The Square of the Corporations

North porticus - statio 32

Only the word NARBONENSES was found by the excavators, between two leaves. The leaves symbolize wishes for a safe journey. There is room for three letters and a space in front of the word. The modern supplement, NAVI NARBONENSES, is wrong: an abbreviation should end with a consonant, not a vowel. The inscription was presumably:

NAV(iculari) NARBONENSES

The statio is usually linked to Narbo Martius, today Narbonne, on the west end of the south coast of France. A navicularius and a navicularius marinus from Narbonne are documented epigraphically. However, we cannot exclude that the whole province of Gallia Narbonensis is meant. All we can say is that as far as can be seen no attempt was made to identify the province as such.

Photo: Gerard Huissen.

Below the text, in a frame, are a ship with a leaf above the main mast and a tower. They are connected by an intriguing construction. In the lower left corner of the frame the excavators found a tiny fragment, showing the lower end of two steering oars of a second ship. It is now lost, but can be seen on a drawing from 1916. To the right are a rectangular U-shape and a dolphin (its sickle-shaped tail is a tiny separate fragment). A few horizontal lines indicate the sea (these are not on the drawing).

Drawing: Notizie degli Scavi 1916, 327 fig. 5.

At first sight the tower seems to be the lighthouse of Portus, an inevitable association and surely the intention of the mosaicist. But it clearly is not: the roof is different and there is no open fire. The mosaicist seems to be playing a visual game with us, concealing the true function of the building, which must have been obvious to the visitors of the square however, on closer inspection. The ship seems to be floating in the air at a ridiculous height, but if we add the second ship, of which a fragment has been preserved, or even a third, the depiction becomes more intelligible, with other ships waiting for their turn.

Suggested reconstruction of the mosaic.

So far the tower has always been regarded as a crane, made up of a vertical and a horizontal pole, lifting bags (cargo) from a ship. We know that the foremast of a ship could be used as a crane. A good example can be seen on the famous Torlonia relief from Portus. Cranes are also discussed by the architect Vitruvius. But seeing a crane is not without problems. If goods were being unloaded, the ship would certainly have been moored, but instead it is freely floating. The horizontal arm is not suited for lifting heavy objects. And what would be the function of the tall upper floor?

It could also be that we are looking at a water tower, supplying fresh water to ships in preparation for their return trip. Water was then led from the tower to the ships through hoses attached to the vertical and horizontal pole. The two poles formed a crane, with which the outlet was manoeuvered above a bag in which the water was collected. The foremast with the bowsprit sail was used to lift the bag. The water was led to a tank in the hull through a hose. To speed up the operation, which will not have lasted long, the ships were not moored. It is possible that this tower has actually been excavated, at the back of the basin of Claudius in Portus. Here a huge, Trajanic cistern was found that could contain approximately 1.152.000 litres.

Narbo Martius was a commercial centre of exceptional importance, through trade relations and local crafts. The most important crafts were metalworking and the manufacture of clothing, and the city became one of nine Imperial dye-works in late antiquity. Another city that must have had a statio on the square, probably not far from this one, is Arelate (Arles, France). This city knew five guilds of navicularii marini Arelatenses, qui annonae deserviunt, "marine skippers from Arles, who serve the food supply". In the Severan period a dispute between these guilds and a procurator was settled by the prefect of the food supply in Rome. In the late second or early third century the guilds erected a statue for the "procurator of the Emperors for the food supply in the provinces of Narbonensis and Liguria". The area mentioned in the latter inscription stretched from Narbo Martius (Narbonne) in the west to Luna (Luni, Italy) in the east. Luna was the harbour for the marble quarries of Carrara, and it is conceivable that the transport of this marble had been entrusted to skippers from the south of France. The wreck of a ship carrying marble columns from Carrara was found near Saint-Tropez.