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The Sibyl's Urn

a novel

by John T. Cullen

XXXII. ARRIVING IN 750 B.C.

It’s a gray, darkling day as you descend upon the plains of Latium. Heavy gray-black clouds scud across the windy plain. You see only the geography now: that S in the Tiber, the island in the lower loop, and opposite on the east side, where Rome will one day blossom, the twin humps of Palatine Hill; beyond that, the twin humps of the Caelian Hill.

You see the Aventine area’s three humps a quarter mile south of there, nestled under the lower loop where the Tiber begins to turn toward the sea.

North of the Palatine you see the Capitoline (or Tarpeian) Rock at the edge of the Campus Martius, and to its northeast in a half-moon formation the Quirinal, the Viminal, and the Esquiline.

There are a few other bumps, like the Oppian, the Fagutal, and the Cispian, not to mention the Velia, or across the river the Vatican, but basically there you have it—seven hills, more or less.

This is the city Romulus started. Already, clearly, there are Etruscan speakers north of the Tiber, early Latin speakers south, and Oscan speaking Samnites east toward the Appenines. In between is a messy collage of cultures, city by city, the Volscians, the Sabines, the Veians, the Albans, a dozen or more tribal names that will pass along through the millennia. It’s important to remember that by the time Hannibal was tramping across Italy with his elephants, all this early stuff was already lost in the mists of time like a Garden of Eden to which the Romans longingly looked backward. Like most civilizations, the Romans were in significant ways a backward looking people. Things started with a golden age in which humans walked with gods, and now look at the mess you’re in. Perhaps the only exception to this rule is your world of the 21st Century, where the educated people know enough about the past to break out in a sweat and hope it never returns, while those who choose to ignore the lessons of history are condemned to relive them (which applies largely to those who believe everything would have turned out better if only things had not gotten so out of hand, on the assumption that there was a golden age in which stern people ruled, and you ate coarse cereal without sugar on it, just for starters in your grim but virtuous day). Cold showers for everyone, beatings, and everyone knew their place. Your age is unique because it is forward looking. This is an important point, because it helps us somewhat understand the dreadfulness of the incomprehensible. The Nazis hid their Holocaust because at heart they must have understood nobody would approve. The Romans, on the other hand, displayed their Holocaust (the Games) to the world with pride. The Romans inherited that fading ember of early Etruscan joy, that frenzied and chthonic (of or pertaining to the Underworld) cult of funeral games that became the stark blood-orgy of the arena (‘sand’). From the light above ground to the shadows in the tomb, as a dying D. H. Lawrence in the spunky but melancholic evening of his life suggested.

However many hills you think Rome had before the building and leveling started, now in 650 B.C. there is almost nothing on them. You make a final circle (almost mocking your grand swing over a vast sunny metropolis 27 centuries in the future). There is no Servian Wall, no Circus Maximus. The Temple of Jupiter is at best a wooden hut with a straw roof and mud walls, not unlike an Iroquois longhouse, and the rest of the houses are a step or more down from that.