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XVII. DOWNTOWN, THE LIGHTS ARE MUCH BRIGHTER THERE
You enter the city through the Porta Raudusculana, a huge gate with turrets on either side. It’s part of the new Aurelian Wall fortifications. During the disastrous epoch beginning with the reign of Commodus (180 A.D.) and about to end with Carinus (285), Rome basks in the final glow of her civilization. There are yet great moments ahead, but the infamous sack by the Goths and Vandals is a mere 135 years ahead in 410. That apocalyptic vision is entirely unknown to the average man or woman in the streets, and you won’t tell them, will you?
As you walk into the city, up the Aventine heights, you enter into a kind of torch glow that reminds you of electric city lights. It’s almost daylight now. You can smell that wonderful aroma of the bakeries, along with a thousand cooking smells—porridge, a little game hen here and there, the ever-present dormouse that keeps half the city alive, and dozens of fascinating pungent spices, herbs, and vegetables. Here’s a fundamental thing you have to understand about the urban Romans. Most of them did not live in houses—contrary to those diagrams you've seen in your Latin book or history book, of a domus with atrium, impluvium, triclinium, and so forth. The wealthy, of course, had huge palaces. The solidly middle class might have small houses built around courtyards in peripheral areas of the city, but most folks lived in enormous apartment blocks called insulae (literally, "islands"). In this way, a slave with a dingy little room in a great house might be marginally better off than a free person living in a miserable little rat-hole in a huge, noisy, smelly tenement. Such insulae were notorious for suddenly collapsing, killing dozens. The emperors do decree some building standards, but builders often use inferior materials and bribe inspectors. Most Romans had no cooking facilities or private bathrooms in their tenement rooms. Often, several families might share a crowded apartment, as will be common in the so-called rookeries across the Victorian world. Most Roman families share a common latrine in a courtyard, and most take their meals at cheap, simple little restaurants or fast food stands. The average Roman is a much more public person than the average Modern. The average man or woman bathes daily in one of nearly 1,000 bathhouses. Some are magnificent basilicas, among the most remarkable buildings ever built, models for some of the world’s great religious and civic structures even in fairly modern times. Romans use public toilets witout concerns about privacy (about the only known effort at privacy is the fact that the great imperial baths or thermae have different bathing times for men and women); they eat in public taverns, and live in public—for the most part, their dingy little homes are merely places to sleep if they can get through the nighttime noise of the city. The earliest settlers here in Neolithic times lived in your regulation neolithic mud hut. It’s round, it has a thatched roof, and you light a fire inside whose smoke escapes through a hole in the roof. You know this because archeologists have found actual models of these ancestral dwellings as ash-filled cinerary urns in Roman grave sites.
By 285 A.D. the Romans have many modern inconveniences—huge stadia, apartment blocks, bikinis, high heels, rental chariots with meters on them, song and dance stars as well as fighting sensations from around the empire, and a million or more people crowded together in an area the size of Lower Manhattan. You wish you had one of those little Vespa (‘wasp’) motor scooters in which modern Romans zip around, often colliding or falling, but quickly getting up and droning on.
The business suit of the day for men is the toga. You don’t just throw this long wrap of white cloth around yourself any old way. It is worn in exactly a certain way, with just the right amount of fold over the left shoulder and a handful gathered in a brooch or pin (aula) on the right shoulder, with a drape across the front of the body. Several hundred wealthy men are senators (literally, "old men") and they get to wear a broad purple stripe on one edge of the drape. Lesser nobles can wear a narrow purple stripe. The emperor alone wears a solid purple toga. That’s why cardinals still ‘wear the purple’ 2000 years later.
The everyday men’s jeans outfit of the period, however, is the tunic—kind of like a big T-shirt, tied around the waist with a belt. The tunic is usually not dyed but left in its natural whitish wool or cloth color, reaching about halfway down to the knee. The Romans think nothing of wearing several of them, depending on how cold it is. It evolves into that white garment with the lacy fringes that will be worn in later centuries by altar boys and priests (a dalmatic). If it gets real cold, a Roman will readily don his cloak. As with so many of these garments, you see echoes of them in modern day church garb.
Women wear similar garments, with fewer twists (no pun intended). In early times, they wore togas, but later those became a mark of ill repute, worn by prostitutes and the kind of women who, in the 1930s, became notorious for smoking cigarettes and behaving in a ‘jazzy’ manner. About 80% of English words are borrowed from Latin, including prostituere (‘standing/stepping before you’).
Here you are, in the big city, with all its noise and stench and bustle this morning, as the full sunlight drives the last patches of night mist from the shaded westward walls of great buildings, or the westerly corners of crowded side streets. An estimated 1.25 million people hurry about the daily business of surviving, or amassing wealth, or staying one step ahead of the law; or earning a decent living to support their family, or lying in wait to rob you, or who knows what. Maybe it’s some zealot who waits to pounce and harangue you about his religion. They don’t have cars or telephones, and your immediate impression is of this mind-numbing mix of the sumptuous and the tawdry; clean paved roads and filthy, muddy alleys; colorful temples and houses; beggars, amputees, exotic priests, modest ladies under the veil versus luridly painted prostitutes showing you a flash of pink plus a smile, and so forth—you could sit endlessly cataloging all the many things you see and smell and hear and feel. Your head swims.
You walk past a huge granary on your right, the Horrea Galbae, named after Galba (emperor for several months in the first century). It’s a sprawl of stone and wood buildings with raised wooden floors to try and keep vermin out, covering over one square mile (2.5 square km). The Romans built in certain standard materials and predictable ways, and often in their ruins across the world you’ll see a characteristic row or two of reddish brick embedded like a kind of telltale watermark in otherwise undistinguished, sturdy gray stone walls.
One of the things you continually become aware of is the presence of horses and other draft animals. From the Neolithic to the early 20th Century, humans share their settlements with horses, be it in a Mesopotamian village or Victorian New York City. Streets are strewn with steamy horse biscuits and gallons of equally steamy greenish-yellow urine, all of which have to go someplace, and frequently don’t—simply because until very modern times, most cities don’t have adequate sewage runoff, much less garbage collections. You are constantly in the presence of not only pets, but also draft animals. Only after the invention of asphalt or 'macadam' by MacAdam in the late 1800s do you start to find a different set of smells. With the explosion of an automobile culture in the 1920s, your world starts to smell of tar, from millions of miles of asphalt roads baking in the sun; gasoline and diesel exhaust; aviation fuel heating the atmosphere and leaving those thick wavy distortions in the air on runways. But don’t think the air here in Rome is any cleaner. If anything, it’s smellier and dirtier. A million fires burn here, from the tiniest charcoal brazier to incense braziers in countless temples, to the huge bellows roaring under the baths tended by armies of slaves. A thousand smithies ringing with hammer blows as horseshoes, wagon hoops, armor, farm implements, nails, and other iron goods are beaten into shape. Millions more fires burn in this part of Italy and across the empire as wood is turned into charcoal—and incidentally helping to extend the Sahara as North Africa’s huge northern forests vanish into the maw of this thousand-year enterprise. You know from the archeological record that the air here is filled with traces of lead, sulfur, and other noxious chemicals. Overall, it’s a smoky smell mixed with food and spice odors with which the natives probably felt at home, but it overwhelms your senses like everything else here. It makes you feel humble, and maybe just a bit scared as this alien world wraps itself around you with its everyday power and mystery.
You are awed by several huge buildings in the otherwise already imposing skyline. Near the center of the city, you see the Forum of Trajan, and near that the great Baths of Trajan. Dominating the Aventine looms an enormous purplish-grayish mass: the baths of Caracalla. You see yet another such mass toward the northeast around the Viminal Hill, the baths of Diocletian. The great modern railroad terminus of Rome, Termini, receives its name not from being the end (terminus, plural termini) of a rail line, as one might be tempted to think, but from the Latin thermae—and Diocletian's stood on the very spot where today travelers bustle in a new sort of vast hall.
The thermae of Caracalla and Diocletian are larger than the already gigantic but older Trajan baths. These are the buildings after which the great basilicas of Christianity will be modeled, like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. In fact, the great railway terminals of the 20th Century will be modeled after these baths.
Here we are at the foot of the Aventine Hill. We’re on the east side of the Tiber looking north, and the Aurelian Wall sticks out to encompass a southward-protruding pie-slice of Rome. On either side of the river is an endless series of wharves for smaller ships, including naval vessels in service of the navy detachment that provides sailors to man the huge sail-like awnings above the Colosseum, or to service the naumachia or artificial sea battles. The vessels up there are primarily ones that trade with the former Etruscan cities to the north, but also nimble vessels able to hop over a whitewater area south of the Sublician Bridge tor each the city's old river port. The Tiber makes a major bend here, at the bottom of the S-curve, the old Portus of the city with its venerable vegetable and cattle markets. By 285 A.D. this place is still a major shipping and commercial center. As you already noted, there’s a huge square complex, the Horrea Galbae, or grain warehouses restored by Galba in the 1st Century A.D. Here’s an exciting deal: the longest building by the Tiber is a huge shopping mall called the Porticus Aemilia. The Romans long ago discovered the fun of retailing from arcades and colonnades, and this is a bustling place indeed. You don’t have time to go in there, because you might just shop all day and miss some of the other highlights. Suffice it to say, if you have the money, you can buy whatever you need, from all over the world, in the Porticus. If you want tin goods from Britain, jade or silk from the Far East, beaten bracelets from India, carved ivory from Africa, amber from the Baltic, sable furs from the frozen north of Asia, whatever you want—you can get it here. You walk on, until you come to a row of two-storied buildings filled with yelling slaves, lowing cattle, and serious-faced citizens. This is the Forum Boarium, the cattle market— cow palace, futures market, and meat market of the age. Rome has several similar markets, where farmers can come to town and hawk their vegetables, pigs, cows, sheep, whatever these urban dwellers will consume. In the old days, you’d see the family farmer here with his wife and children and wagon. Nowadays, when huge corporations have bought up all the small farms, you’re more likely to see thousands of slaves here herding and feeding and washing cattle owned by faceless conglomerates.
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