The Idea of a Town by Joseph Rykwert

Author:Joseph Rykwert [Joseph Rykwert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571308767
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Like the augural templum, the city was quartered, though there was no correspondence between their outlines. The templum was always circular, the Roman city never was. On the other hand, when the abstract, notional templum, or at most the templum drawn on the ground, became incarnate in a building (as it did for countless Roman civic/religious purposes) this templum minus was never circular. On the contrary, the circular temple of Vesta, the most notable of all the circular temples in Rome, was not a templum at all in the ritual sense,23 in spite of the fact that the adjoining house of the vestal virgins was,24 apparently because the religion of the hearth was not concerned with the authority of the sky.

Vesta ruled both the household fire of the individual family and the civic hearth of the city. Hers was the fire which warmed and nourished, a benign and fertilizing power. But Vesta was an earth-bound power, who tied the household to the house, the people of a city to its soil.25 The templum belongs to the di superi.26 That this identification was quite explicit is clear from the double prohibition reported by Aulus Gellius: that the decrees of the senate were not valid if they were passed before sunrise or after sunset, and equally invalid if they were passed outside the bounds of a templum properly effatum.27 This rule implies that the sunlit day is the equivalent in time to the space of the templum. Transferring this to the present theme, the conrectio of the town, the division into four regions presumably placed it under the tutelage of the law-guaranteeing sky.

59, 60, 61. Three Villanovan bi-conic cinerary urns; the outer ones covered with different types of helmet, the central one with a cup Villa Giulia, Rome

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