The Town and the Templum, in the Discussions by Nissen, Nietzsche, Valeton, Catalano and many others

According to Heinrich Nissen, in his Das Templum, 1869, the Roman town is a templum, an inaugurated space with its main axis, the decumanus, oriented towards the sunrise. The day on which the decumanus’ direction was established, according to Nissen, was also the Dies Natalis of the town, and was associated with a festival in the Roman calendar. Nissen seems to have been the first to associate decumanus, sunrise, and festivals of the Roman calendar together. Nissen's Das Templum was used by Friedrich Nietzsche for his Der Gottesdienst der Griechen, which contains the lectures on the Greek cult that Nietzsche held between 1875 and 1878. Nietzsche endorsed Nissen's thesis regarding the decumanus. A totally different position is that of Isaac Valeton who, in his De Templis Romani (1983), shows that the town is not a templum and therefore does not require its decumanus ritually oriented to the sunrise. Valeton demonstrated that, according to Roman laws, the ground of the town is profane, and used by common people, subjected to the rule of the magistrate, not of àugurs. So Valeton criticizes Nissen's theory. We will also see in detail the discussion by Pierangelo Catalano, 1978, regarding the spatial aspects of the Roman juridical-religious system. In Catalano we find reiterated that the town is not a templum. Other scholar studies will be mentioned such as, for example, those by F. Castagnoli and J. Le Gall, which say the same. Regarding the centuriation, i.e. the subdivision of agricultural land, Castagnoli, Catalano and Le Gall stress that it is not a templum. Several scholars have therefore stressed that the town is not a templum, and the same for centuriation; this fact needs to be reiterated because archaeoastronomical approaches exist claiming to infer conclusions about the Roman world without considering Valeton, Catalano, Castagnoli, Le Gall and others’ opinions about the templa.

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