TOWN QUARTER
The Civic Centre · District · Ostia Australis
"The Town Quarter is where Ostia Australis does its civic business — the market, the watch house, the prefect's administrative rooms, the temples, the eating establishments that serve the community rather than the harbour trade. It is the part of the town that would be recognisable to a Roman administrator visiting from any other provincial settlement, and it functions with the civic competence of a community that has been operating its own affairs long enough to have refined the process to its essential elements. The prefect's office is small, well-organised, and staffed by people who know exactly what they are responsible for and exactly what they are not. This is rarer than it should be."
The Town Quarter is the civic and residential centre — approximately fifteen thousand permanent residents in the mixed-use streets that constitute the town's non-maritime domestic life. The market, which runs daily for food and three days a week for goods, serves the combined population of all three districts without the commercial pretension of Portus Meridiani's equivalent facilities and with the practical efficiency of a market that has been in the same location for long enough that everyone knows where everything is. The temples — the standard Roman civic pantheon, maintained to the standard appropriate for a community that honours its religious obligations without making them the primary axis of civic life — are on the quarter's northern edge where the ground rises slightly and the sea is visible from the temple steps.
The prefect's administrative rooms are in the quarter's civic centre, Piscator Salis's office notable for the quality of its record-keeping in the domains he actually administers and the specific character of its gaps in the domains he administers by the method of not administering them. His correspondence with the governor's office in Portus Meridiani is the most diplomatically accomplished provincial correspondence in the governor's incoming archive — thorough on civic matters, responsive on administrative questions, and entirely silent on the subjects the governor has learned not to raise because the silence is more informative than the answer would be.
Access
Fully publicly accessible.
Prefect's administrative rooms — civic business.
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