Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  There are more than seven hills of Rome; but those of the canon—all on the east bank of the Tiber—are seven: six of them in a ring or rampart, Capitoline (from which every capitol and capital is named), Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, and Aventine; and one hill entirely within the rampart, the Palatine (from which every palace is named). These hills, on their outer side, fall off from the level of the surrounding plain; but on the inner side of the rampart they make an abrupt descent to the river level. The City is built on the bottom and sides of a pit and gives the feeling of being a subterranean city. Beyond the City, on every side, the rolling plains are two hundred feet higher than the City of Hills.

  Indeed, there is the feeling that the City goes down very deep and below its apparent floor. Under every house and building there were older houses and buildings. The town is underlaid with caves and pits and chasms. The catacombs of Rome were not vast excavations or tunnels cut out of the rock. They were natural caves, dressed and widened and shored up a little here and there. The cloaca maxima, the great sewer of Rome, was called by the historian Merivale greater than the pyramids of Egypt. An official of the City, after overseeing a cleansing of the drain, once launched a trireme boat on it and was rowed and steered through its miles into the Tiber. But it was a natural gulch and cavern, for all that, and the engineering consisted of facing portions of it with dressed stone. The cloaca itself was not dug by men, and the execution of it was not greater than that of the pyramids.

  The persistent story of fires burning beneath the City in ancient times was true. There was coal, peat, lignite, and igneous earth burning continuously under the City. These fires, whether lit by man or nature, burned, in some of the air-accessible caverns, for centuries.

  The crumbling floor of the City of Rome, the feel of chasms underneath and of old dead cities beneath the living city, and more than anything else the underground fires burning, contributed to the Roman and Christian idea of Hell. The Jewish Hell was not necessarily under our feet, nor was the Hell of the New Testament and of the Apostolic Fathers. But the Hell of the earliest Romans, and of the later Christians of Rome, was popularly set below, under the City of the World, and down in the middle of the earth.

  Rome was built from the materials at hand, of which it had unequaled supply. This may have been the deciding factor in building the great City in that location. The hills of Rome, on the east bank of the Tiber, are of tufa—igneous or volcanic stone, and from this stone both ancient and modern Rome have been built. From this stone, Rome is a pearl-gray or silver city; just as Jerusalem, from the sandstone blocks of which it is built, is a golden city. But Rome also had another, and even better, building material.

  The Vatican slope, and the whole complex of hills on the western bank of the Tiber, are of argillaceous substance. More bricks have been made from the clay of these hills than from any comparable area in the world. These, when baked and cemented with the native sand and lime, have proved even more durable than the stones themselves. Rome, from the second century b.c., was a city of brick and concrete, though having the appearance of stone and often faced with stone. Rome was a quarry and brickyard before it was a city, just as it was a series of mines before it was a city.

  Just before the beginning of historical time, the area of Rome was a lake with one narrow outlet. The natural dam of it was somehow riven, and the lake drained out the fifteen miles to the sea, leaving the old pit.

  There were towns on all the hills before there was one united town. The Tarpeian Hill, not one of the canonical seven, bore a town named Saturnia. The Janiculus, across the river, had its town. The Quirinal had a Sabine town on it; the Latins had a town on the Aventine; a colony of Arcadians had a town on the Palatine. The Romans built a wall around them all—establishing a policy of union and leagues until they had built a wall around the world.

  And just who were these Roman people who did this? Who consolidated and assimilated it all till they themselves disappeared in the assimilation? And who are you yourself, Quaesitor?

  You’re a son of them, or a collateral of theirs, in some line and to some degree, whoever you are.

  For, by the time of the Late Empire—just before the world ended—the citizenry of Rome embraced every sort; from Nubian Negroes, by way of Egypt as artisans, to Chinese tradesmen who had arrived with the Huns. There were East Indians and Irish and deep Slavs who were Roman citizens. But what the Romans had been was an utterly strange, though homogenous, people.

  The Romans were an Asiatic people who had arrived as strangers. There are twenty legends as to their origin, but every one of them brings them from Asia. They were Asian in a way that the Greeks and the Carians of Asia Minor and the Syrians were not. The Romans spoke an Arian language that was not their own, and behind their handling of it was a thought pattern entirely strange to us—even though we may call them our fathers. With the Old Romans we come to a wall, as we do not with the Old Greeks or even the Old Egyptians. There is no word of theirs, and no thought behind the word, that is completely translatable to us. One can take their simplest word, as res, a thing, as in Res Romana, the Roman Affair or Thing, that titles this chapter. But res may mean an affair, a fact, a condition, a property, a profit, an advantage; a suit at law, an affirmation, a matter; the commonwealth, the world, the universe; a cause, a result. The closest meaning of it is “concept,” but it is not quite such a concept as we are able to conceive. We use, mostly, the same words the Romans did, but we never mean quite the same thing by any of them. In a dozen histories we come on the confession of this wall that blocks off the Romans, the strangeness of the thought pattern.

  The Romans were a serious people; it can be seen on their coins and medallions and reliefs, and the broken-nosed faces of their statues. They took themselves seriously, and there was no chink at all in their attitude.

  The devil-gods of the Phoenicians were capable of a grin, for all their evil. In Greek verse or statuary we can never be sure that there is not an element of burlesque, or even that it is not all burlesque. Hittite serpents turn and bite themselves, and Egyptian mummies are buried with their childhood toys. There are Eastern minarets built in the form of a pun, and the most philosophical of all folks had a frog-faced deity. Chinese temple roofs turn up like cowlicks, and wooden Indians have been seen to wink. Only the old potato-faced Romans took themselves completely seriously.

  It is true that the Romans of the Late Empire, of whom we are treating, had become a generation of mockers. They had humor, high and low, and little else. But by that time there were few Romans left in the population of Rome.

  The Old Romans have given the names to all the virtues; loyalty, honor, duty, fidelity, courage, perseverance—to the solemn virtues, that is, and they were peculiarly Roman. But they did not mean to the Romans what they mean to us, and when we see the reverse sides of those coins we are justifiably horrified.

  The Roman patriotism was the most serious thing of this serious people, and was felt by strangers as well. It was not transmittable, and when taken over by outlanders, it became a disease. We become entangled in trying to abstract patterns, in attempting to set up a type or class when there is no class. Some things in the world have happened but once. Patriotism is one of these things that is meaningless in the plural. Patriotism is not the love of one's fatherland. It is the name of one thing only, the love of the Patria. There was only one Patria, and it was Roman. The Patria was the Res Romana, the Roman Thing; it was the Republic, it was the Empire; it was, perhaps, one interpretation of Christendom and Europe. But it was always one thing. Whatever the love of one's land should be, it is not patriotism. There was no Patria but the Roman, and patriotism was of single occurrence.

  But all that is what Rome should have been, and intended to be. It never resembled such except in idea, and by the Late Empire it was quite different.

  The City itself, at that time, had about a million and a half persons—about the same population it had had for four hundred years and about the s
ame that it has today. In the low Middle Ages it was to decline to less than one-tenth of that; but this is its natural population, and it will generally maintain itself.

  The City had been deathly sick for five hundred years: since the failure of the part of the reforms of the Gracchi, and the more damaging success of the others—as the temporary grain dole.

  Rome knew that it was sick. In its more intelligent groups of citizenry it had consulted thousands of doctors, and had employed nearly every nostrum known. It had, however, watched the deaths of many healthy cities and communities, and had come to take sardonic satisfaction in its continuing state.

  The City of a million and a half persons had become involved in the Empire of seventy-five million persons, somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of them slaves. The thinking men of the day knew that the percent of slaves was too high. For corporate health there must never be more than one slave to every two free men, and it had been announced several centuries before that this balance had been violated.

  The Empire had become too unwieldy. It had been broken in two for better administration, but it was still too unwieldy. In the time of the Late Empire it had only been ruled as a unit, briefly, by such strong Emperors as Constantine and Theodosius; and once more divided at their deaths.

  Rome was not, actually, the head of even the Western Empire any longer. The Western Emperors had taken up residence at Milan, and then at Ravenna. But Rome was the seat of the Senate and the See of the Pope. It was the most populous city in the Empire—Alexandria and Antioch had each populations of about a million, Constantinople about three-quarters of a million—it was the City to which Councils and Senates could be summoned, and to which the Emperor himself could be summoned. It was still the head and the heart of the Empire.

  In physical establishment, Rome was at its greatest in this Late Empire time. There has been great admiration for Augustan Rome, but this later Rome contained everything of the Augustan that had not been replaced by something better; and four hundred years of outstanding building had been added to that former excellence.

  But classical Rome was not classical in its building, except for the few and early Greek imitations. For the rest it was as baroque—in the grotesque sense as it is today—baroque from the beginning.

  There were twelve thousand millionaires—in sesterces—in the City. To be a millionaire in sesterces would be to have about seventy thousand dollars in modern coinage; but this was to be quite rich when the range of consumer goods was narrower.

  Ostia, the port of Rome, was the richest port in the Empire; but in the traffic of the port it is difficult to distinguish legitimate trade from tribute. For the two largest imports, grain and slaves, there was no corresponding export. This very favorable trade balance was the main cause of the sickness of the City.

  Coinage was peculiar and late. The Carthaginians, the greatest of old trading nations, had not cared for coinage as such. When they handled the coin of lesser trading nations, Lydia and Greece, they handled it as they would any other commodity, by assay and weight.

  The Romans never had an enduring standard coinage. The names of more than a hundred different coins are a jungle, unrewarding to try to cut through. The weight equivalent of copper to silver was 112-1 in value, and of silver to gold 12-1. The more frequent of the coins were the golden aureus, the silver sestertius, and the copper denarius, the biblical penny which had also been silver in its history and had varied in modern value from more than five dollars to less than five cents.

  Constantine established the gold solidus, seventy-two of them to a pound weight; however, he debased the coin before he left the room, as it were. Ingot and bar metal was used in all larger financial transactions, and credit was based on this ingot metal, by assay and weight. The financial center of Old Rome was the Via Sacra.

  Coinage was private, public, or military; but it was mainly in the hands of the generals. It bore their names, and was used primarily in the payment of troops. The generals operated both mines and mints, and the soldiers' money was the nearest to a standard. The generals, and this does not exclude the honorable generals such as Stilicho, were guilty of debasing their own coinage, which was the reason for many troop revolts. There seems never to have been a period when even the greenest of the barbarian troops did not have the technique to assay correctly the various metals of the coinage.

  Roman shipping seems primitive when we find that the basic three officers of the naval vessel were the Captain, the helmsman, and the flutist who gave the rhythm to the rowers. But the merchantmen had sail and oar of larger size and combination than had already been around Africa and China, and their size (up to a thousand tons) and number sufficed for the Mediterranean. The effect of piracy brought some improvement, in maneuverability. Pirates could sail into the wind before honest men could. They could tack sharper and turn closer, and could make use of shallower harbors for large ships for which they had methods of beaching also. The Roman merchants borrowed from them, and the marine was continuously improving.

  The Empire was breaking up. There was no question of that. But was it a natural process that was inevitable? Or could the trend be reversed by a firm stand? The Master General Stilicho believed that natural processes are only the names of mistakes that could have been prevented; that the Empire was too fine a thing to be allowed to die; and that it could be preserved if enough sincere men could be found to defend it. But enough sincere men could not be found, and many of the sincere men did not see the problem in the same fight as Stilicho.

  Does the mosaic method work? Does any picture at all of that involved Rome emerge? We will add a few more pieces.

  Rome had the first apartments or tenements. A law of Augustus forbade these to be more than seventy-five feet high. But with the low ceilings, this could be twelve stories, and the limit had not been observed in the following centuries.

  Men played a game with stone balls on balked tables. It seems to have been more like boys' marbles than like pool, however.

  Dice were thrown in threes, not in pairs, and loaded dice survive from the era.

  The blocks of houses and apartments faced inward to a space in the center, not outward onto the street. Every block became one internal neighborhood, and there were many who never left it at all.

  Rome was a city of pushcarts. From them were peddled sausage and cheese and wine and meat pies; also copper and brass ornaments and cloth and carded wool.

  The Romans had sidewalk cafes, and flute girls to play for the customers. The pubs served wine, cider, perry, honey mead-whiskey, and contrived strong wine. The alcoholic, as distinguished from the simple glutton, was not common.

  The red-light district was across the Tiber on the Via Avrelia, and red lanterns were used by the establishments for their signs.

  An over-sweet sort of popular art ran parallel to the more worthy productions; and Cupids more cloying than anything of later centuries survive.

  Men wept openly when taken by emotion, but women might only do so privately.

  The Romans had the first underworld, and it was literally under the ground. The criminals of the city lived below the surface in the caves and passages. Nobody considered it unusual that they should live down there as a caste, that they should come up and rob, and then return. Raids were made on them when they were too obstreperous, but there was never a concerted attempt to clear them out. It was assumed that they had been there forever and that they were in the natural order of things. There were even thieves' markets set up on certain days where people could go for bargains.

  Vice was practiced till revulsion set in—or with other sorts it was not practiced at all—but it was never restricted by material fears. The social diseases had not yet appeared, and the law had nothing to do with private lives. The only deterrents were the Christian religion, the old Roman hearth religion, and some groups of the pagan stoicism which held above such things.

  There were no cats at all in Rome. And what has that to do with these great
events? Who can say how one piece of the mosaic will contribute to the final picture? There had been cats in earlier Egypt, there would be cats in later Europe; but there were no cats in Rome. Weasels and their kindred were kept as mouse and rat-killers, but they were not kept as pets. Watchdogs were employed, but the dog as a pet would have been inconceivable; the best dog was the bad dog. The Romans made pets of lambs and kids, and pecora were still kept within the city itself; but they would never have made pets of a savage species like the dog.

  The streets of the City were well lit, but privately. Lanterns hung at all house and shop entrances. The Romans got their lanterns from factories in Capua, which town was devoted to that one industry. There were many such one-industry towns. House lamps were made of clay or terracotta, burned olive oil, and had wicks of linen or moss. Salt was shaken into the lamp flame in the belief that it made it burn brighter. It did not, or it does not now; but the practice was uniform with the Romans. The salt was shaken from leather containers.

  White was the color of mourning. Glass windows were rare, though glass was used for vases and ornaments. Most windows were of vellum, leather dressed so thin that it would let light through, but might not be seen through. The Baths were the lodges or clubs. They had walks, gardens, libraries, taverns, cafes, swimming pools, even theatres. The emphasis on the baths of the Baths is of seventeenth-century rediscovery, not of the original order of importance. Latrines were furnished with jugs of water and sponges.

  Rome has its name, not from Romulus, but from the Tiber whose original name was Rumo. Where the Tiber had that name is not of concern here; this is not a history of rivers.

  The Jewish quarter was in the Trastevere section and was very ancient; as old as the City itself, from one account. This was not the same location as the later medieval ghetto.

  But the most striking aspect of Rome of this period is that the Romans, whoever they were, had disappeared from it. It was like a whirlpool, or a fountain of which Rome was so full. The original water had long since gone, but other water had taken its place and the apparent configuration remained. The Roman people had disappeared, but newer peoples had taken their places and were playing their parts.