Thread on the #walls of #Rome TP Wiseman’s brand new paper on FirstView weighs in on the old debate of the age and shape of Rome’s early fortifications: cup.org/3cOTdGe
It’s been almost 10 years since I weighed in on this topic, suggesting our extant evidence (lit, arch, otherwise) was insufficient to resolve this debate. I still think at least that much is true, despite some very firm claims otherwise. jstor.org/stable/41725315
In the intervening decade, I’ve grown increasingly charitable to the idea of Rome as an extensive Mediterranean capital by the early 6th c. I STILL, however, think that the idea that the city had a full circuit at that date is an assumption, and a speculative one at that.
What is useful now is that Wiseman effectively severs the charge that denying a full 11km archaic 6th c. BCE circuit in tufo del Palatino amounts to “hypercriticism” of our sources for earliest Rome 
The fact is that our sources for the 5th and 4th BCE often presume there was no wall. Horatius Cocles’ (here) defense of the city makes no sense if there was a full circuit, same with the Gauls’ siege of the Capitoline
So: saying “the Kings didn’t build a wall around the city” isn’t source-skepticism per se, in fact it’s choosing parts of the source-tradition over others!
I don’t know what Rome’s 6th c walls looked like, but I continue to think we cannot know based on evidence at hand—and as Wiseman confirms, such agnosticism is not merely a matter of one’s skepticism towards the tradition for monarchic Rome
This endless (and unending?) topographical debate becomes highly technical. I think there are more important questions going forward. E.g.:
1. Why would 6th c BCE Roman society have needed a full circuit of ashlar defences (J. Armstrong’s work has been great on this q)
1. Why would 6th c BCE Roman society have needed a full circuit of ashlar defences (J. Armstrong’s work has been great on this q)
2. What does the unyielding insistence that the Archaic city had a full circuit say about modern scholarship’s reception of the Hellenistic and Late Republican intellectual idea that walls=society
At some point I should probably wade back into this debate in print (and not just on twitter). In the meantime, I’m happy to see Wiseman’s paper.
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