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.

Roman Cities

Roman Cities

The Roman idea of a city is civilisation; the civilised person (cives, plural civites) lives in a city (civitas), a constructed place for a human to live in. Aristotle said that those who live outside the city are gods or monsters; Romulus allegedly offered his followers a deal: follow my laws and you will be protected by me and free of all previous obligations.

We think we know what a Roman city looks like: a grid of streets, with the cardo and decumanus crossing at the place where the temple and law court denote a central square. By that token, the one city which fails that is, of course Rome. It had grown up long before the idea of planning a town had reached Italy and around several cores.

Three groups, two of them incomers, had settled on the seven hills above the marsh. The incomers were the Rhames, a bunch of runaways and malcontents led by a small core group of young men who’d recently left the village of Alba Longa to prevent overpopulation; the second group was a contingent of Sabines looking to populate the coastal region. They both kept themselves to themselves away from those who’d settled there, the so-called ‘aborigines’. Where they had to work in common, the three groups voted by threes, tribus; that ablative plural became a noun, giving us ‘tribe’.

As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has recently pointed out, few Romans lived in villas or even town houses which presented a blank face to the street, but which surrounded a beautiful atrium in the centre. The vast majority lived in an insula, a multi-storey block of flats, often hundreds of years old. There would be shops on the ground floor, including cook shops for those who had no ability to cook for themselves. The poor maintenance led to innumerable court cases and to several spectacular collapses. Don’t think of a modern western block, but more of the jerry-built blocks still being out up in places like Bangladesh and Nepal with poor building standards and backhanders to officials to turn a blind eye. Fourth century estimates cite up to 46,000 insulae and only 1790 houses. This must mean that, even though the city of Rome had a declining population, everyone who was not a senator or senior member of the imperial or city bureaucracy must have lived in one.

Remains of insulae from Ostia Antica, second century AD

Pliny the Younger brought a case to the attention of Trajan in Book 10 of his collected letters: the city of Nikapolis in Bithynia-Pontus had erected an arena as a showpiece for the city, hoping to raise its status in Asia Minor. But they had built it without foundations and it soon collapsed, prompting Pliny to ask Trajan to endorse an official investigation as to how this had happened.

The truth about the layout of cities and towns in the Roman era is that the central concept of a regular planned urban space was perhaps an ideal, but many cities already existed and had to be accommodated. Nevertheless, the ideal was that the city you were born in was your citizenship: they used the same word: civitas. We might call this a city-district, since it comprised an urban core in which a number of higher-function activities took place (justice, religion, politics) along with different types of industrial activity. Dirty and noxious industry was often moved to the outskirts, downstream from the places where people drew water to drink, cook and clean themselves and their clothes, and ideally down the prevailing wind from the city is foul-smelling (rendering animal fats and fulling cloth being good examples).

People who lived in dependent communities outside the city would come there in the spring to bring animals to sell, and again in early autumn with grain. The political control of the city would extended to their journey inbound and going home, with the laws and gods invoked to depend the honesty of the market. Mis-selling goods and short measure were forbidden and the safety of all was protected. While in the city, the area’s farmers would look for any additional farmhands in a hiring fair, hear the latest news and gossip, eye up potential spouses for their children, ask the elders to settle any local disputes and perform for the gods what they had promised in the event of good fortune.

Such things have happened in many sorts of cities all over the world from the earliest days and still do. Rome’s rising cities fulfilled the traditional function.

When Augustus rebuilt Rome and other cities, he filled in the democratic spaces some had made use of. At Rome, he built a memorialised quarter over the Field of Mars; the Campus Martius had been the mustering place for the citizen army each spring; many places had a March field. It was also the area where citizens went to vote, through stalls like those used for some horse races. Now Rome’s wars were elsewhere, the legions stationed for hundreds of years in provicial cities, and democracy was dead. So how better to obliterate that apace than by building over it.

In Athens, the historic agora, where citizens had voted, was filled up with temples transferred their from across Greece. The democratic space in Athens was killed, as in Rome, by religion.

Around each city was a dead zone. It was considered unhygienic in a hot climate to bury the dead within the urban area; the idea of burying the dead near a sacred place only arrives with Christianity, so the burial of early Christians are the Vatican (Mons Vaticanus) is possible because it was ‘trans Tiber’; to this day the area is called ‘Trastevere’; curiously, this was a place where vates, Gaulish priests, performed their rituals. Circling the zones of the living and dead at Rome was a sacred belt, the pomerium, where religious and legal restrictions were enforced. These included forbidding the use of arms within the urbs under Augustus’s’s law (lex julia de vi privata).

Rome was divided into a number of districts, each named for a notable feature such as a monumental fountain, a particular temple or a theatre. Modern cities often do this (Charing Cross, Unter den Linden, Temple Bar, Opéra, Tivoli Gardens, etc.).  We also know that different districts had different status levels; the Subura at Rome is described as a red light district, a working class district (not that Romans had class structures as we would understand the term)

Surviving structures from Rome’s Subura district

However, areas then as now changed over time and it should be noted that Julius Caesar was born in a house in this district. The district lies in a dip between the Viminal and Esquiline Hills at the north side of the city. Then as now, the higher the altitude, the higher the status; the imperial palace was on top of Palatine, one of Rome’s seven hills; the Italian royal palace was atop the Quirinal Hill; today the Italian President lives there.

Walls set boundaries and were obviously available for defence. Rome’s original wall dates back only to the fourth century BC, but was credited to Servius Tullius, Rome’s penultimate king. Clearly, this wall, which survives in places, was not extant when the Gauls seized Rome in c380BC, so the name may have been traditional, or maybe the plans for it were approved by Servius but it was never built.

A section of the Servian Wall, near to Rome’s railway station

The much larger Aurelian Wall, the one which survives today, is built completely outside the Servian Wall, and encloses an area some three times as large. This was built c270–5 for utterly changed political circumstances. Before that, the outer parts of the city must have been entirely extramural.

Aurelian Wall section near Via Veneto

The wall was improved by Maxentius by improvements to forts and again by Stilicho in AD401. This shows that it was in fine condition when Alaric’s Gothic Army turned up in AD410 and that they must have been invited in, as they could hardly have broken through.

It is well known that eventually Constantinople developed a triple ring of walls, which is why it survived till AD1453, when the cannon of Sultan Mehmet II, known as The Prophet and built for him by the Venetians, blew a hole in it.

However, walls could be decorative, and as such might be part of civic eurgetism by social competing citizens. Those of Le Mans in France (Cenomanum) are particularly pretty, with at least four rows of contrasting designs.

The third century AD walls of Le Mans, Maine, France

These are walls designed for display more than four defence. By contrast, the walls of Arverna (modern Clermont-Ferrand) were ruinous in the fifth century when they needed to be strong; they fell down through great age and the city’s bishop, the celebrated letter writer Sidonius Apollinaris, conducted Christian rogations, beating the bounds of the city in a hope that magical thinking would stop the forces of King Euric from seizing it.

Le Vasso Galate, a surviving section of the imperial city wall of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand)

It the later parts of the empire, cities everywhere shrank and became less multi-functional.

It would be useful to consider the link between cities and early Christianity. In every town where there was a Roman presence, there was a priest; in every city with a governor, a bishop; in cities which were seats of vicarii, there was a metropolitan, what we’d call an archbishop. In imperial capitals and cities of high standing, there were senior metropolitans with overarching authority; some were termed patriarchs, great fathers, a term used civicly for men of high authority just below the emperor: Stilicho, Aetius and Theodoric held such a title. Thus it can be seen that the Christians shadowed the urban authority of the empire. Once legal, the network of clergy stepped forward. Constantine allowed bishops to run their own law courts in parallel with the civic ones. In the late empire, towns generally survived if the bishop stayed; if he left, the city was eventually abandoned, such was his network of patronage. There were no rural clergy at that time, so Christianity was professed as an urban religion and those who had no priest to instruct them were termed pagani – country people.

We discussed before the straight Roman streets of many cities; these remained while there was a city authority of decurions to prosecute anyone who impinged his shop or house onto the public highway. In the earlier empire and before, local nobles had wanted to be on the city council. Latterly, however, they had to be compelled. The praetorian prefect and governor set the tax expectations of the emperor as a precept and it was the job of the decurions to collect it; they therefore were loaned the money by a tax farmer, who then forced locals to pay, skimming off the surplus collected.

In the countryside taxes were harder to collect and there were no Christian clergy to demand a tithe and attendance at church. The fact that being outside the walls with the gods and monsters and at risk of seizures by brigands (Bacaudae) did not stop removal from the city to a country retreat suggests that there was an impetus to leave the city.

The fifth century comic play Querolus (the Complainer) refers to a man fed up with paying taxes is offered a chance to join the ‘free men of the Loire’ who live under the trees and pay no taxes. He refuses because he is civilised.

Research on the city of Antioch shows that the straight, Romanised streets were becoming deviated in the 300s AD, centuries before the Islamic conquest of Syria in the 630s. Shop owners had built out into the city streets, possibly with shaded awnings, narrowing the road and making it crooked.

In Britain, there was a forced removal of skilled artisans after the regime of Carausius and Allectus was defeated. A Latin panegyric poem to Constantius Chlorus from the people of Autun (Augustodunum) in Gaul refers to such people being transported to repair Autun because they were so numerous in Britain. It should be recalled that by the time of St Wilfrid the Anglo-Saxons had to import glass-makers from the kingdom of the Franks because nobody in Britain knew how to make glass. Archaeologists tell us that for a while watermills, a common sight in the Roman world ceased to exist in Britain.

There are curious burials associated with urban buildings at Wroxeter, Shropshire (Viroconium), where high-status buildings were turned into forges and city houses were partly demolished to be turned into cattle pens. However, a change in function need not be read as a social collapse; today we find people living in oast houses, old windmills, maltings, converted stables and barns, even old factories and warehouses, as in the US, and we don’t consider any of that to be a sign of social collapse; if anything some may think it cool.

Climate change in Britain may have exacerbated many other problems. We read in Gildas about severe famines, which would have hastened departures from cities. A typical small town like Ixworth, Suffolk (Sitomagus) may have suffered from earthquakes; in the 19^th century the town underwent severe quakes, and people may  have left the Roman town of Sitomagus for similar reasons. It is quite clear across Britain that there were no resources to repair dilapidated buildings, that urban life with its high taxes, controlled labour, nosy clergy and the possibility of being transported to Gaul on a whim would not have been attractive to building workers. The rise of rural villa life in Britain in the fourth century, something that is well attested, may have been a way for pagans and discontented people to supply skilled labour to others who had opted out of the Roman system.

In some places, cities retreated back into their cores, with a barrier built across exit roads. Populations shrank away, but as long as the priest stayed there and the ruler at least went there to administer ritual and justice, the community might survive. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle records kings with British names losing the Battle of Dyrham in AD577; their kingdoms were the towns of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath, which suggests highly local rule, based solely on a town.