by Joel Kotkin
CHAPTER FIVE
ROME—THE FIRST MEGACITY
Titus Petronius, the son of wealthy Romans and courtier to Emperor Nero, spent his time carousing through the back alleys of the city’s streets, dallying with the prostitutes and loose aristocratic ladies with equal enthusiasm. Later forced to commit suicide because of his alleged complicity in a palace intrigue, Petronius left behind remarkable descriptions and insights into this city and the empire that it had created.1
By his time, Rome had grown to a scale not to be seen again till modern times—a massive, sprawling capital city, a warren of marketplaces, drinking places, temples, crowded tenements, and aristocratic villas. In Petronius’s Rome, we transcend the bounds of antiquity and move closer to contemporary New York City, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, Shanghai, or Mexico City. With a population of more than 1 million, Rome was two to three times larger than early giant cities such as Babylon.2 Like later urban leviathans, noted Lewis Mumford, Rome suffered from what he called “megalopolitan elephantiasis,” a total loss of human scale.3
Yet to their everlasting credit, the Romans created the legal, economic, and engineering structures that allowed this leviathan to function as the nerve center of the world for roughly half a millennium. At its height, this greatest of city-empires ruled an expanse stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia and contained as many as 50 million people.4
“THE VICTORIOUS ROMANS”
How had the Romans managed this bold step into the urban future? In many ways, they did so by fusing the two great building blocks of ancient cities, religious conviction and organized military power. The Romans were unshakable in their presumption of greatness and relentless in their pursuit of empire. As Petronius noted:
The entire world was in the hands of the victorious Romans. They possessed the earth and the seas and the double field of stars, and were not satisfied.5
Rome’s great power did not lie with its geography or natural endowment. The Tiber, which flows through the city, does not rank as a great river alongside the Tigris, the Euphrates, or the Nile. True, the city’s heart enjoyed the protection of its seven hills, and its inland location provided a shield from sea invasion. But certainly these presented only a modest barrier to a determined and accomplished conqueror.
Rome enjoyed some basic economic assets, but nothing more than many other towns. The mild climate and decent soil supported a small community of shepherds and farmers. The city lay close to a point where the Tiber is most easily crossed, making early Rome a natural trade route for the surrounding peoples, notably the Etruscans, possessors at the time of a more advanced culture. Deposits of salt provided a significant item for the Romans to trade. 6
The source of Roman greatness lay instead in their peculiar civic mythology and sense of divine mission. The city was said to be founded in the year 753 B.C. by two brothers, Romulus and Remus, abandoned by the Tiber and raised by a she-wolf. They were bloody-minded from the start, turning murderously on each other. Mars, the god of war and agriculture, developed early a strong following among these rough villagers.7
Initially, toughness alone was not sufficient to resist the Etruscans, who seized control of the little settlement in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. and established a kingship there. In many ways, the Romans benefited from this defeat, which exposed them to a more sophisticated culture and linked both the Greek and the Phoenician worlds.8
Once freed of foreign domination, the Romans quickly reformed their fledgling city-state, which in the fifth century B.C. accommodated barely forty thousand people. By 450 B.C., they codified their government with the Law of the Twelve Tables. The codes covered everything from market days, the relationship between patrons and clients, the rights of aristocrats, and protections for plebeians.
Roman law was designed to shape the behavior of the citizen, preferably through self-regulation, into conformity with deeply held notions of personal and civic virtue. Even the Latin word religio itself, suggested the historian F. E. Adcock, was meant to convey the citizen’s obligation to family, civic duty, and the gods.9
The Romans were deeply attached to their place and exhibited a powerful sense of continuity with their past. The household was at the center of everything; each family maintained an altar to honor both their ancestors and the gods. 10 Rome’s historic core, noted Livy, was “impregnated by religion. . . . The Gods inhabit it.”11
Identification with tradition remained keen throughout most of their long history. Laws might be amended, but connection to the past lent them inestimable credibility. Something great, in their eyes, also meant something ancient.12 “Here is my religion, here is my race, here are the traces of the forefathers,” wrote the Roman statesman Cicero in the century before Petronius. “I cannot express the charm I feel here, and which penetrates my mind and my senses.”13
The Romans’ commitment to their res publica, or “public thing,” survived even after repeated disasters. Roman armies could be defeated— the city was even briefly occupied by Gallic invaders in 390 B.C.—and the city could suffer numerous fires but was always rebuilt around its ancient site. These attachments helped the Romans nurture their independent identity at a time when Greek culture dominated many other Italian cities.14
What Cicero felt in his “mind” and “senses”—this peculiar identification with the idea and place of Rome—also drove the city’s relentless expansion. Over the third and second centuries B.C., the Romans fought and eventually overcame the Etruscans and the Greeks. Arguably the most critical triumph took place in 146 B.C., with the destruction of Carthage, the city-state that presented the most potent threat to Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean world.
THE MAKING OF THE IMPERIAL CITY
By the second century B.C., Rome already was taking on the trappings of a major city-empire. New arches and temples rose, along with massive port facilities, aqueducts, and an ever expanding Forum in the center of the city. Around the impressive public façades, thousands of crowded tenements, small marketplaces, and shops grew to service the needs of the ever expanding population.15
Over the next hundred years, the successes of the empire would undermine the old republican institutions. Newcomers, including slaves, now accounted for as much as a third of the population. Long-standing conflicts between wealthy patricians and hard-pressed plebeians intensified. The popular leader Tiberius Gracchus pointed out that old soldiers returning to Italy from triumphant wars found themselves landless and forced to live “homeless and houseless . . . with their wives and children. . . . Lacking a family altar or burial plot, they fight and die so that others could enjoy wealth and luxury.” 16
A century of political instability and rebellions, including the famous slave uprising under Spartacus, set the stage for imperium. Proclaimed dictator in 49 B.C., Julius Caesar imposed order on the increasingly fractious republic. Caesar was also an urban innovator, determined to make Rome a fit capital for the vastly expanded empire. He legislated height limits for the city’s ubiquitous and often creaky tenements, enforced the use of tiles and open space between buildings to prevent fire, and initiated an ambitious expansion of the Forum.
Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C. prevented him from carrying out his grand designs. This would be left to his successor Augustus.17 During Augustus’s reign, Rome emerged as a city of grand palaces, temples, and other public buildings. As Augustus himself is said to have remarked: “I found the city made of brick and left it made of marble.”18
ROME: THE ARCHETYPAL MEGACITY
Augustus’s triumph at Actium in 31 B.C. over the armies of the last Ptolemaic monarch, Cleopatra VII, and her ally Mark Antony marked the close of the Hellenistic era. The Romans already had subdued virtually all the Greek city-states, the larger part of the old Seleucid Empire, and much else beyond. For the next four centuries, the history of urbanism in the West would be written largely by the Romans and those who submitted to their will.
Some have maintained that the Romans lacked the
Greek flair for originality as philosophers, city builders, or architects. This is unfair. Of course, the Romans took what they found in the Hellenized world and built upon it. But they also transformed or rebuilt cities, such as Carthage, and helped restore others, including venerable Athens.19
Rome pushed the frontiers of urbanity to new levels, first of all in Rome itself. The city undertook an unprecedented program of public works—roads, aqueducts, sewers—that made it capable of sustaining its ever growing population. The Greeks, one Roman writer asked, boasted of their “useless” art, and Egypt’s legacy lay in “idle Pyramids,” but what were these compared with the fourteen aqueducts that brought water to Rome? 20
Yet beneath these achievements lurked a deplorable reality. Elegant marble work may have covered the great buildings of the new Forum Augustum and its Temple of Mars, but most Romans lived in slumlike dwellings. There were twenty-six blocks of insulae, or apartment houses, for each private domus. Despite the legislation of the Caesars, many apartment buildings still creaked, sometimes collapsed, and all too often caught fire.21
Day-to-day life was often chaotic. The streets rarely ran in a straight line, but curved, crowded with both people and refuse. In the daytime, the human stampede dominated; an order of Julius Caesar restricted the flow of carts to the evening. When evening fell, the noise and commotion actually worsened. As the satirist Juvenal asked:
What sleep is possible in a lodging? The crossing of the wagons in the narrow, winding streets, the swearing of the drovers brought to a standstill, would snatch sleep from a sea-calf or the Emperor Claudius himself. 22
Despite its blemishes, however, Rome represents something new in urban history. The very need to feed, clothe, and bring water to the megacity’s population forced many innovations in economic organization. The purpose of empire, suggested the world-wise Petronius, was to secure the resources to sustain the city’s swelling numbers of households, no matter what the cost in human lives. “The Fates are bent on war,” the courtier observed. “The search for wealth continues.”23
The very task of absorbing these resources presented monumental challenges. The city was served by three ports, bringing in the grain that sustained its population, the luxuries demanded by its wealthy, and the slaves who served them. There were massive warehouses and highly specialized markets for everything from vegetables and pigs to wine, cattle, and fish. Roman commerce was so robust that even ambitious freedmen, like Trimalchio in Petronius’s Satyricon, could amass the enormous wealth that allowed them to acquire considerable social status.
Urban retail on a modern scale here makes its first sustained appearance. Dealers in books, precious stones, furniture, and clothing concentrated in specialized districts. There were both the horrea, which served as supermarkets, and a vast number of smaller shops, located mostly on the ground floors of the insulae. At its most sophisticated, Rome presaged the contemporary shopping center; the Mercatus Traini offered a vast array of products in its five stories of shops.24
Rome’s economy has widely been described as parasitic, feeding off the riches of conquered nations. Dried fish from Spain, walnuts from Persia, wine from Gaul, and, of course, slaves from many countries poured into a city; the world received relatively few Roman goods in exchange.25 Yet if Rome drained the world for its commerce, its genius for the administration of government provided an unprecedented level of security— sparking a new golden age of city building across vast regions of the settled world.
“A CONFEDERATION OF URBAN CELLS”
York, London, Trier, Paris, Vienna, and Budapest, important cities of the European future, owe their birthright to the urban genius born on the banks of the Tiber.26 Romanization, in many senses, stood synonymous with the advance of urbanization.
Unprecedented security allowed for these developments. “The Romans,” observed Edward Gibbon, “preserved peace by constant preparation for war.”27 Legions placed near border areas, walls, and roads protected the cities, from the Saharan wastes to the edges of frigid Scotland. Walls and other defensive fortifications were critical to the survival of cities in such remote locations. Yet these places, such as Trier in Germany and Verulamium (St. Albans), were more than military outposts. By the first and second centuries A.D., even British towns boasted street grids, sophisticated drainage systems, bathhouses, and piped water.
Most impressive, this flowering of urban civilization was not simply the result of imperial edict; it had a grassroots energy as well. A spirited competition among the various cities sparked lavish new building projects, theaters, and stadia. Rome allowed considerable self-government to individual cities; the empire itself, notes the historian Robert Lopez, functioned as “a confederation of urban cells.”28
Europe would not again see such a proliferation of secure, and well-peopled, cities until well into the nineteenth century. People, products, and ideas traveled quickly through the vast archipelago of “urban cells,” over secure sea-lanes and fifty-one thousand miles of paved roads stretching from Jerusalem to Boulogne.29 Wealthy and highly mobile young Romans thought nothing of going abroad for their education, to Athens, Alexandria, Massilia (Marseilles), or Rhodes.30
Commerce and technology also spread to the frontiers. Craftsmen from the Mediterranean brought with them the techniques for the manufacture of glass, pottery, and farm utensils. By the third century A.D., the Rhineland had emerged, for the first time, as a major industrial zone. The frontiers of trade, through both sea and land routes, expanded to the previously untapped markets of India and even China.31
At its height, Rome turned the ideal of a cosmopolitan world empire earlier conceived by Cyrus and Alexander into a living reality. Emperor Claudius himself, Tacitus tells us, observed that the gradual extension of citizenship constituted one of Rome’s greatest advantages over the more restrictive Athenian state. “The grandsons of Gauls” who had battled Julius Caesar, Gibbon comments, now “commanded legions, governed provinces and were admitted to the Senate.”32 By the third century A.D., Roman citizenship was made available to free men throughout the known world; less than half the Senate now came from Italy.33
Foreigners, starting with the Spaniard Trajan in A.D. 98, now rose to the supreme post of emperor. Over the ensuing centuries, the heads of state came from such varied places as Gaul, Syria, North Africa, and Thrace. All these diverse men stayed and ruled from Rome, the sacred capital of all other cities. “Rome,” declared Aristeides, a Greek writer in the second century, “is a citadel which has all the peoples of the earth as its villagers.”34
This universalist notion was perhaps best expressed by Marcus Aurelius, the emperor and philosopher, who assumed the principate in A.D. 161 at the death of Antoninus Pius. Aurelius, like a classical Roman, considered his “city and fatherland” to be Rome. But as emperor, he saw Rome’s mission in the broader sense to “do the work of man” across the entire breadth of the known world.35
CHAPTER SIX
THE ECLIPSE OF THE CLASSICAL CITY
By the time of Marcus Aurelius, Rome’s imperium was already under assault. One primary cause lay in Rome’s increasing dependence on slavery. Although always an important part of the classical world, slaves now increasingly replaced the artisans and shopkeepers who had made up an important middle element of Roman society. Many of these then became debtors and dependents on the state; eventually as many as one in three residents of the capital lived on the dole.1
In the past, conquest had provided opportunities for displaced Romans. Now the empire, no longer capable of acquiring new territories, was on the defensive, struggling mightily, and at great expense, to protect its vast network of cities. With the breakdown of security and easy communication, long-distance trade declined. Over the ensuing centuries, the currency, the denarius, was consistently debased.
Perhaps even worse, Romans of all classes seemed to be losing a sense of moral purpose. Cynicism and escapist ideas infected the culture. Many in the elites openly despised Rome’s harried
urban life, choosing instead to escape to their villas in the rustic countryside or along the Bay of Naples. “There is in the city,” noted one observer from the eastern part of the empire in the late 300s A.D., “a Senate of wealthy men. . . . Every one of them is fit to hold high office. But they stand aloof, preferring to enjoy their property at leisure.”2
The Roman middle and working classes increasingly lost themselves in the ever more lavish entertainments put on by the state. Many Romans filled their idle hours with the spectacle of exotic animals, brutal gladiatorial displays, and theatrical performances. “The Roman people,” the moralist Salvian complained, “are dying and laughing.” 3
A series of epidemics, some contracted from troops returning from Mesopotamia, increased the sense of gloom. One particularly bad outbreak in the third century A.D. reportedly carried off five thousand Romans a day for several months.4
THE CITY OF MAN VERSUS THE CITY OF GOD
Amid these woes, some found solace in religion. Many attached themselves to exotic cults from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other centers of the ancient world. One new import from the East, Christianity, proved more enduring than any of the others. Over time, it would take over the empire itself.
To the remaining contemporary pagans, and later to Gibbon, the growing influence of these new belief systems fatally wounded the classical urban civilization. The fall of the empire, Gibbon would write acidly, represented “the triumph of barbarism and religion.”5 In this Gibbon is correct, but only to a point. The new ideas themselves—most particularly Christianity—did not destroy Rome. Without a collapse first of the old values, the ascendancy of the newer ones would have been unthinkable.
