The Campus Martius
For I shall sing of Battels, Blood and Rage, Which Princes and their People did engage, And haughty Souls, that mov’d with mutual Hate, In fighting Fields pursued and found their Fate – Virgil, The Aeneid, 19 BC. Book VII, verse 40. Translated by John Dryden (1697). The empire was forged on the Field of Mars, where Roman soldiers drilled and armies assembled under the auspices of the god of war. Here, outside the pomerium, men could bear weapons, the Senate could meet generals in arms and foreign envoys, foreign gods could be worshipped. With the advent of the Pax Romana, the Campus Martius was singularly marked by two friends, Agrippa, the great general, and Octavian, the first emperor, who built monuments there to celebrate not war but peace. By the end of the first century AD, the central Campus Martius was filled to bursting with public buildings, houses, baths, theatres, temples, and monuments. Five centuries later, when mighty Rome was a thing of the past and the aqueducts were cut or in disrepair, people concentrated in this area close to the Tiber, their only water supply, making their houses, shops, and churches in the magnificent remains. Those ancient walls form the modern fabric of this part of Rome, which then like today, was busy, noisy, crowded, confusing, and fascinating. 1 Below: The Roman Army on the march. Soldiers and standard-bearers (wearing animal heads, the emblems of their cohort) on the Column of Marcus Aurelius. Before the 1st century AD, this floodplain was a sort of commons belonging to everyone, used for pasture, as drilling grounds, and for assembling armies.
[Show full text]