This grand Roman innovation in architecture would be accomplished in two centuries as the essential ingredient, concrete, was perfected gradually by trial and error. Vitruvius tried to explain the chemistry, but the improvements were not based on chemical theory. The remarkable qualities of perfected concrete in the Age of Hadrian, the Age of the Pantheon, would be attained by further trial and error in improving the proportions of lime and pozzolana and other ingredients in the mortar.
The techniques of laying concrete were also improved. In the beginning, each horizontal course was allowed to dry before the successor was applied. The result was an unsightly horizontal line of cleavage between layers. Then an improved slower-drying mixture allowed the successive layers to fuse into a single mass, and before the death of Hadrian in A.D. 137 pozzolana-enriched concrete had become a monumental building material in its own right.
The Roman Empire had brought cities into being and created a far-flung urban culture with common needs. And the new architectural creations arose from the needs of these Roman cities. While the glory of classic Greek architecture was in its temples to gods and civic deities, the grandeur of Roman architecture began in the public baths. How and why Romans acquired their mania for public baths remains a mystery. But its signs were everywhere.
Some of the earliest were the grand Stabian baths of the second century B.C. at Pompeii, with elegant arches and a soaring conical dome topped by a central opening that anticipated one of the most appealing features of the Pantheon three centuries later. Grand public bath buildings sanitized and enriched urban life all across the Roman provinces. Besides the balneum, or private bath, found in the town houses and country villas of wealthy Romans, there were the thermae, or public baths. Some historians count these among “the fairest creations of the Roman Empire.” During the second century B.C. they multiplied at a great rate in Rome. It became common for a public-spirited citizen to make a gift of a public bath building to his neighborhood. Others were built commercially by contractors who hoped to make a profit from admission fees. Agrippa’s census (33 B.C.) counted 170 such establishments in Rome, and a century later Pliny the Elder (23–79) had to give up counting. Soon there were nearly a thousand. When Pliny the Younger arrived for a brief stay at his country villa near Ostia, and did not want to fuel his own furnaces, he found “a great convenience” in the three public baths in the neighboring village.
The essentials of a public bath were quite the same everywhere—a changing room, a sweating room heated by hot-air passages under the floor or in the walls, a large vaulted hall gently heated with intermediate temperatures, an unheated frigidarium partly open to the sky with a cold plunge, and a rotunda heated by circulating vapor, open at the top to admit sunlight at noon and in the afternoon. In addition, there were swimming pools. Nearby areas provided for strolling, for conversation, for sunning, for exercise, for various kinds of handball, hoop-rolling, and wrestling. Attached were concert halls, libraries, and gardens. The baths at their best were public art museums and museums of contemporary art. To them we owe the preservation of some of our best copies of Greek sculpture and our great treasures of Roman sculpture. The Farnese Bull, the Hercules, and the Belvedere Torso survived in the remains of the baths of Caracalla and the famous Laocoön group was found in the baths of Trajan.
This was emphatically public architecture, aiming to make every human function sociable. The latrine in the earliest Stabian baths at Pompeii was an open room with seats around the edges so the occupants could enjoy one another’s company. In the remains of the Hadrianic baths at the distant Roman colony of Lepcis Magna we can still see the marble seats around three sides of a spacious open room, with the fourth side occupied by a statue in a niche. The social latrine became standard in public baths. If bathing could be a pleasurable social occasion, why not defecating?
In later envious centuries in the West, especially among other peoples like the British who were far from matching the Romans in plumbing, the baths became a symbol of Roman decadence. In Roman times, too, baths were the butt of moralists and bluenoses. In the early republic, it was still thought improper for Cato the Censor (234–149 B.C.) to take a bath in the presence of his son. Under the early Empire there was an increasing tolerance of nudity and the mixing of the sexes and no formal prohibition of mixed bathing. But for the women who objected there were special baths or separate designated times. Eventually popular outcry against scandalous behavior in the baths led Hadrian to issue a decree separating the sexes. Throughout the Empire baths were enormously popular, accessible to all free Romans at a nominal fee.
Not only the sexual promiscuity but other excesses aroused Roman concern. Besides the procurers of both sexes under the porticoes there were aggressive vendors of food and drink. Some Romans, it seemed, enjoyed the hot baths mainly “to raise a thirst” or stimulate their appetite. “You will soon pay for it, my friend,” Juvenal (60–140?) warned, “if you take off your clothes, and with distended stomach carry your peacock into the bath undigested!” It was tempting to spend most of the day in the baths. The emperor Commodus (161–192), who imagined himself to be the god Hercules, took as many as eight baths a day, and exhibited his prowess in gladiatorial contests until his outraged advisers had him strangled by a champion wrestler. Efforts to prevent such excesses led to regulated hours of opening and closing.
To this conspicuous Roman institution, Edward Gibbon gives less than a paragraph of his seven volumes, casually reminding us that they “had been constructed in every part of the city, with Imperial magnificence.” Though frequently satirized by Juvenal and others, the Roman baths left no literary, graphic, or sculptural art of their own. We have no script for the daily drama of the bath. The institution where Romans acted out much of their daily lives remained formless, unrecorded, and anonymous. Like the hotels and department stores of nineteenth-century America, they were Palaces of the Public, promoting, along with personal cleanliness, wholesome athletic activity, conversation, and the enjoyment of literature and the arts. So, too, they promoted urban pride and reincarnated the Greek ideal for which Juvenal pleaded—“a healthy mind in a healthy body” (mens sana in corpore sano). Like the great clocks in medieval town halls, they too were tokens of community. Nor were the Roman bathers mere spectators. This pioneer public amenity invited them to participate in a secular and sensuous synagogue.
The public baths have left us some of our most impressive Roman ruins. A fragment of the remains of the Baths of Caracalla which altogether once covered twenty-seven acres has become a delightful opera house for open-air performances. The thirty-two acres of the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian now house the National Roman Museum, the Church of Saint Mary of the Angels, the Oratory of Saint Bernard, and a surrounding piazza. In their time the baths amazed visitors to the Imperial city.
The community bath, an enclosed structure to keep the water and the people warm, exploited the special qualities of the pozzolana-enriched Roman concrete to resist humidity and to shape interior space. The Roman architects also used their new materials for other civic functions that brought people together indoors. After the baths, basilicas were the most common and most characteristic Roman public buildings. A “basilica” (from the Greek for king) was a covered hall whose “royal” dignity came from its large size and the public and legal activities that it sheltered. In Roman times a basilica, usually attached to or near the forum, also housed markets, trials, and judicial hearings, public meetings, and covered promenades.
The basilica expressed, too, the same novel Roman interest in interiors. For basilicas throughout their history were usually simple and barnlike in their exterior. Decoration was on the inside. Their later form and their suitability for the Christian liturgy came from their widespread earlier use as a courtroom. In the first century B.C. the basilica commonly provided a raised platform at one end for the judge. With the coming of Christianity the raised end was enclosed by an apse, a semicircular half-domed extension of the wall, which m
ade the whole design especially convenient for the Christian service. The earliest known basilica, the Basilica Porcia, was built by Cato the Elder in 184 B.C. as an addition to the Roman forum, and many others followed in Rome and elsewhere. The only building we can confidently ascribe to Vitruvius’s own design is the Basilica at Fano (c.27 B.C.) which survives only in his description. These earliest basilicas, like Vitruvius’s, were square or rectangular, and usually roofed by timbers. In due course they, too, would be laboratories for the Roman revolution in architecture.
The great incentive came in an unexpected way on the night of July 18, A.D. 64. The fire that broke out in Rome on that night, in Gibbon’s words, “raged beyond the memory or example of former ages” and ravaged the city for nine days. Of the fourteen regions of the city three were leveled to the ground, and seven were devastated. The cause of the fire was never finally determined. This was the tenth year of the reign of Nero (37–68; reigned 54–68), who had well earned the suspicion and contempt of all Romans by murdering his mother and his wife, by extorting from the rich and oppressing the poor. He had forced his successful generals to suicide, and randomly tortured and executed any who excited his suspicion. He scandalized the Senate and soiled the imperial dignity by his buffoonery in the theater and public ostentation of his meager talents as singer and poet. By the year 64 the hatred of all classes of Romans naturally fueled the rumor that he had set the fire himself. It was suggested that he had destroyed the center of Rome so he could rebuild it all into a vast palace of his own and then rename the city after himself.
“To divert a suspicion which the power of despotism was unable to suppress,” Gibbon recounts, “the emperor resolved to substitute in his own place some fictitious criminals.” He made many martyrs, for his victims were the unlucky adherents of the despised new sect called Christians. “Some were nailed on crosses;” reports Tacitus, “others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts, and exposed to the fury of dogs; others again, smeared over with combustible materials, were used as torches to illuminate the darkness of the night. The gardens of Nero were destined for the melancholy spectacle, which was accompanied with a horse race, and honoured with the presence of the emperor, who mingled with the populace in the dress of and attitude of a charioteer.” The new sect had prophesied a second coming of Christ, with a worldwide conflagration. Nero loved classic Greek themes. In his legendary fiddling, he may have been using the Fire of Rome to accompany his own song to the lyre on the burning of Troy.
The fire’s conspicuous historic consequences can be explained only if we grasp the contradictory character of Nero himself. He suffered a repressed and insecure childhood, for when his father died he was raised under the terrifying menaces of his uncle, the deranged emperor Caligula, until Caligula was murdered and succeeded by Claudius. Nero was then brought up by his mother, the impetuous and domineering Agrippina the Younger. She used the wiles of incest and murder to secure for him the imperial throne in place of Claudius’s own son and rightful heir. Agrippina steered the resentful Nero into and out of marriages of convenience until finally she herself was murdered (A.D. 59) by Nero’s hired assassins.
Yet Nero must have had hidden strengths of character. For despite this erratic childhood, when he became the first boy emperor of Rome in A.D. 54 at the age of seventeen, he opened his reign with five generous and constructive years. He tried to reform the circus entertainments by forbidding contests that would cause bloodshed, he banned capital punishment, and even set up procedures for slaves to bring legal proceedings against cruel masters. Claudius, his predecessor, had put forty senators to death, but the young Nero in these first years tolerated those who plotted against him, pardoned the writers of satiric epigrams, and even found ways to make the Senate more independent. Nero’s clemency speedily became proverbial. Romans repeated his words when he signed his first death warrant, “Why did they teach me how to write?” After his first speech to the Senate he was acclaimed the herald of a Golden Age. If Nero had died in A.D. 59 when he was only twenty-two, he might have been celebrated as a noble precocious statesman.
What so suddenly happened to the man? A diabolical transformation occurred in the next three years, when he secured the murder of his demented mother, and then of his wife, so he could marry the wife of a senator. The surprising continuous thread in his life was an obsession with the arts. Even if he did not actually fiddle while Rome burned, the legend carried the truth that Nero was a man of consuming artistic passion. He even imagined giving up his throne to be a full-time poet and musician so that “they would adore in me what I am.” And he believed he could use his art to bring his enemies to tears and repentance. This obsession lasted through his brief life, and, on June 9, 68, just as he was about to commit suicide at the age of thirty-one, he was reputed to exclaim, “What an artist dies in me!”
Nero’s artistic aspirations were more than a madman’s dream. The Great Fire of 64 gave him an opportunity that, as even hostile historians report, he seized with creative energy and imagination. The chance to rebuild Rome had not been offered since Rome was burned by the Gauls in 390 B.C. After that earlier fire, as Tacitus chronicled, the capital was rebuilt “indiscriminately and piecemeal.” This time it would be different. By Nero’s orders, Rome would be rebuilt “in measured lines of streets, with broad thoroughfares, buildings of restricted height, and open spaces, while porticoes were added as a protection to the front of the apartment-blocks (insulae). These porticoes Nero offered to erect at his own expense, and also to hand over the building sites, clear of rubbish, to the owners.” He organized garbage removal by requiring that ships which carried grain up the Tiber must carry refuse downstream to be dumped in the Ostian marshes. He improved the water supply, required fire walls between buildings, and directed all householders to keep in the open their appliances for extinguishing fires. Tacitus (only ten years old at the time of the Great Fire) was Nero’s bitter critic, but he gave grudging credit to the mad emperor. “These reforms, welcomed for their utility, were also beneficial to the appearance of the new capital. Still, there were those who held that the old form had been the more salubrious, as the narrow streets and high-built houses were not so easily penetrated by the rays of the sun; while now the broad expanses, with no protecting shadows, glowed under a more oppressive heat.”
Nero’s aesthetic megalomania had subtle and far-reaching effects on Western architecture. For the Great Fire hastened the liberation from the architecture of mass, of parallels and right angles, which was the legacy of Greece into the architecture of curves, of vaults and domes. Nero’s new building code, specifying that future structures be more fireproof by avoiding timbers or beams (sine trabibus), implied the new architecture of concrete and its sinuous shapes for interiors. Large indoor spaces would now be enclosed not by flat ceilings but by rounded vaults of the newly improved artificial stone. The Fire of 64 thus cleared the way for what Suetonius called “the new form for the buildings of the city.” This was not the first nor the last example of man’s endless capacity to make catastrophe the catalyst of creativity.
…
Nero seized the incendiary opportunity to create for himself a grand palace. Much of the Rome that would not be reconstructed according to his new building code was reserved for his personal palace. If completed it would have covered some 125 acres, about one third of the city. The Golden House (Domus Aurea) it came to be called, because its façade was covered with gold. And there were symbolic reasons for the name. The Augustan Age, which Nero hoped to equal or excel, had been called Golden (aurea aetas, aurea saecula, aurei dies). After the fire, the name was an ironic reminder that Nero’s reign at its beginning had been predicted to be Golden. As Suetonius (c.69–post 122?) describes Nero’s Golden House, it was impossible to exaggerate its magnificence:
Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the Emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple portico a mile long. There was a pond, too, like
a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities, besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the palace all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of-pearl. There were dining rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers, and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. He had baths supplied with sea water and sulphur water. When the palace was finished in this manner and he dedicated it, he deigned to say nothing more than that he was at last beginning to be housed like a human being.
(Translated by William L. MacDonald)
The Golden House was not just a complex of buildings, but a vast pleasure park, for in that age domus (like the later Italian villa) meant a whole establishment—a palace, gardens, ponds, and fields. Nero’s Golden House, like Xanadu’s imaginary Pleasure Dome, was set in a delightful rural landscape (rus in urbe), which he had transported into the very heart of Rome. Much is still to be learned from future archaeological excavations. But we already know that Suetonius gave us only a hint of the palatial fantasies. There was good reason for wiseacres in the Forum to warn: “All Rome is being made into a villa! Flee to Veii [an old Etruscan stronghold twelve miles north]—until the villa spreads to Veii.”
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 16