Apart from wool, pigs, and wine, northern Italy’s most conspicuous product in the Early Empire was Gaius Caecilius Plinius Secundus, Pliny the Younger. Pliny’s uncle and adoptive father, Pliny the Elder, was commander of the Roman fleet at Misenum, a friend of the emperor Vespasian, an exceedingly prolific writer, and the most famous victim of the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The birthplace of both men was an idyllic town at the southwestern end of Lake Como, which the Romans called the Lacus Larius. The area had been occupied regularly since the Paleolithic, and in the Bronze Age the lake’s shores were ringed with pile-dwelling settlements. Growing rich with transalpine trade in the Iron Age, the oppidum (fortified Celtic settlement) at Comum reached its greatest extent in the fifth century BCE, but in the following centuries it fell under the control of the Insubres around Mediolanum and declined in wealth and importance.1
In 89 BCE the settlement at Como gained the status of a Latin colony, although it received no new colonists until 59, when Caesar, by virtue of the lex Vatinia, established five thousand colonists—including five hundred Greeks—at Comum, which took on the name Novum Comum.2 The colonists established a new settlement, with an orthogonal street plan, surrounded by walls. By the time of the Pliny the Elder, the town had expanded almost to the lakeshore.3 Further expansion and development took place during his nephew’s lifetime.
This chapter examines how both Pliny the Younger and the town on Comum evolved in the late first to early second centuries CE and, in particular, it examines the role that elite benefactions played in the development of Comum during that period.4 While these benefactions are attested—largely though inscriptions—across northern Italy, only in Comum do literary, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence combine to provide so thorough a picture of euergetism and urban development.
By the time Pliny the Younger entered the Roman senate at the end of the first century CE, Comum had a theater, baths, a nymphaeum, a temple to Rome and Augustus, and probably a basilica as well.5 Local elites provided most of the money. Calpurnius Fabatus, grandfather of Pliny the Younger’s wife and owner of estates throughout Italy, donated a public colonnade and provided for the decoration of the doors.6 The gens of Pliny’s father, the Caecilii, are well represented among these donors. L. Caecilius Cilo left 40,000 sesterces to the city to provide oil for the baths and the festival of Neptune, while L. Caecilius Secundus set up the temple to Rome and Augustus in honor of his daughter Caecilia.7
The younger Pliny himself provided a library and public baths to the city, as well as money for their furnishing and upkeep.8 In a letter to fellow townsman Calvisius Rufus, Pliny says that he has given 1,600,000 sesterces to the town and that he intends to donate a further 400,000.9 The later 400,000 sesterces Pliny’s friend Saturninus, probably from Comum as well, had originally bequeathed to the town. That legacy had been disallowed as illegal, and some of the disallowed inheritance went to Saturninus’s other heirs, including Pliny, who honored his friend’s wishes and donated the same amount of money out of his own increased inheritance.10 By the end of his life Pliny had given Comum an unspecified amount of money for the construction of the town’s baths, 300,000 sesterces for their decoration, the interest on 200,000 sesterces for their upkeep, 1,866,666 sesterces for the maintenance of 100 of Pliny’s freedman and for the provision of an annual dinner for the people of Comum, 100,000 sesterces for the upkeep of the library he donated, additional money for the hiring of teachers for Comum, and 500,000 sesterces for an alimentary scheme for Comum’s girls and boys.11 In sum, he donated at least 4,766,666 sesterces—and probably closer to 5 million sesterces when unspecified costs are factored in—of a probable fortune of around 20 million sesterces.12
The benefactions recorded in Pliny’s Letters or in surviving inscriptions most likely do not represent the sum total of monumental construction and elite euergetism in Pliny’s time in the later first century and early second century CE. Excavations in the piazza Cacciatori delle Alpi in 2001 and 2002 produced columns and marble bases from an otherwise unattested Trajanic temple, and cornice fragments from the excavations at San Fedele suggest another late first-century monumental structure.13 The recently excavated bath complex of the Viale Lecco was constructed sometime during the late first or early second century; this does not necessarily indicate that these were the baths built with Pliny’s gifts. While there is still much work to be done reconstructing the evolution of Roman Comum’s monumental center, the architectural, epigraphic, and literary material points to a significant building boom in the mid first to early second century. Such monumentalization was mirrored in the Comum of the dead, as the city’s two main necropoleis were decorated with urns and stelae. In addition, the suburbium beyond these necropoleis had itself by the Flavian era grown and become more defined.14 The town that Pliny was born in was becoming increasingly monumentalized, with much of that monumentalization initiated and financed by his relatives.
Comum’s new public buildings were typical of Early Empire in which the Late Republican emphasis on fortification building gave way to a preference for theaters, baths, and temples.15 Thus, while euergetism itself was not a new phenomenon in northern Italy, as the campus that Akisios Arkantokomaterekos donated in Vercellae ably demonstrates, its physical manifestation on the urban fabric very much reflected empire-wide trends.16
Baths in particular were a benefaction of their time. In Rome under the Republic, when public bathing was too closely tied with luxuria and potential immorality, public baths were a rarity, and elite benefactors even rarer.17 Outside of Rome, in Latium and southern Italy, baths were becoming more common, and by the early first century BCE duovirs at Praeneste and Grumentum were overseeing and funding the construction of public baths.18 In Rome, only with the Augustan age and Agrippa’s patronage of “170 free baths” did bathing gain acceptability.19 In northern Italy, there are a few potential pre-Roman precedents for areas of ritual bathing, such as at Lagole in the upper Piave Valley in the northern Veneto, but there is little evidence for anything resembling the public baths of the Early Empire.20
In this context neither Comum nor Pliny was exceptional, even within northern Italy; 70 km to the southwest at Novaria, C. Valerius Pansa, the former governor of Britain, restored the town baths—destroyed by either fire or violence—on a grander scale, on a larger lot and within two years.21 Bathhouses were a common form of benefaction across northern Italy during this period, and such private bathhouse euergetism is attested in the first through second centuries at Bergomum, Novaria, Altinum, Mediolanum, Brixia, Placentia, Verona, and Asola, in addition to Pliny’s Comum.22 An unknown donor at Altinum was particularly generous:
d(ecreto) d(ecurionum)
[h]ic rei p(ublicae) Altinatium HS XVI(milia) [n(ummum) ded(it)]
[i]ta ut balinea Sergium et Puti[nium]
HS DCCC(milia) n(ummum) refecta in usu mu[nicip(um?)]
essent et alia HS CCCC(milia) n(ummum) ut ex [eorum]
reditu cale[fier]ent et HS CC(milia) n(ummum) [in perp(etuam)]
tutelam eo[ru]ndem item HS [CC(milia) n(ummum)]
ut ex usuris eorum VII Idus [---]>
natali ipsius et VII Idus eas[dem]
natali Petroniae Magnar ma[tris]
suae XVII Kal(endas) Ian(uarias) natali L(uci) Fabii St[ellat(ina)]
Amminiani patris ui decurio[nes]
[Au]g(ustales) et seviri sportulas acci[perent]
. . . by decree of the decurions. This man gave to the city of Altinum 1,600,000 sesterces, in such a way that the Baths of Sergius and the Baths of Putinius be repaired with 800,000 sesterces for the use of the town; so that from the return on another 400,000 sesterces the baths be heated and that they be maintained in perpetuity with 200,000 sesterces. Likewise, he gave 200,000 sesterces so that from the return on this sum, the decurions, augustales, and sevirs receive cash handouts 7 days before the Ides of . . . his birthday, and on the same day of that month, the birthday of Petronia Magna, his mother, and on the birthday of his father, L. Fabius Amminianus, of the voting tribe Stellatina, 17 days before the kalends of December.23
Altinum’s donor was keen to ensure that the baths be maintained and, like Pliny, made a donation for their upkeep and fuel. The inscription emphasizes that the benefaction is a permanent one.24
Other benefactors subsidized, either through one-time donations or the creation of more permanent funds, like the interest on the 400,000 sesterces that financed bath maintenance at Altinum and provided free admission for bathers. At Bononia, the price was the same:
Divus Aug(ustus) parens
Dedit
[[C(aius) Caesar]] Augustus
Germanicus [[p(ater) p(atriae)]]
refecit
in huius balinei lavation(em) HS CCCC(milia)
nomin(e) C(ai) Aviasi T(iti) f(ilii) Senecae f(ilii) sui T(itus) Aviasius Servandus
pater testament(o) legavit ut ex reditu eius summ(a)
in perpetuum viri et impuberes utriusq(ue) sex{s}us
gratis laventur
The deified Augustus, father, dedicated (this). Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Caligula) [father of his country(?)] restored (it). In the name of his son Gaius Aviasius Seneca, the son of Titus, Aviasius Servandus his father bequeathed 400,000 sesterces so that out of the interest on this sum men and young people of either sex might bathe free of charge forever.25
Aviasius Secundus’s benefaction points to perhaps the key mechanism for the diffusion of this particular form of euergetism: the model of the emperor. In the case of Bononia’s baths, there may have been a special political reason for Augustus’s benefaction, since in the Late Republic Bononia had been loyal to Marcus Antonius, and Augustus had specially exempted the city from the loyalty oath he administered to the whole of Italy before the Actium campaign.26 Yet whatever the political motivations of the time, the Augustan baths at Bononia set an imperial precedent in northern Italy, and indeed Aviasius Secundus’s gift followed not one but two imperial precedents. Pliny, most likely in Rome supervising the banks of the Tiber when construction began on Trajan’s Oppian hill baths, may have followed a similar inspiration.
Pliny’s alimentary scheme too was a benefaction of its time. Private alimenta, in which funds were set up to maintain a set number of free children in the town, had existed since at least the late Julio-Claudian period but increased dramatically when first Nerva and then Trajan started imperial alimentary schemes in Italian towns.27
The details of one of these imperial alimenta are preserved in a large bronze inscription from Veleia in the western Aemilia just south of Placentia.28 Here Trajan and the treasury provided a capital contribution that provided low-interest loans to local landowners; the interest on those loans then supported 263 orphan boys and 35 orphan girls of legitimate birth, along with an orphan boy and girl of spurious birth. The children received distributions in cash according to their status and sex: legitimate boys received 16 sesterces a month, legitimate girls 12, illegitimate boys 12, and illegitimate girls 10. The details of these schemes, particularly private ones, varied over Italy. At Ostia, for example, payments were made only to girls, while at Tarracina payments were made to equal numbers of boys and girls—compared to the 7:1 ratio at Veletia—but on a tiered scale of 5 denarii for males and 4 denarii for females.29
Pliny’s own scheme differed from that of Trajan’s at Veleia. Pliny donated property to the city at a valuation of 500,000 sesterces; Comum then rented it back to Pliny at a rate of 30,000 sesterces a year.30 After his death the city could continue to rent out the property, and Pliny says that “the property will always find a tenant to cultivate it because its value greatly exceeds the rent charged.”31 Thirty thousand sesterces a year would provide the city with 2,500 sesterces a month for cash subsidies. At 14 sesterces a month per child, the fund would provide for 178 children, on a par with other attested schemes benefitting 100–300 children. These children represented a small proportion of Comum’s population of around fifteen to twenty thousand.32
The effects of the alimenta on Comum must have been fairly limited, at least in terms of the welfare and nutrition of its children.33 The program was, however, intended by Pliny to be permanent: “It is fitting to put public advantages before private ones and to put permanent (aeternas) advantages before transient ones.”34 The alimentary scheme was as much a permanent adornment to Comum as the temples and bathhouses, and such permanence was, like the preference for these buildings, an empire-wide obsession. From the Flavian dynasty to the early Severans, personifications of Aeternitas appeared frequently on imperial coinage, where it reinforced the messages of types celebrating Abundantia, Concordia, Fortuna, Salus, Providentia, and Concordia.35 Aeternitas is common in Pliny’s own vocabulary of virtues, for “what greater could be given to man than glory and praise and aeternitas?”36 Permanence brought stability and continuity to the empire and safeguarded individual praise and glory.
This concern for long-term benefits is echoed in Pliny’s other main benefaction to Comum’s children—the hiring of public teachers, to whose salaries Pliny contributed a third of the funds. In a letter to Tacitus, Pliny describes the rationale for this benefaction:
I was visiting my native town a short time ago when the young son of a fellow-citizen came to pay his respects to me. “Do you go to school?” I asked. “Yes,” he replies. “Where?” “In Mediolanum.” “Why not here?” To this the boy’s father (who had brought him and was standing by) replied: “Because we have no teachers here.” “Why not? Surely it is a matter of great importance to you fathers (and luckily there were several fathers listening) that your children should study here on the spot? Where can they live more happily than in their native place? Where can they be brought up more strictly than under their parent’s eye or with less expense than at home? If you put your money together, what would it cost you to engage teachers? And you could add to their salaries what you now spend on lodgings, traveling expenses, and all the things which cost money away from home—and that means everything. Now as I have no children of my own, I am prepared to contribute a third of whatever sum you decide to collect, as a present for our town such as I might give to a daughter or my mother. . . . So you should meet and come to some agreement; be encouraged by my generosity, for I want my own contribution to be as large as possible. You can do nothing better for your children, nothing more welcome for our town. The children born here should be brought up on their native soil, so that from their earliest years they may learn to love it and choose to stay at home. I hope that you will introduce teachers of repute, so that nearby towns will seek education here, and, instead of sending your children elsewhere as you do today, you will see other children flocking here to you.”37
The letter, which ends with a request that Tacitus look for candidates for the teaching positions from among his own coterie of students, emphasizes how these new teachers will increase both Comum’s standing among its neighboring towns and also the patriotism of its citizens.38 Comum, Pliny, and Tacitus of course all garner honor from the transaction. Pliny’s euergetism and scholarly self-portrait are promoted and his preeminence in his hometown confirmed, the reputation of Tacitus as scholar and patron is praised and memorialized, and Comum receives teachers, a second senatorial patron, and an educational standing no longer secondary to Mediolanum’s.
Teachers were no insubstantial ornament; sometime in the first or second century the grammaticus P. Atilius Septicianus was commemorated at Comum with the following inscription:
(side a):
Morborum The weakness of disease and the worst things in
vitia et vitae life I fled and now I am free from hardship and
mala maxima enjoy tranquil peace
fugi
nunc careo
poenis pace
fruor placida
(side b):
P(ubli) Atili Publius Atilius Septicianus, son of Publius,
P(ubli) f(ilii) Ouf(entina) of voting tribe Oufentina, a teacher of Latin
Septiciani literature, to whom the council of the people
grammat(ici) Latini of Comum decreed decurial honors and who
cui ord(o) Comens(ium) willed his entire fortune to the community
ornamenta
decur(ionalia) decrevit
qui universam
substantiam
suam ad rem publ(icam)
pertinere voluit39
Septicianus was most likely local, since his voting tribe suggests an origin either in Mediolanum or in Comum and since, while the Atilii, members of his adoptive gens, are distributed across the empire, attestations of the Septicii are concentrated in regio XI.40 He had enough prestige as a Latin scholar and teacher to be given decurial honors, which was also the case with his fellow grammaticus latinus (instructor in Latin literature) at Verona, Q. Tuticanus Eros.41 That Septicianus bequeathed his property to Comum suggests that he had no heirs, but it also points to Pliny’s bequests as being conspicuous but not unique.
Also designed to enhance both Pliny and Comum’s scholarly status was a library, most likely Pliny’s first major gift to the city, probably in 97.42 No certain identification has been made with any remains in Como, but the library forms a key part of the Letters.43 Already in book 1, Pliny discusses the speech he gave to the local decurions about the upcoming dedication of his library, which Pliny delivered in the local curia and not in front of general public, so as not to seem to be courting public favor.44 In light of his uncle’s prolific career as an author, a library was an appropriate gift, perhaps standing as the benefaction his uncle would have given had he not died in the 79 CE Vesuvian eruption. In Pliny’s career as a writer and benefactor, it served as the programmatic gift, one that emphasized his own scholarship and promoted himself as a benefactor concerned with gifts that provided a permanent benefit to the community and, in particular, for the future. In his discussion of the library speech, he contrasts his own generosity with those benefactions made from impulse and designed to garner the immediate praise of the people, such as through public games and gladiator shows. Pliny compares his own beneficia (benefactions) to diets recommended by doctors to their patients; they are more like “a beneficial service that is not immediately popular.”45
Pliny certainly had the option of giving gladiatorial games or putting forward money for the construction of an amphitheater or a theater; there is ample evidence for the games’ popularity in the amphitheaters that dotted northern Italy in Pliny’s time.46 There were amphitheaters at the far ends of Italy, at Augusta Praetoria in the west and Pola and Aquileia in the east, and closer to Comum was the amphitheater of Verona, where Pliny’s correspondent Maximus gave games—minus the African panthers delayed by weather—in honor of his late wife.47 Construction at the amphitheater at Mediolanum, just 41 km away from Comum, began at the end of the first century CE.48 Amphitheaters and ludi (games) were established beneficia, just not beneficia suitable to the ideal benefactor envisaged by Pliny in 1.8. Pliny’s introduction of the library and alimenta donations to his readers and his views on euergetism suggests that bread and books were fine, but bread and circuses were not.
Based on internal evidence, book 1 of the Letters dates to 96–98, the same time the amphitheater was being constructed at Mediolanum.49 Mediolanum and Comum had close economic and social bonds, and the simultaneously friendly and competitive relationship mirrored others throughout Roman northern Italy.50 Pliny’s slightly disparaging remark about the ludi was, if not a direct criticism of Mediolanum’s amphitheater, then at least a form of euergetistic competition with the larger city to Comum’s south.
In addition to Pliny’s letters, which provide the fullest evidence for his relationship with Comum, four inscriptions mentioning Pliny also survive from the Transpadana.51 Three of these—AE 1972 372, CIL V 5667, CIL V 5263—are fairly simple dedications, including one from the people of Vercellae. The fourth is far more informative. The great Comum inscription, which Werner Eck has termed a Res Gestae Plinii Secundi, is a now fragmentary marble plaque recording Pliny’s offices and benefactions.52 The inscription was originally placed on a large building or monument in Comum but was transported to Milan by at least 950, when it was used to construct King Lothar II’s sarcophagus in the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio.53 Drawings of four of six fragments are preserved in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts, but between then and the nineteenth century all but one of the fragments were lost.54 The upper left-hand section, now built into the walls of the basilica’s portico, is the sole surviving fragment (fig. 8).
Given the size of the inscription, its most likely original location would have been a large public building in Comum, and for Pliny this would have meant either his library or baths.55 An otherwise unidentified tomb would also be a possibility.56 Given Pliny’s insistent self-presentation as a man of letters—at seventeen he famously found Livy more compelling than the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and years later was quick to tell Tacitus so—the library is also a persuasive candidate, since such placement would allow Pliny to adorn further this carefully constructed self-representation.57 Whether fronting a tomb or the library, the inscription should postdate 112 and Pliny’s service as legatus pro praetore (provincial governor) in Bithynia and Pontus.58
The inscription, in its almost standard list of offices and benefactions, is similar to countless other honorific and funerary inscriptions from across the empire and accordingly serves as another testament to the standardization of elite culture in the High Roman Empire. Yet the inscription deviates from the more customary listing of offices in chronological order to showcase the consulship (as consul suffectus in 100 CE), placed first after Pliny’s nomenclature.59 The prominence of the consulship in the inscription is paralleled in Pliny’s Panegyricus to the emperor Trajan, which linked Trajan’s consulships with his own.60 Pliny’s emphasis of the consulship allowed him to portray his career as starting under Trajan and minimized his success under the now-loathed Domitian. Pliny had undertaken a similar distancing of himself from Domitian in the Letters, whose first book commences just after Domitian’s assassination in September of 96. His closeness to Trajan, so well promoted in the tenth book of the Letters, is similarly promoted in the not strictly necessary inclusion of Trajan’s nomenclature, placed immediately following his consulship and governorship.61 The reader thus encounters Trajan’s name, and the two offices that Pliny tried so diligently to associate with Trajan, before encountering those offices held during Domitian’s reign.
Figure 8. Fragment of the Great Pliny Inscription, Sant’Ambrogio, Milan. Photograph by author.
The benefactions that follow those offices again serve to reinforce the portrait established in the Letters and through the constructions and gifts themselves. That these benefactions seem to have started with the library in 97, just months after Domitian’s assassination, perhaps explain Pliny’s exceptional generosity to his hometown. These gifts, all designed to enhance a scholarly image and also one associated with a lasting and generous new dynasty, its representatives themselves patrons of alimentary schemes, were not entirely the typical offerings of local elites, given to the city in exchange for prestige within a larger economy of honor. They were part of a sustained effort across multiple venues to remake Pliny’s image after the emperor whom he had begun and advanced his career under was assassinated. The urban development of Comum in the later first and early second century is thus partly typical of the era, one in which local elites donated bathhouses and provided for their maintenance in keeping with imperial precedents at Rome and with the messages promulgated in imperial edicts and coins. But the Younger Pliny, an innovator in the publication of letters and of political speeches, was also intensely atypical, and the amount of and type of benefactions given to Comum reflect both his unique circumstances and his innovative reaction.62
Moving beyond Comum’s city center, although not away from Pliny, the suburban road leading south to Mediolanum was lined with funerary monuments, decorated with the same images found in Mediolanum’s monuments.63 To the east anther suburban road led to the area around Lecco, on Lake Como’s eastern branch, and to Bergomum.
Lecco, occupying a position analogous to Comum, was never monumentalized to the extent that its western neighbor was. To its detriment, it was not made an independent municipium in the Republican or Augustan eras, and the territory was divided between the municipia of Comum, Mediolanum, and Bergomum.64 Accordingly, there was no urban center where the modern town of Lecco stands, but rather the territory was composed of villas and small villages. Stone altars there were dedicated to Jupiter, Hercules, Mercury, Minerva, Diana, and Juno, a subset of a pantheon replicated across northern Italy, and locally attested family names, such as the Novelii, the Valerii, and the Vibii, are likewise widely dispersed across the region.65 Lecco’s lack of identity and development point to the importance of early imperial Italy’s municipia, which grew at the expense of communities in their attributed territory.
Directly fronting Comum on the north was the western branch of Lake Como, a center of economic activity since the time of the Palafitte and continuing as such during the imperial era. Working on the lake, whether in harvesting fish or transporting goods, was a key part of the town’s livelihood. At Comum there was a collegium nautarum Comensium (guild of sailors of Como), who could count a local sevir and augustalis, Gaius Messius Fortunatus, as a patron.66 The collegium had another unnamed patron honored at Mediolanum, another sign of the close links between the two towns.67 Work on the lake had its perils. The skeletal remains from the first- to second-century CE necropolis between via Benzi and viale Varese show signs of repetitive stress and injuries associated with the work of the boatmen.68
As was typical of the Early Empire, aristocratic maritime villas lined the lake.69 Pliny mentions several (“plures”) villas built by him on lake Como’s shore, two of which he says were particularly charming and which he describes in further detail.70 Pliny called one “Comedy” because it sat right at the edge of a lake like the low slippers of comedic actors; it was located along a gradually curving bay. The other was named “Tragedy” because it sat high on a ridge like the characteristic high boots of tragic actors; it was located on a ridge dividing bays. In the sixteenth century local antiquarians had already suggested Lenno as the site of Comedy and Bellagio as the site of Tragedy, although their exact locations have proved elusive.71
Comedy and Tragedy formed a pair, one to be matched with the more extensively described villas at Laurentium and Tusculum. According to Pliny, his Laurentine villa on the coast near Ostia was more suitable for winter and spring and for figs and rosemary; Tusculum, in the Tuscan hills, was more suited for summer, autumn, and wine.72 The two pairs of villas formed the cardinal points in Pliny’s carefully constructed portrait of himself, drawn in the rural landscape of Italy; they displayed his taste in good and ill fortune and in all seasons.
Pliny’s villas, including the two on Lake Como, had an afterlife beyond his benefactions and beyond the empire itself, for the villa letters were, by the sixteenth century, influencing architectural design.73 Paolo Giovio, the bishop of Nocera and the namesake of Como’s archaeological museum, had at his Como villa a garden and lakeside study designed to mimic Pliny’s villas.74
Comum’s development in the Early Empire follows a trajectory not easily explained by models of Romanization, creolization, hybridity, or the middle ground.75 Comum’s baths, library, publicly hired teachers, all match Tacitus’s famous description of baths and Latin education enslaving the Britons.76 In the case of Pliny and Comum, these particular forms of development did not enslave the Comenses; they signified not so much Romanitas as much as a precise form of urbanitas, one dictated both by the broader tastes of the late first century and by the individual, even idiosyncratic, needs of regional elites.
Pliny the Younger was not a typical senator, nor was Comum a typical northern Italian municipium. Comum had a contested colonial history, unusual for the Transpadana, while Pliny, in both his success and his self-reinvention after Domitian’s demise, should not stand as the standard early imperial senator, if such a creature ever existed. Nevertheless, both Pliny and Comum demonstrate the mechanisms, politicized and cultural, by which changes to the landscapes of northern Italy were made.