The Rise of Rome

was an invaluable communications link, facilitating resupply and reinforcement of Rome’s armies in the field, its bases, and coloniae (settlements of Roman citizens or Latins in former enemy territory); the road also made it easier for voters living in outlying areas to get to Rome for Assembly meetings and elections. Over the years, it was extended across the Apennines to the Greek seaport of Tarentum. It finally reached Brundisium, today’s Brindisi, the customary port of departure for sea voyages to the Eastern Mediterranean. Originally surfaced with gravel, its first few miles from the city were paved and became an ideal place for wealthy families to memorialize their dead. By Cicero and Varro’s day, two long lines of grand marble tombs and mausoleums bordered the road and stretched far into the distance. They can still be visited today.

Appius Claudius had not finished. Despite the publication of the Twelve Tables, the system of law and government was still infuriatingly opaque, and the Senate was unwilling to go to the trouble of cleaning its windows. So some years after the censorship, a secretary of his, a freedman’s son who had become a state official, leaked a confidential manual of legal procedures, the legis actiones. He also posted in the Forum a list of the days on which official business could be conducted, whether the courts could sit, and when the Senate and the Assembly could meet. These things were decided behind closed doors by the patrician college of pontifices. The disclosures, no doubt inspired by Claudius, created a furor, but once out the cat could not be put back into the bag. The secretary was pleased with himself and marked his achievement by erecting a shrine, not altogether appropriately, to the spirit of Concord in the Comitium, the assembly area in the Forum. Respectable opinion disliked being teased in this way, and a law was quickly passed forbidding anyone in future to dedicate a temple or an altar without the Senate’s permission or that of a majority of the tribunes of the plebs.

The great censor was a man of contradictions. Despite his political beliefs, he remained a noble snob at heart. He vigorously opposed the admission of plebeians into the two senior religious colleges, the pontifices and the augurs, and on two separate occasions he tried to exclude plebeians from the consulship. It is this inconsistency that allows us to detect in Appius Claudius a genuine human being, warts and all.

His career was spectacular, but it ended in failure. The reforms of his high-handed censorship were unpicked by his opponents in the Senate. His attempts to empower the Assembly turned out to be fruitless, and until the end of its days the Republic was never anything more than a partial democracy. However, his two astonishing construction projects are a lasting monument to one of Rome’s most remarkable characters.

ROMANS WERE FINE builders and engineers, and much of their work still survives (in particular, structures dating from the imperial period—i.e., the first century A.D. onward). Dionysius of Halicarnassus was not far wrong when he wrote:

In my opinion, the three most magnificent works of Rome, in which the greatness of her empire is best seen, are the aqueducts, the paved roads and the construction of the sewers. I say this with respect not only to the usefulness of the work, but also to the magnitude of the cost.

The Aqua Appia was the first of eleven aqueducts that were constructed over the centuries, channeling water into an ever more thirsty Rome. They provided drinking water and supplied the city’s many public baths and elaborate fountains. They complemented the complex sewage system, which (as we have seen) originated in the sixth century, when the first Tarquin built the Cloaca Maxima to drain the marshy Forum. By the first century A.D., “gray,” or used, water was being channeled into the sewers, clearing out wastes and emptying into the Tiber.

Fresh running water became a symbol of civilized urban living. Among Rome’s greatest accomplishments, especially in western Europe, was the promotion of the pleasures and uses of towns and cities. Wherever the legions marched and conquered, temples, amphitheaters, forums, triumphal columns, and arches sprang up, and, of course, as the necessary precondition for health and happiness in crowded conurbations, aqueducts and drains. From the second century, vast utilitarian edifices—warehouses, basilicas, and apartment blocks—also became routine features of the built landscape. Such large-scale developments were made possible by technical advances, especially the introduction of concrete during the third century, which allowed architects to cover wide spaces with domes and vaults.

None of this was done purely from kindness of heart but from imperial self-interest. Monumental architecture became a powerful and persuasive tool of Romanization.

The Via Appia opened the way to the construction of a web of roads, throughout Italy and later farther afield. Their purpose was primarily military, but they also linked communities and facilitated trade. They were punctuated by milestones, which enabled a more accurate measurement of distance and of the size of Rome’s territory than had been possible in the past.

Wherever feasible, the engineers who built roads made them run showily straight, bullying and overriding the landscape through which they passed rather than working cooperatively with its hills and valleys. A Roman road was well designed, and typically consisted of two parallel trenches and a well-drained core. Packed stones allowing water to run away formed the foundation. These were covered with layers of concrete and concrete gravel, and topped off by gravel, packed stones, or sometimes paving stones. Roads were made to last, and some of them have, to the admiration of the modern tourist.

When searching for the origins of Rome’s power, we should not forget its engineering record, evidence as it is (alongside its commitment to legal process) of an energetic, practical orderliness.

THE CONFLICT OF the Orders was at last nearing its conclusion. Long years of war meant that farms and smallholdings had fallen into decay, and their owners into debt. In 287, the plebs seceded again, this time to the Janiculum Hill across the Tiber. A dictator, one Quintus Hortensius, took some economic measures to ease the crisis. What these were we do not know, but he also passed a remarkable constitutional law. This gave the resolutions of the Plebeian Council—that institutional symbol of estrangement and revolt, of the state within the state—the full force of law. At last, a right that had been claimed for one and a half centuries was conceded. The long bipolar episode was over, and Rome’s fragmented persona re-formed into an integrated whole.

Not that the results were neat. The Romans were no theorists and, constitutionally speaking, they hated throwing anything away. So, for example, they now had four popular assemblies: the comitia curiata, from the days of the kings (by the first century, its duties had dwindled to confirmation of official appointments and the authorization of adoptions and wills); the loaded-against-the-poor comitia centuriata, which decided elections of senior officials; the concilium plebis; and, a new institution, the comitia tributa, which imitated the concilium but was convened by consuls and praetors, incorporated the entire male adult population, patricians as well as plebeians, and approved bills.

However, the fruits of victory were not exactly what might have been expected. It became clear that the different components of the plebeian movement did not share the same fundamental interests. The poor were concerned to improve their financial situation by means of the assembled People. The wealthy plebeians had now achieved their goal, access to public office, and gradually made common cause with their old enemies, the patricians. A new mixed nobility came into being, and the tribunes of the plebs were absorbed into the official processes of the state, cooperating with the Senate and introducing agreed legislation.

There are two ways of looking at this development. On the one hand, it was a betrayal of the head count, of the oppressed and the dispossessed. Ordinary people could vote on legislation and elected officials, but the rules of procedure forbade debate and access to the levers of executive power was denied them. The confident senatorial oligarchy adjusted itself to the new political situation and remained in charge. One step back, two steps forward.

On the other hand, there was no denying that reconciliation of warring interests had taken place, and without bloodshed. Greeks, who were beginning to be aware of this new aggressive state in central Italy, looked on with a certain jealousy, for the popular and aristocratic factions in Hellenic city-states had a habit of butchering one another, whereas the Romans solved their political difficulties by painful give-and-take.

Writing in the first century B.C., Cicero has one of the speakers in his fine dialogue, The Republic, make the explicit comparison: “Our own commonwealth was based upon the genius not of one man [sc., as often in Greece], but of many; it was founded,