One of Augustus’ least-known reforms has left a stronger imprint than almost any other on the ways in which classical studies on Italy are organised. This was his division of the peninsula, at an unknown date, and for reasons unspecified, into eleven regions. These regiones still lead a flourishing life, having long been adopted as the organising armature for a number of corpora, starting with the CIL, and followed by the Inscriptiones Italiae, L’Année épigraphique, Supplementa Italica, Notizie degli Scavi and Forma Italiae, to name only major publications. There is an irony here: if Pliny the Elder had not decided to use the Augustan division into regiones as a way of organising the mass of data he had on Italy, we would not know that they existed. A smattering of later epigraphic testimony would suggest that at some point in the imperial period Italy had been subdivided into an uncertain number of regions; we might then suspect Augustus as the architect of the change; it would also be plausible, on the basis of the epigraphic evidence alone, to attribute the reform to Trajan or Hadrian. In any case, the Augustan regiones enjoy a currency in modern scholarly literature out of all proportion to the interest or utility they had for ancient writers.
