Cicero - Anthony Everitt [30]
Cicero was to become a landlord and developer, once he had made his fortune and become a man of means; he wrote to Atticus with that combination of insouciance and greed that has marked the upper-class rentier throughout the ages: “Two of my shops have collapsed and the others are showing cracks, so that even the mice have moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants. Other people call this a disaster, I don’t even call it a nuisance.… Heavens above, how utterly trivial such things appear to me! However, there is a building scheme under way … which should turn this loss into a source of profit.”
The smartest addresses were on the Palatine and Velia Hills, although the pressure on space was so great that the mansions of the rich were built on tiny plots of land with minuscule gardens. In his heyday Cicero was hugely proud to own one of the largest houses on the Palatine. Two winding streets, Victory Rise (Clivus Victoriae) and Palatine Rise (Clivus Palatinus), could accommodate carriages and led up from the valley below, from the Forum and the hurly-burly of urban life.
Although the Romans were a practical people, they believed that the foundation of a built community was a sacred act. The city’s boundary, the pomoerium, was holy and inviolable. According to legend, this was a furrow which a plow drawn by a white heifer and ox had traced at the time of Rome’s foundation and it was forbidden to cross it. Entrance was restricted to the gates or ianua where the plow had been lifted. Soldiers were denied access and became civilians when they came inside the ritual enclosure. Likewise burials were not allowed inside the pomoerium.
The Forum was the city’s political, commercial and legal heart, but it was also its spiritual center, a space even more sacred than the city itself. A rectangular piazza, approaching 200 meters long by 75 meters wide, and flagged with stones, it lay in what had once been a marsh between the hills of the Capitol, the citadel where the great Temple of Jupiter stood, and the Palatine. Today it is a jumble of grass and stone rubble, where a few lucky pillars survive to recall the days of ancient Rome. However, with imagination and a guidebook, it is not very difficult to reconstruct in the mind’s eye the scene as it was when the young Cicero presented his first case as a counsel for the defense in 81 BC.
At one end, from 78 BC, the tall facade of the national archive, the Tabularium, lined the cliff of the Capitol. In front, from the point of view of an observer facing it, stood the Temple of Concord (Concordia) and on its left the Temple of Saturn with its large forecourt, which functioned as the State Treasury. Religion and daily life were not separated in the Roman mind and temples were regularly used for business and state purposes.
On the right, the Senate House and the Assembly Ground (Comitium) provided the setting for political activity. A Speakers’ Platform stood on the outer edge of the Comitium. It was decorated with ships’ prows captured in a sea battle in 338 and their name in Latin, Rostra, was applied to the platform as a whole.
The long sides of the square were bordered by two colonnaded halls, the Basilica Fulvia Aemilia and the Basilica Sempronia. Maintained and refurbished by the great families that had had them built, they contained shops and meeting rooms. Farther down just past the Basilica Sempronia, the Temple of Castor and Pollux (or Temple of the Castors) stood on a high podium under which were two rows of moneylenders’ booths—the