Roman towns and their history are generally regarded as being
the preserve of the archaeologist or the economic historian. In
this famous, unusual and radical book which touches on such
disparate themes as psychology and urban architecture, Joseph
Rykwert has considered them as works of art. His starting point is
the mythical, historical and ritual texts in which their foundation
is recounted rather than the excavated remains, such texts having
parallels not merely in ancient Greece but also further afield
Mesopotamia, India and China.
To achieve his reading of the Roman town, he has invoked the
comparative method of the anthropologists, and he examines first of
all the 'Etruscan rite', a group of ceremonies by which all, or
practically all, Roman towns were founded. The basic institutions
of the town, its walls and gates, its central shrines and its forum
are all of them part of a pattern to which the rituals and the
myths that accompanied them provide clues. Like in other 'closed'
societies, these rituals and myths served to create a secure home
for the citizen of Rome and to make him feel part of his city and
place it firmly in a knowable universe.
'It is refreshing to look at standard themes of the history of
urban design from a nonrational point of view, to see surveyors as
quasi priests and orthogonal planning as a sophisticated technique
touched by divine mystery . . .. Rykwert's lasting worth will be to
wrench us away from rationalist simplicities, and to make us face
the fundamental disquietof the human spirit in its claim to a
permanent place on the land.' Spiro Kostoff, "Journal of the
Society Architectural Historians "
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