LAVINIUM
(Pratica di Mare) Latium, Italy.
A city 28 km S of Rome. It was founded by Aeneas,
fugitive from Troy, and named for his wife Lavinia,
daughter of Latinus, king of the Aborigeni. So goes the
legend in the liberal poetic version of Virgil, in Livy
(
11.4ff), Dionysius Halicarnassensis (159.1ff), Dio
Cassius (1. Fragm. 1.3ff),
Origo gentis Romanae (10.5ff)
and in other sources. The earliest testimony of the
legend is in Timaeus, ca. 300 B.C., who speaks of the
Penates of Troy preserved in Lavinium. The people of
Lavinium are mentioned in the first treaty between
Rome and Carthage (Polyb. 3.22). The city was the
center of the Laurens ager, from which the inhabitants of the city are also called Laurentes; and thus
the city itself is sometimes called Laurentum or Laurolavinium. Lavinium was part of the Latin League (Cato,
in Prisc.
Inst. 4) and was the seat of the League's sanctuary. At the conclusion of the Latin war in 338 B.C., Lavinium probably became a federated municipium. Strabo
(
5.3.5; 100.232) connected the city's decline with the
Samnite ravages, that is, with the actions of Marius'
force in 82 B.C. Nevertheless, a particular religious significance preserved Lavinium's importance throughout the
ancient period. It was the seat of the cult of the Penates,
from which the Romans borrowed the official cult (Macrob. 3.4.11, etc.) of the beginning of the Roman peoples called Latins (
CIL x, 797). It is in consideration of
this cult and in the acceptance of the legend of their
Trojan origins that Varro (
Ling. 5.144) could write:
“Oppidum quod primum conditum in Latio stirpis Romanae, Lavinium: nam ibi dii penates nostri.” Other
cults of Lavinium mentioned in the sources include
Vesta, closely connected as at Rome, with the Penates;
Indiges (also called Jupiter Indiges or Aeneas Indiges),
Venus Frutis, Iuturna, Anna Perenna, Liber, etc. From
epigraphic evidence it is known that Castor and Pollux
were venerated at Lavinium ca. 500 B.C. and Ceres
during the 3d c. B.C.
The city was linked to Rome by the Via Laurentina, on
lightly rolling hills in sight of the sea, from which it is
4 km distant as the crow flies. On the coast near the
mouth of the Numicus (now called the Fosso di Pratica)
was Troia with a Sanctuary of Jupiter Indiges. In this
spot legend places the embarcation of Aeneas. The limits
of the city are clearly determinable. Above the hillside
where today stands the village of Pratica di Mare is the
nucleus of the earliest settlement, indicated by the Iron
Age tombs found around it. In the 6th c. the city grew
to the S and the W, while the older nucleus must have
assumed the functions of an acropolis. Various stretches
of city wall have been found, the earliest datable to the
6th c. Inside the city are preserved various remains from
archaic, Republican, and Imperial times, among them
the bases of statues of Lavinia and of Silvius Aeneas,
honorific inscriptions, a bath building renovated by
Constantine, etc.
Outside the city, toward the E, a temple from the 5th
c. has been found; and to the S near the little church
of Santa Maria delle Vigne, which is of Early Christian
origin, elements of a large sanctuary have been discovered. The latter contains a particularly interesting
series of 13 large altars, all aligned, the earliest from
the 6th c. B.C. and the most recent perhaps from the 2d
c. B.C. Besides many votive terracottas the excavation
has brought to light local and imported ceramics from
the 6th and 5th c., small bronzes of kouroi similar to
those of the Niger Lapis (about 500 B.C.), a very fine
bronze statuette of Kore in the Greek oriental style, and
the aforementioned Latin inscription of Castor and
Pollux datable to ca. 500 B.C. These discoveries are interesting for the testimony they provide of direct contact with the Greek world, probably through maritime
trade; and they also contribute new evidence concerning
the function that Lavinium may have had in transmitting Greek influence to Rome, particularly in religious
matters. Another important discovery made in the same
area, about 100 m N of the others, is that of a tomb of
the 7th c. B.C., covered by a tumulus. It was transformed
in the 4th c. into a Heroon and can be identified as the
Heroon in the form of a tumulus seen by Dionysius
Halicarnassensis (1.64.5) near Lavinium, not far from
Numicus; and believed to be the tomb of Aeneas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
R. H. Klausen,
Aeneas und die Penaten I-II (1839-40); A. Nibby,
Analisi . . . della Carta de'
dintorni di Roma (2d ed., 1848) II, 206ff; J. Carcopino,
Virgile et les origines d'Ostie (1919); G. B. Trovalusci,
Lavinium. Pratica di Mare (1928); G. Bendz, “Sur la
Question de la ville de Laurentum,”
Acta Instituti Romani Regni Sueciae 4 (1935); B. Tilly,
Vergil's Latium
(1947); A. Alföldi,
Early Rome and the Latins (1965);
G. K. Galinsky,
Aeneas, Sicily, and Rome (1969); F.
Castagnoli,
Lavinium I (1972).
On recent excavations: F. Castagnoli, “Dedica arcaica
lavinate a Castore e Polluce,” in
Studi e Materiali Storia
e Religioni 30 (1959) 109ff; id., “Sulla tipologia degli
altari di Lavinio,”
Bullettino Commissione Archeologica
del Comune di Roma 77 (1959-60) 3ff; id.,
I luoghi
connessi con l'arrivo de Enea nel Lazio, ArchCl 19
(1967) 1ff; P. Sommella, “Lavinium. Rinvenimenti
preistorici e protostorici,” ibid. 21 (1969) 18ff; id.,
“Heroon di Ena a Lavinium: il contributo dei recenti
scavi a Pratica di Mare,”
RendPontAcc 44 (1971-72)
47-74.
F. CASTAGNOLI
