Te fate of the Roman town of Cosa on the coast of Southern Etruria in western central Italy perhaps fits rather strangely in a collection on the ends of ancient cities, largely because its end as a town in any sense can hardly be placed after the third century AD, when a tiny Severan simulacrum of a Forum was built onthe site of the Augustan Forum, with substantial granaries taking the place of houses and a diminutive shrine of Liber as the principal focus of cult; there is a little mithraeum as well under the vaults of the Curia. Te abandonment of this coastal settlement, which was surely purely administrative, represents the fourth of a series of interruptions which ledto the title of the publication of our excavations an Intermittent town. The desolate state of the town is noted in the well-known lines ofRutilius Namatianus (de Reditu suo, 1.296–7), on his journey up the coast in AD 411or 412: ‘Ten we descry, all unguarded now, desolate Cosa's ancient ruins andunsightly walls … Te story runs that once upon a time the townsfolk wereorced to migrate and lefttheir homes behind because rats infested them,
After the Rats: Cosa in the Late Empire and Early Middle Ages
CIRELLI, ENRICO;
2012
Abstract
Te fate of the Roman town of Cosa on the coast of Southern Etruria in western central Italy perhaps fits rather strangely in a collection on the ends of ancient cities, largely because its end as a town in any sense can hardly be placed after the third century AD, when a tiny Severan simulacrum of a Forum was built onthe site of the Augustan Forum, with substantial granaries taking the place of houses and a diminutive shrine of Liber as the principal focus of cult; there is a little mithraeum as well under the vaults of the Curia. Te abandonment of this coastal settlement, which was surely purely administrative, represents the fourth of a series of interruptions which ledto the title of the publication of our excavations an Intermittent town. The desolate state of the town is noted in the well-known lines ofRutilius Namatianus (de Reditu suo, 1.296–7), on his journey up the coast in AD 411or 412: ‘Ten we descry, all unguarded now, desolate Cosa's ancient ruins andunsightly walls … Te story runs that once upon a time the townsfolk wereorced to migrate and lefttheir homes behind because rats infested them,I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.