Order 807955: The City As A Metaphor

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Living in Rome

AN ENIGMATIC CITY

Living in Rome 137

no central square from which broad avenues might radiate. A combination of dense crowds and roadworks congested the few streets that remained passable: 'In hot haste rushes a contractor with mules and porters; a huge crane now hoists a stone and now a beam; mournful funerals jostle massive wagons; this way runs a mad dog: that way rushes a mud-bespattered sow.' 4

Via Sacra, its continuation Via Triumphalia, which ran right to the foot of the Palatine, and the parallel Via Nova, were the only reasonably wide streets leading into the forum, though their width was very irregular, varying between four and seven metres.

To explain away the anarchic shapelessness of their city, the Romans would point to the fact that at the beginning of the fourth century sc the Gauls had burnt the old city down.95 To speed the city's reconstruction, its inhabitants had been authorized to take stone from wherever they could find it on the condition that they got their buildings up within one year. In their rush, the builders paid no heed to any building lines and nobody bothered to inquire exactly where a neighbour's property ended and one's own began. Wherever there was a gap, something was built to fill it up. Plots of land

For the Romans the place to live above all others was Rome itself, the city. 'Rome, planted in mountains and deep valleys, its garrets hanging up aloft, its roads far from good, merely narrow by-ways.' 92 'The appearance of the city is as if the ground had been gradually appropriated as the need arose rather than divided up according to a planned design.'93 This was how two first-century BC Romans viewed the capital of the world.

Rome could appear either formless or multiform: everything was jumbled together, gods and people, warehouses and temples, parks and dilapidated buildings, vast uninhabited areas with here and there a huge mass of people.Judges worked next door to butchers, nomads slept on the steps of the aristocratic temple of Castor and Pollux, dubious-looking shops rubbed shoulders with princely lodgings. Shrines were used as banks, and brothels sprang up under the colonnades that skirted public buildings. On one side there might be a caved-in building, the charred remains of a house or some monuments under construction, while on the other a newly restored and freshly roughcast temple or a noble palace that its wealthy owner was having roofed with slabs of marble.

Rome looked like nowhere else. No initial design or concerted attempt at town planning had ever managed to impose even the roughest pattern on the tangle of houses, people and commercial, political and religious activities. There was no main thoroughfare,

encroached on each other, and houses spilled over into the streets. It seems unlikely that this is the only reason for Rome's lack of

planning. Rome was constantly being destroyed and rebuilt, right down to the days of the empire. There was, for example, little need for the Gauls to sack the city, since fires would devastate the higgledy- piggledy houses all year round. There were on average two major earthquakes each century, and the Tiber regularly flooded those quarters that lined its banks.

The shape - or indeed the shapelessness - of a town tells us something about its inhabitants. Greek cities followed a geometrical layout; Rome modelled its colonial towns on the military camp. Rome has been painstakingly searched for the two main axes intersecting one another at right-angles, like the cardo and the decumanus of the colonial towns, but in vain. This is hardly surprising, however. The city stands alone, and its seeming disorder is a reflection of one of the features of the Roman mindset: the tendency to proceed by a process of accumulation.

Rome was several towns rolled into one: the centres of religion, politics and commerce. Temples, people and riches were heaped together. Each Rome had its own structure, focal points and boundaries. The sacred ring, the pomoerium traced by Rome's founder, consisting of a strip of earth encircling the city on which all building was prohibited, did not coincide with the city wall erected by

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the ancient king Servius. The Aventine hill, to the south of Rome, was outside the pomoerium but inside the wall. The same was true of the banks of the Tiber and also of the northern part of the Esquiline hill, where the cemetery of the poor was situated.

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THE FORUM

The one site that was common to all these towns that were superimposed on one another was the Forum Romanum, or simply the forum (see figure 6).This was a public square, 6o metres long by 75 metres wide, lined with stones and flagged. Lying at the foot of the Capitol, the forum is a depression encircled by hills: the steep slopes of the Palatine

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rising to the west; the small Velia to the south; and, to the east, the gently rising Viminal, Quirinal and Esquiline. To the west the forum opened on to a valley leading to the Tiber. Paradoxically for a centre, the derivation of the word 'forum' is 'enclosure, or door' and 'vestibule, or entrance'. Here one finds an echo of the structure of Roman houses:the centre of social life was located in the vestibule, for that was where the exterior and interior met.

The northern part of the forum boasted several of the high places of Roman political life: the rostra, or speaker's platform, the comitium, where the people assembled, and close at hand the curia, where the

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senate met. Opposite the curia stood the temple of Saturn, which housed the republican treasury, and between the two buildings, hiding the foot of the Capitol, towered the archive building, erected in more recent times. At the other end of the forum, to the south, stood several of Rome's most ancient and most hallowed sanctuaries: the regia, where the rex sacrorum, king of sacrifices, dwelt; opposite this, on the other side of the Via Sacra (which started at this point), stood

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the round temple of Vesta, the sacred hearth where the Vestals always

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poutifex maximus, the head of the Roman religion. In the middle of the forum was the pinnacle of justice, the praetor's

seat of judgement.But the forum also attracted business people:on its

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The forum was the hub of Roman politics, religion, justice, trade and social life. Business was carried on in the morning, and in the afternoon people would gather to gossip. It was at the forum that

140 Places and lives magistrates would harangue the assembly and there that citizens would flock to listen to the great lawyers who were also the stars of political life. And it was to the forum that citizens would spontaneously make their way whenever anything important happened. The forum was also the place where great families delivered funeral orations for their dead or put on gladiatorial combats.

URBAN SYMBOLISM

But the forum was not the only centre of the city. The Capitol looming over the forum was the hallowed seat of Roman domination. It was said that it derived its name from a head - caput - that had been found on its ground. It was up there that the gods of city life dwelt. Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Juno and Minerva formed a divine triad of wise and peaceful sovereigns, next to the temple of Juno the Adviser. Slightly lower down stood the temple of Concord, recalling the struggles between the orders and the need for solidarity between them. Often, at the most harrowing moments of political debate in the forum, all eyes would be lifted towards these elevated places.

Then there was the other city, the one that people actually lived in. The Palatine hill where the nobles resided was the seat of worldly power. The Aventine was the hill of the plebs, of Romulus' brother Remus, who had come second in the race to power. The Palatine and the Aventine confronted one another, as did the plebeians and the patricians. Likewise, the Capitoline triad was offset by the Aventine triad of Ceres, Liber and Libera.

Roman city-planning appears to have been organized according to principles more complex than could be set down on any straight- forward two-dimensional map. The city was organized like Roman life: it was made up of conflicting sites that had to be reconciled by means of regular ritual ceremonies and routines.

If the contrast between the Aventine and the Palatine hills was an expression of political polarity, the circus, located between them, reunited every class in the great melting-pot of the games, during which all duels at the forum were suspended.

Rome's environs were organized in an equally subtle manner. On the other side of the river, the tranquil countryside provided a counterbalance to the dense urbanization of the left bank.The Tiber did not flow through the city, or even along its outer edge. Although there were two bridges that crossed the river, to the Romans the Tiber

Living in Rome 141 was like the sea, an abyss that separated them from another universe: the Etruscan shore. The right bank did in fact retain a rustic landscape with its fields, meadows, farms, gardens and woods. To cross the Tiber was to cut oneself off from Rome. One of the public rituals that brought in the new year, the festival of Anna Perenna in March, was held on this rustic bank. Romans would leave the city, cross the river and picnic in the huts that lined the river bank. In the evening they would return to the city as if from another world.

There were three ways of leaving Rome: going to the countryside; going off to war; or being laid in one's tomb. To the north of the city, outside the walls, at the foot of the Capitol, lay the field of Mars, a broad plain deliberately left fallow from the time it was first dedicated to the god Mars. It was forbidden either to farm it or to build on it. This was where the legions in arms and the assembly of the people marshalled in accordance with the comitia centuriata system would gather to vote. To the south, outside the walls, the Appian Way stretched into the distance across the city of the dead. From the gates of the city radiated a network of roads leading to the Roman countryside and the provinces beyond.

CITY PLANNING AND RELIGION Rome seemed to hold itself together by balancing the different areas that constituted and bounded it. Every plan for urban renewal had to come to terms with this symbolic organization of space, and either preserve or reproduce it. The alternative was to turn everything upside-down and force through a cultural revolution. This is what Augustus cynically did, thereby ruining the symbolic system of liberty inscribed in the Roman soil. And it is precisely what Caesar wished to avoid when, just before his death, he drew up a plan to expand what was by then an overcrowded city.

By July 45 BC, Caesar had entrusted the technical side of his plan to a Greek architect. He intended to take personal charge of the religious side himself. Rome clearly needed to expand, but no one could decide in which direction. The easiest method would be to divide into plots a large plain on which no houses had yet been built and no land cultivated: the field of Mars. This would do away with the long and costly process of expropriation. Caesar well knew what that involved, having previously expropriated the land of the inhabitants of the centre of Rome, to the north of the forum, in order to create what had become the Forum Julium.Mars would, of course,

I4l Places and lives Livi11g in Rome 143

have to be expelled, but that could be done; there were rituals tailor- made for that purpose. Eighty-eight plots had already been allocated in an area skirting the Capitol which had once belonged to the priests.

The difficulty was of a different order. Rome had to have a field of Mars. If this one was carved up, another one would have to be created. The field of Mars was the place where the five-yearly census was held, where the comitia centuriata voted, where the people's army gathered, where young soldiers drilled and - in the public farm

-where the censors and foreign ambassadors lodged. In a word, it was on the field of Mars that Romans lived out every aspect of the aristocratic liberty that they had won in the revolution of 509 BC. This land, it was said, had belonged to the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, and had been confiscated by the people and consecrated to Mars.

Caesar determined therefore to rebuild a field of Mars on a nearby plain which, since it was situated on the right bank of the Tiber, had remained almost untouched by human habitation: the Vatican plain. The area could not remain as it was, however, for between the field of Mars and the Vatican plain flowed the Tiber. Indeed the Vatican plain was not in Latium at all but 'abroad', at a great symbolic distance from Rome. One might as well have told the people to go and vote on the banks of the Po. Caesar therefore planned to divert the course of the Tiber, by digging a canal to cut out the loop that the river described just before it reached Rome, rerouting it past the base of the Vatican hills.!J6

An explanation as to why he was prepared to undertake work on such a gigantic scale is offered by the definition of the field of Mars as a place situated 'between the Tiber and the city'. This definition is at once a description of the field of Mars as it had always been and,

implicitly, a rule for what it should always remain. Since the field of Mars was between the Tiber and the city, that was where it had to be; not through timid conservatism but because this location made sense.

The Tiber, after all, was a frontier between Rome and a radically foreign place, the land of a non-Latin people, the Etruscans. The Etruscan shore, even if it had been subjected to Rome from quite an early date, continued to play a role as a foreign contment. Insolvent debtors who, after thirty days, or three markets, had not managed to find anyone to stand them bail, were at one time sold 'beyond the Tiber', as the law of the Twelve Tables stipulated that no citizen could be sold within the territory of Rome. When the time came to banish those Campanians who had failed to support Rome in the First Punic War, they were brought to Rome from the south of Italy

and then despatched to the other side of the river.97 The bed of the Tiber was itself an abyss, gobbling up everything that was thrown into it, spiriting it away from the world of humans. Everything that was sacer, destined for the infernal gods, was therefore cast into it: tyrants, patricides and hermaphrodites. 98

From the outside, therefore, Rome was organized according to a polarity between the north-north-west and the south-south-east. To the south, the interior of the city contrasted with an exterior that was culturally similar to it - the Latin towns. To the north, it contrasted with one that was quite different - Etruscan - and from which the city was divided by the Tiber, an impassable barrier- unless, that is, a bridge was built. But the Tiber was not the only barrier; there was also the field of Mars. The city itself never touched the Tiber. The field of Mars, with its defensive associations, provided a symbolic echo of the natural barrier formed by the Tiber. Between Rome and Etruria there was no room for the god Terminus.

THE CITY AS LABYRINTH Dwelling-houses clustered in quarters that were independent of one another. Unless you were born and brought up in a particular Roman neighbourhood it would seem like a labyrinth where it was impossible to find anyone you might be looking for. Even those who were familiar with a particular locality could easily lose their way. As soon as you strayed from the main thoroughfare, road names and house numbers vanished. The essential landmarks were public monuments, temples, colonnades and city gates:

Syrus: You know that colonnade near the meat market, down that way?

Demea: Of course I do. S: Go straight up the street past it. Then there's a turning going

downhill; go straight down and you'll see a temple on this side and next to it that alley -

D: Which one? S: Where there's a big fig-tree.

D: I know. S: Go on through it.

D: (after some thought) That alley hasn't got a way through. S: So it hasn't. What a fool I am. My mistake. Go back to the

colonnade. Yes, this is a much shorter way and less chance of

144 Places and lives

going wrong. Do you know Cratinus' house, that rich fellow's?

D: Yes. S: (rapidly) Go past it, turn left, straight up the street, come to

the temple of Diana, then turn right and before you come to the city gate just by the pond there's a small flour mill and a workshop opposite ... That's where he is.99

Neighbourhoods were meant to be lived in, rather than strolled about in. The exception to this was the main street of each. A quarter consisted of, in effect, a single street, and the Latin word vicus meant both a quarter and a street. This central axis was never very wide, although ancient Roman laws stipulated a minimum width of roughly five metres. At each end of the main street there was a crossroads, from which other road-quarters branched off, unless the street led on to waste ground.The Via Tusculana, for example, began not far from the forum, near the temple of the Dioscuri, where it crossed over the Via Sacra, and it ended at the Forum Boarium (cattle market). These central streets were the only ones that were really passable, even though the entire quarter's trade would be concentrated in them, and would spill out on to the road. It was the only part of the neighbourhood into which strangers would dare to venture, the only truly public area and the only clearly drawn and uninterrupted thoroughfare.

Each quarter would specialize in a particular branch of business, all the artisans and traders of a single neighbourhood working at the same or at complementary crafts. Work in leather, for instance, was the speciality of the Argiletum and of its adjacent streets. In the Argiletum itself, books were manufactured and sold; nearby was the street of the sandal-makers, then the street of the tanners, permanently enveloped in the smell of the tannery. The stench of the Argiletum would accompany anyone on their way up to the Suburra, a quarter known for its low-life taverns and brothels. On the other side of the forum, dipping towards the Tiber, the street of the Tuscans boasted an array of luxury boutiques. There, where the smell of incense mingled with that of purple dyes stewing in stale urine, one might find beautiful papyrus scroll books and high-class prostitutes of both sexes.Each quarter had its own special smell, which its inhabitants no longer noticed but which would strike outsiders as a foul stench. The more sophisticated men, such as the praetor Verres, would seek to protect themselves with fragrant flowers when they went out on the town. Women and effeminate men would carry in their hands a ball of amber which from time to time they would rub and then sniff.

Living in Rome 145

All the shops were in the main street, the rest of the quarter forming a maze of alleys, covered passages, culs-de-sac and steps in which any stranger would immediately get lost. Before long one might no longer be sure whether one was in a street where a fuller had hung his washing out to dry or if one had strayed into the backyard of his workshop. Overnight someone might close off what had been a public passage and build a house on it. From time to time, the aediles -magistrates in charge of the city-would order interloping buildings to be cleared; but others would soon spring up in their place. A broad flight of steps would come to a sudden halt at a terrace occupied by a portable stove, some washing hung out to dry and a tiny garden. A steep alleyway would narrow abruptly, weave a path between two houses, lead to an open door through which one might suddenly emerge into a small sun-drenched square dominated by the dilapidated temple of a rustic god whose half-forgotten name was barely decipherable, an abandoned garden with an enormous fig tree laden with sumptuous fruit, and a family of Syrian ragmen bivouacking with a whole brood of children in long coloured robes. Behind, standing out against the sky, one might see the tortured antefixes of the temple of Janus.

With luck, one might stumble through the backyards of one quarter and come out safe and sound on another shopping street. Otherwise, one might wander from backstreet to alleyway and from alleyway to meandering steps, eventually emerging on a track running past a line of gardens and petering out amid the scraps of waste ground that covered an entire area to the east and north-east of the city, just inside the Servian wall. Here were found first rubbish dumps and then the Esquiline cemetery for the poor, where corpses were heaved into pits with just a few shovelfuls of earth scattered on top. A foul stench hung in the air and carrion crows wheeled over the pits which witches would raid for fresh morsels of flesh.

A quarter was not bounded by other streets which formed a clear perimeter; it was defined by a central axis from which sprouted a profusion of offshoots. The only clearcut boundaries of the quarter were the crossroads at either end, at which gods stood watch. These crossroads lares were shared by the people of the quarters that met at a particular crossroads. The Compitalia, the crossroads festivities held in January, brought all the inhabitants of the various quarters, slaves included, on to these crossroad-squares, helping to weld the quarters together.

The lares were guarantor-gods for the permanent settlement of people on soil that was hence deemed to be definitively cultivated.

146 - Places and lives Living in Rome

147

NOBLE RESIDENCES

Although all the quarters were structured according to the same principle, they were not all home to the same types of people or the same styles of house. In the countryside, the fact that nearly everyone shared the same harsh lifestyle meant that there were no fundamental differences - apart from their size - between the houses of the poor and those of the rich.

In the city, things were different. One had to display one's wealth there; a city house was a social fa ade, a place where one worked and where one received guests. In the countryside, space cost nothing; at Rome it was exorbitantly expensive, at least in the centre. And everybody wanted to live close to the forum, the only way of keeping abreast of the very latest news and the best venue for a pleasant afternoon's saunter. Air too was worth its weight in gold. Up in the hills you could breathe, but down in the hollows you suffocated. Around the forum, therefore, social hierarchy was reproduced vertically.

High on the hills, on the Palatine, the Velia and, in remote times, on the Capitoline, stood the noblest residences. Each of these hills was scaled by a winding track or two, a clivus, that carriages could climb. The Palatine, the most aristocratic of all the hills, was linked to the city below via the Palatine track and the Victory track which in some places were eight metres wide. The nobles dominated the forum with their power, displaying their wealth in architectural refinements. Crassus, nicknamed the Venus of the Palatine, consul in 95 sc, was the first to decorate his residence with Greek marble. He later sold it at a very high price to Cicero who, after his consulship in 64 BC, was longing to leave his house in the Carinae, at the foot of the Velia, to the south of the forum, so that he could show off his new-found glory.

The house was a representation of the man. A house built on a hill, dominating the people in the lower part of town, was a sign of excessive pride. Valerius Publicola had to demolish his residence to evade the accusation of tyranny, several years after the downfall of the kings:

'This Valerius,' they said, 'in concentrating all power upon himself, is not a successor to the consulate of Brutus, to which he has no right, but to the tyranny ofTarquin.Why should he extol Brutus in words, while in deeds he imitates Tarquin, descending to the forum alone, escorted

by all the rods and axes together, from a house no less stately than the royal house which he demolished?' For Valerius was living in a magnificent house on the Velia. It hung high over the forum, commanding a view of all that passed there, and was surrounded by steep slopes so that access to it was difficult.His descent from this regal dwelling formed a lofty spectacle, and the pomp of his procession was worthy of a king. What Valerius did when he was made aware by his friends of the people's disapproval of his way of life shows how good it is for powerful men of high station to have ears that are open to frankness and truth instead of flattery. For he immediately got together a large force of workmen, and while it was still night had the house razed to the ground. In the morning, the Romans saw what had happened, and flocked together. They were moved to love and admiration by the man's magnanimity, but mourned, as if for a human being, for the destruction of the house's stately beauty, which their envy had provoked. They were also distressed for their ruler, who, homeless, was now sharing the homes of others. For Valerius was received into the houses of his friends until the people gave him a site and built him a house of more modest dimensions than the one he had lived in before.100

Publicola's strategy was thoroughly Roman. Instead of wrestling with public opinion, he adapted his behaviour to suit his political project which was to win the favour of the plebs. He carried off a public relations coup. His house was demolished overnight and Publicola himself-a man bearing the highest insignia - was reduced to vagrancy. Thus did he overturn public opinion, turning jealousy to compassion. He anticipated the traditional political sequence of events, when the people would condemn a citizen to be driven from the city, confiscate his goods and demolish his house. This was what generally happened to traitors. Often the site of the former residenc would be left derelict to testify to the infamy of the man who had owned it. On the Palatine, for example, there was a piece of waste ground called the meadows of Vaccus in memory of the act of treachery committed by Vitruvius Vaccus in 33 r sc.101 So the people wanted to provide Valerius with a new home but without conceding that the jealousy aroused by his lofty residence had been groundless. They therefore built him a more modest house at the foot of the Velia. Valerius had sacrificed his patrician pride to a particular political image of himself that he wished to project. The people had recognized this sacrifice for what it was and had granted him a residence that corresponded to this image. It was said that his door remained thereafter permanently open to visitors, even the most humble.

148 Places and Jives

Conversely, by making a present of an aristocratically situated house, the people could ennoble or confirm the nobility of a particular citizen. The brother of Publius, Marcus Valerius Publicola, after crushing the Sabines - he had cau!ied 13,000 of them to perish without the loss of a single one of his own men - obtained the triumph and the gift of a house on the Palatine, constructed at the state's expense. Moreover, although at Rome, unlike Greece, doors normally opened inwards, it was decided that the doors of Marcus' house should open outwards. To Romans, the symbolism of this privilege was evident: the city had chosen to join in paying constant homage to the magistrate. Precedence was granted to those who were leaving his house, and those citizens who happened to be passing would be obliged to step aside to make way for them. 102

A house on the Palatine might even spark off a serious political crisis and lead to revolution. The struggles between Cicero and Clodius, the tribune of the plebs, the practical outcome of which was that Pompey gained full powers in 52 Be, centred essentially on Cicero's house on the Palatine. Clodius, the ruined descendant of a very old and very aristocratic family, whose own residence was also on the Palatine, wished to drive the orator away. His scheme was to rid Caesar and Pompey, for whom he worked, of a man who was a mainstay of the senatorial party while at the same time satisfying an old personal grudge.

Several years earlier, Clodius had been accused of holding an amorous meeting with Caesar's wife at the festivities of the Good Goddess, in the residence of the pontifex maximus, her husband, where the feast was being celebrated. Clodius is supposed to have got into the residence disguised as a woman, taking advantage of the fact that on that day no males were allowed into the house. At the trial, Cicero had exploded Clodius' alibi. Later, to exact vengeance, Clodius forced the orator into exile. He also ordered the demolition of Cicero's house on the Palatine, scattered his statues and furniture, and annexed part of Cicero's land. This he used to enlarge his own house which, as it happened, stood next to Cicero's. On the remaining land Clodius had a temple built to Liberty.

But thanks to Pompey and to his friend Milo, who loosed his gladiators on Clodius' gangs, Cicero was able to return from exile, and his goods were restored to him. He tore down the temple of Liberty and started to rebuild his house. Work on the building, however, was continually held up by the incursions of Clodius' men, who attacked Cicero's workmen and even set fire to the site. Beside himself with rage, Cicero dispatched Milo and his henchmen to the

Living in Rome 149

Capitol to smash the bronze tables bearing the inscriptions of Clodius' laws. In the end, Cicero managed to keep his house. In the meantime, however, Milo killed Clodius and was himself convicted for the crime and banished to Massilia.

CITY GARDENS By the first century BC leading citizens were beginning to desert the centre of Rome. While Clodius and Cicero did battle over a quarter- acre site on the Palatine, masters of war, great military leaders who had subjugated the barbarous peoples of East and West, and such idle members of the nobility as Pompey, Caesar, Lucullus, Atticus and Clodia, withdrew to their vast gardens on the hills surrounding Rome, in some cases on the far side of the Tiber. To keep one's distance from the forum was also to stand aloof from a kind of popular political life that was vanishing. A master of war no longer needed personally to stand guard over everything that went on between the Capitol and the temple of Vesta. Instead he could station his paid men wherever he needed them: he was rich enough to buy off any of the ever-baying senators. Caesar even bribed Cicero to secure permission to expropriate land where he had a mind to build a new forum. Cato the Younger, who would swear to his own unassailable integrity, was unable to resist the pecuniary charms of an assignment that took him to Cyprus to recover an outstanding debt to the Roman state.

For glory and power, the masters of war now looked to their troops rather than to the Roman people in the forum. During the first few centuries of the republic, the forum had gradually gnawed away at the powers of the people of the field of Mars, overriding their vote on most laws. But at the end of the republic, the military raised its voice once again, though in the absence of any legal framework, and carried its generals to power. Subsequently, Pompey marched his troops into Rome, after the senate had passed an exceptional decree, and Caesar with his army of Gauls crossed the Rubicon.

So it came as no surprise that these new nobles began to abandon the political and social centre of the city in order to enjoy a privilege inaccessible to the vast majority-space.The mansions on the slopes of the Palatine were built on small plots of ground, and their back gardens were tiny. Cicero, who doubtless owned the largest of these properties - he had six giant elms that waved their canopies of foliage high over the other houses -was exaggerating somewhat when he boasted that

150 Places and lives

he enjoyed all the pleasures of a park right in the centre of Rome.The grounds of his house measured less than 900 square metres, so the size of the others can easily be imagined. Small houses were in any case the rule in town centres. In Pompeii not a single house had grounds of more than 300 square metres.

A new type of residence began to appear on unoccupied land on the outskirts of Rome, many of them inside the Servian wall. The house would be situated in a park of at least one hectare and the rooms would open out on to the garden. Atticus, Cicero's banker friend, had inherited from an aunt some plots of land on the Velia which he had laid out as 'gardens', as such residences were called at Rome. Most of these gardens were high up on the Quirinal or Viminal hills, or even further away on the Caelian hill and beyond the walls on the Pincian hill, which indeed came to be known as the 'hill of the gardens'. Pompey built his gardens above the field of Mars, Sallust also had a vast property not far away. Evergreens- pines, cypresses, laurels and ivy - ringed the houses with walls of vegetation.

THE LOWER CITY

In contrast to the aristocratic quarters nestling in the hills, the two depressions on either side of the forum- the Velabrum towards the Tiber, and the Argiletum and Suburra threading their way between the Quirinal and the Viminal (the trading port between the Tiber, which was not lined with docks, and the cattle market), accounted for the most populous neighbourhoods. One hill, the Aventine, had always been home to plebeians, but since it was some distance from the forum it escaped the overpopulation of the city centre.

These quarters were crammed with an unbelievable number of inhabitants. The best-known attempt to tackle this overcrowding took the form of high-rise insulae. Designed for letting, these blocks of flats made their first appearance in the second century BC and mushroomed in the first.l tsulae Roman houses, which were never more than two storeys high. These tower blocks, with fac;ades of between six and twelve metres in width, would have five or six floors and some might reach a height of over twenty metres. Flimsily built using light materials, cob and wattle, these constructions only stayed upright by leaning on each other, and even then they would regularly collapse. There were no modern

Living in Rome 151

comforts. A staircase climbed to the upper floors; on each floor there were two windows with a grille made of baked clay, which looked out on to a narrow street. If the absence of heating and lighting scarcely inconvenienced the Romans, who were accustomed to it, the lack of water and drains would have forced them to live in a foul- smelling squalor that they can hardly have found agreeable. These buildings were in fact temporary refuges rather than real homes and their inhabitants were people passing through: solitary freedmen; young people who had come to the city to launch their career; people on the margins of society. A real home had to be planted fairly and squarely on the ground, with a household shrine and gods: only thus could a family be decently accommodated. This is why those who lived in the insulae would make no attempt at home improvements, but would seek, as soon as they had a bit of money, to move to a real house. The one effort they would make was to put some pots of flowers in the windows: a Roman always had to have his little patch of garden. The insulae would be packed with people from the attics down to the damp basements. In 164 ac, Ptolemy Philomector, the Egyptian prince, at that time a refugee at Rome, was given shelter by a landscape painter in his shack built on a flat roof. Others, even more destitute, would set up lodgings in the nooks and crannies of public buildings, around the shrine to Vesta, the Porcia and Emilia basilicas near the forum, not far from their baskets which they would leave chained to a column. They would eat in the taverns and wash at the public baths. If a Roman was not the centre of a social unit - a family, or a network of clients- he had little need of a lodging.

On the other hand, even the poorest craftsman with a wife and children would live in a real house, however tiny.Such poor dwellings might be on the ground floor of an insula or form part of a nobleman's mansion. Rents were exorbitant and a single room would have to serve as shop and workroom by day, and after closing, when the heavy wooden shutters had been put up, as kitchen and shared living space. For a bedroom, everyone would have to make do with a single low-ceilinged mezzanine. But every Roman would aim to have a real house of his own, with a bit of garden where he could grow vegetables and a salting-tub where he could each year prepare his bacon and hams.

Butchers were available to sell pork to those city-dwellers who for whatever reason could not keep their own pigs. There were, of course, exceptions: pigs were known to wander round the streets of Rome, tripping up any passers-by that got in their way.