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<p>“Monumentalizing Infrastructure: Claudius and the City and People of Rome” is
a comprehensive study of public infrastructure in Rome under the emperor Claudius
(41-54 CE). Recent scholarship has targeted Claudius’ reign as an important moment
in the development of the Roman Principate. Overshadowed in the scholarship by Augustus’
transformation of Rome from a city of brick to marble, Claudius’ projects centered
on providing protection from floods, fires, and diseases, and assuring the availability
of enough clean water, food, and means of transportation. Building a large marble
temple certainly made a symbolic and aesthetic impact, but nearly doubling Rome’s
water supply must have meant more to the common person living day-to-day in the city.
By focusing on Claudian infrastructure initiatives and using GIS to map and contextualize
this work, this dissertation interrogates traditional scholarly approaches to Roman
imperial building and ancient urban planning.</p><p>Following a survey of the ancient
sources for Claudian building in Rome in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 examines the practical
measures put in place to secure and advertise the steady supply of affordable grain
to the city. Many have explored the convoluted history of the grain supply in Rome.
I do not replicate such studies, whose findings have not been changed by any significant
new discoveries, but instead I focus on how the labors put in to improve and advertise
such improvements to the food supply of Rome under Claudius changed and shaped the
urban landscape.</p><p>Chapter 3 centers on water and its distribution in the city.
I use archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence to assess Claudius’ effects
on Rome’s water supply. Visualizing these changes lets us consider building as a
process, and see what disruption, repair, and construction of aqueduct lines did to
water distribution to particular regions of the city. The maps suggest that Claudius
improved the potable water supply in areas where the poorer population of Rome lived.</p><p>Chapter
4 addresses boundary marking and road building—the visual and practical changes made
to the organization of and movement in the city. Organizing the boundaries into and
out of the city facilitated the urban development of areas along the banks of the
Tiber river. The visualization in this and other chapters allow us to see much more
clearly than before, and emperor’s impact upon the general populace and obtain a clearer
picture of the city’s urban history.</p><p>My compilation and analysis of the evidence
reveals a thorough revision of Rome’s infrastructure under Claudius, despite his common
denigration as an ineffectual buffoon or a puppet of his wives and freedmen. This
dissertation provides a new framework for examining imperial building in Rome. The
infrastructure projects that made all other construction possible are at the forefront.
The negative aspects of Claudius’ character portrayed in the literary sources are
counterbalanced or at least nuanced when a focus on infrastructure and care for the
people provides a different viewpoint. An emperor’s popularity and legacy among the
people would not be measured by jealous quarrels among the aristocracy. The imperial
government was not merely reacting to crises, rather it was proactively seeking long-term
solutions.</p>
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