquely at home in this fluvial habitat. Stories stressing the eternal bond between the region’s inhabitants and the unchanging riverine environment had the ability to counteract ideas of recent subjugation and frontier settlement; they did so successfully enough that the watery landscape became a conventional part of later Cisalpine elites’ self-image (Gibson 2020). The paper therefore demonstrates that cultural images of rural landscapes, despite their seeming neutrality, are bound up in wider political and social processes.