The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  2

  Imperial Italies

  ROMAN ITALY

  Italy’s diversity was determined by its geography, its climate and its pattern of human settlement, all of which encouraged the growth of different cultures and customs. That diversity had been formed long before the Romans united the peninsula politically in the first century BC.

  Mythology is also a part of that diversity. The family of Julius Caesar claimed it was descended from Aeneas, celebrated as the ancestor of the Roman people; in doing so it also added the goddess Venus, the mother of Aeneas, to the family tree. As Virgil recounts it in the Aeneid, this ancestor was a Trojan exile determined to follow his destiny despite the persecutions of gods and men and plagues and harpies. After spurning the love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, he sailed to Italy, killed the warrior Turnus and married Lavinia, his victim’s fiancée. He then united his victorious Trojans with the defeated Latin natives and became subsequently revered as the founder of the Roman race.

  Some 400 years later, in the early eighth century BC, a descendant of Aeneas was raped by the god Mars. The twin products of this violation, Romulus and Remus, were removed by their maternal grandfather and abandoned on the banks of the Tiber. Suckled by a she-wolf and nursed by a shepherdess, they grew up and bickered over which one should found a city. When his brother started building on the Capitoline Hill, Remus mocked him by jumping over his meagre walls. An enraged Romulus reacted by killing him and carried on building, appealing to outcasts and vagabonds to come and populate his new town. Realizing his dream could have no future without women, he then organized the kidnapping of the young women of a neighbouring tribe, an abduction known as ‘the Rape of the Sabine Women’.

  ‘Wolf’s milk, exile and fratricide were an unusual ancestry’, as the historian Robin Lane Fox has observed.1 So, one might add, are a divine rape and a mass abduction, the latter episode acknowledged and recounted without embarrassment by descendants. The foundation myths of Rome are, obviously, just myths; so are Aeneas and Romulus. Yet they manage to tell us something about the city – and indeed the empire – that Rome later became. Romulus may have made his town an asylum for fugitives because he needed fighters, but later Romans also pursued hospitable policies on immigration and citizenship – to the amazement of the Greeks, who themselves refused to make citizens of freed slaves or former enemies. Such attitudes made it impossible to think of Romans as a race of their own. From the beginning their city was inhabited by Sabines, Albans and Etruscans as well as by Romulus and his outcasts. ‘Romanness’ was a political identity – and later a juridical term – but it had no racial connotation. You did not have to be born in Rome to be successful there. None of the great poets came from the city, and many of the emperors were born outside Italy.

  In history, though not in myth, early Rome was ruled by several Etruscan kings, who were expelled at the end of the sixth century BC. In their place two Roman consuls were appointed to govern for one year at a time, and under them emerged a complex administrative structure of quaestors, praetors, censors, senators, aediles and tribunes. The early republic managed to produce a capable ruling class, its officials generally enjoying a reputation for high-mindedness and incorruptibility. All male citizens, including the ‘plebs’, had a vote in the assemblies that passed laws and elected officials, though in practice the voting was weighted in favour of the upper classes by a complicated system of block-voting. Besides, since elections had to take place in Rome, few of the poor outside the city turned up for the occasion. Nevertheless, by 69 BC there were nearly a million voters on the census, a suffrage numerically unsurpassed in any European country until the nineteenth century.

  The proclaimed virtues of the Roman Republic are not ones that many later Italians have thought desirable to emulate. The senator Cato the Elder, who successfully urged the destruction of Carthage, prided himself on his parsimony and austerity; for him luxury and Greek culture were abominations. His brand of rigid morality was shared by compatriots who delighted in being regarded as hardy and resolute and who exulted in the qualities of gravitas, frugalitas, severitas and simplicitas. In many ways the traits of the early Romans seem, superficially at least, to be the opposite of those belonging to the Italians of later eras: military prowess, political stability and respect for the law, combined with a lack of artistic originality, commercial enterprise, individualism and charm. The rare shared attributes include building and engineering – and a civic pride in the achievement.

  One characteristic prefigured in the legends of Aeneas and Romulus was militarism. Rome’s citizens were forced to serve in the army, and its consuls and other magistrates were ineligible for office until they had endured ten years of military service. Anyone in public life during the early republic was thus also a soldier. Historians used to claim that Rome was essentially a defensive power which became expansionist in circumstances not of its own deciding. Some of its conflicts that resulted in conquest may indeed have been forced upon it, but others, including all three of the Carthaginian Wars, were not. Inside the structure, innate and inbuilt, were a thirst to fight and a desire to dominate.

  Within a span of only seventy years Rome transformed itself from middling city-state to supremacy in the Italian peninsula. In 338 BC the Romans defeated an alliance of Latin neighbours, Volscians and Campanians, and in 295 BC they reduced the Samnites and their coalition of Umbrians, Gauls and Etruscans. A few years later, they went south to the Greek cities, many of which welcomed them, before attacking recalcitrant Tarentum, which not even King Pyrrhus of Epirus, with his elephants and his pyrrhic victories, could save. By 272 BC they dominated Italy south of the Po but felt they needed something more: a few years later, they decided they needed an empire.

  The wars within Italy seldom led to outright annexation. The defeated foes were usually absorbed within the Roman sphere by a system of treaties that turned them, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, into allies or socii. Rome’s chief requirement of its allies was a supply of troops, which they had to raise and pay for, in times of war. However reluctant they may sometimes have been, the allies remained loyal even at moments when disloyalty might have led to the destruction of Rome. The Carthaginian general Hannibal spent fifteen years in Italy, defeating the legions, trying to persuade the socii to join him and finally sulking in Calabria. Yet except for the one with Capua in Campania, the second-largest city in Italy, most of Rome’s alliances held, including all those with the Latin towns. In the north both the Ligurians and the Veneti remained faithful although they were the people most at risk when the Carthaginian army came over the Alps and was reinforced by Gallic tribesmen in the Po Valley.

  The allies doubtless calculated that life under Rome was preferable to a future under north Africans and their uncouth Gallic associates. Yet there were advantages too in the relationship, including military aid in times of trouble. However brutal the Romans were in conquest and in retribution, they were often reasonable and lenient with their arrangements afterwards. In 381 BC they gave the Latin city of Tusculum all the privileges of Roman citizenship and allowed it to retain its government as well. Roman justice was not an oxymoron.

  The favour the allies most desired was citizenship, the right to say in Cicero’s phrase civis romanus sum and thus feel protected against any high-handed behaviour from Roman officials. Yet most of them had to put up with lesser rights until the lifetime of Caesar. While the inhabitants of certain Latin cities were granted citizenship in the fourth century BC, others had to make do with ‘Latin status’ for another two and a half centuries. Latin rights, later extended through much of the peninsula, accorded certain privileges, mainly social and legal, such as the right of Latins to marry Romans and of their children to become citizens. By the time of Hannibal’s invasion towards the end of the third century, much of the peninsula enjoyed these rights. Thereafter the process stalled, and the goal of citizenship, which brought tax advantages as well as the right to stand for Roman office, remained elusive.
In 122 BC, when Gaius Gracchus proposed giving Latins full citizenship, he was countered by people who claimed that in consequence there would be no room for Romans to attend games and festivals.2

  For more than a century after Hannibal the resentments of the allies fermented: they had fought several wars for Rome and had received meagre consideration. Finally an explosion took place in 91 BC after the Senate had again rejected a proposal to extend citizenship. The ensuing Social War engulfed the peoples of the eastern centre, the Marsians and Picenes, and some in the south such as the Samnites and Lucanians; but it did not involve the colonies of Magna Graecia or the Etruscans and Umbrians in the north. The causes of the war are still disputed, historians traditionally claiming that the rebels were fighting for Roman citizenship while revisionist scholars argue that launching a savage war was an odd way of pursuing such a goal. According to the latter, the aim of the insurgents was quite the reverse: independence from Rome and a separate state called Italia.3 Both views seem to discount the possibility that the various allies might have had different motives, different goals and different emotions. Yet the apparatus of the infant state, with its consuls, capital and senate, suggests that a good many rebels did want independence; so does the numismatic evidence, the quickly minted coins stamped with the name Italia and its Oscan equivalent víteliú.

  Rome won with a combination of military suppression and political inducement: the moderate rebels were literally disarmed by the grant of citizenship to those who laid down their arms. Citizenship was also awarded to the Latins and other socii, most of whom had again remained loyal, but those north of the Po received only Latin rights until Caesar turned them into full citizens in 49 BC. All free Italians then received Roman citizenship. Two hundred and fifty years later, the whole population of the empire was given the same privilege by the Emperor Caracalla, the psychopathic fratricide and builder of the eponymous baths in Rome. Yet by then citizenship had lost much of its meaning: citizens no longer retained their exemptions from taxation and they had long lost their right to vote.

  The incorporation of the allies into the body politic took place during a century of intensive ‘Romanization’, a process that included the absorption of a great deal of Hellenic culture. Roman architecture burgeoned in the Italian cities, Roman villas became ubiquitous in the countryside, Latin vanquished Etruscan and the Italic languages, and municipalities and their officials followed the Roman model. The chief agent of the process was the army, marching along straight Roman roads, living in legionary camps and communicating in Latin. Its soldiers were also influential in retirement. Rome had long been placing settlements in strategic areas, especially the Po Valley, and it now constructed many more for the veterans of Pompey’s and Caesar’s huge armies.

  In this, the last century before the birth of Christ, an idea of Italy did emerge, not the Italia of the Social War but the concept of a peaceful, united, Romanized Italy, a reconciliation of the peoples of the peninsula after centuries of warfare. A sense of harmony is projected by a coin depicting Roma in martial costume greeting Italia holding a cornucopia, roles and symbols that soon became familiar and persisted for centuries. In 1926, in commemoration of the 2,000th anniversary of his birth, the citizens of Mantua erected a big bronze statue of Virgil, their city’s most famous son, gesticulating in mid-piazza on a pedestal between marble statues representing Rome the ruler and Italy the mother. Mantua also has a much older statue, dating from the thirteenth century, which restricts Virgil’s role to that of seated scholar with his book; evidently the medieval mind had been undistracted by the idea of Italy.4

  Virgil was the laureate of this Italia. Perhaps he may be considered the first Italian and, if so, maybe the last (except perhaps for Machiavelli) for another 1,800 years. Mantua is a northern city surrounded by water and flat land and cloaked in fog for an average of seventy-one days a year, so it is not surprising that the poet was enraptured by the quality of light and the sylvan landscape of central Italy and Naples. Fortunate was the man, wrote Virgil, who had ‘come to know the gods of the countryside, Pan and old Silvanus and the sisterhood of the nymphs’. Edward Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam identified the essential ingredients of a good picnic as bread, wine, a book of verses, the bough of a tree and a lover who can sing, but the Persian poet had been anticipated a millennium before by the Roman who recommended ‘elegant hampers’

  to condiment

  our meal with the delights of nature: a breeze

  touched with some blossom, a pattern of clouds, birdsong,

  and the babble of running water (in which wine jugs

  lie, waiting like sleeping mistresses).5

  Mantua became formally part of Roman Italy only during Virgil’s lifetime, so again it is easy to understand the poet’s enthusiasm for the idea of fusion. In the Aeneid he had Aeneas tell tragic Dido ‘italiam non sponte sequor’ – ‘[it is by divine will] not my own that I pursue Italy’ – and in the narrative he fused Greek, Trojan and Italic peoples to create a Roman ancestry. Earlier, in the Georgics, he had united Rome and Italy in a natural partnership beneficial to both: ‘the great mother of crops … the great mother of men’ uniting with the great capital of the world. As Richard Jenkyns has observed, the poet illustrated the idea by evoking the Umbrian river Clitumnus mingling with the Tiber and then jointly flowing to Rome.6 Virgil’s poetry was a powerful influence on Dante and Milton, and his depiction of the Italian countryside has had an enduring visual impact. When we look at a painting by Claude, we may see a mythical or biblical scene transposed to the Roman campagna, but we also see an enchanted pastoral landscape, a mellow arcadia in the evening light, which the artist conjured both from his reading of Virgil and from his observations in the countryside. The poet can hardly be blamed if he also inspired the shepherdesses of Dresden china or Marie-Antoinette’s petit hameau at Versailles.

  Virgil’s laus italiae (‘praise of Italy’) had a political purpose too. Accepting that the country was a place of extraordinary variety, he believed its strength and destiny lay in ‘unity in diversity’. For him Roman Italy was not a glorified city-state but an entity that resembled a nation, a territory of shared values and experience. When he wrote of Actium, the naval action between the former allies Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus), he described the battle not as part of a Roman civil war (which it was) but as a struggle between Octavian’s Italians and their un-Roman oriental enemy personified by the decadent and sensuous Antony and his Egyptian lover, Cleopatra.

  Augustus, who according to tradition preserved the Aeneid despite the dying wish of its author, was less lyrical about the idea of Italy. He used it for political ends, claiming that tota italia (‘all Italy’) had sworn an oath of allegiance and supported him in his war against Antony. But he did not put her on his coins or regard her as a nation. For him Italy was an administrative convenience not a cohesive unit, and when he divided it into eleven regions he was careful to preserve ethnic boundaries. Umbrians, Etruscans, Picenes and Ligurians each had their own regions; amalgamations of ethnic groups determined the shapes of all but two of the rest – Latins and Campanians, Sabines and Samnites, Lucanians and Bruttians.

  Another man who had spoken of totius italiae – ‘the whole of Italy’ – was Cicero, the orator and statesman who after Caesar’s death had argued that Octavian must free Italy from the tyranny of the drunk and debauched Antony – an argument that may have been just but was certainly premature (Octavian and Antony were then about to become allies) and led to his murder a few months later. As a minor aristocrat from Arpinum and a politician in need of votes, Cicero had seen like Virgil the advantages of diversity. He appreciated the place of his birth, its ‘charming and health-giving’ landscape, and he adored Rome, where he lived in grandeur on the Palatine. Yet he did not think of Italia as a whole as his homeland or patria. When his friend Atticus asked if he had two home cities or a single homeland, Cicero replied that he, like everyone born outside Rome, had two homelands, one
by birth and one by citizenship: while Arpinum was his ancestral fatherland, Rome was his homeland as a citizen. The orator was content with a double identity. Ennius, a poet from Apulia, proclaimed a triple one, declaring he had three hearts, Greek, Oscan and Latin. It was romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century – and its more sinister successors – that insisted on a single heart.

  While citizens generally had patriotic ties both to Rome and to their native city, they seldom thought of the rest of Italy as their homeland. The poet Catullus may have felt at home in both Rome and Verona but would not have had emotional links with places in between, other towns founded by the Romans such as Piacenza (Placentia – the pleasing) or Florence (Florentia – the flourishing). This dual but limited sense of patriotism was a product of the treaties of alliance between Rome and the various Italic peoples. These had been bilateral deals between the dominant power and the subject cities; the Romans did not encourage or even permit similar accords between the cities themselves. Roman Italy was thus not a federation of Italic territories but a kind of radial unit in which the political spokes, like the roads, all led to the capital.

  The Romans of the first century BC were not nationalists and never had been; apart from other considerations, much of their culture was foreign – Hellenic. Their Italy was essentially a land of city-states running themselves under the biggest city-state of all. The idea of Italy had its moment with Virgil and his fellow Augustans, but it was being superseded even at the time by imperial considerations. Rome transformed itself from city-state to empire so rapidly that there was no room for nationalism, no time for an ethnic Italian identity to emerge. In fact the Romans had chosen the imperial path long before they controlled the whole of Italy.