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X. SOUTH TO AVERNUS
The car navigates past the Via Appia Antica, the first great Roman road that dates to the Fourth Century B. C. and is still remarkable for its straight line and its enduring strength. The New Appian Way, or Via Appia Nuova, is a four lane motorway leading out of town in a southeasterly direction. Darwin unfolds a great big map of the Monte Albano region and does his best to hold it steady as he consults it while wind blows through the open windows. "We should be there in an hour."
"Good," she says. "We can use daylight nicely for the last mile." You wonder what this means, but decide, apprehensively, not to ask. She shifts gears and the car smoothly sails through an exit, out onto the Via Appia Antica itself. There she slows down to 100 kph. "We’re heading into the heart of ancient Latium," Amalthea says over her shoulder, or into the rear-view mirror. "The Alban Hills."
Darwin explains: "Understand that the climate back in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age was different than it is now. You remember that a great volcano, Thera/Santorin, blew up around 1500 B.C. and knocked Bronze Age civilization into a cocked helmet. The blast left an enormous caldera (crater, cauldron) 400 meters (over 1200 feet) deep. Blast debris were measurable in ice cores recently taken in Greenland. Centuries of unrest followed, including the Trojan War about which Homer hiccuped. It’s the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, overrun by the Hyksos or Sea People for several centuries until the Tuthmosid Kings of the New Kingdom liberate Egypt. It was roughly the time of the Biblical Exodus, whose plagues and parting of the Red Sea may reflect some geophysical effects of the blast. From the perspective of Latium, it was just one more event in never-ending sequence of volcanic activity all up and down and across the Italian Peninsula. Following the last Ice Age, there was a lot of volcanic and seismic activity—maybe all that ice melting, making the plates groan under the earth. The atmosphere had more debris in it, blocking the sun, and the result was longer and colder winters, more drizzle, a lot of fog and darkness. The climate was colder and wetter across Lazio, which may have been uncomfortable for the primitive peoples, particularly living higher up like the Sabines. Conditions were made worse by the volcanoes and earthquakes rumbling through people’s lives. No wonder that a major god here is Vulcan (Hephaestus). Imagine how terrified people must have been, not only of the thunder and lightning of the sky gods, but the sulfur, the stench, the danger coming from the earth herself. This earth, or Gaia (like Gea, the feminine variation of Geos), was nurturing but fickle. The ancients around here must have had a great, somber respect for their environment. Perhaps not so much the early Etruscans, who seemed to have laughed with life, but the austere Latins who originally had no named gods in the sense of those in Greek mythology, but worshipped nature spirits much in the manner of the Inuit peoples around the Arctic Circle, or some Native American tribes, or modern-day animists of Africa."
As the car hums along the Appian Way, you marvel at the straightness of the road. Started 312 B.C. by an engineer named Appius Claudius, using technology inherited from the Etruscans, the road eventually stretched the length of southern Italy and ended in Brundisium (Brindisi) looking from the upper part of the Italian heel across the Adriatic to Greece. With a later extension, it now ends in Hydruntum (Otranto) at the heel of the heel. Thousands of miles of connecting roads were added to string the empire together during the next six or seven centuries. Since the Romans liked to build these practical public works in endless military uniformity, the model was not improved much, nor did it need to be. It is a road that has seen much history. From Hannibal’s time to Caesar’s; to the Vandals, the Alans, and the Goths; from the popes to Napoleon, Garibaldi to Mussolini and Patton, countless ghosts march on its stones. Those stones themselves are cut from local basalt, an igneous stone levered out of Lazio’s geothermally active earth. For centuries, the famous, the rich, and the fashionable built villas or had themselves buried in fanciful tombs along its sides. It has been called the Queen of Roads. Legionaries and generals marched out of the Porta Capena gate in the Servian Wall (Rome’s inner defenses, dating from before the Punic Wars) on their way to conquer new provinces around the world. Almost nothing is left of this city gate except a mossy cube of stone set in the middle of a park near the Roman Forum. The structure was part of the earliest major aqueducts of Rome, for the ever-practical Romans liked multiple usage of their architecture when possible, and it’s said the gate itself used to incessantly drip from the water passing overhead. You assume the Romans had not yet learned to use lead to line their water conduits (the Latin for ‘lead’ being plumbum, root plumb-, from which comes the modern English ‘plumbing’). The road passes by the Baths of Caracalla (built exactly 500 years after the Appian Way).
Nearby is the church of Domine Quo Vadis?, ‘Lord, Where Are You Going?,’ which gets its handle from a story regarding St. Peter. The first pope escaped miraculously from wherever he was imprisoned (some say the infamous Mamertine prison) and he was on his way out of town. Coming the other way was none other than a bleeding, dazed Jesus Christ. Peter stammers: "Lord, where are you going?" The answer is: "I am going to Rome to be martyred in your place." Peter falls to his knees, ashamed, and asks forgiveness for his cowardice. The apparition vanishes. Peter turns and walks back to Rome, knowing he will be martyred. He is crucified upside down, for the entertainment of a racing-day crowd, on the central median or spina, spine, of the Circus of Gaius and Nero. This circus, better recognized as that of Caligula and Nero, two of Rome's most infamous tyrants, in those days lay at the far northwestern pale of Rome, on a hill otherwise mainly used as a necropolis for Christians and polytheists alike. In modern times it lies along the main axis of Vatican City. At one end of the circus is the modern St. Peter's Square. At the other end of the spina is the main altar of St. Peter's. While excavating the old St. Peter's Basilica of Constantine to build the modern St. Peter’s, Michelangelo discovered catacombs, including the tomb of a man who could well have been St. Peter, directly under the main altar.
If we trust legend, we know the exact spot of Peter’s crucifixion: on the spina (‘spine’ or median divider around which the chariots raced), and more specifically halfway between the western meta (‘measure’ or turning point) and the imported Egyptian obelisk at the center. In the typical circus, you had a kind of central island or a wall, the spina or spine, which in a modern auto race track would be where cars pull in for those quick tire changes. At either end of the spina were one or more markers called meta (it’s tempting to guess it might be the source of ‘track meet’). Peter was buried halfway along the western half of the spina, where now stands the main altar inside St. Peter’s Basilica. Today, St. Peter’s Basilica sits on the site of the alleged crucifixion, while St. Peter’s Square pretty much sits over the other end of where the spina used to be.
You are south of there now, across the Tiber, leaving Rome and heading south, riding along the old Appian Way (not the new, parallel highway of the same name). Mark Antony rode off to meet Cleopatra on this road, and tens of thousands of Spartacus’ escaped gladiators were crucified and hung in a row for endless miles as a warning that would never be forgotten by captured slaves or their Roman masters. The Apostle Paul came this way, as did St. Peter before him. In fact, according to the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 28:15-16), when Paul came to Rome (where he too was martyred) crowds of enthusiastic Christians came 43 miles south, from Transtiberim at the southwestern corner of Rome, to the Market of Appius to meet him. Others, perhaps women, children, and the old, only made it as far as a place called The Three Taverns, which was about 33 miles along this great road. The Appian Way is a highway of history. Tragic cavalcades of wild animals from Africa and Asia wended their way here to a gruesome death before howling crowds. Elephants, giraffes, hippos, lions, tigers, ostriches, crocodiles, even wagons with large snakes moved along an endless supply line funded by vast public outlays to keep the mob of Rome from tearing the city to pieces and deposing the emperor. From the old gate, the Appian Way follows the route of an even more ancient road south past the Temple of Mars, through the town of Bovillae, and toward the Alban Hills where you are headed right now. The list of names goes on and on, of those who traveled these stones, from Charlemagne to the Crusaders, from Thomas Aquinas to Saracens, armies from Germany, Spain, France, Austria; poets from Dante to Tasso, Byron and Goethe, Longfellow, Melville, Twain; modern tourists from Japan and Rio, car thieves from Naples to Pisa, Latin teachers and pious nuns from little academies everywhere, and, most scary to contemplate, the ordinary and the famous for probably at least another two or three thousand years after You are all long gone and forgotten like D. H. Lawrence’s flowers and Etruscan cities. Such is the melancholy that mixes with sunshine as you race along, grateful for the company of Professor Darwin and his beautiful, self-reliant daughter Amalthea.
You leave the Via Appia and take an even more ancient route, the Via Latina, or Latin Road, heading toward the Alban Hills. As you pass the entrances to the Catacombs of San Sebastiano and St. Callistus, you realize again you are on a journey whose spirit is half in the light above, and half in the dark below.
You pass the Circus of Maxentius (Fourth Century A.D.), the best preserved of its kind in the Roman world. The course is 500 yards (1500 feet, over a quarter mile) long and 80 yards wide, and chariots used to race around and around in the best Ben Hur tradition to the cheering of 18,000 spectators. That’s a lot fewer than over a quarter million who could be packed into the Circus Maximus, but still a healthy crowd. You pass the large circular tomb of the wealthy Cecilia Metella, which resembles a small Hadrian’s Tomb. The Appian Way continues now, asphalted over, but in patchy fashion, so that the old stones poke through here and there. You pass a bend in the road where the legendary Horatii and Curatii brothers (three of each) were selected to settle a fight between the Romans and the Albans around 400 B. C. (early Republic). The only survivor of this alleged match was a fellow named Horatius. In modern shirts-and-skins terms, it went something like ‘One-Zip, Scratch 2/Scratch 3, Game.’ Everyone built monuments and Rome took home the bacon. They won, and they got to write the history. The tombs are still there, little more than grass mounds, and the Appian Way makes one of its only doglegs to accommodate what was, in the Third Century A.D., already ancient history.
You cross the Grande Raccordo Anulare (GRA), or ‘great ring road’ circling modern Rome, bringing you beyond city limits. You pass a melancholy stretch of cypresses—associated with death and bad luck by modern Italians—and cemeteries, as well as the broken pillars of a Temple of Hercules.
Once in the Alban Hills, you pass the ruins of the Villa of the Quintili, murdered by Commodus in the late Second Century A.D. This is the mad emperor (one of various) on whose accession (180 A.D., upon his father Marcus Aurelius’ death) the so-called Pax Romana or Roman Peace comes to a sudden end. You got most of the story if you saw the 2001 movie, except that Maximus didn’t kill Commodus in real life. Maximus in real life died early in the action, before the colas and popcorn ran out, not long after Marcus Aurelius himself. Commodus raised hell for twelve years, during which time he ruined the Empire. He fancied himself a god and an artistic genius, much as Nero and a few other nuts had. Commodus made lots of enemies including everyone close to him. Conspirators got one of his concubines, Marcia, to poison him on the evening of December 31, 192 A.D. Commodus, however, was a physical brute, and he simply vomited up the poison. He did, however, decide to lie down and rest in his bedroom. In a scene reminiscent of the lengthy murder of Rasputin, Marcia’s gang of praetorians and other palace officials then sent in a young athlete named Narcissus to strangle Commodus. The body was quietly buried and that was the end of that. Yes, you may laugh at his name. No, toilets aren’t named after him. However, the modern word ‘commode’ comes from the same word (commodus), a word of several meanings, including ‘pleasing.’ If his parents were alive today, they most likely would not name him Flush, after Thomas Crapper’s 19th Century invention. Perhaps they would have preferred to press on him the handle W.C., but we’ll never know for sure, and who gives a—hoot?
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