3Early Rome

Everyone remembers that Augustus left Rome a city of marble, but too few people recall that he found it a city of brick. The picture of Rome in most people’s minds is of a marble metropolis, proud mistress of a Mediterranean Empire. This to be sure she eventually became, but the archaeological evidence is that until the end of the third centuryB.C.Rome looked tawdry, with patched temples and winding, unpaved streets. To trace the development is fascinating, and archaeology is our chief guide.

The story that we read from the earth begins not in Rome itself but in the Alban Hills, extinct volcanoes in the Roman Campagna, sixteen miles southeast of Rome, close to Castel Gandolfo, the lovely lakeside spot where nowadays the Pope has his summer palace. Here, in a pastureland called the Pascolare di Castello, some peasants in 1817 were cutting trenches for planting vineyards. Under the topsoil of the Alban Hills is a thick bed of solid lava, called tufa, which seals in a layer of ashes. In digging their trench the peasants cut through the lava seal and revealed largedolia, jars of rough clay, each of which contained, in an urn shaped like a miniature oval hut, the ashes of a cremation burial, together withfibulae, objects in amberand bronze, and numerous vases. It was not until fifty years later that a committee of experts, including the same Pigorini who afterwards overstepped his evidence about theterremare, first connected the burials with the city of Alba Longa, traditionally founded in the mists of prehistory by the son of Aeneas. In 1902, in cremation graves from a necropolis to which we shall return, on the edge of the Roman Forum itself, hut-urns and artifacts were found so similar to those from the Pascolare that the inference of cultural connection was inescapable. Whether Alba Longa was the metropolis and Rome the colony, as stated by the literary sources, or the other way about, was not evident from the artifacts.

A necropolis or graveyard implies an inhabited site. The inhabited site of Alba Longa was destroyed by the Romans about 600B.C.Where was the inhabited site that used the Forum in Rome as a necropolis? It could hardly have been the Forum itself, which was a swamp not drained and fit for habitation until about 575B.C., a date which, as we shall see, marks the end of the necropolis. Could it have been the Palatine Hill which rises from the south side of the Forum? At first sight it seemed unlikely that any evidence for prehistoric habitation could be found on the Palatine, since the hill was covered with the substructures of Imperial palaces. But beneath these as early as 1724 were found the remains of the mansions of Republican nabobs (recorded in literature, too, as having lived here), and beneath these in turn why should there not lie the traces of even earlier dwellings? Vergil had pictured Aeneas humbly entertained on the Palatine by Evander, and lodged in a hut with swallows under the eaves. Excavations published in 1906 by the great Italian archaeologist G. Boni (who lived in a villa on the Palatine, and whose memorial bust appropriately adorns the Farnese Gardens there) found under the Flavian Palace traces of huts containing artifacts matching those found in the Forum necropolis.

These artifacts fell into two phases. The first included the rough handmade pottery calledimpasto, which we have already seen to be characteristic of Villanovan sites; serpentinefibulae(which match those found in the First Benacci period at Bologna); ware incised with a clamshell in dogtooth, meander, and swastika patterns, or with a rope-like clayappliqué; pierced beads, spools, and a curious kind of Dutch oven with a perforated top, examples of which were known from the Forum necropolis and the Alban Hills, but not elsewhere. Artifacts of a different and more developed type, belonging, therefore, to a second phase, included pots with thinner walls, sharper profiles (as seen in elevation drawings), and more complicated handles; they are decorated with spirals and semicircles, apparently compass-drawn. There was even a miniature clay sheepdog, his curly coat represented by circles impressed with a metal tube or a hollow reed. Such artifacts match those found in the evolved Villanovan culture, dated in the first half of the sixth centuryB.C.This culture is contemporary with a rich, sophisticated one in Etruria, but the techniques in Rome and its vicinity are much more primitive than in Etruria. We conclude that the Palatine village was infinitely less prosperous than, say, the contemporary Etruscan cities of Caere or Tarquinia. But equally primitive artifacts are found in the Alban Hills burials, certain tombs on the Quirinal and Esquiline Hills in Rome (discovered when the city expanded after Italy’s unification in the 1870’s), and in burials in hollowed-out tree-trunks from the Forum necropolis, the latter now on display in the Forum Antiquarium.

In 1907 D. Vaglieri began excavations in the southwest corner of the Palatine which revealed cuttings in the rock. These were actually, though Vaglieri did not recognize them as such, cuttings for early Iron Age huts, the date being an inference from the artifacts, whose stratification Vaglieri did not record. After a sharp controversy withPigorini (whose prestige, because of public interest in theterremare, was then at its height), the dig was suspended, leaving one but half-excavated. Here, in this intact area, excavations were resumed in 1948 by a younger specialist in the prehistoric archaeology of Italy, S. M. Puglisi. This time, the methods were rigorously scientific, and the cultural strata were observed and recorded with meticulous care. Puglisi recognized that a scientific dig requires the constant presence on the site during working hours of a competent archaeologist; no precise results can ever be obtained by an excavation director who visits his site only a couple of times a week, since unsupervised workmen can hardly be expected to respect levels of stratification, preserve the right artifacts, or keep accurate excavation notebooks, without which, of course, no scientifically valid conclusions can be drawn.

In the area left undug by Vaglieri, Puglisi was able to distinguish five levels, which have been schematically reproduced on the walls of the Palatine Antiquarium. The top level consisted of nine feet of ancient dump. But the four levels beneath the dump amounted to six-and-a-half feet of compact, undisturbed strata, of which the bottom eight inches represented what had collected on the hut floor while it was still in use. Here the sherds were very tiny, for they had been walked on, it being the regular practice of Iron Age man—and woman—to live comfortably in the midst of their own debris. The hearth (one of the Dutch ovens was discovered in fragmentsin situ) was near the center of the hut, very close to a cutting for a central supporting post—the first evidence ever found for such construction. But there was no danger of setting the central post on fire, since the cooking flame was entirely enclosed within the clay of the oven. Bits of fallen wattle-and-daub revealed the wall-construction. There were animal bones and impasto sherds bearing the marks of fire, but none of the shiny black pottery calledbucchero(the best examplesof which are rarely found in Rome in contexts earlier than 700B.C.) and no painted ware. This level, then, belonged to the first phase of the Iron Age, dated, by parallels with the finds from beneath the Flavian Palace, about 800–700B.C.(The traditional date of Rome’s founding is 753.) The lowest level being so shallow, and the sherds showing the marks of fire, the inference is that the hut had not been occupied very long before it was burned down.

The contents of the next superimposed level, two feet deep, show that the site was next used as a kitchen-midden or refuse-heap. Here the deposits resemble those from a well (dug long ago but never described in a detailed scientific article), in the sanctuary of Vesta in the Forum, which is dated in the second phase of the Iron Age (700–550B.C.), corresponding in the tradition to the reigns of the five Roman Kings from Numa to Servius Tullius.AThese finds include polishedimpasto, with high or twisted handles and out-turned rims; slat-smoothed ware covered with a thin coating or engobe of reddish clay, ornamented with double spirals and palmettes, and of a size to fit on the Dutch ovens; sherds of finebucchero(the first evidence of imports from Etruria), and of a coarser grey local imitation; painted ware, of the style known as sub-Geometric, imported from south Italy, and also some local imitations identified by their cruder technique.

AIt will be convenient to record here for future reference the traditional dates (B.C.) of Rome’s seven kings:Romulus: 753–716Etruscan Dynasty:Numa Pompilius: 716–672Tarquinius Priscus: 616–578Tullus Hostilius: 672–640Servius Tullius: 578–534Ancus Marcius: 640–616Tarquinius Superbus: 534–509

AIt will be convenient to record here for future reference the traditional dates (B.C.) of Rome’s seven kings:

The next higher level shows fat-bodied “bloodsucker”fibulae, and flanged tiles, some with horses molded in low relief, betraying a completely different and more sophisticated building technique, like that used in Etruscan temples. The artifacts matched those found in the level underthe late Republican House of the Griffins and under the “House of Livia” on the Palatine, and in the upper strata of the shrine of Vesta well; they are associated with the huts built in the Forum after it was drained; that is, with a transitional period after about 575B.C.The lower date suggested by the archaeological finds for this second phase corresponds to the dates assigned by the literary tradition to Rome’s Etruscan kings, Tarquin I, Servius Tullius, and Tarquin the Proud.

The hut itself (Fig. 3.1) was a large one (12 × 16 feet), sunk about a yard into the tufa of the hill, with six cuttings for the perimetral posts, two for a front porch, and one for the central support. The cuttings, averaging fifteen inches in diameter, are wider than is necessary for posts to support so flimsy a structure; the logs were probably held upright by wooden or stone wedges. The hut, reconstructed, represents a historical fact very much like what Vergil had in mind when he described the sleeping quarters assigned by Evander to Aeneas, and suchcapannecan be found in out-of-the-way places of the countryside near Rome even today. Lucretius, Vergil, and Livy all knew what a Bronze and an Iron Age meant; their generation venerated a replica of the “Hut of Romulus” on the Palatine. It suited Augustus’ propaganda purpose to stress Rome’s rise from humble origins; so, too, to us, archaeology’s picture of Rome’s primitive beginnings may well make the story of her later expansion seem more impressive, and her domination of subject peoples less overbearing.

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Fig. 3.1Rome, Palatine. Prehistoric hut, reconstruction.(G. Davico,Monumenti Antichi41 [1951], p. 130)

Fig. 3.1Rome, Palatine. Prehistoric hut, reconstruction.

(G. Davico,Monumenti Antichi41 [1951], p. 130)

Fig. 3.2Rome, Forum necropolis, showing cremation and inhumation graves. (MPI)

Archaeology’s second major contribution to our knowledge of early Rome is provided by Boni’s excavation of the Forum necropolis (Fig. 3.2), the results of which are displayed with great clarity in the Forum Antiquarium, installed in the cloister of the church of S. Francesca Romana in the Forum itself. The surviving part of the necropolisstretches between the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, on the north side of the Forum, and a late Republican structure to the east which was pretty certainly (to judge from the built-in beds, the narrow rooms, and the analogy with a building similar in plan at Pompeii, certainly identified by its erotic pictures) a house of ill-fame. The original extent west and southward was probably much greater. The graves have now been filled in, but their sites are marked by plots of grass, round for cremation graves, oblong for inhumation ones. The two types sometimes cut into each other; what inferences are warranted by this fact are better postponed until we have discussed the grave contents.

The Forum nowadays is an austere, even at first sight a forbidding place. It looks much more attractive in a painting by Claude Lorraine or a print by Piranesi, with a double row of olives planted down the middle, romantic broken columns, oxen and peasants scattered about the flowered greensward in picturesque confusion, and the Arch of Septimius Severus buried up to its middle. But picturesqueness is not everything. The Forum is history, stark history; every stone is soaked in blood. To understand that history, mere picturesqueness had to be sacrificed; Boni’s graves are not picturesque; they are informative. From them the historical imagination can create a picture of Rome’s beginnings which no Piranesi print could rival.

Sixteen feet of picturesqueness had to be cleared before Boni could reach the necropolis level. The cremation tombs are small circular wells, most of them containing, as in the Alban Hills tombs, adoliumor large jar, covered by tufa slabs. In thedoliawere found ash-containers, often in the shape of miniatures of huts like the full-sized ones on the Palatine. The oblong graves contained rough sarcophagi of tufa, or coffins made of hollowed-out oak logs. Both types of tomb contained, intact on discovery, tomb furniture not differing much between the types, and not differingmuch from the finds in the bottom two levels of Puglisi’s Palatine hut;i.e., roughimpasto, decorated with incised spirals, parallel lines (done with a comb) or zigzags;bucchero, somefibulaeinlaid with amber, glass beads, tiny enamel plaques, remains of funeral offerings of food. It is all very humble, a far cry from the Regolini-Galassi treasure, though some of the tombs are of the same date. The finds show that the necropolis was in use from the ninth to the sixth centuriesB.C.The site was, as we saw, on the edge of a swamp; when the swamp was drained, the cemetery went out of use, and huts, of which more later, were built over it.

In the necropolis, sometimes inhumation graves cut into cremation ones, sometimes vice versa. There is thus no ground for assuming that the cremation graves are older, especially as the grave-contents of the two types are so similar. The difference is not one of time but of funeral practice, as today; it suggests two different populations living peacefully together. The cremators were related to the people whose graves were found so long ago in the Alban Hills, and, as we have seen, to the Palatine hut-dwellers. Who were the inhumers? We know that other Roman hills than the Palatine were inhabited from very early times, though the natural features of the Palatine seem to give it priority: plenty of fodder, abundant water within easy reach, a retreat made safe at night by the hill and the river for the people and their livestock.

But habitation of the Esquiline and Quirinal Hills in the sixth century is attested by a number of tombs from a total of 164 found there in the 1870’s. The finds from these were never scientifically recorded, and they have never been published, but it is noteworthy that they include weapons, which are absent from the cremation-graves in the Forum. It looks as though the Esquiline folk were invaders, with a more warlike tradition than the Palatine hut-dwellers. The Esquiline folk might earlier have used the Forum necropolisfor inhumation. We know that the Sabines buried their dead. Literary tradition (the Rape of the Sabine Women) records that the early Romans got their wives from among the Sabines. Numa Pompilius, the second of the legendary Roman kings, bears a Sabine name. Might not the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis represent the peaceful fusion of cremating Latins and inhuming Sabines who had laid aside their warlike ways?

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On top of the Forum necropolis, when the swamp was drained, huts were built. The archaeological evidence for this phase of early Rome’s history was provided by Boni’s stratigraphic excavation (recently confirmed by the Swede Einar Gjerstad) to the northwest of the site of the equestrian statue of the Emperor Domitian in the middle of the Forum. Gjerstad dug a trench sixteen feet long and eleven feet wide, down to virgin soil, which he found nineteen feet below the present Forum level. On the earth wall of the trench the story of the centuries could be read in the successive levels (Figs.3.3and3.4). Between levels three and nineteen, six pavements could be counted, but level nineteen takes us, to judge by the pots found in it, only back to about 450B.C.In layers twenty to twenty-two, Gjerstad found three pebble pavements, which he dates about 575B.C.If he is right in assigning to this date the beginning of monarchic Rome, he has pushed its date down in our direction over 150 years from the traditional 753B.C.But there is more history below this. Strata twenty-three to twenty-eight are remains of huts, similar to but (pottery again) later than the ones on the Palatine. Gjerstad dates them in two phases: 650–625 and 625–575B.C.Rather than push the traditional date down so far, it seems plausible to suppose that these huts represent the period assigned by the literary tradition to the early kings, and to argue that the sophisticated period, symbolized by the Forum’s earliest pebble pavement, was inaugurated by Rome’s earliest Etruscan king, Tarquin I.

Fig. 3.3Rome, Forum. Excavation at Equus Domitiani, showing strata. (E. Gjerstad,Early RomeI, p. 37)

Fig. 3.4Rome, Forum. Excavation at Equus Domitiani, schematic drawing of strata. (E. Gjerstad,Antiquity26 [1952], p. 61)

These other huts confirm the other archaeological data, which show that what later was unified into urban Rome was originally a group of simple hut-villages clustered on various hills, the Forum huts having spilled down, as it were, from the village on the Palatine. The huts in the level just above the Forum necropolis represent a still earlier stage of this spillover; they antedate the earliest huts in Gjerstad’s twenty-nine levels. By the date of Gjerstad’s earliest pebble pavements, the huts in the necropolis area have been replaced by a more developed domestic architecture, perhaps with rooms opening on a central court. These houses have rectangular plans, mud-brick, wood-braced walls, and tufa foundations. At the spillover stage, the villagers from the various hills formed some kind of confederation symbolized archaeologically by the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis, and in literature by the tradition of the joint religious festival called the Septimontium.

The period of the first pebble pavement (575B.C.) is one of major change, from village to urban life, to a city now for the first time boasting a civic center, destined to become the world’s most famous public square, the Roman Forum. Of the same date are the earliest remains on the Capitoline Hill, which was to be thearxor citadel of historic Rome. Of the same date are the earliest artifacts from the Regia, which later generations revered as the palace of the kings. Of the same date is a sophisticated phase of the round shrine of Vesta, which encircled the sacred flame, symbol of the city’s continuity. The literary tradition would date the last two earlier, at least to Numa’s reign. However no architectural remains have so far been discovered which associate them with the earlier date.

In his interpretation of the archaeological evidence about the date of the beginning of the Roman Republic, Gjerstadis just as iconoclastic as about the dating of the kings. His argument, more ingenious than convincing, is that an event as important politically as a change from a monarchy to a republic should be reflected in the artifacts, changing from richer to poorer, whereas no such objective evidence of a cultural break is visible in the levels dated by him (perhaps more closely than the facts warrant) at 509B.C.Such a cultural break does not come until some fifty years later, when Etruscan imports cease. There are grave difficulties in pushing the date of the Roman Republic’s beginning down so far, of which the chief is a list (theFasti) of pairs of consuls 509–450B.C.where many names are too obscure to have been invented. Gjerstad’s excavation, in sum, is important as confirming the accuracy of Boni’s methods, and as telling us much about the village stage of Rome, but the absolute chronology cannot be said to be as yet firmly fixed, nor the traditional one definitely upset.

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Apart from absolute chronology, what unequivocal evidence can archaeology provide that early Rome was ruled by kings? The ideal evidence would be an inscription, and one was discovered in 1899 in the Forum near the Comitium, where, in the open air in front of the Senate House, the popular assembly met. The inscription is called thelapis nigerstele, because it lies under a later pavement of black marble (lapis niger), now preserved under a deplorable corrugated iron roof. But the stone on which it is carved is not marble but tufa, identified as having come from the quarries of Grotta Oscura in the territory of Veii, some nine miles north of Rome.

On the various kinds of tufa or volcanic stone in use in early Rome there hangs a tale. In 1924 an American, Tenney Frank, published an epoch-making study of Roman building materials in which he put the dating of Roman monumentson a firmer basis by distinguishing several different kinds of tufa used by Roman builders at successive dates. Subsequent studies have blurred the dividing lines and shown the possibility of overlap, but Frank’s nice eye for discriminating tufas has revolutionized the architectural history of the Roman Republic. The following table illustrates Frank’s methods:

Fig. 3.5Rome, Forum:lapis nigerstele. Note the word RECEI, which may be evidence for the historicity of Rome’s kings. (P. Goidanich,Mem. Acc. It.7.3 [1943], Pl. 9)

Fig. 3.6Rome, Forum. Rostra, third phase (fourth-third centuryB.C.). (E. Gjerstad,Skrifter5 [1944], p. 142)

Thelapis nigerstele, inscribed on tufa of the second type in this series, could be of the very late sixth centuryB.C., and this date is borne out by the very archaic letter-styles (Fig. 3.5), which resemble those on the Aules Feluskes stele from Etruscan Vetulonia. Interpreting what the stone says is not made easier by the fact that the top is cut off and the lines are inscribedboustrophedon(like the Lemnian stele among other examples), so that in successive lines the beginning and the end are alternately missing. In the left-hand column below is printed the latest text of the letters as they appear on the stele; in the right-hand column, a translation into classical Latin, filling the blanks; below, a translation of this oldest of all Latin inscriptions:

QVOI HOI QVI · HV[nc locum violaverit,SAKROS ⁝ ESE manibus] SACER · SIT;ED SORD ET SORD[ibus qui haec contaminet]OKAFHAS OCA, FASRECEI ⁝ IO REGI, IV[dicio ei habitoEVAM adimere rem pr]EVAM ·QVOS ⁝ RE QVOS · RE[x per hanc senseritM ⁝ KALATO vehi via]M, KALATOREM,REM HAB HAB[enis eorum, iubetoTOD ⁝ IOVXMEN ilic]O · IVMENTATA ⁝ KAPAI ⁝ DOTAV · CAPIAT, VT · A V[ia statiMM ⁝ I ⁝ TER PE · ITER PE[r aversum locumM ⁝ QVOI HA pergant puru]M · QVI HA[c]VELOD ⁝ NEQV VOLET, NEQV[e per purumIOD ⁝ IOVESTOD perget, iudic]IO, IVSTALOIVQVIOD QO ⁝ LICITATIONE, CO[ndemnetur].

“Whosoever defiles this spot, let him be forfeit to the shades of the underworld, and whosoever contaminates this spot with refuse, itis right for the king, after due process of law, to confiscate his property. Whatsoever persons the king shall discover passing on this road, let him order the summoner to seize their draft animals by the reins, that they may turn out of the road forthwith and take the proper detour. Whosoever persists in traveling this road, and fails to take the proper detour, by due process of law let him be sold to the highest bidder.”

Obviously the inscription thus restored and interpreted, marks a spot which is taboo, its ill-omened nature being further emphasized by the later black marble pavement, which was fenced off by a balustrade of thin white marble slabs set on edge. Beside the stele is a U-shaped shrine or altar,Bon a higher level and therefore of a later date than the inscription. Archaeology provides no clue to the purpose of this structure, but learned Romans believed it marked the tomb of Romulus, their first king. This would be a sacred spot indeed, not to be profaned by the feet of men or animals. From one edge of the shrine run the remains of a semicircular platform with steps (Figs.3.6and3.7), also later in date than the inscription. The platform was the Rostra, so called because of its decoration, after 338B.C., with the bronzerostraor ramming-beaks of captured enemy war-galleys. The Rostra was in historical times the speakers’ platform; from it in one of its phases resounded the sonorous oratory of Cicero. But it was also the spot from which traditionally funeral orations were delivered, while modern men wearing, according to Roman custom, the death-masks of their ancestors sat behind the orators in curule chairs on the platform. To the logical Roman mind a platform beside the tomb of the first king would seem the appropriate place for funeral speeches.

BProfessor Ferdinando Castagnoli and Dr. Lucos Cozza reported in 1959 the discovery, at Pratica di Mare, ancient Lavinium, sixteen miles south of Rome, of a series of thirteen such altars, together with an inscription on bronze, with lettering like that of thelapis nigerstele. They date their finds in the late sixth centuryB.C.

Since American excavations at Rome’s Latin colony ofCosa in 1953 identified as a Comitium a circular, step-surrounded space in front of the local Senate House, it appears that the semicircular steps leading to the platform in Rome were Rome’s Comitium, and new excavations to prove or disprove this were started in 1957.

Fig. 3.7Rome, Forum. Rostra, fifth phase (Sullan).(E. Gjerstad,op. cit., p. 143)

Fig. 3.7Rome, Forum. Rostra, fifth phase (Sullan).

(E. Gjerstad,op. cit., p. 143)

Careful equations between the fifteen levels in the Comitium and the twenty-nine levels near the equestrian statue of Domitian prove the Comitium a monument of the Roman Republic: the first phase coincides with the Republic’s beginning, and its last with Caesar and Augustus, in the late first centuryB.C., when the Republic ends. Thereafter freedom of speech, and an arena for it, were but a memory. But the first Rostra rose where it did because the foundersof the Roman Republic associated it with the first of Rome’s kings.

Thelapis nigerinscription, which refers twice to a king, rests on a base which cannot be older than the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390B.C.(for the base is on the same level as the second of the Comitium pavements, laid over traces of a major fire, and the Gauls set Rome on fire). But an inscription of course is a movable monument, and the present location of the stele may not be where it was originally set up. Furthermore, letter styles so archaic are probably older than 390B.C.: the alternatives, then, are either that the stele, of venerable antiquity, was reset, on a new platform, as a part of rearrangements after the fire, or that it is a deliberately archaizing copy of a much older original. The theory that the king (rex) referred to is not the temporal monarch, but therex sacrorum, a Republican priest of later Republican times who inherited the king’s religious functions, is virtually ruled out by the letter-styles.

Thelapis nigerstele presents one aspect of primitive Roman religion under the kings: the taboo. Another is the pious tending of the sacred flame on the public hearth, a rite performed in historical times by the Vestal Virgins in Vesta’s shrine at the east end of the Forum. The superstructure of the shrine as now restored there yielded no remains earlier than the Gallic fire, but the round plan must reflect the shape of a primitive straw hut of the Palatine type, with central hearth and smoke-hole, and the earliest artifacts, from the previously mentioned well there, are dated in the seventh and sixth centuriesB.C.The shrine of Vesta, then, preserves another memory of Rome of the kings.

Fig. 3.8Rome, Republican Forum. (G. Lugli,Roma Antica, Pl. 3)

Kings, like ordinary mortals, need a dwelling place. Traditionally in Rome, this was the Regia (related in root torex, “king”), on the trapezoidal plot between the Forum necropolis and Vesta’s shrine (see plan,Fig. 3.8). Romans believed its first occupant was the Sabine Numa, the secondand most pious of the kings, but no archaeological remains confirm so early a date (traditionally 716–672B.C.). It seems unlikely that the king could have dwelt there before the necropolis was closed, for the king was a priest, and it was unlucky for a priest to look upon a cadaver, or upon death. The earliest datable masonry remains are a foundation incappellaccioof about 390B.C., another evidence of rebuilding after the Gallic fire. But there might well have been, before the fire, a more primitive structure in wood, revetted in terracotta; indeed, fragments of terracotta revetment, some of a late sixth or early fifth century style and some even earlier, were found there, as well as a greybuccherosherd scratched with the wordrexin archaic letters. The Regia, as it stands, is the result of at least three rebuildings, the last in 36B.C.It still has an old-fashioned air: ancient, straggling, intractable, very holy: the shape of its ground-plan never changing from beginning to end. In keeping with the Etruscan tradition—as at Marzabotto—the building is oriented north and south. Its south side was a dwelling, later the office of the Pontifex Maximus; among the great Romans who worked in this building was Julius Caesar. The rest of the Regia was an area partly unroofed. It was a shrine of Mars, hung with shields and a magic lance that quivered at the threat of war. The Pontifex Maximus recorded yearly, day by day, on a whitened board in the Regia, events in which he and his fellow priests had a professional interest: temple-dedications, religious festivals, triumphs, eclipses, famines, rains of blood, births of two-headed calves, and other prodigies. Fragments of this lost archaeological record, piously kept by the pontiffs, turn up in extant Roman history: Livy often refers to them at the end of his account of a year, particularly an unlucky year.

Orientation like the Regia’s is an Etruscan practice, and it is with domination by the Etruscans that we should expect Rome’s primitive simplicity to evolve into somethingmore like grandeur. The literary tradition ascribed to the Etruscan, Tarquin the Proud, Rome’s last king, a great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, built by the forced labor of Roman citizens, and decorated by Etruscan artisans like Vulca of Veii, the sculptor of the Apollo (page 52). It took World War I to confirm this literary tradition archaeologically. The Italians, on the Allied side in that war, ousted the Germans from their Embassy, splendidly situated on the Capitoline Hill in the Palazzo Caffarelli, and remodelled the palace into a museum. In the process was revealed a massive podium, sixteen feet high, built without mortar of blocks ofcappellaccio, the oldest of Rome’s building stones. Fortunately, diagonally opposite corners were found, making it possible to establish how impressive were the podium’s dimensions: roughly 120 × 180 feet. Three corners of the podium having been isolated, archaeologists were able to fit into the plan the remains of a substructure which had been found in 1865 under the Palace of the Conservatori. This substructure, now built impressively into a corridor of the Conservatori Museum, proved to be the support for columns. The platform as a whole, then, was the podium of a temple, the largest of its time, over twice the size, for example, of the one at Marzabotto. Traces of the settings for the columns proved them to be placed too wide apart to be connected by architraves in stone; they must instead have been great wooden beams. The wood would have been revetted or faced with terracotta, and in fact enough fragments of terracotta revetments were found on the site to establish this temple as decorated in the typical Etruscan style. If its sculptures were as striking as the Apollo of Veii, they were masterpieces indeed. The temple, repeatedly and ever more grandiosely rebuilt—in one phase it was roofed with gilded bronze, and the cult statue was gold and ivory—was the center and symbol of Rome’s religious life. Here the triumphal processions ended. Here the triumphing general, surrounded by his spoils of victory,descended from his chariot drawn by four white horses, and passed through the open doors and the clouds of incense to give thanks to Jupiter the Best and Greatest for his victory. From the cliff behind the temple, the Tarpeian rock, traitors were thrown to their deaths; here, in 133B.C., Tiberius Gracchus, the friend of the people, was murdered. Religion, dignity, pride, greed, pomp, tragedy: all are the stuff of Roman history; all are here, and archaeology illumines their story. Horace boasted that his poetry would endure “so long as, with the mute Vestal, the Pontifex climbs up to the Capitoline Temple.” For him as for us Rome was the Eternal City, and the Capitoline was the symbol of its permanence. Through the assaults of riot, fire, earthquake, poverty, popes, barbarians, limekilns, wind, rain, and earth, the foundations have endured.

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The literary tradition tells us how Rome’s Etruscan monarchy fell: of Tarquin’s despotism and his son’s rape of Lucrece, daughter of a Roman aristocrat, whose husband avenged her and allegedly became one of Rome’s first pair of consuls. It tells us how the Roman nobles rose, drove out the Tarquins, and founded the Roman Republic. Archaeology cannot confirm the traditional date (indeed the founding of temples, Etruscan style, continues, as we saw, for half a century after 509). But about the middle of the fifth century the contents of the tombs on the Esquiline begin to grow mean and shabby. Contact with Etruria has been cut off, and the Romans make a virtue of necessity, pass sumptuary laws against excessive display, and practice simplicity and frugality. The late fifth centuryB.C.in Rome, as archaeology reveals it, is a period of isolation, stagnation, and retrenchment.

Hardly had the new Roman Republic rallied to conquer Veii (traditionally in 396B.C., after a ten-year siege, like Troy’s), when the Gauls descended from the north withfire and sword. Rome bought them off, and, resisting the temptation to move to Veii, fell to rebuilding, mindful of how its ancestors had built their city up out of forest and swamp; in love with their protecting hills, their fruitful open spaces, their busy river. The building was done planlessly; the main concern was to strengthen defenses.

The primitive Rome of separate villages on the hills had been defended, at most, by separate palisades and ditches. It is with King Servius that literature associated the Rome of impressive buildings and a beetling wall, of squared stone, sturdy enough to repel all invaders. With how much justification Roman historians called the wall “Servian,” we are now to learn. The tradition associates Rome’s earliest wall with Servius Tullius, who falls between the two Tarquins, and certain surviving traces of earthwork and masonry, plus the Cloaca Maxima, or Great Drain through the Forum, are assigned by some archaeologists to the sixth century. Indeed until 1932 most scholars accepted the sixth-century date for the whole early circuit. But in that year the Swedish archaeologist Gösta Säflund (who seven years later was to explode Pigorini’s myth about theterremare) published the results of some painstaking fieldwork which radically changed the picture.

Beginning with the Palatine and working counter-clockwise, Säflund examined every inch of the surviving circuit ascribed to Servius (seeFig. 2.3), and for stretches which had been torn down during Rome’s great expansion (after she became the capital of a united Italy in the 1870’s) he had access to unpublished notes and sketches by Boni and another great nineteenth-century Italian archaeologist, Rodolfo Lanciani. Everywhere he paid careful attention to materials, techniques, dimensions, mason’s marks, the relation of the wall to terrain, neighboring tombs, and ancient artifacts found in its context. It was chiefly from the building material that Säflund drew his conclusions.

The stone was in the main Grotta Oscura tufa, which heknew from Tenney Frank’s studies to have been in use in the year (378B.C.) in which Livy says the censors contracted to have a wall built of squared stone. Furthermore, some of the Esquiline tombs already mentioned, containing mid-fourth century artifacts, were outside the line of the Grotta Oscura wall, while some of the tombs containing archaic artifacts were inside. The Romans rarely buried their dead within a city wall: the inference is that at the date of the earlier tombs, Rome had no proper ring-wall, while by the date of the later (fourth-century) tombs a circuit wall had been built. The Great Drain through the Forum is also of Grotta Oscura, and is therefore probably to be dated in 378, like the wall, though some feeder lines are incappellaccio, which, as we have seen, was the earliest volcanic stone the Romans used, and we know—because we know the Forum swamp was drained by 575B.C.—that there must have been some sort of drainage system—possibly open ditches—earlier than 378.

But Säflund found Fidenae tufa also. This he knew, again from Frank’s study, to have been in use from about 338B.C.down into the second century. It had been used to patch the wall in places. What more appropriate time for such repairs than when Hannibal was threatening the city, in 217B.C.? Thereafter, Roman and Latin colonies, advanced bases, served her in the office of a wall, and her own fortifications were allowed to fall into disrepair.

But there are places in Rome’s wall where Monteverde stone has been used for arches, rising from footings set in concrete; in other places the wall has a concrete core faced with Anio tufa. Säflund knew that concrete was little in use in Roman building before 150B.C., and that it had become a favorite material by Sulla’s time (see p.129). Sulla had marched on Rome in 88B.C.and taken it; he must have reinforced the wall to keep his enemy Marius from duplicating his own feat. And Sulla included the bridgehead on the far side of the Tiber in his circuit, reinforcedthe Aventine Hill, and addedballistae(great catapults for shooting stones) in arched casemates flanking the main gates.

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