In the Campus Martius stood a huge temple belonging to the Greek–Egyptian cult of Isis and Osiris, who offered worshippers hopes of paradise. Rome also had temples to Syrian gods and Algerian gods, as well as those dedicated to a whole series of deified emperors, from Julius Caesar onwards. There were temples to the ancient cult of Mater Magna – the Great Mother – which had developed a bizarre ritual whereby devotees became reborn to eternity by standing beneath a grate and being spattered with blood from a lamb or bull that had its throat cut above them. The cult of Mithras offered its male-only worshippers old-fashioned morality and dinner gatherings, and had three dozen cave-like meeting places across the city.
Among the best known of these temples was that of Asclepius on the Tiber Island, which was not only a temple but was, in its strange way, the nearest the city had to a hospital. In its heyday, it was crowded with Romans suffering from every kind of medical complaint, and who hoped that the god Asclepius would guide them to a cure. In Asclepius’ great temples in the eastern Mediterranean – and the one on the Tiber Island was probably no different – patients slept in underground chambers filled with incense, hoping that the god would visit them in their dreams and give them instructions for a cure. If their dreams were unclear – as they frequently were – priests (who fortunately had medical experience) would help with interpretation. Even then, prescriptions could be very odd. Asclepius instructed one patient with a stomach abscess to carry the heaviest stone he could find into the temple. A pleurisy sufferer was told to add wine to ashes from the temple’s altar and place the mixture by his side. If Asclepius’ dream advice did not work there was always the hope that one of the temple’s sacred snakes might bring a cure by licking one’s wound.
Yet in AD 408 every pagan temple in Rome, from that of Asclepius to the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest that dominated the city, had been closed for more than a decade. It was the latest stage in a slow squeeze that had begun almost a century earlier, when Emperor Constantine won the battle of the Milvian Bridge, just north of Rome, captured the city and declared himself a supporter of Christianity. During most of the fourth century the old pagan religions, in spite of Church pressure to ban them, had largely been left in peace. That this tolerance ended was, in some ways, the Visigoths’ fault. The last religiously easy-going emperor was the Valens they killed at the battle of Adrianople. His successors took a harsher line. In AD 383 Emperor Gratian confiscated temples’ estates, and priests – including the Vestal Virgins – lost their tax breaks. Eight years later Emperor Theodosius went further and closed all Rome’s pagan temples altogether.
In AD 408 only two kinds of religious institution were still permitted to function. Rome had a number of Jewish synagogues, which remained open despite blood-curdling anti-Semitic rhetoric by some emperors, and two recent arson attacks, both inspired by churchmen. Most of all, though, Rome had churches, which were its newest great monuments. By AD 408 there were at least seven churches within the city. Most were built over the remains of apartment blocks or grand aristocratic houses, where Christians may have met in earlier times, when Christianity was illegal and its followers had to keep a low profile. The building of Rome’s first officially sanctioned church, the Lateran basilica, was ordered by Emperor Constantine himself. Pointedly, he had it constructed on the demolished headquarters of the city’s cavalry regiment, which he had disbanded together with the Praetorian Guard, as punishment for their both having fought against him. These new Christian temples would have looked very familiar to Romans as they were modelled on that most Roman of buildings, the basilica: an all-purpose hall with aisles and a higher central section with windows, which was used for everything from court trials to army drill.
Rome’s greatest churches, though, were not in the city but outside its walls. The Romans were fortunate that the Visigoths had converted to Christianity and so treated these churches with respect. These were cemetery churches, built directly above the tombs of Christian martyrs: San Sebastiano, San Lorenzo, Sant’Agnese, San Paolo fuori le Mure and, dwarfing all the rest in size, St Peter’s on the Vatican Hill. Plain on the outside, they were lavish within. St Peter’s, whose construction had involved the removal of part of a hillside, had a grand colonnade, a gleaming atrium with a fountain, columns made from stone of five different colours, a ceiling adorned with gold leaf, huge chandeliers and a large gold cross that had been presented by Constantine and Empress Helena.
By the late fourth century St Peter’s had its own great ceremonies, and on 29 June – the feast day of Peter and Paul – it became filled with huge crowds for whom quantities of food were made ready on tables. It was already much more than just a church, and by AD 408, like several other martyr churches, it formed the nucleus of a religious township, whose devout inhabitants wanted to live as close as they could to the saint’s tomb. Most Romans, whether pagan or Christian, would still have found such a choice distasteful. Romans had long seen corpses as unclean things that should be kept well away from the living and buried outside the city. But times were beginning to change.
By AD 408 St Peter’s was drawing in visitors from far away. Rome was already becoming a great pilgrimage site and its martyr churches had stolen the temple of Asclepius’ role as a healing centre, attracting crowds of the sick, the blind and the disabled. They also drew those who believed they were possessed, who might be seen outside their doors, howling and barking like animals, writhing and twisting as they screamed the names of pagan gods – the demons they believed were within them – in the hope that the saint would drive them out. Most of all, though, pilgrims came in the hope that they might be forgiven their sins and improve their chances of reaching paradise. Saint Peter, as prince of the apostles, was believed to hold the keys to heaven. Feeling they were in the actual presence of a saint, pilgrims became highly excited and the city’s great churches were carefully designed to keep them at a distance from martyrs’ body parts. Visitors to the church of San Lorenzo could see his grave but were prevented from touching it by a heavy silver grille. Saint Peter was better protected still. Visitors unlocked a little gate to reach a kind of well into which they could lower a piece of cloth to the tomb below and then pull it up, supposedly heavier as it was now steeped with blessings.
This was the dawn of a new age of martyrs. On the wane were guardian angels, Christianity’s first personal protectors, who were believed to shepherd individuals through life. By AD 408 Christians were looking increasingly to martyrs who, like pagan gods, offered specialist help, carrying one through every kind of dangerous situation, from a sea journey to childbirth. Martyrs, who were believed to have a living presence in the churches that held their remains, were important to their local towns, bringing them pilgrims and putting them on the map. Competition was intense. In the Christian world Rome was second only to Jerusalem as a pilgrimage centre, yet this had not happened by accident and a good deal of work had been required. When Christianity became the official religion of the Empire under Constantine it was the cities of the Eastern Empire and North Africa that were best provided with martyrs, as it was here that persecution – which had been far less extensive than the Church liked to claim – had been most thorough. By contrast Rome was poorly provided with martyrs.
In the 370s and ’80s AD an energetic bishop of Rome, Damasus, remedied the situation by actively seeking out new martyrs. Some, like San Agnese and San Lorenzo, he plucked from obscurity by giving them a church in their name. Others, such as Saint Sebastian, were foreign saints who had died in Rome and who – much to the annoyance of the inhabitants of their home towns – Damasus now claimed for the city. Even then Damasus needed more. He retrieved bones from abandoned catacombs and came up with a new crowd of saints, some of whom were barely remembered, and others who had never even existed. Under Damasus’ guardianship they were each provided with a name, a feast day and an account in verse of their grisly death. Their ends were memorably varied, from Saint Lawrence, who was grilled to death on a large gridiron
, to Saint Sebastian, who was shot full of arrows and, when this failed to kill him, cudgelled to death. By the end of Damasus’ reign every road into Rome had a martyr’s shrine or catacombs for pilgrims to descend into, and the city was completely encircled by dead Christian heroes, fictional or otherwise.
Yet the most important work to place Rome firmly at the top of Christianity’s hierarchy – at least after Jerusalem – had already been done long before. At some unremembered moment during Christianity’s early, wilderness years, Rome’s bishops claimed a unique authority for themselves. They traced their office directly back to Jesus himself, through the city’s first bishop, Saint Peter, whom Jesus was said to have anointed. It was no wonder that St Peter’s was Rome’s greatest church.
Yet there is some doubt as to whether the claim by Roman bishops was actually true. None of the early scriptures mention that Peter ever came to Rome. He fades from the record soon after Jesus’ death. Rome’s Christians claimed he came to the city with Saint Paul, but this seems a little unlikely. There are hints in the scriptures that Paul, who never met Jesus and who led the religion away from Jesus’ brand of Judaism so that it could appeal to non-Jews, had strained relations with Jesus’ disciples in Jerusalem. During the Second World War Pope Pius XII decided to do some investigating and had a German churchman, Ludwig Kaas, excavate the ancient cemetery beneath St Peter’s. Sure enough, directly beneath the cathedral’s altar Kaas found a plain tomb monument, yet his discovery brought more questions than answers. Among graffiti scratched into the walls Peter’s name was written only once (by contrast, in the cemetery beneath San Lorenzo, Lawrence’s name was scratched numerous times). Worse, the bones in the grave, which belong to a man in his sixties, appeared to date from the time not of Emperor Nero, when Peter was said to have died, but of Emperor Vespasian. Neither Pius nor Kaas were happy with the finds and the bones went missing for a while. It seems the claim on Saint Peter by Rome’s early Christians may have been a case of sleight of hand.
If so, it was a dazzlingly successful one, which would be the making of Rome, keeping the city afloat during the long, difficult centuries that lay ahead. By AD 408 it did not matter who really lay in the simple grave far below the altar of St Peter’s, as everyone believed it was Peter. He and Paul were fast stealing the role of Rome’s protectors from that other alliterative pair, Romulus and Remus, and the great and the good sought to be buried in the city of Christianity’s famous martyrs. Emperor Constantine built a complex for his family on the Via Nomentum, which included an exquisite circular church tomb for his daughter – Santa Costanza – filled with mosaics that were barely Christian, depicting birds, people treading grapes to make wine, and strange, staring blue faces. In AD 408 the Western Emperor Honorius had just completed a tomb complex for himself and his family beside St Peter’s.
The direct link back to Jesus was also useful when it came to religious politics. At this time, Rome’s bishops held sway all across the fracturing Western Empire and their supremacy was accepted by bishops from as far afield as Gaul, Spain and Britain. Though they were still not yet quite popes, they were on their way. They also lived very comfortably, at least according to the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who, in the late fourth century, reported that they rode in carriages, enjoyed splendid gifts from wealthy women, dressed in finery and outdid kings in the lavishness of their meals.
A post of this kind was clearly worth having and competition for it could be intense, even violent. In the late 360s AD, both Damasus and a rival, Ursinus, were proclaimed bishop of Rome in different parts of the city, and for two years the supporters of each launched raids against their opponents’ churches. In one skirmish more than a hundred people were killed. The dispute seems not to have been theological but was instead a turf war between Christians on either side of the Tiber. The imperial authorities responded by prohibiting factional Christian meetings within twenty miles of the city, but it would take a lot more than a legal ban to prevent such disputes, which continued to dog Catholicism for the next thousand years.
Of course Rome in AD 408 was not only a city of government and religion. In many ways the functional side of the city – the machinery required to keep Romans fed, watered and clean – was every bit as impressive as its monuments. Rome’s eleven aqueducts provided the city with the equivalent of a million bathtubs of water every day. As well as supplying numerous street fountains and – for a lucky few – fountains in private homes, the aqueducts also supplied Rome’s eight hundred baths, large and small. Here was another opportunity for emperors to outdo their predecessors. In AD 408 the city had eleven great public baths. The greatest were those of Diocletian, built barely a century earlier, whose vast complex had required the demolition of an entire district of the city. Diocletian’s baths were the size of a dozen football pitches and could accommodate 9,000 bathers in the open-air swimming pool, the cold hall, tepid hall and the spacious hot hall.
As well as bathing, Romans had to be fed. Between May and September AD 408 when the seas were calm, convoys of ships sailed across the Mediterranean, as they had done every summer for centuries, to Rome’s main port. Here grain, olive oil, wine, fish sauce and every luxury the city could demand, from Chinese silks to spices from Sri Lanka and eastern Indonesia – lands so distant that the Romans knew of them only from hearsay – were unloaded into river barges, which were then hauled by slaves along 35 kilometres of winding Tiber river to Rome’s river docks. Above these, on the left bank of the Tiber, stood a remarkable testament to the extent of Romans’ appetite. It was a good-sized hill though it was like no other hill on earth. It was formed entirely from the remains of imported clay jars that were used to transport olive oil from Spain and the province of Africa. The jars could not be reused and so, after their contents were poured into barrels, they were broken in two and chucked on to the constantly growing heap.
At the docks, Rome’s food supplies were transferred to handcarts, wheelbarrows or on to the backs of donkeys or slaves, but not into horse-drawn carts, not in daytime, anyway. Since the days of Julius Caesar such carts had been banned from Rome’s streets except at night, to prevent the city becoming gridlocked. Earlier Roman writers complain that thanks to the carts’ endlessly rattling through the hours of darkness, among many other disturbances, it was almost impossible for Romans to sleep, and though evidence concerning life in early fifth-century Rome is harder to come by, as sources are rarer, there is nothing to suggest that matters had changed. Considering the Romans’ skills in organization and engineering, their city was surprisingly poorly designed. Most streets were very narrow, aside from a handful of main streets, and none of them were wide. Back lanes were crammed with rubbish. Fire was a constant danger and despite nightly patrols by firemen, blazes occurred with distressing regularity. The central area that contained most of the city’s great monuments was not exempt and, even though they were protected by a huge firewall, in AD 283 the main Forum was burned to the ground. Rome’s labyrinthine topography also made it a mugger’s paradise and most Romans avoided going out at night without a bodyguard to see them safely home.
It was an option few Romans could afford. Here is something else that would have shocked our early republican. If Rome had been a place of social extremes in the 380s BC then it was far more so now. The city had never been so unequal, a situation that helped its barbarian attackers, as it diminished poorer Romans’ sense of loyalty to their state. At the top end of the social scale were a small number of immensely wealthy Romans who formed a closely knit class of educated, interrelated families. Grouped around the Senate, theirs was a world not unlike that of Jane Austen’s novels, in which parents sought good marriages for their daughters and a promising post in the army or in the imperial administration for their sons. Launching a son’s career was an expensive business. A first rung on the ladder to power was one of the old republican offices – the quaestorship and praetorship – whose chief role was largely confined to staging lavishly expensive games. Fo
rtunately, there were many who could pay the bills for such events, as Rome’s great families were astonishingly wealthy. They owned landed estates that stretched across the Western Empire. They lived in huge town houses, of which some owned a dozen or more. The home of one wealthy family beneath Palazzo Valentini, which has been carefully excavated, was a vast pile, more than 1,800 square metres in area, that contained garden courtyards, stables, storerooms and even a private bath complex.
One of the pleasures of Rome’s nobility was to hold dinner parties. Romans could dine out, as the city had hotels with dining rooms that catered to their needs, but overwhelmingly they entertained at home. Most of what is known about Roman banquets comes from two or three centuries earlier, but they still took place at the beginning of the fifth century and there is no reason to imagine they had greatly changed. They mixed formality with pure pleasure, and by all accounts they could be hugely enjoyable. Hosts and guests reclined on large couches – usually there were nine, sometimes eighteen and occasionally twenty-seven – and guests’ proximity to their host’s couch was decided by their status. Wives sat up next to their reclining husbands. Guests were welcomed with a glass of spiced wine or mead and wore wreaths (a tradition which was opposed by Christians and may have been dying out by AD 408). The air would have been thick with the smell of incense and perfume that was used by guests both female and male. Guests ate mostly with their fingers and might wipe their hands on a napkin that they had brought, or on the tablecloth, or in the hair of one of the serving boys, who were encouraged to grow it long for this purpose. Each dish was announced and all the while slaves would sing, dance, act, recite poetry, juggle and even fence to keep everyone entertained.
As to the dishes themselves, these were divided, rather as they still are in Rome, between a first course, a second course and a pudding, and classical Romans may have eaten an early form of pasta (Greek texts refer to something called lasagnon). Otherwise, though, imperial Roman and modern Italian cuisine have little in common. To our taste classical Roman dishes would be more Thai than Mediterranean. They would have been quite alien to a visitor from early republican Rome used to a simple diet of vegetables and an occasional binge on sacrificial meat, not least because they included something completely unknown to early republicans: sea fish. They were also highly flavoured. A popular ingredient, which seems to have been a Carthaginian invention, was a fermented fish sauce, garum, that probably tasted much like today’s Thai and Vietnamese fish sauces. Roman cooking also used coriander and plentiful quantities of black pepper, giving it a spicy flavour. Many recipes would have been simpler than we might expect: cucumber salad, cauliflower with cumin, eggs with anchovies. Though at a grand feast one might be offered highly exotic items, such as dolphin balls, sausages of lobster and other fish, sow’s womb and nipples, flamingo or ostrich ragout.
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