Fig. 7.13 Rome, Golden House, reconstruction drawing of whole area. (Fototeca)
Fig. 7.14 Rome, the Neronian Sacra Via.
(E. B. Van Deman, Mem. Am. Ac. Rome, 5 [1925])
But a description of the rooms of the Golden House is not quite the whole story. In 1954 the Dutch archaeologist C. C. Van Essen published the results of careful probing in the whole section of Rome for half a mile around the Coliseum, where he found traces of Nero’s palace in a number of places on the perimeter. For the Golden House was much more than the complex of rooms just described. It was a gigantic system ([Fig. 7.13]) of parks, with lawns, groves, pastures, a zoo. Over its central pool later rose the great bulk of the Coliseum. Within these grounds, twice the extent of Vatican City, was a great Versailles in the midst of the teeming metropolis. The eighty-odd rooms we have been describing made up but one of several palaces in the grounds. And an American, Miss E. B. Van Deman, working from some very unlikely-looking architectural blocks piled beside the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the old Forum, was able in 1925 to restore on paper ([Fig. 7.14]) the monumental approach, over 350 feet wide, to the palace grounds from the old Forum and Palatine. It was a mile long, with arcades of luxury shops, and eight rows of pillars. Its plan is concealed today under mounds of dumped earth between the Hall of the Vestals and the Arch of Titus. Beside it rose a colossal statue of Nero, 120 feet tall, now marked by a pattern in the pavement. When Hadrian desired to remove the statue to make room for his Temple of Venus and Rome, it took twenty-four elephants to do the job. But decades before, his predecessors the Flavians had done what they could, with the Baths of Titus and the Flavian Amphitheater (the proper name of the Coliseum) to erase the memory of Nero’s monstrous extravagance, and turn his palace grounds to public use.
* * * * *
The four archaeological examples from the Julio-Claudian age discussed in this chapter were chosen for their intrinsic interest, not to illustrate a thesis. But they do prove a point all the same. Tiberius’ al fresco dining room, with its monstrous and tortured statuary (even though some of it be later in date); Caligula’s houseboats, with their incredibly heavy profusion of work in colored marble, mosaic, and bronze; Nero’s Golden House, with its labyrinth of gaudy and over-decorated rooms of state, all testify to a decadent extravagance beyond Hollywood’s wildest aspirations. By comparison, the cool, quiet taste of the subterranean basilica is an oasis and a relief, but even this is a commentary on Claudius’ intolerance. And it has about it an air of holier-than-thou Brahminism, the furthest possible contrast with the warmth, the close contact with common people, which marked the Christianity that was to be preached in Rome not long after the basilica-sect was outlawed. One cannot but marvel at the staying-power of the organism that could survive this prodigality, this cleavage between class and mass, for over three centuries. But as we focus our attention upon the excesses of court and of metropolis, we ought not to forget that in the municipal towns of Italy and the Empire life went on, more modestly, quietly, and decently. Archaeology gives us precious proof of this in a pair of buried cities of the Flavian Age, Pompeii and Herculaneum.
8
The Victims of Vesuvius
One day in 1711 a peasant digging a well on his property in Resina, on the bay five miles southeast of Naples, came upon a level of white and polychrome architectural marbles, obviously ancient. This chance find led to the discovery of what proved to be the buried town of Herculaneum, destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius of August 24, A.D. 79. Workmen digging in 1748 by the Sarno canal, nine miles farther along the bay, found bronzes and marbles on a site which an inscription, discovered fifteen years later, identified as Herculaneum’s more famous sister city, Pompeii. Thus began a saga of excavation which has told the modern world more about ancient life than any other dig in the long history of archaeology, and this in two towns which have left almost no record in literature. In a few hours of a summer afternoon the eruption stopped the life of two flourishing little cities dead in its tracks: dinner on the tables, the wine-shops crowded, sacrifices at the moment of being offered, funerals in progress, prisoners in the stocks, watchdogs on their chains. The townsfolk had not even time to gather their possessions. Ironically, going back for their little hoards of gold and silver spelled death for many of them, under the hail of pumice-stone and ashes (or, at Herculeaneum, the river of lava) which asphyxiated ([Fig. 8.1]) or engulfed them. At Herculaneum, on the afternoon of the eruption, rain turned the volcanic ash to mud, which solidified, burying the town thirty to forty feet deep. Electric drills and mechanical shovels are needed to dig there, so progress has been slow. Even Pompeii, under its shallower layer of pumice-pebbles and light ash, is still only about three-fifths excavated.