Looking out from his temple on the Capitol, Jupiter Optimus Maximus gazed upon nothing but the Roman empire—at least in the imaginations of Cicero, Livy, and Ovid. From its initial construction in the late sixth century BCE, the colossal scale of the Capitoline temple mirrored the hill's symbolic importance—at least until late antiquity, when the temple suffered the benign neglect of Christian emperors. At this point, the temple and its hill begin to take on a new, largely imaginative significance, which is the subject of Moralee's noteworthy monograph. Part 1 synthesizes the relatively meager evidence concerning the practical and material realia of the Capitoline, while part 2, the volume's core contribution, analyses the various Christian re-interpretations of the hill as a desolate shell, a site of martyrdom, a dragon's home, and, eventually, a wonder of the world.
Once upon a time, it was the peak moment of any political career to ascend the Capitol in some ceremony, but after Constantine, only one emperor, Constantius II in 356, so much as visited the famed hill. Moralee argues that Constantine abandoned the Capitol in 312, based on a pair of Latin panegyrics, even though the panegyrist of 313 admitted that he was not fully briefed on what had happened the year before (Anon. Pan. Lat. 12(9).20.2). However, an alternative tradition transmitted by Zosimus (Zos. 2.29.5), dismissed by Moralee as “dubious” and treated as polemic (42 n. 54), suggests that Constantine had at first mounted the Capitol but stopped when his religious scruples convinced him to forgo such ceremony—a reasonable, if not verifiable, possibility. At any rate, it is certainly true to say that the ritual role of the Capitol precipitously declined sometime at the beginning of the fourth century, eventually to be replaced by the basilica of Saint Peter in Rome's ritual topography beginning in the fifth century.
In addition to its ritual significance, the hill also had social, economic, and political importance—that is, all manner of people lived, worked, and played on the hill—the scant evidence for which Moralee briefly sketches. The Capitoline hill remained a vibrant and diverse place into late antiquity and some of its more mundane architecture may well have been restored during the reign of Theodoric. Moralee then proposes, rather tenuously, that part of one of the administrative structures, the Tabularium, was repurposed as a Marian shrine by the east-Roman general and patrician, Narses, as early as the late sixth century, though the more widely accepted late seventh or early eighth century date still seems more plausible.
As the ritual import of the Capitoline declined, scholarly interest in its continuing use and reuse likewise diminished. This relative scholarly inattention has largely overlooked the process by which the hill became a polemically charged symbol contested by “pagans” for whom the abandonment of the Capitol signaled the decline of empire and Christians, who imagined the supposedly dilapidated Capitol as the would-be locus of martyrdom and the site of a gruesome bath in the blood of infants that was to cure Constantine's leprosy. Arnobius and Lactantius rewrote traditional stories—like the one about the skull supposedly uncovered while digging the foundation for the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus that was traditionally construed as an omen of Rome's empire—as a means to prove the folly of “pagan” tradition. Augustine would add fuel to the fire, criticizing the Capitol at some length in his City of God. Jerome, Paulinus, and Prudentius envisioned Rome's temples as empty and desolate—and, in fact, the gilded roof of the Capitoline temple was reportedly carried off during the Vandal sack of Rome in 455. Indeed, a number of Christian authors took greats pains to catalog the various destructions of the Capitol as a means to diminish its importance.
After rhetorically destroying the Capitoline temple, as it were, the Capitoline hill as a whole would be re-imagined as the heart of darkness: as the site where Constantine was supposed to bathe in the blood of innocents as recommended by the Capitoline pontiffs, the evil, and made-up, villains of the sixth–eighth century Roman gesta martyrum. Fortunately, the emperor turned to Christian baptism under bishop Silvester instead. The hill even housed a dragon, which Silvester defeated. By the end of the sixth century, the once powerful and magnificent Capitol had been overthrown by the Christian God's power—at least in Christian texts. Strangely enough, however, in the early Middle Ages, a now thoroughly degraded Capitol had something of a renascence as a powerful symbol of empire—a fact perhaps best demonstrated by the legend of the statues of Roman provinces with bells above them that would ring out should a province rebel. The Capitol would even feature on lists of the wonders of the world. Moreover, in the ninth century, a martyr could enter the heavenly Capitol—a rather dramatic reversal of fortune.
In sum, this notable work tackles one of Rome's most symbolically charged places during a period that is usually overlooked. Its examination of the shifting valences of the symbolic significance of the Capitoline hill is an admirable contribution to scholarship. The structure of the analysis, which tends to elide chronological and geographical differences in order to incorporate a wide array of disparate sources, could be clearer and the interpretation of individual sources could be fuller, but in the end this work ably explores the ways the Capitol was reimagined, even as it remained central to the image and idea of Rome.
