Rome: An Empire's Story (51 page)

A new concern with posterity appears at the turn of the fourth and third centuries
BC
. Appius Claudius Caecus, who was censor in 312
BC
, commissioned an aqueduct and a great southern road, known after him as the Aqua Appia and the Via Appia respectively. The inscribed
elogia
of the Scipiones in their elaborate tomb complex constructed at the start of the third century
BC
explicitly addresses future readers. Who were these imagined readers? The location suggests family members, but when the inscriptions speak of individual Scipiones holding office ‘among you’ it is difficult not to conjure up the image of the Roman People. During the early second century
BC
more and more grandiose building projects began to incorporate the names of those who had commissioned them. Cato named the great covered hall he built beside the forum in his censorship the Basilica Porcia, an allusion to the royal (
basilike
) stoa given to Athens by Attalus, King of Pergamum, and to the gens Porcia, the clan to which Cato belonged. The first aqueduct to approach Rome on a series of great arches was named the Aqua Marcia after the urban praetor Quintus Marcius Rex who built it in 144
BC
. Lucius Mummius had his name placed on triumphal monuments in the many communities on which he bestowed a share of the booty plundered from the sack of Corinth. From this point on the association of public buildings with individuals became absolutely regular. The great generals of the late Republic developed the idiom further. From the middle of the last century
BC
, a whole new series of monumental types appeared. Theatres, amphitheatres, and circuses are the best known. More than 1,000 were constructed between around 50
BC
and
AD
250.
¹²
To this can be added the Saepta Julia, imperial
thermae
, public gardens, libraries, porticoes filled with captured art, and so on. Not all senators were fortunate enough to win booty with which to build victory temples, and only a few held offices like the censorship that allowed them to build with public funds. Besides, it became increasingly difficult to compete over the last century
BC
, at least as far as public buildings were concerned, once Pompey had set new standards with his great theatre. Tomb building offered a cheaper mode of monumentality. The tombs of the late Republic grew ever more elaborate and varied, including great towers along the Appian Way, and the pyramid built by Cestius now straddling the Aurelianic Walls.

Eventually the emperors drove their competitors out of the city. But the effect was just to move monumental building to the towns of Italy and the provinces.
¹³
The origins of this movement lay in a growing interest in monumentality that coincides, at least chronologically, with the origins of Roman hegemony and continued up until the crisis of empire. But when we visit Roman ruins today, we are mostly looking at monuments created in a long second century. Over most of the empire this building boom gathered pace over the first century
AD
, reached a peak around the year 200, and collapsed in the generation that followed.

Plot that pattern on a graph, and it pretty much coincides with the curve made by the rise and fall of Latin epigraphy.
¹⁴
Most inscriptions were gravestones. That habit of commemoration seems to have spread from the senatorial aristocracy to other sectors of society, especially lesser aristocrats and former slaves. The freeborn masses were largely excluded, the peasantries of the empire are more or less invisible. Hundreds of thousands of these inscriptions survive from the Roman period, even though we probably have less than 5 per cent of those originally set up. The greatest numbers are found in the city of Rome and surrounding areas, but the habit also spread through the cities of Italy and the provinces, and was even taken up by soldiers on the frontier and traders far from home. These too are monuments, deliberate attempts to record human lives for posterity. And they are now a precious source of information on Roman history too, since many record the achievements and ranks of the deceased along with his or her closest relationships, with parents and children, masters and slaves, fellow soldiers and friends. They speak to us of an age when Roman society was at its most energetic, when levels of social mobility were greatest and the urban network of the empire reached its peak. Naturally it is the success stories that are most often commemorated—the slaves given their freedom, the soldiers who won citizenship after long service, the town councillors who collected the set of municipal priesthoods and offices. Their individual pride and anxiety plays against a confidence that there will be future readers; that the world in which they had succeeded would continue in roughly the same form as the present.

One final kind of monument can be set alongside tombs and aqueducts, amphitheatres and gravestones, and that is literary texts. Not long after the first monumental tombs appeared, the same Roman aristocracy that built them set out to create a literature in Latin.
¹⁵
Like the sarcophagi of the Scipiones, the first works created had clear Greek models. Like them they were immediately put to new purposes in Rome’s very un-Greek social order. Horace’s poem, with which I started, begins by borrowing from the Greek poet Pindar the conceit that a poem is a more effective monument than a physical statue. In practice we do not need to separate monuments and texts too sharply, since Roman monuments were from the start covered in writing. The earliest of the sarcophagi in the Tomb of the Scipiones were inscribed with a new verse form developed from Greek models.
¹⁶
When Cato created his literary
monumenta
he was also fixing his name— quite literally—on the vast basilica that flanked the forum. Fulvius Nobilior
patronized the epic poet Ennius, as well as building his temple of Hercules of the Muses. These associations only intensified in the early empire, by which point some of the poets and historians are themselves senators, or even emperors.

An empire where the elite write poetry is a very unusual thing. All early empires made use of writing, but mostly just for administrative purposes. Many empires contained within them literary groups, monks and court poets, priests and scientists. But few of these were close to the levers of power. Perhaps only the scholar bureaucrats of medieval China come close to the erudite senators and equestrians of imperial Rome, although in Rome this sort of activity was one cultural option among many open to the elite.
¹⁷
Roman writers sometimes cast Athens as the civilizing counterpart to martial Rome. Yet Athenian festivals in the Roman period were focused on commemorating the battles of the Persian wars,
¹⁸
and Aelius Aristides’ speech in honour of Athens flattered it with its imperial past. The Roman Empire, on the other hand, created conditions in which education and literary culture of all kinds flourished. Poets and orators were fêted at court, and the emperors endowed positions for teachers of philosophy and rhetoric in many provincial cities. Great libraries were built by emperors in the capital, and by senators and town councillors in other cities. Probably more literary texts were created in the early empire than at any other point in classical antiquity. Most were in Greek, and they covered a huge range of subject matter from medical texts and poems about geometry to erotic epigrams and civic histories. Once again, only a fraction has survived, but through these monuments too we can listen in to the Romans talking to their future selves.

The Futures of Rome

What did the Romans want to tell posterity through their monuments? Many kinds of message can be put in a bottle. Most obvious is the author’s desire to preserve his name, not to perish utterly. Imperial monuments were associated with the names of dynasties and individual emperors and their relatives. So the Porticoes of Octavia and Livia, the Forum of Trajan, the Baths of Caracalla made permanent marks on the cityscape of the city of Rome. The great marble plan of the city created in the Severan period is written all over with the names of generations of the Roman powerful.
Greek and Latin inscriptions on the wall of gymnasia, theatres, libraries, and other civic buildings commemorated their founders. Even temples, where the names of the gods were most prominent, bore records of those who had paid for their building and successive restorations. Poets often began their works with letters addressed to their patrons. Tombstones listed ranks achieved, priesthoods and magistracies held, the profession, tribe, and age of the deceased, and the names of those left behind who had seen to the burial. All this is completely comprehensible to us now.

All monuments present an ambiguous attitude to the future. The act of creating a monument is an act of faith that there will be future readers, yet the need for one betrays a fear that all will be forgotten. That fear seems reasonable even when we think of the empire at its most secure. What of the period that followed? No agreement yet exists on the reasons for the end of monument building. Did the powerful lose faith in the future, or simply run out of the funds needed to communicate with it? Many were certainly impoverished as the imperial economy contracted and as the weight of government pressed harder on those who were not well connected. If the building industry collapsed perhaps this had knock-on effects for the production even of modest monuments. Yet the rich villas of the fourth century and growing expenditure on churches suggest no simple economic explanation will do. Inscriptions continued to be produced, if fewer and now for the rich alone. Perhaps we should imagine a loss of faith in the existence of a future audience, specifically that audience of fellow citizens that in the cities of the early empire had provided spectators for shows and viewers for urban monuments. Perhaps the wealthy had reimagined posterity not as the continued existence of the civic community, but as the persistence of a community of readers like themselves. Was that who Sidonius was writing for in the fifth century in his villa in the Auvergne?

New attitudes to antiquity emerged in the literature of the fourth century
AD
, but no new consensus, either about history or the future.
¹⁹
Classicizing historians presented themselves as traditionalists, but of course they were not. Zosimus gives the game away when he alludes to Polybius’ account of Rome’s rise and immediately asks who could imagine it was not due to divine favour. The answer, of course, is Polybius, who had offered an explanation based on the comparative advantages of political institutions and the attitudes they inculcated. But the argument had evidently become one about religion. Yet even the Christians did not agree about the past. More than a century before Constantine, Melito, the Bishop of Sardis, had
suggested that the birth of Christ at the origin of the Roman Empire showed the Roman world was a providential creation. Orosius tentatively suggested something similar. But this seems to us to deviate from his teacher Augustine’s position that the convulsions of the Earthly City had little relevance for citizens of the Heavenly One. Not all Christian futures had Rome in them, nor did all Christian pasts. Gregory of Tours’s ten-book
History of the Franks
, composed in the later sixth century, began with the creation of the world and went on to tell the story of Christian Frankish rulers. The western empire fell somewhere in the middle of book 2, but it was not important enough to merit a mention in Gregory’s account. For Christians this flexibility was an advantage. Nothing could catch them out, not the fall of the western empire, the thousand-year succession of Byzantium, or the terrible events of the Arab conquests.

What about the posterity of Rome today? Looking back down the telescope we see the worst is now past. Most classical literature ever written was lost between the fifth and eighth centuries
AD
.
²⁰
When cities contracted the libraries—public and private—were no longer maintained, and books burnt, rotted, or crumbled away. Many had probably never existed in more than a handful of copies anyway, given the cost of producing multiple versions in an age before print technology. The shift from papyrus scroll to a codex format, essentially that of the modern book, also acted like a filter. What was not transferred onto the new format was lost. For nearly two hundred years in the west almost no copies of any non-Christian text were made. But what survived to the Carolingian Renaissance had a good chance of being gathered by humanists and preserved until the invention of printing. Almost all classical texts are now available electronically, in the original and in many translations. For the moment those monuments seem safe.

We can be similarly optimistic about the archaeological heritage, at least its most prominent components. Conservation is firmly established in law and it is rare now for Roman monuments to be threatened with demolition. Popular interest in the past has saved it, making it an asset for those poorer countries that attract tourists and a symbol of national pride, too. Local activists defended Roman and other antiquities everywhere. Nor is it a dead heritage. I have tried in this book to indicate the many areas in which research is transforming our understanding of the Roman Empire. The philologists who established the science of classical antiquity in the nineteenth century have now been joined by archaeologists, art historians,
and social scientists of every kind. New answers are being offered to old questions, and new questions are being asked and answered about every aspect of Roman antiquity. Neither the general public nor school and university students have lost that sense of excitement in piecing together a great movement through history that has left so many traces in the world we inhabit today. We are not the posterity that Romans of any age imagined—how could we be?—but in our hands the future of the Roman Empire is an exciting one.