Puteoli

formerly Dicaearchia, Dikaiarchia (Pozzuoli)

A coastal city of Campania (southwestern Italy) in the bay of the same name forming the northwestern part of the Gulf of Cumae or Crater (Bay of Naples); Neapolis (Naples) lies seven miles to its west. Dicaearchia, `city where justice reigns,’ was said by some writers to have been founded c 521/0 by Samian refugees who had moved on from Cyme (Cumae, five miles to the west), of which, according to Diodorus and Strabo, it became a dependent port. It was also intended to serve as an outpost against Neapolis; but the town fell to the Samnites in 421, and then became a dependency of the Romans (c 338/4).

In 215, during the Second Punic War, it successfully resisted the invading army of Hannibal, receiving a Roman citizen colony (situated on the promontory of Rione Terra) in 194. Puteoli now became the principal harbor of the Romans, channelling their massive and varied trade with Egypt and the east. Indeed, according to Festus, it ranked second only to Delos as a Mediterranean maritime center, becoming especially active after Delos had been granted the status of a free port in 166. Puteoli, too, gained civic privileges, which were later confirmed and enlarged. Sulla and Cicero were among many Romans who became proprietors of villas in the fashionable surrounding area, and Augustus (31 BC–AD 14) added new drafts of veteran colonists, naming the city Julia Augusta (as a recently discovered wax tablet records).

After the emperor Claudius created the port of Ostia (AD 42), which lay so much closer to Rome, Puteoli nevertheless retained major importance, attested, for example, by a plan of Nero (54–68) to link it to the Tiber by a canal; moreover, he promoted the `old town’ (vetus oppidum), that is to say, Dicaearchia, to colonial status. The designation of Flavia Augusta is subsequently found. St. Paul visited the port in cAD 61, encouraging the early development of Christianity. Domitian built the Via Domitiana (completed 95, and partly superseding the old Via Campana or Via Consularis Capuam Puteolis) linking Puteoli with the Via Appia and Rome, and Hadrian (117–38) possessed a residence in the neighborhood. By the time of Septimius Severus (193–211) ownership of land had replaced overseas trading as the source of the most substantial local incomes at Puteoli. Signs of stagnation began to appear in the later fourth century. Thereafter, devastations by Alaric the Visigoth (410), Gaiseric the Vandal (455) and Totila (Baduila) the Ostrogoth (545) contributed to the final downfall of the city, compelling its inhabitants to move elsewhere.

Puteoli was divided into a lower and upper town. The lower town in which bradyseism (a series of slow, gradual, earth tremors) has caused alarming falls and rises of the land level in relation to the sea—very recently, the land again fell twenty-four feet, and then rose three feet in 1984 alone—displays the remains of a food market (Macellum, wrongly known as the Serapeum) comprising a two-storeyed colonnaded courtyard, surrounded by an enclosure. On a low acropolis nearby (the Rione Terra quarter on the Castello hill), the remains of a temple of Augustan date, overlaying a shrine of the second century, have been uncovered beneath the cathedral; and the Capitolium—until recently regarded as a temple of Augustus—was brought to light by an earthquake in 1980. The port, of which little remains, was famous for the clay, pulvis Puteolanus (pozzolana), employed for the epoch-making Roman innovation of concrete. An Augustan breakwater (opus pilarum), leading out from a colonnaded quay on fifteen huge masonry piers, was surmounted by a lighthouse, a triumphal arch, statues on columns, and a carving of a ship's prow.

The upper town contained an amphitheater of the time of Vespasian (adjoining, it has now been discovered, a smaller Augustan forerunner) that accommodated at least 40,000 spectators and was the third largest of such buildings in Italy, after Rome and Capua. A circus and a bathing establishment (incorporating the wrongly named `Temples’ of Neptune and Diana) are also to be found in this district, in addition to several spacious cisterns served by a pair of aqueducts. Opulent tombs clustered thickly around the roads leading out of the town.

Above Puteoli, extending between Neapolis and Cumae, is the volcanic region known as the Phlegraean Fields (Campi Flegrei, from the Greek phlegein, to burn; also known to the Romans as the Campi Leborini). The eruptive activities of the area have left their mark in thirteen low craters, some of which still emit jets of steam (fumarole). To the ancients, the subterranean rumblings from the hot and viscous ground suggested the underworld horrors of Tartarus, and prompted many mythological tales (seeAvernus). The Campi Phlegraei have yielded remarkable finds of ancient plaster casts, which were the débris from the workshop of a sculptor engaged in copying Greek statues for the Roman market.