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RABUN TAYLOR, KATHERINE RINNE and SPIRO KOSTOF, ROME: AN URBAN HISTORY FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE PRESENT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 432, illus., maps, plans. isbn 9781107013995. £85.
CLAIRE HOLLERAN and AMANDA CLARIDGE (EDS), A COMPANION TO THE CITY OF ROME. (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World). Hoboken/Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2018. Pp. xxvi + 758, illus., plans. isbn 9781405198196. £130.
SETH BERNARD, BUILDING MID-REPUBLICAN ROME: LABOR, ARCHITECTURE, AND THE URBAN ECONOMY. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 336, illus. isbn 9780190878788. £55.
STEPHEN L. DYSON, ARCHAEOLOGY, IDEOLOGY AND URBANISM IN ROME FROM THE GRAND TOUR TO BERLUSCONI. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xv + 327, illus. isbn 9780521874595. £75.
Taylor, Rinne and Kostof's comprehensive treatment of the urban environment of ancient Rome is a helpful introduction for any student encountering the history of the city for the first time. The first fourteen chapters, principally the work of Taylor, are devoted to the ancient city from its foundations to the tetrarchy and Constantine; the last ten, written largely by Rinne, cover Rome from the Renaissance to the present; while chs 15 to 23 and ch. 25 are a revised version of Kostof's 1976 Matthews Lectures on Medieval Rome. The project emerged from a desire on the part of the living authors to place these lectures, unpublished at the time of Kostof's death in 1991, in the public domain and then to extend the story backwards in time to Rome's foundation and forward to its present. Considering its genesis, the result is admirably cohesive and the focus on medieval Rome is particularly welcome. Of the four books under review, it is the only work that attempts a narrative ‘from antiquity to the present’.
Coverage and attractive layout are the book's greatest advantages. Instructors will want to set specific chapters for specific classes, but in fact the careful integration of themes and narrative throughout the largely chronological arrangement means that those who read the book as a whole will get the greatest benefit. There are signs that this is what the authors want. Technical terms, for example, are defined within the text rather than in a glossary and the discussion in later chapters builds upon the preceding material. This really is an attempt to write a biography of a city rather than a convenient handbook or guide to specific periods or places, even though the reader can learn much about both along the way. The short chapters and clear language, not to mention the lavish number of figures, diagrams and images, are ideal for moving the story forward and keeping the reader's attention.
The genre and scope require the authors to be highly selective in what they present and to keep references and extended reading lists to a minimum. It is to their credit that within these constraints they make every effort to reflect recent scholarship. They even include some details that others pass over — most notably in enabling Marcus Agrippa to take his rightful place as a major player in the development of the Campus Martius. Although the volume progresses chronologically through each period of Roman history, the authors sometimes pause to consider themes, such as the Tiber River as connector between the city and the world and the past and the present, the significance of gardens within the city, housing in the early Medieval period and, most delightfully, how Rome was drawn and painted. These vignettes allow the reader to pause and observe specific aspects of the city and city life over its long history.
As historians with a close interest in the middle and late Republic, we must say that the ten-page chapter covering this period is the least successful of the book. It contains a number of factual errors. For example, in what might have been a misreading of Broughton's Magistrates of the Roman Republic (1.232), the authors assign an otherwise unattested cognomen (Nepos) to C. Flaminius. Far more worrying is their interpretation of urban development as a static ideological contest between patricians and plebeians over four centuries. Such a view disregards the resolution of that quarrel and the emergence of the patricio-plebeian nobility that defines the history of the Roman Republic. So, in their hands Appius Claudius Caecus is portrayed as ‘a patrician with strong plebeian leanings’ and Flaminius ‘a self-made man and a fierce opponent of the aristocracy’, when both are now regarded as far more complex. Ti. Sempronius Gracchus, twice consul and censor (like Flaminius), is idiosyncratically portrayed as a man driven by the same passion as his sons, the reforming tribunes of 133 and 123–122. The authors say of his basilica in the Forum, ‘We may recall a similar kind of class rejoinder on the Circus Flaminius’ northeastern flank, where a Fulvius, an Aemilius, and a Caecilius Metellus – patricians all – had claimed one side of the square to plant their ideological flag in opposition territory.’ In fact, neither the Fulvius nor the Metellus in question were patrician. They were plebeian nobiles, as was Gracchus. Perhaps most bewildering of all are the few cursory lines about Pompey's theatre complex that end the chapter. This enormous building is rendered ‘hard to imagine’ because ‘only crumbs of it remain’. When the authors call it ‘a magnificent amenity, nothing more’, they dismiss the considerable body of literature on Pompey's theatre-garden-museum and its place in Republican history, not to mention the link that it forges between Pompey's own times and the future of the built city. This limited treatment does little to advance a reader's knowledge of four centuries in which the city faced and even resolved some considerable urban challenges.
Fortunately help is at hand. Holleran and Claridge's Companion to the City of Rome uses the now well-established ‘Companion’ genre to present a nicely complementary treatment. The essays, reflecting the interests of both its editors, offer a pleasing emphasis on aspects of urban life and death in antiquity and building and infrastructure. Binding the whole together are a series of mini-essays introducing the key categories of evidence, namely archaeology (Kneafsey), written sources (Flower), epigraphy (Rankov) and numismatics (Burnett). The decision to include a specific treatment of the Severan Marble Plan (Tucci) is masterly. So, too, is Smith's historical overview (in Part 1). Smith makes a point of giving equal coverage to all the periods of ancient Roman history, constantly alluding to controversies without letting them weigh down his text. Instructors can easily fill in the other side of the story if they wish. He outlines with admirable dexterity the problems of demography and infrastructure that Rome faced at each phase and how these were resolved via experimentation and adaptation, sometimes not just despite but also because of a competitive political culture. Claridge's equally useful chapter (in Part 2) lets archaeology and landscape modification play their own role in retelling in some depth the same story of Rome's development into one of the great successes of the built environment.
The Companion is broken up into ten parts: 1. Introductory, 2. The Urban Landscape, 3. The People, 4. The Urban Infrastructure, 5. Living in Rome, 6. Dying in Rome, 7. The Urban Economy, 8. Civic Life, 9. The Roman Triumph, and 10. Receptions of Rome. Part 4 flows particularly well since each author makes a point of interacting with the others and all are sensitive to technological change, even if they share a tendency to over-emphasise Augustan developments at the expense of other periods. Aldrete's chapter (in Part 6) is especially strong in showcasing the hazards of urban life in their diverse forms. Using visceral imagery, he describes the often unpleasant sensory experiences of living in the city, especially for those who were not wealthy enough to be able to escape their worst effects. Also highly commendable is Part 7, covering the urban economy and including Holleran's own research area, alongside useful essays by Tacoma, Kehoe and DeLaine. It is apparent that a deliberate attempt was made to take a broad view of economic activity and to ask pertinent questions, even if they cannot always be answered. Part 10 reinforces the importance of the reception of ancient Rome in modern popular culture for current ‘classical’ studies. Touching on select key moments, the section explores the image of Rome in the post-classical imagination and ends with a fun touch, Cyrino's vivid description of the city of Rome in film. It is also relevant. In the pre-cinematic past, ancient Rome was largely reimagined through visual art. Technological developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made film the primary vehicle through which the popular imagination of Rome was created and disseminated to non-specialists and even non-viewers. Ending on this note cements how crucial film can be as a teaching tool in studies of Roman history and acknowledges the importance of providing students with intellectual commentary.
If Taylor, Rinne and Kostof's Urban History is most effective when read in its entirety, reading whole Parts of Holleran and Claridge's Companion will be more revealing than restricting oneself to individual chapters. Each combination of authors and topics extends the reader's awareness of the changing conditions of the city or speaks to the diverse experiences of Rome's ancient residents (rich or poor, slave or free, male or female). Not all chapters are written in strict academic prose. Some take an experimental turn, with varying degrees of success. But this is a minor issue for a fine volume in which preeminent scholars provide detailed and up-to-date scholarship for a wide audience that will include both students and scholars seeking a quick foothold on these topics.
Both these works provide an excellent foundation for any course bibliography on the City of Rome, but no book that achieves such broad coverage can replace an in-depth treatment of a specific topic by innovative scholars on top of their game. Such a work is Bernard's Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (2018). Bernard's investigation of scanty archaeological and literary resources enables him to reconstruct from an economic and practical perspective the process of converting the profits of imperial war into the built environment of Rome. The result is an impressive and detailed history of urban construction projects of the middle Republic that also informs us about the politics. Bernard departs from the majority of treatments of the intense new phase of building that follows Rome's early successes on the Italian peninsula. With granular attention to detail, he assesses aspects such as the cost of human resources, the availability of materials and knowledge of building techniques at any given time and he then maps new technologies as Rome expands its territorial control. He is also interested in how labour might have been organised and the impact of such decisions on other situations, which leads him to postulate that a particular type of professional employment, different from both corvée and enslaved labour, resulted from imperial expansion. In this way, economic and topographical developments take their place beside political and military history, enabling an insight into the kind of wealth, materials and labour that the burgeoning imperial Republic must have been able to deploy.
Bernard problematises the broadly accepted view that Hellenisation drove fourth-century Roman construction. He is more in sympathy with Horden and Purcell (The Corrupting Sea, 2000), who argue that the Mediterranean provided a sphere for fluid cultural exchange between its ‘microecologies’, and Hopkins (The Genesis of Roman Architecture, 2016), who seeks to equate the architectural status of archaic Rome with centres such as Syracuse and Selinunte. In many ways, his work is a natural sequel to that of Hopkins; both scholars share an eye for technological detail that makes their work particularly outstanding in current studies of early Roman architecture. Both want to place innovation at Rome within the wider Mediterranean cultural context while still recognising Rome's capacity for creativity and self-determination.
Bernard is loath to neglect either literary or archaeological evidence. He wants both categories to contribute to the rich history of Roman construction. Chs 2 and 3 work together to explain the economic disruptions that happened after the Gallic sack. Ch. 2 offers a detailed critique of Livy's narrative of the sack based on a revised interpretation of the archaeological record. Ch. 3 provides a particularly detailed analysis of the cost of building the Republican walls. Bernard models the technologies and materials involved, then uses them to calculate the huge cost in resources and labour that this project required. This, he argues, rather than the destruction of the city by the Gauls, best explains any economic disruption evident in the half-century that followed.
Bernard's achievement shines in ch. 4, where he presents Appius Claudius Caecus (censor 312
The second monograph in our list is Dyson's reading of the practice of archaeology at Rome against a background of Italian unification, the onset of fascism, and then war and post-war reconstruction. It corresponds in its timespan to the last three chapters of the Urban History. Dyson is concerned not just with how the ancient city was co-opted in the modern era to advertise certain religious, ideological or artistic agenda, but also with identifying the people involved with each stage of the process. Whether as archaeologists, antiquities dealers, tourists, government officials or politicians, named individuals are shown to have made the decisions that brought about change — both good and bad. The book is a revelatory read, especially in exposing the significant continuities in ideas, policies and practices from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It ends with an acknowledgement of those archaeologists of the last part of the twentieth century who sought to implement a workable and respectful compromise between heritage management and necessary change. Dyson also provides an excellent basis for discussion about the ethics of managing cultural heritage beyond his Roman context. As Australians, we are very aware that no state or nation is innocent of destroying places of profound cultural significance, most often for the sake of profit. Those most impacted have depressingly little power to sway the will of the regulators who govern their fate.
Dyson's detailed prosopography of scholars, administrators and politicians should serve to remind the academic community of its responsibility to consider where our knowledge of Roman archaeology comes from and at what cost. It is a little surprising to us that he does not refer at all to Watkin's 2011 monograph The Roman Forum. Watkin provides a trenchant and bitter criticism of archaeologists, not developers, for destroying a living city to create what he views as a ‘theme park’. Dyson does recognise that modern Romans have been displaced from their homes and neighbourhoods to facilitate excavations. However, he suggests that even the notorious interventions of Mussolini and his administration, terrible as they were, were not so wantonly damaging to the city as the destructive profit-driven building of the ensuing post-war decades. This is an indication that he sees important contributions to our knowledge of Roman archaeology offsetting to some extent (if they do not excuse) the destruction of post-Roman phases of the city. There is, of course, much value in his criticisms of rampant development, for instance in pointing to the damage to the urban fabric caused by giving enthusiastic precedence to motorised transport. Turning the centre of the city into an ever-expanding ‘blocked-off archaeological park’, however, is deeply problematic and needs to be recognised as such, even if one does not want to accept Watkin's position completely. First, it severs the everyday Roman from the historical heart of an otherwise eminently walkable city. Secondly, it creates a vast and ongoing problem of conservation that other similar cities do not face to the same extent. In this regard, one is reminded of the ten glorious years from 1999 to 2009 under the administration of Dyson's hero La Regina when one could freely walk through the Forum area during daylight hours. Roma per Roma indeed!
Dyson's study can be usefully compared to Rinne's contributions to the Urban History. Both authors expose the philosophical and practical problems of approaching the management of Rome's urban fabric while obsessed by ‘a particular past’. Rinne's concise treatment, however, complements rather than replicates Dyson's full-length study. To offer one example, she expresses her awareness at a much earlier stage in the process of the fate of those many voiceless and powerless inhabitants who were forced out of their neighbourhoods with few if any plans in place for alternative housing. So both accounts are intrinsically useful. On the whole, the Urban History offers an excellent introduction to the issues, while Dyson offers detailed coverage as well as much to think about.
It must be said that of the four here under review the production of Dyson's book is the most mistake-prone. The number of typographical and spelling errors is especially high. The architect of the British School at Rome is ‘Lutygens’ instead of ‘Lutyens’, the ‘Foro Olitorio’ is the ‘Foro Olitario’, and Watkin's name is ‘pluralised’ twice. Some elements of the narrative are repeated or overly cross-referenced, an indication that better organisation of the material and certainly more copy-editing were called for. These errors and others, however, should not deter anyone from reading it. It is a truly valuable contribution.
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies