November 2020

The sun beat fiercely down on my head. I passed beneath a high arch decorated with intricate carving. The worn stones beneath my feet radiated heat. The road was 2000 years old. On my right hand rose the columns of a temple, on my left a hill, its steep slope terraced with more tall buildings.  Ahead lay the open space of the Forum, the heart of ancient Rome. I had been waiting for this experience for approximately half a century.

The Roman Forum lies between the Capitoline and Palatine hills. It dates back to the 8th century BCE, when the first religious and civic buildings of the future centre of empire were constructed, and was the focus of civic life in Rome. As Rome declined, so did the Forum. Many of the buildings were preserved because they had been taken over as Christian churches, but after c.800 CE the Forum was used as a stone quarry for medieval and Renaissance builders, and many buildings have vanished or lie in ruins. Picturesque blocks of fallen masonry and broken columns are grouped around the tourist walkways, with small trees and acanthus growing among them, begging for a watercolour sketch. But you can still walk along the main road and even the ruins are several stories high.

I couldn’t get over the massive size of these buildings, and the height to which some of them had survived. I am used to Roman buildings which survive as low flint footings for wattle and daub walls.  Looking up at them, I remembered painfully translating Juvenal’s satire on the dangers of Rome at night, where he mentions tiles falling off the roofs of tall buildings and cracked pots being thrown out of the windows (Satire III, 268-314).  I passed the temple of the emperor Antoninus Pius and his wife Faustina (as imperials both were of course deified after their deaths). It was during his reign that the Antonine Wall was built in Scotland, although he never visited himself.  According to his statues and the opinions of various Roman historians, he wore a beard and was quite a good guy. In fact, if the description given by his adopted son and successor Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 1.16 and 6.30) is at all accurate, many a modern politician could benefit by following his example. The temple was adapted to serve as a Christian church in 1602, and a rather odd-looking extra bit added above the row of columns where the roof used to be.

A little further on, at the foot of the Palatine Hill were the ruins of the temple of Vesta. For many centuries virgin priestesses had the duty of guarding a sacred fire in the temple, which symbolised the hearth of the city and could never be allowed to go out. Another of the texts I had had to read was some lines from Ovid’s poem about the foundation of Rome (Fasti II, 381-422). According to legend, Romulus and Remus’ mother had been forced to become a Vestal Virgin to prevent her from marrying and producing an alternative king to her usurping uncle. The god Mars got around that one… Next to the circular temple with its three surviving columns was the house where the Vestals lived, and its courtyard garden or atrium, originally enclosed by the buildings of the massive complex. A Vestal was chosen as a child and served for thirty years. Today broken statues of long-dead Vestals line the paths and show the dress and hairstyles and even the names of the women who, long ago, spent their lives here. Reading their names and seeing what they would have looked like somehow made the experience more personal.

As I walked around the various temples in the Forum, I thought of the poet Horace, wandering idly around the Forum 2000-odd years ago, asking the price of cabbages and corn and listening to the fortune-tellers. (Satire 1.6, 111-131). Now I was wandering idly in the same place, surrounded by increasing hordes of tourists with their forests of selfie-sticks. Strangely enough, those hordes of tourists didn’t actually detract from the experience. I sat in a shady spot on a fallen block, sipping at my water bottle, and somehow the Romans I knew only from their poems and letters were as real to me as the coach party posing beside the columns of the temple.

When Horace had finished his stroll in the Forum, he went home to a bowl of leeks, chickpeas and however you want to translate the word “laganum” (pasta, pancake, etc.?). I repaired to a nearby café for cold lemon tea and a magnificent ice cream – pistachio plus coffee plus chocolate. There are some pleasures the ancient Romans hadn’t discovered!