sort of radiating out from the central core of the forum.
We don't see that here.
We see the buildings sort of placed separately
from that main forum space, but in every other
respect very similar to the general plan of these early Roman cities.
What's also useful about this particular plan is the fact, that it shows
you the way though, as time went by and as the city grew,
it shows you the way in which the cardo and the decumanus were
extended and then the other buildings of the city were added here and there.
A number of baths, lots of private residences.
This is a
particularly important building here at 15 and 16, which we'll look at today.
The 15 is the theater and 16 is the so-called Piazza of the corporations,
the Piazzale delle Corporazioni which is very significant and we'll look at
that soon. If you go and visit the city of Ostia
today and enter at the ticket booth what
you see, almost immediately, is again a
polygonal masonry street very, looking very much
like Pompeii but once again there are no stepping stones in Ostia unlike Pompeii.
Which is, which the plot thickens there in terms of why we
see those in Pompeii and don't seem to see them anywhere else.
You walk along that polygonal masonry street, pavement and you see
both the remains up here in the upper left of the original republican city wall.
And it should bring back memories of opus quadratum [LAUGH] or
ashlar masonry that we saw at the beginning of the semester.
You can see it's consistent with the age in which it was built in the republic.
But then over here as you make your way along one of the main, on
the, one of the main streets you see what is characteristic of Ostia as a whole.
And that is concrete construction, brick-based concrete
construction, both for the residences and also for
the public buildings and also for the
religious structures, namely the temples in this city.
The reason for this of course takes us back to
the Neronian period, the fact of the great fire of 64.
When it was realized, you'll remember the Sebora
which was located back beyond the precinct walls
of the forum of Augustus.
The area where the working poor of Rome lived, primarily
in rickety apartment houses that were made out of wood.
Multistoried houses, those were actually multistoried but
they were always going up in flames.
And there was a recognition after the great destruction of the
fire of 64 that the Romans needed to fireproof their buildings.
And so they beg-, and so they recognized the fact that brick is better at,
at protecting the structure from fire than stone is and they,
and stone can burn and they actually began to, as we know,
we've talked about this before, they began to build their houses
and many of their civic structures out of concrete faced with brick.
And we see that development especially well here in Ostia.
And Ostia is extremely important for us also because many of, many comparable
buildings that were put up in the city of Rome itself no longer survive.
The same apartment houses that we're going to see in Ostia did exist in Rome.
We have some remains of them.
There's a very prominent one at the base of the Capitoline Hill, to
the left of the hill as you, as you climb up that hill.
