The late Roman senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus spent most of the summer of 397 CE in his property in Formiae, in the southern coast of Lazio.Footnote ¹ Although his official career was essentially over by that stage, he was still a very active and influential player in imperial politics. During that summer sojourn alone, he wrote seven letters (that survive) to friends in high places, including the consuls of 395 CE Olybrius and Probinus, to Priscus Attalus, and to his son-in-law Nicomachus Flavianus iunior.Footnote ² Symmachus used his property in Formiae as a space for political interaction, amidst the cultural pursuits traditionally associated with the aristocratic idea of otium. This was clearly an important place for him, praised for the attractivenes of its position near the sea and the beauty of its buildings. It might not have been as profitable as the possession of his friend Caecina Decius Albinus near Naples, but it was valued by its merits rather than the gains it generated.Footnote ³ And yet, the late Roman aristocrat never specified what he meant by the merits of his property: in a letter to Attalus, Symmachus asked in jest whether his health benefitted from the walks by the sea or in the countryside, if he improved the cultivation of the fields, the elegance of the buildings, or the size of his herdsFootnote ⁴ – but this was more likely a joke between friends than an indication of the many uses of that property. The size, precise location, appearance, and function of the Formianum remain, in spite of its owner’s enthusiasm, hopelessly unknown to us.

What do we know about the properties of Symmachus, and why does this matter? Symmachus is a well known figure to scholars of Late Antiquity: the descendant of a successful family, urban prefect of Rome in 384 CE and consul in 391 CE, who remained influential in imperial politics until his death in the first years of the fifth century.Footnote ⁵ His standing was (somewhat ambiguously) transmitted to posterity by two responses written by bishop Ambrose of Milan to a petition for the restitution of the altar of Victory in Rome, by a long polemical poem by the Christian Prudentius, and by his inclusion in the fictitious banquet narrated by Macrobius in his Saturnalia. It is thanks to his large literary output, however, that Symmachus occupies such a prominent place in most recent scholarship: eight orations, 49 reports to the court composed while he was a prefect (the Relationes), and over 900 letters.Footnote ⁶

Symmachus’s correspondence, spread over ten books, records his interactions with clients, friends, relatives, political adversaries, Christian bishops, and emperors.Footnote ⁷ For a long time seen as dull and uninformative, they are now seen as a rich source of information about a late Roman senator’s culture, values, and political connections.Footnote ⁸ A number of these record the urban and rural properties owned by Symmachus in Italy and North Africa.Footnote ⁹ Although none of his letters comes close to the wealth of information provided by the younger Pliny about his villa at Laurentum for example, he often refers to the general location, attractivenes, and specific details about his properties, as in the case of the letters sent from Formiae in 397 CE.Footnote ¹⁰ It was based on this information that, in 1986, Domenico Vera published a groundbreaking study of Symmachus and his properties, analysing the structure and functioning of an aristocratic patrimony in the late fourth century.Footnote ¹¹ Starting from Olympiodorus of Thebes’ characterization of Symmachus as a Roman senator of ‘middling income’, whose annual revenues amounted to 2,000 pounds of gold, Vera showed how the location, management, and form of exploitation of this senator’s (and his peers’) estates were geared towards the market, even if most of it was done through rent rather than direct investment. Vera’s analysis, with the discussion of Symmachus’s properties as a central element, remains the basis for some of the most influential discussions of the late antique economy of the early 21^st century.Footnote ¹² In this sense, the properties of Symmachus are not only unusually well documented, but also of great significance for our understanding of the social and economic strategies, political relations, and cultural pursuits of the late Roman elite.

Symmachus’s properties also attracted scholarly attention through their archaeological imprint. In 1617, two inscribed statue-bases were discovered on the Caelian hill, in the area of the modern Military Hospital. Both were dedicated by Symmachus’s son, Quintus Fabius Memmius Symmachus – one to Symmachus himself and the other to his friend (and Quintus’s father-in-law) Virius Nicomachus Flavianus.Footnote ¹³ Sporadic exploration in the area continued to unearth finds, especially during the construction of the hospital between 1885 and 1891, including mosaics, columns, fragments of statues, and walls belonging to different structures of imperial date – only very conjecturally associated with a domus Symmachi.Footnote ¹⁴ Such limited knowledge was radically transformed when a new phase of building works in the area of the hospital offered the opportunity for extensive and careful study, between 1988 and 1992. The excavations, first published systematically by a team led by Carlo Pavolini in 1993, revealed an entire neighbourhood that included streets, insulae, utilitarian structures (including the Basilica Hilariana), and at least two late antique houses that reused earlier structures. One was attributed to the fourth century CE vir clarissimus Gaudentius; the other, a splendid residence covering an estimated area of c. 6,500-8,500 square meters, was convincingly identified as belonging to Symmachus.Footnote ¹⁵

Federico Lizzani’s Il patrimonio di Q. Aurelius Symmachus a Roma e nel Lazio aims to build on these developments, proposing to undertake what he calls an archaeological reconstruction of Symmachus’s properties in the area of Rome and modern-day Lazio, from his letters. From the letters, and not of the letters: the book is not simply a discussion of the passages where the correspondence refers to material structures (although this is also present), but rather takes the letters as a starting point for an exploration of the physical landscape frequented and described by their author. Although L. himself stresses that his main interests are the archaeological and topographical aspects of Symmachus’s properties, the book offers much more than that, considering the forms of transmission, types of use, and the vocabulary employed to describe each one of them. This is fortunate, because (as L. concedes) we remain hopelessly uninformed about almost any physical aspect of these properties. Throughout, L. remains remarkably careful in the handling of information, and his conclusions are a model of methodological self-awareness. Symmachus is consistently vague about these structures, and the surviving archaeological evidence is limited and of dubious value in the best cases. And yet, there is much in the book that makes it worthy of interest and valuable to scholars of the late Roman elite and of Rome’s hinterland, even if this reviewer remains sceptical about the project as it is presented.

What justifies the geographic confines of this book? The choice to limit this study to Rome and Lazio is arbitrary. Symmachus owned properties both north and south of the Mediterranean, as noted above, and it is probable that the lion’s share of his revenues originated in southern Italy and/or North Africa. However, L. suggests that the area extending as far south as Formiae (some 120 km from Rome as the crow flies) corresponded to Symmachus’s understanding of the Roman suburbium, an area limited by the ‘…insieme delle esperienze individuali, familiari e di classe dy Symmachus, foggiatesi su specifiche strutture politiche e culturali’ (13). This makes sense at an intuitive level – Symmachus’s letters should express his own spatial conceptions –, but the reader is left wondering about the outer boundaries of this region.Footnote ¹⁶ Formiae is here presented as a gateway to Campania and its attractions, but it is not clear that this distinction makes sense from the point of view of senatorial economic investments. Recent decades have seen a continuous effort to understand the demography as well as the social and economic geography of different zones of Rome’s hinterland, and the picture that emerges from these studies is one of diversity and complementarity.Footnote ¹⁷ Symmachus’s properties were located at different points of what seems to have been a series of superimposed patchworks of landscapes, settlement patterns, and economic activities that extended in different directions from Rome. This is acknowledged in the way his letters reveal significant differences in how each property was used, its main physical and natural attributes, and how often it was visited. Whereas a clearer discussion of the nature of the suburbium would have been useful, a study as thorough as this could not have been extended indefinitely, and the variety and number of structures examined are impressive enough.

Following a useful Introduction discussing the history of scholarship on Symmachus and his properties, the book is organised in 10 chapters, each dedicated to a property (or a group of those), all following roughly a similar structure: a literary discussion of the letters that mention the property, including terms used and how it is described, followed by a survey of the archaeology and topography of the area. L.’s approach is clear: to make the most of what might be learned from each type of evidence separately, with the aim of combining these discoveries to illuminate Symmachus’s properties. Rather than the properties themselves, the Conclusion discusses different aspects of how Symmachus used his properties, his building projects, mobility, how he received friends, and economic strategies.

The book opens with a discussion of Symmachus’s residential complex on the Caelian, the longest chapter (93 pages long). After briefly discussing the passages where Symmachus’s letters refer to his Lar Caelius (mainly Ep. 3.12, 3.88, 7.18-19), L. presents a detailed analysis of the archaeological finds in the area of the Ospedale Militare, with particular attention to the late 20^th century excavations. These finds were published with different aims over the last 30 years, focusing on different parts of the neighborhood, and L. offers a clear (and welcome) synthesis of the information available, including archival material, not only for the domus Symmachi but also for the house of Gaudentius,Footnote ¹⁸ a fullonica, two insulae, and the headquarters of the dendrophori, the basilica Hilariana. L. suggests that Symmachus’s social dominance had its spatial and physical expression in his control over the entire neighbourhood. This also included a bathing complex as well as other utilitarian structures accessible through a monumental gateway that closed the only vicus giving access to the area (108–9), including physical structures and the people who frequented them, a veritable Symmachianum. This would make the late fourth century summit of the Caelian an area akin to the topos of the Palatine hill under the Flavians, for example, an area still frequented and inhabited by others, but very much dominated by one single family. Attractive as it is, this suggestion raises two issues: in the first place, to what extent can we read spatial proximity as socio-economic dominance? In the second place, if Symmachus’s palatial complex was this extensive, how should we visualize the properties of other powerful aristocratic house-owners in late antique Rome, such as his neighbours the Valerii, or his friends Praetextatus and Nicomachus Flavianus? Should we envision the Rome of Valentinian II and Theodosius I as a city socially and physically divided by competing families, in a radical break with the city of Septimius Severus and Constantine?

The following two chapters are dedicated to Symmachus’s properties in Rome, inside the walls (Chapter 2) and in the ager Vaticanus (Chapter 3). There is almost nothing to be learned about the archaeology or topography of these properties in a strict sense, as the letters are infuriatingly vague about location or physical attributes. L. makes the most of it (Chapter 2), showing that there were at least three urban residences intra muros, besides the house on the Caelian – but there might have been more. Late Roman letter writers were not concerned with being specific about the structures they referred to, and our senator is no exception. Symmachus mentions one urbana sedes (Ep. 3.1); two unspecified domus (3.14); a house where Symmachus was carrying out works on behalf of his father (1.12), possibly in Trastevere (1.44); another unspecified house, this one certainly different from the others (6.70); and possibly another domus, but maybe not in Rome (9.50).Footnote ¹⁹ Outside the wall, Symmachus owned a property on the Vatican (Chapter 3), referred to as both rus and villa (Ep. 6.58). This was used for the enjoyment of otium away from the crowds, while being close enough to the city centre to allow attendance at the Senate (Ep. 7.21). The property adjoined the praedium of Nicomachus Flavianus iunior, his son-in-law, and L. takes this as an indication of the reduced size and the non-productive character of the property. The ager Vaticanus is presented, here, as a crowded area dominated by aristocratic home-owners, whose properties coexisted with imperial structures as well as pagan and Christian monuments. The chapter provides an extensive survey of archaeological finds in the area, from the circus of Caligula to the Phrygianum near St Peter’s, only vaguely related to the property – the location of which remains unknown. This is interesting and useful for the reader, but the book’s argument is not really advanced by it. Perhaps more interestingly, for our understanding of Rome’s urban space, L. persuasively argues that the building of the Aurelian wall and the abandonment of the Pons Neronianus were followed by the aristocratic take over of the Vatican area, suggesting that Rome’s immediate surroundings were witness a similar process to what was going on within the walls.

The following chapters move away from Rome, examining the evidence for Symmachus’s properties on the via Appia (Chapter 4), in Ostia and its suburb (5), in the ager Laurens (6), near Tibur (7), Praeneste (8), and then further south near Cora (9) and finally Formiae (10). L. makes the most of Symmachus’s brief references: the property on the via Appia (mentioned in Ep. 2.59) was a large building in a limited space, either built anew or heavily refurbished; the large villa in the ager Laurens was strategically located near a busy road, and Symmachus praises it for its natural features and hunting grounds (Ep. 4.44; 7.17; 7.26; 9.69); the property in Praeneste was sought during the hotter months in Rome (Ep. 3.50; 7.35), and Formiae is mentioned both for its location by the sea and as a step on the way to Campania (Ep. 1.8; 1.11; 2.3-6; 316; 5.69, 93 and 97; 6.36, 75 and 77; 7.18, 31, 37, and 69; 8.23; 9.29 and 100). The problem here is that there is no way of aggregating this information to describe a ‘typical’ property, simply because they are all so different, as a result of their location but also their dimension and forms of use.

Not knowing where any of the properties was located raises the issue of the usefulness of the archaeological evidence so carefully collected and presented in these chapters: whereas for the house on the Caelian scholars can rely on an enormous wealth of material, even areas that have been more intensively explored like Ostia and its environs represent a serious challenge. L. examines 18^th century maps and antiquarian works, as well as modern surveys and excavations, presenting an impressive amount of data related to settlements, buildings, and inscriptions, ranging in some cases from the late Republic to the late antique period. No stone (literally and metaphorically) is left unturned in the search for Symmachus’s properties, and in the process the reader is presented with very clear and informative surveys of the zones in question. These are often of little help, in terms of the book’s ambitions: in the 17^th and 18^th c., maps of Latium and the Roman Campagna located a ‘Villa di Symmachus’ in the outskirts of Ostia (209–11), and the toponym ‘Vindicio/Vendicio’, first attested in the 12^th century, might be a reference to Symmachus’s brother Avianius Vindicianus (332–33), but L. himself explains why these are unreliable. Praeneste has an important epigraphic record that illustrates an active civic elite and vibrant civic institutions, and its surrounding territory has been the focus of archaeological excavations and surveys revealing structures from all periods of Roman history. Antiquarian maps and plans of the 17^th and 18^th centuries attest the presence of ruined structures in the countryside, showing the rich source material available for this part of Rome’s hinterland. However, as L. observes, there is no trace of Symmachus’s property in this area. In the late 16^th c, Flaminio Vacca described the remains of a splendid residence near the church of S. Sebastiano on the via Appia, which could be late antique, but cannot be reasonably associated with the late Roman senator. As a result, and in spite of the enormous wealth of information presented in these sections, we are confronted with the fact that there is very little that can be said about Symmachus’s properties from a strictly archaeological and topographical point of view. What these sections do exceptionally well is to present the current state of knowledge about the archaeology of these areas, presenting an up-to-date and intelligent synthesis of the available information.

In contrast, L. makes very important points about real estate in late antique Rome and its environs, showing how properties came into Symmachus’s portfolio through different sources – for example, through his father as well as his father-in-law Orfitus (e.g., 16, 87, 135, and 298). A son could be responsible for a father’s residence, carrying out works and managing it for him, and houses could be lent or rented to friends and political associates (Chapter 2). The book illustrates with admirable clarity the variety of uses that could be associated with these structures: Cora was more likely used as a resting place on the road to Campania rather than for productive reasons or as a villa for otium (298); Formiae was a power-base for Symmachus, where his patronage links were reinforced by his constant stays (322); as L. plausibly argues, the properties near Tibur had a strong productive character, and Symmachus usually stayed with friends when visiting the area (267). The terminology used to designate these properties, whether domus, rus, praedium, villa, or deversorium (among others) was employed to refer to realities that were different but that intersected (346), and rather than legal or economic rigidity they illustrate the complex relationship maintained between senators and their properties.

Il patrimonio di Q. Aurelius Symmachus is at its strongest when it expands its focus, focusing on the broader issues of use, management, and cultural value of the properties considered, rather than investigating each one of them individually. We will never know where exactly were Symmachus’s properties, nor how large or lavishly decorated they were, and in this sense the title and chapter structure of the book are either misleading or disappointing. And yet, this is a valuable contribution to our understanding of aristocratic properties in the later Roman empire, using a rich body of evidence to offer crucial insights into how the patrimony of a late Roman senator – possibly the archetypal late Roman senator – was constituted, used, and valued by its owner.