Fig. 12.2 Roman roads of the ager Faliscus. (Papers Brit. Sch. at Rome 12 [1957], p. 68)
These people were the Faliscans. Their settlements must have required road connections, especially between their chief city, old Falerii, and Veii, with which it was allied. These roads the British archaeologists have identified in deep cuttings, identified as pre-Roman by inscriptions in Etruscan characters. (Faliscan was a dialect of Latin, but Etruscan inscriptions occur.) These earliest cuttings, sometimes nearly fifty feet deep, are driven impressively through cliffs, cut downward from the surface in a succession of working levels to match the slope of the finished road, with careful attention paid to drainage. Pre-Roman stone piers probably carried timber bridges, but most of the roads are mere ridgeway tracks, not unlike the medieval and modern farm tracks still to be found in the district. The Faliscans were apparently capable of ambitious engineering, but were driven by poverty to avoid it. The Romans used Faliscan cuttings when they found it convenient, it being their way to take things as they found them, introducing modifications only to the minimum extent necessary to suit their own needs.
Fig. 12.3 Faliscan roads of the ager Faliscus. (PBSR, loc. cit., p. 105)
The most interesting and the most certainly identified Faliscan roads discovered in the British survey are in the neighborhood of Grotta Porciosa, a fortified site about four miles north-northeast of Cività Castellana and a mile and a half west of the Tiber. It controlled the ridge between two gorges, a natural route for a cross-country road between the Tiber and the towns of Gallese, Corchiano, and Cività Castellana. In these towns the Romans had no interest: the two main Roman roads in this area run not cross-country but north and south, the Via Flaminia close to the Tiber, the Via Amerina on the high ground five or six miles to the west. These roads bypassed all the towns just mentioned. But the cross-country tracks, on which the local inhabitants would travel, are visible both in air-photographs and on the ground, where they show no trace of Roman paving. At Grotta Porciosa itself, excavation would be required to reach the early Faliscan level; the majority of sherds found is local black glaze of a quite late pre-Roman period (mid-third century B.C.).
What is most striking about the British results is the contrast they point up between native and Roman. Where the native tracks usually follow the line of least resistance, the Roman Via Amerina is driven across any obstacle, with what Ward Perkins aptly calls “ruthless thoroughness,” whenever there is no reasonable alternative. One might almost think that the new road was built deliberately to impress; in any case the massive viaducts and lofty bridges served to symbolize to the Faliscan peasantry the Roman conqueror’s energy and resources, by which it was hopelessly outclassed. With the same ruthlessness with which they imposed their roads upon the landscape, the Romans imposed law and order upon the countryside. The archaeological evidence is the way in which the peasants shifted from their old anarchical life in small strongholds of armed retainers, which is what Grotta Porciosa must have been, down into settled life in Roman cities, or in the open country beside the Roman roads. The great primeval Ciminian Forest, northwest of Nepi, once the fearsome haunt of brigands, was cleared under the Romans and turned into farms. When after eight centuries Roman power waned, the countryside reverted to pre-Roman conditions; the country-folk crept back into the cliff-top villages, there to remain until quite recent times.
These, the results of careful and enjoyable outdoor work in the Italian countryside by a United Nations of archaeologists, enable us to appreciate how the competence of the Roman road-builders made possible both the cold-bloodedness of the Roman conquest and the security of the Roman peace.
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That security brought in its train prosperity, and even luxury, of which the symbol is the grandiose Roman public baths. Though Agrippa, Nero, Titus, and Trajan all built baths whose sites and plans are known, the most grandiose, and the clearest in plan, are the Baths of Caracalla, begun in A.D. 211. The Baths of Diocletian, built a century later, are equally vast, but their plan has been obscured by the incorporation into their fabric of the church of S. Maria degli Angeli and the Terme Museum. The Baths of Caracalla, known to thousands of visitors as the summer setting for Rome’s outdoor opera, were built on a vast platform, twenty feet high, with an area of 270,000 square feet, greater than that of London’s Houses of Parliament. Excavations in 1938, when the Baths were being prepared for their metamorphosis into an outdoor opera house, revealed in the substructure vaulted service corridors, wide enough for vehicles, widening out at intersections into regular underground public squares, with provisions for rotary traffic. Access to the lower reaches was by stairs let into the central piers of the main building. The principal entrance to the baths was to the north (over the edge of the platform at the top center of the air-photograph, [Fig. 12.4]). It was flanked by numerous small rooms which in the difficult post-war years housed teeming families of Italy’s homeless. (Their unique opportunity of a summer evening to admire the sleek prosperity of the operagoers recreated the gulf that yawned between haves and have nots in Imperial Rome, and contributed not a little to Italy’s unrest.)
The main bath building was set in the northern half of the great open space provided by the platform, and was surrounded with gardens. Facing these on the perimeter was a variety of halls, for lectures, reading, and exercise. Those on the east and west were contained in curved projections (exedras). A part of the western exedra appears in the lower left corner of the air-photograph. Beneath it in a subterranean vault was discovered in 1911 what was at that time the largest Mithraeum (shrine of the Persian god Mithras) in Rome.[E] To the south (lower right on the photograph) was a stadium whose seats were built against the reservoir which supplied the baths: this was fed by a branch from one of the great aqueducts, the Aqua Marcia.