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Imagining Ruins in Ancient Rome European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire ISSN: 1350-7486 (Print) 1469-8293 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cerh20 Imagining ruins in Ancient Rome Catharine Edwards To cite this article: Catharine Edwards (2011) Imagining ruins in Ancient Rome, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 18:5-6, 645-661, DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2011.618316 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2011.618316 Published online: 04 Jan 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 464 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cerh20 Download by: [British Library] Date: 22 February 2017, At: 09:58 European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’histoire Vol. 18, Nos. 5–6, October–December 2011, 645–661 Imagining ruins in Ancient Rome Catharine Edwards* Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK The celebration of ruins, their capacity to evoke melancholy and offer consolation, is often characterised as a specifically modern phenomenon. It is also a phenomenon associated particularly vividly with Rome. This article aims to explore the significance of the ruined city as imagined by a number of Roman (and Greek) writers, Virgil and Tacitus, in particular. Such ruins often serve as traces of violent ruptures in the history of a city whose literary presences more usually work to emphasise continuity and durability. Through these texts, which describe the ruins of antiquity, the city of Rome could preserve all the nuance of its rich and complex past, both the beauty of the city and its devastation, in the minds of later readers. Keywords: ruins; Rome; Troy; literature; carthage; city; virgil; Tacitus For Petrarch in the fourteenth century, Rome’s ruins are a spur to contemplation and philosophical conversation (Epistolae Familiares 6.2). Poggio Bracciolini’s characters muse on the significance of the ruins of Rome in the context of his fifteenth-century treatise on the vagaries of fortune (De Varietate Fortunae, book 1).1 The celebration of ruins, their capacity to evoke melancholy and offer consolation, is often characterised as a specifically modern phenomenon, not widely attested until the Renaissance (even for Hildebert of Lavardin in the twelfth century, the prime significance of ruined pagan Rome is as a marker of the triumph of Christianity). It is also a phenomenon particularly associated with Rome.2 In recent centuries, ancient ruins themselves have been deliberately preserved in Rome from a variety of motives, as symbols of identity, assertions of control or instruments of legitimation by the occupying forces of Napoleon, by nineteenth-century popes, by Mussolini’s Fascist regime as well as by post-war governments. In the aftermath of the Second World War, when so many European cities were reduced to heaps of rubble, a number of governments elsewhere in Europe were persuaded to preserve selected ruins as memorials to the loss and suffering brought by the conflict. The communist authorities in East Germany, for instance, opted to preserve ruins of Die Frauenkirche in Dresden as a monument to the effects of capitalist warmongering.3 Ruined churches still stand as war memorials in British cities, such as Christ Church in Newgate Street in the City of London.4 Other media could also play a part in sustaining the memory of what was lost, as well as the violence of its destruction. Indeed, war artists such as John Piper forged works of terrifying beauty from scenes of devastation. His painting of Coventry Cathedral in flames (Coventry Cathedral, 15 November 1940) according to a recent critic ‘became for Britons what Picasso’s Guernica had been for loyalist Spaniards: *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1350-7486 print/ISSN 1469-8293 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2011.618316 http://www.tandfonline.com 646 C. Edwards an expression of British resilience’.5 Here the focus is on the moment of destruction, the horror of conflagration, rather than its aftermath. After the Persian war, the Athenians, we are told, chose to leave the Acropolis, the sacred heart of their city, in ruins for 30 years as a reminder of all they had suffered. The oath sworn by the Greek forces before the battle of Plataea is said by some sources to have contained the clause: ‘I shall in no way rebuild any of the temples that have been burned and demolished by the barbarians, but I shall allow them to be left as a reminder [hypomneˆma ] to future generations of the barbarians’ impiety’ (Diodorus 11.29.3).6 There is no indication that the ancient city of Rome included deliberately preserved ruins (there was a hut supposed to have belonged to Romulus, but it was regularly repaired rather than left to decay).7 Yet scenes of ruins in Rome and of Rome in ruins haunt the literature of Roman antiquity. This essay aims to explore the significance of the ruined city as imagined by a number of Roman (and Greek) writers, Virgil and Tacitus, in particular. Such ruins often serve as traces of violent ruptures in the history of a city whose literary presences more usually work to emphasise continuity and durability. These Roman ruins need to be considered in relation to the ruins of other great cities, Troy and Carthage, most obviously. Contemplating the once-flourishing city of Carthage in flames, Scipio, its destroyer, is said to have shed tears, as he quoted Hector’s prophecy on the future of Troy from the Iliad (6.448–9): ‘A day will come when holy Troy will perish, and Priam and the people of Priam.’ Scipio likens the fall of the city before him to that of Troy but his thoughts also turn to his own city. ‘When Polybius ... asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the nature of all things human’ (according to 8 Appian, 8.19.132, citing Polybius). A tradition of Hellenistic epigrams savoured the melancholy evoked by the ruin of once great cities such as Mycenae; the mighty Scipio seems to combine Roman military achievement with a Hellenistic sensibility (as well as a concern to avoid affronting the gods).9 For Polybius, it was the combination of such qualities in at least some Romans which made them fit to acquire and rule an empire.10 The ruins of Carthage have a somewhat different significance in a story Plutarch relates, centuries later, about another great republican general, Gaius Marius. According to Plutarch, Marius, in exile following his defeat in the conflict with Sulla in 88 BCE, was on the Roman governor’s orders forbidden entry to the province of Africa. When he was asked what reply he wanted relayed to the governor: he answered with a deep groan: ‘Tell him then, that you have seen Gaius Marius, a fugitive, seated amid the ruins of Carthage.’ And the parallel he drew between the fortune of the city and his own was a telling one. (Mar. 40) In Plutarch’s account, Marius sees the ruins of Carthage as standing for his own future, once a great man, now destroyed by Rome.11 Yet in drawing the comparison, Marius, familiar as he no doubt was with the story of Scipio’s tears, may perhaps also have been hinting at the possible future of Rome itself. The visual images paraded in Roman triumphal processions appear to have included pictures (or models) of enemy cities destroyed. Appian relates that Scipio Africanus’ triumphal display of 201 BCE boasted paintings showing the events of the war (Pun. 66).12 In a highly fictionalised account of the Punic Wars, Silius Italicus’ Flavian epic has Scipio’s great opponent Hannibal looking around the Italian town of Liternum as he relishes his recent success at the battle of Lake Trasimene. In Liternum he is confronted with a series of images of Roman forces vanquishing his own city and celebrating their successes. Angered, he imagines rather the blazing ruins of Rome. Not only will he destroy European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’histoire 647 Rome, he will also put on display in Carthage parallel images, immortalising the moment of Rome’s destruction: Flagrantem effinges facibus, Carthago, Libyssis Romam et deiectum Tarpeia rupe Tonantem. O Carthage, you will depict Rome blazing with Libyan torches and Jupiter the Thunderer thrown down from the Tarpeian rock. (Sil. 6.712–3)13 Silius himself, the last of the Neronian consulars (as Pliny describes him, Ep. 3.7.10), will very likely have witnessed Rome in flames not once but twice, in the great fire of 64 CE (to which we shall return) – and again in 69 CE, in the course of the civil wars following Nero’s downfall. The analogy between the life-cycle of a city and that of a human being evoked in Plutarch’s account of Marius recurs also in a letter from Servius Sulpicius Rufus to Cicero (45 BCE), following the death of Cicero’s beloved daughter Tullia. Sulpicius asserts the consoling power of ruins: Quae res mihi non mediocrem consolationem attulit volo tibi commemorare, si forte eadem res tibi dolorem minuere posit. Ex Asia rediens cum ab Aegina Megarem versus navigarem, coepi regiones circumcirca prospicere. Post me erat Aegina, ante me Megara, dextra Piraeus, sinistra Corinthus, quae oppida quodam tempore florentissima fuerunt, nunc prostrata et diruta ante oculos iacent. I want to tell of something that has brought me no slight comfort, in the hope that perhaps it may have some power to lighten your sorrow, too.
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