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With Hadrian an era ends. Juvenal, who wrote during his reign, is the last secular classical Latin poet of importance. Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138–161) was modest and plain-living where Hadrian had been flamboyant and extravagant. The autobiography (written in Greek) of his successor, Marcus Aurelius (161–180), is throughout a tacit criticism of Hadrian: his boy-love, his architecture, his dilettantism. Marcus Aurelius’ son and successor, Commodus (180–192), was a monstrous megalomaniac beside whose excesses those of Caligula, Nero, or Domitian pale into insignificance. The next dynasty, the Severi (193–235), founded a military absolutism which degenerated into anarchy (235–284). Under Diocletian (284–305) absolutism is intensified and grows more rigid. Under Constantine (306–337) the Empire’s creative center shifts to Constantinople (old Byzantium made new, in the Greek east), a new religion triumphs, and the story of Christian archaeology begins. True, the two centuries from Hadrian through Constantine are represented by some of Rome’s most impressive surviving monuments: the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, the Arches of Septimius Severus and of Constantine, the Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, Aurelian’s Wall, and the Basilica of Maxentius. But, artistically, many of these are derivative; e.g., Marcus Aurelius’ Column imitates Trajan’s; Constantine’s arch incorporates reliefs from earlier, more creative reigns. Yet while the artistic impulse flickers and dies, Roman skill in military and civil engineering, as exemplified in baths and aqueducts, roads and walls, continues unabated.
12
Roman Engineering
In this chapter strict chronology must be violated, and steps retraced, to discuss in specific detail something of what archaeology has to tell us about the most practical aspect of the Romans’ genius: their talent for engineering. This is best exemplified in roads, baths, aqueducts, and fortification-walls.
We have reached in our historical survey the end of Hadrian’s reign, A.D. 138. By this date the main lines of the great consular roads leading from Rome had all been laid down, and later Emperors faced only the problems of maintenance, till the barbarians cut Rome’s lines of communication, and the moving of the administrative center to Milan, Ravenna, and Constantinople reduced their importance. The most recent archaeological investigation of Roman roads in Italy has concentrated on tracing the lines of major and minor Roman highways and the native tracks that preceded them, a work of great urgency, in view of the modernization which is rapidly changing the face of Italy, especially in the vicinity of Rome.
If we turn to Roman baths, like those of Caracalla in Rome, begun in A.D. 211, we are back on the chronological track again, but we find that the last major archaeological work upon them was done at the end of the last century, and that their chief interest today lies in the inspiration they have offered to modern architects.
As for aqueducts, the last important ancient one was built under the Emperor Alexander Severus, in A.D. 226, but working back from that date we can profitably review the difficult and absorbing topographical work done in tracing the courses of the major aqueducts by a devoted Englishman and an American woman.
Finally we shall review the work of another Englishman in tracing the chronology and building techniques of ancient Rome’s last great fortification, Aurelian’s Wall, begun in A.D. 271 and still in large part standing. Its alterations and repairs have been traced down to the middle of the sixth century of our era. The examples chosen should justify the Romans’ high reputation for engineering skill, and illuminate Roman history, at the same time underlining on the one hand our debt, for the facts we know and the inferences we draw, to the careful work of modern archaeologists, and on the other the catalytic effect, in the case of the baths, of Roman work upon our own architecture of the day before yesterday.
