Rome: An Empire's Story (50 page)

Accidents

Few empires lasted as long as that of Rome, or made such an impact on those they ruled. I have struggled throughout this book with metaphors, my own and those of others. The Roman Empire has been likened to an epidemic, a machine, a balloon, a vampire bat and a great resonating vibration, a tsunami and a tide, an organism known only through its fossil body, and a single human life. At times imperial society has seemed like a great dance too, one that drew in more and more dancers, and then was carried on by fewer and fewer until the music was quite different. My last metaphor is an ice age. Tides sweep over beaches and then retreat: fascinating flotsam and jetsam are left behind, but only after a great storm does the beach really look different. But if we consider what the Roman Empire did to tradition and identity, culture and religion, lifestyles and beliefs, we find much more fundamental change. The empire grew like an ice cap, sending glaciers down in all directions. When those glaciers retreated, back to Byzantium rather than Rome, they left entirely new landscapes gouged out, and great moraines of boulders around which their new inhabitants had to accommodate themselves. Those peoples were no longer those that Rome had originally conquered: some were new arrivals, and almost all the rest had forgotten what it was like before the ice.

When we examine the monumental art, the inscriptions, and written texts that are our main sources for the identities assumed by Rome’s provincial subjects, we find that in most parts of the former empire, all memory of earlier times had been lost. Western peoples, both those the Romans had conquered like the Gauls and Spaniards, and those who had conquered Rome like Vandals and Goths, had no reliable memories of their pasts before Rome. From early in the empire, many in the western provinces had come to think of themselves as descendants of Trojan refugees and Greek heroes.
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Ancient place names and the ancestral gods had been forgotten, many of their languages had been lost forever, and the only history they knew was that of Rome. Half a millennium later, Cassiodorus and others helped the new barbarian arrivals create new genealogies, often along the same lines, although now biblical figures jostled with Brutus the Trojan and other legendary figures at the start of their genealogies.
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Nor was this situation unique to the west. Many of the peoples who inhabited the vast arc of the Roman Near East seem to have preserved almost no earlier memories
either.
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The Jews still had their scriptures, and the history contained in them. Traces of Babylonian and Phoenician and Egyptian historical traditions survived in works written in Greek in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods. Like the western traditions, they had been remodelled to suit Greek norms of memory and tradition.
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For the most part their identities too had been accommodated to their long subjection to Macedonian and Roman empires. Only the Greek historical tradition, which Roman scholars had long accepted, persisted. Yet even among the Greeks empire had reshaped collective identities and the memories they preserved.
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There was no alternative tradition, subversive or otherwise, apart from what the Christians were busy creating. It follows that almost everything that has survived, even by accident, preserves traces of a consciousness of empire.

Rome is better documented than most of the other early empires to which I have been comparing it. The explanation includes ecological and economic factors as well as historical and cultural ones. Empires of the tropics, like that of the Vijayanagara emperors of medieval India or the Mayan kingdoms of the Yucatan peninsula, were rapidly swallowed up by vegetation. By contrast the Mediterranean heartland of the Roman Empire is— geophysically at least—a relatively stable environment, one in which stone buildings and tombs can stand for centuries if they are not disturbed by humans. Benign neglect has derived too from the poverty of many Mediterranean lands in the centuries after Rome. Renaissance Italy and early modern Spain notwithstanding, Rome has had few rivals in subsequent centuries. The leading edge of economic power moved in the Middle Ages, north to the lands of the Franks and east to Baghdad. The cities of Spain and Italy and southern France and Greece preserve elements of their Roman street plans partly because few of them were subject to the spectacular rebuilding projects lavished on north European towns in the late Middle Ages and after.

So Roman city walls and gateways became encrusted with houses that preserved them, sometimes completely concealing them for centuries. The amphitheatre of Roman Arles was given towers and made into a castle, the Porta Nigra of Trier became a church, the great palace Diocletian built for himself at Split became a warren of homes and shops. Sometimes only the shadow of a Roman monument survives in a maze of medieval streets. It is possible to walk around the curve of Pompey’s great theatre in the
centro storico
of Rome even though none of the original construction survives above ground; the amphitheatre of Lucca has left an oval space in the city which
was cleared in the 1830s to create a piazza; the great civic fora and temples of Seville and Lisbon were replaced first with magnificent mosques, and then after the
reconquista
with baroque cathedrals. Things were quite different in London and Paris, where great campaigns of building have obliterated major Roman cities. There are only a few sites like Silchester where a break in occupation has allowed something like the whole city plan to be revealed. The ancient cities of Africa and Syria, many of them, survived even better because they were buried in the sand. To be fair, many of the cities of the peripheral provinces were never as grand as those of the central provinces, and some were built more of wood and tile than of stone. All the same, it is still true that the best places to see Roman monuments today are in the poorer countries of southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Fig. 24.
The amphitheatre at Arles

Some Roman relics were enveloped not by medieval houses or the desert sands, but by the political designs of Rome’s many would-be heirs. I described in
Chapter 2
how successive regimes have made use of Roman symbols of power to develop their own imperial imagery. European history has been characterized by successive ‘renaissances’ in which groups of scholars or artists self-consciously claimed a new status for their creativity with reference to the Roman past. Carolingian monks, the translators of the caliphate, the clerical scholars of the twelfth century, the artists of the Italian
Quattrocento, the first humanists, the fathers of the Enlightenment, and many others have recuperated various Roman texts, buildings, and artefacts in this way. The relics of empire have been passed on through history like batons in a long relay race.

Finally there are the objects that lasted simply because of their durability. Early empires were above all great systems of accumulation. By force and the threat of force they drew matter and energy from all over their domains to be consumed and deposited in their capitals. Rome gathered treasure, marbles, and rare beasts from all over the world: the precious metals are long gone, the exotic animals were slaughtered in the arena, but the hard stones remain: brilliant white marble was from Proconnesus in north-west Turkey and Luni in Italy; dark yellow stone from the quarries of African Chemtou; porphyry and rare granites from the eastern deserts of Egypt, and green brescia from the Aegean.
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The Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla are genuinely extraordinary even today: at the time of their construction, before they were stripped of their precious facing stones, they would have put the Taj Mahal to shame. The Elder Pliny’s
Natural History
includes long accounts of sculpture and bronze statuary. Despite his attempt to order this into a systematic history of art, he is constantly diverted into noting in which temple or portico or garden in Rome a masterpiece may now be seen. For conquest and purchase had assembled the treasures of antiquity—Greek, Egyptian, and other—in the capital.
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Much has gone, of course, and most bronzes were melted down long before the revival of interest in classical art during the Renaissance. The core of modern collections survived thanks to the energy of Renaissance collectors, who gathered a vast number of marbles which—by various routes—found their way into the royal and later national collections of Europe, there to be supplemented by aggressive acquisitions policies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Archaeology has added just a few pieces to this body of work, but some are very precious. Our knowledge of ancient bronzes depends substantially on underwater finds, like the Riace Bronzes, two magnificent warriors made in classical Greece but found by a scuba diver off the coast of Italy in 1972. Current excavations at the cities of Aphrodisias and Sagalassos in Turkey have produced wonderful examples of marble sculpture from the imperial age.

Just a few great buildings were also durable enough to survive as more than traces in the street plan of Italian towns. Rome did not acquire its empire as some modern powers did through major technological advantages
over its competitors. But by creating a vast space within which architects and engineers could move about and exchange ideas, and by concentrating wealth in such a way that grand projects could be funded, Rome presided over significant advances in construction techniques. This is evident from technical writing, especially Vitruvius’ book
On Architecture
, and also from the study of standing remains.
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Greek stylistic models remained phenomenally important. But the invention at the end of the last millennium
BC
of concrete and the increased use and production of bricks and of tiles, along with ever more sophisticated techniques of surveying and design, all combined to make possible buildings on a scale never before seen. Vaults and domes made possible enormous enclosed spaces for basilicas, temples, imperial baths, and palaces. Even today the Pantheon and Haghia Sophia take our breath away. Aqueducts too consumed vast energy to build and required amazing engineering skills. A few still functioned into the Middle Ages, and others survived as bridges or simply because they were too well built to crumble, and too difficult or remote to dismantle.

Buildings like the Colosseum and the Pont du Gard seem at first sight bound to fascinate.
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In fact, not all ages have been so entranced by antiquity. The sense that Roman buildings should be preserved whenever possible is relatively recent.
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Many are now known only through sketches and descriptions made by earlier travellers, architects, and Grand Tourists. Up until the nineteenth century, when campaigners like Prosper Mérimée in France first began to demand the preservation of ancient monuments as national treasures, it was not unusual for Roman arches or temples to be demolished to make way for projects of modernization. During the twentieth century the struggle moved to trying to secure legal protection for archaeological material that was not visible on the surface. That battle has been largely won in Europe. But there are occasional scandals, and the cost of conserving sites like Herculaneum and Pompeii still gives major concern.

Monuments

Today we use the term ‘monument’ almost interchangeably with ‘remains’. The Royal Commissions for Historical Monuments have responsibility, in the UK, for any site of human activity that has survived from the past. But the Latin term
monumentum
had a much more specific meaning. It was a
thing deliberately created to commemorate a particular person or event in the past, and it was intended to project that memory into the future.

When a society makes monuments it reveals a lot about collective attitudes to time and the community. First it affirms the importance of history. Second it asserts—however nervously—confidence in posterity, that there will be a future audience or readership. Finally it imagines a community stretched out in time, those to whom this event or this person mattered, and those to whom it will still matter, both groups connected to the original event. Community, it says, is about continuity. A Roman monument captures, in a moment, that sense of the Roman People, fellow travellers on a common journey from their mythic past to their future destiny. Horace was not talking directly to us, in other words, since we are not part of that community. But we can listen in on the messages Romans sent to their imagined descendants.

Not all societies are so concerned with posterity. One reason we know Rome so well is that monumentality came for a while to be almost a cultural obsession. But things were not always that way. Before the middle of the fourth century
BC
, Rome was a great power in Italy. Yet very little in the way of monumental architecture was created. Temples are often monuments, of course, but they were also homes for the gods, and their construction seems to have been part of a dialogue in the present between the city’s divine and human members. The mid-Republican city seemed unimpressive to many visitors. Writing too had been used for mundane purposes for centuries, but it was hardly ever given a monumental form, whether in great public inscriptions designed to last or in literary works of any kind. Romans were not unusual in this respect by the standards of antiquity. But the decisions not to build great monuments, set up inscriptions, and write great books were choices consciously made: Romans were well aware of the monumental architecture of nearby Greek cities, and perhaps of Greek literature and history as well, and they could certainly have afforded to mimic either. Instead booty was more often spent on elaborate festivals that spoke to the present not the future, and although there must have been many traditions about the past there seems to have been no real concern to develop a common, collective, history of Rome.
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