Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

A fragment of the previously-mentioned Marble Plan of Rome, the _Forma Urbis_, inscribed with the letters CIS (Fig. 9.1), is easily restored to something like [Forum Pa] CIS, Forum of Peace. It shows a portico, on one side walled, on the other colonnaded, the colonnade approached by steps. An open space is incised with a series of three long indented strips, apparently representing formal garden-plots. The fragment also shows one right angle of a structure which should be an altar.

Faced with the thousand pieces of the Marble Plan, archaeologists play the fascinating game of making joins, as in a jigsaw puzzle. In 1899 Lanciani announced the discovery of a new fragment which joined with the piece of the Marble Plan already mentioned. It filled out the rectangular shape of the altar, added two more rows of garden-plots, and supplied another side to the portico, at right angles to the other. This side had two rows of columns, four of which were represented as of larger dimensions than the others, and as standing on plinths or square bases. These two fragments made possible restoration, on paper, of a considerable part of the Forum’s plan. Given the Roman architectural principle of axial symmetry, Lanciani could be sure that the altar belonged in the middle of one side of the portico-surrounded space, towards the back. He could restore two more column-bases; and, knowing that there must have been three rows of garden-plots on either side of the altar, and that the scale of the Marble Plan was 1:200, he could arrive at the original length of one inner side of the portico--about 325 feet. But there paper hypothesis had to rest, awaiting excavation.

(M. Scherer, _Marvels of Ancient Rome_, Pls. 162 and 165)]

The opportunity did not arise until 1934, in connection with systematizing and beautifying with lawns the borders of Mussolini’s grandiose new Via dell’ Impero, already mentioned as having been cut through slums from the Coliseum to the Piazza Venezia. The two projecting columns of the _Forum Transitorium_ (“Forum of Nerva”), southeast of the Forum of Augustus, were cleared, under the direction of A. M. Colini, of medieval and modern detritus down to their plinths (Figs. 9.2 and 9.3); the podium of the Temple of Minerva, at the end of this Forum, uncovered; and the _peperino_ wall behind the projecting columns isolated. Close in back of this wall, on the Forum of Peace side, Colini found large columns in African marble, which, he inferred, marked the missing northwest side of that Forum. Its general location had been known since 1818, but only now was there a _precise_ point in modern Rome’s subsoil from which, with the help of the Marble Plan, the true dimensions of Vespasian’s portico could be measured. Also, another fragment of the Marble Plan, not joining the two previously mentioned, showed the very stretch of wall and the columns which Colini had been excavating, as well as the plan of Minerva’s temple, whose podium he had uncovered.

Now that the plan of Vespasian’s Forum could be precisely fitted into the plan of modern Rome, it became clear that some fragments of large fluted white marble columns, found in the southeastern part of this area as long ago as 1875, belonged to the part of the portico where the larger columns shown on the Marble Plan would fall. Colini now made another join on the Marble Plan, adding to Lanciani’s fragment another piece, previously known but not connected, which showed the Temple of Peace at the back of the portico. It was an apsidal building, wider than it was deep, with a pedestal for the cult statue indicated in the apse. If it survived today it would come within a few feet of touching the north corner of the Basilica of Maxentius. The south side of the rectangular hall to the right of it coincides with the actual wall of the church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, which was the findspot--in 1562--of the fragments of the Marble Plan itself. This square hall was one of the libraries of Vespasian’s Forum. Since the principle of axial symmetry nearly always operates, justifying the hypothesis that what appears on one side of the axis of a Roman plan will have a twin on the other; and since the Romans usually built their libraries in pairs (one Latin, one Greek), Colini quite reasonably restored on paper another rectangular hall to the left of the apsidal temple. A section of the polychrome marble pavement, excavated by Colini east of the church wall, was less than an inch thick, too thin to be exposed to the weather. Colini inferred that it must have been part of the flooring of the library in which the Marble Plan was displayed.

An ingenious combination--“joins” recognized on the Marble Plan, actual excavation, and inference--had now made the Forum’s general outline clear, but Colini was not yet done. Overlying the Forum’s outer (northeast) perimeter wall, as he had plotted it, rose the medieval Torre dei Conti, built by the brother of Pope Innocent III. Re-examining beneath this tower the ancient remains, in squared travertine, ordinary tufa, and _peperino_, Colini was able to establish that they formed part of Vespasian’s Forum, a great ornamental rectangular niche on its northeast side, with two columns of African marble in front of it. Symmetry would dictate another matching niche further to the southeast in the same wall, and a pair on the opposite side to correspond. Pink granite columns found in the excavations belonged to the portico; marble gutters proved that it had a pitched roof. Finally, in 1938, the plan was complete enough for a model of the Forum to be made (Fig. 9.4) for Mussolini’s Mostra Augustea della Romanità, a great exhibition of models and photographs of Roman architecture and engineering, casts of inscriptions, and replicas of artifacts.

* * * * *

But Vespasian’s Forum, famous as it was, and valuable as its restored plan is to illustrate archaeological inference at work, is overshadowed by his mightiest monument, which has survived to become the very symbol of pagan Rome to modern times: the Flavian Amphitheater or Coliseum. More perhaps than any other classical monument, its stones are steeped in blood and memories; in the blood of gladiators and wild beasts, and perhaps of Christian martyrs, in memories of medieval battles, Renaissance plundering of stone (much of the travertine in St. Peter’s came from it), and Victorian moonlight visits. Having resisted earthquakes, fire, and demolition, it is now menaced by the vibrations of modern traffic. Work on strengthening its walls against this new threat has been going on since 1956.

For sheer mass the Coliseum deserves its name. It is a third of a mile around, and the Italian engineer G. Cozzo has calculated that 45,000 cubic meters of travertine went into its outside wall, over twice as much into the whole structure. But the achievement here is not mere massiveness, but precise engineering, careful calculations of stresses and strains, avoidance of crowding at entrances and exits, perfect visibility, ingenuity in the arrangements for getting the wild beasts into the arena. (Perhaps this is the place to recall that it was upon the Coliseum that Charles Follen McKim based his design for the Harvard Stadium.) The site chosen, the bed of the pool of Nero’s Golden House, was good propaganda and good engineering. Propaganda-wise, it made for good public relations to turn a detested Emperor’s pleasure grounds into a place for public enjoyment. (Neither Vespasian nor the Roman mob would have thought of the slaughter of men and beasts as anything but enjoyable; their attitude at best was that of Hemingway to a bullfight.) From the engineering point of view, it saved much costly excavation to pump out the pool and use it for the substructure of the arena, and in the low, soft ground, footings could go deep: eight feet of concrete under the _cavea_. Besides, the huge mass of debris from the demolished Golden House could be cannily reused in the new fabric. The first step was to erect a skeleton of travertine piers, a double row, built of squared blocks held together not with mortar but with metal clamps. The holes where these clamps were wrenched out, 300 metric tons of them, in the metal-starved Middle Ages, are visible today throughout the fabric. Differences in construction suggest that the huge project was divided into four quadrants, each assigned to a different contractor. Most of the work is honest, so that, for example, one cannot get the proverbial penknife blade into the joints between the blocks of the piers, but in the northwest quadrant the work is shoddy. This is precisely the section that has given the most trouble under the strain of the traffic vibrations of modern times.

Inside the second concentric ellipse of piers begins a set of radial walls which supported the seats. The slope of the seats was perfectly calculated for perfect visibility. The vaults of the lower levels were left open until the upper level piers were finished. This made possible the use of derricks to lift heavy blocks to the upper levels. The third-story piers have one course of blocks projecting, to provide a step to support the scaffolding required for building the wall on the fourth level. This wall is built of smaller blocks than those used on the lower levels, to facilitate lifting, and it is full of second-hand materials; column drums, for example, which may have come from the Golden House. The outer face of the fourth-level wall is equipped with 240 consoles, projecting brackets jutting out from the wall to support masts. Corresponding to each in the cornice above is a hole for the mast. The mast, Cozzo argues persuasively, was fitted with rope and pulley. The rope descended obliquely and was fastened to another below which ran elliptically at a convenient height above the podium of the arena. Awnings, fixed to these ropes, could be rolled up or down in strips as the sun’s position dictated. Awnings being made of canvas, this duty was assigned to detachments of sailors--the logical Roman administrative mind at work.

When the skeleton was finished, the space between the piers in the radial walls was filled in, on the ground level with tufa, on the second level with lighter materials, brick and cement. Only then were the vaults completed. The stairs were ingeniously planned to give access from the ground direct to each level separately. This both emphasized distinctions (VIPs in the lowest tier, women at the top; compare the separate second-balcony stairs in modern theaters) and facilitated entrance and exit. Each outside entrance--there were originally eighty--bears a Roman numeral. This corresponded to a number on the admission ticket, and divided the 45,000 or 50,000 spectators into manageable groups.

The arena proper was surrounded by a wall, high enough to protect the spectators from the beasts (VIPs not being regarded as expendable), but not so high as to block the view of the arena from the seats behind. Slots in the top of this wall are the postholes for a dismountable fence which supplied additional protection. Literary sources say it was of gilt metal surmounted by elephants’ tusks. In front of the fence ran a catwalk where archers were stationed to shoot beasts which got out of hand.

The arena was originally floored with wooden planking, removable for the mock naval battles which were staged here in the early years of the amphitheater’s existence. Since this had been the site of Nero’s artificial pool, flooding must have been comparatively easy. But though slaves fought and killed each other in these naval battles, they were less sanguinary, and therefore less popular, than gladiatorial contests or beast fights, and changing back and forth from murder on water to murder on land was a nuisance, so the naval battles were transferred elsewhere. The area below the arena floor was then filled in with complicated substructures, which finally revealed their secret to Cozzo in 1928.

The area under the catwalk in each quadrant contains eight cell-like rooms (A in Fig. 9.5), each big enough to hold a man, and approached by a short corridor. Opening out of each corridor, forward and to the left of a man sitting in the cell, are three adjoining shafts, a small square one (a), a large rectangular one (b), and another square one (c) of medium size. How are these to be explained? Cozzo reasoned that a beast was released from his cage near the center of the substructure, into the corridor (1) shown in Fig. 9.6, with a portcullis (a) at the end of it. The portcullis was raised, and the beast charged into the transverse corridor (2). This was too narrow for him to turn back; he was therefore forced to go forward into the open elevator-cage (3). The attendant in the cell (A in the previous figure) then released a counterweight, whose rope ran in shaft (a) of Fig. 9.5, while the weight itself rose and fell in shaft (c); the elevator-shaft is (b). The elevator door then closed; the elevator rose, activated by the counterweight, to position (4) in Fig. 9.6. The beast emerged into the narrow upper-level corridor (5–6), raced up the ramp (7), and emerged, slavering for fresh meat, through the trapdoor (8) into the arena.

(G. Cozzo, _Ingegneri Romana_, Fig. 170)]

(Cozzo, _op. cit._, Fig. 175)]

FIG. 9.7 Rome, Coliseum, model, showing colossal statue of Nero
(left center). Arch of Constantine (bottom left), and gladiators’
barracks (right center). (P. Bigot, _Rome Antique_, fac. p. 44)
]

This is not the only ingenious device in the Coliseum. The substructure piers along the arena’s long axis are cut obliquely. Why? Cozzo reasoned that on them rested, at an angle below the horizontal, hinged sections of the area flooring, on which stage sets could be placed, and the whole section of flooring raised by counterweights to the arena level, to provide appropriate backdrops or scenery for the fights. Against such backdrops, scenes from myth or history were acted out, the protagonists tortured to death before delighted spectators. We hear of 11,000 beasts, and 5,000 pairs of gladiators, fighting to the death in one session in the arena. In 1937, demolition of houses east of the Coliseum revealed the ground plan of part of the gladiators’ barracks, with armory, infirmary, baths, and, for training bouts, a miniature amphitheater, with seats for rabid fans (Fig. 9.7). To celebrate the millennium of Rome, in A.D. 248, elephants, elk, tigers, lions, leopards, hyenas, hippopotamuses, a rhinoceros, zebras, giraffes, wild asses, and wild horses (captured in Africa; see Fig. 13.5) were slaughtered in the Coliseum. This market of flesh did not cease till the sixth Christian century.

* * * * *

Vespasian did not live to see the Coliseum completed. It was dedicated, still unfinished, under Titus in A.D. 80. The chief surviving monument of Titus’ reign is his arch, commemorating his conquest of the Jews in A.D. 70, but, since the inscription upon it refers to him as deified, it is clear that the arch was not finished until after his death. Built of valuable Pentelic marble, it would never have been preserved if it had not been incorporated, in the Middle Ages, into a fortress of the powerful family of the Frangipani. The last vestiges of the Frangipani tower were not removed from the arch until 1821. It was then reinforced and its missing portions restored in travertine. It is chiefly famous for the relief on its inner jamb showing (Fig. 9.8) Titus’ army carrying in triumph the spoils of Jerusalem, including the table of the shewbread, the seven-branched candlestick, and the silver trumpets. In the relief opposite, Titus stands in a four-horse chariot, with the goddess Roma leading the horses, and Victory crowning him with a laurel wreath. The frieze under the cornice, not unrelated to the small inner altar frieze of the Altar of Peace, portrays a procession of priests, sacrificial animals, and troops carrying on their shoulders small platforms bearing representations of cities and places conquered by Roman arms, including a personification of the River Jordan. The motif in the highest part of the inner vault, showing Titus--who was a burly man--carried off to heaven by an eagle, is as conventional as the Ganymede in the vault of the underground basilica at the Porta Maggiore. In the years since Augustus, Roman official art had become conventional without ceasing to be historical.

* * * * *

To the good Titus succeeded the wicked, psychopathic, tyrannical Domitian, the greatest builder-Emperor since Augustus, and one under whom the Empire took a long stride on the road to absolutism. One evidence of Domitian’s self-aggrandizement turned up unexpectedly in 1937, under the Palazzo della Cancelleria in the Campus Martius, seat of the papal Chancellery, and an enclave of Vatican City. Curiously, the palace already had an intimate connection with the Flavians: many of the stones in its fabric were robbed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century from the Coliseum. In connection with extensive repairs to the building, deep excavations beneath it revealed the tomb of the consul Aulus Hirtius, a lieutenant of Julius Caesar’s, who died in office, and in battle against Mark Antony, in 43 B.C. Leaning face inwards against this tomb were five slabs which proved to be part of a marble historical relief. A sixth slab was found later nearby, still within papal jurisdiction; a seventh, found under the sidewalk, technically outside the Pope’s control, was first claimed by the Roman civil authorities, but a trade was made for the slab of the Altar of Peace then in Vatican hands, and all the slabs are now reunited in a courtyard of the Vatican Museum.

The seven slabs combine into two sections of some sixteen figures each, almost complete (Fig. 9.9). The more fragmentary of the two contains near its right end an instantly identifiable figure, with the characteristic beaked profile of Vespasian (Fig. 9.10). He is greeting a young man, surely one of his sons. Comparison with known portraits of Titus and Domitian leads to the conclusion that it is the latter who is represented here. The greeting is taking place in the presence of lictors, Vestals (identified from their characteristic headdress), _apparitores_ or beadles (at either end), a helmeted female figure (the goddess Roma or, according to others, the war-goddess Bellona, or the personification of martial courage), and two male figures, one bearded (the Genius of the Senate), and one beardless, with a cornucopia (the Genius of the Roman People). The other section is at once more complete, more difficult to interpret, and more interesting. Several of the conventional figures recur: the lictors, Roma, the two _Genii_. There are also six soldiers (in the uniform and with the arms of the praetorian guard); the wing of a Victory; a helmeted female wearing the _aegis_, the characteristic breastplate of Minerva; the helmeted, bearded male figure beside her must be another divinity, Mars. The remaining figure, the first on the second slab from the left (see Fig. 9.11), is rendered in profile, and is clearly intended as a portrait, but close examination, by Dr. F. Magi, Director of the Vatican Museums, shows that it was reworked in antiquity.

Here archaeological ingenuity again goes to work. The two sections of the total relief obviously (from the similar technique and the recurrence of conventional figures in both) belong together. The presence of Vespasian places both sections in the Flavian age. Of the three Flavians, only Domitian was sufficiently hated to have had _damnatio memoriae_ practiced upon him, to alter his portrait into another’s. And the most conspicuous alteration of the head consists in hacking off a fringe of curls on the forehead; such a fringe was Domitian’s characteristic hair-style. It remains to inquire whose the new profile is. In the context, it must be an Emperor. The most likely candidate is Domitian’s successor, Nerva, the first of the “five good Emperors.” The new profile, with its irregular nose, lined forehead, and sunken checks, suits the known iconography of that tired old man. Left with the question why, then, the portrait of Domitian on the other section of the relief was left undamaged, Magi argued that the Senate, on second thought, had considered the alteration into Nerva not enough: the relief was dismantled altogether, and its slabs carefully stacked against Hirtius’ tomb for the future use of one of the stonecutters whose yards are known to have been numerous in the area.

Two questions remain: the occasion for carving the relief in the first place, and the building that housed it. The occasion for greeting Vespasian must be the most memorable one of his reign: his triumphant return from Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The occasion for greeting Domitian must be an equally memorable one, almost certainly his setting out on a campaign, or his return from a military victory (because of the prominence of the winged figure and the Mars on the relief). Domitian’s military successes were not many; the likeliest is his campaign of A.D. 83 against a German tribe, the Chatti. If carving the monument would take a year, as competent sculptors report, the earliest possible date for the finished relief would be A.D. 84; on grounds of style one authority, Miss Jocelyn M. Toynbee, would date it eight or nine years later. To celebrate the same victory, Domitian built the Temple of Fortuna Redux (Good Luck and Safe Return), and this temple, Magi thinks, is a reasonable place to suppose the reliefs to have been displayed. In them the whole Roman state is portrayed as asking of the founder of the Flavian dynasty and of his son the peace and prosperity which the Julio-Claudians had failed to give. Like the fresco of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, the relief is not great art but a great document, a measure of the distance Roman sculpture had travelled in the scant century since the Altar of Peace. It is a courtier’s exaltation of a monarch; a solemn, highly rhetorical affirmation of Imperial sovereignty and pride in Rome’s dominion. And perhaps there is a moral in it, too: it summarizes the history of the dynasty, from the triumphant reception of the first Flavian to the explosion of hate which damned the memory, by altering the face, of the last. And these slabs, the expression of a despot’s pride, end leaning against the simple tomb of a lieutenant of Julius Caesar who died fighting, he would have said, to save for his fatherland its free institutions.

* * * * *

In A.D. 86 Domitian set about continuing the work begun by Vespasian on the narrow Forum between the Forum of Peace and that of Augustus, which we have had occasion to mention earlier. (The final dedication was not to occur until Nerva’s reign.) In effect this Forum was an ingenious device to monumentalize the street which led from the old Republican Forum to the unsavory Subura district and workers’ quarter to the north. Caesar’s Forum was Venus’ precinct; Augustus’ belonged to Mars. A convention had been established, a canonical way of doing things: hence Vespasian dedicated his larger Forum to Peace, the _Forum Transitorium_ to Minerva. Domitian, his devotion to Minerva already established by his having given her prominence on the Cancelleria relief, now remodelled Vespasian’s temple to her, raising it on a high podium. The podium alone remains, with its relieving arch marking where the Cloaca Maxima or great sewer passed below. But the original monumentalizing of the street by Vespasian had involved building a colonnade, of a type common in the frescoes of the Pompeian Third and Fourth Styles. Along its architrave, which was richly decorated on its under side, ran a continuous frieze whose technique resembles that of the Cancelleria relief on a small scale, for the art of the Flavian reigns is recognizably related. The dentils in the cornice show between them the characteristic “spectacles-signature” of the architect Rabirius, who may have worked for Vespasian as well as for Domitian.

The surviving section of the frieze portrays Minerva among the nine Muses, and the punishment of Arachne, who for presuming to rival Minerva’s skill at weaving was turned into a spider. The sculptor took the occasion to carve artisans (the figure of a fuller survives) and household scenes, of spinning, weaving, and dyeing, all under Minerva’s special patronage. One sees the wool basket, the upright loom, the scales for weighing the day’s stint, the proud display of a finished roll of cloth. In the attic above the surviving section of the frieze stands the goddess in relief, wearing the characteristic cloak of a Roman general!

Recent excavation has added little to earlier knowledge of this Forum, but it is of absorbing interest for what it adds to our portrait of the Flavians. Domitian takes over his father’s plan, and pushingly insinuates himself, as it were, between his father and the Empire’s founder, both of whom he envied and tried to emulate. But it was beyond even his effrontery to associate himself with the Minerva who was patroness of artisans; nothing could be more incongruous than his connecting his elegant dilettantism with the homely arts of the household. The frieze is probably a part of Vespasian’s plan: its theme suits his plain personality, and the references to handicrafts suit its location on a street leading to a worker’s quarter. The support of the workers (and of their wives, whose influence was all the more important to win because it was indirect) was worth having, and meanwhile Minerva’s connection with the Muses (the creative arts and literature) could be turned by Domitian to his purpose: he desired to be known as a patron of the arts.

* * * * *

The showiest surviving result of Domitian’s patronage of the art of architecture is his palace on the Palatine, planned by the famous Rabirius, and finished perhaps in A.D. 92. Here is a return, after the comparative austerity of his father’s and brother’s reigns, to the baroque extravagance of Nero. Since no final publication of this important complex has ever appeared, the best archaeology can do is to comment on the palace as reflecting Domitian’s personality, as indebted to earlier, and seminal of later Roman architecture. Its throne room (21B on the plan, Fig. 9.12), with its colossal niches for statues, was built for an Emperor with delusions of divinity. The dining room (H) had a dais to elevate the god-Emperor above his guests, but the peristyle (D), originally faced with marbles polished like mirrors (to reflect possible assassins), was planned by a terrified mortal who feared stabs in the back. (Blocks from the peristyle cornice show, as in the _Forum Transitorium_, Rabirius’ “spectacles-signature.”) The restless inward and outward curves of the rooms at 21E in the west block (the public part) of the palace, and at 23C and D in the eastern private quarters, were made possible by the flexibility of poured concrete, which, as we saw in Chapter V, makes it possible to enclose space in any shape (see reconstruction, Fig. 9.13). This fluidity appealed to Hadrian, the most gifted amateur architect among the Emperors, and he imitated it, as we shall see, in his Villa near Tivoli.

The _impluvium_ (pool for rain-water) in the peristyle (23B) of the private quarters contained a fountain, and is curiously treated with cut-out segments of circles, with cuttings in its top face for setting statues. This combination of plays of water and works of art is in the taste of the Sperlonga villa of Tiberius: ancient sources find a parallel between that monarch’s suspicious, tyrannical nature and Domitian’s. The small temple in the upper peristyle (24E), connected with the “mainland” by a curious seven-arched bridge, was built, to judge by its materials and technique, two centuries later than Domitian. But his is the “stadium” (26). Its portico makes it unlikely that it was ever a track for running races in the Greek style; he was to build such a stadium full-scale in the Campus Martius in A.D. 93. The Palatine stadium, in spite of its apsidal Imperial spectator’s box (the model for Bramante’s Vatican Belvedere), was probably a garden for shady strolling. Perhaps Hadrian had this plan in mind when he built the so-called “Painted Porch” or “Poecile” of his villa, to which we shall return. It is hard to realize that all this splendor lies only 100 yards from the site of “Romulus’” straw hut. The difference measures the distance Roman culture had travelled in 800 years.

Nowadays, one can sit under the umbrella pines of a summer evening and hear symphony concerts played in Domitian’s stadium-garden. On such occasions it may seem less of a pity that the Palatine is incompletely excavated. Here, on this hill of dreams, as Miss Scherer calls it, one can imagine Domitian’s palace rich with many-colored marbles, bright with paintings and gold. One can wander in the dappled light among oleander and orange-trees, golden broom and scarlet poppies, and admire how the mellow brick glows rose-colored in the afternoon sunlight. One can appreciate the mood of the Romantics for whom, a century and a half ago, all Rome had this dream-like quality. One can argue that their attitude may not have been scientific, but it produced the classical revival in architecture. Here is the old dilemma, but its horns are properly labelled not art and science, but sentiment and intelligence. If we want truly to understand ancient Rome, the choice is clear. Sentiment is not a Roman quality; intelligence is. The atmosphere of Domitian’s reign was not dream but nightmare. The natural beauty of the Palatine is attractive but adventitious; the essence of the place is of another kind, starker, grander, more disciplined, than a nineteenth-century water color, and behind it looms always the shadow of violence.

* * * * *

Not violence but intelligence, and the affectation of Hellenism, lies behind Domitian’s stadium (for Greek games) and odeum, or music hall (for literary and musical competitions) in the Campus Martius. The shape of the stadium has been preserved almost intact in the loveliest of Rome’s squares, the Piazza Navona (Fig. 9.14). In 1936 the driving of a great new street, the Corso del Rinascimento, north and south through the Campus Martius, as a part of Mussolini’s ambitious new city plan, gave an opportunity for definitive examination of the stadium’s remains, preserved in the cellars of shops and the crypts of churches. This Colini undertook, and emerged from his mole-like labors with a plan (Fig. 9.15) and a model (Fig. 9.16) of the stadium, a prime example of what archaeology can do with bits and pieces. Nowadays remains of the hemicycle are visible under an insurance building outside the north end of the _piazza_, and one travertine pier is to be seen under the arcade of the Corsia Agonale, in the middle of the stadium’s east side. Beneath this area are traces of the footings, of cement poured in caissons, thicker and stronger the farther east they go, to support the increasing weight of the rising tiers of seats above. Brick stamps found here date the building to A.D. 93 or a little after, with evidence of major repairs under Hadrian--another Greek lover--and Caracalla--another violent despot.

Colini found that Domitian’s architect, to compensate for providing here only one _ambulacrum_ or vaulted corridor for sauntering, where the Coliseum had two, widened his corridor at regular intervals between the stairs to provide halls where spectators--the stadium had seats for 30,000--might congregate between footraces. The stadium was built in a repeated sequence: stair, entrance, hall, entrance, stair, which gives classical orderliness and efficiency to the plan (perhaps Rabirius’). In the center of the west side was the Imperial box: the crypt of the church of Sant’ Agnese marks its substructure. Here, according to legend, the good saint suffered martyrdom, condemned by the Emperor Diocletian to the brothels that flourished in the stadium arcades. The whole building profited by the experience of the builders of the Coliseum, as they in turn had profited from the experience of the builders of the Theater of Marcellus. Thus its exterior was adorned with engaged columns, Doric on the first level, Corinthian on the second. But the total effect was deliberately different, graceful where the Coliseum was massive, dedicated to Greek footraces instead of Roman blood-sports. The only thing of its kind outside the Greek world, the stadium was a deliberate flouting of Roman tradition. This was in Domitian’s manner. The Roman people rejected it, in theirs. To them, Greek footraces represented foreign degeneracy, nudism, and immorality. No sooner was the tyrant murdered (in a courtier’s plot sparked by his wife) than they went back to their simple pleasures of watching the murder of gladiators and wild beasts. Domitian’s odeum, traces of which were found south of the stadium in 1936–37, did not suffer the same fate, for it could be used for pantomime (see Fig. 13.1) and other degraded forms of dramatic art.

Here then, is a part, a small part, of what archaeology can tell us of the prodigious Flavian activity in architecture and in art. It will be noticed that, not for the first or the last time in Roman history, the greatest tyrant is also the greatest builder. (He is also Rome’s last great Emperor who did not come from the provinces.) Absolutism was the price Rome paid for its grandeur. But, in the century after Domitian’s murder, absolutism marked time. Nerva’s successor, the Spaniard Trajan, is the second of the “five good Emperors,” under whom the metropolis and its port prospered, and the provinces lived content.

10

Trajan: Port, Forum, Market, Column

Archaeologically speaking, the most important sites in Italy to illustrate Roman events and the Roman way of life in the happy reign (A.D. 98–117) of Trajan--called _Optimus Princeps_, “best of princes”--are the port of Ostia, which in his time reached its apogee, and his Forum, the last and grandest of the Imperial Fora.

Our present knowledge of Ostia, extending far beyond the early _castrum_ discussed in Chapter IV, is due in large part to the devoted skill of Guido Calza. Under some pressure from Mussolini, who wanted the dig finished for an exposition scheduled for 1942 (but never inaugurated), he supervised the removal in four years of over 600,000 cubic yards of earth, recovering some seventy of the 170 acres enclosed within Ostia’s Sullan wall. What he uncovered he rejuvenated but did not falsify: his method was much the same as Spinazzola’s in Pompeii. This was his principle: “Better to brace than repair, better repair than restore, better restore than embellish; never add or subtract.” His aim was not to suppress inconvenient ugliness, but to remove impediments to study and understanding. He restored mosaics, making a clear distinction between the old _tesserae_ and the new; re-erected columns, put balconies back in place, rebuilt wooden ceilings to protect houses from the weather. He detached wall-paintings, reinforced them with cement and wire mesh, and replaced them, covered with glass, and protected against mold by the insertion of lead plates into the wall below the painting, to retard the spread, by capillary action, of dampness. He sealed the tops of walls, freed flights of stairs from rubble, opened out windows which had been bricked up in late antiquity. He planted trees, and set a privet hedge to mark the line of the city wall. He restored the ancient drainage-system. The result of all this careful work was to present to the modern world a picture of Roman life under the Empire only a shade less vivid than Pompeii. And the picture is not of a provincial town, but of the very vestibule of Rome itself, in fact a Rome in miniature, for Ostia gives an excellent notion of what life in the metropolis was like at the height of the Empire. And thanks to the careful work on the brick stamps by Professor Herbert Bloch of Harvard, most of the buildings excavated can be dated with a very fair degree of precision, so that Ostia’s development can be accurately traced from end to end.

We know from an inscription that Trajan’s artificial harbor, whose completion marked the beginning of Ostia’s peak of prosperity, was built in A.D. 104. Ostia proper was at the very mouth of the Tiber, but silting, which today has put the beach of modern Ostia (Ostia Lido) three miles beyond the seawall of the ancient town, early made the city docks impracticable for any but the smallest vessels, so that Trajan built his harbor beside (indeed over the necropolis of) Claudius’, two-and-a-half miles northwest of the town. The traffic in grain and luxury goods to feed and pander to the more or less refined tastes of the largest and richest city in the world made Ostia vastly prosperous. The evidence is building activity, dated by brick stamps, impressed on building tiles, and bearing the names of consuls, tile manufacturers, or both. There was a slight time-lag, while prosperity built up. Only twelve per cent of the datable buildings in Ostia belong to Trajan’s reign; forty-three per cent were built or restored under Hadrian. Then activity tapers off again: seventeen per cent of the buildings are of Antonine date (A.D. 138–192), while only twelve per cent belong to the age of the Severi (A.D. 193–235). Thereafter Ostia, whose fortunes rose with Rome’s, declines with her also.

The most illuminating way to describe what archaeology has to tell us about Ostia is to follow the plan used for Pompeii, treating in order the town and its population, municipal life and public amenities, housing arrangements, trade and industry, and the evidence for Ostia’s religious life. Art in Ostia hardly deserves separate treatment: it is, naturally, less well-preserved than at Pompeii, and what there is seldom rises above the level of pure documentation.

The plan of Ostia (Figs. 10.1 and 10.2) is regular but not regimented. It has unity in variety; it combines utility, a monumental quality, and the scenic. Its backbone is the major east-west street, the _decumanus_, nearly a mile long, and once colonnaded, which runs from the Porta Romana straight to the Forum. Beyond the line of the west _castrum_ wall it forks sharply to the left, ending at the Porta Marina, which once fronted directly on the sea. The main north-south street, the _cardo_, began at the Porta Laurentina on the south--Ostia’s triplicity of gates is an Etruscan heritage--and ran, shaded and porticoed, northwestward to the dazzling whiteness of the colonnaded, marble-enriched Forum. Then it split in two on either side of Hadrian’s Capitolium and passed north between balconied houses to the river. Sixteen per cent of Ostia’s total area, exactly the same proportion as a modern city such as Madison, Wisconsin, was devoted to streets. Twelve per cent of Ostia was taken up by baths, fifteen per cent by warehouses (for Ostia was first and foremost a commercial town), and fifty-seven per cent by houses, most of which are middle-class apartment blocks. Knowing the total housing area available, and calculating twenty-six square meters of space for each person, Calza reckoned the maximum population at 35,000 to 40,000.

The evidence for Ostia’s municipal life comes mostly from inscriptions, over 6000 of them, many unpublished. They show that Ostia, like most Italian towns, imitated Rome: since Rome had a pair of chief municipal officers, the consuls, Ostia had a pair also, the _duoviri_. There was a town council of 110 members, which met in a marble-floored council house facing the Forum. Legal activity went on across the street in the basilica, also paved with marble, and with a pleasant portico facing the Forum. It had a charming frieze of Cupids carrying garlands. Both buildings are of Trajanic date; the prevalence of marble in them can be explained by the ease with which the stone could be brought by ships in ballast. There was a municipal plutocracy, whose names occur and recur on honorific decrees (praising them for benefactions), and on tombs near the Porta Romana and Porta Marina. The names are those of businessmen and freedmen, not of the old Roman aristocratic families. And as the years wear on men seldom hold office more than once, for it grew to be an expensive honor. If taxes assessed by the Imperial treasury were not collected in full, town officers had to make up the deficit out of their own pockets.

Public amenities included a theater, baths, and a fire department. The theater, built in Augustus’ reign (about 12 B.C.), and often restored and enlarged, seats 2700, and is used nowadays for outdoor performances of Greek and Roman plays. Behind it is a portico where theater patrons might saunter, with a temple in its midst built by Domitian. In a combination of business with pleasure typical of Ostia, seventy offices face the four sides of the portico. These offices, to be discussed in more detail below, were maintained by local branches of firms from all over the Empire.

Ostia was well equipped with public baths. The three most interesting belong to the middle years of the second century A.D. The Baths of Neptune, near the theater (_Regio_ II, _Insula_ iv), have a large entrance hall paved with a spirited mosaic showing Neptune driving four sea-horses, surrounded by Tritons, Nereids, dolphins ridden by Cupids, fabulous sea monsters of every kind, and two young men swimming. The Baths of the Seven Sages (_Reg._ III,x) are named from a painting in their dressing room which depicts the seven wise men of Greece, each labelled with an off-color couplet describing in some detail the intimate connection between constipation and the intellectual life. The most interesting of all are the Forum Baths (_Reg._ I,xii). A recent study by an American heating engineer, E. D. Thatcher, underlines how well the Romans understood the principles of radiant heating (of floors, walls, bathing pools, and even vaults), and orientation of bathing rooms to catch the maximum amount of sunlight, and to provide a windbreak, so that, although the large windows were not glazed, the rooms were usable on most days of the year, even in winter, with additional provision, proved by put-holes, of a rigging of canvas for the coldest days. If the windows had been glazed, bathers could not have acquired a tan, whose therapeutic and fashionable implications were the same for an Ostian as for us. Thatcher calculates that an unglazed room in the Forum Baths was usable ninety-eight per cent of the time: hence glazing was not worth while. The Romans knew, as the Forum Baths show, that the flow of heat is always from a hotter body to a colder one, and that air temperature alone is no criterion of comfort. In fact one may be comfortable in a much lower air temperature than that found in most American houses and public buildings, provided one does not lose more heat than one is generating at the time. The floor and wall surfaces of the Forum Baths radiated enough warmth to keep bathers comfortable in relatively cool air with unglazed windows. The courtyard of the baths was paved with white mosaic to reflect light and heat. A room which commanded a maximum of sunlight has radiant heat in the floor only, not in the walls. The various rooms of the baths were heated to different temperatures; Romans achieved with differently heated areas what we achieve with thermostats. The whole complex of the Forum Baths, Thatcher concludes, shows a sophistication in the use of radiant heating well beyond what modern engineers have achieved.

Though brick construction made Ostia more nearly fireproof than a modern city of frame dwellings, the grain for the dole stored in the city’s numerous warehouses was too valuable a commodity to risk, so a cohort of firemen detached from the main corps in Rome was kept at the ready in barracks behind the Baths of Neptune (_Reg._ II,v). The barracks, built under Hadrian, surround an arcaded courtyard with rooms opening off. A latrine with a shrine in it thriftily combines cleanliness with godliness. At the end of the courtyard opposite the entrance is a platform which still bears the bases of statues of Emperors worshiped by the firemen as a part of the Imperial cult.

As at Pompeii, so at Ostia, the houses are the most interesting part of the city, not least because Ostian houses differ completely in plan from Pompeian ones. The great majority are apartment houses, tall, many-windowed brick blocks, with or without shops on the ground floor. They were designed to be rented out in flats, with separate access to the upper stories from the street. Some have balconies, opening both on the street and on garden courtyards where many families shared the pergolas, fountains, trees, shrubs, pools, and statue-studded lawns, as they shared also the large common latrines. The Casa dei Dipinti (_Reg._ III,iv; see Fig. 10.3) is such a block, built in Hadrian’s reign. The ground-floor flats have mosaic floors and paintings of mythological scenes, figures of poets and dancers, landscapes, and fantastic motifs. At the end of the garden is yet another of Ostia’s combinations of the useful with the ornamental: a number of large _dolia_, terracotta jars sunk in the ground for storing oil or grain. Despite the panegyrics of the excavators, there is a certain deadly sameness about these flats where the lower middle class lived their lives of quiet desperation, as they do in the unfashionable quarters of Rome today.

The occupants of Ostia’s flats were largely tradesmen or minor civil servants. Their livelihood came from Ostia’s two artificial harbors (Fig. 10.4). The earlier, begun under Claudius in A.D. 42, is now the site of a military airport, whose engineers have preserved the traces (Fig. 10.5) of the two curving moles which enclosed a basin over 850,000 square yards in area. Ancient sources say there was an artificial island between the arms of the moles, with a lighthouse on it which became the symbol of Ostia: it is often figured in mosaics. A canal, now the Fiumicino branch of the Tiber, connected the harbor with the main stream.

Grandiose as it was, the harbor was ill-protected from prevailing winds: a storm in A.D. 62 wrecked 200 ships anchored or berthed in it. Trajan therefore built a smaller but more efficient basin (Fig. 10.6), hexagonal in shape and with numbered berths where ships might tie up to discharge their cargoes directly into warehouses on all six sides. A complicated entrance with a right-angled turn protected it completely from the hazards which had plagued Claudius’ harbor; it also was connected with the Claudian canal. Nowadays it forms a pool on the Torlonia estate, and access to it is almost invariably refused.

FIG. 10.5 Ostia, harbors of Claudius (traces of the mole show in
a different color in the air photograph), and of Trajan (the
hexagon). (Italian Ministry of Aeronautics)
]

(Mostra Augustea della Romanità, _Catalogo_, Fig. 104)]

The ships that unloaded at the quays of Claudius’ or Trajan’s harbor came from all over the Mediterranean. Their agents had their in-town offices in the portico behind the Augustan theater, called by the Italians the _Piazzale delle Corporazioni_. Each office had an emblem in mosaic before its door, indicating the commodity it imported or the service it rendered. These mosaics, plus inscriptions, document the greatest variety of goods and services, giving a clear idea how busy the port of Rome was in the high Empire. The commodities included furs, wood, grain, beans, melons, oil, fish, wine, drugs, mirrors, flowers, ivory, gold, and silk. Among the service personnel were the caulkers, cordwainers, grain-measurers, maintenance-men for the docks, warehouses, and embankments, shipwrights, bargemen, carpenters, masons, muleteers, carters, stevedores, and divers for sunken cargoes. The home offices, often recorded in the mosaics, include ports famous or forgotten in North Africa, Sardinia, Gaul, and Spain. Ostia proper, as well as the ports, was full of warehouses where these multifarious goods were stored. Their plan, multistoried around a courtyard, was to influence the luxurious _palazzi_ of the Renaissance. (When McKim, Mead, and White built the Boston Public Library, for example, their ultimate model was an Ostia warehouse.) The headquarters of the various guilds grew, in the second and third centuries, very luxurious, with airy courtyards and temples in imported marble, testifying to the power and prosperity of these ancient labor unions. Perhaps, then as now, the labor leaders were more prosperous than the rank and file, for in Ostia as in Pompeii, the multitude of small shops, of fishmongers, fullers, and millers, and the omnipresent _thermopolia_ or bars, are humble enough, often with dark, cramped living quarters behind or on a mezzanine.

Ostia’s world-wide trade made her a melting-pot, and her temples reinforce the point. Besides the temples of the Imperial cults and the official religion, like the Temple of Rome and Augustus, Hadrian’s lofty Capitolium, and the half-scale Pantheon, all in the Forum, there is, near the Porta Laurentina (_Reg._ IV,i) the temple of the Phrygian Great Mother, where her emasculated priests once clashed their cymbals. Near the Porta Marina (_Reg._ III,xvii) is the temple of the Egyptian Serapis, conveniently located for sailors just in from the Levant. Everywhere there were shrines of the Persian Mithras: eighteen of them have been found, ranging in date from A.D. 160 to 250. They always occupy a retired, obscure corner of a pre-existent building; they are apparently intended to symbolize the cave where Mithras was born to his life of struggle with the powers of darkness for the immortal souls of men. They are usually oblong with shallow benches along the sides, with an altar or cult statue at the end. The favorite cult statute is of Mithras slaying the bull; being washed in the blood of a freshly slaughtered bull brought redemption into immortality to Mithras’ votaries. One Ostian Mithraeum, that of Felicissimus (_Reg._ V,ix; see Fig. 10.7) has a mosaic pavement representing the seven stages of initiation, somewhat like the degrees of freemasonry. Each has its appropriate symbol: the Crow, the Bridegroom, the Soldier, the Lion, the Persian (with a scimitar), the Sun-runner, and the Father, or Worshipful Master. The cult was for men only: it appealed to merchants, freedmen and soldiers.

In the fourth century in Ostia some of these were won away by another Oriental religion, Christianity. A house (_Reg._ IV, iii) with a mosaic of the communion chalice, set with the Christian symbol of the fish (the initial letters of the word for “fish” in Greek stand for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”) may have been the residence of the bishop. A remodeled bath (_Reg._ III,i) made over into a humble Christian basilica, may be the place where Augustine worshiped in A.D. 387, as recorded in his _Confessions_. Part of the tombstone of his mother Monica, who died in Ostia, was found a few years ago in the neighboring modern village of Ostia Antica. The altar of the Mithraeum next to the basilica was found smashed by Christian wrath into a thousand pieces.

(G. Becatti, _Scavi di Ostia_, 2, p. 107)]

When Saint Augustine worshiped in Ostia, the city was already in full decline. The Emperor Constantine had revoked its municipal status, and assigned it to the village called Portus which had grown up around Trajan’s harbor. The cemetery of Portus, on Isola Sacra, the island between the Fiumicino and the principal mouth of the Tiber, contains a few Christian burials. It is chiefly noteworthy for the class distinctions it reveals between the wealthy in their fine vaulted brick tombs, embellished with paintings and mosaics (very like those found in the cemetery under St. Peter’s), and the poor, whose ashes rest in the miserable amphorae stuck in the low-lying ground. By the end of the fourth century, burials in this cemetery ceased, mute and pathetic evidence of the decline of Portus itself. Ostia proper agonized on to its end. The flat slabs of inscriptions are re-used as shop-counters, or to mend pavements. Architectural marbles are sawed up into latrine-seats. Statues are reduced to lime or used, whole or decapitated, to repair breaches in the city wall. The water-pipes break and are not repaired, fallen house-walls are left lying, rubble piles up forty feet deep. Sacked by the barbarian, decimated by malaria, Ostia by the fifth century was desolate, and the road to Rome overgrown with trees. Only a Christian chapel by the theater, marking the spot where a Christian was martyred, was left to mark the spot.

* * * * *

Besides embellishing the Forum at Ostia with its basilica and council-house, Trajan, through his architect, the Syrian Apollodorus of Damascus, adorned Rome with the last, largest, and finest of the Imperial Fora (see Figs. 5.13 and 9.4). We know from an inscribed record, the _Fasti Ostienses_, found in re-use to repair a floor in an ancient private house in Ostia, that its dedication day was May 18, A.D. 113. Its general plan has been known since the French excavations of 1812. Its inspiration is the porticoes of Caesar’s Forum and the apses and the Hall of Fame of Augustus’. In conception it is axially symmetric and tripartite: the Forum proper, the basilica, and the famous Column behind, flanked by a pair of libraries. Hadrian added the Temple of the Deified Trajan, now destroyed, which closed the vista to the west.