Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity 9780190492274, 0190492279

Table of contents :
Cover
Series
Rome’s Holy Mountain
Copyright
Contents
A Note on Names
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
A Note on Names
Introduction
Knowing Your Place
Making a Holy Mountain
Lost in the “Dark Ages”
Outline of the Book
Part I Lived-​In Realities
1 Climbing the Capitoline Hill
Trying to Climb the Capitoline Hill
The Last Imperial Processions to the Capitol
Building a New Topography of Devotion
The Forum on Fire
Toward a Christian Topography
A New Imperial Itinerary
Conclusion
2 Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill
Capitoline Temples and Statues
Rituals, Festivals, and Priests
Decline and Renewal in the Fifth Century
Bureaucracy and Justice
The Physiognomy of Neighborhoods in Late Antique Rome
Living on and Around the Capitoline Hill
Conclusion
3 Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity
Slouching toward Byzantium
The Establishment of the Capitoline Hill’s First Church
Oracles, Octavian’s Room, and the “Tabularium”
Two Capitolia, Two Imperial Capitals
Conclusion
Part II Dreamed-​Of Realities
4 Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill
Envisioning and Experiencing the Capitol
Capitolinas ascendit arces: Jerome and Praetextatus
The Capitol and Polemics Against Constantine
Rewriting Constantine’s Pagan Apostasy
The Capitol and the End of Empire: Olympiodorus and Procopius
Conclusion
5 Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance
The Capitol and Memories of Persecution
The Caput in the Capitol
A Problem of Mercy: the Siege of the Gauls in 390 bce
“A City in the Habit of Being on Fire”: The Gothic Sack of Rome in 410 ce
“A Remarkable and Sublime Temple”: Augustine’s Capitols
Reading Augustine’s Capitols at the End of Antiquity
Conclusion
6 Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction
Listing Temple Destructions
Chronicling Past Destructions of the Capitol
Chronicling Future Destructions of the Capitol
Evil Spirits and Owls: Portents of Ruination
Conclusion
7 The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints
The Topography of Martyrdom
A Pope, an Emperor, and the Tarpeian Dragon
The Anatomy of a Legend: The Acts of the Greek Martyrs
“Christ Is My Capitol”
The Face of Persecution: Capitoline Pontiffs
The Capitol and the Power of the Saints
Conclusion
Epilogue: The Fall of the Ancient Capitol
Finding the Capitol in the Early Middle Ages
A Wonder in a City of Wonders
Setting the Capitol in Motion
The Modern Fall of the Ancient Capitol
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ROME’S HOLY MOUNTAIN

OXFORD STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY Series Editor Ralph Mathisen Late Antiquity has unified what in the past were disparate disciplinary, chronological, and geographical areas of study. Welcoming a wide array of methodological approaches, this book series provides a venue for the finest new scholarship on the period, ranging from the later Roman Empire to the Byzantine, Sasanid, early Islamic, and early Carolingian worlds. The Arabic Hermes From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science Kevin van Bladel Two Romes Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity Edited by Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly Disciplining Christians Correction and Community in Augustine’s Letters Jennifer V. Ebbeler History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East Edited by Philip Wood Explaining the Cosmos Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-​Antique Gaza Michael W. Champion Universal Salvation in Late Antiquity Porphyry of Tyre and the Pagan-​Christian Debate in Late Antiquity Michael Bland Simmons The Poetics of Late Antique Literature Edited by Jas Elsner and Jesus Hernandez-​Lobato Rome’s Holy Mountain The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity Jason Moralee

Rome’s Holy Mountain The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity

Jason Moralee

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​049227–​4 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

List of Figures  ix Preface  xi Acknowledgments  xix Abbreviations  xxiii A Note on Names  xxv Introduction  1 Knowing Your Place  1 Making a Holy Mountain  9 Lost in the “Dark Ages”  17 Outline of the Book  22 PART I  Lived-​In Realities 1 Climbing the Capitoline Hill  29 Trying to Climb the Capitoline Hill  32 The Last Imperial Processions to the Capitol  37 Building a New Topography of Devotion  42 The Forum on Fire  44 Toward a Christian Topography  49 A New Imperial Itinerary  51 Conclusion  55 2 Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  57 Capitoline Temples and Statues  57 Rituals, Festivals, and Priests  59 Decline and Renewal in the Fifth Century  62 Bureaucracy and Justice  67 The Physiognomy of Neighborhoods in Late Antique Rome  70

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vi Contents Living on and Around the Capitoline Hill  73 Conclusion  84 3 Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  87 Slouching toward Byzantium  88 The Establishment of the Capitoline Hill’s First Church  92 Oracles, Octavian’s Room, and the “Tabularium”  99 Two Capitolia, Two Imperial Capitals  104 Conclusion  109 PART II  Dreamed-​Of Realities 4 Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  113 Envisioning and Experiencing the Capitol  114 Capitolinas ascendit arces: Jerome and Praetextatus  121 The Capitol and Polemics Against Constantine  123 Rewriting Constantine’s Pagan Apostasy  127 The Capitol and the End of Empire: Olympiodorus and Procopius  129 Conclusion  135 5 Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  139 The Capitol and Memories of Persecution  140 The Caput in the Capitol  144 A Problem of Mercy: the Siege of the Gauls in 390 bce  147 “A City in the Habit of Being on Fire”: The Gothic Sack of Rome in 410 ce  150 “A Remarkable and Sublime Temple”: Augustine’s Capitols  154 Reading Augustine’s Capitols at the End of Antiquity  161 Conclusion  163 6 Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  165 Listing Temple Destructions  167 Chronicling Past Destructions of the Capitol  173 Chronicling Future Destructions of the Capitol  177 Evil Spirits and Owls: Portents of Ruination  180 Conclusion  182 7 The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  185 The Topography of Martyrdom  187 A Pope, an Emperor, and the Tarpeian Dragon  190 The Anatomy of a Legend: The Acts of the Greek Martyrs  192 “Christ Is My Capitol”  198 The Face of Persecution: Capitoline Pontiffs  201 The Capitol and the Power of the Saints  203 Conclusion  206

Contents  vii Epilogue: The Fall of the Ancient Capitol  209 Finding the Capitol in the Early Middle Ages  210 A Wonder in a City of Wonders  216 Setting the Capitol in Motion  223 The Modern Fall of the Ancient Capitol  228 Bibliography  231 Index  267

Figures

1. Plan of the Capitoline Hill and the neighborhoods along its slopes.  xii 2. Rome in the age of Constantine.  2 3. Inscription dated to 1582 at the entrance to the Via di Monte Tarpeo marking the opening up of the road through the playful use of Vergil, Aeneid 8.347–​48.  13 4. Inscription dated to 1568, Palazzo Conservatori, Rome, declaring that the Capitol has been handed over from Jupiter to Jesus.  14 5. Reconstructing the Capitol.  20 6. View of the Capitoline Hill from the Forum Romanum from Giuseppe Gatteschi’s Restauri della Roma imperiale. 21 7. Approximate route of the imperial triumphal procession.  33 8. Consular inauguration coins of Maxentius.  41 9. Arch of Constantine, ca. 315.  45 10. Constantine’s use of Maxentius coin imagery of the Temple of the City in the Forum Romanum.  48 11. Plan of the “Tabularium.”  65 12. Niche of the “Tabularium” showing signs of postclassical construction.  66 13. Capitoline Hill in Regio VIII, the smallest and one of the most densely populated of the fourteen regiones of Rome.  72 14. Early modern Capitoline Hill encased in structures.  74 15. Capitoline Hill encased in neighborhoods.  75 16. Forum Romanum, Rome, photograph of the Basilica Iulia with the Capitolium behind, encased in neighborhoods, before 1930.  76 17. Piazza Montanara, Rome.  77 18. Detail of the Capitoline Hill from a photographic view of Rome.  78 19. Giuseppe Gatteschi’s restauro of the Capitoline Hill as viewed from the Temple of the City, 1896.  79

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x Figures 20. Imaginary view of housing mixed in with the monuments of Capitoline Hill.  80 21. Giuseppe Gatteschi’s restauro of the Theater of Marcellus and the Elefans Herbarius. 80 22. Oblique view of the Circus Maximus, Capitoline Hill, Palatine Hill, Forum Romanum, and Colosseum, July 22, 1938.  81 23. Fresco of Perseus and Andromeda found in a bath on the west side of the Capitoline Hill, ca. 1930.  82 24. Large apartment building discovered on the north slope of the Capitoline Hill, renovated in the early fourth century, before 1930.  83 25. “Casa dei Mulini,” a mill embedded in the neighborhood running along the north slope of the Capitoline Hill, ca. 1930.  83 26. Capitoline Hill and its environs in the early Middle Ages.  90 27. “Maria Regina,” S. Maria Antiqua, Rome, sixth century.  95 28. Constantinople in late antiquity.  106 29. SS. Quattro Coronati, Cappella di S. Silvestro, Rome, ca. 1240.  129 30. Christian Hülsen’s fake map of the Einsiedeln Itineraries.  213 31. Eleventh-​century illustration of the “Capitolium,” Hrabanus Maurus, De Universo, showing the digging of the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the discovery of the intact human head that promised that Rome would be the head of a world empire.  215 32. Apse mosaic of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, 817–​824, showing Christ flanked by the apostles Peter and Paul.  222 33. El Capitolio of San Juan, Puerto Rico.  227

Preface

T

his is a book about anecdotes, toponyms, and the ways of knowing and experiencing the Capitoline Hill in late antiquity. It seems fitting, then, to start with an anecdote and a toponym. A wedding day is not the time for surprises, now or in antiquity. In 45 ce, in the city of Antioch-​on-​the-​Meander, a small but prosperous settlement in Phrygia, a thirteen-​year-​old virgin from a local elite family was ready for the celebration of her marriage to a man chosen by her parents. Everything was as it should have been until she was about to step out the door for the big day. Suddenly she felt terrible pains in her stomach. Her family sought treatment, but in spite of the doctors’ efforts the pain would not go away. On the fourth day, her condition became even worse. She screamed loudly, and just at that moment “male parts” emerged from her. Thus, according to Phlegon of Tralles’s Book of Wonders, “the girl became a man.”1 She was lucky in a way. Normally, when they were discovered, these young androgyni, as they were called, were thrown into the sea.2 It seems that the ominous circumstances of her sudden transformation eventually brought the androgynus to Rome and to the emperor Claudius. According to Phlegon’s account, “Because of this portent, he [Claudius] dedicated an altar on the Capitoline Hill to Zeus Alexikakos,” Jupiter the Averter of Evil. There is no indication why Phlegon, a freedman with interests in chronography and paradoxography and working in the court of the emperor Hadrian (117–​138), chose this incident for his list of wondrous androgyni. Fact or fiction, the report was nevertheless believable to Roman audiences trained to think of androgyny as an ill omen. What draws my interest in the anecdote, and likely Phlegon’s too, is the emperor’s dedication of an altar on the Capitoline Hill. For Claudius and Phlegon’s audiences, this was a suitable, perhaps even necessary, reaction to a troubling event that happened in a city of a distant province. The 1. Phlegon, Mir. 6 (Stramaglia 31–​32; tr. Hansen 38–​39). 2.  Dio 32.11; Julius Obsequens, Liber Prodigiorum 3, 32, 34, 36, 47, 50.

xi

xii Preface

Figure 1.  Plan of the Capitoline Hill and the neighborhoods along its slopes, compiled by Brian Shelburne (after the archaeological plans of Ioppolo, in Reusser 1993, fig. 3; von Sydow 1973, fig. 34; Tucci 2005, fig. 3).

Capitoline Hill is hardly the highest point in the city, nor is it the most domineering feature of the city’s hilly landscape. Yet the Capitoline Hill was made to tell many of the most important stories about the origins of Roman civilization, and it was, as Claudius’s Capitoline altar suggests, a holy place where men, women, and children could affect, and interact with, the divine forces that determined the fortunes of the Roman community locally and throughout the empire. The distant problems of Phrygia were addressed in Rome through the emperor’s attention to the place, the Capitoline Hill, settled by gods and goddesses in the time before humanity. In the next few pages, I would like to introduce this hill and its physical features, its many ritual uses in Roman society, and its symbolic importance (Figure 1). The Capitoline Hill has two summits: The southern one, facing the Forum Romanum and the Tiber River, was generally called the Capitolium (or Capitolia or Mons Capitolinus) in antiquity; the northern one, facing the imperial forums and the Quirinal Hill, was called the Arx and the Tarpeian Rock.3 The hollow between these summits, the present location of the Piazza del Campidoglio, was called the inter duos lucos (place between the groves) and the Asylum. Crammed onto these three locations were dozens of holy places. The most important of them 3.  For recent and especially useful overviews, see Albertoni 1997; Albertoni and Damiani 2008; Perry 2012. Lugli 1969 is an almost complete compilation of evidence from ancient authors, epigraphy, and numismatics. I cite other relevant bibliography in the introduction.

Preface  xiii was the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, which stood on the Capitolium, the southern summit of the hill. The temple was originally dedicated in 509 bce and reconstructed three times thereafter, the last time following its destruction in 80 ce. There were also a number of other temples, shrines, and altars. The Temple of Juno Moneta was built in the middle of the fourth century bce, and a host of others followed, including those for Fides, Mens, Venus Erucina, Ops, and Veiovis. In the first century bce, Augustus dedicated Jupiter Tonans; Domitian dedicated Jupiter Custos in the first century ce; and Marcus Aurelius dedicated the Temple of Euergesia at the end of the second century. The shrines and altars standing on the hill included those for Terminus, Iuventas, Mars, the Gens Iulia, Fausta Felicitas, Genius Publicus, Venus Victrix, Fortuna Primigenia, Bellona, Jupiter Soter, and Jupiter Depulsor. There were also places to venerate foreign cults such as Isis, Serapis, Anubis, Harpokrates, Jupiter Africus, Dea Caelestis, and Mithras. There were military memorials, treasuries, archives, a library, and even a pool. Memorials of past occupants of the hill included the Casa Romuli, one of two houses of Romulus (the other was on the Palatine Hill)—​both of them preserved, perhaps even imbued with religious significance, by the Romans for hundreds of years.4 If the architecture, religious or otherwise, were not enough to draw the attention of ancient authors, there were also statues, some of them masterpieces of incredible antiquity, and stunning objects dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus by Roman statesmen and foreign potentates.5 These were Jupiter’s by right. As Cicero put it, “Many kings, many free states, many wealthy and powerful individuals truly take it upon themselves to adorn the Capitol as demands [desiderat] the majesty of the temple and the renown of our empire.”6 These high-​profile treasures and the rituals associated with the hill’s temples made this location a repository of Roman state memory. In the Roman republic, the calendar year began on the Capitoline Hill with the inauguration of the state’s two chief magistrates, the consuls. Because the consuls were at least initially elected annually, the consuls’ names would subsequently be used in chronography and historiography to mark the passage of time from one consulate to another, year after year, all the way into the sixth century. In the Roman Empire, emperors-​to-​be were inaugurated on the Capitoline Hill with Jupiter Optimus Maximus as witness, and the day on which they were acclaimed emperor continued to be celebrated there as the anniversary of the dies imperii. On January 3 vows were made on the hill for the emperor’s health, and it was the place where thanksgiving rites took place when emperors lived through illnesses, coups, and shipwrecks. The ritual most associated with

4.  Lugli 1946b, 19–​53; Reusser 1993, 46–​51. 5.  Lugli 1969, 417–​30. 6. Cicero, Ver. 2.4.30: “Multi reges, multae liberae ciuitates, multi priuati opulenti ac potentes habent profecto in animo Capitolium sic ornare ut templi dignitas imperiique nostri nomen desiderat.”

xiv Preface the Capitoline Hill, for both us and the Romans, was the triumph, the elaborately staged procession of victorious military commanders, Roman troops, and spoils from foreign lands. This carnivalesque parade snaked through the city to end up at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The Capitoline Hill also was a repository of the future. When the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was built at the end of the sixth century bce, the Sibylline Books, a collection of the utterances of the Sibyls, prophetesses from locations throughout the Mediterranean world, were stored there. Their words were consulted by specialists in times of extreme crisis. The books were lost and reconstituted after the temple was destroyed by fire in 83 bce, and eventually they were moved to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill by order of the emperor Augustus. With or without these sources of divination, the hill also contained other technologies for knowing the future. The Capitoline Hill was the location of the Auguraculum, a structure on the Arx from which the augurs would take public auspices (auspicia publica) and thereby know through observation of the sky whether a course of action was favorable or not. Once every century or so, the Capitoline Hill became an important stage on which solemn rites, called the Ludi Saeculares, were performed for the inauguration of a new age (saeculum). And the physical integrity of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus held ominous significance. When the temple or notable statues associated with it were damaged by lightning or destroyed by fire, this was taken as a sign of the possible imminent destruction of the Roman Empire.7 The density of sacred constructions and the multiplicity of associations with mythology, history, and the future of the empire made this small hill Rome’s holy mountain. Cicero labeled it the “earthly home of Jupiter,” and for Livy it was the “home of the gods.”8 Even outsiders, such as the Jewish historian Josephus, called it the location of the “most honored of temples” (timiōtaton hierōn).9 A  little more than three centuries after Josephus left Judea and arrived in Rome, where he documented the history of his own people in his Jewish Antiquities and Jewish War, the Christian scholar Jerome was leaving Rome for the last time to take up residence in Roman Palestine. By this time Rome and the Capitoline Hill were no longer the center of the Roman state and its religious apparatus. The imaginary cartography of the Roman world’s holy places was beginning to look like a Christian map of sites associated with the Old Testament, Christ, the apostles, and saints. From his new home in Bethlehem, Jerome wrote a letter in 386 to a friend of his still in Rome. True, Jerome wrote, Rome had the memorials of the apostles Peter and Paul, but the Christian God fulminated against the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, registering his righteous anger against the city and its 7.  Lugli 1969, 272–​73. 8. Cicero, Ver. 2.4.129: “in Capitolio, hoc est in terrestri domicilio Iouis.” Livy 5.39.12: “sedes deorum.” 9. Josephus, AJ 19.4.

Preface  xv vain aristocracy, while maintaining that the holy sites in Palestine were resplendent in their humility.10 Jerome’s statement and others like it have the attraction of inevitability. From our point of view, looking back to these distant events, it is obvious now that Rome’s Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus would be destroyed, while St. Peter’s in Vatican City still stands as a triumphant, richly decorated, and otherworldly monument in Rome’s cityscape. Indeed, at the end of the eighteenth century Edward Gibbon related that he was inspired to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while sitting on the hill in the shadow of S. Maria in Aracoeli, wondering, as others had before him, about how this lamentable change in Rome’s topography came about.11 For him, the usual suspects are credited with the hill’s decline and fall—​Christians and barbarians in the late empire. There is some truth to this way of understanding Rome’s visible reorientations of topography and symbolic significance. By the end of the fourth century, Christian elites ridiculed the hill, stripping it of its religious importance. Then Roman and barbarian rulers and administrators began to treat Rome as pilgrims did, thus terminating processions not at the Forum Romanum or Capitoline Hill, as they had in the past, but instead at St. Peter’s or the Lateran Palace. Moreover, even if Rome’s ancient monuments impressed late antique commentators such as Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian, the Capitoline Hill became the target of looting by the end of the fifth century, some of it certainly under official direction. But the Capitoline Hill’s history did not end with the initiation of these processes of ruination. While the hill saw a decline in monumentality, this study is just as interested in other evidence that points to the hill’s integration into the life of the city and in the imagination of a Mediterranean elite. This book thus revisits a major development in the historiography of late antiquity—​the demise of pagan temples—​by focusing on a location of singular political and symbolic importance. It demonstrates that polemics against the Capitoline Hill, such as Jerome’s, were hardly an organized, let alone unified, phenomenon. Jerome’s imagery, while vibrant, was at the end of a Christian apologetic tradition, one that sapped the sanctity of all manner of traditional customs. Nor did such imaginary representations result inevitably in the destruction of the hill’s most important feature—​the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. On the contrary, I would like to show in the following pages that among the forces shaping the history of the Capitoline Hill were the polemics against it. These polemics served to preserve the traditions telling of the hill’s sanctity while opening them up to continuous elaboration. It is only recently that we have come to value the Christian afterlives of Greek and Roman monuments through a series of remarkable studies: Yaron Eliav on 10. Jerome, Ep. 46.11. See ­chapter 4. 11.  Craddock 1984; Grig 2009, 290.

xvi Preface the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (2005), Anthony Kaldellis on the Parthenon in Athens (2009), Douglas Boin on the temples and other public spaces in Ostia (2013), Andrea Augenti on the Palatine Hill (1996), Hendrik Dey on the Aurelian Wall (2011), Robert Coates-​Stephens and Gregor Kalas (2015) on the Forum Romanum (2011), and Caroline Vout on the Seven Hills of Rome (2012). In all cases, these scholars have shown that in the late Roman world iconic places were usable remnants of an increasingly remote past; while these monuments were animated with significance according to classical literary traditions, they were also subject to reuse and reinvention. In short, places from the distant past continued to shape the experiences of people engaged with their physicality and their heritage. Heritage is always a rickety construct, based as it is on the negotiation of dissonant investments in, and assertions of, the significance of the past.12 By paying serious attention to this dissonance, it suddenly becomes clear that the Capitoline Hill was increasingly reimagined in late antiquity. Starting in the third century, Christian elites began to imagine, as Tertullian did, that the Capitol was full of demons. In the Christian empire, the demons had disappeared along with their devotees. In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Jerome and Prudentius imagined that the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was completely empty. Instead, they asserted, the Roman populace was filling up the shrines of the apostles and martyrs. From a place of high state ceremonial, where emperors regularly did the business of empire, the Capitol instead became figured as a place where no human souls dared to go. This imaginary absence was flipped beginning in the late fifth century. The Capitoline Hill was repopulated as Christians began to imagine Rome as the setting for a specifically Christian history of the Roman Empire. The Capitol thus became the setting for a dramatic battle between Christians and their pagan oppressors. It was on the hill that Pope Silvester battled a bloodthirsty dragon living in a cave inside the hill—​the hill is riddled with tunnels. In the hill’s temples, bloodthirsty pagan priests engaged in unimaginable forms of human sacrifice. It was there that Simon Magus took flight and soared over the Forum Romanum, only to be shot down by the prayers of Saint Peter; Pontius Pilate stood trial in a meeting of the senate for the murder of Jesus of Nazareth; and the Tiburtine Sibyl presented the emperor Augustus with a vision of the “Hebrew child” savior. In a sense, the suppression of paganism, so seemingly evident in the Theodosian Code and vividly narrated in literary sources, did not rob the hill of its classical heritage. Stories such as these suggest instead some of the ways by which the Capitoline Hill, as both a real and an imaginary place, continued to play a role in the formation of local identities and Mediterranean literary imaginations.

12.  A point made particularly well in Olsen 2015.

Preface  xvii In the last few decades, literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists, occasionally working together, have been interested in showing that Rome was always in the process of invention. There was, as there is now, a Rome of one’s own, a constellation of memories and monuments, assembled and animated by the proclivities of the Roman emperors, the local aristocracy, and the urban plebs.13 In late antiquity, knowing the cityscape meant conditioning the old “places of memory” against the formation of a Christian cityscape; sometimes, as was the case with the Capitoline Hill, the two registers of knowing the city became inextricably entangled with one another. Helping matters is the fact that we are now better informed than ever on the late Roman significance of the Capitoline Hill. Archaeologists such as Anna Mura Sommella (1996), Dunia Filippi (2000), Pier Luigi Tucci (2005), Roberto Meneghini, and Riccardo Santangli Valenzani—​and others to be sure—​have begun to investigate the physical transformations of the built structures and open spaces on and around the hill from late antiquity into the Middle Ages. Classicists and historians such as Augusto Fraschetti (2001), Pascal Boulhol (2004), Steffen Diefenbach (2007), Lucy Grig (2009), and Ralf Behrwald (2012) have examined the significance of late antique legendary materials for how the Capitoline Hill was deployed as a topos in the construction of the past. By focusing jointly on archaeology, literature, and other less-​than-​literary sources, this book draws on the efforts of these scholars and others to emphasize the entangled relationships between the evidence for the physical collapse of the Capitoline Hill’s classical monumentality and the vitality of classical traditions in the forging of a particularly Christian heritage in Rome. What must be acknowledged at the outset is that no book, in my opinion, can be written on the Capitoline Hill that can narrate the hill’s history from beginning to end. This book is instead about the breaks and bridges between past and present, the formations and deformations of identities, and the simultaneity of the celebration of ruination, the valuation of heritage, and the embeddedness of the distant past in the society, religions, and urban environment of late antique Rome. It is about the ways in which the memory of the Roman Empire was understood in late antiquity through its monuments and how this late antique legacy continued to shape the uses of the distant past in the early Middle Ages and beyond.14 Finally, it is about the stories that were invented, circulated, truncated, and altered concerning the hill and the ends to which they were put. This is also the place to register what this book deliberately does not do. This is not a history of one of the Seven Hills of Rome, from the ground up. The stones of the Capitoline Hill, stones brought to the hill, and stones quarried from its monuments have been the subject of artistic representation and scholarly studies since at least the fifteenth century. There is moreover little here about the localization, 13.  Dieffenbach 2007; Edwards 1996; Galinsky 2014; Zanker 1988. 14.  See Leyser 2012.

xviii Preface elevation, ornamentation, or dimensions of temples once located on the hill but now almost irrecoverably lost—​even to archaeologists. This is also not primarily a cultural biography of the most important of these temples, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the massive edifice that dominated the Roman skyline for hundreds of years. Though I will touch on these important issues, my aim has been to write a history of the people who used the Capitoline Hill in late antiquity, lived in the streets and neighborhoods around it, and wrote about the hill’s variegated past. It is an attempt, however elliptical, episodic, and incomplete, to capture the Capitoline Hill’s charisma and those engaged with its physicality, legacy, and magnetism during a time, from the second to the eighth century, when the Roman Empire disintegrated into a parade of Christian successor states. More generally, this study asks what happens to places of power, like the Capitoline Hill, when societies are revolutionized and formerly marginalized elements in the populace find themselves empowered. These are issues many historians face, especially in studying the formation of new states following wars, the dissolution of empires, the endless processes of decolonization, and the revolutions of the more recent past in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.15 In today’s Mediterranean world, fixed locations such as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Parthenon in Athens are experienced globally. They shatter boundaries of time and space, their histories setting into motion everything from scholarship and international tourism to heritage-​based militancy and attendant claims of ownership of the remains and interpretation of the past, disputed and defended, it is claimed, by the authority of ancient texts, archaeology, national sovereignty, and the facts on the ground, the immutable and immobile status quo.16 Religious polemic and the violent destruction of holy sites is a dynamic all too familiar in today’s world. Zealots target particular types of buildings as a proxy for the people who frequent them. Blazing churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples regularly make headlines because these violent actions are, as usually reported, attacks on a community. I would suggest that the historian can follow analogous processes of identity formation around monuments and around their destruction in late antiquity.

15.  See Nadkarni 2003; Olsen 2015. 16.  Greenblatt 2010, 1–​23; Harvey 2006, 119–​48. See Beard 2003; Goldhill 2005; and Goldhill 2008.

Acknowledgments

I

n some sense, this book is about my own engagement with a hill and its stewards, access granted and denied, the friends I’ve made in researching the hill, and the accumulation of my own memories, most often pleasant but often also embarrassing, of trying to hunt down information and to understand its significance. I can’t imagine a more auspicious beginning and ending for the process of researching and writing this book. I began thinking about the Capitoline Hill at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies, 2009–​2010. Seven years later I had the incredible luck to complete the book at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where I was a member in the School of Historical Studies, 2015–​2016. In Rome, the following in no particular order nourished me, my family, and my obsession with the Campidoglio: Terry Adkins (d. 2014), Merele Williams, Nick Wilding, Rena Diamond, Kiel Moe, Darian Totten, Scott and Jenny Craver, John Calame, Anna Hepler, Lars Lerup, Eva Sarraga, Antonia Fried, Kathryn Blair Moore, Jonathan Conant, Annie Schlechter, Russell Maret, Annie Labatt, Richard Wittman, Aurelia D’Antonio, Ann Vasaly, Stephen Greenblatt, Ramie Targoff, Luca Nostri, Susanna McFadden, Jonas Bjørnebye, Katariina Mustakallio, Turid Karlsen Seim, Victor Plahte Tschudi, Gianni Ponti, Paolo Imperatori, and Bill Franklin. The following made everything happen while I was in Rome: Pina Pasquantonio (d. 2016), Gianpaolo Battaglia, and Giulia Barra. I would especially like to single out Carmela Vircillo Franklin, Corey Brennan, Martin Brody, and Mona Talbott—​their leadership, support, friendship, and food left a deep impression. At the Musei Capitolini, I would like to thank the following for showing me some of the secrets of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus: Claudio Parisi ​Presicce, Margherita Albertoni, and Alberto Danti. Carmela Vircillo Franklin introduced me to the Vatican Library, and Giuseppe Ciminello and Paolo Vian made sure I saw what I needed to see. Elizabeth Jane Shepherd, the director of Rome’s L’Aerofoteca Nazionale, pointed me toward a series of incredible aerial photographs of the Campidoglio, some of which appear by permission in this book. xix

xx Acknowledgments Lavinia Ciuffa, the curator of the American Academy in Rome’s Fototeca Unione, likewise welcomed me into the academy’s photo archive. I thank her staff for the hours and hours of efforts to supply me with stunning images. In Princeton, I will be forever grateful to Patrick Geary and Angelos Chaniotis for an extremely stimulating year. In addition to Patrick and Angelos, the following, through their good humor, intelligence, and patience, left their fingerprints all over this project (again, in no particular order): Michael Kulikowski, Sarah Bassett, Felipe Rojas, Els Rose, Peter Brown, Lorenzo Calvelli, Cédric Brélaz, Debbie Steiner, Teresa Shawcross, Gianfranco Agosti, Eric Ramírez-​Weaver, Courtney Booker, Eric Goldberg, Albrecht Diem, Maria de Lurdes Rosa, Dan Smail, Paulin Ismard, William Van Andringa, Thomas Biskup, Julia Hairston, Willem Jongman, Glen Bowersock, Christopher Jones, and again Carmela Vircillo Franklin. For games of table tennis that sometimes went far into the night, I would like to thank Hodong Kim and Alexander Batten. The following made the year work so smoothly and happily: Marian Zelazny, Maria Mercedes Tuya, Marcia Tucker, Kirstie Venanzi, and Karen Downing. Before, in between, and after these fellowships, the following have read drafts of the book’s chapters, answered questions, and offered advice when it mattered most (again, in no particular order): Guy Geltner, Maya Nadkarni, Bettina Bergmann, Barbara Kellum, Scott Bradbury, Michele Salzman, Claudia Rapp, Ron Mellor, Bob Gurval, Hal Drake, Neil McLynn, Dale Kinney, Robert Coates-​ Stephens, Fabio Barry, Kristine Iara, Paolo Liverani, Lucy Grig, Jessica Maier, Nick Camerlenghi, Hendrik Dey, Brent Upchurch, Vincent Drost, Tony Tuck, Ginna Closs, Brian Ogilvie, Anne Broadbridge, Laura Doyle, Jen Adams, Mark Roblee, Carlin Barton, Anna Taylor, Richard Lim, Jim Kelley, John Higginson, Dan Armenti, and especially Joye Bowman—​the latter deserves my deepest gratitude. It was through Joye that I came to my new academic home in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an institution that has supplied critical support for this project as well as a cadre of colleagues who have made it better. Special thanks are also due to Brian Shelburne, the head of the Image Collection Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I cannot exaggerate the timely importance of Brian’s enthusiastic help and awesome expertise in hunting down and preparing the book’s images. I had the opportunity to test most of the ideas found in the book in the following venues:  the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, Late Antiquity in Illinois, the American Academy in Rome, the Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, Det Norske Institutt i Roma, the Five College Classics Seminar, the Five College Seminar in Late Antiquity, the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Bits and pieces of this book have appeared in the journals Acta ad archeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia and the Papers of the British School at Rome. I thank the organizers

Acknowledgments  xxi of these events and those who participated in them for their criticisms as well as the editors of these journals for allowing me permission to draw on my published work. Ralph Mathisen and Stefan Vranka took an early interest in this project. Their guidance, criticisms, and enthusiasm have sustained me in the course of writing this book. They and the anonymous readers for the press have distilled what I intended to write into a far better substance. I am grateful to OUP’s production team, especially John Veranes in New York and Shalini Balakrishnan in Chennai. All of the book’s remaining faults are mine alone. Now that it is finished, I wish two people had lived to see its printed pages. One would have liked the book unconditionally, and the other would have thought it too rigidly bookish, too black-​and-​white and two-​dimensional, to illuminate the subject from all its hidden angles; both were supporters, interlocutors, critics, and dear to me: my father-​in-​law and scholar Dr. Ravi Nadkarni (d. 2015) and my friend and artist Terry Adkins. Last and most importantly, I would like to dedicate this book to three people:  Ron Mellor, Asha Nadkarni, and Shama Nadkarni. Ron first showed me Rome one summer twenty years ago. Asha has been a constant companion and has patiently listened to me talk about the Capitoline Hill for years. Shama, at eight years old, began her life in Rome and has been on this earth as long as I have been writing these pages.

Abbreviations

A

bbreviations of the titles of ancient sources generally follow those in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, while abbreviations of journal titles in the notes and bibliography generally follow those in L’Année philologique. Abbreviations of epigraphic copora use those of Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. AASS BHG BHL CAH CBCR CIL CPL

DACL DE Drost ICVR ILS LSJ

J. Bolland et al., eds. Acta Sanctorum. Antwerp, 1643–​; 3d ed., 1863–​1869. Biblioteca hagiographica graeca (Subsidia Hagiographica 8a). 3d ed. Brussels, 1957; 1986. Biblioteca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis (Subsidia Hagiographica 6). Brussels, 1898–​1899; reprint 1992. The Cambridge Ancient History. London, 1970–​2005. R. Krautheimer. Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae. Vatican City, 1937–​1977. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin, 1862–​. E. Dekkers. Clavis Patrum Latinorum: Qua in corpus christianorum edendum optimas quasque scriptorum recensiones a Tertulliano ad Bedam. Steenbrugge, Belgium, 1951; 3d ed., 1995. F. Cabrol, ed. Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie. Paris, 1907–​1953. E. de Ruggiero. Dizionario epigrafico di antichità romane. Rome, 1895–​. V. Drost, Le Monnayage de Maxence (306–​312 après J.-​C.) (Schweizer Studien zur Numismatik 3). Zurich, 2013. G.B. de Rossi, A. Silvagni, and A. Ferrua, eds. Inscriptiones Christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores: Nova series. Rome, 1922–​. H. Dessau, ed. Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae. Berlin, 1892–​1916. H.G. Liddell, R. Scott, H.S. Jones, and R. McKenzie. Greek-​English Lexicon. Revised Supplement. Oxford, 1996. xxiii

xxiv Abbreviations LTUR

E.M. Steinby, ed. Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae. Rome, 1993–​2000. MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Berlin, 1819–​. Notizie Notizie degli scavi di antichità. Rome, 1876–​1955. NPNF H. Wace and P. Schaff, eds. A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-​ Nicene Fathers: A Select Library of the Christian Church. New York, 1886–​1890. NTDAR L. Richardson. A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Baltimore, 1992. PG P.-​L. Migne, ed. Patrologia Graeca. Paris, 1857–​1866. PL P.-​L. Migne, ed. Patrologia Latina. Paris, 1844–​1864. PLRE A.H.M. Jones, J.R. Martindale, and J. Morris, eds. Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire. Cambridge, UK, 1971–​1992. RE Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart, 1894–​1980. RIC H. Mattingly et al., eds. Roman Imperial Coinage. London, 1923–​1981. VZ R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, eds. Codice topografico della città di Roma. 4 vols. Rome, 1940–​1953.

A Note on Names

I

n this book I have attempted to be consistent in the names I use to describe the Capitoline Hill in its entirety and its constituent parts. Occasionally the sources clearly wanted to call to mind the whole hill with the following terms: Arx et Capitolium, mons Capitolinus, collis Capitolinus, mons Saturnius, collis Saturnius, mons Tarpeius, and collis Tarpeius. In these instances I use the term “Capitoline Hill.” Capitolium and Capitolia were two other ways of describing the whole hill, but these terms were also used to describe the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill as well as the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. I use “Capitolium” when it is clear that Capitolium refers to the southern summit of the hill, “Capitoline Hill” when Capitolium refers to the whole hill, and “Capitol” when Capitolium/​Capitolia refers to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Throughout, “Capitol” and “Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus” are synonymous. When I  am describing the modern uses of the hill, I  call it the “Campidoglio.” There were also capitolia, Capitoline temples, outside Rome. I use capitolium/​capitolia to refer to these extra-​Roman temples. The best documented discussion of the Capitoline Hill’s names remains G. Tagliamonte, LTUR 1:226–​ 28. Throughout translations are my own unless otherwise attributed.

xxv

Introduction

Knowing Your Place Rome’s Capitoline Hill is easy to locate on maps (Figure 2). It is also simple to quantify—​it happens to be around 460 meters in length and 180 meters in width, a little more than 82,000 square meters, roughly the surface area of ten soccer fields. This sounds impressive, but these dimensions make the Capitoline Hill the smallest of Rome’s Seven Hills. The whole hill could easily fit on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Despite its diminutive size, one can find the Capitoline Hill in all tourist itineraries of Rome. In the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti measured all distances in Rome with the Capitoline Hill as the “center of the city.”1 Modern tourist handbooks, such as the Blue Guide, begin at the hill, and it was Goethe’s last stop in 1788 as he was leaving Rome after his second sojourn in Italy; he called it “an enchanted palace rising from the desert.”2 Yet it is difficult to know the hill as it was in antiquity. There is almost no description of the Capitoline Hill in the ancient sources aside from a few images on coins and in relief sculpture. Whereas the Hebrew Bible, in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles, supplies a thick description of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, and the Mishnah supplies an account of the lost temple’s rituals, there is no similar holistic treatment from the ancient world of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as a structure or cult locus.3 The breathtaking labor of scholars to produce modern encyclopedias on the ancient world, and more recently, on the city of Rome, has perhaps left us with a sense that the Romans, like us moderns, were indeed interested in systematizing knowledge about the past into lists of sources attesting the origins, development, and decline of sites such as the Capitoline Hill and monuments such as the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, charting the life histories of locations and their disintegration from the classical world, a process usually defined as inaugurated by the barbarian occupations of the city in the fifth century ce.4 1.  Leon Battista Alberti, Descriptio urbis Romae 2 (Furno and Carpo 28). 2.  Goethe 1962, 496. 3. Smith 1987. 4. See RE 3.2:1531–​40 (Hülsen and Wissowa); DE 2:85–​95; LTUR 1:226–​34 (Reusser and Tagliamonte); LTUR 2:144–​53 (Tagliamonte and De Angeli); NTDAR 68–​70, 221–​24; Jordan 1871–​1885, 1.2:1–​154; Lugli 1969; Richter 1901, 85–​99.

1

2 Introduction

Figure  2. Rome in the age of Constantine. Ancient World Mapping Center, Univer­sity of North Carolina–​Chapel Hill.

We almost take for granted the primacy of these nineteenth-​century norms of producing and representing scientific historiography, such that other constellations of the production of knowledge and the transmission of information about the past are obscured. How was the Capitoline Hill knowable in the Roman and post-​Roman past? One way that has continued to animate scholarship from antiquity to the present has to do with localizing, and understanding the origins of, toponyms attested in inscriptions and ancient literary sources.5 It was indeed the attempt to recover the Capitoline Hill’s names that was at the heart of the first modern study of the hill. In 1617, Justus Rycquius published De Capitolio romano commentarius. Addressing his “learned readers,” Rycquius laid out all the terms that he could associate with the hill’s many important roles 5.  See Edwards 1996, 52–​63.

Introduction  3

in Roman society. It was, he wrote, the domicilium deorum (house of the gods), the curia procerum (meeting place of nobles), the sedes triumphorum (house of triumphs), the custodia legum (sentinel of the laws), the theatrum sacrificiorum (theater of sacrifices), and the rituum denique omnium qua sacrorum qua profanorum foecundissimum promptuarium (most abundant storehouse of all rites be they sacred or profane). For all its glory, the place itself, with its ancient associations, was lost, an object lesson, in Rycquius’s words, in Fortune’s inconstancy in human affairs; in this case, the author claimed that he had been ruminating thus on the Capitoline Hill since his youth. Indeed, as a young man he had spent time in Rome in a circle of artists and scholars from the north, including Rubens, Faber, Elsheimer, and Caspar Scioppius.6 Rycquius dedicated dozens of pages to problems of nomenclature. He wondered why the hill was originally not called the Mons Capitolinus but, rather, the 6.  Rycquius 1617. Rycquius and his circle: Jaffee and McGrath 1989.

4 Introduction Mons Saturnius; what the Saxum Carmentis was; and what the Ludi Capitolini (Capitoline Games) had been. Rycquius looked for the origin (origo) of Tarpeius, the “other name of the hill” (altero Montis nomine), and its relation to the Saxum Tarpeium. He puzzled over the question of why the hill had been divided into different parts with different names—​the Arx, Capitolium, and Saxum. He was even interested in measuring the absolute height of the Capitolium to determine its stature with respect to the surrounding hills. In addressing these and many other similar questions, Rycquius assembled a staggering amount of citations from ancient authors. Even if he could, in a sense, build up an image of the hill by sifting through ancient sources suddenly made available through the publication of editions printed on paper, Rycquius at times despaired when thinking about how much had nevertheless been lost: “Now, indeed, buried in ruins forever (How Sad!), stripped from its foundations—​all of it has virtually been lost along with the name itself.”7 As far as it goes, the De Capitolio commentarius was an impressive start to the field of topography. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, Rycquius’s study was still cited by the most reputable scholars of Rome’s ancient cityscape.8 Rycquius was not eccentric in his focus on toponyms and their supposed ability to point to the history and functions of the hill. Though no one before him, as far as I know, had ever produced a study focused on the Capitoline Hill, Rycquius was following in the footsteps of ancient antiquarians in his methods. In antiquity, to know a place was to know the origins of the names associated with it. This knowing produced a fragmented past told as a series of anecdotes, diachronically arranged in ancient sources and synchronically experienced through the places thus represented. By the second century bce, if not earlier, Roman poets and historians began to debate knowledge about the past, including the past of famous locations such as the Capitoline Hill and the other hills of the city. Picking up these debates in the following century, M. Terentius Varro narrated the hill’s history through its succession of names. In his De lingua Latina, Varro tells us that the hill was first called the Mons Saturnius, then the Mons Tarpeius, and finally the Capitolium, providing explanations for these toponyms along the way.9 For Varro, the names were associated with the origins of the city in the distant past. Mons Saturnius told the story of Saturn’s foundation of a settlement here called Saturnia, remnants (uestigia) of which could allegedly still be seen and were attested by the persistence of Saturnian toponyms. Mons Tarpeius told the story of the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia, her entombment under Sabine shields, and the persisting

7.  Rycquius 1617, 85: “Nunc tamen omnia aeternum (ō dolor!) ruinis sepulta, aut ab ipsis fundamentis excisa, nomen poene ipsum cum loco amiserunt.” 8.  Jordan 1871–​1885, 1.2:5; Richter 1901, 131. 9. Varro, De lingua Latina 6.41–​42. See Spencer 2011; Vout 2012, 67–​80.

Introduction  5 memory (monimentum) of her punishment in the location—​on the hill—​of the place even now (etiam nunc) called the Tarpeian Rock.10 Finally the Capitol told the story of the curious discovery of a human head while the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter were under construction. Each name, in short, was a story of firsts, traces and reminders—​Varro uses both uestigia and monimentum here—​of how the city was back then and, by comparison, how it appeared to the Romans in their own day. Varro’s source was Ennius, the epic poet writing on the origins of Rome in the second century bce. It was Ennius, notes Varro, who wrote that the hill was originally called the Mons Saturnius. In that sense, Rome’s physical past had been understood for generations through Ennius’s poetry. Poetry continued to supply meaning and community identification with Rome’s urban environment and was the primary means of bridging the vast stretches of time between past and present. If Ennius established a history of the hill, then Vergil, Varro’s contemporary, would, as it turned out, establish the terms by which the hill continued to be remembered throughout antiquity and into the modern world. In a famous passage from the Aeneid, Vergil has Aeneas, the progenitor of the Roman people, tour the future site of Rome, then settled by the Arcadian refugee Evander and his band of followers. Evander leads Aeneas from one place to another in this fairy-​ tale landscape, culminating in a memorable description of the Capitoline Hill: From here he (Evander) leads him (Aeneas) to the Tarpeian House [ad Tarpeiam sedem], and the Capitol [et Capitolia]—​golden now, then bristling with woodland thickets. Even then the dread sanctity of the region awed the trembling rustics; even then they shuddered at the forest and the rock [saxumque]. “This grove,” he cries, “this hill with its leafy crown—​ though we know not what god it is—​is yet a god’s home; my Arcadians believe they have looked on Jove himself, when as often happens, his right hand has shaken the darkening aegis and summoned the storm clouds. Moreover, in these two towns with their walls overthrown you see [uides] the relics and memorials of men of old. This fort [arcem] father Janus built, that Saturn; Janiculum was this called, that Saturnia.”11 Of the sites Evander reveals to Aeneas—​the Porta Carmentalis (below the Capitolium on the southwest side), the Asylum (on the Capitolium), Lupercal (below the Palatine Hill), Argiletum (northeast of the Forum Romanum in the

10.  The Tarpeia traditions: Martini 1998, 9–​42. 11. Vergil, Aeneid 8.347–​56 (tr. Fairclough and Goold 1:85):  “hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit,| aurea nunc, olim siluestribus horrida dumis. | iam tum religio pauidos terrebat agrestis | dira loci, iam tum siluam saxumque tremebant. | ‘hoc nemus, hunc’ inquit ‘frondoso uertice collem | (quis deus incertum est) habitat deus; Arcades ipsum | credunt se uidisse Iouem, cum saepe nigrantem | aegida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret. haec duo praeterea disiectis oppida muris, | reliquias ueterumque uides monumenta uirorum. | hanc Ianus pater, hanc Saturnus condidit arcem; Ianiculum huic, illi fuerat Saturnia nomen.’ ”

6 Introduction direction of the Curia), and the Forum Romanum—​the Capitoline Hill, or sedes Tarpeia et Capitolia, receives the most detailed treatment. The reason, according to Vergil, was that the place was full of the power of religio to terrify (iam tum religio pauidos terrebat agrestis dira loci), a mountain where Jupiter hurled lightning bolts to earth, a place steeped in memories—​monumenta—​of the origins of civilization and mythological battles. Those memories were also visible to the eye (uides) in the form of ruins on and around the Capitol and the Ianiculum.12 The evocation of ruination and rusticity served to remind Vergil’s audience of how different the hill was in their own day, both for Vergil’s generation in the first century bce and for later interpreters: the Capitol “golden now, then bristling with woodland thickets” (aurea nunc, olim siluestribus horrida dumis). Unlike Varro, Vergil did not attempt to link a succession of names to successive moments in the history of the hill. In fact, Vergil was deliberately fuzzy. Aeneas visited the sedes Tarpeia et Capitolia centuries before either name was invented. The Capitoline Hill, as seen by Aeneas and reported by Vergil, was a proleptic landscape. It was “always-​already” everything that it would be a millennium hence—​nunc aurea, irradiated by the gold ornamentation of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Augustus’s aetas aurea—​both celebrated by Vergil himself and his poet contemporaries.13 This particular quality of gold, as will be shown below, defined the Capitol’s presence well after the temple had fallen into ruins and its gold had been stripped away. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that Vergil’s poetic Golden Capitol (Capitolia aurea) became the basis of knowing and visualizing the Capitol for officials, intellectuals, and the public into late antiquity and beyond. The formidable authority of Ennius, Varro, and Vergil did not foreclose the possibility of new understandings of the hill in relation to its toponyms. Rome’s antiquity was always in the process of rediscovery. One of the reasons that Varro believed Ennius’s statement that the Capitoline Hill was once Saturn’s Mountain is that “behind the Temple of Saturn, in the laws for the buildings of private persons, the back walls of the houses are mentioned as ‘Saturnian walls’ ”—​surely a local and, at the time, a legally recognizable way of understanding a now lost stretch of the Capitoline Hill’s sixth-​century bce circuit wall on the Vicus Iugarius.14 Just as physical traces of Rome’s distant past could become remnants of a Saturnian mythscape in Varro’s Rome at the end of the first century bce, Vergil’s poetry continued to supply a sense of the Capitol’s past in the late fourth century. It was at this time that Servius used his commentaries on Vergil’s poetry partly in order to iron out and establish the historicity of the poet’s dense, proleptic 12.  Smith 2005, 93–​94. 13. Servius, In Verg. Aen. 8.355, labeled the coupling of sedes Tarpeia and Capitolia a prolepsis. Much has been written on this passage and the Golden Age of Augustus, but see Feeney 2007, 163–​66 with further references. 14. Varro, De lingua Latina 5.42 (tr. Kent 1:39). This sixth-​century bce wall is attested by fragments, mostly now lost, along the north and south slopes of the hill. See Bernard 2012, 25–​26; Cifani 1998, 364–​65, 374–​77.

Introduction  7 evocation of Rome’s past, present, and future.15 When Vergil talked about rustics shuddering at the forest and the rock (siluam saxumque), Servius fixes the rock to the Capitoline Hill.16 When Vergil coupled “Tarpeian House and the Capitol, now gold” (ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia nunc aurea), Servius notes that both toponyms were applicable to the hill (monti) and that the quality of gold (aurea) applied not just to Capitolia but also to the Tarpeian House. For, Servius went on to point out, the hill was the setting for Tarpeia’s betrayal of Rome to the Sabines for an armful of gold bangles and her ironic punishment at the hands of her would-​be benefactors—​thus granting the name sedes Tarpeia to the place where she was buried (quae illic sepulta Tarpeiae sedi nomen inposuit).17 And when Vergil described the ruined walls of Saturn’s city (oppidum) as lying on the hill, the monuments of ancestors (monumenta uirorum), Servius reminds his readers, were incredibly ancient even in Aeneas’s day (iam tunc uetusta) and Saturn himself was human, one of the first in a long line of kings ruling Italy—​an assertion evident also in Vergil and other writers of his age but not before.18 In chronography and historiography, the Capitoline Hill’s history first comes into focus, as indicated above, in the legend of Tarpeia. In Livy’s account, written at the end of the first century bce, Tarpeia’s father, Spurius Tarpeius, had command of the Capitoline Arx, a walled fortress.19 When occupied by Rome’s Sabine enemies, “for the sake of gold gifts” (pro aureis donis) and “bought by a crime” (scelere emptam), the Capitoline Hill became folded into a specifically Roman manifest destiny. Romulus prayed to Jupiter Optimus Maximus to energize the Romans in their fight, and in return he vowed a temple “which would be a monumentum to how the city was rescued for future generations by your help at this moment” (quod monumentum sit posteris tua praesenti ope seruatam urbem esse)—​thus laying the ritual foundations and significance for the supposed fact that the Romans’ oldest temple was erected by Romulus on the Capitoline Hill in the eighth century bce and that Jupiter was on the side of the Roman people and lent support to their territorial claims.20 Even more significant in how the Capitoline Hill shaped the history and identities of Rome and the late Roman Empire was the construction of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the southern summit of the hill. As far back as the third century bce and continuing into the following century, Roman historians recorded the founding of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the portents that accompanied the process of building the structure. 15.  Kaster 1988, 169–​96, 356–​59 (no. 136). 16. Servius, In Verg. Aen. 8.350 (Thilo 2:250). 17. Servius, In Verg. Aen. 8.347–​48 (Thilo 2:251). 18. Servius, In Verg. Aen. 8.355–​56 (Thilo 2:251). Cf. Vergil, Aeneid 7.180; Servius, In Verg. Aen. 7.180 (Thilo 2:140); Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.7.19–​26, preserving a fragment of C. Julius Hyginus. For discussion of Janus and Saturn as human kings of Italy, see Cornell 2013, 3:556–​58. 19.  Livy 1.11.5–​9. 20.  Livy 1.12.5–​7.

8 Introduction Drawing on the works of Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi, historians from the second and third centuries bce, Livy’s account tells how two of the last kings of Rome, L. Tarquinius Priscus and his son L. Tarquinius Superbus, decided to build the “Temple of Jupiter on the Tarpeian Mount” (Iouis templum in monte Tarpeio) as a physical reminder (monumentum) of the family name of the Tarquinii.21 When completed in 510/​509 bce, this temple was the largest temple on the Italian peninsula, still unbelievable even in Livy’s day.22 Two portents that followed this decision proved especially tenacious in Roman memory. First, according to Livy, when the Sabines occupied the Capitoline Hill after Tarpeia’s betrayal, they dedicated a number of holy sanctuaries (fana sacellaque) there. These were to be cleared away so that the hill could be dedicated to Jupiter alone. It was believed that the gods and goddesses in a sense inhabited the locations of their shrines. All the divinities of the hill consented, but not Terminus. He alone refused to budge, though elsewhere Iuventas is also mentioned as joining Terminus in staying put. This immobility was taken to be a “sign of eternity” (perpetuitatis auspicio), a portent of the immutability, inevitability, and eternity of Rome’s empire.23 The second portent was the discovery of an intact human head by the workmen who were digging the foundations of the temple. This was a sign that Rome would be the “citadel of empire and head of the world” (arcem eam imperii caputque rerum). It was this caput that gave the hill its latest name, the Capitolium. In late antiquity the construction of the temple and its portentous beginnings became part of the history not just of the Roman people but also of the world. The Chronica urbis Romae, apparently an official record of the city’s past dating to 354 ce, repeats the etymology of the Capitol as deriving from the discovery of a human head, the caput. Moreover, and more importantly to my mind, the text notes, “For this reason up to this day it is called the Capitolium,” a reflection of how the Capitol’s name continued to supply the Romans living in Rome with a sense of the past.24 In the chronicle of Eusebius-​Jerome, assembled by Jerome in 379–​380, this past was universalized as a key element in the history of the Roman people. After registering Tarpeia’s betrayal of the Romans the chronicle states: “It is from this that the Tarpeian Mount takes its name, the place where the Capitol now is” (unde mons Tarpeius in quo nunc Capitolium). Moreover, the Tarquinii and their construction of the Capitol are likewise events set in the context of the histories of the Romans, Greeks, Hebrews, and Persians. Like the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the Jerusalem Temple, the Capitol and its cycle 21.  Livy 1.55.1. 22.  Livy 1.55.9. For the design, engineering, and monumentality of the archaic temple, see most recently Hopkins 2016, 97–​122. 23.  Livy 1.55.5. Iuventas: Livy 5.54.7. 24.  Chronica Urbis Romae, VC 1:271: “Hic cum fundamenta Capitolii cauaret, inuenit caput humanum litteris Tuscis scriptum CAPUT.OLIS.REGIS, unde hodieque Capitolium appellatur.”

Introduction  9 of destructions and renovations are monuments of a civilization’s identity and history in the chronicle’s expansive vision. For these poets, critics, historians, and chroniclers, what was knowable about the Capitoline Hill was a question having to do with the tangled relationships among texts, local knowledge, and the visible past. Toponyms—​those embedded in the urban environment, in texts, and in both—​supplied access to, and identification with, past events. In late antiquity, this knowledge rarely went back beyond what was known in the late republic and the age of Augustus through the reception of Varro, Vergil, Ovid, and Livy. From this storehouse of knowledge, it would seem that there was never a time when the Capitoline Hill, its temples, and its significance could fail to connect present-​day Romans with a shared past. For Ennius and Varro, the Capitol was Saturn’s city at some point before he vanished from the terrestrial realm. For Vergil and Livy, it was that and much more; the Capitol was always the home of an awesome divinity. This is where “god lives” (habitat deus), according to Evander’s report to Aeneas, where the primordial inhabitants of Italy gazed upon the face of this divinity and understood him to be Jupiter. And under the initiative of the Tarquinii, in the last half of the sixth century bce, this boundless occupation of the hill by terrifying divine forces came to be housed in a monumental structure, the Capitol, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, which itself, in its construction, fully made clear that the Roman people would rule the world. The signature of the Capitol, aside from the caput that lent the hill its latest name, was gold, Vergil’s Capitolia nunc aurea.25 Making a Holy Mountain Monumentum is a slippery word in Latin. It means both a memorial and a monument, a physical reminder of both the presence of the living and the absence of the dead. In either case, a monumentum is man-​made. When a mountain becomes a monumentum of a divine presence and glorious firsts in history, it becomes a holy mountain through the physical elaboration of cults on the site. This seems a simple observation, but it is worth remembering. Though initially built of timber, stone, and terra cotta, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus almost immediately began to house not just Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, each in their separate cult chambers; it also began to house a collection of gold objects. Beginning just after the republic was founded in 509 bce, the Latins, a collection of surrounding city states, dedicated a gold crown to the recently built temple to celebrate the closing of a treaty with Rome.26 In the second century, the heyday of Roman imperialism, Roman generals began placing increasingly ostentatious displays of gold in the temple. Whereas L. Aemilius Paullus and M. Aemilius Lepidus could 25.  Borrowing “signature” here from the title of Vout 2012. 26.  Livy 2.22.6.

10 Introduction dedicate gold shields for the temple’s roof in 193, L. Mummius had the ceiling of the temple’s interior gilded in 146, just after Rome’s notorious destruction of the Greek city of Corinth.27 This design aesthetic, according to Pliny the Elder, had only formerly been done in the private houses of the elite.28 Mummius made private opulence publicly visible and raised the standard for dedications to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Most of this ornamentation was lost in the destruction of the temple in 83 bce. When it was finally restored in 69, under the direction of Q. Lutatius Catulus, the new building sparked controversy.29 The bronze roof tiles of Catulus’s temple were now gold-​plated, making, one imagines, this already massive structure a singularly dazzling monument from almost any vantage point in the city, a fact that challenged the old-​fashioned self-​image of Roman austerity. Nevertheless it was this temple, in all its splendor, that Vergil celebrated as the Capitolia nunc aurea, “now gold,” because Augustus had just restored the Capitol and added the little, and similarly magnificent, Temple of Jupiter Tonans to the Capitol’s plaza, the Area Capitolina.30 Still, the blazing Capitol drew the occasional jibe. Seneca quipped that the Romans only fought civil wars after the Capitol was decked out in gold—​not strictly true but a damning aside.31 This was the minority opinion. The temple burned down two more times in antiquity, in 69 and 80 ce, and in the subsequent restorations Catulus’s innovation of a gilded roof became canonical. Like the massive dimensions of the temple, the gold-​plated roof was a fundamental element of its design. An eyewitness, Plutarch, tells us that after the temple burned down in 80, the emperor Domitian (81–​96) spent 12,000 talents on the gilding alone, an amount that suggests thousands of pounds of gold were used in the ornamentation of the temple’s roof.32 Domitian’s temple was the fourth and last version of the Capitol. It bridged any imaginable gap between Vergil’s poetic Golden Capitol of a century before and the reality before one’s eyes in Domitian’s day. Vergil’s evocative language and Domitian’s realization of it reverberated for hundreds of years. Ausonius, a poet from Gaul and educated in Rome at the end of the fourth century, remembered the “gold heights of the Capitol,” and at the beginning of the fifth century one of the last publicly celebrated pagan poets of Rome, Claudian, vividly described the metallic blaze of gold as so bright that it was blinding.33 The Capitol’s gold and its tropic quality of goldness, both emblems of Rome’s world power, continued to energize the hill’s portentious history into late

27.  Livy 35.10.12. 28. Pliny, Natural History 33.57. 29. Pliny, Natural History 33.57. 30.  NTDAR 226–​27. 31. Seneca, Contr. 2.1.1: “bella ciuilia aurato Capitolio gessimus.” 32. Plutarch, Publicola. 15.1.3. 33. Ausonius, Ordo 19.17: “aurea Capitoli culmina”; Claudian, De VI cons. Hon. 44–​52.

Introduction  11 antiquity and the Middle Ages. The discovery of the caput on the Capitoline Hill and Terminus’s immobility were signs that the Roman Empire would rule forever. History supplied the confirmation. With the help of Jupiter, Romulus took the Capitoline Hill back from Titus Taitius and his Sabine army, and when the Senonian Gauls occupied Rome, an event traditionally dated to 390 bce, the Capitoline Hill remained in Roman hands through the intervention of Rome’s tutelary deities. Likewise, when the Capitol was destroyed in 83 bce and in 69 ce, the violation of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was a sign, for some, of the empire’s imminent destruction. Christian intellectuals and apologists in the late empire seized upon this history of inviolability and violation and the portentious significance of both. A thousand years after the temple was dedicated in 509 bce, Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, and the symbolic role played by the hill in the political life of Rome underwent fundamental physical and imaginary transformations. For Servius, writing at the beginning of the fifth century ce, the Capitoline Hill’s sedimented sanctity, as transmitted through Vergil’s poetry, was to be understood in the past tense. As he put it, “On the Capitoline Hill images of all the gods used to be venerated [colebantur].”34 In 496, Pope Gelasius I (492–​ 496) joked that perhaps sacrifices should resume “in the temples of demons and in the Capitol” if the Romans of his day were so attached to their ancient traditions; the pope’s suggestion was sarcastic in the extreme. The historians Zosimus and Procopius of Caesarea, both writing in the sixth century, reported instances when the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus had been plundered by Rome’s own leaders and their enemies. Whether true or not, these disasters were in either case a topos, a way of attributing blame for the failure of Roman leadership and the successful barbarian sieges of Rome in 410 and 455. What endured after the end of the Roman Empire and the fall of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was the Capitoline Hill’s associations with world power. In the twelfth-​century Mirabilia urbis Romae, the Capitoline Hill is again described as the Golden Capitol (Capitolium aureum). For the author of the Mirabilia urbis Romae the “Golden Capitol” was so called, according to the text, because Rome had ruled so magnanimously. In the Renaissance, Vergil’s line “golden now, then bristling with woodland thickets” resonated in more literal ways. For example, Poggio Bracciolini’s 1448 De varietate Fortunae begins with a meditation on fate during a trip to the Capitoline Hill involving Bracciolini and his friend and interlocutor Antonio Lusco. The two ride up to the summit of the hill, dismount, and sit down “on the ruins of the Tarpeian Citadel” near a “massive marble threshold” and a “bunch of broken columns lying about here and there.” In this setting, the two take in the view of the city, as many tourists still do today, and begin a discussion of the moral implications of the city’s ups 34. Servius, In Verg. Aen. 2.319 (Thilo 1:272): “in Capitolio enim omnium deorum simulacra colebantur.”

12 Introduction and downs. Lusco, after looking around, says: “O how distant this Capitol is from that [in the past], which Noster Maro [Vergil] praised in verse.” To draw the contrast, he quotes the now familiar line from Vergil’s Aeneid: “Golden now [nunc], once bristling with woodland thickets.” In the dialogue, Lusco then flips the verse upside down: “Golden once, now [nunc] squalid, having returned to thickets and brambles.” Thereupon follows a series of such reversals of fortune, separated by the opposing indicators of time: nunc (now) and quondam (formerly). The papal secretary and manuscript hunter Poggio Bracciolini concludes by figuring the Capitol as a body—​dead, dying, and torn to pieces:  “Now stripped bare of all its decoration, it lies prostrate, the portrait of a gigantic rotted corpse, devoured from all sides.” Playing with the Capitol’s celebrated status as the caput mundi and also Vergil’s nunc aurea, Poggio turns the reader’s mind to the lowest of all bodily functions: “This Capitoline Hill, formerly the caput of the Roman Empire and Citadel of the World . . . is now abandoned and upturned. That gold of long ago? The Capitol has become . . . a dump full of excrement.”35 In the latter half of the sixteenth century, as cartload after cartload of marble was leaving the hill, antiquities were arriving on the hill to join the Capitoline Collection in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, stunning pieces still there such as the Marcus Aurelius on Horseback, the Colossus of Constantine, and the Marforio—​no visit to the Campidoglio today would be the same without them. Michelangelo’s plan for the Piazza del Campidoglio and the surrounding buildings was well under way, though it would take a long time to complete. In this process, the messiness of the site had to be cleaned up, both literally and figuratively. To mark the beginning of the Via di Monte Tarpeo, Pope Gregory XIII (1572–​1585) placed an inscription on the spot in 1582 that plays on Vergil’s proleptic vision of the Capitol’s pasts and futures, the same vision Poggio flipped so nicely for his own purposes a century before (Figure 3). Gregory XIII’s inscription, however, leans on Vergil’s poetry to celebrate the pope’s more mundane role as patron of the city of Rome: “From here he leads (him) to the Tarpeian Rock and Capitol, accessible [peruia] now, once bristling with woodland thickets.” Then: “Gregory XIII Pontifex Maximus opened the Via Tarpeia.”36 Vergil’s Capitolia aurea, his “Golden Capitol,” had become the Capitolia peruia, the more practical and far less poetic “Accessible Capitol.” By this time, Rome’s holy mountain had a new divine patron. Dated to 1568, an inscription placed just beyond 35.  VZ 4:222–​45 (extract of book 1). Opening scene with Vergil: “O quantum, inquit, Poggi, haec Capitolia ab illis distant, quae noster Maro cecinit: aurea nunc, olim siluestribus horrida dumis. ut quidem is uersus merito possit conuerti: aurea quondam, nunc squalida, spinetis uepribusque referta” (230). Corpse: “ut nunc omni decore nudata, prostrata iaceat instar gigantei cadaueris corrupti, atque undique exesi” (231). Excrement: “hunc Capitolii collem, caput quondam Romani Imperii, atque orbis terrarum arcem . . . adeo desolatum atque euersum, et a priori illo aureo immutatum, . . . stercorum ac purgamentorum receptaculum factum” (241). See Edwards 1996, 73–​74, 89–​95. 36.  Musei Capitolini, Inventario Epigrafi, EM 413. Text: Forcella 1869–​1884, 13:87, no. 118: “Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit | pervia nunc olim silvestribus horrida dumis | Gregorius XIII Pont. Max. viam Tarpeiam apervit | Hier. Alterius aedilis secundo | Paulus Bubalus aedilis sexto | curabant | anno domini MDLXXXII.”

Introduction  13

Figure 3.  Inscription dated to 1582 at the entrance to the Via di Monte Tarpeo marking the opening up of the road through the playful use of Vergil, Aeneid 8.347–​48. Musei Capitolini, Inventario Epigrafi, EM 413. Photograph: Author.

the original entrance of the Palazzo dei Conservatori—​now one of the Musei Capitolini’s exits—​states that the Capitoline Hill, once in the hands of Jupiter, has now been handed over to the “True God, Jesus Christ” (Figure 4).37 Even if all the precious metal had been carried off and transmuted into a symbolic substance, the dream of finding piles of gold continued. One dreamer was Barthold Niebuhr, the German Empire’s ambassador to the Holy See from 1816 to 1824. While there he researched the history of Rome’s beginnings. After Niebuhr returned north, he published in the late 1820s perhaps the first scientific history of Rome, subjecting the pious traditions repeated by the Romans themselves to rational inquiry. In spite of his desire for distance and rigor, Niebuhr’s romantic sensibilities were excited by the Capitoline Hill’s charisma. In his Roman History, Niebuhr describes the familiar story of Tarpeia and her entombment on the Capitoline Hill. Niebuhr also did some investigating locally. According to him, he went into the “labyrinth” of passages below the Capitoline Hill accompanied by “local girls” from the houses adjoining the hill—​the daughters of ignorant “smiths and low victuallers.” They told him of “La Bella Tarpeia”: “In the heart of the hill the fair Tarpeia sits, covered with gold and jewels, enchanted: he who endeavours to reach her, never finds out the way; once only she had been seen by the brother of one of our guides.”38 He of course dismissed all of this as baseless. 37.  Musei Capitolini, Inventario Epigrafi, EM 202. Text: “SPQR | Capitolium praecipue Iovi | olim commendatum | nunc Deo vero | cunctorum bonorum auctori | Iesu Christo | cum salute communi supplex | tuendum tradit | anno post salutatis initium | MDLXVIII.” For a discussion of this inscription in the context of the restoration of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in the sixteenth century, see Pecchiae 1950, 129–​30. Tschudi 2017, 149–​73, describes well how ruins prefigured “a Christian architectural history” in the sixteenth century. 38.  Niebuhr 1851, 1:230.

14 Introduction

Figure  4.  Inscription dated to 1568, Palazzo Conservatori, Rome, declaring that the Capitol has been handed over from Jupiter to Jesus. Musei Capitolini, Inventario Epigrafi, EM 202. Photograph: Author.

At the same time, Niebuhr was impressed by the strength of what he called “real oral tradition.” In his private correspondence, Niebuhr was less dogmatically rational. In a letter dated June 6, 1818, Niebuhr describes having drinks on the hill at the Palazzo Caffarelli, the location of the German embassy to the Holy See, with close friends. Something curious happened just after midnight as they were standing on a balcony and looking out over the city: “We saw Jupiter sparkling as if he were looking down on his Tarpeian Rock. We were drinking healths. I said to Thorwaldsen [a Danish sculptor], ‘Let us drink to old Jupiter!’ ‘With my whole heart,’ he replied, with a voice full of emotion.”39 When Niebuhr’s Roman History appeared in English in 1851, one reader found the passage on “La Bella Tarpeia” extraordinary. The Right Honorable Sir George Cornewall Lewis wrote a letter to a Roman friend of his, a physician named Dr. Pantaleoni, to investigate Niebuhr’s story. When Dr. Pantaleoni responded, Lewis published the letter in the January–​June 1857 issue of Notes and Queries, 39.  Niebuhr 1852, 2:126–​27.

Introduction  15 a London periodical self-​described as “A Medium of Inter-​Communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.” Pantaleoni wrote:  “Of the existence of the well mentioned by Niebuhr, there is no doubt, as I visited it myself . . . . The well is on the Tarpeian Rock, in the garden of the new Protestant Hospital. With respect to the popular legend described by Niebuhr, I have made all possible inquiries through people living in that quarter of town, and by their profession and character conversant with the lower orders; but I have not succeeded in finding any trace of it.”40 Lewis was quite a scholar; he too was interested in Rome’s beginnings, and Dr. Pantaleoni was a key source in Rome for his scientific inquiries. In a letter dated May 15, 1858, Lewis wrote about Pantaleoni’s investigations on his behalf into the habits of Italian vultures. According to Pantaleoni, Romulus, as Roman tradition had it, could not have seen twelve vultures in Rome, a sign taken as divine confirmation of his rule, because such birds simply do not fly that far south.41 The search for gold continued. Rodolfo Lanciani, Italy’s most internationally recognizable archaeologist, repeatedly talked about the “Hidden Treasure on the Capitol” at the turn of the century in publications and lectures in both Italian and English.42 Lanciani promised that there was buried treasure to be found on the Capitoline Hill. His lust for gold was inspired by a report from Tacitus that describes the dedication of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus after it had been destroyed in the civil war of 69 ce. Part of the ceremony involved tossing ingots of precious metals into the foundations. In Lanciani’s telling, “The vast mass of gold and silver is still awaiting the hand destined to exhume it from its hiding-​place.”43 Lanciani appears to have taken this hunt for buried treasure seriously. In his private portfolios, now deposited in the Vatican Library, Lanciani included two typewritten copies of his essay, both of them in English, as well as an Italian version published in an unidentified newspaper article.44 He also included handwritten notes in English and Italian on the history of the Capitol. These are enigmatic jottings. On one sheet Lanciani underlined “TESORO,” followed by “THERE ARE TWO POINTS TO MAKE CLEAR.”45 On the following sheet, toward the middle of the page, he wrote and crossed out: “TREASURE.” And finally Lanciani included a letter, dated April 28, 1896, from a certain Sidonie Rose, written in English and sent from the Hotel d’Italie in Rome. Addressing her letter to M. Lanciani, she scribbled: “I went this afternoon to try the Diving Rod in front of the stables of the German Embassy, and found it turned very strongly at a spot in front of no 33. I enclose a diagram of the place. I am leaving for Florence 40.  Notes and Queries, 2d ser., 70 (May 2, 1857): 341. 41.  Lewis 1870, 2:334–​35. 42.  Maurer 2005, 181. 43. Tacitus, Hist. 4.53. Lanciani 1901, 202. 44.  Vat.lat. 13038, pp. 196–​209. 45.  Vat.lat. 13038, pp. 192–​93.

16 Introduction tomorrow, but hope to return to Rome next winter. If I can then be of any use to you in locating treasure with the Rod I shall be very pleased.”46 This was no joke. “X” marks the spot on her plan where the treasure was potentially hidden. Part of the problem of finding this treasure, as Ms. Rose’s letter and Lanciani’s own essay about the Capitol’s treasure suggest, was that the buried treasure was on the German side of the hill, precisely beneath the Palazzo Caffarelli, where Niebuhr and his slightly inebriated companions saw Jupiter a generation before. Lanciani would have his hill. During World War I, the “German occupation” (occupazione tedesca) of the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill became an embarrassment. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as Niebuhr’s stories illustrate, the German Empire had established its embassy to the Holy See in the Palazzo Caffarelli, the sixteenth-​century palace that was constructed right on top of the ruined substructures of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. But it was especially after Italian reunification in 1870 that the German Empire’s claims to the Capitolium were made concrete through a number of large construction projects, including the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica, a villa built in 1877 on the Tiber side of the hill. In spring 1885, Chancellor Bismarck ordered that German and Latin would be the official languages of the publications of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica and furthermore all meetings would now open and close with addresses in German. Previously, only French, Italian, and Latin were the sanctioned languages—​mostly in a spirit of international scholarly cooperation.47 By 1917, Lanciani was using his eloquence to urge Rome’s Assembly to repatriate the Capitoline Hill from the German Empire. Most of his argument was rooted in his own discoveries. He made clear that the column of Pentelic marble, of which only a fragment was recovered, belonged mostly to “Germania” and that of the substructures of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus only “one-​tenth” was owned by the “S.P.Q.R.” in the current situation. The ruins of the temple, he told the Roman Assembly at the Palazzo Senatorio (the “Tabularium”), just a stone’s throw from the Palazzo Caffarelli, “must necessarily be redeemed from servitude at all costs and with any sacrifice.” The plan, which was also reported internationally, was to include the Capitoline Hill in the Zona Archeologica, placing it therefore in a heritage zone encompassing the Forum Romanum, the Fori Imperiali, the Colosseum, and Palatine Hill.48 The rhetoric of “German occupation” certainly had its effect. In late June 1918, a crowd stormed the Palazzo Caffarelli. They broke up furniture, toppled the emperor’s throne built just above the cella of Jupiter, and tore apart his portraits. After 46.  Vat.lat. 13038, p. 195. See Buonocore 1997, 226. 47.  For a history of the Germans on the Capitoline Hill, see Maurer 2005. Languages: Jansen 2008, 151–​54. 48.  Palombi 2008, 142–​46. International coverage:  “May Raze German Embassy,” New  York Times, June 4, 1917, p. 2. See also Leonardi 1916, 21–​44. In this political tract, Leonardi, a nationalist art historian, makes the case for the repatriation of the Campidoglio. Also at issue was the Austro-​Hungarian Empire’s ownership of the Palazzo Venezia, the subject of Filippo Tambroni’s contribution to this slim volume.

Introduction  17 raising the Italian flag, they paraded the spolia in the streets of Rome like a latter-​day triumph.49 The following year Italy seized the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill. Now under Lanciani’s direction, the immediate plan was to level the Palazzo Caffarelli and initiate another series of excavations on the site of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.50 Though Lanciani never found his buried treasure, he found something else of far more importance. It was in this matrix of nationalism and archaeology that Rome’s Capitoline Hill was rediscovered, in a physical and psychic sense, as a “holy mountain.” In his speeches before the Roman Assembly, Senator Lanciani made repeated reference to the “Campidoglio sacro,” “il luogo sacro,” and the “Sacro Colle.”51 Not to miss a symbolic date, Lanciani’s excavation of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus began on April 21, 1919, Rome’s traditional birthday, the ancient holiday called the Parilia, the date when Romulus marked out the line of ritual purity that would surround the future city of Rome. Lost in the “Dark Ages” Given the signs of the Capitol’s physical and symbolic destructions, it is easy to consign the Capitoline Hill to oblivion. Many have done so. It is usually enough to say, as did Lanciani in the late nineteenth century, that after the fifth century the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus “fell into ruin, and became, like so many others, a stone quarry and a lime-​kiln.”52 Similarly, in a lecture held on the Capitoline Hill in 1899 at the German Empire’s embassy to the Holy See, Christian Hülsen editorialized the hill’s decline with the Latin cliché: “Sic transit gloria mundi!”53 For these two giants of Roman archaeology and topography, the hill’s history ended with the collapse of its classical Roman monumentality. Viewed in this light, the hill has indeed virtually disappeared. Even though new discoveries in archaeology have been made in recent years, the fact is that almost nothing remains of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus and the other temples situated on the hill. Beginning in 1875, fragments of marble, assumed to be from the temple, began coming to light. From that moment on, around ten pieces of Domitian’s temple have been discovered on the hill itself.54 In total, these marble 49.  Maurer 2005, 175–​83. Reported in the United States: “Storm Capitoline Hill,” New York Times, June 28, 1918, p. 2. 50.  “Italy to Demolish Ex-​Kaiser’s Embassy,” New York Times, February 14, 1919, p. 2. Here, Lanciani appears as a public intellectual of international standing: “Senator Rodolfo Lanciani, the renowned archaeologist and the greatest authority on the topography of Rome, is going to initiate wonderful excavations for the treasures buried under the palace. He has already visited the palace to plan the work.” 51.  Palombi 2008, 144–​46. For a fuller treatment, see Palombi 2006, 224 n. 350 and generally 220–​27. 52.  Lanciani 1897, 299. 53.  Hülsen 1899, 22. Hülsen certainly was not alone. Cf. Jordan 1871–​1885, 1.2:30–​32. A recent statement of the dearth of evidence: “Knowledge of the history of the Capitoline hill in general and of the Temple of Iuppiter Capitolinus in particular in late antiquity is almost nonexistent” (Gedeyne 2009, 156). 54.  For 1875: Lanciani 1875, 184–​85 = Musei Capitolini Inv. S 2227. For 1889: Lanciani 1892, 90; Lanciani 1897, 299. Aside from Lanciani’s writings, I have not been able to find another printed reference to this “piece of a fluted column of pentelic marble . . . discovered on January 24, 1889.” See also Paribeni 1921, 44 = Musei Capitolini

18 Introduction fragments might, if laid out from end to end, measure up to ten meters; not a whole lot, in other words, remains of the last phase of Rome’s most important temple. Nevertheless, these discoveries and the nostalgia for the glory of ancient Rome were quickly made available to a wide international readership. In 1904, inspired particularly by the findings of the Italian archaeologists, Emmanuel Rodocanachi published one of the first modern book-​length histories of the hill, titled Le Capitole romain, antique et moderne: La Citadelle, les temples, le Palais sénatorial, le Palais des conservateurs, le musée. A second edition was quickly published, which became the basis for the English translation, The Roman Capitol, published in New York in 1906. In many ways, Rodocanachi’s study is still fundamental because of his strict attention to Greek and Latin authors, up-​ to-​date archaeology, and the wealth of documents in Rome’s numerous archives. The son of a prominent family of financiers that had originally come from Chios and settled in Marseilles, Rodocanachi had from his youth a passion for Italy and especially its history in the Renaissance. Though he had day-​to-​day responsibilities in the business world, he was most devoted to the past, and in a deeply personal way. Rodocanachi had an enormous private library, and he filled in the lacunae of his knowledge of Rome with frequent visits to the city. Because of such materials, his study of the Capitoline Hill, particularly from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, is admirably rooted in a vast collection of rather mundane documents and manuscripts, some published, some perused firsthand.55 Thus for the Renaissance, Rodocanachi’s Capitole romain forms the basis of scholarship on the hill’s history. For the Capitol in Roman times, Rodocanachi relied on Leon Homo, a Roman historian and member of the École Française de Rome. It seems possible that Homo perhaps even wrote the whole section “Le Capitole dans l’Antiquité.”56 Here Rodocanachi (and Homo) frequently cites Italian archaeology, all of it quite recent, as well as leading German scholars, such as Heinrich Jordan and his foundational study Topographie der Stadt Röm im Alterthum, which initially had started to appear in 1871. Though studiously done, Rodocanachi’s chapters on the Roman Capitol lack originality: he provided little more than a digest of Inv. S 2226. For 1878 (base): Jordan 1871–​1885, 1.2:72 n. 69 = Musei Capitolini Inv. S 2848. Other fragments: Musei Capitolini S 2846, S 2847, S 2849, S 3378, S 3379. For 1897 (capital): Gatti, 1897, 60, which only noted the find and did not attribute it to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus; Lugli 1946b, 26; Marquand 1898, 21–​22. 55.  Rodocanachi 1904. English translation: Rodocanachi 1906. Obituary: Lépine 1937. Rodocanachi’s death on January 8, 1934, was noted, significantly, in American Historical Review 39 (1934): 600. 56.  In the 1904 edition of Le Capitole romain, Rodocanachi’s first footnote for the section “Le Capitole dans l’Antiquité” reads: “M. L. Homo, ancien member de l’École française de Rome, a bien voulu se charger de rédiger cette première partie” (1904, III). Moreover, the entire section that follows is paginated with Roman numerals (Rodocanachi 1904, III–​XLIV). Standard pagination begins afterward for the section “Le Capitole au Moyen Age.” Curiously, in the subsequent editions, including both the French and English, the footnote is retained, but the Roman numerals are replaced by standard pagination. Moreover, Lawton’s English translation of the footnote is not helpful: “M. L. Homo, formerly of the French School in Rome, has very kindly revised this first part” (Rodocanachi 1906, 3). Leon Homo, for his part, wrote voluminously on Roman institutions and history.

Introduction  19 the sources, all of them used uncritically, as if Roman authors could not tell a lie. Moreover, Rodocanachi, like Lanciani and Hülsen, was virtually silent on anything related to the history of the hill between the sixth and eleventh centuries, stating rather summarily:  “It was nothing more than a heap of rubbish, overshadowed by the church of Santa Maria and the small monastery attached to that edifice.”57 Hence the only modern study of the Capitoline Hill published in any language up to that time simply dropped more than five hundred years of history, leaving as most significant Roman antiquity, on the one hand, and the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, on the other.58 The figuration of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as the passing of the gloria mundi to a dark-​age “heap of rubbish” has led to repeated and ongoing attempts to reconstitute what the temple looked like in the glory days of the Roman Empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, the scale of the temple had been determined, if not always accurately, through the excavation of the temple’s substructures as well as the measurement of the surviving column fragments. The age of reconstruction was thus initiated. If the hill no longer had standing temples, then it would have virtual ones. One of the most intriguing artists to make the attempt to imagine what the temple looked like was Giuseppe Gatteschi. In 1924, Gatteschi published, by his own initiative, Restauri della Roma imperiale con gli stati attuali ed il testo spiegativo in quattro lingue (Restorations of imperial Rome together with their current appearance and an explanatory text in four languages). The book was, as was possible in those days, both nationalistic and scientific, nationalist in the sense that the cover declares it pro ciechi di guerra (on behalf of those blinded by war) and scientific in that the testimonials from some of the most important academics of the day included in the opening pages promised that Gatteschi’s restauri were quite accurate. Above all, the book was to communicate the advances made in Italian archaeology and the majesty of Roma imperiale to an international readership. Inside captions were written in the four languages referred to by the book’s title:  Italian, French, English, and German—​in that order. Gatteschi’s Restauri della Roma imperiale was his unique conception. On the left of the spine is his restauro (restoration), a drawing with hints of color of a vista of ancient Rome; on the right is a photograph of the site, its stato attuale (present condition). His restorations were based on the latest archaeology, which meant, above all, the work of Lanciani. Gatteschi thus brought Lanciani’s meticulous topographical plans to life.59 Indeed, there are little Romans in all the drawings, all of them dressed (or undressed in some instances) for the part. These

57.  Rodocanachi 1906, 65. 58.  Excellent on the modern history of the Campidoglio but disinterested in the late antique and early medieval hill is Paradisi 2004. This period merits an extremely brief sguardo at Paradisi 2004, 42–​43. 59.  Lanciani 1990.

20 Introduction

Figure  5. Reconstructing the Capitol. Left:  Giuseppe Gatteschi’s photograph of the “present state” of the location of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Right:  Gatteschi’s accompanying “restoration.” Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Gatteschi Collection, Fototeca Unione.

imaginary figures, moreover, lived, as the title states, in the “Rome of the emperors” (Roma imperiale).60 After a panoramic view of the Forum Romanum, in the direction of the Capitolium, Gatteschi’s book starts his tour of the sites on the Capitoline Hill. The first series of how-​it-​was-​then as opposed to how-​it-​is-​now is the outside of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, to the left, and the Palazzo Caffarelli, to the right (Figure 5). Then follows a series of oppositions showing the inside of the temple, with its enormous cult statue of Jupiter, and then a view of the Temple of Jupiter Tonans set against a view of the Via del Campidoglio. Some of Gatteschi’s fantasies even ended up on postcards, including the first restauro from the book—​a vista of the Capitoline Hill from the south, from the point of view of the Forum Romanum. The cityscape is dominated by the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Figure 6). Both Lanciani and Gatteschi lived to see the Fascist era, which was in part dependent for its political mythology on the Roma imperiale that they created. For Benito Mussolini, and his own team of archaeologists, most importantly Antonio Muñoz, the Capitoline Hill assumed an incredible importance for a decidedly Fascist Rome. In a 1924 speech on the Campidoglio to mark Rome’s traditional birthday, April 21, Mussolini stated that the Capitoline Hill was for Western civilization second only in importance as a holy mountain (sacro colle) to Golgotha, Jerusalem’s “Place of the Skull,” where Jesus of Nazareth’s body was entombed and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built. This dictum is still in the Aula Consiliare of the Palazzo Senatorio, painted just above the double doors that lead to the platform facing the Piazza del Campidoglio.61 Just a few 60.  Gatteschi 1924. See Capodiferro 2006. 61.  B. Mussolini, “Per la cittadinanza di Rome,” April 21, 1924, in Mussolini 1934, 4:91.

Introduction  21

Figure  6.  View of the Capitoline Hill from the Forum Romanum from Giuseppe Gatteschi’s Restauri della Roma imperiale. Undated postcard printed in Rome by G.B. Paravia & C.

years later Mussolini would use the power of the state to cleft this Fascist holy mountain from the city around it, a policy dubbed the isolamento. This demolition project created the island that one sees today, a hill bounded on the northern and western sides by the Via del Teatro Marcello and on the eastern and southern sides by the Via dei Fori Imperiali and the Forum Romanum. From the first century bce to the beginning of the twentieth century, the attempt to know the Capitoline Hill, that is, to produce an objectively true understanding of the hill, has always yielded more—​and less—​than was perhaps anticipated. To borrow from Umberto Eco’s well-​known thoughts on cult objects, it seems right to say that the Capitol functioned similarly for those engaged with the hill and for those engaged with its legacy from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. The Capitol, as an object with both physical and symbolic qualities, had been broken into parts and selectively remembered through texts and echoes of texts, stories rooted to toponyms that were themselves rooted to a small hill in the middle of Rome—​a “living textuality.”62 Thus talking about the Capitoline Hill was to tell patriotic stories first about Roman exceptionalism, then about Italian reunification, and last about Fascism, while at the same time it became the subject of intense critical investigation in the fields of archaeology, art history, and history. In other words, the temple, when its ruins were discovered, 62.  Eco 1986, 198.

22 Introduction became a location of memory that called to mind the origins of Rome in the distant past at the same time that it could be made to commemorate the origins of the Italian state, the suffering of World War I veterans, Rome’s centrality in the history of Western civilization, and the expertise of an exceptional generation of fin de siècle historians, archaeologists, and philologists. The Capitoline Hill is still the place for symbolic action: politicians, terrorists, would-​be assassins, and selfie-​snapping tourists all have sought to tap into this quality of the Capitol’s pastness, not a stable past but one that is always changing. On April 20, 1979, terrorists set off ten pounds of explosives in Michelangelo’s piazza. Rome’s mayor, Giulio Carlo Argan, formerly an art historian and professor as well as a lifelong communist, told the press: “The terrorists have offended a place that is sacred to the entire civilized world.”63 The following day, April 21, was to be the celebration of Rome’s 2,732nd birthday since Romulus founded the city in 753 bce. For Argan and the terrorists, that was surely no coincidence. Moreover, the pastness of the place could, and continues to, inaugurate possible, alternative, futures. Cola di Rienzo attempted to revive a Roman empire of sorts by marching on the Capitoline Hill in the fourteenth century, and the origin of the European Union was established by the Treaty of Rome, signed on the Capitoline Hill in 1957, a moment celebrated through the issue of a special coin on the event’s fiftieth anniversary in March 2007. The coin depicts a representation of the treaty superimposed on the lapidary geometry of Michelangelo’s design for the Piazza del Campidoglio. Finally, in 2010, I saw one such occasion when the Capitoline Hill again became the stage on which the promise of a better future was finalized. I was invited to witness, improbably for an American professor of history and classics, the moment when Gianni (Alemanno) met Alice (Waters), Rome’s first right-​wing mayor since World War II and the Berkeley foodie impresario. They met in the Palazzo Senatorio, in the mayor’s office on the Capitoline Hill, to talk about Slow Food in the company of learned bureaucrats and to sign an agreement to establish a Victory Garden on the hill. This giardino scolastico was supposed to teach little Romans about the importance of sustainable agriculture, healthful eating, and urban gardening. Like so many Capitoline dreams, the project and the promise fizzled out. Outline of the Book I began writing this book with the intention of uncovering the role that the Capitol played in the political, social, and ritual life in Rome, a total history of the hill straddling either side of the Roman Empire’s dissolution in the fifth century ce. What turned out was quite different from what I  imagined was possible with the scraps of available evidence. Just as important as the place itself are 63.  New York Times, April 21, 1979, p. 1.

Introduction  23 the fundamental imaginary transformations undergone by the hill and its most important structure, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. It was often the pastness of the place that animated the Capitoline Hill’s successive destructions, renovations, and receptions. To study the hill during a millennium when it was arguably least significant is to become engaged with the circulation of memories about the past, problematic indications of distinct times when the hill was used and imagined to have been used, the archaeological absence of textually attested monuments, and finally the litter of disaggregated rubble. Still, the Capitoline Hill was a place embedded in an evolving urban environment, where people lived, worked, and worshipped, probably sometimes mindful of the sedimented pasts of the hill but certainly often indifferent to the questions that modern scholars put to the remnants of the past. The relationship between these lived-​in and dreamed-​of realities of the hill has been one of the most difficult issues to address, amounting to a tension that can never be fully resolved, nor should it be. Both elements constitute the hill’s history. While we can occasionally identify the Capitoline Hill’s integration into the social worlds of those living on and around it, it is also inescapable that the history of the hill has as much to do with the recurrence of imaginary buildings populated by imaginary figures and the mobilization of the Capitol as a topos, an idea related not so much to a set of coordinates as to a constellation of memories about the awesome power of the Roman Empire. The concern throughout this book is an attempt to understand the different ways of knowing the hill and how this knowledge was formed, remembered, and forgotten. This book is divided into two parts. Part I is a roughly chronological treatment of the Capitoline Hill as a lived-​in reality, a place embedded in the city of Rome, from 180 to 741, the beginning of the reign of the emperor Commodus to the end of the pontificate of Gregory III, when we find the firmest possible evidence for a functioning church and monastery on the Capitoline Hill. Chapter  1 introduces the transformations of the traditional uses of the hill from the third to the sixth century, in particular when emperors climbed the Capitoline Hill, when they chose not to do so, and the dynamics that eventually led to the abandonment of the Capitoline Hill. For ceremonies of accession, arrival, and triumph emperors climbed the Capitoline Hill; stopped for a public appearance in the Forum Romanum, where they delivered an oration at the senate house; and returned to the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill—​a series of stops that formed a script, so to say, for the inauguration of divinely and popularly legitimated authority. Instances when this series of movements were forcefully and intentionally interrupted show just how important it could be to direct, interrupt, and redirect ritualized movements to and from the Capitoline Hill. By the end of the fourth century, Christian rulers and administrators began to treat Rome as pilgrims did, thus terminating processions not at the Capitoline Hill, as they had in the past, but instead at St. Peter’s, the

24 Introduction Lateran Palace, or the Forum of Trajan. Far from signaling the end of the hill’s history, the absence from the hill of emperors and their ritual power lifts the hill from the shadow of late Roman high politics and allows us to see how the hill functioned in other ways. Chapters 2 and 3 sharpen the focus on the social and bureaucratic worlds of the Capitoline Hill. In c­ hapter 2, after surveying the evidence for the maintenance of the Capitoline Hill’s temples, statues, festivals, and administrative uses into the sixth century, I  turn to the ways in which the hill was embedded in multiple late Roman neighborhoods. Even as Rome’s urban environment was undergoing serious transformations in the use of public spaces, the Capitoline Hill was surrounded by neighborhoods displaying a high degree of sociability and commerce throughout this period. Chapter 3 continues to explore the social worlds of the Capitoline Hill by focusing on the Christian cultures of the streets around the Capitoline Hill and the ways in which this iconic place was valued locally from the last half of the sixth century to the middle of the eighth. By the middle of the sixth century, legends began to circulate in Byzantium that made the Capitoline Hill the location of oracles presaging the birth of the savior and the apocalypse. One of these legends was particularly important in the city of Rome. It tells of Augustus’s vision of the infant Jesus, his consultation of the Tiburtine Sibyl, and his subsequent dedication of an altar on the Capitoline Hill. As in other locales in Rome, it was at this time that a small church was established on the Capitoline Hill in an urban environment in which public spaces were beginning to be used for the Christian cult. Even as the hill was becoming a distinctly early medieval neighborhood, this location, with its church at its heart, was always associated with the charisma of the Roman Empire’s long-​lost glory. Part II turns to the Capitoline Hill as a dreamed-​of reality in Christian apologetics, chronography, and historiography and last in the edificatory legends of Rome’s hometown martyrs. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which the Capitoline was experienced by those living in late antique Rome, from the ongoing visibility of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to toponyms that supplied a bridge to events from the distant past. Just as the Capitoline Hill was deeply rooted in the Romans’ sense of themselves as an urban community, the image of the Capitol reverberated into literary productions in the last half of the fourth century, first in Roman intellectual circles and then beyond. A series of anecdotes about Roman emperors, military commanders, and barbarian kings either abandoning the Capitol or doing deliberate damage to it show that historians of the late empire, particularly pagan historians, continued to imagine the Capitol as the heart of the Roman Empire. In the reign of the pagan emperor Julian (361–​363), Constantine was imagined as abandoning the celebration of rites on the Capitoline Hill in the days following his triumphal entry into Rome in 312, sending the empire into a spiraling decline. Other anecdotes followed. The Capitol’s linkage to the eternity of the empire, and the waning importance placed on stopping on the Capitol for

Introduction  25 legitimating the emperor’s authority, became a way for other historians, such as Eunapius, Olympiodorus, and Procopius, of talking about and understanding the fragility of the Roman state in the fifth and sixth centuries. Chapter 5 takes up the apologetic traditions related to the Capitoline Hill and its pasts and asks what Christians were supposed to learn from the stories about the Capitoline Hill’s special status in Roman memory as the inviolable citadel of Jupiter’s people. Beginning in the last half of the second century, Christian intellectuals such as Tertullian, followed by Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Lactantius, and Arnobius, ridiculed Roman history and mythology. Because of its centrality in Roman culture and its association with the machinery of persecution, the Capitol was subject to devastating critique. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Jerome, Ambrose, Prudentius, Augustine, and others followed. For these apologists, the ways of knowing the Capitol could be flipped to suddenly make clear that the beloved traditions at the heart of the Capitol’s symbolic status could not stand up to scrutiny. Of particular importance to these men was the belief, erroneous in their minds, that Jupiter was divine, lived in his house on the Capitoline Hill, and was especially able and interested in protecting the Roman people through the long history of their state, a series of arguments reanimated with significance in the years following the Gothic king Alaric’s occupation of Rome in 410. Chapter  6 turns to the issue of temple destruction. When temples were destroyed in antiquity, through either the violence of nature or violent intentional destruction, invariably the event was seen as a portentous disaster. The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was destroyed three times, in 83 bce, 69 ce, and 80 ce. Each of these moments of destruction and damage caused a search for the reasons, the attribution of blame, and the right response—​nothing was clear, and the process of discovery was never straightforward. What Christian intellectuals learned from the Capitol’s cycle of destructions was quite different. They simplified the Capitol’s history of destructions by equating them with those of other famous temples, such as the Jerusalem Temple and the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. No matter the time or the place, temple destructions had a single cause: an interconnected history of God’s anger stretching from the past to the present and even into the future. The focus on the emergence of new interpretations of the Capitol’s history continues in c­ hapter 7 by examining how dozens of martyr acts were composed in the fifth century and thereafter turned the Capitol into a site of resistance. In these pious fictions, rejection of a fantasy Capitol and an equally imaginary bureaucracy of punishment created a new heritage for the hill. However thematically related to the apologists’ writings, these martyr acts elaborated new ways of knowing the hill that had almost nothing to do with the classical past. Like the invented traditions about Constantine and the Capitol and the apocalyptic texts about the Tiburtine Sibyl, these martyr acts constitute another source of

26 Introduction local knowledge about the hill. Here, Roman traditions about Christian heroes made the Capitol emblematic of the Roman Empire itself, a symbol of awesome worldly power that could be dramatically neutralized by the holy spirit channeled through a battalion of Roman saints. In the absence of a functioning machinery of persecution, the Capitol was, in a sense, set in motion, reconstructed out of the “living textuality” of the hill, fragments of inscriptions, and the ubiquitous presence of ruins. Unmoored, but not entirely so, from the traditional ways of remembering the hill established in the late republic, the Capitol came to play a new role in a distinctly Christian history of a pagan Roman Empire. The Capitoline Hill’s late antique history thus oscillates between the Capitol and the Capitole imaginaire, a physical space that structured the lives and urban environment of postclassical Rome; it was also an imaginary location that animated an affective engagement with the hill’s traditions as well as Christian polemics against the materiality of pagan cults. What was never lost was the Capitol’s most enduring quality—​its association with the raw power of empire. The epilogue traces this late antique legacy, the unresolved tension between the valuation and devaluation of the Capitol’s multiplying and variegated histories, into the Middle Ages. In both the east and west, virtually simultaneously in the middle of the eighth century, the Capitol appeared on lists as the first of the “Seven Wonders of the World.” In the early medieval production of universalizing sources of knowledge about the ancient world, the toponym capitolium continued to structure the memory of the Capitol. In the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, written in the seventh century and copied verbatim by Hrabanus Maurus in the ninth, capitolium is glossed as “the highest head [caput summum] of Rome and her religion.” Pilgrims from the north, as reflected by the Einsiedeln Itineraries, show that the Capitol still figured in maps of the city, procession routes, and sightseeing tours into the ninth century. In the twelfth century, even Julius Caesar was believed to have been murdered on the hill, a tradition picked up by Shakespeare. Finally, it was there that an incredible collection of statues called the Salvatio Civium was supposed to have been housed, indicating with their movements and clanging bells, like robotic sentinels, where insurrections against the empire were about to break out. In these sources, the Capitoline Hill became even more mystically charged than it had ever been in its long history. Like another of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Capitol was made to stand astride two realms, a world full of bloodthirsty pagans, when Rome ruled the world, and a world full of Christians, living in the ruins of the Roman Empire.

PART I

Lived-​In Realities

1

Climbing the Capitoline Hill

T

o climb the Capitoline Hill and to occupy it was to rule Rome and the world. This image was deeply rooted in the literary and popular imagination. The poet Horace and the historian Cassius Dio, though separated by more than two centuries, repeated the rumor that Cleopatra had intended to destroy the Capitol or to rule from its heights, in either case a terrifying way of imagining a foreign enemy such as Cleopatra ruining the empire.1 This imagery could even be used playfully. A third-​century ce book of medicinal recipes—​written in Latin hexameters—​opens with an invocation to Apollo, describing his journey from Epidaurus to Rome in the form of a snake. Having seized the “Tarpeian heights and glorious temples,” writes the poet, “you drive away horrible sicknesses with your numinous presence.”2 In the fifth century, the poet Claudian, addressing the emperor Honorius, imagines giants trying to claw their way up the Tarpeian Rock. Like the Senonian Gauls in 390 bce, these giants are held back, Claudian seems to suggest, by the Thunderer’s Roof—​the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.3 The “Tarpeian heights” was indeed a citadel with controlled points of access. Stairs led up to the Area Capitolina, Asylum, and Arx, while wheeled traffic took the Clivus Capitolinus up from the Forum Romanum and to the Capitolium’s main gate, the Porta Capitolini. It was just beyond the Porta Capitolini that Augustus implanted the Temple of Jupiter Tonans as divine protection for the hill—​the cult statue, we are told, was fitted with a bell to alert Jupiter Optimus Maximus, whose temple was close by in the Area Capitolina, if danger was approaching.4 Gauls, giants, and Cleopatra were bogeymen who never were able to climb the Capitoline Hill. Roman revolutionaries and reactionaries, however, did with some frequency. To stand on the Capitoline Hill in highly charged 1. Horace, Odes 1.37; Dio 50.5.4. 2.  Quintus Serenus, Liber Medicinalis, Praef., ll. 7–​8. (Pépin):  “Tarpeias arces atque inclita templa petisti | Depellens taetros praesenti numine morbos.” 3. Claudian, VICons. 44–​52 (Dewar 6–​7):  “iuuat infra tecta Tonantis | cernere Tarpeia pendentes rupe Gigantas | caelatasque fores mediisque uolantia signa | nubibus et densum stipantibus aethera templis | aeraque uestitis numerosa puppe columnis | consita subnixasque iugis inmanibus aedes, | naturam cumulante manu, spoliisque micantes | innumeros arcus. | acies stupet igne metalli | et circumfuso trepidans obtunditur auro.” See Dewar 1996, 94–​100 and Moralee 2013. 4. Dio 54.4.

29

30  Rome’s Holy Mountain moments was to enroll oneself in a list of others who had also done so, such as Manlius Capitolinus (as dictator), Tiberius Gracchus, and Sulla. In 44 bce, Brutus, Cassius, and their fellow conspirators occupied the Capitoline Hill following the assassination of Julius Caesar, while Lepidus and those loyal to Caesar’s memory occupied the Forum Romanum, effectively blocking the assassins from slipping away without punishment. Reflecting the types of associations available to third-​century historians, Dio has Cicero say to a third party of senators assembled nearby at the Temple of Tellus: “Do you not see what is taking place—​that the people are again being divided and torn asunder and that, with some choosing this side and some that, they have already fallen into two parties and two camps, and that the one side has seized the Capitol as if they feared the Gauls or somebody, while the other with headquarters in the Forum are preparing as if they were so many Carthaginians and not Romans, to besiege them?”5 While this was a unique, dramatically narrated moment, as assassinations of heads of state and their immediate aftermath always are, Dio’s narrative nevertheless highlights the role the Capitoline Hill played both as a place in the first century bce and as an artifact of memory in the third century. Climbing the Capitoline Hill invited a multiplicity of reactions, inviting in this instance Dio’s Cicero to worry that Caesar’s assassins had projected an image of themselves as the stalwart Romans who had heroically defended the Capitoline Hill from the Senonian Gauls in 390 bce. This chapter will discuss the roles played by the Capitoline Hill in Rome’s culture of public processions, especially those performed on the following occasions: imperial accessions, inaugurations, and anniversaries as well as imperial triumphs and arrivals to the city. From the distant days of the Roman republic, these events involved, and even terminated on, the Capitoline Hill at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. While an emperor’s itinerary could affirm his commitment to Roman traditions and invite the public’s approbation, ritualized movement within an urban environment could occasion protest and sudden eruptions of violence. Just as the Capitoline Hill’s density of associations with the pageantry of power were no guarantee that processions would happen as planned, these same associations would also not ensure that the hill would continue to be a destination for imperial processions. The habits of rulers and aristocrats, particularly the ways in which they ritually moved through public space, largely determined urban investment, street plans, and the preservation of ancient monuments from antiquity into the early Middle Ages.6 We will see that when emperors stopped climbing the hill for public rituals of legitimation, the pageantry of power could instead be conducted and concentrated at other locations inside Rome, such as the Circus Maximus, the Forum Romanum, and the 5.  Dio 44.25-​1–​3 (tr. Carey 4:347). 6.  Dey 2015; Latham 2016; MacCormack 1981, 55.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  31 Forum of Trajan.7 It was also increasingly the case that these rituals could take place at locations outside Rome in the new provincial capitals of the late empire. It should be said that our sources make a statistical analysis impossible. The truth is that we will never know how often the emperors publicly or privately climbed the Capitoline Hill and why they did or did not do so. While images of Victory, elephant-​drawn chariots, and laurel crowns proliferated in late Roman coinage, literature, epigraphy, and the arts, this triumphal imagery is no guarantee of a triumph celebrated with a procession to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.8 Furthermore, while the movements of emperors as they traveled from one imperial capital to another can often be mapped in the late third century, even in those cases we cannot always be sure where precisely in an urban environment a textually, epigraphically, or numismatically attested event took place, whether in Trier, Milan, Nicomedia, or Rome. Last, it is especially difficult to know how often Roman emperors used the Capitoline Hill for private rituals, social engagements, or flânerie. By the beginning of the fifth century, however, there was generally the sense that emperors stopped climbing the Capitoline Hill in public processions. When Orosius, for example, was writing his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans in 418, it was impossible for him to imagine that a Christian emperor, even a legendary one from the distant past, would ever climb the Capitoline Hill and sacrifice. For him, it was the silence of the sources (nullus actor ostendit) that was particularly illuminating. When he came to Rome in 248 to celebrate the thousand-​year anniversary of the foundation of Rome, the emperor Philip the Arab (244–​249), according to Orosius, “dedicated the gratitude and honor expressed in this great thanksgiving to Christ and the church, as no author speaks of him going up to the Capitol and sacrificing victims there as was the custom.”9 By this time climbing the Capitoline Hill had become part of the dreamed-​of reality of Roman public life. The custom of emperors climbing the Capitoline Hill at ritually significant moments was something that only happened in the past, and Christian emperors had never done so. To climb or not to climb the Capitoline Hill was not a question suddenly available in the fifth century. In attempting to account for changes in how emperors moved into and throughout the city, I will place what at first sight looks like an abrupt reorientation of Rome’s topography at the end of processes of decentralization and imperial investment in the urban environment long in the making. By the time that Orosius was writing, however, Rome’s urban image had indeed changed. Thus we will see that the city was now a city of apostles, and emperors treated movement in the city as pilgrims did—​by visiting the memorials of the 7.  MacCormack 1981, 76. 8.  Bastien 1996; Mittag 2009. 9.  Orosius 7.20.3 (Arnault-​Lindet 3:55; tr. Fear 353): “Nec dubium est quin Philippus huius tantae deuotionis gratiam et honorem ad Christum et Ecclesiam reportarit, quando uel ascensum fuisse in Capitolium immolatasque ex more hostias nullus auctor ostendit.”

32  Rome’s Holy Mountain apostles and participating in church celebrations. This chapter will focus entirely on moments when emperors climbed the Capitoline Hill or apparently chose not to do so. We will have to wait until the subsequent chapters, after having swept the emperors from the hill, to see the other ways in which the Capitoline Hill and its surrounding neighborhoods were used by others and how the hill became an element in the topographical imaginary of late Roman intellectual circles in the east and west. It was the coupling of the Capitoline Hill with a more general sense of the empire’s vague and unending imperiality that would endure throughout late antiquity and into the Middle Ages. Trying to Climb the Capitoline Hill Let us begin with instances of when emperors and emperors-​elect sought to climb the Capitoline Hill, the reasons they did so, and the reactions to these Capitoline itineraries that are embedded in the surviving sources. One of the most important occasions for climbing the Capitoline Hill was the investiture of an emperor-​elect as augustus. The itinerary included stops that projected the emperor’s intimacy with Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Roman senate, and the plebs Romana, the three most important elements for the constitution of legitimate authority in Roman political culture.10 The following is how it was supposed to happen. The emperor-​elect was nominated, occasionally at the Castra Praetoria. He then moved in procession to the Forum Romanum, where the senators formally acclaimed him augustus in the Curia Senatus, the meeting hall of the senators. Leaving the Curia Senatus, the emperor addressed the plebs from the Rostra and then climbed the Capitoline Hill to make sacrifice before the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, surrounded by senators and courtiers. Finally, the emperor took up residence in the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill (Figure 7). This itinerary could take place smoothly. For example, when Commodus (180–​192), following the death of his father, Marcus Aurelius, arrived in Rome as emperor-​elect for the first time, he made sacrifice to Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill before addressing the senate.11 Even following victory in civil wars newly acclaimed emperors sometimes climbed the Capitoline Hill and made sacrifice.12 According to Herodian, Septimius Severus twice “went up to the precinct of Zeus and sacrificed” (anēlthōn es to tou Dios temenos kai thusas) following his victories against Didius Julianus (193) and Clodius Albinus (197). In each case, the emperor was met and acclaimed by the plebs, and then he addressed the senate, distributed largess, and retired to the Palatine Hill.13 But 10.  Straub 1939, 192–​93. 11.  Herodian 1.7.6, 2.14.2. 12. The modern scholarly assumption that Roman generals could not celebrate triumphs following civil wars has been successfully debunked in Straub 1995, 300–​301, and Bonamente 1981. See now Lange 2013 and Lange 2017. 13.  Herodian 2.14.2, 3.8.4.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  33

Figure 7.  Approximate route of the imperial triumph and accession ceremonies. The emperor and his entourage would begin in the Campus Martius (1), proceed to the Circus Maximus (2), pass through the Arch of Constantine and by the Temple of the City (3), and enter the Forum Romanum. In the Forum Romanum (4), the emperor would address the plebs at the Rostra and the senators in the Curia Senatus. Until the fourth century, the procession would then climb the Capitoline Hill and stop before the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (5a). Increasingly, emperors instead proceeded to the Forum of Trajan (5b). The final stop was the Palatine Hill (6), where the emperor would take up residence in the imperial palace. Ancient World Mapping Center, UNC-​Chapel Hill, altered by Jason Moralee and Kiel Moe.

the highly structured orderliness of this itinerary rested on shaky foundations. In his Histories, Tacitus richly details an example of just how self-​conscious new emperors could be when entering the city. In January 69, Vitellius was acclaimed emperor by his troops in Germany and began marching south. By July, Vitellius was standing outside Rome. He was greeted, as was customary, by members of the senate. Tacitus imagines Vitellius’s anxiety: Having come to power in a civil war, how should he now enter Rome, as a general riding at the head of a conquering army or as a togate senator walking on foot? Vitellius chose the latter for he wanted to avoid the impression that Rome was an urbs capta, “a captured city.”

34  Rome’s Holy Mountain Surrounded by his troops, with each division perfectly arranged, Vitellius was led into the city by the senators and the Roman people. Vitellius was hardly a model emperor; nonetheless he managed the occasion successfully, presenting himself to the city as a princeps not a warlord. This prompted Tacitus to state, with obvious sarcasm, that the procession had a “look of propriety” (decora facies). One of Vitellius’s first destinations was the Capitoline Hill. According to Tacitus, Vitellius “entered the Capitol and put his arms around his mother and honored her with the title augusta” (Capitolium ingressus atque ibi matrem complexus Augustae nomine honorauit). Presumably, after completing this public display, Vitellius took up residence on the Palatine Hill, for it was only on the following day that he addressed the senate.14 Looking at how past instances of climbing the Capitol were remembered by historians of the third century suggests also that climbing the Capitoline Hill could become an object lesson, an exemplum, linking past and present in a dialogue on the worthiness of an emperor’s deeds for remembrance.15 Narrating Vitellius’s ascent of the Capitoline Hill, Cassius Dio stresses that to those watching the procession, it seemed that Vitellius’s bad character was made strikingly apparent in contrast to the type of emperor ideally on display for an occasion such as this.16 Watching Vitellius climb the Capitoline Hill triggered the memory of his addiction to gambling, how instead of being surrounded by soldiers on a solemn procession as he was now, Vitellius had in the past been thronged by his creditors. In other words, climbing the Capitoline Hill did not make an emperor legitimate. Quite the opposite, it could dissolve an emperor’s legitimacy, placing this latest instance in a long tradition of hostile historians mocking bad emperors and their attempts to conduct Capitoline processions.17 In 69, according to Dio, the emperor Galba was riding through the Forum Romanum on a litter to climb the Capitoline Hill and make sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Soldiers intercepted the procession and assassinated him “in the presence of many senators and crowds of plebeians.” Thereafter the presence of the emperor was transformed into that of a humiliated enemy. In a gruesome parodic procession, his severed head was brought into the Curia Senatus.18 Climbing the Capitoline Hill always invited commentary and in some cases violent resistance. Yet emperors continued to try climbing the Capitoline Hill into the third century even when faced by violent demonstrations. The eyewitness histories of Cassius Dio and Herodian allow us to reconstruct a handful of 14. Tacitus, Hist. 2.89. 15.  Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10.3 makes this point in reference to Constantius II’s triumph in Rome in 357: unlike those of other more worthy men, Constantius’s deeds did not deserve repeated remembrance. 16.  Dio (Xiph.) 64.5. Dio’s eleventh-​century epitomator Xiphilinus has digested Vitellius’s reign into incoherence here. It may be that Dio-​Xiphilinus had in mind another routine visit to the Capitoline Hill, though he does mention that Vitellius was accompanied by soldiers on this occasion. 17. Icks 2017. 18.  Dio (Xiph.) 63.3–​5 (tr. Cary 8:205).

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  35 examples. Their narratives continue to demonstrate how simultaneously desirable and dangerous it was to use the Capitoline Hill as a terminus for public processions. Following the assassination of Commodus at the end of December 192, the praetorians selected P. Helvius Pertinax as his successor. His first stop was the Curia Senatus in the Forum Romanum, where he addressed the senators—​ Dio claims that he saw the occasion.19 The second instance happened a few months later, when Didius Julianus briefly became emperor in June 193. As with Pertinax, the praetorians selected Julianus, but in this case they also escorted him to the Curia Senatus, where the senators, including Dio himself, assembled in the hall to hear Julianus’s speech. After he was acclaimed augustus, Julianus took up residence on the Palatine Hill. The following day he again stopped in the Forum Romanum, this time to address the plebs from the Rostra and make sacrifice at the Temple of Janus, a small temple situated near the Curia Senatus. This time the plebs started a riot. Julianus’s bodyguard had to cut a way through the mob for them to leave the Forum Romanum.20 Dio’s version of these events (that is, the one handed down to us by his eleventh-​century Byzantine epitomator) does not mention that Pertinax and Julianus made sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus upon accession. According to the Historia Augusta, however, directly after leaving the Curia Senatus, Pertinax fulfilled his vows at the Capitol (in Capitolium uota soluebat) and then went to the Palatine Hill.21 As for Julianus, the Historia Augusta adds that the Roman people showered the new emperor with stones from the surrounding buildings, just as he was about to address them from the Rostra. Nonetheless, Julianus again addressed the senators in the Curia Senatus and, though the mob attempted to stop him, succeeded in forcing his way to the Capitoline Hill.22 These accounts of the urgency with which emperors attempted to climb the Capitoline Hill and the resistence with which they were met are also reflected in Herodian’s narrative of the accession of M. Clodius Pupienus Maximus and D. Caelius Calvinus Balbinus in 238. It is perhaps the richest description of an investiture of emperors that went horribly wrong, presenting us with a crisis that played itself out through combative processions to and from the Capitoline Hill.23 In 235, the military commander Maximinus (now usually called by his fourth-​century derogatory name Maximinus Thrax) was elected emperor by his troops. Three years later the Roman senate declared Maximinus a public enemy. By decree the senate appointed as emperors the elderly senator Gordian I and his son Gordian II while the two men were in Carthage.24 They never entered 19.  Dio (Xiph.) 74.1. 20.  Dio (Xiph.) 74.11.6–​13.5. 21. SHA, Pert. 5.4., 5.7. 22. SHA, Did. 4. But here there is no mention of the Temple of Janus. Moreover, the author of this biography has a favorable view of Julianus, whereas Dio reviled him. 23.  Herodian 2.15.7; Syme 1971, 166 n. 1. 24. SHA, Gord. 11.1.

36  Rome’s Holy Mountain Rome as emperors. After the death of his son in battle, Gordian I hanged himself barely a month after his unwilling installation as emperor. Thus in 238 the senators hastily organized an election for their successors. According to Herodian, the senators had two criteria: there should be two emperors to avoid the tyranny of one-​man rule, and these two emperors should be senators. The senators met not in the Curia Senatus in the Forum Romanum but in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill behind the closed doors of the cellae of the temple. According to Herodian, Jupiter himself, represented by his statue in the temple, was to act as witness (martyr) and watchful fellow councilor (synedros episkopos), his divine presence sanctifying the decision to come. After at least one round of voting, in which the names of less popular candidates were discarded, the majority eventually elected Maximus and Balbinus. A formal decree of the senate made them augusti. Meanwhile, dissenters armed with clubs and stones began climbing the Capitoline Hill, spilling down the Clivus Capitolinus into the Forum Romanum. They instead sought an emperor from the house of Gordian I. The senators called for a bodyguard of armed young men to escort Maximus and Balbinus down from the Capitoline Hill. Probably standing on the buildings abutting the hill, the angry protestors forced the procession back by showering them with stones. In concession to their demands and to restore order, the senators decided to elect Gordian’s teenage grandson, Gordian III, as a junior emperor (caesar). The boy was carried through the Forum Romanum and up the Clivus Capitolinus. This time the dissenters showered the boy with flowers and allowed Maximus and Balbinus to leave the Capitol to take up residence on the Palatine Hill.25 These two senator-​emperors would live to see Maximinus Thrax’s head paraded through the Circus Maximus. In May, however, after just three months, the praetorians abducted Maximus and Balbinus from the palace during the festivities of the ludi Capitolini and assassinated them, leaving Gordian III sole emperor, while the mutilated corpses of Maximus and Balbinus were taken in procession throughout the city.26 Herodian’s narrative of the fate of Maximus and Balbinus shows how the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill functioned (and failed to function) in the middle of the third century. In this highly charged moment, climbing the Capitoline Hill was deemed necessary by all of the parties involved. The senators assumed that conducting the election and investiture of emperors behind the closed doors of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus would demand the consensus of a factionalized urban plebs.27 Indeed, the actions taken on that day were not without precedent. In past centuries, new magistrates

25.  Herodian 7.10.3–​9. See Whittaker 1969–​1970, 2:224–​33, with important notes. Dating:  Kienast 1996, 183–​97. 26.  Herodian 8.8.3–​6. 27.  Ando 2000, 135.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  37 were inaugurated at the temple, and the senate met there in moments of crisis.28 For example, after the emperor Gaius Caligula was assassinated at the end of January 41, the senators met within the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, possibly in the same location, to discuss the future of the state.29 The senate did so again after the assassination of Maximus and Balbinus.30 Moreover, it is important to emphasize that the partisans of the house of Gordian helped their emperor, Gordian III, climb the Capitoline Hill to mark the resolution of the crisis. But this example and the others we have discussed demonstrate that climbing the Capitoline Hill could instead highlight the fractures in Roman society by bringing the emperors-​elect and their supporters into proximity with the conflicting agendas of the plebs, senators, praetorians, and rival would-​be emperors. The Last Imperial Processions to the Capitol Something changed in the last decades of the third century. Whereas in the first half of the third century emperors risked scrutiny, demonstrations, their future reputations, and even their lives to climb the Capitoline Hill, this habit ended within two generations of Maximus and Balbinus’s accession in 238. One important reason is that by the middle of the third century emperors were largely absent from Rome, instead fighting barbarians and falling victim to civil insurrections on the empire’s borderlands. Most of the dozens of emperors and would-​be emperors between 238 and 284 were made on the frontiers by soldiers. Without emperors stopping in Rome, climbing the Capitoline Hill diminished in importance for state rituals of all types. Between 262 and 312, emperors staged at least seven triumphal celebrations in Rome, but only four of them seem to have included the Capitoline Hill in their itineraries. My focus will mostly be on the last two of these triumphal moments in an effort to demonstrate that the emperors’ deeds could be comemmorated in Rome with the symbols of triumph but without an ascent to the Capitoline Hill. The Historia Augusta, our best source for the first three of the triumphal celebrations, those of Gallienus (262), Aurelian (273), and Probus (281), is unfortunately full of fantasy. The triumphal processions of Gallienus and Aurelian are both so canonically narrated that their descriptions look like how a late Roman author, in this case writing in late fourth-​century Rome, would conjure up a triumph of the imagination. These two processions supposedly included exotic animals, senators, soldiers, the Roman people, floats full of gladiators and actors, and prisoners of war from lands recently and allegedly conquered. They both also ended at the Capitoline Hill. However, there is one important difference. 28.  Perhaps in the Curia Calabra: see Servius, In Aen. 8.654 = Lugli 1969, 407, no. 365. 29. Suetonius, Cal. 60. See Whittaker 1969–​1970, 2:224–​25 n. 2. 30. SHA, Gord. 22.8.

38  Rome’s Holy Mountain While Gallienus’s triumph was really for his decennalia and had make-​believe prisoners of war, men dressed as barbarians, Aurelian’s reportedly had Tetricus and Zenobia, the leaders of rebellions in Gaul and Syria, as well as flesh-​and-​ blood barbarian prisoners of war, from Arabs to Germans and a dozen other ethnicities from elsewhere. In reaction to Gallienus’s triumph, the Historia Augusta spits: “What a ridiculous show” (rem ridiculam).31 Twenty years later Rome saw a series of triumphal celebrations. In 298, the emperor Maximian entered Rome for the first time to celebrate a triumph after quelling an insurgency in North Africa.32 In a panegyric delivered to Maximian and Constantine in Trier in 307, the emperor was reminded, and those in attendance were asked to imagine, that the Romans turned out in such great numbers to conduct Maximian “to Capitoline Jupiter’s lap” (ad Capitolini Iouis gremium) that it was as if they were carrying the emperor along with their intense and enthusiastic gaze.33 In November 303, the emperors Diocletian and Maximian arrived in Rome to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their rule (uicennalia) as the senior augusti and the tenth anniversary (decennalia) of the caesares, the junior emperors Galerius and Constantius. According to a panegyric delivered to Constantine in Trier in 310, the two augusti climbed the Capitoline Hill and went into the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and swore an oath that they would jointly abdicate, thus allowing Constantius and Galerius to become the senior emperors.34 These uicennalia celebrations also included a triumphal procession for Galerius’s recent victory against Narses, the king of kings of Sasanian Iran. Though Galerius himself was absent, the emperors Diocletian and Maximian, according to the Chronicle of 354, entered Rome with spoils from the east, including thirteen elephants, six charioteers, and 250 horses.35 Although it is certainly 31. Gallienus: SHA, Gall. 8–​9. Cf. Aurelius Victor Caes. 33.15. See de Blois 2017, 344–​52. Aurelian: Aurelius Victor Caes. 35.5; Eutropius 9.13.2; SHA, Aur. 33.2–​34.3. Cf. Zosimus 1.59 (Paschoud 1:52; tr. Ridley 19). See Beard 2007, 321–​22. Less than a decade after Aurelian’s more legitimate and stupefying celebration, Probus celebrated a triumph in 281. Perhaps because the Historia Augusta is so focused on listing the thousands of animals that the emperor supplied for bizarre spectacles in the Circus Maximus and Colosseum, the Capitol is never mentioned (SHA, Prob. 29). It is also equally possible that the Capitol was not included in his celebrations. 32.  Pan. Lat. 7.8.7. Barnes 1982, 58, suggests that Maximian might have been in Rome for the birth of his daughter Fausta in 289 or 290. Nixon is skeptical. See his commentary in Nixon and Rodgers 1994, 201 n.  32, 241 n. 73. 33.  Pan. Lat. 7.8.7. 34.  Pan. Lat. 6.15.6. 35.  MGH AA 9, 148: “regem Persarum cum omnibus gentibus et tunicas eorum ex margaritis numero XXXII circa templa domini posuerunt. elephantes XIII, agitatoresVI equos CCL in urbem adduxerunt.” This report is apparently corrupt. The domini was probably added by a Christian copyist. See Mommsen 1909b, 578 n. 4. There is also confusion. Narses was not led as a captive into the city. But Galerius did capture his household, including his wives, sisters, and children. According to Eutropius (9.27), these members of Narses’s household were led before the emperor’s triumphal chariot. Mommsen assumed that the reference to regem Persarum cum omnibus gentibus referred to images. Moreover, though the available sources admittedly do not say that the triumph terminated at the Capitol, as was the custom, Mommsen allowed for the likelihood that the triumph proceeded to the Capitol. More recently, McCormick and Bauer have also argued for the procession of images and the probable termination of the triumph at the Capitol: Bauer 2012, 67; McCormick 1986, 19. A terra cotta plate was recently discovered in Sardinia that has what looks like an illustration of this triumph. See Gualandi 2010; Haake 2017.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  39 possible that this triumph terminated on the Capitoline Hill in the precinct of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, no source says so. Instead, we only hear that the emperors deposited images of Narses and his family in temples, together with the dazzling clothing of the Iranian royal family: tunics made of stitched-​ together pearls. Then nothing. After the celebrations of 303, it seems that Rome’s Capitol was not deemed a necessary destination for triumphing emperors. Indeed, in the last two decades of the third century, emperors stopped in Rome least often in the history of the empire. This was, in the words of one recent scholar, a “new quality of absence.”36 Milan was where the emperor Maximian was proclaimed caesar in July 285, and in the following year Mainz was where he was proclaimed augustus.37 Moreover, when the emperors Diocletian and Maximian abdicated on May 1, 305, making good on the oath that they swore on the Capitoline Hill in 303, Maximian abdicated in Milan, while Diocletian did so in Nicomedia, triggering the need to elect new caesares.38 Importantly, it was not in Rome that Diocletian announced the identity of the new caesares. According to Lactantius, Diocletian led a procession of soldiers to the top of a mountain just outside Nicomedia. Standing on a tribunal before a column topped by a statue of Jupiter, Diocletian raised Maximinus Daia to the purple.39 One result of this “new quality of absence” was that Rome was becoming a city of the imagination for its reigning emperors. Diocletian’s successor as augustus, Galerius, attempted to besiege Rome in late 307 to oust the usurper Maxentius. Though his victory over the Sasanian king Narses had been celebrated as a triumph in 303, Galerius himself had never been to Rome. Before coming upon the city, he thought that Rome “was not much bigger than the cities he knew.”40 According to Lactantius, Galerius was shocked at the city’s immensity and its formidable circuit of walls. Faced with the reality of his enormous error, Galerius abandoned his plans for a siege—​and his opportunity to celebrate a formal aduentus into the city. Galerius never climbed the Capitoline Hill, nor did his successors Maxentius and Constantine, both of whom were, by contrast, familiar with Rome’s urban environment. To make this point as clear as possible, it will be important in the following pages to point out that Maxentius and Constantine had many opportunities to climb the Capitoline Hill. We will see that Maxentius and Constantine were invested with imperial authority by the senate in 306 and 312, respectively, celebrated triumphs, participated in consular inaugurations, 36.  Bauer 2012, 7. 37.  Barnes 1982, 57. 38.  Movements of the Tetrarchs: Barnes 1982, 47–​87. 39. Lactantius, Mort. Pers. 19; Barnes 1982, 65. 40. Lactantius, Mort. Pers. 27.2 (Creed 42–​43): “quippe qui numquam uiderat Romam aestimaretque illam non multo esse maiorem quam quas nouerat ciuitates.”

40  Rome’s Holy Mountain and spent months and even years in Rome; yet there is no firm evidence that either included the Capitoline Hill, as was customary, in these rituals of power. The details of Maxentius’s rise to power in Rome are familiar from descriptions of other coups in Roman history. On October 28, 306, the Roman people and the praetorians, according to Aurelius Victor, acclaimed Maxentius as emperor, while the historian Zosimus states that Maxentius “was promoted to the imperial throne after promising large rewards to those who supported him.”41 The sources, however, are pointedly silent on the role played by the senate in the process of investiture.42 Maxentius immediately took the antiquated title princeps. Two years after his accession Maxentius assumed his first consulate on April 20, 308, thereafter taking the title augustus. 43 This occasion was commemorated by the production of an aureus with the unique legend FEL PROCES CONSVLAT AUG N (felix processus consulatus Augusti nostri, “the propitious consular procession of our augustus”). Minted in Ostia and Rome, the consular coins of Maxentius depict the emperor riding in a quadriga drawn by four elephants just as he is about to be crowned as victor (Figure 8).44 Maxentius went on to celebrate three more consular inaugurations (309, 310, and 312) in Rome.45 Finally, in 310 Maxentius put down the usurper L. Domitius Alexander. The official representations trumpeting the occasion suggest that this victory celebration was at least supposed to be remembered as a majestic triumph.46 Like Maxentius, Constantine had many opportunities during his sojourn in Rome to climb the Capitoline Hill.47 On the sixth anniversary of his rule, October 28, 312, Maxentius was defeated by Constantine and killed in battle just outside Rome. Constantine entered Rome on the following day in triumph and spent about two months in the city, leaving after the inauguration of his third consulate in January 313.48 The source closest to the events of October 312 is a panegyric, Pan. Lat. 12(9), delivered to Constantine himself in spring 313 in Trier, just months after Constantine left Rome. It commemorates Constantine’s battle against Maxentius and the joyful embrace he received in Rome in the days after. We learn that Maxentius’s corpse was mutilated, his head placed on a pike, paraded in the city, and subjected to “the customary jests of a triumph” (ioci 41. Urban plebs:  Aurelius Victor Caes. 40.5. Tribunes and praetorians:  Zosimus 2.9.3 (Paschoud 1:81; tr. Ridley 28). 42.  Barnes 1981, 37. 43.  RIC 6 Rome 134, 135. See Cullhed 1989; Cullhed 1994, 32 and n. 115. Recent discussion of Maxentius’s senatorial self-​fashioning: Chenault 2008, 10–​17; Van Dam 2011, 224–​49. 44.  For the coinage of Maxentius, see now Drost 2013. Discussion of the consular types: Bastien 1996; Drost 2011, 162. Bastien suggests that the reverse types that depict the emperors as consuls (standing on foot and holding a globe and scepter) imply a Capitoline ascent for the processus consularis, while the reverse types that depict the emperor in a quadriga pulled by elephants or horses depict the pompa circensis following a consular inauguration. 45.  MGH AA 9, 67. See Barnes 1981, 37 and n. 84. 46.  Zosimus 2.14.4 (Paschoud 1:86; tr. Ridley 30–​31); RIC 6 Rome 214–​17. 47.  See the fundamental chapter and article Fraschetti 1986 and Fraschetti 1999b. 48.  Chronicle of 354 (Mommsen, MGH AA.9, 60); CTh 10.10.1, January 18, 313. For further evidence, see Bagnall et al. 1987, 160–​61; Barnes 1982, 95 and n. 19.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  41

Figure  8. Consular inauguration coins of Maxentius. Top:  Gold coin minted in Ostia for the fourth consulate of Maxentius with the legend FEL PROCES CONS IIII AVG N: Drost O.10. Bottom: Bronze coin minted in Rome for the third consulate of Maxentius with the legend FEL PROCES CONS III AVG N: Drost R.99a = RIC 6 Rome 215, 217. Photographs: Vincent Drost.

triumphales);49 senators accompanied Constantine’s chariot in the procession as it slowly pushed its way through the “countless multitude” (innumerabilis multitudo) that “struggled and surged back and forth” (impulsu uario fluctuare) as it went;50 the procession then entered the Forum Romanum and Constantine took up residence on the Palatine Hill, leaving the masses camped out just beyond the “sacred threshold” (sacrum limen) of the palace.51 While in Rome, the panegyric continues, Constantine, to the delight of the Roman people, presided over “the days of exhibitions and eternal games” (diebus munerum aeternorumque ludorum) and, to the delight of the senators, addressed them in the Curia Senatus, where he restored the body’s ancient authority.52 To show their gratitude to

49.  Pan. Lat. 12(9).18.3 (tr. Nixon and Rodgers 322). See Kristensen 2016. 50.  Pan. Lat. 12(9).19.2 (tr. Nixon and Rodgers 322). 51.  Pan. Lat. 12(9).19.3 (tr. Nixon and Rodgers 322–​23). 52.  Pan. Lat. 12(9).19.6–​12.20 (tr. Nixon and Rodgers 324–​25).

42  Rome’s Holy Mountain Constantine, the senators dedicated a statue, shield, and crown—​all of them made of gold.53 Whereas emperors occasionally climbed the Capitoline Hill in the third century, by the beginning of the fourth century, as we have seen, it was possible for Maxentius and Constantine to celebrate victory in Rome, be acclaimed as emperors, and be inaugurated as consuls without climbing the Capitoline Hill. In Constantine’s case, the silence of the sources and his decision not to climb the Capitoline Hill has been attributed to the emperor’s embrace of Christianity on the eve of his victory over Maxentius.54 In the game of late Roman politics, for Saint Peter to win, it seems, Jupiter had to lose.55 But this interpretation does little to help us understand why the non-​Christian emperors of the third century rarely climbed the Capitoline Hill. By the end of this chapter it will be clear that the cult of the apostles in Rome certainly brought changes to how emperors thought of Rome’s topography and to habits of ritual movement within the city. However, let us first turn to how Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus were affected by deep changes in Roman political culture and in Rome’s urban image. We will see that the Capitol had been falling off the itineraries of emperors for centuries. Building a New Topography of Devotion The loss in the Capitol’s usability for emperors in the fourth century can be traced back to the distant reign of the emperor Augustus (27 bce–​14 ce) and perhaps even beyond.56 On the one hand, Augustus was a patron of the Capitoline Hill. His Res Gestae trumpets the emperor’s restoration of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the dedication of the Temple of Jupiter Tonans in the Area Capitolina.57 Moreover, recent scholarship has demonstrated the significance that the Capitoline Hill held for a remarkable generation of poets as a representation in stone of the restoration of the republic and its institutions, a badly needed symbol in the years after the conclusion of almost a century of internecine conflict.58 On the other hand, Augustus was also responsible for 53.  Pan. Lat. 12(9).25.4 (tr. Nixon and Rodgers 331–​32) with n. 157 for the debate on the nature of this statue. Cf. Barnes 1981, 46. Note that Claudius Gothicus, an ancestor whom Constantine claimed as his own, only received a gold statue from the senate after he was deified. 54.  Constantine’s case, to be sure, remains a problem for historians. While Pan. Lat. 12(9), the earliest source on Constantine’s victory celebration in 312, is silent on the Capitoline Hill, one sixth-​century source, Zosimus’s Nea Historia, reports that Constantine stopped on the hill once and then decided not to do so on another occasion. See Fraschetti 2000, 19–​31, on “il dossier su un silenzio.” To my mind, Zosimus’s represents a dubious tradition. The report reflects late fourth-​century polemics against Constantine; as such I will return to Zosimus’s report and others like it in ­chapter 4. 55.  E.g., Alföldy 1948, 52: “In this mighty creation of art that reflected the sanctity of the Christian Empire, the omnipotent Emperor set a worthy rival by the side of the Capitol.” For the late antique version of placing St. Peter’s in opposition to the Capitol, see ­chapters 4 and 7. 56.  Itgenshorst 2017; Lange 2017. 57. Capitol: RG 20.1: “Capitolium . . . impensa grandi refeci.” Jupiter Tonans: RG 19.2. 58. Rea 2007.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  43 inaugurating the disintegration of the Capitoline Hill from the Roman aristocracy’s most desirable honor—​to climb the Capitoline Hill in triumph. Augustus made this dream virtually impossible. After 27 bce, he wholly declined future triumphs and reserved the ceremony mostly for members of his household. Indeed, the last triumph held by anyone else was that of L. Cornelius Balbus in 19 bce.59 The senate found other ways to honor Augustus’s foreign successes and those of his commanders. Mario Torelli, for example, observes that the dedications of the Ara Pacis and the Ara Fortunae Reducis, both of them vowed with annual cult observances, were “substitutes for triumphal honors.”60 Similarly, triumphal insignia were awarded for success in war. Thus within a single generation, during the four decades of Augustus’s principate, climbing of the Capitoline Hill in a triumphal procession would become a rarity. When emperors and emperors-​elect did so in subsequent years, they were making publicly visible their dynastic ambitions, or they were making the assertion that their new principate was legitimate in the eyes of Jupiter and his people—​often both simultaneously.61 While Jupiter called the city of Rome his home, he was never the only source of Rome’s success on the battlefield. In the reign of Augustus, Jupiter Optimus Maximus was still imagined as a distant awesome force, but it was Apollo who served on the front lines in the wars against Cleopatra and Antony.62 Augustus thus built the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill in recognition of Apollo’s role as his divine patron. He also removed the Sibylline Books from the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where they had been kept since its dedication in the late sixth century bce, and had them placed instead in Apollo’s new temple. Finally, the spoils of war were put on display not just in the Capitol but also, as Augustus himself reports, in the Temples of Divus Iulius, Vesta, Apollo Palatinus, and Mars Ultor.63 As Diane Favro has pointed out, the emperor himself became associated with triumph, and the urban environment became full of locations that commemorated Rome as an Augustan city.64 This decentralization of Rome’s symbolic topography in the age of Augustus continued into the third century. We need to keep reminding ourselves that Rome was not the only city where important celebrations were held. Public celebrations of victory, attended by the emperors, often took place elsewhere. Clodius Pupienus Maximus, after the death of Maximinus Thrax in 238, was acclaimed in Aquileia, the celebrations and sacrifices lasting for three days. Maximus then 59.  Beard 2007, 295–​305; Itgenshorst 2005, 105. 60.  RG 4. Torelli 1982, 28, observed that the Ara Pacis and the Ara Fortunae Reducis should be seen as “substitutes for triumphal honors.” See Beard 2007, 67–​68. 61.  Beard 2007, 296–​97. 62.  For an overview, see Fears 1981. 63.  RG 21.2. On the “marginalization” of the Capitol under Augustus as a place of elite self-​representation, see Bonnefond 1987. 64.  Favro 1996, 237–​42.

44  Rome’s Holy Mountain rejoined his co-​emperor Balbinus in Rome, where the celebrations continued.65 The acclamation of emperors for victory in provincial cities would become the norm throughout the fourth century. Constantine, for example, was acclaimed in Trier twice in the late 300s for victories against barbarians, and Theodosius I was similarly acclaimed in Milan in 389.66 The emperors channeled enormous state resources into making these cities into stages for the projection of their majesty, even inaugurating new cities beginning with the emperor Philip the Arab’s foundation of Philippopolis (Shahbā) in Syria around 244 and culminating in Constantine’s foundation of Constantinople on the Bosporus.67 Even in Rome the Capitoline Hill was not the target of votive investments. Like Augustus, Septimus Severus and his successors sought to memorialize their rule by erecting new religious sanctuaries in Rome. Such innovatory alterations to the cityscape made the tastes of the third-​century emperors public and publicly debatable.68 In around 215, Caracalla constructed in the Campus Martius the Serapeum in honor of the Egyptian Serapis and Isis.69 A  few years later, Elagabalus (218–​222) arrived in Rome from Syria. He installed his family’s own divinity in a new temple, the Heliogabalium, on the Palatine Hill. Though judged harshly by Herodian and Dio, Elagabalus invited elites to participate in the rites, and they reportedly considered it an honor to do so.70 It was through these new temples that the emperors of the late third century sought to memorialize the magnitude of their deeds. In 274, Aurelian (270–​275) dedicated the Templum Solis in the Campus Martius in honor of Sol Invictus, the divine patron of the emperor in the war against Zenobia and her Palmyrene empire. Aurelian’s temple was, according to the sources, a “magnificent temple,” filled with gold, precious stones, and triumphal spoils from Palmyra.71 The Forum on Fire While the absence of emperors from Rome was important for the dwindling use of the Capitol in public rituals, less obvious, but no less important, are the mutually reinforcing circumstances of urban disasters and an increasing emphasis placed on the elaboration of the Forum Romanum for the celebration of a distinctive late Roman imperiality. Throughout the literature and art of the late empire, the emperor is almost always surrounded by senators, courtiers, and the 65.  Herodian 8.7.3–​7; McCormick 1986, 18–​21. 66. Constantine:  Pan. Lat. 6(7).10.5–​6; McCormick 1986, 36. Theodosius:  Ambrose, Ep. 61; McCormick 1986, 45. 67.  Dey 2015, 33–​64. 68.  Curran 2000, 17. 69.  CIL 6.570 = ILS 4387; Curran 2000, 10. 70.  Herodian 5.5.10. 71.  Aurelius Victor, Caes. 35.7; Eutropius 9.15; SHA, Aur. 39.2. Spoils: SHA, Aur. 28.5.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  45

Figure  9. Arch of Constantine, ca. 315. The frieze on the north face depicts Constantine standing on the Diocletianic Rostra in the Forum Romanum with the five-​column monument behind him. The Capitol is just out of the frame. American Academy in Rome Library Collection, Alinari no. 17325. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Fototeca Unione.

Roman people, the scene enclosed, so to say, in an architecture of power: the palace, the hippodrome, or the forum (Figure 9).72 Thus when the Forum Romanum and the imperial forums burned, as they did with alarming regularity in the late empire, it is easy to see why the emperors as well as Rome’s elite continued to see the restoration of these areas as necessary for the city’s urban image. For it was in these areas that the emperors showed their majestic presence to the senate and people of Rome and made that presence permanent in the form of statues, inscriptions, and monuments. In the final years of Commodus’s reign, the city center suffered a major fire caused by a lightning strike. Dio reports that the fire damaged the Temple of Peace, the Palatine Hill, and warehouses abutting the palace.73 Herodian adds the Atrium of Vesta in the Forum Romanum to this list of destruction and the detail that only rain was able to put a stop to the conflagration.74 When Septimius Severus came to power in 193, he initiated a large-​scale restoration project to make the city ready for the celebration of the Secular Games in 204 and more urgently to assure the Roman people and the aristocracy that his usurpation in the recent civil wars promised stability.75 In the area of the Forum Romanum, Severus, together with members of his household, restored the Atrium of Vesta, the Temple of Peace, the Temple of Divus Vespasianus, and the Rostra. The most enduring alteration to the area came in 203, when the senate dedicated a triumphal arch still standing by the Curia Senatus in honor of the emperor’s victories in the east. 72.  Dey 2015, 57–​64; Straub 1939, 21, 42. 73.  Dio (Xiph.) 73.24. 74.  Herodian 1.14.2–​6. 75.  Curran 2000, 5. The following account of changes to Rome’s topography in the course of the third century is largely dependent on his survey (2000, 5–​26).

46  Rome’s Holy Mountain Following a series of fires, in 283 or 284, Diocletian and Maximian set about restoring some of the publicly maintained buildings and amenities (operae publicae) of the city.76 Diocletian and Maximian seem to have been especially interested in restoring locations on public procession routes into the Forum Romanum. On the Via Lata (today’s Via del Corso), the last stage of the Via Flaminia as it approached the Forum of Trajan and the Capitoline Hill, the emperors erected a new arch and a public fountain, identified as the Arcus Novus and the Nymphaeum Iovis in the fourth-​century regionary catalogs and the Chronicle of 354.77 In the Forum Romanum itself they restored the Curia Senatus, Basilica Iulia, and Forum of Caesar. In 303, a new monument was constructed in honor of the twentieth anniversary of Diocletian and Maximian’s rule—​five columns topped by statues of the four emperors likely flanking a statue of Jupiter, creating in association with other innovations to this area of the Forum Romanum a plaza bounded on all sides by statues.78 This concern for public spaces where large assemblies could gather also included the Theater of Pompey and its vast porticus in the Campus Martius. Reflecting this program of restoration, the city’s mint at this time produced large amounts of coinage that included slogans such as “public utility” (utilitas publica).79 The fires at the end of the second and third centuries that damaged key structures in the Forum Romanum did more than anything else to focus the attention of the emperors on the restoration of this area. It was there, framed by new monuments, that the statues of emperors could be honored together with Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the heart of the city. In the Rome of Diocletian and Maximian, the new Forum Romanum and the procession routes integrating it into the rest of the city became magnets for investment, thereafter drawing the attention of their successors, Maxentius and Constantine, as well as the self-​aggrandizing euergetism of Rome’s aristocracy. Maxentius invested in the triumphal procession route that connected the Capitoline Hill to the Forum Romanum, Palatine Hill, and Circus Maximus and initiated another wave of large-​scale construction projects in the Forum Romanum including the Basilica Nova. This investment in the Forum Romanum involved locations up and down the Via Sacra, the last stage of the triumphal procession route running directly through the Forum Romanum.80 76. The Chronicle of 354 (Mommsen, MGH AA 9, 148)  mentions that Diocletian and Maximian provided multae operae publicae, including “senatum, forum Caesaris, basilica Iulia, scaena Pompei, porticos II, nymfea III, templa II Iseum et Serapeum, arcum nouum, thermas Diocletianas.” They also, the text continues, after the Circus Maximus collapsed, killing 13,000 people, distributed gold and silver coins in circo. For Diocletianic building projects in Rome, including a critical discussion of all relevant evidence, see Bauer 2012; Kalas 2015, 23–​45. 77.  Arcus Novus: Chronicle of 354 (Mommsen, MHG AA 9, 148); VZ 1:110. Nymphaeum Iovis: VZ 1:110. 78.  Kalas 2015, 34–​39. 79.  RIC 6 Rome 47, 48, 62. 80.  Marlowe 2011, with further references. Illustrations and discussion: Leppin and Ziemssen 2007. It has also been suggested that the Arch of Constantine might also have been a Maxentian construction. For discussion and the relevant scholarship, see Lenski 2008, 216 with n. 48.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  47 It was not the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill that symbolized Maxentius’s claim to be the “savior of his own city.” This role would be played by the Temple of the City, the late antique name for what is generally called the Temple of Venus and Roma. Dedicated in 121 to Rome’s tutelary goddesses, the temple burned down at the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century.81 The Chronicle of 354 and Aurelius Victor celebrate Maxentius’s restoration of the Temple of the City at the south end of the Forum Romanum as his signature contribution to Rome’s cityscape.82 Beginning in late 306, the Roman mint issued dozens of coins in all denominations showing the temple’s new facade and the cult statue of Roma standing inside.83 Through the inscriptions on these coins, Maxentius seized the opportunity occasioned by the restoration to trumpet the message that he himself was “savior of his city”: CONSERV VRB SVAE (conseruator urbis suae). Moreover, recent archaeology suggests that Maxentius elaborated the northeastern slopes of the Palatine Hill, in conjunction with the Temple of the City and the Basilica Nova, the three monuments together creating what Clementina Panella suggests was a “grandiose stage” for the celebration of rites in honor of Roma.84 Following Constantine’s victory over Maxentius, the senate named Maxentius a tyrant and rededicated Maxentius’s constructions in Constantine’s name.85 Constantine continued to channel state resources into the restoration of the Forum Romanum and other public spaces during his two-​ month stay in Rome.86 In 321, Nazarius delivered a panegyric in Rome for the fifth anniversary (quiquennalia) of the rule of Constantine’s sons Crispus and Constantinus.87 Though Constantine and his sons were absent on this occasion, Nazarius recalls that Constantine restored buildings “worn out through age” and made them “shine with golden light.”88 More specifically Constantine restored Diocletian and Maximian’s five-​column monument in the Forum Romanum, the Temple of Peace, the Basilica Nova, and also the Circus Maximus.89 Taking up Maxentius’s

81.  Discussion of the renovations and their antecedents as well as holes in our understanding of the decorative features and functions of the temple: H. Ziemssen, in Leppin and Ziemssen 2007, 74–​82. It would be useful to know whether Maxentius shifted ceremonies and rituals traditionally done elsewhere to his new Temple of the City, as Augustus did when he constructed the Temple of Apollo Palatinus and the Temple of Mars Ultor. Cf. Suetonius, Aug. 29; Dio 55.10.2–​5. See Bauer 1996, 87–​88; Zanker 1988, 108. 82.  Chronicle of 354 (Mommsen, MGH AA 9, 148); Aurelius Victor, Caes. 40.27. For a useful introduction to the Chronicle of 354, see Salzman 1990, 51–​56. 83.  RIC 6 Rome 166, 187, 194–​205, 208–​13, 258–​63, 278–​80. See Drost 2013, 78–​79, 82–​84. 84. Panella 2008. 85.  Aurelius Victor, Caes. 40.26; Curran 2000, 76–​90; Marlowe 2011. 86.  Constantine’s renovations in the Baths of Caracalla: CIL 6.40772. For the haphazard survival of evidence for imperial restoration projects, see Scheithauer 2000, 178, 214. 87.  Nazarius’s identity and the occasion of the speech: Barnes 1981, 181–​84; Nixon and Rodgers 1994, 334–​42. Straub 1939, 194, notes the silence of Nazarius on any mention of the Capitol. 88.  Pan. Lat. 4.35.4 (tr. Nixon and Rodgers 381). 89. Five-​column monument and Temple of Peace:  CIL 15.1569, 1643; Daguet-​Gagey 1997, 357. Circus Maximus: Pan. Lat. 4.35.5; Aurelius Victor, Caes. 40.27.

48  Rome’s Holy Mountain

Figure 10.  Constantine’s use of Maxentius coin imagery of the Temple of the City in the Forum Romanum. Silver coin showing Roma seated in a hexastyle temple with the legend RESTITVTOR VRBIS SVAE: RIC 6 Rome 312. Photograph: Brent Upchurch.

slogans, the Roman mint issued coins reminding the Romans that Constantine was the restitutor urbis suae, and like Maxentius, Constantine linked his own claim to be the city’s restorer with the Temple of the City (Figure 10).90 Standing across from the Temple of the City, the Arch of Constantine marks the beginning of the Via Sacra. In 315, in advance of Constantine’s visit to the city to celebrate his decennalia, the senate honored the emperor with a triumphal arch at the beginning of the Via Sacra, the last stage of the Via Triumphalis as it turned into the Forum Romanum. Its inscription celebrates Constantine’s victory, almost nostalgically, in locutions rooted in the distant past.91 Moreover, the friezes that encircle the arch narrate Constantine’s campaign against Maxentius and his triumph in Rome, one of which shows Constantine standing before the Roman people on the Rostra in the Forum Romanum thronged by senators. Behind them towers the five-​column monument erected by Diocletian and Maximian (Figure 9).92 The memory of Constantine’s triumph in Rome lasted a long time, both physically in the form of monuments and ceremonially in the calendar of the city. Nazarius claims that Constantine’s triumph in 312 as better than any triumph recorded in Roman history. “What triumph,” he asks, “was more illustrious, what spectacle more beautiful, what procession more fortunate?”93 Eusebius of Caesarea, remembering the event after Constantine’s death in 337, writes that Constantine “rode in triumph [met’epinikiōn] into the imperial city” and that “all 90.  RIC 6 Rome 301–​2, 312 with the legend restitutor urbis suae. 91.  Grünewald 1990, 64–​86; Lenski 2008, 213–​31. 92.  It is an intriguing possibility, though no more than a guess, that the Capitol was deliberately left out of the frame. See Bonamente 1978. 93.  Pan. Lat. 4.32.1 (tr. Nixon and Rodgers 377):  “Quis triumphus inlustrior, quae species pulchrior, quae pompa felicior.” Also Pan. Lat. 4.30.5: “nulli tam laeti triumphi quos annalium uetustas consecratos in litteris habet.”

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  49 the people of Rome gave him a bright-​eyed welcome with spontaneous acclamations and unbounded joy.”94 Moreover, like other triumphs, Constantine’s was celebrated in the city’s calendar for decades. According to the Calendar of 354, October 28 was meant to celebrate the euictio tyranni, the “casting out of the tyrant [Maxentius],” and October 29, the aduentus diui, the “arrival of the divine [Constantine].” Constantine’s aduentus was then followed by two days of games (ludi uotiui), one for the euictio and another for the aduentus.95 That the senate wanted Constantine’s presence to be permanently beheld in the Forum Romanum is made clearly visible by the decision to place a colossal marble statue of the emperor in the Basilica Nova probably in time for Constantine’s last visit to Rome to celebrate his uicennalia in 326.96 It is slightly ironic that the remnants of the colossus, including its giant head and right hand, which had been lying in the Forum Romanum for more than a millennium, were taken up to the Capitoline Hill just after they were unearthed in 1486—​a procession, so to say, that Constantine himself seems never to have undertaken. We will return to the ways in which Constantine’s memory was taken up and stretched into new directions in ­chapter 4. Toward a Christian Topography Rome’s Christian communities and their ecclesiastical leaders would play a significant role in the reorientation of the city’s ritual topography. Christians were a visible minority in Rome within a generation of Jesus of Nazareth’s execution.97 Despite periodic eruptions of state-​sponsored violence against Christians, notably under Decius and Diocletian, the Christians were significant enough in the social world of Rome that Maxentius rescinded the empire-​wide edicts of persecution. According to the Liber Pontificalis, Rome’s popes at this time were able to increase the number of churches and clergy operating in the city.98 It has even been suggested that Maxentius started the construction of the Basilica Apostolorum (now S. Sebastiano) in conjunction with Maxentius’s palace situated nearby on the Via Appia.99 Thus it is hardly surprising that the Christians of Rome had enthusiastically supported Maxentius.100 But by the autumn of 312, as 94. Eusebius, VC 39.1–​2 (tr. Cameron and Hall 85). See Cameron and Hall 1999, 216–​19, for commentary. The Greek word epinikia was sometimes used to translate the Latin triumphus; see LSJ 648 s.v. epinikeios. 95.  Inscriptiones Italiae 13.2 (Degrassi 1963, 257, 527). See Beard 2007, 318–​ 28; Curran 2000, 72–​ 75; MacCormack 1981, 34–​35; Salzman 1990, 144–​46. In late antiquity, there was little distinction in form between the ceremonies of the aduentus, the triumphus, the investiture of emperors, and the processus consularis—​they all necessitated ritualized movement into and through the public spaces of cities. McCormick 1986, 80–​91, is an important analysis of this “creeping assimilation.” Most recently, see Ando 2017. 96.  Buddensieg 1962; Parisi Presicce 2006. 97.  Curran 2000, 35–​41, 48–​50. 98.  LP (Duchesne 1:31–​32). Discussion of Maxentius’s toleration of Christians: Barnes 2011, 67–​68; Curran 2000, 63–​65; Drake 2000, 171–​74. 99.  Curran 2000, 99; Jastrzebowska 2002. 100.  De Decker 1968, 501–​25. Constantine, OC 22, discussed by Edwards 2003, xxviii–​xxix, 53–​54 and n. 9.

50  Rome’s Holy Mountain Constantine’s army was approaching, relations had soured, a turn of events that Constantine and his Christian supporters were able to seize upon to craft their own justification for Constantine’s advance on Rome.101 Directly after his victory over Maxentius, Constantine began to act as a patron of Rome’s Christian community. He issued orders to restore the property and rights of Christians, and he made provisions, probably within weeks of his victory celebrations, for the construction of the Basilica Constantiniana on the Caelian Hill (now S. Giovanni in Laterano).102 Just as emperors had done throughout the city in the construction of votive temples, Constantine channeled the incredible resources suddenly available to him to adorn the basilica. According to the Liber Pontificalis, Constantine donated hundreds of pounds of gold and silver liturgical objects and dedicated properties recently won from his campaign against Maxentius to supply the olive oil for the basilica’s hundreds of glass lamps.103 Constantine and his family went on to participate, at least financially, in the foundation of St. Peter’s and perhaps as many as half a dozen other Christian shrines throughout the city.104 After Constantine left Rome in early 313, he visited the city on two other occasions. On both occasions, imperial celebrations included Christians for the first time.105 According to Eusebius of Caesarea’s Life of Constantine, written just after Constantine’s death in 337, Constantine “celebrated popular festivals everywhere” for his decennalia in 315, and offered up “prayers of thanksgiving to God the King of all [tōi pantōn basilei theōi], like sacrifices without fire and smoke.”106 On his last visit to Rome in 326 for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of his rule, Constantine admitted bishops to the palace as his esteemed guests.107 Presumably the rites associated with public worship for the uicennalia celebrations continued, since it seems that Constantine only sought to make his own ritual behavior distinctly Christian.108 Returning to the question of why the Capitoline Hill seems to have slipped off the itinerary of emperors and their celebrations in Rome, I would point to three intersecting developments:  a more decentralized empire, Rome’s evolving symbolic topography, and the increasing significance of Rome’s Christian community. From the last half of the third century to the first decades of the fourth, this resulted, within the city of Rome, in emperors focusing resources on a new topography of devotion that included Aurelian’s Templum Solis, Maxentius’s Temple of the City, and Constantine’s Lateran basilica. On the one 101.  Lenski 2008, 206 with n. 6. 102.  LTUR 2:127 (Liverani); Curran 2000, 93–​96; Liverani 1999. 103.  LP (Duchesne 1:172–​74). 104.  See the recent summary in Lenski 2016, 182–​87. 105.  Paschoud 1971, 352–​53. 106. Eusebius, VC 1.48 (tr. Cameron and Hall 89). VC 4.40.2 repeats that thanksgivings were offered up to God in the tricennalia celebrations in 335/​336. 107. Eusebius, VC 3.15. 108.  Curran 1996, 70.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  51 hand, Constantine thought of Rome’s Capitol as other third-​century emperors had done: climbing the Capitoline Hill was not necessary in the public pageantry of legitimation. On the other hand, Constantine’s public intimacy with Christian clergy and his patronage of large-​scale Christian churches began to erode the legitimizing authority of Jupiter Optimus Maximus: for him and increasing numbers of the emperor’s Christian intimates, this was not the supreme divinity of the Roman state.109 We will see in subsequent chapters that this Christian ruling ideology would reject the claim that Jupiter’s earthly home was on the Capitoline Hill, in turn creating the conditions for a distinctly Christian itinerary for imperial accessions, arrivals, and celebrations of victory. A New Imperial Itinerary Constantius II (337–​364), the son of the emperor Constantine and one of the first Roman emperors raised from childhood as a Christian, arrived in Rome on April 28, 357, for the celebration of triumphs and his own uicennalia. He was met by senators outside Rome. They led Constantius and his army into the city. Like so many of his predecessors, the emperor climbed the Capitoline Hill. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, Constantius first came to rest at the Forum Romanum and the Curia Senatus, where he addressed the Roman people and the senators in turn. Then he retired to the Palatine Hill to take up residence in the imperial palace. Constantius then visited the Capitol, the Baths of Diocletian or Caracalla, the Colosseum, the Theater of Pompey, and the Pantheon. His itinerary ended at the Forum of Trajan, where Constantius reportedly stood transfixed by this location—​it was otherworldly in its dimensions and beauty.110 Constantius’s visit in 357, as well as the inscriptions produced in his honor before and after his month-​ long stay, demonstrates this emperor’s understanding of himself as an ruler committed to Rome’s long history as the center of empire, despite the hostile editorializing to the contrary by Ammianus. Indeed, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, while he was urban prefect (384–​385), reflected on Constantius’s visit some thirty years before. According to Symmachus, Constantius was curious about the history of the buildings and allowed traditional rites held in temples to continue. As the emperor toured the city he looked at the temples and read the inscriptions on their pediments.111 Constantius’s visit also shows how much the Roman world had changed in a single generation. While Constantius climbed the Capitoline Hill, this was not his final stop, nor was it deemed the most important one. As important as these changes in ritualized 109.  See Scheid 2005 for discussion of the Capitol’s centralizing polytheistic logic. 110.  Ammianus 16.10. Ammianus states that Constantius understood the event to be a triumph, but it was not, in his opinion, technically or deservedly one (16.10.1). See Bjørnebye 2013; Klein 1979; Straub 1939, 175–​92. 111. Symmachus, Relatio 3.7. See Klein 1979, 112–​14.

52  Rome’s Holy Mountain movement within the city were, it is important to emphasize that Constantius’s sojourn in Rome placed him in the middle of a papal schism between Liberius (352–​366) and Felix II (355–​365) and in a specifically Christian cityscape fractured by the factions of these two popes, with each of them occupying important locations in the city. Constantius’s Rome was thus an urban environment defined by martyr shrines, churches, and ancient monuments.112 Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Constantius stepped foot in the newly dedicated Lateran basilica or St. Peter’s. Like his father Constantine, Constantius likely celebrated Christian rites together with Christian clergy within the walls of the palace on the Palatine Hill.113 But the ways in which imperial piety was publicly demonstrated in Rome’s urban environment would change rapidly in the latter half of the fourth century. While Constantius’s itinerary in 357 clearly demonstrates that the house of Constantine had no trouble visiting the Capitoline Hill and its most important temple, it is only around the visits of Gratian (376), Theodosius (389), and Honorius (403/​404) that reports registering a new itinerary for ritualized movement in the city can be found. According to Paolo Liverani’s astute analysis, by the end of the fourth century, and certainly by Honorius’s aduentus in Rome and inauguration as consul on January 1, 404, it was not missed by those at the time that emperors began stopping at St. Peter’s. There, they removed their diadem, the symbol of their worldly authority, before the tomb of Saint Peter, and prayed for the apostle’s patronage, either before or after addressing the senate in the Forum Romanum, taking up residence on the Palatine Hill, and hosting games in the Circus Maximus.114 In short, the script for the aduentus of the emperor was beginning to look as though it was made for a specifically Christian pageantry of power. This reorientation was made permanent in multiple ways, from coinage to the redirection of street traffic. The Roman mint issued coins in honor of Theodosius with the legend GLORIA ROMANORUM—​lodged between the letters of the second word is a chrismon.115 More permanent still was the decision to construct Rome’s last two triumphal arches in the Campus Martius. The Arch of Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius I  and the Arch of Arcadius, Honorius, and Theodosius II revitalized and, in a sense, joined together the old Via Triumphalis, St. Peter’s, and the Forum Romanum.116 112.  See Curran 2000, 129–​37; Klein 1979, 110–​11; Salzman 1990, 222. Constantius’s meetings with heterodox groups in Rome and Liberius and his supporters occupying S. Agnese on the Via Nomentana: LP (Duchesne 1:207–​8). Theodoret (HE 2.14) reports that Constantius tried to announce a decree in the circus (presumably he imagined this location to be the Circus Maximus) that would allow both bishops to jointly hold the see, but the crowd ridiculed the suggestion and shouted the acclamation, “One God, One Christ, One Bishop.” 113. McLynn 2009. 114.  Liverani 2007. Liverani points to the textual evidence for the deposition of the diadem at the tomb of Saint Peter: Augustine, Cum pagani ingrederentur 25–​26 (Dolbeau 266); Chrysostom, Epist. II ad Corinthos (PG 61:582); Chrysostom, Contra Iudaeos et Gentiles 9 (PG 48:825). 115.  RIC 9 Rome 60; McCormick 1986, 106. 116.  Dey 2015, 68–​73; Liverani 2007, 85–​89. It should be stressed that such innovations and constructions would have been enacted through the planning of the urban prefects and their subordinates, virtually all of whom were pagans in the last decades of the fourth century. See McCormick 1986, 104–​7.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  53 In contrast to the rarity of emperors stopping in Rome in the fourth century, throughout the fifth century the city’s populace saw repeated imperial visits—​ this in spite of, and likely because of, the barbarian sieges and occupations of the city in 410 and 455.117 The emperor Honorius was often in the city after 404, leaving the imperial capital of Ravenna as the base of military operations under the care the magister militum Stilicho. Honorius’s presence in Rome and patronage of the city made a lasting impression. Rome considered itself a lucky city: the city’s mints produced large amounts of bronze, silver, and gold coinage, including a dozen issues of bronzes with the legend VRBS ROMA FELIX.118 Having been in Rome on as many as eight occasions, Honorius eventually became a permanent resident:  he had a dynastic mausoleum constructed adjacent to St. Peter’s, where he was buried together with his spouse, Maria.119 Following Honorius, Valentinian III (425–​455) was even more frequently in Rome. Not only was he inaugurated there upon his accession in October 425, but he also resided on the Palatine Hill from February 450 until March 455, when he was assassinated in the Campus Martius.120 With the exception of Majorian (457–​ 461), all the emperors of the western empire stopped in Rome between 455 and 475. These stops included singular occasions such as the ceremony of accession, the inauguration of emperors as consuls, and even a wedding.121 Following the example set by Honorius in 404, most of these emperors would have stopped at St. Peter’s. However, only two particularly noteworthy occasions survive in the sources. Significantly, they both involve popes attempting to use their authority as stewards of the tomb of the apostle to urge emperors to reject heresies from the eastern empire. In 450, under the direction of Pope Leo I (440–​461), Valentinian III participated in the celebration of the establishment of the episcopacy of Rome (Cathedra Petri) together with his mother, Galla Placidia, and spouse, Eudoxia. It was also on this occasion that the imperial family, the pope, and the assembled clergy affirmed their faith.122 In 467, Anthemius likewise participated in the celebration of the liturgy, and on this occasion the emperor swore to Pope Hilarus (461–​468) on the tomb of the apostle that he would not allow sectarians to meet in Rome.123 After the emperor Nepos’s forced departure from the city in 475 and deposition of his successor Romulus Augustulus in the following year, Rome would not function as the head of a centralized state until the emergence and 117.  Gillett 2001; Humphries 2003; Humphries 2007; Humphries 2012; Liverani 2007; McEvoy 2010. 118.  RIC 10 Rome 31–​33; under Honorius: RIC 10 Rome 128–​31. 119.  Gillett 2001, 139–​41; Liverani 2007, 91; Paul the Deacon, Hist. 13.7 (Waitz, MGH AA 2, 197). 120.  Gillett 2001, 142–​48; Humphries 2012. 121.  Accession: Petronius Maximus in March 455 and Nepos in June 474. Inauguration of emperors as consuls: Honorius in January 404, 405, and 407; Valentinian III in January 426; Avitus in January 456; Anthemius in January 468. Weddings: Anthemius giving his daughter Alypia to Ricimer in marriage in 467. See Gillett 2001. 122. Leo, Ep. 55 (PL 55:858); Humphries 2012, 166–​70; Liverani 2007, 92. 123. Gelasius, Ep. XCV.61 (Günther 390–​91), cited here as an example of bishops using their authority to sway emperors toward right behavior. See Liverani 2007, 92.

54  Rome’s Holy Mountain territorial integration of the papal respublica beginning in the late eighth century.124 Nonetheless, it remained the largest and most symbolically important city in the west for the subsequent rulers of the city. One important reason, as Paolo Liverani has pointed out, is that emperors and kings began coming to Rome, at least in part, as pilgrims.125 Indeed, in 500 Theoderic, the king of the Ostrogoths, began his sojourn in Rome by stopping first at St. Peter’s. After he paid honor to the apostle by prostrating himself in the church, Pope Symmachus (498–​514), the senators, and the populus Romanus led the king past the Mausoleum of Hadrian (Castel Sant’Angelo), across the Pons Aelius (Ponte Sant’Angelo), and into the Campus Martius. The procession then made its way through the Arch of Gratian, Valentinian, and Theodosius to the Via Triumphalis. The procession continued south to the Curia Senatus in the Forum Romanum, where Theoderic addressed the people ad Palmam, a monument closely associated with the Curia Senatus.126 After taking up residence on the Palatine Hill, where he would remain for the next five months, Theoderic then hosted games in the Circus Maximus in honor of his tricennalia.127 For us, standing at a distance and looking at the city from the third to the sixth century, it seems almost as if the Capitol was deliberately left out of the social, political, and bureaucratic worlds of the city’s elite. This impression is partly true. From Constantius’s procession in 357 to King Henry IV’s siege of the Capitoline Hill in spring 1084, it is impossible, with the available sources, to locate a single ruler on the Capitoline Hill for any reason at all.128 To put it plainly, while living and dead emperors could be found in Rome, they were definitely not to be found on the Capitoline Hill. In 387, Theodosius I addressed the senators in the Curia Senatus and the people from the Rostra in the Forum Romanum.129 In a panegyric delivered in 468 in honor of Anthemius, Sidonius indicates that he was addressing the emperor in the shadow of the Basilica Ulpia just before Anthemius was about to manumit a host of slaves (captiuos), thus making them into Romans (Quirites).130 Furthermore, emperors permanently resided in the Forum Romanum and the imperial forums in the form of statues. This was where emperors and Roman aristocrats were celebrated for military as well as literary triumphs through honorary statues, epigrams, and public oratory.131 The names of 124.  Gantner 2014; Noble 1984, 23–​60. 125. Totila: Procopius, Wars 3.16.22–​23. See Liverani 2007. 126.  Vita Fulgentii 9.27 (Isola 182–​83): “in loco qui Palma Aurea dicitur memorato Theoderico rege contionem faciente, Romanae curiae nobilitatem decus ordinemque distinctis decoratam gradibus exspectaret et fauores liberi populi castis auribus audiens, qualis esset huius saeculi gloriosa pompa cognosceret.” 127.  Anon. Val. 65–​67. See Liverani 2007; Vitiello 2005. 128.  LP (Duchense 2:290): “Rex [Heinricus] Capitolium ascendit, domos omnes Corsorum subuertit.” 129.  Pan. Lat. 12.47.3–​4. See MacCormack 1981, 50–​51; Machado 2006. In a letter from 468, Sidonius Apollinaris suggests that he could be seen delivering his poetry in the Comitium in the Forum Romanum: Sidonius, Ep. 9.7. 130. Sidonius, Carm. 2, 544–​48. 131. Chenault 2012; Coates-​Stephens 2011; Humphries 2003; Humphries 2012, 171; Kalas 2015, 75–​103; Machado 2006.

Climbing the Capitoline Hill  55 the emperors were ubiquitous in these different media and qualified by an innate victoriousness: they were always and continuously uictores et triumphatores.132 As these examples suggest, the Forum of Trajan became particularly important in the late empire. While the inauguration of consuls, who often were the emperors themselves, used to be done on the Capitoline Hill, this ceremony also came to be celebrated at the Forum of Trajan.133 The consul designate would begin the processus consularis from his home (the Palatine Hill, if the consul was also emperor) and continue through the Forum Romanum into the Forum of Trajan and finally on to the Circus Maximus for the presentation of games—​perhaps an itinerary that was hardened into ritual through the inauguration of Honorius as consul on January 1, 404.134 Boethius remembered well the occasion when his sons, like he was in 510, were inaugurated consuls in 522. They were carried from their domus to the Curia Senatus, attended by the senate and the Roman people. There, Boethius delivered a panegyric in honor of Theoderic. Standing between his sons at the Circus Maximus, Boethius watched as they opened the ceremony for the masses assembled around them.135 No less significant was the fact that the Forum of Trajan was also the place where laws were proclaimed in Rome, including nine constitutions from the fourth century and eleven from the fifth.136 The repetition of these ceremonial practices made the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Trajan into resilient spaces in the public life of the city. Recent archaeology has shown that these areas remained largely intact until the ninth century, when Rome’s urban image was shifting in new directions.137 Conclusion This chapter has shown that by the beginning of the fourth century the Capitoline Hill was no longer the preeminent stage for high state ceremonies such as the aduentus, triumph, accession, or for the inauguration of magistrates. No single actor is responsible. Instead, the endemic civil wars and establishment of new imperial capitals at the end of the third century pulled emperors and imperial rites away from the city of Rome. However, this explanation does not account for why the Capitoline Hill seems to have fallen off the itinerary of emperors when they did come to Rome. Though more often than not absent from the 132.  CIL 6.1163, 6.1764, 6.41336. See McCormick 1986, 35–​64; Straub 1939, 178. 133. See RE 4.1:1125–​26 (Kübler) for the evidence of the traditional route of the processus consularis and regalia of consuls. For the late antique consulate, see now Sguaitamatti 2012. 134. Claudian, VICons. 640–​60. See MacCormack 1981, 54; Machado 2010, 296–​300; Sguaitamatti 2012, 139–​40. 135. Boethius, Cons. 2.3.29–​34. Commentary: Gruber 2006, 187. Sons: ​Flavius Boethius: PLRE 2:232 (Fl. Boethius 3); and Flavius Symmachus: PLRE 2:1044 (Fl. Symmachus 8). 136.  CTh 10.1.2 (319 ce), 9.19.1 (326), 9.17.3 (356), 1.9.1 (359), 14.2.1 (364), 14.10.2 (397), 14.14.1 (397), 10.10.31 (422), 11.20.4 (423). Nov. Val. III, 2.2 (442), 11 (443), 19 (445), 21.1 (446), 21.2 (445), 23 (447), 25 (447), 27 (447), 31 (451). See Lugli 1969, 73–​78, nos. 408–​27. 137.  Meneghini 2010, 197–​217. More generally, see Dey 2015.

56  Rome’s Holy Mountain city, Constantine, Constantius II, Gratian, and Theodosius honored Rome with sojourns in the city. But it seems that only Constantius II climbed the Capitoline Hill in 357. The visual and textual descriptions of these imperial visits are admittedly sketchy, but they do mostly agree that the most important stages for the celebration of the deeds of emperors and also of Roman elites were the Forum Romanum, the Forum of Trajan, and the Circus Maximus. In the fifth century, when emperors were in the city rather more frequently, it was again the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Trajan where emperors made themselves visible. What was new in the fifth century, however, was the addition of St. Peter’s to imperial itineraries. When institutional norms fall apart and take new shape, it takes a long time. In attempting to situate the decline of the Capitol’s centrality, we have taken up two intertwined developments. The first is the decentralization of Rome’s topography of devotion, a process stretching back hundreds of years as victorious magistrates and emperors vowed temples in thanksgiving to a host of divinities and had them constructed throughout Rome’s hilly landscape and in the Campus Martius. The second has to do with the destruction and restoration of the Forum Romanum following fires in the late second and late third centuries. The restorations to the Forum Romanum trumpeted the love of the emperors for the city and its institutions, drawing additional investment in the elaboration of the Forum Romanum and imperial forums by the senate. In the late empire, to honor the emperors required setting up monuments not on the Capitoline Hill, but just below in the large plazas where thousands of Romans could assemble. Roman emperors needed to be imagined as surrounded by the ranks of senators and the urban plebs more than they needed to be enclosed in the Capitol under the watchful eyes of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

2

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill

W

hile processions for the aduentus, accession, and triumph of emperors did not terminate at the Capitol by the fourth century ce, the hill continued to be a repository of temples, memorials, statues, and inscriptions into the sixth century. Constantine’s patronage of Christianity, moreover, did not change the fact that Rome’s temples and statues were owned by the state and taken care of by the emperor and the urban prefect.1 This chapter looks at the Capitoline Hill as a quilt of public and private places of sociability, housing, and administration from the third to the sixth century. We will see that a social and economic history of the hill can be assembled from a variety of sources, including archaeology, epigraphy, and literary sources—​virtually all of them problematic, from imperfectly documented excavations on and around the hill to faint hints of urban topography embedded in lists and literary sources from the Middle Ages. Sifting through these materials will show a dramatically different Capitoline Hill. Though abandoned by the emperors, the hill and the streets surrounding it were embedded in different and distinct neighborhoods, where people lived and worked and where they conducted market transactions and encountered the full force of Roman justice. Capitoline Temples and Statues Of the more than twenty-​five temples, shrines, and altars attested in Roman literary sources, it is almost impossible to know which were still standing in the fourth century.2 Archaeology has supplied surprisingly little evidence. On the Arx, finds have been attributed to the Temple of Isis Capitolina and the Temple of Juno Moneta; in the Asylum, the “Tabularium” and the Temple of Veiovis; 1.  Alchermes 1994; Curran 2000, 161–​217; Kahlos 1995; Lizzi Testa 2001. 2.  List of temples, shrines, holy places, and statues: DE 2:85–​92; Lugli 1946b, 1–​46, tav. I. Juno Moneta: Gianelli 1980–​1981; but see Tucci 2005. Isis Capitolina: Coarelli 2009. Fides Publica: Reusser 1993. Two other (probably?) sacred structures have also turned up on the Capitolium: a platform on the Via di Rupe Tarpeo, which might have been the base for a religious monument (no one can identify it with certainty), and, though still unpublished, remains of a sacred structure were found in the ongoing renovation of the Protestant Hospital. I thank Claudio Parisi Presicce for alerting me to these excavations. Some of these remains were recently displayed in the exhibition Campidoglio. Mito, memoria, archeologia held at the Musei Capitolini in Rome, March 1 to July 3, 2016. See http://​ www.museicapitolini.org/​servizi/​sala_​stampa/​campidoglio_​mito_​memoria_​archeologia.

57

58  Rome’s Holy Mountain and on the Capitolium, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the Temple of Fides Publica. Here, the regionary catalogs from the fourth century are of little help: Regio VIII lists several temples, but all of them are from the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Trajan. The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the other temples that stood on the Capitoline Hill are either absent from the regionary catalogs or simply folded into what they call the Capitolium. The little evidence that is available suggests that the Capitol’s upkeep continued to be of public concern into the sixth century.3 According to the Historia Augusta, the emperor Tacitus (275–​ 276) made an endowment to keep the Capitol in good repair from estates that he owned in Mauretania (possessiones, quas in Mauretania habuit, sartis tectis Capitolii deputauit).4 Though Ronald Syme called Tacitus’s biography in the Historia Augusta an “elaborate romance,” there is abundant analogous evidence for emperors and other benefactors throughout the empire making endowments for temples.5 Indeed, according to the third-​century jurist Ulpian, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill had been legally designated as one of the few temples in the Roman world that could be made an heir in wills.6 The public interest in the hill and its special status were also visibly affirmed by the senate’s placement of statuary on the hill and their removal. This was a long-​standing tradition that occasioned debate. Domitian (81–​96), for example, ordered that only gold and silver statues of himself should be placed in the Area Capitolina, the precinct of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. After Domitian was assassinated, the statues were mutilated and melted down. By contrast, Trajan (98–​117) was praised for the fact that his statues in the Area Capitolina were made of bronze.7 The practice of erecting statues in honor of the emperors continued in the late empire. Herodian tells us that Caracalla (211–​217) ordered statues of himself as Alexander the Great to be put up “in the Capitol and in other temples.” The historian wrote that he himself had even seen such images.8 To honor Claudius Gothicus (268–​270), the senate voted him “unprecedented rewards” (nouis honoribus). Aside from a clipeus aureus, a gold shield placed in the senate house, and a silver statue surmounting a column adjacent to the Rostra, Claudius Gothicus, as a diuus, received what had never been offered before—​a gold-​plated colossus, ten feet high, placed “on the Capitol in

3.  Locals maintaining temples: Dignas 2002, 145–​46. 4. SHA, Tac. 10.5 (tr. Magie 3:315). 5.  Syme 1971, 237–​47, quotation at 238. 6.  Jupiter Tarpeius as state-​sanctioned heir: Ulpian 21.6: “Deos heredes instituere non possumus praeter eos, quos senatus consulto constitutionibusue principum instituere concessum est, sicuti Iouem Tarpeium, Apollinem Didymaeum Mileti, Martem in Gallia, Mineruam Iliensem, Herculem Gaditanum, Dianam Efesiam, Matrem deorum Sipylenen, Nemesim quae in Smyrnae colitur, et Caelestem Salinensem Carthagini.” 7. Pliny, Pan. 52.1–​6. See Lahusen 1999; Whitehorne 1975. 8.  Herodian 4.8.1–​2.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  59 front of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”9 Others were not so fortunate. The emperor Tacitus (275–​276) urged the senate to erect a gold statue of the now divine Aurelian (270–​275) on the Capitoline Hill. Significantly, this never happened. The senate allowed memorials to be placed, as was increasingly common, in the Forum Romanum, imperial forums, and the Campus Martius: silver statues were to be put up in the Curia Senatus, the Temple of the Sun, and the Forum of Trajan.10 Rituals, Festivals, and Priests Despite the evidence of the Capitol’s special status as a place where singular honors were awarded, the Capitoline Hill was not an exclusionary zone like the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple or Studio 54 in New York City. It is important to stress that the Capitoline Hill was routinely and regularly embedded in the social worlds of Roman men, women, and children. At least until the last quarter of the third century the Capitol was the setting not only for accessions and triumphs but also for state religious rites, poetry competitions, and meetings of private religious associations. One of these rites was the celebration of the Capitoline Games (Ludi Capitolini). The Ludi Capitolini originated in the aftermath of the Gallic siege in 390 bce, at the end of which only the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus remained in Roman hands. In 86 ce, Domitian revived the games and turned them into a literary and athletic competition to be held every five years. Domitian, according to Suetonius, wore a gold crown that depicted the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and he sat in this manner as a judge together with the priests of Jupiter and the Flavian gens. The priests, too, wore crowns, but theirs had the addition of an image of Domitian. The main theme for the poetry competition was praise of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The victors were crowned at the Capitol and awarded an oak branch. These games continued well into late antiquity, but it is not clear whether the Ludi Capitolini were held regularly, especially in the absence of emperors. According to Herodian, when they were held, Rome was inundated with tourists. Commodus (180–​192) presided over the Ludi Capitolini in 181 as judge, probably in the Colosseum. Like Domitian, he sat “with other members of the priestly colleges.”11 It was during this festival, as noted in ­chapter 1, that Maximus and Balbinus were murdered in 238. Neither Herodian nor the Historia Augusta can tell us whether the two emperors likewise 9. SHA, Claud. 3.3–​5 (tr. Magie 3:157, 159); mentioned again at 12.2. The statue was also noted in the fourth and following centuries:  Eutropius 9.11; Aurelius Victor, Caes. 34.4; Eusebius-​Jerome, Chronicon (Helm 222); Orosius, Hist. 7.23. 10. SHA, Aur. 9.2. 11.  Herodian, 1.9.2–​3 (tr. Whittaker 1:53). See n. 3 for an argument for dating the games to 184; Kienast 1996, 147, has a provisional date of November 181.

60  Rome’s Holy Mountain judged the competition before their demise. However frequent the competitions were, the last mention of the Ludi Capitolini dates to the fourth century.12 Another festival for which the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus served as important venues was the Secular Games (Ludi Saeculares). The Ludi Saeculares were usually a once-​in-​a-​lifetime event. Every century or so the festival marked the passage of one world epoch (saeculum) to another. The new saeculum was inaugurated by three days of prayers, processions, public performances, beast hunts, and sacrifices. They were held, remarkably, twice in the third century, first under Septimius Severus (193–​211) in 204 and again under Philip the Arab (245–​249) in 248.13 The latter coincided with the one thousandth anniversary of the foundation of Rome by Romulus in 753 bce. The processions and prayers of these third-​century ce ludi followed a program established by Augustus more than two and a half centuries in the past.14 A  fragmentary inscription that commemorates the Severan ludi, portions of which were found as recently as 1930 in the Campus Martius, shows that even though minor changes did occur, the Capitol’s centrality in the celebration of the rites continued into the third century. Prayers began at night in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill, and then the emperors Severus, Caracalla, and Geta, together with choruses of children, moved in procession to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There, they continued the prayers “in front of the pronaos” of the temple. After the emperors led sacrifices to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the procession moved to the Campus Martius for performances held in a theater specially built for the occasion. On the last day twenty-​seven boys and twenty-​ seven girls—​all had to have living parents—​sang “hymns and victory songs in both Greek and Latin for the preservation of the Roman empire.”15 This festival reminded the Roman people that it was necessary to honor Jupiter Optimus Maximus and his earthly home on the Capitoline Hill as well as other gods and goddesses. Though solemn on the whole, this occasion was also supposed to be fun. According to Zosimus’s sixth-​century account of the Severan ludi, the Sibyl herself ordered: “Let the seats [thōkous] of the gods be thronged with people, and seriousness be mixed with laughter.”16 12. Suetonius, Dom. 4.  Praise of Jupiter Optimus Maximus:  Quintilian, Inst. 3.7.3. Crowning on the Capitol: Martial, Ep. 4.54. Late antiquity: Ausonius, Prof. 5.7. In general, see White 1998 with further references. For a study of a victorious child prodigy and his extemporaneous poem, see Coleman forthcoming. 13. The Ludi Saeculares under Severus: CIL 6.32326–​336. Philip the Arab: Eusebius-​Jerome, Chronicon (Helm 217); Cassiodorus, Chronica (MGH AA 11, Mommsen 147); Aurelius Victor, Caes. 28.1; Eutropius 9.3. For a brief discussion of the various changes that took place, including differences in how the Romans dated the saeculum, see Beard, North, and Price 1998, 1:201–​6. 14.  The difference between the Secular Games of 204 and 248: Gagé 1934, 103–​11. Birley 1988, 156–​60: the Palatine Hill and Capitol were also important staging areas for the preparations leading up to the rites. New edition of and commentary on the Augustan commentarium: Schnegg-​Köhler 2002. 15.  Zosimus 2.5.5 (Paschoud 1:76; tr. Ridley 27). 16.  Zosimus 2.6 (Paschoud 1:78–​9; tr. Ridley 28).

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  61 The Arval Brothers, a college of priests with roots in the distant past, likewise registered the locations where their rites were celebrated and the names of those participating in them. Most were conducted in a lucus, a grove just outside Rome sacred to Dea Dia. But the location most frequented by the Arval Brothers in the city itself was the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill.17 In the first century, the Arval Brothers met on the hill to acclaim emperors, to mark anniversaries of their rule, and to make regular sacrifices inaugurating the New Year on January 3. They did so before the Capitol in the pronaos (in pronao) of the temple. In the third century, the Arval Brothers continued to sacrifice on the hill, specifically now before the cella of Juno Regina (ante cellam Iunonis reginae). The brothers met there in 213, 214, 218, 231, 238, 239, and 241, always in honor of the emperor—​for his safe return, for surviving a shipwreck, or for the anniversaries of the emperor’s accession.18 Like the accession ceremony, the Ludi Capitolini, and the Secular Games, the rites of the Arval Brothers brought into proximity the emperor, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, aristocrats, and the urban plebs. In the case of the Ludi Capitolini, it seems that those of obscure origins could participate and be crowned victors, while the Ludi Saeculares became an opportunity to celebrate and make visible the names of the adults and children who took part in the prayers and processions. Indeed, one of the functions of the Severan inscription was to record the names of the participants, 109 of them, for posterity.19 Likewise the commentarii of the Arval Brothers, their official records, list the names of the brothers who led the rites on the Capitoline Hill (either promagistri or magistri). The names show that those responsible for taking care of some of the most solemn obligations in Rome were not from the old aristocracy. For example, C. Sulpicius Pollio was promagister in 214, and C. Porcius Priscus Longinus was magister in 231; they and their fellow brothers were mostly middling senators.20 The festivals discussed above remind us that the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was a public place in all senses. The temple was a state institution, and it was widely accessible despite the grumbling of some. The poet Martial, writing at the beginning of the second century, ridiculed an ex-​slave whom he calls Aethon for botching his prayers before Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Martial’s Aethon had passed gas while in the process of prostrating himself in prayer. “The father of the gods was offended” (diuom offensus genitor), Martial writes, and ordered Aethon banned from the Capitol for three days. As prayers in antiquity 17.  Scheid 1990b, 179. 18.  Scheid 1998, 99a  =  CIL 6.2086 (213), 99b  =  6.2103a (213), 100  =  6.2104b (218), 106  =  6.2108 (231), 112 = 6.2113 (238), 113 = 6.37165 (239), 115 = 6.2114 (241). Note that Scheid’s list of examples, followed here, significantly expands the instances listed in Lugli 1969, 340–​41 nos. 360–​63. 19.  Birley 1988, 159–​60:  the names listed of the men, women, and children who participated in the rites include only a few of noble republican families. Many more were of provincial families. 20.  Discussion of promagistri and magistri: Scheid 1990a, 251–​69, 432–​36 (C. Sulpicius Pollio), 458–​60 (C. Porcius Priscus Longinus).

62  Rome’s Holy Mountain often were, Aethon’s private act of piety was done in public. According to Martial, “people laughed” (riserunt homines) at Aethon’s flatulent impiety.21 In the third century, Rome was home to a significant number of immigrant communities.22 Like Martial’s Aethon, some participated in the Capitoline cults while others established their own. In 259, a college of priests dedicated a statue to the Virgo Caelestis on the Capitoline Hill in honor of the priestess Flavia Epicharis and her husband and priest Junius Hylas. It is highly significant that the dedication makes the statement that the “most abiding Virgo Caelestis” is the “protecting numen of the place of the Tarpeian Mount” (Virgini [sic] Caelestis praesentissimo [sic] numini [sic] loci montis Tarpei).23 Flavia Epicharis, Junius Hylas, Sextia Olympias, and Chrestina Dorcadius were not boldly claiming that their virgin goddess was ruling the roost in Jupiter’s house. Like the dozens of divinities assembled together on the hill, she was yet another numen that stood for, and together with, the Capitoline Triad—​Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.24 The names of the priests and priestesses of Caelestis’s Capitoline cult—​Flavia Epicharis, Junius Hylas, Sextia Olympias, and Chrestina Dorcadius—​suggest that they or their families were ex-​slaves originally from the eastern provinces.25 Other inscriptions attest to the worship of Sabazius and Mithras on (or in the vicinity of) the Capitoline Hill by those of similar origins.26 In one inscription, C. Ducenius Phoebus, son of Zeno and a devotee of Mithras, tells us that he was “born in Syria at Nisibis” (natus in Suria Nisibun) and was “freed from slavery in Rome” (liber factus Romae).27 Decline and Renewal in the Fifth Century While inscriptions can supply scattered information on the uses of the Capitoline into the late empire, Roman literary sources are silent on virtually all the holy places after the second century. From reading the increasingly strident Christian laws and hagiography of the late fourth century, it is easy to imagine that the old temples of the Roman world were like decommissioned nuclear power reactors: they were systematically closed, cleaned up of contaminants, and eventually demolished. Rome’s temples, however, continued to be categorized, and in 21. Martial, Ep. 12.77. For an example of a prayer to Jupiter, see Martial, Ep. 7.60. This is an example of perhaps a private prayer for Domitian made public through Martial’s publication of the epigram. 22.  Noy 2000 posits that 5 percent of the population of Rome were immigrants by the third century. See also Killgrove 2010. 23.  CIL 6.37170 = ILS 4438 = Lancellotti 2010, 127 no. BR 9 (inscription). 24.  See Scheid 2005, 99, on this particular “polytheistic logic” of the Capitol. Cf. Price 2011, 262–​67, supplying evidence for the lack of “theological exclusivity” in Roman religion and instances of other elective cults claiming the supremacy of their divinities. 25.  Halsberghe 1984, 2215–​22. See now Lancellotti 2010, 77–​80. 26.  Two small statues of Bona Dea dedicated to Sabazius found on the north and south sides of the hill: Brouwer 1989, 18–​20. It has long been assumed that Sabazius and Caelestis shared a shrine on the Capitol. But note the recent skepticism in Lancellotti 2010, 67. 27.  CIL 6.700  =  ILS 3944. Discussion of possible mithraea on the Capitoline Hill:  Griffith 1993, 110–​13. Ducenius and others like him: Knapp 2011, 139.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  63 some measure protected, as public property. Moreover, many of the festivals of the Roman calendar continued to be celebrated into the fourth century.28 The Calendar of 354, for example, includes the Ludi Romani, games held in September in honor of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, probably coinciding with the anniversary of the dedication of the Capitol in 509 bce.29 If these fourth-​century ce Ludi Romani were anything like those described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, they would have involved a procession originating at the Capitol. The procession was led by Roman officials, followed by young men, musicians, entertainers, and athletes. The end of the procession saw images of the gods carried from the Capitoline Hill into the Forum Romanum and Circus Maximus.30 The conservatism of Roman culture evident in the Calendar of 354 was nevertheless met by changes in official attitudes toward Rome’s urban environment. When Constantine last visited the city in 326, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his rule (uicennalia), the emperor’s interest in the cityscape was all around to see: new baths, arches, and statues as well as renovations to monuments from the distant past such as the Circus Maximus and the Baths of Caracalla. By the end of the fifth century, however, Rome was a tangibly different city than it had been a hundred years before. Upon his inauguration in Ravenna in 457, the emperor Majorian (457–​461) addressed the Roman senators as the “conscript fathers” (patres conscripti), an honorific associated with the founding of the institution of the senate by Romulus himself. The emperor’s purpose was to establish legislation to mitigate the destruction of Rome’s ancient monuments, a process initiated, shockingly from the emperor’s point of view, by the urban prefect himself. Even from a distance, the emperor sought to project an image of himself as the pious custodian of the public spaces of Rome.31 Majorian had reason to worry. Rome was occupied twice in the fifth century, in 410 by the Visigoths and 455 by the Vandals, triggering a flight of aristocrats elsewhere. While we hear of a handful of the incredibly wealthy leaving the city in advance of Alaric’s siege in 408–​410, others were surely arriving in the city, periodically in waves. At the end of the century, Pope Gelasius I (492–​496) was pleading with a noblewoman, Firmina, on how her properties would help manage an escalating crisis. Large numbers of refugees from the north were arriving in Rome, displaced from their homes perhaps in the civil war between the Ostrogothic rulers Odoacer and Theoderic (492–​493). The problem was made more acute, according to Gelasius, because church estates had been stolen by either barbarians or Romans—​the ambiguity is significant—​thus depriving the 28. Mulryan 2011. 29.  Salzman 1990, 120–​21. 30.  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 7.72–​73. See Latham 2016. 31.  PLRE 2:702–​3 (Fl. Iulius Valerius Maiorianus); Nov. Maior. 1 (Mommsen and Meyer 2:156) and Nov. Maior. 4 (Mommsen and Meyer 2:161), issued jointly by the emperors Leo and Majorian on July 11, 458. See Alchermes 1994; Lizzi Testa 2001.

64  Rome’s Holy Mountain church of much needed resources to accommodate those fleeing to Rome.32 It was the Ostrogothic kings who took up the obligation to be faithful custodians of Rome.33 Theoderic (475–​526) and his young successor and grandson Athalaric (526–​534) made the protection of Rome’s “temples and public places” (templa et loca publica) from illicit spoliation a key element of a Gotho-​Roman vision to restore the city’s “unique beauty” (pulchritudine singulari).34 Theoderic’s care for the city is now evident in the large number of his bricks that have been found throughout the city.35 Stamped with Theoderic’s name, they have been found in association with locations in the Forum Romanum (the Temple of Vesta, the Basilica Aemilia, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and the Basilica Nova), the palace on the Palatine Hill, the Baths of Caracalla, and also the Capitoline Hill.36 Two of these bricks were found at the Temple of Veiovis (Figure 11), a small temple adjacent to the “Tabularium.”37 It is also possible that the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was restored in this burst of urban rejuvenation under the Ostrogothic kings, as attested by a tantalizing, though fragmentary, inscription discovered in excavations of the Curia Senatus in the late 1940s.38 The urban prefect Valerius Florianus conducted the restoration of the Atrium Libertatis under Theoderic and Anastasius (491–​518). Nearly half of the inscription is missing, but the capitolium (the term usually used in reference to both the hill generally and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus specifically) is mentioned near the end, presumably in connection with the other renovations.39 While the city was unquestionably bustling in the late fifth century, and its elites were tightly holding to their traditions, Rome was becoming a distinctly postclassical city, with a “lingering sacredness,” in Kristine Iara’s words, continuing to adhere to Rome’s ancient monuments.40 This lingering sense of the Capitoline Hill’s importance in the fifth century can be detected both in literary sources and possibly also through archaeology. Based in Rome in the first decades of the fifth century, Servius was a grammarian and wrote student commentaries 32.  Gelasius, Fragment 35 (Thiel 501–​2; tr. Neil and Allen 206–​7). 33.  Moorhead 1992, 60–​66. See now Arnold 2014, 201–​29. 34. See Anonymus Valesianus 67. Unique beauty:  Cassiodorus, Variae 7.13.1. Temples and public places: Cassiodorus, Variae 3.31.4. See Arnold 2014, 223–​24. 35.  CIL XV, 1663–​70, with Bloch 1947–​1948, 119–​20. For supply of the bricks, see Bardill 2004, 1:13–​16. 36.  Lusuardi Siena 1984, 525. 37.  Brick stamps from the Temple of Veiovis: Colini 1942, 46 = CIL 15, 1664, 1670: “+Reg(nante) D(omino) N(ostro) Theodorico bono Rome and (Regnan)te D(omino) N(ostro) Theo(de)rico Felix Roma.” Evidence of other possible Ostrogothic renovations on the Capitoline Hill: CIL 15, 1665, no. 30. The find was described in the following obscure terms: “in arce Capitolina: rep. negli sterri per la costuzione del monumento a Vittorio Emanuele, tegolone.” 38.  The Curia Senatus was rededicated into a church under Pope Honorius (625–638): LP (Duchesne 1:324). 39.  CIL 6, 40807 = HD 018443 = EDR 073917. For discussion of this and related inscriptions, see AE 1953, 25–​26 no. 68; Arnold 2014, 224–​28; Fraschetti 2000, 199–​212; Kalas 2015, 153–​57; McCormick 1986, 273–​74. 40.  E.g., Sidonius Apollinaris, Ep. 1.5.9–​11, describing his journey to Rome, his first stop at St. Peter’s, and the bustle of activities around Ricimer’s wedding in 467. See Iara 2015.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  65

Figure 11.  Plan of the “Tabularium,” compiled by Brian Shelburne (after G. Ioppolo, in von Sydow 1973, fig. 34).

on Vergil’s poetry. Commenting on the Georgics, Servius claims to have seen with his own eyes (hodieque conspicimus) four bronze columns originally dedicated by Augustus in honor of his Egyptian triumph (August 29 bce) and subsequently transported from the Campus Martius to the Capitoline Hill by Domitian.41 Similarly, Servius’s contemporary and fellow antiquarian Macrobius calls to mind two monuments on the Capitoline Hill. In his sympotic dialogue called the Saturnalia (ca. 430), Macrobius’s fictionalized Vettius Agorius Praetextatus says: “The House of Romulus is [proxima est] next to the Curia Calabra,” both of which were located in the Area Capitolina.42 Seeing heritage sites such as this would not have been surprising in late antique Rome. Indeed, it is possible that a mysterious niche discovered on the southwest side of the “Tabularium” (Figure 12) continued to be honored as the location of the House of Titus Tatius, 41. Servius, ad Georg. 3.29 (Thilo 3:277): “quattuor columnas quae postea a Domitiano in Capitolio sunt locatae, quas hodieque conspicimus.” See NTDAR, 97; Liverani 1992–​1993, 88. Servius apparently described a number of monuments still visible in his own day, signaled by the phrase hodieque. For examples, see Sehlmeyer 2002. 42. Macrobius, Sat. 1.15.10 (Willis 1:71): “curiam Calabram, quae casae Romuli proxima est.” For the location, see LTUR 1:241 (Coarelli).

66  Rome’s Holy Mountain

Figure 12.  Niche of the “Tabularium” showing signs of postclassical construction. Photograph: Author.

the legendary Sabine king and erstwhile enemy of Romulus following the Rape of the Sabine Women.43 When excavated in the middle of the nineteenth century, the niche reportedly still contained traces of a “costruzione fatta in fango,” a wattle-​and-​daub hut.44 While we can say that renovations took place on the Capitoline Hill in the reign of Theoderic, it is difficult to know why and what else happened there from the fourth to the sixth century. Before looking at what evidence there is, however, it is important to keep in mind that officially sponsored renovations were not necessarily intended to result in the restoration and preservation of structures in their pristine state. Renovations to one structure could change the look of a whole street. S. Anastasia, for example, was a high-​profile church constructed by Pope Damasus (366–​384) not on the site of a domus, as was generally done 43. Plutarch, Romulus 20.4; Solinus 1.21. Mura Sommella 1997, 440–​42, interprets the niche as a locus saeptus that predated the “Tabularium” but was nonetheless respected in the construction of the building in the late republic. Cf. Tucci (2005, 30–​31), who interprets the niche and the hut found inside as a structure venerated as the House of Titus Tatius. 44.  Unpublished archival document dated to 1849/​1850, quoted in Mura Sommella 1997, 438 n. 45.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  67 in the fourth century, but, rather, on the foundations of an insula in a bustling quarter built in the second century ce.45 Because of its location on the slopes of the Palatine Hill, and thus its proximity to the emperor’s own domus, S. Anastasia had the support not only of popes but also of Rome’s secular officials. The urban prefect Flavius Macrobius Longinianus (400–​402) dedicated a baptistery in the church at the beginning of the fifth century, and at the beginning of the sixth century Theoderic’s bricks were used in renovations that involved incorporating rooms of an adjacent domus and narrowing the street in front of the church.46 Officially sponsored renovations at this time could also alter the functions of and relationships between public buildings. The church of SS. Cosma e Damiano in the Forum Romanum was first a hall adjoining the Temple of Peace. The hall was renovated in the fourth century by the addition of an apse and the construction of a rotunda and portico opening onto the Forum Romanum. Bricks manufactured in the reign of Theoderic were used in the restoration of the hall’s roof at the beginning of the sixth century, not long, in other words, before Theoderic’s successor, Athalaric, allowed Pope Felix IV to dedicate the two formerly public spaces, the hall and rotunda, to the two foreign saints around 530.47 Bureaucracy and Justice With the caveat that officially sponsored restorations could involve the patronage of churches and did not demand continuity of either form or function, let us return to the Capitoline Hill. Valerius Florianus’s restorations of the Atrium Libertatis and their connection to the capitolium named in the inscription as well as the use of Theoderic’s bricks in association with the Temple of Veiovis suggest that the hill was included in the armature of state bureaucracy through the beginning of the sixth century. How specifically the hill was used as an administrative zone is largely still unclear. However, it does seem possible to speculate, based on a handful of inscriptions and literary sources, that the hill hosted at least a few important offices, including those belonging to the curatores operum publicorum and the comes sacrarum largitionum. The best-​preserved building on the Capitoline Hill is the “Tabularium.” It is called by this name because of an inscription still visible in the fifteenth century, though now lost, recording the dedication of the building as a substructio and a tabularium.48 The “Tabularium” was thus not a purpose-​built hall of records 45.  CBCR 1:42–​61; Augenti 2001, 37–​40. 46. Longinianus:  ICVR 2:150 no.  19. The inscription is not extant, but it was copied in the Sylloge Laureshamensis in the ninth century. See PLRE 2:686–​87. Bricks: CBCR 2:51, 60. 47.  LP (Duchesne 1:279); CBCR 1:143; on the possible theological and political background to the dedication, see Maskarinec 2015a, 44–​55; Tucci 2004. 48.  CIL 6, 1314; LTUR 5:17–​20 (Mura Sommella). Purcell suggests that perhaps this structure was the Atrium Libertatis, which in his opinion was located on the “Tabularium” (1993, 147); contra Fraschetti 1999a and Tucci 2005. See also Henning 1995, 153–​58.

68  Rome’s Holy Mountain (tabularium); rather, it was the platform (substructio) for another structure, its interior spaces supplying rooms for the housing of offices, including the official mint of Rome (Moneta Publica) (Figure 11). While the offices of the mint were likely located in the suite of rooms on the northeast side of the building, the direct evidence for the location of offices on the Capitoline Hill for state functionaries is admittedly thin.49 Just a handful of epitaphs from the Via Latina, probably from the first or second century ce, locate individuals as from, or working on, the Capitoline Hill (de Capitolio)—​one a dispensator, another possibly an adiutor, both middling functionaries in the city administration.50 More information survives in a collection of inscriptions from Rome copied in the eighth century and now called the Sylloge Einsidlensis. The anonymous copyist registered the location of seven inscriptions as in Capitolio, raising the possibility that the Capitoline Hill continued to be a location for the public display of ancient inscriptions into the early Middle Ages.51 Two of these inscriptions are still in situ and demonstrably not from the hill itself but, rather, from the Forum Romanum (the Temple of Saturn and the Arch of Septimius Severus), leaving five inscriptions that either had always been on the hill, had been moved there before the eighth century, or like the Forum Romanum inscriptions, were read in places adjacent to the hill. Three of the Einsidlensis inscriptions, tellingly, report the activities of officials responsible for the management of public spaces in Rome: a dedication by three senatorial curatores tabularum publicarum from the first century, the authorization for the use of public space for a private dedication by two senatorial curatores operum publicorum from the second century, and the dedication of a statue erected in the 330s in honor of Ceionius Rufius Albinus under the care of a senatorial curator statuarum, Flavius Magnus Ianuarius.52 Together with the epitaphs of the dispensator and adiutor as well as the bureaucratic associations of the “Tabularium,” these three inscriptions suggest that the Capitoline Hill was within the official ambit of the curatores operum publicorum—​that much we could guess. But they also suggest that the hill was quite possibly the location of their offices until at least the middle of the fourth century. 49. See LTUR 3:278–​79 (Coarelli); Tucci 2005, 9–​11 with fig. 3. 50.  CIL 6, 8687: dispensat(oris) Capitoli. CIL 6, 10021 = EDR 030673, ll. 2–​3: Laeti de Capitolio. In his CIL edition, Mommsen speculated, probably based on the formulaic language of the epigraphy of artisan epitaphs, that the text was meant to read: Laeti a(editui) de Capitolio. This would mean that Laetus was a temple attendant at the Capitol. Cf. CIL 6, 2263: religiosus de Capitolio. Just as likely, to my mind, is the possibility that this Laetus was an equestrian adiutor, so Laeti a(diutoris) de Capitolio. Perhaps Laetus was thus a functionary in the office of the curatores operum publicorum. Cf. CIL 16, 5347. See Kolb 1993, 100–​105, 192–​93. 51.  Walser 1987, nos. 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43. 52. For the cura operum publicorum until the third century, see Kolb 1993. Curatores tabularum publicarum: CIL 9, 916 = Walser 1987, no. 43, pp. 40–​41 (facsimile), 102–​3 (commentary). Curatores operum publicorum: CIL 6, 1472 = Walser 1987, no. 42, pp. 40–​41 (facsimile), 102 (commentary). See Kolb 1993, no. B71, p. 266; Roxan and Eck 1997. Curator statuarum: CIL 6, 1708 = Walser 1987, no. 40, pp. 38–​39 (facsimile), 99–​100 (commentary). On the need for such curatores after the closure of the temples in Rome in the late fourth century, see Liverani 2014.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  69 The possibility that the Capitoline Hill was a location of late Roman administrative offices is strengthened by a letter by Sidonius Apollinaris in which he narrates a troubling episode that occurred while he was urban prefect in 469. In that year, a major scandal erupted. Aravandus, the praetorian prefect of Gaul, was arrested on the charge of corruption and brought to Rome by ship to stand trial.53 According to Sidonius, when Aravandus arrived, he was held in Capitolio, in the custody of Flavius Eugenius Asellus (in Capitolio custodiebatur ab hospite Flauio Asello). Asellus at this time was comes sacrarum largitionum. He was thus a high-​ranking finance minister with responsibility to ensure the smooth functioning of the official mints (Moneta Publica). This was also an appointment within the emperor’s consistory and a steppingstone to the urban prefecture. Not only would Asellus become urban prefect after the Aravandus affair, but Valerius Florianus also held this office before he became urban prefect under Theoderic when he sponsored the renovation of the Atrium Libertatis and the capitolium some twenty years later.54 It has been assumed that Asellus hosted Aravandus in his own domus.55 While we will see later in this chapter that there were indeed elite domus on the hill, it is more likely that Aravandus was detained in the offices of the comes sacrarum largitionum. 56 In the absence of additional information, there is no obstacle to the suggestion that the comes sacrarum largitionum conducted his duties as manager of the Moneta Publica, as did Asellus, on the Capitoline Hill and specifically within the rooms of the “Tabularium” from the middle of the fifth to at least the middle of the sixth century. Since the third century bce, the hill was associated with the Moneta Publica, but for how long is not clear, nor is it known whether the site was still used in relation to the five late Roman officinae of the city’s Moneta Publica.57 Though in intermittently diminished ways, the Roman mint continued to be used, wherever its officinae and production sites were located, from the fifth century to the end of the Byzantine occupation of Rome in the middle of the eighth.58

53.  For succinct information on Sidonius’s tenure as urban prefect, the problems he faced in that position, and the Aravandus affair, see Harries 1994, 141–​66. See also Köhler 1995, 245–​46. 54.  PLRE 2:164 (Fl. Eugenius Asellus 2). Urban prefect: CIL 6, 1668, after 469. Valerius Florianus: Schäfer 1991, no. 54, pp. 71–​72. Duties of the comes sacrarum largitionum: Cassiodorus, Variae 6.7. See PLRE 1:427–​37; RIC X, 23; Grierson and Mays 1992, 49–​50. 55.  Platner and Ashby 1929, 180. 56.  We know that individuals were held in public buildings while awaiting trial. Cf. Livy 25.7.2: “Custodiebatur in atrio Libertatis minore cura.” 57.  By the second century ce, one of the officinae of the mint, and perhaps its main production site, was located near the Colosseum. Inscriptions made in honor of a host of monetarii in 115 were found in the sixteenth century in front of the church of S. Clemente, and the fourth-​century regionary catalogs agree, stating that a moneta was located in Regio III. CIL 6, 42, 43, 44, 791. Regionary catalogs: VZ 1:95, 167. See Grierson and Mays 1992, 65–​66. Note that the fifteenth-​century Anonymus Magliabecchianus locates “la Zeccha vecchia” in direct association with the Capitoline Hill: VZ 4:140–​41. 58.  The Moneta Publica in Rome:  Grierson and Mays 1992, 65–​66; Hahn 1973–​, 2:43–​44, 49, 64, 78, 83; 3:119–​20, 130–​33, 146–​47, 154–​55, 157, 162–​63, 168–​70, 176–​78, 181–​82, 187–​88, 189, 190, 194, 196,

70  Rome’s Holy Mountain Sidonius’s account of the circumstances of Aravandus’s detention, though not always clear, suddenly illuminates the Capitoline Hill as an administrative zone, marketplace, and stage for public execution. Aravandus was housed in a fashion appropriate to his rank. While under Asellus’s care Aravandus was able to receive visitors, including Sidonius, and he was allowed to leave his site of detention. We are told that Aravandus hurried through the Area Capitolina while wearing a white robe (aream Capitolinam percurrere albatus). There, in the shadow of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Aravandus received the salutations of his supporters as he made his way through a marketplace specializing in luxury items, such as silk, gemstones, and gilded clothing chests (pretiosa quaeque trapezitarum inuolucra), all the while having much to say about the laws, the times, the senate, and even the emperor Anthemius.59 According to Sidonius, Aravandus’s trial before a full meeting of the senate was a disaster. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. How he met his end is not clear, but Sidonius tells us that Aravandus was at the time of his writing incarcerated on the Tiber Island (capite multatus in insulam coniectus est serpentis Epidauri), dreading his horrifying return to the Capitoline Hill where he would be strangled at the Carcer Mamertinus and his body would be hurled from the Tarpeian Rock down the Gemonian Steps—​a praetorian prefect humiliated and killed, like a latter-​day Sejanus.60 The Physiognomy of Neighborhoods in Late Antique Rome People not only conducted business on the Capitoline Hill; they also lived there. In the following sections, we will see, from different points of view, that the Capitoline Hill had all the characteristics of late antique neighborhoods elsewhere in Rome. It was a physically distinct space within the city, a zone where residents lived and conducted business.61 Late Roman neighborhoods were

198, 199, 200–​201, 202, 206, 208; RIC X, 31–​32; Wroth 1908, 1:70, 71, 103, 104, 124, 125, 154–​57, 181, 182, 244–​53; 2:310, 311, 328, 329, 353, 377; Wroth 1911, xxxv–​xxxix, xli–​xliv, liii–​liv, 45, 54–​59, 69, 70, 75, 76, 93, 94, 98–​105, 108–​13, 122, 189–​91. Now see Metlich 2004, 11–​25, 35–​38, 47–​55, 83–​87, 92–​94, 96, 98, 104, 110, 112–​13, 114–​18, 119–​20. After a lull in the production of coinage in Rome following the reign of Constantine V (741–​775), Pope Hadrian I (772–​795) established a new distinct style of coinage. See Toubert 1973, 1:562–​ 65, and Wickham 2014, 171–​76, for references to the new moneta Sancti Petri and moneta de Roma in the eighth century. 59. Sidonius, Ep. 1.7.4, 1.7.6, 1.7.8. For inuolucrum as a clothing chest, see Gregory of Tours, Hist. 4.26. See Du Cange 1883–​1887, 8:367b, s.v. volucrum. Anderson’s LCL translation is surely too literal (1996, 373): “all the costly cases of the goldsmiths.” These chests were perhaps not unlike the famous late fourth-​century Proiecta Casket now in the British Museum. 60.  For Aravandus’s punishment to have been meted out on the Tarpeian Rock requires us to believe that Sidonius, Ep. 1.7.12, was not merely anachronistically gesturing to the classical past:  “uncum et Gemonias et laqueum per horas turbulenti carnificis horrescens.” The Capitoline Hill as place of punishment: Bradley 2012. 61.  Defining Roman neighborhoods: Lott 2004, 12–​27; Tarpin 2002, esp. 87–​174. General features of premodern urban neighborhoods: Smith 2010.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  71 heterogeneous, and yet physically distinct, spaces. Not zones for housing one social stratum or for the concentration of artisans specializing in a particular industry, these neighborhoods consisted of residential structures of different sizes as well as gardens, cult sites, cemeteries, routes of access, stores, workshops, markets, and the almost ubiquitous presence of ruins and other fragments of the past such as ancient statuary and inscriptions.62 Some ruins and statues served as landmarks, while others were used as the core of late antique constructions and for the systematic quarrying of stone. The Capitoline Hill and its immediate environs were part of at least two different administrative maps of the city. Under Augustus, the city was organized into fourteen civic regiones and more than four hundred officially recognized street districts (uici).63 The Capitoline Hill was in Regio VIII (Figure 13).64 The Augustan systemization of the city persisted at least in memory well into the Middle Ages, though for administrative purposes this official cartography of the city seems to have stopped by the end of the sixth century, when the Augustan regiones were replaced by seven ecclesiastical regiones.65 According to the first redaction of the Liber Pontificalis, written in the first quarter of the sixth century, the organization of the city into these seven regiones was attributed to the first- and third-century popes Clement and Fabian.66 Unfortunately, this chronology is not firmly established, nor can the boundaries of these ecclesiastical regiones be drawn with certainty. According to Giovanni Battista de Rossi, the Capitoline Hill and the Forum Romanum were probably in the ecclesiastical Regio II along with the Caelian Hill, but this is no more than a guess.67 Étienne Hubert has reminded us that Rome was a “city without a center.” Each of the regiones had its own inward-​looking hierarchies of elites, economies, and cult sites.68 Even if the boundaries of the regiones and the uici cannot be mapped precisely, it is clear that neighborhood identities and district traditions formed within and across them.69 Aside from the largely unknown names of the hundreds of officially recognized uici, there were certainly many other distinct neighborhoods that were known or in some sense defined by, for example, the names of

62. The physiognomy of an early medieval neighborhood in Rome:  Campese Simone 2011, 360. Statuary: Coates-​Stephens 2016. 63.  The names of, and sources on, the known uici: LTUR 5:151–​201 (various authors). 64.  Curiosum (VZ 1:113–​21). 65.  Duchesne 1890; Hubert 1990, 71. 66. Clement: LP (Duchesne 1:123). Fabian: LP (Duchesne 1:148). See Noble 1990; Pietri 1976, 1:649–​59. 67.  de Rossi 1864–​1880, 3:514–​26: it is also occasionally unclear whether the civil or the ecclesiastic regiones are intended when noted in literary sources, e.g., LP (Duchesne 1:505). See Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004, 91 and fig. 75; Pietri 1976, 1:652 n. 1. 68.  Hubert 1990, 70–​96. See also Wickham 2014, 411–​12. 69.  For the general problem of identity, addresses, and neighborhoods before the influence of universalizing bureaucratic systems, see Smail 2000.

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Figure 13.  Capitoline Hill in Regio VIII, the smallest and one of the most densely populated of the fourteen regiones of Rome (Favro 1996, fig. 58).

Roman statuary and monuments standing in the area, such as the Caput Africae on the Caelian Hill and the Elephantus Herbarius near the Theater of Marcellus.70 The residents of each of the ecclesiastical regiones tended to be buried in the same cemeteries outside the Aurelian walls.71 Moreover, burials within the walls, a practice that became increasingly common in the sixth century, suggest that even more discrete identities formed; in the words of Roberto Meneghini, the assemblages of artifacts included in these burials indicate that “groups of people with particular cultural traditions occupied different zones of the city.”72 Finally, though local identities were not initially rooted to churches, by the end of the fourth century the Christian topography of the city was fractured into public and private zones of doctrinal affiliations, and by the sixth century, each of the 70.  NTDAR, 70–​71, 142. For a full list of churches identified by locality, see Hülsen 1927, xcv–​civ. Persistence of statues such as the Elephantus Herbarius and the Caput Africae as notable sites into the early Middle Ages evidenced by the Einsiedlen Itineraries: Walser 1987, 189, 193, 206, 208. The street district called the Caput Africae has recently been excavated: Pavolini 1993 and Pavolini 1997. 71.  Pietri 1976, 1:653–​54. 72.  Meneghini 2000, 268.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  73 regiones eventually developed its own Christian festivals (letaniae) and procession routes (collectae).73 Living on and Around the Capitoline Hill It is easy to imagine the Capitoline Hill as a strictly administrative zone, a stuffy, lifeless place studded with statues, temples, and inhospitable bureaucratic offices. Though partly true, this hardly would have characterized the look and feel of the area. The opening of the fourth century saw new building projects and renovations in the city center.74 The Capitoline Hill and its slopes seem to have enjoyed the up cycle of this fourth-​century surge in investment. The density of habitation on and around the hill as well as the degree of social relations for the hill’s residents are difficult questions to address, but the regionary catalogs (Curiosum and Notitia) and archaeology nevertheless suggest that the Capitoline Hill was a district of high sociability in the late empire. According to the regionary catalogs, Regio VIII held (continet) the Capitolium along with the Forum Romanum; the Forums of Caesar, Augustus, Nerva, and Trajan; and the Forum Holitorium. They report that there were thirty-​four officially recognized district shrines (aediculae) and street districts (uici), of which only one is named: the Vicus Iugarius, a street district running along the south slope of the hill from the Forum Holitorium to the Forum Romanum. Also listed are 3,480 insulae, 130 domus, 18 warehouses (horrea), 86 baths (thermae), 120 fountains (laci), and 20 bakeries (pistrina).75 For the smallest of the fourteen regiones, this is a remarkable concentration of private property, public amenities, and production sites for dietary staples. Only Regions I (Porta Capena), II (Caeleomontium), V (Exquiliae), VII (Via Lata), and XIV (Transtibertim) had more than three thousand insulae.76 In other words, Regio VIII was the most thickly inhabited district in Rome, at least according to the image presented by the regionary catalogs.77 Moreover, a recent study of funerary inscriptions that identify the location of artisans in the first century ce suggests that Regio VIII had the highest concentration of production sites after the Subura.78 If one looks at the hill today, it is difficult to locate where people lived in this densely populated regio. Tacitus reports, however, that in the siege of the Capitoline Hill in 69 ce the partisans of Vitellius were able to jump on top of the hill from adjoining buildings, which were constructed up to the height of 73.  Baldovin 1987, 153–​66, 234–​38; Lizzi Testa 2004, 129–​70; Maier 1995. 74.  Ward-​Perkins 1984, 38–​48. 75.  Curiosum (VZ 1:120). 76.  Curiosum (VZ 1:92, 95, 106, 112, 147). 77.  von Gerkan 1949, 49–​50, 55, 63, for estimates of the size and population of Regio VIII. 78. Monteix 2012.

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Figure 14.  Early modern Capitoline Hill encased in structures. Antonio Tempesta, Pianta di Roma, 1593, detail of the Campidoglio. Used by permission of the American Academy of Rome, Fototeca Unione.

the hill.79 For an even better idea of how the city looked in this region—​a quilt of temples, fountains, and memorials, all crowded in by domus, apartments, and shops—​we have to turn to the early modern cartography (Figure 14), the Nolli map of 1748 (Figure 15), fin de siècle photography of the Capitoline Hill and its environs (Figures 16–​18), and the imaginative “restorations” (restauri) of Giuseppe Gatteschi (Figures 19–​21). Until quite recently, the Capitoline Hill was virtually encased by buildings. As Fascist-​era archaeologists began removing buildings from the slopes of the hill beginning in the late 1920s, what they discovered was a late antique neighborhood (Figure 22). Curving around the north and west slopes of the hill were late antique porticos, insulae, restaurants, baths, mills, and workshops (Figure 14).80 Probably the best-​known discovery is a late fourth-​century painting of Perseus and Andromeda found in a bath (public or private is unclear), situated between the Campidoglio and the Theater of Marcellus, just under the modern Via del Teatro Marcello (Figure 23).81 Next to this bath was an insula as well as houses and porticos.82 Further down, along the north side of the hill, in the direction of the Vittoriano, and just beside the steps of S. Maria in Aracoeli was another 79. Tacitus, Hist. 3.71: “Nec sisti poterant scandentes per coniuncta aedificia, quae ut in multa pace in altum edita solum Capitolii aequabant.” 80.  A.M. Colini, in Muñoz 1930, 41; Lugli 1946b, 46–​53. See the lucid summary in Lugli 1946a, 1–​6. 81.  Roma, Antiquarium Comunale inv. 4478. See A.M. Colini, in Muñoz 1930, 68–​76, tav. xciv–​xcv; La Rocca 2009, 222, no. II.18 (color photo), 291–​92 (discussion dating the painting on stylistic grounds to the third quarter of the fourth century); Lugli 1946b, 50–​51. 82.  A.M. Colini, in Muñoz 1930, 54–​62.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  75

Figure  15. Capitoline Hill encased in neighborhoods. Detail of the Capitoline Hill from the Nolli map of 1748, engraving on paper laid down on Japanese paper. Used by permission of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Photograph: Laura Shea.

insula (the so-​called Casa di Via Giulio Romano), a large building that was renovated with the addition of a portico, probably at the beginning of the fourth century (Figure 24).83 Indeed, while most of these structures were built in the second century, they were demonstrably in use until at least the fourth century. Mills, for example, and housing located in this area were rearticulated with walls of opus vittatum, a type of construction evident only from the fourth century onward. In Robert Coates-​Stephens’s words, this evidence points to a “huge quantity of late Roman housing” in the crowded area between the hill and the Theater of Marcellus (Figure 25).84 This picture of fourth-​century habitation continues around the south slope of the hill along the Vicus Iugarius. Excavations in 1956 showed that this street district was full of second-​century 83.  CBCR 2: 244–​45. The portico of the “Casa di Via Giulio Romano” was built by embedding reused amphoras in the vaulting, similar in technique to the construction of the Basilica of Maxentius in the Forum Romanum as well as in the Circus of Maxentius and Mausoleum of Romulus on the Via Appia. See Lancaster 2005, 75–​85, 215. 84.  Coates-​Stephens 1996, 247–​48. See Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004, 201–​2.

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Figure 16. Forum Romanum, Rome, photograph of the Basilica Iulia with the Capitolium behind, encased in neighborhoods, before 1930. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Fototeca Unione.

shops presumably with housing on the floors above. An epitaph found on the Via Praenestina identifies a purpurarius as from de Vico Iugar[io], a tradesman involved in distribution of precious purple textiles.85 These shops and the housing associated with them were likely still in use in the fourth century, suggested by the discovery of significant amounts of late Roman pottery and coins from the fourth through the seventh century.86 In 1943, the private fountain of a domus was also found on the Vicus Iugarius close to the Forum Romanum. Erected probably in the fourth century, this fountain was decorated with a large-​ scale painting of Roma, similar in composition and style to other fourth-​century monumental paintings of Rome’s tutelary divinity found in aristocratic settings on the Caelian Hill.87 The top of the Capitoline Hill did not look fundamentally different than the streets surrounding it. From the middle of the fourth to the end of the fifth century, the hill was a lively place. It had streets lined with shops, insulae, and pinpoints of aristocratic investment. The Arx, Asylum, and Capitolium could each be 85.  LTUR 5:169–​70 (Virgili). Shops excavated in 1959: Virgili 1974–​1975. Purpurarius: AE 1923, 59. 86.  Pottery: Virgili 1974–​1975, 158. Coins: Virgili 1974–​1975, 168–​69. See also Coccia 2001; O’Hara 1985. 87.  Colini 1980–​1982; M.P. del Moro, in Ensoli and La Rocca 2000, 429–​32 nos. 4–​11. Larger context of monumental painting in fourth-​century Rome: McFadden 2013, with discussion of the Vicus Iugarius paintings at p. 107.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  77

Figure 17.  Piazza Montanara, Rome. An example of the vibrant neighborhood cultures situated at the base of the Monte Tarpeio before its destruction in the isolamento of the late 1920s. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Gatteschi Collection, Fototeca Unione.

reached by staircases from the Campus Martius, Forum Romanum, and Forum Holitorium, and wheeled traffic continued to access the hill from the south by the Clivus Capitolinus, the last stage of the Via Sacra, which led up from the Forum Romanum and terminated at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. It was the only route passable with horse and cart, thus the path of the Roman triumphus.88 In this sense, the Capitolium, as it was in antiquity, was oriented to the south, in the direction of the Forum Romanum. On top of the hill, archaeology, some of it recently published, has revealed a road system leading from the Asylum to the Arx, mercantile installations, and buildings not yet identified—​indeed, a whole “quarter of the city” unknown until a few years ago.89 Located just north of the “Tabularium,” there was at least one insula (and likely others), built at the

88.  There were also at least two sets of stairs: the Centrum Gradus, which allowed access to the Capitolium from the bustling area to the southwest, and the Scala Gemoniae, which led to the Arx from the area of the Forum Romanum to the south. 89.  Coarelli 2010, 115.

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Figure 18.  Detail of the Capitoline Hill from a photographic view of Rome (fotopiano), taken by the Aeronautica Militare, 1925. Housing and businesses crowd the slopes of the hill. Used by permission of the Aerofototeca Nazionale, Rome.

beginning of the second century ce and thus at about the same time as the insulae surrounding the hill.90 Particularly important, though as yet not fully published, are the pottery fragments found along the Via del Campidoglio during the restoration of the “Tabularium” from 1978 to 1985. These fragments show that residents of the Capitoline Hill used pottery and products imported from North Africa and Palestine at least until the end of the fifth century.91 As a lived-​in space, the hill was also occupied at least in part by aristocrats since the fourth century bce. The first elite dwelling attested by literary sources was built in honor of Manlius Capitolinus. In 390 bce, after successfully defending the Capitoline Hill from the Gauls, Manlius was allowed the honor of having 90.  Lugli 1946a, 6: “In front of the north side of the Tabularium, several pilasters, consisting of large perperino blocks with travertine corbels, reveal the presence of later constructions, perhaps of the Imperial period”; Lugli 1946b, 48. See also Chini 2003. 91.  E. Talamo, in Paroli 1992, 344–​45: pottery manufactured in North Africa spanning the middle of the fourth to the last half of the fifth century (sigillata D, Hayes 58B; Hayes 76)  as well as lamps from the fourth century (Kugelformigelampen), amphoras for the transportation of wine (perhaps from as far as Gaza: Late Roman 4), small ceramic containers (similar to Agora M234), and a fragment of a vase glazed using a technique originally from Constantinople. See also Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004, 24–​25; Santangeli Valenzani 2000, 102–​3.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  79

Figure 19.  Giuseppe Gatteschi’s restauro of the Capitoline Hill as viewed from the Temple of the City (Venus and Roma), 1896. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Fototeca Unione.

a domus on the hill, probably on the location of the foundation walls visible in the public garden adjacent to the “Tabularium.” This was destroyed in 384 bce and was replaced by the Temple of Juno Moneta.92 Annius Milo, according to Cicero, had a domus on the Clivus Capitolinus.93 In the reign of Tiberius, Gn. Calpurnius Piso had properties spanning the old Servian Wall as well as the saddle that linked the Capitoline and Quirinal hills until it was removed in the construction of the Forum of Trajan.94 Finally, Pier Luigi Tucci has recently revealed that a “vast domus” lies buried under the church of S. Maria in Aracoeli (Figure 1). Parts of this domus date to the middle republic, but four hundred years later, in the third century ce, the domus was significantly renovated, its owners incorporating small houses into a large villa supported, even, by a water conduit linking the Arx to the Aqua Marcia. Otherwise forgotten, these remains have suddenly provided “eloquent testimony,” in Tucci’s words, of the habit of aristocratic life on the hill into the late empire.95 Below the apse of S. Maria in Aracoeli, in the direction of the Forum of Caesar, there also was a large precinct that has cautiously been labeled the Temple of Isis Capitolina.96

92.  Livy 6.20.13. See LTUR 2:135–​36 (Giannelli); Tucci 2005, 11. 93. Cicero, Mil. 26, 64. See Purcell 1993, 132 n. 35. 94.  Tucci 2005, 28–​29; contra Eck 1997. 95.  Tucci 2006, 66 with fig. 2. See Tucci’s important subsequent comments: Tucci 2009, 220, leaving open the possibility that this Capitoline domus might have had imperial connections. 96.  For the evidence for Isis Capitolina, see Coarelli 2009, 222–​23. Coarelli 2010 likely supersedes Tucci’s reconstruction of the Tabularium as the substructio of the Temple of Juno Moneta. Instead, Coarelli has a Sullan triad on the substructure: Venus Victrix flanked by the Genius Publicus and Fausta Felicitas.

Figure 20.  Imaginary view of housing mixed in with the monuments of Capitoline Hill. Left: Giuseppe Gatteschi’s photograph of the “current state” of the “Tabularium,” Asylum, and Arx, 1911. Right: Giuseppe Gatteschi’s restauro. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Fototeca Unione.

Figure 21.  Giuseppe Gatteschi’s restauro of the Theater of Marcellus and the Elefans Herbarius. An imaginary view of housing mixed in with the monuments lying at the base of the Capitoline Hill. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Fototeca Unione.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  81

Figure  22. Oblique view of the Circus Maximus, Capitoline Hill, Palatine Hill, Forum Romanum, and Colosseum, by Aeronautica Militare, July 22, 1938. The Capitoline Hill’s slopes have been stripped of buildings. Used by permission of the Aerofototeca Nazionale, Rome.

This discovery of late antique housing on the Arx illuminates, to my mind, a passage in the Historia Augusta. In the biography of Elagabalus, we learn that the young emperor was a gourmand. On one apparently notable occasion, “he gave a banquet in which one course was served in the house of each guest” (celebrauit item tale conuiuium ut apud amicos singulos singuli missus appararentur), even though one lived on the Capitoline Hill, one on the Palatine Hill, one on the Caelian Hill, and one across the Tiber.97 This biography is mostly dismissed as a humorous collection of the bogus and scandalous. Yet Ronald Syme and others have pointed out that the author did at least have access to accurate materials. He was best when it came to knowledge of elite names and discrete locations in Rome.98 It is not that this banquet happened. More significant is

97. SHA, Elag. 30.4 (tr. Magie 2:165). 98.  Syme 1971, 118–​21. Bogus and scandalous are Syme’s words. See the recent evaluation of the biography in Icks 2012, 108–​15.

82  Rome’s Holy Mountain

Figure 23.  Fresco of Perseus and Andromeda found in a bath on the west side of the Capitoline Hill, ca. 1930. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Fototeca Unione.

the fact that a gluttonous banquet should have been imagined, at the end of the fourth century, as happening in an aristocratic residence on the Capitoline Hill at the beginning of the third century. Though it is impossible to document, it seems likely that this habit of aristocratic housing persisted from late antiquity into the eleventh century, when the Liber Pontificalis attests the hill as the base of the Corsi family. By this time, moreover, the hill was bordered on two sides by places named after other aristocratic families for hundreds of years; indeed, the whole area stood in the middle of different interconnected aristocratic quarters.99 This persistent occupation on and around the hill by aristocrats marks this location as distinct from the other hills of Rome, suggesting its importance as a place of power from late antiquity until the revolution of the twelfth century.100 99.  Coates-​Stephens 1996. 100.  LP (Duchesne 2:290). Here, Henry IV besieges the Capitolium in the spring of 1084 to root out support of Gregory VII (1073–​1085) in advance of Robert Guiscard’s march from the south. At this time, part of the hill was privately owned by the Corsi family. Where they had their domus Corsorum is hardly clear. Duchesne has them on the site of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (2:291, n. 28). The city center was dominated by the new aristocracy of the eleventh century: Hubert 1990, 70–​96; Wickham 2014, 411–​12.

Figure 24.  Large apartment building (insula) discovered on the north slope of the Capitoline Hill, renovated in the early fourth century, before 1930. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Fototeca Unione.

Figure 25.  “Casa dei Mulini,” a mill embedded in the neighborhood running along the north slope of the Capitoline Hill, ca. 1930. Used by permission of the American Academy in Rome, Fototeca Unione.

84  Rome’s Holy Mountain Conclusion It is clear that capitolia elsewhere could continue to function as spaces of interaction and transaction, for both public and private uses. Carthage’s Capitol continued to function in an official capacity. In winter 429, the emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III ordered landholders in Africa to return funds pilfered from tax collectors to their local capitolium.101 Rome’s capitolium was no different. The marketplace in the Area Capitolina, though attested before Sidonius’s letter from the last quarter of the fifth century, would have been in operation for a long time, supplying luxury items to Rome’s elite, some of whom, as we have seen, lived on and around the hill. The Capitoline Hill was in fact the meeting place of a number of neighboring commerce zones still identified in the fourth-​century regionary catalogs as situated in Regio VIII: the Porticus Margaritarius, Basilica Argentaria, Basilica Iulia, and Vicus Iugarius.102 Moreover, Sidonius’s suggestion that Aravandus’s last days were spent between the Tiber Island, the Gemonian Steps, and Tarpeian Rock was a fate reserved for the exemplary punishment of high-​profile criminals, as it was in the days of the Roman republic.103 Indeed, the fact that the Capitoline Hill and Tiber Island had once been nodes in a constellation of public humiliation and punishment in late antique Rome seems also to have entered into the local literary imagination, as reflected by legendary acts and passions of the Roman martyrs produced mostly in the sixth century and beyond, a topic to which I will return in ­chapter 7.104 It is hardly surprising, given the discussion of the uses of the Capitoline Hill in late antiquity, to conclude that the hill supplied the spaces necessary for a high degree of face-​to-​face interactions. This chapter has shown how socially, economically, and kinetically integrated the Capitoline Hill was into the rhythms of Roman life from the third to the sixth century. Indeed, it is only through the absence of emperors from the hill that we can begin to find the people who lived and worked on and around the hill. The evidence suggests that the region directly surrounding the Capitoline Hill participated in the vibrant economy of fourth-​ century Rome, attracting investment in both industrial and commercial installations as well as in residential housing, the provision of services for all levels of society, and governmental bodies. The urban environment persisted along

101.  CTh 11.1.34. 102.  VZ 1:113–​21, 173–​75. The Diocletianic eastern Rostra was used in the sixth century for shops. See Giuliani and Verduchi 1987, 163–​67, 187; Coates-​Stephens forthcoming. 103.  Thein 2015, 180. 104. See Passio sanctorum Eusebii et sociorum martyrum (AASS, Nov. iv, 98), where the bodies of two Christians are left exposed on the Insula Licaonia, a local name for the Tiber Island since the fifth century. See Besnier 1902, 67–​87; Torallas Tovar 2010, 47–​49. Note that Duchesne 1904, 482–​83, suggests, without hard evidence, that the Capitoline Hill became the headquarters of the urban prefecture when the office of urban prefect was revived in the eighth century.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill  85 ancient patterns for the most part, and it was even renovated, signaled by investment in centuries-​old buildings. In the next chapter, I  will show that despite numerous sieges, plagues, fires, earthquakes, and floods, the hill was always at the heart of the inhabited zone of the city. But important changes in the patterns of life and uses of public spaces took place in the sixth and seventh centuries. It was here, in the center of the city, that a small church was built.

3

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity

In around 530 ce, Pope Felix IV dedicated SS. Cosma e Damiano in

the Forum Romanum. The way in which this is registered in the Liber Pontificalis leaves no doubt about its notable location. It was “in the city of Rome, in the place which is called Via Sacra, next to the Temple of the City of Rome.”1 This was the first dedication of a Roman public building to eastern saints in the heart of the city, and Felix’s decision to honor these Arab brother-​physicians, reportedly killed in the Diocletianic persecutions, was a sign of the times. Fifty years later, in 582, Gregory the Great arrived from Constantinople, where he was serving as apocrisiarius, the pope’s senior diplomat, returning with the holy relics of the Constantinopolitan apostles Luke and Andrew. He housed them in the Xenodochium de Via Nova, a hospice on the Aventine Hill (now S. Saba), established originally as a pious foundation by Gregory’s mother, Silvia.2 Like Gregory, the city’s elite were integrated into systems of commerce and flows of information among Europe, Byzantium, and the Middle East.3 They directed their resources into the construction and ornamentation of churches, oratories, and monasteries—​many of them dedicated to eastern saints.4 Some were local artisans such as Amantius and Ypolita, owners of ateliers in gold and silver. Before 571 they helped establish an oratory beside S. Maria Antiqua in the Forum Romanum in honor of the apostle Andrew (the so-​called Oratory of the Forty Martyrs).5 It was also in the sixth century that a church was established on the Capitoline Hill for the first time. This chapter argues that Narses, the Byzantine administrator

1.  LP (Duchesne 1:281): “Hic fecit basilicam sanctorum Cosmae et Damiani in urbe Roma, in loco qui appellatur uia Sacra, iuxta templum urbis Romae.” 2.  See Coates-​Stephens 2007, 228–​29; Mabillon 1739–​1745, 1:166. 3.  Zanini 1998, 304–​6. Overviews:  Christie 2000; Delogu 2001; Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004. Diplomatic contacts: Herrin 2013, 220–​38. 4.  Tyranny: Pragmatic Sanction of 554 (CIC Nov. App. VII, Mommsen and Meyer 799): “a Totiliane tyranno.” Churches: Augenti 1996, 41–​44; Coates-​Stephens forthcoming; Spera 2016, 102–​3. Byzantine Rome: Krautheimer (2000, 76) imagined a “government compound” largely devoid of residential housing. See instead Coates-​Stephens 1997, 222–​27; Maskarinec 2015a. 5.  Coates-​Stephens forthcoming.

87

88  Rome’s Holy Mountain of Italy, established this church in honor of the Theotokos, the Constantinopolitan designation for “Mary the Mother of God” that gained currency in the last half of the fifth century. In summer 552, Narses succeeded in taking Rome after the defeat and death of the Gothic king Totila (541–​552). He spent much of the coming two decades in the city. In around 570, Narses built two churches in locations intimately associated with state authority, one in the Forum Romanum at the entrance to the palace on the Palatine Hill (S. Maria Antiqua), the other on the Capitoline Hill (eventually called S.  Maria in Capitolio). That he did so is not certain, but the suggestion does make sense of the absolute silence of the Liber Pontificalis on the interests of the popes on the hill until the eleventh century. We will see that this Capitoline church continued to be outside the authority of the popes until the seventh century. I will begin by looking at the Christian cultures that arose in neighborhoods around the Capitoline Hill. Then I will turn to how the Capitoline Hill’s associations with an enduring Roman imperiality became entangled in curious ways with a number of Greek and Latin apocalyptic texts, in which the Capitoline Hill and its church became a memorial of an epiphany of Mary and Christ in Rome. Last, I will briefly leave Rome’s Capitol to consider the ways in which Constantinople’s Kapetōlion functioned in New Rome. Interestingly, while Constantinople’s Kapetōlion continued to be included in imperial processions into the sixth century and Rome’s no longer did, for both of these capitolia associations with emperors and empire continued to determine their Christian futures in the Byzantine state and in medieval memory. Slouching toward Byzantium Throughout this chapter we will see that the Capitoline Hill’s physicality and legacy were shaped by Rome’s engagement with Byzantine imperial culture. Following the end of “Totila’s tyranny” in 552 and thus also Ostrogothic rule in Italy, Byzantine administrators set up their offices on the Palatine Hill and established two churches there, S. Cesario and S. Maria Antiqua, and for two centuries, until the middle of the eighth century, Constantinople would remain Rome’s nominal master in an uneasy and at times mutually hostile relationship. It will be important to keep in mind that local Roman identities and understandings of Rome’s cityscape were formed together with, and occasionally against, streams of influence from Byzantium.6 It is in this context of Rome’s hybridity and iconicity, a late Roman Romanness (for lack of a better term) consisting, in Mirella Serlorenzi’s apposite words, of both “classicità e cristianità,” that I would like to explore the significance of the Capitoline Hill in its urban context at the end of

6.  Gantner 2014; Noble 1984, 23–​60.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  89 the late antique world.7 To that end a few introductory comments will supply at least a sense of the social worlds of Byzantine Rome. More than a century of warfare, hostile occupations, plagues, earthquakes, and floods reduced Rome’s population from an estimated 800,000 in the first century to less than a tenth of this size by the middle of the sixth century.8 Recent archaeology in Rome has brought to light a number of laboratories for understanding the urban transformations of this era. Sites such as the Crypta Balbi and Largo Argentina, the Forum Romanum and the imperial forums, the Theater of Marcellus, and Palatine Hill show evidence of the abandonment and rearticulation of insulae and domus, the systematic spoliation of public monuments, and also new types of investment.9 The following are snapshots of these changes from the late fifth to the end of the sixth century: The Horrea Agrippiana, a warehouse situated in the Velabrum on the slopes of the Palatine Hill, was in-​filled with houses and shops;10 a small monastery was built into the portico and precinct surrounding the republican-​era temples of the Largo Argentina, joining almost two dozen other monastic foundations throughout the city;11 the Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus was systematically demolished;12 and cemeteries were established within the walls of the Baths of Caracalla, the Baths of Titus, the Crypta Balbi, and the Temple of Peace as well as around the Colosseum—​a sure sign that official use of such places had ceased.13 Byzantine Rome was a cityscape under the influence of new forms of Christian euergetism (Figure 26).14 If we scan the area around the Capitoline Hill, it is easy to see the results. By the seventh century, the huge structures built in and around the Forum Romanum hundreds of years in the past began to function as churches, monasteries, and soup kitchens (diaconiae). S. Adriano was dedicated in the Curia Senatus under Pope Honorius I (625–​638).15 It was also in the seventh century that diaconiae were situated nearby in the area of the Temple of Concord. In the Velabrum, adjacent to the Forum Romanum, there were likewise diaconiae associated with today’s S.  Maria in Cosmedin, S.  Teodoro, and S. Giorgio in Velabro. In the eighth century, diaconiae were placed around the Capitoline Hill, including ones in the Forum Romanum at SS. Cosma e Damiano, S. Adriano, and SS. Sergio e Baccho. The latter was constructed between the Arch 7.  Serlorenzi 2016, 117–​21. 8.  Brown 1984, 1–​20; Durliat 1990, 110–​25; Wickham 1981, 1–​27, 74–​77. 9.  Augenti 2000; Coates-​Stephens 2011; Filippi 2000; Meneghini 2010, 118–​22; Santangeli Valenzani 1994. New investment, in addition to the above, see Augenti 2001; Bavant 1989; Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004, 24–​25; Santangeli Valenzani 2000, 102–​3. 10.  CBCR 4:283–​84. See Coates-​Stephens 1996, 249. 11.  Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004, 98; Santangeli Valenzani 1994. 12.  Meneghini 2010, 208. 13.  Temple of Peace:  Meneghini 2010, 199. Cemeteries:  Costambeys 2001; Marcelli 1989; Meneghini 2000; Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004, 103–​25; Osborne 1984. 14.  Zanini 1998. See also Coates-​Stephens 2006; Dey 2011, 241–​50. 15.  LP (Duchesne 1:324).

90  Rome’s Holy Mountain

Figure 26.  Capitoline Hill and its environs in the early Middle Ages (VZ 2, Map 1, drawn by R. Falconi).

of Septimius Severus and the Temple of Saturn.16 By this time, the Basilica Iulia was also used in new ways. Its interior spaces now housed an oratory as well as sites for the production of lime.17 Near the Theater of Marcellus, the church and diaconiae of S. Angelo in Pescheria were constructed in the Porticus Octaviae.18 In other words, Rome at the end of antiquity was hardly a desolate landscape of ruins. Its public spaces were opened up for new uses, especially for the needs of Rome’s indigent population and foreign pilgrims. This sixth-​century urbanism likewise affected the Capitoline Hill. Just below the hill, in the direction of the Via Lata, the church of S. Marco had been renovated in the sixth century.19 Just steps away, however, the two richly appointed fourth-​century domus adjacent to the Forum of Trajan, found in 2005 beneath the Palazzo Valentini, had been abandoned, perhaps as the result of an earthquake.20 On top of the Capitoline Hill, the changes were even more dramatic. The

16.  Dey 2008; Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004, 72–​91. 17.  Maetzke 1991, 76–​92. 18.  Campese Simone 2011; De Nuccio 2007. 19.  CBCR 2:246. 20.  Baldassarri 2008–​2009; Cucinotta 2012, 171–​75.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  91 historian Procopius, who had been in Rome in 538 with Narses’s predecessor, Belisarius, supplies a rare eyewitness point of view. Like so many others, Procopius too was drawn by the spectacle of the Capitol, especially its famous golden roof. By his time, the Capitol was beginning to be a spectacular ruin: “This roof was of bronze of the finest quality and, as a thick layer of gold had been poured over it, it shone as a magnificent and wonderful spectacle.” In Procopius’s day, however, it seems that half of these tiles had been spoliated, an act that he attributed to the siege and brief occupation of Rome by the army of the Vandal king Geiseric in 455—​we will return to Procopius’s anecdote in c­ hapter 4.21 Elsewhere, Procopius described seeing a curious bronze statue still visible on the Clivus Capitolinus and related the gruesome local legend attached to it.22 Rome, because of its size, walls, and apostolicity, remained the largest city in Europe. It was also of singular importance to the distant Byzantine emperors. In August 554, the emperor Justinian (527–​565) issued the Pragmatic Sanction, a response to a petition (pro petitione) by Pope Vigilius (537–​555) on issues arising from the chaotic aftermath of the most recent phase of the Gothic wars. This was to be a stern reminder that the Gothic tyranny and the irregularities that were introduced at that time were to be erased. The pope and the Byzantine state would work together to ensure that property rights were upheld, food distribution was managed, economic transactions were justly regulated, and the publicae fabricae were repaired, particularly those important, as the document states, “for the utility of all” (ad utilitatem omnium). This explicitly included the Tiber River embankments, the Forum Romanum, ports, and aqueducts.23 This list was certainly not intended to be exhaustive. Robert Coates-​Stephens has pointed out that this list of publicae fabricae would have included other places of Byzantine officialdom, such as the palace on the Palatine Hill.24 Despite, and occasionally because of, Byzantium’s imperial presence in the administration of the city, Rome had a fraught relationship with Byzantine officialdom.25 More than anything else, it was Constantinopolitan theology that hardened the Romans’ sense of themselves, occasionally resulting in violent resistance.26 In one instance, a mob forced Pope Eugenius I (654–​657) to cease the celebration of mass at S. Maria ad praesepe (today’s S. Maria Maggiore) until he promised to stop accommodating the Monothelite policies of the emperor Constans II (641–​668).27 In the years after the Lateran Synod, particularly after 21. Procopius, Wars 3.5.4 (Haury 1:332; tr. Kaldellis 155). For Procopius and Geiseric’s supposed plundering of the temple, see ­chapter 4. 22. Procopius, Anecdota 8.16–​21. See Coates-​Stephens 2016. 23.  The Pragmatic Sanction of 554 (CIC Nov. App. VII, Mommsen and Meyer 2:802). See Pilara 2006–​2009. 24.  Coates-​Stephens 2006. 25.  Knipp 2002; Krautheimer 2000, 62–​108; Zanini 1998, 182–​84. 26.  The Lateran Synod of 649, for example, brought together 106 bishops, most of them from cities on the Italian peninsula and from Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, to refute the Monothelite doctrine emanating from Constantinople. See the recent introduction and translation in Price 2014, 59–​68, with further references. 27.  LP (Duchesne 1:341).

92  Rome’s Holy Mountain the establishment of Muslim rule in Roman Palestine, eastern monastics began settling in Rome in significant numbers.28 Moreover, the Liber Pontificalis reports that virtually all the popes from 685 to 741 had eastern origins, signaled by the formula natione Grecus or natione Syrus. Yet these prelates were largely born in Italian cities, had been formed as clergymen in the Roman Curia, and continued to resist, from their point of view, eastern heresies into the age of Byzantine iconoclasm.29 A decade after Eugenius’s show of resistance to Constans II, the emperor visited Rome for the first time in July 663. Richard Krautheimer reminded us that for rulers engaged in sightseeing, tours of Rome involved not only taking in the wonders of the city but also “a bit of looting.”30 Both the Liber Pontificalis and Paul the Deacon report that Constans removed the bronze roof tiles from the Pantheon and all the other bronze ornamentation that remained in the city.31 Yet it is important not to forget that Constans had antiquarian interests in Rome, as attested by Greek graffiti naming the emperor twice on Roman monuments, once in the form of a prayer left in the stairwell that winds its way up the hollow core of the Column of Trajan and again on the Janus Quadrifrons in the Velabrum.32 By visiting Rome’s monuments, even as he spoliated some of them, Constans, like the Romans he nominally ruled, selectively valued and was fascinated by Rome’s imperial past as reflected by the city’s ancient monuments. The Establishment of the Capitoline Hill’s First Church Already at the beginning of the fourth century, the streets just north of the Capitoline Hill had a significant Christian community. Across from the insula at the base of S. Maria in Aracoeli, in a neighborhood known from the first century bce to the fourth century ce as the Pallacinae, Pope Marcus (336) dedicated the basilica of S. Marco.33 Nearby, his successor, Pope Julius (337–​352), dedicated a basilica next (iuxta) to the Forum of Trajan.34 These were small foundations. 28.  Krautheimer 2000, 89–​108; Sansterre 1983. 29.  John V (685–​686)—​LP (Duchesne 1:366): “natione Syrus.” Conon (686–​687)—​LP (Duchesne 1:368): “oriundus patre Thraceseo, edocatus apud Siciliam.” Sergius (687–​ 701)—​ LP (Duchesne 1:371):  “natione Syrus, Antiochiae regionis, ortus ex patre Tiberio in Panormo Siciliae.” John VI (701–​705)—​LP (Duchesne 1:383): “natione Syrus.” John VII (705–​707)—​LP (Duchesne 1:385): “natione Grecus, de patre Platone.” Constantine (708–​715)—​ LP (Duchesne 1:389):  “natione Syrus, ex patre Iohanne.” Gregory II (715–​731)—​LP (Duchesne 1:396):  “natione Romanus, ex patre Marcello.” Gregory III (731–​741)—​LP (Duchesne 1:415): “natione Syrus, ex patre Iohanne.” See Noble 2010. 30.  Krautheimer 2000, 81. 31.  Coates-​Stephens 2006. 32.  Coates-​Stephens 2006, 153 with the author’s photo of the Column of Trajan inscription. 33.  LP (Duchesne 1:202 and 203 n. 5); Gnoli 1939; Jordan 1867; Richardson 1980. 34.  LP (Duchesne 1:205 and n.  4). The Liberian Catalogue (Mommsen, MGH AA 9, 76)  further identifies the church: “basilicam Iuliam quae est regione VII iuxta forum diui Traiani.” Duchesne identified this church as today’s SS. Apostoli. Krautheimer was extremely skeptical of this attribution: CBCR 1:77. For Pope Julius, see now Thompson 2015.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  93 They nonetheless exemplify the fluidity of religious affiliations in this area at a time when Rome’s populace and its elite were largely pagan.35 Suggestive also is an orans, a figure (whether Christian or not is an open question) with arms outstretched in the gesture of prayer, that was painted in a room just off the cortile of one of the houses on the north slope of the Capitoline Hill.36 Aside from the implantation of these churches and the ambiguous painting of the orans, however, there is little evidence to suggest the formation of a distinct neighborhood identity around churches on and surrounding the hill for at least two centuries. It would not be until the last half of the sixth century that we begin to see the establishment of a distinctly Christian culture in the city center. The residents of this regio would celebrate the liturgy in Santa Maria Antiqua in the Forum Romanum as well as engage in public processions from SS. Cosma e Damiano in the Forum Romanum to S. Cesario on the Palatine Hill and from S. Anastasia in the Velabrum to S. Sabina on the Aventine Hill. In the following century, moreover, after Pope Honorius I (625–​638) dedicated the Curia Senatus as S. Adriano, a procession departed from this new church up the Esquiline Hill to S. Maria Maggiore.37 Most significant of all, Christians began worshipping on the hill in the sixth century, occupying spaces once reserved for official uses. The problem of determining when they began doing so is difficult to address.38 A church and monastery called S.  Maria and located on the Capitoline Hill never appears in the most important local source on the topography of Rome, the Liber Pontificalis. In particular, its absence from Pope Leo III’s list of church donations from 807, a document that circulated independently of the Liber Pontificalis but was also included with it, has been seen as particularly damning.39 These silences have traditionally become a terminus post quem for the construction of a church on the Capitoline Hill: it would have been built after 807 and before its first appearance in the documentary record in 944. Thus, according to most modern scholars, the church on the Capitoline Hill was a late foundation, Latin, and more or less 35. Comparison of Constantinian church foundations in Italy:  Lenski 2016, 185. Pagans were unable to block and uninterested in restricting Christian building activities in the city center in the Constantinian period: Diefenbach 2007, 132. 36.  Colini, in Muñoz 1930, 64, tav. lxxxii; Lugli 1946b, 50. At the time of the find, Colini interpreted the orans as Christian because it was discovered under the altar of S. Andrea in Vincis, which was demolished in the isolamento. The assumption is that if the site had in antiquity been used for Christian services, then it would have retained its Christian character in the Middle Ages. But there is no firm reason to date the painting to the second century ce and equally no reason to identify an orans as Christian. Pagan figures of the same type were fairly common in late antiquity, e.g., the orans in the so-​called Case Romane del Celio. See Brenk 2000. In the absence of further evidence, I assume that the insula and the room with the orans were in use at the same time as the adjacent bath. 37.  Ordines Romani (Andrieu 3:231–​36, 253–​62). See Baldovin 1987, 158–​66; Dyer 2007. 38.  Brancia D’Apricena 1996 is an excellent overview of the evidence. My argument that a sixth-​century Theotokos shrine was dedicated on the “Tabularium” differs considerably. But a Theotokos shrine on the “Tabularium” and a Latin monastery on the current site of S. Maria in Aracoeli from the ninth century are not mutually exclusive. 39.  LP (Duchesne 2:18–​25).

94  Rome’s Holy Mountain insignificant until the tenth century.40 However, this reconstruction pointedly ignores the fact that the Liber Pontificalis is full of important omissions.41 Indeed, the Liber Pontificalis is notable not only for what it tells us but also for its many silences, in particular those on the foundation of churches and the restoration of ancient structures otherwise attested through archaeology and epigraphy. Because the Liber Pontificalis is largely a record of the deeds of the popes, its authors had little interest in highlighting the pious euergetism of others. Robert Coates-​Stephens has convincingly demonstrated that in some instances the Christian foundations that the Liber Pontificalis ignores were either private foundations or Byzantine state foundations specifically made in honor of the Constantinopolitan Theotokos.42 In what follows I would like to explore the possibility that the church and monastery of S. Maria in Capitolio in the tenth century was originally a late sixth-​century Byzantine state foundation in honor of the Theotokos. The Byzantine cult of the Theotokos (Theotokos is rendered in Latin as Genetrix Dei) had begun proliferating after the Council of Ephesus in 431, reaching Rome quickly thereafter.43 It was just at this time that Pope Sixtus III (432–​440), for example, dedicated a basilica on the Esquiline Hill, according to the church’s dedicatory inscription, to the uirgo Maria (today’s S. Maria Maggiore).44 Following the Gothic wars, the Byzantine state initiated the foundation of churches and monasteries in honor of the Theotokos throughout the Italian peninsula.45 In Rome, the most important example is S. Maria Antiqua in the Forum Romanum. Originally a richly decorated vestibule of the palace on the Palatine Hill, by the middle of the sixth century it became a church. Coinage from 565–​567, the reign of Justin II, reportedly found by Giacomo 40.  The extreme skepticism is understandably focused on the omission of S. Maria in Capitolio from the 807 list and the less justifiable rejection of the discovery of a marble fragment found in the construction of the Vittoriano inscribed with the Greek monogram for a hêgoumenos. For a handy list of the “Byzantine” fragments of stone found near the current S. Maria in Aracoeli, see Brancia D’Apricena 1996, 152. Skeptics: Ferrari 1957, 210–​13; Geertman 1975, 119; Malmstrom 1973, 1–​19; Sansterre 1983, 1:34, 2:89 n. 238. It is unclear to me why the evidence, which I discuss below, from the “Laterculus Malalianus,” a Latin translation by a Greek monastic, probably in early eighth-​ century Rome, for a church on the Capitoline Hill dedicated to Mary did not convince Sansterre and Geertman. For his part, Sansterre confidently states that the text was written by an author “sans doute un Latin,” who was working from a Latin epitome of Malalas carried to Rome by “un émigré syrien” (Sansterre 1983, 2:181). 41.  Omissions from the list: Davis 2007, 172–​75. Omissions from the Liber Pontificalis: Coates-​Stephens 1997, 179–​81. 42. Private:  Coates-​ Stephens 2007; Coates-​ Stephens forthcoming. Byzantine state foundations:  Coates-​ Stephens 2006, 154–​63. 43. Barber 2000. 44.  LP (Duchesne 1:232 and n. 2). See p. 235 for the lost apse mosaic of Mary enthroned. Duchesne’s view is traditional. But see Klauser 1972 on Rome’s resistance to the Theotokos cult until the seventh-​century dedication of the Pantheon. Even if Klauser’s argument is correct, namely, that S. Maria Maggiore was not originally dedicated specifically as a Constantinopolitan Theotokos shrine, nevertheless Pope Sixtus III’s foundation does attest the rich local Marian traditions in the city with which sixth-​and seventh-​century Theotokos cults could interact. In the extant fifth-​century mosaics on the triumphal arch, Mary is depicted as a Roman aristocrat. See Brenk 1975, 50; Osborne 2008, 96. 45.  Coates-​Stephens 2012 lists several possible examples of Byzantine foundations in honor of the Theotokos.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  95

Figure  27. “Maria Regina,” S.  Maria Antiqua, Rome, sixth century. Photograph: Author.

Boni in 1900 beneath one of the columns of the church, suggests that construction began after 567.46 The sixth-​century origins of the church are also demonstrated by the remains of the interior decoration. One of the walls flanking the apse was originally decorated with an image of Mary, fragments of which are still visible. Enthroned and holding the infant Jesus in her arms, she, with her jewel-​encrusted diadem, looks remarkably like the sixth-​century mosaic portrait of the empress Theodora in S. Vitale in Ravenna (Figure 27). It has been argued that the most likely source for this dedication is Narses. According to the Liber Pontificalis, Narses resided for long stretches of time in the palace as the Byzantine administrator of Italy from 552 until his death in Rome around 573.47 It seems fitting, then, that Narses, famous in his lifetime for his militant devotion to the Theotokos, would fashion the point of entry to his residence in

46.  See Bordi 2016, 40; Coates-​Stephens 2006, 156; Coates-​Stephens 2012, 81; Osborne 2008, 99–​100; Tea 1937, 41–​42. 47.  LP (Duchesne 1:306).

96  Rome’s Holy Mountain Rome into a Theotokos shrine, adorned with an icon of the Theotokos made in Constantinople.48 For similar reasons, it is also possible—​and this is a highly speculative suggestion to be sure—​that Narses participated in the dedication of a Theotokos shrine on the Capitoline Hill. Anna Mura Sommella has recently asserted that the likely location for the hill’s first Christian shrine is the “Tabularium” (Figure 11).49 By the time Narses settled in Rome, in the 550s, the area adjacent to the west side of the “Tabularium” was transformed into a cemetery. Excavations from 1978 to 1983 brought to light the remains of four individuals ranging in age from a small child to a rather old man in his sixties, all of them likely buried in the sixth century.50 Like other public places in the city, this one had been formally designated as a sanctified zone suitable for the housing of the dead.51 This cemetery ran down the hill along the Clivus Capitolinus, where another two sixth-​ or seventh-​century inhumations were discovered in 1983.52 Moreover, this same series of excavations, as discussed above, demonstrated that the “Tabularium” and the Temple of Veiovis continued to be adapted for use throughout late antiquity and well into the Middle Ages.53 By contrast, we should remember that the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was becoming a ruin, as Procopius’s above-​ mentioned report attests. We can speculate on how the “Tabularium” became designated for use by Byzantine churchmen by analogy. In Rome, the best-​attested example of the process of making a public place into a church is the Pantheon. It took a petition to the emperor like Pope Vigilius’s petition that led to the issuance of the Pragmatic Sanction in 554. On May 13, 609 or 610, Pope Boniface IV (608–​615) successfully brought to a conclusion a petition (petitio) directed at the Byzantine emperor Phocas (602–​610) to make “the temple which is called the Pantheon” into a “church of the blessed Maria, the eternal virgin and of all the martyrs.”54 We can catch only glimpses of the same permission-​granting process elsewhere. It was not easy. In the Life of Porphyry of Gaza by Mark the Deacon, written probably in the middle of the fifth century, the author claims that he was sent to Constantinople with letters to petition (aitēsai) the emperor Arcadius (383–​ 408) to destroy the temples of Gaza, especially the oracular shrine called the Marneion. The effort involved not just travel to Constantinople from Gaza but 48.  Devotion to the Theotokos: Evagrius, HE 4.24. The sixth-​century icon from S. Maria Nova is now considered to have been transferred from S. Maria Antiqua: Andaloro 2000; Andaloro, Bordi, and Morganti 2016. 49.  Maetzke 1991, 92; Mura Sommella 1996. 50.  Manzi and Salvadei 1982. 51.  Talamo and Albertoni 1983, 110. 52. Maetzke 1987. 53.  Mura Sommella 1984. LTUR 4:20 (Mura Sommella), for the survival of the “Tabularium” into late antiquity and the Middle Ages: the use of the structure is attested “dal riuso dei vani di fondazione interni, dalle trace di murature tarde nella galleria porticata e nel sottostante corridoio della substructio.” 54.  LP (Duchesne 1:317): “Eodem tempore petiit a Focate principe templum qui appellatur Pantheum, in quo fecit ecclesiam beatae Mariae semper uirginis et omnium martyrum.” See now Thunø 2015.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  97 also the intercession of the bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, as well as the efforts of the chamberlain, Eutropius. Eventually, Arcadius read the petition and affirmed the request by issuing a holy decree (theon gramma). That their petition was initially a success was considered a miracle in itself. Having fallen ill while Mark was in Constantinople, Porphyry, the bishop of Gaza, recovered upon hearing of the petition’s favorable outcome.55 And this was only the beginning of a long affair. Because these were matters that involved turning the ear of distant emperors and their courtiers, dramatic miracle stories replaced the narration of the nitty-​gritty of the politics and economics of public space.56 The dedication of the Pantheon on May 13 was a celebration not just of Boniface IV’s successful petition to Phocas. The day also marked the pope’s leadership of the populus Romanus in a three-​day fast followed by a procession to the temple and a chant of “Kyrie eleison” before its doors. According to the legend, the devil and all his ministers could stand it no more and launched themselves upward through the famous oculus of the temple, leaving it demon-​free and thus cleansed for Christian worship.57 Like the Pantheon and the palace on the Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Hill’s temples and other public buildings were designated as part of the operae publicae of the city, requiring permission from the emperor or his representatives to repurpose them.58 Understanding that the Byzantine state had an interest in the hill as well as in establishing Theotokos shrines in Rome helps us, in ways not yet appreciated, tease out the significance of an enigmatic text on Narses and the Capitoline Hill. A ninth-​century manuscript now at St. Gall (Cod. Sang. 878, fols. 303–​15) contains a document called the Excerptum ex Chronica Horosii.59 It is demonstrably not derived from Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans; instead it is a chronicle that supplies information on events from 390 to 573, including prodigies such as a mysterious sign in the sky in 390 that looked like a dangling column, a solar eclipse in 393, the deep rumbling of the earth in the Temple of Peace in 408, and in other years stars blazing in the daylight like torches. According to the chronicle, in 571 “Narses departed Naples, entered Rome, took down the statue of the Palatium and [entered] the Capitolium and there was a plague terribly afflicting men and beasts.”60 This has 55.  Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry of Gaza 26–​27 (Grégoire and Kugener 22–​24). 56.  Gandolfo 1989; Klauser 1972, 122–​26. 57.  A sermon to be delivered on All Saints’ Day, which includes the story of the petition and the pope’s cleansing of the site, is preserved in a twelfth-​century manuscript: Vat.lat.5046, 88r–​89v. See the transcription and translation by W.L. North: https://​apps.carleton.edu/​curricular/​mars/​assets/​Anonymous_​Sermon_​on_​the_​Pantheon.pdf. 58. The Chronicle of 354 (Mommsen, MGH AA 9, 146), for example, lists the Capitolium as one of the operae publicae that Domitian had constructed. The Pragmatic Sanction of 554 (CIC Nov. App. VII, Mommsen and Meyer 2:802) does not mention the Capitolium in this regard. Nor does it mention other locations that we know were used and maintained by the Byzantine authorities, such as the Palatine Hill. See Coates-​Stephens 2006, 149–​54. 59.  Excerpta Sangallensia (Mommsen, MGH AA 9, 336). Mommsen did not include the full text, and so one still must rely on the first edition of de Rossi 1867. 60.  Excerpta Sangallensia (Mommsen, MGH AA 9, 336 = de Rossi 1867, 22–​23): “de Neapolim egressus Narsis ingressus Romam et deposuit palatii ejus statuam et capitolium et fuit hominum et boum nimia mortalitas.”

98  Rome’s Holy Mountain usually been taken as documentation of Narses’s otherwise unattested spoliation of Palatine and Capitoline hills.61 More recently, this has been used to suggest quite the opposite: Narses’s stops, as reflected in the Excerptum, show that he “revived the ancient triumphal route’s final destinations of the Capitoline and Palatine.”62 Much has probably been lost in the process of the Excerptum’s redaction and transmission of what was originally in its source chronicle. It seems to me best to see this difficult little sentence as reflecting, in a highly condensed form, a story originally about Narses’s Christianization of the two hills, specifically the implantation of two initially small Theotokos shrines, S.  Maria Antiqua for the Palatine Hill and a S. Maria for the Capitoline Hill. Similar to what Pope Boniface IV would do in 609 or 610, Narses, in this scenario, led a procession to the Palatine and Capitoline hills and toppled their pagan statues, thus cleansing these places of demons.63 This interpretation remains only a possibility. For it is uncertain whether the information in the chronicle was supposed to be favorable to Narses or not. In Rome, Narses was remembered with ambivalence. While Narses saved Rome from the tyranny of the Gothic king Totila and the threat of the Franks, he also allegedly betrayed the peninsula to the Lombards—​the latter a baseless accusation. Nevertheless, what remained of his memory in Italian monastic circles was a deep respect for his piety and Christian euergetism. For them, “Narses the patrician” was a great patron of churches. In the eighth century, Paul the Deacon wrote, while he was a monk at Monte Cassino, that Narses was “a most pious man, Catholic in religion, generous to the poor, and devoted to the restoration of churches” (in recuperandis basilicis satis studiosus).64 In his late tenth-​century chronicle, Benedict of Sant’Andrea di Monte Soratte credits Narses with a number of projects in and around Rome. According to the chronicle, he dedicated the monastery “ad aquas Salvias” (now Tre Fontane) where the relics of the martyr Anastasius the Persian were venerated; restored the Ponte Salario, which was destroyed by Totila; and distributed “many donations (donaria multa) to all the churches within the Roman city.”65 In short, virtually all the sources agree that Narses was an agent of God and a great patron of the city of Rome and its churches.

61.  E.g., de Rossi 1867, 22–​23; Hülsen 1899, 22: “Narses der Exarch kam von Neapel zurück, und nahm die Statuen vom Palatin und vom Kapitol weg.” Similarly: PLRE 3:925–​26. 62.  Coates-​Stephens 2011, 402–​3. 63.  Cf. Prudentius, Apotheosis 506–​8. There Christ is described as having thrown down the statues of the Tarpeian Rock (simulacra Tarpeia subegit) as a metaphor for the Christianization of Rome. See c­ hapter 6 for further discussion. 64.  Paul the Deacon, Historia Romana 17.8 (Crivellucci 243). 65.  Benedict of Sant’Andrea di Monte Soratte, Chronicon (Zucchetti 32–​33). Sansterre 1983, 1:14, urged caution on the use of Benedict’s chronicle. See also Coates-​Stephens 2006, 154; Wickham 2014, 376–​77.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  99 Oracles, Octavian’s Room, and the “Tabularium” This Theotokos shrine on the Capitoline Hill, whenever it was dedicated, eventually became entwined with Christian apocalyptic texts circulating in Greek and Latin having to do with the Sibylline oracles, Roman rulers, and an epiphany of Jesus. Written around 390 in Greek, and surviving by way of a version from around 510, the so-​called Oracle of Baalbek tells of the Sibyl’s prophecy of an apocalyptic battle and Christ’s final judgment.66 For the sake of clarity, I will use Paul Alexander’s designation of this late fourth-​century text as the Greek “Theodosian Sibyl.” Significantly, the Greek “Theodosian Sibyl” makes the Capitoline Hill the location of a pagan revelation of the birth of Christ in the time of the emperor Augustus. The text begins with the Sibyl coming to Rome by invitation. She is met by all the city’s inhabitants, including one hundred judges (kritai). They ask the Sibyl to apply her wisdom to a vision of nine suns that each of the judges saw that day. The Sibyl responds by saying, “Let us go to the Capitolium of the great city of Rome, and let the tribunal take place.” After sitting down on the Capitolium “among the olive trees,” the judges relate their vision of nine suns and then listen to the Sibyl’s interpretation. For my purposes, the most important is her interpretation of the fourth sun. In this generation, the Sibyl reports that a woman named Mary will “give birth to a son and they will call him Jesus by name.” Suddenly “Hebrew priests,” not mentioned before, ask the Sibyl if indeed the “god of heaven will beget a son,” as they have heard from the gentiles. She answers: “The god of heaven will beget a son who will be like his father and will assume the likeness of a child.” Importantly, the Sibyl reports that the birth and crucifixion of this child will take place when “there will arise a king named Augustus and he will rule in Rome and the entire inhabited world will be subjected to him.” This late fourth-​century oracle almost immediately began circulating in Rome through a Latin translation of the “Theodosian Sibyl.” It has a distinctly Roman point of view, reflecting, I would argue, intense debates about the spiritual merits of celibacy taking place in Rome in the 380s. In this Latin version, the hundred judges become “100 men of the Roman senate” (centum uiri ex senatu Romano). The ciues Romani meet the Sibyl when she arrives at Rome. Here, however, the Sibyl rejects the Capitoline Hill. Though the Capitolium is not identified as such in the manuscripts, the location is described as a “place full of excrement and polluted by diverse sources of contamination” (in loco stercoribus pleno et diversis contaminationibus polluto). The Sibyl thus advises them to gather elsewhere for the interpretation: “But come and let us ascend the Aventine Hill and there I will 66.  Alexander 1967, 3–​5, on Silvio Giuseppe Mercati’s announcement of the discovery of the Greek text in 1949 and his own discovery of manuscripts beginning in 1959. The Latin reworking of the Greek text is discussed and published in Sackur 1898, 150–​77 (introductory notes), 177–​87 (text), but without any knowledge of a Greek exemplar.

100  Rome’s Holy Mountain tell to you what will come to the ciues Romani.” Finally, when Mary and Jesus are introduced, presumably on the Aventine Hill this time, the Latin “Theodosian Sibyl” suddenly plunges us into the world of late fourth-​century Rome, when Jerome, Ambrosiaster, and Helvidius were publicly arguing about the nature and exemplarity of Mary’s virginity through pamphlets such as Jerome’s De Perpetua virginitate B. Mariae Adversus Helvidium.67 The Latin “Theodosian Sibyl” was clearly in Jerome’s camp, stressing Mary’s inviolate virginity, before and after parturition. “In these days,” the Sibyl says, “a woman of the Hebrew race, by the name of Mary, will rise up, taking a man by the name of Joseph as a spouse, and the son of God by the name of Jesus will be born from her without joining with man [but] from the holy spirit, and she will be a virgin before birth and a virgin after birth. The one born from her will therefore be true God and true man.”68 The text continues by describing a vision of Christ in heaven, concluding with the statement that the voice of God will boom over him (super eum): “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.”69 This epiphany of Jesus and the Sibyl’s prophesying on the Aventine Hill were an implicit rejection of the Capitol and also the version reported in the Greek “Theodosian Sibyl.” This, like the debates on Mary’s exemplary virginity evident in the text, was rooted in late fourth-​century polemics against pagan materiality—​a subject I will address in part II of this book.70 For now, it is important to note that the Latin Sibyl’s rejection of the Capitol was a minority report, apparently forgotten within the city where it was produced. The Greek “Theodosian Sibyl” and Latin “Theodosian Sibyl” were just two examples of similar texts in circulation—​all of them linked in ways that are still far from clear.71 For example, the Tübingen Theosophy, a Christian apologetic compilation from around 500, contains supposedly pagan oracles witnessing the birth of Christ and the inevitable future triumph of Christianity. In one instance, Apollo has foretold the transformation of the Parthenon in Athens and a temple in Cyzicus into an “oratory (and) house of our most-​glorious lady Theotokos.”72 Similarly, in the Greek “Theodosian Sibyl” it is predicted that in the time of 67.  See Cain 2009, 99–​128; Rocca 1998. 68.  Sackur 1898, 179: “et in diebus illis exurget mulier de stirpe Hebreorum, nomine Maria, habens sponsum nomine Ioseph et procreabitur ex ea sine commixtione uiri de spiritu sancto filius Dei nomine Iesus et ipsa erit uirgo ante partum et uirgo post partum. Qui ergo ex ea nascetur, erit uerus Deus et uerus homo.” The parallels of language between the Latin “Theodosian Sibyl” and late fourth-​century polemical texts need closer examination. But see Jerome, De perpetua virginitate B. Mariae 19–​20 (PL 23:213–​14); Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 2.13. 69.  Sackur 1898, 180: “Veniet namque uox super eum dicens: ‘hic est filius meus dilectus ipsum audite.’ ” 70.  Sackur 1898, 173, briefly notes the connection between the Sibyl’s rejection of the Capitol and the Latin apologetic tradition. 71.  Sackur 1898, 173, points to a relationship with the Mirabilia urbis Romae, on which see below. But neither he nor Alexander (1967, 53) elucidated the textual and historical links, if any, among the “Theodosian Sibyl,” John Malalas, the “Laterculus Malalianus,” and the Mirabilia urbis Romae. For a general discussion, see Gauger 1998, 465–​74. See Beatrice 1997 and Beatrice 2001, xl–​xliii, 62–​72, for an attempt to attribute the “Oracle of Baalbek” to a larger text composed between 491 and 503, the so-​called Tübingen Theosophy. 72.  Tübingen Theosophy 53 (Erbse 35). See Kaldellis 2009, 47–​53; Mango 1995; Margutti 2012.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  101 Gratian and Theodosius these two righteous rulers “will destroy the forsaken temples of the pagans, and the temples of the Gentiles will be transformed into tombs of saints.”73 The one oracular text that eventually became dominant in Rome is a simplified revelation. The hundred judges or senators became distilled into a single figure, the emperor Augustus, and the nine suns and the apocalyptic battles for the future were reduced to the succinct formulation that Christ would be the ultimate successor of the Roman emperors. The earliest example of this simplified version has come down to us through the Greek world chronicle of John Malalas, who assembled the text in Antioch in the late sixth century. Here, the emperor Augustus consults the Sibyl on the question, “Who will reign over the Roman state after me?” The Sibyl, after some prodding, replies that a “Hebrew child ruling as God over the blessed ones” has urged her “to abandon this house” (tonde domon prolipein) and return to Hades. For reasons that are not made clear, Augustus then departed from the oracle, wherever it was, and “came to the Capitoline Hill where he placed a great, tall altar, on which he inscribed in Roman letters, ‘This is the altar of the first-​born God.’ ” Curiously, Malalas added that the altar “stands on the Capitoline Hill to the present day,” giving as his source the “learned Timotheos,” a rough contemporary whom Malalas generally used for esoteric materials.74 In short, not only was Christ born in the forty-​second year of Augustus’s reign—​a fact scrupulously calculated in Christian apologetic chronography and reflected in the Greek and Latin Sibylline oracles discussed above. In this version of the Sibylline oracle, Augustus also established the first Christian monument in the city even before the apostles Peter and Paul arrived there a generation later, and he did so on the Capitoline Hill.75 Between the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth, a Latin translation of Malalas’s account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was made in Rome, and like the Latin “Theodosian Sibyl,” it shows a Roman point of view. The “Laterculus Malalianus,” as it is known in modern scholarship, also includes Augustus’s consultation of the Sibyl.76 The fingerprints of a Greek-​speaking translator are evident throughout, suggesting that he was one of the hundreds of eastern monastics residing in the city in monasteries such

73.  Oracle of Baalbek ll. 100–​103 (Alexander 15; tr. 26). Cf. the Latin “Theodosian Sibyl” (Sackur 1898, 185): “omnes ergo insulas et ciuitates paganorum deuastabit et uniuersa idolorum templa destruet, et omnes paganos ad babtismum conuocabit et per omnia templa crux Iesu Christi erigetur.” 74.  Malalas 10.5 (Thurn 167; tr. Jeffreys 123). See Agusta-​Boularot 2006, 2:111–​12. Timotheus: Jeffreys 1990, 194–​95: “a very shadowy figure, who is unknown outside Malalas’ chronicle . . . with a tendency to include ‘pagan oracle,’ or Hermetic/​gnostic elements, including Orphic texts.” 75.  Calculating the birth of Jesus: Eusebius, HE 1.5.2; Eusebius-​Jerome, Chronicon (Helm 169); Malalas 10.1–​2 (Thurn 173–​74). 76.  Ludwig Traube was the first to suggest that the Vatican manuscript (Pal. Lat. 277) was made in Rome in the early eighth century: Traube 1895, followed by Mommsen: MGH AA 13, 424–​37. Stevenson argues for late seventh-​ century Canterbury contra Mommsen’s eighth-​century Rome: Stevenson 1995, 8–​20.

102  Rome’s Holy Mountain as Ad Aquas Salvias.77 In the “Laterculus Malalianus,” the story begins and ends on the Capitoline Hill. Here, Augustus consults the Sibyl on the Capitoline Hill, located, according to an addition to Malalas’s text, “in the center of the city of Rome” (in medium orbis [sic] Romae).78 This infans Hebreus, we are told, was “born without stain” (genitus sine macula) and will “break up this house” (discutiens hunc domicilium). By contrast, in Malalas, the Sibyl is ordered “to abandon this house,” that is to say, the location of the oracle where the Sibyl and Augustus have met. Augustus then leaves this location and dedicates an altar on the Capitoline Hill. The location of the altar and the oracle are therefore distinct. But in the “Laterculus Malalianus,” with its Roman origin and point of view, the Capitoline Hill is the location of both the oracle and the altar, and whereas Malalas’s Sibyl will abandon her shrine, the “Hebrew child” of the “Laterculus Malalianus” promises to “break up this house.” Both the Greek and Latin versions thus constitute apocalyptic warnings, but the “Laterculus Malalianus” has direct consequences for the Capitoline Hill, damning the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to destruction. This localization of the epiphany and prophecy on the Capitoline Hill is important, for it allows the “Laterculus Malalianus” the opportunity to add a pointed contrast between past and present. After Augustus has arrived at the Capitolium (in Capitolium) and placed the altar “on an even loftier place” (in sublimiori loco), the Latin epitome notes:  “whence was made after many years the home and basilica of the blessed and ever-​virgin Mary” (unde factum est post tot annis domicilium adque baselicam beatae et semper uirginis Mariae).79 This interpolation is the best evidence for the implantation of a church on the hill by at least the late seventh or early eighth century. Moreover, for an eyewitness such as the translator responsible for the “Laterculus Malalianus,” it was easy to see the truth of the prophecy. The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Capitolium, was surely on its way to collapse in the late seventh century. In this sense, by the eighth century the Capitoline Hill had become a Christian heritage site. 77. Note the translation of Greek genitive absolutes directly into Latin genitive absolutes(!):  “Laterculus Malalianus” 11 (Stevenson 134; comm. 191). Cf. Vircillo Franklin 2004, 63. For Greek monastics in Rome and the evidence of their translation efforts, see Vircillo Franklin 2004, 55. 78. This interpolation, in medium orbis Romae, suggests two possibilities:  first, that the author of the “Laterculus Malalianus” had before him either more of Malalas’s Greek chronicle or a more complete Latin version and, second, that he had knowledge of other traditions related to the Capitol in the early Middle Ages. I would guess that the Latin translates a passage of Malalas on Simon Magus, not included in the “Laterculus.” Malalas (10.34 [Thurn 192–​93; tr. Jeffreys 135]) records that Simon took flight en mesōi tēs poleōs Rōmēs, whereupon Peter shoots him down through prayer. Furthermore, the spot where Simon hit the ground, according to Malalas, is still marked by a “stone balustrade” called the “Simonium.” The place where Simon took flight had already by the last quarter of the fourth century been associated with the Capitol: Ps.-​Hegisippus, Historiae 3.2 (Ussani 1:185): “conscendit statuto die montem Capitolinum ac se de rupe deiciens uolare coepit.” It is also significant that this passage from Ps.-​Hegisippus became the basis for the Simon episode in the passion of Peter and Paul: Passio apostolorum Petri et Pauli 10 (Lipsius 1:230): “in monte Capitolino.” 79.  “Laterculus Malalianus” 8 (Stevenson 130; tr. 131; comm. 186–​87).

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  103 The earliest evidence for the location of a monastery within or on the “Tabularium” is a monastery mentioned in an eighth-​century colophon on the last folio of a fifth-​century Vetus Latina version of the Gospel of John. Originally produced in Italy, the codex now exists in fragments at S. Gall (Cod. Sang. 1394). Written in the script of the papal scrinium and dated to the pontificate of Gregory III (731–​741), the five-​line notice records the holding of this manuscript in the “monastery of Mary Bearer of God (Dei Genetrix), which is also called the Camellaria, and of John the Evangelist and John the Baptist.”80 Bernhard Bischoff was the first to decipher the text and speculate on its significance as evidence for the functioning of an eighth-​century monastery that included a monastic library on the Capitoline Hill.81 For him, the folio, which also has a layering of scribbles, some of them in Caroline miniscule and others in Old High German, shows the process by which late antique Roman libraries were bought up and the books were transported across the Alps by the agents of Charlemagne toward the end of the eighth century.82 The colophon, I  would suggest, also demonstrates that this monastery was originally a Theotokos shrine and that it had come under the authority of the Roman church by the pontificate of Gregory III. Like other Italian foundations dedicated to the Theotokos, this one is identified in the manuscript as dedicated to Maria Dei Genetrix.83 Moreover, the colophon holds the key to locating this monastery on the Capitoline Hill by its inclusion of the cartographic notice quae appellatur, a fairly common practice in an age well before the introduction of legally recognized address numbers and street names.84 This church was thus Maria Dei Genetrix quae appellatur Camellaria, just as SS. Cosma e Damiano was known in the sixth century as the basilica sanctorum Cosmae et Damiani in urbe Roma, in loco qui appellatur uia Sacra, iuxta templum urbis Romae. Whereas the location of the Via Sacra is clear, identifying the Camellaria is not. This Camellaria seems to be the first attestation of a structure called the Porticus Camellariae in a bull of Pope Anacletus II (1130–​1138).85 As this twelfth-​century document deals only with properties on the Capitoline Hill to be donated to the abbot of S. Maria in Capitolio, which by then had become a Benedictine foundation, it has generally been assumed that the Porticus Camellariae was located on 80.  Cod. Sang. 1394, p.  92 (Rabikauskas 42–​57). Krautheimer allows for the possibility that the inventory notation and the Bull of Anacletus II both refer to the same church: CBCR 2:269–​70. Cf. Malmstrom 1973, 5–​6, 257 (doc. 2). 81.  Bischoff 1956, 412–​22; Lowe 1956, no. 978b. Rabikauskas was able to publish a slightly improved text and critical study. 82.  Bischoff 1956, 421, calls the page “eine wahre Musterkarte von Schriften.” Libraries: Bischoff 1959. For the importance of this manuscript, which contains some of the oldest attestations of Old High German, see Voetz 2013. 83.  Coates-​Stephens 2012. 84.  Localizing toponyms and relational cartographic grammars: Favro 1996, 5–​7; Hubert 1990; Smail 2000. 85.  Origins of the term camellaria: Gnoli 1939, 47. Text of the Bull of Anacletus II: Jordan 1871–​1885, 2:667–​ 68. Cf. Mirabilia urbis Romae 23 (VZ 3:53).

104  Rome’s Holy Mountain the Capitoline Hill, and since the late nineteenth century, this twelfth-​century Camellaria has specifically been associated with the “Tabularium.”86 Many of these loose ends come together in the twelfth-​century Mirabilia urbis Romae. In the Mirabilia, it is Octavian who consults the Sibyl. After she delivered her prophecy, “heaven opened up and a blazing light beamed down upon him. And he saw in heaven a most beautiful virgin standing on an altar holding a boy in her arms. Awestruck, he heard a voice saying: ‘This is the Altar of the Son of God.’ He immediately fell to the ground and worshipped. Octavian then showed the vision to the senators, and they too were amazed.” Then the Mirabilia localizes the vision: “This vision was in the camera Octauiani imperatoris, where there is now the church of S. Maria in Capitolio. That is why it is called Sancta Maria on the Altar of Heaven” (in Ara Caeli).87 The word camera (room) is likely the origin of camellaria.88 It was thus the Camera of Octavian the Emperor, the location where the epiphany took place, that lent the “Tabularium” and its church monastery its name:  S. Maria Dei Genetrix quae appellatur Camellaria. This identification is made even more clear elsewhere in the Mirabilia. In its staccato description of the Capitoline Hill, we find additional toponyms and memories associated with the place of the vision: “In the place where S. Maria now stands were the two Temples of Phoebus and Carmentis, both joined to the palace, [the place] where Octavian the emperor saw the vision in heaven. Next to the Camellaria, the Temple of Janus, who used to be the watchman of the Capitol.”89 From the Mirabilia’s description of this cluster of buildings, it seems possible, likely even, that the “Tabularium” housed the palace of Octavian and the Camellaria, and thus it was the location of Octavian’s vision (Figure 11).90 The two temples joined to the palatium were either those originally located on top of the “Tabularium” or perhaps those in association with the “Tabularium” in the direction of the Arx, such as the Temple of Juno Moneta. Finally, in this reconstruction the Mirabilia’s Temple of Janus was not the shrine located in the Forum Romanum but the Temple of Veiovis, which was, according to the Mirabilia, located next to the Camellaria (“Tabularium”) (iuxta Camellariam). Two Capitolia, Two Imperial Capitals We have been tracing the monumentalization of the Capitoline Hill under the influence of Byzantine theology and apocalyptic texts. Especially palpable is the hill’s ongoing association with imperial culture. The Capitoline Hill likely 86.  Jordan 1871–​1885, 2:457–​58. Recently and most convincing, though I would not agree with all aspects of his argument: D’Onofrio 1973, 48–​52. 87.  Mirabilia urbis Romae 11 (VZ 3:28–​29). 88.  Du Cange 1883–​1887, 2:45a. 89.  Mirabilia urbis Romae 23 (VZ 3:53). 90.  But see Brancia D’Apricena 2011.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  105 remained public property into the sixth century, when Narses, I suggested, established a Theotokos shrine on or within the “Tabularium,” perhaps because it was one of the last structurally intact monuments left on the hill at this time as well as because of its associations with the emperor Augustus’s announcement of the coming of Christ. In this final section of the chapter, I would like to explore the possibility that Narses’s devotion to the Theotokos as well as his experience of Constantinopolitan triumphal celebrations perhaps also played a role in his patronage of the Capitoline Hill. Narses had spent much of his early life in the imperial court of Constantinople. Like thousands of other residents of the imperial capital, he would have been intimately aware of the city’s procession routes. Perhaps he even witnessed Justinian’s triumph in 534 celebrated for his victory against and annexation of Vandal North Africa. Writing decades later, the court poet Corripus could remember that Justinian, on this occasion, visited the “high Capitol in triumphal procession” (alta triumphali tereret Capitolia pompa).91 According to the tenth-​century De Ceremoniis, Justinian celebrated another triumph in 559. Justinian, moving from the Church of the Holy Apostles, “descended to the Capitol” (katēlthen epi to Kapetōlion), and then “from the Capitol” (apo tou Kapetōliou), now thronged by officials and artisans, he made his way east to the palace along the Mesē, the main artery of the city.92 Constantinople thus had a functioning, ritually significant place called a Kapetōlion in the sixth century. Little is certain about Constantinople’s Capitol aside from its location in the city (probably near today’s Laleli Camii) (Figure 28). The structure marked the junction of the northern and southern stretches of the Mesē as they joined together to form a single thoroughfare that proceeded to the hippodrome, palace, and Church of Holy Wisdom.93 In front of the Capitol, there was a triangular portico, the Philadelphion, that once held statues, including the famous group of porphyry tetrarchs removed as triumphal spolia in the thirteenth century and incorporated into the exterior of S. Marco in Venice.94 If the description from the De Ceremoniis is accurate, the Kapetōlion and the Philadelphion could become a staging area where large groups of participants could join the emperor as he moved into the heart of the city. Moreover, the columns found in this area suggest that the Mesē was a porticated thoroughfare that led eastward to the Forum of Constantine.95 This impression is supported 91. Corippus, In Laudem Iustini Augusti Minoris Libri IV, 3.125 (Cameron 64). Cameron 1976 provides no commentary on alta Capitolia. Cf. Antès 1981, 117, where he concludes: “C’est pourquoi nous pensons plutôt que l’expression alta . . . Capitolia a ici une valeur symbolique.” 92.  Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Ceremoniis aulae Byzantinae (Reiske 1:497). On the evolution of triumphal topography in Constantinople, see Bassett 2017; Dey 2015, 77–​85, 98. 93.  Bassett 2004, 31–​32; Bauer 1996, 230–​33; Berger 1988, 330–​37; Janin 1950, 171–​72; Kuban 2006, 229–​30; Mango 2000, 177; Speck 1995, 146. 94. Barry 2010. 95.  Dey 2015, 81; Mango 2001, 45.

106  Rome’s Holy Mountain

Figure  28. Constantinople in late antiquity. Ancient World Mapping Center, University of North Carolina–​Chapel Hill, altered by Jason Moralee and Brian Shelburne.

elsewhere. According to the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai (Brief Historical Notes), the celebration of the founding of Constantinople in 330 began at the Philadelphion, where a bronze statue of Constantine was placed on a carriage and brought in procession to the Forum of Constantine. Once set up in the forum, the statue was acclaimed by the army and the people as if it were the emperor himself, and then the statue was taken in procession around the hippodrome to the repeated shout of “Kyrie eleison.”96 While it is clear that Kapetōlion’s function in Constantinople’s culture of public processions is more or less clear, all the literary sources on its original appearance are problematic, perhaps fatally so. Hesychius of Miletus, a Byzantine antiquarian interested in classical culture and history, supplies a promising hint in his Patria Kōstantinoupoleōs (Origins of Constantinople).97 A single manuscript of the Patria from the eleventh century, now in Rome (Angelicus gr. 22), includes 96.  Parastaseis 56 (Cameron and Herrin 130; tr. 131). See Dey 2015, 81. Cf. Cameron and Herrin 1984, 243. 97. Kaldellis 2005.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  107 the statement that Constantine was responsible for erecting “famous buildings made in imitation of Rome, even the Kapetōlion.”98 While Constantine’s association with the construction of this Kapetōlion cannot be confirmed, it does seem that by the fifth century the site was indeed associated with Constantine’s family. According to the seventh-​century Chronicon Paschale, a fierce electrical storm and earthquake hit Constantinople in 407, toppling the “sign of the cross of the Capitol” (to signochriston tou Kapetōliou).99 This cross monument was at least eventually associated with statues of Constantine and his family. The Parastaseis tells us that the cross was covered in gold and set on a porphyry base. Flanking the cross were statues of Constantine, his mother Helena, and his two sons, all of them sitting on thrones. The cross, if we accept this legendary account, therefore functioned as the centerpiece of an otherwise straightforward dynastic monument. But it was also more than just that. The Parastaseis states that it was a memorial. The cross marked the location where Constantine saw the vision of the cross for the first time.100 Situated halfway between Constantine’s mausoleum (Church of the Holy Apostles) and the Forum of Constantine, the Kapetōlion stood for political continuity, dynastic harmony, and a toponymic bridge to Rome’s ancient imperial culture.101 We should not forget that Constantinople’s Kapetōlion was also a Christian monument, probably from its inception. This Kapetōlion did not tell the residents of Constantinople of the mythological foundations of Rome—​the place where Jupiter toppled his father, Saturn, from the top of the hill or the place where the mysterious human head, the caput, was discovered in the construction of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus at the beginning of the sixth century bce, a prodigy that intimated that Rome would be the caput mundi, the head of a world empire. Rather, Constantinople’s Kapetōlion told the story of Constantine’s intimacy with the Christian God by signaling and memorializing where the emperor was shown a vision of the cross. Like Rome’s Capitoline Hill, Constantinople’s Kapetōlion functioned in ways not associated directly with emperors and rituals of power. While the classicizing associations of the Kapetōlion with the triumph persisted into the middle of the sixth century ce, the building complex was functioning as a university by the fifth century. Two laws dated to February 27, 425, attempted to deal with two major problems still plaguing public higher education: professors’ salaries and facilities for students and faculty. One of the laws states that publicly funded professorships 98.  Patria 1.42 (Preger 18). See apparatus for l. 2: oikous en K/​polei perphaneis kata mimēsin Rhōmēs kai to Kapetōlion ektisen. The tenth/​eleventh-​century manuscript, Codex Angelicus graecus 22 (Ang.), is discussed in Preger 1901, IV–​V. This addition and many others from Ang. gr. 22 are not noted in the recent translation in Berger 2013. 99.  Chronicon Paschale (Dindorf 1:570). Berger 1988, 333, states that the cross memorial was “probably” Theodosian in date. 100.  Parastaseis 58 (Cameron and Herrin 134; tr. 135; comm. 246–​47). See Bassett 2011, 33. 101. Magdalino 2001.

108  Rome’s Holy Mountain were assigned to the “auditorium of the Capitol.” It was a great honor to teach there.102 From the law’s point of view, the problem was moonlighting—​public professors taking on private students. The other law is concerned with the physical structure where the professors were to meet. As described in the law, the Kapetōlion was a rectangular building with half-​round meeting halls (exedras) on the north side. These spaces, spacious and ornate, abutted a portico. Other less fancy meeting halls, placed on the east and west sides, were assigned for the use of the “old snack bars” (ueterum popinarum). There were yet other even humbler meeting halls that stood against privately owned “rooms” (cellulae).103 The Kapetōlion was still functioning as a university in the sixth century. The bureaucrat-​professor John Lydus tells us that he too was assigned to teach at the Kapetōlion, probably in 543.104 Constantinople was not unique in this way. Indeed, iconic locations in Rome functioned similarly. The Forum of Augustus, dominated by the Temple of Mars Ultor, hosted grammarians and their students at the end of the fourth century, as did the Forum of Trajan.105 Like rooms in Roman houses, public spaces, then, had multiple functions.106 The triangular plaza in front of the Kapetōlion had a cross memorial and statues of Constantine, his mother, and his two sons. Its location there was hardly accidental. The Capitol stood just at the joining of the two stretches of the Mesē, the main thoroughfare into and out of the city, not only for emperors and officials but also for merchants and travelers.107 Thus the Kapetōlion was almost an unavoidable stop for imperial processions, as Justinian’s triumph suggests. Moving inside the Kapetōlion, we know that the structure consisted of at least a portico and meeting spaces and that these areas were officially designated for the use of professors of grammar and rhetoric in the fifth century. Constantinople’s Kapetōlion was therefore an important element in the imperial capital’s public life and a memorial to the city’s Christian founder, Constantine. Perhaps, then, Byzantine administrators such as Narses saw Rome’s Capitolium as a similarly important element in Rome’s urban system. These two imperial capitolia asserted a mimetic continuity, a bridge between the imperial capitals of Constantinople and Rome and the glorious past of the empire; they were also Christian memorials that articulated a new relationship among empire, place, and divinity. By the end of the sixth century, these were Christian capitolia for Christian capitals.

102.  CTh 14.9.3. See Marrou 1965, 442–​43. 103.  CTh 15.1.53. 104.  John Lydus, De Magistratibus 3.29 (Wünsch 117). John Lydus here states that he was assigned to teach epi tēs Kapitōlidos aulēs. See Maas 1992, 35–​36. 105.  Bauer 1996, 88, 96–​97. See Marrou 1932, 107, where he draws the comparison between the scholae at the Capitol in Constantinople and the Fori Imperiali in Rome; now Magdalino 1996, 37–​38. 106.  Multifunctionality of rooms in Roman houses: Bowes 2010, 35–​60. 107. Berger 2001.

Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity  109 Conclusion By the twelfth century, Rome had been a medieval city longer than it had been a city under the rule of Roman emperors. By looking at medieval texts such as the Mirabilia urbis Romae, I have stepped far into the various futures of the city, the Capitoline Hill, and S.  Maria in Capitolio in an attempt to locate where a sixth-​century shrine for the Theotokos was located and how it became associated with the popular legend of Augustus, the Sibyl, and the epiphany of Mary as Mother of God. Moreover, in this and the previous chapter we saw some of the ways in which the Capitoline Hill and the areas directly around it were thriving late antique neighborhoods into the sixth century and beyond. It is extremely important to underline the fact that, even as the monumentality of this district was collapsing by the sixth century and the population of the city had dwindled significantly, this would remain one of the most populous—​and aristocratic—​ areas of the city.108 The hill did not need to be used in public ritual by emperors and popes in order for it to continue to be used as a place of market transactions, administration, housing, and eventually Christian worship. The Capitoline Hill had a certain charisma for those living in late antique Rome. In part II of this book, I will continue to delineate the ways in which the Romans were ever more entangled with the legacy of the Capitol. More than anything else, it was the stories told about this location and its connection to patriotic rituals from the time of the emperors that created the conditions for various forms of affective engagements with the hill’s pasts, from the persistence of toponyms associated with Tarpeia and the Gallic siege of 390 bce to the invention of an epiphany of the infant Jesus before the emperor Augustus.

108.  Wickham 2014, 115.

PART II

Dreamed-​Of Realities

4

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill

Despite the revolutions of the third century ce and the increasing

absence of emperors from Rome, a particular type of identity formation emanating from pride in the city of Rome itself continued to shape politics and the valuation of Rome’s symbolic topography, both in poetry and in the politics of the street. The act of remembering the Capitol was to collect scattered memories of the Roman Empire into a location that signified the eternity of the empire and the populus Romanus.1 By publicly stopping on the Capitoline Hill, emperors such as Diocletian and Maximian were enacting scripts of ritualized movement in Rome that symbolized the divinely sanctioned, legitimate assumption of power by magistrates from the increasingly remote past of the Roman republic. But, we saw that Maxentius and Constantine, the successors of Diocletian and Maximian, likely did not climb the Capitoline Hill for accession, triumph, or consular inauguration. Thereafter emperors were rarely in Rome in the fourth century, and in their absence it seems that the Capitoline Hill stopped playing a role in high state ceremony and routinized forms of elite representation. After Constantius’s visit to Rome in 357 and his ascent of the Capitoline Hill, only two emperors visited the city in the coming half century, Gratian in 376 and Theodosius I in 389, and neither seems to have climbed the hill.2 We will see that it was precisely at this time, in the last decades of the fourth century, when the unity of the empire was endangered by barbarian incursions, doctrinal disputes, and a string of usurpations, that Constantine was retrospectively blamed for abandoning rites usually celebrated by emperors on the Capitoline Hill on one of his three visits to Rome, in 312, 315, and 326.3 A cluster of hostile, probably related, sources, which originated a generation or more after Constantine’s death, suggest that Constantine abandoned the hill, thereby setting in motion the destruction of Roman civilization itself.

1.  Edwards 1996, 69–​95; Thein 2014. Dagron 1984 is an expert guide in interpreting the role of ancient monuments in forging late antique and medieval urban culture. 2.  Gratian’s visit: Themistius, Or. 13. See RE 7.2:1835 (Seeck); Barnes 1975; Vanderspoel 1995, 179–​85. 3. See the fundamental works Fraschetti 1986; Fraschetti 1999b; Fraschetti 2000, 9–​127; Paschoud 1971; Paschoud 1993.

113

114  Rome’s Holy Mountain This study has thus far demonstrated the ways in which the Capitoline Hill remained a locus of sociability throughout late antiquity despite the absence of emperors. But street districts and neighborhoods are shaped not just by the physical constellations of houses, businesses, state administrative offices, streets, and monuments; iconic sites, from the U.S. Capitol to Egypt’s Giza pyramids, were, and continue to be, embedded in symbolic constellations of images, shared by individuals, institutions, and communities across huge distances of time.4 This chapter thus investigates the role played by the Capitoline Hill in late fourth-​ century Rome and in fifth-​century Greek literary culture. We will see that for at least a handful of literary-​minded men, the Capitol and its associations with legitimizing authority could be used as a source of critique, which pitted new, specifically Christian, ways of legitimizing authority against the traditions of the ancestors. We will see in this and in the remaining chapters that the end of the emperors’ habit of climbing the Capitoline Hill to sacrifice before the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus did not spell the end of the cultural significance of the hill. I  will therefore look for the elements of the Capitoline Hill’s pasts that stimulated an affective engagement with the place, a sense that the history, topography, and toponyms of the hill were intimately and materially present for those living in postclassical Rome, linking them, and at times contrasting their rulers, to a celebratory past. In attempting to find the ways in which the hill’s pasts defined its presence in the topography of the city, first I will examine how the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, as an edifice, continued to loom as a presence both in the cityscape and in the literary imagination. Then I will turn to the valuation of the history of, and the rituals associated with, the Capitoline Hill as a common heritage for an increasingly sub-​Roman populus Romanus by looking at a series of case studies of the contested significance of the Capitol. Even those instances in which opposition to the traditional uses of the Capitol is articulated show that the place continued to reproduce patriotic memories rooted in a continuum of history as well as producing imperfect, selective, and even invented memories for generations of Rome’s postclassical urban dwellers. In this sense, the Capitoline Hill never stopped being an important element in the literary culture of an empire-​wide elite as well as in the popular cultures of the city.5 Envisioning and Experiencing the Capitol Like the Pantheon in Rome or the Parthenon in Athens, the associations with the toponym capitolium emanated, first, from the ongoing visibility and imaginability of a stunning edifice. Seeing the Capitol, or seeing it in the imagination, 4.  See Beard 2003; Dey 2011; Eliav 2005; Kaldellis 2009; Thunø 2015. 5.  See Dagron 1984, 17.

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  115 was a vision of the past that animated different registers of meaning and memory in different genres of writing. In a panegyric probably delivered in 291 to the emperor Maximian in Trier, on the occasion of Rome’s traditional birthday, April 21, an otherwise anonymous orator calls Rome the “mother of your empire” (imperii uestri mater), the “eternal city” (immortalis ciuitas), and “mistress of nations” (domna gentium).6 He extols Maximian and Diocletian as the city’s “preservers” (conseruatores) and imagines Rome, embodied, receiving the two emperors in triumph, both ascending the Capitoline Hill together in a single chariot and then residing in the city on the Palatine Hill.7 Returning to his topic, Rome’s birthday, the orator then directly addresses Maximian: “O Emperor, how much more majestic would that City now be, how much better would she celebrate this her birthday, if she were viewing you, surrounded by your Senate, on that famous citadel of Jupiter Capitolinus.”8 Even from this distance—​Trier is more than a thousand kilometers from Rome—​the image of emperors climbing the Capitoline Hill and standing on this height flanked by senators reminded Maximian and those listening of a Rome embedded in the mind’s eye: the city was the heart of a vast empire, and dominating the city was “that famous citadel of Jupiter Capitolinus.” Ammianus Marcellinus, at the end of the fourth century, and Claudian of Alexandria, at the beginning of the fifth, called to mind the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, both authors rhapsodically declaring that the temple bridged the human and divine realms through its otherworldly splendor.9 Around the same time, Ausonius could find no better way to praise Narbonne’s temple than to say that even those responsible for building the Capitol and for its famous golden roof would not dare to belittle it.10 The Christian poet Prudentius commented on how God’s power, like the rays of the sun, “filters into the Capitol, glittering with marbles.”11 Writing in the second quarter of the sixth century, Cassiodorus attests the awe with which administrators like him, a high functionary in the Ostrogothic court, gazed at the ancient sites. He called the Forum of Trajan a “miracle to behold” (uidere miraculum est), and to climb the “Capitoline heights”

6.  Pan. Lat. 10(2).14.4 (Nixon and Rodgers 74). See also n. 47. Discussion of occasion, author, and date: Nixon and Rodgers 1994, 41–​43. 7.  Pan. Lat. 10(2).13.2–​3 (Nixon and Rodgers 74). 8.  Pan. Lat. 10(2).13.4 (Nixon and Rodgers 74). 9.  Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10.14: “Iouis Tarpei delubra, quantum terrenis diuina praecellunt.” Ammianus also states that the Serapeum in Alexandria was second only to the Capitol (22.16.13): “ut post Capitolium, quo se uenerabilis Roma in aeternum attollit, nihil orbis terrarum ambitiosius cernat.” Claudian, VI Cons. 44–​52 (Dewar 6–​7): “iuuat infra tecta Tonantis | cernere Tarpeia pendentes rupe Gigantas | caelatasque fores mediisque uolantia signa | nubibus et densum stipantibus aethera templis.” 10.  Narbonne temple: Ausonius, Ordo 11.19.14–​17: “quodque tibi Pario quondam de marmore templum | tantae molis erat, quantam non sperneret olim | Tarquinius Catulusque iterum, postremus et ille, | aurea qui statuit Capitoli culmina, Caesar?” 11. Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 2.834: “intrat marmoribus Capitolia clara.”

116  Rome’s Holy Mountain (Capitolia celsa conscendere), he added, was like seeing all human achievements surpassed.12 There is reason to think that the temple continued to be an identifiable landmark throughout the Middle Ages. A bull of Pope Anacletus II (1130–​1138) lists all the legally defined properties of the Capitoline Hill: houses, crypts, cellars, courtyards, gardens, orchards, administrative buildings, and a marketplace.13 Significantly, the hill also had the “Great Temple which looks out above the Elephant” (templum maius quod respicit super Alaphantum).14 The “Elephant” was a late antique statue, first mentioned in the fourth-​century regionary catalogs, and was situated at the base of the western edge of the Capitoline Hill, either on the Vicus Iugarius or near the Theater of Marcellus (Figure 21). Because this monument was on the western side of the hill, it has generally been assumed that the Great Temple standing above it must have been the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the remains of which continued to be notable ruins at least until the end of the fifteenth century.15 In an age when the pagan past was becoming an increasingly imaginary realm, just as important as the temple in defining the identity of the hill was the persisting memory of famous events and rituals that used to take place in association with the Capitol. In late antiquity, the most enduring associations with the Capitoline Hill’s physical location and its pasts had to do with events that happened at the origins of the city during the rule of its first king, Romulus; with Rome’s last stand against the occupation of the city by Brennus and the Senonian Gauls in 390 bce; and with rituals such as the triumph. This was a late Roman classicism that allowed the embeddedness of the pagan past in Rome’s cityscape to continue to form the basis of an urban identity for late antique Romans.16 In lists of the Seven Hills of Rome, beginning with the fourth-​century Curiosum, the hill was called the Mons Tarpeius.17 There was a local awareness of why it should be called thus. Servius, in his fifth-​century commentary on Vergil’s 12. Cassiodorus, Variae 7.2 (Fridh 265–​67): “Traiani forum uel sub assiduitate uidere miraculum est: Capitolia celsa conscendere hoc est humana ingenia superata uidisse.” Note that Cassiodorus’s purpose for adducing these examples was to say that such monuments, as delightful as they were, did not contribute to the “health of the body” (corporis salus). What was truly miraculous, Cassiodorus concludes, was Rome’s system of aqueducts and the salubrious benefits they brought to Rome as a whole. As such they were even more deserving of public funds to halt their deterioration. 13.  Text:  Casimiro 1845, 670–​85; Jordan 1871–​1885, 2:667–​68:  “Tuis igitur dilecte in Christo fili Joannes Abbas, & Fratrum tuorum precibus annuentes, commissio tibi ejusdem Dei Genetricis Monasterio concedimus et confirmamus totum Montem Capitoliii in integrum cum casis, cryptis, cellis, curtibus, hortis, arboribus fructiberis & infructiferis, cum porticu Camellariae, cum terra ante Monasterium, qui locus Nundinarum uocatur, cum parietibus petris, & columpnis & omnibus ad eum generaliter pertinentibus.” 14.  Casimiro 1845, 670–​85; Jordan 1871–​1885, 2:667–​68. 15.  The statue is again mentioned in the Codex Einsidlensis in the eighth century and twice again in the twelfth, once in the Bull of Anacletus II and second in the Mirabilia urbis Romae. See LTUR 2:221 (Coarelli); NTDAR, 142–​ 43; Casimiro 1845, 676; Platner and Ashby 1929, 199–​200, 300. Fifteenth century: Moralee and Moe 2015. 16.  See Lim 2009 and 2012. 17.  Curiosum (VZ 1:191). Eighth-​century lists: VZ 1:297. The information is mostly derived from Festus’s De verborum significatione. See VZ 1:293.

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  117 Aeneid, helpfully explained that the reason the poet used the term Tarpeia sedes (Tarpeian house) in reference to the Capitoline Hill (ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia) was that Tarpeia was buried there.18 The persistence of this local knowledge is demonstrated in an eighth-​century list of the names of the hills of Rome as well as the names of the city gates, streets, and aqueducts, which circulated in Italy between the sixth and eighth centuries. There, it states:  “The Tarpeian Mount is so named because it was there that the virgin Tarpeia was buried by the shields of the Sabines.”19 More generally, the cartographic adjective Tarpeius had poetic resonance; collocations such as Tarpeian Rock (rupes Tarpeia) and Tarpeian Jove (Iuppiter Tarpeius) were used by Vergil, Ovid, Propertius, Statius, Lucan, and Juvenal to call to mind the whole Capitoline Hill. Thus Ammianus Marcellinus chose “Tarpeian Jove’s shrines” (Iouis Tarpei delubra) to describe the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, while Claudian used the borrowed image of the gigantomachy, forcing the emperor Honorius and the rest of his audience to imagine these monstrous creatures clawing their way up not Mount Olympus but the “Tarpeian Rock” (rupes Tarpeia). It was probably this mélange of poetic and patriotic associations that led Jerome in 386 to snipe that it was the “Tarpeian Rock” (rupes Tarpeia) that was so deplorable in comparison with the true holy sites in his new home of Bethlehem.20 Like Tarpeia’s betrayal, the Gallic siege of the Capitoline Hill in 390 bce continued to define the physicality of the hill and its importance for the deliverance of the city in the distant past.21 Having elected to abandon the city to the Gauls, a handful of Roman aristocrats succeeded in holding the Capitoline Hill, but it was only through an alert goose that the city was rescued. It honked out a warning to the sleeping Romans just as the hill was about to be taken in a night raid. The goose became rightfully famous. In Vergil’s description of the Shield of Aeneas, a silver goose (argenteus anser) is described as standing on the Capitoline Hill (Aen. 8.655). In his fifth-​century commentary on this passage, Servius assures his audience that Vergil meant something quite real (rem ueram), a silver statue of a goose, which had been placed (positus fuerat) on the Capitoline Hill in honor of the fowl.22 The goose and the localization of the siege in association with the Capitoline Hill were celebrated in different ways, from individual thanksgiving offerings to citywide festivals. After providing this information on the silver goose, Servius adds the following: “Even today there is an altar on the Capitoline Hill of Jupiter Sutor [the ‘Cobbler’] on which those freed from danger

18. Servius, In Aen. 8.347–​48 (Thilo 251): “quae illic sepulta Tarpeiae sedi nomen inposuit.” Cf. Varro, De lingua Latina 5.41–​42. For Servius and his “passing references” to Rome’s topography, see Tischer 2012. 19.  VZ 1:297: “Tarpeius mons appellatus, quod ibi Tarpeia uirgo obruta sit clipeis Sabinorum.” 20.  Ammianus Marcellinus 16.10.14; Claudian, VICons. 44–​52; Jerome, Ep. 46.11. See Moralee 2013, 52–​53 and ­chapter 6. 21.  I take up the Gallic siege of the Capitoline Hill in 390 bce and its role in Christian polemics in ­chapter 5. 22. Servius, In Aen. 8.655 (Thilo 2:294).

118  Rome’s Holy Mountain [liberati obsidione] burned leather straps and old shoes.”23 The altar was apparently still there even if the ritual associated with the liberation of Rome from the Senonian Gauls had stopped. In addition, the whole city hosted an especially dazzling commemoration of 390 bce into the third century ce and possibly into the late fourth, during which a goose was carried on a litter throughout the city.24 What endured after the end of the ritual consecration of shoes and processions of goose statues was the localization of where these events took place. The House of Titus Tatius, the House of Romulus, dazzling columns from the days of Augustus, and curious altars still signified a direct connection to a distant past. In the eighth-​century list of the names of Rome’s mountains, aqueducts, and roads and why they were called thus, a number of moments from the Capitoline Hill’s pasts could be remembered at a single location—​the Porta Capitolini, probably the point of access to the Area Capitolina from the Clivus Capitolinus. “The Porta,” according to the list, “began to be called Capitiolinus’ Gate [Capitolini] from the [toponym] Capitolium. Previously it was called the Porta Tarpeia. Moreover, the gate is in a place so steep that it is impossible to enter. The gate always should stand open because it was there that the Senonian Gauls had worn themselves out and lifted the siege of the Capitol” (Capitolium obsidione liberantes).25 From Servius’s commentary in the fifth century to this eighth-​century list one can sense a continuum of knowledge about the Capitoline Hill, a popular culture, so to say, associated with the hill and its unique topography. It is a story almost as familiar today as it was then—​in 1857 a special correspondent for the Chicago Daily Tribune, while touring Rome, reported being shown by a local where the “sacred geese hissed the salvation of Rome” for a “shinplaster lire.”26 Also remaining in the late antique urban culture of Rome were fantastic literary representations of the Capitol as a place of imperial power. This is best exemplified by the Historia Augusta, a series of imperial biographies, from Hadrian to Carinus (117–​285), written in the last decades of the fourth century.27 The author shows an almost antiquarian interest in the Capitoline Hill—​one of the six men he invented as the authors of the biographies is called “Julius Capitolinus.”28 In the ever-​so-​slightly fantastic world of the Historia Augusta, emperors made vows there upon their accession.29 On the kalends of January, consuls were obliged 23. Servius, In Aen. 8.652 (Thilo 2:294): “hodieque ara in Capitolio est Iouis Sutoris, in qua liberati obsidione coria et sola uetera concremauerunt.” 24. Aelian, De natura animalium 12.33. See Barnes 1971, 205. Cf. Plutarch, On the Fortune of the Romans 12 (325D). Ambrose, Exameron 5.13.44, seems to suggest an ongoing festival (“ideo illis diebus anseri sacrificas”), but the festival had ended in Augustine’s time: the Romans “anseri sollemnia celebrabant” (City of God 2.22). 25.  VZ 1:298:  “Capitolini porta uocitari coepta est a Capitolio, quae antea Tarpeia dicebatur. Est autem in loco adeo praecipiti, ut non possit ea intrari: quod Galli Senones pepigerant, Capitolium obsidione liberantes, ut ea semper pateret.” 26.  Chicago Daily Tribune, March 21, 1874, p. 9. 27.  Cameron 2011, 743–​82. 28.  Chastagnol 1991; Rike 1987, 117–​27. Severus Alexander: SHA, Alex. 43.5. 29. SHA, Pert. 5.4; Did. 4.6; Sep. 7.1; Car. 3.2; Maximinus et Balbinus 3.2, 8.2–​4.

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  119 to renew the annual vows for the safety of the empire.30 Emperors swore oaths there and made weekly sacrifices to Jupiter.31 There were statues on the hill, meetings of the senate, urban villas for aristocrats, and the Capitoline amphora.32 The emperor Maximinus Thrax reportedly guzzled wine from this seven-​gallon container once per day while gulping down forty pounds of meat.33 And triumphs still terminated on the Capitoline Hill.34 Spoils of war, triumphal robes, and diplomatic gifts were dedicated to, and housed in, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, including a cloak of incredibly rich purple coloring sent by the Iranian king of kings from the distant eastern borders of his own empire.35 As we have seen time and again, the most highly affective element of the Capitol’s pasts was its role as the final destination in the Roman triumph. The triumph signaled visions of prisoners of war, soldiers, senators, carts laden with booty, banners illustrated with faraway places, and the emperor’s chariot slowly going along the Via Sacra, up the Clivus Capitolinus, and finally stopping in front of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. By the fourth century, as we have seen, this type of procession was largely an artifact of memory. Nevertheless, even in the absence of these rituals of power, the image of triumph and its ancient associations with the Capitol were no less potent in the language of praise. In a panegyric delivered to Constantine in Trier in 310, Constantine’s swift punishment of insurgent barbarian kings is praised by analogy with past practice: “For then captive kings graced triumphal chariots from the gates right up to the Forum, and as soon as the commander began to turn his chariot toward the Capitol they were cast into prison and killed.”36 In praising Theodosius on the emperor’s visit to Rome in 389, Latinus Pacatus Drepanius calls to mind the former practice of “triumphant men” (uiri triumphales) laying laurel crowns in the lap of the cult statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus before retiring to civilian life.37 Claudian, writing at the beginning of the fifth century, invokes the Capitol and triumph in a number of ways, as if Honorius, a rather pious Christian, were going to sacrifice white bulls, nourished on the salubrious waters of the Clitumnus, as had been done in an imaginary Vergilian past.38 In 458, Sidonius performed a poem in honor of the emperor Majorian (457–​461) in Lugdunum (Lyon); its soaring final lines claim that the poet longed to walk before the emperor’s chariot as it made its way to the shining Capitol (Capitolia fulua). Importantly, however,

30. SHA, Heliog. 30.4. Elagabalus, however, refused to go to the Capitol for the uota. See c­ hapter 2. 31. Oaths: SHA, Marc. 29.4. Sacrifices: SHA, Alex. 43.5. 32. Statues: SHA, Claud. 3.4; cf. Tac. 9.2. Senate: SHA, Gor. 22.8. Villa: SHA, Heliog. 15.7. 33. Amphora: SHA, Max. 4.1. 34. Triumphs: SHA, Alex. 57.1; Gall. 8. 35. Votives: SHA, Aur. 33.3, 41.11, 57.1; Alex. 40.8; Gor. 4.4; P 7.4. Cloak: SHA, Aur. 29.1. 36.  Pan. Lat. 6.10.6 (Nixon and Rodgers 577; tr. 233). 37. Pacatus, Pan. Lat. 2(12).9.5 (Nixon and Rodgers 652):  “depositis in gremio Capitolini Iouis laureis uiri triumphales rusticabantur.” 38. Claudian, Carmina minora 4.3–​4. Cf. Claudian, Cons. Stil. 1.213–​14.

120  Rome’s Holy Mountain Sidonius vividly imagines a scene that he and his audience, standing a thousand kilometers from Rome, knew was already old-​fashioned. For this singular occasion, which was never to take place, Sidonius describes how the emperor would be dressed more priorum, “in the manner of the ancients,” his hair twined around the crown of the triumphator.39 Certainly, these memories of the Capitol fit into that space that Christopher Jones has recently described as lying “between pagan and Christian.”40 While it is clear that these authors and their audiences, including emperors, knew how the hill was supposed to function in Roman society, it is just as clear that their imaginations were laboring under the downward pressure of a Christian ideology of power, which, as we will more fully see in the next chapter, had placed the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus at the opposite end of a Christian spectrum of religio.41 Yet those such as Claudian, Sidonius, and the author of the Historia Augusta still found the charisma of the Capitol useful in their literary imaginations. For example, like a Christian attending the liturgy in a church, the emperor Severus Alexander (222–​235) reportedly “ascended the Capitol” (Capitolium ascendit) every seventh day and visited the temples when he was in the city.42 Others saw it differently. Priscian of Caesarea, a grammarian writing in Constantinople at the beginning of the sixth century, demonstrated the limits and possibilities of representing the Capitol and the triumph in his poetry. In his Latin panegyric in honor of the emperor Anastasius, Priscian uses a famous triumph from the distant past to show that Anastasius was decidedly not like L. Aemilius Paullus, the triumphator who brought King Perseus of Macedonia to Rome in chains following his victory in 168 bce. According to Priscian, it was fitting that Paullus marched the king up to the Tarpeian citadel (ad Tarpeiam arcem) to please Jupiter, the “lord of the Capitoline temples” (Capitolia templa tenentem). By contrast, Anastasius’s Christian triumph was altogether more significant: “It was all powerful God who beheld you from the citadel of the heavens [ab arce superum] as you placated the divine majesty of Him who rules over the celestial temples [caelestia templa tenentis].”43 While this section has demonstrated some of the ways in which the Capitoline Hill and its monuments were embedded in late Roman literary, popular, and urban cultures, it remains to be seen how some used the iconic pastness of the Capitoline Hill to make claims about and understand the present. The rest of this chapter thus looks at a series of anecdotes about the Capitoline Hill found in literary sources from the late fourth to the middle of the sixth century ce. We will see that the Capitol suddenly turns up in sharp debates between Christian and 39. Sidonius, Carm. 5.586–​603. 40. Jones 2014. 41.  Rike 1987, 127. 42. SHA, AS 43.5. 43. Priscian, De Laude Anastasii Imperatoris 174–​79 (Coyne 46; tr. 58; comm. 135–​36).

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  121 pagan intellectuals. In these debates, the Capitol as a location in Rome’s urban environment and as emblem of empire became a way of representing and critiquing the exercise of social power, the morality of rulers, the authority of divine forces, and the failures of the state. Capitolinas ascendit arces: Jerome and Praetextatus In 358 or so, Jerome arrived in Rome as a teenage student from Strido, a city near Aquileia. He spent probably a decade in the city and left in 368 when he was twenty-​one years old to pursue a career in Gaul in the provincial administration. Then, after traveling in the eastern provinces, where he became intensely interested in the radical ascetics of the desert, Jerome returned in 382. He was intimately aware of the principal figures of the city—​both those engaged in the religious traditions of the past and those opposed, such as Marcella, one of Jerome’s students and correspondents. One morning in October 384, while Jerome was in the middle of discussing Psalm 72 with Marcella, they were interrupted by bad news. Leah, a Roman noblewoman, who had converted to Christianity and become the “head of the monastery” and “mother of virgins,” here referring to a monastic foundation on the Aventine Hill, had suddenly died. Marcella took it badly. Later that day Jerome wrote Marcella a short letter of consolation in which he assured Marcella that Leah’s simplicity of life, pure devotion to the faith, and service to her religious community of women guaranteed the enjoyment of eternal happiness (aeterna beatitudine fruitur). The important point for Jerome was that Leah’s power came from her rejection of the world (saeculum) for Christ.44 In the letter, Jerome emphasizes this point by interpreting the significance of Leah’s death against the recent passing of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus. In fall 384, Praetextatus was one of Rome’s most distinguished senators. Born in Rome around 310, he had an illustrious career in the imperial administration, holding a number of posts, including stints as the proconsul Achaiae (chief administrator of Greece, 362–​364), praefectus urbis Romae (urban prefect, 367–​368), and best of all praefectus praetorio Italiae Illyrici et Africae (praetorian prefect of Italy, Illyricum, and Africa, 384). When he died, Praetextatus had just been elected consul—​he would have been awaiting his consular inauguration, presumably in a few months’ time at the New Year’s rites. Praetextatus was a hero to traditionalists such as Ammianus Marcellinus, Symmachus, and Zosimus for his staunch efforts to clamp down on Christian vandalism, for his patronage of temples, and for the depth of his intelligence—​indeed, Macrobius makes him one of the main discussants in his fantasy symposium called the Saturnalia. Praetextatus also held numerous religious offices, both traditional ones, such as augur, and those en 44. Jerome, Ep. 23 (Hilberg 1:211–​14). For a recent discussion of Jerome’s chronology, see Williams 2006, 267–​301.

122  Rome’s Holy Mountain vogue in the fourth century, such as “Father of Fathers” (pater patrum), the highest level in the mysteries of Mithras.45 It seems that on one occasion Praetextatus climbed the Capitoline Hill. Jerome used the memory of this procession as his basis for the comparison of Leah’s life to that of a man of the world. Jerome reports, as if he were an eyewitness, that just before Praetextatus died the official had “climbed the Capitoline heights” (Capitolinas ascendit arces). In this procession, Praetextatus was led by the “pinnacle of all officials” (dignitatum omnium culmina), “as if he were triumphing over defeated enemies” (quasi de subiectis hostibus triumpharet). According to Jerome, this procession to the Capitol was quite a spectacle. The Roman people met Praetextatus with acclamations and a stamping of feet. When he died a few days later, continues Jerome, his death unsettled the whole city (urbs uniuersa). This anecdote was to prove that all this pomp only landed Praetextatus “in Tartarus” (in Tartaro), while Leah, with her austerity, had joined the “choirs of angels” (angelorum choris).46 Scholars have often linked Jerome’s description of Praetextatus and his procession to the subject of a frustratingly anonymous Carmen contra Paganos.47 The opening lines of this poem address an unnamed official, called a prefect and a consul, accusing him of devotion to a number of holy places, including the Capitolia celsa Tonantis, the “Thunderer’s Capitoline heights.”48 Later the narrator asks, “What benefit to the City was your prefect, when, a plunderer in ceremonial attire, he had reached the throne of Jupiter, whereas (in fact) he scarcely atones for his crimes by a protracted death?”49 Augusto Fraschetti was in no doubt that this reference to the “throne of Jupiter” (Iouis solium) was not, as others argued, a euphemism for pagan apotheosis but was a synecdoche for the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Thus, in this interpretation, the Carmen contra Paganos should be read together with Jerome’s letter to Marcella as representing the same event—​a triumphal procession up to the Capitol.50 Others have asserted that the subject of the poem is another aristocrat and that by implication the poem attests another public procession to the Capitoline Hill in the late 390s.51 45.  For discussion and relevant citations, see PLRE 1:722–​24. 46. Jerome, Ep. 23.2–​3 (Hilberg 1:212–​13). See Kahlos 2002, 98–​99; Vera 1983. 47.  Grig 2009, 287–​88. For a discussion of the problem of authorship, date, and subject, see Fraschetti 2000, 70–​74. Edition of the Carmen contra Paganos: Mommsen 1909a. English translation: Croke and Harries 1982, 80–​ 83. Now Cameron 2011, 806–​8. 48.  Carmen contra Paganos l.2 (Mommsen 489). Surely this is a reference to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, rather than Jupiter Tonans. For the unnamed official’s interest in temple restorations, see Mulryan 2011. 49.  Carmen contra Paganos ll.25–​27 (Mommsen 489–​90; tr. Croke and Harries 80): “dicite, praefectus uester quid profuit urbi, quem Iouis ad solium raptum tractatus abisset, cum poenas scelerum tracta uix morte rependat?” Cameron 2011, 273–​319, seems to have made the case for identifying the subject of the Carmen contra Paganos as Praetextatus. 50.  Fraschetti 2000, 73–​74. 51.  Matthews 1970, 471, argues for Nicomachus Flavianus. Cf. Mommsen 1909a, 497, for the suggestion that the unnamed official was Nichomachus Flavianus (cos. 394) and the Temple of Jupiter was an extra-​Roman structure.

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  123 There is no difficulty in believing that officials were climbing the Capitoline Hill in the late fourth century. Jerome’s Praetextatus made the ascent “as if ” (quasi) he were celebrating a triumph. It is impossible, however, to single out the occasion to which Jerome was referring in this letter. In fact, given the rarity of triumphal processions in Rome, the least likely possibility is the celebration of a triumph.52 As we saw in c­ hapter 2, we should keep in mind that the Capitoline Hill continued to be used as an administrative zone into the late fifth century and beyond. Whatever the circumstances of this procession and the purposes of its participants, it is clear that at the end of the fourth century Roman elites were calling to mind, and perhaps even using, the Capitoline Hill as it was in the distant past. While he was urban prefect in 367, Praetextatus had already made his interest in the Capitoline Hill clear for all to see by restoring the Porticus Deorum Consentium as well as its statues (sacrosancta simulacra).53 This was the last monument on the Clivus Capitolinus as it led from the Forum Romanum up to the Area Capitolina. Jerome was not impressed. Imagining those like Praetextatus climbing the Capitoline Hill was a way to teach an object lesson: this pomposity and the unexpected death that followed led to a topos familiar from Christian apologetics against persecutor-​emperors—​worldly pomp combined with pagan practices was a combustible mixture that would inevitably lead to an excruciating death and hellish afterlife. The Capitol and Polemics Against Constantine It should be clear by now that within the city of Rome the act of imagining climbing the Capitoline mattered. In this section, we will see that, whereas Jerome and the author of the Carmen contra Paganos were able to use the image of climbing the Capitoline Hill to harden a Christian identity for those familiar with Rome’s urban environment, pagans were using the same image to lay the blame for the failures of empire on Christian emperors. In the late fourth century, in the same milieu in which Jerome was ridiculing Praetextatus’s procession to the Capitol, a narrative of Constantine’s rejection of the Capitoline Hill came together in Rome, combined with elements of hostile traditions about Constantine’s so-​called pagan conversion and the unsettling decision to establish Constantinople as a “New Rome” in 330. We will see that Constantine’s rejection of the Capitol became an infectious story, turning up in a range of contemporary Christian and pagan sources in both the east and west.54 In ­chapter 1, we saw that our best source for Constantine’s victory celebrations in Rome in late October 312, Pan. Lat. 12(9), is full of details on Constantine’s 52.  Cf. Fraschetti 2000, 61 and n. 85; Vera 1983. 53.  CIL 6, 102; LTUR 2:9–​10 (Nieddu); NTDAR, 313. See Lizzi Testa 2001, 686. 54.  Bleckmann 2011; Diefenbach 2007, 145–​52; Lenski 2016, 1–​3.

124  Rome’s Holy Mountain movements on the days after he vanquished Maxentius’s army at the Milvian Bridge. The panegyric says nothing about the Capitoline Hill.55 However, in a History first published in 395, Eunapius of Sardis claims that Constantine climbed the Capitoline Hill at least once and then shamefully abandoned the rites traditionally celebrated there on at least two more occasions.56 Though his history does not survive independently, it was largely incorporated into Zosimus’s Nea Historia (Recent History), written at the beginning of the sixth century. Eunapius and Zosimus both asserted that the decline of traditional rites had doomed the Roman world to disintegration from internecine strife and barbarian wars. Because Eunapius’s history is entangled with Zosimus’s own, both in thesis and in content, here I will call their joint project Eunapius-​Zosimus. The first instance of Constantine’s abandonment of the Capitol occurred in 313. After describing the program of the Secular Games and its last celebration in 204 under Septimius Severus, which included important rites celebrated at the Capitol, Eunapius-​Zosimus points out that in 313 Constantine ignored the Secular Games. This was an important duty. For “while all this was observed according to direction, the Roman empire was safe and Rome remained in control of virtually all the inhabited world.”57 Thus the consequences were disastrous: “When Constantine and Licinius were in their third consulship (313), the period of one hundred and ten years had elapsed and they ought to have kept up the traditional festival. By neglecting it, matters were bound to come to their present unhappy state.”58 By these calculations, the year 313 was therefore the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. The second instance has to do with Constantine’s murder of his spouse Fausta and their son Crispus and the so-​called pagan version of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. According to this tradition, Constantine was wracked by guilt over the murders and was terrified when he finally realized the depths of his own impiety—​no pagan priests would absolve him. The promise of forgiveness came instead from the “Egyptian.” Under the Egyptian’s nagging influence Constantine then “abandoned his ancestral religion” and banned divination.59 Then, according to Eunapius-​Zosimus, “when an ancient festival (tēs patriou heortēs) fell due and it was necessary for the army to go up to the Capitol to carry out the rites, for fear of the soldiers he took part in the festival, but when the Egyptian sent him an apparition which unrestrainedly 55.  B.S. Rodgers, in Nixon and Rodgers 1994, 323–​24 n. 119, argues that the orator’s report, detailed as it is, cannot be assumed to be a complete account. The orator was not there himself, visits to the Capitol were not always reported, and Constantine’s religious scruples could have demanded silence on this particular issue. I would add the example of Livy’s narration of events following Camillus’s successful siege of Veii (5.23). Livy does not mention a visit to the Capitol, but there is little doubt that Livy implies such a visit. 56.  See Blockley 1981–​1983, 1–​26. 57.  Zosimus 2.7.1 (Paschoud 1:79; tr. Ridley 28). 58.  Zosimus 2.7.2 (Paschoud 1:79; tr. Ridley 28). 59.  Zosimus 2.29.1–​4 (Paschoud 1:101–​2; tr. Ridley 36–​37).

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  125 abused the rite of ascending to the Capitol, he stood aloof from the holy worship and thus incurred the hatred of the senate and people.”60 The language is unambiguous: Constantine participated in the ceremony (ekoinōnēse tēs heortēs), and then he stood away (apostatēsas)—​literally a pagan apostasy. Given the silence in Pan. Lat. 12(9), the oration delivered in 313 to Constantine just months after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, this account has been seen as an invaluable source possibly showing that Constantine climbed the Capitol on one occasion. While it is tempting to accept this information, the account is problematic.61 It is a distillation of events from different times. Fausta and Crispus were dead by the end of spring 326.62 The “Egyptian from Spain” was surely Bishop Ossius of Cordoba. This bishop, however, was with Constantine in Rome only in 312, thus making Ossius incapable of offering direct advice to Constantine in 315 or 326 when the emperor was in Rome for his decennalia and uicennalia celebrations. It is also important to remember that Eunapius-​Zosimus’s account stands within a tradition of polemics against Constantine and Christianity that had begun emerging in the generation after the rule of the pagan emperor Julian (361–​363) and are found fully formulated in Libanius’s speeches from the late 380s.63 By the time the tradition ended up in Eunapius-​Zosimus, it had already accommodated a now lost Roman source, a local point of view that directly linked Constantine’s abandonment of the Capitol and the foundation of Constantinople. Thus, according to Eunapius-​Zosimus, Constantine, having angered the Roman senate and people with his sacrilegious disregard for the “holy rites” on the Capitoline Hill, was “unable to endure the curses of almost everyone” and “sought out a city as a counterbalance to Rome.”64 These polemics found their way into the Historia Augusta. According to André Chastagnol, Constantine’s embrace of Christianity and his pagan apostasy are parodied in the Historia Augusta’s largely bogus life of the emperor Elagabalus.65 In one episode, the emperor and his cousin (the future emperor Severus Alexander) are named consuls-​designate for 222. However, Elagabalus does not want to appear publicly with Severus Alexander for the inauguration rites traditionally held on the Capitoline Hill on the kalends of January. His mother and grandmother warn Elagabalus that the army will assassinate him 60.  Zosimus 2.29.5 (Paschoud 1:102; tr. Ridley 37). 61.  I will deliberately sidestep the question of the historicity of Eunapius-​Zosimus on this anecdote. Though unlikely, as I pointed out in ­chapter 1, it is possible that Constantine climbed the Capitoline Hill in 312, 315, or 326. Indeed he could have done so on all these occasions—​his son, Constantius II, did in 357. Supporting Constantine’s visit to the Capitol: Alföldy 1948, 62, allowing that Constantine might have felt “uncomfortable”; Diefenbach 2007, 139–​41; Fraschetti 2002; Grünewald 1990, 76 and n. 83; Lenski 2008, 207; Paschoud 1971–​1979, 1:224; Rodgers, in Nixon and Rodgers 1994, 323–​24 n. 119; Stephenson 2009, 146. 62.  See Barnes 2011, 144–​50. 63. Libanius, Or. 19.19, 20.24; Sozomen, HE 2.3. See Wiemer 1994a, 516–​18; and Wiemer 1994b. Wiemer linked the report in Zosimus and Libanius to Constantine’s last visit to Rome for the uicennalia celebrations in 326. 64.  Zosimus 2.29.5–​30.1 (Paschoud 1:102–​3; tr. Ridley 37). 65.  Chastagnol 1960, 138; Chastagnol 1991; Paschoud 1971–​1979, 1:224. See now Fraschetti 2000, 31–​47.

126  Rome’s Holy Mountain otherwise. So Elagabalus “put on the praetexta [the purple-​bordered toga worn by high magistrates] and at the sixth hour of the day entered the senate, inviting his grandmother to the session and escorting her to a seat. But then he refused to proceed to the Capitol to assume the vows for the state and conduct the usual ceremonies, and accordingly everything was done by the city-​praetor, just as if there were no consuls there.”66 Like Constantine, Elagabalus initially agreed to participate for fear of the soldiers and then changed his mind. Elsewhere in the Historia Augusta we are told that Elagabalus supported Christians by declaring that the “rites of the Jews and Samaritans and Christian sorcery” (Iudaeorum et Samaritanorum religiones et Christianam deuotionem) should be conducted in the Heliogabalium, a newly built temple located on the Palatine Hill and adjacent to the palace.67 Moreover, the biography suggests that Elagabalus was a pagan monotheist. He “sought to extinguish the Roman rites” (Romanas exstinguere uoluit religiones) by demanding the mandatory worldwide veneration of Heliogabalus alone.68 If Elagabalus was meant to be a literary proxy for Constantine and a parodic representation more generally of a Christian emperor, then Constantine was viewed by traditionally minded pagan intellectuals as an iconoclast hell-​bent on the destruction of customary rites and their replacement by a single divinity. Imagined in this way, Elagabalus became, in Paschoud’s words, Constantine “avant la lettre.”69 The irony is that the fictitious author ends the life by directly addressing the emperor Constantine and lavishing him with praise—​surely the intended irony was not lost on the late antique readers of the Historia Augusta.70 In accounting for these literary inventions from Eunapius-​Zosimus and the Historia Augusta, we should pay attention to Eunapius-​Zosimus’s statement that the Roman people’s anger at Constantine’s rejection of the Capitol led the emperor directly to the decision to establish Constantinople as a new imperial capital. In Gilbert Dagron’s analysis, Constantine, in the generation after the demise of the pagan emperor Julian in 363, was judged in conservative circles as “anti-​Rome”; he was a dangerous innovator chased from the city by a populace attached to the city of Rome, its institutions, and its traditions.71 In these late fourth-​century culture wars, deploying the image of climbing the Capitoline Hill was a way of visualizing and affirming the importance of Rome’s 66. SHA, Heliog. 15.7 (tr. Magie 2:137): “sumpta praetexta hora diei sexta processit ad senatum, auia sua ad senatum uocata et ad sellam perducta. deinde in Capitolium ad uota concipienda et perficienda sollemnia ire noluit, omniaque per praetorem urbanum facta sunt, quasi consules illic non essent.” Note that praetorem was supplied by Mommsen. Codex Palatinus 899 (P) reads pr. The other option, supplied by Peter, is praefectum, thus the urban prefect. See Diefenbach 2007, 139–​41. 67. SHA, Heliog. 3.4–​5. Deuotio connoted “sorcery” and “curses” for pagan authors, e.g., Oxford Latin Dictionary, 534, s.v. deuotio, while for Christians it meant “piety.” The ambiguity might well have been intentional. 68. SHA, Heliog. 6.6–​7. 69.  Paschoud 1971–​1979, 1:224. 70. SHA, Heliog. 34–​35. 71.  Dagron 1984, 21. See now Diefenbach 2007, 145–​52.

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  127 history, topography, and institutions in association with the smallest of Rome’s Seven Hills. Rewriting Constantine’s Pagan Apostasy Constantine’s rejection of the Capitol became a popular story in the fifth and sixth centuries.72 Not only was it picked up by pagan authors such as Eunapius of Sardis and the inventor of the Historia Augusta; the story also found its way into Christian hagiography at about the same time. According to the probably fifth-​century Acts of Silvester, Constantine, now afflicted with leprosy as divine punishment for his persecution of Christians, is advised by the priests of the Capitol (pontifices Capitolii) to come up to the Capitol and bathe himself in a pool full of the blood of sacrificed children. The warm blood, they say, will wash away the disease. Leaving the palace on the day designated for the bath, Constantine comes upon a crowd of weeping mothers and their children while en route to the Capitol. He learns that the women are going to the same place, only they will be forced to leave their children on the hill, where the priests intend to kill them for the emperor’s cure. Constantine is horrified by this news and thereupon begins a public meditation on the theme of triumph, realizing that true victory over all adversaries comes when impiety is vanquished by piety. To the acclaim of all, Constantine orders the women and children to depart and immediately abandons his plan to climb the Capitoline Hill (et haec dicens iter quod arripuerat eundi ad Capitolium deserens). In the palace that night the apostles Peter and Paul reveal to Constantine that he should summon Pope Silvester from Mount Soracte, where Silvester has taken refuge. Silvester returns to Rome, instructs Constantine, and baptizes the emperor at the Lateran Palace, thereby healing the emperor of his skin disease. In gratitude, Constantine puts Christianity on a firm footing in the city in the days thereafter:  he ordered that the bishop of Rome would be the head of the Christian church, and he ordered the foundation of the Lateran basilica and St. Peter’s.73 Perhaps most significant of all, the Acts of Silvester has Constantine visiting the confessio of St. Peter's, where the emperor removes his diadem and fully prostrates himself at the apostle’s tomb, and, in a memorable image, Constantine’s profusion of tears soaks through his imperial purple robe.74 Having rejected the Capitol, Constantine is remembered as starting a new itinerary that, as we saw

72.  Behrwald 2012, 276; Fraschetti 2001; Liverani 2008. 73.  We will return to the Actus Silvestri in ­chapter 7. Though not the earliest version of the text, the most easily accessible edition of the Actus Silvestri is Mombritius 1978, 2:508–​31. The pontifices Capitolii: 2:510–​11. Discussion and summary of the earliest version (A1) of this account: Pohlkamp 1992, with reference to his earlier groundbreaking studies. See also Fowden 1994, 155; Santangeli Valenzani 2007; Sessa 2017. The adaptation of the eastern Constantine-Silvester tradition specifically in Rome by the middle of the fifth century: Liverani 2008; Sessa 2010. 74.  Baptism, healing, and confessio of St. Peter: Mombritius 1978, 2:513.

128  Rome’s Holy Mountain in c­ hapter 1, was likely only initiated at the beginning of the fifth century: upon entering Rome, Roman and barbarian rulers would lay down their diadem and prostrate themselves before the shrine of the apostle. Another instance of the mobility of the story of Constantine’s pagan apostasy is found in the legendary sixth-​century Acts of Gallicanus (BHL 3236). Here, the consul Gallicanus has returned victorious from wars in the east. Similar to the story of Constantine in the legendary Acts of Silvester, Gallicanus’s first stop on his triumphal entry into Rome is St. Peter’s (ad sacra Petri apostoli limina), not the Capitol. A decidedly Christian Constantine then proudly addresses the victorious general: “When you were going off to war, you entered the Capitol and the temples and sacrificed to demons, now returning as victor, you adore Christ and his apostles” (cum ad bellum pergeres Capitolium et templa ingressus daemonibus immolasti; inde uictor rediens, Christum et ejus Apostolos adoras).75 In this imaginary world, in which the Capitol and St. Peter’s stand against one another, Gallicanus has substituted the sacra limina of St. Peter’s and Christ himself for the Capitolium et templa, just as Constantine had done in different terms in the Acts of Silvester. Constantine’s rejection of the Capitol, as told in the Acts of Silvester, had a long life into the Middle Ages. In the eighth or ninth century, the story ended up in the Constitutum Constantini (eventually the Donation of Constantine) and in the popular Byzantine Greek Life of Constantine (BHG 364), rewritten as a firsthand account narrated by Constantine himself.76 In the west, the Latin Acts of Silvester and the Constitutum Constantini provided the inspiration for possibly the last representations of the Capitol as a pagan cultic institution before the Renaissance. In the stunning thirteenth-​century frescoes in Rome’s SS. Quattro Coronati, the story of Constantine’s conversion begins with an image of the emperor afflicted with a skin disease.77 He sits on a throne in front of a crowd of women, children, and a single old man—​no such old man is mentioned in the different versions of the Acts of Silvester. As we know from the Acts of Silvester, these people are on the way to donate the blood of these children to the Capitoline pontiffs to heal Constantine. Behind the emperor is a tower, presumably the Capitol. Standing inside are three pagan priests gesturing in phatic communion with the other figures in the scene (Figure 29).78 In this image, the celebration and the condemnation of Constantine’s memory from the late fourth century forward were fixed on

75. AASS, Iun., v, 38. See Fraschetti 1999b, 247–​48. 76.  Constitutum Constantini (Fuhrman, MGH Fontes Iuris 10, 68): “ad haec aduenerunt sacerdotes Capitolii, dicentes mihi debere fontem fieri in Capitolio et compleri hunc innocentium infantum sanguine et calente in eo loto me posse mundari.” See Edwards 2003, 100–​105; Fried 2007. BHG 364: Lieu and Montserrat 1996, 119–​20. 77.  Discussion of the Actus Silvestri and the Constitutum Constantini in relation to the frescoes: Mitchell 1980. 78.  I thank Fabio Barry for discussing this image with me and deepening my understanding of its composition.

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  129

Figure  29.  SS. Quattro Coronati, Cappella di S.  Silvestro, Rome, ca. 1240. Detail of Constantine, the Capitoline pontiffs, and the Capitol. Photograph: Walter Denny.

an imaginary and simplified cartography of a Rome in which the Capitol and its pagan priests stood in opposition to St. Peter’s and the popes. The Capitol and the End of Empire: Olympiodorus and Procopius Though fixed in a particular place, the Capitol was a mobile construct that could be deployed for cross-​purposes in Christian and pagan texts of different genres and across huge spans of time. Constantine’s treatment of the Capitol was a way for Eunapius of Sardis, the Historia Augusta, the Acts of Silvester, and Zosimus to talk about and imagine the existential crises and religious transformations of the Roman Empire in different times and places, from the late fourth-​and fifth-​century Rome of the Historia Augusta and the Acts of Silvester to the urban intellectual circles of the fifth-​and sixth-​century eastern empire of Eunapius and Zosimus. In this final section of the chapter, I  will turn to how the historians Olympiodorus, Zosimus, and Procopius used anecdotes about the Capitol as a way of understanding the horrors of the barbarian wars in the fifth century as an object lesson in divine punishment. Thinking about the possible end of the Roman Empire led these authors to imagine the Capitol as playing an important

130  Rome’s Holy Mountain role in key events in the timeline of the state’s decline and fall. We will see that some of the most repeatable late antique anecdotes about the use and abuse of the Capitol look like prophecy in the guise of history and hagiography.79 In what follows I will briefly look at three of these ominous anecdotes. Olympiodorus of Thebes, a flâneur and diplomat with close connections to the Constantinopolitan court of Theodosius II (408–​450), wrote a history of the western empire in Greek around 440.80 According to Olympiodorus, sometime in late 407 or early 408, Rome’s magister militum Stilicho was in Rome to discuss with the senate the advancing threat of the Gothic king Alaric, particularly the hefty ransom demanded by Alaric for the city of Rome. A  fragment of Olympiodorus’s history preserved by Zosimus, and thus here called Olympiodorus-​Zosimus, reports that Stilicho ordered the doors of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to be stripped of their ornamental gold plating.81 This was an act of sacrilege (asebeia). Stilicho’s workers, we are told, while they were removing the gold, discovered an old Latin inscription on the doors: “These are kept for a miserable king” (MISERO REGI SERVANTUR). Confirming the prophetic significance of these words, Stilicho fell out of favor shortly thereafter. He was murdered, and his wife, Serena, herself guilty of impiety against the gods by brazenly removing temple treasures for her own use, was forced to commit suicide.82 For Olympiodorus-​Zosimus this paradoxical turn of events demonstrated the “secret workings of Justice” (tēs Dikēs ta aporrēta).83 And this was more than a disaster for Stilicho and his family. Stilicho’s absence was bad news for the state: Alaric was fast approaching Rome at the head of his barbarian army. Olympiodorus returns to the Capitol in another anecdote.84 Just after the fall of Stilicho and his appropriation of the Capitol’s gold, Alaric surrounded the city of Rome in 408. It was at this point, according to Olympiodorus-​Zosimus, that an enigmatic event happened. The urban prefect Gabinius Barbarus Pompeianus sponsored a proposal to allow Etruscan seers to use their divinatory powers on the Capitoline Hill to protect Rome from Alaric’s Gothic army. The seers told him that they had liberated the city of Narnia through prayer and the practice of their rites according to tradition. This brought down thunder and lightning, chasing Alaric’s troops away. Pompeianus was convinced. He then consulted Pope Innocent I, who assented to the request with one proviso: these rites had to be done in secret. But, according to Olympiodorus-​Zosimus, the seers warned 79.  Grig 2009, 283–​84. 80.  See Gillett 1993 for dating and a thorough review of previous scholarship. 81.  This episode is not included in Blockley’s list of fragments. But Paschoud (1971–​1979, 3:266–​67) believes it possible. 82.  Zosimus 5.38.2–​4 (Paschoud 3:56–​57; tr. Ridley 119–​20). 83.  Zosimus 5.38.5 (Paschoud 3:57; tr. Ridley 120). See Paschoud 1971–​1979, 3:266–​68, where Paschoud admits the possibility of the legend’s historicity and adduces evidence for Christian polemics against the memory of Stilicho. 84. Sozomen, HE 9.6.3–​ 6 (Bidez and Hansen 398); Zosimus 5.41 (Paschoud 3:60–​ 63; tr. Ridley 121) = Olympiodorus, Blockley Fr. 7 (Blockley 1981–​1983, 2:158–​61).

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  131 that rites done in this manner would not be efficacious:  “The customary rites had to be performed publicly by the senate on the Capitoline Hill and in the Forum.” No one dared do it, and “they,” presumably the senators, sent the seers away, instead opting to buy off Alaric with contributions from senators and by melting down Rome’s protectors—​the statues of the divinities, who, according to Olympiodorus-​Zosimus, had gone “lifeless and inefficacious after the diminution of rites.” The melting down of these holy objects, especially a statue of Virtus, to buy Rome’s salvation had the analogous effect that Rome’s martial bravery, its uirtus, likewise and simultaneously melted away.85 The third anecdote comes from Procopius of Caesarea’s Wars. Written in the middle of the sixth century, Procopius’s Wars reports that the Capitol was a casualty of the Vandal king Geiseric’s sack of Rome in 455. According to Procopius and his main source, Priscus of Panium’s lost history, the Vandal king Geiseric was invited to Rome in the most shocking of circumstances. The Roman aristocrat Petronius Maximus led a coup against Valentinian III in March 455, ending in the emperor’s murder, the usurpation of his title, and the rape and forced marriage of the emperor’s spouse, Eudoxia. But Eudoxia was so put off by Maximus that she sent an embassy to Geiseric, saying that her husband, Valentinian III, had been killed “by an unholy man” (hup’andros anosiou) and thus she was suffering “unholy treatment” (anosia). It would almost be a crusade—​a “holy matter” (hosion)—​for Geiseric to become an avenger of the calamity that Maximus had inflicted upon the imperial household.86 Yet the Vandal king’s true motivation was loot. He set sail from North Africa to Rome “for no other reason than that he suspected that he would gain much money.”87 While Geiseric was sailing north, Maximus was killed in Rome by a mob, and so Geiseric met no resistance when he marched on the city. According to Procopius, the Vandal king walked into Rome, took control of the Palatine Hill, and began looting the city—​a sort of topsy-​turvy aduentus in which Geiseric, as we will see, perhaps also climbed the Capitoline Hill. Procopius’s account is full of ominous dread. Maximus, the “unholy man,” was stoned to death, his body torn into pieces by the Roman people. Geiseric abducted Eudoxia and her two daughters, Eudocia and Placidia, sending them to Carthage on ships laden with spoils from the palace.88 In this series of disasters, Procopius includes the following: Geiseric “plundered also the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and tore off half the roof.” Then follows an aside: “This roof was of bronze of the finest quality, and, as a thick layer of gold had been poured over it, it shone as a magnificent and wonderful spectacle.”89 Finally, Procopius 85.  Zosimus 5.41 (Paschoud 3:60–​63; tr. Ridley 121). See Grig 2009, 283–​84, and the recent discussion in Jones 2014, 114–​16. 86. Procopius, Wars 3.4.38–​39 (Haury 1:331; tr. Kaldellis 154–​55). 87. Procopius, Wars 3.5.1 (Haury 1:331; tr. Kaldellis 155). 88. Procopius, Wars 3.5.1–​3 (Haury 1:331–​32; tr. Kaldellis 155). 89. Procopius, Wars 3.5.4 (Haury 1:332; tr. Kaldellis 155).

132  Rome’s Holy Mountain adds that the ship that was holding the statues looted from the city sank in the Mediterranean. For his part, Geiseric arrived safely in Carthage together with Eudoxia and her two daughters, Eudocia and Placidia.90 We can of course take a stripped-​down version of these three anecdotes as rooted in fact. There is no reason why Stilicho would not have stripped the gold plating from the doors of the Capitol, why Pompeianus would not have allowed Etruscan seers to publicly undertake rites on the Capitoline Hill, or why Geiseric would not have looted half the gilded roof tiles from the temple. Even though none of these Capitoline events can be substantiated by other sources, there is no doubt that the Vandal assault on Rome was devastating. Historians, chroniclers, and officials both in Rome and throughout the empire also state that Rome was taken without a fight; treasures were seized from the palace, including the imperialia ornamenta; and Eudoxia and her two daughters were abducted.91 But none of these sources include the spoliation of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The only author to come close to reporting the looting of the Capitol is late and likely dependent on Procopius’s account. John Zonaras, a Byzantine historian and official who stitched together a chronicle in the twelfth century, vaguely states that Geiseric stripped the “votive offerings of the temples of the gods, those which were made of gold and adorned with precious stones.”92 While these anecdotes on Capitoline Hill could well have happened—​I see no reason in particular to dismiss Procopius’s account—​what is important, for my purposes, is that these three anecdotes point to a historiographically informed worldview, in which the physical integrity of the Capitol was symbolic of the health of the empire and its vulnerability was a sign of the failures of the empire’s leaders.93 Sozomen ends his Christianized version of Olympidorus’s account by saying that everyone realized that the Gothic king Alaric was an instrument of divine anger (theomēnia), a punishment for Rome’s indolence and licentiousness. The image is made especially vivid when Sozomen adds the detail that an Italian monk stopped Alaric on his march to Rome, urging him not to continue. Alaric responds to the monk by saying that a strange force inside him is propelling him onward.94 Similarly Procopius’s choice to highlight the fate of the Capitol in his narrative of the Vandal looting of Rome was not accidental. Since the late fifth century, Geiseric’s military success and his ability to strike the heart of the empire

90. Procopius, Wars 3.5.5 (Haury 1:332; tr. Kaldellis 155). 91.  Codex Iustinianus 1.27.6–​8; Evagrius Scholasticus, Church History 2.7; Marcellinus Comes, Chronicle (MGH AA 11, Mommsen 86); Victor Tonnennsis, Chronicle (MGH AA 11, Mommsen 186). The Liber Pontificalis (LP Duchesne 239 with n. 5, p. 240) adds that Pope Leo I replaced the silver church utensils that were looted from all the titular churches. I thank Robert Coates-​Stephens for discussing these sources with me. 92.  Zonaras 8.25 (Dindorf 3:250). Zonaras’s version even seems to gesture to Luke 21:5–​6. 93.  For Procopius and his artful use of anecdotes to reveal “a deeper aspect of his thought,” see Kaldellis 2004, 62–​93. Cf. Elsner 2014, 160. I thank Robert Coates-​Stephens for discussing with me Procopius and the other sources on the Vandal assault. 94. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 9.6.3–​6 (Bidez and Hansen 398). See Paschoud 1971–​1979, 3:279.

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  133 were understood as primarily due to Rome’s moral corruption. Borrowing from his source, Priscus, Procopius relates how the emperor Valentinian III’s lust was the beginning of his own demise. Through the emperor’s trickery and no fault of her own, Lucina, the morally upstanding wife of Petronius Maximus, was raped by Valentinian. As we saw above, Maximus succeeded in having Valentinian murdered. But the story continues to devolve into depravity. Maximus, taking Valentinian’s widow, Eudoxia, as his wife, raped her in turn, thus leading, in part, to Geiseric’s march on Rome.95 It seems, then, that the fall of Rome in 455 to the Vandals and the destruction of the Capitol were understood, in this reckoning, to be the ultimate result of the lust of two Roman tyrants, Valentinian and Maximus, and their two crimes against aristocratic women in Rome, a formulation reminiscent of Sextus Tarquinius’s rape of Lucretia and the subsequent revolution that led to the establishment of the Roman republic and dedication of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the same year, 509 bce.96 Perhaps Procopius had these literary and historical parallels in mind, or perhaps he was more generally tapping into the Capitol’s associations with the eternity of empire.97 While we can reconstruct why Procopius included the looting of the Capitol in his account, the source of the information is still unclear. Averil Cameron has pointed out that “there was a considerable reservoir of interest in Latin, Roman history and the Roman past” in the elite circles of sixth-​century ce Constantinople.98 Procopius’s interest in Rome and its monuments was more than bookish. The historian joined Justinian’s general, Belisarius, in Rome a century after these events. For a year, from 536 to 537, Procopius lived in Rome while it was under constant siege by Vittigis, the king of the Goths.99 Procopius learned much about the city, even in the chaos of war. He knew the names of the city gates, the names and in some cases the quality of the roads leading into the countryside, and the names of aqueducts and their courses. He also described the disposition of Rome’s port, how barges were drawn by oxen up the Tiber to Rome, and the distance of the city from the sea—​no doubt Procopius derived this information from local sources.100 Procopius was just as interested in describing the ways in which the city was fractured not only through famine and pestilence but also by religious identity.101 95. Procopius, Wars 3.4.16–​39 (Haury 1:327–​31; tr. Kaldellis 153–​55) = Priscus, Blockley Fr. 30.1 (Blockley 1981–​1983, 2:326–​33). 96.  Livy 1.57.6–​58. The parallels between Lucina and Lucretia are explored in John Fletcher’s 1614 play The Tragedy of Valentinian. See Chernaik 2011, 43–​44. 97.  For Procopius as a conservative, see Kaldellis 2007. 98.  Cameron 2009, 28. Cf. Cameron 2011, 638: “Why would any Greek-​speaker have been interested in the Latin histories of Flavian or Symmachus cos. 485?” 99.  For Procopius’s narrative strategies when writing about the siege of Rome, see Kaldellis 2004, 165–​221. 100.  City gates: Procopius, Wars 5.22.9 (Haury 2:109; tr. Kaldellis 302), 5.22.12 (Haury 2:110; tr. Kaldellis 302), 5.23.1 (Haury 2:112; tr. Kaldellis 303), 5.23.2 (Haury 2:113; tr. Kaldellis 303), 5.23.9 (Haury 2:114; tr. Kaldellis 304). Roads and aqueducts: 6.3.3–​6 (Haury 2:160; tr. Kaldellis 324). Port: 5.26.3–​13 (Haury 2:128–​29; tr. Kaldellis 311–​12). 101.  See Cameron 1985, 188–​206; Cameron 2009, 33–​34.

134  Rome’s Holy Mountain He claims, for example, that he heard aristocrats debating the oracles found in the Sibylline Books. Procopius decided to read them all for himself and quotes from them in Latin.102 He describes the Temple of Janus in the Forum Romanum and how, he supposes, a few “who had in mind the old belief ” secretly attempted to open the doors of the temple. Before Christian times, it used to be the case that the doors of the temple were open in times of war and closed when peace on land and sea was secure. The effort failed, as the doors were impossibly fixed in place.103 He reports a conversation he had with a Roman senator about the origins, legends, and oracular significance of statues in the Temple of Peace.104 He describes seeing the Boat of Aeneas preserved perfectly in a specially built boathouse on the Tiber.105 Finally, Procopius was deeply impressed by the Romans’ urban identity. Despite the privations of war, “the Romans,” he wrote, “love their city above all the men we know, and are eager to protect all their ancestral legacy and preserve it, so that nothing of the ancient glory of Rome may be obliterated.”106 Procopius was thus not only able to see the remains of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus; he was also interested in the ancient monuments still left in the city and the antiquarian lore surrounding them. His statement that the Vandal king Geiseric had spoliated half the Capitol’s roof a century before his own sojourn in a city battered by war is perhaps true enough. What is clear is that Procopius at least heard this information while in Rome. The Romans themselves—​“lovers of their own city” (philopolides)—​had come to terms with the disintegration of their beloved monuments by attributing the city’s destruction to ruthless barbarians.107 It was only, Procopius notes, in the siege of the Mausoleum of Hadrian by the Goths that the command was given to break up the large marble statues that adorned the structure and throw them down on the barbarian attackers.108 The reality was different of course. As noted in ­chapter 3, the Romans had been dismantling their ancient monuments and reusing the materials continuously since antiquity and especially since the late fourth century. It seems to me that Procopius’s statement that the roof of the Capitol “shone as a magnificent and wonderful spectacle” could be one of the last eyewitness observations of the temple’s immense beauty and prodigious decline. Just as 102. Procopius, Wars 5.24.28–​37 (Haury 2:121–​23; tr. Kaldellis 307–​8). 103. Procopius, Wars 5.25.18–​25 (Haury 2:126–​27; tr. Kaldellis 310–​11). 104. Procopius, Wars 8.21.10–​18 (Haury 2:601; tr. Kaldellis 510–​11). For the continued significance of statues as sources of divination in late antiquity, see Athanassiadi 1993. 105. Procopius, Wars 8.22.7–​16 (Haury 2:604–​5; tr. Kaldellis 511–​12). 106. Procopius, Wars 8.22.5 (Haury 2:603–​4; tr. Kaldellis 511). 107.  It was perhaps always a local tradition that barbarians had destroyed the Capitol. This was at least the case in late sixteenth-​century Rome. Flaminio Vacca wondered why more of the temple was not extant. He thought perhaps that the “frenzy of the Goths” was to blame. See Vacca 1818, 28: “Non si trovarono nè cornicioni nè altri segni di detto Tempio; onde io fo giudizio, che per essere tanto accosto alla ripa di detto monte, si siano dirupati da loro stessi; ovvero che dal furore de’ Goti fossero precipitati; puol’ essere ancora, che per qualche accidente non fosse finito.” 108. Procopius, Wars 5.22.12–​25 (Haury 2:110; tr. Kaldellis 302).

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  135 important is Procopius’s account of the value of Rome’s ancient heritage for “lovers of their own city” and his record of the local knowledge they possessed about the topography and monuments from the distant past. Conclusion Remembering Constantine’s rejection of the Capitol was a way for Christians and pagans to come to terms with a world that by the end of the fourth century had changed in almost all ways. Constantine’s vision of the cross and his march against Maxentius were seen, even in the emperor’s lifetime, as a turning point in the history of the empire and its relationship to the divine forces that were ultimately responsible for the empire’s safety.109 For Christians, Constantine’s embrace of Christianity on October 28, 312, marked the fulfillment of a providential view of history. God established the Roman Empire under Augustus to allow the church to flourish, and Constantine’s victory and his patronage of the church marked the apogee of this long process. For pagans, Constantine’s embrace of Christianity signaled the empire’s steep decline. By ignoring traditional rites and abandoning temple worship, Constantine lost the support of the gods and goddesses who for so many years had ensured the empire’s inviolability. We have seen that Constantine’s supposed decision not to climb the Capitoline Hill became part of this debate, even in late antiquity. It is a testament to the success of this image that modern scholars have seen Constantine’s rejection of the Capitol as a decisive moment in the history of the Roman Empire. In the words of François Paschoud, Constantine’s rejection is “a symbol of Constantine’s break with traditional religion and with ancient Rome.”110 Sabine MacCormack similarly stated:  “The precedent which Constantine set had lasting results:  no subsequent emperor performed this exclusively Roman sacrifice.”111 The list could go on. However unlikely, it does not matter so much whether Constantine climbed the Capitoline Hill in 312, 315, or 326. If he did, Constantine would have been enacting a familiar script, performing ritualized movements that many emperors in his shoes had repeated in the past. If he declined, Constantine also would have been performing the righteous humility of a latter-​day Augustus. What this late antique and modern debate tells us is that both Christians and pagans imagined Constantine as standing between two worlds, the Capitol standing as a bridge between two dissonant pasts and only one inevitable Christian future. In this way, the hill became an imaginary location where worldviews could touch and where ruptures in history could continue 109.  Diefenbach 2007, 152–​53. 110.  Paschoud 1971, 353: “On n’a pas tort d’y voir comme le symbole de sa rupture avec la religion traditionnelle et avec l’ancienne Rome.” 111.  MacCormack 1981, 39.

136  Rome’s Holy Mountain to be imagined into the Middle Ages.112 According to the twelfth-​century official chronicle of S. Vincenzo al Volturno, Constantine, upon his baptism by Silvester, “destroyed a host of demon temples and even the famous Capitol itself ” (plurima templa demonum, ispum quoque insigne Capitolium destruxisset).113 In medieval memory, despite the unique report in Procopius’s Wars that the Vandal king Geiseric spoliated the temple, it was Constantine, and not the barbarians, who pulled down the Capitol. The more important question is:  What was gained by remembering Constantine’s abandonment of Rome’s Capitol? Throughout this chapter we have seen that the Capitoline Hill and its ancient traditions continued to be talked about and therefore experienced in different ways. Talking about the Capitoline Hill was a way of hardening different identities within the city of Rome. Within the city the Capitoline Hill was a location with toponyms linking places to historical moments in the distant past. Even as imperial legislation was shuttering temples, pagan traditionalists such as Praetextatus were using the office of the urban prefect to make sure that at least some temples continued to be protected as elements of Rome’s operae publicae. He and others like him, if Jerome is to be believed, were perhaps also staging processions, climbing the Capitoline Hill as crowds of Romans acclaimed them. The Capitoline Hill was also a highly charged literary topos. Because of the Capitol’s association with Rome’s claims of eternal empire, the image of the Capitol and climbing the Capitoline Hill could energize polemics against Christian emperors, a new urban image of the city of Rome that now included imperial stops at St. Peter’s, and an empire that now had a rival capital at Constantinople. In Rome, this anger could be tightly focused on the Capitol. In this way, the Capitol assumed an importance not imagined since the days of the ancestors, when Livy’s Camillus tells the Romans in 390 bce that the Arx and Capitolium are the home of the gods (arx Capitoliumque sedes deorum) or when Suetonius’s Vespasian shoulders building materials for the reconstruction of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus following its destruction in 69 ce.114 For late Roman traditionalists, then, Constantine’s rejection of the Capitol was the singular wrong turn in the history of the empire, a sacrilege with disastrous consequences for the empire as a whole, becoming a way of explaining how a Roman emperor was brazen enough to found a “Second Rome.” This decision turned patriotic history on its head, as if Livy’s Romans had ignored Camillus’s “home of the gods” speech and succeeded in their bid to move the state to Veii (read Constantinople) rather than remain in the holy city of Rome. In this sense, 112.  Zerubavel 2003, 40–​41: “Despite the fact that mnemonic bridging is basically a mental act, we often try to ground it in some tangible reality. Indeed, one of the most effective ways of bridging the gap between noncontiguous points in history is by establishing a connection that allows them to almost literally touch one another.” 113.  John the Monk, Chronicon Vulturnense (Federici 146). 114.  Livy 5.32.7; Suetonius, Vesp. 8.5.

Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill  137 Constantine’s memory collided with a late Roman pride in the city of Rome, its traditions, and its monuments—​a collision also evident, for example, in Jerome’s narration and appropriation of Praetextatus’s quasi-​triumph and unexpected death as a critique of the habits of Rome’s aristocrats. We have seen that despite the late fourth-​century polemics against Constantine for his supposed rejection of the Capitol, the Capitol was not thereby placed out of bounds for others to practice traditional rites on the hill, nor did it put to rest debates about the hill’s significance or irrelevance. For historians writing in the fifth and sixth centuries, as Rome was repeatedly besieged and occupied by barbarian and Byzantine armies, there was no better way to emotionally engage an audience than to supply snapshots of the Capitol damaged and in danger. As Procopius put it in the passage cited above, the Capitol’s blazing roof tiles “shone as a magnificent and wonderful spectacle,” a fact that made the damage to the Capitol all the more tragic, a turn of events explicable only by the Romans’ attribution of it to the furor of barbarians.

5

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance

B

y the end of December 384 ce, the consul-​elect Vettius Agorius Praetextatus and Pope Damasus were dead and the urban prefect Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and Bishop Ambrose of Milan had debated the necessity of pagan institutions (the so-​called Altar of Victory debate), and by the summer of the following year, both Jerome and Augustine had left the city for good. All of these men would play a role in how the city of Rome and the Capitol would be remembered in subsequent centuries. They came of age in an empire that was pagan.1 Some of them lived long enough to see this world shattered and the old traditions subjected to mockery. In a crowning moment at the height of a singular career, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus was perhaps the last Roman official to publicly climb the Capitoline Hill just before he died, a decision and a spectacle that angered Jerome, while Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and his defense of pagan tradition, including the Capitol’s role in the distant past, angered Ambrose, Prudentius, and others. It was not just the pagan past that was under scrutiny. In establishing his own dominance in the face of Christian factions, Damasus had almost single-​handedly established the officially sanctioned cult of the Roman martyrs through his own poetry and patronage of the catacombs associated with them located outside the city walls.2 With the increasing density of public and private foundations of churches and martyr memorials inside and outside the city, Rome’s past was likewise enriched by an alternate version of Roman history.3 For Christians, the city of Rome told stories that linked Rome’s traditional places of memory to the bloody heroism of Christian martyrs. Like the structure of DNA, there were parallel and intertwined histories and associated places of memory in the city for Christians and pagans. In the coming decades, especially following Alaric’s occupation of Rome in August 410, it was the loss of the assumed permanence of the pagan past and the invention of a triumphalist Christian memory culture that created the conditions for a re-​evaluation of the traditions on Rome’s 1.  See Watts 2015. 2.  Sághy 2000. Imperial and ecclesiastical patronage of the Roman cult of the martyrs had been developing at least since the reign of Constantine: Curran 2000, 116–​57; Pietri 1976, 1:125–​34. On the early medieval reception of Damasus, see now Maskarinec 2015b. 3.  For the rise and persistence of private church foundations in Rome at this time, see Bowes 2008, 66–​103; Hillner 2007; Maier 1995.

139

140  Rome’s Holy Mountain Capitol and articulation of new understandings of the Capitol as a place, a concept, and a word.4 We have already seen hints of this reorientation of the past. Beginning in the late fourth century, Constantine’s legacy came under attack by members of the pagan aristocracy of Rome. Constantine, according to these revanchist legends, had doomed the empire though his apostasy, that is, his abandonment of the Capitol and decision to found Constantinople. For these pagan critics as well as other less polemically minded antiquarians, the Capitol functioned nostalgically as a bridge to a glorious and increasingly distant past. In the late fourth century, using the Capitol and talking about its past significance became an assertion of a Rome-​based identity at a time, from the fifth century on, when the western empire was facing organized barbarian polities that were successfully moving through and seizing Roman territory. It is easy to see why the Capitol often surfaced in assertions and critiques of Roman identity. The Capitol’s role in the history of the Roman people was rich with moments of patriotic significance. Stories about Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius Capitolinus were meant to teach the Romans that they were a people sanctioned by the heavens to rule a world empire. Beginning in the second century, however, Christians began to formulate polemics against Roman traditions, including those involving the Capitol. Christian apologists, from Tertullian to Augustine, passed on to one another a set of arguments that subjected the Capitol’s long history to intense criticism. In doing so, they not only attempted to demolish the Capitol’s significance; but by repeating the stories and adding at times fascinating commentary on them, the apologists also showed the Capitol’s persisting significance in the formation of a Christian intellectual culture that was both dependent on and at odds with the pagan past. This and the following chapter will follow how the roles played by the Capitol in Roman history were used by Christian apologists toward a new Christian history of the Roman people. Here, I  will take up one of the main problems that Christians had to come to terms with: what could be learned from the Capitol’s ominous beginnings and its famous deliverance in the Gallic siege of 390 bce. Then in ­chapter 6, I will turn to the opposite problem: what Christians could learn from the Capitol’s cycle of destructions and restorations. The Capitol and Memories of Persecution In Roman culture, the Capitol was a holy mountain, chosen by Jupiter Optimus Maximus as his terrestrial home.5 From here, Jupiter protected the Romans as a chosen people destined for world dominion. In this formulation, the Capitol 4.  This chapter leans on insights in Assmann 2011, 1–​14, 281–​324, 333–​43. 5. Cicero, Verr. 2.4.129; Vergil, Aen. 8.351–​52; Livy 5.39.12. See the introduction.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  141 could be universalized. In a culture that projected the future signs of empire into the distant past, Rome’s Capitol testified not just to the destiny of a booming city state in the sixth century bce but increasingly by the end of the first century bce to the destiny of all the empire’s inhabitants.6 Through the empire-​wide diffusion of the cult of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the implantation of capitolia in cities particularly in the west, there was a Capitol for everyone. But there were dissenting voices. Not everyone in the empire identified themselves with the state cult of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the cult’s physical manifestations in the form of inscriptions and temples. By the end of the second century ce, in the reign of Septimius Severus (193–​211), Christian intellectuals were, in W.H.C. Frend’s phrase, “coming out of the shadows” and asserting an identity in opposition to the majority culture and pagan traditions of the present and past.7 Christians, in fact, claimed that they constituted a race, a people historically and culturally distinct from, and superior to, all other peoples.8 This Christian minority devoted itself to the rhetorical demolition of the Capitol’s universalizing importance. This process began in the third century not in Rome itself but across the Mediterranean Sea in the provincial capitals of Carthage and Alexandria in North Africa and Egypt, Caesarea in Palestine, and Nicomedia in Asia Minor. One reason that Christians targeted the Capitol was the association of local capitolia with Christian persecution. In 250, the emperor Decius (249–​251) used major urban temples, including the capitolia of Rome and Carthage, to demand sacrifice and thereby demonstrate loyalty to the state. Across the empire, Romans of all ages, classes, and statuses were ordered to present themselves or to send a household representative to a major temple and to sign a certification (libellus) that they “have always been constant in sacrificing and showing piety to the gods.” After the certification was publicly read out, the final stricture mandated confirmation of the declaration by pouring a libation on an altar and by the consumption of ritual meat in front of statues of local divinities and the diui, the deified emperors of the past. Local commissions were established to manage this effort. No place was too remote. The evidence is patchy, but it does show an effort to enact the decree in all corners of the empire, from Spain, Gaul, Italy, Sicily, and North Africa to Asia Minor, the Near East, and Egypt.9 One of their tasks was to root out dissidents, most especially recalcitrant Christians.

6. Thein 2014. 7.  Frend 1984, 272–​306. 8.  Johnson 2006; Kimber Buell 2005. 9.  This section is largely dependent on CAH 12, 2d ed., 625–​35 (G. Clarke); Ando 2000, 206–​9; Rives 1999; and Voisin 2000.

142  Rome’s Holy Mountain For how Decius’s decree was enacted in Rome, we can turn to the writings and correspondence of Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage.10 Fortunately, in just one place, Cyprian suggests that the Capitol was the ultimate location for sacrifice and certification. Christians, he states, willingly climbed the Capitol to sacrifice, in effect sacrificing their own souls. More telling is a letter addressed to Cyprian by Celerinus, a fellow Carthaginian Christian living in Rome. He reports that his sister, Numeria, had walked in procession on the Via Sacra up to the Three Fates, a set of statues intimately associated with the Curia Senatus in the Forum Romanum. Here, Numeria had a change of heart and turned around. Instead of sacrificing, she bought a certificate.11 Though the letter does not describe Numeria’s final destination, she would have passed the Three Fates and climbed the Capitoline Hill. She was hardly alone in her refusal to carry out the demands. Others, including Celerinus, had been interrogated and imprisoned, only to be released a short time later. In fact, it seems to be the case that the only Christians to die in Rome did so not because they were executed but primarily because they were unable to stand up physically to the conditions of confinement. One of those who died in this way was Pope Fabian (236–​250).12 It is difficult to imagine that the Capitol was the only location where the commissions established the mechanisms for certification. If so, however, this would help us understand why the process apparently took months to conclude. On successive days, hundreds would be obliged to line up on the Via Sacra, wearing garlands and accompanied by animals for sacrifice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the commissions operated for only a year.13 Though abandoned by Decius, the policy was revived by his successors. Some fifty years later, when Diocletian (284–​305) and his co-​emperors sought specifically to root out Christians through a series of edicts, it seems that the Capitol was again chosen as the location for sacrifice. Perhaps like Pope Fabian, Pope Marcellinus (295–​303) climbed the Capitol at the beginning of 303. Unlike Fabian, Marcellinus reportedly did sacrifice; he also burned the sacred scriptures in Capitolio.14 The Christians who opted out of the duty to make sacrifice at Rome’s Capitol (or before the capitolia and other temples throughout the empire) thereby rejected Roman ritual norms and the temples associated with them. For Christian churchmen like Cyprian it was the souls of Christians who participated in the

10.  E.g., Cyprian, Ep. 59.13.3; De Lapsis 8.24. Recent discussion of Cyprian, the Decian persecution, and these passages: Brent 2010, 225–​33. Discussion of the variety of places where Christians were subjected to Roman justice: Aubert 2010. 11. Cyprian, De Lapsis 8; Ep. 21.3.2 (tr. Clarke 105). See the detailed commentary at Clarke 1984, 312–​30. 12.  CAH 12, 634 (Clarke). 13.  Rives 1999, 152–​54. 14.  MGH AA 9, 196. The detail in Capitolio is supplied by the fifth-​century Liber Genealogus Anni CCCCLII and might well be fabricated. No other source tells of the location of the apostasy. Cf. Augustine, Contra litteras Petiliani 2.92 [202] (Petschenig 2:125): “qui cum tura praedicerent incensis codicibus dominicis primus Marcellinus, episcopus Romanorum qui fuit.” See Barnes 1981, 38 and n. 100.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  143 certification process that were most worrying. Climbing the Capitoline Hill led to the recognition of a category of in-​between Christians, the lapsi, those who had stumbled and fallen. Cyprian’s reportage, localized as it is in Carthage, is apparently corroborated elsewhere. Written in the summer of 250, a letter from the Church of Rome to the Church of Carthage states that those who had been forced to climb the steps (ascendentes) for sacrifice—​an oblique reference to Rome’s Capitol—​were “separated from us, but we have not forsaken them.”15 In these cases, penance was required for the lapsed, not excommunication. Capitolia were thus sources of pollution for Christians. Dating from the beginning of the fourth century, one of the canons from the Council of Elvira in Spain states: “No Christian should climb the capitolium and watch idol sacrifice, as the pagans do” (prohibendum ne quis Christianus, ut gentiles, ad idolum Capitolii causa sacrificandi ascendat et uideat). Making sacrifice and even standing in the presence of this local capitolium were the same crime and required, according to the canon, ten years of penance.16 At the end of the fourth century, Pacian, the bishop of Barcelona, reported that Christians who did sacrifice in the Decian persecution were denounced by other Christians with the nicknames “apostate or Capitoline or Syndrene.”17 To be called a “Capitoline” was clearly a slimy insinuation that still held meaning well into late antiquity. Indeed, Augustine was still calling to mind, at the beginning of the fifth century, “what had actually happened on the Capitol of the Romans” as opposed to what the Donatists “had made up” about Catholic bishops in the aftermath of the Diocletianic persecutions.18 Like the other terms in Pacian’s list, a “Capitoline” was a lapsed Christian, an outcast to be removed from the Christian people, and possibly also a source of contagion. According to Tertullian, places such as the Capitol and the Temple of Serapis were in themselves polluted by what was done there, namely, sacrifices and the adoration of idols. In his words, “Contamination contaminates us.”19 For some Christians, such as Tertullian and his community of Christians living in North Africa at the end of the second century, the Capitol was a particularly repellent danger zone where innumerable pagan shrines and statues were part 15. Cyprian, Ep. 8.2.3 (tr. Clarke 69). See Clarke for discussion of dating (1984, 204) and commentary (1984, 212 n. 20). 16.  Can. 59: “Prohibendum ne quis christianus, ut gentiles, ad idolum Capitolii causa sacrificandi ascendat et uideat; quod si fecerit, pari crimine teneatur: si fuerit fidelis, post decem annos acta poenitentia recipiatur.” The Latin is not quite clear and has led to attempts at emendation: von Hefele 1907, 1.1:255. Elvira is famously difficult to date, and the canons themselves are even more so, as they are apparently part of a collection assembled over a period of time. Canon 59 was not part of the original set of canons, as it contradicts Canon 1, which demands the stiffer penalty of lifelong excommunication for those caught sacrificing: Meigne 1975. For a recent reassessment of the scholarship since Meigne, see Ramos-​Lissón 2005. 17. Pacian, Ep. 2.3 (tr. Hanson 29). Hanson noted that all three terms were synonymous with lapsus. Discussion: Beard, North, and Price 1998, 1:240–​41. 18. Augustine, Liber de unico baptismo contra Petilianum 16(28) (Petschenig 3:30–​31): “an uero quod de foro Abtungensium fictum fuerat, ab istis accusaretur; et quod in Capitolio Romanorum factum fuerat, taceretur?” Here, Augustine is discussing the false accusations against Bishop Felix of Abtunga. He was cleared of charges of apostasy. 19. Tertullian, De Spectaculis 8: “de contaminatis contaminamur.”

144  Rome’s Holy Mountain of the poisonous environment of Roman cities.20 For others, such as those living in the aftermath of the Decian and Diocletianic persecutions, the Capitol functioned like a borderline that separated Christians from the majority pagan society. The Capitol was, and was imagined to be, a location where Christian heroes demonstrated the strength of their faith—​these became esteemed as confessores. Or the Capitol became a location of apostasy, a place where lapsed Christians failed to resist.21 Talking about the Capitol, then, was a way of localizing apostasy, the worst choice a Christian individual could make, and forced apostasy, the worst harm that the state could inflict on individual Christians. The Caput in the Capitol For Greek and Roman authors, the past had been written, understood, and valued as segmented into a series of useful anecdotes (exempla). This segmentation of the past made each singular, potentially didactic, episode so particularly inviting for Christian cross-​examination.22 Just like their pagan predecessors, Christian intellectuals, from Tertullian to Basil of Caesarea and Ambrose of Milan, had a readily accessible stock of exempla from the past.23 Christian intellectuals mined Greek and Latin literature to interrogate history, mythology, and customs, showing that the Greeks and the Romans held erroneous, even ridiculous, beliefs.24 In the process, they used the Capitol to rewrite the past, and they did so in apologetic treatises.25 Here, these critics, many of them recent converts, answered charges made against Christians in part by focusing their incisive wit on pagan traditions, including those centered on the Capitol that had come together at least since the third century bce. A thousand years later, around the beginning of the third century ce and stretching into the fifth, Christian apologists subjected these traditions to criticism.26 The results of their investigations into the past show an intense ambivalence that was expressed, one the one hand, by the need to collate and catalog the past and, on the other, by the obligation to simplify and falsify the claims by which the past had traditionally been understood. The Christian apologists were just as interested in the origins of place names as their pagan contemporaries. The Capitol’s name, Capitolium, was always 20.  Watts 2015, 17–​36. 21. Cyprian, Ep. 54.13; De Lapsis 8.24. For discussion of the problem of the lapsi, see Lane Fox 1987, 450–​92. 22.  On exemplarity in Roman historiography, the critical literature is vast, but see Chaplin 1999; Fornara 1983, 91–​141; Roller 2009; Vasta 2014. 23.  Barnes 1976; Carlson 1948; Pétré 1940. 24.  Burrows 1988 and Van Haeperen 2005 provide an introduction and further references on Christian apologists and their uses of Roman history. 25.  Fraschetti 1999b; see now Grig 2009 and Grig 2012, 139. 26.  I will limit my discussion to those stories that Christian apologists explicitly located on the Capitol. An important target of Christian polemics was Romulus’s establishment of the Asylum:  Bruggisser 1999. We know from ancient sources that the Asylum was established on the Capitol, e.g., Tacitus, Hist. 3.71.3. See LTUR 1:130 (Wiseman).

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  145 enigmatic.27 When the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was under construction at the end of the sixth century bce, workers discovered an intact human head, a caput, while digging the foundations. In Livy’s version of the tale, this caput intimated that Rome was the “citadel of the empire and head of the world” (arcem eam imperii caputque rerum).28 It was this prodigious caput that lent the hill its name: the Capitol (Capitolium) was the Place of the Head (caput).29 Whose head this was and why it was there was discussed by Rome’s first historian, Q.  Fabius Pictor. In his Annals, written in Greek circa 216 bce, Pictor suggests that the head had belonged to a recently deceased Etruscan and that the name of the hill was derived from this man’s name.30 This was the Head of Olus or Aulus (Latin: caputoli or caputauli).31 The debates on these matters were dense in antiquity. For our purposes, it is significant that at least one version of the story continued to circulate in the rhetorical schools of late antique North Africa. Writing at the beginning of the fourth century ce, Arnobius of Sicca Veneria (El Kef, Tunisia), a rhetor and recent convert, claimed that everyone knew the story of the discovery of the head and the bloody circumstances behind it: “Who is there among men who does not know that the Capitolium of the ruling people is the tomb of Olus of Vulci? Who is there, I say, who does not know that there rolled out of the very base of the foundations the head of a man, which not very much earlier had received the rites of burial, either on its own without the other parts of the body (for so some relate) or together with all the limbs?”32 According to Arnobius, the story could be found in “Fabius” (Q. Fabius Pictor) and three others he mentions.33 These sources apparently related the circumstances of the murder and reported the precise find-​spot of the head and the place on the citadel (arx) where it was subsequently hidden from the public. For the prophecy to work, Arnobius surmises, it was believed that the decapitated head had to stay on the Capitol and “be concealed in careful obscurity” (curiosa obscuritate conclusum).34 Arnobius reports these details in his Adversus Nationes, an attack on pagan cult practices written in the opening years of the Diocletianic persecution. The 27.  Moralee 2013; Vout 2012. 28.  Livy 1.55.5–​65. Cf. Livy 5.54.7; Pliny, NH 28.4.15. Rome as caput rerum: Ovid, Met. 15.736: “iamque caput rerum Romanam intrauerat urbem.” 29. Varro, Ling. 5.41; Livy 1.55.6; Zonoras 7.11. 30.  For Q. Fabius Pictor, see Cornell 2013, 1:160–​78 (E.H. Bispham and T.J. Cornell). 31.  The derivation of the word capitolium from caput oli/​auli is false. For a discussion of the story and main scholarly interpretations, see Borgeaud 1987; Cornell 2013, 3:46–​47 (E.H. Bispham and T.J. Cornell); Engels 2007, 333–​38. Thein (2014, 294–​301) doubts the attribution of Arnobius’s version to Fabius or Antias. 32. Arnobius, Adversus nationes 6.7 = Q. Fabius Pictor F30 (Cornell 2:102; tr. 2:103). On Arnobius, see Fragu 2010, xi–​xlii, 117–​21; Simmons 1995. Note that Simmons 1995, 6–​22, rejects the appellation of Arnobius as an “apologist.” 33.  Arnobius identifies Sammonicus, Granius, Valerius Antias, and Fabius as sources. Bispham and Cornell suggest that Arnobius probably had only second-​or thirdhand knowledge of authors such as Q. Fabius Pictor. See Cornell 2013, 1:47–​48. 34. Arnobius, Adversus nationes 6.7 = Q. Fabius Pictor F30 (Cornell 2:102; tr. 2:103).

146  Rome’s Holy Mountain story of the caput in the Capitol helped Arnobius articulate the allegation that “you,” pagans, “worship the dead in place of immortal gods” and that therefore “an inexpiable affront has come to the deities whose shrines and temples have been raised over the tombs of the dead.”35 Arnobius summed up the significance of his inclusion of the caput story with the statement that Rome, “the greatest state and worshipper of all deities did not blush when giving a name to the temple, to call it the Capitolium after the head [caput] of Olus, rather than the name of Jupiter.”36 The origins of the Capitol’s name, if properly remembered and understood, thus revealed that the place was nothing other than a tomb for a forgotten, dismembered, and decapitated mortal from a city in Etruria. Though Arnobius had no systematic critique of the Capitol and its associations, the thematic focus of his attacks was consistent—​and derivative. Like the apologists before him, Arnobius mocked Roman theological ideas and cultic practices, but unlike them he used the Capitol to do so. It was a big target. Pagans asserted, according to Arnobius, that Jupiter was a supreme divinity because “he is called and held to be Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, Jupiter Best and Greatest,” and because “we,” pagans, “have built for him the most august houses and immense capitolia.”37 But it was not man-​made buildings, no matter how opulent, that made a divinity. How, Arnobius asks, could Jupiter be a supreme divinity if so many stories asserted that Jupiter was born from a mother? Indeed, how could it be that there was a time when Rome’s greatest divinity was quite literally a crybaby?38 It was therefore foolish to honor Jupiter with “immense capitolia” for he had been mortal, like the owner of the prodigious caput that gave the hill its name. Even if one accepted that Jupiter was a divinity, others claimed that a cursory investigation could prove that it was impossible for Jupiter to have chosen the Capitoline Hill as his home. Crete was both his place of birth and the location of his tomb. Writing two generations before Arnobius, Tertullian asks why Jupiter would favor Rome while allowing his own birthplace, Crete, to fall under Roman dominion. Indeed, Crete should have been the head of the empire: “It stands to reason that [Jupiter] would have placed his own tomb above the Capitol, and ruled instead from the land which held his ashes?”39 L. Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius, Arnobius’s student and, like his teacher, a convert,40 put it this way in 35. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.6.2: “Nonne patet et promptum est aut pro dis immortalibus mortuos uos colere aut inexpiabilem fieri numinibus contumeliam, quorum delubra et templa mortuorum superlata sunt bustis.” 36. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.7.5 (Cornell 2:102; tr. 2:103):  “nec erubuit ciuitas maxima et numinum cunctorum cultrix, cum uocabulum templo daret, ex Oli capite Capitolium quam ex nomine Iouio nuncupare.” 37. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 1.34.1: “cum a nobis et Iuppiter nominetur et optimus habeatur et maximus cumque illi augustissimas sedes et Capitolia constituerimus immania.” 38. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 1.34.4–​5. For Arnobius’s focus on the “anthropopathic” features of pagan gods and goddesses, see Simmons 1995, 13–​16, 252–​56. 39. Tertullian, Ad Nationes 2.17: “nonne omni capitolio sepulchrum suum praeposuisset, ut illa potius terra regnaret, quae cineres Iouis tegit?” Cf. Tertullian, Apol. 25. 40. Jerome, De viris illustribus 80, states that Lactantius was Arnobius’s student. The Divine Institutes were probably written in 308/​309 in North Africa. See Barnes 1981, 13; Barnes 2011, 176–​78; DePalma Digeser 2000.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  147 his Divine Institutes: “So how can god be alive in one place and dead in another, and have a temple in one place and a tomb in another? The Romans need to realize that their Capitol, the capital [summum caput], that is, of all their state religion is simply an empty tomb [inane monimentum].”41 Tertullian, Arnobius, and Lactantius sought to reduce the Capitol’s importance. For Tertullian, it was an embarrassing display (ambitus), and for Lactantius, it was a memorial to nothing (inane monimentum), a sign flushed of significance. However, in reducing the Capitol’s importance the apologists likewise had to affirm what had long been asserted in Roman historiography: the Capitol’s absolute centrality in Roman religious belief and practice.42 It had to be, as Lactantius wrote, the “capital of state religion” (summum caput religionum publicarum), so that the Capitol could stand in for all that was both praiseworthy and ridiculous in Roman history and religion. A Problem of Mercy: The Siege of the Gauls in 390 bce The centrality of the Capitol in the promise of Rome’s world dominion was deeply embedded in Roman public memory.43 Rome’s success in holding the Capitol in 390 bce, when the hill was surrounded by Gauls and the rest of the city was smoldering in ashes, was attributable to the Romans’ piety and the mercy of the Roman gods.44 The story was a source of patriotic optimism. Writing about the doom that followed the destruction of the Capitol in 69 ce, Tacitus notes: “Even though the Gauls had captured the city [in 390 bce], the empire had survived because Jupiter’s house was intact [integra].”45 However, in 69 ce “Jupiter’s house” had been consumed in a terrible fire. For some, it was a sign that the empire, too, was doomed. Like the intact head (caput integrum) discovered on the site of the future Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus,46 the integrity of the building itself (integra sede Iouis), according to Tacitus, also pointed to Rome’s destiny as mistress of the world. Head, temple, and empire—​all of them were folded into, and signaled by, the word capitolium.47 For Christian apologists such as Minucius Felix, a jurist from North Africa and a convert writing in the last quarter of the second century, this story was just 41. Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.11.49:  “Quomodo igitur potest deus alibi esse uiuus alibi mortuus, alibi habere templum, alibi sepulcrum? Sciant ergo Romani, Capitolium suum, id est summum caput religionum publicarum, nihil esse aliud quam inane monimentum.” For an introduction to the Divine Institutes, see Bowen and Garnsey 2003, 1–​54. 42. Thein 2014. 43.  Schwegler 1853–​1876, 3:256–​60, lists the ancient testimonia. See Horsfall 1981. 44.  See Barton and Boyarin 2016. 45. Tacitus, Hist. 4.54:  “captam olim a Gallis urbem, sed integra Iouis sede mansisse imperium.” Tacitus returned to the comparison with the Gallic siege in Ann. 15.43.1–​5, where he stated that Nero’s fire in 64 ce did worse damage than the Gauls did. See Edwards 1996, 52. 46.  Livy 1.55.5–​6. 47.  Borgeaud 1987, 86. See ­chapter 6 for further discussion of the destruction of the Capitol in 69 ce.

148  Rome’s Holy Mountain what a pagan would tell to demonstrate the Romans’ dedication to religio. The Romans, Munucius has a pagan named Caecilius say, “fortify the city of Rome by observance of rites [sacrorum religionibus], by chaste virgins, and by the many offices and names of priests.”48 In the siege of the Gauls, when there was little hope, the Romans, according to the same character, were “armed by the cultivation of religio” (cultu religionis armati). Yet the Romans could also be critical of their own traditions.49 Though it could be that religio played a role in the deliverance of the Capitol, some did not hesitate to add that the real salvation of the city was a large sum of gold—​a thousand pounds’ worth of ransom that was paid to the Gauls.50 Others could use the episode in a more direct attack. Tacitus suggests that the emperor Nero, by allegedly setting fire to Rome in 64 ce, managed to accomplish what the barbarian Gauls had not.51 The Christian apologists took their use and critique of this episode in a different direction. In their framing of the distant past, they appropriated these venerable stories, often using them to talk not of Roman patriotism or religio but of the pathetic credulity of the Romans. In his Apology, Tertullian points out that Romans were victorious on the battlefield even before the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was constructed and that Rome suffered shameful military disasters after the temple was dedicated: “Rome, even when it was a woodland thicket, predated some of its own divinities, and it became a kingdom before the great frippery [ambitus] of the Capitol was built.”52 Even after the Capitol was built, Jupiter failed to safeguard Rome. Taking up the damning alternate version of the siege that goes back at least as far as Ennius, Tertullian has the Gauls victorious in spite of Rome’s universal piety: “All your gods were worshipped by all at the time when the Senones [Gauls] occupied the famous Capitol.”53 Others mocked the beloved story that a gaggle of geese—​fowl that were sacralized and dedicated to Juno—​had played a key role in the battle for the hill. In Livy’s version, the attackers were stealthily making their way up the hill in the middle of the night. Before all was lost, the geese honked, rousing Marcus Manlius and then the rest of the Roman defenders, thereby averting disaster. None of the Roman men, women, and children holed up on the hill suffered a 48.  Minucius Felix, Octavius 6: “urbem muniunt sacrorum religionibus, castis uirginibus, multis honoribus ac nominibus sacerdotum.” 49.  See Burrows 1988, 221, on Tertullian and his use of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum. 50.  Livy 5.48.8–​5.49; Suetonius, Tiberius 3; Eutropius, Breviarium 1.20; Jerome, Ep. 130. 51. Tacitus, Ann. 15.43.1–​5; Edwards 1996, 52. 52. Tertullian, Apol. 26.2: “prior est quibusdam deis suis siluestris Roma, ante regnauit quam tantum ambitum Capitolii extrueret.” 53. Tertullian, Apol. 40.8: “omnes dei uestri ab omnibus colebantur, cum ipsum Capitolium Senones occupauerunt.” Cf. Ennius, Annals 227–​28 (Skutsch 90): “Qua Galli furtim noctu summa arcis adorti | Moenia concubia uigilesque repente cruentant.” For the existence of this alternate version of events, see Skutsch 1953; Skutsch 1978; Skutsch 1985, 407–​8, 610 n. 4. For Tertullian’s attestation of this version, see Barnes 1971, 204–​5; Barnes 1976, 12–​ 13; Clarke 1967. Barnes argues that Tertullian knew Ennius. Pétré 1940, 58, missed the significance of Tertullian’s report by stating that here the author was exaggerating.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  149 single injury. In Livy’s words, the fateful honking was Rome’s “deliverance” (res saluti fuit).54 In the aftermath, the senate decreed that the Capitoline Games (Ludi Capitolini) should be held “because Jupiter Optimus Maximus had watched over his own house [suam sedem] and the citadel of the Roman people at this critical moment.”55 By the late fourth century ce, there were at least two possible Christian readings of the tale. One was the continuing rejection of Roman claims of exceptionalism evident in Tertullian and Arnobius. Arnobius asks why Rome’s tutelary divinities would need animals to help defend their temples and statues.56 Hence, the Roman gods and goddesses were impotent fictions. Similarly, in 384, Bishop Ambrose of Milan quipped: “See the type of protectors Roman temples have! Where was Jupiter then? Or was it the case that he was in the habit of talking through a goose?”57 The other way of reading the story, which Ambrose would also adopt elsewhere, was an elegant appropriation of the divinely inspired goose, a way of interpreting pagan history as revelatory of God’s providence. In his Hexaemeron, a series of sermons on the six days of creation, Bishop Basil of Caesarea writes that the hand of the Christian God was at work in all nature’s creatures, even the Capitoline geese. It was not Jupiter talking through the goose but God: “What vigilance in geese! With what sagacity they divine secret dangers! Did they not once upon a time save the imperial city?”58 Repeating a particularly late antique version of the story, according to which the Gauls advanced to the summit of the Capitol through tunnels, Basil asks: “When enemies were advancing by subterranean passages to possess themselves of Rome’s citadel [akran], did not geese announce the danger?”59 In his own sermons on the six days of creation, Ambrose, writing some ten years after Basil’s Hexaemeron and relying heavily on it, agreed with Basil, but he could not resist adding his own biting commentary: “What you rule, Rome, you rightly owe to the [geese]: your gods were sleeping, while the geese were standing guard.”60 In sum, it was the discovery of the fateful caput on the hill that marked the city for worldwide dominion, and it was the preservation of the Capitol from the Gauls through the timely honking of a goose that proved that the hill was Jupiter’s house. Both stories could be flipped, to show, first, that the Romans built temples 54. Livy 5.47. 55.  Livy 5.50.4:  “ludi Capitolini fierent, quod Iuppiter optimus maximus suam sedem atque arcem populi Romani in re trepida tutatus esset.” For Livy’s figuration of the fate of Manlius as a tragedy, see Jaeger 1997, 57–​93. 56. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.20. For a discussion of different versions and their topographical significance, see Wiseman 1979; Ziolkowski 1993. 57. Ambrose, Ep. 18.5:  “en quales templa Romana praesules habent. Ubi tunc erat Iuppiter? An in ansere loquebatur?” 58.  Basil of Caesarea, Hexaemeron 8.7 (77E) (Giet 466; tr. NPNF, adapted). Basil’s method: Lim 1990. For the problems of dating these sermons, see Rousseau 1994, 360–​63. 59.  Basil of Caesarea, Hexaemeron 8.7 (77E) (Giet 466; tr. NPNF, adapted). The tradition that the Gauls had attempted to penetrate the defenses of the Capitol through tunnels (cuniculi) is also attested in Servius, Aen. 8.625. For references, see Schwegler 1853–​1876, 3:258. 60. Ambrose, Exameron 5.13.44 (Schenkl 172): “merito illis debes, Roma, quod regnas. dii tui dormiebant et uigilabant anseres.”

150  Rome’s Holy Mountain to honor dead men, not in honor of the deeds of lightning-​wielding immortals; second, that the Romans wrongly attributed the true reason for their success, namely, human valor (uirtus), to religious scruples (religio); and third, that God himself played a role, even at times a merciful one, in Roman history. “A City in the Habit of Being on Fire”: The Gothic Sack of Rome in 410 ce Nearly eight hundred years after the Gauls left Rome in 390 bce, the Visigoths, led by Alaric, occupied the city for three days or so beginning August 24, 410 ce.61 The siege of the Gauls and the integrity (or not) of the Capitol became directly relevant to Christians and pagans as a way of weighing the significance of the Gothic siege in 410. For, even if modern historians can now agree that the sack was more or less “genteel,”62 the event was, at least for some, a “symbolic enormity,” a “psychological trauma” that led to a search for its true meaning.63 To those searching for the logic of catastrophes such as this the root cause had to be impiety. The question was, Whose impiety impelled Alaric to besiege the city, Christian or pagan? Pagans insisted that the gods and goddesses had left Rome to its fate in the absence of worship, and they had good reason to think so.64 In the early 390s, the emperor Theodosius issued a new series of edicts meant to renew and restate restrictions against pagan practices, including sacrifice, divination, and temple worship, especially by imperial officials.65 Even if the legislation had a limited effect locally, the imperial policy emboldened Christians at the turn of the fifth century to claim, like Prudentius, that Rome, in her old age, had finally embraced Christ, inaugurating a new age of peace, or, like Augustine, that the God of Israel was smashing the pagans into oblivion.66 For Christians, the end of the fourth century was therefore, in Robert Markus’s words, an “age of achievement.”67 The fall of Rome to the Goths in August 410, however, called into question Christians claims that the present age was better than it had been before. In an effort to come to terms with the implications of the Gothic siege, Christians looked to the distant past. On the one hand, they found in Roman history that catastrophe was a running theme, and, on the other, they found in the Old Testament the certainty that God repeatedly punished even the righteous often for reasons beyond human understanding.68 In this section, we will focus in particular on how the exemplum of the Gallic siege helped 61.  For the literary accounts of the 410 sack, see Mathisen 2013. 62.  “Genteel”: Mathisen 2013, 90. Heather 2005, 227: “one of the most civilized sacks of a city ever witnessed.” 63.  Fredouille 1998, 439–​40; Kulikowski 2007, 178–​84; McLynn 2013, 323; Zwierlein 1978, 46–​47. 64.  E.g., Zosimus 5.41.6–​7 (Paschoud 3:62; tr. Ridley 121). See ­chapter 6. 65.  CTh 16.10.10–​11; Watts 2015, 207. 66. Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.523, 2.655–​56; Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.14(21). 67.  Markus 1970, 27–​31. 68.  De Bruyn 1993; Salzman 2013a.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  151 Augustine think through the implications of the Gothic siege. By comparing the Gallic and Gothic sieges, Augustine came to see the Gothic siege as exemplifying God’s mercy, but he did so only as his vision of what took place at the end of August 410 became more and more detailed with time and the circulation of more comprehensive information. Only after having delivered two sermons that addressed the Gothic siege in the months directly thereafter, Augustine first linked the two sieges together almost a year later.69 In a sermon preached at Carthage in June 411 on the occasion of the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul, thus almost a year after the siege, the bishop devoted the second half of his time on the pulpit that day to the questions raised by Alaric’s occupation of Rome.70 He begins this segment of his sermon by making “people” grumble about the efficacy of Rome’s cult of the apostles and their apparent inability to deliver the city’s inhabitants and its buildings from worldly evils: “Rome is suffering such enormous evils; where are the memorials of the apostles?”71 The grumbling continued: How could it be that the city where Peter, Paul, Lawrence, and dozens of other holy martyrs were buried was “devastated, afflicted, crushed, burnt; death stalking the streets in so many ways, by hunger, by pestilence, by the sword”?72 Augustine’s response is sobering: “In Peter himself the flesh was temporary, and aren’t you willing for the stones of Rome to be temporary?” Peter now reigns with the Lord, he continues, while his body “is lying in some place or another.”73 The destruction was God’s will, Augustine points out, and it was not for mortals to know why, just as a slave should never question the intentions of his master: to a Christian, nothing more needed saying.74 But for grumbling pagans, the challenge would be different. It seems clear that pagans had been harassing Christians, pointing out that the end of sacrifice had led to Rome’s suffering. They, according to Augustine, needed evidence “from their own histories” (historia eorum). “As their own history relates,” claims Augustine, warming up to his task, “their own literature [litterae ipsorum] relates, this is the third time the city of Rome has been burnt.”75 The first time was when the Gauls occupied the city, “so that only the Capitoline Hill was left.” The emperor Nero, the “slave of idols, the slayer of apostles,” was responsible for the second time in 64 ce, and then came the third time in 410. He ends the thought with what amounts to a joke: “Why do you like growling against God for a city that has 69. Augustine, Serm. Denis 24 (September 25, 410) and Serm. 81 (end of 410). See Fredouille 1998, 440–​41. 70. Augustine, Serm. 296 (Morin 1:401–​12); all translations are from Hill 1994, 204–​16. 71. Augustine, Serm. 296.6 (Morin 1:405): “tanta mala Roma patitur: ubi sunt memoriae apostolorum.” 72. Augustine, Serm. 296.6 (Morin 1:404–​5):  “et misera est Roma, et uastatur Roma:  affligitur, conteritur, incenditur; tot strages mortis fiunt, per famem, per pestem, per gladium.” 73. Augustine, Serm. 296.6 (Morin 1:405): “In ipso Petro temporalis fuit caro, et non uis ut temporalis sit lapis Romae? Petrus apostolus cum domino regnat, corpus apostoli Petri quodam loco iacet.” 74. Augustine, Serm. 296.7 (Morin 1:405). 75. Augustine, Serm. 296.9 (Morin 1:407): “Sicut habet historia eorum, incendium Romanae urbis hoc tertium est; sicut habet historia eorum, sicut habent litterae ipsorum, incendium Romanae urbis, quod modo contigit, tertium est.”

152  Rome’s Holy Mountain been in the habit of being on fire?”76 That Rome had burned down twice “amid the sacrifices of the pagans” and just once “amid the sacrifices of Christians” was hardly a robust response to these “insulting pagans.” Like the apologists before him, Augustine had the siege of the Gauls ready to hand to show, as Tertullian had done, that Rome had suffered calamities before there were Christians in the empire. The three destructions—​by the Gauls, Goths, and Nero—​were indistinguishably bad. For Christians, the latest destruction offered no palpable consolation in the here and now. And from anyone’s point of view, the tempora Christiana in which the Roman people now lived turned out to be frighteningly disappointing. Augustine’s attitude would change as he received more information. Our sense that Augustine missed an opportunity for a more fruitful comparison of disasters is only clear in hindsight. At the time that he delivered the sermon, in June 411 for the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul, Augustine had not yet heard, as he soon would, that Alaric’s occupation of Rome could offer consolation to Christians fretting that God was not quite on their side—​in the saeculum. By the beginning of 412, in his sermon On the Sack of the City of Rome, Augustine was reporting a more upbeat version of the Gothic occupation. This time Augustine begins his sermon not by gesturing to another disaster but, instead, focuses on the efficacy of prayer and the pouring forth of God’s mercy in the face of disaster. According to Augustine, in 398 a stinking cloud of fire was smothering Constantinople, but because of the “penitential mourning” of the emperor Arcadius and Constantinople’s inhabitants, God spared the city. So too, Augustine points out, did God spare Rome in 410 from complete destruction.77 Not only did “large numbers” of Romans have time to flee in advance; but those left behind also either hid or “were preserved alive and safe in the holy places.”78 For these reasons, Augustine was able to proffer the consolation that God’s strict hand had brought Rome into line rather than causing the city’s wholesale destruction.79 Indeed, it took two or three years for Augustine to know that Alaric and his soldiers had honored St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s as inviolable sanctuaries.80 Similarly by late 412, Jerome, in an encomiastic letter for his patron and friend Marcella, relates how the barbarians burst into Marcella’s lodging and pounded her with clubs. But at Christ’s bidding they relented and took Marcella and her friend Principia, the addressee of the letter, to the “basilica of the apostle Paul.”

76. Augustine, Serm. 296.9 (Morin 1:407):  “te quid delectat contra deum stridere pro ea quae consueuit ardere?” 77. Augustine, De Excidio 7 (O’Reilly 68–​70; comm. 89–​90). 78. Augustine, De Excidio 8 (VII) (O’Reilly 70–​71). 79. Augustine, De Excidio 8 (VII) (O’Reilly 70):  “manu ergo emendatis Dei correpta est potius ciuitas illa quam perdita.” 80.  For comments on the slow trickle of information to reach Augustine, see Salzman 2013b; O’Donnell 2016.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  153 Soon after, Marcella died.81 By 413, when the first installment of his City of God was published, Augustine was emphatic that the Gothic siege was an exemplum of God’s mercy. At the opening of the first book, he proclaimed that the “places of the martyrs and the basilicas of the apostles” had indeed received Christians and “others” (alienos).82 The Gothic sack of Rome was therefore a sign that God saved both Christians and gentiles (alienos). This is a far different message from that in the sermon of 411, where Augustine harshly dismissed the earthly power of the apostles’ shrines. Peter’s body, he said then, was “lying in some place or another.”83 Armed now with a reading of the Gothic sack of 410 that highlighted God’s mercy, Augustine turned again in City of God to the Gallic sack of 390 bce to show how much worse the body count was for it and other disasters.84 In a discussion on the bloody reprisals that followed civil wars, Augustine asks: “What was the foulest and most horrible spectacle ever seen in Rome? The invasion of the Gauls, long ago? The recent invasion of the Goths?” Or, he continues, was it when the factions of Marius and Sulla inflicted mass carnage on the Roman people throughout the 80s bce? Augustine’s answers would lead to the conclusion that the most recent disaster, the fall of Rome in 410 ce, resulted in almost no deaths, while in 390 bce the Gauls butchered as many senators as they could find, save for those on the Capitoline Hill. Using the salvation of the hill as a bridge, Augustine suggests that Sulla accomplished what the Gauls had failed to do: Sulla “took up his position as conqueror on that same Capitol which had been preserved from the Gauls, to issue decrees for massacre.” Thus it was from the Capitol, Augustine declared, that Sulla issued his lists of proscriptions, which deprived “a large number of Romans of their lives and properties.” The bottom line for Augustine was that Sulla slaughtered “more senators than the Gauls were able to despoil.”85 Augustine was not alone in drawing the comparison between the Gallic and Gothic sieges. In 411 ce, the sack of 390 bce came to mind in a sermon, along with Nero’s fire in 64 ce, as equally bringing about ruin and slaughter. In 412 and 413, after Augustine and others had heard accounts of the Christian mercy

81. Jerome, Ep. 127.13. For a recent introduction and translation of the text, together with critical notes, see Rebenich 2002, 119–​29. McLynn 2013, 327, suggests that Jerome only called to mind the Gothic sack of Rome when it suited his purposes: the “fate of Rome remained an option for Jerome rather than an obsession.” 82. Augustine, City of God 1.1. De Labriolle 1957, 1:5, translates “confugientes suos alienosque” as “chrétiens et non-​chrétiens.” 83.  Of course Augustine knew precisely where St. Peter’s basilica was located. He, like other ascetically minded bishops in the late fourth century, took a dim view of the cult of the saints. See Brown 2000, 202. Note that the cult of the apostles at Rome is mentioned more favorably at De consensu Evangelistarum 1.10 (16) (Weihrich 15–​16), where Augustine also notes the proliferation of painted images of Peter and Paul depicted together with Christ. 84.  See MacCormack 1998, 190–​91. 85. Augustine, City of God 3.39 (tr. Bettenson 130); also 3.31, where the Gallic siege appears in a list of disasters, this time including Tiber floods and civil wars. Here again civil wars are the worst type of disaster. Cf. Florus, Epitome 2.9.7: “arcemque Capitolii, quae Poenos quoque, quae Gallos etiam Senonas euaserat, quasi captiuam uictor insedit.”

154  Rome’s Holy Mountain displayed by the Goths, a hierarchy of suffering emerged:  the Gallic sack was much worse than the Gothic one. All that interested Augustine in his comparison of disasters, sieges, and tyrants was his assertion of the simple truth that the tempora Christiana were not so bad after all—​or at least not as bad as things had been in the past. Augustine’s young protégé, Orosius, continued this line of thought.86 Written quickly between 417 and 418, Orosius’s Seven Books of History Against the Pagans highlights the comparison between the two sieges twice, once for each narration of the two events.87 In doing so, Orosius followed his patron’s purpose of interpreting them together, which Augustine began articulating only in 412: the lesson to be learned from looking at the Gallic siege of 390 bce and the Gothic siege of 410 ce was that only in the latter case was God’s anger mitigated by the mercy he showed to Christians and everyone else. “A Remarkable and Sublime Temple”: Augustine’s Capitols For Christians, the Gallic siege was a problematic exemplum. It was difficult to explain away the famous inviolability of the Capitol in the Gallic siege of 390 bce. We have already seen that for Livy the lesson of the Gallic siege was that Jupiter Optimus Maximus had kept his own house—​the Capitol—​safe. The evidence was the rousing of the geese to alert the Romans of what would be the Gauls’ last advance against the hill. In this instance, Jupiter appeared to be a god of mercy. Augustine and Orosius encountered the story almost certainly through an epitome of Livy’s vast history written by L. Annaeus Florus in the first quarter of the second century ce.88 There, Florus writes that about a thousand Romans dug in on the citadel of the Capitoline Hill (arcem Capitolini montis) and “begged Jupiter himself to look after their bravery through the god’s numen, as if present, just as the soldiers had come together to defend his temple.”89 After recounting the story of the goose and the ransoming of the hill for a thousand pounds of gold, Florus concludes the episode by saying that Rome, as it was “destined to be the home of men and gods” (destinata hominum ac deorum domicilio), was not destroyed “but rather seemed avenged and purified” (sed expiata et lustrata uideatur).90 We have seen the different ways in which the issue of the Capitol’s inviolability was addressed by Christians, from Tertullian’s mockery to the story’s full rehabilitation in Basil’s Hexaemeron and partial rehabilitation in Ambrose’s own sermons on the six days of creation. Orosius had yet a different approach. Having 86.  Bradbury 1996, 24–​25; Fear 2010, 6–​7; McLynn 2013, 323–​25. 87. Orosius, Hist. 2.19.12–​15, 7.39.15–​17. 88.  O’Daly 1999, 248–​50. 89.  Florus 1.7.13: “Iuuentus uero, quam satis constat uix mille hominum fuisse, duce Manlio arcem Capitolini montis insedit, obtestata ipsum quasi praesentem Iouem, ut quem ad modum ipsi ad defendendum templum concurissent, ita ille uirtutem eorum numine suo tueretur.” 90.  Florus 1.7.18.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  155 Florus’s version in front of him, Orosius simply chose to omit the story of the goose, focusing instead on the ransom as the true, and shameful, source of the deliverance of the city.91 For his part, Augustine rarely missed the chance to ridicule Roman claims that the Capitol was especially graced by the gods. In his City of God, Augustine wonders whether the gods of Troy, who were entrusted with Rome’s protection, were elsewhere when the siege started but returned just in the nick of time, drawing on the widely accepted view that absent gods and goddesses were unable to protect their own temples: “Were [they] at Ilium when the Gauls took Rome and burned it? But so quick is their hearing and so swift their speed that they returned in a hurry at the goose’s cry, so that at least they could protect the Capitoline Hill, which remained in Roman hands. But they received the warning to return too late to defend the rest of the city.”92 It did not take the sack of Rome in 410 to draw Augustine’s attention to the Capitol and its traditions and to ask such questions. Before returning to the City of God, let us first look at how Augustine used the Capitol in his writings before 410. Ten years or so before Augustine started writing City of God, he had already directed scorn at the Capitol in his On the Harmony of the Evangelists, an attempt written around 400 to argue for the consistency of the four gospels against the persistent criticisms of Neoplatonists that Christ was a magician and the evangelists were fakes.93 It was in the first of four books, which together form On the Harmony of the Evangelists, that Augustine critiqued Rome’s Capitol. Writing here as an apologist, Augustine invokes the Capitol as a real place, a notable holdout in a world that everyday saw the smashing of pagan statues and the toppling of temples.94 So, Augustine asks:  “Who is this god, the one who thus persecutes all the gods of the pagans [gentium], the one who thus exposes all their holy rites [sacra], and thus destroys them?”95 Some say, Augustine continues, that the supreme divinity of the Christians is none other than Saturn, because these critics equated the Christian Sabbath to the day of the week dedicated to Saturn (dies Saturni).96 According to Augustine, Varro thought that the “god of the Jews” (deum Iudaeorum) was Jupiter, “for the Romans usually worship nothing higher than Jupiter.” Indeed, “their [eorum] Capitol is clear and sufficient testimony” of this fact, “and they judge him to be king of all the gods.”97 Augustine’s 91.  Orosius 2.19.8–​9. Others were seemingly uninterested in the geese and omitted the detail, e.g., Festus, Breviarium 6 (Eadie 49; comm. 108–​9). See also Eutropius, Breviarium 1.20. 92. Augustine, City of God 3.8 (tr. Bettenson 96, adapted): “fortasse apud Ilium erant, quando a Gallis ipsa Roma capta et incensa est; sed ut sunt auditu acutissimi motuque celerrimi, ad uocem anseris cito redierunt, ut saltem Capitolinum collem, qui remanserat, tuerentur; ceterum ad alia defendenda serius sunt redire commoniti.” 93. Magny 2014. 94.  E.g., Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.7(10) (Weinrich 10–​11). 95. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.21(29) (Weinrich 28): “quis est deus iste, qui omnes deos gentium sic persequitur, qui omnia eorum sacra sic prodit, sic extinguit?” 96. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.22(30) (Weinrich 28):  “quis iste sit? Alii dicunt:  Saturnus est, credo propter sabbati sanctificationem, quia isti eum diem Saturno tribuerunt.” 97. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.22(30) (Weinrich 28):  “nam quia nihil superius solent colere Romani quam Iouem, quod Capitolium eorum satis aperteque testatur, eumque regem omnium deorum arbitrantur.”

156  Rome’s Holy Mountain principal objection to these assertions of Jupiter’s primacy was rooted in his polemically informed presentation of Roman mythology: none of it made sense. Augustine wondered how it could be, after Jupiter defeated his father, Saturn, thereby becoming the king of the gods, that he would allow Saturn to persist as a potential rival. And if Saturn preceded Jupiter, should the Romans not “build capitolia to Saturn rather than to Jupiter?”98 From Augustine’s point of view, the problem with Jupiter, then, was that no one fully imagined that Jupiter was a supreme divinity—​he certainly did not conduct himself that way. By implication the immense and impressive materiality of the Capitol was a terrible waste of resources for an undeserving divinity. Nevertheless, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus made a big statement, “clear and sufficient testimony,” as Augustine put it, that the Romans held Jupiter as their supreme god. Augustine asks: “So what do they worship on the Capitol?” He pointed to three possibilities, all of them based on carefully selected proof texts.99 The first possibility is that Jupiter was a “vivifying spirit” (uiuificantem spiritum). For this, Augustine cites a line from Vergil’s Eclogues: “All things are full of Jupiter” (Iouis omnia plena).100 The second possibility is that Jupiter was a “sublime body” (corpus sublime), an “embodied heaven” (caelum corporeum), a possibility informed by a line from Vergil’s Georgics, according to which Aether, the “omnipotent father” (pater omnipotens), “descends, with impregnating showers, into the lap of his eager spouse,” triggering a renewal of life.101 The final possibility, which we have already encountered in the works of the apologists, is that Jupiter was nothing more than a dead man elevated by poets to the status of a false god—​ here, Augustine was leaning on Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods.102 Augustine could accept what he called the “philosophical” notion that the supreme god was an all-​pervasive “spirit” or even an “embodied heaven,” for he points out that the prophet Jeremiah reported that God said of himself: “I fill heaven and earth.”103 What Augustine found troubling was the materialization of the fictional storytelling (fabulae) of poets in the iconography of cult objects and built structures such as temples. In answering the question, “So what do they worship on the Capitol?” Augustine gives a surprisingly specific answer: “If [they worship] spirit or indeed embodied heaven, what is that shield of Jupiter doing over there [illic], the one

98. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.23(35) (Weinrich 34). The quip is repeated once more: 1.23(36) (Weinrich 35). 99.  See discussion of these sections of Augustine’s De consensu Evangelistarum in Magny 2014, 133–​34. 100. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.23(31) (Weinrich 29); Vergil, Eclogues 3.60. Augustine uses this same quotation again in City of God 4.9, 4.10, 7.9. 101. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.23(31) (Weinrich 29); Vergil, Georgics 3.325: “tum pater omnipotens fecundis imbribus aether coniugis in gremium laetae descendit.” Cf. Augustine, City of God 4.9–​10, where he is using the same two proof texts (Vergil, Eclogues 3.60 and Georgics 3.325) to somewhat different effect. 102. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.23(32) (Weinrich 30–​31); Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.42(119). 103. Jer. 23:24.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  157 that they call the Aegis?”104 He explains that the Aegis was named thus because a goat nursed Jupiter when hidden away by his mother and that Jupiter fashioned a shield from her pelt in honor of his nurse (nutricis). Here, Augustine was calling to mind the myth of Jupiter’s birth, his father Saturn’s intention to destroy the child, and the role played in Jupiter’s deliverance by the Cretan nymph Amalthea. As Jupiter’s nurse, Amalthea protected the newborn from his father by hiding him away in the woods of Mount Ida and nourished him there with the milk of her most prized goat.105 Later, as Jupiter was preparing to fight the Titans, he learned of an oracle that promised to reveal the means of success: Jupiter would win only if he shielded himself with the Gorgon’s head and a goat’s skin. Jupiter chose to honor Amalthea’s goat, the lactic source of his first slurps of food, by turning her pelt into armor. The Greek root of the word for goat is aig, and thus this talismanic shield came to be called the Aigis (Latin: Aegis).106 Augustine seems to be suggesting that the Aegis was materially represented on the Capitol—​“that shield of Jupiter . . . there” (illic). Augustine again mentions whatever this was even more opaquely a decade later in City of God: “What conception of Jupiter was in the minds of those who placed his nurse [nutricem] in the Capitol?”107 He believed, or he wanted his readers to believe, that the Romans worshipped (colunt) Jupiter Optimus Maximus by means of physical representation—​a shield, a nymph, a goat. Thus for Augustine this relic, enshrined in the Capitol, revealed the fact that the Romans knew and celebrated Jupiter’s infancy and therefore the god’s humanity.108 This sign of Jupiter’s humanity was important for Augustine.109 Religious architecture and cult objects failed in their ability to represent truth, since the stories materially represented in temples were so obviously false. Thus, according to Augustine, the story of the honking of the goose that saved the Capitol was poetry: “Or are the poets making this up, too?”110 If the stories about the gods came from the imaginations of poets, Augustine suggests, then the places where the gods were worshipped and the objects by which the fictions of the poets were represented ceased to be able to represent anything truthful. In thinking in 104.  Origin of the name:  Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.23(31) (Weinrich 29–​30):  “si spiritum, si denique ipsum caelum corporeum, quid illic facit scutum illud Iouis, quod appellant Aegida? Making of the shield: 1.23(34): “scutum eius in honorem nutricis eius factum de pelle caprina.” 105. Ovid, Fasti 5.115–​28. 106. Hyginus, Astronomia 2.13. 107. Augustine, City of God 6.7 (tr. Bettenson 239):  “Quid de ipso Ioue senserunt, qui eius nutricem in Capitolio posuerunt?” 108.  Suda, s.v. aigis, provides evidence that there was a cult object carried by an Athenian priestess to visit women just after they were married. See Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3d rev., s.v. Aegis. It is not unbelievable that Augustine had in mind a true artifact and that these references are the sole evidence for it. Servius, after all, is the sole witness to the existence of a silver goose that was once venerated on the Capitol. It is also worth mentioning here that there are two instances when Jupiter is depicted as shaking his storm-​bringing aegis on the Capitol: Vergil, Aen. 8.353–​54; Silius, Punica 12.720. 109.  For Christians and the problem of pagan materiality, see Ando 2001. 110. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.23(31) (Weinrich 30): “an et hoc poetae mentiuntur?”

158  Rome’s Holy Mountain these terms, Augustine poses the striking question: “Surely it can’t be true that the capitolia of the Romans are also the creations of poets?”111 Capitolia were real structures, as even Augustine had to admit, but what they represented was not. By simplifying Rome’s Capitol and all capitolia to a sign of Jupiter’s infancy, Augustine sought to lead his readers to the conclusion that the Romans unwittingly engaged and currently still engaged in the worship of dead humans. Indeed, in both On the Harmony of the Evangelists and City of God Augustine directly moved on from the idea that Jupiter had once had an infancy, which was commemorated in the Capitol materially, to give abundant examples of the human foibles and desires of the gods. For Augustine, as we have seen, the Capitol represented the summation of Roman religious thought and practice. Yet as a physical location that commemorated generations of storytelling about Jupiter the Capitol failed to be a source of moral improvement for society. Augustine made this clear even when addressing the most vexing issues in his own bishopric in North Africa. In summer 408, a riot took place in Calama (Guelma, Algeria), a prosperous city south of Hippo Regius. In defiance, and possibly in ignorance of the law, the city’s pagans marched in procession through the streets. Upon resistance from Calama’s Christian community, a riot broke out, eventually leaving the city’s basilica torched and at least one Christian dead. Nectarius, a pagan notable from Calama, wrote to Augustine asking the bishop to intercede with the state on behalf of the city’s pagan elites. For these men and their families, what caused the most pressing fear was not the wrath of Augustine’s God. It was the financial penalty that came with guilt and the resulting—​and humiliating—​loss of wealth and status.112 For centuries, cities in North Africa publicly praised the virtue of leniency in their patrons. In 378, the people of the city of Sabratha honored their patronus, the governor of Tripolitania, Flavius Vivus Benedictus, with a statue in Sabratha and an inscription that praises his integritas, moderatio, iustitia, prouiso, fides, benignitas, fortitudo, and beneficentia.113 Augustine, however, would not play “outstanding patron” (patronus praestantissimus) for the pagans of Calama. Instead, he invited Nectarius to see the big picture: the “shameful and impious deeds” (mala dedecoris impietatisque) of the gods had corrupted the morals of pagans. Jupiter was the worst of them all, so many of his adulteries (adulteria tanta) having been commemorated in the arts. Augustine even found himself wishing that a decree “prohibiting such deeds could be read at least on Jupiter’s 111. Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 1.23(31) (Weinrich 30):  “numquid et Capitolia Romanorum opera sunt poetarum?” 112. Augustine, Ep. 90 (Nectarius’s letter to Augustine). On Nectarius, see PLRE 2:774, s.v. Nectarius 1. For the riot and Augustine’s correspondence with Nectarius, see Hermanowicz 2008, 155–​73; Kaufman 2003. Lepelley 1979–​1981, 1:355–​69, discusses Calama and the persistence of pagan cult and culture in late fourth-​century North Africa. 113.  Flavius Vivus Benedictus: IRT 103, http://​inslib.kcl.ac.uk/​irt2009/​IRT103.html (accessed August 2015). See PLRE 1:171, s.v. Benedictus 4; Lepelley 1979–​1981, 2:360; Warmington 1954.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  159 own Capitol.”114 Augustine’s message was that pagans, surrounded as they were by vile images and lacking structurally defined moral centers, were socialized to be hooligans, like Calama’s rioters. It was virtually impossible for them to be good citizens. Since morality had not emanated and could never emanate from temple culture, Augustine counseled that it would be much better for Nectarius if he were to convert “to the true worship of God and chaste and pious ways.”115 As Augustine’s rhetorical deployment of the Capitol in the aftermath of the Calama riots demonstrates, the bishop kept finding the Capitol a useful heuristic. This is especially the case in City of God, where it is mentioned more than two dozen times.116 In this sense, the Gothic occupation of Rome in 410 provided Augustine with a final opportunity to hammer away at the hill and its patriotic associations.117 His was a rich engagement with the hill’s classical heritage. The following is a list of several ways in which Augustine uses the Capitol in City of God. First, the Romans did not sufficiently honor the Capitol and Jupiter Optimus Maximus: Why were poets allowed to slander the gods, and not men, thus elevating the senate (human laws) above the Capitol (religious scruples)?118 Second, Jupiter Optimus Maximus was not all-​powerful: If Jupiter brought Rome its empire, if the god was so all-​powerful, why did the Romans dishonor him by symbolizing his power materially through a scepter and the “Capitol on its high hill” (in alto colle Capitolium)?119 Why would Jupiter yield place in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to lesser gods such as Mars, Terminus, and Iuventas?120 How could Jupiter be the king of the gods when his star twinkles less brightly in the night sky than Venus’s or appears lower than Saturn’s?121 Third, the Capitol was a source of moral corruption: Why did shame-​inducing “demented exhibitions” take place all year round on the Capitol?122 Fourth, the stories about the gods were ridiculous: Were the gods asleep when the Gauls set Rome on fire, and so was it not just the geese that saved the Capitol, or perhaps they were away and came back a little late?123 Fifth, allegorizing the “fables” (fabulae) of the gods was unable to “fix” (sarciant) the inconsistencies: So if Jupiter was Aether (Upper Air) and his spouse was Aer (Lower Air), a coupling that makes sense, then what 114. Augustine, Ep. 91.5:  “quantum erat, ut in suo saltem Capitolio ista prohibens legeretur.” See Madden 1930, 26. 115. Augustine, Ep. 91.6: “tollantur illa omnia uana et insana, conuertantur homines ad uerum dei cultum moresque castos et pios.” 116.  Exemplarity in Augustine’s writings: Herdt 2012. 117.  It seems that the bulk and perhaps also the level of detail are related to Augustine’s intense reading of the Latin classics in 410 and thereafter. See Hagendahl 1967, 702–​22; O’Donnell 1980; Shanzer 2012. 118. Augustine, City of God 2.12. 119. Augustine, City of God 4.9. 120. Augustine, City of God 4.23. Cf. Ovid, Fasti 2.667–​76; Livy 1.55.4–​5; Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom. 3.69.5–​6; Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.20.37–​41. 121. Augustine, City of God 7.15. 122. Augustine, City of God 6.10, here quoting Seneca’s otherwise lost De superstitione. See Hagendahl 1967, 245–​49. 123. Augustine, City of God 2.22, 3.8.

160  Rome’s Holy Mountain atmospheric role did Minerva play, since, “although she was set up on the Capitol with them [Jupiter and Juno in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus], she was not their daughter”?124 Sixth, the gods never really cared about the Capitol: Why would Jupiter allow himself to be honored with a temple by the parricide King Tarquinius? Given that the temple was built “through the perpetration of the most incredible crime imaginable,” why would the gods remain present and watch “their king” Jupiter rule from “atop the highest of temples” (in altissimo templo)?125 Why, in 460 bce, when slaves seized the Capitol under the leadership of the Sabine Herdonius, did the gods allow the consul Publius Valerius, who championed the strategy that saved Jupiter’s temple, to die?126 Why would the gods sanction, by prophecy, the destruction of the Capitol under Sulla?127 Seventh, material objects on the Capitol and elsewhere could not, in Vergil’s words, supply “empire without end” (imperium sine fine): So why not abandon the relic called the Capitoline Stone (lapis Capitolinus), since it would not be found in the “heavenly fatherland”?128 Eighth, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus came either too late or too early to the cityscape: Why did it take so long after the establishment of Roman religion by Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, for Rome’s “apex temple of Jupiter” (summum templum Iouis) to be built by Rome’s last king, Tarquinius, centuries later?129 How fickle was it that Summanus, the god of nighttime lightning, used to be honored more than Jupiter Optimus Maximus, “but after the remarkable and sublime temple was built for Jupiter, the masses rushed to him because of the shrine’s grandeur”?130 Finally, the order of the arrival of the gods to Rome was puzzling: Why is it that the Mother of the Gods, Magna Mater, came to Rome only after her son, Jupiter, was presiding over the Capitoline Hill?131 Why, in 296 bce, when Rome was suffering from plague, did the Roman senate invite the healing god Aesculapius into Rome? Surely Jupiter, the “king of the gods,” should have known the art of medicine, since he “was living for so long on the Capitol” (diu in Capitolio sedebat).132

124. Augustine, City of God 4.10. Artemis-​Minerva is the daughter of Zeus-​ Jupiter and Leto:  Hesiod, Theogony 918. 125. Augustine, City of God 3.15. 126. Augustine, City of God 3.17. 127. Augustine, City of God 2.24; cf. 3.29. 128. Vergil, Aen. 1.279; Augustine, City of God 2.29, 4.15. In 4.15 it is not quite clear what Augustine had in mind by referring to the worship of Jupiter as the lapis Capitolinus. There had been a ritual in which “swearing by the Jupiter Rock” (iurare Iouem lapidem) was done on the Capitoline Hill. One took up a rock of some sort in one’s right hand, repeated the oath, and then cast the stone on the ground. See Polybius 3.25; Cicero, Ad famil. 35 (7.12); Plutarch, Sulla 10; Aulus Gellius 1.21; Apuleius, De deo Socratis 5. See Huebner 1963–​1976, 4:127, and Chilver and Townend 1985, 66, on the possible connection between lapis and Terminus. 129. Augustine, City of God 3.12. 130. Augustine, City of God 4.23: “Sed postquam Ioui templum insigne ac sublime constructum est, propter aedis dignitatem sic ad eum multitudo confluxit.” 131. Augustine, City of God 3.12. 132. Augustine, City of God 3.17.

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  161 Throughout Augustine’s literary engagement with the Capitol, from around 400 ce, when he wrote On the Harmony of the Evangelists, to 415, when he published the second installment of City of God, we see his insistence that the Capitol, by which he meant the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, was an incredible structure. It was a “remarkable and sublime temple” (insigne ac sublime); it had “grandeur” (dignitas); and it had height. The Capitol sat on a “high hill” (in alto colle); it was the “loftiest of temples” (in altissimo templo); it was the “apex temple of Jupiter” (summum templum Iouis) in Roman religious life and community memory. Augustine had collected fragmented memories of the Capitol from the poetry of Vergil, the histories of Livy and Florus, the philosophical treatises of Varro and Seneca, and the apologetic works of Tertullian and Lactantius.133 In doing so, he invented a Big Capitol—​one that was out of date and increasingly detached from fifth-​century Rome, but a sublime temple nonetheless, sitting on a high hill in Rome and functioning as the head of Roman state religion and a source of national pride. Reading Augustine’s Capitols at the End of Antiquity Before moving on to discuss the other ways in which the Capitol continued to be remembered at the end of late antiquity and into the early Middle Ages, there is the lingering question of just how influential Augustine’s polemics specifically against the Capitol were. We can have a sense of what interested Augustine’s readers through the uses to which his writings were put in the century after his death. Like Livy’s massive From the Founding of the City, Augustine’s vast corpus of writings was simply too much for anyone to read:  both Livy and Augustine were digested into epitomes in late antiquity. In Augustine’s case, a few continued to find Augustine’s Capitols useful. In the late sixth century, an anonymous author assembled a polemical treatise called Against the Philosophers. This literary quilt of Augustine’s words is a work of startling ingenuity.134 The author painstakingly assembled a dialogue in which a host of pagans, including the generic “Romanus” as well as the named luminaries—​“Scipio,” “Cicero,” “Porphyrius,” “Sallustius,” “Varro,” “Apuleius,” “Plotinus,” “Hermes,” “Iamblichus,” and “Plato”—​all debate “Augustinus,” each with Augustine’s own words. The effect is strange and illuminating.135 Throughout Against the Philosophers, Augustine’s polemics against 133.  For Augustine’s use of the classical authors, see Hagendahl 1967; especially relevant here is Conybeare 1999; for the Christian authors, Agnus 1906, 39, 50–​51. 134.  Anonymi Contra Philosophos (Aschoff 1975). The editor initially thought that the Contra Philosophos dated from late sixth-​century Italy (Aschoff 1984). Later he came to believe that it dated instead from seventh-​century Spain (Aschoff 1985). The difference for our purposes is only slight. Despite the fact that Arnaldo Momigliano (1980, 12–​13) noted the potential importance of Contra Philosophos long ago, it has received almost no scholarly attention beyond Aschoff ’s own efforts. 135.  Augustine’s own use of his sources, e.g., Varro, suggests that Augustine thought that he himself was debating the classical authors. See Vessey 2014, 272.

162  Rome’s Holy Mountain the past, as reflected in the early books of On the Harmony of the Evangelists and City of God, are transformed into the opinions of pagans. For example, it is “Romanus” (i.e., the pagan) who discusses the Gallic and Gothic sieges for “Augustinus,” noting that Sulla succeeded in occupying the Capitoline Hill where the Gauls had failed.136 Later, “Romanus” places the Capitol “on the lofty hill” (in alto colle),137 while “Porphyrius” asserts that “their Capitol is clear and sufficient testimony” (Capitolium eorum satis aperteque testatur) that Jupiter is the most preeminent Roman divinity.138 What is important here is that this anonymous author could use Augustine’s works to represent a diversity of pagan points of view. Perhaps in spite of himself Augustine succeeded in memorializing and preserving knowledge of the pagan past, against which he had spent his adult life thinking, writing, and preaching. But forgetting Augustine’s pasts was more the norm at the end of antiquity. Eugippius, a monastic living in southern Italy, dedicated his Excerpts from the Works of St. Augustine around 530 to Proba, a family member of the aristocratic Anicii. It represents almost 350 extracts from a multitude of Augustine’s works and runs to over a thousand printed pages in the modern edition.139 Yet Augustine’s Capitols, as found in On the Harmony of the Evangelists and City of God, are nowhere to be found. Eugippius’s purpose was not to argue against grumbling pagans; rather, as he explained to Proba in his dedicatory letter, his goal was to provide an exhortation to virtue and a fortification against heresy written in the words of the world’s most trusted theologian.140 The anonymous Against the Philosophers survives in two fifteenth-​century manuscripts, suggesting that, whatever its original purpose, the experiment was not of much interest in the early Middle Ages. Eugippius’s treasure chest, however, was a different story. Because of its usability as a source of spiritual edification, his Excerpts from the Works of St. Augustine had an immediate and lasting impact. Cassiodorus, Eugippius’s contemporary and probably a close relation of Proba’s, recommended it as essential reading (opera necessaria) because it brought together “the loftiest questions and opinions as well as diverse matters” into one codex.141 Indeed, the book was copied early and often, the earliest manuscripts dating from the seventh century.142 For those reading Augustine at the end of antiquity, especially lay aristocrats such as Proba and monastics such as Eugippius, Augustine’s polemics against the material world of the secular 136.  Contra Philosophos 1.2005–​70 (Aschoff 69) = Augustine, City of God 3.29, 3.31. 137.  Contra Philosophos 2.125 (Aschoff 78) = Augustine, City of God 4.9. 138.  Contra Philosophos 3.1470–​71 (Aschoff 189) = Augustine, De consensu Evangelistiarum 1.23(31). 139. Eugippius, Excerpta ex operibus S.  Augustini (Knoell). For Eugippius, see RE 6.1:  988–​90 (Jülicher). Recent discussion of the political clout of the Anicii in Ostrogothic Italy: Bjornlie 2013, 134–​38. Cf. the detailed prosopographical study in Schäfer 1991, 149–​69. 140. Eugippius, Epistula ad Probam (Knoell 1–​4). 141. Cassiodorus, Inst. 1.23: “altissimas quaestiones ac sententias diuersasque res.” 142. Eugippius, Excerpta ex operibus S. Augustini (Knoell I–​XXXII).

Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance  163 past were increasingly irrelevant to living a pious Christian life in the present. Heretical Christians, not pagans, were the focus of polemics in the sixth century. Conclusion Even though his attacks in City of God are more detailed, Augustine’s examples and conclusions are familiar not only from his own writings, such as On the Harmony of the Evangelists, but also from those of the apologists. Two centuries before Augustine was writing, Tertullian quipped that the Capitol was the “temple of all demons.”143 A century after that Lactantius joked that the caput of Rome’s state religion (caput religionum publicarum) was nothing but an “empty memorial” (monumentum inane).144 There is no firm indication that the Africans Minucius Felix, Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, and Lactantius had ever been to Rome. Yet beginning in the third century the Latin apologists nevertheless brought Rome’s history and monuments to the fore of their polemics against pagan culture.145 This was a Rome richly imagined and rhetorically constructed by provincial intellectuals. Moreover, these men saw themselves as occupying a space at the margins of a culture that emanated outward from Rome’s Capitol. In interrogating the Capitol’s traditions from this distant vantage point, these apologists provincialized the Capitol’s centrality and destabilized the traditional ways of knowing the hill. Even though Roman intellectuals, since at least the second century bce, had debated the Capitol’s name and the validity of selected elements of the stories associated with the hill, Christian apologists rejected as false all instances of divine intervention exemplified by the hill’s long history. Augustine’s Capitols were different from those of his apologist predecessors. In contrast to them, Augustine had lived in Rome in 383–​384 ce.146 In that year, the city’s ancient past was all around him, and the writing of ancient history by senators was en vogue.147 Augustine taught rhetoric probably in the schools situated in the imperial forums, thus in the shadow of the Capitoline Hill. Augustine’s Capitol was not swarming with demons, nor was it a sign flushed of significance, as Tertullian and Lactantius had imagined. Though he never mentioned the Capitol in his Confessions, Augustine shows a familiarity with the Capitol as a place in his On the Harmony of the Evangelists and City of God. In both works, it was important for him to stress that the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was simultaneously both real and unreal. While Augustine allowed his readers to hear the patriotic stories set on the Capitol, he relegated them to the fabulae of poets. Augustine put it most clearly 143. Tertullian, De spectaculis 12. 144. Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.11.49. 145. Price 1999. 146. Augustine, Confessions 5.12. 147. Cameron 1964.

164  Rome’s Holy Mountain in On the Harmony of the Evangelists, where he jeered: “Surely it can’t be true that the capitolia of the Romans are also the creations of poets” (opera poetarum)? For Augustine, the capitolia of the Roman world were indeed the opera poetarum. It was a place where poetic fictions had in fact become materialized in a cityscape. This was a deep intervention in Roman cultural memory. By turning the Capitol’s pasts into poetry, Augustine was fashioning the Capitol into what Aleida Assmann has called a “place of commemoration.”148 Like the Berlin Wall, Auschwitz, or Robben Island, the Capitol was a monument of discontinuity: its presences in Rome’s cityscape as well as in classical texts stood for obsolete ways of understanding the world—​Augustine’s opera poetarum. Thus it was important for Augustine to remember the traditional stories if only to establish and teach a hierarchy of knowledge in which the Capitol was emblematic of an erroneous way of understanding and symbolizing the divine. Stories such as the discovery of the intact human head on the Capitol and the inviolability of the hill in the Gallic siege of 390 bce were merely fictions bested by the true story of God’s mercy through the sanctuary afforded to all Romans by the shrines of the apostles Peter and Paul in the Gothic siege of 410 ce.149

148.  Assmann 2011, 292. 149.  Bruggisser 1999; Conybeare 1999.

6

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction

O

n July 6, 83 BCE a fire utterly consumed the Capitol, a temple that had stood on the Capitoline Hill for more than four hundred years. The cause remained a mystery, but the fact that it happened in the midst of a civil war waged by the factions of Marius and Sulla led to recriminations on all sides. By the end of the following year, in November 82, Sulla succeeded in asserting his domination. Still, the fire’s significance was ambiguous: Was the destruction of the temple a divine sign of support for Sulla or not? Like all politicians faced with a crisis, Sulla attempted to manage the disaster of the temple’s destruction by shaping its memory in his favor. In his memoirs, as reflected in Plutarch’s Sulla, Sulla stated that the supreme divinity supplied him with numerous signs of his success, including a warning of the temple’s destruction. Though he arrived too late to stop it from happening, Sulla suggested that the destruction would have consumed the whole state had he not succeeded.1 Few were satisfied with this interpretation. For most others, the temple’s destruction was remembered as a foreboding sign of the bloody proscriptions Sulla would initiate in the coming year. According to Appian, “All things seemed to indicate the large number of violent deaths, the conquest of Italy, and as regards the Romans themselves, the capture of their city and political revolution.”2 For his part, writing as he did two centuries later, Appian remained agnostic about the cause of the destruction, but he had no trouble in repeating the accusation that the factions of Sulla or Marius were the arsonists.3 Despite the ambiguities of the omen, Sulla announced the inauguration of a new age. He tasked Q. Lutatius Catulus with the reconstruction of the temple and ordered that the Sibylline Books, which had been housed in the temple and lost in the fire, be restored through the collection of copies from Erythrae in Asia Minor and other locations in Italy, North Africa, and Sicily.4 The restoration of the temple took more than twenty years. Indeed, it was such a protracted process that Cicero registered different opinions on the cause of the destruction in the 1. Plutarch, Sulla 27.4–​8; Flower 2008, 82. 2. Appian, BC 1.83; Flower 2008, 82. Cf. Julius Obsequens, Liber Prodigiorum 57. 3. Appian, BC 1.86. 4. Restoration of the Sibylline Books that began in earnest in 76:  Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.6.14. Locations: Tacitus, Annals 6.12.5; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 4.62.6. See Santangelo 2013, 134–​48.

165

166  Rome’s Holy Mountain course of his long career. Writing against Sulla’s official view, Cicero states in his Pro Roscio (80 bce) that Jupiter Optimus Maximus could not have deliberately destroyed the Capitol “by divine plan,” but the cause was, rather, the “force and magnitude of nature.”5 After Sulla died, Cicero apparently came close to the official view, claiming in his Verrines (70) that “the divine flame [illa flamma diuinitus] had come down, not to destroy the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but to demand an even more famous and magnificent [temple].”6 Cicero’s interpretation of the temple’s destruction highlighted the possibility that the “divine flame” was paradoxically benevolent, a view at odds with what he had stated a decade before in the Pro Roscio. But Cicero’s change of heart was understandable. His more upbeat interpretation was appropriate as Catulus’s new temple was finally on the verge of completion. It is highly significant that the destruction continued to be ominous, becoming a “fateful year” that portended revolution and possibly the end of empire on the twentieth anniversary of the temple’s destruction in 63.7 Temple destructions were unsettling because most believed that they always happened for a reason. The trouble is that it was almost impossible to determine why the gods would sanction the destruction of their terrestrial homes. The destruction of the Capitol in 83 bce was particularly troubling. As we saw in ­chapter 5, since 390, when the Capitol was saved by the intervention of Jupiter, the Romans continued to celebrate the event as a sign that their state would endure forever. What was to be learned, then, from the Capitol’s destruction in 83? In the words of Harriet Flower, the process of coming to terms with the loss of the Capitol produced “ever new layers of reinterpretation and remembering of the past.”8 Talking about the destruction of the Capitol, its causes, and its significance was a way of assigning blame for the fracturing of the state into the chaos of internecine conflict, while talking about the restoration of the Capitol was a way of asserting the necessity of renewing the societal values that made Rome into the head of a world empire. In other words, there was no single interpretation, and the dynamic of interpretation was never ending. It is important to stress that even though the Capitol’s destruction in 83 resulted in a cacophony of responses, all were sympathetic interpretations of a tragedy that assumed the necessity of the restoration of the temple for the continuation of the Roman state. In this chapter, I  will focus on how the Capitol’s destructions continued to be discussed by Christian authors in the late empire. The chapter will first take into account the apologetic writings of Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius of Sicca Veneria, and especially Eusebius of Caesarea. These three authors demonstrate an interest in the calculation, tabulation, and interpretation of multiple temple 5. Cicero, Pro Roscio 131; Flower 2008, 83. 6. Cicero, Verr. 2.4.69. 7.  For 63 bce: Cicero, Catilina 3.9; Sallust, BC 47.2. See Flower 2008, 85–​87 with comments on the possible significance of the thirtieth and fortieth anniversaries of the destruction in 53 and 43 bce. 8.  Flower 2008, 88.

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  167 destructions in the form of lists—​the Capitol appears on all of them. Then I will follow the figuration of the Capitol as, in Lactantius’s words, a “temple often damned by the judgment of heaven” into the late fourth and early fifth centuries ce. For Prudentius and Jerome, the ongoing desolation of the Jerusalem Temple and the imaginary future desolation of the Capitol were clear evidence of God’s righteous anger and the establishment of a Christian empire. In looking at this range of writings, we will find that late antique Christian discussions of temple destruction narrowed the possible interpretations of traumatic events such as these and therefore also what ought to be learned from them. Listing Temple Destructions Beginning with Tertullian, it is easy to see that Christian apologists sought to demonstrate that pagan temples—​especially the most important of them—​had never been safe from catastrophic events, thus showing that Jupiter, Apollo, and all the rest of the Olympians had always been either powerless demons or figments of the imagination. It was Clement of Alexandria, however, who came up with a list of temple destructions. Written in Greek at the end of the second century, Clement’s Protrepticus invites his audience to see a map of burning temples. In a single paragraph, Clement creates an itinerary zigzagging across time and space from one fire to another, from the Temple of Hera at Argos to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (“a second time after the Amazons”), the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill (“often swept up” by fire), the Temple of Serapis at Alexandria, the Temple of Dionysus at Athens, and the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (destroyed first by a storm, then again by fire). Clement’s conclusion is that the flames that burned these temples were from the same source, a “knowing fire” (pur sōphronoun) whose destructive force was meant to be a “remedy for superstition” (deisidaimonias iatikon). The fate of the burning temples, he concluded, was a warning about the fate of the soul. Like a temple set alight, the unrepentant soul likewise would be utterly destroyed.9 It is difficult to know where Clement came upon his list of temple destructions, or whether he assembled it himself,10 but his list and his providential interpretation of the singular “knowing fire” that caused the individual destructions became an attractive schema of a specifically Christian historiography of the ancient world.11 Writing at the beginning of the fourth century, Arnobius of Sicca Veneria surely had Clement’s Protrepticus in hand, and with it he produced his

9. Clement, Protrepticus 4.53.2–​3 (Mondésert 115–​16). 10.  Osborn 2005, 19–​20. Protrepticus relies on Philo and Posidonius. Perhaps the list appeared in a philosophical text, either Stoic or Neoplatonic. Cf. Philo, On the Special Laws 1.4(21); Decalogue 7. 11.  None of Clement’s modern editors have commented on the formation of the list itself beyond giving ancient testimonia of the destructions that Clement included in the list.

168  Rome’s Holy Mountain own idiosyncratic list of temple destructions.12 In Arnobius’s list, the Capitol is at the top. According to Arnobius, Jupiter was an absentee father, hence a “hungry fire often [totiens] kept consuming the Capitol and snatched away [the statues of] Jupiter Capitolinus together with his wife [Juno] and daughter [Minerva].”13 Then Arnobius’s list takes shape through a series of questions, asking where the gods and goddesses were when their temples were destroyed: the Temple of Juno Regina (Hera) at Argos, the Temple of Serapis at Alexandria, the Temple of Liber (Dionysus) Eleutherius at Athens, the Temple of Diana (Artemis) at Ephesus, and the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. In this way, Arnobius changed the order of temple destructions that he derived from Clement and added the destruction of the Temple of Apollo at Dodona, pointing out the irony that Apollo the seer (diuinus) was constantly attacked at his many shrines by pirates and robbers.14 His purpose in adducing this evidence was less theologically charged than it was for Clement. Whereas Clement saw the “knowing fire” as God’s providence (pronoia), for Arnobius it would have been “a task of unending labor” (infiniti operis res) to describe all the temple destructions throughout the world. Arnobius concludes that the temples had no divine inhabitants to protect them, thus “Fortune is master over them.”15 Drawing on his own chronicle as well as the “canonical writings” (anagraptoi marturai) of the Greeks and possibly also Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus, Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine includes the Capitol in two separate lists of temple destructions.16 In his Praeparatio Evangelica, written between 313 and 318, thus after Constantine declared official toleration for Christianity, Eusebius, like Arnobius, began his list with a series of questions: “Where is your temple in Delphi, hailed since forever by all the Greeks? Where is the Pythian, the Clarian? Where indeed is the Dodonian?” There was no deliverance for the Capitol, which was destroyed twice, or the Temple of Vesta in Rome, or for the colossus of Zeus at Olympia or the Temple of Serapis at Alexandria.17 Eusebius deployed a list of temple destructions again in his Theophany, a distillation of his Praeparatio Evangelica and a work that was written late in life.18 Here, God emerges as the source for these destructions. According to Eusebius, God provided knowledge of himself by “refuting the error of polytheism through 12.  Fragu 2010, 6:151–​54; Röhricht 1893, 32, posits a dependent relationship between Protrepticus 4.53.2–​3 and Adversus Nationes 6.23, as does Rapisarda 1939, 67. 13. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.23.2 (Fragu 20–​ 21):  “cum Capitolium totiens edax ignis adsumeret Iouemque ipsum Capitolinum cum uxore corripuisset ac filia, ubinam fulminator tempore illo fuit.” 14. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.23.3–​6. 15. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.23.6 (Fragu 21): “nunc uero, quia cassa sunt et nullis habitatoribus tecta, habet in illis fortuna ius suum.” 16.  Eusebius did know Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus, and it is certain that Clement’s works were represented in Eusebius’s library in Caesarea, but Eusebius was not relying solely on this work for his list of temple destructions. For Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica and Clement, see Mras 1954, LV–​LVI. 17. Eusebius, PE 4.2.8 (Mras 167–​68). 18.  Kofsky 2000, 277, reviews attempts to date the Theophany.

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  169 thunder and lightning.” Hence, “history” supplied proof: the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was burned down, as were the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Temple of Hera at Argos, and the colossus of Zeus at Olympia. Eusebius then looks to the “histories of the Romans” for proof: evidence for God’s angry presence in the world was demonstrated by the “so-​called Capitol, the all-​holy temple [that] was once destroyed by fire from heaven,” as well as by damage done to the Temple of Vesta and the Pantheon.19 Many of these ideas were not new. For most in the ancient world, no matter one’s cultic entanglements, the sudden devastation of a temple had the potential to register the operation of divine anger within the world. We find this equation already fully formed in the seventh century bce. In Hesiod’s Works and Days, the poet warns his addressee that “woe from heaven” (ouranothen pēma) was brought down by moral transgressions. The “evil hubris and unjust deeds” of mortals (hubris kakē kai schetlia erga), he goes on, roused Zeus to make justice (dikē) manifest by directing his punishing force against humans and their interventions in the landscape.20 When temples were violated, through either destruction or robbery, this circumstance called into question the presence and power of the divinity honored there.21 That is why Arnobius and Eusebius present their lists partly as a series of questions: Where in the world was Artemis when her temple at Ephesus was destroyed, where was Hera, where was Apollo? It was a deeply held belief in the Mediterranean world that gods and goddesses had to be present at their temples in order to protect them. Plutarch, for example, reports that Alexander’s birth took place precisely when the Temple of Artmesis at Ephesus burned down. Plutarch then quotes Hegesias of Magnesia’s quip (ca. 250 bce) that Artemis was too busy birthing Alexander to take care of her own temple.22 The failure of gods and goddesses to protect their temples suggested either that they were absent, as we have seen, or that they were possibly fraudulent. Thus Babrius, in a collection of fables written in the third century ce, tells the story of a farmer who came into the city hoping that the divinity would help him recover his stolen property. Much to his disappointment, the farmer realizes that the divinity in fact was a victim of robbery: the god’s own property was stolen from the temple. “How could this god know,” opines Babrius’s farmer, “about other thieves, when he doesn’t know who those were who stole his own property?”23 Making lists of temple destructions was also not a particularly Christian practice. Each temple had its own records, showing the supporting roles played by divine and human benefactors. Pious pilgrims could learn about the history of 19. Eusebius, Theophania 2.82–​83 (Gressmann 122–​23). This portion of the Theophany is preserved only in a Syriac translation. I rely here on Gressmann’s translation of the Syriac into German. 20. Hesiod, Works and Days 238–​47. 21.  Chaniotis 2005, 155–​57. 22. Plutarch, Alexander 3 = FGrH 142. 23. Babrius, Fables 2 (tr. Perry 7).

170  Rome’s Holy Mountain famous sites through ritual performances and the recitation of inscriptions. In the fifth century bce, for example, Pindar narrated the history of the first four temples built at Delphi in the mythological past. Though fragmentary, the remains of the song celebrate the fabulous bronze temple built by Hephaestus, the third temple, which was swallowed by a chasm opened up by a lightning bolt hurled from the heavens by the children of Cronus.24 Centuries later, Pausanias used Pindar’s poetry to narrate his own list of Delphic temples, registering ambiguity on the foundations and destructions of the four temples and largely rejecting the agency of Apollo.25 But for most others, gods and goddesses not only caused their temples to be built but inhabited the holy structures once they were dedicated. In Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written at the beginning of the third century ce, Apollonius famously debates Thespesion on anthropomorphism in the representation of divinities. However much they differed in their opinions, Apollonius and Thespesion both agree that Apollo inhabited (ōikēse) his Delphic house and the god himself chose to elaborate the temple (Apollonius’s view) or not (Thespesion’s view) according to his own divine intentions.26 When a temple was destroyed, this could be experienced as the loss of a community’s identity, and so it was important to remember the lost physical objects that pointed to, and represented, the political, religious, and social dimensions of a community’s past. Thus, in 99 bce, following the successive destructions of the Temple of Athena Lindia, the local magistrates of the city of Lindos on Rhodes ordered the restoration of the temple’s memory. This required the collection of records of the lost offerings formerly deposited in the temple treasury and of the epiphanies of the goddess—​all of which was inscribed on stone.27 More rare was the listing of temple destructions from different sites. One example is Plutarch’s list of the thirteen sanctuaries and shrines that were attacked by pirates beginning in the late 80s bce.28 These lists were therefore meant either to supply encomiastic accounts of individual locations or to show what happened in a single region and in quick succession. More generally, individual instances of violence against temples can be found scattered throughout Hellenistic literature and inscriptions. The prominent representation of violence against temples was due to the fact that such instances stimulated feelings of fear and the desire for the restoration of order.29 Hence Plutarch’s list of temples destroyed by pirates is adduced as an example of the reverberating effects of Rome’s civil wars. Fighting in Italy left the seas empty of patrols. According to Plutarch, it was only when the disruption 24. Pindar, Paean 8 (fr. 52i); see edition, translation, and extensive commentary in Rutherford 2001, 232. 25.  Pausanias 10.5.9. Plutarch, for example, knew Pindar’s Paeans: De garrulitate 511B. The Paeans circulated as a single papyrus role in the second and third centuries ce: Rutherford 2001, 137–​52. 26. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 6.19.4, 6.19.15. 27.  See now Chaniotis 2005, 158–​59; Higbie 2003. 28. Plutarch, Pompeius 24.5. 29.  Chaniotis 2005, 157.

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  171 of commerce caused food shortages in Rome that Pompey was sent out to rid the sea of pirates, thus placing Rome at the beginning of a chain of unfortunate events that led to temple destructions in the eastern Mediterranean.30 We have already had a glimpse of the moral condemnation that followed the destruction of Rome’s Capitol in 83 bce. When the temple was destroyed a second time in December 69 ce, again in the midst of civil war, thus began a cycle of destructions and restorations as well as a new round of interpretations.31 Thus in his Histories, Tacitus reports that after 69 the Druids took the “fateful fire” (fatali igne) to be a “sign of divine anger” (signum caelestis irae) that indicated that Roman world dominion (possessionem rerum humanarum) would end and pass on to others, namely, the Gauls.32 Naturally, Tacitus dismisses the prophetic utterances (canebant) of the Druids as false superstitio. Nonetheless, this latest destruction did inspire Tacitus to make sense of the Capitol’s cycle of destruction by inserting a remarkable eulogy for the Capitol in his Histories. He sorrowfully calls to mind the temple’s ominous foundation as a pignus imperii—​the promise of empire; its dedication in the first year of the republic as a glorification of freedom (libertas) from the tyrannical rule of kings; and its deliberate devastation as the result of the “rage of emperors” (furore principum). Tacitus was hereby mourning the republican values (mores) that had secured the favor of the gods and held Jupiter’s house (sedem) intact.33 For him, not only was the temple a sign of Rome’s divinely sanctioned preeminence; the destroyed temple was contrariwise a nostalgic emblem of the death of the republic’s libertas. It is important to underline the fact that in the aftermath of the destructions of 83 bce and 69 ce Romans and even their enemies, such as the Druids, began to understand the temple’s long history as embedded in a cycle of destructions. There were two responses. Like Lucretius, the interested observer could accept that the cause of temple destructions was beyond human understanding. Or the more common response was to consider the destruction of the temple as a dreadful omen, an urgent message in need of immediate attention. To use the terms employed by Lucretius and Tacitus, the source of the destruction was either “wild nature” (libera natura) or a “fateful fire” (fatali igne).34 But we should not miss how penetrating Tacitus’s own interpretation was. He did not attribute blame to one faction or another. The problem was systemic: Tacitus framed his own narration of the cycle of destructions as a metonym for the state itself. The destructions

30. Plutarch, Pompeius 24.1, 25.1. 31. Heinemann 2016. 32. Tacitus, Hist. 4.54. 33. Tacitus, Hist. 3.72. Tacitus’s rhetorical framing of the history of the Capitol as a eulogy: Flower 2008, 89–​91; Huebner 1963–​1976, 3:151–​52 with further references. 34. Tacitus, Hist. 4.54; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 2.1090–​1104. Cf. Lactantius, Divine Institutes 3.17.

172  Rome’s Holy Mountain of the temple could be understood as a representation of the republic’s ultimate political demise and the moral corruption engendered by the principate. The moral transgressions and political corruption at the heart of the cycle of destructions likewise informed the understandings of the Capitol’s attendant cycle of renovations. In his biography of P. Valerius Publicola, one of the first consuls of the Roman republic (cos. suff. 509 bce), Plutarch, like Tacitus, narrates the Capitol’s cycle of destructions and renovations. Significantly, Plutarch numbers the temples, from the first temple’s dedication in the first year of the republic, 509 bce, to the fourth (tetartos) temple dedicated by the emperor Domitian in 82 (or 89) ce. The latest temple was troubling to some. According to Plutarch, the “high cost of the Capitol” caused “amazement” (thaumasas):  no one other than the emperor, Plutarch points out, had the wealth to pay for the gilding of the temple’s bronze roof tiles, which alone cost more than 12,000 talents. While Plutarch was clearly impressed by Domitian’s building activities, he nonetheless uses his narrative of the Capitol’s cycle of destructions and renovations in part to call Domitian a latter-​day Midas for his unrestrained passion to turn everything into gold—​and, in this case, marble.35 Having seen the multiplicity of pagan responses to temple destructions, we can now return to, and more fully appreciate, the novelty of the Christian lists of temple destructions. For Christians such as Clement and Eusebius, one temple’s destruction was like all the rest. This collapsing of chronology and the collation of scattered occurrences of temple destructions deliberately flattened the history of temples into a single exemplum—​all destructions, no matter the immediate cause or the time when they occurred, revealed a truth that was beyond history, namely, that God’s pronoia destroyed the temples of the pagans, and he did so to show that the gods and goddesses had no power in the world.36 In this way, the dynamic process initiated by the Capitol’s destruction in 83 bce, which Harriet Flower characterized as producing “ever new layers of reinterpretation and remembering of the past,” came to an end in the hands of Clement, Arnobius, and Eusebius. We can clearly see this reduction of complexity in an arresting example. Writing at the beginning of the fourth century ce, Lactantius mocks Cicero’s claim that “divine flame” destroyed the Capitol in 83 bce so that a better temple could replace it. He loosely quotes Cicero’s assertion and then draws a rather different conclusion: “By their persistent stupidity [authors such as Cicero and Lucretius] not only failed to understand the power and majesty of the true God but also exacerbated the impiety of their own mistakes in 35. Plutarch, Publicola 14–​15. For discussion of Domitian as Midas and Plutarch’s narration of the history of the temple, see Flacelière, Chambray, and Juneaux 1961, 2:55–​57. 36.  If the pagan responses can be roughly understood in part as “theology,” that is to say, interpretations from within a pagan worldview (anthropologists would call this “emic”), then the Christian apologists came to articulate a “theory of religion,” an order of analysis essentially removed from the participants’ understandings of the events (or “etic”).

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  173 striving, against all propriety, to restore a temple so often damned by the judgment of heaven.”37 The only lesson to be learned is simple: the Christian God had always had all the power. Chronicling Past Destructions of the Capitol More so than his apologist predecessors, Eusebius was especially interested in fixing the chronology of temple destructions. He felt obligated to supply proof that temple destructions were chronologically determinable, hence Eusebius in both the Praeparatio Evangelica and the Theophany claimed that “history” and “historians” supplied solid evidence for establishing chronology.38 As noted above, there was allegedly so much evidence that both Arnobius and Eusebius presented themselves as crushed under the burden of too much information. For Arnobius it would have been “a task of unending labor” (infiniti operis res) to describe all destructions, and for Eusebius it would have been a “long story” (makros logos) to narrate the particulars. It is almost impossible to know what Clement was using when he assembled his list or why Arnobius chose not to reproduce Clement’s list but, instead, added his own items, ordering, and interpretations. But Eusebius’s case is different. We can at least have a sense of how he formed his own interpretation of the Capitol’s destructions and how his lists were different from those deployed by his predecessors Clement and Arnobius. The reason we can do so is that Eusebius’s most ardent reader was Eusebius himself.39 Eusebius’s lists of temple destructions found in his Praeparatio Evangelica and Theophany drew on his own synchronization of world history, the Chronicle canons, which he began assembling at the end of the third century and brought into its final form in 325/​326.40 In the chronicle, Eusebius charts the cycle of destructions not only of the Jerusalem Temple but also of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the Capitol in Rome. He follows these destructions consistently but not always fully, while also including singular occurrences of other destructions elsewhere. In the chronicle, in the 174th Olympiad, that is, from 84/​83 to 81/​80 bce, Eusebius synchronizes the third burning of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi at the hands of Thracians with the destruction of the Capitol in Rome.41 We know that this was originally part of Eusebius’s chronicle, and not, for example, Jerome’s 37. Lactantius, Divine Institutes 3.17.15 (Heck and Wlosok 2:262; tr. Bowen and Garnsey 199): “pertinaci ergo stultitia non modo uim maiestatemque ueri dei non intellexerunt, sed etiam impietatem sui erroris auxerunt, qui templum caelesti iudicio saepe damnatum restituere contra fas omne contenderint.” 38.  Burgess 2006, 22–​23; Burgess and Kulikowski 2013, 80–​119; Mosshammer 1979. 39.  Kofsky 2000, 38–​40, noted Eusebius’s use of his chronicle in later apologetic works. 40.  For 326: Eusebius-​Jerome, Chronicon (Helm 231). See Barnes 1981, 111–​20; Burgess and Kulikowski 2013, 119–​26; Grafton and Williams 2006, 133–​77; Mosshammer 1979. 41.  Eusebius-​Jerome, Chronicon (Helm 151):  “templum tertio aput Delfos a Thracibus incensum et Romae Capitolium.”

174  Rome’s Holy Mountain addition, because in this instance Eusebius’s Greek happens to survive in an anonymous tenth-​century Byzantine chronicle now in Madrid (Matritensis gr. 4701).42 Clearly Eusebius saw this synchronization as important. This third destruction of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was an obscure event even in antiquity, and it was certainly almost forgotten by the fourth century. Pausanias fails to report the fire, even though he, as we saw above, was interested in Delphi’s cycle of destructions. “From the beginning,” writes Pausanias, “the sanctuary of Delphi has been plotted against by a vast number of men.” Thereupon follows a list of Delphic destructions.43 In fact, the only testimony for a destruction at Delphi in the 80s bce comes from Appian’s Illyrica and Plutarch’s Numa, the latter only if a late nineteenth-​century textual emendation is correct.44 Moreover, Clement (and presumably also Arnobius) was interested only in the second destruction of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, which happened, according to Plutarch, Pausanias, and Eusebius, in the sixth century bce. Figuring out why Eusebius was able to make this synchronization will help us understand how he attempted to shape the meaning of the Capitol’s destructions. The date for the Capitol’s first destruction in 83 bce was widely known and already fixed in Olympiad chronicles. Eusebius used the Roman Antiquities, a history of Rome written by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the late first century bce, to place the destruction of the Capitol in 83 bce in the 174th Olympiad.45 Dionysius supplies this information in a discussion of the importance of the Sibylline oracles to the Roman state. According to Dionysius, the oracles were kept below the cella of Jupiter Capitolinus in a stone box. “But,” he continues, “when the temple was burned after the close of the 173rd Olympiad, either purposely, as some think, or by accident, these oracles together with all the offerings consecrated to the god were destroyed by the fire.”46 It seems clear that Eusebius had already fixed the Capitol’s destruction in the chronicle, because it would have been easy to do so by way of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Then he added the information about the third destruction of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to his Chronicle canons in the 174th Olympiad from an otherwise unknown source. The reason why Eusebius made the synchronization of these two temple destructions brings the apologetic possibilities of his chronicle suddenly into focus.47 Having made the synchronization of the two temple 42.  Anonymi Chronographia Syntomos (Bauer 43). 43.  Pausanias 10.7.1 (tr. Jones 4:400–​403). 44. Appian, Illyrica 5; Plutarch, Numa 9.6, emended by G.  Zippel and accepted by Ziegler (1973, 3.2:64). Kallet-​Marx 1995, 361–​64, critically revises Pomtow 1896. 45.  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 4.62.6. That Eusebius was relying on Dionysius for the dating is a possibility hinted at without argumentation in Zink 1979, 90–​91 n. 1. Cf. Appian, BC 1.9.84–​1.10.86, for Appian’s dating of the event also in the 174th Olympiad. According to his explanatory preface to the Chronicle canons, as transmitted by the Armenian translation, Eusebius used Dionysius especially for the early history of Rome: Karst 1911, 125–​36. 46.  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 4.62.5–​6 (tr. Cary 2:466–​69). 47.  The chronicle’s apologetic themes: Kofsky 2000, 38–​40.

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  175 destructions in the 174th Olympiad, Eusebius elucidates its significance in the Praeparatio Evangelica: “It is reported that the Delphic oracle was burned a third time by the Thracians. The oracle supplied no knowledge (of the destruction) in advance, nor was it able to protect the abode of the Pythian.” Next, Eusebius deploys the synchronization that he made in his Chronicle canons. According to Eusebius, “Historians report that the Capitol in Rome suffered the same thing.”48 This “same thing” (tauton) was surely a reference to the Delphic oracle’s inability to protect the shrine from the Thracians, and likely an oblique reference to Sibylline oracles and their failure to protect the Capitol from destruction. Even though the Capitol was not an oracular shrine in the same way as the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, it was treated as such in the long aftermath of 83 bce. According to Cicero’s poem De Consulatu suo, when Jupiter’s thunderbolts crashed down on the Capitol in 65 bce, hurling down and melting ancient statues, this was a prophetic utterance from Jupiter himself, a warning to the Roman people to save the state from the destruction of laws.49 Thus in Cicero’s own consulate, when a new statue was dedicated, it was precisely at the very moment when L.  Sergius Catilina’s plot was exposed and the state was therefore saved from revolution.50 The alleged fact that Jupiter could communicate through the Capitol’s destruction and renovation was troubling not just to Eusebius. It bothered others too. In critiquing this passage by Cicero, Arnobius was disturbed by how seductive these miraculous stories (mirabilia) were and how they demanded that the gods be appeased materially, through either sacrifice, the erection of temples, or the dedication of statues.51 Eusebius’s calculations in his chronicle and his interpretation of them in the Praeparatio Evangelica and Theophany lent proof to Clement’s assertion from a century before; it was indeed the same fire that zigzagged from one temple to another, no matter how widely separated by time and place. But the world had changed in the century that separated the two authors. By the middle of the 320s, when Eusebius began writing the Praeparatio Evangelica, the realities of Christian community life looked far different than they had in Clement’s Alexandria. The emperor Constantine had openly affiliated himself with Christ and his churches; he lent property, manpower, and resources for the dedication of large basilicas in Rome and Palestine; and he issued legislation that validated the authority of Christian clergy in public life while also restricting the privileges of other religious communities. It was after 324, moreover, that Constantine had set himself against the oracles of the ancient world. In a letter addressed to the provincials published in that year, Constantine declared that Apollo’s oracular 48. Eusebius, PE 4.2.8 (Mras 167). Eusebius uses the same verb in both cases—​the chronicle: eneprēsthē; and PE: emprēsthēnai. Dating: Barnes 1981, 178; Kofsky 2000, 74–​75 n. 3 with further references. 49. Cicero, De Consulatu suo Frag. 2 = De Divinatione 1.11.19–​1.12.20. 50. Cicero, Div. 1.12.21. 51. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 7.40–​41.

176  Rome’s Holy Mountain utterances at Didyma had authorized the Great Persecution under Diocletian.52 This, in part, led Constantine to order the seizure of temple treasuries in the eastern provinces, including ancient votives from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.53 Eusebius got the message. His synchronization of the two destructions in the 174th Olympiad, it seems to me, was thus meant to bridge the destructions of the two most important sites of oracular communications in the Greek and Roman worlds, the Delphic oracle and the repository of the Sibylline Books—​a sign that the oracles had indeed been silenced in the Constantinian empire.54 We can continue to follow Eusebius’s uses of his own chronicle and the role that the Capitol played in his apologetic projects.55 In the reign of the emperor Commodus, according to his chronicle, “lightning fell on the Capitol, a great fire arose and consumed the libraries and those shrines that were nearby.”56 It was also under this emperor, though recorded in the chronicle in different years, that the Temple of Serapis at Alexandria burned down, as did the palace on the Palatine Hill and the Temple of Vesta in Rome.57 Reflecting on these calculations in his Praeparatio Evangelica, Eusebius closely follows the chronology that he had established, separating each group of destructions into distinct phases. After reporting a lightning strike that toppled the colossus of Zeus at Olympia “in the reign of Julius Caesar,” Eusebius states that “at another time” (allote) the “Kapetōlion of Zeus” was set on fire, the Pantheon was destroyed by lightning, and the “Sarapeion was similarly burned up.”58 In sum, the specificity of the chronicle allowed Eusebius in his apologetic works to harvest individual instances of temple destructions and flatten them into lists. On the one hand, these lists documented the intentionality, persistence, and scope of God’s anger, and on the other hand, they demonstrated the impotence of the pagan divinities to do anything about it. In the Praeparatio Evangelica, Eusebius did what his list-​making predecessors had not done. Rather than listing temple destructions almost randomly, Eusebius’s list was not only bigger but was chronologically accurate. Eusebius was thereby able to turn Greek and Roman chronography and historiography into the basis of Christian apologetics, in a format—​the chronicle—​that would allow others to continue his project not only in the Latin west through the translation and adaption by Jerome in 387 ce but also into Eurasia through translations into Armenian and Syriac.59 In the fifth-​century Armenian translation of the chronicle, “the Temple of Capitoline 52. Eusebius, Life of Constantine 2.50. Cf. Lactantius, Mort. Pers. 11. 53. Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.54. 54.  The oracles continued to function: Athanassiadi 1989–​1990. 55.  See Mras’s note on PE 4.2.8 (Mras 167): “Reminiszenzen an die Chronik des Verfassers.” 56.  Eusebius-​Jerome, Chronicon (Helm 209): “In Capitolio fulmen ruit et magna inflammatione facta bibliothecae et uicinae quaeque aedes concrematae.” For these events, see c­ hapter 1. 57.  Eusebius-​Jerome, Chronicon (Helm 208–​9). 58. Eusebius, PE 4.2.8 (Mras 168). Cf. Eusebius, Theophania (Gressmann 123). 59.  Armenian: Karst 1911. Syriac: Schoene 1875–​1876, 2:203–​19.

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  177 Ohrmazd burned down” in 69 ce. In this way, the Capitol was made culturally mobile. Uprooted from its Roman context and translated into a Persianate culture, the Capitol and its centrality in Roman culture could be made to stand for a temple dedicated to the preeminent deity of Zoroastrian cosmology.60 Chronicling Future Destructions of the Capitol The image of divine forces destroying temples and silencing oracles continued to resonate in elite literary productions into the sixth century. Like Vergil, Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus, late antique Christian and pagan writers used the physical integrity of the Capitol as symptomatic of the moral integrity of Rome’s leaders and the Roman people. For Christians such as Paulinus, Jerome, and Prudentius, the image of the Capitol as desolate, haunted, and pounded by lightning was an easy—​and traditional—​way to demonstrate Rome’s favor or disfavor in the eyes of God. These men had lived in Rome. Through their education and sojourns in the city, they were intimately aware of Rome’s history, its institutions, and the rhythms of aristocratic life.61 Let us briefly look at the ways in which they used the vivid, but imaginary, reports of the Capitol’s ruination to think about the future of a Christian empire. In the middle of his poem Apotheosis, a didactic exploration of the divinity of Christ written around 400, Prudentius lists the salutary effects that the proclamation of the Gospels (uox euangelica) has had in the world. Snowy lands have become temperate; barbarians have set aside their arms. With the birth of Jesus, the oracles of Delphi, Dodona, Cuma, and Ammon have fallen silent. And Rome’s Capitol, here poetically called the “Romulean Capitol” (Capitolia Romula), laments that her emperors now see Christ as their God and have ordered the destruction of temples. Now the emperor, Prudentius continues, prays in churches.62 This is a vivid image of the Capitol suffering from feelings of loss and abandonment, as emperors turned away from her for Christ and his churches. For Prudentius, then, it is clear that the Capitol’s abandonment was a necessary step in the establishment of a Christian Roman empire. Next Prudentius addresses “Barren Judaea” (infelix Iudaea) and her own loss of the Jerusalem Temple: just as Rome forced Judaea to her knees, Christ forced Rome, the mistress of empire (imperii dominam), to prostrate herself before him. Prudentius visualizes this subjugation by imagining for his audience that Christ had toppled (subegit) the statues of the

60.  Karst 1911, 216. Other slippages and misunderstandings in the Armenian translation:  Christesen and Martirosova-​Torlone 2006. 61.  Jerome in Rome: Grig 2012. Paulinus in Rome: Trout 1999, 33–​45. 62. Prudentius, Apotheosis 445–​48 (Lavarenne 19): “Ipsa suis Christum Capitolia Romula maerent principibus lucere Deum destructaque templa imperio cecidisse ducum; iam purpura supplex sternitur Aeneadae rectoris ad atria Christi uexillumque crucis summus dominator adorat.”

178  Rome’s Holy Mountain gods on the Tarpeian Rock.63 Jews, he states, ought to learn from the visible ruination of the Jerusalem Temple that structures made by the hands of men, such as the Capitol and the Jerusalem Temple, can be destroyed, while the true temple, Christ, was made from the word of the Lord (uerbo factum Domini). As such, the Christian temple—​Christ—​is eternal.64 Jerome similarly explored the apologetic possibilities of imagining the desolation of the two holy mountains as exemplifying the triumph and supersession of Christ over Jews and pagans. By August 385, Jerome’s patron Pope Damasus (366–​384) had died. Jerome left Rome shortly thereafter, having fallen out with the ecclesiastical establishment concerning the severity of his eastern asceticism and his questionable influence on aristocratic women in the city. Writing from Rome’s port, Ostia, Jerome asks one of these women to pray “that I return from Babylon to Jerusalem.”65 Rome had become, as he put it, the dominion of Nebuchadnezzar. He, like the Jews, had been living in exile following the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians in 586 bce. After touring the holy sites in Palestine for a year, Jerome and his companions established a monastery in Bethlehem, never to see Rome again. In 386 ce, Jerome wrote to Marcella, urging her to join them. Here, he continued to develop the theme of Rome as Babylon by referring Marcella to the Apocalypse of John: “It has fallen, fallen, Babylon the Great has become the dwelling place of demons.”66 While Rome had its own claim to holy sites, continued Jerome, including the “trophies of the apostles and martyrs” (trophaea apostolorum et martyrum), and “paganism had been squashed” (gentilitate calcata) there, the city had too much bustle and vanity for one dedicated to the “lifestyle of monks” (proposito monachorum). In contrast, Jerome points out that Jerusalem means “vision of peace” (uisio pacis), a place where one could read the whole history of the biblical past in the present landscape. “It would take a long time,” in Jerome’s words, “to count how many prophets, how many holy men this city [Jerusalem] has sent forth.”67 If Rome’s holy mountain could be denied its sanctity by pointing to its cycle of destructions, how did one account for the number of times Jerusalem was destroyed? For Jerome, Jerusalem’s cycle of destructions only proved that the Jews had sinned. The land, however, had always remained holy. God himself destroyed the Temple, but, according to Jerome, “through the passage of time, [the Temple Mount] is now much more august” (per profectus temporum multo nunc augustior est). Seeing the places associated with scripture, moreover, allowed one to be 63. Prudentius, Apotheosis 506–​8 (Lavarenne 21): “orbem possidet, imperii dominam sibi cedere Romam conpulit et simulacra deum Tarpeia subegit.” 64. Prudentius, Apotheosis 509–​51 (Lavarenne 21–​22). 65. Jerome, Ep. 45.6 (Hilberg 1:327): “ora autem, ut de Babylone Hierosolyma regrediar.” 66. Jerome, Ep. 46.12 (Hilberg 1:342): “cecidit enim, cecidit Babylon magna, et facta est habitatio daemonum.” Cf. Apoc. 18:2. 67. Jerome, Ep. 46.3 (Hilberg 1:332): “quantos haec urbs prophetas, quantos emiserit sanctos uiros, longum est recensere.”

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  179 folded into the story as an eyewitness: Jesus wrapped in his burial shroud with an angel sitting at his feet.68 In Bethlehem, he continues, one could see all the sites associated with Mary and the nativity. This is where one could ruminate on the difference between the rough little crevice in which Jesus was born and Rome’s mansions with gold-​plated ceilings, staffed by slaves. Jerome also had in mind the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. “This place is holier, to my mind,” he declares, “than that Tarpeian Rock, which has shown itself displeasing to God by how often it has been struck by lightning.”69 Thus, in Jerome’s view, the Capitol’s many burnings were symbolic of Rome’s ongoing, perhaps never-​ending, punishment because of the pettiness of the city’s inward-​looking aristocratic culture.70 Almost a decade later, in 403, Jerome returned to the theme. In a letter to the Roman aristocrat Laeta on how to raise her newborn daughter, Jerome writes that just as no one is born a Christian (fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani), but one must become one, so too Rome. For him, the story of the city’s Christian conversion was measured by the decline of the Capitol: “The Golden Capitol is neglected. All the temples of Rome are covered in black soot and spider webs. The city is changed from the ground up, and the people, spilling past the almost ruined temples, rush to the tombs of the martyrs.”71 Even with this reorientation of topography and cult, Jerome does not advise Laeta to educate her daughter in the city. She should instead bring the child to Palestine for a proper upbringing. Rome, a city so important to Jerome for his own intellectual and religious formation, was eclipsed by a far more important terrestrial source of spiritual inspiration. In these ways, Jerome and Prudentius directly linked the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Capitol in Rome. The two holy places were figured as desolations, real ruins in the case of Jerusalem and the imaginary future ruination of the Capitol. These assertions of desolation were necessary to serve as the proof, visible at least in the mind’s eye of Jerome’s readers in Rome, of a Christian cosmology and history now manifest in the Constantinian churches of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and the Nativity in Bethlehem. Such a comparison was not a stretch. The two holy mountains shared a history of destruction. In the year 69/​70 ce, both the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill and the Jerusalem Temple were in ruins, the former because of civil war, the latter because of insurrection and invasion. The fall of each was remembered as a tragedy. Of the destruction of the Temple of Jupiter, Tacitus writes: “This was the saddest and

68. Jerome, Ep. 46.5 (Hilberg 1:334). 69. Jerome, Ep. 46.11 (Hilberg 1:341): “et hic puto locus sanctior est rupe Tarpeia, quae de coelo saepius fulminata ostendit, quod Domino displiceret.” 70.  For Jerome’s rhetorical constructions of Rome, see Grig 2009; Grig 2012. 71. Jerome, Ep. 107.1 (Hilberg 2:291): “Fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani. auratum squalet Capitolium, fuligine et aranearum telis omnia Romae templa cooperta sunt, mouetur urbs sedibus suis et inundans populus ante delubra semiruta currit ad martyrum tumulos.” Similar is Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.544–​60.

180  Rome’s Holy Mountain most shameful crime that the Roman state had ever suffered since its foundation.”72 Similarly the Jewish historian Josephus notes that one cannot but mourn the destruction of “the most marvelous edifice that we have ever seen or heard of, whether we consider its structure, its magnitude, the richness of its every detail, or the reputation of its Holy Places.”73 Like Tacitus, Josephus was moved to write a condensed narrative of the Jerusalem Temple’s history, highlighting the fact that the Temple was destroyed on the same day (the Ninth of Ab) as the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Babylonians. His only consolation was an intense fatalism. No author before late antiquity had explored the interpretive possibilities of aligning the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 and the Capitol in Rome in 69. By appropriating Jewish and pagan interpretations of these two temple destructions, however, Jerome and Prudentius created a new architecture of Christian triumphalist thought in which the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple and the Roman Capitol became the basis of an inevitable Christian future. Evil Spirits and Owls: Portents of Ruination The Temple Mount in Jerusalem would remain a desolation for centuries, its significance reanimated as Palestine became a Christian Holy Land.74 For Christians such as Eusebius of Caesarea, no restoration of the Jerusalem Temple was possible, only “deeper depths of desolation.”75 In this formulation, the ruins of the Temple Mount could in fact be ruined even more thoroughly, and the process could never be reversed. In Eusebius’s chronicle, as reflected in Jerome’s Latin translation and the fifth-​century Armenian translation, the destruction of the temple in 70 ce was its final ruin (nouissima ruina).76 However, the Capitol was not yet in ruins at the beginning of the fifth century. It had been destroyed in the past and repeatedly damaged by lightning, as we have seen, but the temple was very much still standing. Thus Jerome ensured his readers that the Capitol would soon be ruined by forcing them to imagine the structures as about to collapse. In Jerome’s letter to Laeta, he continues his dramatic depiction of temples in desolation: “Paganism suffers in solitude in the city, since the gods of the nations remained behind with eagle-​owls and night-​owls (cum bubonibus et noctuis) on the deserted rooftops” of the temples.77 Writing his apologetic poem Contra 72. Tacitus, Hist. 3.72 (tr. Moore 3:452–​53): “Id facinus post conditam urbem luctuosissimum foedissimumque rei publicae populi Romani accidit.” 73. Josephus, BJ 6.267–​68 (tr. Thackeray 3:254–​55); cf. 6.435–​42. 74.  See Eliav 2005; Jacobs 2004; Moralee 2009; Wilken 1992. 75. Eusebius, DE 8.2; Eusebius, Theophania 4.18. 76.  Eusebius-​Jerome, Chronicon (Helm 187). Armenian:  Karst 1911, 216:  “Letze Zerstörung des Tempels Jerusalems.” 77. Jerome, Ep. 107.2 (Hilberg 2:292): “solitudinem patitur et in urbe gentilitas, dii quondam nationum cum bubonibus et noctuis in solis culminibus remanserunt.”

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  181 Symmachum at around the same time, Prudentius adds to this gloomy image of desolate temples by describing how Jupiter’s bloody altar has been rejected, while crowds instead gather together at the Vatican Hill to honor Saint Peter and at the Lateran Palace to receive baptism.78 What was left behind, according to Prudentius, were “whatever evil spirits (laruas) were usually shuttered up in the Capitol.”79 Both Jerome and Prudentius were putting into play the belief that the gods inhabited their temples. Moreover, Prudentius’s charge that the Capitol contained the evil spirits of the deceased is rooted in the arguments of those such as Arnobius and Lactantius who wrote that the Capitol, like other temples, was nothing other than the tomb of a dead man, not a holy space made in honor of an immortal deity.80 The temple’s inhabitants, then, were nothing other than the evil spirits of deceased mortals. Jerome, too, mockingly allows for temples to be inhabited, though he does not characterize these inhabitants as spirits. He put it simply: “They [the gods] remained” (remanserunt) in the temples. As we just saw, what animates Jerome’s image of these lonely gods is his description of owls hooting in the eaves of a temple’s roof. This looks innocent enough. But in antiquity owls were bad company to keep. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, written in the middle of the first century ce, reports that the eagle-​owl (bubo) was an especially bad omen. Usually owls lived in desolate places, and if an owl were seen in a city, or indeed on a temple, this unfortunate circumstance required a lustratio, the ritual required for the purification of a place.81 By looking at a compilation of omens made by a rough contemporary of Jerome’s, we can have a better sense of what Jerome intended by describing the Capitol and other temples as empty, neglected, and colonized by owls. Toward the end of the fourth century, Julius Obsequens produced a Book of Prodigies. Like Eutropius and other pagan historians at this time, Julius Obsequens mined Livy’s hundreds of pages of From the Founding of the City as well as a Livian epitome that was in circulation at the time.82 His purpose, apparently, was to produce a list, in staccato fashion, of all manner of strange happenings from 259 to 11 bce (the end of Livy’s From the Founding of the City) and to note, occasionally, their connection to internecine conflict and military defeat.83 For Livy and Julius Obsequens, damage to temples by fire and storm was particularly unsettling for reasons discussed throughout 78. Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.578–​86. For discussion of a similar assertion in Prudentius of the desolation of pagan temples, see Lizzi Testa 2009, 267–​68. 79. Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.631: “et quascumque solent Capitolia claudere laruas.” 80. Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 6.6.2; Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.11.49. See ­chapter 5. 81. Pliny, Natural History 10.17: “Bubo funebris et maxime abominatus publicis praecipue auspiciis deserta incolit nec tantum desolata sed dira etiam et inaccessa, noctis monstrum, nec cantu aliquo uocalis sed gemitu.” 82.  Cameron 2011, 225–​27, 757; Crawford 1970, 269; Schmidt 1968. 83.  Damage to temples: Julius Obsequens, Liber Prodigiorum 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 14, 16, 18, 29, 38, 39, 41, 54, 59, 61, 63, 68.

182  Rome’s Holy Mountain this chapter; such damage necessitated the intervention of religious specialists (e.g., haruspices) to supply the right response from the community.84 Obsequens was also interested in owls. Of the twelve ominous signs recorded by Obsequens as having happened in Capitolio, fully half of them involve owls.85 The seriousness of this omen is reflected in three instances in which Obsequens specified that the owl had to be killed and an expiation had to take place. The first instance was in 135 bce, when an owl was heard in Capitolio and then elsewhere in the city. The bird was killed, its body was burned, and the ashes were scattered in the Tiber.86 In 98 bce, an owl was seen in the Capitol above the statues of the gods. The purification rites, however, failed. The bull designated for sacrifice fell dead—​prematurely.87 And in 96 bce, it is reported, simply, that an owl was killed on the Capitol.88 Such lists of prodigies continued into the empire. According to Pliny the Elder, an eagle-​owl “entered the cella of the Capitol” in the consulate of S. Palpellius Hister and L. Pedanius Secundus (43 ce). The city had to be purified in a ritual that took place on the nones of March.89 The tradition of owls as omens of imminent disaster likewise continued into the late empire. In the sixth century, Zosimus reports that Constantine ordered his troops to ready themselves after seeing a host of owls settling on the Aurelian Wall just before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.90 For pagans such as Zosimus and his source Eunapius of Sardis, this flight of owls suggested that Maxentius’s tutelary deities had abandoned him to his fate.91 Drawing on this long tradition of owls, omens, temples, and the fate of rulers, Jerome was confidently forecasting the imminent doom of paganism and its forlorn temples. Even if the Capitol was not yet in ruins like the Jerusalem Temple, its future desolation was guaranteed by its history of damage and destruction. Conclusion Throughout this book we have been following the ways in which the Capitol was disintegrated from its uses in public rituals of power as well as from a 84.  Santangelo 2013, 84–​114. 85.  Julius Obsequens, Liber Prodigiorum 3, 61 (lightning); 5, 16, 29 (storms); 26, 27, 30, 32, 47, 49 (owls and birds). 86.  Julius Obsequens, Liber Prodigiorum 26: “Bubonis uox primum in Capitolio dein circa urbem audita. Quae auis praemio posito ab aucupe capta combustaque; cinis eius in Tiberim dispersus.” 87.  Julius Obsequens, Liber Prodigiorum 47: “Bubone in Capitolio supra deorum simulacra uiso cum piaretur taurus uictima exanimis concidit.” 88.  Julius Obsequens, Liber Prodigiorum 49: “Bubo in Capitolio occisus.” 89. Pliny, Natural History 10.17: “Capitolii cellam ipsam intrauit Sexto Palpellio Histro L. Pedanio coss., propter quod nonis Martiis urbs lustrata est eo anno.” 90.  Zosimus 2.16.2 (Paschoud 1:88; tr. Ridley 31). 91. No other source mentions these owls. For debates on Zosimus’s source for this detail, see Franchi de’Cavalieri 1953, 156–​57 n. 211; Paschoud 1971–​1979, 1:220.

Learning from the Capitol’s Destruction  183 sympathetic understanding of its registers of meaning in the past. By the end of the fourth century, as described in part I, the Capitol was no longer the destination of public processions or the location where state rituals of power took place. Beginning in the third century, Christian apologists distilled knowledge about Rome’s traditions, a process that involved collecting the Capitol’s stories and controlling the messages they suggested. In ­chapter 5, we saw that it was especially important for these Christian authors to interrogate the belief that Jupiter Optimus Maximus chose the Capitoline Hill as his home on earth and that this divinity was demonstrably present there at key moments in Roman history. It was important to prove that Jupiter was not an omnipotent father protecting the Capitol through this numinous presence, his thundering aegis, and his honking geese. The ancient, almost universally held belief that temple destructions were oracular signs of divine anger, moral corruption, and the endangerment of the state clearly continued into late antiquity. However, for Christians such as Eusebius, temple destructions, especially repeated destructions of iconic temples such as the Capitol, did not require investigation into the human failures at the root of divine anger. There was no ambiguity: Rome’s Capitol and other temples repeatedly fell victim to lightning strikes and civil wars because of the Christian God’s righteous anger. This history of destructions, both rooted in past examples and projected into the future, became in late antiquity the primary way of both remembering the Capitoline Hill’s history and imagining its inevitable desolation into a future moment when the Capitol, like the Jerusalem Temple, would be a visible ruin similarly pregnant with theological significance. What were Christians to learn from the Capitol’s destructions? The Capitol was a metonym of either Roman paganism, its imperfect embrace of Christianity, or its conversion through the power of the apostles and martyrs; it was invoked either to criticize or to praise divine authorities and their human agents on earth; and the frequency of lightning strikes showed God’s relentless, tempering anger. In January 405, to supply one more example, Paulinus delivered the latest in a series of poems on the feast day of the martyr Felix at Cimitile, the location of the martyr’s shrine situated just north of Nola and close to Pompeii.92 Paulinus’s theme on this occasion was how the tombs of the apostles and martyrs were like stars in the sky, their sparkling light illuminating the darkness of a once demon-​haunted world.93 That is why, according to Paulinus, Christ rooted (fixit) Peter and Paul in Rome, and since then Christians had grown rapidly in numbers. In Paulinus’s imagery, these Christians, in their multitude, spill out into the streets of the city, together raising a “sacred acclamation” (clamor sanctus) that electrifies the atmosphere with the praising of the Lord, causing lightning 92.  Trout 1999, 105–​32. 93. Paulinus, Carm. 19.15–​19.

184  Rome’s Holy Mountain to pound the roof (culmine) of the Capitol and leaving the temple shaking in its place.94 Paulinus continues by describing the same salutary effect that the presence of relics had throughout the world. The most important lesson, then, is that the presence of the saints was draining the Capitol’s power, a topic that we will explore in the next chapter.

94. Paulinus, Carm. 19.67–​68: “laudibus aeterni domini ferit aethera clamor sanctus et incusso Capitolia culmine nutant.” See Grig 2009, 282 n. 17.

7

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints

I

n the Peristephanon, a cycle of lyric poems that narrates the passions of dozens of martyrs, Prudentius describes how Vincent of Saragossa has been swept up in the Diocletianic persecution and brought before Datianus, the Roman governor of Spain. Vincent ridicules idol worship, sacrifices, and temples, which enrages the official, leading Datianus to declare that Vincent’s recalcitrance in Spain had distant reverberations in the capital. Even this far from Rome, Vincent was, in effect, stubbornly squashing the Tarpeian rites (Tarpeia calcentur sacra), the city of Rome itself, the senate, and the emperor.1 For Prudentius, this was a vision of a highly centralized empire, in which Rome’s authority gripped the provinces through the vigilance of the emperor’s officials. Written at the beginning of the fifth century ce, the Peristephanon also presents an imaginary Roman state that was incapable of forcing apostasy on the holy martyrs of the past, no matter the magnitude of threat and torture, a series of violent images made potent through the literary effects available to poets who had studied, and become intimate with, Catullus, Vergil, Horace, and Ovid as well as Statius, Persius, and Silius Italicus.2 Even as Prudentius has Christ and the martyrs symbolically smashing the Capitol, the Capitoline Hill and its associations with the eternity of empire were nonetheless experienced primarily through Rome’s ancient literary heritage. In this way, and as we saw in ­chapter 6, the traditional ways of knowing the hill continued into the fifth and sixth centuries. The Capitol was also of course more than a literary construct. It was a location within a city undergoing a revolutionary shift in how its past was understood. By the end of the fourth century, Rome was becoming a city defined by the presence of its dead apostles and martyrs.3 The veneration of these hometown Christian heroes came into sharp focus largely through the efforts of Pope Damasus (366–​ 384). He turned Rome, according to Maya Maskarinec’s arresting image, inside out: the burial sites located outside the walls of the city, situated along the roads leading into the city, now became the center of Rome’s symbolic topography.4

1. Prudentius, Peristephanon 5.105–​8. See Roberts 1993. 2.  Roberts 1993, 31–​32, 92–​99; Trout 1999, 82–​88. 3.  Goodson 2010, 197–​256; Grig 2004. 4.  Maskarinec 2015b, 129.

185

186  Rome’s Holy Mountain Damasus elaborated key locations in these cities of the dead through the placement of ornate, beautifully made inscriptions, which the bishop himself composed, at the site where the remains of the martyrs were deposited. These verses profiled the martyrs and, importantly, Damasus’s discovery of them. Nearly sixty of them, including many pious imitations passed off as genuine Damasan inscriptions, were copied into collections and circulated in the early Middle Ages, attesting to the success of Damasus’s project.5 Most recent scholars of Damasus’s efforts have argued that the bishop sought to unify the city’s fractious Christian communities by promoting Rome’s Christian topography and placing these new heritage sites firmly in the bishop’s hands. His plan was wildly successful, so much so that Damasus’s role as the arbiter of the memory of the cult of apostles and martyrs led to the apocryphal celebration of him as the author of the Liber Pontificalis, the chronicle of the popes that was assembled in the first half of the sixth century.6 With the patronage of the popes, emperors, and aristocrats, the cults of Rome’s apostles Peter and Paul and of the city’s vast number of martyrs were at the center of the city’s ritual life and its urban identity.7 Writing two decades after Damasus’s death, Prudentius, in his poem on the passions of Peter and Paul from the Peristephanon, describes the frenetic energy on June 29, the joint feast day of Peter and Paul, when crowds ran throughout the city and rejoiced (Romam per omnem cursitant ouantque), bustling from St. Peter’s to S.  Paolo fuori le Mura.8 This was a day on which Rome’s popes continued to call to mind the singularity of the city’s spiritual defenses by its holy citizens. Pope Leo I  (440–​461), in a sermon delivered in 441, a generation after Prudentius was writing, celebrates the security offered by the almost unimaginably immense number of martyrs that followed after the apostles: “Thus thousands of blessed martyrs give witness to how great a progeny these two illustrious shoots of the divine seed [Peter and Paul] proliferated. The followers of the triumphs of the apostles have encircled our city with an ennobled populace, shining to far distances, and they have crowned it as if with a diadem fitted with the beauty of many gems.”9 This chapter will turn to the consequences of Rome’s real and imaginary transformations into a city of apostles and martyrs for the ways in which the Capitol and other iconic locations from the distant past were remembered in the production and circulation of the legendary acts and passions of the Roman martyrs. In these texts, the basis of knowing the Roman past, including discrete places in the

5.  Diefenbach 2007, 289–​324; Diefenbach 2012; Sághy 2000; Sághy 2012. Edition: Ferrua 1942. Early medieval collections: Maskarinec 2015b. 6.  LP (Duchesne 1:117 and xxxiv). The apocryphal letters by Jerome and Damasus that allege their authorship were included in the earliest manuscripts of the LP, which date from the eighth century. 7.  Liverani 2008; Thacker 2012. 8. Prudentius, Peristephanon 12 (Cunningham 379). 9. Leo, Serm. 82.6 (tr. Freeland and Conway 356). See Salzman 2013a; Thacker 2012, 394–​96.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  187 urban environment, was not primarily and directly rooted in classical literature. Instead, Rome came to be defined through the use of a new set of literary topoi, echoes of Christian polemics as well as encounters with inscriptions, both ancient and late antique Christian inscriptions located in the martyrial shrines outside the city walls. By the end of the sixth century, as these legendary sources for knowing the city came to be uprooted from the authority of the ancient authors, knowing the city became an act of devotion: knowing Rome was to experience the cityscape in relation to the acts and passions of Rome’s martyrs. The Topography of Martyrdom Leo’s sublime image of the martyrs surrounding the city, like a battalion of elite soldiers under the command of Rome’s preeminent bishop, was a mirage. The shrines of the martyrs could become a “topography of dissent.”10 In the city of Rome, Damasus was opposed by two rivals claimants, both of whom, Liberius and Ursinus, had successively established themselves and their followers at the cemetery of the shrine of St. Agnes on Via Nomentana.11 Leo’s sermon also hints at another way in which the cult of the martyrs was potentially problematic. Rome was blessed with thousands of martyrs, but just a handful of them had names, passions, and specific locations where their bodies had been deposited in the extramural cemeteries. The list of martyr depositions in the Calendar of 354 by Furius Dionysius Filocalus lists only around forty martyrs by name and their feast days.12 The two centuries between 400 and 600 saw a host of anonymous authors inventively filling in the details of the roster of Roman martyrs through the proliferation of a large number of martyr acts and passions, the construction of large funerary basilicas at the cemeteries of the martyrs, the lay endowment of churches (tituli), and the emplacement of inscriptions in these martyrial zones, telling, often in imitation of Damasus’s famous poems, the deeds of the holy men, women, and children not known or celebrated at the end of the fourth century by Damasus and his immediate successors.13 These martyr acts and passions, known collectively as the gesta martyrum at least since the sixth century,14 came to the attention of the scholarly world beginning with, among others, Boninus Mombritius’s Sanctuarium seu vitae sanctorum, published in 1480, and from the seventeenth century on through the Acta Sanctorum, editions of the gesta by the 10.  Maier 1995; Sághy 2012, 254–​55. 11.  LP (Duchesne 1:207); Collectio Avellana, Ep. 1.12 (Günther 4). 12.  VZ 2:17–​28. 13. Thacker 2012. 14.  Decretum Gelasianum 4.4 (Dobschütz 39): “gesta sanctorum martyrum”; LP (Duchesne 1:123): “qui gestas martyrum sollicite et curiose”; LP (Duchesne 1:147): “hic gestas martyrum diligenter a notariis exquisiuit et in ecclesia recondit”; LP (Duchesne 1:148): “ut gestas martyrum in integro fideliter colligerent.” See Cooper 1999, 305–​8.

188  Rome’s Holy Mountain Société des Bollandistes organized according to the feast days of the saints on the liturgical calendar. Through these editions, modern readers of the gesta suddenly encountered the use of real and imaginary cityscapes to stage the fortitude and faith of the martyrs.15 The question of how to interpret the gesta’s listing of locations has troubled generations of scholars. Especially in the nineteenth century, they were widely used in studies of Roman topography, epigraphy, and history to locate and discuss the persistence into the Middle Ages of ancient monuments in Rome and elsewhere.16 Importantly, the Capitol is named in two dozen legendary martyr acts. Not only did the gesta tell stories about Rome’s Capitol,17 but they also seem to attest capitolia or the cult of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus at sites throughout the Roman world, including Atripalda, Aquileia, Brescia, Cagliari, Capua, and Ravenna in Italy;18 Augsburg and Trier in Germany;19 Fismes, Narbonne, and Toulouse in France;20 Girona in Spain;21 and in the east, Marmara Ereğli (Heraklea), İznik (Nicaea), and Kayseri (Caesarea) in Turkey.22 By the end of the nineteenth century, books and articles followed one after another, often in heated debate to determine the historicity of the information in the gesta, from Auguste Castan’s Le Capitole de Vesontio et les capitols provinciaux du monde romain (1869) to the most recent study by Josephine Quinn and Andrew Wilson (2013).23 Catholic scholars such as Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Paul Allard, Hippolyte Delehaye, and Albert Dufourcq, also writing at the end of the nineteenth century, were, for their part, interested in how the topography in the gesta 15.  Cityscape as “stage”: Behrwald 2012, 287; Boulhol 2004, 171; Diefenbach 2007, 436–​37. 16.  E.g., de Rossi 1864–​1880. 17.  Rome (listing titles when possible from CPL): Passio S Felicis presbyteri Romani, AASS, Ian., i, 951 (BHL 2885/​CPL 2189); Passio Alexandri (papae), Eventii, Theoduli, Hermetis et Quirini, AASS, Mai., i, 375–​79 (BHL 266/​ CPL 2160); Passio SS. Callisti papae, Calepodii presbyteri et sociorum, AASS, Oct., vi, 498–​502 (BHL 1523/​CPL 2173); De sancto Aureliano martyre romano, papiam translatio, AASS, Mai., v, 128–​29; Passio S.  Restituti, AASS, Mai., vii, 10–​13 (BHL 7197/​CPL 2226); Passio Gallicani, Ioannis et Pauli, AASS, Iun., v, 37–​39 (BHL 3236/​CPL 2193); Passio SS. Processi et Martiniani, AASS, Iul., i, 300–​305 (BHL 6947/​CPL 2223); Passio S. Sebastiani, AASS, Iul., ii, 263–​66 (BHL 7543/​CPL 2229); Passio Polochronii, Parmenii, Abdon et Sennes, Xysti, Felicissimi et Agapiti et Laurentii et aliorum sanctorum, AASS, Iul., vii, 138; Passio SS. Eusebii, Pontiani, Vincentii et Peregrini, AASS, Aug., v, 115–​16. 18. Atripalda:  Acta S.  Hypolisti, AASS, Mai., i, 42–​44 (BHL 4054). Aquileia:  Passio SS. Felicis et Fortunati, AASS, Iun., ii, 460–​62 (BHL 2860/​CPL 2191). Brescia: Passio Faustini et Iovite, AASS, Feb., ii, 813–​17 (BHL 2838); see Fidèle Savio 1896 for an edition of the “rédaction primitive.” Cagliari: Passio S. Saturnini martyris, AASS, Oct., xiii, 306–​7 (BHL 7490); see Piras 2002 for a new edition. Capua: Acta SS. Rufi et Carponii, AASS, Aug., vi, 16–​20 (BHL 7378). Ravenna: Passio S. Apollinaris episcopi Ravennatensis, AASS, Iul., v, 344–​50 (BHL 623/​CPL 2166). 19. Augsburg: Passio Afrae vetustior (Krusch and Levison, MGH Script. Rer. Merov. 7, 200–​204) (BHL 107b/​ CPL 2077). Trier: Acta SS. Eucharii, Valerii, et sociorum, AASS, Ian., iii, 534 (BHL 2655–​57). 20. Fismes: Passio S. Macrae, AASS, Ian., i, 325–​26 (BHL 5126). Narbonne: Acta S. Pauli, AASS, Mar., iii, 371 (BHL 6589). Toulouse: Passio S. Saturnini Tolosanae (BHL 7495/​CPL 2137); Cabau 2001. 21. Girona: Acta SS. Vincentii, Orontii, Victoris, et Aquilinae, AASS, Ian., ii, 390–​93. 22.  Marmara Ereğli (Heraklea):  Passio S.  Philippi ep. Heracleae, AASS, Oct., ix, 537–​47 (BHL 6834). İznik (Nicaea):  Vita et passio S.  Tryphonis martyris, AASS, Nov., iv, 357–​65 (BHL 8339). Kayseri (Caesarea):  Passio S. Sergii Martyris Caesareae in Cappadocia, AASS, Feb., iii, 461–​63 (BHL 7598). 23.  Barton 1982; Castan 1869; Castan 1886; Kuhfeldt 1883. Quinn and Wilson 2013, 118–​28, expertly surveys the past studies.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  189 could shed light on the study of hagiography, the history of persecution, and a specifically Christian archaeology.24 The last century of intense scholarly inquiry has shown that while the gesta are a difficult source for understanding social and economic realities, they are impossible to ignore. The most recent surge of scholarship on the gesta has focused primarily on the production, Tendenz, literary features, and audiences of the individual martyr acts. Most agree today that the gesta were, above all, literature and, more specifically, edifying romances for lay Christians.25 In Steffen Diefenbach’s useful words, they present their audiences with a “Rome imaginaire.”26 Almost like snow globes sold in tourist shops, these small imaginary Romes are often full of real officials, institutions, and identifiable places, such as the Capitol, the Colosseum, the Tiber River, and the Seven Hills of Rome—​a series of images that, along with the Liber Pontificalis, came to be valued in the early Middle Ages as reliable witnesses to the city’s history. The first editions of the Liber Pontificalis make reference to the gesta, and they also used the martyr acts as sources for facts, for a handful of the popes were themselves martyrs and therefore had acts and passions in circulation that could be mined for details.27 Even when, as Julia Hillner has pointed out, the sixth-​century Decretum Gelasianum forbade reading the gesta publicly in Roman churches, largely because of the anonymity of their authors, they were nonetheless deemed acceptable for the edification of the laity.28 Over time the legends of the martyrs hardened into sources of true knowledge. In the eighth century, Pope Hadrian (772–​790) introduced the reading of passiones martyrum into the liturgy of St. Peter’s.29 By the twelfth century, Rome’s topography of martyrdom was firmly established with the help of the gesta. In the Mirabilia urbis Romae, the “places that are found in the passions of the martyrs” (loca quae inueniuntur in passionibus sanctorum) are listed as almost part of the infrastructure of the city—​this list follows an accounting of the length of the walls, the number of towers surrounding the city, and the names of the city’s gates, triumphal arches, the Seven Hills, baths, palaces, and theaters; the “places that are found in the passions of the martyrs” come before lists of the bridges of the city and its cemeteries and the names of the saints associated with them.30 In short, the devotional topography of Rome, known and circulated through the passions of the martyrs, was becoming part of the physical fabric of the city.

24.  Allard 1887; Delehaye 1897; de Rossi 1864–​1880; Dufourcq 1910. See DACL 1:2043–​48 (Leclercq). 25. Romance:  Barnes 2010; Boulhol 2004; Cooper 1999; Delehaye 1962, 222; Diefenbach 2007, 434–​35; Levison 1924, 214; Sessa 2007a; Sessa 2007b; Sessa 2012, 249–​52. 26.  Diefenbach 2007, 445. 27. See LP (Duchesne 1: xci–​c). See Sessa 2007b, 87–​91. 28.  Decretum Gelasianum 4.4 (Dobschütz 39–​43). See de Gaiffier 1969; Hillner 2007, 255–​56. 29.  de Gaiffier 1969, 65–​67. 30.  Mirabilia urbis Romae 1–​10 (VZ 3:17–​28).

190  Rome’s Holy Mountain The resounding authority of the martyrs never stopped being relevant in late antique and early medieval Rome. The popes could always position themselves as confessors as a new age of martrydom was unfolding from the Council of Chalcedon (451) to the Sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople (680).31 Just as the imaginary conflicts played out in the mostly sixth-​century acts of the martyrs, doctrinal conflicts from the same period could stage the bogeymen of the Christian past to dramatize present realities. According to the Liber Pontificalis, two popes, Agapetus (535–​536) and Vigilius (537–​555), rebuked the emperor Justinian for, as they saw it, abandoning the Chalcedonian creed for Monophysitism. In both cases, the popes stood before the emperor after making the journey to Constantinople hoping to find a Christian emperor but, instead, discovering a latter-​day Diocletian.32 It would have been damning that Justinian’s religious policy was equated to Diocletian’s attempt to eradicate Christianity—​a bloodthirsty paganism revived and writ large as Justinian’s demand for the western bishops’ condemnation of the Three Chapters, a controversy not resolved and therefore of continuing relevance until the Council of Pavia in 698.33 A Pope, an Emperor, and the Tarpeian Dragon One of these legendary acta had a decisive impact on how the Capitol was remembered and forgotten in the gesta martyrum: the Acts of Silvester. This text was known in Rome probably by the middle of the fifth century in the versions that we have now.34 According to the sixth-​century Decretum Gelasianum, which forbade the reading of the gesta martyrum in churches, an exception was made for the Acts of Silvester. Even though, it states, “the name of the one who wrote it was not known,” the Acts of Silvester was allowed because, like the other gesta, it had been read in the city of Rome by the laity, and in this case the text had also been in use for a long time (pro antiquo usu) in many churches.35 Moreover, the

31.  See Allen and Neil 2002. 32. Agapetus:  LP (Duchesne 1:287):  “Ego quidem peccator ad Iustinianum imperatorem christianissimum uenire desideraui; nunc autem Diocletianum inueni; quod tamen minas tuas non pertimesco.” Vigilius:  LP (Duchesne 1:298): “ut uideo, non me fecerunt uenire ad se Iustinianus et Theodora piissimi principes; sed hodie scio quod Diocletianum et Eleutheriam inueni. Facite ut uultis: digna enim factis recipio.” Duchesne noted, as others had, that no extant source couples Diocletian with an Eleutheria (n. 22, 1:301). See Leyser 2007, 159–​61. 33.  How popular this coinage was—​Justinian as Diocletian—​is difficult to determine. Aside from these two instances in the Liber Pontificalis, the Agapetus episode turns up twice in the eighth and ninth centuries. It was epitomized by Paul the Deacon in his continuation of Eutropius’s Breviarium, written at Monte Cassino, and again in Anastasius Bibliothecarius’s De vitis Romanorum pontificum: Paul the Deacon, Historia romana 16.13 (Droysen, MGH SS rer. Germ. 49, 131); Anastasius Bibliothecarius, De vitis Romanorum pontificum 59 (95), 61 (106) (PL 128:551, 579). 34.  Canella 2006, 11–​23; Liverani 2008. 35.  Decretum Gelasianum 4.4 (Dobschütz 42–​43): “item actus beati Siluestri apostolicae sedis praesulis, licet eius qui conscripserit nomen ignoretur, a multis tamen in urbe Romana catholicis legi cognouimus et pro antiquo usu multae hoc imitantur ecclesiae.” This document was written before the name of Eusebius of Caesarea was attached to the text as the author: Actus Silvestri (Mombritius 1978, 2:508); Canella 2006, xv.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  191 text was used elsewhere in Rome in early sixth-​century texts, for example, in the biography of Silvester in the Liber Pontificalis and in the so-​called Symmachan forgeries.36 The popularity, accessibility, and canonicity of the Acts of Silvester established the ways in which the Capitol would be remembered as a location and an imaginary pagan religious institution in the Middle Ages. In c­ hapter 4, we saw that the Acts of Silvester narrates Pope Silvester’s role in the conversion of Constantine. Riddled with disease, Constantine looks to the priests of the Capitol (pontifices Capitolii) for help. They suggest that he bathe in a pool on the Capitoline Hill. The two dominant versions of the text (A1 and B1) both state that when the emperor discovers that the pool will be filled with the blood of babies, Constantine decides not to climb the Capitoline Hill (A1: ad capitollium; B1: ad capitolium). Instead, the emperor turns to Silvester and the Lateran basilica, where Constantine is baptized, his disease cured by holy waters.37 In the imaginary Rome of the Acts of Silvester there is also a dragon. In both versions (A1 and B1), the creature lives underground, demanding sacrifices and nourishment from those dedicated to providing the creature supplicatory tribute. Poisonous gases puff from the dragon’s mouth, killing the people of the city. In the most widely distributed version (A1), and still the most readily available today through Mombritius’s fifteenth-​century edition, the whole episode is only briefly described, the location of the dragon’s lair is vague, and the responsibility for its nourishment is left to the Vestal Virgins. However, in the version of the Acts of Silvester that was produced in Rome (B1), the “landscape of myth,” in the words of Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, and the “landscape of reality” joined.38 Here, Silvester’s defeat of the dragon directly precedes Silvester’s dealings with a decidedly pagan Constantine. The dragon lives “on the Tarpeian Mount where the Capitol is located.” Magicians and impious virgins (magi cum uirginibus sacrilegis) descend by way of 365 steps to the dragon’s lair to make sacrifices and supply it with nourishment. Moreover, in this version the dragon’s poisonous breath is befouling the “air of the whole city of Rome.”39 Silvester takes it upon himself to descend to the dragon and to seal it in the name of Saint Peter behind bronze doors fastened with a chain. 36.  LP (Duchesne 1:170). See Liverani 2008. 37.  Discussion of the different versions: Canella 2006, xv–​xxiv; Kliege-​Biller 2000, 30–​48, 62–​69 (ms. witnesses to Version B); Levison 1924; Pohlkamp 1983; Santangeli Valenzani 2007. A1, which was by far the earliest and most common version circulating in the Middle Ages, is the version printed in Mombritius’s Sanctuarium. For pontifices Capitolii, see Mombritius 1978, 2:510. For B1 I rely on Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 14704, saec. VIII–​IX saec., fols. 101r–​119r. Pontifices Capitolii: fol. 105r. 38.  See Pohlkamp 1983, 44–​54, and Santangeli Valenzani 2007 for discussion of previous scholarly attempts to understand the legend of the dragon and its reception. 39.  The story of the dragon as found in Version B1 was first printed and discussed in Duchesne 1897. He relied on Paris, BNF Lat. 5301, saec. X, fols. 310r–​325v, for his text at Duchesne 1897, 31–32 (= Scripta Minora, 159–​60). I transcribe here the relevant section of the text of Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 14704, fol. 104r. The underlined words indicate the places where the orthography and syntax of the Munich manuscript differ from those in the one transcribed by Duchesne: “Erat draco immanissimus in monte tarpilo in quo est capitolium collocatum. ad hunc per ccclxv gradus quasi in infernum magi cum uirginibus sacrilegis descendebant. semel in mense cum

192  Rome’s Holy Mountain Rome’s dragon failed to appear for one year and then another. With the city thus liberated, the dragon’s attendants (ministri) “prostrated themselves before Saint Silvester, believed in Christ, and were baptized” (prosternantes se sancto Siluestro crediderunt Christo et baptizanti sunt). Silvester’s defeat of the dragon was surely meant to parallel Apocalypse 12:7–​9, where Michael the Archangel similarly banishes from heaven the satanic dragon. Through this specifically Roman version of Silvester’s defeat of the Tarpeian dragon and Constantine’s rejection of the Capitol and its priests, it was established that, as literary constructions, the Capitol and the pontifices Capitolii stood in opposition, topographically and symbolically, to Christian locations such as the Lateran basilica and to Christian authorities such as Pope Silvester. Thereafter, according to a host of recent studies of the gesta, the Capitol was staged as the locus of pagan power. The rejection of this location became one of the literary dynamics ready to hand for the authors of the gesta.40 As a space, the Capitol was to be avoided as the site of pagan cults and the abode of a beast lifted right out of the pages of the Apocalypse; as for the Capitol as a religious institution, its priests and their practices were marked by a horrifying insistence on blood sacrifice.41 The Anatomy of a Legend: The Acts of the Greek Martyrs Let us turn to how the Capitol became known at the end of the Roman world through the anonymous gesta martyrum written from the sixth to ninth centuries. The best way to do so is through an examination of one particularly detailed example: the Passio SS. Eusebii et Sociorum Martyrum (BHL 3970). Known in modern scholarship as the Acts of the Greek Martyrs, the text narrates the martyrdom of a family of wealthy Greek émigrés to Rome.42 By the time the passion begins, in the reign of Valerian (253–​260) and Decius (249–​251) and in the pontificate of Stephen (254–​257), this family has split along confessional lines. Hippolytus (not the third-​century priest) has become a monk (monachus), while his sister, her husband, and their two young children have remained pagans. Hippolytus lives in criptis, that is, in the crypts on the Via Appia at the first milestone from the city, thither drawing increasing numbers of pagans to know the love of Christ. Hippolytus’s magnetism comes to the attention of the urban

sacrificiis et lustris ex quibus esca poterat tanto draconi inferri. Hic draco ex inprouiso subito ascendebant et licet non egrederetur uicinius tamen flatu suo uitiabat totius urbis romę aerem.” 40.  Behrwald 2012; Boulhol 2004; Fraschetti 1999a; Fraschetti 2001; Grig 2009. 41.  Because A1 was much more widely distributed, by the twelfth century A1 was also the version in use in Rome. It seems that because A1 associates the dragon with the Vestal Virgins, local legends had moved the dragon’s lair into the Forum Romanum: Mirabilia urbis Romae 24 (VZ 3:56 with n. 2). See Santangeli Valenzani 2007. 42. AASS, Nov., iv, 90–​99. See Amore 1955; Boulhol 2004, 163–​68; Delehaye 1936, 143–​51; Lanéry 2010, 295–​97.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  193 prefect Maximus and the emperor Valerian. Hippolytus, they believe, is seducing the people: “Nearly half the plebs run to him. The Capitol is deserted, and all care for the temples has ceased.” In response to this problem, Valerian issues an edict for the restoration of traditional piety: “All should not abandon the care for the Capitol, and should offer sacrifice to Jupiter.”43 Safe for the moment in the crypts just outside the walls, Hippolytus and Pope Stephen prepare the Christians in their care with instruction in doctrine. In the meantime, Hippolytus’s sister and her family have arrived in Rome after a dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. It worries Hippolytus that his own sister Paulina, her husband Hadrias, and their children Neon and Maria refuse to abandon what Hippolytus calls the “lies of demons” (fallacia daemonum), sparking, as one can easily imagine, a heated family argument. Hadrias tells his brother-​in-​law that their family has too much to lose: the wealth (facultatem) that they, as peregrini, brought with them from Greece, not to mention the real possibility, under the circumstances of Valerian’s new edict, of imperiling their own lives and those of their children. Addressing her brother Hippolytus, Paulina adds that the only reason they came to Rome in the first place was to “see the Temple of the Capitol of Invincible Jupiter and to sacrifice to our own gods.” “Fine,” she continues, “if you abandoned your vows, but why hurry us to abandon ours, thereby condemning our children to death?”44 Later Paulina describes the circumstances of their vow (uoto): they promised, while en route to Rome from Greece, that they would fulfill a vow in Capitolio together with their children for a safe return.45 Hippolytus summons the priest Eusebius for help. Paulina asks him what the Kingdom of Heaven is and if it is “larger than the great treasury and building of Jupiter’s Capitol.”46 Eusebius responds that all that one now sees will be destroyed, while the Kingdom of Heaven will never be destroyed, adding that the Kingdom of Heaven was made by a divine hand. Eusebius ends his vision with an apocalyptic flourish, gesturing, we are made to imagine, in the direction of the Capitoline Hill: “This building of the Capitol, which we see, will be destroyed along with everything else.”47 Such arguments, while prompting anxiety, fail to bring about 43. AASS, Nov., iv, 92–​93: “ ‘quidam uir christianus seducit populum, et pene media plebs ciuitatis romanae ad eum concurrit; et Capitolium deseritur, et omnis cultura templorum desolatur.’ Hoc audiens Valerianus praecurrens nuntiauit Decio Caesari. Tunc Decius repletus gaudio dixit: ‘Iubemus omnes a cultura Capitolii non recedere, et deo Ioui sacrificium offerri.’ ” It might be worth pointing out that the only other instance I have found of the phrase “Capitolium deseritur” is Livy 5.51.3. Here, Camillus urges the Romans not to desert the Capitol (Capitolium deseretur) voluntarily when they had successfully held the hill against the Gauls. The usage in the acta need not be an echo of Livy, and the situation is certainly different, but the sentiment is the same: if the Capitol is deserted, Rome falls. 44. AASS, Nov., iv, 94: “Bene nosti quia nos non uenimus in hanc urbem, nisi ut uideremus templum Capitolii inuicti Iouis, et immolaremus diis nostris; sufficit tibi quod deseruisti uota tua; quid nostra obscurare festinas et filios nostros morti tradere?” 45. AASS, Nov., iv, 94: “Paulina dixit: ‘Et quid de uoto nostro erit quod nos in mare promisimus reddituros cum filiis nostris in Capitolio?’ ” 46. AASS, Nov., iv, 94–​95: “plus est regnum ipsum quam tantus thesaurus et fabrica Iouis Capitolii?” 47. AASS, Nov., iv, 95: “haec quam uidemus, Capitolii fabrica cum omnibus destruetur.”

194  Rome’s Holy Mountain Paulina’s conversion. But then another couple arrives with their paralyzed son. Eusebius prays, the boy is healed, and Paulina, moved by the miracle, asks to be baptized. The Greek émigrés, now Christians, distribute their once coveted wealth to the poor. As the violence picks up, Hippolytus, Hadrias, Paulina, Neon, and Maria are killed. Eusebius and Marcellus, along with another Maximus, a commentariensis and convert, are also swept up in the violence and executed—​all in the winter of the same year. Pope Stephen gathers their corpses and deposits them in the same chamber where they all used to meet in the crypts located at the first milestone from the city on the Via Appia. I will return to the role that the Capitol plays in this and similar legends. Before doing so it will be useful to investigate the Roman origins of the Acts of the Greek Martyrs. We will see that the text is a rich resource for understanding how such legends were stitched together from diverse sources of information. The text was first published and commented upon in 1877 by Giovanni Battista de Rossi based on a single manuscript, a twelfth-​century lectionary originally housed in S. Maria ad Martyres (better known today as the Pantheon) before it was moved to the Vatican Library (Vat.lat. 5696, fols. 90v–​95). De Rossi drew attention to the possible relationship between the passio in Vat.lat. 5696 and two inscriptions included in the seventh-​century Sylloge Turonensis, a manuscript collection of forty-​two Christian inscriptions. Thirty-​seven are from Rome, with five additional inscriptions from Tours added at another time.48 According to de Rossi, two of the epigrams copied in Rome, both in elegiac couplets and supposedly datable to the fifth century, seem to record a lapidary version of the passion. The first one opens with the line: “The formerly impious crowd, which Greece sent, shines, now decorated by the merits of martyrdom” (olim sacrilegam quam misit Graecia turbam martyrii meritis nunc decorata nitet). It goes on to describe a vow at sea to Jupiter and lists Hippolytus, Hadrias, and Paulina.49 The second epigram celebrates Neon and Maria, two siblings who distributed their wealth and were martyred. The last line, interestingly, makes reference to a passion: “When the passion has been read it will teach the virtues of these [martyrs] to the one who correctly will understand that God is present to his servants” (horum uirtutes quem passio lecta docebit rite suis famulis discet adesse deum).50 This suggested to de Rossi and others, including the esteemed archaeologist Orazio Marucchi, that the passio in the last line of the second epigram was none other than the text preserved in Vat.lat. 5696.51

48.  Sylloge Turonensis (ICVR 2:58–​71). 49.  ICVR 2:67 no. 26; AASS, Nov., iv, 99. 50.  ICVR 2:66–​67 no. 25; AASS, Nov., iv, 99. 51. Marucchi 1926.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  195 In a stroke of luck, shortly after de Rossi’s publication of the Acts of the Greek Martyrs, a fragment of the second epigram, dated by letterforms to between the fifth and sixth centuries, was discovered in 1877 in a rubble fill just in front of S.  Maria dei Monti, thus confirming, so it seemed, the antiquity of the tradition.52 De Rossi concluded that the Acts of the Greek Martyrs, as found in Vat. lat. 5696, was older than and therefore the source of the two epigrams. The Acts of the Greek Martyrs could thus be dated before the sixth century, when the epigrams were supposedly inscribed at the latest, and certainly before the middle of the seventh century, when the Sylloge Turonensis was likely assembled. De Rossi went further. He linked the Acts of the Greek Martyrs not only to the two epigrams just discussed but also to two epigrams attributed to Damasus, both of which mention “holy confessors whom Greece had sent.”53 If one accepted all the epigrams as ultimately derivative of the text of the passion found in Vat.lat. 5696, it was now possible to push the date of the cult and the passion to the late fourth century. Not everyone accepted this chronology and its implications. The Franciscan scholar Agostino Amore was doubtful. In a 1955 article, he demolished de Rossi’s arguments by rightly pointing out that the content of the two epigrams from the Sylloge Turonensis differs considerably from the Acts of the Greek Martyrs and that there is no reason to assume that the two epigrams should be joined together as a single narrative.54 Rather, Amore argued, it seems that the passion was written in the sixth century on the basis of the two epigrams—​not the other way around. Indeed, the passio that the second epigram mentions would have been a now lost passion for the siblings Neon and Maria, a cult disconnected from the Greek crowd (turba) of the other epigram. In a recent study on the hagiography of Italy, Cécile Lanéry, following Amore’s points, even suggests that the Acts of the Greek Martyrs was written as late as the eighth or ninth century, when relics of Hippolytus, Maria, Neon, and Hadrias were translated intra muros to S. Agata dei Goti, perhaps in the large-​scale translation of relics under Leo II (795–​816) and Gregory IV (827–​844).55 To sum up, it seems correct that a version of the Acts of the Greek Martyrs, which is not necessarily the same as the one found in Vat.lat.

52.  Notizie, 178; de Rossi 1887a and de Rossi 1887b; Marucchi 1926, 249–​50. Dating of the epigrams based on the letterforms of the inscriptions: Delehaye, in AASS, Nov., iv, 92: “saeculi VI litteris inscriptae erant”; Marucchi 1926, 249: “composta forse nel quinto secolo.” 53.  Epigrammata damasiana, no.  16, l.  7 (Ferrua 120; Trout 113–​15):  “hic confessores sancti quos Graecia misit”; no. 48, l. 1 (Ferrua 195; Trout 172–​73): “iam dudum, quod fama refert, te Graecia misit.” Note that Trout doubts that the reference to the confessores sancti quos Graecia misit points to the “Greek martyrs.” Rather, he suggests that these confessores were the Greek popes interred in the Crypt of the Popes in S. Callisto. 54.  Amore 1955; Amore 1975, 130–​37. 55.  Lanéry 2010, 295–​97. More recently, the relics were placed in more elaborate settings, first in 1504, by Cardinal Ludovico Padocatharo, originally from Cyprus, and again in 1638, by Cardinal Antonio Barberini. See Franchi de’Cavalieri 1962.

196  Rome’s Holy Mountain 5696, was assembled between the fifth and sixth centuries on the basis of the two epigrams copied into the Sylloge Turonensis.56 There are other reasons to assign the Acts of the Greek Martyrs to the fifth or sixth century. The imaginary third-​century Rome that it summons to life is run by fifth-​century institutions. First, Hippolytus is anachronistically introduced as a “monk” (monachus). Translations of Greek accounts of holy men for a Latin-​speaking audience in Rome, like Evagrius of Antioch’s Latin translation of Athansius’s Life of Anthony in 373, made the Greek title monachos familiar, if at times controversially, in the west—​more than a century after Hippolytus was killed.57 Second, a commentariensis named Maximus is introduced. By the late fourth century, commentarienses were high-​ranking members in the civil administration, with a staff and a secretariat (scrinium) for conducting investigations, overseeing the treatment of prisoners, and bringing malefactors to justice through torture and, if necessary, capital punishment.58 In the Acts of the Greek Martyrs, the emperor Valerian grants the commentariensis Maximus the authority (potestas) to find Hadrias and his Christian friends. Maximus’s plan is to dress up like a beggar (quasi mendicans) and ask for alms, in an attempt to draw the charitable attention of Hadrias, and through this charade to root out the wealth of Hadrias’s family. If successful, Maximus would be able to claim half of it as a reward. Maximus goes to the otherwise unknown Ara Carbonaria on the Caelian Hill and sits “as if a Christian and starts begging” (sedebat quasi Christianus et mendicabat).59 Hadrias and his entourage happen upon Maximus. They see from Maximus’s way of holding himself that the beggar is a noble (nobilis) in disguise. Having seen through Maximus’s ruse, the Christians take him to the crypts anyway. Immediately upon entering, Maximus is possessed by a demon. Through prayer the demon is cast out, and Maximus divulges his plot. After he is baptized, Maximus remains with Pope Stephen for a while before returning to his own domus. Missing for twenty-​four days, Maximus is found at his house by the emperor’s agents. Valerian interrogates Maximus and discovering that he is now a Christian orders Maximus to be put to death by having him tossed into the Tiber. 56.  Amore 1955, 23. Epigraphy as the source of hagiography: Delehaye 1962, 83–​85; Rapp 2012 with further references. 57.  Bertrand 2006. The term monachos was not always appreciated: Brown 2012, 302. 58.  CTh 9.3.5–​6; Passio Sanctae Crispinae (Musurillo 302). In a letter to a commentariensis by Basil of Caesarea, the bishop even attempts to put a stop to an investigation into the theft of church property. Fearing the heavy hand of official justice, Basil sternly declares that he will get to the bottom of the crime himself (Ep. 286). See Jones 1986, 1:587, 2:1242 n. 58; CAH XIII, 167–​68; Kelly 2004, 70; PLRE 3A:427–​28, s.v. Drosus. 59.  The location Ara Carbonaria is another indication of the influence of local inscriptions on the composition of the gesta. Perhaps the source was a now lost fragmentary inscription (cf. CIL 6, 1317) for a monument in honor of the Papirii Carbones, one of the most important plebeian families in Rome. In the late second and beginning of the first century bce, they held five consulates. See RE 18.3, 1002–​34 (Hofmann and Kroll). Other possible origins of the toponym Ara Carbonaria are discussed in de Rossi 1864–​1880, 3:204; Jordan 1871–​1885, 2:120; LTUR 1:74 (Palombi).

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  197 The toponyms of places of torture, interrogation, death, and interment likewise suggest a specifically late Roman urban and suburban environment. Hadrias and his family are arrested, taken to the Prison of Mamertinus (in custodia Mamertini), interrogated in the Forum of Trajan, and tortured at night in Tellude in front of the Temple of Pallas—​a portico attached to the Baths of Trajan on the Esquiline Hill, identified by a fourth-​century inscription as the scrinia tellurensia. These were the offices (scrinia) of the urban prefect—​and a favorite site for the interrogation of martyrs in the gesta.60 The children Neon and Maria are killed and left at the Petra Scelerata near the Lacus Pastoris—​a site close to the Colosseum, identified first in the fourth-​century regionary catalogs.61 Hippolytus and Hadrias are tortured in the Circus Flaminius and killed on the Pons Antonini next to the Tiber Island, identified in the Acts of the Greek Martyrs as the Insula Licaonia (iuxta insulam Licaoniam), a local name in use from the fifth century on.62 All the bodies of the saints are buried in the crypts at the first milestone from the city on the Via Appia. In 1991, a large church with dozens of burials was discovered at the Via Ardeatina. This church-​cemetery unit lasted from the fifth to the seventh century—​and it has been suggested that the site was the location where the Greek martyrs were venerated.63 This list of places constitutes an imaginary cartography of pagan Rome, in which the martyr’s life is mapped onto identifiable locations as it progresses to its inevitably violent conclusion. In the Acts of the Greek Martyrs, and in all other martyr acts and passions, after a location is named the narration becomes tightly focused on the implements of torture, the interrogation, and the heroic physical resistance and doctrinal clarity of the martyrs. Indeed, the most important feature of texts such as the Acts of the Greek Martyrs is the specification of the deposition of the martyr’s body outside of the city—​in the crypts at the first milestone from the city on the Via Appia, which becomes, even within the text, a place of devotion. The Acts of the Greek Martyrs concludes with a story of pilgrimage. A Greek named Martana and her daughter come to Rome. They ask Pope Stephen “to point out to them where the bodies of the holy men were buried.” They then spent the rest of their lives there, “devoting themselves to vigils and prayers.”64

60.  CIL 6, 31959 = 37114. Delehaye 1897, 232–​35; Färger 2012; Jordan 1871–​1885, 2:381. 61.  VZ 1:97, 167. 62.  See Besnier 1902, 76–​87. 63.  See Fiocchi Nicolai 1995–​1996. 64. AASS, Nov., iv, 99: “uenerunt ad beatum Stephanum episcopum, et miserunt se ad pedes eius ut demonstraret eis ubi sepulta erant corpora sanctorum. Et dum inuenissent locum diebus uitae suae omni tempore erant ibi uigiliis et orationibus insistentes.”

198  Rome’s Holy Mountain “Christ Is My Capitol” The focus on the Acts of the Greek Martyrs in the last section is meant to suggest the ways in which at least some of the legendary martyr acts were stitched together from late Roman bureaucratic norms, epigraphy, and the “living textuality” of Rome’s ancient monuments. Now let us turn to how the Capitol was thematized more generally in the other martyr acts and passions to delineate the roles that the Capitol and its zealous preists played in how Christians at the end of antiquity began to imagine the ways in which the Roman empire functioned, how its emperors and officials talked, and how its cities, temples, and public places were integrated into a vast and powerful apparatus of punishment. In those martyr acts where a capitolium appears, it is a place of awesome power, functioning textually as the last redoubt of pagan theology and ritual and the ultimate symbol of loyalty to the emperor and his local officials. As we saw in the Acts of the Greek Martyrs, upon hearing of Hippolytus’s popularity in the crypts, Valerian decides to issue an edict: “all should not abandon care for the Capitol” and “should offer sacrifice to Jupiter.”65 Similarly, in the Acta S.  Callisti, the emperor Severus Alexander decides that the only way to combat the dangerous incantations of the Christians is to stage a mass sacrifice at the Capitol. Moreover, as the decree quoted in the acts makes clear, if anyone is found at home on the appointed day instead of hastening to the Capitol, he or she will pay the ultimate penalty.66 In the imaginary empire of the gesta, the emperor’s power to call the masses to the Capitol echoes throughout the provinces. This is made remarkably clear in the Vita et passio S. Tryphonis martyris. Here, the emperor Decius orders an empire-​wide persecution: “Whoever fails to worship and adore the most sacred numina of Jupiter and Minerva established in Capitolio of the city of Rome, and of the rest of the gods, will find [himself] in the midst of fire, sword, beasts, and various [other] punishments, and all their wealth will be seized for the public treasuries.”67 Tryphon, a Christian living hundreds of miles away in Nicaea, is arrested, publicly interrogated, and tortured, all without effect. In frustration the Roman official (iudex) offers a compromise: “Enemy of your own soul, if you refuse to adore the holy gods, at least worship the image of the emperor Decius and swear by the numina of the Holy Capitol [sacri Capitolii].”68

65. AASS, Nov., iv, 93: “iubemus omnes a cultura Capitolii non recedere, et deo Ioui sacrificium offerri.” 66. AASS, Mai., ii, 500. 67. AASS, Nov., iv, 360: “ut quicumque non coleret atque adoraret sacratissima numina Iouis et Mineruae in capitolio urbis Romae constituta ac ceterorum deorum, igne, ferro, bestiis ac diuersis suppliciis interirent, et omnia bona illorum publicis gazophilaciis reconderentur.” 68. AASS, Nov., iv, 360: “inimice animae tuae, si adorare sacratos deos refugis, saltem imaginem diui caesaris Decii uenerare et iura per numina sacri Capitolii.” Another version of the passion (BHL 8336) has “adorate ymaginem Decii caesaris et iurate per eos qui in Capitolio deae Romae sunt.” For important comments on the Roman cult of this eastern saint, see Vircillo Franklin 2001, 883–​85.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  199 In a few instances, local officials order mass sacrifices at a capitolium. Set in Aquileia, the Passio SS. Felicis et Fortunati tells how Euphemius, the praeses, sacrifices inside the Temple of Jupiter after arriving in the city. Then, through the public herald, he orders all to come to the Capitol of Jupiter (ad Capitolium Iouis) with sacrifices at the ready.69 In the gesta, imaginary capitolia spring up in the most unlikely of places. In the Passio S. Saturnini martyris, a praeses named Barbarus orders a mass sacrifice in Capitolio, a location that, according to the passion, is “near the seacoast and the city gates of Cagliari.” We learn that the Sardinians are Jupiter-​obsessed, and so a huge crowd shows up and sacrifices.70 Elsewhere we also hear that the praeses Rufinus “established a Capitol” (Capitolium constituerat) at the small settlement of Girona in Catalonia.71 For all the focus on the Capitol as the stage for sacrifice, just one of the martyr acts locates an execution as taking place specifically on the Capitoline Hill.72 Restitutus, we are told, is ordered by the praeses Hermogenes to go to the Capitol and sacrifice at the Temple of Eternal Jupiter. When Restitutus refuses, the soldiers bind his hands and chop off his head extra Capitolium, suggesting that the bloody deed was done just outside the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The soldiers haul away the body and leave it to be consumed by dogs iuxta arcum Triumphi ad Palmam, that is to say, quite close to the Curia Senatus and the Arch of Septimius Severus, just below the Capitoline Hill in the Forum Romanum. The localization of these events is remarkably clear—​a Capitoline Hill separate from but inclusive of a Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and contiguous with identifiable monuments in the Forum Romanum.73 Most often the rejection of a capitolium results eventually in martyrdom elsewhere. The brother-​saints Felix and Fortunatus, for example, never make it to the capitolium of Aquileia. Instead, the minions of the praeses Euphemius have them taken outside the city and beheaded.74 It is important to stress that the Capitol in Rome and the capitolia elsewhere are never described in detail. What is more important in the gesta is the dramatic dialogue of the saints and their interrogators. The process of rejecting sacrifice at the Capitol comes in a variety of forms, narrated with biting humor, to teach the faithful that the Capitol is a locus of impiety set against the embodiment of true religion—​the holy martyrs.75 In the case of Faustinus and Iovitta, Hadrian 69. AASS, Iun., ii, 462. See Allard 1887, 372–​73. 70. AASS, Oct., xiii, 306 (BHL 7490). See Piras 2002, 39 (text), 71–​72 (commentary and bibliography). 71. AASS, Ian., ii, 390 (BHL 8670). Allard 1887, 365, was incredulous. 72. AASS, Mai., v, 128: Aurelianus and his son were beheaded at the Capitol. As Dufourcq pointed out, these acta are rather late: Dufourcq 1910, 1:135. They have more to do with the cult of Aurelianus in Pavia. For Fraschetti such notices marked the preservation of fragmented memories of the hill as a contested space: Fraschetti 1999b, 239. 73. AASS, Mai., vii, 11–​13: “ducite eum in Capitolium ad fanum Jouis, ut sacrificet: si uero sacrificare contempserit, jubemus eum capitalem subire sententiam. Milites itaque accipientes, duxerunt eum ad fanum Jouis aeternalis, ut ibi sacrificia offerret . . . ligauerunt ei manus a tergo, et decollauerunt extra Capitolium: extrahentes jactauerunt eum juxta arcum Triumphi, ad Palmam, ut a canibus consumeretur.” See Grig 2009, 289. 74. AASS, Iun., ii, 462. 75.  Behrwald 2012, 274; Diefenbach 2007, 444.

200  Rome’s Holy Mountain orders the two brother-​saints to prepare a sacrificial barbecue (carnes assatae) in front of the capitolium of Brescia (ante Capitolium). Much to Hadrian’s relief, the saints seem at last ready to sacrifice. With a crowd assembled before Faustinus and Iovitta, they pray to God instead of making the requisite sacrifice, causing statues of Saturn and Diana to jump from their pedestals into the flames.76 In this act of divinely authorized cunning, the gods themselves thus become carnes assatae at the most surprising of places—​a capitolium. In the Passio Afrae, an official demands from Afra, a woman from Augsburg identified as a public prostitute (meretrix publica), that she “ascend the Capitol [and] sacrifice.” Afra simply responds: “Christ is my Capitol, whom [quem] I hold before my eyes, . . . I desire to sacrifice to him alone.”77 This is a startling response. Afra has replaced Christ for the capitolium—​a quem for a quod. Probably composed in the ninth century, the Passio Macrae displays a similar, and obviously dependent, play on perspective. The governor (praeses) Rictiovarus orders the virgin Macra:  “Look to the Capitol, and sacrifice to the gods.” She responds: “Christ, to whom I have devoted myself entirely, is my Capitol. I look always to him.”78 In one emotionally charged instance, the passion of Pope Alexander tells the sad story of Hermes, an urban prefect, and his belated conversion in the reign of Hadrian. In spite of Hermes bringing his terminally ill child to the Capitol, sacrificing to the gods, and showering presents on the priests, his son dies, presumably not on the Capitoline Hill. The dead boy’s blind nurse then says: “Had you taken him to the threshold of St. Peter’s and believed in Christ, your son would today be safe and sound.”79 The Capitol and the imaginary cartography of Roman martyrdom in which it was embedded functioned didactically for the lay readers of the gesta.80 Interior spaces, such as palaces, houses, prisons, and catacombs, signal an imminent conversion and instruction in Christian dogma, while public spaces, such as temples, circuses, and forums, supply the setting for torture, interrogation, and the dramatic demonstration of Christian fortitude in the face of unrelenting judicial

76.  Fidèle Savio 1896, 113:  “Adrianus iussit ante se carnes afferri, unde immolauerat Saturno, et sic dicebat: ‘Faustine et Iovitta, accedite et manducate, unde obtuli sacrificium deo Saturno, et faciam uos magnos esse in palatio.’ Faustinus et Iovitta dixerunt: ‘Fac fieri focum ante capitolium; assatas carnes manducabimus.’ ” 77.  Passio Afrae vetustior (Krusch and Levison, MGH Script. Rer. Merov. 7, 201):  “ ‘accede ad Capitolium, sacrifica.’ Afra respondit: ‘Capitolium meum Christus est, quem habeo ante oculos meos, qui scit, quid gessi in me ipsa; tamen, si dignam me iudicat, desidero ipsi sacrificare.’ ” 78.  Passio Macrae, AASS, Ian., i, 325–​ 26:  “ ‘prospice ad Capitolium, et sacrifica diis.’ Quae respondit:  ‘Christus, cui me tota deuotione commisi, Capitolium est meum, in quem semper respicio.’ ” Cf. AASS, Iun., ii, 462: “accedite & sacrificate deo magno Joui, per quem potestis salutem promereri. S. Felix respondit: Tu ipsius salutem promerearis: nam salus nostra Christus est.” AASS, Ian., ii, 391: “descendite de monte & loquimini mecum. Viri Dei Vincentius & Orontius, armati uexillo crucis in frontibus suis & roborati in fide, dixerunt Rufino:  Mons noster Christus Dei filius est; in quo semper sumus & in quem mentibus nostris semper ascendimus.” 79. AASS, Mai., i, 373 (BHL 266): “tu si ad sancti Petri limina eum adduxisses, et credidisses Christo, hodie filium tuum haberes incolumen.” See Dufourcq 1910, 1:135; Fraschetti 1999b, 247–​48; Fraschetti 2000, 109–​22; Grig 2009, 288–​89. Cf. AASS, Iun., v, 38, discussed in ­chapter 4. 80.  Cooper 1999; Diefenbach 2007, 437; Sessa 2007a; Sessa 2007b.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  201 savagery. This is not to say that martyrdom did not happen in urban settings such as those just mentioned. It did.81 But the listing of places in the gesta martyrum cannot be used as a source of reliable information either for the association of martyrs and particular monuments or for the urban history of late antique Rome.82 What role, then, did the Capitol play in this imaginary cartography of Roman martyrdom? Following the example set by the Acts of Silvester and the works of the apologists and church fathers, the legendary martyr acts includes the Capitol as an important storytelling element for at least three reasons. First, it functions as the center of pagan cults and the symbol of loyalty to the state. Second, the Capitol is a building, a destination knowable from far away and visible in the city of Rome.83 Finally, the Capitol’s inevitable future destruction is an object lesson in Christian eschatology: all places that one can see will be destroyed, and all the wealth that one possesses will be worthless, while the Kingdom of Heaven will last forever.84 Like the apologetic chronography that was examined in c­ hapter 6, these anonymous authors thus stress the Capitol’s visible presence in the cityscape and visualizes its absence in the end times. The Face of Persecution: Capitoline Pontiffs Thus far the focus has been on the narrative uses of a hill and an imaginary structure called a capitolium. However, it is not only a Capitol-​as-​building that is conjured to life; in some instances, the martyr acts couple a capitolium with a violent bureaucratic apparatus. Indeed, aside from the emperor and his officials, the most sinister opponents of the saints are the Capitoline pontiffs (either sacerdotes Capitolii or pontifices Capitolii), who, as we saw above, made their first appearance probably in the Acts of Silvester; these pagan priests continued to menace the saints thereafter.85 The Capitoline pontiffs are occasionally benign. In the Passio SS. Eusebii et Sociorum Martyrum, a blind sacerdos Capitolii named Lupulus is made to see again by baptism, instruction in Christian doctrine, and a prayer to Christ: illumina me.86 More typically the Capitoline pontiffs are threatening, often playing the roles reserved for emperors and officials in other martyr acts and passions: they interrogate malefactors, engage in debate, and mete out justice. In the Passio Polochronii, the Persian Christian aristocrats Abdon and Sennen, dazzling in their rich clothing, are ordered by Decius to appear before Claudius, the 81.  Bowersock 1995, 41–​57. 82.  Boulhol 2004, 171; Diefenbach 2007, 437. 83.  One exception is a description of the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva in the Acta SS. Iuliani, Basilissae, et Celsi. There the temple’s walls are covered not in marble but in sheets of silver; and it has exquisite mosaic floors and rooms littered with pure gold and pearls (AASS, Ian., i, 585). 84.  Cf. Dan. 2:44; 1 Cor. 15:24. 85.  Behrwald 2012, 275–​76; Fraschetti 2001, 40–​41; Grig 2009, 289. In the Synodi Sinuessanae de Marcellino papa (PL 6:12), a pontifex Capitolii forces Pope Marcellinus into apostasy. See Townsend 1933. 86. AASS, Aug., v, 116.

202  Rome’s Holy Mountain pontifex Capitolii, to make sacrifice.87 In the Acta SS. Euchariii et Valerii, the pontifices Capitolii have the responsibility to police the popular piety of Trier. Jealous that Saint Eucharius is converting so many souls, they raise a mob and chase his followers out of the city in a hail of stones.88 In another instance, Ulpian, the summus pontifex Capitolii, tries to persuades saint Anastasia to marry him, promising all the precious objects she can imagine. Instead Ulpian is struck blind. As a remedy he prays to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva—​the Capitoline Triad—​and has himself led to the Capitol in the middle of the night. The head priest (magnus pontifex) makes a sacrifice on Ulpian’s behalf, but, as it turns out, a demon interrupts, saying that Ulpian will forthwith join him in hell. In anguish, with his pagan piety in shambles, Ulpian returns home and drops dead.89 The most elaborate vision of Capitoline pontiffs is found in the Passio S. Apollinaris. Circulating already in the sixth century, the passion opens with Apollinaris going to Ravenna at the urging of Saint Peter. He sets up a house church in the city. As we have seen so often in these tales, years later the saint’s popularity brings him to the attention of the imperial authorities. The dux Saturninus has Apollinaris stand “before the priests of the Capitol of Ravenna” (ante pontifices capitolii Rauennatis) and interrogates him. Saturninus wants to know whether Christ sent the saint to empty out (euacues) the temples of the gods. Then the Roman official makes the question more specific:  Do you not know the holy name of Jupiter, the “great inhabitant of the capitolium of this city” (magnus habitator capitolii huius ciuitatis)?90 For his part, Apollinaris denies knowing this divine inhabitant and the temple. Then the Capitoline pontiffs demand: “Come and see the great temple and admire its adornment. There you will see the statue of Most Invincible Jupiter.” Apollinaris enters the capitolium; laughing, he says to the pontiffs: “Such a heap of gold and silver ornamentation could have been better spent on the poor rather than displayed before the eyes of demons.”91 In a different episode, the Capitoline pontiffs bring Apollinaris to the Temple of Apollo for him to learn the power (uirtus) of the immortal gods. Apollinaris predicts that the temple will be destroyed and replaced by a church. As a sign of the truth of the saint’s prediction, the statue of Apollo tumbles down. 87. AASS, Iul., vii, 138. 88. AASS, Ian., i, 534. 89.  Passio S. Anastasiae 26–​28 (Delehaye 1936, 240–​42)—​description of Ulpian’s title: “cui extitit quidam qui diceret Ulpianum, qui Capitolii summus pontifex erat”; invocation of the Capitoline Triad:  “ab hora diei tertia usque ad uesperam girabat caecus inuocans Iouem, Iunonem, Minueruam et dicens: ‘Dii, liberate me’ ”; midnight visit: “igitur dum facta fuisset media nox petit se ad Capitolium duci Ulpianus.” See the new edition and translation in Moretti 2006. Discussion of this episode: Grig 2009, 289. Of course some rituals were legitimately performed at night, but such rituals could likewise be associated with dangerous magic. 90. Cf. a lintel inscription from a church doorway in Abboid Madjadja in western Algeria:  “Hic D|eus Chr[i]‌stu|s (h)ic abit[atio?  .  .  .  ].” This might mean:  “God (is) here, Christ here lives(?).” Text:  Benseddik 1990. Translation and discussion: Yasin 2009, 195. 91. AASS, Iul., v, 344–​46: “aiunt pontifices: Veni et uide magnum templum & mire exornatum, ibique cernes simulacrum inuictissimi Jouis. Cumque introisset capitolium beatus Apollinaris, subridens ait pontificibus:  Ista tanta ornamenta aurea & argentea melius poterant pauperibus erogari, quam ante conspectum dæmonum appendi.”

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  203 The people demand the saint’s death, and so the Capitoline pontiffs send an official dispatch (relatio) to the emperor Vespasian detailing Apollinaris’s crimes and requesting the emperor’s advice. In his response, Vespasian empowers the Capitoline pontiffs with the legal authority to put malefactors such as Apollinaris to death. The Capitoline pontiffs, as imagined in the gesta, are not always attached to a capitolium, and their activities are not limited to religious ritual. These pontiffs are intimates of the emperors and their activities include administrative duties. They are an embodiment of the Roman empire’s ability to exercise state power over its population and to enforce social, religious, and political conformity among dissidents.92 This view of Capitoline pontiffs as administrators and civic leaders made sense in a world in which bishops had come to play precisely the same role in the cities of the late Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages. Bishops petitioned rulers for a host of reasons, and their responses had the force of law.93 By imagining the pontifices Capitolii in the ways described above, the gesta transformed the Capitol and its pontiffs into a more knowable and familiar enemy, a sort of pagan church and clergy.94 The Capitol and the Power of the Saints In ­chapter 6 we saw that throughout antiquity the destruction of temples, no matter the cause, was attributed to the divine punishment of moral corruption in the human realm. The writings of the Christian apologists from the late second to the beginning of the fifth century assembled pagan testimony of temple destructions, especially the Capitol’s, to show that the false gods and goddesses of the Greeks and Romans could not protect their own temples and that these temple destructions, when charted chronologically, showed a history of God’s anger operating in the world. The capitolia of the gesta were largely pieced together from this Christian apologetic tradition.95 Remembering the temple in this way had the effect of disintegrating the Capitol from its pasts, leaving it a simplified and circumscribed sign of a lost empire and its religious delusions. Most often the echo of the apologists’ language is faint. When the Acta S. Pauli describes the proliferation of pagan superstition in Narbonne as happening “through the care of diverse temples and the frippery of the Capitol” (diuersorum templorum culturis et Capitolii ambitione), Tertullian’s similar jab at the

92.  Allard 1887, 363 notes the peculiar role played by the pontiffs, suggesting that they were imagined to be a distinct class of religious zealots. 93.  Rapp 2005, 260–​73. 94.  Van Haeperen 2005. 95.  Behrwald 2012, 286.

204  Rome’s Holy Mountain senseless immensity of the Capitol (ambitum Capitolii) is just below the surface.96 In a few instances, however, we can identify the Latin gesta’s direct adaptation of the writings of the apologists, including Clement’s Greek list of temple destructions that we discussed in c­ hapter 6.97 In the Passio S. Philippi episcopi Heracleae, Bishop Philip of Heraklea, a city in Roman Thrace, is arrested in the midst of the Diocletianic persecution. When his church is shuttered, and the holy scriptures housed there are set on fire, Philip addresses a crowd on the theme of God’s just anger (ira iusta). Philip tells them that a divine fire (ignis diuinus) will cleanse the world, as it had done in the past. He cites a handful of examples and provides almost precisely the list of temple burnings that Clement produced at the end of the second century: the divine fire burned the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus and the Capitol in Rome as well as the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria, the Temple of Dionysus in Athens, and the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.98 The implication is that this divine fire would eventually return. In other martyr acts, the divine fire does indeed destroy local capitolia, almost as if the cycle of destructions for the Capitol in Rome was bound to be repeated locally. For example, the Acta S.  Callisti commences with the description of a prodigy:  “In the middle of the day a divine fire burned part of the Capitol, and inside the Temple of Jupiter the left hand, which was made of gold, was melted and ruined.” Then soothsayers (aruspices) and pontiffs (sacerdotes) run to the emperor Severus Alexander and report the need to make propitiatory sacrifices. But while they were performing pagan rituals, divine lightning came down from a crystal clear sky, killing four priests of idols (sacerdotes idolorum) and setting fire to the altar of Jupiter (ara Jouis incendio concremata est).99 Outside Rome, we find in the Acta SS. Rufi et Carponii that Christ destroyed the capitolium of Capua “with his own lightning bolt” in answer to the prayers of these two saints, thereby causing the end of the persecution itself. According to the text, the reason the destruction of the capitolium ended the persecution is that the “persecution of the Christians in

96.  Acta S. Pauli, AASS, Mar., iii, 371; Tertullian, Apologeticum 26.2. 97.  See also the passion of Tranquillinus: AASS, Iul., ii, 265. 98. AASS, Oct., ix, 546–​47. Franchi de’Cavalieri 1915 argues that the Latin version was copied from a Greek original dating from the fourth century, thus close to the events it describes. He also notes the passion’s late antique features, such as the use of metrical clausulae and orthography. The passion’s list and its dependency on Clement were noted first in Führer 1892. Cf. Gurlitt 1893, 103–​5. As pointed out by Bossue in his AASS edition, what is identified as ms. B reads “hic Romanae urbis moenia et capitolium incendit” rather than “hic Romanae urbis et Capitolium incendit et templum.” What is this “et templum”? Gurlitt guessed that the author might have added information at his disposal on the burning of another temple in Rome, perhaps the Temple of Venus and Roma, restored in the reign of Maxentius. I see no difficulty with “et templum.” The sense is that “both the Capitolium,” as a hill, “and the temple” of Jupiter Optimus Maximus were devastated. Gurlitt also suggested that the Elagabalium should actually read, as ms. B does, Eliopolim, thus Heliopolis (Baalbek), referring to either destructions in the reign of Antoninus Pius or the temple conversion in the reign of Theodoius I. 99. AASS, Oct., vi, 500.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  205 the province of Campania” took place “in the temple of the Capitol of Capua.”100 Like pouring water on a fire, it seems that the destruction of a capitolium would end the killing of Christians. In the Acta S. Hypolisti, the martyr is led, with arms tied behind his back, to the capitolium of Atripalda and thrown in the forum (ad montem Capitolinum perductus in foro dejicitur).101 Then a temple—​perhaps the Capitol, but the connection is not made clear—​is struck by lightning, shattering a statue of Jupiter. In the Passio S. Felicis presbyteri Romani, Felix, a young priest in Rome, is led to Draccus, the urban prefect. Draccus orders him to sacrifice. Felix responds: “If you want to test the power (uirtus) of my Lord Jesus Christ, order me to go to the Capitol, so that I can cause the ruin of that Jupiter, prince of your demons.”102 Felix never has the opportunity to strike the death blow to the Capitol. Instead, Draccus has the saint beaten with clubs and sent into exile to quarry stones on Monte Circeo. Imagining earthquakes and lightning bolts summoned at the command of saints to shake the foundations of capitolia continued to resonate into the early Middle Ages. In the seventh-​century acts of Faustinus and Iovitta, the emperor Hadrian has the two brother-​saints of Brescia brought to Rome’s Capitol. As Faustinus and Iovitta arrive, “the foundations of the place shook such that all the people fled from fear.” Then statues of Jupiter and Apollo jump up and fly about, finally plunging themselves into the Tiber and sinking to the bottom of the river.103 In sum, to imagine a capitolium by reading the term in the martyr acts was to see in the mind’s eye something of far more importance than a built structure. The toponym capitolium put into motion a multiplicity of associations. There was the local pride of living in a place with a capitolium or of having one’s local saints, such as Faustinus and Iovitta of Brescia or Felix of Rome, do battle at the Capitol of Rome. This visualization of a capitolium also allowed readers to see their own locality as participating in the constantly unfolding truth of scripture: just as Christ had declared himself to be the temple, local saints also claimed supersession over the local analogue of the Jerusalem Temple, a capitolium. In 100. AASS, Aug., vi, 18–​20. Persecution:  “sub Diocletiano imperatore & Maximiano cæsare erat persecutio Christianorum in prouincia Campaniæ, in templo Capitolii Capuæ” (18); Christ’s lightning: “Quod capitolium ciuitate Capua orationibus sanctorum Rufi et Carponii Christus fulmine suo interemit, & ultra non surrexit persecutio paganorum” (19). Commentators from Michael Monachus’s early sixteenth-​century Sanctuarium Capuanum to Johannes Stilting’s edition in the Acta Sanctorum and Kuhfeldt’s and Allard’s discussions of Capua’s capitolium have wondered at this reference to the destruction in the Diocletianic persecution. Most point to Suetonius, Gaius Caligula 57.2, where it is noted that Capua’s capitolium was struck by lightning in the reign of Gaius Caligula on the ides of March. According to Suetonius, this was considered to be an omen presaging the death of another Caesar, in this case, of course, Gaius Caligula himself. 101. AASS, Mai., i, 43. 102. AASS, Ian., i, 957: “sed si uultis probare uirtutem Domini mei Iesu Christi, ad Capitolium ire me iubete, ut ipsum Iouem principem dæmoniorum uestrorum ruere faciam.” 103.  Fidèle Savio 1896, 147: “factum est post dies tres ascendit Adrianus in capitolium, ut sacrificia offerret Ioui et Apollini, et iussit adduci beatos martyres Faustinum et Iouittam; cumque ingressi fuissent capitolium, loci ipsius fundamenta contremuerunt, ita ut omnis populus a timore fugeret.”

206  Rome’s Holy Mountain fact, if Christ’s saints had upturned statues at capitolia in the more recent past, it apparently seemed likely that Christ had also done so in his own travels—​as an infant. In the Gospel of Pseudo-​Matthew, an apocryphal account of Jesus’s infancy written in Latin probably by the end of the sixth century or beginning of the seventh, Mary and Joseph, during their sojourn in Egypt, happen upon a place called Sotinen. Seeking refuge, Mary takes the child into the “capitolium of this city.” Inside were idols for each day of the year. When they go into the temple (templum), these idols immediately fall to the floor and shatter to pieces. According to Pseudo-​Matthew, this idol-​smashing marked the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy: Isaiah 19:1. Here, the prophet supplies a vision of God billowing into Egypt on a cloud to destroy the man-​made idols of the Egyptians.104 Conclusion The Capitol’s history was replete with moments of patriotic significance, and therefore everything about the Capitol was potentially exemplary—​even its individual destructions. For pagans, each destruction was a tool of correction, a way of chastening and improving the community, a remedy to the disease of moral corruption. For Christians, the Capitol’s associations with the machinery of persecution beginning in the middle of the third century made it an important subject for the scrutiny of the growing number of Christian apologists. The interest in the Capitol’s secular and religious exempla and the calculation, collation, and interpretation of the Capitol’s cycle of destructions distilled a view of the Capitol that was already imaginary by the third century and utterly inappropriate by the fifth. On the one hand, this was a Capitol that Christians notionally constituted as resonating with secular power and religious significance. As Lucy Grig has pointed out, “In late antique Christian texts, the Capitol increasingly takes on a new significance as the headquarters of ‘paganism,’ and thus, in the writings of Christian polemicists, as the heart of darkness.” Indeed, as we saw in ­chapter 5, Augustine calls the Capitol a “remarkable and sublime temple”: it was the “loftiest of temples,” which sat on a “high hill,” and it was the “apex temple of Jupiter.” On the other hand, this was a Capitol that was always getting destroyed. In Lactantius’s words, it was “a temple often damned by the judgment of heaven.” And in the writings of Clement, Arnobius, and especially Eusebius, because of its cycle of destructions the Capitol and its fate were reduced in significance—​it burned down like all the other temples on the lists. 104.  Pseudo-​Matthaei Evangelium 22.2–​23 (Gijsel 473, 475). In this instance, one senses the direct influence of hagiography on the construction of the life of Jesus, and not the other way around. Indeed, it might be the case that the fifth-​century Historia monachorum in Aegypto, which was rapidly translated into Latin by Ps.-​Rufinus, inspired this whole episode, especially the role of Egyptian holy men claiming the fulfillment of prophecy in the destruction of pagan religious objects. See Gijsel’s discussion of the relationship between Ps.-​Rufinus and Ps.-​Matthew at 472 n. 2 and 474 n. 1.

The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints  207 Both versions of the Capitol—​a singular temple distinct in its traditions and a temple wrapped in flames like all the rest—​were hermeneutic constructions that helped Christian apologists simplify the messy specificities of the past to tell a single truth—​even before the tempora Christiana God destroyed temples, including the Capitol—​to prove the utter futility of a theological system of signs from heaven and the insignificance of the materiality of pagan religious practices. In the gesta martyrum, the Capitol becomes part of the story of Christ’s resurrection, the migration of his power to the west through the apostles, and the continuation of this power into late antiquity through the martyrs. In one case, the Capitol’s connection to Jesus is quite literal: Pontius Pilate himself was reportedly interrogated by the senate on the Capitoline Hill.105 More figuratively, to see the Capitol, in the mind’s eye through the reading and recitation of martyr acts, was to collapse time and place. On the one hand, visualizing the Capitol was to place it in history, albeit a history of God’s anger, stretching from the burning of temples in the distant past to the present. On the other hand, visualizing the Capitol was also to project the total absence of the Capitol in the future, removing the Capitol from history, thus signaling an end of history itself and the attendant fulfillment of prophecy. To say, as the anonymous authors of the martyr acts did, that the Capitol was deserted was less a description of the reality of late antique Rome as it was an elaboration on Christian polemics already in evidence in the second century. Reading the gesta was to experience, in a virtual realm, the transformation of the victims of persecution into the holy martyrs of the Catholic Church and the visible manifestation of God’s power in the saeculum.106 Last, it is important to realize that imagining Rome’s cityscape as the arena of martyrdom was a way to talk about what was ultimately real—​not Rome and its monuments but the Heavenly Kingdom. In the Acts of the Greek Martyrs, for example, Hadrias and Paulina are wealthy peregrini, and it is this wealth that the Roman authorities desperately want. Hadrias’s line is consistent: “Worldly wealth is an impediment to eternal life” (facultates istae terrenae impedimenta sunt uitae aeternae). For the Christians, their wealth is for the poor (pauperes), and their remaining “treasures are their souls” (thesauri nostri animae nostrae sunt).107 Indeed, in contrast to the city of Rome and its man-​made monuments, the text reiterates the claim that the Kingdom of Heaven is a majestic city full of real treasures, perfectly laid-​ out streets of gold, and no more hunger. The urban environment of Heavenly Jerusalem is like Rome’s but better, because in this celestial city everyone is rich.108 In a city whose population had contracted drastically in the last half of the fifth

105.  Paradosis Pilati 5 (Ehrman and Plese 506). See Graf 1923, 296. 106.  Boulhol 2004, 163; Diefenbach 2007, 444–​46. 107. AASS, Nov., iv, 94, 98. 108. AASS, Nov., iv, 95.

208  Rome’s Holy Mountain century and again in the last half of the sixth, the challenge for hagiographers was to imagine a city that was utterly different from anything they had seen. The imaginary Rome in the time of the martyrs was a place where there were immense public structures and ornately decorated temples as well as emperors, senators, and aristocrats with vast amounts of wealth. This was also an imaginary empire that was obsessed with temple sacrifice and rooting out Christianity through the promulgation of edicts and the use of force. Moreover, these were urban environments where Christian piety had to be expressed in the absence of churches. But anyone looking around late sixth-​century Rome would have seen the opposite: the growing impoverishment of the city and its denizens set against the rising fortunes of the churches of Rome.

Epilogue The Fall of the Ancient Capitol

T

his book has sought to capture the ways in which the Capitol affected the imaginative life of the Romans and post-​Romans, animated scholarship and writing, and shaped the continually evolving topography of the city of Rome from the third to the seventh century ce. In short, I have been interested in how the Capitol’s particular late Roman charisma defined the lived-​in and dreamed-​of realities of the Capitoline Hill. The four centuries that have been the main focus of this study saw incredible changes to the Roman world. The Roman state and its functionaries were not always centered in the city of Rome, a process well under way before the troubles of the third century. Rituals of power, such as the triumph, could be enacted throughout the empire, and when they were done in Rome they did not terminate at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. Constantine’s embrace of Christianity, his legislation in favor of Christian ritual and clergy, and the emergence of Christian public euergetism set into motion deep changes in Rome’s urban environment, leading to the construction of churches and martyr memorials both inside and outside the walls of the city. One assumption, against which I have been arguing throughout the preceding pages, is that these changes, which together are emblematic more generally of the late antique world, destroyed the Capitol’s raison d’être, therefore removing the hill from the analysis of historians. In part I, I demonstrated what can be seen by looking at the lived-​in realities of the Capitoline Hill from the point of view of the streets surrounding it. The accumulated evidence of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources points to the hill as a vibrant urban zone enmeshed in neighborhoods of high sociability and economic activity throughout late antiquity. Moreover, the Capitoline Hill functioned as an administrative zone at least into the sixth century. The hill’s associations with elites and state power thus survived long after the Roman Empire disintegrated into a patchwork of post-​Roman states. Indeed, I argued that it was Narses, the Constantinopolitan official in charge of Byzantine Italy, who was responsible for implanting a church on the Capitoline Hill toward the end of the sixth century and dedicated it to the Theotokos. The shrine was likely situated in association with the “Tabularium,” a 209

210 Epilogue structure that has continued to function as a place of administration from antiquity to the present. Part II was a series of explorations into the dreamed-​of realities of the hill. The Capitol had been a target of Christian polemics since the end of the second century. Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius, Eusebius, Augustine, and other Christian intellectuals and churchmen subjected the Capitol’s history to intense scrutiny, in effect rewriting the hill’s past significance as emblematic of the failure of the pagan divinities to protect their temples from harm, evident from the number of times the Capitol had been damaged and destroyed through divine anger. For Eusebius and Jerome, writing in the fourth and fifth centuries, respectively, the Capitol was a ruin-​in-​the-​making. Even if the temple was still intact, the Capitol’s inevitable desolation would be another sign, like the desolation of the Temple Mount, of Christ’s triumph over Jews and pagans. For pagan historians such as Eunapius and Olympiodorus, the Capitol’s desolation allowed the Goths and Vandals to occupy and loot the city of Rome for the first time in a thousand years. For Christians and pagans, then, the Capitol as a sign of empire continued to supply a way to come to terms with a postclassical world shaped by barbarian wars, heresy, and urban decay. Finally, through an examination of legendary martyr acts and passions, almost none of them directly rooted in the classical and classicizing discourses on the significance of the Capitol, we saw that the Capitol was never fully erased from the memory of the city of Rome and the memory of the Roman Empire for those living in the early medieval west. The Capitoline Hill’s presence was thus always defined by an oscillation of what can be characterized as the Capitol and the Capitole imaginaire, a physical and an imaginary construct. In this epilogue, I will show the ways in which this oscillation continued to define the hill into the Middle Ages. Finding the Capitol in the Early Middle Ages In the ninth century, it was the Capitol that at least some saw, if not visited, as they made their way through the Christian holy sites and pagan antiquities in and around the city. This was a time of particular vitality in the construction of churches throughout the city as well as in trafficking the relics of Roman martyrs across the Alps into the Carolingian Empire.1 As is so often the case with anything related to the Capitol in the Middle Ages, our source for the Capitoline Hill’s role in the burgeoning heritage industry comes from a single manuscript now shelved at the Stiftsbibliothek Einsiedeln as Codex Einsidlensis 326.2 This manuscript contains three, probably related, texts that were assembled in the ninth century. Whatever the intentions of the copyists, these three texts together 1.  Goodson 2010. Carolingian interest in Roman martyr narratives and relics: Diesenberger 2007; Geary 1990; Maskarinec 2015b; Pilsworth 2000; Vocino 2010. 2.  For a summary of the discovery and various editions as well as another reconstruction of the manuscript’s origins, see now del Lungo 2004, 11–​21.

Epilogue  211 seem to constitute an elliptical description of the city of Rome: the first is a sylloge of Roman inscriptions (fols. 67r–​79v) that were copied down together with a notation of their locations in the city; the second is a list of eleven itineraries that bisect the city (79v–​85r), listing the names of ancient sites and up-​to-​date churches on each route; and the third is a list of the vital statistics of Rome’s Aurelian Wall (85r–​86r). As Christian Hülsen put it in 1907, the itineraries allow us to “shed a little light” on the topography of the city during this “obscure period of history.”3 The anonymous author (or authors) unwittingly saved much that would otherwise have been lost concerning the city’s shape, streets, and antiquities in the early Middle Ages. Like the acts and passions of the martyrs, the Einsiedeln Itineraries show interest in the monuments of the ancient city within the city walls. They list temples, baths, triumphal arches, statues, imperial forums, columns, and obelisks and make reference to at least some of the Seven Hills—​the Palatinus, Caelius, and Capitolium. For the author of the itinerary, Rome in the ninth century was a city where antiquities were visibly embedded in the cityscape, apparently valued in themselves, and set physically alongside and in contrast to Christian churches. This seems an obvious point to us now: most modern pilgrims, both the secular and the religious, come to Rome to see both St. Peter’s and the Colosseum. But we should not take our point of view, and apparently that of the itinerary, for granted. In the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, there was regular traffic across the Alps or the Mediterranean to visit Rome; for some the city was the primary destination of their travels, and for others Rome was the first major stop on the pilgrimage to the Holy Land.4 However, in virtually all the documents that describe such journeys, no interest is displayed in Roman antiquities—​it is as if the old city had disappeared, to be replaced by churches, martyr memorials, and hospitals.5 If the Codex Einsidlensis 326 had not survived, in other words, it would be difficult not to conclude that most visitors to the city in the early Middle Ages were simply uninterested in the remains of ancient Rome. As Codex Einsidlensis 326 shows, there was always interest in Rome’s ancient heritage sites. But it is difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible, to evaluate its intensity. We saw in ­chapter 2 that the Einsiedeln sylloge lists seven inscriptions copied in Capitolio, or “on the Capitol.” In addition, three of the eleven itineraries list the Capitol as a destination. The first itinerary stops at the Capitol about a third of the way through the journey.6 It begins at the Gate of St. Peter, continues east through the Campus Martius and the Forum Romanum, and ends near the top of the Esquiline Hill. Directional indicators appear just under the title of the route: in 3.  Hülsen 1907, 420. For discussion of the importance of the Einsiedeln itinerary, see Bauer 1997; Tellenbach 1989, 267. 4.  See Birch 1998. 5.  D’Haenens 1980, 126; Sommerlechner 2004. 6.  Walser 1987, no. 1, 143–​44 (facsimile and transcription), 162–​67 (commentary).

212 Epilogue dextra, “to the right,” and in sinistra, “to the left.” The assumption from the beginning is that these directions were meant to be used as a guide, in other words, indicating what one would see “to the right” or “to the left” while moving through the city. But these are not usable cartographic cues. In the case of the first itinerary, halfway through, after crossing the Tiber, the indicators are flipped—​only by walking backward would one see what was apparently supposed to be seen;7 while in the other two itineraries that list the Capitol the directions are reversed, so that the Capitol would have been seen correctly by looking to the side indicated, “to the right” or “to the left.”8 Such difficulties, as Rodolfo Lanciani pointed out more than a hundred years ago, only “sow confusion.”9 But confusion, as is often the case, is fruitful, for it has led to speculation on the origins of the itinerary, which has implications for our ability to know something about the survival of the Capitol into the early Middle Ages. In 1864, Giovanni Battista de Rossi first pointed out, in addition to the problems noted above, that many of the locations indicated as standing “to the left” or “to the right” would not have been visible from the route itself: the structures were simply too far away. De Rossi’s clever solution to these distortions of perspective was to suggest that the author of the itinerary took the information for each of the routes from a bird’s-​eye view. According to de Rossi’s theory, the author had in front of him the copy of a lost map, perhaps similar to the one ordered to be made by Charlemagne in his will. According to Einhard, Charlemagne’s functionary and the author of his biography, the king ordered a round map of the city of Rome to be inscribed on a huge silver table and gifted to the bishop of Ravenna.10 That this request was carried out by Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious (814–​840), is apparently confirmed by Agnellus’s Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis, written after 846, in which the map is described as “an engraving of all of Rome.”11 Christian Hülsen followed de Rossi’s suggestion that the itinerary was a dim reflection of Charlemagne’s map and actually came up with a “medieval” map of his own, a make-​believe prototype that could at least partly account for the distortion of the itineraries (Figure 30). Like the literary description of Charlemagne’s map, Hülsen’s is round. He oriented the map from west (at the top) to east (at the bottom) and centered it on the area just below the Capitoline Hill. Hülsen then argued, having drawn his map accordingly, that the author of the itinerary had epitomated a much more detailed itinerary, which was originally meant to travel with a version of this map—​the two, the map and the fuller version of the

7.  Walser 1987, 164. 8.  Walser 1987, no. 7, 181–​89; no. 8, 189–​96. 9.  Lanciani 1889, 445. 10. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni 33 (Waitz, MGH Script. Rer. Germ. 25, 40):  “et  altera, quae forma rotunda Romanae urbis effigie figurata est, episcopio Rauennatis ecclesiae conferatur.” 11. Agnellus, Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis 170 (Mauskopf Deliyannis 350–​51): “mensam argenteam unam absque ligno, habentem infra se anaglifte totam Romam.”

Epilogue  213

Figure 30.  Christian Hülsen’s fake map of the Einsiedeln Itineraries (Hülsen 1907, tav. XIV).

itinerary, functioned together to facilitate the pilgrim’s desire to locate and venerate the holy places of the martyrs.12 Hülsen’s map is pure guesswork, a beautiful out-​in-​the-​open fake. But whatever the faults of Hülsen’s map, his hypothesis does at least point to the most likely source for the copying and collecting together of texts related to the topography of Rome at the end of the ninth century. Charlemagne visited Rome on three occasions, the last of which was for his coronation as Imperator et Augustus in St. Peter’s on Christmas 800, thus forging the origins of the special relationship between the Carolingian and papal state that would dominate the affairs of the city and the popes in subsequent centuries.13 Institutes (scholae) of transalpine visitors to Rome were established near St. Peter’s: the Schola Saxonum in the eighth century and the Schola Frisonorum in the ninth.14 This political, cultural, 12.  Hülsen 1907, 386–​92 (description of the mapmaking project) and tab. XIV. Hülsen’s map is occasionally mistakenly reprinted as a genuine map from the Middle Ages, e.g., Moatti 1993, 20–​21. 13. Einhard, Vita Karoli 28 (Waitz 32). Discussion: Noble 1984, 291–​99. 14.  LP (Duchesne 2:6). See Cassanelli 1976.

214 Epilogue and religious engagement led to perhaps the first of a series of small-​scale renaissances, bringing about a renewal of interest in Roman history, Roman literature, and the city’s antiquities, the ripples of which were felt throughout northern Europe. If there ever were such a map like the one commissioned for Louis the Pious, surely Hülsen was close to the mark when he imagined the Umbilicus Urbis at the base of the Capitol as the center of the city.15 Looming above the Umbilicus Urbis, the Capitol likewise was remembered for its centrality. For some the hill was still at the heart of Rome and its lost empire. Hrabanus Maurus, the theologian, polymath, abbot of Fulda, and later archbishop of Mainz, wrote De universo in the middle of the ninth century and dedicated it to Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son and successor. The De universo is, as its title suggests, a universal encyclopedia of natural phenomena and etymology. In a section largely dedicated to defining various parts of cities and landscapes, Hrabanus includes a short notice called De Capitolio. It begins by quoting Lactantius’s Divine Institutes:  “The Capitol of Rome is so called because it was the highest caput of the Roman city and religion.” Then, rather than following Lactantius, he relates the now familiar, and widely available, story of the discovery of the human head (caput) while the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus were under construction (Figure 31).16 Hrabanus derived his material, often verbatim, from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, which Isidore wrote at the beginning of the seventh century. In this sense, Hrabanus was just copying down what was before him. But in another sense, Hrabanus was a reader, transmitting the material he found useful for his own age. What did other early medieval readers of Isidore think as they read and copied his Etymologiae? It is not much of a clue, but an eighth-​century Italian copyist from Bobbio chose to substitute the Latin word regionis for Isidore’s religionis, thus making the sentence read: “The Capitol was the highest caput of the Roman city and kingdom.”17 It was a correction or an easy mistake—​just the elision of two letters—​and yet the sentence still makes sense, and perhaps it made sense to the copyist—​a vision of the Capitol as the head of Rome and its territory. Perhaps Isidore’s (and later Hrabanus’s) short definition of Capitolium was the type of information that would have been included in the supposedly 15.  NTDAR, 404. 16.  Hrabanus Maurus, De universo libri XII 14.10 (PL 111:387):  “Capitolium Romae uocatum, quod fuerit Romanae urbis et religionis caput summum. Alii dicunt:  Tarquinius Priscus dum capitolii fundamenta Romae aperiret, in loco fundamenti caput hominis litteris Tuscis notatum invenit: et proinde Capitolium appellauit.” 17.  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum 15.2.31 (Lindsay). Lindsay did not note that the phrase Romanae urbis et religionis caput summum derives from Lactantius, Divine Institutes 3.17.12–​14. Bobbio ms., now in Wolfenbüttel: Cod. Guelf. 64 Weiss., fol. 228r, has regionis. See Lowe 1959, no. 1386. Regio can signify a kingdom in this period: Neirmeyer, van de Kieft, and Burgers 2002, 2:1176.

Epilogue  215

Figure 31.  Eleventh-​century illustration of the “Capitolium,” Hrabanus Maurus, De Universo, showing the digging of the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the discovery of the intact human head that promised that Rome would be the head of a world empire (from Miniature sacre e profane dell’anno 1023, illustranti l’enciclopedia medioevale di Rabano Mauro, riprodotte da un codice di Montecassino [no 132] [Monte Cassino, 1896], tav. LXXXIV).

lost and more fully detailed version of the Einsiedeln itinerary. As Hrabanus himself put it in his dedication to Louis the Pious, the user of his compendium of words was to look for the “historical and mystical explanation of each individual thing.”18 The mystical basis of the Capitol’s fame, at least to Isidore and Hrabanus, was the prophetic discovery of the human head, the caput that intimated Rome’s world dominion, analogized in corporeal terms as the caput mundi, the “head of the world.” This place was still etched into the memory of transalpine scholars in the early Middle Ages as the heart of an immense empire, and as such the Capitol would become celebrated as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

18.  Hrabanus Maurus, De universo libri XIII (PL 111:9): “Quod idcirco ita ordinandum aestimaui, ut lector prudens continuatim positam inueniret historicam et mysticam singularum rerum explanationem.”

216 Epilogue A Wonder in a City of Wonders Since the second century bce, the Capitol was occasionally called “one of the wonders of the whole earth.”19 We have already seen the occasions when Ammianus Marcellinus, Cassiodorus, and Procopius singled out the Capitol as a wondrous site. However, the late antique lists of the Seven Wonders of the World initially did not include the Capitol. In the last quarter of the sixth century ce, for example, Gregory of Tours included a list of the Seven Wonders of the World in his De Cursu Stellarum Ratio (On the Course of the Stars).20 The Capitol is missing. We can surmise that by the end of the seventh century, the Capitol was included in such a list, possibly originating in Rome. It was from here that the Capitol’s status as one of the septem miracula mundi was disseminated to Byzantium and Europe.21 The Capitol first pops up in the surviving lists of the Seven Wonders of the World in both the east and west, in Greek and Latin, by the ninth century. A manuscript written before 814 in the diocese of Augsburg (Munich, BSB Clm 22053, fols. 95v–​97v) supplies a description of the Seven Wonders of the World, falsely attributed to Bede, naming the Capitolium Romae as the primum miraculum.22 The Capitol itself, according to this list, was the Salvatio Civium, or “Salvation of the Citizens,” a place “greater than a city.”23 Its salvific powers were contained in statues representing all the peoples under Roman control, all of them inscribed on the chest with their corresponding names. Hanging from their necks were little bells. If any of the peoples represented by the statues were about to revolt, the little bells would sound the alarm. The custodians stood on duty night and day to mind the bells, and if they began to ring, they informed the Roman princes by word and writing of the imminent danger so that an army could be sent out immediately “for punishment.” This same story was used on the other side of the world at about the same time. In the second half of the eighth century, Cosmas of Jerusalem, while he was bishop of Maiuma, Gaza’s port city, wrote a commentary in Greek on the poems of Gregory Nazianzus, the fourth-​century Cappadocian Father. Cosmas, however, did not find the Capitol listed in Gregory’s poetry. In a poem about a funerary monument, Gregory does not name a single one of the Seven Wonders, instead supplying the information that they included “a wall, a statue, gardens, pyramids, a temple, another statue, and a tomb.”24 In his role as commentator, 19.  See a Syriac fragment of the Hellenistic historian Diocles in which the Capitol is thus named: TAPA 20 (1889): xxix–​xxxiii. Discussion of Diocles and his Roman history: RE 5:797 (Schwartz); Momigliano 1990, 101. 20.  Gregory of Tours, De cursu stellarum ratio (Krusch, MGH SS. rer. Merov. 1.2, 407–​10). 21.  Demus-​Quatember 1970, 80. 22.  Pseudo-​Bede, De septem mundi miraculi (PL 90:961–​62): “De septem miraculis mundi manu hominum factis. Quod primum est Capitolium Romae, saluatio ciuium, major quam ciuitas, ibique fuerunt gentium a Romanis captarum statuae uel deorum imagines.” For a discussion of these lists, see Demus-​Quatember 1970, 71–​75 with new edition, translation, and commentary; Omont 1882. Cf. Epitome Ovetense (Mommsen, MGH AA 11, 371). 23.  Graf 1923, 143–​67. Cf. Cilento 1983; Schneider 1926, 165–​68; VZ 3:35–​36 n. 1. 24.  Greek Anthology 8.177 (tr. Patton 2:478–​79).

Epilogue  217 Cosmas took it upon himself to supply the missing names of Gregory’s wonders (thaumata). For the first item on Gregory’s list, the wall, Cosmas raises three different possibilities:  it was Babylon’s walls, Rome’s Capitol and its walls, or Heraklea’s theater. For the Capitol, Cosmas writes: “Rome’s Capitol is, as they say, a huge building [ktisma mega] surrounded by walls, in which there is a bunch of little statues.” Then follows the same story of the alarm bells. Before going on to discuss the remaining wonders on Gregory’s list, Cosmas noted: “There are also many other wonders, worthy for sure, at Rome.”25 At the end of the tenth century, an anonymous chronicler, probably from S.  Benedetto in Salerno, reports that this miraculous statue group—​he named seventy bronze statues in all—​ was spirited away to Constantinople by the Byzantine emperor Alexander I  (912–​913). Like any villain, the emperor seals his own fate by declaring his foolish reasons for the seizure of the statues: “It was back then that the Roman emperors were glorious, when such statues were venerated” (illo denique tempore Romanorum imperatores erant gloriosi, quando istae statuae uenerabantur). Alexander is obviously no such emperor, and the veneration of pagan statues was taboo. When the statues arrive in Constantinople, the emperor, the chronicler continues, dresses them in silk robes. Then one night, as Alexander was sleeping, the apostle Peter comes to him in a dream and says: “I, Peter, am the emperor of the Romans!” There is some dark humor here, a play on the phrase and identity “emperor of the Romans” (princeps Romanorum). Saint Peter and his successors, the popes, were the rulers of Rome, not the Byzantine emperors.26 Then comes the punch line: Alexander immediately begins to vomit his own blood and dies moments later. By the middle of the twelfth century, the Capitol, imagined now as the walled enclosure for a miraculous group of statues, became folded into the Mirabilia urbis Romae, a text put together in the first half of 1143.27 Not just the location of one of the Wonders of the World, Rome, as the title of the text shows, became a whole City of Wonders. Often called a guide for pilgrims, the Mirabilia urbis Romae is more than that, partly an imaginary laus urbis, partly a firsthand account of the city and its history as understood at the time.28 The anonymous author reveals the reason for the composition in the last sentences: “These and many other temples and palaces of the emperors, consuls, senators, and prefects were in this here Roman city in the time of the pagans. So we have read in ancient annals, seen with our own eyes, and heard from old-​timers (ab antiquis).” It was, 25. Cosmas of Jerusalem, Commentarii in Sancti Gregorii Nazianzeni Carmina (PG 38:546). See Demus-​ Quatember 1970, 76–​79. 26.  Chronicon Salernitatum 131 (Pertz, MGH SS 3, 538–​39). The chronicle itself contains material pertaining to the years 747–​974 and was probably assembled around 978. See Demus-​Quatember 1970, 84. 27.  Mirabilia urbis Romae 16 (VZ 3:34–​35): “Uniuscuiusque regni totius orbis erat statua in Capitolio cum tintinnabulo ad collum; statim ut sonabat tintinnabulum, cognoscebant illud regnum esse rebelle. Cuius tintinnabulum audiens sacerdos, qui erat in speculo in [h]‌ebdomada sua, nuntiauit senatoribus.” 28. Kinney 2007.

218 Epilogue he continues, written “for the memory of those to come,” a testament to how much beauty there was, the sheer mass of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and precious stones there had been.29 If not a history, it was thus, as the author puts it, a “memory” (memoria) of the city’s “beauty.” Moreover, the Mirabilia urbis Romae was not just a record of a past no longer visible. The author sets the sites of Christian Rome against the backdrop of dazzling survivals from antiquity.30 It is important to stress that the Mirabilia urbis Romae was probably an official document emanating from the papal curia. The earliest manuscript containing the Mirabilia urbis Romae (Vat.lat. 8486, ca. 1192) is a dossier of important information, including the Ordo of Benedict, the canon of St. Peter’s, a description, in Dale Kinney’s succinct summation, of the “public ceremonies of the pope and the curia throughout the church year, including the routes of seven liturgical processions to and from stational churches.”31 As we will see, stories such as the Salvatio Civium, which were invented outside Rome, would become the stories that Roman churchmen used to understand their city’s history. If not quite a map, this dossier offers a twelfth-​century digest of stories about the city, a sketchy outline of the city’s physical shape and the state of its monuments, and a vague sense of how the urban landscape was used for church ceremonial in the present.32 Indeed, Benedict’s Ordo demonstrates that the Capitoline Hill was back on the itinerary of official processions. The text records that the Easter Monday procession began at the Lateran Palace and ended at St. Peter’s. On the way the pope circled around one side of the Capitoline Hill before proceeding into the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Trajan.33 Rome’s ancient patrimony was essential to the Roman church’s appropriation of the city’s history, its monuments, and its public—​the Christian plebs Romana. The Mirabilia urbis Romae begins by providing lists of Rome’s walls, gates, triumphal arches, mountains, baths, palaces, theaters, “places found in the passions of the martyrs,” bridges, and cemeteries; then the lists give way to curious stories about individual monuments; and finally the Mirabilia urbis Romae sweeps the reader through the city of Rome from one site to another. The tour begins at the Vatican, moves past the Castel S. Angelo, and continues through the Campus Martius, past the Capitoline Hill and imperial forums, with stops at the Arch of Titus, the Forum Romanum, the Palatine Hill, the Colosseum, the Aventine

29.  Mirabilia urbis Romae 32 (VZ 3:65): “Haec et alia multa templa et palatia imperatorum, consulum, senatorum, praefectorumque tempore paganorum in hac Romana urbe fuere, sicut in priscis annalibus legimus et oculis nostris uidimus et ab antiquis audiuimus. Quantae etiam essent pulchritudinis auri et argenti, aeris et eboris pretiosorumque lapidum, scriptis ad posterum memoriam, quanto melius potuimus, reducere curauimus.” 30.  For critical discussion of the Mirabilia urbis Romae and its sources, see Campanelli 2011; Kinney 1990; Kinney 2007. 31.  Kinney 2007, 236. Description of Vat.lat. 8486:  VZ 3:15. For a discussion of the manuscripts and their contents, see VZ 3:11–​16; Accame and Dell’Oro 2004, 13–​31. 32.  Wickham 2014, 348–​50. 33.  Ordo Romanus (VZ 3:219). Discussion: Wickham 2014, 327.

Epilogue  219 Hill, the Circus Maximus, the Caelian Hill, the Lateran Palace, the Esquiline Hill, the Viminal Hill, and the Quirinal Hill. The visit concludes across the Tiber in Trastevere. For each place, the author tells of their wonders, often related in dichotomies that contrast the present and the past: “where there is now . . . there used to be . . . . ” For example, at the Mons Exquilinus, as it is called here, we learn: “Where there is Sancta Maria Maior [S. Maria Maggiore], was a temple of Cibeles. Where there is Sanctus Petrus ad Vincula [S. Pietro in Vincoli], was a temple of Venus.”34 The Capitol shows up in several places in the Mirabilia urbis Romae. Just after the first section, which includes lists of the hills, walls, and other urban features, begins a second section dealing with curiosities associated with individual monuments. The first such curiosity, which I discussed in c­ hapter 3, relates to the church of S. Maria in Capitolio. It was in this place, according to this version of the legend, that Octavian, the first emperor, learned from the Tiburtine Sibyl that a divinity would manifest himself, take human form, and rule the world.35 The Capitol turns up a second time in its by now familiar form as the walled enclosure for the Salvatio Civium, the man-​made Wonder of the World, though without being identified as such. In the Mirabilia urbis Romae’s telling of the story, the statues and their warning bells were located in Capitolio and more specifically “in the Temple of Jupiter and Moneta.” Nowhere else in the legends dealing with the Salvatio Civium was it imagined that the Capitol was a temple. This small act of remembering and forgetting is multiplied throughout. Later, when the Capitol itself is described, the hill becomes crowded with buildings, and the buildings themselves call to memory moments from the past: The Capitoline Hill, which used to be the head of the world [caput mundi], was where the consuls and senators devoted themselves to the ruling of the world. It was for a long time surrounded by high and sturdy walls standing beyond the height of the mountain, decorated round about with glass and gold, and inlaid with marvelous mosaics. On the Arx was a palace with amazing works, decorated throughout with gold, silver, bronze, and precious stones, such that it was a mirror for all peoples. The temples that were on the Arx, which I am able to remember, are the following. On the summit of the Arx, beyond the Porticus Crinorum, was the Temple of Jupiter and Moneta, just as is found in Ovid’s martyrology de Faustis. On the side facing the Forum was the Temple of Vesta and Caesar, where there was a throne for the pagan high priests. It was here that the senators 34.  Mirabilia urbis Romae 28 (VZ 3:60): “ubi est Sancta Maria Maior, fuit templum Cibeles. ubi est Sanctus Petrus ad Vincula, fuit templum Veneris.” 35.  Mirabilia urbis Romae 11 (VZ 3:28–​29):  “haec visio fuit in camera Octaviani imperatoris, ubi nunc est ecclesia Sanctae Mariae in Capitolio.”

220 Epilogue placed Julius Caesar on the throne on the sixth day of March. On the other side of the Capitoline Hill, beyond the Canapara, was the Temple of Juno. Next to the Forum Publicum was the Temple of Hercules. On the Tarpeian, was the Temple of Asylum, where Julius Caesar was murdered by the senate. In the place where S.  Maria now stands were two temples likewise joined together with the palace, those of Phoebus and Carmentis. This is where Octavian saw the vision in heaven. Next to the Camellaria was the Temple of Janus, the god who was the guardian of the Capitoline Hill. Thus it used to be called the Golden Capitol [Aureum Capitolium], because before all the kingdoms of the whole world it used to show strength with wisdom and grace.36 According to the Mirabilia urbis Romae, the Capitoline Hill was the caput mundi. This centrality was like a magnetic force that pulled several monuments from the surrounding landscape to itself. The Temple of Vesta, the Temple of Divus Iulius, and the Temple of Janus were drawn up from the Forum Romanum; the Temple of Hercules, from the Forum Boarium; and the Temple of Carmentis and Temple of Apollo, from the Campus Martius. These sites joined the main parts of the hill, the Arx, the Capitolium, the Asylum, and the Tarpeian Rock. It is easy to miss the significance of the passage. Because it joins, in the same register, fact and fiction, history and legend, topography and topos, we are tempted to dismiss the whole:  while senators and consuls certainly used the Capitol for important meetings and rituals, Julius Caesar was most definitely not killed there, as the Mirabilia urbis Romae—​and Shakespeare—​have it.37 Absent also is the well-​researched mockery of the apologists.38 Instead the Mirabilia urbis Romae combines knowledge of pagan poetry, Christian legends, and the current topography of the hill into a single celebratory accumulation of sentences that together forms a total description of the hill, the first such attempt to encapsulate the hill’s multiple registers of memory since Vergil’s Aeneid.

36.  Mirabilia urbis Romae 23 (VZ 3:51–​53): “Capitolium, quod erat caput mundi, ubi consules et senatores morabantur ad gubernandum orbem, cuius facies cooperta erat muris altis et firmis diu super fastigium montis, uitro et auro undique coopertis et miris operibus laqueatis. Infra arcem palatium fuit miris operibus, auro et argento et aere et lapidibus pretiosis perornatum, ut esset speculum omnibus gentibus. Templa quoque quae infra arcem fuere, quae ad memoriam ducere possum, sunt haec. In summitate arcis, super porticum Crinorum, fuit templum Iouis et Monetae, sicut repperitur in marthi[ro]logio Ouidii de Faustis. In partem fori templum Vestae et Caesaris. Ibi fuit cathedra pontificum paganorum, ubi senatores posuerunt Iulium Caesarem in cathedra sexta die infra mensem martium. Ex alia parte Capitolii, super Canaparam, templum Iunonis. Iuxta forum publicum templum Herculis. In Tarpeio templum Asilis, ubi interfectus fuit Iulius Caesar a senatu. In loco ubi nunc est Sancta Maria, fuere duo templa simul iuncta cum palatio, Phoebi et Carmentis, ubi Octavianus imperator uidit uisionem in caelo. Iuxta Camellariam templum Iani, qui erat custos Capitolii. Ideo dicebatur aureum Capitolium, quia prae omnibus regnis totius orbis pollebat sapientia et decore.” 37.  Fisher 1907 points out that Shakespeare derived his sense that the Capitolium was a building and that Caesar was murdered there ultimately from the Mirabilia urbis Romae. 38.  Noted in VZ 3:3–​4.

Epilogue  221 Thinking through the possible sources for the Mirabilia urbis Romae’s Capitol points the way to the new means of visualizing the past available in the twelfth century through the rediscovery of Roman poets and possibly also through new modes artistic representation. The author of the Mirabilia urbis Romae knew the Augustan poet Ovid, citing him for the statement that there used to be a Temple of Jupiter and Moneta on the summit of the Arx. This seems to reflect the author’s familiarity with at least three passages from Ovid’s Fasti, a verse calendar of Roman religious rites identified in the Mirabilia urbis Romae as Ovid’s martyrology de Faustis. Ovid, in introducing the month of June, writes, in the voice of Juno herself, that Juno’s temple has been joined to that of Tarpeian Jove.39 Some lines later, Ovid channels the voice of Iuventas, Juno’s daughter, who proudly says: “My mother owns the Golden Capitol [aurea Capitolia], where she shares the temple, and, as is right, occupies the summit [summa] along with Jupiter.”40 Last, it was also from Ovid that the author of the Mirabilia urbis Romae probably derived the information that there had been a Temple of Juno Moneta (the “Alarm-​Sounder”) on the Arx.41 Ovid’s poetry, moreover, allowed the Mirabilia urbis Romae to conjure up the Golden Capitol.42 The hill thus leans, in imaginative terms, on Vergil’s poetry, even if the Mirabilia urbis Romae’s author did not know it. Vergil’s Aurea Capitolia echoed through Ovid and other poets such as Silius Italicus at the end of the first century and Ausonius at the end of the fourth.43 From here, the Golden Capitol stretched to the anonymous author of the Mirabilia urbis Romae to become part of a lost reality accessible through text—​and one that was increasingly of interest in twelfth-​century Rome.44 Perhaps mosaic representations of cities were another source for the Mirabilia urbis Romae’s description of the Capitol. In the Mirabilia urbis Romae, the Capitol is a walled city, with structures poking out of its enceinte. This is similar to how walled cities are generally depicted in Roman and late Roman art—​a bird’s-​eye view at a slight angle of buildings tightly packed into a circuit of walls and towers. One can point to this artistic convention in a variety of forms and places, from the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome to the mosaic floors of churches in Madaba and Umm er-​Rasas. In these instances, the same conception 39. Ovid, Fasti 6.33–​34: “si torus in pretio est, dicor matrona Tonantis, | iunctaque Tarpeio sunt mea templa Ioui.” Valentini and Zucchetti give this passage as the source for the citation in the Mirabilia urbis Romae: VZ 3:52 n. 1. But this citation gives us neither the Arx nor the epithet “Moneta.” 40. Ovid, Fasti 6.73–​74 (tr. Frazer and Goold 323): “aurea possedit socio Capitolia templo | mater et, ut debet, cum Ioue summa tenet.” 41. Ovid, Fasti 6.183: “arce quoque in summa Iunoni templa Monetae.” 42.  The idea of Roma aurea appears in a number of speeches written in praise of Rome, and thus the idea of the Capitolium aureum might have persisted because it was a literary trope taught in schools. For this trope and many others, see Gernentz 1918, 58–​62. 43.  Silius Italicus, Punica 3.623–​24:  “aurea Tarpeia ponet Capitolia rupe | et iunget nostro templorum culmina caelo.” Here Silius Italicus is making Jupiter foretell Domitian’s rebuilding of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Ausonius 11.19.17 (Ordo urbium nobelium): “aurea qui statuit Capitoli culmina.” 44.  The scholarship on the valuation of the idea of Rome in the Middle Ages is vast. See now Diefenbach 2002.

222 Epilogue

Figure 32.  Apse mosaic of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, 817–​824, showing Christ flanked by the apostles Peter (right) and Paul (left). Below twelve lambs representing the apostles amble in procession through the heavenly cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, both cities with walls of gold and jewels. Photograph: Walter Denny.

of space was applied to Roman military camps, barbarian cities, and the holy cities of Palestine.45 However, in reading the Mirabilia’s literary description of the Capitol against these visual representations, there is an important difference. In the Mirabilia urbis Romae, the Capitol’s walls are described as covered “with glass and gold, and inlaid with marvelous mosaics.” Moreover, the palace on the Arx was “decorated throughout with gold, silver, bronze, and precious stones.” In few places other than in Rome do mosaics depict city walls as studded with stones or covered with precious materials, and in Rome the only cities depicted thus are Jerusalem and Bethlehem, beginning first with the mosaic representation of these cities on the fifth-​century triumphal arch of S. Maria Maggiore. Here, glittering to the left and right of the apse, are the walls of the two holy cities, shining with gold and studded with pearls. Such a depiction, to be sure, had theological implications. These are not the terrestrial cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. In the Apocalypse of John (21:10–​21), the walls of Heavenly Jerusalem are described as high and sturdy, made of pure gold and studded with precious stones.46 From S. Maria Maggiore these città gemmate appeared in the sixth-​century S. Lorenzo, the ninth-​century S.  Prassede and S.  Cecilia in Trastevere, and the twelfth-​ century S. Clemente and S. Maria in Trastevere (Figure 32).47 Hendrik Dey has 45. Bertelli 1999. 46.  Brenk 1975, 33–​34. See also Cecchelli 1956, pl. LXII. 47. Matthiae 1967, 1:149, 2:  pl. 89 (S. Lorenzo); 1:238–​39, 2:  pl. 183 (S. Prassede); 1:236 (S. Cecilia in Trastevere); 1:280, 2: pls. 228, 256, 257 (S. Clemente).

Epilogue  223 recently argued that John’s Heavenly Jerusalem might have contributed to the deepening cognitive presence of the Aurelian Wall beginning in the fifth century, leading to the wall’s visualization as the surrogate of Christian Rome in the early Middle Ages.48 Perhaps, then, it is also the case that this literary-​artistic model likewise influenced the Mirabilia urbis Romae’s evocation of the Capitol: a place as important as the caput mundi should appear—​here, in the mind’s eye—​as heavenly as Heavenly Jerusalem did in contemporary art. Like Heavenly Jerusalem’s, the Capitol’s walls soared in height and were dazzling to behold. It was as if the Mirabilia urbis Romae had turned the Capitol from a man-​made Wonder of the World into Rome’s holy mountain, similar, in at least formal terms, to the Holy Mountain—​Jerusalem.49 The Mirabilia urbis Romae is indeed a collection of the miraculous. Perhaps its most miraculous trait was its durability, its ability to create a usable past for the city of Rome, its monuments, and its denizens. The Mirabilia urbis Romae profiled the wonders of Rome’s past and made certain that this past continued through the construction of churches on the ancient sites described with such awe. In that sense, the Mirabilia urbis Romae is a pious document, one that celebrates a type of historical continuity between the Roman Empire and the Roman church, a continuity writ onto the city’s evolving urban environment, in its passage from a pagan city to the urbs christiana.50 In short order the Mirabilia was folded into, added onto, or truncated in a number of collections, including the late twelfth-​century De Mirabilibus urbis Romae by Magister Gregorius, the thirteenth-​century Graphia urbis Romae, the fourteenth-​century De Mirabilibus civitatis Romae by Nicolas Rosell, and many other vernacular versions, such as Le miracole de Roma. In each of these texts, the Golden Capitol (Capitolium aureum) is resplendent, the caput mundi, the center of it all.51 From one of the Seven Hills of Rome to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Capitol actually came to possess more power in imaginative terms than it had in antiquity. With such a status, this miraculum was emblematic of a lost world, lost technologies, and a lost monumentality. The raw power associated with the Capitol in late antiquity forged a mobile Capitole imaginaire for the Middle Ages. Setting the Capitol in Motion The Capitol had been a mobile construction for a long time. For centuries, since its dedication in 509 bce, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus dominated the cityscape. From the beginning, the temple was not solely for Jupiter but for

48.  Dey 2011, 142–​55, 281–​82. 49.  Demus-​Quatember 1970, 81–​82. 50. Frugoni 1984. 51.  VZ 3:67–​167.

224 Epilogue the Capitoline Triad, consisting of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, each with its own cella and religious rites. This was certainly the largest temple in Rome for hundreds of years and probably the largest temple in Italy until the first century bce. When Rome began establishing military colonies in Italy, some of these communities imitated the Capitol in Rome by building versions of their own. In the third century bce, Cosa, a colonia north of Rome, built a small-​scale reproduction of Rome’s Capitol, while at Sufetela (Sheitla, Tunisia) three separate temples (for Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva) were built side by side in the second century.52 Or an already-​standing temple was simply rededicated and called a capitolium after the reorganization of the community into a colonia in the first century bce.53 More than a hundred such capitolia have been identified, most of them in Italy and North Africa, though there were others in the east, such as the capitolium of Aelia Capitolina—​Jerusalem, which became a colony under Hadrian. Some of these capitolia lasted for centuries because they were periodically repaired by local patriots. In the province of Raetia, an inscription found in the local detachment’s shrine and dedicated to Rome’s military standards tells of how the soldiers, under the direction of the provincial governor, restored a capitolium at the beginning of the third century ce because the building was falling down from old age.54 In all cases, the establishment of a colonia and the erection of a capitolium attested that community’s loyalty to the state, both for itself and for the surrounding region, an investment, as it were, in a demonstrable loyalty to the state. However, temples are not the only evidence. The cult of Jupiter Optimus Maximus is likewise attested in hundreds of inscriptions. There are more than two thousand examples, many of them nothing more than a humble stele recording that someone had fulfilled a vow to Jupiter Optimus Maximus willingly. In one example, a man named Titus Aelius Avitus, from the province of Moesia Superior, made a dedication to Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus (abbreviated in the inscription as IOMC) while he was a local councilor in the late second century ce.55 He was far from Rome and probably never saw Rome’s temple. Yet he and hundreds of others made that distant presence a part of daily life in the provinces. Jupiter even presided over the most hidden practices of Roman religion. At the beginning of the third century, the victim of a theft in Roman Britain called on Jupiter Optimus Maximus for justice through a lead curse tablet.56 Some, perhaps, could also visualize the Capitoline Hill from afar. Just as the gods were worshipped through statues and other cult images, Roma, the personification of the city and its empire, was worshipped together with representations 52.  Beard, North, and Price 1998, 1:333–​34, 2:244–​45. 53.  Barton 1982, 261. 54.  AE 1989, 581. 55.  ILJug 1397. For a recently discovered example from Patara in Lycia, see Engelmann 2007, 135 no. 2c. 56.  Lipka 2009, 113 and n.  506, citing Gager 2002, 196 no.  98. Gager notes that the invocation of Jupiter Optimus Maximus is unusual in this context.

Epilogue  225 of the Seven Hills of Rome. In one unique instance, from the Roman colony of Corinth in Greece, a statue base, probably for Roma, dating from the second century, has depictions of the hills as lumps, each identified by inscription with one of the names of the hills, including the Mons Capitolinus.57 More vividly, military veterans, from the first to the third century, were issued a bronze diploma on their retirement from service. These diplomas note precisely where the original document was publicly displayed in Rome. They were attached to the Ara Gentis Iuliae, a monument in the precinct of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill, as well as to the “Tabularium” and other locations on the hill.58 Even if these military men never saw the Capitol and its hill, they could rest assured that their rights as veterans were nonetheless inscribed and could be found there. In late antiquity, most of these local capitolia began a slow, uneven decline. Four examples of the fate of capitolia will suffice. The capitolium of Cosa had already ceased functioning as a temple in the third century. The site was transformed in the fifth and sixth centuries for secular purposes, and it was finally abandoned in the seventh.59 In Verona, sometime in the last quarter of the fourth century, an official named Valerius Palladius took it upon himself to remove a statue that “was lying for a long time in the capitolium” (in Capitolio diu iacentem) and set it in the forum.60 The inscription recording this information is matter-​of-​fact; there is no sense of loss in moving the statue from the capitolium to Verona’s forum. In the fifth century, Verona’s capitolium was robbed of much of its stone, though the site continued to be used into the early Middle Ages.61 After Brescia’s capitolium was dismantled, the temple’s platform became a housing zone in the latter half of the sixth century.62 Finally, Jerusalem’s capitolium, which was almost surely located on the site of the Holy Sepulcher, had been destroyed already under Constantine.63 As these buildings tumbled down or became targeted for violent destruction, the toponyms associated with them occasionally set into motion new associations. Capitolia, as we saw in c­ hapter 7, proliferated in the legends of the martyrs in many places, so that even now it is impossible to determine whether, for example, the capitolium of Ravenna ever existed outside the imaginary Ravenna of the Passio S. Apollinaris. In the case of Jerusalem’s capitolium, the toponym lifted off from its location on the site of the Holy Sepulcher and became, by the seventh century, associated with the Temple 57.  Corinth: Robinson 1974. This iconography seems to be similar to another unique object: a coin minted under Vespasian shows Roma reclining on the Seven Hills. See RIC 2.1 no. 108. 58.  E.g., Ara Gentis Iuliae: AE 1985, no. 770; AE 2003, no. 2060. “Tabularium”: AE 1953, no. 74. See the still useful discussion in Lanciani 1892, 91–​92. 59.  Cirelli and Fentress 2012. 60.  CIL 5, 3332 = ILS 5363. See Ward-​Perkins 1984, 33. 61.  Cavalieri Manasse 2008. 62.  Decline of Brescia’s capitolium: Brogiolo 1993, 73, 90, 95, 113. 63.  Belayche 1997; Bowersock 1980; Murphy-​O’Connor 1994.

226 Epilogue Mount. According to a local legend, found in both Greek and Georgian, after pacifying Jerusalem the first place the Muslims went was the capitolium, and it was there that the Aqsa Mosque was built.64 While Cosa’s capitolium had no significant, detectable afterlife as a sign of power, others did. The Temple Mount’s charisma as a location drew the city’s capitolium to it, and we have already seen how Rome’s Capitol had a similar magnetic quality in the Middle Ages. Throughout antiquity and well into the Middle Ages, the names Capitolium, Arx, Tarpeian Rock, and others were remembered as ancient names attached to monuments both lost and still visible in the form of ruins. Rome’s Capitol likewise was imagined as having the capacity to house a multiplicity of fantasy monuments purportedly ancient but of more recent invention, such as the Palace of Octavian and the Salvatio Civium. Just as other toponyms were drawn to the associations of the hill, it was also true that the word capitolium itself took off and had a life of its own. Uprooted, so to say, from the city of Rome, it was used to express a host of other meanings in the Middle Ages. One of the first hints of this process comes from the Vita Kaddroae, a hagiography written shortly after the saint’s death in the late ninth century. As one anticipates, the saint’s final destination is Heaven, but Heaven appears here under the striking euphemism caeleste Capitolium. Kaddroe, the abbot of S. Felix at Metz, thus climbed up to the “Heavenly Capitol,” a fitting, and perhaps unwitting, twist on Vergil’s Golden Capitol (aurea Capitolia).65 In other sources, the word capitolium could be flipped and refer to hell. In less figurative terms, the word was used to describe, in addition to the Capitol in Rome, pagan temples, castles, courts of law, council chambers, chapter houses in churches and monasteries, and the cathedrals and monasteries themselves.66 Thus Rome’s Capitol and the word capitolium connoted a locus of power, be that in the distant past as the setting for martyrdom, in the present as the setting for a convocation of bishops, or in the future as the destination of the soul. It became a capitolium of one’s own, portable and pliable, like rituals such as the Roman triumph and architectural forms such as the triumphal arch. Looking at the Capitoline Hill at a distance from antiquity, from the point of view of those living in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, one can say that the Capitol never lost its head (caput), that is to say, its centrality, a location from which everything else important emanated. From the mid-​twelfth century on, the hill came to function as the seat of the renewed, or better 64. Flusin 1992. 65.  Vita Kaddroae abbatis (Pertz, MGH SS 4, 484). Cf. Vita Severi, AASS, Feb., i, 85: “ibi denique aliquamdiu orans, pretiosam Domino animam laetus reddidit, atque sarcina carnis exutus, caelestis regni Capitolium est indeptus.” 66.  Du Cange 1883–​1887, 1:138–​39; Fuchs, Weijers, and Gumbert 1977–​2005, 2:118–​19; Latham and Howlett 1975–​, 1:271; Lehmann and Stroux 1959–​, 2:229–​30; Neirmeyer, van de Kieft, and Burgers 2002, 1:179.

Epilogue  227

Figure 33.  El Capitolio of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photograph: Author.

said, newly invented, Roman city state. In 1143 and the years immediately thereafter, the Capitoline Hill became the locus of revolution, laying thereby the origins of the commune of Rome.67 From this moment on, the toponym capitolium began to tell new stories intimately related to the old ones. In spite of, and perhaps even because of, the polemics of the apologists, the legacy of the Capitol bequeathed to the Western world was therefore a toponym, an ambiguous, virtually always domed edifice pointing to a secular locus of power. For those of us living in the United States, it is easy to see this legacy. From Washington, D.C., Boston, Hartford, and Sacramento to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Havana, Cuba, the noun Capitol and the adjective Capitoline are odd-​looking words, often mispronounced and misspelled, which, almost by their alterity, signal a center of state and federal power, and more generally they stand for a particularly modern, concretized form of imperial democratic authority (Figure 33).

67.  Most recently Wickham 2014, 13–​20, 385–​457.

228 Epilogue The Modern Fall of the Ancient Capitol We began this book by discussing the figuration of the Capitoline Hill in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both as a holy mountain for modern Italy and as a heap of rubble that was lost in the “dark ages.” It seems fitting then that the conclusion of this study should return to the legacies of the Capitol in modern Italy. For it was then that the Capitol’s history was simultaneously invented and destroyed. By looking quickly into the Capitoline Hill’s more recent past, we can more fully appreciate the ambivalent legacy of the hill’s symbolic allure. It was not a moribund paganism, Constantine’s pagan apostasy, Christianity, or barbarian wars that initiated the fall of the Capitol. Rather, it was the sistemazione of the hill in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the quest to uncover Roma antica, and the emergent politics and business of Italy’s national heritage—​these are the developments that ultimately destroyed the ancient Capitolium and the social and economic patterns of life on and around the hill. The habit of elite habitation on and around the hill is exemplified by the fifth-​ century domus on the Arx, the domus Corsorum in the eleventh century, and the small estates (curtes) of the Bull of Anacletus II in the twelfth century. This habit continued into modern times. At the turn of the twentieth century, the antiquities of the Forum Romanum were coming to light, making the whole area from the Capitoline Hill to the Colosseum a showcase of Rome in the past and present. New “electrical light globes” were installed in the Musei Capitolini and in the Forum Romanum, so that one could, as the German emperor Wilhelm II did in May 1903, stroll through the museum as the light dimmed and then take in the view of the Forum Romanum and Palatine Hill, both of them “brilliant” with the glow of colored lights.68 Rome’s ancient past, which was now revealed through scientific archaeology and displayed with the latest technology, would help usher Italy into modernity. It was just at this time that one of the hill’s most famous modern residents lived there for a short time. Eleonora Duse, once called the “world’s greatest tragedienne,” had almost been forgotten by the public after retreating from their gaze following a long affair with the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.69 In 1910, Duse decided that it was time to return to the spotlight. Her repertoire was to be limited, a short run of Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea. Settling in Rome, Duse rented a “small flat” at Via di Monte Tarpeo, Number 61. The location fit perfectly with her own story of renewal. On the other side of the hill, builders were adding the finishing touches to the Vittoriano. Just below Duse’s flat, as she gazed out the window, she would have seen the Forum Romanum, emerging from centuries of accumulated debris and set to open to the public in concert with the dedication 68.  New York Times, May 6, 1903, p. 5. 69.  For this period of Duse’s career, though without mention of her flat on the Campidoglio, see Pontiero 1986, 185–​96.

Epilogue  229 of the Vittoriano. The New York Times described her location as “one of the most romantic spots in Rome,” where one could hear the songs of thrushes by day and nightingales by night. To the surprise of her friends, however, Duse wanted to move immediately:  “She suddenly found that the stairs were too many, the neighborhood undesirable, the solitude too intense.”70 This quality of solitude was not for lack of neighbors. She had plenty of those, especially in the warren of churches, apartments, and businesses attached to the hill, but these were perhaps not the right neighbors for an international star of the stage. In a sense, Duse was correct. The hill was quickly becoming a lonely place. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the monastery so long attached to S. Maria in Aracoeli was destroyed to make room for the Vittoriano.71 Just after the end of World War I, the Italian state appropriated the south summit of the Capitoline Hill from the German Empire. Rodolfo Lanciani was charged with figuring out how best to remove all of the hill’s residents and how much compensation would be required, in order to make the hill into a zona archeologica.72 In his private portfolios now housed in the Vatican Library, Lanciani included his own handwritten ledger of the names, addresses, and origins of the hill’s residents. He also listed their jobs: they were housewives, carpenters, porters, and soldiers. In his estimation, the total was sixty-​three souls.73 The cost of removing them would be 6.5 million lire.74 Lanciani’s papers also include an engineer’s plan of the different areas around the Campidoglio. Lanciani annotated it with indications of where the Campidoglio’s families resided.75 As we have seen throughout this book, the result of this effort eventually came to be called the isolamento. In the 1920s the hill and its slopes were denuded of much residential and retail space. Now all the remaining buildings on top of the hill function in some official capacity, and no one lives on or directly around it anymore—​at least legally. Perhaps some of the last officially sanctioned residents of the hill were not even human. For around a century, beginning just after Italian reunification, the state housed an Italian wolf and an eagle in cages just to the left of the Cordonata, the staircase that leads up to Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio. The Lupa Viva Capitolina was a popular attraction not only for passersby. Beginning in the 1920s, the Lupa was also the subject of newsreels. In one intentionally humorous segment, Rome’s Lupa, with her bushy tail, blithely ignores a cat that climbs into 70.  New York Times, November 2, 1902, p. 27; New York Times, July 28, 1912, p. C3. For photos of the flat before it was destroyed in the isolamento, see Brigante Colonna 1940. 71.  Brancia D’Apricena 2000, 267–​301, includes a number of quite dramatic photographs of the destruction and dismantling of the monastery. See also Leone and Margiotta 2007. Lanciani was against the plan for the Vittoriano because of the amount of destruction it would involve; he had a much more modest monument in mind. See Palombi 2008, 133–​34. 72.  See Maurer 2005, 169–​83, 312–​17 with figs. 150–​60. 73.  Vat.lat. 13038, pp.  258–​59:  “Notizie informative riguardanti gli inquilini e persone che alloggiano negli stabili già di proprietà dell’Impero di Germania sul Campidoglio.” 74.  Vat.lat. 13038, pp. 269–​73. 75.  Vat.lat. 13038, p. 284.

230 Epilogue the cage and starts eating the Lupa’s supper.76 It was almost immediately pointed out how silly it was to have a caged animal as a national symbol of liberation from the authority of the papacy, while others, both in Italy and abroad, thought the whole display to be inhumane—​state-​sanctioned cruelty to animals.77 These animal residents, too, were removed from the hill. Today the Campidoglio is becoming ever more restricted. For decades, the walkways on the Monte Caprino, winding around the area below the former Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, had been a famous location for gay cruising—​until recently. Now moralizing efforts to close this area off have been justified by concerns for Rome’s ancient heritage. If anything has ended the ancient legacy of the Capitol, it is because its location has been honored in the last century through the particularly modern idioms of development, nationalism, and patrimony.

76.  The newsreels have been archived by the Istituto Luce, and some can be seen through its website, such as the Lupa’s encounter with a Roman cat: “Varietà Roma: La lupa del Campidoglio,” Caleidoscopio ciac c1287, 02/​ 1961, http://​www.archivioluce.com/​archivio/​. 77.  Maes 1885, 129. In addition to the living wolf, there was also an eagle on display, a symbol of the Roman legions. See Henry Gaggiottini, “Rome Eagle: Symbol and Headache,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 5, 1957, p. A13.

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Index

accession of Commodus, 32 of Constantine, 40–​42 of Didius Julianus, 35 of Galba, 34 of Maxentius, 40 of Maximian, 39 of Maximinus Daia, 39 of Maximus and Balbinus, 35–​37 of Pertinax, 35 of Septimius Severus, 32 of Valentinian III, 53 of Vitellius, 33–​34 Acta S. Callisti, 198, 204 Acta S. Hypolisti, 205 Acta S. Pauli, 203 Acta Sanctorum, 187-​88 Acta SS. Eucharii et Valerii, 202 Acta SS. Rufi et Carponii, 204 Acts of Gallicanus, 128 Acts of the Greek Martyrs, 192–​98, 207 Acts of Silvester (Actus Silvestri), 127–​29, 190–​92, 201 aduentus, imperial, 49, 52 Aegis, 157 Aeneas, 5, 6, 7, 9, 117, 134 Agapetus, bishop of Rome, 190 Agnellus of Ravenna, 212 Alaric, king of the Visigoths, 130, 132, 139, 150 Alberti, Leon Battista, 1

Albinus, Ceionius Rufius, urban prefect, 68 Alemanno, Gianni, 22 Alexander, bishop of Rome, 200 Ambrose of Milan, 139, 149 Ammianus Marcellinus on Constantius II’s visit to Rome, 51 on Rome’s Capitol, xv, 115, 117 Amore, Agostino, 195 Anacletus II, bishop of Rome, 103, 116, 228 Anastasius, Byzantine emperor, 120 androgyny, xi–​xii anecdotes, xi, 4, 144 anonymus, Against the Philosophers, 161–​62 Anthemius, emperor, 53, 54, 70 Antony (Marcus Antonius), consul 44 BCE, 43 Apocalypse of John, 178, 192, 222. See also visual depiction of Jerusalem and Bethlehem Appian, 165, 174 Aquileia, 43, 199 Ara Carbonaria, 196 Aravandus, praetorian prefect, 69, 84 Arcadius, emperor, 52, 96–​97, 152 Argan, Giulio Carlo, 22 Arnobius of Sicca Veneria, 25, 145–​46, 147, 149, 163, 166, 167–​68, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 181, 206, 210

267

268 Index Arval Brothers, 61 Asellus, Flavius Eugenius, urban prefect, 68–​69 Assmann, Aleida, 164 Athalaric, king of the Ostrogoths, 64, 67 Atripalda, 188, 205 Augenti, Andrea, xvi Augustine of Hippo, 25, 139, 140, 143, 150, 151–​64, 206, 210 Augustus, emperor (including Octavian), xiii, xiv, xvi, 6, 9, 10, 24, 29, 42–​43, 44, 47n81, 60, 65, 71, 118, 135 in Christian legends, 99–​104, 105, 109, 135, 220 Aurelian, emperor, 37–​38, 44, 50, 59 Aurelius Victor, 40, 47 Auschwitz, 164 Ausonius, Decimus Magnus, 10, 115, 221 Babrius, 169 Balbinus, D. Caelius Calvinus, emperor, 35, 44, 59 barbarians, 38, 44, 63, 119, 134, 137, 177 Basil of Caesarea, 149 Behrwald, Ralf, xvii Belisarius, 91, 133 Benedict the Canon, 218 Benedict of Sant’Andrea di Monte Soratte, 98 Berlin Wall, 164 Bischoff, Bernhard, 103 bishops. See under various individuals. Roman popes are identified as bishop of Rome Boethius, 55 Boin, Douglas, xvi Boni, Giacomo, 94–​95 Boniface IV, bishop of Rome, 96 Boulhol, Paschal, xvii Brescia, 200, 225 buried treasure, 13–​16 Calama (Guelma, Algeria), 158 Caligula, Gaius, emperor, 37, 205n100

Camellaria. See Capitoline Hill Cameron, Averil, 133 capitolia outside Rome, 84, 88, 104–​9, 141–​44, 188, 199, 203–​6, 224–​26 Capitoline Hill/​Campidoglio in ancient historiography, 7–​9, 24, 144–​54, 165–​77 as ancient holy mountain, 9, 140–​41 Area Capitolina, 10, 29, 42, 58, 65, 70, 84, 118, 123 Arx, xii, xiv, 4, 7, 29, 57, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 104, 136, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226, 228 association with Saturn, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 107, 155–​59 Asylum, xii, 29, 144n26 burials on, 96 Camellaria, 103–​4, 116n13, 220 Capitoline Amphora, 119 Capitoline Stone (lapis Capitolinus), 160 Capitolium/​Capitolia, xii, xiiin6, 4, 5, 8, 11, 13n37, 16, 20, 26, 29, 31n9, 33, 34, 35, 42n57, 51, 54n128, 56, 57n2, 58, 64, 67, 73, 76, 77, 82n100, 84, 90–​91, 97–​98, 99, 101, 102, 108, 114, 115n9, 118, 120, 125, 126n66, 127, 128, 136, 143, 144–​46, 147, 148n53, 155n97, 158–​59, 162, 168n13, 173n41, 176, 179n71, 177, 182, 191, 193, 198, 199, 200, 204n99, 211, 214–​15, 216, 218, 220, 221n42, 223, 226, 228 (see also Capitoline Hill/​ Campidoglio: Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus) as carrier of memory (monumentum), 5, 7–​8, 9, 147, 163 as center of Rome, 1 Clivus Capitolinus, 29, 36, 77, 79, 91, 96, 118, 119, 123 in the “Dark Ages,” 17–​19 destruction of Capitol in 69 CE, 10, 11, 15, 25, 136, 147, 171, 177, 179–​80

Index  269 destruction of Capitol in 80 CE, xiii, 10, 25 destruction of Capitol in 83 BCE, xvi, 10, 11, 25, 165–​66, 171, 172, 173–​75 dimensions of, 1 diplomas of veterans located on, 225 discovery of the caput, 5, 8, 26, 107, 144–​47, 149, 163, 214, 215, 226 as emblematic of the moral and physical integrity of the empire, 8, 11, 29, 132–​37, 166, 171–​72, 177, 183, 210 as emblematic of the vicissitudes of fortune, 3, 11–​12 festivals, rites, celebrations, 59–​62 (see also Ludi) Gemonian Steps, 70, 77n88, 84 as imaginary place, xvi, 22–​23, 24–​26, 118–​19, 201 inscriptions on, 68, 130 inter duos lucos, xii in itineraries, 26, 30, 32–​39, 42, 56, 72n70, 211–​13 as “living textuality,” 21 marble remains found on, 17–​18 marketplace, 70, 84, 109, 116 in the Middle Ages, 210–​23 as modern holy mountain, 17, 20, 22 in modern Italy, 13–​17, 20–​21, 74, 228–​30 Mons Capitolinus, xii, 3, 102n78, 154, 205, 225 Mons Saturnius, 4, 5 Mons Tarpeius, 4, 8, 62, 77, 116–​17, 191 as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, 216–​23 Palazzo Caffarelli, 14, 16, 17, 20 Palazzo dei Conservatori, 12, 13, 14 Palazzo Senatorio, 16, 20, 22 photography of, 19, 20, 74, 76, 78, 80, 229n70 Piazza del Campidoglio, xii, 12, 20, 22, 229 Porta Capitolini, 29, 118

pottery found at, 76, 78 reconstructions of, 19–​20 in the Renaissance, 11–​13, 116 routes of access to, 29, 71, 77, 118 statues on, xiii, 58–​59, 182 “Tabularium,” 16, 57, 64, 65–​69, 77, 78, 79, 80, 93n38, 96, 99–​104, 105, 209–​10, 225 Tarpeian Rock, xii, 5, 12, 14, 15, 29, 70, 84, 98n63, 117, 178, 179, 220, 226 Temple of Fides Publica, xiii, 57n2, 58 Temple of Isis Capitolina, 57, 79 Temple of Juno Moneta, xiii, 57, 79, 104, 221 Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 1, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 47, 51, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 70, 77, 91, 96, 102, 107, 114–​16, 117, 119, 120, 131, 132, 167–​68, 223–​24 Temple of Jupiter Tonans, xiii, 10, 20, 29, 42 temples, shrines, and altars on, xiii, 57–​58, 117 Temple of Veiovis, xiii, 57, 64, 67, 96, 104 Via del Campidoglio, 20, 78 Via di Monte Tarpeo, 12, 13, 228 working on, 68–​69 Capitolinus, M. Manlius, consul 392 BCE, 30, 78, 140, 148–​49 Capitols, modern, 227 Capua, 188, 204–​5 caput mundi, 12, 107, 215, 219–​20, 223 Caracalla, emperor, 44, 58, 60 Carmen contra Paganos, 122 Carthage, 35, 131, 132, 141, 142, 143, 151 capitolium of, 84 Cassiodorus, 115–​16, 162, 216 Cassius Dio, 29–​30, 34, 44, 45 Castan, Auguste, 188 Catulus, Q. Lutatius, consul 78 BCE, 10, 115n10, 165, 166 Charlemagne, 103, 212–​13, 214

270 Index Chastagnol, André, 125 Christians as apologists, xv, 25, 140, 144–​50, 167–​68, 172–​77 persecution of, 49, 87, 141–​44, 176 Chronicle of 354 (Chronica urbis Romae), 8, 38, 46, 47, 97n58 Chronicon Paschale, 106 Chronicon Salernitatum, 217 Chronicon Vulturnense, 136 Cicero, xiii, xiv, 30, 79, 156, 161, 165–​66, 172, 175 civil wars, 32, 40, 42, 43, 47, 49–​50, 55 Claudian (Claudius Claudianus), xv, 10, 29, 115, 117, 119, 120 Claudius Gothicus, emperor, 42n53, 58 Claudius, emperor, xi–​xii Clement of Alexandria, 25, 166–​68, 172, 173, 174, 175, 204, 206 Clement, bishop of Rome, 71 Cleopatra, Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, 29, 43 Clodius Albinus, emperor, 32 clothing crown, 9, 31, 42, 59, 119, 120 purple robe, 119, 127 Sasanian/​Persian, 39, 119, 201 toga praetexta 126 Coates-​Stephens, Robert, xvi, 75, 91, 94, 97n58 Codex Calendar of 354, 49, 63, 187 Codex Einsidlensis, 26, 68, 210–​13, 215 coinage, 40–​41, 46, 48, 52, 53, 94–​95. See also mints: of Rome Cola di Rienzo, 22 Commodus, emperor, 32, 35, 45, 59, 176 Constans II, Byzantine emperor, 91–​92 Constantine I, emperor, 2, 38–​42, 44, 45, 47–​51, 52, 56, 57, 63, 113, 119, 168, 175–​76, 182, 209, 225, 228 as founder of Constantinople, 44, 45, 106–​7, 123, 140 and rejection of the Capitol, 24, 25, 42n54, 123–​29, 135–​37, 125n61, 135–​37, 140, 191–​92

in Rome, 40–​42, 47, 50, 63, 191 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Ceremoniis, 105 Constantinople, 44, 88, 91, 96, 105–​8, 123, 125, 133, 136, 152 Kapetōlion, 105–​8 relations with Rome, 91–​92 statues, 105, 107, 108 Constantius I, emperor, 38 Constantius II, emperor visit to Rome, 51–​52 Constitutum Constantini, 128 consulate/​consulship, xiii, 40, 41, 52, 55, 175, 182, 196n59. See also processions Corinth, 10, 225 Cosa, 224, 225, 226 Cosmas of Jerusalem, 216–​17 Council of Elvira, 143 Curiosum urbis Romae. See regionary catalogs Cyprian of Carthage, 142–​43, 163 Dagron, Gilbert, 126 Damasus I, bishop of Rome, 66–​67, 139, 178, 185–​86, 187, 195 de Rossi, Giovanni Battista, 71, 188, 194–​95, 212 decennalia of Constantine, 48, 50 of Galerius and Constantius I, 38 of Gallienus, 38 Decius, emperor, 49, 141–​42, 192, 198, 201 Decretum Gelasianum, 189, 190 Delehaye, Hippolyte, 188 Dey, Hendrik, xvi, 222 Didius Julianus, emperor, 32, 35 Diefenbach, Steffen, xvii, 189 Diocletian, emperor, 38, 39, 46, 47, 48, 49, 87, 113, 115, 142, 143, 144, 145, 176, 185, 204–​5 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 62, 174 Domitian, emperor, 10, 58, 65, 172, 190

Index  271 dragon living in the Capitoline Hill, xvi, 191–​92 Duse, Eleonora, 228–​29 Eco, Umberto, 21 Einsiedeln Itineraries. See Codex Einsidlensis Elagabalus, emperor, 44, 81, 125–​26 elections, 36 Eliav, Yaron, xv Ennius, 5, 6, 9, 148 Eudoxia, widow of Valentinian III, 53, 131, 132 Eugenius, bishop of Rome, 91 Eugippius, abbot of Castellum Lucullanum (S. Severino), 162 Eunapius of Sardis, 25, 124–​27, 129, 182, 210 Eusebius of Caesarea, 8, 48, 50, 168–​69, 172, 173–​77, 180, 210 Evagrius of Antioch, 196 Excerptum ex Chronica Horosii, 97–​98 execution, 49, 34, 70, 84, 199 Fabian, bishop of Rome, 71 Fausta, 124–​25 Felix II, bishop of Rome, 52 Felix IV, bishop of Rome, 67, 87 Filippi, Dunia, xvii flatulence, 61–​62 Florianus, Valerius, urban prefect, 67 Florus, L. Annaeus, historian, 154 Flower, Harriet, 166, 172 Fraschetti, Augusto, xvii, 122 Frend, W. H. C., 141 Galba, emperor, 34 Galerius, emperor, 38, 39 Galla Placidia, augusta, 53 Gallienus, emperor, 37–​38 Gatteschi, Giuseppe, 19–​20, 74 Gaza, 78n91, 96, 216 Geiseric, king of the Vandals, 91, 131–​32, 133, 134, 136

Gelasius, bishop of Rome, 11, 63–​64 German Empire, 13–​17, 228, 229 gesta martyrum, 84, 187–​208 scholarly reception of, 187–​89 use in the churches of Rome, 190 Gibbon, Edward, xv Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1 Golden Capitol (including the Capitol’s gilded bronze roof tiles), 5, 6, 9, 10, 11–​12, 91, 115, 131–​32, 137, 172, 179, 220, 221, 223, 226. See also Vergil Gordian I, emperor, 35–​36 Gordian II, emperor, 35–​36 Gordian III, emperor, 36 Gospel of Pseudo-​Matthew, 206 Gracchus, Tiberius, tribune, 30 Gratian, emperor, 52, 54, 56, 101, 113 Gregory I, bishop of Rome, 87 Gregory III, bishop of Rome, 103 Gregory IV, bishop of Rome, 105 Gregory XIII, bishop of Rome, 12 Gregory of Tours, 216–​17 Grig, Lucy, xvii, 206 Hadrian I, bishop of Rome, 189 Hadrian, emperor, xi, 199–​200, 205, 224 Henry IV, Holy Roman emperor, 54 heresy, 53, 92, 162, 210 heritage concept of, xvi–​xviii heritage sites in Rome, 65, 102, 114, 134–​35, 159–​60, 186, 211 and modernization, 228–​30 Herodian, historian, 32, 34, 35, 36, 44, 45, 58, 59–​60 Hesiod, 169 Hesychius of Miletus, 106–​07 Hilarus, bishop of Rome, 53 Historia Augusta, 35, 37, 38, 58, 59–​60, 81, 118–​19, 120, 125–​26, 127, 129 Homo, Leon, 18 Honorius, emperor, 29, 52, 53, 55, 117, 119 Horace, 29, 185

272 Index Hrabanus Maurus, 214–​15 Hubert, Étienne, 71 Hülsen, Christian, 17, 211, 212–​13 Ianuarius, Flavius Magnus, curator statuarum, 68 Iara, Kristine, 64 Innocent I, bishop of Rome, 130 Isidore of Seville, 214–​15 isolamento, 21, 77, 93n36, 229 Jerome, xiv, xvi, 25, 100, 117, 121–​23, 136, 137, 139, 152–​53, 167, 172, 176, 177, 178–​81, 182, 186n6, 210 Jerusalem Temple (including Temple Mount), xvi, 8, 25, 59, 167, 173, 177–​80, 182, 183, 205, 210, 225–​26 Jerusalem, xvi, xviii, 1, 20, 178, 207, 216, 222, 223, 224, 225–​26 John Lydus, 108 Jones, Christopher, 120 Jordan, Heinrich, 18 Josephus, xiv, 180 Julian, emperor, 24, 125, 126 Julius Caesar, dictator, 30, 220 Julius Obsequens, 181 Julius, bishop of Rome, 92 Jupiter Averter of Evil (Zeus Alexikakos), xi–​xii Optimus Maximus, passim dedications to, 224 Justin II, Byzantine emperor, 94 Justinian I, Byzantine emperor, 91, 105, 108, 133, 190 Kalas, Gregor, xvi Kaldellis, Anthony, xvi Kinney, Dale, 218 Krautheimer, Richard, 92 Lactantius, 25, 39, 146–​47, 161, 163, 167, 172, 181, 206, 210, 214 Laeta, Roman aristocrat, 180 Lanciani, Rodolfo, 15–​17, 19, 20, 212, 229

Lanery, Cécile, 195 “Laterculus Malalianus,” 101–​2 laughter, 60, 62 Leo I, bishop of Rome, 53, 186 Leo II, bishop of Rome, 195 Leo III, bishop of Rome, 93 Lepidus, M. Aemilius, consul 187 BCE, 9 Lewis, Sir George Cornewall, 14–​15 Libanius, 125 Liber Pontificalis, 49, 50, 71, 82, 87, 88, 92, 93–​94, 95, 186, 189, 190, 191 Liberius, bishop of Rome, 52, 187 lightning, xiv, 6, 45, 130, 150, 160, 169, 170, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 183–​84, 204–​5 Liverani, Paolo, 52, 54 Livy, 8, 136, 145, 148–​49, 154, 161, 181–​82 Longinianus, Flavius Macrobius, urban prefect, 67 Lucretius, 171 Ludi Ludi Capitolini, 36, 59–​61, 149 Ludi Romani, 63 Ludi Saeculares, xiv, 45, 61, 124 Lupa Viva Capitolina, 229–​30 MacCormack, Sabine, 135 Macrobius, 65, 121 Mainz, 39, 214 Majorian, emperor, 53, 63, 119–​20 Malalas, John, 94n40, 101–​2 maps, 1, 26, 71, 74, 75, 212–​13 Marcella, Roman aristocrat, 121, 152–​53, 178 Marcus Aurelius, emperor, xiii, 12, 32, 221 Marcus, bishop of Rome, 92 Maria Genetrix Dei, 94, 103, 104. See also Theotokos Mark the Deacon, 96–​97 Markus, Robert, 150 Martial, poet, 61–​62 martyrs, xvi, 139, 151, 185–​208 Marucchi, Orazio, 194 Maskarinec, Maya, 185

Index  273 Maxentius, emperor, 39–​42, 46, 47–​50, 113, 124, 135, 182 coinage of, 40, 41 Maximian, emperor, 38, 39, 46, 48, 113, 115 Maximinus Thrax, emperor, 35, 43, 119 Maximus, M. Clodius Pupienus, emperor, 35–​37, 43–​44, 59 Meneghini, Roberto, xvii, 72 Milan, 31, 39, 44, 139, 144, 149 Milo, T. Annius, praetor, 79 mints of Ostia, 40 of Rome, 40, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53, 68–​70 Minucius Felix, 147–​48 Mirabilia urbis Romae, 11, 104, 109, 189, 217–​23 Mithras, xiii, 62, 122 Mombritius, Boninus, 187, 191 Mummius, L., censor 142 BCE, 10 Muñoz, Antonio, 20 Mussolini, Benito, 20–​21 Narbonne, 115, 188, 203 Narses, Byzantine exarch, 87–​88, 91, 95–​98, 105, 108, 209 Narses, Sasanian king, 38–​39 Nazarius, panegyrist, 47, 48 Nepos, emperor, 53 Nero, emperor, 147n45, 148, 151, 152, 153 Nicomedia, 31, 39, 141 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 13–​15 Nolli Map of 1748, 74, 75 Notitia urbis Romae. See regionary catalogs Olympiodorus of Thebes, 25, 129–​31, 210 Oracle of Baalbek, 99–​100. See also Sibyl orans, 93 Orosius, 97, 154–​55 on Christian emperors and Capitoline itineraries, 31 Ossius of Corduba, 125 Ostia, xvi, 40, 41, 178 Ovid, 117, 185, 219, 221 owls, 180–​82

Pacatus, panegyrist, 119 Pacian, bishop of Barcelona, 143 paintings of Perseus and Andromeda, 74 of Roma, 76 Panegyrici Latini, 4, 38, 40–​42, 44, 47, 48, 54, 115, 119, 123–​25 Panella, Clementina, 47 Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai, 106 Parthenon of Athens, xvi, xviii, 100, 114 Paschoud, François, 135 Passio Afrae, 200 Passio Macrae, 200 Passio Polochronii, 201 Passio S. Apollinaris, 202, 225 Passio S. Felicis presbyteri Romani, 205 Passio S. Philippi episcopi Heracleae, 204 Passio SS. Eusebii et Sociorum Martyrum, 84n104, 201 Passio SS. Felicis et Fortunati, 199 Paul the Deacon, 92, 98 Paulinus, bishop of Nola, 177, 183–​84 Paullus, L. Aemilius, consul 182 and 162 BCE, 120 Pausanias, 174 persecution. See Christians personifications of Rome, 47, 224–​25 Pertinax, Q. Helvius, emperor, 35 Petronius Maximus, emperor, 131, 133 Philip the Arab, emperor, 31, 44, 60 Phillipopolis (Shahbā), Syria, 44 Philostratus, 170 Phlegon of Tralles, xi–​xii Phocas, Byzantine emperor, 96 Phrygia, xi Pictor, Q. Fabius, historian, 8, 145 Pindar, 170 Piso, Gn. Calpurnius, consul 7 BCE, 79 Piso, L. Calpurnius, historian, 8 Pliny the Elder, 10, 181 Plutarch, 10, 165, 169, 170, 172, 174, 177 Poggio Bracciolini, 11 Pompeianus, Gabinius Barbarus, urban prefect, 130–​31

274 Index pontifices Capitolii (Capitoline pontiffs), xvi, 127, 128–​29, 191, 192, 201–​3 Pontius Pilate, xvi, 207 Popes. See individual entries for bishops of Rome Porphyry of Gaza, 97 Praetextatus, Vettius Agorius, urban prefect, 121–​23, 139 Pragmatic Sanction of 554, 91, 96 Priscian, 120 Probus, emperor, 37, 38n31 processions, xiv, xv, 23–​24, 26, 30, 31, 32–​42, 43, 46, 48, 54, 57, 60, 61, 63, 73, 88, 93, 97, 98, 105, 106, 108, 118, 119, 122–​23, 136, 143, 158, 183, 218, 222 processus consulatus, 40, 41, 55 (see also accession; aduentus; triumphal celebrations) Procopius of Caesarea, 11, 91, 96, 131–​35, 137 Prudentius, xvi, 25, 115, 139, 150, 167, 177, 179, 180, 181, 185, 186 quiquennalia of Crispus and Constantinus, 47 Quirites, 54 Ravenna, 53, 63, 95, 188, 202–​3, 212 capitolium of, 202, 225 regionary catalogs, 46, 58, 69, 73, 116, 197 Res Gesta Divi Augusti, 42 Robben Island, 164 Rodocanachi, Emmanuel, 18–​19 Rome Ad Aquas Salvias, 98, 102 artisans, 73, 75–​76, 87 churches Basilica Apostolorum (S. Sebastiano), 49 Lateran basilica (including palace), xv, 24, 50, 52, 127, 181, 191, 192, 218, 219 Oratory of the Forty Martyrs, 87 S. Adriano, 89, 93

S. Agata dei Goti, 195 S. Anastasia, 66–​67 S. Cecilia in Trastevere, 222 S. Marco, 92–​93 S. Maria Antiqua, 87, 88, 93, 94–​96, 98 S. Maria in Aracoeli, xv, 74, 79, 229 S. Maria in Capitolio, 88, 103, 219 S. Maria dei Monti, 195 S. Maria Maggiore (S. Maria ad praesepe), 91, 93, 94, 222 S. Paolo fuori le Mura, 152, 186 S. Pietro in Vincoli, 219 S. Sabina, 93 SS. Cosma e Damiano, 67, 87, 89, 93, 103 SS. Quattro Coronati, 128–​29 St. Peter’s, xv, 23, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 127–​28, 129, 136, 152, 153n83, 186, 189, 200, 211, 213, 218 tituli, 187 civic administration comes sacrarum largitionum, 67–​69 curator operum publicorum, 67–​68 curator tabularum publicarum, 68 urban prefects, 51, 52n116, 57, 63, 64, 67, 69, 84n104, 121, 123, 130, 136, 139, 192–​93, 197, 200, 205 civic topography ad Palmam, 54, 199 Aqua Marcia, 79 Arcus Novus, 46 Argiletum, 5 Atrium Libertatis, 64, 67, 69 Auguraculum, xiv Aurelian Wall, xvi, 72, 182, 211, 223 Basilica Argentaria, 84 Basilica Iulia, 83 Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine (Basilica Nova), 46, 49, 75n83 Basilica Ulpia, 54 baths, 47n86, 51, 63, 64, 73, 74, 89, 189, 197, 211, 218 Campus Martius, 33, 44, 46, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60, 65, 77, 211, 218, 220

Index  275 Capitol (see Capitoline Hill/​ Campidoglio) Capitoline Hill (see Capitoline Hill/​ Campidoglio) Caput Africae, 72 Carcer Mamertinus, 70, 197 Casa di Via Giulio Romano, 75 Castra Praetoria, 32 cemeteries, 71, 72, 89, 96, 187, 189, 197, 218 Circus Maximus, 30, 33, 36, 38n31, 46n76, 47, 52, 54, 55, 56, 63, 81, 219 Colosseum, 38n31, 51, 89, 218 Column of Trajan, 92 Crypta Balbi, 89 Curia Senatus (senate house), xvi, 6, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41, 45, 46, 51, 54, 55, 59, 64, 89, 93, 142, 199 curtes, 228 diaconiae, 89–​90 domus (see Rome: houses) Elefans Herbarius, 72, 116 five-​column monument of Diocletian and Maximian, 46, 47, 48 Forum of Augustus, 89, 108 Forum of Caesar, 46 Forum Holitorium, 73 Forum Romanum, xii, xv, xvi, 5, 6, 16, 20, 21, 23, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41, 44–​49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 73, 76, 77, 81, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 104, 123, 134, 142, 192n41, 199, 218, 220, 228, 229 Forum of Trajan, 51, 55, 56, 90, 108, 115, 197, 218 hills Aventine, 87, 93, 99, 121, 218–​19 Caelian, 50, 71, 76, 79, 196, 219 Capitoline (see Capitoline Hill) Esquiline, 93, 219 Palatine, xiii, xiv, xvi, 5, 16, 23, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60, 64, 67,

81, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 97–​98, 115, 126, 131, 176, 218, 228 Quirinal, 79, 219 Vatican, 181, 218 Horrea Agrippiana, 89 houses (domus) domus Corsorum, 82, 228 of Manlius Capitolinus, 78–​79 of Romulus (Casa Romuli), xiii, 65 of Titus Tatius, 65 imperial forums (Fori Imperiali), 54, 56, 73, 89, 163, 218 imperial palace on the Palatine Hill (see Rome: hills, Palatine) Janus Quadrifrons, 92 Lacus Pastoris, 197 Lupercal, 5 Mausoleum of Hadrian (Castel Sant’Angelo), 54, 134, 218 neighborhoods, 70–​73, 93 Nymphaeum Iovis, 46 Pantheon, 51, 92, 96, 97, 114, 169, 176, 194 Pons Aelius (Ponte Sant’Angelo), 54 Porta Carmentalis, 5 Porticus Deorum Consentium, 123 Porticus Margaritarius, 84 Porticus Octaviae, 90 Rostra, 32, 33, 35, 45, 48, 54, 58, 84n102 Servian Wall, 79 Seven Hills, xvi, xvii, 1, 116, 127, 189, 211, 223, 224–​25 statues, xiii, 36, 46, 47, 54, 72, 123, 131, 132, 134, 175 temples of Apollo Palatinus, xiv, 43, 60 of the City (Templum urbis/​Temple of Venus and Roma), 33, 47, 48, 50, 79, 87 of Divus Iulius, 43, 220 of Divus Vespasianus, 45 Heliogabalium, 44, 126 of Isis and Serapis, 44 of Janus, 35, 134, 220

276 Index Rome (cont.) of Juno Moneta, xiii, 57, 79, 104, 221 of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (see Capitoline Hill/​Campidoglio) of Mars Ultor, 43, 89 of Pallas, 197 of Peace (Templum Pacis), 45, 47, 67, 89, 134 of Saturn, 90 of the Sun (Templum Solis), 44, 50 of Tellus, 30 of Vesta, 176, 220 Theater of Marcellus, 72, 74, 75, 89, 90, 116 Theater of Pompey, 51 triumphal arch of Arcadius, Honorius, and Theodosius II, 52 of Constantine, 33, 45, 46n80, 48 of Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius I, 52, 54 of Septimius Severus, 45, 89–​90 uicus, 71, 73 Pallacinae, 92 Vicus Iugarius, 6, 73, 75, 76, 84, 116 Villa of Maxentius (including Circus of Maxentius), 49, 75n83 Via Appia, 49, 197 Via Ardeatina, 197 Via Lata, 46, 90 Via Latina, 68 Via Nomentana, 52n112, 187 Via Praenestina, 76 Via Sacra, 46, 48, 77, 87, 103, 119, 142 Via Triumphalis, 48, 54 Crypta Balbi, 89 foreigners, resident at, 62 Gallic sack (390 BCE), 11, 29–​30, 59, 63, 78, 109, 113, 116, 117–​18, 136, 140, 147–​50, 151, 153–​54, 154, 159, 164, 166 Gothic sack (410 CE), 11, 25, 53, 63, 139, 150–​54, 155, 159, 164

Largo Argentina, 89 Palazzo Valentini, 90 personification of (see personifications) population of, 89 public space and buildings, 61–​62, 63, 68, 96, 108 loca publica, 64 operae publicae, 46, 97, 136 publicae fabricae, 91 regiones XIV Augustan regiones, 71 VII ecclesiastical regiones, 71 relations with Constantinople, 91–​92 Schola Frisinorum, 213 Schola Saxonum, 213 Tiber Island (Insula Licaonia), 70, 84, 197 Vandal sack (455 CE), 11, 53, 63, 91, 131, 133 Vittoriano, 74, 228 Xenodochium de Via Nova, 87 Romulus Augustulus, emperor, 53 Romulus, king, xiii, 7, 11, 15, 17, 22, 60, 63, 65, 66, 116, 118, 140, 144n26 Rycquius, Justus, 2–​4 Sabratha, 158 sacrifice, 11, 32, 50, 143–​44, 151, 152, 198–​201. See also gesta martyrum Salvatio Civium, 26, 216, 218, 219, 226 Santangeli Valenzani, Riccardo, xvii, 191 Sasanians, 38–​39 Septimius Severus, emperor, 32, 44, 45, 60, 124, 140 Serena, wife of Stilicho, 130 Serenus, Quintus, 29 Serlorenzi, Mirella, 88 Servius, 6–​7, 11, 64–​65, 116–​17, 118, 157n108 Severus Alexander, emperor, 120, 125, 198, 204 Sibyl, 60, 99–​104, 109 Sibylline books, xiv, 43, 134, 165, 174–​76 Tiburtine, xvi, 24, 25, 219

Index  277 Sidonius Apollinaris, 54, 69–​70, 84, 119–​20 Silius Italicus, 221 Silvester, bishop of Rome, xvi, 127, 136, 191–​92 Simon Magus, xvi, 102n78 Sixtus III, bishop of Rome, 94 Sol Invictus, 44 Sommella, Anna Mura, xvii, 96 Sozomen, 132 Stephen, bishop of Rome, 192 Stilicho, magister militum, 53, 130, 132 Suetonius, 136 Sulla, dictator, 30, 79n96, 153, 160, 165–​66 Sylloge Turonensis, 194–​96 Syme, Ronald, 58, 81 Symmachus, Q. Aurelius, urban prefect, 51, 139 Syria, 62 Tacitus, emperor, 58, 59 Tacitus, historian, 15, 33, 34, 73, 147, 148, 171, 172, 177, 179–​80 Tarpeia, 4, 8, 13–​14, 109, 117, 140 temple destruction, xviii, 169–​73 Temple of Venus and Roma. See Rome; temples: of the City temples outside of Rome of Apollo at Delphi, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174–​76 of Artemis at Ephesus, 167, 168, 169 of Athena Lindia (Rhodes), 170 Terminus, 8 Tetricus, Gallic emperor, 38 Tertullian, xvi, 25, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154, 161, 163, 167, 203–​4, 210 Theoderic, king of Ostrogoths brickstamps of, 64, 67 in Rome, 54, 64 Theodosian Code, xvi, 55, 107–​8, 150 “Theodosian Sibyl,” Greek and Latin. See Oracle of Baalbek Theodosius I, emperor, 44, 52, 101, 150

Theotokos, 88, 93n38, 94–​96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 105, 109, 209 third-​century crisis, 37, 113 Tiberius, emperor, 79 toponyms as way of knowing the Capitoline Hill, 2–​9, 226 Totila, king of the Goths, 88 Trajan, emperor, 58 tricennalia of Theoderic, 54 Trier, 119, 202 triumphal celebrations, xiv, 37–​42, 43–​44, 48, 105, 115, 116, 119–​20 of Diocletian and Maximian, 38–​39 of Gallienus, Aurelian, and Probus, 37–​38 Tübingen Theosophy, 100 Tucci, Pier Luigi, xvii, 79 uicennalia of Constantine, 49, 50, 63 of Constantius II, 51 of Diocletian and Maximian, 38–​39, 46 Ulpian, jurist, 58 urbanism, xvii, 42–​44, 49–​51, 62–​67, 70–​83, 88–​98, 104–​8. See also isolamento Vacca, Flaminio, 134n107 Valentinian III, emperor, 53, 84, 131, 133 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 4–​7, 9, 155, 161 Vergil, 5–​6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 65, 116–​17, 119, 156, 157n108, 160, 161, 177, 185, 220–​21, 226 Verona, 225 Vespasian, emperor, 136, 203 Vigilius, bishop of Rome, 91, 190 Virgo Caelestis, 62 visual depiction of emperors, 44–​45 visual depiction of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, 222–​23 Vita Kaddroae, 226 Vita S. Tryphonis martyris, 198 Vitellius, emperor, 33–​34, 73 Vout, Caroline, xvi

278 Index Waters, Alice, 22 Wilhelm II, German emperor, 228 World War I, 16, 22, 229

Zenobia, ruler of Palmyra, 38 Zonoras, John, 132 Zosimus, historian, 11, 40, 42n54, 60, 121, 124–​27, 129, 130–​31, 182