If you have been to St. Peter’s Square in Rome and have stood near the obelisk in the middle and felt the long, convex arms that extend from the main basilica, you can get the sense that you are being embraced in a motherly grip. You can also get the sense that spiritual calipers are measuring the worth of your soul for the next life.
Rome is referred to as the Eternal City. This is because it has been around for a heck of a long time. The agreed-upon date of its founding is 758 BC. Now that’s not exactly eternal, since cities like Athens and Thebes date earlier, but Rome’s longevity is hard to run against. I mean, it’s still around, and it’s still thriving. It had its moments in the Dark Ages, when it became a backwater littered with cattle and plague, but it has stood the test of time.
‘Eternal’ also denotes a likelihood of continuance into the future. No matter what political makeup or geological avatar it will take on, it will still remain Rome, the city founded on the Tiber river, among seven hills.
Of course ‘eternal’ also harkens to its significance on the spiritual world stage. Here, at least according to Catholic doctrine, St. Peter met his fate by being crucified upside-down. Matthew 16:18 has Jesus saying, “Upon this rock I will build my church.” Peter, or Petros, is Greek for ‘rock.’ The dude’s name was actually Simon. Either way, he goes down as the first pope. The popes have called Rome their home for nearly two millennia, with confusing detours in Avignon, France and Ravenna in northern Italy.
Rome has had its hand in so many fires throughout history that it’s mindboggling. First, you get its fascinating origin story. Then you get its war of annihilation against the other Mediterranean upstart Carthage. It has wars against the Macedonians, the descendants of Alexander the Great. At its height, you have it extending from England in the west to the border with Persia in the east, and from Germany in the north to North Africa in the south. The Mediterranean Sea literally became a Roman lake, called Mare Nostrum. That’s some mafia shit right there. Cosa Nostra, anyone?
Kingdom to republic to empire. That’s how it went. And each epoch is teeming with fascinating stories. After the fall of its empire, it still fielded armies all the way up to the Rennaisance, where it didn’t quite take center stage, that being reserved for Florence and other city-states all across the boot. It even played a part in World War II. Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini shook his fists and jutted his jaw from the balcony of Piazza Venezia before being strung up along with his mistress in a small northern Italian town trying to flee to Switzerland.
As with all grandiose cultures, its origins are shrouded in a fog that’s composed of half historical record and half myth.
It all starts with the Trojan War. The Trojan hero Aeneas escapes the collapse of his home city of Troy and flees from the invading Myceneans. After befriending a wicked Phoenician queen who kills herself because he’s smart enough to not stick around, he heads to the Italian peninsula where he sets down roots. Don’t believe me? Just go read the Aeneid by Virgil. It’s all in there.
For whatever reason, ancient peoples loved linking themselves to the Trojans. I never got this. The dudes lost the war named after them. They were literally pummeled into the dirt and you don’t hear from them again. Like, ever. The USC Trojans? Come on. You have to appreciate the irony of an institution of higher learning hitching their wagon to a star that fizzled out almost three millennia ago. Couldn’t they have called themselves the USC Myceneans? Because those were the real bad dudes. They launched a thousand ships across the Aegean Sea and won the war. Imagine the increase in touchdowns your running backs would get you if they were equipped with this fact.
Even prophylactic companies align themselves with the Trojans. I’m not here to post negative Yelp reviews on condoms, and I’m not here to deride a corporation whose flagship product may work just fine, but I’d be a little tentative to sign off on some good old-fashioned forny whose expediency would be facilitated by a consenting party’s admission of having a device meant to assuage any fears of receiving surprise Father’s Day cards, especially if the device took its name from a civilization whose walls couldn’t keep out an oversized wooden horse on wheels.
For the Grecophile Romans, exalting a culture that fought against the Greeks, and unsuccessfully at that, always boggled me. If the emperor Augustus commissioned Virgil to write that propaganda as a way to link his imperial legitimacy to a society that, again, lost the battle named after them, then it had to be as a nod to graceful defeat. What else? That’s pretty emo, Augie.
Let’s leave the myths, though. Rome sort of just sprouted from the ground. It took some time for the city on the Tiber to expand. The Etruscans, for example, were a people who waged perpetual war against the Romans, until they were eventually defeated and their culture was subsumed. The Romans fought, defeated, and gobbled up the peoples who posed as threats to their geographical integrity or to their resources. Bigwig blue-blood patricians looking to make names for themselves struck out far afield to come back and claim such-and-such place to now be under the Roman yoke, holding a triumph where they showed off capture slaves and treasure, and sometimes kings of the conquered territories. Gangster.
While it was at the edge of a sword that Rome swallowed up surrounding territories, it was through invoking the beloved Greeks that civic codes and culture began to flourish, often extending outward these practices to the very people they conquered. After some time, being a Roman citizen had little, if anything at all, to do with familiarity with the city of Rome itself, but instead had to do with being under the administrative umbrella of the Roman kingdom, republic, or empire.
St. Paul, formerly Saul, was a Syrian Jew. He was a Roman citizen. This is what enabled him to hopscotch across Greece and Anatolia—modern-day Turkey—to tuck his nifty little letters into the shirt pockets of the citizens of Ephesus, Galata, Corinth, Phillipi, and Thessalonica. He’s responsible for half of the New Testament. Being a Roman citizen posed more perks than just possessing a jet-setting passport: it got you seats to the Olympic games, or to gladiatorial combat in the amphitheaters, or running water. It got you the baths.
The baths. If you were a fifth-century Goth from the north turned Roman citizen, gone were your days of wearing a mottled bearskin parka that slowly turned into a dreadlock quilt and emitted a foul odor that you became inured to. Animal skin buy-back programs got you a fancy toga that breathed and went perfectly well with your Teutonic blue eyes to where you began to muse to yourself, “Why were these average-looking, average-height Latins the ones who came up with all this business? I’m over six feet tall and I resemble Chris Hemsworth.”
Location, location, location. And like all other things that catch on like wildfire, a shitload of luck.
Of all the Romance languages, Italian is the closest to old Latin. It stayed close to home and took up Catholic mass and liturgy so greedily that it elbowed out of the way Aramaic, Coptic, Syriac, and other tongues that dealt in the nascent religion of Christianity. The Romans would go on to bicker for centuries with the Byzantines, who chose to enunciate the name of God in Greek, hence Greek Orthodox that coexisted with the Latin of the west until the Great Schism of 1054 had the churches separate for good, for both their own good. No alimony, no child support, just 50/50 custody of the souls, have a nice life.
Nowadays, it’s de rigueur for a newly-elected pope to know Italian along with Latin. Latin is not, as they say, a dead language; it just smells funny. It has Dad’s Adam’s apple, a slight overbite, and male-pattern baldness. ‘Senatus’ became ‘senato.’ ‘Populus,’ ‘popolo.’ ‘Que,’ ‘che.’ It’s more accurate to say that languages devolve rather than evolve. Yeah, that ‘s’ used to denote plurality, I’m just not into it. If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness is the father of novelty.
To a half-Mexican American who speaks Spanish, Italian sounds like a petulant child speaking Spanish. I am not being demeaning or even kidding. It just sounds so. I’m sure the same can be said about an Italian’s ears when I rattle of a recipe for ‘carne en su jugo.’ I love the Italian language. I fell in love with it so much just out of high school that I learned it over the course of a few years. That effort required plowing through three levels of language books, reading Italian newspapers, listening to Italian love songs from the 60s and 70s, watching Federico Fellini films, reading Diabolik comics (which I still love), eventually reading novels by Umberto Eco, Dino Buzzati, and Italo Calvino, and taking my wife to Italy in 2008 to try out my brand-new tongue on hotel concierges, museum ticket collectors, and a Venetian gondoliere who ultimately accepted all the euros and pocket change jingling in my pants for an unforgettable float down the Grand Canal.
But back to Rome. There’s more history per square foot in Rome than any other city on earth. It’s an embarrassment of riches that the present Romans themselves seem to take for granted. I guess it’s to be expected. Such blasé disregard is most obvious when you wish to locate what was known all the way back to early republican Rome as the Tarpeian Rock. It was this outcrop of a hill from which high-profile criminals, traitors, and enemies of the state were ritualistically flung to plummet to their deaths. After some time of locating this rock with the dual assistance of a city map and an Internet search, you’ll find that you have gone up and down it a few times via staircase from which people come and go, bent over in the slog of day-to-day life. It won’t be as high as you hope, but you sure wouldn’t want to launch yourself from there without at least six months of parkour lessons or one of those infamous squirrel suits.
Another place Romans seem to take for granted is the Circus Maximus, a hippodrome that predates the Coliseum. This ovular horserace track stretches across a lawn, bereft of bleachers and boxes that no doubt went along the perimeter. Here was the main public entertainment before the ruling class and rabble realized that pitting humans against each other, or different zoological species against each other, was better than ponies making the perpetual left turn. Right turn?
Now all you will find is the dusty track itself, kept up by New Years resolutionists in joggers. There’s no admission fee or velvet rope. You just walk across it as if it were any old public park. All alone in the middle of the oval is a solitary tree, a tree that seems intentionally mediocre as if to drive home the point that only earth-shattering events happened around here—but that, as they say, is history.
Directly north of the Circus Maximus is the Palatine Hill. This was the one of the seven hills where the aristocrats and overachievers pitched their tents. Their palaces intermingled with temples to goddesses of the harvest and dinky amphitheaters where Christians went to heaven through the jaws of lions. Here too is the Cryptoporticus, a tunnel where the notorious emperor Caligula was shanked by the Praetorian Guard, who had decided that the top dog impregnating his sister and himself administering the abortion, and making his horse a consul, was just bad policy, like masturbating to the moon.
For more juicy Caligularities, pick up The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. This compendium of imperial misbehavior starts from Julius Caesar and ends with Domitian. The foul deeds therein are too numerous to mention, plus I have at least a minimal sense of decorum that prohibits me from going into detail on Tiberius and Nero. Caesars Ten and Eleven weren’t too bad. Vespasian and his son Titus ransacked the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and with the proceeds built the Flavian Amphitheater.
You would know that as the Coliseum. It got called that because it got built right in the spot where a giant golden colossus of Emperor Nero had stood before being toppled by either an earthquake or a band of Goths. Vespasian was such a tightwad, though: he imposed a tax on public urination. His legacy is that the Italian word for urination is ‘vespasiano.’ It’s a normal bodily function, so he shouldn’t hang his head too much.
Tucked between the Palatine Hill and the Coliseum is the legendary Forum. How could you not be charmed for all eternity by setting foot precisely where Julius Caesar’s sandals trod? To have the soles of your overpriced Hokas share the same cubes of spaces as Marc Antony, Augustus, Brutus, Cicero, and Cato is enough to justify visiting the Forum. The Forum in Inglewood, CA, holds the squeaky-sneakered ghosts of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabar, so it’s a wash. But here, too, is the Temple of Jupiter, the Senate House, the Temple of Maxentius, and a building whose pillars are scored with deep gashes from ropes that had dug into the stonework as the Visigoths tried with all their might to bring the building down when they sacked Rome in 410.
Exiting the western end of the Forum and climbing the steps lands you at the Capitoline Museum. You’re greeted here by a statue of a horse-riding Marcus Aurelius, one of the so-called five good emperors of the second century, who penned the wonderful Stoic treasure trove known to modern readers as Meditations, and who fathered Joaquin Phoenix. If he was annoyed by being pulled away from his studies to pose for the sculptor, he doesn’t show it. And should he?
Inside the Capitoline Museum are famous sculptures such as the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, descendants of Aeneas. There’s also the Dying Gaul. My own unforgettable moment happened in one of the rooms of this museum: coming upon the famous head and neck of the emperor Constantine. You’ve maybe seen the image of the famous aquiline Roman nose, the piercing wide eyes, giving the emperor a Sylvester Stallone look, as if he’s jumping at the chance to box Clubber Lang, and if there’s any sign of losing, he’ll just have the Praetorian Guard rush into the ring and take out Mr. T.
(Come back next week for Part Two)
Good stuff Brad, I completely agree. Really enjoy your writing. Take care my friend