Temple of the Earth

Rome is famous for its urban planning; words like "ordered," "gridlike," and "uniform" are often used in praise of the Roman town. But though there is something accurate about this vocabulary, Roman planning was not conceived in these terms; far different principles were at work.

It's true that Rome's colonies were generally constructed on a standard plan, a plan still evident in cities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean (though not in Rome, which has no plan to speak of). The basic elements of the standard plan were two streets, the cardo maximus and decumanus maximus. The cardo would run north to south, the decumanus east to west; at their intersection a forum would be built, and at their extremes, three or four gates in an otherwise solid city wall. All other streets in the town would be drawn parallel to one of these two.

Map of central Turin, with the Roman street plan superimposed; the ancient grid is still evident.

From the viewpoint of modern surveying, that's basically all there is to it. But Roman cities were not just organizational networks; both in their foundation and daily use, all cities in the Roman empire had intense ritual and spiritual meanings. The origins of a town were always in augury—practices of discerning the gods' will. Per Etruscan tradition, inherited by the Romans, augury was usually taken from a combination of bird-flight, sacrificial liver dissection, and the observation of various sacred animals. First, before a town could be founded at all, a special sign was required; some kind of propitious event, heaven-sent, which would point out the exact spot at which a settlement should be constructed. (For Aeneas, legendary founder of the Roman people, the sign was a wandering heifer; where she lay down, he built the city of Alba.)

Next, the performance of augury would seek to ensure that the sign had been properly interpreted. Whenever augurs were to be taken in Rome, a special priest (augur) would select a spot with a wide-ranging view—a hilltop. From this point, he would define boundaries in the landscape before him, outside of which no observed events would be deemed meaningful. Most importantly, he would then use his staff—the ritual lituus—to draw a shape into the ground: two crossed lines forming a plus, oriented with the top pointing north, surrounded by a circle. This sign was called the templum, meaning sacred enclosure (i.e. temple).

Straightaway, we should note that this shape exactly reproduces the shape of the Roman town: two crossed lines, surrounded by a border. But we should not understand the templum as an image of the city; rather, they are both images of something else. This quadripartite division, unified by an encompassing circle, is in fact representative of the cardinally-divided Earth, and of the entire universe, which extends from a central point outward in four directions. When the augur drew the templum, he thus centered the entire universe on that spot; it was only from this vantage that divine will could be understood.

The Templum of the Earth. Note the "KM" and "DM" for "Kardo Maximus" and "Decumanus Maximus." Codex Arcerianus, reproduced from Joseph Rykwert, "The Idea of a Town."

The city, then, is itself a templum on a grand scale; it transforms its landscape, the landscape bounded by the augur's field of view, into the "point of the universe." Where Greeks located the world-navel at the Delphic oracle, for Rome the center was wherever a templum was drawn—and the most permanent templum was the city. This fundamental mythology is reflected in the procedure of town-founding. Once a site had been chosen and sanctified, the first action would be the digging of a mundus, a deep hole in the ground—a portal to underworld deities—whose name itself means universe. Into this hole, settlers would cast offerings, which included clods of earth from their homelands; in this way the landscape of the new city was unified with the ancestral landscapes of its founders.

The streets would then be arranged by a team of ritual surveyors, who, beginning from the mundus, would identify in which directions the cardo and decumanus were to extend. And though the compass-orientation of the streets might seem casual, it is not. For in the templum of the city, which corresponds to the templa of the earth and of the sky, there is a divine order: the decumanus charts the sun's course from east to west; the cardo is the north-south axis around which it turns. This spatio-temporal connection between daylight and the city-templum had political as well as ritual aspects; no Senate decrees passed at night, or outside the boundaries of the city, would have effect. Thus in both space and time, Roman cities in their entirety constituted temples of the universe, sacred enclosures (guaranteed by numerous gods) in which the business of urban life could unfold.

I could go on and on; but because this is getting long, I won't. Instead, a parting thought:

Ritual is absent from our modern discourse of cities. We prefer to think in the terms with which I began: order, geometry, uniformity. These are our modern ideals in city planning, the ideals that created New York and St. Petersburg; we comfort ourselves by locating them in antiquity. But in the present day, there is no higher principle than traffic flow. Thus town squares, once designed to collect people together, to be the center of the universe, are now designed to send us elsewhere: they are built, primarily, as transit hubs. Berlin's Potsdamer Platz is little more than a train station; the Place Charles de Gaulle is a circulating wall of cars around the Arc de Triomphe; and new squares, like the Bismarckplatz in Heidelberg, are actually built to accommodate not people, but the requirements of busses and trams. But perhaps this is, in fact, a new model of our universe: the universe of uncertainty, imbalance, and entropy. The lack of mundus and forum in our towns is, perhaps, the spatial equivalent of the decentralization of modernity.


Top image: town and hill; the landscape of augur and templum. Painting by Simon Denis.

*This post is greatly indebted to the work of Joseph Rykwert.