Time travel on Rome's ancient Appian Way

June 05, 2012|By Rick Steves, Tribune Media Services | Rick Steves' Europe

The Appian Way -- Rome's gateway to the East -- was Europe's first super highway and the wonder of its day. Built in 312 B.C., it connected Rome with Capua (near Naples), running in a straight line for much of the way. Eventually it stretched 400 miles to Brindisi, from where Roman ships sailed to Greece and Egypt.

While our modern roads seem to sprout potholes right after they're built, sections of this marvel of Roman engineering still exist. When I visit Rome, I get a thrill walking on the same stones as Julius Caesar or St. Peter. Huge basalt paving blocks form the sturdy base of this roadway. In its heyday, a central strip accommodated animal-powered vehicles, and elevated sidewalks served pedestrians.Fortunately, about the first 10 miles of the Appian Way is preserved as a regional park (Parco dell'Appia Antica, http://www.parcoappiaantica.it). In addition to the roadway, there are ruined Roman monuments, two major Christian catacombs, and a church marking the spot where Peter had a vision of Jesus.

Getting here from the center of Rome is easy; it's a short Metro ride and then a quick bus trip (catch number 118 from either the Piramide or Circo Massimo Metro stops). It's best to come on a Sunday or holiday, when the whole park is closed to car traffic, and it becomes Rome's biggest pedestrian zone. You can rent bicycles -- and enjoy a meal -- at a nearby cafe.

Tomb of Cecillia Metella - Rome

As you stroll or bike along the road, you'll see tombs of ancient big shots that line the way like billboards. While pagans didn't enjoy the promise of salvation, those who could afford it purchased a kind of immortality by building themselves big and glitzy memorials. One of the best preserved is the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, built for the daughter-in-law of Rome's richest man. It's a massive cylindrical tomb situated on the crest of a hill. While it dates from the first century B.C., we still remember her today ... so apparently the investment paid off.

But of course, early Christians didn't have that kind of money. So they buried their dead in mass underground necropoli -- or catacombs -- dug under the property of the few fellow Christians who owned land. These catacombs are scattered all around Rome just outside its ancient walls, including two inside this park.

The tomb-lined tunnels of the catacombs stretch for miles and are many layers deep. Many of the first Christians buried here were later recognized as martyrs and saints. Others carved out niches nearby to bury their loved ones close to these early Christian heroes. While the bones are long gone, symbolic carvings decorate the walls: the fish stood for Jesus, the anchor was a camouflaged cross and the phoenix with a halo symbolized the resurrection.

By the Middle Ages, these catacombs were abandoned and forgotten. Centuries later they were rediscovered. Romantic-era tourists on the Grand Tour visited them by candlelight, and legends grew about Christians hiding out to escape persecution. But the catacombs were not hideouts. They were simply low-budget underground cemeteries. The Appian Way has two major Christian catacombs, each offering visitors a half-hour underground tour to see the niches where early Christians were buried. The Catacombs of San Sebastiano also has a historic fourth-century basilica with holy relics, while the larger Catacombs of San Callisto is the burial site for several early popes.

On your way back to the city center, stop by the Domine Quo Vadis Church. This tiny ninth-century church (redone in the 17th century) was built on the spot where Peter, while fleeing the city to escape Nero's persecution, saw a vision of Christ. Peter asked Jesus, "Lord, where are you going?" ("Domine quo vadis?" in Latin), to which Christ replied, "I am going to Rome to be crucified again." This miraculous sign gave Peter faith and courage, causing him to return to Rome.

Who were the 99% of ancient Rome?

From Gibbon to "Gladiator," it might seem like we know a lot about Ancient Rome, but our view of this civilization is a skewed one. The Romans lived in one of the most stratified societies in history. Around 1.5% of the population controlled the government, military, economy and religion. Through the writings and possessions they left behind, these rich, upper-class men are also responsible for most of our information about Roman life.

The remaining people – commoners, slaves and others – are largely silent. They could not afford tombstones to record their names, and they were buried with little in the way of fancy pottery or jewellery. Their lives were documented by the elites, but they left few documents of their own.

Now, Kristina Killgrove, an archaeologist from Vanderbilt University, wants to tell their story by sequencing their DNA, and she is raising donations to do it. “Their DNA will tell me where these people, who aren’t in histories, were coming from,” she says. “They were quite literally the 99% of Rome.”

People have long been interested in the Romans, but most archaeologists only started paying attention to their skeletons in the last 30 years or so. There are currently anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 skeletons knocking about in Italian warehouses, and most have been ignored because of lack of money and personnel. “It’s an untapped data source, especially about the common people, the ones we know nothing about,” says Killgrove.

Since 2007, Killgrove has been studying 200 skeletons recovered from lower-class graves excavated outside Rome’s city walls. As they went about their lives, these Romans incorporated chemical isotopes from their water, food and environment into their bones and teeth. By measuring the levels of these isotopes, Killgrove could reconstruct the lives of her subjects.

Carbon and nitrogen told her they ate different and varied diets, which included wheat, barley and fish. Strontium and oxygen revealed that a third of them had immigrated to Rome after their childhood, and had very similar lives to the locals. That was a surprise.

Ancient Rome lacked any formal census, so it is hard to pin down the dynamics of its population. Many people thought only young boys came to the city, but Killgrove found older men, women and children among her immigrants.

She thinks that some could have travelled to Rome from as far away as North Africa, but the isotopes cannot pinpoint a location. To do that, Killgrove wants to extract DNA from the bones of as many immigrants as possible.

This will mark the first time anyone has sequenced DNA from a Roman skeleton, and it is part of a growing field of “molecular archaeology,” in which scientists turn the tools of modern genetics toward ancient civilizations. Several teams have sequenced DNA from Egyptian mummies, both human andcrocodile. John Dudgeon, one of Killgrove’s collaborators from Idaho State University, has been sequencing the DNA of Easter Islanders. Other societies, from the ancient Greeks to the Etruscans, are likely future targets.

But for the moment, Killgrove’s attention is squarely on Rome. She says, “I’m trying to fill in these huge gaps in history and piece together what life was like for the average people in Rome.” She will start with where they came from.

Killgrove’s own origin story, like many of the best, involves radiation. At the age of 7, she broke her arm and while discussing her X-ray, her doctor asked, “Do you want to know how tall you’ll be when you grow up?” As Killgrove writes: “Predicting the future from bones –that is how you blow a 7-year-old’s mind.” That incident sparked a longstanding and “slightly creepy” love for skeletons, which fused with a fascination for ancient civilization. Both interests are abundantly clear in her research and her personal blog, Powered by Osteons.

To finance her new project, Killgrove is looking for public donations. She is one of 49 scientists who are trying to persuade the public to fund their research as part of the SciFund Challenge. With more than a month to go, she has already raised more than a third of her $6,000 target. Her donors are mostly members of the public, and include several “weekend genealogists.” One generous individual has donated $1,000, earning an acknowledgement on the eventual research paper.

Killgrove says the crowdfunding model comes into its own for small pilot projects, which can provide the basis for larger grant applications. “I don’t think it could fund an archaeological expedition, which could cost tens of thousands of dollars,” she says. “But for these small-scale projects, I think it’s a great way of raising money and bringing the public into my science.”

Editor's note: Ed Yong is a freelance writer who blogs regularly at Discover Magazine's Not Exactly Rocket Science.

The 99 percent in ancient Rome -- and America

Posted at 01:20 PM ET, 01/03/2012

Reprinted from the Washington Post

By Robert Knapp

About this blog: We’ve heard plenty in recent months about the divide between the haves (the 1 
percent) and the rest of us (the 99 percent). As Robert Knapp shows in his new book, “Invisible Romans,” the gap goes way back. Knapp, a professor emeritus in the Classics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, takes us into the lives of ordinary people in ancient Rome — laborers, housewives, soldiers, slaves — whose stories were overshadowed by those of the rich and powerful. Here, he assesses how Rome’s 99 percenters were different from our own today.

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As the last of the Occupy Wall Street encampments is dismantled, it seems that the protesters’ argument-- that the wealth inequality that characterizes contemporary America is without precedent — has finally become a topic of mainstream discussion.

While compelling, this argument ignores a historical truth: Over the centuries, concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has been the norm, rather than the exception.

A particularly vivid example of this phenomenon was ancient Rome, where wealth and power were tightly controlled by 1 percent or less of the population. In fact, much of what we today know of Roman life is in fact the chronicle of only this 1 percent, rather than of the silent 99 percent.

By looking carefully at the archaeological record and at such unexpected sources as the Gospels, we can understand the vivid lives underlying that historical silence, and the alarming causes of these Romans’ apparent complacency in the face of sharp inequality.

Hidden away in the hopes and fears expressed in dream interpretations, in astrological predictions, in magical texts, in grave epitaphs, and even in the New Testament world populated by 99-percenters sound the voices of ordinary Romans. And they are not so different from us.

Ordinary men focus on work as a source of identity and pride, and find social satisfaction in clubs and religious ceremonies. They worry about the dangers of travel abroad and disorder in the neighborhood. Ordinary women work hard, often outside the home. Both are concerned about their children, and strive to arrange a good future for daughters as well as sons.

Some men become soldiers to access a stable and secure world — if they lived — and some become gladiators to take advantage of the people’s craze for violent entertainment. Some women take up roles in the business world, some become prostitutes.

Even slaves carve out a life that recognizes their reality; some by hard work and less honorable means earned their freedom and even wealth. It is far, far from a benign situation with suffering for many, but still ordinary Roman people show great resilience in developing family, culture, and survival techniques to make the best of it.

Confronted by the vivid lives of this vast Roman majority, we might ask, Why didn’t the slaves revolt? Why didn’t the women fight for more equality? Why didn’t ordinary men demand political power?

The answer is simple and for us disconcerting. No one in the Roman world could conceive of such massive change in a profoundly hierarchical and static society.

Even early Christians endorsed the existing order. As Paul states, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. … Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.” (Romans 13:1-7). There could be no clearer endorsement of the existing order of things.

In the Occupy movement we are experiencing the strong American tradition of questioning authority and the rule of the elite rich. Although resistance is usually futile — the periods of power to the people are few — still the enduring leitmotif is that change for the better is possible.

On the contrary, the most startling fact about how the Roman 99 percent lived is a lack of any widespread socio-political alternative to living within the expectations they were born into. Only some outlaws with their egalitarian habits could break out of the mould. And that is where we deeply differ from the 99 percent of Rome.

We can imagine conditions different than they are, and can work for positive change. We learn from the ordinary Romans that it is possible to survive and even thrive in a world constricted by the power of the elite. We hope we differ from them in being able to limit that power for the greater good of an entire society.

By Robert Knapp  |  01:20 PM ET, 01/03/2012 

The Murder of Julius Caesar

Rome Relives the Ludi Romani

History   9 - 18 September. The third edition of the Ludi Romani Festival takes place at Rome's Appia Antica park and in other locations around the capital from 9-18 September. From 15-16 September the entire area around the Circus of Maxentius in the Appia Antica park will be transformed into a frontier town, complete with soldiers and warfare from the era of imperial Rome. A series of events celebrates the life and culture of ancient Rome, including theatre, music, literature, dance and religion associated with the Ludi Romani festival, which dates to 386 BC. The ancient tradition was dedicated to Roman god Jupiter and included a procession from the Capitoline hill to the Circus Maximus followed by a sacrifice to Jupiter, feasts, theatrical productions and chariot races. The 2012 international festival of Roman civilisation and culture involves historians mingling with costumed actors in an attempt to take visitors back in time through a mixture of fact and visuals. Visitors can observe military re-enactments and gladiatorial combat, and afterwards sample some traditional ancient Roman cuisine. There will be educational workshops for children and theatrical productions set against a background of music played on ancient instruments. There will be conferences at the National Institute of Roman Studies on the Aventine and at the Temple of Hadrian in the central Campo Marzio district. from: http://www.wantedinrome.com/news/2001546/rome-relives-the-ludi-romani-festival.html

Virtual Pompeii