ond pillar of the city's great wealth. North Africa was "the main granary of Rome," and Leptis controlled the "ocean of olive tress" that covered the rolling plains and were worked mainly by slave labor (Wells 148).
Leptis Magna also achieved a unique position in architectural history by becoming a meeting point between the influence of the Hellenic culture of the eastern empire and the more purely Latin culture of the west. Its historic remains are all Roman. Though the city was established as a Carthaginian trading post prior to the fifth century BC and though the precise site is known, "the earliest extant remains are of the Augustan age" (Ward-Perkins 371). With some interesting exceptions, the earlier remains are not regarded as "demonstrating any great artistic originality" and were "largely derivative" of Italian models (Ward-Perkins 371). This was mainly because the Phoenician, or Punic, culture had little interest in the visual arts in general and did not, therefore, make the kind of vigorous local contribution to imperial art and architecture that migrating Greeks in Egypt, the Middle East, Anatolia and the Balkans did.
In their approach to Romanizing the existing Punic city, the Augustans did not provide any innovations but stuck to the basics. In terms of the civic center, Roman towns generally had the principal components of forum, temple and basilica. These were accompanied by large-scale structures in the surrounding area, such as theaters, amphitheaters and public baths. Along these general lines, they "gave the Roman stamp to a vast array of towns within the empire without wholly suppressing local traditions of construction and design" (Kostof 203). In a typical plan for a complex of civic buildings, the temple was usually placed at the head of a long, narrow forum, and the basilica ran transversely, closing off the other end of the open space. This complex generally fit into a central spot in the grid...