Dr. Kevin Dicus, University of Oregon

Archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani captivated the public with his account of excavations on Rome’s Esquiline Hill. No doubt influenced by Horace’s Satire 1.8 about the same region, his portrayal of mass graves embedded within a vast field of municipal waste offered a thrilling, dystopian vision that continues to resonate nearly 150 years later. This talk revises Lanciani’s portrayal of the Esquiline as a wasteland of rotting corpses and garbage and offers a new interpretation of Horace’s Satire 1.8. I argue that Horace describes not mass graves on the
hill but rather a modest cemetery where multiple graves shared the same plot of land that also received the city’s refuse. Archaeological comparanda from across the Roman world demonstrate that individual, modest graves dug into suburban municipal dumps were a common and legitimate form of burial for the urban poor. This intersection between the city’s dumps and its dead provides new insight into Roman attitudes toward waste: although the disposal of refuse beyond the city walls transformed the suburban landscape, it did little to alter the cultural meaning of the extramural zone. People continued to use these areas much as they had before their appropriation for refuse, including the symbolically charged act of burying loved ones.