Emona, Legacy of a Roman City
Emergence of Emona
The Roman occupation of the wider Ljubljana area is linked to the conquest of the Balkans by Augustus. Archaeological investigation in Ljubljana in 2008 yielded the traces of two military camps in the area where the navigable Ljubljanica River came closest to the castle hill, below which ran the main road link towards the Balkans. Behind the first camp two defensive ditches were excavated, and west of the ditches a defensive embankment. The soldiers lived in tents. At the beginning of the 1st century CE, on the left bank the walls of this camp were levelled with the ground and the ditches filled in, and then a large part of this area was developed with wooden huts to house the soldiers who built Emona.
In the first decade of the 1st century, in the area of what is now Ljubljana, along the left bank of the Ljubljanica River, the Romans established their colony of Julia Emona. From the inscription stone discovered nearly a century ago, we know that Emona already stood in the second half of the year 14 or beginning of the year 15, and that within it the emperors Augustus and Tiberius ordered the construction of a large public building, perhaps as envisaged by the reconstruction in the writing of Jaroslav Šašel, a walled fortification with towers. The city was settled by colonists from northern Italy. We know the names of around 30 families that settled in Emona; of these 13 were from northern Italy, mainly from the Po River valley.
As a result of archaeological research conducted in the centre of Ljubljana, in recent years we have found out a great deal about the pre-Roman, ancient settlement of Ljubljana. The beginnings of Ljubljana can be traced back to the proto-urban settlement under the Castle Hill, in the area of the modern-day district of Prule, which emerged in the 10th century BCE. The builders carefully planned their settlement. A proper grid of streets was adapted to the terrain and the streets were laid with gravel. Along them were lined wooden buildings, each with one or more rooms. The buildings were renovated and reconstructed several times, yet nevertheless the basic plan of the settlement did not change significantly. The cemetery for the inhabitants of this settlement lay on the other side of the Ljubljanica.
The settlement below the castle hill enjoyed renewed vigour from the 3rd century BCE on. In the 1st century BCE the ancient inhabitants traded intensively with the Romans, and the Ljubljanica River played an important part as a transport route. Later, when the colony of Emona was already established, the settled area below the castle hill existed as a suburb of Emona.
Roman city of Emona
The Roman Empire was an extraordinary achievement. At its height, in the 2nd century CE, it comprised 60 million inhabitants living in an area covering 5 million km²: from Hadrian’s Wall in northern England to the Euphrates in Syria, from the Rhine-Danube river routes that linked Central Europe with the Black Sea to the North African coast and Egypt. During the Emona period, the area of modern-day Slovenia was incorporated into the Roman Empire and it acquired some of the key gains of Roman culture: urbanisation, literacy and the Roman residential culture.
Emona flourished from the 1st to the 5th century. It was laid out in a rectangle with a central square or forum and a system of rectangular intersecting streets, between which were sites for buildings. Under the streets, running west-east flowed the cloaca, a major drainage channel that carried waste water into the Ljubljanica. The city was enclosed by walls and towers, and in places also by one or two ditches filled with water. Some areas beyond the walls were also settled; the potters’ quarter behind the northern wall is well known. Along the northern, western and eastern thoroughfares into the city – from the directions of Celeia, Aquileia and Neviodunum – cemeteries became established, according to Roman custom. In the 1960s, the northern cemetery in particular was thoroughly researched.
As a Roman colony, Emona had extensive pertaining territory for which it was the administrative, political, economic and cultural centre. Emona’s administrative territory or ager stretched from Atrans (Trojane) along the Karavanke mountains towards the north. In the east, the boundary ran somewhere near Višnja Gora, and in the south probably along the Kolpa River. In the west, the territory of Emona bordered that of Aquileia at the village of Bevke in the Ljubljansko barje wetland.
Surveyors measured part of the Emona ager and divided it into agricultural holdings. As in the majority of Roman cities, the main activity of Emona’s inhabitants was agriculture, working the fertile land they had been granted around the city. In Roman times, a land holding meant more than just land for cultivation; ownership of land meant individual wealth and social standing.
The wider area of Emona saw the development of typical Roman rural infrastructure: villages, hamlets, estates and brickworks. The small towns became local centres and markets: Karnij in the area of modern-day Kranj, Navport in the area of Vrhnika, and in the area of modern-day Ig and Mengeš, settlements whose Roman names have been lost.
Alongside its road links, the waterway of the Ljubljanica was very important for Emona. From prehistoric times right up to the construction of the railway in the 19th century, it was an important trade route that linked the northern Adriatic and the Danube region. The mass of finds from the bottom of the Ljubljanica that can be dated to the middle Stone Age and later, indicate that the Ljubljanica was also an important cult area. The Ljubljanica probably had associations with the pre-Roman deities of Laburus and Aequorna. Aequorna was a very popular deity in Emona – perhaps she was the deity of the nearby Barje wetland, and Laburus the local water god.
From its creation to its collapse, Emona was closely tied to events in the Roman Empire. Its geographical position meant it played an important part in the Empire’s military defence system. From the second half of the 4th century right up to the Hungarian incursions in the 10th century, this area was an important transit territory on the route to the Apennine peninsula. Research of Emona has confirmed its important role in the period of late Antiquity , when it was the first major station in support of the newly established defensive line across the Alps, Claustra Alpium Iuliarum. Linked to this are some extensive new constructions at Emona in the 4th century, chiefly the public bath house in the area of the planned new university library, where numerous finds with a military association indicate the major concentration of reinforcement troops in Emona or nearby.
From the late 4th to the late 6th century, Emona was the seat of a bishopric. The intensive contacts pursued by the early Christian community of Emona with the ecclesiastical circle of Milan are reflected in the architecture of the early Christian complex along Erjavčeva Street and in two preserved letters from St. Hieronymus to the nuns of Emona and the monk Anthony.
In the late Roman period, the image of Emona gradually changed: some entrance ways through the walls were filled in, while the cleaning and maintenance of the cloaca and city ditches were neglected. In the 5th and 6th centuries, effectively the only new constructions of any architectural quality were ecclesiastical buildings. In view of similar cases elsewhere in the Roman Empire, for instance in Gaul, we can say that this did not indicate the collapse of the city, but a change in the urban identity of Emona, which reflected changes in the thinking of the Emonans, in the priorities and role of the city at that time. Secular architecture and infrastructure was clearly no longer important, with major concern and financial input focused on architecture linked to the early Christian Church, whose power at that time was growing rapidly. In cities throughout the Empire, bishops at this time were no longer just Church dignitaries, but were taking on administrative functions. In short, the change in the image of Emona in late Antiquity reflects the change in the internal world of the Emonans, the change in their identity, and the administrative changes with the disintegration of the Empire.
In the period from the 4th to the 6th century, the Roman Empire gradually fell apart. The governing authority became increasingly decentralised, communication between individual parts of the Empire deteriorated and the Roman system of administration lost its grip. During this period, the Empire encountered numerous tribes referred to by the Romans with the generic name “barbarian”. These people sought better living conditions in the Empire: money, fertile land, slaves and steady work. Some of these people stopped in the area of Emona. The Visigoths camped by Emona in the winter of 408/9, the Huns inflicted themselves on it during their campaign of 452, the Langobards passed through on their way to Italy in 568, and then came incursions by the Avars and Slavs. After the first half of the 6th century, there was no life left in Emona.
We know the archaeologically researched cemetery in the northern part of Ljubljana, in Dravlje, to be from the period at the end of the 5th and beginning of the 6th centuries, when the wider Ljubljana area was ruled by the Ostrogoths from Italy. Members of the Ostrogoth military station and ancient inhabitants are buried there in more than 50 graves laid out in rows. Despite the reports in Roman sources of arson, slaughter and devastation as the barbarians invaded , the cemetery in Dravlje, along with other archaeological sources, indicate that the invaders and original inhabitants were able to live side by side for several decades.
