Chapter IX: Front Matter (9)

A recent (1957) survey of the central section of the Valeria by the Dutch scholar C. C. Van Essen illustrates the methods and results of archaeologists working in the field with topographical problems. Faced with the palimpsest of more than two millennia overlying the road he wanted to trace, Van Essen paid particular attention to such roadmarks as Roman milestones; ancient tombs (which regularly lined Roman roads in the vicinity of towns); supporting walls, in Roman headers-and-stretchers; rock-hewn causeways; bridges, where Roman materials and workmanship can be distinguished from modern (as has been recently done for the bridges of the Via Flaminia by Michael Ballance of the British School at Rome; there the striking thing is the predominance and good quality of the work done under Augustus, who had a vested interest in assuring efficient communications with his veterans dispersed in colonies in north Italy). Stretches of ancient pavement are rare on the Valeria, having been destroyed by medieval and modern resurfacing, by the plow, and by torrents and earthquakes, but the trench in which it was bedded can often be distinguished on air photographs. What struck Van Essen chiefly was the frequency with which the ancient Via Valeria would run straight on, with steep gradients, where the modern road resorts to sweeping curves or hairpin bends. Ancient vehicles, the heaviest of which were perhaps only a quarter the weight of a modern light European car (Roman wagon, perhaps 440 pounds; Volkswagen, 1650), and scarcely ever carried loads of over 1100 pounds, would be less troubled by steep gradients than a modern heavy truck. Even so, at Tagliacozzo, about six miles on the Rome side of Alba Fucens, the grade is so steep that Van Essen supposes the ancient inhabitants hired out oxen to help the straining horses on the upslope. Van Essen noted that the telegraph lines, following the comparatively straight course of the ancient road, often gave a clue to its presence. The ancient sixty-eighth milestone of the Valeria, found, as we saw, within the walls of Alba Fucens, provides a good comparison of the respective lengths of the ancient and the modern roads. Since the Roman mile (4861 English feet) was slightly shorter than the English, sixty-eight Roman miles corresponds to slightly over sixty-two English miles, whereas the modern Via Valeria covers about 113 kilometers, or approximately seventy miles, to reach Alba.

Archaeologists have not confined their interests to the great consular roads. Minor highways in areas away from the main stream of traffic are often more rewarding, since they tend to be better preserved, and offer some chance to trace the pre-Roman systems that underlie or intersect them. The district just north of Rome has been surveyed in this way by members of the British School at Rome since 1954, only just in time, for there prevails in this region a situation analogous to the rapid disappearance of Indian remains in the American West with the building of the great hydroelectric dams. In the country north of Rome, since World War II, there has been an extensive program of land expropriation, reclamation, and resettlement of small farmers, an excellent thing for rehabilitating the Italian peasantry, but fatal for archaeological remains, since the plan involves the use of the deep plow, an ideal instrument for obliterating traces of ancient roadways. Thus it is that members and friends of the British School, spurred on by the Director, John Ward Perkins, a worthy successor of the indefatigable Thomas Ashby, are to be seen braving wind and weather as they scour the countryside for Roman and pre-Roman roads from Veii to beyond Cività Castellana, armed with large-scale maps, air photographs, and brown paper bags for collecting the potsherds which are the evidence of ancient roadside habitation.

The British School’s most significant recent work has been carried on from Nepi, a Roman colony allegedly of 383 B.C., twenty-eight miles north-northwest of Rome, and Falerii Novi, about four miles farther north. Falerii Novi was built by the Romans from the ground up in 241 B.C. to house the inhabitants of Falerii Veteres (Cività Castellana) a hostile native Faliscan center, which the Romans completely destroyed. But the old city must have been resettled, for ruts in the third century B.C. road connecting the new city with the old are not of standard Roman width, and were probably made by Faliscan wagons. The _cardo_ of the new settlement is formed by a new road connection with the south, the Via Amerina (Fig. 12.2); in the course of exploring this the British archaeologists found traces from which the older road system (Fig. 12.3) which it partially supplanted, may be inferred. At Torre dell’ Isola, just north of Nepi, for example, they found, by the wall of a medieval castle, sherds with the cord-impressed chevrons characteristic of Villanovan ware, and part of one of the portable hearths which we met first in the primitive hut on the Palatine in Rome. These sherds provide evidence for habitation here at least as early as on the Palatine. The discovery of similar sherds within the walls of Etruscan Veii suggests a people inferior culturally to the Etruscans, and probably living in subjection to them.

, p. 68)]

These people were the Faliscans. Their settlements must have required road connections, especially between their chief city, old Falerii, and Veii, with which it was allied. These roads the British archaeologists have identified in deep cuttings, identified as pre-Roman by inscriptions in Etruscan characters. (Faliscan was a dialect of Latin, but Etruscan inscriptions occur.) These earliest cuttings, sometimes nearly fifty feet deep, are driven impressively through cliffs, cut downward from the surface in a succession of working levels to match the slope of the finished road, with careful attention paid to drainage. Pre-Roman stone piers probably carried timber bridges, but most of the roads are mere ridgeway tracks, not unlike the medieval and modern farm tracks still to be found in the district. The Faliscans were apparently capable of ambitious engineering, but were driven by poverty to avoid it. The Romans used Faliscan cuttings when they found it convenient, it being their way to take things as they found them, introducing modifications only to the minimum extent necessary to suit their own needs.

The most interesting and the most certainly identified Faliscan roads discovered in the British survey are in the neighborhood of Grotta Porciosa, a fortified site about four miles north-northeast of Cività Castellana and a mile and a half west of the Tiber. It controlled the ridge between two gorges, a natural route for a cross-country road between the Tiber and the towns of Gallese, Corchiano, and Cività Castellana. In these towns the Romans had no interest: the two main Roman roads in this area run not cross-country but north and south, the Via Flaminia close to the Tiber, the Via Amerina on the high ground five or six miles to the west. These roads bypassed all the towns just mentioned. But the cross-country tracks, on which the local inhabitants would travel, are visible both in air-photographs and on the ground, where they show no trace of Roman paving. At Grotta Porciosa itself, excavation would be required to reach the early Faliscan level; the majority of sherds found is local black glaze of a quite late pre-Roman period (mid-third century B.C.).

What is most striking about the British results is the contrast they point up between native and Roman. Where the native tracks usually follow the line of least resistance, the Roman Via Amerina is driven across any obstacle, with what Ward Perkins aptly calls “ruthless thoroughness,” whenever there is no reasonable alternative. One might almost think that the new road was built deliberately to impress; in any case the massive viaducts and lofty bridges served to symbolize to the Faliscan peasantry the Roman conqueror’s energy and resources, by which it was hopelessly outclassed. With the same ruthlessness with which they imposed their roads upon the landscape, the Romans imposed law and order upon the countryside. The archaeological evidence is the way in which the peasants shifted from their old anarchical life in small strongholds of armed retainers, which is what Grotta Porciosa must have been, down into settled life in Roman cities, or in the open country beside the Roman roads. The great primeval Ciminian Forest, northwest of Nepi, once the fearsome haunt of brigands, was cleared under the Romans and turned into farms. When after eight centuries Roman power waned, the countryside reverted to pre-Roman conditions; the country-folk crept back into the cliff-top villages, there to remain until quite recent times.

These, the results of careful and enjoyable outdoor work in the Italian countryside by a United Nations of archaeologists, enable us to appreciate how the competence of the Roman road-builders made possible both the cold-bloodedness of the Roman conquest and the security of the Roman peace.

* * * * *

That security brought in its train prosperity, and even luxury, of which the symbol is the grandiose Roman public baths. Though Agrippa, Nero, Titus, and Trajan all built baths whose sites and plans are known, the most grandiose, and the clearest in plan, are the Baths of Caracalla, begun in A.D. 211. The Baths of Diocletian, built a century later, are equally vast, but their plan has been obscured by the incorporation into their fabric of the church of S. Maria degli Angeli and the Terme Museum. The Baths of Caracalla, known to thousands of visitors as the summer setting for Rome’s outdoor opera, were built on a vast platform, twenty feet high, with an area of 270,000 square feet, greater than that of London’s Houses of Parliament. Excavations in 1938, when the Baths were being prepared for their metamorphosis into an outdoor opera house, revealed in the substructure vaulted service corridors, wide enough for vehicles, widening out at intersections into regular underground public squares, with provisions for rotary traffic. Access to the lower reaches was by stairs let into the central piers of the main building. The principal entrance to the baths was to the north (over the edge of the platform at the top center of the air-photograph, Fig. 12.4). It was flanked by numerous small rooms which in the difficult post-war years housed teeming families of Italy’s homeless. (Their unique opportunity of a summer evening to admire the sleek prosperity of the operagoers recreated the gulf that yawned between haves and have nots in Imperial Rome, and contributed not a little to Italy’s unrest.)

The main bath building was set in the northern half of the great open space provided by the platform, and was surrounded with gardens. Facing these on the perimeter was a variety of halls, for lectures, reading, and exercise. Those on the east and west were contained in curved projections (exedras). A part of the western exedra appears in the lower left corner of the air-photograph. Beneath it in a subterranean vault was discovered in 1911 what was at that time the largest Mithraeum (shrine of the Persian god Mithras) in Rome.[E] To the south (lower right on the photograph) was a stadium whose seats were built against the reservoir which supplied the baths: this was fed by a branch from one of the great aqueducts, the Aqua Marcia.

[E] In 1958 Dutch archaeologists excavated a larger one under
the church of S. Prisca on the Aventine Hill.

The main block of the baths is distinguished for its axial symmetry. The most prominent room was the circular _caldarium_, or hot bath (just to the right of center in the photograph). It is between its main piers that the opera stage is set. Behind it the vast rectangular open space (82 × 170 feet) is most logically interpreted as a grand concourse whence the patrons of the baths (as many as 1600 in peak hours) could move unimpeded to the bathing rooms of their choice. This central room was groin-vaulted in coffered concrete, in three great bays supported by eight piers (Fig. 12.5). The rooms around the central rectangle, with their enormously thick walls, were ingeniously arranged as buttresses to resist the thrust of the colossal vaults.

(Castagnoli, _Roma antica_, Pl. 35)]

The large open spaces at the east and west ends of the main block were exercise-grounds. The exedras adjacent to their inner sides were decorated in the early fourth century with the splendidly satiric mosaics of athletes now in the Lateran Museum. With their broken noses, low foreheads, and cauliflower ears, they are the very type of overspecialized brutal brawn which intellectuals in all ages have delighted to ridicule.

The large rectangular area at the rear center was the cold swimming pool, or _frigidarium_; perhaps the rooms on either side were dressing rooms. Below the pavement of the baths the excavators discovered tons of L- or T-shaped iron bolted together in the form of a St. Andrew’s cross. The possible inference is that some part of the baths was roofed with iron girders, designed to support bronze plates ingeniously contrived to reflect sunlight onto the bathers below. (The evidence for the bronze plates and the sunroom is not archaeological but literary, and, chiefly because the literary source had little or no idea what he was talking about, has raised apparently insoluble controversy.)

Excavations were going on in the Baths on a langorous summer afternoon in late June of 1901 which the American architect Charles Follen McKim spent there. That afternoon bore fruit soon after, when he was asked to design for the Pennsylvania Railroad a great terminal station in New York. McKim, lover of Rome and founder of the American Academy there, belonged to the school of architects for whom the grand manner, as found in Roman baths, the Pantheon, and the Coliseum, formed the basis of design for works of the first rank. He desired to symbolize in Pennsylvania Station the monumental gateway to a great city, which should at the same time perform efficiently its function of handling large crowds. To a man of his training and prejudices, the Baths of Caracalla seemed to fill the bill. He is reported to have assembled on one occasion a huge band of workmen in the Baths in Rome, simply to test the aesthetic effect of huge scale upon crowds passing under the arches. (Crowds there must always have been, in the heyday of the baths, motley, colorful crowds, speaking many tongues; there is easily room for 2500 patrons at a time. We may imagine them bathing, sauntering, making assignations; conversing idly or upon philosophical subjects; thronging the lecture rooms, the library, the picture-gallery; running, jumping, racing, ball-playing, or watching spectator-sports in the stadium at the back.)

The station plan (Fig. 12.6) shows how creatively McKim imitated Roman architecture. The succession of portico, vestibule, arcade, vestibule, staircase, which leads to what before remodelling of 1958 was the climax in the great central concourse, is noble architectural language, beautiful ordering of space, which Hadrian would have understood, and so is the balance in the façade, the alternating rhythms throughout the building of open and closed, big and little, wide and narrow. In the arcade, the repeated rhythms (now spoiled by advertising) emphasize the traditional, and the movement which is the essence of transportation. The great central hall, once a pool of open space, is even larger (340 × 210 feet, and 100 feet high) than the one that inspired it in the Baths; it is longer than the nave of St. Peter’s. In it McKim contrived to preserve simplicity, dignity, and monumentality in spite of mechanical distractions, as when he used the protruding tops of ventilator shafts as pedestals for lamp-standards. The other refinements, too, are in the Roman manner and material. The rich golden stone facing of the great room is travertine imported from Tivoli, here used for the first time in America (and now badly in need of cleaning). The structural steel and glass in the concourse leading to the trains may have been inspired by the girders in the Baths of Caracalla. The statistics that record 1140 carloads of pink granite brought from New England to build the half-mile of exterior walls are in the Roman tradition, and so is the vast extent of the eight-acre structure, and the six years it took to build. The efficiency is Roman, too: access on all four sides, carriage drives twice as wide as the normal New York street of 1910--when the building was opened--a traffic-flow plan that separated incoming and outgoing passengers.

Pennsylvania Station belongs to a vanished era, an era of princely magnificence, of willingness to spend on purely aesthetic pleasure. The young architectural fellows of McKim’s Academy in Rome are impatient with what it stands for, but perhaps they are letting their understandable and proper scorn of soulless copying--of which there is far too much in American monumental architecture--stand in the way of their appreciation of a building which has worn well, and earned accolades--especially by contrast with recent tawdry and misguided additions in plastic--from such emancipated critics, friendly to modern trends in architecture, as Talbot Hamlin and Lewis Mumford. In a day of what a less temperate critic than these has called “the monstrous repetition of cellular facades cloaked with vitreous indifference” by “sedulous apes to the latest expressions of technological baboonery,” it may be salutary to look with understanding at how successful a modern architect of genius can be with a Roman model.

* * * * *

Roman baths needed oceans of water. It was supplied by another triumph of Roman engineering, the system of aqueducts. The eleventh and last of the ancient aqueducts was built by the Emperor Alexander Severus in A.D. 226; the earliest, the Aqua Appia, dates back to the same builder and the same year--312 B.C.--as the _regina viarum_. The network (Fig. 12.8) supplied Rome with over 250,000,000 gallons of water every twenty-four hours. When New York was thrice the size of Severan Rome, its aqueducts supplied only 425,000,000 gallons daily.

(A. H. Granger, _Charles Follen McKim_, p. 77)]

(Granger, _op. cit._, fac. p. 82)]

We owe our knowledge of Rome’s aqueducts to three people, one ancient and two modern: Sextus Julius Frontinus, water commissioner under Trajan, whose book on aqueducts survives, Dr. Thomas Ashby, former Director of the British School at Rome, and Miss Esther B. Van Deman of the American Academy. For over thirty years, before modernity removed the traces, this devoted pair tramped the rough country between Tivoli and Rome, plotting the courses of the major aqueducts. Their definitive work is well-nigh as monumental as the aqueducts themselves. Together they explored the mazy course of the aqueduct channels, above ground and below, along crumbling cliffs and the edge of deep gorges, over walls, through briers, across turnip fields, in the cellars of farm-houses and wine-shops. They climbed and waded; Ashby explored downshafts “with the aid of several companions and a climber’s rope,” and when they were through, the courses and the building history especially of Rome’s four major aqueducts, the Anio Vetus (272–269 B.C.), the Marcia (144 B.C.), the Claudia (A.D. 47), and the Anio Novus (A.D. 52)--all repeatedly repaired--were better known than they had been since Frontinus’ day, and fellow archaeologists were in a position to draw from their detailed pioneer work important conclusions about Roman hydraulic engineering and about Roman culture.

Following Frontinus’ indications, Ashby and Miss Van Deman found the sources of the four great aqueducts at over 1000 feet above sea level, in springs or lakes in the upper reaches of the Anio valley, near Subiaco, Mandela, and Vicovaro. The airline distance of the sources from Rome varies from twenty-four to twenty-seven miles, but to follow the contours the aqueducts took a circuitous course, so that their actual length is from forty-three to sixty-two miles. Though the modern reader associates Roman aqueducts with the magnificent lines of arches (Fig. 12.9) stretching across a once-empty Campagna near Rome, the fact is that well under a third of a Roman aqueduct’s course was normally carried on arches: the rest was tunnel or side-hill channel. The reason for this was in part economy, in part strategic considerations: an aqueduct below ground is harder for an enemy to find and cut. When the Goths finally did cut the aqueducts in the sixth century A.D., the seven hills of Rome became, and remained for centuries, unfit for civilized habitation.

(Deutsches Museum, Munich)]

The four aqueducts, Ashby and Miss Van Deman found, followed the course of the Anio fairly closely from their source to just below Tivoli, where, having lost half their altitude, they turned south along the shoulder of the hills to Gallicano. In this stretch, at Ponte Lupo, the Aqua Marcia crosses a gorge on a bridge that would test the mettle of the most seasoned archaeologist, for it epitomizes Roman constructional history in stone and concrete for almost nine centuries. After Gallicano the intrepid pair traced the aqueducts’ course westward, where, by a system of tunnels, inverted siphons (the Romans knew that water would rise to its own level), and side-hill channels they cross the broken gorges of the Campagna to a point south of Capannelle racetrack, six miles from Rome, whence they proceed on the famous arches to the Porta Maggiore. From reservoirs in the city the water was distributed in lead pipes (one, of Hadrianic date, has walls three inches thick, and weighs eighty-eight pounds per running foot), with a strict priority, first to public basins and fountains (the Aqua Julia alone supplied 1200 of these), next to baths (extensions of the Marcia supplied those of both Caracalla and Diocletian), then to private houses. Surplus was used for flushing the sewers. Attempts were made to control the priorities by running the pipes for private use only from the highest levels of the reservoirs, but Frontinus complains bitterly of illegal tapping.

In the Gallicano-Capannelle stretch special archaeological ingenuity is required, first to find the channels, and then to decide which belongs to which aqueduct. Where the channels have entirely disappeared, through the disintegrating action of floods, earthquake, tree roots, or plowing, the course can be defined by plotting the occurrence of heaps of calcium carbonate on the ground. This is the aqueduct deposit. Roman water is extremely hard, and the heaps mark where once there were downshafts (_putei_) for inspection and cleaning the channels, which without such maintenance would soon have become completely blocked with deposit. Frontinus says the downshafts occurred regularly every 240 feet, and Dr. Ashby found many at just this interval.

For distinguishing one aqueduct from another there are many criteria. The first is construction materials. The earliest aqueducts are built of cut stone, the latest of brick. Miss Van Deman was famous for her precise dating of building materials; she was the only archaeologist in Rome who could date a brick by the _taste_ of the mortar. A second criterion is quality of workmanship. The Claudia, for example, is notoriously jerry-built: where abutments are found which should be solid, but are instead one block thick, filled in with earth behind, that channel belongs to the Aqua Claudia. A third criterion is mineral deposits. Thus the Marcia was famous for its purity; the crystalline lime deposits were quarried in the Middle Ages, polished, and used to decorate altars. The Anio Novus, on the other hand, is distinguished by a singularly foul deposit. A fourth criterion is directness of course: the older the aqueduct the more sinuously it runs; a channel found meandering by itself along the contours is likely to be that of the Anio Vetus.

The total impression the aqueducts give is one of efficiency, organization, and heedlessness of expense, under the Republic as well as under the Empire. They were built with the spoils of wars or the tribute of provinces. The Marcia, built with the proceeds of the loot of Carthage and Corinth, cost 180,000,000 sesterces, or $9,000,000 uninflated. The Tepula, of 125 B.C., was perhaps built with the profits from the organization of the new province of Asia. From Agrippa’s time onward, and especially in Frontinus’ administration, the aqueduct service employed a large bureaucracy; overseers, reservoir-superintendents, inspectors, stonemasons, plasterers (the stone-built channels were lined with two or three coats of hydraulic cement), and unskilled laborers. Maintenance was a constant problem. Arches needed propping, filling in, or brick facing; piers needed to be buttressed or brick-encased. There was no attempt to produce high pressure: lead pipes would not have stood it, and for public use it was not necessary. There was no attempt to make the aqueducts financially self-supporting: their original building was one of the benefactions expected of successful commanders. Since these nabobs expected a _quid pro quo_ in the gift of power, the aqueducts are a symbol, under the Republic of irresponsible oligarchy, and under the Empire of increasingly irresponsible autocracy, though “good” Emperors like Augustus, Claudius, Trajan, and Hadrian had a hand in them. In Augustus’ reign were built the Julia, the Virgo, and the Alsietina. Trajan built a northern line from Lago di Bracciano to Rome’s Trastevere quarter on the right bank of the Tiber: part of its course runs under the courtyard of the American Academy. Hadrian executed major repairs, datable by the omnipresent brick stamps. But even good Emperors knew no way of financing such public works except bleeding the taxpayer. In municipalities, private capital was absorbed in such public enterprise, with no return in income or local employment commensurate with the capital involved. So one major conclusion from Ashby’s and Miss Van Deman’s work is that the Romans were better engineers than they were economists. Let the last word on aqueducts be Pliny the Elder’s: “If one takes careful account of the abundant supply of water for public purposes, for baths, pools, channels, houses, gardens, suburban villas; the length of the aqueducts’ courses--arches reared, mountains tunnelled, valleys crossed on the level--he will confess that there has never been a greater marvel in the whole world.”

* * * * *

One of the latest pieces of Roman engineering, to a knowledge of which archaeology has recently contributed, is Aurelian’s Wall. It has been meticulously studied by a pupil of Ashby’s, I. A. Richmond, now Professor of Archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford. Two-thirds of it is still standing (Fig. 12.10), to the disgust of those interested in the unimpeded flow of Rome’s traffic, to the delight of those in love with Rome’s past. It was twelve miles long, twelve feet thick, sixty feet high; it had 381 towers, each with a latrine, and eighteen portcullised gates, nine of which survive (Fig. 12.11). Though the Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini had examined the wall as early as 1431, and the Frenchman Nicholas Audebert had studied it scientifically in 1574, Richmond was still able to make important contributions. He emphasizes, for example, that one-sixth of the wall incorporated buildings: tombs, houses, park walls, aqueducts, cisterns, porticoes, an amphitheater, a fortress. The inference is that the wall had to be built with speed and economy, in the face of the threat of barbarians in north Italy and a depleted treasury. Strategic reasons, of course, dictated the protection of the aqueducts. The use of tombstones as latrine covers shows, says Richmond, that the wall builders “had their religious scruples under excellent control.” It was a sense of urgency and not solicitude for works of art that prompted them, when they built a garden wall at Porta San Lorenzo into the circuit, to leave the statues in their niches and pack them round with clay.

(H. Kähler, _Rom und seine Welt_, Pl. 252)]

LEGEND

_Roads and Gates_
I Porta Pinciana--Via Salaria
II Porta Salaria
III Porta and Via Nomentana
IV Porta and Via Tiburtina
V Porta Praenestina (Maggiore): major aqueduct junction; Via
Praenestina
VI Porta Asinaria--Via Tusculana
VII Porta and Via Latina
VIII Porta and Via Appia
IX Porta and Via Ostiensis
X Porta and Via Portuensis
XI Porta Aureliana (S. Pancrazio); Aquae Alsietina and Traiana; Via
Aurelia
XII Porta and Via Flaminia

_Monuments_
1 Forum
2 Argentina Temples
3 Cloaca Maxima
4 Pompey’s Theater and Portico
5 Imperial Fora
6 Altar of Peace
7 Augustus’ Mausoleum
8 Subterranean Basilica
9 Golden House
10 Coliseum
11 Cancelleria Palace
12 Domitian’s Stadium
13 Temple of Venus and Rome
14 Pantheon
15 Hadrian’s Mausoleum
16 Baths of Caracalla
17 Baths of Diocletian
18 Cemetery under St. Peter’s

FIG. 12.11 Rome, Aurelian’s Wall, plan, with major Imperial monuments.]

Richmond also found that in the phase of the wall identified as Aurelian’s by building materials and brick stamps, the workmanship differed sharply from one curtain to another. The inference from this was that various stretches were assigned to various gangs of workmen--mostly civilian, since the legions were needed in the North, and for Aurelian’s campaign against the Parthians in the East. These workmen belonged to the various city guilds, or _collegia_, some experienced in construction, some not, but all pressed into service in the emergency.

Richmond distinguished the bottom twenty-four feet of the wall as the original phase. It was built of brick-faced concrete--that its bricks were often second-hand is inferred from the many Hadrianic stamps--surmounted by a gallery with loopholes outside and an open, bayed arcade inside, with a crenellated wall-walk above. Access to the wall was by the towers only; Richmond inferred that the planner aimed to keep excited and irresponsible civilians from interfering with defense, and the wall-detail from pilfering or philandering in the adjoining houses and gardens. In this phase the wall was plain, efficient, functional, simple, and uniform, built to a standard size and pattern. Its many gates show that there was no very formidable danger: the intent was to provide a barrier to shut chance bodies of undesirables out of the city as on far-flung frontiers structures like Hadrian’s Wall shut them out of the Empire.

In its second phase another thirty-six feet of wall was fitted on to the base provided by Aurelian’s. In some places the addition was only six feet thick, the other half of the original width being left as a passage for the circulation of materials and messages. A wall sixty feet high reduced the required number of defenders, since it had nothing to fear from an enemy equipped with scaling ladders. In this phase machines did the work of men: if there were two _ballistae_ to a tower, the expensive and impressive total of pieces of artillery would have been 762. Heightening the wall meant heightening the tower, sometimes to five stories. A start was made toward monumentalizing the gateways, but it petered out, though the effect can be admired in the Porta Asinaria near the Lateran, which was restored in 1957–58. For the workmanship of this phase is identical with and therefore of the same date as the Basilica and Circus of Maxentius (who reigned A.D. 306–312); when he was defeated by Constantine at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, and the capital moved to Constantinople, neither the money nor the motive for monumentality any longer existed.

The next major alteration is dated by inscriptions to A.D. 401–403, the reign of Honorius. It was prompted by the threat that the city might be sacked by Alaric the Visigoth. It involved second-hand stone facing for the curtains of the wall, and square bases for the towers. The photograph (Fig. 12.10) shows this Honorian phase at the Porta Appia. The upper stories of the round towers belong to Maxentius’ addition, while halfway up the face of the curtain between the rectangular towers to the left of the gate can be seen the patching required to add Maxentius’ brickwork to the battlements of Aurelian’s original wall. (To distinguish the building phases of the Porta Appia, Richmond had to crawl into the base of a tower through a very small hole, while a small uninvited audience bet on his chances of sticking.) The new battlements were built in a way that shows that in this phase Rome could no longer afford artillery: archers replaced _ballistae_. By now the Empire is Christian, and crosses begin to appear on the keystones of the gate arches, as prophylaxis against the devil. Later, in what Richmond describes as “an age of vanishing standards of faith and hygiene,” an indulgence of 100 days was granted for kissing one of these crosses. They were no help: the wall was assaulted by earthquakes (A.D. 442), and by Goths (A.D. 536 and 546), and repeatedly repaired. Belisarius in 547 restored it all, with the help of palisades, in twenty days, and equipped it with spring-guns the force of whose projectiles could impale five men, and with mantraps or deadfalls, barrow-like devices which could be pushed over on assailants. But the repairs are botched work, appropriate to what Rome had become: no longer an Imperial capital, but a minor metropolis of an outlying Byzantine province. All the same, the wall was never really breached till the advent of heavy artillery, when Garibaldi’s men attacked the Porta San Pancrazio in 1849.

* * * * *

What Richmond’s work has done is to epitomize, in the history of a work of Roman engineering, Rome’s decline and fall. This is the latest point in ancient history to which our survey will take us. In the 1300 years since the Palatine huts we have, with archaeology’s help, traced Rome’s rise to grandeur and her agonizing decline. Spiritually, Rome never fell. The Papacy in a sense is the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned upon its grave: the symbol is the Popes’ palace-fortress installed in Hadrian’s mausoleum, or St. Peter’s basilica overlying what is in part a pagan cemetery. It will be appropriate in the final chapter to confront Caesar with Christ, by describing a late Imperial hunting lodge in Sicily, and a tomb beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s, which by the fourth century A.D. was believed to be the last resting place of the apostle who was a fisher of men.

13

Caesar and Christ

In the official Italian archaeological journal _Notizie degli Scavi_ for 1951 were reported recent excavations of a grandiose villa near Piazza Armerina, in central Sicily, which had already received some notoriety in the press, for depicting “Bikini girls” in very brief bathing suits (Fig. 13.1). Of this villa traces had always existed above ground, and as early as 1754 the discovery had been reported there of a “temple” (probably the basilica numbered 30 in the plan, Fig. 13.2), with a mosaic floor. In 1881 the trilobate complex (46) was excavated, and in 1929 the great Sicilian archaeologist Paolo Orsi, the expert on prehistoric remains on the island, dug there. Major funds--500,000 lire--made possible large-scale excavation between 1937 and 1943, as a part of _Il Duce’s_ plans for a major celebration of the bimillennary of Augustus’ birth. After the war, government support to the tune of 5,000,000 lire (which inflation reduced in value to $8,000, only a tenth as much as the earlier grant) made it possible to finish excavating the villa and to take steps to preserve _in situ_ the mosaics which are its chief glory. This is one of the few excavations on Italian soil whose chief avowed intent was to encourage tourism, and it has succeeded. Piazza Armerina is a boom town, boasting a new hotel, and its narrow streets are choked with sightseeing busses.

Both the mosaics and the villa’s ambitious plan make it a sight worth seeing. There are forty-two polychrome pavements, involving the setting by the ancient workmen of 30,000,000 individual mosaic rectangles, or _tesserae_, over an area of more than 3500 square yards, a complex unique in extent in the Roman world. The plan, too, is one of the most ambitious known to archaeology, rivalling that of Nero’s Golden House, Hadrian’s villa, or Diocletian’s palace at Spalato on the Dalmatian cost. The villa lies three-and-a-half miles southwest of Piazza Armerina, nearly 2,000 feet above sea level, on the west slope of Monte Mangone, in the midst of green orchards and pleasant groves of nut trees. Its altitude assured its being cool in summer; its setting under the lee of the hill protected it from winter winds. But the slope required terracing, and so the villa was laid out on four levels centering on three peristyles and a portico (plan 2,15,41,26). The parts are connected by irregular rooms (13,14,40). The technique of the masonry shows that the whole complex is of one build, characterized by asymmetrical symmetry, strange, twisted ground-plans, a fondness for curves, and off-center axes, all of which shows a definite break with conventional classicism. The structure is light and elastic: the dome over the three-lobed state dining room (46), nowadays replaced by an unnecessarily ugly modern roof to protect the mosaics, was built of pumice concrete, lightened still further by setting in it lengths of clay pipe and amphorae, to reduce the weight of the superstructure on the bearing walls.

From a strange polygonal porticoed atrium (2) steps lead down to a porticoed horseshoe-shaped latrine (6) and to the baths (7–12), where spatial architecture runs riot, with single and double apses, a clover-leaf, and an octagonal _frigidarium_ or room for taking a cold plunge (9). The middle terrace, east of the baths, centers on a huge trapezoidal peristyle (15), with a complex fountain, embellished by a fish mosaic, in the middle, and living rooms opening off to north and south. South of the peristyle a higher terrace is occupied by an odd elliptical court, shaped like a flattened egg, with a buttressed apse at the west end, the trilobate dining room at the east, and a triple set of conventional rectangular rooms, with mosaics of Cupids vintaging and fishing, to the north and south. The total effect is of an agreeable contrast between straight and curved walls. Returning to the rectangular peristyle, we find to the east of it a long double-apsed corridor, like the _narthex_, or long narrow portico, in front of an early Christian church. East of this is a suite of rooms centering on the vast, off-centered, apsed basilica--larger than Domitian’s on the Palatine in Rome--which was the earliest part of the villa excavated. On either side of this is a series of rectangular and apsed rooms, the private quarters and nursery, to judge by the mosaics. An aqueduct limits the villa on the north and east. The servants’ quarters are not yet excavated; they probably lay to the southwest, to the left of the monumental entrance (1). The whole is complicated, consistent, functional, organic, clearly the work of a master architect who will challenge comparison with the builder of the Sanctuary of Fortune at Praeneste or with Hadrian himself.

The mosaics must have been done in a hurry by huge gangs of craftsmen, probably imported from North Africa, since the technique resembles that of mosaics at Volubilis, Hippo, Carthage, and Lepcis. Mosaic-making is slow work; nowadays it takes a careful workman six days to lay a square meter of tesserae. To finish the job in the space of a few years must have required a swarm of as many as 500 artisans.

Apart from their vast extent and their subject-matter--of which more in the sequel--the mosaics are of prime importance for the contribution they make to dating the villa. About its date there is controversy. Professor Biagio Pace (who excavated here in the ’30’s), relying on stylistic similarities to late (fifth century A.D.) mosaics in Ravenna and Constantinople, would date the villa in about A.D. 410, and ascribe its ownership to a rich Sicilian landed proprietor. Pace’s pupil G. V. Gentili, who was in charge of the 1950 excavations, argues, following the Norwegian archaeologist H. P. L’Orange, for an earlier date. One piece of evidence not adduced by him is conclusive in his favor. The double-apsed entrance (8) to the baths contains a spirited mosaic depicting the Circus Maximus in Rome, full of life and movement, with the chariots of the four stables, the Greens, Blues, Whites, and Reds, all represented. The Green--the Emperor’s favorite--wins, not without a collision. Down the center of the oval track runs the _spina_, or division-wall, surmounted by various monuments, including a single obelisk in the center (Fig. 13.3). Now it is known that Augustus set up an obelisk in the Circus Maximus, and that in A.D. 357 Constantius added another: therefore any representation of the Circus with only one obelisk must be earlier than 357. Pace’s late date is therefore excluded.

Is there any possibility of still more precise dating? Gentili thinks there is. Beginning from the _a priori_ proposition that a complex architecturally and artistically as grand as this must be beyond the means of any private citizen, however rich, he assumes that the villa must have been built to the order of an Emperor. Which one? To answer this question he looked among the mosaics for possible portraits, and he found them in several places. For example, in the vestibule (13) between the baths and the trapezoidal peristyle (15) there is an obvious portrait study of the mistress of the villa flanked by two children, presumably her son and daughter. The son has a squint. He is represented again, with the same squint, in the northeast apse of the _frigidarium_ (9), in the room of the small hunting scene (23), and in the vestibule of Cupid and Pan (35). (The effect of the squint is achieved by setting one eye with a square tessera, the other with a triangular one.)

Now was the time to have recourse to the study, there to take down from the shelves the works of the Byzantine chronicler John Malalas. He records that Maxentius, the son of the Emperor Maximian Herculius (A.D. 286–305), Diocletian’s colleague, was cross-eyed. Armed with this firm clue, Gentili examined the mosaics again, looking for proof or disproof that the villa belonged to Maximian. He found proof. Knowing that Maximian Herculius equated himself with Hercules, as his name shows, he looked for, and found, evidence in a colossal sculptured head of Hercules from the basilica apse, and in the mosaic, of preoccupation with that hero and his exploits. Over and over again, in the borders of robes, in foliage, and self-standing (in 4) he found representations of ivy, which was Hercules’ symbol: the initial of its Latin name, _hedera_, is the initial of the hero’s name. Furthermore, one of the most extensive and important mosaics in the villa, that in the state dining room (46), has as its subject the labors of Hercules. Gentili’s case looks conclusively proven; it was buttressed when he took up the Circus mosaic (8), to back it with concrete and replace it, and found under it a hypocaust containing coins of the late third century, presumably dropped by the workmen who laid the mosaic in the first place.

The subjects of the mosaics are in part more or less conventional mythological scenes. Odysseus hoodwinks the one-eyed Sicilian giant Polyphemus, making him drunk with a great bowl of wine (27); an obliging dolphin rescues the musician Arion from a watery grave (32), and Orpheus with his lyre charms a vast array of animals, including a goldfinch, a lizard, and a snail (39). Still more interesting are the mosaics which show Maximian’s interests. He appears to have had three obsessions: hunting, the circus, and his children. The three scenes of the chase (23,26,33) have prompted L’Orange to suggest that the villa was built as a sumptuous hunting-lodge, but the great basilica shows that it was adapted also to the uses of more formal protocol; the Imperial court must sometimes have met here.

The smaller hunting scene (23) is divided into five bands (Fig. 13.4). At the top, two eager hounds, one gray, one red, are off in full cry after a fox. Next below, a young hunter identified by Gentili as Constantius Chlorus, Maximian’s adopted son, accompanied by our old friend the squint-eyed Maxentius, sacrifices to Diana, the goddess of the hunt. The third band is devoted to fowling--with birdlime--and falconry, the fourth to the fox, gone to ground and besieged in his den by the dogs. In the fifth, on the left a stag is about to be caught in a net stretched across a forest path in the unsporting Roman way; on the right is a boar-hunt with an unorthodox hunter just about to make the kill by dropping a large rock from above on the boar’s head. In the center is a vivid huntsman’s picnic. The hunters, wearing puttees, are sitting under a red awning. While they are waiting, one of them feeds the dog. A black boy blows on the fire, over which a succulent-looking trussed bird is roasting. Servants fetch bread from a wicker basket; another basket harbors two ample amphorae of wine.

This is an intimate _genre_ scene. More impressive is the large hunting scene which crowds the whole 190-foot length of the double-apsed corridor (26). Here the aim portrayed is to catch exotic North African animals alive for the wild beast hunts in amphitheaters like the Coliseum. In the south apse is a female figure symbolizing Africa, flanked by a tiger and an amiable small elephant with a reticulated hide. The figure in the opposite apse who has a bear on one side, a panther on the other may be Rome, the animals symbolizing her dominion over palm and pine. In this case Africa is the point of departure of the captured beasts, Rome their destination. Between the two apses the hunting scenes unfold amid fantastic architecture in a rolling, wooded landscape sloping down to the sea in the center, teeming with fish. On land, animals attack each other (a leopard draws blood from a stag’s belly), and hunters in rich embroidered tunics hurl javelins, in the presence of the Emperor, at snarling lions and tigers at bay, set traps baited with kid for panthers (the kid being spread-eagled in a way that looks curiously like a parody of the Crucifixion). The hunters act as bearers--their heads camouflaged with leafy twigs, like Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane--or drag a lassoed bison toward the red ship that will transport it to Italy. A horseman, having stolen a tiger cub, delays the mother’s advance by dropping another cub in her path. A hippopotamus and a rhinoceros are among the game; smaller animals are hauled to the ships in crates on ox-carts; a live trussed boar is carried slung on a pole; a recalcitrant ostrich and an antelope are being pushed up a gangway (Fig. 13.5), while the gangway of another ship is groaning under the weight of an elephant with a checkerboard hide like the one flanking Africa in the apse. Most curious of all, just in front of this same apse the tables are turned: a man has taken refuge in a cage against the attack of a fabulous winged griffin, with the head of a bird of prey. The crowded, vivid, barbarous artistry of this mosaic brings us to the very threshold of the Byzantine age; in Rome’s past, only the Barberini mosaic at Palestrina can match it.

In Maximian’s family even the children were brought up to take part in blood sports. Room 36, a child’s room, perhaps Maxentius’--his squint-eyed portrait recurs in the anteroom (35)--portrays a child’s hunt, in three bands, full of characteristic Roman insensibility to animal suffering. In the upper band, a boy has hit a spotted hare full in the breast with a hunting spear, while another has lassoed a duckling. The middle band portrays hunting mishaps: a small animal nips one fallen small boy in the leg; a cock attacks another with its beak and spurs. In the bottom register one boy clubs a peacock, a second defends himself with a shield against a buzzard, and a third has plunged his hunting spear into the heart of a goat.

The child’s Circus (33), unlike the hunt, is rather fantastic than brutal. Around a _spina_ with a single obelisk, as in room 8, run four miniature chariots drawn by pairs of birds in the appropriate stable colors: green wood-pigeons, blue plovers, red flamingoes, and white geese. As usual, Green wins, and is awarded the palm. Servants with amphorae sprinkle the track to lay the dust. It is all vivid, detailed, alive, more illuminating than a dozen pages in a handbook.

The masterpiece among the mosaics is clearly the labors of Hercules cycle in the _triclinium_ (46). These were part of a standard repertory, available for copying from a book of cartoons (we have seen this sort of thing in Pompeii), but here the artist has stamped his own personality on the hackneyed scenes. In his hands they are at once learnedly allusive and bloodily violent. Thus the Augean stables, which Hercules cleaned by diverting a river to run through them, are simply suggested by a river and a pitchfork. Violence is often rather hinted at than insisted on, as in the slit-like eye of the dying Nemean lion, or the Picasso-like protruding eye of the terrified horse of Diomedes (Fig. 13.6). Sometimes the effect is gained by a topical touch, as when Geryon, the triple-headed giant, is given a suit of scaly armor, like the barbarians (cataphractarii) on Trajan’s column. But the full baroque excess, as insistent as in the frieze from the Pergamene altar, or the Laocoön group, comes out in the scene in the east lobe where five huge giants, foreshortened with a technique which anticipates Michelangelo’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, convulsively, despairingly, imploringly, yet full of impotent rage, turn their deep-sunk eyes to heaven as they strive to pull from their flesh Hercules’ deadly arrows, steeped in the blood of the Centaur Nessus. In the north lobe the apotheosis of Hercules is no doubt the mosaicist’s enforced tribute to his Imperial master, but in the scenes of metamorphosis in the entrance-ways to the apses--Daphne into a laurel, Cyparissus into a cypress, Ambrosia into a vine--he is following his own paradoxical bent, accepting as it were the challenge of expressing so dynamic a thing as the change from one form to another in the obdurate medium of mosaic.

The ten “Bikini Girls” (38) come last, because these mosaics, which overlie another set, are obviously later than the rest. They owe their fame to the scantiness of their costumes, as brief as any to be seen on modern European beaches. Gentili thinks they are female athletes, being awarded prizes, but Pace may be nearer the truth in supposing that they are pantomime actresses, with tambourines and _maracas_, performing in a sort of aquacade, the blue _tesserae_ in which they stand representing water. There is ancient evidence for this curiously decadent art-form. Martial speaks of actresses dressed--or undressed--as Nereids swimming about in the Coliseum, and the Church fathers fulminate against such spectacles. When the orchestra of the most august of theaters, that of Dionysus in Athens, was remodelled in Roman times to hold water, we must suppose, since the space is too small for mock naval battles, that the place once sacred to the choruses of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was thereafter used for the aquatic antics of just such actresses as the Piazza Armerina mosaics portray. Tastelessness and grandeur, conspicuous waste and a daring architectural plan: this paradoxical blend, so characteristic of the villa, explains both what is meant by decline and why it took the Empire so long to fall.

* * * * *

The villa at Piazza Armerina belongs to an age when Christians were persecuted: the motifs in the mosaics are almost aggressively pagan. But Maximian’s son-in-law Constantine became in the end a convert to Christianity, and built, beginning about A.D. 322, in honor of St. Peter, a great basilica church on the Vatican Hill, replaced in the Renaissance by the present building. In 1939, at the death of Pope Pius XI, who had asked to be buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s, excavations for his tomb created the occasion for transforming the crypt into a lower church. In lowering the floor level of the crypt for this purpose, the workmen came, only eight inches down, upon the pavement of Old St. Peter’s, Constantine’s church. This in turn rested upon mausolea with their tops sliced off, and their interiors rammed full of earth. At the direction of Pius XII, these mausolea were scientifically excavated.

What was revealed was a pagan Roman cemetery, in some places thirty feet below the floor of the present church. The mausolea were all in use and in good repair when Constantine began his church in A.D. 322: the earliest brick stamp found in the area dates from the reign of Vespasian, A.D. 69–79. The excavations were carried out under conditions comparable in difficulty only to the recovery of the Altar of Peace: the same constant battle with seepage, the same problem of underpinning one structure in order to read the message of another. Under these formidable difficulties, the cemetery was cleared, and archaeologists found the reason why Constantine moved a million cubic feet of earth and went so far as to violate sepulchres to build Old St. Peter’s on just this site. Whatever modern walls it was necessary to build were carefully marked with Pius XII brick-stamps, that future archaeologists might be in no doubt as to which masonry was modern and which ancient. The cemetery may now be visited by small groups with special permission, under the expert guidance of a polyglot archaeologist. The story he has to tell was not published until over ten years after the excavation began, in a massive two-volume _Report_ which stands fifteen and three-quarters inches high, contains 171 text figures and 119 plates, and weighs fourteen pounds. Fortunately its objectivity is as impressive as its bulk. The archaeological evidence is lucidly set forth, and no conclusions are drawn which exceed it.