Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

The Forum proper lay at right angles to the Forum of Augustus, its façade bowed slightly out, like the _Forum Transitorium_. Its entrance was through a triumphal arch, added in A.D. 117, after Trajan’s death. In the middle of the great porticoed square, over 620 feet wide, with apses on either side, was placed a great equestrian statue of Trajan; the Romans used to say that never did a horse have such a stable.

At the back of the open square which forms the Forum proper lay the basilica, its two short sides curved, like the sides of the Forum, into apses. The basilica presents its long side to the Forum as Italian basilicas regularly did, but was much grander than the basilicas of Alba, Cosa, or even the Basilica Julia in the old Forum. The basilica had two double rows of columns, in gray granite and polychrome marble: the yellow _giallo antico_, from Numidia; the striated green _cipollino_, “onion-stone”; the purple-streaked _pavonazzetto_, “peacock-stone”--Italian masons have over 500 different names for marble. The architraves were marble, crystalline white from Mt. Pentelicus in Attica. The walls were veneered with marble, from Carrara. The roof was plated with gilt bronze. It was this magnificence which the Christians sought to imitate in their great early basilica churches in Rome, where the high altar stood in the place of the judges’ tribunal: Old St. Peter’s, Santa Sabina, St. John Lateran, St.-Paul’s-Without-the-Walls, San Lorenzo. Trajan’s goodness as _optimus princeps_ was legendary to early Christians; Trajan’s basilica supplied a noble model for early Christian churches; Pope Sixtus V did Trajan a grave injustice when he replaced his statue at the top of the Column with one of St. Peter.

Behind the basilica a pair of small libraries, one Greek and one Latin, faced the tiny square in the midst of which rose Trajan’s 100-foot column. Its shaft, of Parian marble, was wound about with 155 scenes on the twenty-three spirals of the great scroll, whose bands grow wider the higher they go, so that they were “readable” to a great height, especially from the library balconies. Unrolled, the scroll would be 650 feet long. It described in 2500 figures the events of Trajan’s two campaigns, of A.D. 101–102 and 105–106, against the Dacians, ancestors of the modern Rumanians. It is because of Trajan’s conquests, imposing Roman culture, that Rumanians speak a Romance language, derived from Latin, today.

To what that great scroll has to tell us about the Roman attitude--and the sculptor’s--to the art of war we shall return. For the moment another matter is of interest: the inscription on the column-base. It states that the column marks the height of earth that was removed to make room for it. For centuries it was inferred that Trajan’s engineers had cut away a whole saddle connecting the Esquiline with the Capitoline Hill. But in 1907 Boni published the results of excavations around the base of the column, which revealed a street, a wall, and houses, dated by their pottery--Arretine and earlier--to the late Republic. Hence there probably never was a saddle of hill here. What then does the inscription mean? Boni fixed his eye on the terraced slope of the Quirinal to the north of the Forum, and concluded--rightly, as later excavation proved--that what Trajan was referring to was the cutting down and terracing of this slope for some purpose to be connected with the Forum. What that purpose was did not transpire until 1928, when Corrado Ricci cleared the area of medieval and later accretions and discovered the six levels of Trajan’s Market (Fig. 10.8).

The terrace treatment clearly goes back for inspiration to the Sanctuary of Fortune at Praeneste. Brick stamps show that the Market was built before the Forum: the shape in which the hill was dug out left space for the Forum apse when it came to be built. Form follows function: the hemicycle shows the classical virtues of symmetry, regularity, and creative exploitation of tradition, but the shape is practical, too: it allows space for nearly twice as many rooms as would have been possible with a rectilinear front. The shop fronts are good-looking as well as utilitarian. The ground floor rooms are handsomely framed in travertine; the second level windows are arched, and framed with pilasters, much as at Praeneste, with pediments alternately curved and triangular, the triangular pediments are sometimes deliberately broken, never coming to an apex, a trick of style imitated with success by eighteenth century English furniture designers like Chippendale. But this is an old thing in a new way, for here the material is not stone but brick, the beautifully-proportioned rose-red Roman kind, used unashamedly without veneer of stucco or marble, like the rose-red arcades of Renaissance Bologna.

Some of the rooms have drains in the floor for carrying of spilled liquid; the inference is that these were wine or oil shops; those without such provision would be for dry commodities like grain. There are 150 of these shops altogether, all more or less identical. The whole complex has the air not of private enterprise but of a government project, and it seems a reasonable guess that here we have the headquarters of the _annona_, the government dole of wine, oil, and grain, the cargoes of the ships that docked in Trajan’s port of Ostia.

Access to the second level is by stairs at either end of the hemicycle, not in the middle. The split approach is borrowed from the exedra of Terrace VII at Praeneste. (It was brick stamps in these stairs that enabled Bloch to date this complex in the first decade of the second century A.D.). The second-floor shops open onto a semicircular vaulted corridor with windows opening on the Forum. On the third level variety within unity, plus ease of access for wagons, is achieved by a semicircular street on which the third level shops face. A straight stretch of paving running north and south, called the Via Biberatica--“Pepper or Spice Street”--and concealed by the façade, contains shops with balconies, as at Ostia. Stairs ascend from this level to a great rectangular cross-vaulted basilical hall, with shops opening off it at two levels. Some archaeologists think this was the place where the dole was distributed; others see in it ancient Rome’s wholesale grain, oil, and wine market, like the Pit in Chicago where bidding fixes the day’s commodity prices. The interconnecting suites of rooms on the fifth and sixth levels are clearly not shops, but offices for administrative personnel. One large centrally-located room, with a view over the whole complex, would be a good place for the office of the superintendent of the entire affair, the _praefectus annonae_.

Trajan’s Market did not let his people forget his generosity. Trajan’s Column did not let them forget his prowess in war. Though casts have often been made of the reliefs on the column--the earliest to the order of Francis I of France, in 1541--the best photographs were not taken until 1942, when a scaffolding erected around the column to protect it from air attack made close-ups possible. The _optimus princeps_ appears more than fifty times, larger than life. He dominates the sea voyages (he handles the tiller personally), the marches, the river-crossings, the councils of war, the reviews, the encounters in the open field, the sieges, the sacrifices, the submissions of enemy chiefs.

Because of the fascinating detail of the reliefs, Trajan’s Column tells us as much about the Roman army and navy as Pompeii and Ostia do about civilian life. Nor is this all: we learn a great deal, too, about provincial and native customs and culture. Most important, the unknown sculptor has impressed his personality and his feelings upon what he carved. There is an occasional touch of rough humor--a slave falling off a mule, a Dacian ducked in the Danube--and a scene or two in which Trajan, deprecating the humility of submissive native chiefs, seems to be following Vergil’s advice to spare the meek. But the dominant note is Vergil’s, too: the horror of war. Some of the detail is worth recording.

The army and navy first. The transports, with cars in two banks, and auxiliary sail, have ramming-beaks, adorned with an enormous eye, for luck, or with a sea monster. The soldiers are jacks-of-all-trades: we see them woodcutting and reaping, but most often at the interminable work of building palisaded camps, with tents of skins, a new camp every night when they were on the march. They built their permanent camps of squared stones: the sculptor shows the soldiers carrying them in slings on their shoulders, or in baskets. The walls had towers, with balconies, from which flaming torches gave signals by night. Catapults were mounted on the battlements; other catapults are horse or mule drawn, or mounted on improvised wooden bases like stacked railroad ties. We see the standards of the legions--the famed Eagles--and the standard-bearers, wearing animal heads for helmets, like Hercules. On the march the men carry their gear in bundles on the ends of their pikes, like tramps with their worldly goods done up in a bandanna.

We see something of provincial towns and their citizens. The army embarked from an Adriatic port, Ancona or Brindisi, and sailed across to Illyricum. Here the cities ape Rome, with arches, columned temples, theaters, and amphitheaters. The citizens turn out in a body, leading their children by the hand, to greet their Emperor with upraised right arms, as in a Fascist salute, and to offer sacrifice. The Danube is crossed on a great bridge, the work of Apollodorus, with masonry piers and wooden superstructure. Then one is in wild country, with exotic flora and fauna, including an especially bloodthirsty wild boar. The natives live in straw huts, and wear trousers: this last, to a Roman, sure proof of barbarism. In battle they use short hooked swords, and carry sinister dragon-head standards. Their cavalry, horses and all, are protected from head to foot with scaly armor.

It is exciting, but it is terrible. Dacian women burn Romans alive; Romans impale the severed heads of Dacians before the walls of their camp (Fig. 10.9), or present them, dripping with gore, to the Emperor. A Dacian is assassinated with a sword thrust as he pleads for mercy. Bodies are trampled underfoot in battle, prisoners are dragged along by the hair. The Dacian king commits suicide rather than fall into Roman hands; his subjects burn their capital to the ground to deny it to the Romans. The story of the first campaigns is separated from the second by a Victory writing on a shield; immediately thereafter the deadly, monotonous round begins again. The pathos of some of the scenes heightens the horror, as when two comrades carry tenderly from the field the limp body of a mortally wounded Dacian youth, or a whole tribe, with babies in arms, or children carried on their fathers’ shoulders, comes to make the act of submission. At the end looting, with the Dacian treasure loaded on the backs of mules. These scenes, with their implied criticism of warfare, are the closest the Romans ever came to pacifism.

The province won with so much blood, sweat, and tears by Trajan was consolidated by his successor Hadrian (who had fought in the campaigns) and taught the arts of peace. Hadrian, that restless traveler, spent little of his reign in Rome, but he adorned the city with some of its grandest buildings, for which he himself probably drew the plans, and he built near suburban Tivoli a villa greater than Versailles.

11

An Emperor-Architect: Hadrian

About Trajan’s successor Hadrian (A.D. 117–138) archaeology and literature, interlocking, tell us so much that we can write his biography from his buildings, with an occasional assist from written sources. The buildings of his reign are numerous and brilliantly designed. We shall take as examples three from Rome and three from the unique complex of his Villa near Tivoli: the Temple of Venus and Rome, the Pantheon, and his mausoleum; the _Teatro Marittimo_, the _Piazza d’Oro_, and the Canopus. All can be dated with more precision than usual, because in Hadrian’s time the practice became general of stamping bricks with the names of the consuls of the year they were made. Professor Bloch’s accurate study of, and sound inference from, over 4600 stamps, most of them from Hadrian’s reign, have put all students of Roman archaeology deeply in his debt.

An attempt to understand Hadrian through his buildings rests upon the hypothesis that he was himself his own architect, inspired by the ferment of building activity in Rome in Domitian’s and Trajan’s reigns, when he was growing up. The hypothesis is perhaps justified by an inference from an anecdote recorded by Dio Cassius, a Roman senator and consul from Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor, who wrote in Greek a history of Rome from the beginning to A.D. 229. Dio’s story is that once when Trajan was in conference with his architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, Hadrian interrupted, and Apollodorus, angered, said, “Oh, go and design your pumpkins!” We infer that Apollodorus’ reference to “pumpkins” was intended to pour scorn on certain of Hadrian’s designs for vaults, involving pumpkin-like concave segments with re-entrant groins between, such as are still to be seen in Hadrian’s Villa, in the vestibule of the Piazza d’Oro, and in the Serapeum at the end of the Canopus (Fig. 11.1). The same anecdote records that Apollonius so piqued Hadrian, later, by his criticisms of the design of the Emperor’s Temple of Venus and Rome, that Hadrian had him first exiled and then put to death. This is how Hadrian is established as an architect, and a vindictive one at that.

Hadrian’s most baroque flights of architectural fancy are to be seen at his villa near Tivoli, where the various complexes of buildings are scattered over an area 1000 yards one way by 500 yards the other. The buildings, which far outdid Nero’s Golden House in extent and grandeur, include palaces, large and small, for manic and for depressive moods (plan [Fig. 11.2] A,G,R,S,T,U,V,W), guest-quarters (B), a pavilion (C), dining rooms (D,E,K), baths (F,O,P), a library (the apsed building to the right of G), porticoes (H,J), pools (between H and J, and northwest of X), slave quarters (J,N), a stadium (L), many cryptoporticoes (for example, M), firemen’s barracks (between A and M), a palaestra or wrestling ground (Q), and a vaulted temple of Serapis (X). Excavation, and the carrying off of statues, with which Roman museums are crammed, began as early as 1535, and continues to the present. It has been followed by reconstruction (Fig. 11.3) and general tidying up: the Italian authorities report the clearing away of 13,200 pounds of briers!

The setting of Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli takes full advantage of landscape: the view embraces mountains in one direction, distant Rome and the sea in the other. There is the color of pines, olives, ripe grain, pasture, and vineyard, the sound of cicadas by day and nightingales at twilight. And when the villa was new, everywhere was the sound of water and the color of marble. For this enormous Folly, this Roman Versailles, the immensity of all this space devoted to the whims of one man, untrammelled by any limitations of technique or money, is the perfected product of 200 years of Roman experience in elegant country living. Its builder occupied it but little. Eleven of the twenty-one restless years of his reign were spent in foreign travel. He named parts of his villa for famous buildings and places he had seen in the Greek East: the Academy and the Painted Porch (_Stoa Poecile_) in Athens, the Canopus near Alexandria. He even created a mile of cryptoporticoes which he called a “Hell” (_Inferi_, the Lower Regions): in his tortured life he had been there, too, as we shall see. But the buildings are idiosyncratic, not imitative, except in the creative Roman way. Hadrian, the Spaniard, was quick to learn. He always spoke Latin with an accent (his Greek was better), but his architecture was pure Graeco-Roman, using the architectural vocabulary of the past to create a new architectural language of his own.

His earliest architectural essay at the villa, to judge from the brick stamps, is the so-called “_Teatro Marittimo_” (the round complex at G; see also Fig. 11.4). Its earliest bricks date from the first year of his reign. (Of course the bricks need not have been used in the year they were made, and indeed will often have been put aside for several years to season.) Some bricks in the fabric of the _Teatro Marittimo_ are dated A.D. 123, an _annus mirabilis_ in Roman brick production, to meet the vast requirements of Hadrian’s many projects, some ready to build, some still on the drawing-board. These bricks point to later restorations of the original plan, but the point here is that the fundamental design, very characteristic of Hadrian, must have been laid down early. Much light on this complex, and on the villa as a whole, has been cast by the sensitive, perceptive work of the German Heinz Kähler, who, undaunted by the burning of all his carefully drawn plans in World War II, redid and published them in 1950, illuminating as never before our picture of Hadrian as man and architect.

The entrance to the _Teatro Marittimo_ was through a portico to the north (at the bottom of the air photograph) which approached a door in a high circular brick wall, insuring complete privacy from the rest of the villa. Inside the wall was a circular portico, concentric with the portico a moat. The _Teatro Marittimo_ is now restored (through the philanthropy of an Italian tire manufacturer, impressed by the likeness of its plan to his product), and the moat is filled with water. When it was dry, its floor showed a pair of grooves in an arc, one on either side of the main axis. The grooves were made by the rollers of a drawbridge worked from a small room on the edge of the inner circle. On the site of one of the drawbridges there is now a permanent foot-bridge, visible in the air photograph. On the circular island, the columned arc between the drawbridges is a vestibule where the Emperor might receive his friends. Beyond it is a diamond-shaped peristyle, originally with a fountain in the middle: its sides are segments of circles which if projected would be tangent to the outer wall of the moat. Beyond the peristyle is an apsidal room; the apse has the same arc as the vestibule. This would be a pleasant place for intimate dinner parties. The rooms on either side might be bedrooms. A broad window opens from the dining room onto the moat, with a view directly on an alcove let into the circular wall on the axis of the far side. From the alcove the view leads through eleven differently shaped and differently lighted spaces back to the entrance portico and a far-distant fountain to the north.

It remains to describe the rooms east and west of the peristyle. The central apsidal room of the three on the west (to the right of the peristyle in the air photograph) is a deep bath with a window over the moat. Steps lead up to the low sill: Hadrian could choose between tub and moat for bathing. To the south is the dressing room, to the north the steam bath and furnace room. East of the peristyle is a circular room whose interior cross-walls form a double T, creating two alcoves for reading. Each would be appropriate to its season: the eastern for winter mornings and summer afternoons, the western for summer mornings and winter afternoons. The two adjoining rooms would be just right for a small library, of some 1500 rolls, half Greek and half Latin; the main library lay conveniently to the southwest (right center in the air photograph). It is tempting to see in this suite of rooms the study where the Emperor wrote his resigned, sentimental, mannered little poem to his soul (or is it to the soul of his beloved Antinous?):

“_Little soul, gentle and drifting,
Guest and companion of my body,
Now you will dwell below in pallid places,
Stark and bare;
There you will abandon your play of yore._”

The remaining odd corners would house latrines, little conservatories, cupboards, and pantries.

This earliest Hadrianic building perfectly expresses one aspect of the man: his genius, his moodiness, his striving for form, his restlessness. With its wall, its moat, and its drawbridge, it is all designed for privacy and quiet. From any room one gets a view of variously lighted sections of space: _chiaroscuro_ to match moods grave and gay. In the midst of axial symmetry, unrest is everywhere: in the curved forms, in the abrupt switches from light to dark, from roofed to open spaces, from horizontal architraves to the vertical play of the central fountain. The unrest is central: the midpoint is water and inaccessible. Tension and split are expressed in the divided bridge approach. All is indirection, schizophrenia, avoidance of forthrightness. As an architectural exercise, it is uniquely abstract, a proposition of Euclid in brick and marble, at one moment seeming to involve nothing but circles, at another, nothing but squares. It is probably no accident that its total diameter is almost exactly the same as the Pantheon’s. It would have suited the complexity of Hadrian’s mind to design a grandiose habitation for all the gods to the self-same dimensions as this splendid toy, the habitation of a restless, schizophrenic man whom his subjects worshipped as a god. The gods had made Hadrian in their own image; seconded by flattering courtiers, he was returning the compliment.

The next building in Hadrian’s architectural biography is his Temple of Venus and Rome, built facing the Coliseum to rival the most splendid buildings of Athens and the Greek East. Literary sources give its foundation date as Rome’s birthday, April 21, A.D. 121; the brick-stamps, of 123, 134, and the fourth century, tell the story of long years of building and late restoration. The restoration probably followed Hadrianic lines; at any rate the proportion of straight to curved profiles in the apses--exactly half and half--is Hadrianic language, repeated in the Pantheon. The essence of the plan is two apses back to back, one for Venus and one for the goddess Roma. They may be interpreted as a colossal architectural pun. Venus is a goddess of love, Love is AMOR, and AMOR is ROMA spelled backward. The symbolism does not stop here. Hadrian is Caesar: his is the heritage, if not the blood, of the Julian line, and the temple is a reminder of the greatness of Rome, firmly established by Augustus, and smiled upon by Augustus’ ancestress, Venus. The plan (Fig. 11.5 and 11.6) was ingenious and devious, in Hadrian’s manner. The exterior is foursquare and conventional: the interior, with its vaults and apses, was novel and emphasized curves: compare the interplay of the square and the round in the _Teatro Marittimo_. Daring as it was, the design was the butt of the criticisms which cost Apollodorus his life. He had said that the temple should have been set on a high podium, which could have housed various paraphernalia useful in the Coliseum opposite, and that the vaulted apses had been designed too low for the statues in them: “If the goddesses wish to get up and go out, they will be unable to do so.” The first half of Apollodorus’ criticism is unjustified: Hadrian was designing a Greek temple, not an Italic one. About the second half we cannot judge, for certain, for brick stamps show the apses to belong to the fourth century reconstruction, but the proportions, as we saw, are Hadrianic (Fig. 11.7). The temple was set in the midst of a forest of sixty-six columns of grey granite. When it was re-excavated in 1932, some of the columns were re-erected; the positions of others were ingeniously marked by clumps of shrubbery trimmed to the proper shape. The excavators found under the pavement an octagonal room interesting in itself, and significant for its place in Roman architecture. The level at which it was found is lower than that of Nero’s Golden House. (Hadrian’s temple was built in the grounds of what had once been the Golden House; the reader will recall the twenty-four elephants needed to move the colossal statue of Nero and make room for the temple.) The octagonal shape appears in the dining room of the Golden House itself, in Domitian’s palace on the Palatine, and in a room in the Small Baths at Hadrian’s villa (O on the plan, Fig. 11.2). The cupola of Nero’s octagonal dining room, together with its lighting through a hole in the roof, reappears on a grand scale in the Pantheon. This is what we mean by saying that Hadrian adapted to his own new architectural language the vocabulary of pre-Neronian, Neronian, and Domitianic buildings. Here once again modern archaeology illuminates the development of Roman architecture by demonstrating and dating the classical use of new things in old ways, and old things in new.

Shortly after the consecration of the Temple of Venus and Rome, Hadrian set out on the first of his great tours of his Empire. He visited the western provinces, making arrangements, among other things, for the building of the great wall bearing his name that runs from Tyne to Solway in the north of England. He visited the provinces of Africa, Cyrene and Crete. Finally, in A.D. 123, he reached Bithynia, and there met Antinous (Fig. 11.8), the sulky, langorous, adolescent boy who, for the remaining seven years of his short life, and even more after his tragic death by drowning--perhaps suicide--in the suburb of Alexandria called Canopus, was to dominate Hadrian’s existence and inspire his whole creative activity. It is not surprising that the Emperor, childless and unhappily married, should find deep satisfaction in the company of this boy. The psychological aspects of the affair, and the possible effect of Hadrian’s infatuation upon his architecture have been treated with delicacy and understanding by Marguerite Yourcenar and Eleanor Clark.

The first Hadrianic building that could have been designed after the meeting with Antinous is the Pantheon (Fig. 11.9), “the oldest important roofed building in the world that still stands intact.” On the evidence of the brick-stamps, its framework was complete by A.D. 125, and the whole building perhaps finished by 128. Until 1892 the building passed as the work of Augustus’ lieutenant Agrippa, because the inscription that runs across the architrave of the rectangular porch in front of the drum, “Marcus Agrippa built this when he was consul for the third time” (27 B.C.), was taken at its face value. But in 1892 the entire fabric was found to be full of stamped bricks of Hadrianic date, and the building therefore Hadrianic throughout (with Severan restorations, also recorded in an inscription). The Agrippa inscription partly follows the Roman practice of repeating the original dedication in a restored structure, partly reflects the Emperor’s mock modesty. His involuted nature found satisfaction in seldom inscribing his own name on the buildings he designed. His contemporaries knew well enough who the architect was. And the elaborate mystification served also to point up his identifying himself with Augustus, which we saw first in the Temple of Venus and Rome. Whether Hadrian thought of himself as a new Augustus or not, certainly Augustan domed buildings at the seaside resort of Baiae, on the Bay of Naples, influenced his architecture. Hadrian played the game out in the way he handled the transition between the circular and the rectangular parts of his plan (Fig. 11.10). On either side of the entrance to the drum, behind the porch, he designed rectangular projections with huge half-vaulted apses cut out of the front: one of these apses would have contained a statue of Agrippa, the other of Augustus. And Romans passing between them (through the great bronze entrance doors that still survive) would marvel at how self-effacing was their Emperor-architect.

The interior (Fig. 11.11) carries forward that liberation of religious architecture from the Greek tyranny of the rectangular box, which can only come about through the use of poured concrete, and which we saw first in the Sanctuary of Fortune at Praeneste. Here Hadrian plays with geometrical abstractions, as in the Teatro Marittimo. The game is to describe a sphere in a cylinder: if the curve of the dome were projected beyond the point where it meets the vertical walls of the drum, the bottom of the curve would be just tangent with the floor. The very pavement, with its alternation of squares and circles, plays up the geometrical _jeu d’esprit_. (Beneath this pavement lies the simple rectangular plan of Agrippa’s temple.) Furthermore, both the plan and the interior view show that the walls of the drum are not solid, and that they continue the architect’s vast toying with geometrical concepts. The walls are lightened with niches (for statues; one, of Venus, wore Cleopatra’s pearls in her ears). The niches are alternately rectangular and curved; the result is that the hemispherical cupola is supported not on a solid wall but on eight huge piers. In order to reduce the bearing weight of the superstructure upon the niches, into the concrete fabric above the apertures were built, concealed by polychrome marble revetment, elaborate brick relieving arches, which run as barrel vaults right through the walls. The cupola itself is designed with sunken stepped coffers, to lighten it, and to exaggerate the perspective, and to play yet again with the alternation of curve and straight line. The concrete of the cupola, which is thinner toward the top, is made with pumice, the lightest material available. But in spite of the pains taken to lighten the enormous mass, the piers gave under the weight of the cupola, and external buttresses proved necessary (see plan, Fig. 11.10), which spoiled the exterior effect. Hadrian is an amateur to the end; his vaults do not hold, his cupolas need bracing, his foundations give--and yet the essence of his designs has lasted forever.

The Pantheon is lighted solely through the great hole, thirty feet across, at the top of the cupola. (The building is so large that the inconvenience from rain is negligible.) The best possible idea of the perfection of this great building is to be gained by looking down into the interior from high above, from the edge of the hole in the roof. This dizzy height, at which one may glory or despair according to the measure of one’s acrophobia, is reached by a stair behind the left apse in the porch. The stair gives access to the cornice at the top of the drum; one then walks half-way round the cornice, which is wide but unrailed, to the back of the drum, where a flight of steps, only half-railed, leads up over the lead plates (the original gilt bronze was sent to Constantinople in the seventh century), to the aperture, from which those with a head for heights can gauge the aesthetic satisfaction of realizing that the interior is exactly as high as it is wide. The total effect, massive, daring, playing with space, yet not entirely successful technically, reflects the man.

One wonders what Hadrian’s tortured and cynical spirit would make of the vicissitudes his building has suffered. A Barberini pope in the seventeenth century used the bronze of the porch roof to make the canopy over the high altar of St. Peter’s, and guns for the papal fortress, Castel Sant’ Angelo (which had once been Hadrian’s mausoleum); of this vandalism the wags of 1625 made the famous epigram, “_Quod non fecerunt barbari fecerunt Barberini_,” which might be paraphrased, “The Barberini rush in where barbarians fear to tread.” At the same time Bernini added a pair of ridiculous bell towers--called “the ass’s ears”--which were not taken down until the nineteenth century. Perhaps Hadrian would be better pleased to know that men like himself were buried in his building: a great creative artist--Raphael--and two Italian kings.

While the Pantheon was being built, an activity unexampled in the history of Roman architecture was going on at the villa. To the fruitful years after 125 belongs the uniquely inspired plan (Fig. 11.12) of the most important palace in the villa complex, called the _Piazza d’Oro_, the Golden Square. Its “pumpkin” vestibule (K in the plan) has already been mentioned. In many of its features, including the hole in the roof, the eight supporting piers, and the alternation of curved and rectilinear niches, it is a quarter-scale Pantheon, but there is greater frankness in the display of the structure, both internally, in the groined vault, and externally, where the octagonal plan is left clearly visible, instead of being concealed by the skin of the drum, as in the Pantheon. Except perhaps for the cross-vaulted passages N,N, the portico is conventional; excavation in the summer of 1958 revealed footings for formal flower beds, as in the portico of Pompey’s theater, and in Vespasian’s Forum of Peace.

The part of the complex which shows Hadrian’s full genius is the palace-block, south of the portico (plan A-I). Here the vastness, sweep, and richness of the _Piazza d’Oro_ comes to its climax in a design which has been called lyrical, feminine, and even Mozartian. Here, if anywhere, can be detected the influence of Antinous. The frieze-motif, for example, is Cupids (riding sea-monsters), but since this theme is borrowed from the _Teatro Marittimo_, which, at least in its earliest phase, antedates Antinous, too much should not be made of it. The center of the composition is the four-leaf-clover room at A, with a fountain in the middle. Its walls sweep in and out, with a sinuous, wave-like movement, as though the room were alive, and breathing. The outswinging arcs open into light-wells (C,C; B is a curved nymphaeum, with statue-niches alternately curved and rectilinear, from beneath which the water flowed down steps into a reflecting pool; the fourth side is the entrance). The inswinging arcs open into bell-shaped rooms (a,a,a,a). These serve to counter the thrust of the centrally-pierced cupola (see the reconstruction, Fig. 11.13), which may have successfully solved the problem of transition from octagonal ground-plan to circular dome. The cupola was supported (none too well, for it has fallen and left no trace) on eight delicate piers, in what we now see to be Hadrian’s standard but ever-varied manner. The six tiny apsidal rooms (b) are latrines; their water-supply came from fountains at the back of the bell-shaped diagonal rooms, yet another example of the Roman combination of the useful with the ornamental.

Off the central clover-leaf open on each side five rectangular rooms (I is a late addition), all but one barrel-vaulted; the exception (G) had a cross-vault. Each set opens onto a light well. At the back of the central room (E) in each set is a statue-niche. The view from the back of these rooms runs, as in the _Teatro Marittimo_, through variegated light and shade. E was diagonally lit from the light-well; the light-well itself, a variant on the conventional atrium, had probably a square _compluvium_, or open skylight; the central room was lit by the round cupola-aperture, and so on. The whole design, with its indirect lighting, plays of water, and works of art, is light and gay, reflecting the Emperor’s brief years of pleasure with his _inamorato_; what the Empress Sabina thought is not recorded. But here again is the tension that comes from an inaccessible midpoint. And whose statues were in the niches? Whatever may have been the case in Antinous’ lifetime, after his death Hadrian deified him, identifying him with Apollo, Dionysus, Hermes, Silvanus, Osiris, and other gods, and surrounded himself with reminders of him in marble. Of the statues of Antinous in Roman museums, a number variously estimated at from sixteen to thirty comes from the villa.

Hadrian’s happiness was short-lived. In A.D. 128 he set out again on his travels, accompanied by Antinous. They wintered at Athens, which Hadrian enriched with monuments, passed over into Asia Minor, and down through Syria into Egypt. Here, in 130, Antinous died, probably a suicide, to please his master or to avoid his passion. Hadrian’s grief was more baroque than any of his buildings. From this point his life becomes one long death-wish. The most massive symbol of this is his mausoleum, whose great concrete drum, approached by Hadrian’s bridge, the _Pons Aelius_ (nowadays the Ponte Sant’ Angelo) still dominates the right bank of the Tiber near St. Peter’s. The latest Hadrianic bricks in it are dated A.D. 134; it must have become an important part of the Emperor’s plans when he returned to Rome, mourning Antinous, in 132 or 133. Its plan goes back to Etruscan _tumuli_, via the Mausoleum of Augustus--creative imitation again. The square block on which the drum rests has almost exactly the dimensions of the Augustan monument’s diameter. A spiral ramp leads up to the tomb chamber in the very center of the drum. The top was spread with earth and planted with cypresses, the trees of death (Fig. 11.14), and the whole surmounted by a colossal group in bronze, perhaps of Hadrian in a four-horse chariot, now replaced by the archangel Michael, who gives the mausoleum its present name, Castel Sant’ Angelo. When the death he longed for agonizingly came, from dropsy, in A.D. 138, Hadrian’s ashes were laid beside those of the wife he had never loved, in the core of the monument which symbolized his despair at the death of the only creature to whom this strange man had ever given his affection. The great pile has been successively fortress, prison (immuring, among others, the great Renaissance scientist Giordano Bruno), and, since 1934, military museum.

Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Piazza d’Oro, reconstruction.

(H. Kähler, _Hadrian_, Pl. 16)]

Rome, Hadrian’s Mausoleum, reconstruction.

(S. R. Pierce, _Journ. Rom. Stud._ 15 [1925])]

But before his death Hadrian dedicated one more section of the villa to mourning his loss. This is the Canopus (Figs. 11.1 and 11.15), named for the suburb of Alexandria where Antinous met his untimely and unhappy end. The original plan may have antedated Antinous’ death--the latest stamps reported by Bloch are dated A.D. 126--but after the disaster Hadrian, deliberately turning the knife in the wound, must have made this complex a memorial of the place where it happened. For the approach is along a pool (excavated and restored 1954–1957) intended to be reminiscent of the canal which gave access to the Canopus at Alexandria. The latest finds make it possible to restore the pool with its south end fitted with dining couches. The north end is apsidal, edged with a curious colonnade whose architrave is flat over one pair of columns and arched over the next pair. Along the sides were found perfect (and entirely unimaginative) copies of the Caryatids, the maidens who upheld the south porch of the Erechtheum; these would be memories of past happiness in Athens. Flanking the maidens were Sileni. Other marbles, adorning the apsidal north end of the colonnade, included, in order, an Amazon, a Hermes, a river god representing the Tiber, another representing the Nile, an Ares, and another Amazon. All this uninspired archaism is depressing; in the ageing, heartbroken Hadrian taste and inspiration alike are dead.

The colonnade led to the terminal half-dome (another “pumpkin,” it will be recalled) and secondary structures, the whole long known as the Serapeum (there was such a temple in the Alexandrian Canopus). It is complex in plan, at once _nymphaeum_ and temple, with its hemicycle deepened at the back into a long narrow apsidal gallery in which some commentators have seen a deep sexual significance. Here Hadrian has turned, to catalyze his flagging inspiration, to older civilizations, dead or dying like himself. Once again, for the last time, and feebly, he has made of what they have to offer something uniquely his own. In the Canopus, as in the Teatro Marittimo and the Piazza d’Oro, there is no single satisfactory viewpoint: the result is an effect of motion, in curved space, in varied light and shade, involved with water, the whole a polyphonic counterpart to Hadrian’s own restlessness.

The buildings we have studied present a partial portrait of the man. Hadrian the hunter, the soldier, the statesman comes out clearly in reliefs, coins, and inscriptions we have not room to treat. But the buildings reflect the dilettante Hadrian, uneasy, moody, whimsical, formal, distant, unapproachable, tense, self-conscious, cold. They show many facets of his character: in the Teatro Marittimo, his love of privacy, and his restlessness; in the Temple of Venus and Rome, the neat, abstract quality of his mind, his sense of humor, his self-conscious pairing of himself with Augustus; in the Pantheon, abstraction and Augustus again, plus an awareness of his own grandeur; in the Piazzo d’Oro, complication, involution, febrile gaiety. In the mausoleum, the obsession with his own grandeur and with the memory of Augustus recur, and something new has been added: death-wish and posturing with grief. These last two attitudes are to be read again in the fabric of the Canopus, together with a failure of creativity which marks the beginning of the end.

Hadrian is not the only Emperor whose personality may be read in the artifacts of his reign, but he is unique in being himself his own architect. This in turn creates a problem. How much in his work is genuine self-expression, how much mere playing with form? But the very putting of the question gives insight into Hadrian’s character. The key is schizophrenia: unrest and self-consciousness where there might have been the easy confidence born of unchallenged Empire; loneliness in the midst of a crowded court; genius that failed; a love that killed. These are the contradictions that have caused Hadrian to be saluted--a dubious compliment--as “the first modern man.” In his architecture, perhaps more eloquently and poignantly than in any other Roman work, the mute stones speak.

* * * * *

With Hadrian an era ends. Juvenal, who wrote during his reign, is the last secular classical Latin poet of importance. Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138–161) was modest and plain-living where Hadrian had been flamboyant and extravagant. The autobiography (written in Greek) of _his_ successor, Marcus Aurelius (161–180), is throughout a tacit criticism of Hadrian: his boy-love, his architecture, his dilettantism. Marcus Aurelius’ son and successor, Commodus (180–192), was a monstrous megalomaniac beside whose excesses those of Caligula, Nero, or Domitian pale into insignificance. The next dynasty, the Severi (193–235), founded a military absolutism which degenerated into anarchy (235–284). Under Diocletian (284–305) absolutism is intensified and grows more rigid. Under Constantine (306–337) the Empire’s creative center shifts to Constantinople (old Byzantium made new, in the Greek east), a new religion triumphs, and the story of Christian archaeology begins. True, the two centuries from Hadrian through Constantine are represented by some of Rome’s most impressive surviving monuments: the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, the Arches of Septimius Severus and of Constantine, the Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, Aurelian’s Wall, and the Basilica of Maxentius. But, artistically, many of these are derivative; _e.g._, Marcus Aurelius’ Column imitates Trajan’s; Constantine’s arch incorporates reliefs from earlier, more creative reigns. Yet while the artistic impulse flickers and dies, Roman skill in military and civil engineering, as exemplified in baths and aqueducts, roads and walls, continues unabated.

12

Roman Engineering

In this chapter strict chronology must be violated, and steps retraced, to discuss in specific detail something of what archaeology has to tell us about the most practical aspect of the Romans’ genius: their talent for engineering. This is best exemplified in roads, baths, aqueducts, and fortification-walls.

We have reached in our historical survey the end of Hadrian’s reign, A.D. 138. By this date the main lines of the great consular roads leading from Rome had all been laid down, and later Emperors faced only the problems of maintenance, till the barbarians cut Rome’s lines of communication, and the moving of the administrative center to Milan, Ravenna, and Constantinople reduced their importance. The most recent archaeological investigation of Roman roads in Italy has concentrated on tracing the lines of major and minor Roman highways and the native tracks that preceded them, a work of great urgency, in view of the modernization which is rapidly changing the face of Italy, especially in the vicinity of Rome.

If we turn to Roman baths, like those of Caracalla in Rome, begun in A.D. 211, we are back on the chronological track again, but we find that the last major archaeological work upon them was done at the end of the last century, and that their chief interest today lies in the inspiration they have offered to modern architects.

As for aqueducts, the last important ancient one was built under the Emperor Alexander Severus, in A.D. 226, but working back from that date we can profitably review the difficult and absorbing topographical work done in tracing the courses of the major aqueducts by a devoted Englishman and an American woman.

Finally we shall review the work of another Englishman in tracing the chronology and building techniques of ancient Rome’s last great fortification, Aurelian’s Wall, begun in A.D. 271 and still in large part standing. Its alterations and repairs have been traced down to the middle of the sixth century of our era. The examples chosen should justify the Romans’ high reputation for engineering skill, and illuminate Roman history, at the same time underlining on the one hand our debt, for the facts we know and the inferences we draw, to the careful work of modern archaeologists, and on the other the catalytic effect, in the case of the baths, of Roman work upon our own architecture of the day before yesterday.

Roman roads (see Fig. 4.1) echoing to the measured tread of marching legions, had made a large contribution to unifying Italy by the time the last great consular highway, the Via Aemilia, opened up the Po valley from Ariminum to Placentia in 187 B.C., but their work of carrying commerce and ideas was unceasing. Of course there were roads in Italy before the Romans: the name and route of the Via Salaria, from the salt-pans at the Tiber’s mouth up the valley into the Apennines, suggest that it must have been in use since prehistoric times. The Via Latina, named not for a Roman consul but for a people potent in central Italy until the Romans broke their league in 338 B.C., must count as a pre-Roman road, and its winding course along the foothills must antedate the draining of the Pomptine marshes and the laying down of the straight course across them from Rome to Tarracina and thence to Capua of the _regina viarum_, the queen of roads, the Via Appia. It bears the name of a Roman censor of 312 B.C. This is the first of the great highways, and it deserves its fame for its bold conquest of natural obstacles, its arrow-straight course across the marshes, but its gravel surface was not replaced by stone pavement until 293 B.C., and then only as far as the suburb of Bovillae. And its course, like that of many another Roman road, was not always so arrow-straight. In the hills behind Tarracina it followed the contours; it was not until Trajan’s time that another bold stroke of engineering cut through the high, rocky Pesco Montano to let the road pass by the more direct coastal route. (Some authorities hold that the Romans preferred straight roads because the front axles of their vehicles were rigid.) Trajan’s engineers showed their pride in their work by incising monumental Roman numerals, still visible, to mark the depth of the cut every ten feet from the top down, until the road level was triumphantly reached at CXX.

Along the Appia, and the other consular roads radiating from Rome, traces of the ancient stone paving are occasionally preserved. The paving blocks are usually _selce_ (flint), polygonal in shape and closely fitted without mortar. While most Roman roads prove on archaeological examination to consist of paving blocks laid in a trench and packed with earth and _selce_ chips, it will be worthwhile to record the ideal method of laying a pavement--strictly speaking a mosaic pavement--as recommended by the architect Vitruvius, a contemporary of Augustus. The method illustrates the Roman engineer’s infinite capacity for taking pains.

After the field engineer (1 in the reconstruction, Fig. 12.1), assisted by the stake man (2), had aligned the road with his _groma_, he ran levels with the _chorobates_ (3) with the roadman’s help (4). A plow (5) was used to loosen earth and mark road margins; then workmen dug marginal trenches (6) to the depth desired for the solid foundations. Laborers (7) shoveled loose earth and carried it away in baskets. The next step was to consolidate the roadbed with a tamper (8). Now the roadbed was ready for its foundation, the _pavimentum_ (9), lime mortar or sand laid to form a level base. Next came the _statumen_, or first course (10), fist-size stones, cemented together with mortar or clay, the thickness varying from ten inches to two feet. Over this was laid the _rudus_ or second course (11), nine to twelve inches of lime concrete, grouted with broken stone and pottery fragments. Next the _nucleus_, or third course (12), concrete made of gravel or coarse sand mixed with hot lime, placed in layers and compacted with a roller. Its thickness was one foot at the sides, eighteen inches at the crown of the road. Finally, the _summum dorsum_ or top course (13), polygonal blocks of _selce_ six inches or more thick, carefully fitted and set in the _nucleus_ while the concrete was still soft. Sometimes, when archaeologists have taken up a stretch of Roman road, they have found the _selce_ blocks rutted on the under side: the economical contractors, happily untroubled by high-priced labor, had repaired their road by turning the worn blocks upside down. Standard curbs (14a and b) were two feet wide and eighteen inches high; paved footpaths (15a and b) often ran outside them. Conduits (16) under the curb, with arched outlets (17) opening beside the right of way, took care of draining surface water. Milestones (18) marked the distance from Rome and the name of the Emperor responsible for repairs. From the names of successive Emperors on milestones of the same road, archaeologists have calculated that the average life of a highway was thirty to forty years.

Two points should be emphasized: first, this represents an ideal method of construction, not often exemplified in practice; second, to a modern engineer a road like this would seem insufficiently elastic, a five-foot wall in the flat, too rigid for the stresses and strains to which it was subjected. Hence perhaps the frequent need for repairs, but Roman traffic was lighter than ours, and the very fact that we can write about the roads at all is a tribute to their durability. Upon roads like these, under the Empire, travelled the Imperial posting service, with relays of messengers, and post-houses where horses and carriages could be changed. Under exceptional conditions the Emperor Tiberius, using this service, once travelled 180 miles in a day, a rate of speed not equalled on European roads until the nineteenth century.

The next major road laid out after the Appia must have been the Valeria, which was needed for eastward communication via Tivoli with the new colony of Alba Fucens, founded, as we saw, in 303 B.C. Archaeology has shown that in general the foundation of a colony precedes the laying down of the metalled military road. This is true of Cosa (foundation date of the colony, 273 B.C.; probable date of the Via Aurelia which served it, about 241); of Ariminum (founded 268 B.C.; reached by the Via Flaminia in 220), and of the Roman colonies in the Po valley; _e.g._, Bononia (Bologna: founded 189 B.C.; reached by the Via Aemilia after 187). The full extension of the Via Valeria beyond Alba to the Adriatic had to await the pacification of the Samnite tribes of central Italy and the granting of citizenship to Italians after the “Social” War, in 89 B.C. Milestones on this last stretch belong to Claudius’ reign (A.D. 41–54).