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Bandstra World History 2016-17
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A History of Cities: Rome
Compiled from a 50-part series published by The Guardian in 2016, these stories reflect the fascinating
history of humankind’s urbanization: how geography and environment impacted the design and growth
of cities throughout the history of the world, how cities displayed the culture of those who lived and
interacted in them, and how cities help to explain the intricacies of human social, political, and economic
interactions.
According to Tacitus, perhaps the greatest of all Roman historians, it was the great temple of Jupiter
Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill that held the key to the future of ancient Rome.
Writing about a fire at the temple in 69 CE, Tacitus assumed the conflagration would embolden the
enemy Gauls into thinking they might finally conquer the city, such was the symbolism of the temple.
“This fatal conflagration has given proof from heaven of the divine wrath,” he wrote, “and presages the
passage of sovereignty of the world to the peoples beyond the Alps.”
But Tacitus’s fears were not realised. The Gallic revolt was crushed and the temple rebuilt – as it was
again and again right up until its closure by the Christian emperor Theodosius I in 392 CE. Indeed, even
after Roman power had shifted to the east, and the Vandal invasion of 455 CE had stripped all gold from
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the doors of the temple, the prefect of Italy, Cassiodorus, was moved to write: “To stand on the lofty
Capitol is to see all other works of human intellect surpassed.”
This focal point above the city was begun nearly 1,000 years earlier by Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the
last Roman king – but only completed and dedicated, according to legend, in the year of his
overthrowing and the creation of the Roman republic in 509 BCE.
It was a massive structure for its time – the largest temple in the Italo-Etruscan world – standing on a
stone plinth measuring 53 by 63 metres, and with a broad red roof supported on 24 columns. Also
known as the temple of the Capitoline Triad, inside were statues of the three gods most venerated by
the Latin people: Juno, Jupiter and Minerva. On the apex of the roof was a quadriga, a blatant symbol of
martial triumph depicting four horses being driven by Jupiter himself.
“Here was where the Roman kings established the centre of its most important cult: the temple of the
Capitoline Triad – Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Juno Regina and Minerva,” says Prof Filippo Coarelli from
the University of Perugia. “They were hoping to draw the political centre of the Latin League [a
confederation of about 30 towns mainly south of the Tiber] to Rome and displace the league’s
traditional cult centre on Mons Albanus – present-day Monte Cavo.”
According to Dr Robert Coates-Stephens, a fellow at the British School at Rome, the temple inspired a
sense of destiny and invulnerability: “The Romans considered the Capitol important because it was
home to the state religion and because, according to optimistic tradition, since the hill failed to be taken
by the Gauls in 390 BCE, it had always remained inviolable.”
The temple building was copied across the Roman Empire as the focal point of new settlements or of old
enemy cities that were embracing the Roman way of life. It is telling that when Constantine built his new
eastern capital on seven hills along the Bosphorus in 330 CE, he removed the colossal statue of Hercules
that stood in front of the Temple of the Triad to confer legitimacy on his new Capitolium.
Indeed it might be said that, had the Romans not succeeded in focusing the Latin League on this temple,
Rome may not have achieved its domination of the league. And without that, we would not have had
the Roman Empire, one of the most influential forces in the development of urbanisation there has ever
been.
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The selection of the site on which Rome was founded in the eighth century BCE is the stuff of myths.
Whether it was Romulus and Remus, Virgil’s Aeneas or one of the early Etruscan kings who founded the
city hardly matters, as the reasons for choosing this hilly bend on the river Tiber were obvious.
“Rome is at the lowest point on the course of the Tiber where the river is naturally crossable, and like
many important ancient or medieval cities (think of London) Rome is close to the sea, but not close
enough to be in serious danger from pirates,” explains Georgy Kantor, associate professor in ancient
history at St John’s College, Oxford. “Also this was the point where Via Salaria, the Salt Road, leading to
important salt pans inland, joined the main coastal road.”
As well as creating a spiritual focal point devoted to victory on the Capitoline Hill, the kings also drained
the malarial marshes between the seven defensible hills of Rome so that people could meet and trade.
Additionally, during the reign of the penultimate king, Servius Tullius (who reigned 578-534 BCE), they
completed a wall round the hills to keep this huge city safe.
“By the late sixth century BCE, the city of Rome had united around a central space, surrounded by a
defensive wall and in the shadow of a temple which was one of the largest in Italy, and by its simple
monumentality an indication of Rome’s importance,” says Prof Christopher Smith, director of the British
School at Rome.
Because of the policy of making trading allies of its defeated enemies, money flooded into Rome in the
early days of the republic. The city that sprung up below the temple of the Triad was a hodgepodge of
narrow streets and tall wooden buildings with forums and markets created by individual donors.
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So was there any guiding principle behind the
development of Rome? Certainly, there was no
Dinocrates of Alexandria to lay out the city for the
first kings and their republican successors. But
according to the Roman historian Livy in his Ab
Urbe Condita, the early Etruscan kings did try for
rational urban planning of the kind found at
Rhodes, Pella, and Philippi – but all that was swept
away when the Gauls sacked Rome (390 BCE) and
by the unbridled speculative building that followed.
In 63 BCE, the great orator Cicero lamented the
discrepancy between the regular planning of
Roman cities in Campania, with the hilly and
swampy conditions in Rome itself.
The lack of any effective urban plan is shown in the
way that a victorious general, after processing in
triumph up to the temple on the Capitoline Hill,
had the right to build a new temple wherever he
chose – and in the way that wealthy politicians
such as Julius Caesar would build a marketplace to
curry favour with the people. Pompey built a theatre to honour himself, and Sulla a new state archive.
This level of individualism was both Rome’s strength and weakness. When most of Rome burned down
under emperor Nero in 64 CE, Tacitus chronicled how a new plan for stone buildings at a standard
height with wide streets was drawn up – but reported that the people lamented the lost, ad hoc nature
of republican Rome.
“Still, there were those who held that the old form had been the more salubrious, as the narrow streets
and high-built houses were not so easily penetrated by the rays of the sun,” he wrote, “while now the
broad expanses, with no protecting shadows, glowed under a more oppressive heat.”
In 1563, England’s Queen Elizabeth I coined the Latin phrase “Romam uno die non fuisse
conditam” (Rome wasn’t built in a day). She might have also added: “And it was hardly planned at all.”
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Today, the Rome of the republic lies buried beneath medieval and renaissance Rome. It further
disappeared under the 19th-century expansion that followed Italian unification in 1871. Those famous
seven hills have been levelled and built over to the point that their obscured contours have merged with
the rising level of the valleys below.
Indeed, you could be forgiven for not realising that a marshy valley once ran between the Capitoline and
Palatine hills. The only reason we can see this valley at all today is because in the 1930s, Mussolini
demolished more than eight acres of buildings and removed rubble lying 20 feet deep to expose the
forum.
Ancient Rome – the powerful, republican city that so rapidly conquered the known world – has, of
course, given us so many ideas about urban planning. Today we talk about capital cities and forums, as
well as structures such as amphitheatres, basilicas, [paved] roads, pavements and multi-storey
apartment blocks because of the idea of the city that Rome bequeathed us.
Yet it is ironic that the grid system (what the Romans called centuriation), a city planning concept they
exported all over Europe from the third century BC onwards, was never employed in Rome itself. The
Romans got their idea of laying out their cities on a square grid from the military encampments they
constructed on campaign, but it was never possible to implement it properly in Rome because of the
power of individual initiative – and, of course, those hills.
After the empire moved its capital to Constantinople in 326 CE, everyone who could afford to leave
Rome followed suit. The city was repeatedly looted and only began to recover some its lost significance
during the Renaissance, and with the return of the popes. It took until the 20th century for it to regain
its ancient proportions.
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Nevertheless, the temple of the Triad lasted until 1536 CE when its remains were demolished as part of
a palace and piazza development conceived by Michelangelo for Pope Paul III. What is left of it is now
under Michelangelo’s Palazzo dei Conservatori, one of the Capitoline Museums. These days, you can see
some of its mighty plinth exposed if you walk up to the first floor.
Rome remains a hodgepodge, one of the worst examples of the very notion of the well-planned city, an
idea that it bequeathed to us via – among others – Chester in Britain, Verona in Italy, Trier in Germany
and Sinop in Turkey. But the impact of its Temple of the Triad can still be seen now if you stand down in
Mussolini’s reconstructed forum and gaze up at the Capitoline museums.
As for the idea of the Capitoline Hill, that reached eventually as far as America where today there are
nine Capitol hills across the United States, including the seat of the US congress in Washington.
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