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DIKEARCHIA (Ancient city) ITALY
Puteoli, now Pozzuoli; originally named Dicaearchia. A celebrated seaport town of Campania, situated on a promontory on the eastern side of the Puteolanus Sinus, and a little to the east of Cumae, was founded by the Greeks of Cumae, B.C. 521, under the name of Dicaearchia. It obtained the name of Puteoli either from its numerous wells or from the stench arising from the mineral springs in its neighbourhood. The town was indebted for its importance to its excellent harbour, which was protected by an extensive mole to which Caligula attached a floating bridge, which extended as far as Baiae, a distance of two miles. Puteoli was the chief emporium for the commerce with Alexandria and with the greater part of Spain. The town was colonized by the Romans in B.C. 194, and also anew by Augustus, Nero, and Vespasian. It was destroyed by Alaric in A.D. 410, by Genseric in 455, and also by Totila in 545, but was on each occasion speedily rebuilt. There are still many ruins of the ancient town at the modern Pozzuoli.
This text is cited Dec 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Twelve km from Naples about midway on the shore of a bay formed by the promontories
of Mons Posilypus and Misenum. To the rear it is ringed by a series of volcanic
hills, and as far as Cumae the whole area was known as the campi phlegraei from
its sulphurous atmosphere, hot springs, and other volcanic phenomena. Settled
by Samian refugees ca. 520 B.C. and politically dependent upon Cumae, it was an
outpost against Neapolis until conquered by the Samnites in 421. There is little
literary or archaeological evidence until ca. 334 B.C. when much of Campania came
under Rome. In 215 B.C. Puteoli successfully resisted Hannibal; in 199 it received
a Roman customs station and a maritime colony in 194. By this time its proximity
to the Via Appia at Capua had made it a port preferable to Naples. Sulla or Augustus
may have conferred further colonial status; Nero and Vespasian certainly did,
and the latter enlarged the city's territory from ca. 10 sq. km of coastline to
include a substantial part of the agricultural ager Campanus.
Puteoli's attraction for upper-class Romans and its location only
5 km from Baiae's amenities must have influenced the city's cultural life, but
its great fame and prosperity were based on its importance as a port of Rome,
especially from the East and especially after Delos became a free port in 166
B.C. Even after Claudius installed the port of Ostia, its prosperity continued
to such an extent that Nero undertook to link it with the Tiber by canal. Although
by comparison Puteoli declined from the 2d c. onward, it nevertheless remained
important until it was abandoned in the 6th c. The city's population, estimated
to be nearly 65,000, was commercial and highly cosmopolitan, as is reflected by
oriental cults such as Sarapis (105 B.C.), Kybele, Jupiter Dolichenos, Bellona,
Dusares, I.O.M. Heliopolitanus, Judaism and pre-Pauline Christianity (but not
Mithraism), as well as by the usual Graeco-Roman and the imperial worship. Puteoli
was likewise a gateway for Alexandrian artistry and artisanship, while its material
imports were as varied as the world's products, especially eastern grain bound
for the capital.
Return cargoes from Puteoli included oil, wine, and probably Republican
black "Campanian" pottery; also the locally made and widely distributed
glass and early imperial terra sigillata.
The most conspicuous ancient monuments are reproduced and named on
Late Classical globular glass vases from Piombino (now in the Corning Museum of
Glass, NY), Odemira (Portugal), Ampurias, Populonia, and one now in Prague, and
in Bellori's engraving of a wall painting now destroyed; interpretation of these
illustrations and inscriptions is difficult and often conjectural. The city was
eventually plundered to provide building materials for the cathedrals of Salerno
and Pisa. Puteoli naturally divides into a lower town, an upper town, and the
environs. Since antiquity parts of the lower town have sunk ca. 8 m and risen
again through bradyseism; high water has been marked by marine borers attacking
the three columns standing since antiquity in the macellum. Since the 18th c.
a new cycle of subsidence has progressed at about 2 cm annually.
The great macellum, formerly called the Temple or Baths (?) of Sarapis
from a statue found there in 1750, consisted of a large rectangular courtyard
(ca. 38 x 36 m), now submerged, surrounded by a portico into which shops on E
and W opened, or onto the streets outside; the inner oriented shops were faced
and paved with marble while the others were merely stuccoed. Stairs led to an
upper story. The grand entrance, flanked by further shops or offices, was in the
center of the S side; opposite it on the N was a large apse with capacious latrines
in the courtyard's NE and NW corners. At some later time the courtyard was embellished
by a circular colonnade of 16 African marble columns on a podium (18.2 m diam.);
statues and putealia were in the intercolumniations, a fountain was at the center,
and the whole structure was either roofed or hypethral. The entire macellum was
surrounded by an even larger one-story enclosure of additional shops facing inward,
and the whole must have been a spectacular unit worthy of the importance of the
city it served.
Of the port little is now accessible. Ruins of the famous Augustan
opus pilarum, a breakwater (15-16 m x 372 m), carried on 15 enormous masonry piers,
with at least one triumphal arch, columns topped by statues, a lighthouse, and
an architectural ship's prow at the end, are embedded in the modern solid breakwater.
The colonnaded quay (ripa) and some docks are now below sea level.
The Temple of Augustus, contributed cum ornamentis by a local admirer,
was situated on a low (36 m) acropolis. It was largely destroyed by the renovations
of the present Cathedral, but some columns, an architrave, and inscriptions remain.
In 1964 it was discovered to have encased the remains of a structure reusing late
5th c. Greek blocks, and of a Samnite or Italic temple with handsome base moldings.
Other monuments of the lower town, conspicuous enough for identification on the
glass vases and engraving mentioned above, have disappeared.
The upper town was residential and recreational. An outstanding discovery
was the small Augustan amphitheater with axes of 130 and 95 m under the new Rome-Naples
express railway line; it apparently lacked the subterranean chambers necessary
for venationes. These and other improvements were supplied in the great Flavian
amphitheater (149 x 116 m) nearby, which the Puteolans built at their own expense
in the principate of their benefactor Vespasian. Accommodating 40-60,000 spectators,
it was the third largest in Italy after those at Rome and Capua. Beasts and machinery
went underground on ramps along the long axis reaching 6.7 m down to two subterranean
levels of passageways and 80 cages; as needed, animals were returned to the arena
on elevators through rectangular openings, in an ellipse paralleling the podium
of the cavea and through other shafts. Cisterns and fountains were for decoration,
not naumachiae. An elaborate sewer system concentrated all surface drainage under
the arena.
The upper town also included the Baths of Trajan or Janus, which may
be the same as the so-called Temple of Neptune or of Diana, a solarium portico,
a circus, and several great cisterns served by a Republican aqueduct from the
N and, from the E, by a longer one attributed to Agrippa.
In the environs, Puteolan opulence is evident in the magnificence
of the columbaria, hypogea, and mausolea along the Via Consularis Capuam Puteolis
(Via Campana) extending for ca. 2 km as far as S. Vito, especially that part closest
to the city gate (Via Celle). Some are decorated with stucco or mosaics, or are
otherwise impressively preserved, and in Christian times some were reused for
inhumations. Similar but less ostentatious funerary monuments also flanked the
ancient road to Naples.
The Via Campana was the only road connecting the coastal cities with
the hinterland and the Via Appia until construction of the Via Domitiana linking
Rome with Puteoli, a less expensive substitute for Nero's projected canal. Under
Augustus the pre-Sullan road to Naples was shortened by the crypta Neapolitana;
Nerva and Trajan improved this artery and made it a continuation of the Domitiana,
and the latter placed a triumphal arch over it.
There is a museum at Pozzuoli but the statues, coins, pottery, and
other antiquities from the city are mostly distributed among museums in various
countries and at Naples.
H. Comfort, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites,
Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Dec 2005 from
Perseus Project URL below, which contains 5 image(s), bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
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