The Skeleton of an Empire The Grandeur That Was Rome

In the beginning there was a patch of hill and valley beside the sea.

That patch grew through confidence, through ambition,

through a sense of adventure. But chiefly as the trees grow

while the sun shines, through a sort of obscure inevitability.

Ultimately it stretched from the Atlantic to the Tigris.

It reached the Emperor of China. It was the world. Then it crumbled.

Colony after colony fell away from it.

It continued to win wars, but more and more often lost the peace.

Its citizens worked less and depended more and more

upon welfare and having a good time.

Its civil service grew larger and larger

and interfered increasingly with everyday life.

Taxation eat out its heart, even death was taxed.

It vanished into history almost imperceptibly.

I've been talking of an empire, but I wonder whether you and I

have the same empire in mind, perhaps we have.

HORN AND DRUMS PLAY

I've been speaking, of course, of Ancient Rome.

The Rome which gave us London and York,

codes of law and highways and drains,

and an alphabet and a few snatches of Virgil.

The Rome which gave us factories and post offices

and the changing of the guard and soap.

The Rome which first gave us civilization

and then taught us how to misuse it.

The Rome which survives in nostalgic romance

and in enduring concrete, and as a compulsory subject in schools

and universities, which is perhaps a part of that concrete.

Roman Britain. Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland 18 centuries ago -

the furthest northern frontier of the Roman Empire.

See how the hand of Rome reaches out

and plunges its long finger nails into the English landscape.

Beyond this wall, tribal barbarians.

Behind it, you could be a citizen whatever your race.

You had law, towns, central heating, the bricks of civilization.

Between the savages and the soap, stood this wall.

And along it, the frontiersman of civilization -

Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Spaniards,

even Shropshire lads and men of Devon. All in Roman uniform.

Think of them peering northwards into the moorland mists,

where at any moment the shapes of barbarian enemies

might loom up like ghosts.

Hadrian, the builder of this wall, wrote poetry on his deathbed.

For 300 years the wall made peace and poetry possible.

Then the barbarians won.

The wall alone remained, rib of the imperial skeleton.

Its busy fortresses faded into memory

and then into forgetfulness.

Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,

might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

MILITARY HORN SOUNDS

Behind the wall, the garrison town, York.

Headquarters of the Roman army in Britain.

Here came the Emperor Hadrian to plan the great frontier wall

which we have seen.

Here too, a century later, came another roman emperor,

Septimius Severus, to have one more whack at the unbeaten Scots.

He probably built the tower against which I'm standing.

The old man Severus is rather a favourite of mine,

although I happen myself to come from Scotland.

When he came to York, the stars had already foretold his doom.

He suffered from gout and an outrageous family.

But he was carried defiantly on a stretcher,

northwards at the head of his army, levelling mountains

and filling up swamps as the historian tells us.

He came back to York to die.

And we're told how his body was placed here on a funeral pyre which

was lighted by his sons, I suspect, with a cynical indifference.

His soldiers threw gifts into the flames

and his ashes were taken back to Rome in an urn of porphyry.

His death marked an epoch in the Roman Empire.

From that moment, Rome and civilization were on the defensive,

their backs to the wall.

Here at York, new towers were built at last

to keep resurgent barbarism at bay.

From the extreme north and the dead Emperor Severus to the extreme

south of the empire and the same man's birthplace, to North Africa.

Here in Libya,

at this magnificent town of Lepcis Magna, Septimius Severus was born.

From Libya to Yorkshire,

the span of this man's lifeline was almost the span of the Roman Empire.

Yet even Lepcis Magna did not quite complete the span of Rome.

400 miles south from Lepcis and the coast, in the desert of the Fezzan,

stands a lonely tomb. Furthest monument of Rome's greatness.

Here in Africa was once the granary of Rome,

Roman dams stored up the rain,

African corn and olives filled the markets of Rome. Then Rome fell.

The sand sea engulfed the scene.

In our time other Empires have come this way.

ENGINES RUMBLE

New desert armies sweep across the landscape.

Behind their smoke and dust, rise again the stones of some of the

grandest cities of the Roman Empire, above all Lepcis Magna itself.

Nothing shows the universality of Rome more vividly than this.

Severus, local boy made good,

proudly proclaimed Britannicus, in the African city of his birth.

Here at Lepcis, you can

see the structure of a Roman town almost to perfection.

Its town hall is unsurpassed in the Roman world.

Indeed imperial ambition sometimes o'erleapt itself.

The harbour is a triumph of grandeur over actual need.

It silted up almost at once and the mooring blocks remain unused,

a Roman folly.

ALARMING HORNS SOUND

The marketplace was wrecked by vandals once Rome had collapsed.

Yet it still speaks grandly with a thousand voices.

And now the market is more homely in its eloquence.

Here are the grooves where Roman knives were sharpened.

There, the standard measures of length,

like those which another empire has placed in London's Trafalgar Square.

For volume, the shopkeeper filled up one of these containers

and you held your bag underneath.

Bread in the marketplace, music hall or drama next door.

ECHO OF VOICES SPEAKING LATIN

Behind the theatre,

a pedestal that once carried the statue of an honoured actor.

Pantomimus he's called, an actor in pantomime.

"The best turn of his day," the inscription reads.

What a lot of life this city still has in it, though all in stone.

OMINOUS HORNS SOUND

And now for the western and eastern boundaries of this vast empire.

Timgad, to the west of Libya, in Algeria.

Merida, to the far west in Spain.

And to the near east, in Jordan, Jerash.

In the Lebanon, the famed magnificence of Baalbek.

Everywhere, Romans ruled and traded, legions marched,

arches and pillars framed the imperial pattern.

But the real business, that which gave these provinces life

and law, was the eternal city herself, haughty Rome.

Rome above the nations.

Look down on her shell and conjure up the imperial city

when emperors reigned.

A million people and more thriving on excess of every kind,

including that of martyrdom.

And yet, a city decisive for the souls of men as no other place.

Perversely, it is a mild philosopher,

Marcus Aurelius who surveys the city from one of its seven hills.

With an unconvincing gesture of command,

an emperor no longer sure of empire. A puzzled university don.

But there's an accidental rightness about his posture.

His back is turned to the forum.

Say what you will, the Roman forum is a mess.

Once the hub of the civilized world,

the forum today bears the likeness of an excoriated cemetery.

Grandeur is a hard word to fit to it.

Yet strangely, grandeur is there. Clothe these stones with history,

the murder of Caesar, the fire of Rome, the spread of Christianity

and you hand any man the fabric of his own past.

This is indeed the graveyard of an empire.

The temple of fame stands upon the grave.

The flame that burns upon its altars is kindled

from the ashes of great men.

Rome invested heavily in the pre existing civilization of Greece

and in so doing, enlarged and infused the products

and skills of that very great civilization.

It put the ideas of the Greek world on a moving belt

and mass produced them with added tricks and novelties of its own.

As a cultivated commercial power,

it governed millions for its own exclusive benefit and dignity.

After all, it's given to some to rule and others to obey.

And in the make-up of the Roman people

was an inherited power to command.

But at the same time, it set a grandiose

pattern of civilization before the barbarian world.

And a provincial city, in a moment of exultation,

could think of no higher claim than to boast it was a "little Rome".

Yes, I suppose that the Romans were the greatest tycoons of history.

Their empire was a vast, flamboyant department store,

out to make money at all costs and graft was no doubt its second name.

But it also meant peace.

The Roman equivalent of peace with honour was peace with profit.

And in order to make profit, it had to give value.

Trade then, was the lifeblood of this tremendous organism.

Imperial tradesmen travelled from the Atlantic to

the Pacific, the Emperor of China himself traded with Rome

and found the Romans honest in their dealings.

China at the eastern end of the world and at the western end,

Rome's own port, Ostia by the Tiber.

Ostia, gradually uncovered by the Italian state,

is one of the most spectacular Roman merchant cities.

It's a place whose citizens had nothing of the Oxford accent

or the Horatian sniff, where business was business.

In the heart of the town were the shipping companies.

The mosaic floors tell us their names

and the commodities of the ports with which they traded.

This way for trade with Africa, to Sabratha, with its African elephant.

If the port of London were destroyed tomorrow and had gone

in for mosaics, you would find there precisely what you find in Ostia.

A microcosm of the world beyond the seas.

Ships to Carthage, to Bizerte, to the other end of the Mediterranean.

Even Ostia's own river delta was recorded in mosaic

and reminds us how the port died.

It silted up and was left high and dry.

Ostia has none of Rome's grandeur, it is commercial and ordinary.

Yet, on that account, extraordinarily real.

Its architecture anticipated suburbia by 1,700 years.

Those years have mellowed and perhaps improved it.

It had its moments.

Well to do merchants instead of mock-Tudor and Monkey puzzle trees,

on occasion displayed a mass produced art of a certain elegance.

More anatomy of empire.

Pompeii below Vesuvius, second rate and famous for the wrong reason.

In the year 79, lava and ash buried the whole place.

Nothing in Pompeii's life became it like the leaving of it.

Nevertheless, its poor familiar bones show that

something of Roman grandeur reached down to very ordinary citizens.

Straight streets planned and paved a pattern.

Equipped even, with a Roman version of our zebra crossings.

Public fountains for the hot, south wind of summer.

And a standard of living so widespread,

that no doubt on the very eve of destruction Pompeians were

saying to one another, "we've never had it so good."

A few miles away along the Naples coast, Herculaneum.

Most of it still buried below the modern town of Resina.

If Pompeians soiled their hands with work and trade,

Herculaneum had more of Regency Brighton about it.

To this day the volcanic mud, petrified by age,

engulfs more than three quarters of the town.

Here again, the characteristic Roman discipline of straight streets.

Here too the leisured colonnades of the well to do.

Hidden amongst them, as some scholars believe,

is the first Christian cross, long years before it appeared elsewhere.

But the provincial grandeur of Rome spread through a great

part of Europe. Of it all, give me the great cities of Provence.

Provence, the province par excellence.

Shaped and colonized by the Romans.

As judges of a comfortable human landscape,

the Romans had few equals.

Even the wild eye of van Gogh can not enflame

the rich tranquillity of Provence.

The Romans were less fierce than he in their Provencal affections.

To them, the province supplied quiet, intelligent leisure.

Time to think between meals,

which is after all is a pretty good definition of civilization.

These vineyards of Provence call to mind the ancient wines

that are still fished up from time to time. From Greek

and Roman wrecks along the Provencal coast.

But above all they remind one of the fact that France, in origin,

owes her vineyards to the Romans.

In fact, the oldest vintage wine known to me

in history is recorded from a Roman town in the south of France where

the jar that contained it is labelled in Latin,

"I am five years old."

But that's not all.

The whole Provencal landscape seems to me to have about it,

something of a living Roman quality.

It may be that the Provencal speech retains a Latin ring

as indeed it does.

It may be that the old Roman amphitheatres

hereabouts are still used for blood sports of a Roman kind.

And that the Provencal crowd reacts to them

in an unreflective Roman way.

But again, that's not the whole story.

The tall black Cypresses and the tall white columns

and buildings belong together as by traditional right.

And close beneath the picturesque casualness of the modern

Provencal town, lies the discipline of Rome

and somehow one is conscious of it.

Yes, I'm afraid that one is conscious too of a lingering

savagery that is also Roman.

There was a cruel edge to the grandeur that was Rome.

Are we ourselves entirely guiltless?

We know only too well from a famous mosaic in Tripoli what the

Roman crowds loved.

A whole paraphernalia of ancient barbarism.

Wild beasts, the feeding of prisoners to Lions,

gladiators fighting to the finish, the ominous funeral bier for the

loser and an orchestra with trumpets and pipe organ for background music.

Translate this to the same Roman amphitheatre

in our own time at Arles or Nimes.

CROWD CHANTS

1960, AD 160, different animals, different people, but the same

emotions, the same satisfactions, the same masochistic barbarism.

Mass emotion.

We too have our frenzied cup-ties, our boxing championships,

our bloodsports. We follow where Rome led.

The Roman empire was there before us.

But what, after all, did all this really amount to?

Oh, what did that Roman Empire mean?

Apart from wide areas of Europe, Asia and Africa

and uncounted millions of assorted human beings.

Was it all really rather like one of those

mountainous primeval monsters?

Those dinosaurs whose little brains were too small

to steer their huge carcases through time and change.

Or was there more to it than that?

Even in its failures, some intelligent

power of fulfilment that can mean something for us today.

You know, it'd be easy to recite a stirring story of battles won.

Of Horatius defending his bridge,

Julius Caesar fighting with shaggy Gauls and Britons on the one hand

and with contentious politicians at home on the other.

But that sort of two-way battle has been the job of successful

generals through the ages.

Or it would be easy to add up miles of Roman road

and acres of Roman town planning

and to leave those Romans as successful engineers and plumbers.

But after all there were good engineers and excellent plumbers

long before the Romans and there have been a few since. No.

Those Romans had something very much more than all that.

Something more than military prowess.

Something more than civic discipline and codes of law.

In religion, they gave us the empire of the early Christian church.

In art, they gave us the first romantic movement. Pulling mankind

out of the studios and setting him squarely on the landscape.

Surely that was their grandest achievement.

First they brought men and women down to earth

and then gave them the prospect of a new heaven.

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