Earlier this month a rare almost 2000-year-old border stone from the reign of the Emperor Claudius was unearthed in the city of Rome. The stone, technically known as a pomerium cippus (boundary stone), marked the sacred limits of the Roman Empire’s capital city and dates to 49 A.D., when Claudius expanded the boundary of the city. This wasn’t a simple property marker, it was part of a series of stones that divided the urban civic world of Rome from the military powers that lay outside it. Even more interestingly it is inscribed with now-lost ancient letters invented in the first century. As the first discovery of its kind in almost a century, the discovery created a media firestorm.
While border stones are well known to scholars, this one is noteworthy for being discovered in situ. It was discovered during excavations for a new sewer system underneath the recently renovated Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome’s historic city center. In antiquity the stones marked the pomerium, the sacred boundary that soldiers were forbidden to cross with weapons. At a press conference, Claudio Parisi Presicce, director of the Archaeological Museums of Rome, said that, “The founding act of the city of Rome starts from the realization of this ‘pomerium.’’ The stones, in other words, are part of what founded and defined Rome. The enlargement of the pomerium in 49 A.D. had some practical effects on the city. The 139 border stones laid by Claudius now incorporated the Avertine hill, which previously lay inside of the city walls but outside of the pomerium, with the result of reconstituting Rome as the seven hilled city that we know today.
Dr. Lisa Marie Mignone, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, and author of an important study of the border stones published in Historia, told The Daily Beast that “[Claudius’s] goal was not to increase the civic space of Rome, so much as to celebrate his expansion of the Roman Empire itself.” All the stones that marked the new boundary bear the same inscription, which states that Claudius (and his many official titles) “extended and redefined the pomerium because he had increased the boundaries of the Roman people.” The expansion of the boundary matched the expansion of the empire. Claudius, Mignone said, had overseen the annexing of several provinces in the east but his major accomplishment was the capture of Britain. Despite the large celebratory procession (known as Triumph) and arch he was granted in the city as a result, these conquests were hundreds of miles away. Extending the pomerium was “a sacral, topographical, and physical way to showcase at Rome his renewed expansion of the boundaries of the Roman Empire.” It was a way of marking his control over both foreign, domestic, civic, and sacred space.
In addition, Claudius’s expansion of the pomerium cleared up a great deal of confusion. As Mignone told me, first-century Roman historians were unclear about where the boundary actually lay until Claudius redefined it. Ancient commentators like the Seneca and Aulus Gellius struggled to explain why the Avertine hadn’t been included within the sacred city from the start and could only suggest that it was an ill-omened location and that there was no clear explanation.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/big-stone-found-in-rome-gets-everyone-all-excited
