Rome: A History in Seven Sackings

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From The Wall Street Journal:

Rome is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. Three thousand years or so of history take us down beneath the modern streets, past Mussolini’s imperial city, on through the capital of Risorgimento Italy, past Baroque palazzos and churches, through the castles of medieval militias, and on to the Romes of Constantine, Trajan, Augustus, Caesar and their republican predecessors. Deepest of all is the archaic age, where mythology locates Romulus and Remus and their Trojan ancestor Aeneas, and archaeology finds clusters of wooden huts on hilltops around the boggy forum.

Notoriously the modern city preserves traces of nearly all these ancient Romes, often incongruously juxtaposed. An ATM pokes out of a wall right next to the columns of an ancient temple opposite a Baroque church. A trattoria shelters in the substructures of Pompey’s theater. Christian basilicas cannibalize the column capitals from pagan temples; gardens planted in the 16th century spread among the ruins of imperial palaces. The manhole covers in the streets read SPQR, a Latin abbreviation for “Senate and People of Rome,” echoing ancient coins. Freud used the city of Rome as a metaphor for the human mind, an accumulation of material from all ages still in some sense accessible if we just refocus our gaze.

Rome makes concrete our sense of a deeply layered past, but not one formed by gentle sedimentation. The city’s geological stratigraphy has been repeatedly convulsed, metamorphosed under spectacular pressures. It is an accumulation of urban wreckage, some put to new uses, the rest a sober reminder that no city can become eternal except through constant demolition and reconstruction.

In “Rome: A History in Seven Sackings,” Matthew Kneale, a British novelist whose works reveal a deep understanding of the tangled human life of cities, has had the good idea of writing the biography of Rome not as a study in longevity but as a tale of disaster. Disaster after disaster, in fact, as the city faced invasions of Gauls and Goths, Byzantines and Normans, Catholic and Protestant armies in the wars of religion, Napoleon and the Nazis, and somehow survived each trauma. The effect is rather like that of a biologist telling the story of life on earth in terms of mass extinctions. The sacks of Rome were nowhere near as traumatic. Before gunpowder it was not that easy for armies to do serious damage to cities built of stone and brick, but invaders could steal treasures, commit rape and murder, terrify residents and generally make them doubt the power of their gods or god.

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The cutting off of the aqueducts in the sixth century during the Gothic Wars meant that the carrying capacity of the city was dramatically reduced. For generations Romans lived in a largely abandoned city. Areas that had been densely populated became part of the disabitato, areas of vineyards and gardens within the ancient wall circuit. The loss of the aqueducts and changing mores, Mr. Kneale notes, also meant the end of Rome’s hundreds of public baths: “In Christian eyes water was for drinking, not bathing, while it was certainly not for pleasure bathing, which smacked of licentiousness.”

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Seven sackings is, as Mr. Kneale frankly admits, an arbitrary total. Arguably Rome has been sacked on many more occasions. His story is of constant external threats and repeated recoveries. An alternative narrative might have explored the violence that Romans did to their own city, and each other, over the millennia. That was a theme that would have appealed to the historians and poets of classical Rome who found in the story of Romulus’s killing of his brother Remus the archetype of multiple acts of civil violence. The republican general Sulla, when his lucrative command was threatened by political enemies, turned his army around and marched on the city. Coriolanus in myth had nearly done the same. Constantine seized the city from his rivals after a battle at the Milvian Bridge. A bitter rivalry between the papacy and the liberal state dominated the history of the city from Italy’s unification in 1871 until the 1930s. What Mussolini did to the medieval city to make space for his grandiose triumphal Road of the Imperial Forums was a different kind of civil sack.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal