There has been intense controversy over the social and economic impact of trade on the empire as a whole. In The Ancient Economy (Berkeley, 1973) Moses Finley suggested that trade had a very limited role to play in the social and economic development of the empire. He argued that the staples of the agricultural economy were uniform throughout the Mediterranean basin so there was little incentive for one area to trade with another. The cost of transport was another factor inhibiting exchange as it would price traded goods well above the same goods produced locally. (This would explain why the development of oil, wine, and pottery production in the provinces in the settled years of the empire might threaten the traditional centres of production such as Italy.) Finley also pointed out that the status of traders remained low and that as soon as they had made profits they tended to invest them in land. It was not the lure of money as such which stimulated economic activity but the search for status, achieved through landownership, public office, and displays of largesse in the city centres. Finley concluded that the forces that dictated the movements of goods were not those of the market but those imposed by the state in its determination to keep the imperial structure, the prestigious cities such as Rome, and the legions, intact through the provision of grain and other basic necessities.
Finley’s thesis has now been strongly challenged. Surpluses from agriculture might have been small and unpredictable but there is evidence that they were traded in local markets. The use of coins was widespread with evidence also for commercial loans and shared risk investment. Coins would not have been found in so many contexts if small-scale trading had not been significant. Even humble homes had access to fine pottery and glass. Tiled houses were common in a way they had never been before.
There is also a much more positive picture of ingenuity and innovation than anything conceived by Finlay. Archaeology is continuously expanding our knowledge of these developments and they show how the unity of the empire encouraged the spread of new techniques. The earliest glass-blowing tubes have been found in Jerusalem dating to the first half of the first century Bc but the technique spread throughout the empire in the first century ad and made glass available to everyone. A glass cup could be bought for a copper coin according to Strabo.
Water-lifting devices first appear in Egypt (certainly by 1300 Bc) but become more sophisticated in the Hellenistic period. With Egypt incorporated into the empire they spread so that an example has been found in London dated as early as ad 63. It served a deep well and would have been able to provide large quantities of water, possibly to a neighbouring bath house or the city’s amphitheatre. Its design is unique and this suggests that once the concept had been grasped the Romans pragmatically made their own models to suit local demands. Animal-powered water-lifting wheels, known in Alexandria in the third century bc, were similarly adapted to power undershot watermills. These become important from the first century ad onwards and the finds and reconstructions of watermills show a high degree of innovation and flexibility in the way that waterwheels, often with gears, were used throughout the empire. The milling of grain was their most important function but there is evidence that water was used to power sawmills and crush ores. Water, it is now being argued, was a power source hardly mentioned in the literature that may, in fact, have been fundamental in raising levels of production. (See John Peter Oleson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, Oxford, 2008, for a wide-ranging survey of these developments.)
What was lacking was any vision of economic progress, any idea that the growth of wealth was an end in itself. What did exist, however, were the conditions in which enterprise could flourish through those classes, notably the freedmen, and individuals who grasped the opportunities that the pax Romana offered. There would always be restraints on agricultural production—this was the nature of the environment—but there was room for steady improvement of yields. Roman technology did advance and many techniques were adopted widely even if there never was a breakthrough to higher levels of production in the sense of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. In short, one can talk of not one but two coexisting imperial economies, one driven by the state in its need to supply Rome and the legions, the other by free enterprise.
The geographer Strabo, writing in Augustus’ reign, praised the Greeks for always placing their cities in the finest environments where natural harbours and landscape could be used as backdrops for beautiful buildings. In contrast, the Romans were, he argued, pragmatic: primarily great builders of roads, aqueducts, sewers, and, when they needed to, harbours, such as the one at Ostia. In fact, Roman buildings had many uses beyond the purely functional and students of Roman art show increasing appreciation of its aesthetic quality. A fountain delivers water but it can also offer a satisfying backdrop to a long street and will provide a memorial to the generosity of its builder. There was no structural reason for facing a building with costly marble, usually brought precariously across the Mediterranean from Africa, but it was intrinsic in giving status to a monument. So any study of the Romans as builders encompasses not only the problems of construction and questions of what the building was designed to provide but who initiated the project, what they hoped to gain from it, and its visual impact. Certainly the Romans had an eye for harmony and proportion. Vitruvius (see further below) insisted that a building must be attractive. ‘The principle of attractiveness will be upheld when the appearance of the work is pleasing and elegant, and the proportions of its elements have properly developed principles of symmetry.’ (See, in general, Jean-Pierre Adam, Roman Building: Materials and Techniques, trans. Anthony Mathews, London and New York, 2005, and Mark Wilson-Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture, New Haven and London, 2000.)
Cities were always the focus of Roman civilization, the centres of administration, and collecting points for taxes. It was where the local elites congregated and competed with each other as benefactors, as the inscriptions on so many buildings proudly proclaim. Cities were also vying for status with their neighbours. Nimes and Arles, in southern Gaul, appear to have had a battle at the end of the first century AD as each strove to outdo the other in the grandeur of their amphitheatres.
As an example of the creation of a new city, one can trace the architectural development of a Roman colony, the Colonia Augusta Emerita, the modern Meridian in south-west Spain, from its foundation for soldiers discharged from Augustus’ Spanish campaigns in 25 Bc. Up to then it had only been a minor settlement. First, and crucially, it was linked into the road network by a major bridge over the river Anas. Then the plan of the city was laid out and this was enclosed with walls with spaces designated inside for the city forum. A temple to the cult of the emperors was soon in place and both Augustus and Agrippa, his son-in-law, made benefactions, Agrippa a theatre, Augustus an amphitheatre.
Within nine years the colonia had been elevated to the capital of the province of Lusitania. Three aqueducts were feeding water into the city by ad 50. The original forum was joined by another in the same way that imperial fora had accumulated in central Rome—in fact the second forum seems to have been modelled on that of Augustus in Rome. The determination to flaunt the growing status of the city could be seen when another open space was created in the centre by demolishing private housing and then adding yet another forum, this one with porticos and a monumental entrance gate. There were many statues, notably a group showing Aeneas fleeing Troy for Italy so pinning the new city into Roman mythology. By ad 75, Colonia Augusta Emerita offered an impressive backdrop for imperial administration and provided a model that other cities would follow. While a colonia was always the creation of the state and its main benefactors often the imperial family, it was the elite of the municipia who would initiate their own building programmes. (See further Jonathan Edmondson, ‘Cities and Urban Life in the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, in D. Potter (ed.), A Companion to the Roman Empire, Oxford, 2006.)
If there was a birthplace of a distinctive Roman architecture it was not Rome, nor even Greece, but the cities of coastal Campania, wealthy settlements along the Bay of Naples to the south of Rome. The sheltered coastline had been open to eastern influences for centuries and the cultural development of the area was in many ways more advanced than that of Latium. It is to this area that the emergence of the typical Roman stone building types, the amphitheatre, the theatre (in its Roman form), and almost certainly the Roman bath, the market building, and the basilica, can be traced. Here too the typical Roman house with its atrium (central court) and enclosed colonnaded garden was born.
Of these the most obviously Greek in conception was the basilica, a long hall framed on each side by a colonnaded aisle. Its origins were probably in the Greekspeaking cities of southern Italy but a very early example (early second century bc) has been found beside the Forum at Pompeii. The preservation of Pompeii as a result of the great volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79 has allowed the architectural development of a Campanian city to be studied in detail. In the second and early first centuries bc Pompeii, whose heritage was Greek but which had been overrun by the Samnites in the fifth century, had already acquired a full complement of urban buildings, including theatres, an amphitheatre, bath houses, and market buildings. Two of the bath houses pre-date any in Rome by a century, while Rome had no stone theatre before Pompey’s in 55 bc (and even that had to be disguised as a temple) and no stone amphitheatre before the Colosseum (dedicated in ad 80). Even a small Campanian town such as Pompeii had achieved a sophisticated lifestyle long before the same was available in Rome.
By the first century bc Rome did, of course, have its great public buildings around the Forum, its temples, senate house, halls for the public assemblies, and state offices. There were market halls and great warehouses. However, it was not until the reign of Augustus that the city was transformed ‘from brick to marble’ From this time on imperial patronage was to be an essential component in architectural development. Only the emperors had the resources and political need to make a major impact on architecture while the stability of imperial rule stimulated the spread of building throughout the empire. Earlier traditions of town planning from the Greek world combined with this stimulus and the renewed prosperity of a settled empire to create the typical Roman town, with its grid plan, central forum, and surrounding public buildings.
One of the inspirations of this urban renewal came from an engineer, Vitruvius, responsible for a great basilica in the town of Fano on the Adriatic coast. In his treatise De Architectura, in which he laid down the requirements of good building (for his legacy see p. 675 below), Vitruvius puts ‘soundness’ and ‘utility’ alongside attractiveness. ‘Soundness’ was achieved by putting firm foundations in place and using building materials that were appropriate to the structure to be built. ‘Utility’ required spaces that were ‘properly orientated, appropriate and comfortable’ and that could be passed through without difficulty. Vitruvius set out a shopping list of buildings and urban accessories that any self-respecting Roman town ought to have. Among the essentials were paved streets and drains, an aqueduct to bring in fresh water (not least to supply the public and private baths), an amphitheatre and a theatre, a forum, temples, and basilicas for public business. City walls were to be built, in some cases for defence, but more often as a mark of civic pride, and the centre of the town might be graced with commemorative arches and statues of its prominent citizens and benefactors. Many Italian towns achieved all these buildings quite rapidly.
Large cities depended on efficient water supplies. The earliest Romans drank from the Tiber but by the late fourth century Bc alternative sources were needed. While the aqueduct was not a Roman invention (earlier examples have been found in Persia and seventh-century Assyria) it was a building form that Roman engineers made their own. The first aqueduct of Rome, the Aqua Appia, had been constructed as early as 312 BC. It was 17 kilometres long. As the city grew engineers began probing ever further into the Campagna, the countryside round Rome, for water. The Aqua Marcia of 144 BC, for instance, ran for 92 kilometres from the east of the city and is estimated to have brought in a million litres of water an hour. The problem facing the engineers was how to secure a regular flow from higher to lower ground. The Aqua Marcia had a fall of 260 metres, one metre for every 354 metres in length, and the route had to be planned to keep this fall constant. (Roman architects were also able to use a siphon system to take water down across a valley from one piece of high ground to another slightly lower.) The visible remains of the great aqueducts, the thousand arches which led Claudius’ aqueduct into Rome, the imposing Pont du Gard near Nimes, the two-tiered structure at Segovia (which still carries part of the city’s water supply), give the impression that aqueducts ran largely above ground. In fact whenever possible they were run underground to protect the purity of the water and its possible contamination by enemies. The Aqua Marcia only ran above ground for 11 of its 92 kilometres and the water which crossed the Pont du Gard then ran underground for the next 50 kilometres. Aqueducts needed constant supervision if water was not to leak out, and in imperial times a task force of slaves was kept by the emperors specifically to keep them in repair. (See A. Trevor Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply, 2nd edition, London, 2002.)
The typical aqueduct, if running overground, coursed along an arched foundation. The arch was not a Roman invention. It is used in the mudbrick buildings of the east. The Greeks preferred rectilinear designs and so shunned the arch but, by the fourth century, even they were prepared to use it for city gates. These gates are found in central Italy from the early third century bc onwards and the arch then becomes part of the Roman builders’ repertoire. The Romans understood that a stone arch can bear much greater stress than a stone lintel and so greater spans are possible. One particularly powerful manifestation of it is the triumphal arch, erected by emperors to commemorate their victories. The first of these arches dates from the reign of Augustus (with the earliest example actually to survive at Rimini in Italy erected in 27 bc). Tiberius erected a particularly elaborate arch with three openings and a mass of decoration, at Orange in southern France in ad 26, after he had suppressed a Gallic rebellion. In Rome the emperor Titus erected an arch (in concrete, faced with Pentelic marble) to celebrate his conquest of Jerusalem. Another elaborate example in Rome is the arch of the emperor Septimius Severus (built in ad 203). The form of the triumphal arch became a symbol of Roman imperialism which spread throughout the empire but which was adopted with particular enthusiasm in the eastern and north African provinces.
The transformation of cities such as Rome was helped by the development of a strengthened form of concrete, which used local volcanic ash (known now as pozzolana) mixed with lime as mortar. The combination was first used in the late republic but it took two generations of trial and error before the best kind of lime was isolated and the right mix was perfected. One of the qualities of volcanic ash, as compared to the sands used in earlier Etruscan and Roman concretes, for instance, was that it produced a mortar that would set under water and so could be used as the base for bridges and harbour works. To create a standing wall the mortar was mixed with stone. A typical method was to lay a course of stones boxed in with planks. The mortar would then be poured in and when it was dry a new layer of stones added and so on. The finished rough wall was then faced with patterned stone. In the larger buildings the content of stone fill would be lightened as the building rose.
The new concrete provided the possibility of a totally different approach to architecture, one in which the encapsulation of space, rather than just the construction of a structural mass, became possible. It was the emperors who alone had the resources to develop this possibility to the full in a succession of great public buildings that now began to fill Rome.
The concept of a dome may have been inspired by the tent canopies of Achaeme-nid Persia but there are early Roman examples in the bath complexes at Baia in the Bay of Naples that date from the first century bc. A more sophisticated approach can be seen in Rome in the Domus Aurea, the ‘Golden House, built by Nero as a palace for himself after the burning of Rome. The style was that of an opulent seaside villa of the type well known along the coast of Campania but here transported into the centre of the city. What was revolutionary about its design was one room, the central chamber of the east wing, where a dome was raised from an octagonal base. Radiating out from the central chamber were a series of vaulted rooms. The whole was lit by a circular opening in the dome and by windows placed high in the walls of the surrounding rooms. This was a truly revolutionary way of using space and light.
This initiative was developed in the palace the emperor Domitian built for himself at the end of the first century ad, the ruins of which still stand on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Like Nero, Domitian was seeking a setting in which to display his autocracy. The Domus Augustana was a grand building with two majestic fa9ades, one overlooking the Circus Maximus, the racetrack, the other the Forum. The site was an awkward one and vast foundations had to be laid before the building could rise on two different levels. Its grand public rooms, in particular the Aula Regia where the emperor displayed himself on ceremonial occasions, could not have been constructed without concrete. This vast room (possibly 30 metres across) was roofed in timber but the adjoining basilica had a concrete vault that spanned over 14 metres. The whole was an elaborate interplay of vaults, domes, and half-domes, still set, however, within a traditional rectangular exterior.
In Trajan’s reign the plunder of Dacia provided the opportunity for another massive building programme in Rome. Trajan decided to benefit the city directly with a huge complex including a forum and library as well as a market hall. In the forum and library, Trajan stuck to traditional forms and they were built on levelled ground at the foot of the Esquiline and Capitoline Hills. Trajan’s column, faced with the great scroll of the events of his Dacian campaigns that winds round it, was built to a height of 40 metres as a marker of how much the ground had been lowered. The market area had to be built behind, within the cuttings of the hillside, and this required considerable imagination and expertise. Trajan’s architect, an easterner, Apollodorus of Damascus, created a masterpiece of design that exploited the difficult site to create a complex that still exists on three different levels each with its terrace and entrance from the surrounding slopes. (Although traditionally seen as a commercial centre, even a shopping mall, in truth its exact function is not known.) Again this would have been impossible without concrete, but here it is used in the service of the community in a set of buildings which are elegant but which, unlike the Forum and its accompanying buildings below, have no pretensions to grandeur.
With Hadrian comes the culmination of these developments. Like Trajan, Hadrian was sensitive to the Roman past and when he built a temple to Trajan in Rome he followed traditional models. Likewise the Mausoleum he built for himself by the Tiber (now the Castel San Angelo) was modelled on that built by Augustus. With the Pantheon, the temple to all the gods, however, he exploited to the full the confidence with which Roman builders now used concrete. It was erected on the site of an earlier temple built by Augustus’ colleague, Agrippa, and Hadrian modestly preserved Agrippa’s name at the top of the columned faqade. The Pantheon appears simple in design, no more than a drum roofed with a huge dome, the world’s largest until modern times, over 43 metres in diameter. The problem was how to support the vast weight of this dome.
Fig. 10 The Pantheon. Roman engineers constructed a solid circular foundation some 15 ft deep and then superimposed a wall on it which rose in three sections with a diameter of 142 ft. Exactly half this distance up, they built a huge wooden frame and the concrete dome was put up layer by layer over it. By narrowing the width of the dome as it rose, the weight was kept manageable. Further weight was saved by carving out coffers, which may originally have been decorated with rosettes as was the case in other buildings of the period. For centuries this was the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. The proportions are so harmonious because the distance from the floor to the centre of the oculus, the ‘eye’ in the centre of the dome, is exactly the same as the building’s diameter. The interior contains, in fact, a perfect sphere.
It was done by lightening the type of stone used as the structure went higher and narrowing the masonry skin so that while 6 metres thick at the foundation it is only 150 centimetres thick around the opening at the top of the dome. Recesses carved inside the completed dome lightened the load still further. The sophistication of the builders was such that the semicircle of the dome can be continued as a full circle whose circumference touches the centre of the floor. As originally designed the portico would have been much higher, but the task of transporting 100-tonne columns, as each would have been, from Egypt to Rome seems to have defeated the builders and they had to settle for 50-tonne examples. (Unlike the Greeks with their columns made up of drums, the Romans preferred the monumentality of a single piece of marble.) The whole building (mercifully saved by transformation into a Christian church in the seventh century) stands today as the supreme achievement of Roman architecture.
Hadrian is also remembered for the complex of buildings which make up his villa at Tivoli (built between ad 118 and 134). It is the largest villa known from the Roman world and, like the English country house of the eighteenth century, set in landscaped surroundings. The whole is an extravaganza of the new tastes in architecture and the skills needed to realize them. Domes, vaults, and almost every form of curved surface are used in the succession of buildings, which are set alongside pools, fountains, or cascades of water. Some echo buildings Hadrian had seen in the east, a stoa from Athens, the temple to Aphrodite (the Roman Venus) at Cnidus, for instance, while along the galleries and colonnades were set copies of antique statues. The villa is a public display of the emperor as connoisseur. (See the extensive discussion in William MacDonald and John Pinto, Hadrians Villa and its Legacy, London and New Haven, 1995.)
Among Trajan’s many benefactions to Rome was a vast bath complex. There had been earlier baths in Rome (both Nero and Titus had built some for the city) but Trajan’s set a pattern that was to become copied through the empire. The centre of the baths was the frigidarium, a cold room, which now, through the use of concrete, could become vaulted and vast. From the frigidarium the bather would proceed to smaller rooms where the water was warm or hot (the tepidarium and the caldarium). There was much more to bathing than this. The Romans incorporated the concept of the Greek gymnasium into the bath complex so that, typically, there were palaestrae, exercise areas, on either side of the frigidarium and libraries, galleries, and even shops. The Roman could satisfy not only his or her physical requirements, but also his social, intellectual, and sexual needs (from the many prostitutes who frequented the baths). In the first century ad there was no prohibition on women bathing at the same time as men, although those women who particularly valued their reputation normally patronized separate establishments. There were, inevitably, scandals, and Hadrian eventually had to decree the segregation of the sexes. In the large city baths it now became the custom to institute separate bathing times for men and women, the men being allocated the hottest time of all, the afternoons.
The imperial baths built in Rome in the later empire are the most monumental of all. The baths of Caracalla (built ad 212-16) covered 2 hectares and were set in an enclosure of 20 hectares. They could accommodate 1,500 bathers, the water being provided by cisterns in the rear of the complex that could hold 18 million litres, enough to keep a constant flow of cold water into the frigidarium. (The warm and hot baths were refilled at intervals and 10 tonnes of wood a day was consumed in fifty furnaces to heat the water.) The baths of Diocletian (built ad 298-306: the short time-span an indication of the efficiency of the whole building operation) were even larger. Their great central hall was later converted by Michelangelo into the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli and survives today, its eight vast supporting pillars still faced in the original Egyptian marble. The central hall baths of Maxentius, begun in ad 307 and completed by Constantine, rose to a height of 35 metres above ground level. There was no better way to make the ordinary citizen of Rome feel he was part of a proud empire, and baths became part of Romanization throughout the provinces. In the west, where they were an innovation, great baths are found at Timgad and Leptis Magna in north
Fig. 11 The Baths of Caracalla, begun by this emperor but only completed in the 220s, show the grandeur of the third century imperial projects. Huge and lavishly decorated with marble and statuary, the Baths could hold 1,500 bathers at a time. In the central complex, the natatio was a large swimming pool from which one could progress to the central (cold) frigidarium and then to the circular (hot) caldarium. Glass panels added natural heat to that already provided by massive boilers. One either side of these central rooms were palaestrae, exercise grounds, and halls. The Farnese Bull (see p.670) dominated the centre of one of the palaestrae. The surrounding enclosure included a majestic entrance from the Aventine and a library. The baths were finally abandoned in the sixth century.
Fig. 12 This vast basilica (here in a cutaway reconstruction) was begun by Maxentius before his defeat in ad 312 by Constantine who completed it. Entrance from the Via Sacra in the Forum was up a wide set of steps graced by four massive porphyry columns. Once through these the visitor would have been overwhelmed by the vaults and rich marble floors. The seated statue of Constantine, whose remains survive in the Capitoline Museum, was placed in a niche at the northern end. The basilica’s vaults were brought down by an earthquake in ad 847.
Africa, at Trier, near the Rhine border, and at Aquae Sulis, the modern Bath, in Britain where the local hot springs fed the bathing pools.
Perhaps the Romans will not be remembered as much for the beauty of their architecture as for the confidence with which they handled their materials and the sheer monumentality of their creations. This had its legacy. When the empire became Christian the basilica became the most popular of the designs for churches, while Justinian’s great church of St Sophia in Constantinople has been seen by some as inspired by the Pantheon and the Baths of Maxentius. When the Venetian architect Piranesi created his prints of real or imagined Roman buildings in the late eighteenth century, he scandalized some by his insistence that Roman architecture was more inventive than Greek, but inspired others so that one finds the dome and the arch reappearing in early nineteenth-century architecture as far afield as Washington. Even into the twentieth century the Roman architectural legacy has persisted, in creations such as the war memorial at Thiepval, France, and the great booking hall of Pennsylvania Station, New York, which drew on the triumphal arch and the bath house respectively.
World History
