City Founding

The Consul of Rome was worried.  The recent attempted coup by Cataline had been suppressed by the Roman Army, but had exposed that in the countryside—particularly to the north—there was widespread discontent among the landless poor, to whom Cataline had promised land reform in his failed bid to be elected consul.

The Consul decided to shoot two hares with one arrow.  He would strengthen the security of The Po Valley while co-opting Cataline’s policy, by creating a little land reform of his own:  He would create a new city.

Sending a cohort of soldiers to secure the area along the Roman road, Via Cassia, and within the Valley of the River Arno, a site was chosen close to a narrow point in the river, where fording the river was easy.  A short distance from the river, a level site was chosen for the camp.  After an auger from Rome carefully examined the livers of a pheasant and a rabbit from the area and certified that the area was suitable, the gods were thanked, and construction was begun.

The cohort quickly erected a castrum, a rectangular military camp.  A ditch was dug and a wooden stockade was erected within the ditch.  Within the stockade two broad streets, one running north and south and the other, east and west, were created.  At the northern end, a large open area—the forum—was erected and the commandant’s tent placed at the end.  The rest of the rectangle was filled with orderly rows of tents for the soldiers and slaves who would erect the city.  Slowly, over the coming weeks and months, these tents would be replaced with more permanent structures.

The engineers carefully planned the city.  After calculating the amount of water that could eventually be brought to the city by an aqueduct and measuring the amount of arable farmland in the vicinity, the engineers determined that the maximum population for the city would be 50,000.  The city would be designed to accommodate that many inhabitants and would not be allowed to grow past that number for fear of polluting the water supply.  When the population grew to that number, a new city in a different location would be created.

The engineers carefully enlarged the rectangular camp to enclose an area 720 yards by 620 yards, with the castrum forming the center of the new city.  The wide north/south road was called the Cordo, with the equally broad east/west road called the Decumanus.   The remaining area was subdivided with six more roads running north/south and four roads running east/west.  This meant the city was laid out in a grid pattern with each block, called an insula, of roughly the same size.

Surrounding the new city, a large double wall began construction, with the stone coming from a government quarry.  The long rectangle of walls, roughly a mile and a half in length, were broken only at the four points where the two main roads crossed.  Just within the walls there was a thirty-yard-wide open space called the pomerian separating the city from the walls.  In times of warfare, this open space could be used by the military or the civilians from nearby farms seeking safety.

Each insula was divided by a narrower back street running east/west, creating two large rectangular areas that could be filled with a double row of buildings facing either a main street or a back street.  These rows of double buildings could be further divided by alleys as necessary.  Each street was paved, with a drainage ditch on both sides and lined with a stone sidewalks.  Roman law required buildings along major street to have a protective cover over the sidewalks and limited the height of buildings to no more than twice the width of the street so that sunlight could reach the street.

The engineers designed a new and larger forum at the center of the city, large enough to be the civic center of the city.  Nearby, they established a public market, created a public fountain to be fed by the aqueduct, and set aside spaces for bath houses, toilets, an amphitheater, and a coliseum to be located just outside the walls.  The rest of the space inside the walls was set aside for private owners to build in as they liked.

To help settle the area, the Consul gave some of the interior land to 2,000 retired soldiers.  This seemingly generous gift actually solved several problems for the Roman government.  The new residents of the city were fiercely loyal to a government that they had fought for and would serve as the leading citizens of the new city.  The soldiers would be loyal and grateful to the Consul who had rewarded them, and most important—at least in the mind of the Consul—it safely removed from Rome large numbers of unemployed men who knew how to fight.

Besides the soldiers, many more workers were needed to build the city, most of whom  were slaves, belonging either to individuals who wished to build in the city or to  the government.  Many of the slaves were from the recently conquered Gaul, but others came from Greece, Egypt, and every corner of the Roman Republic.  Other workers were poor farmers who lived near the new city and were eager to find work to supplement their income.

By now, the interior of the city was beginning to fill up.  While it would take years to complete the walls, the theater, and the coliseum, the signs of growth were everywhere.  Workshops, forges, and the huts of the workers were scattered across the city.  While a stone bridge across the Arno was planned, a makeshift bridge of wooden planks across wooden boats already bore the weight of wagons bringing building material and food for the workers.  The market, though not yet under a stone roof, was already busy every day with merchants selling their wares to the inhabitants.

Eventually, both the forum and market would be in large stone buildings.  The water wells within the city would be replaced by the stone aqueduct that brought water the thirty miles from the mountains to the north.  A bridge high enough to allow for boat traffic was to be built, and the roads of the Via Cassia would be paved with stone all the way to Rome.  

Though it would take much longer for the city population to reach 50,000 than expected, the town was firmly established.  It would quickly become a center for textile production, the remains of which were just recently discovered by archaeologists.  Today, the city that Julius Caesar founded—Florence—is far more famous for being the birthplace of the Renaissance.