|
XXXI. AS IF IN A DREAM, FLYING BACK TO 753
As in a dream, you fly as if you were in a great airliner once again, but the wind rattles freely around your face. A great force lifts you up, and in your half-dreaming oracular state, you can almost see, even feel, the huge arms of a flying god (Mercury) propel you in spirals through the turbulent air. You are traveling backward in time, and already slowing as 753 B.C. draws near.
Up, up, you go over the blue Mediterranean, in a great circle that takes you out over the water and brings you in counter-clockwise over the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily. From there (Monte Vulcano, Stromboli, Etna) and then up past Greek Neapolis (the New City, later Napoli, where the singers and pizzas come from, and where Vesuvius belches his rage into the sky) you have a remarkable view of Italy that few ever see. It is a vision like something out of another planet, another world entirely. The altitudes are high enough that snows accumulate in the frigid air, and the volcanic cones loom like tilted pustules thousands of feet into the air. If you don’t like that example, picture barnacles the size of Manhattan. It’s a scene out of a science fiction movie. You expect Godzilla to come tromping over the landscape. No wonder the ancient people, who had not taken Geology 101 (perhaps slept through it, as you did), were convinced that a whole crowd of rather grouchy gods led by Vulcan were hammering away under the ground. You fly in over the Burning Fields—the Phlegrean Fields north of Naples, not far from where the Cumaean Sibyl held court in a fume-choked underground cavern guarding the entrance of the Underworld. You start to descend over the Alban Hills. You circle as in a great airliner, but now in the arms of a winged god. There lie the green rolling marshes with a few bumpy hills and the glittering Tiber, which will one day become Rome. Before you lies the embryo of world power.
You see the blue oceans below, and the green hills, and rivers coursing through stone channels to escape onto the fertile plains. Clouds roll gently like gauze over this vision, and you dream on with your companions at your sides. As you begin your journey backward, the city is embroiled in the great fire of 283 caused by rioting mobs; the flames and smoke are gone in a moment, replaced by an illusion of peaceful sunshine while we pass through a time when the empire was divided by civil wars, and in one 25 year period at least 30 major insurrections occurred in various parts of the empire, during each of which the local legion proclaimed one of its generals as emperor. You fly back toward the golden age past insane little tyrants like Nero and Caligula or great emperors like Hadrian and Trajan—through it all, the machinery of bureaucracy and army functioned smoothly, the taxes were collected, and merchants could travel in peace over the largest single nation Europe has ever known.
It isn’t Mercury anymore who carries you, but now Amalthea, wearing a white chiton and a wreath of white flowers in her hair. A bit like Superman carrying Jimmy and Lois in your own mythologies, she bears you in the crook of one arm and Drusus in the other. The hem of her garment flutters in the wind, and its folds lie along her shapely legs as if wet. She looks neither at your nor Drusus, but straight ahead with the ferocious determination of a beautiful hawk. Spiraling down, like the bird of prey that sails down to hunt among the valleys, you see the arms of the familiar hills below: Bracciano to the north, the Alban Hills to the south, and the Sabines to the east, and beyond the Sabines the distant blue-black Apennine Range challenging the sky. You see the city below in its splendor, a golden confection as the late afternoon sun bakes its walls and is reflected blindingly from the golden domes and sea-green windows pent in wrought iron, of its splendid baths. As the clouds drift in and then pass, as night comes and goes like the slow passage of Night’s passing hand, you see that the city is changing. The golden domes grow bright in their youth and abruptly disappear. At the same time, the vast outer wall of Aurelian disappears as we fly backward into the era when Rome was secure, her borders far away, her legions guarding the ends of the earth, and no Roman could imagine the tramp of foreign armies or the clatter of barbarian horses on the city’s temple steps. The flames and smoke of a thousand accidental house fires wink in and out of existence as time passes quickly, running backward like a great river at flood, when the sea backs into it and reverses its currents. You pass through the black smoke that signaled the end of the golden age as cruel and insane Commodus assumed power. It is the turning point that signals the end of the golden age, the beginning of a long decline punctuated by a few great rulers and many weak, sometimes insane ones, until that last little boy Romulus Augustulus is removed from the imperial throne in 476 by a Goth (Odoacer) and western Imperial Rome ceases to exist.
Gone are the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian. Soon, the Colosseum vanishes. The great statue of Nero falls under the mob that celebrated his death, then rises in an obscene orgy of gold and sunlight. The Rome of marble disappears in a pall of smoke greater than any the city has ever known, or probably will ever know until, half a millennium later, the barbarians burn her houses and books, loot her treasures, and defile her people. It’s the great fire of Nero, which he blamed on Christians, gone also in seconds, replaced by a city of wood and stone. Gone is the Pantheon, gone is the Circus of Nero.
Now you pass through that invisible curtain, before Tiberius who ruled in the time of Christ, then back before the time of Augustus the first emperor, and back before his uncle Julius Caesar who usurped an ancient law, declared himself dictator for life, and was murdered two years later (44 B.C. ) by desperately concerned senators—but it was too late; the Roman Republic would be gone for all time, resurrected only in the dreams nearly 1800 years later of a handful of rebellious English aristocrats on a distant continent across the great sea of Atlas. The end of the Republic is the a great turning point in Roman history and in fact the history of the world, a mythical meta or turning point any democratic civilization should fear, the change from a citizen government with checks and balances to a government by one powerful strongman after another in bloody succession.
As you fly back over the blessed sky of the Republic, when Rome was ruled by two consuls, you see the city steadily shrinking back toward its childhood. It is not an untroubled childhood, and the Romans have been honest in recording some of their worst national disasters, including civil and social wars that brought about the Republic’s disintegration. For hundreds of years now, we have seen huge plantations or latifundia, stretching from horizon to horizon. The people planting and reaping are not the free farmers of old, but slaves, men, women, and children imported from captive nations and worked until they drop in early death. The machinery of empire demands a ceaseless supply of human labor, and makes automation unnecessary, so that slavery is self-perpetuating.
Going further back, we pass through a time when the city steadily shrinks back in size, revealing the small brown fields of traditional family farms. by the time we arrive at the Second Punic War with Carthage, 216 B.C., we see Hannibal inflicting terrible damage on Roman armies that cannot stand and fight, but slowly draw him down the length of Italy with his war elephants. The Romans are desperately replaying the scorched earth policy that nearly cost them their nation but won them, in the end, a bloody peace from which they could recover but their superior enemy couldn’t. Terrible defeats threaten the end of Rome: defeat after defeat in the field, with 15,000 Roman dead at Trasimene and 50,000 Roman dead at Cannae. The Romans put fleets to sea but they are sunk, and with them the remnants of armies already defeated on land. Tens of thousands of Roman soldiers and sailors perish, along with their generals, admirals, priests, doctors, and other officers. We are moving backwards, from the time when Rome overcame all these bitter defeats to become mistress of the known world, backwards to the days of the founding itself.
Barely 60 years earlier, 275 B.C., the Romans drive the Greeks out of most of Italy and Sicily. In Greece, the Golden Age is over, Athens a burned husk, Sparta briefly triumphant (402 B.C. ). Alexander the Great comes and goes, and we are in the long twilight following the Greek golden age before Rome finally conquers her and makes her a province (by about 146 B.C.). But here we are, 275 B.C., and the Greek city states pool their money to finance one last great campaign against Rome on Italian soil. The leader is Pyrrhus, the greatest general of his day. He wins all the battles, but the victories are so costly that he loses the war and returns to Greece in defeat, giving his name to a type of war in which the winners lose all the battles but simply wear their enemy down. The final costly but losing colonial wars of various western powers through the middle 20th Century come to mind.
You fly on, through night and day, as the Sibyl cries out amid shifting leaves in her steam-shrouded cavern by the chilly lake.
Ever more, the city shrinks, and the landscape grows greener, wilder, more lush. Still, the city is surrounded by a sizeable wall, the Servian wall (c. 378 B.C.). We are now in the early Republic, from the time (509 B.C.) when Rome threw out the last Etruscan king, to (290 B.C.)when Rome defeated her Samnite enemies and took control over central Italy. your flight is slowing as we cross through that c. 200 year period.
What a sight the ancient city presents now! You now see her as a town. What a strange sight, compared to the noisy, smoky, smelly world class metropolis of 284 A.D. Unlike that teeming future hive, this city looks comfortingly normal. At first glance, it might just as well be a 21st Century town in any verdant area in North America or elsewhere. The Tiber meanders down along its course from the Apennine Range. We almost can’t see the river because of the lush marshlands, the thick stands of cypress and deciduous trees, and the mists that drift in low from the sea, or creep down from the mountains when the wind turns. We sense a great primordial freshness in the air, offset only by occasional whiffs of smoke from a thousand cooking stoves. A shepherd sits on a hill outside the city, roasting a bit of game over a small fire, while he watches his two dozen sheep grazing by a stream. The plain is checkered with long, narrow family farm plots. We see familiar-looking whitewashed farmhouses at the ends of muddy paths. We could be looking at a medieval European village of 2,000 years later, except for one substitution: replace the omnipresent, squat little church with its low, probably thatched bell tower, with a small temple, often round, with spindly little pillars that distantly evoke the grand columns of the Parthenon and other famous religious centers in Greek-owned Sicily. Leave in place the wooden palisade fort or the rudimentary castellum (castle) on a bordering hilltop.
There are no paved roads, but already you see familiar tracks winding through the wilderness and crossing the city. We see the Via Salaria, or Salt Road. Much of the ancient economy revolves around salt. The Etruscans have long had a considerable industry tied up in capturing salt by evaporation of Mediterranean seawater. The Romans, not to be outdone, built a salt capture works by the river. Even now, the city has some distinguishing landmarks that will become its most venerable. On the eastern shore, south of the island, opposite, is a small river port called, surprise, Portus (not to be confused with the later, greater Portus opposite Ostia). The Romans have built a salt works here, and the Via Salaria meanders here, crosses the Sublician Bridge, and meanders northeast across the plains. Just south of Portus is a pretty respectable circus, the famous Circus Maximus (‘Great Circus’). One of those trodden paths leading south from there is the Alban (later Appian) Way.
Most of the city’s buildings—homes, temples, villas, warehouses, bowling alleys (just kidding)—sit on the hilltops surrounded by segments of the Servian Wall.
Etruscan engineers are remembered above all for their skill draining swamps and managing waterways (a job done millennia later and an ocean away by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which indicates it’s a never-ending messy but important job someone has to do, so in modern times as in ancient times it’s the soldiers who get stuck with the engineering tasks; in fact the Engineer Corps insignia resemble a twin-tower castellum). Not long after this time period, the Etruscans will swoop down from the north and occupy Rome for over a century as a kingdom. In a subtle way, this must be a tribute to those stalwart proto-Romans, who may have been runaway slaves without girlfriends or a place to go Friday nights, until that fateful picnic with the Sabines and their wives. We are about to meet those early Latins, but suffice it to say they will go down in history as surely the most dour, humorless, no-nonsense bunch of people not to fool around besides their Spartan contemporaries across the Adriatic. Can there be a connection? It’s one of the many mysteries of all those people moving around while the lights were out in the dark age between Homeric and Classical times. Actually, everyone was focused on war, though it seems some people, like the Etruscans, initially at least had that Mona Lisa smile and a sense of humor. The Etruscans, historians tell us, turned sour as their civilization reached its high point (800 to 600 B.C.) before those naked, screaming, blue-painted Gauls raced through Italy attacking everyone in sight, bringing the Greeks and the Etruscans down and giving the Romans their opportunity to step into history as the tough guys on the central Italian street. We know where the Greek colonists occupying southern Italy and Sicily came from, the origin of everyone else is a mystery lost in those clouds drifting by underneath you. In the low areas,
At the western end of the Capitoline Hill, at the edge of a wood, is one of those dreadful spots you must know about: the Tarpaeian Rock. It’s a cliff overlooking some rather nasty rocks far below at the Tiber’s edge, with a scenic view of the river and Portus, and this is where criminals were thrown down to their deaths. Dominating the Capitoline Hill is an imposing structure, the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, where the city’s most important religious cult is housed. The chief priest is the Pontifex Maximus. Later academics and macadamians theorize maybe it really referred to the Sublician Bridge, which originally was the most important fiscal feature of Rome. It was a crossing point over the Tiber, where the all-important moolah was carried (in the form of salt) and most likely the ever-pecunious Romans collected a tax each time someone rattled across their bridge with a few pots of NaCl. It may have been the original "look, ma, how important I am" sort of office in the whole valley, the envy of all, which is why it became the crème de la crème of the chief priesthoods quite early on.
Later ages recall it as meaning ‘Chief Bridge-Maker’ to the gods. It’s an office the emperors liked to usurp onto themselves, and it’s no surprise that, when Constantine and later emperors were jealous of the pope’s power, they tried to make themselves co-popes. That didn’t go over at all with the heads of the Christian church (which was to be, after 312 A.D., the official religion of the empire), but the chief bishop saw no problem (since the polytheist gods had been banished) in calling himself Pontifex, hence Pontiff, bridge-maker. The term Pope comes from the Greek, later Italian, papa, meaning ‘papa.’
‘Bronze Age’ and ‘Iron Age’ are relative terms describing overlapping levels of technology. ‘Homeric’ does not necessarily mean Homer’s lifetime, halfway to the Classic Athenian period. Rather, the so-called Homeric age lies in the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 B.C. Homer, compiling Aegean legends around the 9th Century B.C., refers to that age in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Homeric weapons and armor were indeed bronze (a harder alloy of copper and tin), as we know from excavations at the very site of Troy in what is now southern Turkey. After 1200 B.C. follows a generalized blob of time, a dark age, of much migration, turmoil, resettling, regime change, gradually lightening into a new definable epoch characterized by the appearance of iron implements. The arrival of iron is significant for Mediterranean civilization because the iron plow, harder than either the wooden or bronze plow, enables mankind to break soil farther away from the soft soil of littoral areas, meaning settlements can reach farther into hills and mountains, enabling more people to settle into agrarian lifestyles rather than nomadic ways. It means more people in more places doing more stuff, all of which means civilization ratchets forward in its capabilities.
Beyond the Temple of Jupiter in this primeval Rome, on the second hump of the Capitoline Hill, stands the Temple of Juno Moneta. If you look at a modern Monopoly® game piece for a bank, or drive through just about any town dating back to the most recent neo-Classical revival (they occur like clockwork about once every hundred years) you’ll see something that looks like a Roman temple, the kind they copied from the Greeks, with a row of pillars on a portico or porch, and a triangular entablature that may read "Save, Borrow, Spend!" or maybe just "Bank." The ancient Romans kept their money in temples for safe keeping, and did business on tables (banc, ‘bench’ or ‘table,’ a Germanic word for a change, no pun intended). This particular temple was the Roman equivalent, roughly, of Wall Street and the Fed (or the Bank of England and the City, or what have you from financial centers around the 21st Century world).
From the base of the Capitoline Hill to roughly the Palatine Hill stretches the true center of ancient Rome: the Roman Forum. It’s difficult to conjure an exact modern equivalent. Picture a sort of Loop containing the law courts, chief temples, main monuments, banks, city hall, and the Curia (where the Senate meets; the original site is lost, but the Curia in front of which Julius Caesar was stabbed to death, and in which depraved emperors like Commodus bullied terrified senators, will be put here in
You sail lower, the way the owl at dusk eagerly begins her hunt, and the weather turns patchy. Gray sheets of mist fly past as the climate itself grows colder and wetter. More and more, you see the smoke and steam of volcanic activity as we enter a more active period (it’s always active, but in this time a bit more so, because the great African and European tectonic plates are bumping against one another with greater ferocity). Is it any wonder that Vulcan, who gave his name to volcanoes, was one of the leading deities, and one of the oldest in the Roman pantheon?
There it lies, the city of the early Republic, and even earlier (650-509 B.C. ) as the city of the Etruscan kings. At first glance, even now, you expect to see streetlights flicker on in the late, lingering light before dusk. You expect to see, among the reddish rooftops, cars parked under shade trees. You expect to see green road signs over the autostrade, signaling fast-moving drivers whether to pull off at the next exit for a rest stop (bathroom, dinner, stretch legs, check oil, fill up gas and air) or race on toward the next city. Instead, after a full minute, as your eyes adjust, you see there are no highways, no cars, no signs, no streetlights, no streams of trucks and no trains rolling along on their rails. The lights you do see come from either the low sun in the west gleaming in a puddle outside a farmhouse, or in an occasional window of crude glass, or even on an iron farm plough that slaves are rubbing down with animal fat or the dregs of olive oil after a day’s hard work to prevent rust. No tall signs advertising fast food or rest stops. Only the moon, the stars, and torches illumine night. In fact, you see a hundred fires from above, all in furnaces where bread is baked, or a smith is working late into the evening hours to shoe horses for tomorrow’s ploughing, or a man and his family sit on their porch chatting and drinking wine and roasting chestnuts on a small brick barbeque. It is so haunting, so familiar and yet so distant, the way the public and commercial buildings sprawl along muddy roads, and family homes with their red tile roofs nestle side by side on small, winding residential streets. This is not yet the teeming hive of Martial and Cicero. This is still the more easygoing country town where, as the American expression goes, "they roll up the sidewalks at dusk and everyone goes home."
You are flying toward a different golden age of Rome—shrouded in myth and mist, a childhood that later Romans romanticize but cannot remember or understand. As you fly backward, past the age of Greek settlement in the south and Etruscan glory in the north, the city loses the cultural trappings of the Greek great period. You enter the late Bronze Age, flying ever lower above the fertile flood plain of the Tiber. You see that already, paths exist where men have walked for centuries, and which later will become the famous post roads. The Via Salaria, or salt road, runs along the Tiber to the mouth (os) where Ostia will one day grow under Fiumicino’s windblown grasses, to be laid bare as Leonardo da Vinci’s airport is laid out on Lazio’s soil. From the air, this and other paths look like tanned ribbons worn into the grass so that nothing grows. At the os now is a settlement where the locals dry their own salt rather than trade with the Etruscans across the river and twelve miles away at Veii. Clever Etruscans, and later the Romans, they pour seawater in clay pots by the dozens, and let the sun evaporate the water so that salt is left. They repeat this process (you can imagine the poor slaves whose miserable lives consisted of doing just this, in the heat of summer and cold of winter, from childhood to their early deaths), until gradually each pot fills up with the dry salt that is worth gold. Then their salesmen break the pots, and carry away a shaped plug of salt to trade with the Sabines and other mountain folk. There remains into the 21st Century a mountain of broken pots along the Tiber near Ostia, originally from this industry, and later from the transfer of oil and other commodities from their ship-borne urns into other vessels.
You see a coastal road that runs from the Greek colonies in the south to the cities of the Etruscans in the north. Soon enough, the growing settlement near the Tiber Island will form into an important town and then a city, and the heavier path will wander that way, leaving a ribbon to cross the os; besides, the river is forded at the Tiber Island at a bridge called Sulpicia, named after an ancient family (the Sulpicii) that will give Rome many senators and consuls, and later even emperors (like Galba). Eventually Appius will pave this path (the Via Albana, to bear his own name) over, but that is centuries in the future. You see the other ancient paths that will become great highways, including the Latin Road, which is another way into the Alban Hills; the Sacred Way, which runs through the city itself. Another is the Latin Way, on which you drove into the Alban Hills in the Rome of the 21st Century.
Now, the vaguely boat-shaped Tiber Island is a grassy mound with trees in the center on a hill. From Republican times forward, this island has been a place of healers, first housing a temple of Aesclapius, god of healing and medicine, then much later in the Middle Ages a place of quarantine for plague victims, and into your time the site of a hospital (the Fatebenefratelli, ‘do good, little brothers’). In time, the first stone bridges will go up near this place.
You begin to see the underlying hills for which the city is famous (Urbs septicollis, ‘City of Seven Hills’). Think of it this way: the Tiber makes a large letter S. Inside the upper curve, on the east or city side of the Tiber, will one day soon be the Campus Martius, whose history is intimately tied to the dismissal of the Etruscan kings. After that event, the Republic was established, a fairly respectable democracy by any but the most modern standards. Instead of rule by one despot, a system of checks and balances was built in that the Founding Fathers of the United States made a cornerstone of their Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787. Borrowing from the example of the Spartans, who had two kings, the Romans installed two Consuls. The word ‘king’ was a dirty word, and never reappeared until Gothic times after the removal of the last boy emperor, Romulus Augustulus, a thousand years later. Mussolini, the modern fascisto, ended up hanging by his heel from a meat hook, so it seems the Italian people never did forget the lesson of their ancestors. Another thing the Romans did, after throwing the Tarquins out (dynasty of Etruscan kings), was to pass a variety of laws aimed at preventing military takeover. One such law forbade any general to march into the city at the head of his army. Hence, the Campus Martius (Field of Mars, or Military Field) was used for parades and drills. Exceptions to the rule covered the police, variously known as lictors and later urban cohorts, who had barracks or precincts and fire houses around the city, and the Praetorian Guard. Originally, the office of Praetor was nothing to sneeze at. The Romans really did the checks and balances thing to the hilt, and had all sorts of offices that gave wealthy people a chance to get elected and keep busy, and rather muddled the picture of who really was in charge. That suited the power-paranoid Romans just fine. They had another law, by which in times of emergency, the Senate could appoint a dictator. The dictator had absolute power for not more than six months, after which he was expected to retire. The legendary Cincinnatus (after whom Cincinnati, Ohio is named) was such a fellow. A simple farmer, he was called upon to rule as absolute dictator during one of Rome’s innumerable military crises in her early years (Fifth Century, bash with the Aequi in the Alban Hills; lasted 16 days, and Cincinnatus turned in his laurels and returned to his plow; considered a model of Roman virtues the later ages so desperately looked back on). The undoing of the system came in 46 B.C. when Julius Caesar usurped this law and declared himself dictator for life. A mob of Senators stabbed him to death two years later outside the Curia of the Senate (the exact spot is still marked by a memorial to him from that time), but it was too late—after a brief civil war with, among others, Cleopatra and her lover Marcus Antonius, Julius Caesar’s adopted nephew Octavian became Rome’s first emperor. But that’s all more than half a millennium later than where we are going now, to seek the very soul of Rome. That’s just a little discussion of the Campus Martius, and every inch of the city is worthy of a book in itself.
Behind the upper hook of that S made by the river, on the west or "across the Tiber" side of the Tiber, is now (approaching 650 B.C.) a marshy field like so much of the ancient Tiber plain. Later, after being drained, it will house that huge Circus Maximus, capable of seating a quarter zillion screaming fans. It’s all there, or rather isn’t—the foundations, on those rocky gray hills and in those green valleys, of the Rome you have seen in the future. Here is the last gasp of that primordial Bronze Age (okay, Iron Age, if you count a few knives and axes) culture to which the Romans looked back with mystery and longing for the next twelve centuries.
|
