Rome

Rome, by virtue of its name and historical traditions, was the center of the Roman world. By the time of Diocletian, Rome had long since ceased to be the main focal point of political and military power in the empire, but the Senate, “the better part of the human race” (Symmachus, Rel. VI.1), numbering some 600 members, including the richest landowning families of the western empire, retained high prestige. The senators’ public role was largely ceremonial. The old republican offices of quaestor, praetor, and suffect consul were now taken by wealthy men in the early stages of a public career, and were marked not by administrative or judicial duties but by the obligation to pay for shows and spectacles to entertain the Roman people and impress one another with their wealth and style. The practice of the late fourth and early fifth centuries is described by Olympiodorus:

Many of the Roman households received an income of 4000 pounds of gold per year from their properties, not including grain, wine and other produce which, if sold, would have amounted to one-third of the income in gold. The income of the households at Rome of the second class was 1000 or 1500 pounds of gold. When Probus, the son of Olybrius, celebrated his praetorship during the reign of the usurper John [423-5], he spent 1200 pounds of gold. Before the capture of Rome, Symmachus the orator, a senator of middling wealth, spent 2000 pounds when his son Symmachus celebrated his praetorship. Maximus, one of the wealthy men, spent 4000 pounds on his son’s praetorship. The praetors celebrated their festivals for seven days. (Olympiodorus fr. 41.2, trans. Blockley)

Many members of the Senate were prodigiously wealthy, deriving their riches from land holdings in Italy and the other western provinces. They built huge villas in and around the city. Olympiodorus wrote that the great houses of Rome in his day were as large as good-sized cities, each containing its own race course, fora, temples, fountains, and various bath houses (Olympiodorus fr. 41.1). A century later Theoderic commended the wealthy Symmachus for the magnificence and good taste of his suburban villa, which “created public works of a sort in your own private dwelling,” and on the strength of this commissioned him to supervise repair work on Pompey’s theater (Cassiodorus, Var. 4.51). Both passages imply the growing tendency in late antiquity for the wealthy to spend lavishly on their private properties.

Diocletian was aware of the continuing importance of the Senate, and rebuilt the Curia, its meeting place. The building still stands in the Roman forum in the form that it then took. However, the tetrarchs spent little time in the city except in November 303, when Diocletian, prematurely, arrived to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his accession to power. It is revealing that he left the city in haste, before the year was out, unable, according to Lactantius, to tolerate the free spirit of the Roman people (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 17.1-2). Similar antagonism is implicit in Ammianus’ account of Constantius’ visit in 357 (Ammianus 16.10). The great cities of the empire were the only places where emperors encountered a great mass of their ordinary subjects, and these meetings were fraught with tension and significance. The tenor of an imperial reign could be defined in such moments, and the despotic Diocletian chose to avoid a confrontation with a free-speaking plebs. Lactantius, however, does not mention another initiative of Diocletian in Rome which was equally representative of an emperor’s relations with the people. In 305, the year of their abdication, the tetrarchs completed the Thermae Diocletianae, a monstrous bathing complex, with almost double the capacity of the Baths of Caracalla, capable of holding 3,000 bathers at a time, dedicating the building “to their own Roman people” (ILS 646).

Diocletian himself constructed another major monument in the Forum to celebrate his vicennalia, an ensemble of five columns erected next to the temple of Concord. Four of these supported statues of the tetrarchs, and were grouped behind a central column with a statue of Jupiter. This presented the religious ideas of the tetrarchy at the center of the empire (see p. 63 and Plate 9.1). At the same time Diocletian also organized the celebration of the secular games, an event of major religious significance previously staged by the Severans in 204.

Ammianus called Rome the temple of the whole world (17.4), and implied that the Capitol remained the greatest pagan sanctuary of the empire (26.16.12), while Ausonius hailed it as the house of the gods (Ausonius XI.1). It was the symbolic center of the struggle between paganism and Christianity in the fourth century.9 Senators, like the rest of the population, were divided in their religious allegiances, but leading senators can be identified as the main champions of paganism up till the last years of the fourth century.

Between 300 and 450 only one would-be emperor resided in Rome, Maxen-tius, son of Maximianus, who claimed the title of Augustus between 306 and his defeat by Constantine in 312. He restored Hadrian’s temple of Venus and Roma, which had been destroyed by fire, and built the huge brick basilica, which stands at the east end of the forum and must have been designed as the setting for his public appearances as judge and ruler. The basilica was later dedicated by the Senate to Constantine, and the famous colossal head of Constantine, the best known of his portraits (Plate 2.2), was found there, implying that the building continued to serve a similar function after Maxentius’ death (Aur. Victor, Caes. 40.26). As imperial visits to Rome became less frequent, the building may have been taken over as a ceremonial meeting hall and courtroom by the city prefect.10 The best comparison for this building is the equally grandiose basilica, perfectly intact today, which was constructed by Constantine at the northern Gallic capital of Trier (see p. 386 and Plate 10.5).

Constantine’s most conspicuous construction in Rome was the famous arch (see pp. 168-70, Plate 5.1). More significant in the long term were his church

Plate 9.1 Detail from Arch of Constantine, showing Constantine delivering a speech from the rostra in the forum, addressing magistrates and military officers (© funkyfood London - Paul Williams/Alamy)

Foundations. Work began on St John Lateran in the weeks following the victory of the Milvian bridge in autumn 312. The basilica was built on the demolished foundations of the barracks that had been occupied by Maxentius’ cavalry bodyguard. Constantine’s mother Helena is associated with another major basilica, the church now called S. Croce in Gerusalemme, which was attached to a palace where she now resided.11

The best known of the fourth-century Roman churches, the forerunner of the great sixteenth-century basilica on the Vatican hill, dedicated to St Peter, was not built by Constantine, but by one of his successors, probably Constans between AD 340 and 350. The site was directly superimposed on a cemetery of pagan and Christian graves, one of which was identified as a martyrion of St Peter and already served as a shrine for Christian worshippers. This was integrated into the new five-aisled building at the point where the transept and the apse intersected. The work of construction had been extremely laborious, and involved building massive substructures which effectively reversed the direction of the hill slope in order to achieve the correct orientation for the church.12 The Church of the Lateran appears to have been the seat of the bishop of Rome, but it was the tomb and basilica of St Peter, combined with its location in the greatest city of the Mediterranean, that conveyed special authority on the leaders of the Roman Church. The bishop of Rome had no lasting rivals in the western empire, and was recognized as the senior patriarch by the Council of Constantinople in 381. After the fall of the last western emperor in 476 the Pope also became effectively the senior secular authority in the western Roman Empire.

Constantius II paid a famous visit in 357, which has been immortalized in some of the best known paragraphs of Ammianus’ history, written in Rome in the 390s.

When he came to the Forum of Trajan, a creation which in my view has no like under the cope of heaven and which even the gods themselves must agree to admire, Constantius stood transfixed with astonishment, surveying the gigantic fabric around him; its grandeur defies description and can never again be approached by mortal men. So he abandoned all hope of attempting anything like it, and declared that he would and could imitate simply Trajan’s horse, which stands in the middle of the court with the emperor on its back. Prince Hormis-das. . . remarked with oriental subtlety: “First, majesty, you must have a similar stable built, if you can. The horse you propose to fashion should have as much space to range in as this one which we can see.” (Ammianus 16.10, trans. Hamilton)

In the event Constantius marked his visit by bringing to Rome an obelisk, which had been intended for the city by his father Constantine. This was one of several that the city acquired during late antiquity (Ammianus 17.4; ILS 736).13

The city, and especially the forum, continued to be a focus for the public commemoration of emperors and senators. Senatorial wealth was used to fund public entertainments in the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, which was restored by Theodosius I. However, secular public building on a grand scale virtually ceased after the fourth century. The material damage inflicted by Alaric’s Goths in 410 was repaired, but the psychological blow had a lasting effect. We should not, however, underestimate the amount of building that must have continued in the ifth-century city. The Notitia Urbis catalogues 462 living quarters, 46,602 apartment buildings, 254 bakeries, 19 aqueducts, 11 major thermae, and 856 small bath houses. The effort required to service Rome’s enormous population still dwarfed that of any other city of the empire. Looking back in the 530s, Cassiodorus reflected precisely on these conditions, which had changed by his own day:

It is evident how great was the population of the city of Rome, seeing that it was fed with supplies furnished even by far off regions, and that this imported abundance was reserved for it, while the surrounding provinces sufficed to feed only the resident strangers. For how could a people that ruled the world be small in number? For the great extent of the walls bears witness to the throngs of citizens, as do the swollen capacity of the places of entertainment, the wonderful size of the baths, and that great number of water mills which was clearly provided especially for the food supply. (Cassiodorus, Var. 11.39, trans. Barnish)

The pattern of public construction changed drastically in the fifth and sixth centuries. Virtually all new buildings were now churches, oratories, and, especially in the sixth century, monastic foundations. Fourth-century Rome contained relatively few Christian foundations. Apart from the Constantinian basilicas and the huge extra-mural church of Saint Paul on the road to Ostia, the churches were inconspicuous and made no attempt to rival pagan religious architecture. The pattern then changed. Only two major basilicas, including the present church of S. Maria Maggiore, were built in the fifth, and only one, the Church of the Holy Apostles, in the mid-sixth century, probably dedicated by Justinian’s general Narses after the final defeat of the Ostrogoths in the 550s. On the other hand, parish churches during this period spread to all parts of the city and were clearly marked by external porticos and courtyards. They thus acquired the characteristic appearance of public buildings, but their distribution through the wards of the city represents a change in their social function. They served Rome’s neighborhoods, as the magnetic power of the civic center began to fade.

Rome suffered another critical blow when it was attacked and plundered by the Vandals under Gaiseric in 455. The city enjoyed a revival in political terms during the third quarter of the fifth century, as it usurped the place of Ravenna as the main imperial residence in the West and became the focus of Ricimer’s attempts to restore a stable western empire,14 and it benefited notably from the stability created by the Ostrogoth Theoderic’s long reign from 483 to 526. Famously he visited the city in person in 500 in a manner appropriate to an emperor:

In celebration of his tricennalia he entered the palace in a triumphal procession among the people, staging circus games for the Romans. He made an annual grant to the Roman people and the poor of 120,000 modii of grain, and gave orders that each year two hundred pounds of gold should be taken from the wine tax and spent on restoring the palace or reconstructing the city walls. (Anon. Val.

2, 67)

The situation faced by Theoderic also illustrates the transformation that had overtaken the city. Much of the interior of the city was no longer inhabited, as Rome’s population began to decrease. A conservative estimate puts the number of inhabitants in the fourth century at over 500,000. By the mid-sixth century the figure was not more than a tenth of this. Procopius indicates that the inhabitants and defenders were unable to man the nineteen-kilometer wall circuit during the long sieges of Rome in 537-8 and 546. Warfare and above all the plague must have hit the city hard in the 530s and 540s, but the root of Rome’s decline lay in the acute diminution of its food supply, the life support system on which it had depended for over five hundred years. The city had always been supplied by a diversity of sources in Italy and overseas. Some of this was distributed without charge to free urban householders, but most was put on the market for sale at controlled prices. As in all ancient cities there was immense distress if the grain supply was interrupted, and shortages were greeted by violent rioting. The main staple, grain, was imported from Egypt, Africa, and Sicily. After the foundation of Constantinople Egyptian grain was diverted to the eastern capital, leaving Rome dependent on western sources. A critical moment came in 439 when the Vandals seized Carthage, the point of export for most of the African grain, and used their sea power to menace shipping out of Sicily. The vital change was not a direct embargo on exports from Carthage. There is no evidence that the Vandals, who set up a highly effective state in their new African environment, wished to curtail normal economic activity, but they were able to use their control of Carthage and their maritime strength as powerful bargaining weapons in dealing with the western empire. Moreover they cut off the African tax revenues, in kind as well as cash, to Rome. The loss of the African annona, combined with growing insecurity in the Mediterranean, will have driven up prices as it reduced Rome’s supply. The situation was naturally compounded with the final fall of the western empire in 476. The ability of the city of Rome to feed its enormous population in earlier centuries had depended directly on its role as an imperial city which could impose tax demands on its subjects. Now it had to pay for what it consumed. The population accordingly shrunk to a level much closer to that of other larger cities of the later empire.15