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XIV. ALONG THE OSTIAN WAY
At last, Asconius comes down the walkway. He is a smallish man with olive complexion and short black hair, curly, graying around the temples. He wears a long white garment with many folds in it (his toga), and over it a cloak and a scarf. In fact, his vestments are not that dissimilar from those worn by of modern Christian priests, patterned on everyday Roman street-wear. Asconius greets you with polite interest, and makes small talk with Darwin as you begin the trek into the city. Seems that Darwin is making arrangements ahead for places to stay.
You are walking on a paved road, built of solid stone, about two or three miles from the Ostian Way south of Rome. You’ve heard the saying "All roads lead to Rome." Well, that was true for many centuries, primarily because the Romans built most of the roads in the known world, and if you followed any one of them long enough, chances are you’d end up somewhere in Rome cooling your heels with a cup of red wine and talking about which famous chariot team (the Blues or the Greens) was going to win at the race track the next day.
If you were to look at a map of Rome at this point in the Imperial era, you’d see a blob containing about a million inhabitants, an urban sprawl covering something like nine square miles at its main core, jam-packed with temples, shops, multi-story apartment buildings, palaces, market places, race tracks, arenas, and of course the villas of the trendy and well to do. With that kind of population, it would be even today one of the largest cities in North America, Europe, or just about anywhere. Because at this point it’s sitting in a secure geographical heartland a thousand miles from the nearest border in any direction, and it’s unthinkable that barbarians would come pouring through looting and burning (as they will in 225 years), there aren’t any city walls or towers. That comes much later, when the Empire starts shrinking and the Dark Ages begin. At this moment, the heart of the Roman Empire is no longer the little village it was a thousand years ago, but a sprawl that just goes on and on for hundreds of miles. From above, like any city of that size, Rome looks like an octopus with all these major roads coming into it from all points of the compass.
Looking at your map, we’d see the core of the sprawl sitting some 25 kilometers (15 miles) from what was then the shore of the Mediterranean to the west. There, is the port city of Ostia. This is where in the 21st Century you would fly in to Leonardo da Vinci International Airport and then casually enjoy a 20-minute taxi ride into town. In 285 A.D. this is the main pressure point of Rome’s world trade, where the all-important grain comes in by ship from Egypt, and where Roman merchant and military fleets sail to the port cities of the empire. Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. Because the Tiber is such a forceful river, it dumps a lot of silt into its mouth (os, hence Ostia), thus moving the shoreline eastward. As a result, Ostia has gradually become more and more inland and is being abandoned as a port. Claudius, in the first Century, built a major port (called, unimaginatively, Portus) on the north side of the Tiber mouth. Trajan added some major features, and now Portus is the main harbor for Rome's sea trade. Ostia, however, is still an important city in many ways. The corporations have their headquarters here, and the warehouses remain busy as ever. Insulae ('islands') serve as apartments and hotels and what-not. If you're a Roman and can't afford a luxury villa in Neapolis, but can afford a trip to the beach, you'll bring your family down to the beachfront west of Ostia—working on that tan down by the waves.
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You leave the country villa, where the owner of Asconius often escapes the noise and crime of the big city. You head toward the main road, whose stone course runs straight as an arrow mile after mile. The Army built and maintains most of the Roman highways, and for the most part it’s all done according to regulation: exactly 15 feet 9 inches wide to permit two standard military chariots or cargo wagons to pass each other going in opposite directions. These roads, as they pass through built-up neighborhoods everywhere along the way, are cleverly constructed so that pedestrians can cross them by stepping on blocks placed in the roadway—but the axles ride above the blocks, and wheels travel past them in prebuilt ruts.
So far, you’re still on a quiet side road where you can hear crickets chirping loudly in swamps, and cicadas rattling away in big trees. You hear dogs barking in villas all around—the closer you get to Rome, the more expensive the real estate and the more exclusive the ownership. There on your right is a huge barracks lit by torches all around, in which trainee gladiators sleep, some in chains. You wince a bit, hearing the screams of a man being flogged for trying to run away, and can you blame him? Asconius shrugs and tells us the poor fellow is scheduled for his first and probably last fight in one of the warm-up shows at the Colosseum in a few days.
Along the way, you file through the courtyard of a small villa where Asconius has a flurried conversation with the owner, perhaps about a bill Asconius owes. As you cool your heels waiting, you look around. It’s a rather typical layout, found from Pompeii to Londinium, with few variations. The prevalence of fertility symbols again strikes you. You see a wall painting of a brawny purple-skinned country guy, Priapus, with a huge member hanging out of his garment and proudly resting on a scale to indicate its heaviness. What are these old Romans thinking? It’s not just bawdy, as tittering moderns might think, but at some level has religious significance, at least in that people were thinking about, or wishing for, good potency, kids, family values; they just expressed it a little differently from your culture. Male and female genitalia and other sexually explicit images from simpler ages pop up throughout daily life in Classical antiquity. As you did in your bedroom at the hotel, if you’ll look up to your right, on that balcony outside the second story where the family have their main quarters, you’ll see oil lamps hanging from the rafters, and the oil lamps are in the shape of penises. It always boggles the mind how hard it is to pin down just what went on in the Roman mind. The better villas, likewise, are covered inside with odd and sometimes haunting religious allegories that moderns dismiss as ‘mythology’ but whose significance cut to their core of how the ancients saw themselves. Picture again an ancient Roman dropped on Main Street in Anytown, USA. He’d be confused as the dickens by all those signs. Does a cluster of road signs, with squiggles and arrows pointing in all directions, have religious significance? If he had a clue the squiggles are Arabic numerals, would he wonder if the numbers are lucky ones? Are the signs for Beef-o-Burger holy icons of some cattle cult (like Mithraism) or are they advertisements for a taberna (‘tavern’)? Is the bun on the billboard a prayer to a wheat goddess (Ceres)? Does the neon palmist sign herald an official government temple? The displaced Roman’s questions would be endless (and intelligent), and that describes how you feel on this dark, oppressive stretch of road leading to Rome.
Here in this alien world, you have a fleeting but lasting vision of wind chimes tinkling in the wind, and a female tragic drama mask—eyes wide and mouth open in terror—floating under a tree branch in the wind above. It’s again that eerie Rome that is almost close enough to reach out to, but always just a little bit too far to touch.
You come to a crossroads. You’ve been hearing the noise and seeing the lights for at least a mile away. Now you smell it too, the odor of human and animal waste in the night. Though you are still several miles from town, welcome to the outskirts of Rome, capital of smells and noises. The Senate passed a law, downtown in the main Forum where all the lawyers work, some centuries ago decreeing that nobody can drive a wagon carrying goods into the city during daylight hours. That’s because the city center is relatively small, and the population enormous, and the traffic jams horrendous. As a result, nobody can sleep at night—from dusk to dawn, from Ostia to Rome, from Portus and Veii, from Satricum and Lanuvium, from Tusculum and Praeneste and a thousand other points in the area, the main roads are clogged with wagons coming in at night and leaving before dawn. In the meantime all those animals and slaves have to eat, to drink, to relieve themselves, and you’re a few thousand years short of modern truck stops. But they do have taverns and fast food stands along the way, and, yes, houses of ill repute, in short anything a slave, his master, his mistress, or a good pack mule may possibly need. Got a horse that needs a quick shoeing? There’s Brutus the smith, open 24-7. Need a loan at three a.m. (actually, the ninth hour of night, by the clepsydra or water clock)? Then stop at the Villa of Balbus down the road and knock on the side door for the night slave to open a slot; it’ll cost you plenty, but you’ll get your loan if you can prove decent credit. The nightlife reminds you of Las Vegas by torchlight.
In fact, you’re just passing by a crossroads where the Ostian Way intersects some lesser country road serving a bunch of wine orchards and cheese-producing dairy farms, and the place rocks. A joke, you think? Listen, and you’ll hear the drums, cymbals, flutes, and bagpipes, not to mention a brass ensemble, in a nightclub where the sleepless come to drink honeyed wine and eat fruit while mingling around the dance floor. An act from Nubia in Africa is shortly followed by a belly dancer from Alexandria, Egypt, and then a troupe of wailing singers from Anatolia. If you can’t find it around Rome, you can’t find it anywhere.
Ah! Relief for sore feet—here comes the wagon Asconius arranged for you and Darwin. You help your mentor climb in, then join him on the clean and fragrant straw. The long cart is pulled by a team of oxen, and it doesn’t have much in the way of shock absorbers, just some leather padding on the axle, but the road bed is so smooth that you could doze off—if it weren’t for the constant crack of whips, shouting of overseers, singing of slaves from 100 different cultures determined to make the best of a bad situation, and of course the Hare Krishna-like chanting of religious cultists on street corners trying to get us to join their particular flavor of Mithraism or Isis worship or whatever. The Romans do have chariots you can rent, and every time the wheel turns, a pebble drops from one sealed box into another. If you mess with the seal, you go to jail. If you do this a lot, you end up in the arena with a sword in your trembling hand, plus an empty bladder and wet feet. At the end of the day, you turn the wagon in and pay the mileage. There are lots of such little touches that would be familiar to us—for example, women in beach towns like Pompeii wearing bikinis, high heels, and enough cosmetics to set up a modern department store counter in Manhattan. Then you immediately get the picture of a teenage girl having her hair done by her slave girls, and peevishly sticking them with needles when things aren’t going her way. It could be a scene out of Gone With The Wind—Abesse Cum Vento.
The Ostian Highway is just one major road coming into Rome. The most famous is of course the Appian, where some twenty to forty thousand rebellious slaves were crucified after the Spartacus Revolt in 71 B.C.—grisly, but effective, when you consider people are still talking about it 2000 years later. Good memory aid. The Latin, the Valerian, the Salarian, the Tiberine, the Flaminian, the Cassian, and the Aurelian—those are some of the major highways leading into Rome. All along the way, you find the wealthy showing off, not just in the splendor of their palaces and villas, but competing with fancy tombs.
You pass plenty of settlements where the poor live. You find areas devoted to travelers, in which there are hotels and restaurants—the accommodations frankly horrid by your standards, with uncomfortable beds, tiny rooms, lousy public toilets, and constant stench and noise. Above all, you really gotta love fish because the whole place smells like a cross between a urinal and a sardine can. Luckily nobody smokes (it’s unknown) but they do burn incense at every opportunity, whether it’s at a roadside shrine to some god, or just to freshen up a bit. But consider—the Romans have the finest plumbing Europe will see until the mid 20th Century or beyond, and their standards of personal hygiene are unequaled anywhere—it cost about a penny to get into the enormous bath establishments (the size of cathedrals), and everyone who wasn’t stuck in a salt mine or rowing a bireme went—even the better class of slaves have their hour, and of course the women have their own times, different from the men’s.
It’s time for a snack. Did you say hot dogs? You should rather say dormice. Those aren’t mice at all, but little rodents that were the hot dog and the hamburger of the Roman fast food crowd. "E-e-w-w..." you say. Right. Well, first you should remember that they had no pasta, no tomatoes, and no potatoes, among other staples you take for granted. They did have plenty of bread and other cereals, barley, rice, and lots of beans (except some cults, like the Pythagoreans, believed beans were tiny fetuses of transmigrating souls, and therefore a sin to eat). The average Roman’s idea of edible big game was the dormouse. This isn’t actually a mouse (mus musculus) at all, although it is in fact a rodent (L. ‘one that gnaws’) as is the mouse. Rather, it’s a member of the family Gliridae, which resemble squirrels in that they are bigger than mice, gray, live in trees, and have bushy tails. In fact, the name dormouse is said to be a corruption, not suggesting a mouse living by your door, but of the French dormeuse, from Latin dormire, a sleepy or sluggish one. As with so many myths, you’re not lying down to eat—that’s just the wealthy at major meal celebrations. You’re sitting around like picnickers of any era, eating leisurely from little baskets, while the traffic rumbles around you on the great highway and a young blond slave boy jumps about with a whisk, shooing flies away—a perk of eating at Molo’s roadside stand, a real favorite among wagoneers.
As you sit chewing on your fresh bread and dormice (tastes like chicken, but then what doesn’t?), and wash it down with watered down, honey-sweetened red wine, you watch the endless parade of souls going in and out of the city. (You wish you had a cup of coffee about now, but small sacrifices must be made.) You see a century (100 men) of marines marching past in formation and full armor, led by a centurion on a horse. You see a wagon of numbly frightened, shackled slaves being taken to a quick death during halftime. Death sports are, in a way, Rome’s biggest industry. Endless and varied charnel house entertainments in the arenas and circuses provide millions of spectators their daily races and death sports. If you get tired one any one event, you just change the charnel.
You see a caravan of grain carts bringing wheat from Egypt, by way of Ostia and Trajan’s Portus, to the industrial size bakeries around the city that cater to the riffraff—being "on welfare" mainly means getting free food and wine in addition to free entertainment in the cheap seats at the Colosseum or the Circus Maximus. It’s what used to get politicians during the Republic their election votes. Now it just keeps the mobs of a quarter million uneducated, unemployed, unskilled loafers from tearing up the city. Hordes of people are on the dole, and it gets worse every generation. For centuries, wealthy land owners have been putting the traditional small farmers of the Republican period out of business. Sound familiar? The small farmers can’t compete with the wealthy plantations that use thousands of slaves, and so are forced to sell to the wealthy landowners, thereby making the plantations (latifundia) bigger and bigger. With his little payout, the farmer takes his family into the city hoping for some sort of killing, gets killed instead, and the family ends up being more riffraff on the streets getting their daily dose of free food and circus games to keep them out of trouble. Everyone frowns on it, and politicians constantly promise to clean things up if elected—like the world’s oldest profession, that seems to be the world’s oldest song and dance.
Yes, they do have elections here. Well, they did, during the Republic. You’ll recall that for the first 450 years or so—from 509 B. C. when they threw out the last Etruscan king, to 46 B. C. when Julius Caesar declared himself dictator for life, Rome was a republic. One of the first things they did in the old republic was to pass a law forbidding anyone to enter the city with an army, including their own (except on certain feast days, and then only for a few hours—in, out, basta!). That worked until well into Imperial times, when emperors got around the law by having a strong palace guard force (the Praetorian), whose numbers they could beef up with skilled fighters from the arena.
Moderns have inherited are those two bundles of sticks (fasces) you see, one on either side of the U.S. flag behind the rostrum in the House of Representatives. The ancient Etruscan symbol of communal power was that same bundle of sticks (representing the power of unity—you can break one at a time, but you can’t break them all at once) with a double-headed axe in the middle representing the king’s absolute power over life and death. The Romans threw out the axe and kept the bundle (fasces). From the Spartans (who had two kings) the Romans may have borrowed the custom of having two consuls to rule them. These guys had to consult with each other before anything drastic got done—an early system of checks and balances.
Roman law said that, in times of emergency, the people could elect a single man dictator (‘speaker, orders-giver’) for a term of not more than six months. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a simple Roman farmer and good old country boy, until the Senate called on him in 458 B. C. to save them from an enemy tribe called the Aequi (long since vanished) early in the mythology-shrouded origins of the Republic. Seems the consul Minucius and his army were getting creamed in the field. Cincinnatus took just 16 days to annihilate the Aequi, promptly resigned his absolute power, and returned to the simple life of plowing his fields and milking his cows. As a reward, he had a city in Ohio named after him. You can readily guess the flaw in this system—a guy wouldn’t necessarily want to give up once he had absolute power, and that’s how Julius Caesar felt about things in 46 B.C. The Senators stabbed him to death at a spot right outside the Senate Curia inside Pompey's Theater.
Inside a theater? This is a historical footnote worth telling. The original Senate Curia (from cura, care) or hall where the Senate meets to plan the future of Rome, was located where now (285 and after) the Imperial Fora are located. That's just east of the old Roman Forum, and consists of a great Temple of Peace, plus the Forums of Nerva, Caesar, Augustus, and Trajan. It was Julius Caesar who decided to begin adding on with his own forum, and several others followed suit. They were able to do this because the area east of the Forum burned down around the middle of the First Century B.C., and with it the old Curia. Soon after, the three most powerful men in Rome were Crassus (Money Bags), Pompey (famous general and admiral), and Julius Caesar (most notorious of the New Men). Following a series of civil wars, the Senate tried to restore order by appointing these guys as a Triumvirate ('three men') to rule the city together. Pompey built the city's first stone theater, and because the Curia had burned down, he offered the Senate the use of his theater as a temporary Curia. It's located in the Campus Martius area near the Tiber, in the Flaminian Way district. Togetehr with the nearby Via Lata ('Broadway') district, this is Rome's theater and entertainment district. Although conservative Rome hated what they considered the decadent Greeks and their sophisticated ways (including theater), Rome as a whole couldn't get enough of all things Greek. There had been Greek and Greek-style theater in Rome for centuries, but the building of permanent (stone) theaters was prohibited, and in particular it was forbidden to offer theatrical performances within the sacred Pomerium, the spiritual boundary, of the city. The Campus Martius lay outside this boundary, so finally Pompey was able to persuade those sourpusses across the Roman Forum to let him build a stone theater in the 50s B.C. They relented, reluctantly, on the condition that the city's priests approve. Pompey came up with a scheme that finally was deemed acceptable. He erected a shrine to Diana above the highest row of spectator seats in his semi-circular theater, and persuaded the sacred authorities the gods would see the theater as a temple to Diana, with the spectator seats being steps leading to the shrine. Ironically, Julius Caesar managed to do away with both Crassus and Pompey, thus ending the First Triumvirate (trium, ‘three’ + vir, ‘man’) and becoming Dictator (an office stemming from a very ancient law that said in times of emergencies, the Senate could suspend the balanced government of two consuls, and for a limited time appoint one really savvy guy dictator for a term not to exceed six months). After two years of Caesar's dictatorship, the most conservative senators were itching to get their Republic restored, so they stabbed Julius Caesar to death in the Curia of Pompey's Theater. Even in modern times, Roman fascists and romantics continue to burn candles and lay flowers every year on the anniversary of Caesar's murder, in Pompey's Theater, at a shrine dating from ancient times.
Along came Julius Caesar's adopted nephew, Octavius, who decided it was time for a new world order. He felt everything would be so much easier if he were dictator. He had the Senate declare him higher and higher honors along a slippery upward slope, until in 27 B.C. they made him Imperator. Ironically, he got there by promising them he was the one and only person who could restore the Republic. His appointment effectively terminated the Republic forever. Having done away with the Republic’s checks and balances, and such fine points as elections, he found that, as emperor, he could do anything he wanted, and nobody could question him. After his death, he was declared a god. Later emperors didn’t have that kind of patience and forced an increasingly powerless Senate to declare them living gods right away. The emperor thing is a lot like a progressive illness, a cancer that eats society from inside while nobody is paying attention. This deification-thing came to a screeching halt when Christianity became the official state religion after 313 A.D. After that, a few emperors tried to make themselves pope, but those crusty old bishops were nowhere near as spineless as the Senate, and that idea went nowhere.
Speaking of popes, the word Pontiff, referring to a pope, comes from the term for the ancient chief priest of Jupiter, or pontifex maximus, ‘supreme bridge-maker’ (to the gods). To be fair, Plutarch disagreed with this idea, arguing ‘pontifex’ comes from the root word potes, ‘power.’ Some archaeologists think that the main priesthood, that of Jupiter atop the Capitoline Hill, became wealthy and powerful by collecting tolls (likely at knifepoint) on the nearby Sublician Bridge. Before the bridge was built, there was a ferry crossing at the same place. The trade at the ferry crossing probably was so lucrative that they parlayed it into the first bridge across the Tiber—which would literally make them bridge-makers. The controversy is now just water under the bridge.
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