Richmond also found that in the phase of the wall identified as Aurelian’s by building materials and brick stamps, the workmanship differed sharply from one curtain to another. The inference from this was that various stretches were assigned to various gangs of workmen—mostly civilian, since the legions were needed in the North, and for Aurelian’s campaign against the Parthians in the East. These workmen belonged to the various city guilds, or collegia, some experienced in construction, some not, but all pressed into service in the emergency.
Richmond distinguished the bottom twenty-four feet of the wall as the original phase. It was built of brick-faced concrete—that its bricks were often second-hand is inferred from the many Hadrianic stamps—surmounted by a gallery with loopholes outside and an open, bayed arcade inside, with a crenellated wall-walk above. Access to the wall was by the towers only; Richmond inferred that the planner aimed to keep excited and irresponsible civilians from interfering with defense, and the wall-detail from pilfering or philandering in the adjoining houses and gardens. In this phase the wall was plain, efficient, functional, simple, and uniform, built to a standard size and pattern. Its many gates show that there was no very formidable danger: the intent was to provide a barrier to shut chance bodies of undesirables out of the city as on far-flung frontiers structures like Hadrian’s Wall shut them out of the Empire.
In its second phase another thirty-six feet of wall was fitted on to the base provided by Aurelian’s. In some places the addition was only six feet thick, the other half of the original width being left as a passage for the circulation of materials and messages. A wall sixty feet high reduced the required number of defenders, since it had nothing to fear from an enemy equipped with scaling ladders. In this phase machines did the work of men: if there were two ballistae to a tower, the expensive and impressive total of pieces of artillery would have been 762. Heightening the wall meant heightening the tower, sometimes to five stories. A start was made toward monumentalizing the gateways, but it petered out, though the effect can be admired in the Porta Asinaria near the Lateran, which was restored in 1957–58. For the workmanship of this phase is identical with and therefore of the same date as the Basilica and Circus of Maxentius (who reigned A.D. 306–312); when he was defeated by Constantine at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, and the capital moved to Constantinople, neither the money nor the motive for monumentality any longer existed.
The next major alteration is dated by inscriptions to A.D. 401–403, the reign of Honorius. It was prompted by the threat that the city might be sacked by Alaric the Visigoth. It involved second-hand stone facing for the curtains of the wall, and square bases for the towers. The photograph ([Fig. 12.10]) shows this Honorian phase at the Porta Appia. The upper stories of the round towers belong to Maxentius’ addition, while halfway up the face of the curtain between the rectangular towers to the left of the gate can be seen the patching required to add Maxentius’ brickwork to the battlements of Aurelian’s original wall. (To distinguish the building phases of the Porta Appia, Richmond had to crawl into the base of a tower through a very small hole, while a small uninvited audience bet on his chances of sticking.) The new battlements were built in a way that shows that in this phase Rome could no longer afford artillery: archers replaced ballistae. By now the Empire is Christian, and crosses begin to appear on the keystones of the gate arches, as prophylaxis against the devil. Later, in what Richmond describes as “an age of vanishing standards of faith and hygiene,” an indulgence of 100 days was granted for kissing one of these crosses. They were no help: the wall was assaulted by earthquakes (A.D. 442), and by Goths (A.D. 536 and 546), and repeatedly repaired. Belisarius in 547 restored it all, with the help of palisades, in twenty days, and equipped it with spring-guns the force of whose projectiles could impale five men, and with mantraps or deadfalls, barrow-like devices which could be pushed over on assailants. But the repairs are botched work, appropriate to what Rome had become: no longer an Imperial capital, but a minor metropolis of an outlying Byzantine province. All the same, the wall was never really breached till the advent of heavy artillery, when Garibaldi’s men attacked the Porta San Pancrazio in 1849.
* * * * *
What Richmond’s work has done is to epitomize, in the history of a work of Roman engineering, Rome’s decline and fall. This is the latest point in ancient history to which our survey will take us. In the 1300 years since the Palatine huts we have, with archaeology’s help, traced Rome’s rise to grandeur and her agonizing decline. Spiritually, Rome never fell. The Papacy in a sense is the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned upon its grave: the symbol is the Popes’ palace-fortress installed in Hadrian’s mausoleum, or St. Peter’s basilica overlying what is in part a pagan cemetery. It will be appropriate in the final chapter to confront Caesar with Christ, by describing a late Imperial hunting lodge in Sicily, and a tomb beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s, which by the fourth century A.D. was believed to be the last resting place of the apostle who was a fisher of men.
13
Caesar and Christ
In the official Italian archaeological journal Notizie degli Scavi for 1951 were reported recent excavations of a grandiose villa near Piazza Armerina, in central Sicily, which had already received some notoriety in the press, for depicting “Bikini girls” in very brief bathing suits ([Fig. 13.1]). Of this villa traces had always existed above ground, and as early as 1754 the discovery had been reported there of a “temple” (probably the basilica numbered 30 in the plan, [Fig. 13.2]), with a mosaic floor. In 1881 the trilobate complex (46) was excavated, and in 1929 the great Sicilian archaeologist Paolo Orsi, the expert on prehistoric remains on the island, dug there. Major funds—500,000 lire—made possible large-scale excavation between 1937 and 1943, as a part of Il Duce’s plans for a major celebration of the bimillennary of Augustus’ birth. After the war, government support to the tune of 5,000,000 lire (which inflation reduced in value to $8,000, only a tenth as much as the earlier grant) made it possible to finish excavating the villa and to take steps to preserve in situ the mosaics which are its chief glory. This is one of the few excavations on Italian soil whose chief avowed intent was to encourage tourism, and it has succeeded. Piazza Armerina is a boom town, boasting a new hotel, and its narrow streets are choked with sightseeing busses.
