Cosa

Cosa was an ancient Roman city near the present Ansedonia in southwestern Tuscany, Italy. It is situated on a hill 113 m above sea level and 140 km northwest of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea coast. It has assumed a position of prominence in Roman archaeology owing to its excavation.

History

The Etruscan town may have been where modern Orbetello stands; a fortification wall in polygonal masonry at Orbetello's lagoon may be in phase with the walls of Cosa.
Cosa was founded by the Romans as a Latin colony in 273 BC, on the Ager Cosanus, land confiscated from the defeated Etruscans, to solidify the control of the Romans and offer the Republic a protected port. The town was linked to Rome by the Via Aurelia from about 241 BC.
The Second Punic War, in which Hannibal had left a trail of devastation across Italy, affected the town like many Latin colonies and the rich bought up both public land and the small farms of the poor. New colonists arrived in 197 BC. Cosa seems to have prospered again until it suffered a crisis in the Roman Republican civil wars and in the 60s BC when it became depopulated. As part of land redistribution, a group of large villas was assembled in the area, run by slave labor, similar to the latifundia estates typical of southern Italy. These villas included nearby Settefinestre, the largest at "Le Colonne", "La Provinia", and one at Portus Cosanus.
It was rebuilt under Augustus. Cosa appears to have been affected by an earthquake in 51, which occasioned the reconstruction of the republican Basilica as an Odeon under the supervision of Lucius Titinius Glaucus Lucretianus, who also worked on the Capitoline temple. However, as early as 80, Cosa seems to have been almost deserted. It was revived under the emperor Caracalla, during whose reign the portico around the forum was built, concealing two large granaries. At the same time, the odeon was restored, a Mithraeum constructed in the basement of the Curia, and a sanctuary to Liber erected at the southeast end of the Forum.
It is possible that the intermittent nature of the town's occupation was due to the fact that, already in the early Empire, malaria was hyperendemic on the coast of Tuscany. By the 4th century only the sanctuary of Liber was periodically visited. One of the last textual references to Cosa comes from Rutilius Claudius Namatianus who remarks that by AD 417 the site of Cosa was deserted and was in ruins, and suggests that a plague of mice had driven the people away.
In the early 6th century, some occupation in the ruins is attested by pottery, and the remains of a church have been found built onto the Basilica. Perhaps at the same time, the Arx was occupied by a fortified farm, subsequently transformed into a small fortified outpost under Byzantine control. This was abandoned in the late 6th or early 7th century.

Archaeology

In the 20th century, Cosa was the site of excavations conducted under the auspices of the American Academy in Rome, initially directed by the archaeologist Frank Edward Brown. Excavations have traced the city plan, the principal buildings, the port, and have uncovered the Arx, the forum, and many houses. Unexcavated buildings include a bathing establishment, but no trace of a theatre or an amphitheatre has been found. In the 1990s a series of excavations was carried out under the direction of Elizabeth Fentress, then associated with the American Academy in Rome. This latter campaign aimed at understanding the history of the site between the imperial period and the Middle Ages. Sample excavations took place over the whole site, with larger excavations on the Arx, the Eastern Height, and around the Forum.
From 2005 to 2012, the Universities of Granada and Barcelona excavated a domus, while from 2013,Florida State University has excavated a bath building in the southwest corner of the Forum. From 2016, l’Università di Firenze has been excavating along the processional street P.

The City

Urban layout

Within the city walls, the urban area was divided into an orthogonal plan, with space allotted for civic, sacred, and private architecture. The plan represents a subtle adaptation of an orthogonal plan to the complicated topography of the hill. The forum was found on a saddle between two heights, with the sacred area, the Capitolium, linked to it by a broad street. Recent excavations have suggested that the original layout provided for about 248 houses, of which 20 were intended for the decurions, and were double the size of the houses of the ordinary citizens. The larger houses were found on the forum and the main processional streets.

City walls and gates

The city wall of Cosa was built at the time of the foundation of the colony in 273 BCE. It is 1.5 kilometres long and built in polygonal masonry of Lugli's third type. It included a system of interval towers, numbering eighteen in all. These are found at irregular intervals, and all but one are rectangular in plan - the exception is round. There are three gates which correspond to as many roads: the northwest, or Florentine gate, which corresponds to the modern entrance to the site, the northeast, or Roman gate, and the southeast, or maritime gate. Each has the same structure, twin gates, one in line with the walls and one to the inside, with a space between them. The arx also had an independent circuit wall. At the western corner of this was a postern, closed in the early Byzantine period, when the hill was refortified with a wall built with an emplecton. A final, medieval circuit in mortared rubble masonry runs along the same line.
In recent years, the Archaeological Soprintendenza of Tuscany has conducted extensive documentation, repairs, and reconstructions of the walls.

Temples on the Arx

The vast majority of religious monuments at Cosa were located at the Arx, "an area sacra, abode of those gods, quorum maxime in tutela civitas." The Arx was positioned at the highest and southernmost point of the colony. Its limits were defined by the Town Wall on the S and W sides, by cliffs on the NW side, and by the Arx Wall on the NE side. In total, the Arx constituted around one-twentieth of the whole area of the townsite. Aside from the colony's walls, the Arx provides us with the site's most impressive remains, the first American excavation taking place from 1948-1950. Though mainly a religious center, there is some evidence of Republican housing. The Arx reached its fullest development in the early 2nd century BC, consisting of at least three temples and the Capitolium.
The arx or citadel of Cosa received some of the first serious treatment by Frank E. Brown and his team when they began the Cosa excavations in 1948. The citadel was a fortified hill on which were built several temples, including the so-called capitolium of Cosa.
Brown also discovered a pit that he thought was connected to the first rituals of foundation carried out at Cosa in 273 BC. On the arx were two temples, one the triple-cella building dubbed the Capitolium of Cosa, the other a smaller temple.

Capitolium

The Capitolium at Cosa marks, as far as we know, the only Capitolium constructed in a Latin colony. It was located at the summit of the Arx and would have been visible for miles at sea. Smaller temples to the left and the right accompany the Capitolium, the entire complex accessible from the Forum by the Via Sacra. The Capitolium was oriented ENE and consisted of three cellae with a deep columnar pronaos. This was preceded by a terraced forecourt. Approaching from this forecourt, one would have faced continuous steps across the entire facade. The temple walls rose from a high podium, its steps oriented on the axis of the Via Sacra. It is believed that the Capitolium was modeled after the 6th-century BC Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva at Rome. Its moldings are similar to the building traditions of Etruscan and early Roman architecture. The Capitolium was built in the 2nd century BC, most likely as an affirmation of Roman loyalty and identity following the Second Punic War. A square platform is located underneath the Capitolium, cut into the rock but oriented differently from the later building. A crevasse/pit with vegetative remains is located here, suggesting some sort of ritual activity associated with the religious foundation of Cosa. The exact meaning behind this find is undetermined, the source of much controversy and skepticism.

Unidentified temple

The remains of an unidentified temple lie on the crest of the Arx by the south wall of the Capitolium. For the most part, the remains have not been excavated; the original building was obliterated in antiquity after destruction by fire. The temple was not rebuilt, leaving only Temple D and the Capitolium at that time. Though the burning itself does not imply a battle, the subsequent construction of fortifications may suggest some sort of attack. Scholars have only been able to identify this building through traces of walls and fragments of its terracotta decoration. These remains included two subtypes of antefix, one featuring a bust of Minerva and the other Hercules. The temple has thus been attributed to Jupiter, both Minerva and Hercules being offspring of the god. Much speculation arises, however, as the gods held a wide variety of contexts in Italy. Furthermore, when the site was further explored in the 1960s, no more traces of the temple were found.

Temple D

Dating to the late 3rd century BC, Temple D was located opposite the north angle of the Capitolium's forecourt and was oriented SE. It supported a single square cella. Temple D has been identified as being dedicated to the Roman-Italic goddess Mater Matuta, though this conclusion remains speculative.

Architectural remains

A great deal of important terracotta fragments have been found at Cosa and the Arx. They suggest various phases of temple decoration and redecoration and include pedimental structures and revetment plaques. Most of the remains date from the late 3rd century to the early 1st century BC. They display similar qualities to finds from Latin and Etruscan sites in Hellenistic Italy. Dyson holds that these evolving styles and similarities reflected the influence of the larger Hellenistic Mediterranean world that Rome was beginning to dominate. Two sets of these remains clearly belong to the earliest buildings ; however, there is a third unidentified set. Scholars have used this set to explain the hypothetical Temple of Jupiter discussed earlier.