On the city of Rome from Rubicon

So it was that smoke from sacrifices to the gods continued to rise

above the seven hills, just as it had done back in far-off times, when

trees ‘of every kind’ had completely covered one of the hills, the

Aventine." Forests had long since vanished from Rome, and if the

city’s altars still sent smoke wreathing into the sky, then so too did

a countless multitude of hearth-fires, furnaces and workshops. Long

before the city itself could be seen, a distant haze of brown would

forewarn the traveller that he was nearing the great city. Nor was

smog the only sign. Nearby towns with celebrated names, rivals of

the Republic backlin the archaic past, now stood deserted, shrunk to

a few scattered inns, emptied by Rome’s gravitational pull.

As the traveller continued onwards, however, he would find the

roadside lined with more recent settlements. Unable to accommo-

date a burgeoning population, Rome was starting to burst at the

seams. Shanty-towns stretched along all the great trunk-roads. The

dead were sheltered here as well, and the necropolises that

stretched towards the coast and the south, along the great Appian

Way, were notorious for muggers and cut-rate whores. All the

same, not every tomb had been left to crumble. As the traveller

approached Rome’s gates he might occasionally find the stench

from the city ameliorated by myrrh or cassia, the perfumes of

death, borne to him on the breeze from a cypress-shaded tomb.

Such a moment, the sense of a communion with the past, was a

common one in Rome. Yet just as the stillness of a cemetery shel-

tered violence and prostitution, so not even the most hallowed and

timeless of spots were immune to defacement. Admonitory notices

were always being posted on tombs, prohibiting electioneering slo-

gans, but still the graffiti would appear. In Rome, seat of the

Republic, politics was a contagion. Only in conquered cities were

elections an irrelevance. Rome, having neutered political life in

other societies, was now supreme as the world’s theatre of ambi-

tions and dreams.

The Paradoxical Republic 15

Not even the graffiti—ravaged tombs, however, could prepare a

traveller for the bedlam beyond the city gates. The streets of Rome

had never had any kind of planning imposed upon them. That

would have taken a design-minded despot, and Roman magistrates

rarely had more than a single year in office at a time. As a result, the

City had grown chaotically, at the whim of unmanageable impulses

and needs. Stray off one of Rome’s two grand thoroughfares, the via

Sacra and the via Nova, and a visitor would soon be adding to the

hopeless congestion. ‘A contractor hurries by, all hot and sweaty,

with his mules and porters, stone and timber tvsdsts on the rope of

a giant crane, funeral mourners compete for space with well-built

carts, there scurries a mad dog, here a sow who’s been wallowing in

mud?” Caught up on this swirl, a traveller was almost bound to

end up lost. 4

Even citizens found their city confusing. The only way to nego-

tiate it was to memorise notable landmarks: a fig-tree, perhaps, or a

market’s colonnade, or, best of all, a temple large enough to 100111

above the maze of narrow streets. Fortunately, Rome was a devout

city, and temples abounded. The Romans’ reverence for the past

meant that ancient structures were hardly ever demolished, not

even when the open spaces in which they might once have SI00d

had long since vanished under brick. Temples loomed over slums or

meat markets, they sheltered veiled statues whose very identities

might have been forgotten, and yet no one ever thought to demol-

ish them. These fragments of an archaic past preserved in SIOHC,

fossils from the earliest days of the city, provided the Romans with

a desperately needed sense of bearing. Eternal, like the gods whose

spirits pervaded them, they stood like anchors dropped in a storm.

Meanwhile, on all sides, amid a din of hammering, rumbling

wagon wheels and crashing rubble, the city was endlessly being

rebuilt, torn down and rebuilt again. Developers were always look-

ing for ways to squeeze in extra space, and squeeze out extra profit.

Shanties sprouted like weeds from the rubble left by fires. Despite

the best efforts of responsible magistrates to keep streets clear, they

were always filling with market stalls or squatters’ shacks. Most

profitably of all, in a city long constricted by her ancient walls,

developers had begun to aim for the sky. Apartment blocks were

springing up everywhere. Throughout the second and first cen-

turies BC landlords would compete with one another to raise them

ever higher, a development frowned on by the law, since tenements

were notoriously jerry-built and rickety. In general, however, safety

regulations were too weakly imposed to inhibit the splendid oppor-

tunities for profiteering that a high-rise slum presented. Over six

storeys or more, tenants could be crammed intotiny, thin-walled

rooms, until invariably the building would collapse, only to be

flung up again even higher than before.

In Latin these apartment blocks were known as insulae, or

‘islands’ — a suggestive word, reflecting the way in which they stood

apart from the sea of life down on the streets. Here was where alien-

ation bred by the vastness of the city was most distressingly felt. To

those dossing in the insulae, rootlessness was more than just a

metaphor. Even on the ground floors the insulae usually lacked

drains or fresh water. Yet sewers and aqueducts were precisely what

the Romans would boast about when they wanted to laud their

city, comparing the practical value of their public works with the

useless extravagances of the Greeks. The Cloaca Makima, Rome’s

monstrous central drain, had provided the city with its gut since

before the foundation of the Republic itself. The aqueducts, built

with plunder from the East, were an equally spectacular demon-

stration of the Romans’ commitment to communal living.

Stretching for up to thirty-five miles, they brought cool mountain

water into the heart of the city. Even Greeks might on occasion

admit to being impressed. ‘The aqueducts convey such volumes

that the water flows like rivers,’ wrote one geographer. ‘There is

The Paradoxical Republic 17

barely a house in Rome which doesn’t have a cistern, a service-pipe

or a gushing fountain.“ Evidently, the slums had not been on his

tOLll'.

In truth, nothing better illustrated the ambiguities of Rome

than the fact that she was at once both the cleanest and the filthi—

est of cities. Ordure as well as water flowed through her streets. If

the noblest and most enduring virtues of the Republic found their

expression in the murmuring of a public fountain, then its horrors

were exemplified by filth. Citizens who dropped out of the obstacle

race that was every Roman’s life risked having shit - literally —

dumped on their heads. Plebs sordida, they were called — ‘the great

unwashed’. Periodically, waste from the insulae would be wheeled

out in barrows to fertilise gardens beyond the city walls, but there

was always too much of it, urine sloshing over the rims of fullers’

jars, mounds of excrement submerging the streets. In death, the

poor themselves would be subsumed into waste. Not for them the

dignity of a tomb beside the Appian Way. Instead their carcasses

would be tossed with all the other refuse into giant pits beyond the

easternmost city gate, the Esquiline. Travellers approaching Rome

by this route would see bones littering the sides of the road. It was

a cursed and dreadful spot, the haunt of witches, who were said to

strip flesh from the corpses and summon the naked spectres of the

dead from their mass graves. In Rome the indignities of failure

could outlive life itself. I ‘

Degradation on such a scale was something new in the world.

The suffering of the urban poor was all the more terrible because,

by depriving them of the solaces of community, it denied them

everything that made a Roman what he was. The loneliness of life

on the top floor of an apartment block represented the antithesis of

all that a citizen most prized. To be cut off from the rituals and

rhythms of society was to sink to the level of a barbarian. To its own

citizens, as to its enemies, the Republic was unyielding. It gave up

on those who gave up on it. And after abandoning them, in the 1

it had them swept out with the trash.

T It was no wonder that life in Rome should have been a

struggle to avoid such a fate. Community was cherished

it was found. The potential anonymity of big-city life was not

conquering. Vast and formless though the metropolis appeared,

there were patterns of order defying its chaos. Temples were not the

only repositories of the divine. Crossroads, too, were believed to be

charged with spiritual energy. Shadowy gods, the Lares, watched

over the intersection of all the city’s high streets. These streets, the

vici, were so significant as a focus for community life thatthe

Romans used the same word to describe an entire urban quarter.

Every Ianuary, at the festival of the Compitalia, inhabitants of a

vicus would hold a great public feast. Woollen dolls would be hung

beside the shrine of the Lares, one for every free man and woman in

the quarter, and a ball for every slave. This relative egalitarianism

was reflected in the trade associations that were also centred on

the vicus, and were open to everyone: citizen, freedman and slave

alike. It was in these associations, the cvllegia, rather than on the

broader stage of the city, that most citizens sought to win that uni-

versal goal of a Roman — prestige. In a vicus a citizen could know his

fellows, sit down to supper with them, join in festivities throughout

the year, and live confident that mourners would attend his

funeral. In a patchwork of communities across the metropolis, the

intimacies of traditional small—town life still endured.

None of which calmed the suspicions of outsiders. Walk down a

main street, and the snarl of narrow back alleys twisting off it might

appear dark with menace, the air heavy with the stench of

unwashed bodies, and trade. To refined nostrils, both were equally

noxious. Fears that the collegia served as covers for organised crime

combined readily with the upper classes’ instinctive contempt for

anyone obliged to earn his keep. The very idea of paid work inspired

The Paradoxical Republic 19

Par0xy51'1‘1S of snobbery. It affronted all the homespun peasant

Values in which wealthy moralists, lounging comfortably in their

villas, affected to believe. Their scorn for ‘the mob’ was unvarying.

It @n'1bI'8.CCCl not only the wretches starving on the streets or

crammed into insulae, but also traders, shopkeepers and Craftsmen-

‘Necessity’, it was assumed, ‘made every poor man dishonest)“

gugh contempt - unsurprisingly — was much resented by those

who were its object.* Plebs was a word never spoken by a nobleman

without a curling of the lip, but the plebs themselves took a certain

pride in it. A description once spat as an insult had become a badge

of identity, and in Rome such badges were always highly prized.

Like other fundamentals of Roman life, divisions of class and

status were deep rooted in the myths of the city’s very origin. On

the far side of Rome’s southernmost valley stretched the Aventine

Hill. This was where immigrants would invariably end up, the port

of disembarkation possessed by all great cities, an flfefl W116!‘ 6 new

arrivals congregate by instinct, drawn to one another’s company

and shared confusion. Facing the Aventine rose a second hill. There

were no shanty-towns to be found on the Palatine. Hills in Rome

tended to be exclusive. Above the valleys the air was fresher, less

pestilential —— and therefore cost more to breathe. Of all Rome’s

seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far.

Here the city’s elite chose to cluster. Only the very, very rich could

afford the prices. Yet, incongruously, there on the world’s most

expensive real estate stood a shepherd’s hut made of reeds. The

reeds might dry and fall away, but they would always be replaced, so

that the hut never seemed to alter. It was the ultimate triumph of

Roman conservationism —- the childhood home of Romulus,

Rome’s first king, and Remus, his twin.

* Iudging from funerary inscriptions — the only written evidence that has

survived.