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The Hills of Rome Caroline Vout Full Chapter
The Hills of Rome Caroline Vout Full Chapter
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
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107025974
c Caroline Vout 2012
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
References [240]
Index of principal passages discussed [270]
General index [274]
The colour plates willl be found between pages 174 and 175
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-
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
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
permission of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’
Etruria Meridionale [147]
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’
Etruria Meridionale [148]
5.25 The Esquiline panel, Julius III’s apartment, Palazzo del Belvedere
(after Biagetti, 1936) [149]
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
also colour plate section. Photo, author. Reproduced with
permission of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’
Etruria Meridionale [152]
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
permission of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’
Etruria Meridionale [154]
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
(after Biagetti, 1936) [156]
List of figures xiii
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
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
2 Introduction: the journey to Rome
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
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.
4 Introduction: the journey to Rome
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
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 . . . ’
6 Introduction: the journey to Rome
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,
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
8 Introduction: the journey to Rome
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.
10 Introduction: the journey to Rome
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
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.
12 Introduction: the journey to Rome
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
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.
14 Introduction: the journey to Rome
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
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:
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.
20 The lie of the land
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
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.
22 The lie of the land
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’.
24 The lie of the land
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
that represents how specific classes of people have signified themselves and
their world through their imagined relationships with nature.’28
Cities are, above all, places whose analysis requires a sense of spatial and physical
structure.30
IGGA.