LET us stop at this precarious zenith and try to realize that the Empire was greater than Rome.We have lingered unduly at this brilliant center, which hypnotizes historians as it fascinated provincials. In truth the vitality of the great realm no longer dwelt in the corrupt and dying capital; its surviving health and strength, much of its beauty, most of its mental life lay in the provinces and in Italy. We can have no just idea of what Rome meant, nor of its astonishing achievement in organization and pacification, until we leave it and surrender ourselves to a tour of the thousand cities that made up the Roman world.I
“How shall I commence this undertaking?” the elder Pliny asked as he began his description of Italy, “so vast is the number of places—what man could enumerate them all?—and so great is their individual renown!”1 Around and south of Rome lay Latium, once her mother, then her enemy, then her granary, then a paradise of suburbs and villas for Romans who had both money and taste. South and west from the capital fine roads and the Tiber led to the rival harbors of Portus and Ostia on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ostia had its great age in the second and third centuries of our era. Merchants and longshoremen crowded its streets and filled its theaters; its homes and apartment houses were remarkably like those of Rome today; as late as the fifteenth century a Florentine traveler marveled at the wealth of the town and its sumptuous adornment. Some surviving columns, and an altar elegantly designed and carved with delicate floral reliefs, show that even this commercial population had absorbed the classic conception of the beautiful.
Southward on the coast rose Antium (Anzio), where the richest Romans, many emperors, and favored gods had palaces or temples reaching out into the Mediterranean to catch any passing breeze; in its three miles of ruins were found such master sculptures as the Borghese Gladiator and the Apollo Belvedere. Near by an extant monument reminds “excellent citizens,” now nineteen centuries dead, that they have recently had the pleasure of seeing eleven gladiators die in combat with ten ferocious bears.2 To the north, beyond the coastal hills, Aquinum gave birth to Juvenal, and Arpinum plumed itself on Marius and Cicero. Twenty miles from Rome was the old town of Praeneste (Palestrina), its pretty homes built upon terraces in the mountain slopes, its gardens famous for their roses, its peak crowned with a celebrated temple to the goddess Fortuna Primigenia, who gave good luck to women in childbirth, and exchanged oracles for cash. Tusculum, ten miles from Rome, was similarly rich in gardens and villas; here old Cato was born, and Cicero placed his Tusculan Disputations.II Most renowned of Rome’s suburbs was Tibur (Tivoli), where Hadrian spread his country house and Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, spent her captive years.
North of Rome, Etruria experienced under the Principate a modest resurrection. Perusia was largely destroyed and partly restored by Augustus, whose artists beautified there an old Etruscan arch. Arretium gave Maecenas to Rome and pottery to the world. Pisae was already hoar with age: it traced its name and origin to a colony of Greeks from Pisa in the Peloponnesus, and made a living by organizing the lumber business along the Arnus River. Farther up the same stream was a young Roman colony, Florentia, rare among cities because it probably underestimated its future. At the northwestern extremity of Etruria were the quarries of Carrara; Rome’s finest marble was conveyed thence to the port of Luna, and went by ship to the capital. Genua had long served as an outlet for the goods of northwestern Italy; as far back as 209 B.C. we hear of the Carthaginians destroying it in a ruthless commercial war; it has been destroyed many times since, and has always achieved a fairer reincarnation.
Under the Alps lay Augusta Taurinorum, founded by the Taurini Gauls and made a Roman colony by Augustus; its ancient pavements and drains can still be seen under the streets of Turin; and a massive gate survives from Augustan days to remind us that the city was once a fortress against invaders from the north. Here the lazy Padus (Po), rising in the Cottian Alps, turns eastward 250 miles to divide north Italy into what the early Republic knew as Transpadane and Cispadane Gaul. In all the peninsula the valley of the Po was the region most fertile, populous, and prosperous. At the foot of the Alps were those lakes—Verbanus (Maggiore), Larius (Como), and Benacus (Garda)—whose splendor feasted the eye and soul of those generations as well as ours. From the younger Pliny’s Comum a main trade route led south to Mediolanum (Milan). Settled by the Gauls in the fifth century B.C., it was already a metropolis and educational center in the days of Virgil; by A.D. 286 it would replace Rome as the capital of the Western Empire. Verona controlled the trade over the Brenner Pass and was rich enough to have an amphitheater (recently restored) seating 25,000 spectators. Along the winding Po rose Placentia (Piacenza), Cremona, Mantua, and Ferrara—originally frontier towns designed to hold the Gauls at bay.
North of the Po and east of the Adige lay Venetia. The district took its name from the Veneti, early immigrants from Illyria. Herodotus tells how the leaders of these tribes annually brought together the marriageable lasses in their villages, put a price upon each according to her beauty, wed her to the man who paid the price, and used the money to provide alluring dowries for the less alluring girls.4 Venice itself was not yet born, but at Pola on the Istrian peninsula, at Tergeste (Trieste), Aquileia, and Patavium (Padua), substantial cities crowned the head of the Adriatic. Pola still has from Roman days a stately arch, a pretty temple, and an amphitheater only less impressive than its model, the Colosseum. South of the Po a line of important cities ran from Placentia through Parma, Mutina (Modena), Bononia (Bologna), and Faventia (Faenze) to Ariminum. Here, at Rimini, is one of the most perfectly preserved of the countless bridges built by Roman engineers; it carried the Flaminian Way into the city through an arch as strong and dominating as the Roman character. A branch road led from Bononia to Ravenna, the Venice of Roman days, built upon piles in marshes made by several rivers emptying into the Adriatic; Strabo describes it as “provided with thoroughfares by means of bridges and ferries.”5 Augustus stationed there his Adriatic fleet, and several emperors in the fifth century made the city their official residence. The superior fertility of northern Italy, its healthier and more stimulating climate, its mineral resources, varied industries, and cheaply-borne river trade, raised the region to economic supremacy over central Italy in the first century of our era and to political leadership in the third.
South of Ariminum the eastern coast, rocky, stormy, and harborless, developed few cities of moment north of Brundisium. And yet there were in Umbria, Picenum, Samnium, and Apulia many small towns whose wealth and art can be judged only by studying Pompeii. Asisium gave birth to Propertius as well as Saint Francis; Sarsina to Plautus, Amiternum to Sallust, Sulmo to Ovid, Venusia to Horace. Beneventum was famous not only for a Pyrrhic defeat but for the great arch erected there by Trajan and Hadrian; on its virile reliefs Trajan told the story of his achievements in war and peace. On the southeastern coast Brundisium commanded traffic with Dalmatia, Greece, and the East. Within the “heel” Tarentum, once a proud city-state, was now a declining winter resort for Roman magnates and aristocrats. In southern Italy large estates had absorbed most of the land and turned it to pasture; the cities lost their peasant patronage, and their business classes waned. The Greek communities that had sported their sybaritic wealth in earlier times had been ruined by barbarian infiltration and the Second Punic War, and were now reduced to small towns in which Latin was slowly replacing Greek. On the “toe” Rhegium (Reggio) had a good harbor and flourished on the trade with Sicily and Africa. Up the west coast Velia could hardly remember the days when Parmenides and Zeno had made it, as Elea, ring with metaphysical poetry and impish paradox. Poseidonia, which still amazes visitors with its majestic temples, had been renamed Paestum by its Roman colony, and its Greek stock was melting in a flux of “barbarian”—here Italian—blood from the countryside. Only in Campania was Greek civilization alive in Italy.
Geographically Campania—the mountains and coast around Naples—was part of Samnium; economically and culturally it was a world by itself, industrially more advanced than Rome, financially powerful, and crowding into a little space an intense life of political turmoil, literary competition, artistic exuberance, epicurean luxury, and exciting public games. The land was fertile and produced the finest olives and grapes in Italy; hence came the famous Surrentine and Falernian wines. Probably Varro was thinking of Campania when he challenged the world: “You who have wandered over many lands, have you ever seen any better cultivated than Italy? . . . Is not Italy so stocked with fruit trees as to seem one great orchard?”6 At the southern end of Campania a precipitous peninsula ran out from Salernum to Surrentum. Villas nestled among the vines and orchards on the hills and garlanded the shore. Surrentum was as beautiful as Sorrento is now; the elder Pliny called it “Nature’s own delight,” upon which she had poured out all her gifts.7 Hardly anything seems to have changed there in two thousand years; the people and their customs are probably the same, almost the same their gods; and the cliffs still stand the sea’s unending siege.
Facing this promontory lay the buffeted isle of Capreae (Capri). On the southern side of the gulf Vesuvius smoked, while Pompeii and Herculaneum slept under their lava coat. Then came Neapolis, “Newtown,” the most Greek of Italian cities in Trajan’s day; in Naples’ laziness we watch an echo of its ancient addiction to love and sport and art. The people were Italian; the culture, customs, games, were Greek. Here were fine temples, palaces, and theaters; here, every fifth year, were held those contests in music and poetry at which Statius had won a prize. In the western corner of the gulf was the port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli), named from the stench of its sulphur pools;8 It throve on Rome’s trade and on manufactures of iron, pottery, and glass; an amphitheater here shows us, by its well-preserved underground passages, how gladiators and beasts were introduced into the arena. Across the harbor of Puteoli sparkled the villas of Baiae, doubly attractive in their setting between mountains and sea; here Caesar, Caligula, and Nero played and rheumatic Romans came to bathe in mineral springs. The place profited from its reputation for gambling and immorality; Varro reports that maidens there were common property, and many boys were girls;9 Claudius thought Cicero irremediably disgraced for having gone there once.10 “Do you suppose,” asks Seneca, “that Cato would ever have dwelt in a pleasure palace, so that he might count the lewd women as they sailed past, the many kinds of barges painted in all sorts of colors, the roses wafted about the lake?”11
A few miles north of Baiae, in the crater of a dead volcano, Lake Avernus emitted sulphurous fumes of such potency that legend said no bird could fly above it and live. Near it was the cave through which Aeneas, in Virgil’s epic, had made his facilis descensus Averni into Tartarus. North of the lake was the old city of Cumae, now slowly dying through the superior attractions of her daughter-city Neapolis, the better harbors of Puteoli and Ostia, and the industries of Capua. Capua lay thirty miles inland, in a fertile region that sometimes harvested .four crops in a year;12 and its bronze and iron works were unrivaled in Italy. Rome had so severely punished it for helping Hannibal that for two centuries it failed to recover, and Cicero spoke of it as the “abode of the politically dead.”13 Caesar restored it with thousands of new colonists, and in Trajan’s time it was prospering again.
Listed so rapidly, these major cities of classic Italy are merely names; we mistake them for words on a map and hardly feel that they were the noisy abodes of sensitive men eagerly pursuing food and drink, women and gold. Let us turn over the ashes of one Roman habitation, and from its strangely preserved vestiges try to recapture some movement of the life that ran in those ancient streets.