PRAENESTE
(Palestrina) Italy.
An ancient
Latin town on the inland highway from Etruria to Poseidonia, ca. 36 km E of Rome, set on the steep slope of
Monte Ginestro, an outcrop of the Apennines commanding the entrance to the Hernican valley. It possessed
wealth early, as the finds from the necropolis S of the
city at La Columbella show. Here just after the middle
of the 19th c. were found a number of fossa tombs with
extraordinarily rich furniture. The most famous of these
are the Bernardini and Barberini tombs of the orientalizing period (third quarter of the 7th c. B.C.), the material
from which is now in the Museo della Villa Giulia. But
there were also other important finds, including the famous Praenestine gold fibula inscribed along its catch-plate in archaic Latin, showing that in the second half
of the 7th c. this was Praeneste's tongue. The wealth of
the Bernardini tomb shows a completely Etruscanized
taste. The finds included personal jewelry, among it a
large pectoral fibula of gold (0.17 x 0.06 m) covered
with 131 tiny figures in the round of lions, horses, chimaeras, and harpies, all decorated with granulation; other
large pins of different design, including a gold serpentine
fibula and silver comb fibulas; a dagger with a sheath of
silver and a hilt decorated with gold, silver, and amber.
There was also table ware, including a gold bowl with
embossed animals in single file in Egyptian style, other
bowls more elaborately decorated in silver, a small silver
cauldron decorated with similar embossing mounted
with six silver snakes rising from rosettes, a gold skyphos
of great beauty mounted with tiny sphinxes decorated
with granulation, a great bronze cauldron mounted with
six gryphon protomes, together with a decorated base
for this, and numerous bronze vessels and mounts, some
of which show lively wit and imagination. Other luxuries
include glass and carved ivories. The Barberini tomb
was equally rich and contained a similar pectoral fibula
in gold and a similar great bronze cauldron; it also produced a bronze throne and a great bronze tray mounted
on wheels, as well as numerous very fine carved ivories,
including a cup supported by four caryatids, and a charming wooden box in the form of a fawn. The use of some
of the ivories may remain in doubt, but not the wealth
to which they attest. A silver situla from the Castellani
tomb is another unusual piece of treasure.
Sporadic finds of fine terracotta temple revetments
show the continuance of wealth and artistry in the 6th
and early 5th c., but we have no buildings to associate
with these, and there is then a gap that lasts from the
early 5th c. to ca. mid 4th. Sometime in the 4th c. the
city walls must have been constructed, fortifications in
great polygonal blocks of the local limestone fitted together with varying degrees of precision but usually with
some attempt to make the main beds nearly level, while
there is virtually no coursing. These present differences of
style in different stretches, and some try to distinguish
different periods of construction. The walls are long (ca.
4.8 km), with rectangular towerlike bastions at irregular
intervals. That they are built without knowledge of the
arch suggests an early date, but the fact that they include
the arx above the town (Castel S. Pietro) and the town
itself in a single system that must climb the steep cliff
face boldly suggests a late date. A mid 4th c. date best
accommodates their peculiarities and is consistent with
the reappearance of wealth in Praenestine burials, but the
walls still need thorough investigation. Along the S front
they are replaced by later walls of tufa.
From Livy (
2.19.2) we know that Praeneste, one of
the original members of the Latin League, went over just
before the battle of Lake Regillus in 499 B.C. to alliance
with Rome. But after the invasion of the Gauls it revolted from Rome and was at war with Rome down to the final dissolution of the Latin League in 338 B.C. Thereafter it kept its independence and rights of asylum and
coinage and was governed by four magistrates, two praetors, and two aediles, responsible to its senate. It furnished Rome with a military contingent, when needed, the cohors praenestina, commanded by one of the praetors (
Livy 23.19.17-18).
In excavations in the Columbella necropolis that began
in the 18th c. and continued into the early 20th c. a
great number of burials of the 4th c. and early Hellenistic
period came to light. These were usually in sarcophagi
of peperino or tufa, their places marked by cippi consisting of a block of limestone inscribed with the name of the
deceased surmounted by either a rather crude portrait
bust or a smooth, sharply pointed egg-shape usually
poised on a base of acanthus leaves; the latter is characteristic of Praeneste. In the graves were found a great many bronze cistae, decorated boxes containing toilet articles and feminine adornments, and at first it was thought
Praeneste was a center of the manufacture of these. But
the handsomest of them, the Ficoroni cista in the Museo
della Villa Giulia, bears an inscription stating that it was
made at Rome. In general the cistae, when they are inscribed, are inscribed in Latin, while the mirrors they
may contain are inscribed in Etruscan. The decoration of
the cistae consists of engraving (or embossing with a
point in dotted patterns, an early technique) and the
addition of cast mounts and chains. The main scene on
the body tends to be mythological, framed by formal
borders; the mounts are usually without narrative content. Thus on the Ficoroni cista the main scene is the
aftermath of the boxing match between Pollux and
Amykos from the Argonaut story, some 19 figures. It is
framed at the base with an engraved band of confronted
sphinxes and palmettes and at the crown with a double
interlace of lilies and palmettes, standing and hanging.
The cover is decorated in two rings: the outer, a hunt;
the inner, lions and gryphons. The handle of the cover
is a youthful Dionysos standing between two young
ithyphallic satyrs. The feet are lions' paws set on frogs
with relief attachment plaques showing groups of three
figures, one of whom is Hercules. The older cistae (mid
4th c.) tend to be oval, broader than deep, and with a
handle of a single figure in an acrobatic arch. There
are also some in which the bronze wall was worked
à
jour over a wooden lining (such a lining was probably
always present). Among other objects in these burials
one may note bronze implements (strigils, tweezers) and
alabastra of glass paste.
The great glory of Praeneste was the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia, a sanctuary that grew up around the
sortes praenestinae, a collection of slips of oak marked
with words in an archaic alphabet kept in an olive wood
box. When someone wished to consult the sortes, a young
boy (sortilegus) drew one or more of these at random
from their box in a ceremony we understand only poorly.
The sortes were held in awe and honor, and the inscriptions of grateful devotees chart the cult's enormous success. It is uncertain whether the goddess' name comes from her being the eldest child of Jupiter, as some inscriptions have it, or from her having nursed Jupiter
(Cic.
Div. 2.41.85). The coins found in the excavation
of the sanctuary show that it still flourished into the
4th c. A.D. The chief festival fell on April 10-11.
The sanctuary consists of two complexes, commonly
known as upper and lower. The axis of the two is unified,
but there is no direct connection between them, and they
seem to express rather different architectural ideas, points
that have led some to presume that the lower sanctuary
was rather simply the forum of Praeneste. The lower
sanctuary consists of three principal members, the “grotto of the sortes,” to W, a large rectangular edifice in the
middle, and an apsidal building to E. Walls of tufa before
the grotto of the sortes and under the cathedral of Palestrina show that this area has been extensively rebuilt.
The grotto is in part natural, in part artificial, an ample
nymphaeum paved with a splendid colored mosaic of fish
and other marine subjects; from what can be made out
of the plan of the whole, this should have been the focus
of a large hall balancing the apsidal building. To E of it
a rectangular building enclosing a Corinthian colonnade
is best completed as a basilica, despite some uncertainty;
a basement story on the S with a Doric colonnade carried
the S aisle down to the level of the street outside. To the
E of this and communicating with it is the apsidal hall,
its apse, like the grotto, cut into the rock and rusticated,
also presumably a nymphaeum; it was originally paved
with the famous Barberini mosaic of Nilotic subjects,
now in the museum. The hall preceding it is ringed with
a deep podium trimmed with a diminutive Doric frieze
along the crown, above which rise engaged columns alternating with great windows that must have given this hall
a very grand effect. It has been supposed that the podium
was for statuary or ex-voto offerings, but certainty is
impossible here. In the basement of this hall, accessible
only from the exterior, is a vaulted chamber identified by
an inscription of the aediles as an aerarium.
The upper sanctuary consists of a sequence of steep,
shallow terraces rising to a great colonnaded square,
above which stood the temple proper, the apex of the
design. The first terraces are two of fine polygonal masonry separated by one of opus quadratum, possibly a survival from an earlier period. The upper polygonal terrace, relatively high, is cut at its ends by broad stairways
that lead up to the base of a double ramp that sweeps
across the whole complex. Throughout this part of the
sanctuary the visitor is presented with a series of surprises,
the height of the terraces preventing his forming any
notion of what awaits him at the successive levels. To
increase this effect the Doric colonnades along the great
ramps turn to the hill and present a blank wall to the
view to the S. At the top of the ramps a generous terrace
spreads to either side. This is lined with a fine Corinthian
colonnade with a high attic, in effect a second story, and
develops into a hemicycle halfway along each arm. That
to the E framed a tholos, that to the W an altar. The
tholos is not centered on its hemicycle, and it covered a
dry well that has been supposed to be the place where
the sortes were believed to have been found.
From this level a monumental stair follows the main
axis, rising through a terrace of vaults with a facade of
arches alternating with rectangular doors, all framed by
an engaged order, architecture similar to that of the
tabularium in Rome, to emerge in a great ceremonial
square surrounded on three sides by porticos in which
the columns support vaulted and coffered roofing. At the
back of this, lifted a story above it, a hemicyclical stair of
broad shallow steps rose to a final hemicyclical colonnade
that screened the tholos of the temple proper at the same
time it made a grandiose entrance to it.
The whole building is generally consistent in fabric and
style, with walls faced with fine opus incertum of the local
limestone and carved members of travertine and peperino.
On the basis of a building inscription that mentions the
senate of Praeneste, the excavators wished to date the
upper sanctuary toward the middle of the 2d c. B.C. and
the lower to the time of the Sullan colony. This has been
strongly opposed, especially by architectural historians,
who see a difference between the two parts of little
more than a decade at most and incline to ascribe
the whole temple to the time of Sulla's colony. For
Praeneste, after many decades of prosperity as an independent municipium, refused to take sides in the social
war with the Italian towns against Rome, but in the
Marian war it had the misfortune to give shelter to the
younger Marius and his army after their defeat by Sulla.
There he stood siege for many months, but after the battle of the Colline Gate the Praenestines surrendered, and
Marius killed himself. The sack of Praeneste was extraordinarily savage (App.
BCiv. 1.94), and it is generally
supposed that this gave the opportunity for replanning
and rebuilding the temple of the goddess to whom Sulla
was so devoted. And at this time the city became a colony.
Besides the buildings noted, one should mention extensive works of terracing in opus quadratum along the S
front of the city that replaced the old city walls, an impressive series of vaulted rooms in opus incertum in continuance of the line of these (Gli Arconi), and a large
imperial cistern of brick-faced concrete. All these works
follow the orientation of the buildings of the sanctuaries
higher up, but it is not clear what the purpose of all of
these may have been, or even whether they formed part of
the sanctuary. But it seems not unlikely that by the Sullan
period the forum of Praeneste and all its appurtenances
had been moved to the foot of the hill. Inscriptions mention numerous public buildings, including baths, an amphitheater, and a ludus gladiatorius, but these have not yet been located. There are remains of numerous villas
in the neighborhood, the most impressive being the Hadrianic ruins near the cemetery (Villa Adriana) from which
in 1793 Gavin Hamilton extracted the Braschi Antinous
now in the Vatican (Sala Rotonda).
The Palazzo Barberini built on the hemicycle at the
top of the temple of Fortuna has been converted to use
as a museum, and an excellent collection of material from
the site is displayed there.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
R.V.D. Magoffin,
A Study of the Topography and Municipal History of Praeneste (1908); C. D.
Curtis,
MAAR 3 (1919) 9-90, pls. 1-71; F. Fasolo &
G. Gullini,
Il santuario della Fortuna Primigenia a
Palestrina, 2 vols. (1953)
MPI; P. Romanelli,
Palestrina
(1967)
I.
L. RICHARDSON, JR.
