Ager Campanus e approvvigionamento di grano a Roma (IV – II sec. a.C.)

Abstract

For the republican period there was a competition between the roman army and the inhabitants of Rome in the field
of basic supplies. The supply of wheat in Rome appears in turns linked with the transport over distance of foodstuff,
especially grain. The defeat of the Carthaginian Hannibal at Zama, in 202 B.C., determined a rapid Romanization
which also interest the Northern Campania and Latium, in the land of Garigliano and Volturno bacin, along the river
Tyrrhenian coastal strip. It was the necessity of great supplies of grain, tied to the big scenario of the second Punic war
which after determined the foundation of the Roman colonies in 194 B.C. In that period, Volturnum was founded as
a Roman maritime colony on the south-Est extremity of the Volturno mouth and the land of ager Campanus undergo
profound transformations. The territory between the two ancient cities, Capua and Volturnum, particularly during the
second century B.C. archaeologically present more rural settlements, located along the road of centuriation. The roman
farms with its assigned lots and its one-family tenancy lived together around the villa rustica, in which the dimension
of the structure imply the appropriation of a notable extension of land and the start of a single-crop system of cereal
altered with fodder and livestock breeding. Regarding the more general theme of ager Campanus, this paper dwells
upon on the activities of Lentulus in 165 B.C. in the Campanian plain to expropriate the lands and bring them back into
the availability of the ager publicus populi Romani using, most likely, the riches taken from Perseus and Macedonia
in 167 B.C.