Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Sixteen feet of picturesqueness had to be cleared before Boni could reach the necropolis level. The cremation tombs are small circular wells, most of them containing, as in the Alban Hills tombs, a _dolium_ or large jar, covered by tufa slabs. In the _dolia_ were found ash-containers, often in the shape of miniatures of huts like the full-sized ones on the Palatine. The oblong graves contained rough sarcophagi of tufa, or coffins made of hollowed-out oak logs. Both types of tomb contained, intact on discovery, tomb furniture not differing much between the types, and not differing much from the finds in the bottom two levels of Puglisi’s Palatine hut; _i.e._, rough _impasto_, decorated with incised spirals, parallel lines (done with a comb) or zigzags; _bucchero_, some _fibulae_ inlaid with amber, glass beads, tiny enamel plaques, remains of funeral offerings of food. It is all very humble, a far cry from the Regolini-Galassi treasure, though some of the tombs are of the same date. The finds show that the necropolis was in use from the ninth to the sixth centuries B.C. The site was, as we saw, on the edge of a swamp; when the swamp was drained, the cemetery went out of use, and huts, of which more later, were built over it.

In the necropolis, sometimes inhumation graves cut into cremation ones, sometimes vice versa. There is thus no ground for assuming that the cremation graves are older, especially as the grave-contents of the two types are so similar. The difference is not one of time but of funeral practice, as today; it suggests two different populations living peacefully together. The cremators were related to the people whose graves were found so long ago in the Alban Hills, and, as we have seen, to the Palatine hut-dwellers. Who were the inhumers? We know that other Roman hills than the Palatine were inhabited from very early times, though the natural features of the Palatine seem to give it priority: plenty of fodder, abundant water within easy reach, a retreat made safe at night by the hill and the river for the people and their livestock.

But habitation of the Esquiline and Quirinal Hills in the sixth century is attested by a number of tombs from a total of 164 found there in the 1870’s. The finds from these were never scientifically recorded, and they have never been published, but it is noteworthy that they include weapons, which are absent from the cremation-graves in the Forum. It looks as though the Esquiline folk were invaders, with a more warlike tradition than the Palatine hut-dwellers. The Esquiline folk might earlier have used the Forum necropolis for inhumation. We know that the Sabines buried their dead. Literary tradition (the Rape of the Sabine Women) records that the early Romans got their wives from among the Sabines. Numa Pompilius, the second of the legendary Roman kings, bears a Sabine name. Might not the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis represent the peaceful fusion of cremating Latins and inhuming Sabines who had laid aside their warlike ways?

* * * * *

On top of the Forum necropolis, when the swamp was drained, huts were built. The archaeological evidence for this phase of early Rome’s history was provided by Boni’s stratigraphic excavation (recently confirmed by the Swede Einar Gjerstad) to the northwest of the site of the equestrian statue of the Emperor Domitian in the middle of the Forum. Gjerstad dug a trench sixteen feet long and eleven feet wide, down to virgin soil, which he found nineteen feet below the present Forum level. On the earth wall of the trench the story of the centuries could be read in the successive levels (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). Between levels three and nineteen, six pavements could be counted, but level nineteen takes us, to judge by the pots found in it, only back to about 450 B.C. In layers twenty to twenty-two, Gjerstad found three pebble pavements, which he dates about 575 B.C. If he is right in assigning to this date the beginning of monarchic Rome, he has pushed its date down in our direction over 150 years from the traditional 753 B.C. But there is more history below this. Strata twenty-three to twenty-eight are remains of huts, similar to but (pottery again) later than the ones on the Palatine. Gjerstad dates them in two phases: 650–625 and 625–575 B.C. Rather than push the traditional date down so far, it seems plausible to suppose that these huts represent the period assigned by the literary tradition to the early kings, and to argue that the sophisticated period, symbolized by the Forum’s earliest pebble pavement, was inaugurated by Rome’s earliest Etruscan king, Tarquin I.

, p. 61)]

These other huts confirm the other archaeological data, which show that what later was unified into urban Rome was originally a group of simple hut-villages clustered on various hills, the Forum huts having spilled down, as it were, from the village on the Palatine. The huts in the level just above the Forum necropolis represent a still earlier stage of this spillover; they antedate the earliest huts in Gjerstad’s twenty-nine levels. By the date of Gjerstad’s earliest pebble pavements, the huts in the necropolis area have been replaced by a more developed domestic architecture, perhaps with rooms opening on a central court. These houses have rectangular plans, mud-brick, wood-braced walls, and tufa foundations. At the spillover stage, the villagers from the various hills formed some kind of confederation symbolized archaeologically by the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis, and in literature by the tradition of the joint religious festival called the Septimontium.

The period of the first pebble pavement (575 B.C.) is one of major change, from village to urban life, to a city now for the first time boasting a civic center, destined to become the world’s most famous public square, the Roman Forum. Of the same date are the earliest remains on the Capitoline Hill, which was to be the _arx_ or citadel of historic Rome. Of the same date are the earliest artifacts from the Regia, which later generations revered as the palace of the kings. Of the same date is a sophisticated phase of the round shrine of Vesta, which encircled the sacred flame, symbol of the city’s continuity. The literary tradition would date the last two earlier, at least to Numa’s reign. However no architectural remains have so far been discovered which associate them with the earlier date.

In his interpretation of the archaeological evidence about the date of the beginning of the Roman Republic, Gjerstad is just as iconoclastic as about the dating of the kings. His argument, more ingenious than convincing, is that an event as important politically as a change from a monarchy to a republic should be reflected in the artifacts, changing from richer to poorer, whereas no such objective evidence of a cultural break is visible in the levels dated by him (perhaps more closely than the facts warrant) at 509 B.C. Such a cultural break does not come until some fifty years later, when Etruscan imports cease. There are grave difficulties in pushing the date of the Roman Republic’s beginning down so far, of which the chief is a list (the _Fasti_) of pairs of consuls 509–450 B.C. where many names are too obscure to have been invented. Gjerstad’s excavation, in sum, is important as confirming the accuracy of Boni’s methods, and as telling us much about the village stage of Rome, but the absolute chronology cannot be said to be as yet firmly fixed, nor the traditional one definitely upset.

* * * * *

Apart from absolute chronology, what unequivocal evidence can archaeology provide that early Rome was ruled by kings? The ideal evidence would be an inscription, and one was discovered in 1899 in the Forum near the Comitium, where, in the open air in front of the Senate House, the popular assembly met. The inscription is called the _lapis niger_ stele, because it lies under a later pavement of black marble (_lapis niger_), now preserved under a deplorable corrugated iron roof. But the stone on which it is carved is not marble but tufa, identified as having come from the quarries of Grotta Oscura in the territory of Veii, some nine miles north of Rome.

On the various kinds of tufa or volcanic stone in use in early Rome there hangs a tale. In 1924 an American, Tenney Frank, published an epoch-making study of Roman building materials in which he put the dating of Roman monuments on a firmer basis by distinguishing several different kinds of tufa used by Roman builders at successive dates. Subsequent studies have blurred the dividing lines and shown the possibility of overlap, but Frank’s nice eye for discriminating tufas has revolutionized the architectural history of the Roman Republic. The following table illustrates Frank’s methods:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Type Characteristics Quarries Where used
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Cappellaccio flaky dark Rome Capitoline temple
grey ash (509 B.C.)

Grotta Oscura friable greyish 2½ mi. N. of Forum stele,
yellow Prima Porta “Servian” Wall,
Tullianum
(prison)

Fidenae flecked black Castel Giubileo, Castrum, Ostia
fragments 5 mi. N. (338 B.C.)
(scoriae) of Rome Argentina
Temple A
(ca. 200 B.C.)

peperino peppered; can Marino (Alban Tomb of
be carved Hills 11 mi. Scipios (early
SE) 3rd cent.)
Altar,
Argentina C
(ca. 186 B.C.)

sperone coarse-grained Gabii Milvian Bridge
brown (12 mi. E) (109 B.C.)

Monteverde reddish, olive Across Tiber Sullan pavement
streaks nr. _Lapis niger_

Anio brown Cervara Tomb of
(35 mi. ENE) Bibulus (before
50 B.C.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

FIG. 3.5 Rome, Forum: _lapis niger_ stele. Note the word RECEI, which
may be evidence for the historicity of Rome’s kings. (P. Goidanich,
_Mem. Acc. It._ 7.3 [1943], Pl. 9)
]

, p. 142)]

The _lapis niger_ stele, inscribed on tufa of the second type in this series, could be of the very late sixth century B.C., and this date is borne out by the very archaic letter-styles (Fig. 3.5), which resemble those on the Aules Feluskes stele from Etruscan Vetulonia. Interpreting what the stone says is not made easier by the fact that the top is cut off and the lines are inscribed _boustrophedon_ (like the Lemnian stele among other examples), so that in successive lines the beginning and the end are alternately missing. In the left-hand column below is printed the latest text of the letters as they appear on the stele; in the right-hand column, a translation into classical Latin, filling the blanks; below, a translation of this oldest of all Latin inscriptions:

QVOI HOI QVI · HV[nc locum violaverit,

SAKROS ⁝ ESE manibus] SACER · SIT;
ED SORD ET SORD[ibus qui haec contaminet]

OKAFHAS OCA, FAS

RECEI ⁝ IO REGI, IV[dicio ei habito
EVAM adimere rem pr]EVAM ·

QVOS ⁝ RE QVOS · RE[x per hanc senserit

M ⁝ KALATO vehi via]M, KALATOREM,
REM HAB HAB[enis eorum, iubeto

TOD ⁝ IOVXMEN ilic]O · IVMENTA

TA ⁝ KAPAI ⁝ DOTAV · CAPIAT, VT · A V[ia statiM

M ⁝ I ⁝ TER PE · ITER PE[r aversum locum

M ⁝ QVOI HA pergant puru]M · QVI HA[c]

VELOD ⁝ NEQV VOLET, NEQV[e per purum

IOD ⁝ IOVESTOD perget, iudic]IO, IVSTA

LOIVQVIOD QO ⁝ LICITATIONE, CO[ndemnetur].

“Whosoever defiles this spot, let him be forfeit to the shades of
the underworld, and whosoever contaminates this spot with refuse,
it is right for the king, after due process of law, to confiscate
his property. Whatsoever persons the king shall discover passing on
this road, let him order the summoner to seize their draft animals
by the reins, that they may turn out of the road forthwith and take
the proper detour. Whosoever persists in traveling this road, and
fails to take the proper detour, by due process of law let him be
sold to the highest bidder.”

Obviously the inscription thus restored and interpreted, marks a spot which is taboo, its ill-omened nature being further emphasized by the later black marble pavement, which was fenced off by a balustrade of thin white marble slabs set on edge. Beside the stele is a U-shaped shrine or altar,[B] on a higher level and therefore of a later date than the inscription. Archaeology provides no clue to the purpose of this structure, but learned Romans believed it marked the tomb of Romulus, their first king. This would be a sacred spot indeed, not to be profaned by the feet of men or animals. From one edge of the shrine run the remains of a semicircular platform with steps (Figs. 3.6 and 3.7), also later in date than the inscription. The platform was the Rostra, so called because of its decoration, after 338 B.C., with the bronze _rostra_ or ramming-beaks of captured enemy war-galleys. The Rostra was in historical times the speakers’ platform; from it in one of its phases resounded the sonorous oratory of Cicero. But it was also the spot from which traditionally funeral orations were delivered, while modern men wearing, according to Roman custom, the death-masks of their ancestors sat behind the orators in curule chairs on the platform. To the logical Roman mind a platform beside the tomb of the first king would seem the appropriate place for funeral speeches.

[B] Professor Ferdinando Castagnoli and Dr. Lucos Cozza
reported in 1959 the discovery, at Pratica di Mare, ancient
Lavinium, sixteen miles south of Rome, of a series of
thirteen such altars, together with an inscription on
bronze, with lettering like that of the _lapis niger_
stele. They date their finds in the late sixth century B.C.

Since American excavations at Rome’s Latin colony of Cosa in 1953 identified as a Comitium a circular, step-surrounded space in front of the local Senate House, it appears that the semicircular steps leading to the platform in Rome were Rome’s Comitium, and new excavations to prove or disprove this were started in 1957.

(E. Gjerstad, _op. cit._, p. 143)]

Careful equations between the fifteen levels in the Comitium and the twenty-nine levels near the equestrian statue of Domitian prove the Comitium a monument of the Roman Republic: the first phase coincides with the Republic’s beginning, and its last with Caesar and Augustus, in the late first century B.C., when the Republic ends. Thereafter freedom of speech, and an arena for it, were but a memory. But the first Rostra rose where it did because the founders of the Roman Republic associated it with the first of Rome’s kings.

The _lapis niger_ inscription, which refers twice to a king, rests on a base which cannot be older than the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 B.C. (for the base is on the same level as the second of the Comitium pavements, laid over traces of a major fire, and the Gauls set Rome on fire). But an inscription of course is a movable monument, and the present location of the stele may not be where it was originally set up. Furthermore, letter styles so archaic are probably older than 390 B.C.: the alternatives, then, are either that the stele, of venerable antiquity, was reset, on a new platform, as a part of rearrangements after the fire, or that it is a deliberately archaizing copy of a much older original. The theory that the king (_rex_) referred to is not the temporal monarch, but the _rex sacrorum_, a Republican priest of later Republican times who inherited the king’s religious functions, is virtually ruled out by the letter-styles.

The _lapis niger_ stele presents one aspect of primitive Roman religion under the kings: the taboo. Another is the pious tending of the sacred flame on the public hearth, a rite performed in historical times by the Vestal Virgins in Vesta’s shrine at the east end of the Forum. The superstructure of the shrine as now restored there yielded no remains earlier than the Gallic fire, but the round plan must reflect the shape of a primitive straw hut of the Palatine type, with central hearth and smoke-hole, and the earliest artifacts, from the previously mentioned well there, are dated in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. The shrine of Vesta, then, preserves another memory of Rome of the kings.

Kings, like ordinary mortals, need a dwelling place. Traditionally in Rome, this was the Regia (related in root to _rex_, “king”), on the trapezoidal plot between the Forum necropolis and Vesta’s shrine (see plan, Fig. 3.8). Romans believed its first occupant was the Sabine Numa, the second and most pious of the kings, but no archaeological remains confirm so early a date (traditionally 716–672 B.C.). It seems unlikely that the king could have dwelt there before the necropolis was closed, for the king was a priest, and it was unlucky for a priest to look upon a cadaver, or upon death. The earliest datable masonry remains are a foundation in _cappellaccio_ of about 390 B.C., another evidence of rebuilding after the Gallic fire. But there might well have been, before the fire, a more primitive structure in wood, revetted in terracotta; indeed, fragments of terracotta revetment, some of a late sixth or early fifth century style and some even earlier, were found there, as well as a grey _bucchero_ sherd scratched with the word _rex_ in archaic letters. The Regia, as it stands, is the result of at least three rebuildings, the last in 36 B.C. It still has an old-fashioned air: ancient, straggling, intractable, very holy: the shape of its ground-plan never changing from beginning to end. In keeping with the Etruscan tradition--as at Marzabotto--the building is oriented north and south. Its south side was a dwelling, later the office of the Pontifex Maximus; among the great Romans who worked in this building was Julius Caesar. The rest of the Regia was an area partly unroofed. It was a shrine of Mars, hung with shields and a magic lance that quivered at the threat of war. The Pontifex Maximus recorded yearly, day by day, on a whitened board in the Regia, events in which he and his fellow priests had a professional interest: temple-dedications, religious festivals, triumphs, eclipses, famines, rains of blood, births of two-headed calves, and other prodigies. Fragments of this lost archaeological record, piously kept by the pontiffs, turn up in extant Roman history: Livy often refers to them at the end of his account of a year, particularly an unlucky year.

Orientation like the Regia’s is an Etruscan practice, and it is with domination by the Etruscans that we should expect Rome’s primitive simplicity to evolve into something more like grandeur. The literary tradition ascribed to the Etruscan, Tarquin the Proud, Rome’s last king, a great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, built by the forced labor of Roman citizens, and decorated by Etruscan artisans like Vulca of Veii, the sculptor of the Apollo (page 52). It took World War I to confirm this literary tradition archaeologically. The Italians, on the Allied side in that war, ousted the Germans from their Embassy, splendidly situated on the Capitoline Hill in the Palazzo Caffarelli, and remodelled the palace into a museum. In the process was revealed a massive podium, sixteen feet high, built without mortar of blocks of _cappellaccio_, the oldest of Rome’s building stones. Fortunately, diagonally opposite corners were found, making it possible to establish how impressive were the podium’s dimensions: roughly 120 × 180 feet. Three corners of the podium having been isolated, archaeologists were able to fit into the plan the remains of a substructure which had been found in 1865 under the Palace of the Conservatori. This substructure, now built impressively into a corridor of the Conservatori Museum, proved to be the support for columns. The platform as a whole, then, was the podium of a temple, the largest of its time, over twice the size, for example, of the one at Marzabotto. Traces of the settings for the columns proved them to be placed too wide apart to be connected by architraves in stone; they must instead have been great wooden beams. The wood would have been revetted or faced with terracotta, and in fact enough fragments of terracotta revetments were found on the site to establish this temple as decorated in the typical Etruscan style. If its sculptures were as striking as the Apollo of Veii, they were masterpieces indeed. The temple, repeatedly and ever more grandiosely rebuilt--in one phase it was roofed with gilded bronze, and the cult statue was gold and ivory--was the center and symbol of Rome’s religious life. Here the triumphal processions ended. Here the triumphing general, surrounded by his spoils of victory, descended from his chariot drawn by four white horses, and passed through the open doors and the clouds of incense to give thanks to Jupiter the Best and Greatest for his victory. From the cliff behind the temple, the Tarpeian rock, traitors were thrown to their deaths; here, in 133 B.C., Tiberius Gracchus, the friend of the people, was murdered. Religion, dignity, pride, greed, pomp, tragedy: all are the stuff of Roman history; all are here, and archaeology illumines their story. Horace boasted that his poetry would endure “so long as, with the mute Vestal, the Pontifex climbs up to the Capitoline Temple.” For him as for us Rome was the Eternal City, and the Capitoline was the symbol of its permanence. Through the assaults of riot, fire, earthquake, poverty, popes, barbarians, limekilns, wind, rain, and earth, the foundations have endured.

* * * * *

The literary tradition tells us how Rome’s Etruscan monarchy fell: of Tarquin’s despotism and his son’s rape of Lucrece, daughter of a Roman aristocrat, whose husband avenged her and allegedly became one of Rome’s first pair of consuls. It tells us how the Roman nobles rose, drove out the Tarquins, and founded the Roman Republic. Archaeology cannot confirm the traditional date (indeed the founding of temples, Etruscan style, continues, as we saw, for half a century after 509). But about the middle of the fifth century the contents of the tombs on the Esquiline begin to grow mean and shabby. Contact with Etruria has been cut off, and the Romans make a virtue of necessity, pass sumptuary laws against excessive display, and practice simplicity and frugality. The late fifth century B.C. in Rome, as archaeology reveals it, is a period of isolation, stagnation, and retrenchment.

Hardly had the new Roman Republic rallied to conquer Veii (traditionally in 396 B.C., after a ten-year siege, like Troy’s), when the Gauls descended from the north with fire and sword. Rome bought them off, and, resisting the temptation to move to Veii, fell to rebuilding, mindful of how its ancestors had built their city up out of forest and swamp; in love with their protecting hills, their fruitful open spaces, their busy river. The building was done planlessly; the main concern was to strengthen defenses.

The primitive Rome of separate villages on the hills had been defended, at most, by separate palisades and ditches. It is with King Servius that literature associated the Rome of impressive buildings and a beetling wall, of squared stone, sturdy enough to repel all invaders. With how much justification Roman historians called the wall “Servian,” we are now to learn. The tradition associates Rome’s earliest wall with Servius Tullius, who falls between the two Tarquins, and certain surviving traces of earthwork and masonry, plus the Cloaca Maxima, or Great Drain through the Forum, are assigned by some archaeologists to the sixth century. Indeed until 1932 most scholars accepted the sixth-century date for the whole early circuit. But in that year the Swedish archaeologist Gösta Säflund (who seven years later was to explode Pigorini’s myth about the _terremare_) published the results of some painstaking fieldwork which radically changed the picture.

Beginning with the Palatine and working counter-clockwise, Säflund examined every inch of the surviving circuit ascribed to Servius (see Fig. 2.3), and for stretches which had been torn down during Rome’s great expansion (after she became the capital of a united Italy in the 1870’s) he had access to unpublished notes and sketches by Boni and another great nineteenth-century Italian archaeologist, Rodolfo Lanciani. Everywhere he paid careful attention to materials, techniques, dimensions, mason’s marks, the relation of the wall to terrain, neighboring tombs, and ancient artifacts found in its context. It was chiefly from the building material that Säflund drew his conclusions.

The stone was in the main Grotta Oscura tufa, which he knew from Tenney Frank’s studies to have been in use in the year (378 B.C.) in which Livy says the censors contracted to have a wall built of squared stone. Furthermore, some of the Esquiline tombs already mentioned, containing mid-fourth century artifacts, were outside the line of the Grotta Oscura wall, while some of the tombs containing archaic artifacts were inside. The Romans rarely buried their dead within a city wall: the inference is that at the date of the earlier tombs, Rome had no proper ring-wall, while by the date of the later (fourth-century) tombs a circuit wall had been built. The Great Drain through the Forum is also of Grotta Oscura, and is therefore probably to be dated in 378, like the wall, though some feeder lines are in _cappellaccio_, which, as we have seen, was the earliest volcanic stone the Romans used, and we know--because we know the Forum swamp was drained by 575 B.C.--that there must have been some sort of drainage system--possibly open ditches--earlier than 378.

But Säflund found Fidenae tufa also. This he knew, again from Frank’s study, to have been in use from about 338 B.C. down into the second century. It had been used to patch the wall in places. What more appropriate time for such repairs than when Hannibal was threatening the city, in 217 B.C.? Thereafter, Roman and Latin colonies, advanced bases, served her in the office of a wall, and her own fortifications were allowed to fall into disrepair.

But there are places in Rome’s wall where Monteverde stone has been used for arches, rising from footings set in concrete; in other places the wall has a concrete core faced with Anio tufa. Säflund knew that concrete was little in use in Roman building before 150 B.C., and that it had become a favorite material by Sulla’s time (see p. 129). Sulla had marched on Rome in 88 B.C. and taken it; he must have reinforced the wall to keep his enemy Marius from duplicating his own feat. And Sulla included the bridgehead on the far side of the Tiber in his circuit, reinforced the Aventine Hill, and added _ballistae_ (great catapults for shooting stones) in arched casemates flanking the main gates.

Thus Säflund distinguished three building periods for the so-called “Servian” Wall, though none as early as King Servius Tullius. One section of earth work or _agger_, on the Quirinal Hill, faced in part with small blocks of _cappellaccio_, looked older than 378 B.C., and Säflund knew from observations at Ardea, Cerveteri (and, as we now know, Anzio) that the use of the earthwork was standard in the sixth century to reinforce weak places on hilly sites. Some early sixth-century sherds, but none later, were found _under_ the agger. This helps to confirm that the agger was a part of Rome’s sixth-century, genuinely Servian defenses, never a complete ring-wall, but an adjustment and reinforcement of natural defenses, later incorporated into the circuit wall of 378 B.C. A splendid stretch of the facing of this reinforced agger, 100 yards, survives today by the Termini railroad station (Fig. 3.9).

But Säflund’s careful observations did more than redate the wall in its several phases. By comparison of the mason’s marks, hacked in Greek letters on the heads of the Grotta Oscura blocks only, with similar marks found on the blocks of the fortifications of the Euryalus above Syracuse, in Sicily (built in the late fifth century B.C. by Dionysius I), Säflund was able to demonstrate that Rome’s wall was built by Sicilian workmen, Rome not having the manpower or the skill at the time. (Dionysius for his wall had employed 6000 men and 500 yoke of oxen.)

The wall of 378 B.C. is evidence that Rome had emerged from the doldrums into which the Republic had begun to sink. Before 390 B.C. she had depended on men, not walls. The Gallic sack had proved her not invincible, and had also, as war emergencies will, produced a new sense of solidarity. The wall symbolizes it, and so does the bill passed in 367 B.C. (while the wall was still under construction), opening the highest office in the Republic to plebeians. Thus a reinforced oligarchy was formed, which by 338 B.C. could beat its once powerful enemies, the neighboring settlements linked in the Latin League; proudly (even arrogantly) mount the beaks of enemy ships on the new Rostra; and embark upon a career of Manifest Destiny in Italy. The Republic had reached adulthood.

There were other outward and visible signs of the Republic’s new maturity and prosperity. The gods deserve their reward for fighting on the side of the biggest battalions, and so the expanding Republic built temples. In another age of arrogant expansion, in 1926, not long before Säflund began his work on the walls, slum clearance in front of the Argentina theater (on the site of the portico of Pompey’s theater, where Caesar was murdered) revealed the foundations of four Republican temples (Fig. 3.10), nowadays the haunt of countless tomcats. The gods to whom the temples were dedicated being unknown, they were named, with proper archaeological sobriety, Temples A, B, C, and D. The foundations of Temple C, the third from the north, are the deepest; it is therefore the oldest. It is set in the Italic manner at the back of a high podium, built of Grotta Oscura tufa; its mason’s marks match those on the “Servian” wall. Clearly it was built by the same masons or in the same tradition. The podium carries the distinction of being the oldest surviving datable public building in Rome. Terracotta revetments found in excavating are of fourth century type. Besides meanders, the so-called “Greek frets” or “key” design, an angular pattern of lines winding in and out, their decorative motifs include strigil patterns: parallel troughs, made by the workman’s thumbs in the wet clay, and then painted in contrasting colors. The strong curve of the profile resembles that of the strigil or scraper used by athletes in the gymnasium to remove caked oil and dirt from their bodies; hence the name. The roof’s peak and corner ornaments, called _acroteria_, have spikes set in the clay to discourage birds from perching and committing nuisances. This temple and its three later fellows are still a long way from the grandiose marble and gold of the Augustan Age, but they are an equally long way from the primitive wattle-and-daub huts of the Palatine village. They mark a stage in the painstakingly unravelled archaeological story of Rome’s expansion, which we shall follow at various newly-excavated sites in Italy.

4

Roman Colonies in Italy

Rome’s wall begun in 378 B.C. took twenty-five years to build. However secure she might feel behind it, immediately beyond the gates lurked enemies. To the north the Gauls, to the east and south, Italic tribes (whom Rome successively feared, rivalled, dominated, and invited to partnership; of these the Samnites were the most fearsome), on the seas the Syracusan and Carthaginian navies--all represented a clear and present danger. Rome’s population being inadequate to keep legions in the field, much less a fleet at sea, against all these threats at once, she evolved a system of advanced bases, called Latin colonies (Fig. 4.1), manned partly with trustworthy local non-Romans, though with a hard core of Roman legionaries. This avoided undue drain on the Roman manpower, and placed the responsibility for frontier defense upon frontiersmen who had the greatest interest in their own security.

During the last thirty years the efforts of archaeologists of several nations; for example, Italians at Ostia, Belgians at Alba Fucens, Americans at Cosa have added much to the sum of our knowledge of these frontier outposts: their fortifications, street plan, public buildings, housing arrangements, and the surveyed (“centuriated”) quarter-sections of land (allotments) stretching away from the walls into the countryside round about. From these brute facts inferences can be drawn, about what prompted the founding of these outposts (was the motive always military?), about relations with neighbors and with Rome, about communications, about economic, social, and cultural life.

, p. 127)]

At Ostia, at the Tiber’s mouth, historical tradition said that there had been Romans settled since the days of King Ancus Marcius, and that, even earlier, Aeneas had landed there and built a camp. In 1938 the great Italian archaeologist Guido Calza began soundings to ascertain the date of the oldest surviving stratum. The area he chose was beneath Ostia’s Imperial Forum, where the two main streets, the _cardo_ and the _decumanus_, crossed. (The Via Ostiensis, from Rome to the river mouth, determined the line of the _decumanus_.) What he found (Fig. 4.2) was a set of walls enclosing a rectangle 627 feet long and 406 feet wide. The wall was built of roughly squared blocks of tufa in a technique not unlike that of Rome’s wall of 378 B.C., but since there was Fidenae stone in it, Calza dated the wall somewhat later than 378. The wall was pierced by four gates of two rooms each, with portcullis. The south gate was demolished in the early Empire to provide space for a temple of Rome and Augustus; the north gate gave way under Hadrian to the massive podium of a Capitolium, but the footings of the east and west gates survive, well below the level of the Imperial pavement. Calza found drains within the walls, and traces of four other streets (unpaved) besides the _cardo_ and _decumanus_, but no identifiable buildings. Some terracotta revetments found in the area suggest an unidentified temple of the third century B.C. No traces earlier than the late fourth-century wall have been found in the excavated area of Ostia. Either Ancus Marcius’ foundation is a myth, or it was planted in some thus far undiscovered spot, of which all the plowing and digging in the neighborhood has left no trace.

What Calza found at Ostia was a coastguard station, or _castrum_, planted by the Romans at the river’s mouth once their control of the sea was established by their victory over Antium’s navy (which produced the bronze beaks on the Rostra). The normal complement of such a station was 300 men. A contingent of that size could have manned Ostia’s _castrum_ wall with one soldier every six feet. Thus the prime motive of the founding was military, and the _castrum_ plan is like the familiar and standard plan of a Roman army camp. But the civilian plan antedated the military: Polybius in his description of the Roman camp of about 150 B.C. says that it was planned _like a town_ (_i.e._, with a rectangular grid like Marzabotto). And Ostia’s function must from the beginning, or soon after, have been commercial as well as military. Its site at the river mouth was as ideal for collecting the customs as for guarding the coast. Grain from Egypt and Sicily to feed Rome may from the earliest days have been landed here and stored in warehouses for later shipment upriver by barge. At all events history records the appointment as early as 267 B.C. of a special finance officer or _quaestor_ for Ostia, and Calza found the footings of warehouses of Republican date. The terracotta revetments mentioned above date from this period. The houses and shops remained humble for seven generations, but those generations saw the departure of many a fleet, and the arrival of many a consignment of grain. An inscription dated in 171 B.C. marking the limits of public land in Ostia shows that by then it had expanded far beyond the _castrum_ walls. But the story of Ostia’s development, her new wall under Sulla, new theater under Augustus, new port under Claudius, new garden apartment houses under Trajan, and the rest, belong to later chapters.

* * * * *

In the last half of the fourth century Rome fought two wars against the Samnites. Alba Fucens (Fig. 4.3) in the Abruzzi, one of her advanced bases in the Second Samnite War, has been explored since 1949 by the Belgians. It lies 3315 feet above sea level, on the Via Valeria sixty-eight miles east-northeast of Rome. (The sixty-eighth milestone of the Valeria was found _in situ_ inside the colony wall.) Alba’s site dominates five valleys. The Latin colony of 6000 families planted here in 303 B.C. assured Rome’s communications on two sides of Samnium, eastward to the Adriatic and southeastward through the Liris valley.

The pride of Alba is its walls, nearly two miles of them, surrounding the three hills on which the colony lies. The material is limestone, which breaks at the quarry into irregular, polygonal blocks. These are set without mortar. The excavators distinguished four different building techniques in the wall. They assumed that the roughest sectors, built of enormous blocks, were the oldest, coeval with the foundation of the colony. These polygonal walls, common all over central Italy, used to be called Pelasgian or Cyclopean, and were formerly assumed to be of immemorial antiquity, but recent archaeological work has pushed the dates of most of them down into the late fourth century or later. At Alba the techniques involve the use of smaller blocks and more careful workmanship in successive phases, until finally with the use of cement we reach the 80’s B.C. and the age of Sulla. On the northwest, where the hill has the gentlest slope, the circuit is triple, and the outermost is the latest. The loop to the north was the _arx_; it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1915. The wall is pierced by four gates, some with portcullis and bastions. The Via Valeria entered at the northwest, made a right-angled turn, passed the civic center, and emerged at the southeast; that is, it was made to conform to a grid plan within the colony, a grid plan laid down despite the hilly terrain, which made terracing necessary.

Excavating Alba’s civic center, the Belgians found a Forum, with altar and miniature temple, buried under many feet of earth. They also found a basilica (a rectangular roofed hall with nave and two side aisles, used as a law court and commercial center), presenting its long side, with three entrances, to a portico facing the Forum. Beside the basilica, a market, with baths on one side and a temple on the other, with early revetments, repeatedly restored. An adjoining street, parallel to the Valeria, was lined with shops, including a fuller’s drycleaning establishment and at least one wine shop. The doorsills still show slots for the shutters. In front of the shops ran a portico supported on high pilasters. In the curb were holes where customers might tie their mules. At the corner of the _decumanus_, the excavators found charming statuettes of elephants, used as street signs. Under the market were revealed subterranean chambers accessible only by manholes; the excavators suggest that these are the very dungeons, dark underground _oubliettes_, where prisoners of state like King Syphax of Numidia in 203 B.C., King Perseus of Macedonia in 167, the Gallic chief Bituitus in 121 were incarcerated, for the Romans often used their colonies as detention points.

Levels, construction techniques, and artifacts assigned various dates to these buildings, but their earliest phases fall in the Republican period, in the age of Sulla or earlier. To the age of Sulla belongs also a handsome rock-cut theater. There is an amphitheater of the early Empire; as we know from a new inscription, its donor was Macro, the notorious informer under the Emperor Tiberius, who brought about the fall of the Emperor’s ambitious and scheming favorite, Sejanus.

Walls, grid, civic center, public buildings: these made of Alba a smaller and more orderly replica of Rome. The general layout is repeated so often in so many places that it suggests a master plan made in the censors’ office in Rome. By the time Cosa was founded, in 273 B.C., the Romans already could draw on the experience of founding at least eighteen colonies.

* * * * *

Cosa, where the writer did his first excavating, may be used to supply a little more detail on materials and methods in field archaeology. Seven eight-week spring seasons of excavation there (1948–1954), modestly intended as laboratory training for young American classicists, have in fact resulted in a remarkably complete picture of an old-style Latin colony. The site was chosen for excavating because it looked attractive from air photographs, because it was convenient to Rome (ninety miles up the Via Aurelia on the Tyrrhenian Sea), and because its walls were almost perfectly preserved, great gray masses of polygonal limestone looming up as high as a four-story building on a 370-foot hill that rises out of the reclaimed swamplands of the Tuscan Maremma. For Cosa was planted, carved out of the territory of the once proud Etruscan city of Vulci, to mount guard over Rome’s newly acquired marches, and to affirm Rome’s name and supremacy in a restive neighborhood.

A large assortment of gear is necessary for a modern scientific dig, even a modest one: for surveying and levelling, clinometer (which measures slopes), plane-table (which measures angles), alidade (which shows degree of arc), prismatic compass with front and back sights (for taking accurate bearings; the prism brings the object being sighted, the hair-line of the front sight, and the reading on the compass card all in a vertical line together), leveling staves marked in centimeters (for measuring elevations); templates for recording the curves of moldings; brooms, brushes, and mason’s tools for cleaning the architectural finds; zinc plates and sodium hydroxide pencils for electrolysis of coins; measuring tapes of all sizes, mechanical drawing instruments, trowels, marking-pegs, cord, squared paper, large sheets of filter paper for taking “squeezes” of inscriptions, catalogue cards, India ink, shellac, cardboard boxes, small cloth bags, labels, journal books, field notebooks, and a small library of technical manuals. The gear was divided between the villa where the staff lived and an abandoned Italian anti-aircraft observation post on the site itself, whose concrete gunmounts made excellent drying floors for freshly washed potsherds.

Ambitious excavations use a light railway for carting earth to the dump, but at Cosa, which ran on a shoestring budget ($5000 for eight weeks), the vehicle was the wheelbarrow, the track a set of boards bound at the ends with iron to keep them from splitting. Twenty of the local unemployed formed the corps of workmen. The foreman, in better times a master carpenter, used a pick with all the delicacy of a surgeon with a scalpel.

The first step in excavating a site is to lay down a grid--fifty-meter squares are convenient--marked with wooden stakes set in cement and levelled. During the ten months of the year when there was no digging and Cosa was abandoned to the shepherds, they operated on the conviction that the stakes marked the spot where the treasure lay buried. They would overturn them and dig like badgers, and each new season would have to begin with a partial re-survey.

A typical excavating day would begin with the removal of surface earth in wheelbarrows. As large objects came to light--bits of amphora, roof-tile, terracotta revetments--they were placed in shallow yard-square wooden boxes called _barrelle_, equipped fore and aft with carrying shafts, and labelled accurately with the precise designation of the area from which the finds came: Capitolium Exterior South, Level I; Arx North Slope, Surface, and the like. Small objects--bone _styli_, small sherds, loomweights (pierced terracotta parallelepipeds, whose weight held the threads hanging straight down on an ancient vertical loom), lamps, fragments of inscriptions--went into separate marked cloth bags. Thus the horizontal and vertical findspot of each object was precisely known, so that when a dated or datable object was found in a level, the whole level could be automatically dated, and so the whole mosaic painstakingly put together and the history of the site analyzed, or, as the archaeologist says, “read.” The meanest potsherd, accurately defining a context, thus becomes more valuable historically than a whole museum shelf full of gold jewelry from an unstratified dig.

When a _barrella_ and a set of cardboard boxes had been filled, they were carried to the excavation shack and sorted. Objects that could not be “read”--shapeless bits of rubble, parts of coarse pots without profile of base or rim--were discarded, the rest sent to be washed. After washing and drying, cataloguing began. Every object was painted with a small square of shellac, on which its catalogue number was written in India ink and then shellacked over to preserve it. A letter indicated the dig, another the season, a number showed the place of the object in the chronological sequence of finds. A typical entry might read like the card, p. 101. Leica or plate photographs were taken of all important finds and separately indexed for ready reference in the final publication.

CC 1487 Capitolium Exterior South
Level I

Moulded terra-cotta revetment
Width 0.17 (centimeters)
Height 0.14
Thickness 0.03

Pale pink terra-cotta, much pozzolana. All edges preserved, slight
crack lower right corner. Nail-holes each corner. Strigillated
cornice moulding above, finishing in a half-round moulding,
enriched thunderbolt pattern in field. Thunderbolt runs from
upper left to lower right, tapering to points at ends, hand grip
in center; enriched on either side of hand grip with seven-point
sword-and-sickle palmettes. Photograph.

After the workmen’s day (7:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., with a half-hour for lunch) was over, there was still much for the staff to do. Pottery, spread out on trestle tables, had to be examined, joins made where possible, types distinguished. (Careful attention at Cosa to plain Roman black glaze has led to an arrangement of types in a dated series which will be useful for future dating on other sites.) Evenings were devoted to writing up the journal, studying the manuals, making drawings, planning the next day’s dig, and shop talk. The results of a typical season’s work, in 1950 on the _arx_ at Cosa (Fig. 4.4), were to isolate a second temple at right angles to the Capitolium, restore on paper the design of several sets of terracotta revetments, follow the line of the Via Sacra from the _arx_ gate to the Capitolium, clear the _arx_ wall, get down to bedrock beside the Capitolium, discover a terracotta warrior who was part of the pedimental sculpture of an older temple under the excavation shack, and in general get a pretty clear idea of the religious center of the colony as it was, perhaps, in the time of the elder Cato, in the early second century B.C.

In the two seasons preceding the discoveries on the _arx_ just described, much work had been done. In the survey to set up the fifty-meter grid, Cosa’s own ancient rectangular grid of streets, with pomerial street running just inside the wall as at Marzabotto, came out clear enough to be plotted on the plan (Fig. 4.5), together with the standard blocks of housing, like the identical “ribbon-development” apartment blocks of a welfare state, which compensated the pioneers for whatever fleshpots they had given up in the metropolis or elsewhere. Housing was found to occupy two-thirds of Cosa’s thirty-three acres, while public buildings took just over twenty per cent, and streets the rest. The site, which is waterless, was found to be honey-combed with cisterns: over sixty-five were plotted. The mile-and-a-half of walls, with their eighteen towers, spaced an effective bowshot apart, had been closely examined. They were found to be built with two faces and a rubble fill. The outer face was handsomely finished, with tight mortarless joints, and sloped seven degrees back--this is called “batter”--from the perpendicular; the inner face was left rough. Potsherds of the Etrusco-Campanian style found in the rubble fill were of a period matching Livy’s date of 273 B.C. for the colony. It was clear that the walls, which show throughout no difference in technique, were built all at one go, at the time the colony was founded. Those impatient of the Roman reputation for perfect engineering will be pleased to know that the ancient craftsmen, when they came to close the ring of the wall, found they had made an error of from two to four Roman feet. (The Roman foot approximately equals the English.) The three gates were examined, and found to be of two rooms, with the main gate grooved on its inner walls with slots for the rise and fall of the portcullis, as at Alba. Bordering the roads leading from the gates were tombs. The director of the excavations, by skindiving, examined the outworks of the port, built to prevent silting, and established them as Roman. They were parallel jetties 350 feet long, supported on huge piers measuring twenty by thirty Roman feet, and forty-five Roman feet apart.[C]

[C] Undersea exploration, one of the most fascinating branches
of archaeology, has not been carried as far in Italy as in
France (see, _e.g._, P. Diolé, _4,000 Years under the Sea_
[New York, 1954]). But this is a convenient place to report
a 1950 Italian operation off Albenga, on the Ligurian coast
between Genoa and the French border. Along this stretch of
the Italian Riviera fishermen’s nets had frequently brought
up amphorae, presumably from an ancient wreck, which was
soon located in twenty fathoms. The use of an iron grab
damaged the sunken hull, but an impressive number and
variety of objects were recovered. The ship yielded up over
700 more or less intact cork-sealed, pitch-lined amphorae,
from a cargo of perhaps thrice that number; their shape was
that current in the second and first centuries B.C. Some
had contained wine, others still held hazel-nuts. Campanian
black-glaze pottery, of a type datable in the last half of
the second century B.C., was found in sufficient quantity
to enable Professor Nino Lamboglia, who was in charge of
the operation, to set up a whole typology of black-glaze
ware, based on types, fabric, and glaze, a typology which
proved a useful check for dating Cosan pottery, and for
which the Cosan results have provided some corrections.
Lead pipes and lead sheathing resembled those found in the
ships from Lake Nemi (see Chapter 7), and a stone crucible
with molten lead in the bottom suggested that running
repairs could be carried out at sea. Fragments of three
helmets, of unusual design, may have been intended for
Marius’ army, which was campaigning in the north against
Germanic tribes in the late second century B.C. The finds
are on display in the Albenga Museum (see N. Lamboglia,
“Il Museo Navale Romano di Albenga,” _Rivista Ingauna e
Intemilia_ [1950] Nos. 3 and 4).

The 1949 campaign concentrated on the Capitolium (Fig. 4.6), situated so that its central _cella_ lay over a cleft in the rock, from which some kind of oracular fraud could be perpetrated. Between porch and _cellae_, running the width of the building, was a cistern lined with the waterproof cement called _opus signinum_, made of lime, sand, and pounded bits of terracotta. The temple walls, which stand on the south to an impressive height, visible far out to sea, were built of brick-like slabs of the local calcareous sandstone, set in mortar. On the north, the line worn in the rock by water dripping gives mute evidence of the wide overhang of the roof, Etrusco-Italic style. Some of the terracotta revetments belonged to the older, wooden temple. It must have made a brave show when it was new, covered with brightly painted tiles, its pediment and roof ornaments glittering in the sun.

The last four campaigns of digging attacked the Forum area, thickly overgrown with asphodel, acanthus, and thistles. Here lay the remains of an ungainly but monumental triple arch of about 150 B.C., the oldest dated arch in Italy. It had a central roadway for wheeled traffic, two side arches for pedestrians, and a stone bench attached to the outer face where old men could sit in the sun and gossip. There was a basilica, as big as a New England town hall, like Alba’s (but older: about 180 B.C.). It presented its long side to the Forum, had a nave and two side aisles, and a tribune for the presiding judge at the back, with a vaulted cell, perhaps the local lock-up, beneath it. At some time in the early Empire the basilica was abandoned as a legal center, and restored as a festival hall, or intimate theater.

Other buildings turned out to hold fascinating secrets. A complex beside the basilica turned out to be an Atrium Publicum, a public hall in the form of the central unit of an Italic house, which was rebuilt as an inn for the patrons of the adjoining festival hall. When, about A.D. 35 (on the evidence of pottery--the “Arretine ware” characteristic of the period), the basilica wall collapsed, it crushed and entombed in place the inn’s complete furnishings and equipment. The excavators suddenly found their hands full of tableware, kitchen crockery, and all sorts of household gear, in metal, glass, and stone; decorative pieces, including a lively marble statuette of Marsyas; and objects of personal adornment, including a fine engraved amethyst. For the first time outside of Pompeii an ancient building had yielded not only its structure but its contents.