traversed by the fortification. Where the wall followed the face of
the cliffs, as for instance on the Capitol and Quirinal, it was raised
on an artificial shelf after the fashion employed on the Palatine
(vide supra). In other places, where the slope was gentler, the wall
was formed of rubble with revetments of opus quadratum, e.g. on
the Aventine; finally, where the ground was flat, as on the plateau
of the Esquiline, a ditch was dug and an embankment formed by the
upcast; this agger, as it was called, was then faced with retaining
walls of opus quadratum. The length of the agger on the Esquiline
is put by Dionysius (ix. 68) at 7 stadia, which agrees, roughly
speaking, with the discoveries made in 1876-1879, when the railway
station was built and the new quarters laid out. The total length
was about 4225 ft., the thickness of wall and agger about 50 ft.,
while the ditch was 100 Roman ft. in width and 30 in depth. There
is, however, a difference in technique between the inner and outer
retaining walls of the agger. The inner wall is built of greenish
tufa in blocks of irregular size, while in the outer brown tufa is
employed and the blocks are of standard size, two headers ranging
with each stretcher. Between the railway station and the Dogana
a fine lofty piece of the front wall remains, with traces of the Porta
Viminalis and of the lower back wall. Unfortunately the whole of
the bank or agger proper has been removed, and the rough back
of the great retaining wall exposed. Both tufa and peperino are
used, the latter in restored parts; the blocks vary in length, but
average in depth the usual 2 Roman ft. The railway cutting, which
has destroyed a great part of the agger, showed clearly the section
of the whole work: the strata of different kinds of soil which appeared
on the sides of the foss appeared again in the agger, but reversed as
they naturally would be in the process of digging out and heaping
up. Dionysius (ix. 68) states the length of the agger to have been
7 stadia—that is, about 1400 yds.—which agrees (roughly speaking)
with the actual discoveries. Originally one road ran along the
bottom of the foss and another along its edge; the latter existed
in imperial times. But the whole foss appears to have been filled
up, probably in the time of Augustus, and afterwards built upon;
houses of mixed brick and opus reticulatum still exist against the
outside of the great wall, which was itself used as the back wall of
these houses, so that we now see painted stucco of the time of
Hadrian covering parts of the wall of the kings. Another row of
houses seems to have faced the road mentioned above as running
along the upper edge of the foss, thus forming a long street. As
early as the time of Augustus a very large part of the wall of the
kings had been pulled down and built over, so that even then its
circuit was difficult to trace (Dionys. iv. 13). A very curious series
Masons' marks.
of masons' marks exists on stones of the agger wall (as
well as on those of some other early buildings). They are
deeply incised, usually on the ends of the blocks, and
average from 10 to 14 in. in length: some are single letters or
monograms; others are numbers, e.g. ↓, the numeral 50. Fig. 6
shows the chief forms
from the Palatine and
Esquiline.[1]
Fig.—Masons' Marks on Early Walls.
There are also extensive remains of the “Servian” wall on the Aventine, in the Via di Porta S. Paolo. Here the wall has a backing of concrete and the upper portion is built with blocks of peperino, set in mortar and bevelled at the edges. These are unmistakable signs that the wall has undergone restoration. This portion is pierced by an arch about 9½ ft. high, which probably served as an embrasure for a military engine. Finally, where the wall skirts the bank of the Tiber it is built in two sections—a foundation about 2 metres in height and 3 in width, which forms a landing-stage, and an upper wall, 6 metres high, which retains the bank. It is built of peperino, and is probably later than the rest of the fortification.
The age of this wall is uncertain, but it has been rendered exceedingly probable that it belongs to the 4th century B.C. The evidence for this is derived from the comparison of other fortifications in central Italy, from the measurements of the blocks employed, which presuppose the later Roman foot of 296 millimetres, and from the character of the alphabet from which the masons' marks are taken.[2] Livy (vi. 32) speaks of a contract entered into by the censors of 378 B.C. for the construction of a wall of opus quadratum, and this probably refers to the older portions of the existing wall, which was built owing to the fear of a second Gallic invasion.[3]
The Servian city did not include what is now the most crowded part of Rome, and which under the Empire was the most architecturally magnificent, namely, the Campus Martius, which was probably to a great extent a marsh. It was once called Ager Tarquiniorum, but after the expulsion of the Tarquins was named Campus Martius from an altar to Mars, dating from prehistoric times (Liv. ii. 5).
Of that wonderful system of massive arched sewers[4] by which, as Dionysius (iii. 68) says, every street of Rome was drained into Cloacas. the Tiber, considerable remains exist, especially of the Cloaca Maxima, which runs from the valley of the Subura, under the Forum along the Velabrum, and so into the Tiber by the round temple in the Forum Boarium; it is still in use, and well preserved at most places. Its mouth, an archway in the great quay wall nearly 11 ft. wide by 12 high, consists of three rings of peperino “voussoirs,” most neatly fitted. The rest of the vault and walls is built of mixed tufa and peperino.[5] Pliny (H.N., xxxvi. 104) gives an interesting account of what is probably this great sewer, big enough (he says) for a loaded hay-cart to pass along. The mouths of two other similar but smaller cloacae are still visible in the great quay wall near the Cloaca Maxima, and a whole network of sewers exists under a great part of the Servian city. Some of these are not built with arched vaults, but have triangular tops formed of courses of stone on level beds, each projecting over the one below—a primitive method of construction, employed in the Tullianum. The great quay wall of Great quay wall. tufa and peperino which lined the Tiber at the mouth of the Cloaca Maxima is also of early date. In later times this massive wall was extended, as the city grew, all along the bank of the Campus Martius, and, having lost its importance as a line of defence, had frequent flights of stairs built against it, descending to the river. Some of these are shown in one of the fragments of the marble plan (see Jordan, F.U.R. Frag. 169). In 1879 a travertine block was dredged up inscribed P. BARRONIVS . BARBA . AED . CVR . GRADOS . REFECIT, dating from the 1st century B.C. This records the repair of one of these river stairs.[6]
The Tullianum is the earliest of the existing buildings of Rome. Imprisonment as a punishment was unknown to Roman Tullianum and Carcer. law, and hence the Carcer, where criminals were detained pending trial, was of small dimensions. Its remains are preserved beneath the church of S Giuseppe dei Falegnami, and below them is the Tullianum, a dungeon where executions took place. It is partly cut in the tufa rock of the Capitoline hill and partly built of 2-ft. blocks of tufa, set with thin beds of pure lime mortar, in courses projecting one over the other. Its name is derived, not from Servius Tullius, as Varro (v. 151) asserts, but from an early Latin word, tullus, a spring of water; its original use was probably that of a cistern or well. It was closed by a conical vault, arched in shape, but not constructionally an arch—very like the so-called “treasury of Atreus” at Mycenae, and many early Etruscan tombs. When the upper room with its arched vault, also of tufa, was built the upper part of the cone seems to have been removed, and a flat stone floor (a flat arch in construction) substituted.[7] That its use as a cistern was abandoned is shown by the cloaca which leads from it, through the rock, to a branch of the Cloaca Maxima. This horrible place was used as a dungeon, prisoners being lowered through a hole in the stone floor—the only access. The present stairs are modern. The two chambers are vividly described by Sallust (Cat. 55). The entrance to the upper prison was on the left of the stairs leading up from the Forum to the Clivus Argentarius, the road to the Porta Fontinalis (see fig. 7, General Plan of Ancient Rome). Lentulus and the Catiline conspirators, as well as Jugurtha, Vercingetorix and other prisoners of importance, were killed or starved to death in this fearful dungeon, which is called τὸ βάραθρον by Plutarch (Marius, xii.). According to a doubtful tradition of the Catholic Church, St Peter was imprisoned in the Tullianum. The name Mamertine prison is of medieval origin. The front wall of the prison was restored in the reign of Tiberius A.D. 22, and bears this inscription on a projecting string-course—C. VIBIVS . C . F . RVFINVS . M . COCCEIV[S . M . F . NERVA]COS . EX . S . C.[8] The floor of the upper prison is about 16 ft. above the level of the Forum. The Capitol was approached from the Carcer by a flight of steps—Scalae Gemoniae—on which
- ↑ See Bruzza, Ann. Inst. (1876), 72; Jordan, Topographie, i. 250; Richter, Über antike Steinmetzzeichen (1885).
- ↑ See Richter in the work quoted above, and Beiträge zur römischen Topographie (Berlin, 1903); also Delbrück, Der Apollotempel auf dem Marsfelde in Rom, pp. 14 ff.
- ↑ For earlier studies of the Servian wall consult Nibby and Gell, Le Mura di Roma (1820); Piale, Porte del Recinto di Servio (1833); Becker, De Romae Muris (Leipzig, 1842); Lanciani, Ann. Inst. (1871), p. 40, Mon. Inst. ix. pl., xxvii.; Borsari, “Le mura e porte di Servio,” Bull. Comm. Arch. (1888), pp. 12 ff.
- ↑ See Liv. i. 38, 56; Dionys. iv. 44.
- ↑ In the upper part of its course the Cloaca Maxima was restored in some places, under the Empire, with a vault of brick-faced concrete; at the entrance to the Forum a large bend was made when the Basilica Aemilia was extended westwards in 34 B.C.
- ↑ A great quay wall with arched cloaca, similar in style to those in Rome, exists at the mouth of the river Marta near Tarquinii, and similar constructions are found in other Etruscan cities.
- ↑ Livy (i. 33) mentions the “carcer . . . media urbe imminens foro,” and also speaks (xxxiv. 44) of an “inferiorem carcerem,” and at xxix. 22 of a criminal being put in the Tullianum.
- ↑ Consules suffecti for A.D. 22.
