John North Hopkins		john.hopkins@mail.utexas.edu  |  Via Angelo Masina 5, 00153 Roma, ITALIA | +39 06 5846 302
Thesis		“Reflections of Expansion: The Cloaca Maxima and Urban Image in Tarquin Rome”
Check it out Request a Copy Advisors John R. Clarke Penelope J. E. Davies Ingrid E. M. Edlund-Berry		Abstract   |    C.V. According to Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Tarquinius Superbus oversaw the construction of Rome's Cloaca Maxima in the late sixth century B.C. as a drainage canal for a preexisting stream that traversed the Forum Romanum. Modern excavations demonstrate that the masonry of its earliest walls, whose construction technique archaeologists also date to the reign of the Tarquinius Superbus, was built of monumental four-foot-square blocks of cappellaccio tufa. Moreover, Livy describes the Cloaca as a work "for which the new magnificence of these days has scarcely been able to produce a match." (I.56.2) Along with other scholars, I believe that in an effort to give a more powerful face to their expanding economic, political and military endeavors in Rome, Tarquinius Superbus and his father, Priscus, envisioned an urban image of monumental proportion. The monumentality of the Cloaca belongs alongside other great works that the Tarquins undertook in the late Roman regal period including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Circus Maximus, and the first monumental reconstructions of the Regia. In order to better understand the Tarquins' reasons for and ability to construct this program one must consider the economic, military and political world that it became a part of. By both literary and archaeological account, Tarquin Rome was a time of great expansion. Livy maintains that Priscus sacked and annexed seven of Rome's Latin neighbors, bringing home cartloads of plunder, and Superbus, after securing treaty with the Etruscans to the north and with Carthaginians in northern Africa, sought hegemony over Latium. Ivory, bone, and amber deposits found near the Forum Boarium and terracotta, bronze and iron deposits from the Forum Romanum demonstrate a rich economic development in sixth century Rome. By contextualizing the Cloaca within the larger Tarquin program of urban architectural development and within its cultural surroundings, one sees more clearly how a Roman viewer might have understood its propagandistic nature. Based on Colin Renfrew and John Cherry's theories of peer-polity interaction, I argue that the Cloaca did not serve simply as urban beautification for the pleasure of Rome's inhabitants, but that, as a monumental structure alongside the Tarquins' other works, it served as a beacon at the center of Rome that signaled to anyone, foreign or local, that Rome's political power and economic strength was expanding.
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