Moving Through the City

In the city

There’s a thousand things I wanna say to you

(Paul Weller, The Jam, ‘In the City’, 1977, Polydor Records)

Don’t step on the lines or the bears will get you

(Often said to children walking in cities cf. ‘Lines and Squares’ by AA Milne, When We Were Very Young, 1924)

Rome was a very outdoor city, still is, as you can tell when trying to find somewhere outdoors to eat late on a summer evening. Cities are places of opportunities (as Weller tells us) or of dangers (as the warning to children suggests; in Milne’s poem, bears hang around street corners waiting to pounce; we might read an early suggestion of ‘stranger danger’ there). But then again, as Aristotle commented with regard to Athens, those who live outside the city are either Gods or Monsters.

Christianity in the Roman rite is often performed outdoors with parades, autos da fe, presentations of saints’ images, through to pilgrimages to cult centres.

But Rome itself was always like that and what we see performed today in Christian culture derives from that, not only in Rome but throughout the Roman world. I am indebted to the excellent chapter (Power Walks: Aristocratic Escorted Movements in Republican Rome) by Ida Östenberg in The Moving City, eds Östenberg et a;, London Bloomsbury, 2015.

Processions were always a political tool, witness the progress of the republican Consul through the city preceded by lictors and heralds. Below see a coin of Brutus, showing his reputed ancestor L Junius Brutus, the first ever consul of the republic. 

Coin of Brutus, showing procession with lictors and accensus

The consul is shown third from left with two of his lictors fore and aft and an accensus (herald) clearing the way.  We cannot tell if these were meant to be the same lictors who returned the bodies of his sons in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting of 1789, a year in which a lot of movement ran through Paris.

The Lictors Return to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons by Jacques-Louis David, 1789

Under the Republic, candidates for office were expected to walk through the city meeting and greeting voters. This was sometimes a disagreeable event for Roman aristocrats, famously C Marcius Coriolanus, who today we see largely through Shakespeare’s dramatic version of Plutarch’s life. It was a commonplace of candidates for office to process to the Roman Forum with an entourage of supporters and there to meet voters and canvass their votes. By the first century BC, there were over 900,000 people eligible to vote and we have a reference to it taking over five hours to conduct the voting for consul.

On reaching majority, a Roman boy would celebrate his toga day and process with his father and entourage from the family home to the Forum. The family also took part once, sometimes twice, a year as part of the Compitalia to honour the lares and penates, household gods; the drawing below shows a procession carrying a lar, held aloft by a young woman.

Young woman carrying a Lar in procession; Lateran Museum

We know quite a lot about Roman funerals of the leading citizens from Polybius (book 6). The surviving family of recently dead member would assemble at the family home, where death masks in wax, depicting famous ancestors, were kept in the atrium. Members of the family would wear these and process through the streets carrying the bier of the deceased to the family tomb site.

Many of the religious rituals of the classical era involved movement through the streets of Rome. Among the most famous was the twice yearly procession of the Salii, the jumping priests of Mars, who paraded in bronze armour, chanting doggerel so obscure that neither Ovid nor Cicero could understand it. Surviving Fasti indicate which days were permitted for trade (fasti), which were not (nefasti) and so on. As processions, which in later times might involve emperors and would certainly have involved the great and the good, heads covered and in certain religious robes. Nothing was allowed to delay or damage the ritual or else the ceremony had to be repeated on a new, auspicious day. Animals to be slaughtered would have to be selected from markets and taken to the temple in question.

Roman triumphs, originally celebrated for successful generals (imperatores) but in imperials times by the emperor, took the form of massive processions through the streets, the most famous being those of Julius Caesar, who marked a triple triumph in as many days. Domitian was infamous, according to Suetonius, for celebrating not only triumphs in which he had played no part, but those to mark battles which had not happened.  As well as the triumph, lesser celebrations such as the ovatio, involved the successful general walking through the streets in a toga praetextata as part of a major entourage of supporters. Aulus Plautius received an ovation in Rome on completion of his conquest and term of office in Britain, and Claudius walked beside him to and from the Capitolium, as Tacitus tells us (Agricola 14).

Carriages were banned in the city on purely pragmatic grounds. The Chronography of AD354 lists in Regio I Porta Capena both public areas where carriages might be left (area carruces) and a storage place for imperial carriages (mutatorium caesaris). Litters were used for private travel within the city and Region XIII (Transtiberim, i.e. Trastevere) contained the barracks of litter bearers (castra lecticariorum). As always, there were members of the elite who managed to ignore such rulings, especially if their houses were in better areas. According to the Chronography of AD354, there were 1,790 houses, but 46,602 insulae blocks of flats.

With 256 bakers and 290 grain warehouses in the city there would have been considerable movement of cereals. As Rome came to import most of its grain from Egypt, Asia Minor and Sicily into Ostia and Portus, there would have been massive traffic upriver to the wharves at the foot of the Aventine, from which the trade proceeded into the city. Oil and wine too, as the huge mound of the Monte Testaccio testify.

Two types of live creatures would have needed to move through the city: livestock for both ritual use and human & animal consumption and slaves and captives, the former for sale and the latter for public shows and triumphs.

We might also think about the impediments to such movements. These would have been many, ranging from discarded babies to stray animals, runaway slaves to buildings placed outside of official street lines, as can be seen in cities like Antioch. In Athens, the former exercise of voting was hardly helped by the original Agora being used to house temples from across Greece. That’s one way to snuff out democracy: build in it. At Rome too, the Campus Martius, where Roman citizen armies had mustered and people voted, was built over with a memorial district in favour of the new emperor, including the Ara Pacis Augustae.

Experience of public routes in the provinces might not always be positive: the Babylonian Talmud reports a discourse among three rabbis.

R. Jehudah opened the conversation, saying: ‘How beautiful are the works of this nation [the Romans]). They have established markets, they have built bridges, they have opened bathing-houses.’ R. Jose said nothing, but R. Simeon b. Johai said: ‘All these things they have instituted for their own sake. Their markets are gathering-places for harlots; they have built baths for the purpose of indulging themselves in their comforts; they have built bridges to collect tolls from those who cross them.’ (Babylonian Talmud, p.56-7, around the time of Antoninus Pius).

This was reported to the Roman governor and Rabbi Simeon was condemned to death by the governor for this ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ statement, but went and lived in a cave for twelve years and the governor died. It does indicate that Simeon saw no advantage in a Roman bridge, but Rabbi Jedudah was rewarded. Cities have long been repacked to suit the authorities. As has been pointed out, the grands boulevards of Paris built by Baron Haussmann during the carnival empire of Napoleon III were built wide and straight to enable protestors to be fired on. Likewise Mussolini cut a wide road through the clutter of the medieval Borgo (the Burgus Anglorum where English visitors to Rome stayed in the middle ages to open up a grand vista of St Peter’s.

Christianity took over many Roman rituals and parades, such as the Lupercalia, which was transformed into the Easter Parade. Cities, including Rome itself, gradually came to bury people in and around churches and other holy sites, rather than in the mausolea outside Rome’s notional pomerium.

Take for example the rogation that Sidonius Apollinaris and the citizens of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand) performed  in AD474 to insulate the city against attack by the Visigoths; they did this because the actual city walls were so ancient and unrepaired that they had fallen down (Ep. 7.1 ‘Our only present help we find in those Rogations which you [Bishop Mamertus of Vienne] introduced’, cf. Ep. 7.8 ‘Alas! penned as I am within the narrow enclosure of half-burned and ruinous walls, with the terror of war at the gates’). Gregory of Tours recalls in the Miracles of St Martin that people prayed for the Visigoths to bypass their town and if they were lucky ‘the Goths passed by on the other side of the road’.

So when we write about the creation and definition of public space, we should always remember that public space was designed to be crossed and defined by human movement through it.

A Very Merry Unbirthday to Rome

 Today a number of tweets have been posted wishing Rome a happy birthday, on the assumption that today is the day and that 753BC is the date. Neither of those is demonstrably true, and both can be argued as false.

The year is clearly untrue, as there is no consistency in Roman sources. In fact, 753BC is the year that the Athenian republic was founded, and that year was not suggested until the time of the linguist Varro in the time of Augustus. Several other foundation years have been proposed, some as late as 728BC, proposed by Cassius Dio c.250 years after Varro.

Attempts have been made to tie the birth of Romulus, the foundation of Rome and the death of Romulus to eclipses Rather a coincidence, that.  Efforts to tie the foundation of Rome to Egyptian and Greek calendars appear to be post-hoc by many centuries, since Rome was completely unknown to both Egypt and Greece. There is no reference to Rome in Herodotus, and he knew about the Etruscans and may have performed his Historie in Sicily. There are no extant references to Rome in the Greek world before the time of Aristotle (c.340BC).

Accurate remembrance of the foundation year, assuming that to have been knowable and important to early residents, would have been hampered by total illiteracy. The first known works in the Greek alphabet date to c.750BC, so it is highly unlikely that the tiny village of Rome would have been literate almost instantaneously.

Having cast doubt on the foundation year, let’s turn to trashing the supposed date. The argument for 21 April is that all extant sources agree. Well, all extant sources agree that there was a King Arthur, but that is not generally accepted as proof.

The Roman year began on 15 March, the infamous Ides of March, which is why Caesar was murdered then. This seems to be simply the start of Spring in middle Italy, rather earlier than in more northerly climes. That does mean however that 21 April has only one significance: lambing season. I see no reason why shepherds would breaking off from their most busy season to found a new settlement. It would be ruinous to do so.

There were a number of attempts to reform the complicated lunar calendar of Rome with the solar calendar necessary to perform religious and agricultural rituals. As Rome moved from worship of Chthonic deities (festivals performed at night) to those performed in daytime, a complex series of intercary months and odd days were added, subtracted, messed around with and generally screwed up for political reasons. People then lied about the antiquity and origins of such measures, assigning them to Romulus and Numa Pompilius, the second (or perhaps third) king of Rome.

Unless a date can be confidently observed with relation of another calendar, it is in fact simply impossible to fix a date for anything before the time of the Julian calendar reform, and indeed the use of dates ab urbe condita originates from use made by Varro and Livy in those days. The problem with using a Greek cross-reference is that there were eight different Greek calendars at use at the same time. The month of Badromios was Dec/Jan in Boeotia and Sep/Oct in Delphi; the months of Athens, our best source for Greek information, bear almost no coincidence in name or start date with any other part of the Greek world.

If there is a day, I would propose 21 June, which is midsummer day; it was an easy day to remember, a pragmatic choice (good weather and a point in the agricultural cycle after the end of the livestock rearing and selling cycle and before the harvest season) and takes into account the odd fluctuations of a 13 x 28 day lunar cycle (364 nights, 365 if you count like a Roman (and like the French still do) and a 365/6 day solar year of twelve months (inherited from earlier civilisations). The vagaries of the early Roman system mean that the foundation date of Rome is in fact unknowable.

If we can believe Livy, the Roman kings had no succession. They were elected for life, and on their death an official known as the Interrex (appointed for five days only) conducted an election in which he could not be a candidate. A Popular Assembly of adult male citizens made a choice.

This does appear in other societies, and seems to have been an Iron Age norm, because the Irish High King (Airdrie) was elected by the hundreds of petty kings in a special conclave held on the Hill of Tara in Co. Meath; he too served for life.

If we examine the Latin word rex (3^rd declension) we see that it’s cognate to Gothic reiks, to Anglo-Saxon rice, to Irish ri and Hindi rajah. Less obviously it’s cognate with Greek archon. This indicates an Indo-European term, but not of course a commonality of approach.

Year	King	Years
753–717 BC	Romulus	36
716–673 BC	Numa Pompilius	43
673–642 BC	Tullus Hostilius	31
640–616 BC	Ancus Marcius	24
616–579 BC	Tarquinius Priscus	37
578–535 BC	Servius Tullius	43
535–509 BC	L. Tarquinius Superbus	26

It does seem highly unlikely that a Roman king would serve as long as 43 years, given ancient life expectancy levels. Lucius Tarquinius supposedly became king 43 years after his father’s death and to have served for 26 years, which would have made him at the very least 69 years old at the point when he lost the throne; despite this, in Livy, drawing on the Roman traditional dates, he is portrayed as a man in vigorous middle age, say forty, trying to regain his throne.

If we can for a moment consider the reigns of the British monarchs since 1837, we have the following data: Victoria (63 years), Edward VII (9), George V (26), Edward VII (less than 1), George VI (15), Elizabeth II (64 and counting). This real data shows a much greater variation.

It strikes me that later annalists possessed accession dates for seven kings and made up narratives to make them fit. After Romulus, there are six kings, three good, followed by three bad, totalling seven and Rome has seven hills. It’s all a bit too pat. Somewhere in the cracks there may lie several other, less successful kings, erased from memory in a generally illiterate society.

The alternative is that Rome is a lot younger than it has always claimed to be, and Tim Cornell of Manchester University would bring the Romulus figure forward to about 625BC. The Tullus Hostilius figure (with a unique praenomen) seems to duplicate deeds previously assigned to Romulus. That certainly would not chime with any of those eclipse dates, which seem increasingly to be spurious.

The second and fourth kings are said to have been Sabines and the final three to have been Etruscans (although Livy says Priscus was half-Greek). As Romulus had a co-king, Titus Tatius, we could well be looking at two or more parallel monarchies of Rhames (Romans), and of Sabines, succeeded by Etruscans; perhaps the two ran in parallel.

The myth of Romulus and Remus is a copy of that of Parrhasius and twin Lycaon, founders of the kingdom of Arcadia in southern Greece, whose city Parrhasia, was destroyed in the 370s BC to promote use of the new capital, Megalopolis. This was spotted in antiquity by Plutarch and discussed in Parallel Lives 36.

I suspect that virtually everything about the Roman kingdom was invented around 360BC, recycling the foundation myth of Parrhasia, newly removed, perhaps with some Arcadian refugees in Italy. If the Roman kingdom was created long after its supposed dates, then we can put no trust in its idealised methods of election.

So, a very merry unbirthday (as Disney had the Mad Hatter say to Alice, although it was Alice to Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll) to you, Rome.

Ausonius and his Aunt Aemilia Hilaria

Decius Maximus Ausonius is an author who deserves to be better known and appreciated. He covered the bulk of the fourth century AD (AD310–305) and rose from prosperous farming stock to become professor at the University at Burdigala (modern Bordeaux) and later was raised to becoming tutor to prince Gratian, who was emperor of the West from 375 to 383. Gratian made him consul in and at the same time Ausonius’ son was Pretorian Prefect of Gaul.

Among the most affecting of Ausonius’ poems are his eulogies to his family members, the Parentalia. These seem to have been written by his to be recited over their graves on the anniversaries of their deaths as part of what seems to have been a ‘pagan’ (or at least traditional)ceremony in which they were invoked by having their names recited three times. These verses seem to have been collected and ‘published’ late in his life, perhaps when his poetic energies were lower.

I want here to highlight the unusual case of Aemilia Hilaria, his maternal aunt (matertera), who was a doctor, as was Ausonius’s own father, Julius Ausonius. This is the text of his verses to his aunt’s shade. The ellipsis is believed to indicate a textual lacuna.

Aemilia Hilaria, My Mother's Sister, An Avowed Virgin

You too who, though in kinship's degree an aunt, were to me a mother, must now be recalled with a son's affection, Aemilia, who in the cradle gained the second name of Hilarus because,
bright and cheerful after the fashion of a boy, you made without pretense the very picture of a lad ...
busied in the art of healing, like a man. You ever hated your female sex, and so there grew up in you the love of consecrated maidenhood. Through three and sixty years you maintained it, and your life's end was also a maiden's end. You cherished as well me with your precepts and your love as might a mother; and therefore as a son I make you this return at your last rites.   (Ausonius Parentalia 6, from Loeb Edition Opuscula vol.1, trans Hugh G Evelyn White, 1919, pp.67 & 69)

It is hard to say what Aemila was. She might have been a lesbian, or more probably considered herself to be a male in some sense. It was not of course possible to alter the physicality of one’s sex in those days. But it was possible to transcend the social expectations, which she did, becoming a doctor. Perhaps she worked alongside Julius, the author’s father. While Ausonius describes his mother with little affection, and reports her spinning wool in the convention of the Roman matrona, Aemilia was clearly a but unusual. As we know from many studies, a lot of women worked outside the home, ran businesses and professions, ventured money as investors. Jane Gardner’s excellent book Women in Roman Law and Society (Indiana University Press, 1991) gives many accounts from Roman primary sources of just that, many in the eastern provinces; she discusses Aemila and other women doctors on pp.240-1).

There seems to have been a tension in parts of the empire between social expectations and individual wishes. Aemilia’s sister Aemilia Maura (‘the dark’) is said to be ‘perpendiculum’ (rigidly upright, as the word refers to a mason’s or carpenter’s plumb line), but no such terminology is given for Aemilia Hilaria, who is said to have more virum.

That her cognomen (given in the poem’s title as in female form, but the title might not be on the original) is given as masculine in the text suggests that she carried a male name and identified with that name. She supposedly did so ‘without pretense’, but ‘ever hated [her] female sex’.

Aemila Hilaria and her sister Aemila Maura seem largely to have brought up Ausonius after his mother died early. The term ‘virgin’ as translated by White need not make us assume anything of her sexuality or lack of it. Virgo just means ‘unmarried woman’ and the use of that word alone English sense of someone who has never had sex dates only to c.AD1300. Here virgo devota is someone who has pledged not to marry, which might simply be a dedication to her career as a doctor. It is only a generation back that most women did not drop their work upon marriage, and in the UK is was considered appropriate for women teachers to be single if at all possible. However, Graydon Snyder in Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine says there were ‘pagan’ communities of women with the term virgo devota (virgines devotae), but that a simple unmarried woman might be termed virgo innupta. (Mercer University Press, 2003, p.234), this being from analysis of memorials. Perhaps Aelia lived in a female community as a male, or relieved from the pressure of females to conform.

It is Ausonius’s comment that she hated her own sex (feminei sexus odium tibi semper et inde/ crevit devotae virginitatis amor,) which is slightly surprising.

Greek myth contain several instances of contrary sexuality. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Iphis is female but raised as a boy (Ov. Met. 9.9); the name Iphis, allegedly Cretan, was available for both sexes. The mother, impelled by her husband’s command to kill her first child if a girl, invokes Isis, who tells her to pretend the newborn girl is a boy; Iphis reaches adulthood and falls in love with a girl, Ianthe. Isis, invoked again, transforms Iphis into a male.

Antoninus Liberalis, a later Greek author, wrote a collection of Metamorphoses, which includes the myth of Leucippus, born female and given a male name, again in Crete, but in this case the deity is Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis. Reference is made to other, mostly lost, myths. Leucippus means ‘white horse’ (leukos hippos). There is also a Leucippus, a male disguised as a female and a companion of Daphne.

Only in myth could sex be changed in those days. But there is a possibility that Aemilia Hilaria could have been intersex; a few years ago I remember reading of a number of children in Cuba, growing up in a remote community, who were male at birth, but who became female at puberty. This was a significant genetic indeterminacy, but every year many children are born biologically intersex. It is not impossible that children on Crete in antiquity were subject to the same limited gene pool in an island community and that such a prodigy entered myth.

However, there is real warmth in Ausonius’s writing about his unusual aunt, showing she was valued and loved in her own society.