Atuatuca: provincial town in Gallia Belgica, modern Tongeren.
At the beginning of our era, Atuatuca started to look like a Roman town, with a gridiron-like lay-out, paved roads and city houses - at first made of wood, later of bricks. There is a tantalizing inscription which mentions the presence during the reign of Tiberius or Caligula of soldiers of III Cyrenaica at Tongeren - remarkable, because this legion was garrisoned at Alexandria. Although the town suffered from the Batavian revolt (69-70), it flourished until the third century.In the second century, Tongeren is for the first time called a municipium. Too much has been made of this. It is true that in the second century CE, many Roman towns north of the Alps start calling themselves municipia, and this has often been interpreted as some sort of special status that signified the town's successful romanization. It no longer was a mere civitas, a word that means both 'town' and 'tribe', but had been recognized as a real Roman city. Unfortunately, this nice theory is contradicted by the simple fact that a municipium is by definition a town that has kept its ancestral customs and laws (Aulus Gellius, Attic nights, 16.13). Saying that the Roman government gave a town the right to live according to its ancient customs is simply a contradiction in terms. The easiest explanation for the rise of the name municipium is that the word had no technical meaning, but was recognized as ancient. In the second century, when the use of archaisms became popular, towns in the Latin word started to rename themselves. The Municipium Tungrorum was, therefore, linguistically part of the Roman world. The walls that surrounded Tongeren were impressive: six meters high, two meters wide and four kilometers long. Built by the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, they were larger than those of the provincial capital of Germania Inferior, Cologne.
A minor mystery is why these fortifications were erected at this time, because the second century was an age of tranquility and peace. That the walls had no real military function is suggested by the fact that there was a granary outside the walls.
In the fourth century, the basilica near the Forum was changed into a Christian church by bishop Servatius. It was one of the first Christian churches in the Low Countries. Another Christian sanctuary is the church of Berg, 2¼ kilometer east of Tongeren along the road to Maastricht, which is probably built over an older, pagan sacred precinct. The presence of a modern town makes excavation difficult, but the Gallo-Romeins Museum at Tongeren is one of the most beautiful and interesting museums in the Low Countries.
- J. Lendering and A. Bosman, Edge of Empire: Rome's Frontier on the Lower Rhine (2012).
- R. Nouwen, Tongeren en het land van de Tungri: (31 v.Chr. - 284 n.Chr.) (1997).