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The Hills of Rome
Rome is ‘the city of seven hills’. This book examines the need for the
‘seven hills’ cliché, its origins, development, impact and borrowing.
It explores how the cliché relates to Rome’s real terrain and how it
is fundamental to the way in which we define this. Its chronological
remit is capacious: Varro, Virgil and Claudian at one end, and on,
through the work of Renaissance antiquarians, to embrace frescoes and
nineteenth-century engravings. These artists and authors celebrated
the hills, and the views from these hills, in an attempt to capture Rome
holistically. By studying their efforts, this book confronts the problems
of encapsulating Rome and ‘citiness’ more broadly and indeed the
artificiality of any representation, whether a painting, poem or map.
In this sense, it is not a history of the city at any one moment in time,
but a history of how the city has been, and has to be, perceived.
caroline vout is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of

Cambridge, and Fellow of Christ’s College and the Society of Anti-
quaries. She is a historian and art historian who publishes on a wide
range of topics related to Greek and Roman art and its reception, Latin
Literature and Roman history, and is the author of Power and Eroticism
in Imperial Rome (Cambridge, 2007). In 2008 she was awarded a Philip
Leverhulme Prize for her work on Art History, and in 2010 was the
Hugh Last Fellow at the British School at Rome.
The Hills of Rome
Signature of an Eternal City
caroline vout
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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c Caroline Vout 2012
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2012
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Vout, Caroline.
The hills of Rome : signature of an eternal city / Caroline Vout.
pages. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-02597-4 (hard back)
1. Rome (Italy) – Description and travel. 2. Rome – History. I. Title.
DG63.V68 2012
937 .63 – dc23 2012012765
ISBN 978-1-107-02597-4 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
It was surnamed Septicollis from its seven hills.
Hazlitt 1851 (1995: 296)
Contents
List of figures [page ix]

Acknowledgements [xvi]
1 Introduction: the journey to Rome [1]

The map [1]
The itinerary [11]
The destination [15]
2 The lie of the land [18]

The seven hills of Rome, Republic and Empire [21]
After the high Roman fashion [25]
The Renaissance of the seven hills [31]
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters [47]
3 Seven is the magic number [57]

An invention of tradition [59]
The potency and possibility of the number seven [61]
Varro’s contribution to the story [67]
Before the mountains were settled [75]
4 Rome, la città eterna [81]

The seven hills and the ambitions of Empire [83]
Dizzy heights under the Flavians [95]
The rise and fall of Rome in late antiquity [103]
Postscript [117]
5 Painting by numbers [121]

The limits of representation [121]
The seven hills of Renaissance artists and patrons [133]
Nineteenth-century ways of seeing [165]
6 On top of the world [188]

Villas and gardens [191]
In the thick of it [195]
Getting the measure of the whole of Rome [199]
Framing a view from the Capitoline or Palatine [207]
The imperial gaze [214]
Divine omniscience [220]
vii
viii Contents
7 Signing off [227]

The history of an idea [227]
Geography as history [235]
References [240]
Index of principal passages discussed [270]
General index [274]
The colour plates willl be found between pages 174 and 175
Figures
1.1 The Cathedral, Durham City. Photo, author [page 2]

1.2 The Colosseum, Rome. Photo, author [5]
1.3 Bird’s-eye view of ancient Rome by Pirro Ligorio, as printed in
Braun and Hogenberg 1572–1617. See also colour plate section.
Photo, author [7]
1.4 The canonical seven hills inside the ‘Servian’ and Aurelianic
wall [9]
1.5 The ‘tetrarchs’, St Mark’s Square, Venice. Photo, author [11]
2.1 Title page of Jeremiah Donovan’s Rome, Ancient and Modern
and its Environs, 1842. Reproduced with permission of the British
School at Rome [20]
2.2 Copy of the Capitoline Lupa. Photo, author [26]
2.3 Page of Andrea Fulvio’s Antiquaria urbis, 1513. Reproduced with
permission of the British School at Rome [38]
2.4 Fabio Calvo, ‘Roma Quadrata’, Antiquae urbis Romae cum regionibus
simulachrum, 1527. Reproduced with permission of the University
Library, Cambridge [40]
2.5 Fabio Calvo, ‘Rome in the reign of Servius Tullius’, Antiquae urbis
Romae cum regionibus simulachrum, 1527. Reproduced with
permission of the University Library, Cambridge [41]
2.6 Fabio Calvo, ‘Augustan Rome’, Antiquae urbis Romae cum regionibus
simulachrum, 1527. Reproduced with permission of the University
Library, Cambridge [42]
2.7 Fabio Calvo, ‘Rome at the time of Pliny the elder’, Antiquae urbis
Romae cum regionibus simulachrum, 1527. Reproduced with
permission of the University Library, Cambridge [42]
2.8 Rome as depicted in the codex of Solinus’ Polyhistor in the
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, fourteenth century. Reproduced
with permission of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana [44]
2.9 Map of the city of Rome under the emperors, from Marliani’s
Urbis Romae topographia, 1544. Reproduced with permission
of the British School at Rome [45]
ix
x List of figures
2.10 James Barry, The Tarpeian Rock, 1769, The Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge. Reproduced with permission of the Syndics of the
Fitzwilliam Museum [50]
2.11 Piranesi’s engraving of the Capitoline, Le antichità romane, 1756.
Photo, author [52]
2.12 Section of Andrea Mantegna’s Martyrdom of St Sebastian, 1480,
Louvre, Paris. See also colour plate section. Photo, C RMN/René-
Gabriel Ojéda [53]

2.13 Fresco of Nero persecuting the Christians, Santo Stefano Rotondo,
Rome. See also colour plate section. Photo, author [54]
2.14 Bartolomeo di Giovanni, Rape of the Sabines, 1488, Galleria
Colonna, Rome. See also colour plate section. Reproduced with the
permission of Galleria Colonna [54]
3.1 Stefano Dupérac, Veduta delle sette chiese di Roma, 1575, Istituto
Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome. Courtesy of the Ministero per i Beni
e la Attività Culturali [63]
4.1 The goddess Roma as depicted in the Palazzo dei Congressi, EUR,
Rome. See also colour plate section. Photo, author [85]
4.2 Fischer von Erlach, Entwurff einer historischen Architectur, 1725.
Photo, author [92]
4.3 Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, French, 1750–1819, Mount Athos
Carved as a Monument to Alexander the Great, 1796, The Art
Institute of Chicago. See also colour plate section. Photography
C The Art Institute of Chicago [93]
5.1 Relief from Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome, showing the siege of
Ctesiphon. Photo, author [123]
5.2 Wall painting from the triclinium of the House of M. Fabius
Secundus, Pompeii, Archaeological Museum, Naples. See also
colour plate section. Reproduced with permission of the
Soprintendenza Archeologica di Napoli [124]
5.3 Coin from the reign of Commodus showing Mount Argaeus, RPC
online, 8627. Reproduced courtesy of Gorny & Mosch Giessener
Münzhandlung [126]
5.4 Coin from third century CE showing Mount Tmolus, BMC 94.
Reproduced courtesy of Helios Numismatik [126]
5.5 Relief panel showing Caelian Jupiter, Hercules Julianus and the
Genius Caelimontis, Capitoline Museums, Rome. Reproduced
with permission from the Archivio Fotografico dei Musei
Capitolini [127]
List of figures xi
5.6 The base of the Column of Antoninus Pius, 161 CE, Vatican
Museums. Photo courtesy of arachne.uni-köln.de
(FA3815–01) [128]
5.7 Coin showing Roma seated on seven hills, 71 CE. Photo, C Trustees
of the British Museum [129]

5.8 Coin showing a seated Hercules (?), 42 BCE. Photo, C Trustees of
the British Museum [130]

5.9 Fragment of the ‘Roma Monument’, Corinth with Capitolinus
Mons inscription. Reproduced with permission of The American
School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations (BW
1973 073 25) [131]
5.10 Fragment of the ‘Roma Monument’ with Collis Viminalis
inscription. Reproduced with permission of The American
School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations
(BW 1974 037 07) [132]
5.11 Late antique statuette of Roma from the Panayia Domus, Corinth.
Reproduced with permission of The American School of Classical
Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations [134]
5.12 Nicolas Poussin, The Aventine as seen in Studio di paese nella
campagna romana, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Florence, inv.
GDSU, cat. S, n. 8101. Photo courtesy of the Archivio fotografico
del Gabinetto fotografico (neg. no. 560473) [135]
5.13 Official logo of the Seven Hills of Edinburgh Race and Challenge.
Reproduced with permission from Alan Lawson [137]
5.14 The six-hilled crest of the Chigi family, Porta del Popolo, Rome.
Photo, author [137]
5.15 Pietro da Cortona, Deinocrates Shows Alexander VII Mount Athos,
print study, The British Museum. Photo, C Trustees of the British
Museum [139]
5.16 Chateau Giullaume, after Ciro Ferri, Allegorical Portrait of Alexander
VII, Gabinetto delle Stampe, ING, Rome. Reproduced with
permission of the Instituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome [140]
5.17 Giovanni Battista Naldini (1537–91), Vue de Rome, avec un
personnage assis dessinant, Louvre, D. A. G. Photo, C RMN/Michèle
Bellot [141]
5.18 The Villa Giulia, Rome. Photo, author [143]
5.19 Section of the frieze in the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome.
Photo, author. Reproduced with permission of the Soprintendenza
per i Beni Archeologici dell’ Etruria Meridionale [145]
xii List of figures
5.20 The Esquiline panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome. See
also colour plate section. Photo, author. Reproduced with
permission of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’
Etruria Meridionale [146]
5.21 The Villa Giulia panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome.
See also colour plate section. Photo, author. Reproduced with
5.22 The Villa Giulia panel, Julius III’s apartment, Palazzo del Belvedere
(after Biagetti, 1936) [147]
5.23 Close-up of the Esquiline panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa
Giulia, Rome. See also colour plate section. Photo, author.
Reproduced with permission of the Soprintendenza per i Beni
Archeologici dell’ Etruria Meridionale [148]
5.24 Julius III’s heraldic device, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia,
Rome. See also colour plate section. Photo, author. Reproduced
with permission of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’
5.25 The Esquiline panel, Julius III’s apartment, Palazzo del Belvedere
5.26 The Laocoon group, from Marliani’s Urbis Romae topographia,
1544: 89. Photo, author. Reproduced with permission of the British
School at Rome [150]
5.27 The Quirinal panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome. See
5.28 Jupiter from the frieze in the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome.
Photo, author. Reproduced with permission of the Soprintendenza
per i Beni Archeologici dell’ Etruria Meridionale [153]
5.29 The Capitoline panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome.
See also colour plate section. Photo, author. Reproduced with
5.30 Close-up of the Capitoline panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa
Giulia, Rome. See also colour plate section. Photo, author.
Reproduced with permission of the Soprintendenza per i Beni
Archeologici dell’ Etruria Meridionale [154]
5.31 The Capitoline panel, Julius III’s apartment, Palazzo del Belvedere
List of figures xiii
5.32 Hieronymus Cock’s engraving of the Campidoglio, showing the

Palazzo Senatorio, 1562. Photo, author [156]
5.33 Head of Constantine, Collection of the Capitoline Museum, Rome.
Photo, author [157]
5.34 The Viminal panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome. See
5.35 Close-up of the Viminal panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia,
5.36 Close-up of the Quirinal panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia,
5.37 The Palatine panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome. See
5.38 The Aventine panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome. See
5.39 Close-up of the Aventine panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia,
5.40 The Caelian panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia, Rome. See
5.41 Close-up of Villa Giulia panel, the Sala dei Sette Colli, Villa Giulia,
5.42 Bartolomeo Pinelli, View of the Aventine. Photo, author [168]
5.43 Rossini’s Palatine and Part of the Roman Forum. Reproduced with
permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College,
Cambridge [169]
xiv List of figures
5.44 Giovanni Battista Naldini (1537–91), previously wrongly attributed

to Titian, Vue de l’arc de Septime Sévère, Louvre, Paris, D. A. G.
Photo: C RMN/Michèle Bellot [170]
5.45 Piranesi’s view of the Temple of Saturn. Photo, author [171]

5.46 Piranesi’s panoramic view of the Forum. Photo, author [171]
5.47 Rossini’s Capitoline Hill. Reproduced with permission of the Master
and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge [172]
5.48 Rossini’s Aventine Hill. Reproduced with permission of the Master
5.49 Rossini’s Quirinal Hill. Reproduced with permission of the Master
5.50 Rossini’s Panorama of Rome. Reproduced with permission of the
Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge [174]
5.51 Frontispiece to Rossini’s I sette colli. Reproduced with permission
of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge [175]
5.52 One of the so-called ‘Trophies of Marius’ on the balustrade of the
Campidoglio. Photo, author [177]
5.53 Rossini’s General Plan of Ancient Rome and its Seven Hills.
Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity
College, Cambridge [178]
5.54 Rossini’s Fragments Found on the Palatine. Reproduced with
Cambridge [178]
5.55 The hippodrome in Constantinople as seen in Onofrio Panvinio’s
De ludis circensibus, 1600. Photo, author [179]
5.56 Section of Rossini’s Restoration of the Palatine, Forum and Via Sacra.
Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity
College, Cambridge [180]
5.57 Rossini’s View of the Palatine from the Aventine. Reproduced with
Cambridge [181]
5.58 Rossini’s Viminal. Reproduced with permission of the Master and
Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge [182]
5.59 Another View of the Capitoline by Rossini. Reproduced with
Cambridge [183]
5.60 Part of the Roman Forum and the Capitoline Hill with the Temple of
Jupiter by Rossini. Reproduced with permission of the Master and
List of figures xv
5.61 Rossini’s Pincio. Reproduced with permission of the Master and

6.1 Bird’s-Eye View from the Staircase and the Upper Part of the Pavilion
in the Colosseum, Regent’s Park, 1829. Aquatint on paper. London:
Guildhall Library Print Room. Photo: C City of London [189]
6.2 View from the Pincio today. Photo, author [192]

6.3 Plan of the Farnese Gardens (c. 1670) from Falda (1640–78), Li
giardini di Roma [194]
6.4 Inscription on the loggia of the Villa Lante, the Janiculum, Rome.
Photo, author [200]
6.5 Statue of Diana of Ephesus from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, DAIR
7146 [201]
6.6 John Robert Cozens (1782–3) View of the Villa Lante on the
Janiculum (Gianicolo), in Rome, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. See also colour plate section. Rogers Fund (1967) 67.68.
Reproduced with permission of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art [202]
6.7 Giuseppe Vasi, Prospetto del’ alma città di Roma visto del Monte
Gianicolo, 1765. Photo, author [204]
6.8 View from the Janiculum today. Photo, author [206]
6.9 Samuel Palmer, English 1805–81, The Golden City: Rome from the
Janiculum, 1873 watercolour and gouache with traces of pencil,
black chalk and gum Arabic 514. x 710. cm, National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne. See also colour plate section. Presented by
members of the Varley family, 1927. Reproduced with permission of
the National Gallery of Victoria [206]
6.10 View of the Forum from the Capitoline today. Photo, author [207]
6.11 Samuel Palmer, A View of Ancient Rome. See also colour plate
section. Photo, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery [210]
6.12 Samuel Palmer, A View of Modern Rome. See also colour plate
section. Photo, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery [210]
6.13 Relief of the apotheosis of Titus from the attic of the Arch of Titus.
Photo, DAIR 79.2393 [225]
7.1 View of and from the Piccolo Aventino by Nicolas Didier Boguet,
BSR fol. 31. Reproduced with permission from the British School at
Rome [232]
7.2 The Palazzo degli Uffici, EUR, Rome. Photo, author [233]
7.3 Banner advertising the Monti region of Rome with its three hills.
Photo, author [236]
Acknowledgements
This book would have been slower to write, were it not for the generous
support of The Leverhulme Trust and the British School at Rome. The receipt
of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2008 enabled me to enjoy a sabbatical from
my teaching and to take up the Hugh Last Fellowship at the British School
in 2010. I thank both institutions. I would also like to thank everyone at the
School, especially its Director, Christopher Smith, Sue Russell and Valerie
Scott for making it such an easy and productive place to work. And I thank
my colleagues in the Faculty of Classics and at Christ’s College, Cambridge
for their generosity, friendship and academic engagement. David Sedley
deserves special mention for stepping into my shoes to be Director of
Studies.
Many people have helped in the writing of this book. I am particularly
indebted to David Larmour and Diana Spencer, who set me off on this jour-
ney by inviting me to contribute to their co-edited volume, The Sites of Rome:
Time, Space, Memory (2007), and to audiences in the Classics Departments
of Edinburgh and St Andrew’s as well as the Triennial in Cambridge and the
British School for giving direction to my initial forays. Mary Beard, Jacopo
Benci, Ed Bispham, Nicholas Champkins, Robert Coates-Stephens, Cather-
ine Fletcher, Emily Gowers, Paul Howard, John Patterson, Richard Pollard,
David Reynolds, Carol Richardson, Clare Rowan, Amy Russell, Christopher
Smith, Michael Squire and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill all contributed more
than they will know, either in advice, critical discussion or in their reading
of draft chapters, and Torsten Krude, Ann, Colin and Sue Vout provided
support throughout. Yet again, Michael Sharp has been a sympathetic edi-
tor. I thank him and Cambridge University Press’s anonymous readers for
challenging me.
The final stages of any project are always harder than one expects. But
the process has been made easier by Kathryn Stevens, who cheerily checked
all of my translations from the Latin and Greek; Franco Basso and Lucia
Prauscello, who did the same with the Italian; by my heroic copy-editor, Jan
Chapman; by the Librarians in the Faculty of Classics, Trinity College and
the University Library, Cambridge; and by Maria Pia Malvezzi and Lucyna
xvi Prochnicka, who helped me in acquiring the picture permissions. I again
Acknowledgements xvii
thank the Leverhulme Trust, whose grant paid for these permissions and
enabled me to publish some of the images in colour.
I could not end these acknowledgements without also expressing my
gratitude to Felix Budelmann, Viccy Coltman, Philip Jones, Helen Lovatt,
Helen Morales, Maryam Parisaei, Sophie Read and Elizabeth Speller. It
would have been a more difficult journey without them. And I thank Robin
Osborne. It would be a very different book, were it not for Robin, who read
all of it, more than once, and always understood where it was going.
1 Introduction: the journey to Rome
There is a strong and pleasant memory for hills.

Kevin Lynch (1961: 173)
The map
I was born in a ‘city of seven hills’. Durham is one of the hilliest cities in
the north of England. Yet even now I am unsure which of its contours add
up to seven. It is hard to imagine any of them competing with the dramatic
Cathedral peninsula, which gives the city its name (Figure 1.1). In 995 CE,
when the monks of Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast were looking
for a permanent resting place for the body of their bishop, Saint Cuthbert,
he appeared to them in a vision directing them towards ‘Dunholm’ or ‘hill
island’. Despite the vividness of this name (‘dun’ means ‘hill’, and ‘holm’
means ‘island’, in Anglo-Saxon), it took a milkmaid and her ‘dun cow’ to
help them find their destination.
Archaeological evidence points to a history of settlement in the Durham
area long before the monks’ arrival. But it is at this point that the set-
tlement becomes a city. When Durham acquired its seven hills is less
clear. Yet knowing that there are seven is, in a sense, sufficient – safe,
solid and strangely familiar. The concept underwrites Durham’s urban cre-
dentials, taking us back to cities as old as Babylon and Jerusalem. As old
as Rome. Small wonder that when writer DBC Pierre was describing the
faded glories of Durham’s Miners’ Gala, the best-known and largest meet-
ing of the mining community in England, he found it an obvious way of
invoking tradition and summoning regional pride. It was 2004, a decade
after the last colliery in the Durham coalfield had closed, yet comfort is
gained from ‘the men, women and children of the pit villages labouring
up and down any number of Durham’s seven hills under sizable silver
instruments’.1 Their route is irrelevant; it is the general terrain that makes
1 Pierre 2004. Though Pierre was brought up in Mexico City and considers himself Mexican, his
mother was born in Durham, and, like me, he would return there for holidays.
1
Figure 1.1 The Cathedral, Durham City.
their marching momentous. Seven hills lend gravitas to Pierre’s account,

turning struggle into an image of triumph.
Durham is not the only ‘city of seven hills’ in Britain. Bath, Bristol,
Edinburgh and Sheffield all celebrate as much in their tourist informa-
tion and university websites, while for Torquay on the South Devonshire
coast, its ‘famous seven hills provide the backdrop to a waterfront scene
that matches anything you’ll find on the French Riviera’.2 The precise
2 For the active myth that is the seven hills of Bath, see, for example, the Bath Chronicle on
28 August 2008 and The Independent (www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/winter-walks-and-
refreshing-rambles-1845579.html?action=Gallery&ino=2, last accessed 13 August 2011). For
Bristol, see the description in The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868): ‘The
surface is very irregular, so that within the limits of the town, there are, as in ancient Rome,
seven hills’; www.bristolviews.co.uk/views-h.htm (last accessed 13 August 2011): ‘As with many
English towns and cities, Bristol claims, like Rome of old, to be built on seven hills’; and the
recent composition by Jolyon Laycock entitled ‘Among Seven Hills – Sinfonia Concertante for
Piano and Orchestra’, which, though about Bath, premiered at Colston Hall, Bristol. For
Edinburgh, see Anderson 1922: 136: ‘Like ancient Rome, Edinburgh is now a city of seven hills’,
and the folded map that is Edinburgh: Seven Hills (1998). And for Sheffield, the BBC website,
also accessed 13 August, www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A659847: ‘Another feature of
Sheffield is the hills. Sheffield, like Rome, is built on seven hills’ and, less positively, George
Orwell (diary, 3 March 1936; Orwell and Angus 1968: 91): ‘I have now traversed almost the
whole city. It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen . . . I
The map 3
stratigraphy of these places is less important than their aspirations. The

fact that even Cambridge, one of the flattest of England’s cities, has been
known to manipulate its fenland into seven ‘hills’ highlights how wide the
gap can be between image and experience.3 Leave the British Isles behind,
and the list becomes formidable: not only Babylon and Jerusalem, but
Bergen, Brussels, Budapest, Istanbul, Lisbon, Moscow, Nijmegen, Nı̂mes,
Prague, Siena, Turku, Seattle, Somerville in Massachusetts, Rio de Janeiro,
Kampala in Uganda, Amman in Jordan, Thiruvananthapuram in India . . . 4
This cannot be a coincidence. A visit to any of them reveals that their ‘seven
hills’ are a sales-pitch rather than a reality. The currency of the seven hills
goes beyond western culture to imply a universal, or at least transferable,
idea of ‘citiness’.5
This book is about Rome’s role in this economy. Rome is the ‘city of
seven hills’ par excellence. What are the names of these hills? The Palatine,
Capitoline, Aventine – sites which are as central to Rome’s identity and
foundation history as the Cathedral peninsula is to Durham. After this,
though, the list is harder to compile. Even specialists in classics founder. The
modern city sprawls either side of the River Tiber, embracing the Oppian
and Cispian spurs of the Esquiline hill, the Caelian, Quirinal, Viminal, the
Pincian Hill and Monti Parioli to the north, Monte Mario and the Janiculum
to the west, not to mention Monte Testaccio, to the south, an artificial mound
made from the sherds of discarded amphorae. This already gives a total of
thirteen, with such names as Monte Savello and Montecitorio adding to the
confusion. Which of these ‘hills’ are included in the canon? What counts
as a ‘hill’ in the first place? How and when did seven hills come to be
doubt whether there are any architecturally decent buildings in the town. The town is very hilly
(said to be built on seven hills, like Rome) and everywhere streets of mean little houses
blackened by smoke run up at sharp angles, paved with cobbles which are purposely set
unevenly to give horses etc a grip. At night the hilliness creates fine effects because you look
across from one hillside to the other and see the lamps twinkling like stars.’ The quotation
about Torquay is repeated on tens of tourist websites.
3 Castle Hill, Pound Hill, Honey Hill, Market Hill, Peas Hill, St Andrew’s Hill and Senate House
Hill. Although rumours have long circulated about the existence of an early map of the city
which celebrates this canon, my classics colleague, James Clackson (pers. comm.), assures me
that these rumours are false, and that he is the list’s inventor. To counter construction with
construction, see Iman Wilkens (1991), who has suggested that Troy is in Cambridgeshire.
4 Some websites now extend these claims to Athens: see http://wikitravel.org/en/Athens (last
accessed 13 August 2011). On the question of whether ancient Roman cities ever made the
claim, see Chapter 2.
5 Thucydides (7.77.7), in a sentiment which can be traced back to the Greek lyric poet Alcaeus
(fr. 22), reckoned that ‘citizens make a city, not walls nor ships devoid of men’, but cities remain
difficult to define. See de Certeau 1984, Rodwin and Hollister 1984, Middleton 1996, Frey and
Zimmer 2001, Amin and Thrift 2002, Mayernik 2003 and Reader 2004. On the city as a work of
art, see Calvino 1972 and Olsen 1986, and on Rome itself, Rykwert 1976.
the magic number, and less a description of the scenery than an enviable
concept?
These questions demand that we dig through the layers of Rome’s geo-
graphical and historical landscape – back to its mythological foundation by
Romulus. As we dig, some strata will detain us longer than others: the radi-
cal interventions made to the urban environment by Mussolini, Napoleon,
Sixtus V, Aurelian, Augustus; the ways in which this environment was repre-
sented in nineteenth-century engravings, Renaissance maps and painting,
late antique, Flavian and Augustan poetry, Republican prose texts . . . But,
unlike most books which bring this breadth of material together, the subject
of this one is not Rome and its development, but the development of an idea –
Rome as a city of seven hills – and how this idea was honed and sustained
to give coherence to a chaotic, growing, shifting metropolis. First celebrated
in the literature of the late Republic, but with a resonance that hints at a
pre-established heritage,6 ‘the seven hills’ have withstood major shifts in
Rome’s topography, and in representational strategy, to become one of the
city’s chief characteristics, and one which other communities have seen fit
to appropriate for themselves. How did this happen? This book tells the
story of their status and celebration over time. Unlike Heiken, Funiciello
and De Rita’s The Seven Hills of Rome (2005) or ongoing projects to map
the various phases of the ancient city, it is not about land formation, but
canon formation; about the written-ness of urban geography.
The ‘seven hills’ are not the only standard-bearer of what Rome is and
was. The Capitoline hill and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus upon
it have a special standing as the ‘nucleus of Roman glory, the centre of the
universe’.7 Even in antiquity Livy could claim, ‘Here is the Capitol, where
once upon a time, upon the discovery of a human head [caput, from which
the hill is said to take its name], it was foretold that in that place would be
the head of the world and the pinnacle of power.’8 Not all members of the
canon are equal. As we shall discover, their jostling for supremacy is part of
what keeps the canon a live issue. Apart from the hills – in the valley between
the Caelian and Esquiline – the mighty Colosseum vies for attention as an
icon of Rome’s identity (Figure 1.2). In 80 CE already, the poet Martial
celebrated its completion by claiming that it surpassed, or could stand for,
the seven wonders of the ancient world.9 ‘Here where the venerable mass of
6 This statement is complicated by the related issue of Rome’s ‘Septimontium’ to which we will
return in Chapter 3.
7 Lady Morgan 1821: 114.
8 Livy 5.54.7: ‘hic Capitolium est, ubi quondam capite humano invento responsum est eo loco
caput rerum summamque imperii fore.’ See also Livy 1.55.5–6.
9 Mart. Spect. 1 and the discussion by Fitzgerald 2007: 38. For a possible connection between
Rome’s seven hills and the seven wonders, see Chapter 3.
The map 5
Figure 1.2 The Colosseum, Rome.
the amphitheatre rises in full view, were Nero’s lakes . . . Rome is returned
to herself.’10 The Colosseum too was able to function as a metonym.
Emphasis on one hill or one building inevitably fragments the city. Hence
the importance of the idea of ‘the seven hills’ in lending Rome integrity.
It took until the 270s CE and the emperor Aurelian for the capital to be
10 Mart. Spect. 2.5–6 and 11: ‘hic ubi conspicui venerabilis Amphitheatri | erigitur moles, stagna
Neronis erant . . . reddita Roma sibi est . . . ’
fortified by a hefty brick and concrete boundary. Before this, Rome was
effectively without defences. The built-up area of the city had long spilt over
the Republican walls, out into surrounding territory: ‘in other directions,
it [Rome] had been secured by lofty walls or precipitous mountains, except
that the spread of buildings has added many cities’.11 The capital was in
danger of having multiple personalities. Several definitions of Rome as an
administrative entity applied that were not contiguous with these walls:
the sacred boundary or ‘pomerium’, the customs boundary.12 But in visual
terms,
If someone, by looking at these suburbs, wishes to estimate the size of Rome, he

will necessarily be misled and have no secure sign by which to discern up to which
point, as it stretches forth, the city is still the city, and from which point it starts
not to be the city any longer – to such an extent is the fabric of the city interwoven
with the countryside and provides its viewers with the notion of a city stretching to
infinity.13
The Aurelianic wall provides a commanding circumference or frame

for the first time for centuries, and one which is routinely plotted on post-
antique representations of the city so as to mark its limits. Renaissance artist
Pirro Ligorio’s map of the ancient city, first published in 1561, constitutes
a good example (Figure 1.3).14 As Hendrik Dey puts it: ‘the Aurelian wall
came to dominate physical and mental landscapes of the Eternal City like
11 Plin. HN 3.67: ‘cetero munita erat praecelsis muris aut abruptis montibus, nisi quod
exspatiantia tecta multas addidere urbes’.
12 Excellent on the problems of definition is Haselberger 2007: 19–22. Also important is
Goodman 2007: 7–38. On the ‘pomerium’ specifically, see also Patterson 2000.
13 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.13.4: kaª e« mn e«v taÓt tiv ¾rän t¼ mgeqov xetzein boulsetai tv
ëRÛmhv, plansqa© t’ nagkasqsetai kaª oÉc xei bbaion shme±on oÉdn, diagnÛsetai,
mcri poÓ proba©nousa ti p»liv stª kaª p»qen rcetai mhkt’ e²nai p»liv, oÌtw
sunÅfantai t¼ stu t cÛr kaª e«v peiron kmhkunomnhv p»lewv Ëp»lhyin to±v
qewmnoiv parcetai. Also important here are the ways in which jurists distinguished between
the ‘urbs’ (the Servian city) and ‘Rome’: so P. Alfenus Varus, in the Augustan period, cited by
second-century lawyer Ulpius Marcellus (Dig. 50.16.87): ‘ut Alfenus ait, “urbs” est “Roma”,
quae muro cingeretur, “Roma” est etiam, qua continentia aedificia essent: nam Romam non
muro tenus existimari ex consuetudine cotidiana posse intellegi, cum diceremus Romam nos
ire, etiamsi extra urbem habitaremus’ (‘As Alfenus said, “urbs” is “Roma” which was
surrounded by a wall, but “Roma” also extends as far as there are continuous buildings: for it
can be understood from daily use that Rome is not considered to extend only as far as the wall,
since we say that we are going to Rome, even if we live outside the urbs’). And, similarly, in the
third century, Julius Paulus (Dig. 50.16.2).
14 This version was made in 1570 for Braun and Hogenberg 1572–1617: 49, its caption, ‘Urbis
Romae Situs cum iis quae adhuc Conspiciuntur Veter. Monumet Reliquiis Pyrrho Ligorio
Neap. Invent. Romae M.D.LXX’. Braun’s accompanying commentary drew attention to the
city’s river, its gates, its seven hills and the Campus Martius.
The map 7
Figure 1.3 Bird’s-eye view of ancient Rome by Pirro Ligorio, as printed in Braun and
Hogenberg 1572–1617. See also colour plate section.
no other manmade feature, ever’.15 But even this wall can be breached –
and not just by marauding invaders.16 In contrast to Ligorio’s image, the
Forma urbis Romae, or Marble Plan, a map displayed in the hall, or aula, of
the Temple of Peace from the start of the third century CE, marks neither
geographical nor political boundaries and includes buildings beyond what
will be embraced by Aurelian’s perimeter.17 Although invaluable for anyone
studying urban topography, the Marble Plan is not a map as we would
understand it, but a monument or exhibit, recently described as ‘offering a
hyper-abundance of cartographic information designed to overwhelm the
viewer’.18 Its Rome is its buildings, and its buildings are a chequerboard
covering a hundred and fifty marble slabs. In recording the ground plans of
15 Dey 2011: 279. Dey is now the standard work on the wall and its impact on the city.
Particularly relevant here are pp. 160–95.
16 Note, however, Dey 2011: 135–7 on the wall’s extraordinary effectiveness, at least according to
the literary sources.
17 Goodman 2007: 33–4.
18 Trimble 2007: 378 in a piece which examines the plan’s visual function in its original viewing
context in the temple. Also relevant here is Favro 2006: 38: ‘The largely illegible individual
components shown on the map collectively projected the scale and grandeur of the city, but
not its specificity. Alive and always growing, representing time and place, Rome was too
complex, too grand for human observers to grasp. The aniconic image of the Forma Urbis
these buildings, this monument achieves in cumulative surface detail what

Pliny achieves with the idea of elevation: ‘if someone were to add the height
of the buildings, he would certainly come up with a worthy estimate and
would admit that the magnitude of no other city in the whole world could
be compared to it [i.e. to Rome]’.19
For Pliny and the Marble Plan, the power of Rome lies in its capacity to
spread onwards and upwards, to dominate the landscape, the world even –
imperial expansion as expansiveness and order. It is an image of dominion
which is of a piece with Roman expertise in road building and in control-
ling water (whether in bringing fundamental supplies along aqueducts or
exploiting its sound and reflections to enliven a grotto or villa-garden).
And it is very much an imperial vision, which can potentially accommodate
similar fora, amphitheatres and bathhouses springing up throughout the
provinces. These structures are an obvious part of what made settlements
Roman. But what of Rome’s natural landscape – the rustic Rome of Evan-
der that these technologies adapted; the geology that made this part of Italy
perfect for a city in the first place? What of the seven hills and the valleys
between them? The Tiber is the only natural feature to be represented on
the Marble Plan, and this, a gap or negative area left by the buildings.
The Marble Plan’s decision not to represent the hills does not militate
against their importance as an image of Rome in antiquity. As we shall
discover, public, and it seems private, art was reticent about representing
precise geographical features,20 preferring to personify Rome and its ele-
ments, for example, the Tiber and the Campus Martius (see Figure 5.6 on
p. 128).21 More than this, depictions of conquered cities were particularly
favoured. None of this detracts from the prolific presence of the seven hills
in Latin poetry, or from their prominence in Rome’s reception history. If
anything, it better explains their function – not as territory but as concept,
and one which exceeded the certainties of the Augustan or Flavian land-
scape, the physical appearance of the city such as one would plot by tracing
its wall or measuring its buildings. If ‘the seven hills’ did reference real
Romae was an artefact of the capital’s pictorial inconceivability.’ For more compendious
coverage, see Rodrı́guez-Almeida 1981 and, for a broader context, 2002, with the review by
Najbjerg and Trimble 2004, as well as the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Project
(http://formaurbis.stanford.edu/), and the survey on the scholarship by Najbjerg and Trimble
2005.
19 Plin. HN 3.67: ‘quod si quis altitudinem tectorum addat, dignam profecto aestimationem
concipiat fateaturque nullius urbis magnitudinem in toto orbe potuisse ei comparari’.
20 For images of cities in Roman painting, see Pappalardo and Capuano 2006, and Goodman
2007: 28–36.
21 LIMC s.v. ‘Campus Martius’ and ‘Tiberis, Tiberinus’.
The map 9
‘Se
Au
Quirinalis
rvian’ wall
rel
ian
Viminalis
ic w
Campus Martius
all
Capitolinus Esquilinus
Palatinus
Trans Tiberim
Caelius
Aventinus
Figure 1.4 The canonical seven hills inside the ‘Servian’ and Aurelianic wall.
topography, it was that of the sixth-century BCE city, contained within the
wall attributed to the early king, Servius Tullius. And we shall be pursuing
this possibility in more detail later. But, for all that the canonical seven – the
Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal and Viminal, as
it turns out – were included in its circumference, Servius and his urban
reforms are as legendary as Durham’s milkmaid (Figure 1.4).
When in 7 BCE the first emperor, Augustus, took the sprawling metropolis
by the scruff of the neck, organizing it into fourteen regions which formally
recognized the extra-mural settlement as part of Rome, the Servian city was
officially engulfed.22 The Campus Martius, the low-lying plain in the bend of
the river beyond the walls, was key to this development. Greek author Strabo,
writing under Augustus, observes: ‘for the size of the Campus Martius is
wondrous’. Such is the intensity of the buildings there that ‘they seem to
22 See Sablayrolles 1981, Frézouls 1987, Coarelli 1988, Favro 2005 and Haselberger 2007.
render the rest of the city incidental’.23 The focus of urban activity had
shifted. From this moment, if not before, Rome’s status as a city of seven
hills was symbolic.
Given this symbolism, what reason was there for Rome’s reluctance to
personify its hills – especially when the Campus Martius was bodied forth
as a strong young man and the Tiber depicted as a reclining, bearded male?
The hills of other localities were personified in Greek literature from the
fifth century BCE and are sometimes seen in the visual record.24 For Rome,
though, it is the sense of seven hills that is crucial. As is the case with
each of the porphyry ‘tetrarchs’ that now grace the sea-facing corner of
the south façade of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice (Figure 1.5), to
give the hills individualized, charismatic bodies would have been to arm
them with sufficient might to compete with one another for supremacy.25
Jostling for position in the literary record is one thing – it reinforces the
canon by making cohesion and membership something worth contesting.
But visually, this competition risks fracturing the canon’s unity: it gives each
member attributes which refer to specific divinities, landmarks, legendary
rivalries. Even after Rome’s early hilltop settlements had come together
as one community, hills had their own identities, with the Aventine, for
example, associated in the fifth century BCE with the plebs, or poorest
inhabitants, in their conflict with the patricians.26 Personification would
give these hills character traits, their own relationship to the river and place
in history. Collectively, they could be more amorphous, a-temporal, before
time even. They could bring the Rome of Augustus and heirs into dialogue
with the Romes of Servius Tullius and of mythical founder, Romulus.
The chapters that follow trace exactly how this dialogue develops. Under
Augustus already, the idea of the seven hills enabled the city to enjoy an
established identity, a space to occupy which transcended the changes that
were happening on the ground. Inevitably, ongoing urban development,
including the removal of large mounds of earth to make way for buildings,
and raised ground levels elsewhere in Rome led to further changes in the
physical fabric, which made the relationship of ‘the seven hills’ to the land
more pressing. It is hardly surprising that by late antiquity, with Old Saint
Peter’s rivalling the Capitoline as Rome’s nucleus, the hills to the west of
the river often appear in the canon: for example, the appendices to the
late antique regionary catalogues, the Curiosum and Notitia, substitute the
23 Strabo 5.3.8: kaª gr t¼ mgeqov toÓ ped©ou qaumast»n . . . Þv prergon n d»xaien
pofa©nein tn llhn p»lin, and Coarelli 1997.
24 LIMC supplementum, s.v. ‘montes’. Also relevant here is Buxton 2009.
25 See Bergmann 1977: 163–79; Rees 1993; and Smith 1997: 179–83.
26 Cornell 1995: 242–71.
The itinerary 11
Figure 1.5 The ‘tetrarchs’, St Mark’s Square, Venice.
Vatican and Janiculum hills for the Quirinal and Viminal.27 Even then, the
celebration of the seven hills in literature affirms the currency of the concept.
The itinerary
Rome is its seven hills in ways in which it is not its wall, the Colosseum or
Capitol. Chapter 2 illustrates why this is so, giving us something of a survey
of its seven hills as an idea and unpacking the extent to which this idea does
27 Jordan 1871: vol. II.ii, 539–74. See Arce 1999.
and does not fit the city’s changing landscape. Exposing this divergence
proves a useful starting point. Today, to be a ‘city of seven hills’ is a cliché as
applicable to Durham and Kampala as to Rome. But what is at the root of this
borrowing? I argue that though Jerusalem and Babylon are also ancient cities
renowned for their seven summits, Rome is the original of this stereotype.
What prior assumptions about Rome do the seven hills carry with them and
where do these come from? The answers to these questions reveal that being
a city of seven hills was a cliché in antiquity already, and that authors then
were almost as unsure of precise membership as we are today. Not that this
makes the seven hills meaningless. Rather, their import lies in their capacity
to give contours to the palimpsest that is Rome, defining the territory of
the city while at the same time turning this city into an abstract idea which
rises above its links to the land. For each new politician or poet wanting to
make their mark there, and for those who live outside it, ‘the seven hills’
gave a sense of continuity to what it was they were experiencing. These hills
created a template for comparing Rome, past, present and future, and for
committing this place to paper. In this way, the glory that was the ancient
city is made forever reproducible.
If Chapter 2 presents the end point or overuse of ‘the seven hills’ concept,
Chapters 3 and 4 set out in search of its origins and original effectiveness. I
am not the first to do this. Back in the 1970s Remo Gelsomino cut a swathe
through a series of arguments and counter-arguments about the minutiae of
membership, when he claimed that late Republican author Marcus Terentius
Varro (116–27 BCE), whose obsession with the number seven is attested
throughout his oeuvre, invented the canon. Up to that point, according to
Gelsomino, there was no canon, only communities, which scholars have
mistakenly associated with seven ‘hills’. This ‘error’ and correction of this
‘error’ hinges on ‘Septimontium’, the name of a festival in which these
communities had long taken part.28 More recently, archaeologist Andrea
Carandini has re-established the link between ‘Septimontium’ and the land,
tying the word, and Varro’s etymology of it, back to Rome’s real peaks and
troughs and to earlier phases of the city’s development.29
The claims on both sides are as complex as they are bold. Attractive
as Gelsomino’s idea is, my concern in Chapter 3 is less to credit Varro,
or anyone else, with ‘an invention of tradition’30 than to understand why
28 Gelsomino 1975, 1976a and 1976b.

29 Carandini 1997: 269: ‘L’insediamento del Septimontium prende nome dall’insieme dei monti
che lo compongono . . . I monti non erano infatti sospesi in aria . . . ’ (‘The settlement of the
Septimontium takes its name from all of the montes of which it consists . . . the montes were not
in fact suspended in air . . . ’).
30 Seminal here is Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983.
The itinerary 13
seven and why then, when the Republic was on its last legs and autocracy
was looming. Varro and his friend Cicero presage an investment in Rome as
a city of seven hills by Augustan poets Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus
and Virgil, which requires us to think hard about how the idea fits with
the urban reforms of the Princeps. Whether or not Servian and pre-Servian
Rome had seven hills, why did that number sound so sweet now? What does
popularity of the seven hills reveal about how the Romans regarded Augustus
and, more broadly, conceptualized the current city and its relationship to
previous incarnations? All Romes are relative. Varro himself recognizes this:
his is the earliest extant work to link the concept of the seven hills with the
ancient festival of the ‘Septimontium’, with Rome’s real terrain. Rather than
inventing the concept, it seems that Varro too is attempting to understand
how the Romans got there.
Varro and the Augustan poets set the ball rolling. Domenico Palombi
has recently summarized the evidence for the part that ‘the seven hills’ and
the Tiber played in the updating of the urban imagination engendered by
Augustus’ adornment of the city.31 Chapter 4 builds on his survey, reading
this poetry closely so as to explicate exactly what it does to the landscape,
bringing the city of fourteen regions into alignment with the Servian city
of seven hills to rewrite innovation as re-foundation. As we read, we begin
to unpick the process by which the Servian city becomes the ‘city set high
on seven hills which presides over the whole world’,32 a city which remains
distinct from the satellite cities of its Empire, yet a city which speaks not
only of itself but of urban aspirations everywhere. While scholars such
as Paul Zanker, Diane Favro and Lothar Haselberger have done much to
understand the impact of Augustan reforms on the city and on the way
that its inhabitants experienced the city,33 the abstraction innate in the hills’
cliché makes it easier for us to look forwards as well as back, putting pressure
on the extent to which this experience, along with the description it elicited,
was peculiarly Augustan. In the Domitianic period and in the fourth and
fifth centuries, poets celebrated Rome’s seven hills with renewed vigour.
By the time when the Christian poet Paulinus of Pella was writing, the
Aurelianic walls were complete. But he envisages these walls ‘on the world’s
heights (culminibus)’, ‘culmina’ being used of the seven hills by the Flavian
poet Statius.34
31 Palombi 2006.
32 Prop. 3.11.57: ‘septem urbs alta iugis, toto quae praesidet orbi’.
33 P. Zanker 1987, Favro 1996 and Haselberger 2007.
34 Paulinus of Pella, Eucharisticos 36–7: ‘visurus et orbis | inclita culminibus praeclarae moenia
Romae’ and Stat. Silv. 1.5.23.
Paulinus’ Rome is a different world from that of Virgil; and not just in
terms of its physical appearance, but in terms of its centrality, domination
and influence. Constantine the Great’s decision to found a new city, Con-
stantinople, a ‘second Rome’, on the site of Byzantium in 324 CE, pushed the
centre of power eastwards.35 The emperors were no longer based in Rome.
Those who did visit were tourists. Such distance and the demise in Rome’s
fortunes intensified the sense in which ‘the eternal city’ was an imaginary
city, one whose authority lay not in what it was but in what it stood for. The
concept of ‘the seven hills’ enabled poets to put these rare imperial visits,
and the Rome that they came into contact with, on equal, or at least com-
parable, footing with the Rome of the Flavians, Julio-Claudians, and early
kings of the mythological past. The figure of Roma, personified, is imagined
as old and grey, but she still has the hills to support her.36 The final third of
Chapter 4 examines what kind of continuum this is. All too often modern
scholarship reduces the relationship between late antique panegyric and
earlier poetry to literary allusion. The hills flesh out this relationship by
highlighting what Claudian and his contemporaries do – not to Virgil or
Statius, but to Rome as a city, and model for other cities. In their hands, it
is not just Rome’s status as a city of seven hills that is symbolic, but Rome
itself, as its supremacy shifts from real to notional.
The Renaissance codified Rome’s cultural capital. The sixteenth century
was the first time, as far as we can tell, that anyone was comfortable in
making the canon more than a poetic conceit or, different again, a list of
names, and in representing each and every member visually. Up to this
point, visualization of the seven hills and of the Rome(s) they piece together
had been in the hands of the reader. Now imagination was confronted
with concrete images which intruded upon this space, as – following in
Varro’s footsteps – artists and antiquarians attempted to understand how the
concept mapped onto the real terrain. It no longer mattered if the city were
atomized in the process: ancient Rome was a foreign country to be mined
for valuable fragments. Chapter 5 concentrates most of its attention on two
such visual depictions – the first of them a set of sixteenth-century frescoes,
and the second a series of engravings made in the nineteenth century as
antiquarianism ceded to archaeology and grand teleological narratives – to
examine the different ways in which their artists pay homage to the seven
hills, and what these artistic choices reveal about the relationship of the
ancient and modern city. Neither of these endeavours was about refining
35 Still key reading on the early history of Constantinople is Janin 1950. Also relevant here are
C. Kelly 1999 and Bassett 2004.
36 Claud. De bello Gildonico 17–25.
The destination 15
the canon. Like this book, they exploit its value as a vehicle for getting a
handle on Rome’s constructedness.
‘The seven hills’ are not the land but a way of seeing the land. In the
penultimate chapter, I take this statement at its most literal by tracking how,
from antiquity onwards, special premium has been given to the panoramic
or bird’s-eye view, and to the act of surveying Rome from its summits. Today,
a special ‘Seven Hills Tour’ still takes visitors to the top of the canonical seven
in an air-conditioned minivan. More than this, many people enjoy the most
memorable vista of the city from the Janiculum or Pincio. What are they
looking at?; looking for? Rome’s hills were never simply safe havens from
possible attacks or from the miasma and malaria of the low-lying areas. They
were oases of calm – in the city, yet above the city – on which elite residences
were built and nature enhanced with sculpture in formal parkland. An
alternative name for the Pincian Hill, for example, is the ‘Hill of Gardens’.
All of this exploited their importance as viewing platforms, from which
auguries could be taken, Rome commanded, and its area delineated, not
by real or sacred boundaries, but by the gaze. From the Capitol, it was –
as poets have often exploited – Jupiter himself who looked out, turning his
temple into a beacon of Empire. What does his particular prominence and
the role of the Janiculum and the Pincio do to the idea of the seven hills?
How is it that using its hills as tripods has made Rome comprehensible?
These questions allow us to come at Rome’s constructedness from a
different angle – not Rome as its hills but the antithesis, Rome as the
flatland beneath them. Stand on the Janiculum today, and the dome of the
Pantheon on the plain that is the Campus Martius rivals the Capitoline for
eminence (see Figure 6.8 on p. 206). The Capitoline, meanwhile, has been
said to look ‘abroad upon a large page, of deeper historical interest, than
any other scene can show’.37 This ‘page’ is one of many in this book which
reveal how the hills have helped centuries of people, both inhabitants and
visitors, get a purchase on Rome’s complexity.
The destination
The complexity of any city is itself a cliché, and the particular cachet of
ancient Rome is fundamental for western culture. Scholars have left few
stones unturned: from the city’s topography, demography, decline and fall,
to its place in the literary and artistic imagination. As far as the hills of
37 Nathaniel Hawthorne [1860] 2007: 127.

Rome are concerned, individually, they have been intensively studied, their
history written and rewritten in light of new excavations and geological
surveys. There are articles on distinct etymologies, rituals, phases. There are
also useful overviews.38 But putting these hills together is a different matter.
Despite, if not because of, the difficulty of reconstructing their ancient
elevations,39 topographical debate dominates, with little questioning of the
merging of the real and representational. For example, Funiciello, Heiken
and De Rita take ‘the seven hills’ of their title for granted.
On a parallel track to this research on Rome’s land transformation is
that of Catharine Edwards, Alexandre Grandazzi, Nicholas Purcell, Peter
Wiseman and others, whose interests in written Rome have led to a more
self-conscious reading of the ancient literature than is practised by many his-
torians and archaeologists.40 Edwards focuses on several different themes:
how the city’s authors related to Rome’s own past and to Troy, how they
treated the Capitol and Rome’s built environment, and finally how exiles
and aliens, ancient and more modern, imagined the city. Relationships
between Edwards’ chosen themes and sources and the material Rome they
reference are elucidated throughout to reveal how perceptions of the city
are conditioned by texts and images. But the material city remains a city
of fragments. ‘We must struggle’, she writes, ‘to imagine a city, or rather
a succession of cities, in which different buildings dominated’;41 as indeed
people in late antique or Flavian Rome must have struggled. Taking inspira-
tion from what Edwards does – but with, and from, the seven hills – makes
overlapping visions possible.
These visions cannot be divorced completely from the natural contours
that created them. They do not simply condition perceptions of the city;
they are the city, or rather the raw material or bedrock on which the city
38 The most useful starting point for surveys of individual hills and their recent bibliography are
the relevant entries in Lexicon topographicum urbis Romae (LTUR), for the Augustan period,
Haselberger 2002, and, for a literary approach, Boyle 2003. Also important is the entry on
‘montes’ in LTUR, and Coarelli 2007. Further to the publications cited in these, one should
now also see Giavarini 1998, Cecamore 2002 and Pensabene 2002 on the Palatine; Carandini
2004 on the Palatine and Velia, and 2007 on the Quirinal; Carafa 1993, Palombi 1997 and
Carandini 2007 on the Palatine and Esquiline; Coates-Stephens 2004 on the Esquiline, Colini
1944 and Pavolini 2006 on the Caelian; Merlin 1906, Di Gioia 2004 and Mignone 2010 on the
Aventine; Paradisi 2004 on the Capitoline, and Steinby 1996 on the Janiculum. On classifying
the hills, see Langdon 1999 and on their history, Zolfanelli 1884.
39 See Ammerman 2006: 300. For the current state of research into the urban imaging of ancient
Rome, see Haselberger and Humphrey 2006.
40 Edwards 1996, Grandazzi 1986 and 1991, Purcell 1992 and T. P. Wiseman 1979.
41 Edwards 1996: 4.
The destination 17
was created – geo-graphy, the writing of the land.42 Scholars who work
on imaginary Rome sometimes underestimate the ways in which the land
shapes conceptualization of the land. Those studying the city’s ancient
topography can underestimate the ways in which conceptualization of the
land shapes the land. Rome’s seven hills bind these elements. They were what
Rome’s poets chose back in the late Republic and Empire, if not before, to
give the city then, and from its foundation, a form, content and unity which
could transcend aristocratic rivalries, radical revision under Augustus, and
expansion into Empire. As an idea, they have withstood its Christianization,
collapse and shift to cultural paradigm, tourist capital even, to forge a link
between past and present. Still today they epitomize, without shrinking, the
eternal city. So strong are they that other communities can challenge them
with impunity – even the market town of Morley in West Yorkshire makes
a cheeky claim to seven summits.43
Interrogating this strength of character, and where it wavers – for Rome,
and for town and ‘citiness’ more broadly (something notoriously difficult to
define) – will have us look at not only ancient authors such as Virgil, Varro,
Statius and Claudian, but antiquarians, including Fulvio and Fauno, and
artists, including Mantegna, Rossini and Palmer, to make us more conscious
of what we are doing when we look at Rome and at literary descriptions,
maps, engravings and paintings of Rome. The hope is that they will make
all of us – classicists, (art) historians, geographers and tourists – see, read
and experience the Eternal City differently.
42 Crucial in thinking about the writtenness of landscape is the work of Denis Cosgrove 1984 and
1993 and Cosgrove and Daniels 1988. Also important is J. Duncan and N. Duncan 1988,
J. Duncan 1990, Barnes and J. Duncan 1992, Daniels 1993, Rose 1993, who turns ‘landscape as
a way of seeing’ into an exploration of landscape and the gendered gaze, and Olwig 1996. A
critical overview of the importance of ‘constructedness’ in the field of cultural geography is
Wylie 2007.
43 See e.g. www.visitoruk.com/historydetail.php?id=13308&cid=592&f=leeds (accessed 4 April
2010): ‘Like Rome, Morley is built on seven hills.’
2 The lie of the land
When the Queen of Nations is at length before us; when we enter within
the walls of the Seven-hilled City; pass along the ruins of her greatness;
or glance with eager gaze on her venerable piles, then, to use the language
of Byron, ‘full flashes on the soul the light of ages.’ The studies of our
juvenile days and the labours of our maturer years are conjured ‘up by
the genius of the spot:’ we seem to live and converse with the illustrious
dead, whose names are familiar to us from boyhood, and are so
intimately associated with the objects and localities around us, ennobling
the spot on which we stand – ‘A world is at our feet’; ‘Our tread is on an
Empire’s dust.’
Jeremiah Donovan (1842: xi–xii)
This is a book about a cliché. Rome was not built in a day. It takes time
to make a city eternal. All roads lead there. As the capital of the Roman
Empire and home of the papacy, Rome and its influence on western culture
have proved inescapable. Yet how are we to reconcile this mighty reputation
with the metropolis in Lazio on the River Tiber? Today, a graffito in the
Ghetto reads ‘Rome is not a museum.’ The city is a living organism, which
has survived collapse, occupation and modernization to become one of the
most popular tourist destinations in the world and home to some three
million residents. What does this built environment have to do with the
Rome of Mussolini, the Renaissance, Augustus, Romulus, with the Rome of
the imagination? This mismatch of reality and expectation is particularly
acute for the many visitors, eager to gaze ‘on her venerable piles’. For some,
there is pleasure, for others, disappointment, for many, puzzlement. Those
who are impressed tend, like the very Reverend Jeremiah Donovan, whose
aim it was to offer ‘a more accurate and comprehensive study’ of ancient
and modern Rome than had thus far been undertaken in English, to draw
on existing authorities to articulate their admiration.1
Such inherited wisdom does more than lend weight to personal opinion.
It recognizes that the Rome that one is looking at has a history, and that it
is this history that makes the city more than a city – a veritable Queen of
18 1 Donovan 1842: i.
The lie of the land 19
Nations. Donovan’s recourse to Lord Byron, and later to Pliny, turns him
from a tourist to a traveller in a more visionary sense, tying past and present
together in such a way that the ruins rise again from the ashes.2 Any one of
us who has stood on the Palatine is familiar with the frisson of feeling the
genius of the spot and of standing on an empire’s dust. It is an experience
which is extremely evocative. Centuries of response find focus in the view
of the Forum which transports us back through the Romes of romanticism,
classicism and the Renaissance, back to antiquity and to the greatness of a
culture which could build such foundations, further back to the origins of
the city and to Romulus, Evander, Aeneas. But these Romes do not exist –
they are cultural capital as opposed to concrete cities with populations,
prosperity and perimeters. Where did these Romes begin and end? Where
did the city stop and the suburbs and countryside start? What is Rome when
defined as a single urban intervention?
The geographical remit of Donovan’s Rome is alluded to on the title page
already in a couplet by the poet Martial (Figure 2.1). At the end of the first
century CE, he wrote:
hinc septem dominos videre montis,

et totam licet aestimare Romam
From here it is possible to see the seven sovereign hills and to get the measure of the
whole of Rome.3
It is a couplet which is picked up in the preface as Donovan enters ‘within

the walls of the Seven-hilled city’. The image immediately gives form to the
city, taking the reader from Italy into Rome itself – not a Rome of the mind,
but a physical Rome, which is not simply built environment nor faded glory,
but shelves of tufa; a Rome that is and always will be; that has been since
volcanic activity in the Alban Hills formed these shelves tens of thousands of
years ago.4 Donovan continues: ‘The seven-hilled city has become a marble
wilderness.’ But the implication is that its ruins are surface decoration; the
hills are its substance as well as its bedrock. For all of the changes that
man has made to these hills, ‘Rome, city of seven hills’ is a cliché which
enables the city’s universal significance to speak to the natural terrain that
it occupies.
This cliché pervades high and low culture. For example, The Seven Hills
of Rome is the English title of Italian tenor Mario Lanza’s penultimate film,
2 Excellent on the difference between the response of a tourist and a traveller to a new place is
Buzard 1993.
3 Mart. 4.64.11–12. 4 Heiken et al. 2005.
Figure 2.1 Title page of Jeremiah Donovan’s Rome, Ancient and Modern and its
Environs, 1842.
The seven hills of Rome, Republic and Empire 21
Arrivederci Roma, released by MGM in 1958. Madonna of the Seven Hills is

Jean Plaidy’s recently reissued historical novel of the young Lucrezia Borgia,5
and The Seven Hills is John Maddox Roberts’ 2005 alternative account of
the Punic Wars. Today, the ‘Sette Colli Giallorossi’ is a prize, awarded by
football club A. S. Roma on the eve of their annual derby with local rivals,
Lazio (Roma’s colours being red with a yellow trim).6 What kind of space
do the seven hills connote? Is it still a Rome that fits within the walls as
Donovan’s does? And if so, which walls: those attributed to Servius Tullius
or to Aurelian? How do the natural and built environments, and Rome’s real
terrain and the seven-hills shorthand relate? This chapter sketches a history
of these relationships, accenting key moments of evolution, on the ground
in Rome and in terms of Rome’s reception history. Its vision is deliberately
longue durée, introducing the territory of ensuing chapters and establishing
some ground rules. ‘Septicollis’ never was a straight description. Like every
place, ‘Rome’ is crystallized in experiences of the land which have impressed
themselves on the imagination.
The seven hills of Rome, Republic and Empire
Can Queen Victoria eat cold apple pie?7
Tradition has it that the sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius (conventionally
dated to 578–535 BCE), was the first to build a wall which embraced the
canonical seven summits. We shall be examining the texts that underpin
this tradition in the next chapter. But Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing
in the second half of the first century BCE, states the case succinctly: ‘after
Tullius had surrounded the seven hills with one wall, he divided the city
into four regions’.8 Although the best-known stretches of the ‘Servian Wall’
are now known to be fourth century BCE in date, archaeology confirms
earlier phases of construction.9 Follow the line of this wall, and we find it
embracing the Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal
and Viminal, and excluding the Pincian Hill and those across the river.
5 Plaidy 1958. See also the books about Rome and its mythology which carry the seven hills in
their titles, for example, Harding and Harding 1898 and Hastings and Hodder 1936.
6 For more details, see e.g. (last accessed on 15 March 2010): www.ccsnews.it/ipusher/dettaglio.
asp?id=a5150588&titolo=PREMIO%20SETTE%20COLLI%20GIALLOROSSI.
7 A well-known mnemonic for remembering the members of Rome’s now canonical seven hills.
8 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.14.1: ëO d TÅlliov, peid toÆv pt l»fouv nª te©cei perilaben, e«v
tttarav mo©rav dielÜn tn p»lin . . .
9 Cornell 1995: 198–202.
But this ‘discovery’ begs a greater suspension of disbelief than maps like
Figure 1.4 acknowledge. First there is the question of the Velia, which
Dionysius describes as ‘a relatively high and steep hill commanding the
Forum’.10 Why was it ignored, when it too was inside the perimeter? The
fire of Rome in 64 CE, ambitious building projects by the Roman emperor,
Nero, and his successors, and the construction of the Via dei Fori Imperiali
by Benito Mussolini in 1932 have so changed this region as to make recon-
struction difficult. Consensus now downgrades the Velia as a ‘ridge’ which
joined the Esquiline and Palatine.11 But if the Velia is a ridge, then what
about the Quirinal, Viminal and Esquiline, which, like fingers on a hand,
are promontories of one volcanic plateau? Conversely, the Esquiline is made
up of two fingers or spurs, the Oppian and the Cispian – why were these not
taken separately? One Renaissance humanist was so struck by its summits as
to compare it to the many-headed monster, the Hydra.12 One could ask the
same of the Capitoline, with its two summits, the northern ‘arx’, or ‘citadel’,
and the southern Capitolium with its temple to Jupiter, separated by the
‘asylum’, or saddle, which now accommodates Michelangelo’s piazza;13 or
indeed of the largest of the hills, the Aventine, which again has two heights,
only one of which, the north-western point, was definitely always known by
this name.14 Even the Caelian is made up of a ‘Caelius Minor’ and ‘Caelius
Maior’.15 Getting seven from these contours requires creative counting.
Already this raises the question of what an incline has to look like to
qualify as a ‘hill’. For Dionysius, the Velia was a ‘l»fov’, a noun that he
and other Greek authors use for the canonical seven (more often than
they use the alternative ‘Àrov’).16 In Latin, a hill could be a ‘mons’ or a
‘collis’. Although there is a tendency in English to translate the former
as ‘mountain’, for Rome’s authors the two are regularly coterminous. For
Martial, Varro, Tibullus and Ovid, the seven hills are ‘montes’, for Horace
and Claudian, ‘colles’, and for Virgil, ‘arces’, the plural of ‘arx’, or ‘citadel’,
and a word which carries with it an idea of defence or powerbase, in contrast
to its more natural counterparts. Propertius, meanwhile, refers to them as
10 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 5.19.1: . . . l»fon Ëperke©menon tv gorv Ëyhl¼n pieikäv kaª
per©tomon, Án kaloÓsi ëRwma±oi OÉel©an, klexmenov.
11 Steinby 1993–2000: vol. V, 109: ‘La posizione della collina non si ricava con chiarezza dalle
testimonianze antiche’ (‘The position of the hill cannot be determined with clarity from
ancient sources’). On its early importance in ancient Rome, see Fraschetti 2002: 57. Also
important are Rebert 1925, Terrenato 1992, Tomei 1994, Palombi 1997, Carandini 2004 and
Capanna and Amoroso 2006.
12 Fulvio 1513: bk 1: ‘Hinc mons Exquilinus cunctis Spatiosor unus | in plures apices velut hydra
attollitur altos.’
13 On the ‘arx’ between myth and reality, see Tucci 2006.
14 See, for example, Skutsch 1961: 254 with bibliography.
15 Mart. 12.18.6; Cic. Har. resp. 15.32; and Varro, Ling. 5.46. 16 Langdon 1999.
The seven hills of Rome, Republic and Empire 23
‘iuga’, or ‘ridges’, which potentially opens the door to the Velia, Oppian and
Cispian.17 Beyond poetry, in the epigraphic record, a stronger separation
is maintained between the terms ‘collis’ and ‘mons’, with the Quirinal and
Viminal routinely referred to as ‘colles’ as distinct from the other members
of the now traditional canon, and the Oppian and Cispian, all of which are
‘montes’.18 ‘Tarpeius mons’ (Tarpeian hill) is also found in the literature and
in inscriptions, sometimes used as an early synonym for the whole of the
Capitoline and sometimes, even in late antiquity, for part of it.19 As Richard
Buxton writes in ‘Imaginary Greek Mountains’, ‘a mountain is in the eye of
the beholder’.20
Some of Rome’s canonical seven are, and always were, more vulnerable in
their membership than others. A ‘mons’ it may be, but the Aventine, though
within the ‘Servian wall’ and fundamental to Rome’s foundation mythology,
remained outside the city’s sacred boundary, or ‘pomerium’ (again usually
attributed to Servius), until the reign of Claudius (emperor, 41–54 CE) –
and this, despite the fact that across the city, the Campus Esquilinus or
burial grounds beyond the wall’s Esquiline Gate had been included in the
late Republic under Sulla.21 Aulus Gellius, writing in the second century
CE, notes, ‘it has been asked and even now is the subject of inquiry, why
only the Aventine, which is neither a remote nor a thinly populated quarter,
is outside the pomerium, when the other six are inside it’.22 His answer,
based on an Augustan source, is that this was because Remus had taken his
auspices there, making the hill inauspicious. There is also, as I have already
mentioned, the hill’s early history as public land (ager publicus), which was
taken over unlawfully and then throughout the Republic associated with
17 For these poets and their manipulation of the concept, see Chapter 4.
18 See Fridh 1993, and with an emphasis on Greek authors, Langdon 1999. Also crucial
here are Poucet 1967 and Fraschetti 1996. Poucet 1985: 83 explains that the Viminal
and Quirinal are ‘colles’ because they belonged to a part of the city which was originally
called ‘colles’ or ‘Collina’ (Varro, Ling. 5.45), a more marginal community than that
embraced within the ‘Septimontium’. That said, there were exceptions to this norm: Flor.
1.7.16 and Eutr. 1.7 and the tradition that the Quirinal was first called ‘Mons Agonus’
(Festus 304l).
19 See Varro, Ling. 5.41; Livy 1.55.1; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.60.3–61.1, 7.35.4; Prop. 4.4.93–4;
Suet. Iul. 44.1; Plut. Num. 7.2; CIL vi 37170 = ILS 4438 and Cataloghi regionari Notitia e
curiosum, appendix in Valentini and Zucchetti 1940: 294–6.
20 Buxton 1992: 2, revisited in 2009: 81–96.
21 L. Richardson 1992: 294. On the Campus Esquilinus, Hor. Sat. 1.8.14–16: ‘Now it is possible to
live on a health-giving Esquiline and to stroll on the sunny rampart where recently people,
miserable, used to gaze at ground ugly with white bones’ and T. P. Wiseman 1998 and
Edmunds 2009. And on the stinking pits and mass graves of its former incarnation, Lanciani
1889a: 14 and 1899b: 64–5 and Hopkins 1983: 208–11.
22 Aul. Gell. 13.14.4: ‘propterea quaesitum est, ac nunc etiam in quaestione est, quam ob causam
ex septem urbis montibus, cum ceteri sex intra pomerium sint, Aventinus solum, quae pars
non longinqua nec infrequens est, extra pomerium sit’.
the plebs, to consider.23 On the other side of the river, the highest of Rome’s
hills not to make it, the Janiculum (the only one more often referred to as
an Àrov in Greek), mounted a challenge: it is said to have been walled by
Ancus Marcius, the fourth of the early kings, and joined to the city already
by the Pons Sublicius.24
In time, the Viminal and Quirinal prove the most precarious members
of the list (perhaps because of their unusual colline status), although even
the Capitoline can be excluded in favour of the Janiculum.25 Before late
antiquity, when that particular list was compiled, no one seems to have
worried very much about which hills were included – so much so that
Theodor Mommsen could claim, rather too strenuously, that ‘no ancient
author knows the to us familiar seven (Servian) hills’.26 Instead, in the late
Republic and early Empire when the seven hills became a modish way of
referring to the city, poets were content simply to celebrate the concept; and
prose writers, to explore how Rome had grown from one hill to seven and
thereby reached maturity. Of these authors, Varro causes most problems by
claiming that ‘where Rome now is was called Septimontium after the same
number of hills which afterwards the city surrounded by its walls’,27 and by
thus conflating a festival celebrated on 11 December and its associated
rituals with the city’s territorial remit. It is a move which has introduced
other names to the list of contenders – the collis Latiaris, collis Mucialis, and
collis Salutaris, not to mention the Fagutal and Cermalus as well as the Velia –
and has led some scholars to commit to a second canon of earlier hills (more
of which later). For the moment, however, our subject is the now traditional
canon and its growth into a cliché that had to be carefully managed from the
outset. It is this management that makes Rome’s seven hills more than a fact –
a calculated formula or concise way of expressing the city’s complexities
and making this city potentially navigable. Rome equals . . . What follows
builds on the introduction to explore how this general relationship between
qualities (Rome and the hills, soil and symbol) works out. In this way, the
land becomes landscape, ‘a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing,
structuring or symbolizing surroundings’. ‘Landscape is not merely the
world we see, but rather a way of seeing the world. It is an ideological concept
23 Cornell 1995: 242–71.

24 Livy 1.33.6; Plut. Num. 9.2–3; and Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 3.45.2.
25 Serv. ad Aen. 6.783. Although note D’Anna (1992: 155–7), who claims that the Janiculum
referred to here is part of the Capitoline. See below, p. 213.
26 As cited in Jordan 1871: 206: ‘die uns geläufigen sieben (servianischen) Hügel kein alter
Schriftsteller kenne’.
27 Varro, Ling. 5.41: ‘ubi nunc est Roma, Septimontium nominatum ab tot montibus quos postea
urbs muris comprehendit’.
‘After the high Roman fashion’ 25
that represents how specific classes of people have signified themselves and
their world through their imagined relationships with nature.’28
‘After the high Roman fashion’29
Cities are, above all, places whose analysis requires a sense of spatial and physical
structure.30
Rome is not unique in seeking circumscription. Nor is it unique in claiming

seven summits. As Spiro Kostof observes in his book The City Assembled,
defining a city and belonging to a city ask for delineation of its span and
circumference.31 And as we have already established, cities the world over
have found ‘seven hills’ a possible solution. Their competing claims to the
accolade have given it universal value. But what does this do for them
and to the ‘Rome equals’ formula? A closer look at a few of these cities
reveals that their celebration of a seven-hills status is less ancient than one
might think – a phenomenon which seems to depend, to a large extent, on
Rome’s Renaissance standing. As Rome, the model western city, becomes
more paradigmatic by lending its attributes, these attributes become a more
essential mark of what Rome is, turning it from capital of the Empire into
the ideal urban centre into ‘Urbild’. Constantinople’s strategic position on
the Bosphorus Strait is not enough to ensure success. Only seven hills give
it the geography to be a world-leading city.32
The most famous reference to seven hills outside the classical canon is
in the Bible. In the Book of Revelation, written in the first century CE, an
allegorical ‘whore of Babylon’ in purple and scarlet and adorned with gold,
jewels and pearls is pictured seated on a scarlet beast with seven heads,
which are interpreted by an angel as ‘seven mountains’ and seven kings.33
Although opinion is divided over whether these hills point to Rome or
Jerusalem, there is a rationale to the former, and only one explicit mention
of Jerusalem as a city of seven hills in the whole of the Talmud, this being
late antique.34 It is likely that Rome is at the root of both passages and is in
28 Meskell and Preucel 2004: 219 on the work of Denis Cosgrove. See Chapter 1 above, n. 42.
29 Cleopatra in Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra Act 4, scene 15: ‘What’s brave, what’s noble,
Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion, And make death proud to take us.’
30 C. Tilly 1984: 120. 31 Kostof 1992: 11.
32 For Constantinople as a city of seven hills, see e.g. Janin 1950: 4 and Baldovin 1987: 168.
33 Book of Revelation 17.9. For a careful weighing of Rome and Jerusalem’s candidature in this
passage, see Biguzzi 2006; also, Aune 1998: 944–5.
34 Bialik and Rawnitzky 1992: 371 citing the Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, 71. I thank Simon Goldhill for
help with this point. Also important here are the rash of references to Rome as a city of seven
Another random document with
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the decks. These tents, moreover, were no longer water-tight, and
the sleeping-place in the damp boats was very small.
Our negroes generally managed to stow themselves away under
shelter somehow, often one on top of the other, but I should have
liked better weather for this last bit of the journey, so that they might
have been able to get over all they had gone through at Bussa. They
made up for their discomfort at night by getting up late in the
morning. All this, however, did not prevent us from making good
headway without any over pressure, borne on as we were by the
strong current. On the 13th we covered forty-five miles, going on
until eight in the evening, just in time to anchor before we were
overtaken by a tornado, and an awful one too. Fortunately we found
shelter in a little gulf, and escaped with a good ducking.
IGGA.
On the 14th, judging by the rate at which we went, the current

must have been yet stronger. We made some fifty miles, passed the
night near Igga, and arrived there at eight o’clock in the morning on
the 15th.
The country between Geba and Igga is uninteresting; no villages,
or scarcely any, were passed, and there was no cultivation. The
appearance of the banks is much what it is between Say and Bussa;
a few karités occur here and there, that is all. We met a canoe now
and then only. The oil-palms, which had begun to appear beyond
Say, now became more numerous, but the country still appeared
deserted.
In a large plain near Igga there is a factory kept by a white man.
Just before we reached it we saw a big boat called the Nigritian,
which was formerly the pontoon of Yola. The Royal Niger Company
had just been driven from the Benuë and from the Adamawa; its
trading agents had been recalled, together with the pontoon they had
been authorized to use on the river. This must have been a very
severe blow to the Company, for much of the ivory exported through
their agents came from Adamawa and Muri.
The Ribago, a pretty little craft of from six to seven hundred tons,
is moored at Igga. She is the best boat belonging to the Company.
She brings down palm-oil in the nut before it is extracted, karités and
other articles for export. The oil is of a very fine quality indeed. It will
probably be the Ribago which will tow us down-stream if all is
satisfactorily settled with the Company about Bussa and Auru.
The agent at Igga thought we should find Mr. Wallace at Lokodja. I
was very anxious to see him, for it is with him I must get the
misunderstanding, if misunderstanding there were, explained. His
word alone would suffice to exonerate the Company from blame, and
only if he could give me that word, should I care to accept his good
offices on my behalf.
After passing an hour at our anchorage at Igga, we started for
Lokodja to look for Mr. Wallace, whom it was very difficult to catch.
Fortunately for us, the current was still very strong, but navigation
was very tiring, for with the banks inundated as they were, it was
difficult to find the bottom amongst the tall grass. Late in the evening
we at last anchored near the left bank, and landed to cook a hasty
meal. Fili, one of the coolies who looked after the kitchen
department, had cleared a corner of bushes and lit a fire when, all of
a sudden, the men made a rush for the boats screaming manians!
manians! They had been attacked by the black ants they call
manians, the bite of which is very severe. No cooking for us to-night,
no meal however simple! No sleep either for our poor men, for the
rain began to pour down again. Worse still, the terrible manians
began to climb on board by the anchor-chains, by the ropes of the
grappling-hooks, by everything, in fact, which held us to the bank.
They had come to storm the barges, and the ropes and chains
became black with their swarms. The only way we were able to
check this novel kind of invasion was by lowering the chains and
ropes into the water.
This horribly comfortless night over, we started again with almost
empty stomachs. The scenery was very picturesque, but although
the water was high we felt the boats grate on the rocks lining the bed
of the stream. Navigation must be generally far from easy here.
The vegetation now became denser, and the oil-palm of much
more frequent occurrence. There were, however, few villages, and
they became further apart, on the banks at least, as we advanced. At
last in the evening our pilot told us we were approaching Lokodja.
Picturesque hills, from about six hundred to a thousand feet high,
lined the right bank, whilst on the left we could see the mouth of the
Benuë, now greatly increased in width by inundations.
About six o’clock we came in sight of the huts of the village, rising
in tiers from the slopes of a hill, their zinc roofs shining amongst the
verdure in the glow of the setting sun. We were at Lokodja, and as it
was nearly night we anchored off the bank.
Here we found Mr. Drew, the executive officer of the Company for
the Lokodja-Geba district, for whom we had waited in vain at Geba,
and also another officer who spoke French.
We were received with all due etiquette and invited to dinner. We
talked about the river; and Mr. Drew, who did not allow himself to
show any surprise at our having passed safely down it, must really
have been astonished. He told us he had himself achieved the
arduous task of going over the rapids in a light canoe accompanied
by one man only. He had intended to go down to Bussa by the
channel used by the natives. He had even been capsized, and
dragged down into the whirlpool. He owed his life entirely to his
canoe-man, who had plunged after him and brought him up from the
bottom. He still had the scar of a wound he had got from the sharp
flints, amongst which he had been rolled over and over.
Major Festing, who came in to dessert, invited us to go to him the
next day. We cut but sorry figures beside our hosts in their
unimpeachable costumes, for our clothes were torn by our struggles
in the bush, our gold lace was tarnished, our breeches were
patched, our boots had been bought in the country, and our helmets
were terribly battered about.
I do not know which agent of the Company it was who refused to
receive the leader of a French expedition because of his
disreputable appearance, with untrimmed beard and clothes in rags.
Times are greatly changed since then, or rather perhaps the
instructions given have been modified.
The next day we had breakfast with Major Festing, and were most
cordially received. Our host was then Commander-in-chief of the
troops in the service of the Niger Company. Lokodja was his
headquarters, and his soldiers, who were Haussas, were well
lodged. Their cantonments are charming, and the Major’s house had
every English comfort that could possibly be expected. Big airy
rooms adorned with weapons, looking-glasses and hunting pictures,
etc., native mats on the ground, flowers growing in the copper pots
manufactured in the country. Everything very simple and suitable.
Music was going on whilst we were at breakfast, as if we were on
board an admiral’s flag-ship or at the Grand Hotel in Paris. Children
played to us on the flute, regaling us with the familiar airs of the café-
concerts of France. We had printed menus, dainty salt-cellars,
caviare, whisky-and-soda, good stout, etc. Oh, what a delight it was
to eat a well-served meal on a table-cloth decked with fresh flowers!
If only we had had a few ladies in light summer costumes to share it
with us, it would indeed have been complete.
Major Festing most courteously placed at our disposal as
interpreter, a Haussa sergeant of his from the Senegal, who had
been at one time in the service of Mizon, and also of De Brazza. He
spoke a little French, and had been one of the last to leave the
station of Yola. He told us of all his strange wanderings to and fro,
and piloted us about the town when we went to make our purchases,
for we did make some purchases at Lokodja. To begin with, we
supplemented our stores of provisions, which was very necessary, if
we wished suitably to return the hospitality we received. We had,
moreover, very little of the dinner service left which we had brought
from France three years before. We had, it will be remembered, sent
to the bottom of the river everything not absolutely indispensable,
and we wanted some claret and champagne-glasses badly.
The natives of Lokodja were very civilized, using table napkins,
basins, dishes with covers, china flower-pots, etc., sold to them by
the Company, or rather bartered for native productions, for there is
no money currency in the Niger districts. The wages of the troops,
labour, and raw material are all paid for in merchandise, such as salt,
stuffs or ware of different kinds. The Company seem to make
considerable profit on these transactions. As for us, we were rich
enough to be generous. Suleyman, our interpreter, received orders
to buy everything offered at the price asked, for we should only have
to throw the things which were too heavy to take on, into the water
later. So we gave silk drawers for a dozen eggs, and long strings of
pearls, false ones of course, for three bananas.
The generosity of Commandant Mattei, agent of the old French
Niger Company, whom we so clumsily allowed an English Company
to supplant, has become proverbial, and the natives often quote it
apropos of the stinginess of the Niger Company. I am very sure that
our stay at Lokodja did nothing to lessen the fame of French
liberality. The natives of the banks of the Niger still bemoan the loss
of French traders and the hauling down of the French flag.
Lokodja, which we were able to visit, is a fairly large village, very
picturesquely situated on a mountain. It is cut across by ravines and
shaded by banana and papaw-trees, with numerous oil-palms. There
is a splendid view of the meeting of the Benuë and the Niger. The
remains of the steam-boat Sokkoto, which was wrecked on a rock,
are still to be seen, and further down the river are other stranded
boats.
We were told that Lokodja is the principal town of an extensive
district numbering from twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. The
town properly so called, however, does not contain more than from
four to five thousand at the very most. The market, which is very
extensive, is much frequented, and is held in the afternoon. All
manner of European articles are offered for sale in it. The only native
industries are the beating of copper and the manufacture of rather
peculiar drawers made of two pieces of stuff sewn together and
adorned with a kind of open work. The blacksmiths, who are very
skilful in a kind of repoussé work done with a pointed instrument on
copper, make vases, cups, and ewers of it, which are really very
original in design.
Most curious of all the specialities of Lokodja, however, are the
games and the tam-tams held there. In the former, the performers
are all young graceful girls who are perfectly nude. I have visited
many towns of low morality. I know Naples, Port Saïd, and Colombo.
I have seen the so-called flower-boats of China and the Japanese
yoshivaras in that Orient where everything is possible, but never did I
witness anything to be compared with what goes on at Lokodja.
The chief of the village is the well-known Abegga, and the name
calls up for us French all manner of memories. Abegga is really
almost a relation of mine, for he is a freed man who was bought at
Sokoto, and given his liberty by my Uncle Barth. Abegga followed his
master to England first and then to Germany. Back again in Africa,
he entered the service of Commandant Mattei as interpreter, and to-
day he is king of Lokodja. Such are the chances of life!
We were received by him with effusion, for we awoke all his old
memories. Taburet, who from his translations from Barth’s book
knew more about Abegga than Abegga did himself, had a long talk
with him in English. In the end we sent our royal friend, Baudry’s
hunting-piece as a present, by the hands of his envoy.
We expected every minute to hear of the arrival of Mr. Wallace,
but he did not come. I could not remain at Lokodja for ever, so I took
Mr. Drew’s word for it that neither he nor the Company had had
anything to do with our difficulties at Bussa and Auru, accepting the
offer made to me with so much urgency that we should be towed
down-stream by the Ribago, the steamboat we had met at Igga, and
which had now come down again to Lokodja.
MOUNT RENNEL ABOVE LOKODJA.
We were to start at two o’clock. After we had made our farewell

visits I went to Mr. Drew and said, “I have decided to accept your
offer of having us towed down-stream.” Then I added rather
awkwardly, “How much?”
“Five pounds for each white man, and one for each black, was the
reply.
A good price truly just for towing us down-stream! It would come
to 1450 francs altogether! I merely, however, said “Oh!” just to relieve
my feelings.
Now was not this rather sharp practice on the part of the
Company? After pressing me so much to accept a service, I had
imagined that it was offered gratuitously as between one friendly
government and another, and what had annoyed me was the thought
of being under an obligation to the Royal Niger Company. But I was
quite wrong; I was dealing with the traders of the Company only, and
that put me at my ease.
They may have thought that having come so far I should not have
money enough left to pay them, and that I should have to leave in
their debt, but I simply said to Mr. Drew—
“All right; I will come back and settle with you in a minute.”
A few moments later I arrived with my bag of crown-pieces. I had
not, however, brought enough after all, for by some
misunderstanding, no doubt, we really had to pay six pounds for
each white man, and twenty-five shillings for each black, which
mounted the sum-total up to 1800 francs. However, I was able to
make up the difference at once all but two sous, I think, and those I
sent by Digui.
No doubt Carrol foresaw all these mercenary dealings when we
were at Geba, when he made such a fuss about paying Taburet for
his attendance on the people who were ill at the station, and wanted
to give me money for the miserable little musical-box which I had
been so glad to leave with him as a token of my gratitude.
The Royal Niger Company had in fact treated our expedition as a
party of traders, and I preferred that both for myself and for France. I
do not therefore owe the members of that Company any more
gratitude than I should the conductor of an omnibus in Paris when I
have paid him my six sous.
The loading of the Ribago went on slowly, but at five o’clock we
started; the pipers of Major Festing came down to the quay and
played the Marseillaise, whilst the guns of the station fired a salute
as, towed by the Ribago, we left for Assaba.
Now for a couple of words about the Royal Niger Company. I will
say nothing of the treaties or of the constitutive acts which preceded
its formation, for I have not got to draw up an indictment against it. I
will confine myself to quoting what Naval Lieutenant Agoult said on
the subject—“The Company is but the screen behind which England
hides herself.”
To the great detriment of the shareholders, the Company tries to
create an Empire, and in view of its acquisitions of territory, to make
head against the revolts caused by its rapacity, it is obliged to
maintain an army relatively large. This necessity causes a
mischievous friction between the military and civilian officers in the
service of the Queen, they and the trading agents sometimes
carrying their animosity to each other so far as to come to blows.
Then again the officers are anything but well treated by the
Company. Like the agents, they are taxed and taxed again. Heaven
only knows what an arduous profession theirs is. Carrol was always
on the road, and Festing, when we saw him, was suffering horribly
from a liver complaint. He had just returned from a twenty days’
campaign against the villages in the bush on the left bank, and he
was so tired he could not remain in the saddle. We were told of
several officers having recently been killed by poisoned arrows, and
of one who had died from eating poison in a village on the banks of
the river.
Moreover, this armed force and all the courage and devotion of
those who command it, fail to secure peace. Whilst we were on our
voyage, the horsemen of Bidda had come down to pillage as far as
the bank opposite Lokodja. It is only in the immediate neighbourhood
of the stations that things are quiet. The steam-launches have to be
constantly going up and down the arms of the river, especially in the
delta, to keep the natives in awe with their riflemen and their
machine-guns. It is rare for a boat to go down the river without being
fired at. At Abo, lower down-stream, the people were astonished that
we had been able to come so far without any fighting. It may have
been the effect of the flag we carried, for the tricolour flag is still
beloved and regretted in these parts for the sake of the memory of
Commandant Mattei.
The Company does not hold the country beyond the banks of the
river. Then, again, there are no means of communication between
one place and another. Truly we French may be proud of our work in
the French Sudan. We have done better than the English on the
Upper Niger; our colonization is far superior to theirs. On the Lower
Niger they have neither telegraph wires, for these go no further than
Akassa and Brass, at the mouth of the river, no road at all to be
compared with our line of revictualling posts, and of course, need we
add? they have no railway!
It seems to me a fact that of all the Niger districts, the richest and
the most favoured by Nature from every point of view are those we
occupy in the French Sudan.
Assaba is the residence of the Agent-general of the Company,
and there is a hospital there for the use of the employés. When the
French mission of the Pères du Saint Esprit left Lokodja it
established itself at Assaba.
A missionary was waiting for us when we landed, and I went at
once to his house. The situation is beautiful enough, but what a hard
life the Fathers lead! They are, I believe, rather harassed by the
Company, as much because they are French as because they are
Catholic, and as a result their tale of converts is not very long. Some
Sisters of Charity work in connection with them, and make their way
on foot from village to village in the interior, marching at night to
avoid the heat of the sun, and visiting the Christian natives far away
from the river.
A few hours’ walk off, the Fathers told us, are some big, very big,
villages, into which alone they are able to penetrate, not without
considerable danger to life sometimes. Terrible scenes of human
sacrifice and cannibalism have been witnessed by the devoted
Sisters. Such atrocities would never be tolerated in the French
Sudan.
But what does all that matter to the Company as long as it can
buy its palm-oil at the market-price, a price fixed by force?
That evening we had to dine with us the only Father of the
mission just then at Assaba, and two Sisters, one the Superior,
Sister Damien, a pale-faced Italian, whose hands had become
almost transparent, and whose features were wasted through
successive attacks of fever. For all that she still eagerly pursued her
vocation. I know nothing finer than the life led by these women at the
extreme advance guard of civilization, exposed to the heat of the
sun, to fever, to all manner of fatigue, to the indifference of the
negroes, and sometimes, as if all that were not enough, to the malice
of the whites.
I imagine that it was long since the Father and the Sisters had
enjoyed themselves so much. Unfortunately a tornado burst upon us
in the middle of dinner, and at eight o’clock we had to take refuge in
Father Hacquart’s rooms, through the cracks in the roof of which,
however, the rain poured in torrents.
We escorted our guests back to the mission house through the
rain.
That same night the long-expected Mr. Wallace, Agent-general of
the Company, arrived on the launch Nupé. I went to call on him the
next day. After congratulating me on our successful journey, he
renewed the assurances already made to me by Carrol, Festing, and
Drew. I heard later that Mr. Flint, another important member of the
Company, was also on board the Nupé. But he preferred to avoid us.
When we left we were able to rejoice the hearts of the
missionaries of Assaba, with a few bales of stuffs and knick-knacks,
with which they could reward their faithful natives. We wanted to stop
at Onitcha, the cross of the mission of which we could already see,
to give a greeting to the Pères de Lyon stationed there, but the
captain of the Ribago told us he had been ordered not to go there,
although Mr. Wallace had assured me to the contrary only a minute
before.
Avoiding Onitcha, therefore, we went to anchor for a few
moments, first at Illuchi, and then at Abo, where the Ribago was to
leave us.
The Company, however, was determined to escort us to the very
threshold of their territories. Those who know what it is to be
suspected, will involuntarily compare this conduct to the way in
which, in certain shops, customers are escorted to the door lest they
should steal anything on their way out.
No doubt, without being exactly sharpers, we might have got a lot
of information, and have made observations on many things if we
had remained longer on the river. Would that have been altogether to
the advantage of the Company? D’Agoult says he saw the steamer
laden with spirits going by, yet all the time, according to the
Company, all its subjects, white or black, would, under its beneficial
influence, become teetotalers or total abstainers.
It was politic too, perhaps, to hide from us the troubled state of the
district all along the river, and the precarious position of the
Company. Do its members know, I wonder, how happy these
discontented regions once were under the French Company, and all
that would result from the mere presence once again of the French
flag?
As for me, however, I prefer to think simply that this
obsequiousness of the Company towards us, this insistence on our
accepting the offer of being towed down-stream, and paying for the
service rendered, this eagerness to see us off, had but one aim, and
that aim a humane one.
We were escorted to Wari to save us from another attack from the
Patanis. Our departure was hastened because we were tired, worn
out, eager to taste once more the joys of home and family life. All
serious thinkers, whose opinion is of any weight, and who know
anything about English ways, will agree with me, irony or no irony!
We dined at Abo, and when night had fallen, a launch arrived at
our anchorage, which was to take charge of us. On board was a
bright, jovial young officer, Lieutenant Aron by name, of Australian
birth. Judging from what we saw of him, Australia must be to
England what the south of France is to the French. Did he not tell us
one day that the Company had a post at Kano, another at Kuka, and
twelve big steamers on the river? But for these venial exaggerations
he was a charming companion, what the English call a very good
fellow, who made the hours we were in his company pass very
pleasantly. We shall all, Lieutenant Aron included, long remember
the dinner we had together on the Kano, as the Ganagana pontoon
is called, whilst a tornado was raging, and he sung at the top of his
voice all the comic songs in the Anglo-Franco repertory, to the
accompaniment of the flute and the harmonium, whilst quaffing the
whisky and the claret we still had left.
As is well known, the Niger flings itself into the sea in an immense
number of branches. Two of these branches, viz. that of Brass and of
Forcados, are more practicable for navigation than any others. The
first belongs to the Royal Niger Company, the second to the Niger
Protectorate, a regular colony governed directly from England, and I
was told that the competition in trade between the two was very
keen.
I had long intended to go down to the sea, not by the Brass, but
by the Forcados branch, which would enable me to get away from
the Royal Niger Company sooner, and pass a few days in the
English districts on the coast belonging to the Niger Protectorate.
I preferred to embark there than in a port belonging to the
Company. The two Companies are, as already stated, more or less
rivals, and those on the French despatch boat Ardent had cause to
speak in terms of high praise of the way in which they were treated
by the English of the Protectorate.
Lieutenant Aron accompanied us on the Forcados branch as far
as Wari, where resides an English vice-consul. We were
breakfasting on board the launch when we came in sight of the
houses of Wari. Our three barges were roped together, and their
three tricolour flags flying. The launch, however, could not hoist the
British flag, its gear having somehow got damaged.
The Dantec now brought us up to the stockade, where we awaited
the arrival of the officers of the Protectorate. Then between
ourselves and our guide began an animated and certainly very
curious colloquy; astonishment on one side, vehement explanations
on the other. What changes in the expressions of the faces of those
engaged in the conversation! What shouts of laughter! What were
they saying? This is what I thought I made out. Seeing our three
barges each flying a tricolour flag, and the launch with no colours at
all, the English of the Protectorate had thought we had retaliated on
the Company by a skilful manœuvre for the bad turn they had done
the French the year before. “The Company,” they said, “had intended
to confiscate our barges, but they being well manned and well
armed, had instead captured the launch and taken her down under
the French flag to Wari.”
No, I cannot have understood the conversation, I must have
dreamed it all! The English never could have believed us capable of
such a thing, and would never have suggested it, even in their own
language. And yet—!
Who was it told me that the Protectorate and the Company were
enemies at heart, and that the English of Wari are always brooding
on the damages paid to the Niger traders on account of a certain
attack on the people of Brass from Akassa?
No doubt all these are merely such calumnies as are always
circulating.
We shall, all five of us, always remember the welcome we
received at Wari from the agents of the Protectorate, and this
memory will be the more cherished because a few days after our
return to France we heard the terrible news of the death of several of
them, who, having gone on a mission to the interior almost unarmed,
were massacred by the natives of Benin.
We had the best of receptions at Wari; the officers even gave up
their rooms and their very beds to us, knowing how greatly we
should appreciate such comforts. We became much attached to our
new friends.
At Wari I got rid of all the rest of my stores, which would have
been an encumbrance to me on my return journey. There were
plenty for the missionaries and for the servants at the Consulate.
Suzanne, our bicycle, rejoiced the heart of a Sierra Leonese; the
Dantec, with a few bottles of claret, delighted Lieutenant Aron; even
the Aube we left as a token of our friendship with the agents at the
Consulate. We were generous, no doubt, but unless we had sunk
our barges when we got to the sea, what else could we have done
with them?
As for the Davoust, it took us two days to empty, dismantle, and
take her to pieces, after which she was embarked in sections on
board the Axim, a Liverpool steamer, which took her back to Europe.
Sold as old metal, and what she fetched debited to the credit of
the budget of our expedition, all that is left of the Davoust is now
circulating in fairs or figuring in shop-windows, in the form of light
match-boxes and other small articles such as are made of
aluminium.
And this was the end of all the three sturdy barks: Davoust, Aube,
and Dantec, which for twelve whole months were all the world to us!
The Dantec had often seemed likely never to get to the end of her
journey; the Aube certainly ought not to have arrived, judging by the
two or three occasions on which she had seemed done for; at the
end of the voyage you could put your fingers through her rotten
planking. If she had run aground but once more, or if she had got
another blow in passing the last rapid, all would have been over with
her worm-eaten keel, and also with her crew. The Davoust too had
received many wounds, and what was more serious still, oxidation
was beginning to work havoc in her sections.
Ten times at least, face to face with some specially bad rapids, I
had made up my mind to lose one of the three, if not all; but, as the
English said, they were gallant ships. Bravely, in spite of rapids,
whirlpools, and rocks, they had made for the appointed goal, the
mouth of the river, bringing there without faltering the whole
expedition: we white men, the coolies, all our goods, and the French
flag!
No doubt it was Aube, Dantec, and Davoust, their sponsors, our
comrades, who had died at the task of the conquest of the Niger,
who had brought good luck to our three boats.
Thanks to them, I had kept my oath of 1888.
It was not therefore without emotion, without a sadness which
may have been childish, but which many will understand, that we
parted finally with the companions of so many dangers.
Have not boats souls? Sailors love them like old friends, like
heirlooms. We must attach ourselves affectionately to something in
this life, must we not?
The Axim took us to Forcados; the Forcados to Lago; the Olinda,
chartered specially for us, to Porto Novo.
On November 1, at five o’clock in the morning, there was great
excitement at the house of the officers of Porto Novo. Some people
had suddenly arrived, and were banging against the shutters. The
door was soon half-opened and a voice inquired, “Who are
you?”—“Hourst!”—“Where do you come from?”—“Timbuktu”—and
the next moment, without any further questioning, we all fell into
each other’s arms.
After all I experienced in Dahomey and in the Senegal, I will not
dwell too much on the goodness the Governor-General, M. Chaudié,
showed to us on our return, on the kindness he lavished upon every
member of the expedition, or on the reception our friends of St. Louis
gave us later, but I can never thank any of them enough.
We dismissed our coolies at St. Louis, thus effecting an immense
economy. Abdulaye, the carpenter, at once changed his costume for
that of a private citizen. A soft hat, a frock-coat, and a cane with a
silver handle, converted the chrysalis into a butterfly; at the same
time our old servant began to make up for his long months of
sobriety and abstinence. It was, in fact, impossible to find him even
to give him an extra tip.
The rest of our coolies dispersed about the town, holding
receptions in all the public places of the Sarracolais quarter, telling
their adventures with much declamation, and eliciting considerable
applause.
The negroes also, it seems, have their mutual admiration for
geographical societies!
Later all the brave fellows who had been devoted to us to the
death, and some of whom we looked upon as real friends, dispersed
themselves once more amongst the Galam villages dotted along the
banks of the Senegal, and there at least I can confidently assert our
mission, or rather, as Digui called it, the Munition, was and still is
popular.
That is something, at all events.
On December 12, 1896, we landed from the steamer on the quay
of Marseilles, where men were spitting just as they had been when I
left Brest. Looking out of the window of my cab upon the deserted
street, I saw a little Italian boy in the drizzling rain which was falling,
holding in his arms a plaster statuette representing a nude woman
with graceful, supple limbs, probably meant for Diana resting on a
crescent of the moon. She and her bearer looked cold and
melancholy enough. This was my first sight of a really civilized
human being after my three years’ exile.
NATIVES OF AFRICA.
EPILOGUE
I have now narrated all our adventures, and I leave my readers to

judge of our work. I think it necessary still just to jot down here the
practical conclusions I came to, which may be of use later in French
colonial policy.
To begin with, let us consider how to turn the Niger to account as
a highway for reaching the heart of the Western Sudan.
The French Journal Officiel of Western Africa has published a
report written by Baudry on the possible importations and
exportations, to which I have nothing to add. To every unprejudiced
mind he has clearly proved that there is great wealth of natural
produce to be found in these districts, such as india-rubber, gutta-
percha, skins, wool, wax, karité, cotton, etc., which can easily be
bought, and are, in fact, simply waiting to be developed.
Now which would be the best route to take these products to
France? This is the point we have to elucidate to begin with.
We brought home our hydrographical map of the Niger, from
Timbuktu to Bussa, on a scale of 16 miles to the inch, in fifty sheets.
One glance at it will suffice to show that the river is not really
practically navigable further than Ansongo: that is to say, 435 miles
below the last French port in the Sudan.
Further down than Ansongo the river is simply one hopeless
labyrinth of rocks, islands, reefs, and rapids; and although at the time
of our transit there seemed to be fewer obstacles between Say and
Tchakatchi than elsewhere, it must be remembered that we passed
when the water was at its maximum height. As for the Bussa rapids,
they are simply impassable for laden boats.
“You passed all right, though!” some one said to me; and so we
did, but I think the tour de force by which, thanks to our lucky star,
we achieved our passage under the greatest difficulties, would not
be successful once in three times. We might, however, go down
again once more, but to go up would be quite a different matter.
None but little boats, very lightly laden, or without any cargo, such
as the canoes of the natives, can venture without foolhardiness into
such passes as we came through.
This is certainly not the way in which a river can be
remuneratively navigated. Even if an attempt were made to employ
the primitive means alone likely to succeed, beasts of burden, such
as camels, could compete on disastrous terms with the waterway.
To attempt therefore to turn the river to account in supplying the
central districts with merchandise, or to bring down their products to
the coast, would simply result in failure. To take merchandise up to
Say by means of the lower branches of the river, is but a utopian
dream, which would but result in disaster to those traders involved in
the speculation.
Nature has, in fact, laid her interdict on the navigation of a great
part of the course of the Niger; but at least the 435 navigable miles
above Ansongo, and between it and Timbuktu, added to the 622
between the latter town and Kolikoro, form what may be
characterized as a safe mill-stream, well within the French districts.
We have not as yet nearly realized all the resources of those
districts.
How then shall we get to this mill-stream of ours, or, as we may
perhaps call it, this inland trading lake? A unique solution to the
problem presents itself: we must finish the line of railway uniting
Kayes to Kolikoro.
The first workers at the task of penetrating into Africa were right.
The project of Mungo Park, and Faidherbe, taken up and continued
by the Desbordes, the Gallieni, the Archinards, etc., should be
continued, pushed on and completed without delay.
All has already been explored. We are no longer discussing a
castle in the air, with no firm foundations. We know what that railway
will cost, its whole course has been decided on and surveyed; only

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caroline vout is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of

Cambridge University Press

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First published 2012

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List of figures [page ix]

1 Introduction: the journey to Rome [1]

2 The lie of the land [18]

3 Seven is the magic number [57]

4 Rome, la città eterna [81]

5 Painting by numbers [121]

6 On top of the world [188]

7 Signing off [227]

1.1 The Cathedral, Durham City. Photo, author [page 2]

Gabriel Ojéda [53]

of the British Museum [129]

the British Museum [130]

5.32 Hieronymus Cock’s engraving of the Campidoglio, showing the

5.44 Giovanni Battista Naldini (1537–91), previously wrongly attributed

5.45 Piranesi’s view of the Temple of Saturn. Photo, author [171]

5.61 Rossini’s Pincio. Reproduced with permission of the Master and

6.2 View from the Pincio today. Photo, author [192]

There is a strong and pleasant memory for hills.

Figure 1.1 The Cathedral, Durham City.

their marching momentous. Seven hills lend gravitas to Pierre’s account,

stratigraphy of these places is less important than their aspirations. The

Figure 1.2 The Colosseum, Rome.

If someone, by looking at these suburbs, wishes to estimate the size of Rome, he

The Aurelianic wall provides a commanding circumference or frame

these buildings, this monument achieves in cumulative surface detail what

Figure 1.5 The ‘tetrarchs’, St Mark’s Square, Venice.

28 Gelsomino 1975, 1976a and 1976b.

37 Nathaniel Hawthorne [1860] 2007: 127.

hinc septem dominos videre montis,

It is a couplet which is picked up in the preface as Donovan enters ‘within

Arrivederci Roma, released by MGM in 1958. Madonna of the Seven Hills is

The seven hills of Rome, Republic and Empire

Can Queen Victoria eat cold apple pie?7

23 Cornell 1995: 242–71.

‘After the high Roman fashion’29

Rome is not unique in seeking circumscription. Nor is it unique in claiming

On the 14th, judging by the rate at which we went, the current

MOUNT RENNEL ABOVE LOKODJA.

We were to start at two o’clock. After we had made our farewell

I have now narrated all our adventures, and I leave my readers to

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