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I. INTRODUCTION
DESPITE ITS PROSAIC NAME, THE PONS SUBLICIUS was the most famous bridge in classical antiquity for two reasons.1 First, it was enshrined in Roman myth for its supporting role in Horatius Codes' defense of Rome; two millennia later, Thomas Macaulay needed only to refer to it as the bridge. Second, its sacred status and idiosyncratic construction requirements rendered it more artifact than architecture.
On close reading, the ancient literary sources present dialectical views of the Pons Sublicius. On the one hand, the bridge was ... or religiosus (sacred), its destruction was ... (unlawful) and ep??at?? (sacrilegious), and it had to be constructed in wood without iron or bronze according to religious prescription (Plutarch cites obethence to an oracle) under the authority of the pontífices, whose name Varrò attributed to this function of bridge-building. Its persistently wooden construction - a notable anomaly from antiquity's most skilled engineers - made it susceptible to destruction by storm and flood, yet its collapse came to be regarded as a prodigy.3 Until at least the third century b.c. it was the only bridge over the Tiber at Rome.4 However, the apparently unique religious status of the bridge - no other bridge in Rome and its environs, or even in the empire, is described in this way - is not specifically connected with the circumstances of its initial construction in the seventh century B.c. in any surviving source. Rather, we are told that practical and military considerations inspired the bridge, that it connected Rome with a new garrison on the Janiculum hill and formed part of a defensive network to guard the Tiber River from three fortified hilltops (including the Capitoline and Aventine), and furthermore that it facilitated access to territory downstream conquered by Ancus Marcius, and thus offered Rome considerable economic benefits. In this paper I attempt to reconcile these divergent representations by examining what is known about the Pons Sublicius from ancient references to the bridge from the first century b.c. onwards and in terms of Roman pile-bridge technology. I then argue, on the basis of what is known about Rome and central Italy in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c. from archaeological evidence, that the account of the construction of...