Municipium Augusta Bilbilis
In: Hispania Antigua. Arqueológica: 14, 2022
DOI: 10.48255/9788891327734.05
Bilbilis or Bilbilis Augusta, how it is traditionally known, was an important Roman town since Caesar Augusto decided it should become into municipium//. This also constituted one of the important points in the territorial organisation of the Middle Ebro Valley.
According to written sources, it was once an indigenous town, inhabited by the tribe of the Lusones, who were peaceful people but who lost importance within the group of Celtiberians after the campaigns of Graco in the first Celtiberian War. It respected the treaties and this is probably the reason why its subsequent history was always on the side of legitimacy within the framework of Roman politics.
The city, which had some importance in the Sertorian Wars, was besieged and taken in 77 BC. Metelo recovered it in 74 BC and Italic immigrants came to this town, which marked its later history, as it is attested in the monetary coinage.
There are few but evident remains of constructions of the indigenous city. The rise of Roman citizens to the status of municipium, also attested to on the coins, meant a total transformation of that small Romanised indigenous city, which was to become a centre of administrative and social attraction in the area of the Jalón, Jiloca and Ribota valleys, which markedits important communications.
Since 1st century BC, this town had a wall all around its perimeter and the image of municipium was extraordinary.Marcial, its most illustrious son, described its urban layout adapted to a complicated orography. It was made up of monumental and residential quarters. It had a monumental centre with a forum, a large square that housed the temple, which was surrounded by porticoes on two levels; a curia, a basilica on one of the lateral sides, porticoes on two levels closing off the square and cryptoporticoes for storage (which, among other rooms, housed the municipal mint, the citys warehouses and a large cistern for storing water).
There was also a theatre attached to the forum, with a two-storey stage and decoration combining marble and pictorial cladding, with sculptures, including one of Augusto capite velato, which stands out for its importance.
The city had an important water-supply network, with about 100 urban cisterns, fountains and a possible aqueduct, but there are doubts as to whether it was ever completed. There was a thermal complex in an upper quarter, together with several domus richly ornamented with paintings and mosaics from the last decades of the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD.
There were also residential neighbourhoods with large, wealthy houses of Italic and Hispano-Roman owners,some of which were devoted to agricultural production and others fronted onto the road network with tabernae on their façades.
The municipium suffered a loss of importance and population from the middle of the 1stcentury AD onwards, being gradually abandoned until 5th century AD, when it was no longer more than a vague reminder of its past splendour. Its population moved to the plain, to what would later become medieval Calatayud, under whose structures insistently appear Roman remains from the Imperial period and earlier.