Digging up early Rome
The many stories of Romulus and the other founders tell us a good deal about how the Romans saw their city, their values and their failings. They show too how Roman scholars debated the past and studied their history. But they tell us nothing, or at most very little indeed, about what they claim to: that is, what earliest Rome was like, the processes by which it became an urban community and when. One fact is obvious. Rome was already a very old city when Cicero was consul in 63 BCE. But, if there is no surviving literature from the founding period and we cannot rely on the legends, how can we access any information about the origins of Rome? Is there any way of throwing light on the early years of the little town by the Tiber that grew into a world empire?
However hard we try, it is impossible to construct a coherent narrative that could replace the legends of Romulus or Aeneas. It is also very hard, despite many confident assertions to the contrary, to pin precise dates onto the earliest phases of Roman history. But we can begin to get a much better idea of the general context in which the city developed and enjoy a few surprisingly vivid (and some even more tantalisingly elusive) glimpses into that world.
One way of doing this is by turning away from the foundation stories and seeking out clues lurking in the Latin language or in later Roman institutions that might point back to earliest Rome. The key here is what is often simply, and wrongly, termed the ‘conservatism’ of Roman culture. Rome was no more conservative than nineteenth-century Britain. In both places, radical innovation thrived in dialogue with all kinds of ostensibly conservative traditions and rhetoric. Yet Roman culture was marked by a reluctance ever entirely to discard its past practices, tending instead to preserve all kinds of ‘fossils’ – in religious rituals or politics, or whatever – even when their original significance had been lost. As one modern writer has nicely put it, the Romans were rather like people who acquire all kinds of brand-new kitchen equipment but can’t ever bear to throw away their old gadgets, which continue to clutter up the place even though they are never used. Scholars, both modern and ancient, have often suspected that some of these fossils, or old gadgets, may be important evidence for the conditions of earliest Rome.
One favourite example is a ritual that took place in the city in December each year, known as the Septimontium (‘Seven hills’). What happened at this celebration is not at all clear, but one learned Roman noted that ‘Septimontium’ was the name of Rome before it became ‘Rome’, and another gave a list of the ‘hills’ (montes) involved in the festival: Palatium, Velia, Fagutal, Subura, Cermalus, Oppius, Caelius and Cispius (Map 2). The fact that there are eight names suggests that something has got confused somewhere along the line. But more to the point, the oddity of this list (Palatium and Cermalus are both parts of the hill generally known as the Palatine), combined with the idea that ‘Septimontium’ was the predecessor of ‘Rome’, has raised the possibility that these names might reflect the sites of separate villages that preceded the fully fledged town. And the absence of a couple of obvious hills from the list, Quirinal and Viminal, has tempted some historians to go even further. Roman writers regularly referred to both of those hills as colles rather than the more usual Latin montes (the meaning of the two words is more or less identical). Does that distinction point to two separate linguistic communities somewhere in Rome’s early history? Could we possibly be dealing – to press the argument even further – with some version of the two groups reflected in the story of Romulus, the Sabines associated with the colles, the Romans with the montes?
Just possibly we could. There is little doubt that the Septimontium is related in some way to Rome’s distant past. But in exactly what way, and quite how distant, is very hard to know. The arguments are no firmer than I have made them seem, probably even less so. Why, after all, should we trust that learned Roman’s claim that Septimontium was the early name of the city? It was just as likely a desperate guess, to explain an archaic ceremony that baffled him almost as much as it does us. And the insistence on two communities seems suspiciously driven by a desire to rescue at least some part of the legend of Romulus for ‘history’.
Much more tangible is the evidence of archaeology. Dig down deep in the city of Rome, below the visible ancient monuments, and a few traces of a much earlier, primitive settlement, or settlements, remain. Beneath the Forum itself lie the remains of an early cemetery, which caused tremendous excitement when they were first unearthed, at the start of the twentieth century. Some of the dead had been cremated, their ashes placed in simple urns alongside jugs and vases which originally contained food and drink (one man had been given little quantities of fish, mutton and pork – and possibly some porridge). Others were buried, sometimes in simple oak coffins made by splitting a trunk and hollowing it out. One girl, about two years old, had been put in her grave wearing a beaded dress and an ivory bracelet. Similar finds have been made in other places all over the ancient city. Far below one of the later grand houses on the Palatine Hill, for example, lay the ashes of a young man, interred with a miniature spear, maybe a symbol of how he had spent his life.
The dead and buried are often much more prominent than the living in the archaeological record. But cemeteries imply the existence of a community, and traces of that are presumably to be found in the groups of huts whose faint outlines have been detected under various parts of the later city, including on the Palatine. We have little idea of their character (beyond their construction in wood, clay and thatch), still less of the lifestyle they supported. But we can fill in some of the gaps if we look just outside Rome. One of the best preserved, and most carefully excavated, of these early structures was found at Fidenae, a few miles north of the city, in the 1980s. It is a rectangular building, some 6 by 5 metres, made of wood (oak and elm) and rammed earth – so-called pisé de terre construction, still in use up to the present day – with a rough and ready portico around it, formed by the overhanging roof. Inside was a central hearth, some large pottery storage jars (plus a smaller one, which seems to have been a container for potting clay) and traces of some fairly predictable foodstuffs (cereals and beans) and domestic animals (sheep, goats, cows and pigs). The most surprising discovery amid the debris was the remains of a cat, which died (perhaps it was tethered) in a savage fire that eventually destroyed the building. Its claim to fame now is as the earliest known domestic cat in Italy.
There are vivid glimpses of human and other life here, from the little girl laid out in her grave in her best dress to the poor ‘mouser’ whom no one let off his leash when the fire blazed. The question is what those glimpses add up to. The archaeological remains certainly demonstrate that there is a long and rich prehistory behind the ancient Rome we see, but quite how long is another matter.
Part of the problem is the conditions of excavation in the city itself. The site of Rome has been so intensively built on for centuries that we find these traces of early occupation only in spots that happen not to have been disturbed. The foundations dug in the first and second centuries CE for the vast marble temples in the Forum obliterated much of what then lay beneath the surface; the cellars of Renaissance palazzi cut through even more in other parts of Rome. So we have only tiny snapshots, never the big picture. This is archaeology at its most difficult, and – although new fragments of evidence emerge all the time – its interpretation, and reinterpretation, is almost always contested and often controversial. For example, there is an ongoing debate about whether the small pieces of wattle and daub found in excavations in the Forum in the mid twentieth century indicate that there was an early hut settlement there too – or whether they were inadvertently introduced as part of the rubble used a few centuries later to provide a new raised surface for the area. It has to be said that, though fine for a cemetery, this would have been a rather damp and marshy place for a village.
12. A typical cremation urn from the early cemeteries of Rome and the surrounding area. In the form of a simple hut, these houses for the dead are one of the best guides we have to the appearance of the accommodation for the living.
Precise dating is even more contentious; hence my intentionally vague use of the word ‘early’ over the last few pages. It cannot be stressed enough that there is no certain independent date for any of the archaeological material from earliest Rome or the area round about, and that arguments still rage about the age of almost every major find. It has taken decades of work over the past century or so – using such diagnostics as wheel-made pottery (assumed to be later than handmade), the occasional presence in graves of Greek ceramics (whose dating is better, but still not perfectly, understood) and careful comparison from site to site – to produce a rough chronological scheme covering the period from around 1000 to 600 BCE.
On that basis, the earliest burials in the Forum would be around 1000 BCE, the huts on the Palatine around 750–700 BCE (excitingly close to 753 BCE, as many have observed). But even these dates are far from certain. Recent scientific methods – including ‘radiocarbon dating’, which calculates the age of any organic material by measuring the residual amount of its radioactive carbon isotope – have suggested that they are all too ‘young’, by as much as a hundred years. The hut at Fidenae, for example, was dated around the middle of the eighth century BCE according to traditional archaeological criteria, but that is pushed back towards the end of the ninth century BCE if we follow the radiocarbon. Currently, dates are in flux, even more than usual; if anything, Rome appears to be getting older.
What is certain is that by the sixth century BCE Rome was an urban community, with a centre and some public buildings. Before that, for the earliest phases, we have enough scattered finds from what is known as the Middle Bronze Age (between about 1700 and 1300 BCE) to suggest that some people were then living on the site, rather than just ‘passing through’. Over the period in between, we can be fairly confident that larger villages grew up, probably (to judge from what ends up in the graves) with an increasingly wealthy group of elite families; and that at some point these coalesced into the single community whose urban character was clear by the sixth century BCE. We cannot know for sure when the inhabitants of those separate settlements first thought of themselves as a single town. And we have absolutely no idea when they first thought of, and referred to, that town as Rome.
Archaeology is not, however, just about dates and origins. The material dug up in the city, the area around it and even further afield has important things to tell us about the character of Rome’s early settlement. First, it had extensive contacts with the outside world. I have already mentioned in passing the ivory bracelet of the little girl in the cemetery and the Greek pottery (made in Corinth or Athens) that turned up in Roman excavations. There are also signs of links with the north, in the form of a few jewels and decorations in imported amber; there is no clue of how these reached central Italy, but they certainly point to contact, direct or indirect, with the Baltic. Early Rome, from almost as far back as we can see it, was well connected, as Cicero hinted when he stressed its strategic location.
Second, there were similarities, and some important differences, between Rome and its neighbours. The Italian peninsula between about 1000 and 600 BCE was extremely mixed. There were many different independent peoples, with many different cultural traditions, origins and languages. The best documented are the Greek settlements in the south, towns such as Cumae, Tarentum and Naples (Neapolis), founded from the eighth century BCE on by immigrants from some of the major cities in Greece – conventionally known as ‘colonies’ but not ‘colonial’ in the modern sense of the word. To all intents and purposes, much of the southern part of the peninsula, and Sicily, was part of the Greek world, with a literate and artistic tradition linked to match. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest specimens of Greek writing to survive, maybe the very earliest, have actually been discovered there. It is much harder to reconstruct the history of any of the other inhabitants of the peninsula: from the Etruscans to the north, through the Latins and Sabines on Rome’s doorstep to the south, to the Oscans, who formed the original population of Pompeii, and Samnites beyond them. None of their literature, if they had any, has survived, and for evidence of them we depend entirely on archaeology, on texts inscribed on stone and bronze – sometimes comprehensible, sometimes not – and on Roman accounts written much later, often tinged with Roman supremacy; hence the standard image of the Samnites as tough, barbaric, non-urbanised and dangerously primitive.
What archaeological finds do show, however, is that Rome in its early days was very ordinary indeed. The development, from scattered settlements into an urban community, that we can just about detect in Rome seems to have happened at roughly the same period throughout the neighbouring region to its south. And the material remains in the cemeteries, local pottery and bronze brooches, as well as more exotic imports, are fairly consistent there too. If anything, what has been discovered in Rome is less impressive and less suggestive of wealth than discoveries elsewhere. Nothing has emerged from the city to compare with, for example, the finds from some extraordinary tombs in nearby Praeneste – though that might just be bad luck or, as some archaeologists have suspected, a case of some of the best finds from the nineteenth-century excavations in Rome having been stolen and directed straight to the antiquities market. One of the questions we shall have to address over the next couple of chapters is: when did Rome cease to be ordinary?