Everyone remembers that Augustus left Rome a city of marble, but too few people recall that he found it a city of brick. The picture of Rome in most people’s minds is of a marble metropolis, proud mistress of a Mediterranean Empire. This to be sure she eventually became, but the archaeological evidence is that until the end of the third century B.C. Rome looked tawdry, with patched temples and winding, unpaved streets. To trace the development is fascinating, and archaeology is our chief guide.
The story that we read from the earth begins not in Rome itself but in the Alban Hills, extinct volcanoes in the Roman Campagna, sixteen miles southeast of Rome, close to Castel Gandolfo, the lovely lakeside spot where nowadays the Pope has his summer palace. Here, in a pastureland called the Pascolare di Castello, some peasants in 1817 were cutting trenches for planting vineyards. Under the topsoil of the Alban Hills is a thick bed of solid lava, called tufa, which seals in a layer of ashes. In digging their trench the peasants cut through the lava seal and revealed large dolia, jars of rough clay, each of which contained, in an urn shaped like a miniature oval hut, the ashes of a cremation burial, together with fibulae, objects in amber and bronze, and numerous vases. It was not until fifty years later that a committee of experts, including the same Pigorini who afterwards overstepped his evidence about the terremare, first connected the burials with the city of Alba Longa, traditionally founded in the mists of prehistory by the son of Aeneas. In 1902, in cremation graves from a necropolis to which we shall return, on the edge of the Roman Forum itself, hut-urns and artifacts were found so similar to those from the Pascolare that the inference of cultural connection was inescapable. Whether Alba Longa was the metropolis and Rome the colony, as stated by the literary sources, or the other way about, was not evident from the artifacts.
A necropolis or graveyard implies an inhabited site. The inhabited site of Alba Longa was destroyed by the Romans about 600 B.C. Where was the inhabited site that used the Forum in Rome as a necropolis? It could hardly have been the Forum itself, which was a swamp not drained and fit for habitation until about 575 B.C., a date which, as we shall see, marks the end of the necropolis. Could it have been the Palatine Hill which rises from the south side of the Forum? At first sight it seemed unlikely that any evidence for prehistoric habitation could be found on the Palatine, since the hill was covered with the substructures of Imperial palaces. But beneath these as early as 1724 were found the remains of the mansions of Republican nabobs (recorded in literature, too, as having lived here), and beneath these in turn why should there not lie the traces of even earlier dwellings? Vergil had pictured Aeneas humbly entertained on the Palatine by Evander, and lodged in a hut with swallows under the eaves. Excavations published in 1906 by the great Italian archaeologist G. Boni (who lived in a villa on the Palatine, and whose memorial bust appropriately adorns the Farnese Gardens there) found under the Flavian Palace traces of huts containing artifacts matching those found in the Forum necropolis.
These artifacts fell into two phases. The first included the rough handmade pottery called impasto, which we have already seen to be characteristic of Villanovan sites; serpentine fibulae (which match those found in the First Benacci period at Bologna); ware incised with a clamshell in dogtooth, meander, and swastika patterns, or with a rope-like clay appliqué; pierced beads, spools, and a curious kind of Dutch oven with a perforated top, examples of which were known from the Forum necropolis and the Alban Hills, but not elsewhere. Artifacts of a different and more developed type, belonging, therefore, to a second phase, included pots with thinner walls, sharper profiles (as seen in elevation drawings), and more complicated handles; they are decorated with spirals and semicircles, apparently compass-drawn. There was even a miniature clay sheepdog, his curly coat represented by circles impressed with a metal tube or a hollow reed. Such artifacts match those found in the evolved Villanovan culture, dated in the first half of the sixth century B.C. This culture is contemporary with a rich, sophisticated one in Etruria, but the techniques in Rome and its vicinity are much more primitive than in Etruria. We conclude that the Palatine village was infinitely less prosperous than, say, the contemporary Etruscan cities of Caere or Tarquinia. But equally primitive artifacts are found in the Alban Hills burials, certain tombs on the Quirinal and Esquiline Hills in Rome (discovered when the city expanded after Italy’s unification in the 1870’s), and in burials in hollowed-out tree-trunks from the Forum necropolis, the latter now on display in the Forum Antiquarium.
In 1907 D. Vaglieri began excavations in the southwest corner of the Palatine which revealed cuttings in the rock. These were actually, though Vaglieri did not recognize them as such, cuttings for early Iron Age huts, the date being an inference from the artifacts, whose stratification Vaglieri did not record. After a sharp controversy with Pigorini (whose prestige, because of public interest in the terremare, was then at its height), the dig was suspended, leaving one but half-excavated. Here, in this intact area, excavations were resumed in 1948 by a younger specialist in the prehistoric archaeology of Italy, S. M. Puglisi. This time, the methods were rigorously scientific, and the cultural strata were observed and recorded with meticulous care. Puglisi recognized that a scientific dig requires the constant presence on the site during working hours of a competent archaeologist; no precise results can ever be obtained by an excavation director who visits his site only a couple of times a week, since unsupervised workmen can hardly be expected to respect levels of stratification, preserve the right artifacts, or keep accurate excavation notebooks, without which, of course, no scientifically valid conclusions can be drawn.
In the area left undug by Vaglieri, Puglisi was able to distinguish five levels, which have been schematically reproduced on the walls of the Palatine Antiquarium. The top level consisted of nine feet of ancient dump. But the four levels beneath the dump amounted to six-and-a-half feet of compact, undisturbed strata, of which the bottom eight inches represented what had collected on the hut floor while it was still in use. Here the sherds were very tiny, for they had been walked on, it being the regular practice of Iron Age man—and woman—to live comfortably in the midst of their own debris. The hearth (one of the Dutch ovens was discovered in fragments in situ) was near the center of the hut, very close to a cutting for a central supporting post—the first evidence ever found for such construction. But there was no danger of setting the central post on fire, since the cooking flame was entirely enclosed within the clay of the oven. Bits of fallen wattle-and-daub revealed the wall-construction. There were animal bones and impasto sherds bearing the marks of fire, but none of the shiny black pottery called bucchero (the best examples of which are rarely found in Rome in contexts earlier than 700 B.C.) and no painted ware. This level, then, belonged to the first phase of the Iron Age, dated, by parallels with the finds from beneath the Flavian Palace, about 800–700 B.C. (The traditional date of Rome’s founding is 753.) The lowest level being so shallow, and the sherds showing the marks of fire, the inference is that the hut had not been occupied very long before it was burned down.
The contents of the next superimposed level, two feet deep, show that the site was next used as a kitchen-midden or refuse-heap. Here the deposits resemble those from a well (dug long ago but never described in a detailed scientific article), in the sanctuary of Vesta in the Forum, which is dated in the second phase of the Iron Age (700–550 B.C.), corresponding in the tradition to the reigns of the five Roman Kings from Numa to Servius Tullius.[A] These finds include polished impasto, with high or twisted handles and out-turned rims; slat-smoothed ware covered with a thin coating or engobe of reddish clay, ornamented with double spirals and palmettes, and of a size to fit on the Dutch ovens; sherds of fine bucchero (the first evidence of imports from Etruria), and of a coarser grey local imitation; painted ware, of the style known as sub-Geometric, imported from south Italy, and also some local imitations identified by their cruder technique.
[A] It will be convenient to record here for future reference the traditional dates (B.C.) of Rome’s seven kings:
| Romulus: 753–716 | Etruscan Dynasty: |
| Numa Pompilius: 716–672 | Tarquinius Priscus: 616–578 |
| Tullus Hostilius: 672–640 | Servius Tullius: 578–534 |
| Ancus Marcius: 640–616 | Tarquinius Superbus: 534–509 |
The next higher level shows fat-bodied “bloodsucker” fibulae, and flanged tiles, some with horses molded in low relief, betraying a completely different and more sophisticated building technique, like that used in Etruscan temples. The artifacts matched those found in the level under the late Republican House of the Griffins and under the “House of Livia” on the Palatine, and in the upper strata of the shrine of Vesta well; they are associated with the huts built in the Forum after it was drained; that is, with a transitional period after about 575 B.C. The lower date suggested by the archaeological finds for this second phase corresponds to the dates assigned by the literary tradition to Rome’s Etruscan kings, Tarquin I, Servius Tullius, and Tarquin the Proud.