Back To Rome Part Four

It's not that Cleopatra couldn't dream and plot with the best of them. BUT she was a realist. She knew where her dreams must end. There was no way she could wish for more than to keep Egypt the dominant power in the eastern Meditteranean under Roman tutelage. In all likelihood the Donations were a symbolic token, a way of easing public opinion in the east and getting the people behind Antony as Dionysus/Osiris and Cleopatra as Isis/Aphordite. There were very few if any practical changes that were of noted in Syria, Cappadocia, Pontus or Galatia. And there were most certainly not any masses of Egyptian administrators spreading throughout the Middle East, and replacing local authorities and Roman officials and tax collectors. From Anthony Everitt's Augustus, on page 162: "It is hard to disagree with the sentiments that the great twentieth-century Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy attributed to the audience at the glittering ceremony in the Gymnasium.

And the Alexandrians thronged to the festival
Full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations,
In Greek, and Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
Charmed by the lovely spectacle--
Though they knew of course what all this was worth,
What empty words they really were, these kingships.

The importance of the Forum in Roman life can't be understated. The business of government was conducted in and around the Forum during the five centuries of the Republic. It was in a valley between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills and was a rectangular shaped piazza that had a plethora of temples to goes and heroes lining it.

Citizens' assemblies were convened in an open space called the Comitia. Money could be borrowed and prostitutes bought. Trials were conducted in the open air. Senators met and debated in the Senate House. Statues of famous Romans adorned columns, and large paintings celebrated Roman victories. Two basilicas, which mingled the activities of shopping mall and conference center stood down the Forum's long sides.

Now, with Octavian and the Second Triumvirate-and his growing ascendancy- a change could be seen in the way politics was conducted. Important politics moved from the noisy open square up to a complex of houses on the "wealthy" Palatine Hill, where Octavian and Livia worked and lived. "Palatine" derives from the word "palace," meaning some sort of confined space where autocrats make political decisions in private-away from the "noisy rabble."

To the northwest stand the buildings where Octavian and Livia spent most of their lives. In 36 BC, a grateful popular assembly voted that a house should be presented to him with taxpayer money. Octavian had already bought an expensive property at the southwest end of the Palatine Hill, but it had been struck by lightning-an omen tha he took to heart. So he demolished that building and replaced it with a temple to Apollo. With his grant from the Senate, he arranged the purchase of a house, or more accurately a group of houses, next door.

The location Octavian had chosen for he and Livia, was as so many things were with the young triumvir-chosen for very specific reasons and calculating purpose. Octavian wanted his residence to signal and embody his central role in Rome. Near it stood a hut, built on the hill's natural tufa and with a sloping thatched roof, its reed walls daubed in clay. This was said to be the home of Romulus, Rome's founder, and was carefully preserved in his honor. By closely associating himself with Rome's beginnings, Octavian was telling the Roman world that he stood for traditional values, for mosmaiorum, the customs of ancestors.

Rome certainly didn't look -or smell like the capital of a great empire. There had been no central planning of any sort as the city had grown over the ages. Things were so terribly close. There were no wide avenues and few open spaces-apart from the previously mentioned Forum and the forum boarium. There were few streets that were wide enough to allow vehicles to pass one another and most were unpaved. There was no wheeled transport at all in the daytime! To reduce traffic congestion, Julius Caesar had restricted it to the night time hours-with the natural effect being that the unpaved roads groaned and squealed with a cacophony of wooden carts when people were trying to sleep! The wealthy lived in houses with no outside windows to escape the noise (and some of the smells) of urban life. Their rooms were grouped around one or more open-air courtyards. The poor rented single rooms or crowded into multi-story apartments, or insulae as they were known.

These were often extremely shoddily built and very prone to collapse or fire. Rome, of course, did have shops-but they were usually just a ground floor room with a masonry or wooden counter for selling goods and a space in the back for stock. There were any number of bars and restaurants. These catered mostly to the poor or working classes-people whose homes or apartments didn't have properly equipped kitchens.

As mentioned before, Rome was a city of horrendous smells. Raw sewage, trash, even occassionally human corpses were dumped in the streets. People walking below were so often hit by the disgusting contents of chamber pots emptied from the second floor or the roof that laws were passed regulating the damages that could be claimed!

Water was the only thing that made life in the city bearable-especially for the poor. The ready availability of water supplied by four aqueducts-the first built way back in the fourth century BC. Arcades crossed the land bringing fresh, clear water from springs and lakes miles away. The water was piped to fountains-some of them tiny affairs-stone troughs really-in the small public squares that were all over Rome. The wealthy and powerful could obtain permission from the Senate to tap the pipes for their own personal use (their ornate fountains, orchards, baths etc). Regular folks carried water from the nearest fountain or had it delivered by a water seller. Another thing that the surfeit of water made possible, was one of Rome's most popular pastimes-going to the public baths. The price of getting into these was so small that all but the poorest citizens could afford it. Many Romans would go to the baths every day, often in the afternoon, after work and before the evening meal. Men and women both enjoyed meeting friends and catching up on the latest gossip.

I hope to do one more article for this blog today-I don't know how long it will be as I am rather tired. All the best to anyone stopping by!