Rural landscapes and their suburbs: a view of the urban periphery from the countryside

This chapter re-evaluates the function and significance of Roman suburbs by taking a rural perspective on the urban periphery. Recent research has sought to blur the long-standing urban-rural dichotomy that frames the study of Roman urbanism by drawing attention to the ambiguous status of suburban landscapes. However, this narrowing of focus onto the zone immediately outside the city has inadvertently revived the old dichotomy in a new guise (urban-suburban) and marginalised consideration of the rural in the study of Roman urbanism. Challenging these developments, this chapter asks, what did suburbs ‘do’ for rural populations? To answer this question requires a reorientation of perspective. Instead of viewing suburbs as the product of an urban centrifugal force, the chapter deploys a parallel centripetal model to consider how suburbs drew in the rural landscape. Focusing on urban, suburban and rural contexts around the city of Rome and central Italy during the late republican and imperial periods, the chapter uses case studies of entertainment, burial and marketing to demonstrate both how rural populations have been excluded from analyses of Roman suburbs and how they might be re-integrated. This leads to the provocation that suburbs can be usefully considered as central places generated by the need of increasingly dispersed rural populations to gather as communities in their own right as well as to engage socially, politically and economically with the city.