The Growth and Extent of Rome: From Fringe to Suburb

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary, multi-theoretical approach to investigate the physical growth and expansion of ancient Rome in relation to its concomitant economic and demographic development from its inception as a decidedly urban entity in the Archaic period (6th century BC) to the construction of the Aurelian Wall in the later 3rd century AD. In particular, it seeks to achieve more accurate delineations of Rome’s urban and suburban space, diachronically, and to analyze and qualify Rome’s physical and economic expansion through a re-assessment of the available archaeological and textual evidence and the employment of models and theories from disciplines such as Economic Geography, Regional Science, Urban Morphology, and Complexity Science. As such, case studies from Rome’s eastern periphery and so-called ‘suburbium’ were used to more fully explore and evaluate the applicability and usefulness of frameworks designed for the study of contemporary cities in an ancient setting. The results presented show that such approaches do have value for tracking and examining Rome’s urban and suburban growth on local, regional, and macro scales. In addition, their application allows both the underlying stimuli behind the City’s urban and suburban expansion, as well as the impacts of it, to be analyzed and understood in novel and meaningful ways. Furthermore, as an emerging framework known as Settlement Scaling Theory indicates the physical, demographic, and economic growth of settlements correlate in both past and present urban systems, the style and speed of Rome’s urban growth should also be seen to reflect its economic and demographic development, which has significant implications for how we interpret the City’s archaeological remains.