ROME (̔Ρώμη, G4873). In the second millennium b.c. there was a time of “folk-wandering.” The Indo-European tribes who were to form the ethnic pattern of Europe until modern times were on the move, and a strong drift in the tribal movement was toward the warmer lands of the Mediterranean basin. The Iberian, Italian, and Greek peninsulas were infiltrated in successive waves, and the language map of Italy reveals something of the process of occupation. It would appear that one tribal group moved down the W coast, left a group of its nationals around the mouth of the Tiber, and proceeded to found settlements in Sicily. Linguistic correspondences between Latin and Sicilian dialects prompt this conjecture.
Tribes speaking a distinct but allied dialect, either following the same invasion routes or crossing the Adriatic, enfolded the enclave by the Tiber mouth. These were the Umbrianand Oscan-speaking peoples. In the middle of Italy lay the cities of an alien race from Asia Minor, the Etruscans, whose name survives in modern Tuscany. These non-Europeans, still imperfectly known to history, had a higher culture than the incoming nomads, and during the first half of the first millennium b.c. they held an empire which extended to the northern Lombardy plains. They dominated Rome itself in its early years. Add the Gr. settlements all around the coast of the southern half of the land mass, and the picture of the Italian peninsula about the 8th and 7th centuries, the traditional period of Rome’s first appearance, begins to emerge. It was an enclave of Lat.-speaking tribesmen around the lower Tiber valley, a dominant Etruscan empire in the Upper Tiber and Arno valleys and in the N. Indo-European tribesmen established throughout the mountain spine of the long peninsula, and in the Campanian plain and Gr. cities in an irregular chain around the southern coastline from Cumae to Tarentum.
Alien occupation of the arc of hill country which fenced off the area of the Tiber mouth, the effective barrier of Etruscan occupation to the N, and the Oscan possession of Campania to the S, imposed a certain unity on the Lat.-speaking agriculturalists who held the narrow enclave by the river. Their scattered groups cohered into various leagues and communities. There was also the need for common defense against the mountaineers, those traditional raiders of adjacent lowlands in all historical contexts. It was the fashion to build stockaded retreats, preferably on an outcrop of rock like the Acropolis of Athens or some similar eminence to which the plainsmen could retreat with flocks and families, while a fighting task force dealt with the raiding hillmen.
In such fashion Rome came into existence. The Palatine hill was prob. the first “acropolis” of the shepherds and peasants of the fertile plain. Where the Tiber pursues its lower westward course to the sea, the river valley forms a deep trough, averaging a m. in width, and cuts into the soft volcanic tufa which at this point floors the river basin, the same geological material which made it so easy to cut the hundreds of m. of catacomb galleries which run beneath the city. The edges of this wide depression were eroded in prehistoric times by tributary waterways to shape the famous group of hills on which Rome stood. They were the Capitol, the Palatine, the Aventine, the Caelian, the Oppian, the Esquiline, the Viminal, and the Quirinal. The Vatican might be added, making nine, rather than the traditional seven, but some of them were no more than flat-topped spurs.
In modern Rome it is difficult to distinguish the group. Twenty-seven centuries of continuous human occupation have filled valley bottoms, cut away edge, escarpment, and eminence, and leveled down what once must have been a striking group of strongholds, each the fort and stockaded retreat of some family group of the peasant community which occupied the adjacent territory.
Through this irregular terrain the Tiber makes an “S” curve, shallows, and divides to form an island. At this point is found the only practicable fording place between the river mouth and the upper reaches of its waterway. Thus it was that geography played its eternal role in history, because, as the population of Italy matured and grew, the occupants of the hills by the ford found themselves in natural control of the trade and communications between the higher civilizations of the Etruscans to the N of them, and the Greek cities to the S. Another road, perhaps a “salt route,” ran from the sea up the valley to serve the highland tribes.
Cities set on a crossroads of trade are inevitably cast for a role of greatness. They attract immigration and form strong outward-looking communities with some interest in a larger world. Archeological evidence, the sole source of the knowledge of primitive Rome, suggests that the hill forts by the Tiber coalesced to form a federation by the 6th cent. b.c. Burials from the Capitoline and Palatine hills on the edge of the marshy valley bottom which was to be the Forum cease about this time, and the Cloaca Maxima, the Great Sewer, first of the vast engineering works which was to be a major Rom. contribution to the world, seems to have been started about the same time to drain the now common territory of the united community.
It would therefore appear that Rome found her name and unity in the half legendary period of her kings, whose rule, encrusted though it became with Rom. folklore, is established fact. The famous foundation legends, such as the tales of Aeneas coming from far Troy to father a new race, and of Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, are inventions on the model of Gr. foundation myths, perhaps actually the inventions of canny Greeks of the S Italian Gr. cities that marked the rising power on the Tiber.
The later kings were certainly Etruscans, and Tarquin is an Etruscan name. The story of “false Sextus” and “Tarquin the Proud,” and their expulsion from Rome, with Horatius Cocles holding the bridge against their counterattack, are parts of a saga of the Lat. city’s struggle for liberation from alien rule. There is fact in the stories; the battle for Lat. independence was an experience which hardened and consolidated the young city, and left a horror of royal rule so strong that Julius Caesar was forced at the height of his power to refuse the title of king. Fragments of the Servian Wall reveal that Rome at this time was a fortified city, able to close its gates against the stranger and resist alien domination.
The traditional date for the founding of the Republic is 510 b.c., and at that point in time the tremendous story of Rome’s move to world empire began. Professor A. J. Toynbee, in his famous Study of History (1. 271-355), develops the thesis of “Challenge and Response.” All human progress, the historian avers, is the result of a successful reaction to some confrontation with difficulty, danger, or hardship. The story of Rome’s expansion provides a striking illustration. The population which now filled the hills and valley floors was a composite community, gravely divided, as the old stories of patricians and plebeians indicate, over questions of status and privilege. She was also an upstart among Italy’s peoples, holding coveted advantages, and still hemmed in by the powerful empire of the Etruscans to the N, whose powerful stronghold, Veii, was only twelve m. distant, by the more remote but rich Gr. colonies to the S, and by the tough Oscan and Umbrian tribes of the hinterland and central Italy. Perhaps it was the military menace from without which imposed unity within and prompted that resourcefulness which traditionally, in early Rome, solved political problems without bloodshed. It is part of the wonder of Rom. history that, until the onset of the intractable constitutional problems of the two centuries b.c. which finally brought the Republic to ruin, Rome resolved the vast tensions of her class struggle by debate, wise compromise, and a legal inventiveness which laid the foundations for another tremendous contribution of Rome to human history—Rom. law. By the middle of the 4th cent. b.c. the Republic had solved the problems of internal schism, economic, ethnic, or whatever tension it was which divided “the orders,” and was reacting to that long quest for a stable frontier, which took her first to the Alps and the sourrounding seas and finally to the Tyne, the Euphrates, and the R ed Sea.
By this time, too, Rome was large and populous. The valleys and levels between the ancient hills afforded a natural road-building pattern which remained recognizable through all the history of Rome, even to the present day, vast though the accumulation of human debris is on the site. The story of building, rebuilding, destruction, and reconstruction is one which, on a site so securely occupied, archeology will never have the opportunity fully to investigate. When the city began to build her brief stretch of underground railway a generation ago, construction proceeded at a snail’s pace as the tunnelers passed through the rubble and ruin of centuries of Republican Rome.
The adjective “Republican” must be used with some reserve. Theoretically, a species of democracy and popular voting existed, and there was wide privilege of office. In practice, however, the ancient families, not all of whom the Romans called “patrician,” dominated the Senate, and provided the sort of leadership which Britain knew in the days of her ruling aristocracy. It was, in fact, an oligarchy of blood, wealth, and experience which functioned well, and guided Rome through two vital centuries. It is prob. true to say that the common people had in practice no great power or influence, but their sovereignty was legally recognized. To rest on the letter of the law was a Rom. instinct which by-passed and modified much social stress.
Those two vital centuries saw the dynamic Republic break the encirclement of the hill tribes, reduce the Etruscans to impotence, dominate Southern Italy with its Gr. cities and tribal hinterland, and become a world power. Egypt, under the Ptolemies of Alexandria, signed a treaty with Rome in 273 b.c., and it was not long after this that Rome discovered that the central Mediterranean itself was too small for one power based in Italy, and another, of alien breed, based in Africa across the narrow waist of the Inland Sea, esp. since Sicily lay as a bridgehead of contention between the two. The Carthaginian wars which filled half a cent., and left Rome established in Spain, southern Gaul, and Africa, and in confrontation with the Hel. monarchies of the Eastern Mediterranean, an encounter which, little by little, with the decline of Gr. power, took Rome to the destiny of Middle Eastern empire.
As empire in the geographical sense of that word grew, so the city by the Tiber expanded. A city is a magnet, and draws in a varied population. The second clash with Carthage had seen Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, and the peninsula did not really recover from the burning and devastation of that decade of disaster. The small peasantry suffered, and with the simultaneous flowing into Rome of tribute and loot from abroad, as history moved on through the 2nd cent. b.c., a change came over the land utilization of Italy. The rich landholders bought out the independent farmers, who had once been the backbone of the land, and the dole-fed urban mob, the tool and weapon of the demagogue through the cent. of constitutional strife and city disorder which destroyed Republican Rome, was daily swollen by new accretions from the countryside. Add to these the drifters who always congregate where wealth, vice, opportunity, and entertainment are plentiful, and the pattern of Rome’s urban growth may be guessed from the analogy of many a modern city.
As early as the 3rd cent. there is evidence of the great insulae, the “islands,” or huge tenement houses, which were a feature of later Rome, and suggest the overcrowding, the squalor, and the slums which were creeping around and amid the mansions of senator, aristocrat, and “knight,” the term applied to the new class of business men and tax farmers, the hated publicani, whose exploitation of the provinces was another factor in the decay of Republican Rome.
Amid squalor there was also magnificence, and it is possible from the records to piece together the story of varied building activity. At the end of the 2nd cent. b.c., when Rome was penetrating the Hel. lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, there was a tremendous influx of wealth and capital from the newly constituted provinces, and the opportunities for exploitation their government afforded the new ruling class. Much of this new wealth found expression in architecture. Pompey, the great soldier who organized the eastern provinces into ordered and coherent form in the sixties of the 1st cent. b.c., also did much to adorn and beautify Rome.
Augustus, the first of the emperors, whose leadership and diplomatic genius gave peace to Rome after the ordeal of her two civil wars and cent. of strife, also gave attention to the restoration of the damaged city and to its further adornment. In an inscr. discovered on the wall of a temple built in his honor at Ancyra, Augustus boasts that he “found Rome built of brick, and left it built of marble.” Augustus also made a bold and far-sighted attempt to give life again to Rome’s old religion, and to establish above all the worship of Apollo, whose youthful godhead was a symbol to him of the restoration he sought for the sorely damaged state. The architectural consequence was a great upsurge in temple building, and most notably a magnificent library and shrine dedicated to the ruler’s favorite god, a building of which remnants still stand.
Augustus thus set the fashion for the emperors who came after him, and it is, in fact, from the early centuries of the Christian era that most of Rome’s surviving ruins date, the great baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, for example, and those of Constantine, columns and triumphal arches, and the most striking of all the city’s surviving memorials, the Flavian Amphitheater, still called by its medieval name of Colosseum.
A vivid picture of life in Rome at the end of the 1st cent. is found in the third satire of the embittered poet Juvenal, a mordant description imitated for Paris by Boileau, and for London by Samuel Johnson. Juvenal knew Rome from the slum pavement, from the viewpoint of the poor and the underprivileged, and he wrote savagely of the poverty and the inhumanity of the great metropolis with the cruel inequalities between the absurdly rich and the shockingly poor.
The population prob. passed the million mark about this time, and the city was as cosmopolitan as New York and London. “The Syrian Orontes is now a tributary of the Tiber,” shouted Juvenal in the satire quoted, and in his list of the pains and misfortunes of his small world he included the foreign rabble with the perils of fire, traffic, assault and battery, and the collapse of jerry-built slum hovels.
Paul found a Christian church already active in Rome when he arrived under escort in March, a.d. 59. Perhaps Claudius’ expulsion of the Jews in a.d. 49 (see Nazareth Decree) marked some of the tensions in the ghetto associated with the first Christian intrusion into the synagogue. It is a fair guess that the Christian Gospel was preached there first in the latter half of the fifth decade of the cent. The strength of the Christian population may be calculated from the burials in the catacombs. Reliable calculations suggest that the vast tangle of the catacombs contains up to 600 m. of galleries. The lowest estimate of the graves they contain is 1,750,000; an admissable probability is something like 4,000,000. This is obviously a question which could be settled quite conclusively. At any rate, some ten generations of Christians are buried in the catacombs, so that, on the second figure, there was a Christian population in and about Rome of 400,000 for one generation. On the smaller computation the number would be 175,000.
Such averaging, of course, is not good statistical method, for the number of Christians was smaller in the earlier, and larger in the later generations of the period concerned. If the figure of 175,000 is taken as representing a middle point in that period, perhaps about the middle of the 3rd cent. a.d., those who remember Gibbon’s estimate of the Christian population of Rome will immediately mark a huge discrepancy.
Gibbon’s guess, recorded in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was that the Christians at the end of the 3rd cent. numbered something like one-twentieth of the population of Rome. That population is reliably estimated at something like one million. The most conservative interpretation of the catacomb burial figures would, therefore, suggest that not one-twentieth but one-fifth of Rome’s people in the middle Empire were Christians and it is possible that the proportion was at times much greater. To quote in conclusion the writer’s Cities of the New Testament (p. 87):
“Rome, like Babylon, became an image of carnal, organized paganism. In the lurid poetry of the document of protest which closes the canon of the New Testament, empire and city are mingled as symbols of sin. Chapters 17 and 18 of the Apocalypse look grimly forward to just such a fate for Rome as Rome had wreaked on Jerusalem, on Corinth, on Carthage, and many another city of her foes, just such a fate as Rome did in fact suffer under the fire and sword of Alaric the Goth. The former oracle, passionate in its imagery, pictures Rome sitting like a woman of sin on her famous seven hills, polluting the world with her vice. The second of the two chapters, cast in the form of a Hebrew ‘taunt-song,’ and imitating Ezekiel’s chapter on Tyre, pictures the galleys loading cargo for Rome in some eastern port. There was ‘merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and of fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, vessels of ivory, and precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, cinnamon, and frankincense, beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and the souls of men.’
“The climax is shocking, as the writer pictures Ostia, the Tiber port of Rome, in the stark ruin which, indeed, it may be seen today, its great warehouses empty shells revealed by the archeologist’s spade, its streets empty, and its courtyards desolate. Amid all the voices of praise from the first century one alone cried protest against Rome’s domination of the souls of men. That voice was a Christian voice, and history took heed of it.”
Bibliography W. W. Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero (1908); W. E. Heitland, The Roman Republic, 3 vols. (1909); T. Rice Holmes, The Roman Republic (1909); CAH, VIIIX (1924-1939); D. R. Mac Iver, Italy Before the Romans (1928); J. Scullard, A History of the Roman World, 753-146 b.c. (1939); F. B. Marsh, A History of the Roman World, 146-30 b.c. (1939); R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939); R. W. Moore, The Roman Commonwealth (1942); T. Frank, Rome and Italy of the Republic ([1933] Pageant Books, 1959); E. M. Blaiklock, The Century of the NT (1962); The Cities of the NT (1965); A. H. McDonald, Republican Rome (1966).