Fig. 3.9Rome, “Servian” Wall of 378B.C., surviving stretch beside Termini railway station. (Photo Paul MacKendrick)
Fig. 3.9Rome, “Servian” Wall of 378B.C., surviving stretch beside Termini railway station. (Photo Paul MacKendrick)
Thus Säflund distinguished three building periods for the so-called “Servian” Wall, though none as early as King Servius Tullius. One section of earth work oragger, on the Quirinal Hill, faced in part with small blocks ofcappellaccio, looked older than 378B.C., and Säflund knew from observations at Ardea, Cerveteri (and, as we now know, Anzio) that the use of the earthwork was standard in the sixth century to reinforce weak places on hilly sites. Some early sixth-century sherds, but none later, were foundunderthe agger. This helps to confirm that the agger was a part of Rome’s sixth-century, genuinely Servian defenses, never a complete ring-wall, but an adjustment and reinforcement of natural defenses, later incorporated into the circuit wall of 378B.C.A splendid stretch of the facing of this reinforcedagger, 100 yards, survives today by the Termini railroad station (Fig. 3.9).
But Säflund’s careful observations did more than redate the wall in its several phases. By comparison of the mason’s marks, hacked in Greek letters on the heads of the Grotta Oscura blocks only, with similar marks found on the blocks of the fortifications of the Euryalus above Syracuse, in Sicily (built in the late fifth centuryB.C.by Dionysius I), Säflund was able to demonstrate that Rome’s wall was built by Sicilian workmen, Rome not having the manpower or the skill at the time. (Dionysius for his wall had employed 6000 men and 500 yoke of oxen.)
The wall of 378B.C.is evidence that Rome had emerged from the doldrums into which the Republic had begun to sink. Before 390B.C.she had depended on men, not walls. The Gallic sack had proved her not invincible, and had also, as war emergencies will, produced a new sense of solidarity. The wall symbolizes it, and so does the bill passed in 367B.C.(while the wall was still under construction), opening the highest office in the Republic to plebeians. Thus a reinforced oligarchy was formed, which by 338B.C.could beat its once powerful enemies, the neighboring settlements linked in the Latin League; proudly (even arrogantly) mount the beaks of enemy ships on the new Rostra; and embark upon a career of Manifest Destiny in Italy. The Republic had reached adulthood.
Fig. 3.10Rome, Largo Argentina, temples. (G. Lugli,Monumenti Antichi, 3, fac. p. 32)
Fig. 3.10Rome, Largo Argentina, temples. (G. Lugli,Monumenti Antichi, 3, fac. p. 32)
There were other outward and visible signs of the Republic’s new maturity and prosperity. The gods deserve their reward for fighting on the side of the biggest battalions, and so the expanding Republic built temples. In another age of arrogant expansion, in 1926, not long before Säflund began his work on the walls, slum clearance in front of the Argentina theater (on the site of the portico of Pompey’s theater, where Caesar was murdered) revealed the foundations of four Republican temples (Fig. 3.10), nowadays the haunt of countless tomcats. The gods towhom the temples were dedicated being unknown, they were named, with proper archaeological sobriety, Temples A, B, C, and D. The foundations of Temple C, the third from the north, are the deepest; it is therefore the oldest. It is set in the Italic manner at the back of a high podium, built of Grotta Oscura tufa; its mason’s marks match those on the “Servian” wall. Clearly it was built by the same masons or in the same tradition. The podium carries the distinction of being the oldest surviving datable public building in Rome. Terracotta revetments found in excavating are of fourth century type. Besides meanders, the so-called “Greek frets” or “key” design, an angular pattern of lines winding in and out, their decorative motifs include strigil patterns: parallel troughs, made by the workman’s thumbs in the wet clay, and then painted in contrasting colors. The strong curve of the profile resembles that of the strigil or scraper used by athletes in the gymnasium to remove caked oil and dirt from their bodies; hence the name. The roof’s peak and corner ornaments, calledacroteria, have spikes set in the clay to discourage birds from perching and committing nuisances. This temple and its three later fellows are still a long way from the grandiose marble and gold of the Augustan Age, but they are an equally long way from the primitive wattle-and-daub huts of the Palatine village. They mark a stage in the painstakingly unravelled archaeological story of Rome’s expansion, which we shall follow at various newly-excavated sites in Italy.