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Category: History
Description: In the first of twelve articles, we walk from the ancient port of Ostia to the imperial city of Rome, now (150 A.D.) under the enlightened rulership of Antoninus Pius. ### For the first time ever: here is a complete walk through ancient Rome, for the lay reader, through all fourteen Augustan districts. It's a virtual tour, told as if we are really a group of tourists walking through the thronged markets and alleys of the imperial capital in 150 A.D. Learn about Roman history, religion, and customs in a vivid and unforgettable manner. Our motto is always: Rome is people. We will meet many interesting personalities, and find that people then are much as we are today. There are a few glaring differences, such as the prevalence of slavery and the deadly bloodshed of circus and arena. Even the names of the city districts resonate excitingly, like modern metro stops: Aventine Hill, Circus Maximus, Great Forum, People's Pool, Capena Gate, Caelian Hill, Esquiline Hill, Temple of Peace, Isis and Serapis, High Lane, Broadway, Flaminian Circus, Palatine Hill, Across-the-Tiber. Visit places of exquisite interest, often off the beaten path and forgotten for centuries, now known only to academic experts.
eBook Publisher: Clocktower Books and Far Sector SFFH (magazine), 2009
AllShortStories.com Release Date: December 2009

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Words: 19729
Reading time: 56-78 min.
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"A delight to read. Cullen is especially effective in bringing the streets of Rome to life, adding people, sounds, and smells to the empty marble and concrete buildings."--Dr. Fred S. Kleiner, Chairman, Department of Art History; Professor of Art History and Archaeology; Etruscan and Roman Art, Boston University, author of many books and scholarly papers published around the world, including The Arch of Nero in Rome (1985) , A History of Roman Art (2006) .

"A fine piece of work. My compliments."--Dr. Harry Turtledove (Byzantinologist; acclaimed and prolific author of historical fiction and alternate history novels).

"A nice introduction to ancient Rome for a general audience. Overall, quite accurate and certainly better than the majority of historical documentaries about Rome that one sees frequently on TV today."--Dr. Greg Aldrete, Professor of History and Humanistic Studies, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, author of books including Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii and Ostia (Univ. of Oklahoma, 2009).

"This is the guide book Baedeker would have written if he had been alive two thousand years ago. Anyone who reads it will feel that ancient Rome--with its slaves and Senators, its temples and palaces, its slums and brothels, its sounds and smells--is only an air flight away."--Best-selling author Anthony Everitt, whose books include Cicero: A Biography; Augustus; Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome.

"What a marvel! The guide book we've all been waiting for. It is SO accessible. I certainly hope a video follows."--Dr. Rose Mary Sheldon, Ph.D., Chair and Professor of History, Virginia Military Institute, author whose books include Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust the Gods, but Verify (Taylor & Francis, 2004).

"A real treasure, A Walk in Ancient Rome is accessible and readable. It offers a complete virtual tour of ancient Rome. Readers gain access to every corner of the ancient capital. Along the way, they learn surprising and interesting facts generally known only to experts. I recommend it for schools and personal enjoyment."--Simcha Jacobovici, film director, producer, free-lance journalist, and author. Narrator of The Naked Archeologist, seen on VisionTV in Canada and The History Channel in USA.

Preface

Most books about ancient Rome either trace her history, or deal with a biography or a period, or are a chapter-by-chapter compendium of dry facts.

My study originally grew out of a New York book packager's wish to produce a book that would interest people who enjoyed the BBC/HBO series Rome (no connection to this project). Much went wrong, due to haste in production, and much has now been fixed. This digital series of twelve articles is taken, not so much from the 2005 print edition, which was frankly a botch on the publisher's part. Some copies are still available, and I advise the reader to avoid them.

I had a very limited amount of time to research the first edition in 2004, but I grew lucky.

First, I found an amazing resource: a pair of documents compiled in the 3rd Century by unknown Roman city officials, titled the Notitiae and the Curiosum. These two so-called Regionary Catalogs date to the reign of Constantine, and have perilously survived in copies through the European Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and into modern times. They are nearly identical, with the Curiosum probably just a light revision of the Notitiae. I then had the good fortune to find, maintained by the University of Pennsylvania, with editorship of Mr. Bill Thayer (www.lacuscurtius.com), the classic 1929 A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (all references cited in the Bibliographies of these articles). With dozens of other resources, I was able to piece together as complete a walk through the Rome of 150 CE as is possible.

This is a project based, not on biographies, or wars, or eras of history, but upon topology: what's on the ground, both natural and man-made. That mode of organization forces the discussion into a certain discipline, which I have found personally most delightful. By understanding the topology of the ancient capital, we lay readers can understand its people in surprising new ways.

Topography--that is, writing about (Roman) topology--bring together the thousand pieces of a mosaic, so that the luminous whole is greater than the sum of its many fascinating parts.

For example: Domitian built an altar to Neptune in each of the fourteen Augustan districts. Why? We learn he did so because Neptune, the principal god of waters, was the natural opposite of fire in the ancient philosophical scheme of four elements (fire, water, earth, and air). Domitian wanted to enlist the divine aid of Neptune in combating the city's many disastrous fires. In fact, the altars are a pointed reference to the great fire of 64, during the reign of Nero, which led to the first large persecution of Christians, who were scape-goated as the cause of the fire. Domitian reigned 81-96, at a time when memories were still painful and vivid of the fire that destroyed or severely damaged all but four of the city's fourteen Augustan districts.

This is just one example of how a marble altar comes to life, in telling us an interesting piece of Roman history. It gives us insight into Roman thinking, which did much to shape our own world. Ancient Rome lives on among us in many ways--our languages, our names, our laws, our customs, our place names, and so on.

Most notably, perhaps, in 1776, when the Framers met in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution of the United States, there had not been a functioning democracy in the world since the ancient Roman Republic. The Framers thus turned to ancient Rome for a model of the U.S. Republic, and we have much to learn there. Modern people often confuse the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. Each lasted about 500 years. What the Framers of 1776 most sought was equal representation for all citizens. What they most wanted to avoid were the structural, constitutional reasons that led to the decline of the Roman Republic, and its usurpation by a tyranny (the empire) that lasted for five more centuries in the West, and, beyond that, another 1,000 years in the East (Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire).

Classical Rome is, first and foremost, People.

You'll meet many intriguing characters you'll long remember. Though much of the ancient city has disappeared, leaving only enigmatic ruins, this book weaves together my imagination as a novelist, my study of history, and my background as a journalist to create a vivid tour guide. This project has the support and praise of several best-selling authors and also academic experts, who understand its value both as an entertainment and a teaching tool.

This has become one of my life's passionate projects. To me, a virtual tour is better than a trip to Rome today, where whizzing Vespas, broken columns, and gaggles of tourists can be a distraction . Sit back in your armchair at home, and let this walk--this 'vivid journey back in time,' as my first publisher put it--saturate your imagination. Enjoy a virtual tour of mind and imagination to a wondrous city that was for centuries the capital of the world's first quasi-global empire.

This series not only explains what things are and where they are (the Forum, the Arch of Constantine--so what?) but what they mean. We come to understand the past as never before.

It is fair to warn the reader that this material reads as entertainingly as fiction at times, yet is textbookish at other times. It is not always an easy and breezy read. While parts of the book make for light and entertaining reading, other parts are more detailed and scholarly. The topographical detail is considerable. The book can serve as a reference work, and the bibliography offers a mix of popular and scholarly resources for further reading.

The reader with an interest in detail will enjoy the world's first virtual guided tour of the entire city of Rome in these twelve articles based on my nonfiction/Ancient History book A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, 2010, ISBN 978-0-7433-1000-0, $22.00). Because of the huge number of illustrations in the Revised 2nd Edition (over 200 Megabytes, often sprawling across six inches of print page), I've had to split the book up into twelve articles, with small illustrations to accommodate the limitations of various digital formats.

1. Arriving in Ostia

Our bireme from the future docks at the travertine marble wharves of Ostia. This is Rome's older of two Mediterranean seaports, located sixteen miles west of the city on the Tyrrhenian coast. As we ascend the broad steps, we are overwhelmed by the noise, the smells, and the hustling people.

The Plan: In this first of twelve segments, we land at the port city of Ostia, before we walk the sixteen miles to Rome itself. We'll explore Ostia, and take a fascinating walk on the Ostia Road that leads to the ancient Servian Wall on the southern outskirts of the imperial capital. We'll eat roasted dormice (the Roman McBurger), we'll learn about garum (Rome's ubiquitous fish sauce), we'll observe slaves and free workers, and we'll spend the night at the Hotel Balbi along the Tiber. We'll also witness some wealthy ladies in a really bratty scene, proving as always that, first and foremost, Rome is people, and there is no greater place to people-watch.

Ostia, a tiny version of Rome, is a clamorous, teeming hive that makes one stagger back and hold one's head. The blur of contradictions wraps itself around us without shame, without hesitation. As we climb from our galley with its twin oar decks, we climb up a broad, slimy stairway rising out of the murky, yellowish water. The water's color is primarily due to sandy silt borne on the Tiber's powerful current. Its murkiness comes from over a million people's effluent being carried out to sea.

As we slip and slither on the wet, nasty steps, people young and old dart around us. We are elbowed, shoved, run around if we aren't quick enough to get out of the way. Greedily, this sea of relentless power and energy rushes around us, to suck us helplessly into the maelstrom of so many lives lived so desperately amid such fearful power, to drown us in its naked cruelty and violence--and, yet, to bathe our senses in so much wondrous beauty.

After all, we are about to embark on a walking tour of Rome. She is the capital of the world's first quasi-global empire, spanning thousands of miles in all directions: from the drizzly Scottish border of Britain to the foggy (modern Russian) mountains covered in surly pine trees near the Black Sea; from the frozen beaches of the North Sea (modern Holland) to the scorched, glassy deserts of Arabia; from the lion-haunted South Atlantic beaches of Mauritania to the palm-fronted Nile with its pyramids; from the mosaic pools of a hundred colonial cities in Africa and Asia, where the wealthy and their pampered families indolently swim, to Gaulish slave markets near gloomy, haunted Germanic forests; from the timeless oases of the Tigris and Euphrates to the vine-draped hills of Spain. You can name thousands of places, and the Romans will leave melancholy ruins and the memories of their lives there.

Just think of it. Here we are, in the Year 150 CE, when Rome rules an estimated fifty to one hundred million people, a staggering population for their era, from nearly the Arctic Circle to nearly the Equator. Over a thousand years, Rome is building over 50,000 miles of all-weather military and post roads to connect the many cities and cultures they rule. Imagine owning the cloud-shrouded Alps, and they are just a few pebbles in your vast yard. They own the Mediterranean Sea. They own the Black Sea. They own the future Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Greece...about 50 modern nations in all. The list of countries, mountain ranges, rivers, cities, deserts, valleys, and other properties contained in at least 76 provinces is too long and tedious to comprehend. Add to that more than a dozen seas in two oceans. That's if you count the Med as an ocean, as used to be the case in Eurocentric times, until modern globalists decided it's just a polyp on the nether Atlantic, notwithstanding its historic importance to the entire world.

The docks here in Ostia are stacked high with boxes and stone jars. The smells make us gag. On these steps, thousands of hustling slaves in ripped tunics and bare feet mush up a mixture of salty Tyrrhenian seawater, rotting fish, leaky latrines, the poop of patrolling sea gulls and marauding dogs and cats. The mixture rises into the powder-blue sky as an antidote to fresh air and sunlight.

As we ascend the slimy, stinking steps, we witness (see cover image, A Kiss, 1891, imagined by the Dutch-British painter, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema) a little scenario at a nearby clean dock of white marble, well-swept and strewn with rose petals. A fabulous sailing yacht lies moored, out of sight. This brief drama is one of myriad such glimpses we'll have of every-day life. A wealthy and beautiful young mother gives her little daughter a kiss, while a nurse maid stands by rather coldly. There is always a drama in these Alma-Tadema paintings. Quite often, it involves the eyes. Re-imagining Classical Rome (and other ancient civilizations) was a passion of artists in the 19th Century. What is going on here, on the docks of Ostia, in this fleeting glimpse before we and these people part company forever in the swirling melee of endless activity?

At first glance, it seems like a cozy family tableau. A wealthy young woman is bidding her little daughter farewell. The child is to embark with her slave nurse on a trip back to the city or maybe down the coast to a resort town like Pompeii. But look closer. The servant, holding what looks like keys or a lamp, looks down rather unpleasantly at the child. Is she jealous? No, she is hurt, angry, and humiliated by something the girl has done to her, of which she is afraid to tell the mother. The slave woman is afraid to rat to the mother for fear of being beaten by the mother, and tormented by the brat. The young mother seems oblivious, and intent only on rushing off to a party somewhere. The child stands rather stiffly, not embracing the mother, and glancing away and up, in the direction of the slave. The child is not a little cherub, as her mother might think, but a cold, cunning manipulator. She will grow up to be a flighty, shallow young woman like her mother, interested only in clothing and parties. Judging from the mother's figure, it is the slave woman, or someone like her, who nursed the girl as an infant, but gets little respect. The girl and the slave are keeping a nasty secret from the mother, whatever it may be.

Slaves in great homes are frequently treated with cruelty and coldness, although in many middle class families they occupy a cherished role, as family members, someplace between the family dog and the children. Romans have had to adapt to life with their millions of slaves, which can be like owning pit bulls--affectionate one moment, murderous the next. This is all foreign to us as modern people, but it is one of the two most wrenching adjustments we have to make in getting close to the Romans: their ownership of other human beings, the way we might own a dog or a cat. Another wrenching adjustment is to the violence and cruelty of a society that is drenched in the blood and gore of deadly games, from dawn to dusk, day in and day out, in the circuses and arenas around the empire. The underlying violence and coldness are evident even in a simple garden, where it is common to find little bunny figurines such as a modern home owner might keep. Only many of the Roman garden ornaments, meant for the visitor to stumble upon under a bush, or spy with surprise through leaves, are of themes like an eagle disemboweling a snake, or a dog mauling a rabbit.

There are other disconcerting features here for a modern person, though an ancient Roman, Greek, or Etruscan would think nothing of them. For example, it's common to come across a herm--a stylized figure, typically a featureless marble obelisk about the height of a man, typically with a bearded man's head or bust on top. In the center of the otherwise completely blank, flat front, one sees a totally erect penis with engorged glans. Huh? Roman society is traditionally conservative about sexual morals, though the reality under the surface is anything but prim (with the same dual standard as that of the Victorians). There are still remnants and attitudes of a primordial, animistic fertility cult. It's like those country festivals in modern Japan, where the women lug a model penis the size of a truck through town, festooned with ribbons and flowers. Rome is a society lit at night by hearth fires, torches, and millions of tiny clay oil lamps--many of which, that could fit in the palm of the hand, are in the form of Priapus figures, with exaggerated penises for handles. Many others are figures of famous gladiators and charioteers.

There is much to be shocked and repulsed by, but a visit to ancient Rome also entails endless, dreamy vistas of great beauty. Aside from the natural beauty of Italy, and the sun-drunken softness of Tuscany, we will walk through enormous, multi-domed baths that contain not only pools for bathing in water at various temperatures, but libraries, gymnasia, meeting halls, shrines, boxing rings, and shops. We will walk through huge supermarkets full of pungent spices, cloth, carpets, and other goods from all over the empire. There are special markets (fora) for fish, beef, vegetables, pork, wine, slaves, and even cooks. Yes, you can buy or rent a chef if you have the money--at the Forum Coquinum (Cooks' Market) in the city.

Speaking of chefs, at the carnarium near the Colosseum--where bodies and carcasses from the day's deadly games are stored until they can be tossed into the city dump beyond the Esquiline at night--cooks from all the great palaces of the city come to buy cuts of rare animals for the tables of Senators and millionaires. They buy cutlets of tiger, of camel, of rhino, of bush snake, and many other delicacies. How about some crocodile eggs, hippo intestine, or lion liver? Monkey brains, anyone?

When we get to Rome in a day or so, there will be no end to our amazement. But we always stay grounded in one fact: Rome is people. We can only get to know Rome by understanding her people--their religion, their customs, their fears, their joys. And we begin now in Ostia.