British novelist Matthew Kneale presents the biography of Rome as a tale of disaster. [***]
Image from review, with caption: The remains of Pompey’s theater in Rome, Italy.
Rome is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. Three thousand years or so of history take us down beneath the modern streets, past Mussolini’s imperial city, on through the capital of Risorgimento Italy, past Baroque palazzos and churches, through the castles of medieval militias, and on to the Romes of Constantine, Trajan, Augustus, Caesar and their republican predecessors. Deepest of all is the archaic age, where mythology locates Romulus and Remus and their Trojan ancestor Aeneas, and archaeology finds clusters of wooden huts on hilltops around the boggy forum.
Notoriously the modern city preserves traces of nearly all these ancient Romes, often incongruously juxtaposed. An ATM pokes out of a wall right next to the columns of an ancient temple opposite a Baroque church. A trattoria shelters in the substructures of Pompey’s theater. Christian basilicas cannibalize the column capitals from pagan temples; gardens planted in the 16th century spread among the ruins of imperial palaces. The manhole covers in the streets read SPQR, a Latin abbreviation for “Senate and People of Rome,” echoing ancient coins. Freud used the city of Rome as a metaphor for the human mind, an accumulation of material from all ages still in some sense accessible if we just refocus our gaze.
Rome makes concrete our sense of a deeply layered past, but not one formed by gentle sedimentation. The city’s geological stratigraphy has been repeatedly convulsed, metamorphosed under spectacular pressures. It is an accumulation of urban wreckage, some put to new uses, the rest a sober reminder that no city can become eternal except through constant demolition and reconstruction.
ROME
By Matthew Kneale
Simon & Schuster, 417 pages, $30
In “Rome: A History in Seven Sackings,” Matthew Kneale, a British novelist whose works reveal a deep understanding of the tangled human life of cities, has had the good idea of writing the biography of Rome not as a study in longevity but as a tale of disaster. Disaster after disaster, in fact, as the city faced invasions of Gauls and Goths, Byzantines and Normans, Catholic and Protestant armies in the wars of religion, Napoleon and the Nazis, and somehow survived each trauma. The effect is rather like that of a biologist telling the story of life on earth in terms of mass extinctions. The sacks of Rome were nowhere near as traumatic. Before gunpowder it was not that easy for armies to do serious damage to cities built of stone and brick, but invaders could steal treasures, commit rape and murder, terrify residents and generally make them doubt the power of their gods or god.
The sacks of Rome provide punctuation marks in a long story. Typically Mr. Kneale uses an impending disaster to grab our attention, then surveys how Rome had fared since the last crisis, before concluding each chapter with a racy narrative of the sack and its immediate aftermath. Now and then he interrupts the narrative with a time traveler’s sidelong view or whisks us away to some distant place touched by the successive tragedies of Rome. My favorite was the vignette of Heinrich Himmler in Cosenza, deep in the south of Italy, gathering local worthies at dawn in 1937 to witness his search for the grave of Alaric the Goth and the plunder from his fifth-century sack of Rome: Himmler “began to lecture the Cosenzan officials on ways in which the river might be diverted from its course so its bed could be drained.” Most of Mr. Kneale’s story, however, is staged within the walls of the city he evokes with casual brilliance.
Perhaps inevitably, the most exciting passages relate the sacks themselves, from motley barbarian armies appearing below the walls (several times in fact) to the horror of Allied bombing raids on a city that had no adequate air force or antiaircraft artillery to defend it. The fall of Mussolini is a splendid read.
There are many other gripping vignettes. The cutting off of the aqueducts in the sixth century during the Gothic Wars meant that the carrying capacity of the city was dramatically reduced. For generations Romans lived in a largely abandoned city. Areas that had been densely populated became part of the disabitato, areas of vineyards and gardens within the ancient wall circuit. The loss of the aqueducts and changing mores, Mr. Kneale notes, also meant the end of Rome’s hundreds of public baths: “In Christian eyes water was for drinking, not bathing, while it was certainly not for pleasure bathing, which smacked of licentiousness.”
By the 16th century cardinals and other antiquarians began to take an interest in the sculpture that occasionally turned up in these plots of land. That first harvest of classical art would be largely pillaged by Napoleonic armies, but as Rome regenerated more of its past has resurfaced in fields turned back into suburbs. Another story line tracks public health and cleanliness, from the spectacular public baths to the grim conditions of lower-class housing in the 20th century’s interwar years. This is not a tale of decline and fall so much as a slow roller-coaster ride through the fortunes of a place deeply entangled in its past.
Seven sackings is, as Mr. Kneale frankly admits, an arbitrary total. Arguably Rome has been sacked on many more occasions. His story is of constant external threats and repeated recoveries. An alternative narrative might have explored the violence that Romans did to their own city, and each other, over the millennia. That was a theme that would have appealed to the historians and poets of classical Rome who found in the story of Romulus’s killing of his brother Remus the archetype of multiple acts of civil violence. The republican general Sulla, when his lucrative command was threatened by political enemies, turned his army around and marched on the city. Coriolanus in myth had nearly done the same. Constantine seized the city from his rivals after a battle at the Milvian Bridge. A bitter rivalry between the papacy and the liberal state dominated the history of the city from Italy’s unification in 1871 until the 1930s. What Mussolini did to the medieval city to make space for his grandiose triumphal Road of the Imperial Forums was a different kind of civil sack.
A powerful strand of this story is the sad story of the Jewish ghetto. Centuries of prejudice seemed to have ended in the mid-19th century, and Rome’s Jews supplied prime ministers, generals and even leading fascists to the newly united Italian state until the ghastly consequences of Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler brought about their disaster. Rome has been fought over by a hundred generations of its inhabitants. Enemy invasions have been an occasional distraction from domestic violence.
Yet Rome has survived, a beautiful jumbled collection of ruins and stories. Marx wrote that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Romans today seem to enjoy an altogether more tranquil relationship with their past, somehow making antiquities part of the furniture of a civilized life lived largely outdoors. At least by day, it is now difficult for the visitor to conjure up many ghosts. Mr. Kneale’s achievement is to remind us of the past upheavals that lie only a few inches beneath the cobbled streets of the eternal city.
—Mr. Woolf, the director of the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, is the author of “Rome: An Empire’s Story."
*** JB note: How will the future history of the USA/ and its imperial capital Washington DC be written?
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