Rome

Andrew Leach

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509514991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Andrew Leach's Rome is the first book in Polity's exciting new 'Cities in World History' series, which aims to provide the general reader and traveller with historically informed companions to the world's greatest cities. Most city guides are good on practical details but very thin when it comes to recounting the histories of cities and contextualizing the buildings and sites for which they are famous. These new books from Polity bridge the gulf between guide and history by offering concise and accessible accounts written by some of the world's leading historians. Rome has a history unmatched in richness by any city on the globe. It looms large in the word's cultural imagination, and for millennia it has been a meeting point of great cultures, a place where myth mixes freely with history, leaving neither unscathed. In this compact history, Leach demonstrates what most visitors to the Eternal City will instinctively understand: that the buildings, streets, monuments and gardens of this ancient city give the visitor moments of direct communion with its past. He reveals the long, twisting history of Rome through its ruins, art works and monuments, its metro stations and modern apartment blocks. Each chapter takes the reader on a physical journey invoking Rome in different moments of its life. Engaging historical narrative is supplemented with maps and photos, making Rome an indispensable companion for those who want to dig below the city's surface.

1
A Matter of Foundations

At the Ara Pacis Augustae – Romulus and Remus – Aeneas and the Origins of the Romans – Foundations – Archaic Rome – The Servian Wall – A City of Seven Hills – The Forum Romanum – From Settlement to City

At the Ara Pacis Augustae

In his biography of the first Roman emperor, the historian Suetonius had Augustus famously observe that he had ‘found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble’: ‘Marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam acceptisset.’ The year 2014 marked two millennia since the emperor and his marble city finally parted company – the former to enter the afterlife, the latter to continue bearing witness to the passage of time – and the biographer captures perfectly the absolute transformation to which Augustan Rome bore witness. Once the centre of its own world, one settlement among several, it had become the centre of the world.

To mark his achievements in perpetuity, Augustus conceived of three monuments: a domed, circular mausoleum (main map, 2), now called the Augusteum, that would house his funeral pyre (ustrinum) and a dynastic tomb; a massive sundial, the Solarium Augusti, casting its shadow across the Campus Martius; and a monument to the ‘Augustan Peace’, the Ara Pacis Augustae (main, 1), which the sundial would overshadow each year on 23 September, the autumnal equinox and the emperor’s birthday. Each monument entered a state of ruin within the lifetime of the empire Augustus had founded, only to be recovered in piecemeal fashion as the Campus Martius, or Campo Marzio, became increasingly populated with palaces and churches in the early modern era.

Fragments of the Solarium were found from the fifteenth century onwards and placed in their current location before the seventeenth-century Palazzo Montecitorio – once home to the Curia Apostolica and, since Unification, accommodating the Italian House of Representatives (main, 3). Pieces of the Ara Pacis (or what have long been assumed to be such) were also collated from the sixteenth century onwards to form the monument that now sits opposite the forlorn Augusteum, which was restored as part of an urban renewal project conceived under Mussolini’s authority in the 1930s. The bimillennial of Augustus’ death was a dull affair marked by missed deadlines. The 1937 celebration of his birth, however, was vividly coloured by the cult of romanità as ideologues and tastemakers sought to recast Rome as the heart of a new Italian Empire, a natural heir to its ancient imperial forebear. That year saw the inauguration of building works intended to ensure that the Ara Pacis was preserved as a privileged moment within the fascist city – works that were interrupted by war and never resumed. More than half a century later, though, the Ara Pacis found itself encased in a contentious new building designed by the American architect Richard Meier, opening to markedly mixed reviews in 2006.

The significance placed by Mussolini on imperial Rome was hardly the first time that a glorious past had been used to validate present-day claims of authority. Augustus himself built confidently on the bedrock of Rome’s myths – two of which, rendered in marble, we meet upon entering Meier’s stage (figure 1.1). Only with difficulty can we extract the events depicted on the Lupercal and Aeneas panels from the very idea of Rome, and so each deserves our attention.

Figure 1.1: Ara Pacis, building by Richard Meier (completed 2006).

Romulus and Remus

Romulus and Remus are everywhere in this city: twin infants sustained by a she-wolf, one of whom would go on to found Rome itself. The medieval, bronze Capitoline Wolf – with its sixteenth-century addition of the twins – has come to stand for Rome as surely as the Eiffel Tower stands for Paris and the Statue of Liberty for New York. (The eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann suggested that the wolf was Etruscan, possibly made by the same sculptor, Vulcan of Veii, who carved the reliefs on the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Carbon dating has put it instead as being made between the mid-eleventh and mid-twelfth centuries.) In modern times it was used as the symbol of the 1960 Olympic Games and even now appears on the crest of Rome’s premier football team– on almost anything, really, that can be sold at a souvenir stand or market stall. T-shirts, key rings, beanies, barbeque aprons: Romulus, Remus and the wolf, alone in their cave, embody Rome. In the Ara Pacis their story is invoked on the left of the two panels (the Lupercal Relief), which shows the brothers drinking from the wolf in the shade of a fig tree under the protective gaze of their father, depicted as Mars, and the shepherd Faustulus, who found them at the base of the Palatine and raised them with his wife, Acca Larentia.

Standing before the Lupercal Relief is one way to reflect upon this foundation myth. Another is to make the short trek from the Ara Pacis to the Palatine hill (entry through the Forum for a fee) and to the Domus Augusti (House of Augustus: inset map, 33) thereupon, now protected by an incongruous hip roof (and partly visible from the Circus Maximus, or Circo Massimo, that runs along the base of the hill). In 2007, archaeologists announced their discovery of a decorated first-century BC circular chamber beneath the Domus– an apparent celebration of what they claimed to be the very cave in which the twins were said to be raised. It appeared to add substance to the story. Enthusiasm quickly gave way to debate, though, as to the precise identity and patronage of what had first been named the Lupercal, but it is difficult to shake the idea of the emperor literally building his own house upon the embellished grotto in which the idea of Rome was first made possible.

The events held to have followed the discovery of Romulus and Remus on the banks of the Tiber (the course of which having changed over time) comprise what must arguably be one of the best-known stories of antiquity. As is common with siblings, the boys were close, but were also prone to fight, and as they grew into men their conflicts became more pronounced. They were children of the god of war and grandchildren of the king of the principal Latin city of Alba Longa; rulership was in their blood. (Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence, now occupies the site of Alba Longa.) Before the boys had been born, Amulius had conspired to remove his brother Numitor from the throne, kill his male heir and commit his niece Rhea Silvia to life as a Vestal Virgin. Discovering that she had become pregnant (to the god Mars, she claimed) and given birth to twin boys, Amulius instructed that the boys be killed and their mother imprisoned. The boys, as we know, survived. As youths, they worked the slopes of the Palatine hill and tended livestock, playing Robin Hood in their spare time by depriving thieves of their spoils and distributing the takings among the shepherds. An act of retribution saw Remus in the custody of his grandfather, who (like Faustulus at the same time) did his sums and understood the young man to be his grandson. Romulus and his shepherd brethren met Remus at an agreed-upon time and they together overthrew Amulius, King of Alba Longa.

Not content with waiting to inherit Alba Longa from their grandfather, Remus and Romulus instead embraced the prospect of founding a new city (or two new cities, depending on the account) on the very slopes where they had tended flocks with their adoptive father. Romulus built a wall (or dug a trench) to define the extent of a settlement over which he would rule as king. Remus may or may not have founded his own city of Remoria (main, 31) on the neighbouring Aventine hill, but he insulted Romulus’ fortifications and showed their weakness by climbing (or jumping) over them, at which point either Romulus or his agent Celer (from whom we have Celeres, royal bodyguards) clocked him fatally on the head with a shovel (or a hoe, or some other deadly implement), thereby clearing up the question of sovereignty and defining for the city its first ruler, after whom, naturally, Rome took its name.

This is the most resilient version of events, recorded three centuries after the fact by Quintus Fabius Pictor. Fabius wrote towards the end of the third century BC, in the years of the Second Punic Wars, when Rome had begun to assert itself as a Mediterranean force and acquire colonies. He helped to make sense of the city’s rise and shaped the image that projected its power and authority within the region. The history written by Fabius is now lost to time, but shaped those later histories written by the likes of Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Titus Livius Patavinus, known as Livy. Written in the time of Augustus, Livy’s history was called Ab urbe condita (‘from the founding of the city’), borrowing from Fabius to explain the events spanning from Rome’s origins to his present day. As such, his rehearsal of the so-called Fabian myth offers a reassuring version of Rome’s foundations as a city at a time when, under Augustus, Rome was bedding down fresh footings upon them.

Livy has Romulus disappear at the end of his life, being swallowed up by a storm after offering a sacrifice on the Quirinal hill: perhaps an early instance of senatorial regicide, but with the effect of deifying the founder for subsequent generations. Variations on Fabius (and Livy after him) abound, and the now-conventional depiction of the twins, wolf, shepherd and wife is one version of a story told every which way. Some writers accord Acca Larentia with either more base or more divine standing, depending on the storyteller; some conflate her with the wolf. Others have Remus survive Romulus, which would put paid to the Fabian punchline. The importance of the story is not, though, simply in identifying a moment in which Rome comes to be: a makeshift weapon finding its mark and a furrow hitting the earth, first gestures defining the city that would rule the world. It rests rather in the potential authority offered by history to the great families of the third and second...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Map of Rome
• Preface
• Introduction: Thinking about Seeing
• 1 A Matter of Foundations
• 2 Roma Caput Mundi
• 3 A Middle Age
• 4 Return to Rome
• 5 The Capital of Italy
• Selected Sources
• Chronology
• Credits
• Index of Works
• Index of Places
• Index of Names
• End User License Agreement