All that glisters is not gold
This is a study about ancient Rome, but it begins with a contemporary city.Footnote 1 By 2015, the downtown and waterfront of Beirut had been under redevelopment for some two decades. Following the devastation wrought on the city by the civil war which ended in 1990, the area was being transformed through huge outlays of investment in modern buildings. The new high-rise structures and shopping districts, some designed by international ‘starchitects’, were tangible symbols of progress – statements in concrete and glass that the city, and therefore presumably life for its inhabitants too, was on the up.
But not everyone thought so. To build the new developments, older neighbourhoods had been torn down. There were dissenting voices who claimed that, with the creation of the sleek shopping mall, traditional trades had been displaced by luxury brands aimed at foreign tourists rather than locals. The redesigned souk was deemed stale. Alongside the clean streets and neat building fronts, spaces were privatized and surveillance increased. High-end housing developments led to poorer residents being pushed to the outskirts, and the term ‘gentrification’ in its pejorative sense surfaced in discussions about how the city was being transformed.Footnote 2
My point here is not to determine whether the projects in Beirut were positive or not; rather, the example illustrates that building activity which in itself might appear to be a mark of progress does not reflect the actual diversity of attitudes such developments can stimulate. Beirut was being furnished with architectural symbols of success, secular monuments of the modern city, but some people clearly felt that they were losing out – there were negative consequences to the construction work, a darker side to the glitz.
Evidence for investment in urban development is not unequivocally evidence for the collective approval of such schemes. A city is a complex and layered arrangement of often competing interests: the priorities of locals differ from those of visitors; municipal authorities see a different picture from that presented by a single neighbourhood; the concerns of the rich vary from the needs of the poor; what is advantageous for commerce can be detrimental to residents, and so on. In short, that which is perceived to be good for some is not good for all.
The point is obvious enough and there are incalculable examples the world over where ostensibly beneficial urban redevelopment has been opposed by, or had negative consequences for, certain groups and individuals ‘on the ground’.Footnote 3 Yet despite the commonplace nature of the phenomenon and the widespread interest in the subject among modern historians, architects, urban planners, and sociologists, it has received comparatively little attention in the study of ancient Roman urbanism.Footnote 4
A difficulty in appreciating the potential for there also having been hostile attitudes to urban development and the construction of public monuments in the ancient Roman world comes from the very limited number of surviving voices which comment on such matters. Unlike today, there were not minutes of NIMBY pressure group meetings, the opinion pieces of outraged newspaper columnists, or images of protests. The preservation of civic archives and deeds of property ownership, among other types of records, means that historians of more recent periods can draw on a rich store of documentary evidence both to reconstruct the effects of urban development and to uncover attitudes towards it. Such material is not available in the study of Roman cities, and the few comments about these matters by ancient authors that have come down to us comprise snippets rather than entire pictures. Instead, scholarship derives its understanding of ancient urbanism overwhelmingly from the archaeological record. The problem with this is that if there was disagreement about the appropriateness of a project at the time of its construction, then the archaeological remains of the building tend only to present the winning side.Footnote 5
Consequently, and not unreasonably, evidence of the construction of new public buildings in antiquity has typically been seen by scholars as evidence of positive investment in a city. Urban development is taken to be an indicator of a city’s vibrancy, relevance, ambition, and economic health. Lavish new temples, fora, baths, and entertainment venues are cast as positive projects that would have been welcomed by the inhabitants. The prevailing model used to discuss this is euergetism. Succinctly, it is the premise that leading citizens distributed part of their wealth to communities in the form of public gifts.Footnote 6 With specific regard to the subject under discussion here, it is the understanding that members of the Roman elite could acquire prestige, popularity, and political advantage through patronizing the construction of public buildings and infrastructure projects, because the inhabitants of cities are presumed to have responded positively to such acts of civic munificence.Footnote 7 But there is an alternative perspective.
This paper does not start from the proposition that public buildings were necessarily unwelcome or unpopular in ancient Rome; rather it recognizes the probability that there were some people who lost out when such projects were undertaken and would therefore have been hostile to them. It aims to establish the detrimental consequences that accompanied the construction of projects that are traditionally considered to be beneficial. The argument is not seeking to overturn the premise of euergetism, but it does attempt to nuance it, bringing in the societal and personal effects that the construction of such monuments had, and countering the overwhelming tendency in scholarship to view them purely in terms of architectural or political achievement. Through a combination of archaeological and what is often scant textual evidence, the paper tries to find and reconstruct a largely lost and too often ignored perspective.
The discussion primarily focuses on the situation in Rome, which as the capital of the Empire received unparalleled patronage and investment from its leaders. The type of activity this study is concerned with is most apparent in periods of growth in an already well-established urban centre, when people want to build new monuments but space is at a premium, meaning that the potential for controversy and hostility is at its greatest. Therefore, the main chronological focus is from the first century bc to the end of the third century ad, although the subject is relevant to places and periods beyond this.
By ‘public buildings’ I am referring to types of buildings that are traditionally thought of by scholars, and commonly presented by ancient authorities, as being of benefit to the populace and the city: baths, fora, entertainment complexes, temples, porticoes, basilicas, and the like. This categorization is less concerned with whether a building was commissioned or financed by a private individual (as opposed to the civic authorities), and more about whether its intended users and beneficiaries were the wider public.Footnote 8 We might reasonably expect that the construction of these types of buildings was intended to be popular by design, on account of the function they served, the amenities they provided, their positive impact on the appearance of the city, and representational value as markers of its enhancement. Moreover, the boastfulness of patrons regarding their construction of such buildings is a clear indicator that they anticipated their benefactions to have broad appeal.
This line of research aims to advance a new way of approaching the ancient city, drawing attention to inhabitants whose voices are now largely absent and emphasizing the relevance of the individual. It highlights how civic benefaction and architectural patronage should not always be thought of in positive terms, underscoring the potential ways in which people lost out as public buildings went up.
Beneath the ancient monuments
Displayed behind plexiglass in an underpass of Rome’s metro station Repubblica are the uninspiring remains of what is labelled a Roman ‘residential building’ (Figures 1a–b). Comprising a series of travertine blocks, the structure is dated to the ‘imperial period’ and is possibly one of several known residences that were destroyed when the enormous artificial platform (356 by 316 metres) of the Baths of Diocletian was constructed over it between the end of third and the beginning of the fourth century ad. A hundred metres to the north, underneath the floor of the octagonal-shaped hall of the baths, which now houses the Museo dell’Arte Salvata, excavations revealed further structures dating to the late first century ad, which were also levelled and covered over when the baths were constructed.Footnote 9 Under the southern exedra of the thermae, a house was found with stamped water pipes indicating that it had once belonged to a certain Cornelia Volusi Saturnini.Footnote 10 Indeed, the existence of a substantial district on the site is further indicated by the dedicatory inscription of the baths, the composer of which felt the need to emphasize that the emperors had ‘bought the pre-existing buildings’ upon which the bath was sited.Footnote 11 That the purchase featured so prominently in the monumental text is suggestive of its substantial scale (Figure 2).
a–b. The ancient ‘residential’ building in Repubblica Metro Station, Rome (photographs by author).
The approximate extent of the Baths of Diocletian (shaded) over the modern city, with Termini railway station at the bottom right. (Map Data from OpenStreetMap, adapted by author and reproduced under the Open Database License https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright).
This was not an isolated case: residences of the first, second, and third centuries have been found under the early-fourth-century Baths of Constantine;Footnote 12 a substantial Hadrianic-era house was discovered some ten metres below the Baths of Caracalla (ad 217) (Figure 3);Footnote 13 and on the Aventine Hill a set of baths identified as those of the emperor Decius (ad 249–52) sit atop an early-second-century ad domus.Footnote 14
Hadrianic-era house discovered beneath the Baths of Caracalla. (Photograph by John Henry Parker (1867), reproduced by kind permission, British School at Rome Research Collections, John Henry Parker Collection, jhp-0725. https://digitalcollections.bsr.ac.uk).
Leaving baths to one side, let us consider other public monuments. The forums of Caesar (dedicated 46 bc), Augustus (2 bc), Vespasian (also known as the Temple of Peace, ad 75), Nerva (ad 97), and Trajan (ad 113) were all at least partially constructed over residential buildings. As were the latter emperor’s ‘Markets’, a modern and deceptively modest description of a vast network of streets, rooms, and halls built against the Quirinal Hill. Indeed, given that the creation of this multi-storey complex entailed the complete removal of part of that hill, then we must assume that many more structures have irrecoverably vanished. Preserved below the Trajanic structure, the broken remains of a tuff well that once belonged to a Republican-era domus is a visible if meagre testimony of this.Footnote 15
In the forum Romanum itself, the lawcourts of the Basilica Sempronia (170 bc), forerunner of the Basilica Julia, replaced a series of domūs, including that which had once belonged to the famous general Scipio Africanus.Footnote 16 Likewise, when holding the office of censor, Cato the Elder acquired two houses and four shops as the site for the Basilica Porcia, in the face of opposition from the Senate (184 bc).Footnote 17 Overlooking the forum, within the imposing tuff structure identified as the ‘Tabularium’, the presence of mosaic floors attest to the edifices which preceded, and were supplanted by, the enigmatic monument in the 70s bc.Footnote 18
This is far from an exhaustive list of residential buildings that have been found underneath monuments in Rome. But the examples underscore that the construction of many of the most significant public buildings in the city necessitated the demolition of private residences and, on occasion, entire neighbourhoods.
These houses predominantly appear to have been what we might characterize as either ‘elite’ or, at least, ‘well-to-do’, with large rooms, mosaic floors, and frescoed walls. However, whether this is a meaningful observation or a happenstance of the surviving evidence is not apparent, as it is more difficult to find the urban poor in such conditions because they have left so few permanent and conspicuous traces in the cityscape.Footnote 19 Whether it was the better-off or not who lost their property to the construction of new public buildings, such occurrences potentially represented a profoundly lamentable state of affairs for such residents, made even more so, given the importance sometimes attached by Romans to ancestral property. Losing one’s home could be a public as well as a personal and emotional injury, as evident from Cicero’s distress at having his mansion on the Palatine Hill demolished while in exile:
What is more sacred, what more inviolably hedged by every kind of sanctity, than the home of every individual citizen?Footnote 20
Willing sellers
Of course, we need not assume that the response to these houses being replaced by public buildings was always necessarily negative. In more recent times, although stories of residents being forced out of their property by unscrupulous developers and faceless government officials abound, some people are happy to sell up and move if they are appropriately compensated. It is probable that similar situations occurred in ancient Rome. Julius Caesar reputedly paid over 100,000,000 sesterces to acquire the land for his forum. Over a century later, Pliny the Elder and Suetonius still deemed this figure noteworthy, from which we can infer that it was considered a lot.Footnote 21 Writing at an early stage of the project, Cicero remarks in a letter to Atticus that he and a colleague Oppius, on behalf of Caesar, had already spent 60,000,000 sesterces buying the land (presumably houses) for the forum because ‘the claims of private owners could not be satisfied for less’.Footnote 22 It seems that the owners held out for a good price, but were nevertheless willing sellers.Footnote 23
It is also possible that certain areas selected for redevelopment were occupied by underused or even ruinous structures, making their transformation into public amenities more likely to have been unequivocally welcomed. An example of this situation, albeit outside of Rome, is the subject of a petition (c. ad 110–112) from Pliny the Younger in his role as governor of the province of Bithynia, modern-day Turkey, to the emperor Trajan. Pliny suggests that a new bathing complex could occupy the sight of an abandoned house, which had been bequeathed decades before to the imperial family. He argues:
We could thus remove this eyesore and embellish the city without pulling down any existing structure; indeed, we should be restoring and improving what time has destroyed.Footnote 24
The example illustrates how the presence of residential structures underneath public buildings need not necessarily indicate that the owners of the former were forced out. Moreover, Pliny’s explicit consideration that by using an abandoned plot it was not then necessary to tear down any existing buildings is indicative of an awareness on the parts of Pliny and Trajan – who in his reply also emphasizes the importance of the site being unoccupied – that had this not been the case it was notably (surely predictably) more problematic.Footnote 25
It is rarely possible to see in the surviving archaeological evidence that analogous circumstances applied to any of the known examples where public buildings were constructed on top of houses in Rome. It is certainly possible that, following one of the fires which periodically swept the city, damaged buildings were abandoned and would have been more readily available for redevelopment.Footnote 26 However, the occurrence most commented upon by ancient authors of an emperor capitalizing on a such a disaster to reshape the city is Nero using the fire of ad 64 to acquire land for his private rather than public building projects.Footnote 27
Other instances where the replacement of residential buildings with public ones is more easily cast as a positive acts were when the property had been explicitly gifted to, as opposed to expropriated by, a city or emperor. The wealthy and infamously cruel senator Vedius Pollio bequeathed his enormous house in Rome to the emperor Augustus. It was subsequently demolished and became the site of the Porticus of Livia, a colonnaded recreational public space in the Subura, dedicated by the emperor’s wife.Footnote 28 Ovid presents the transfer of land use in glowing terms:
…where Livia’s colonnade now stands, there once stood a huge palace. The single house was like the fabric of a city; it occupied a space larger than that occupied by the walls of many a town. It was levelled with the ground, not on a charge of treason, but because its luxury was deemed harmful.Footnote 29
Interestingly, the imagery used by Ovid to describe the house of Pollio is notably similar to that used later by Pliny the Elder, Suetonius (quoting a lampooning verse), and Martial, when describing the emperor Nero’s vast residence, the Domus Aurea:
Yet how small was the theatre in comparison with Nero’s Golden Palace which goes all round the city!Footnote 30
Twice have we seen the whole city girdled by imperial palaces, those of Gaius [Caligula] and Nero, the latter’s palace, to crown all, being indeed a House of Gold.Footnote 31
Rome is becoming one house; off with you to the city of Veii, Romans!
If that house does not soon seize upon Veii as well.Footnote 32
Where the starry colossus sees the constellations at close range and lofty scaffolding rises in the middle of the road, once gleamed the odious halls of a cruel monarch, and in all Rome there stood a single house. Where rises before our eyes the august pile of the Amphitheatre [the Colosseum], was once Nero’s lake. Where we admire the warm baths, a speedy gift, a haughty tract of land had robbed the wretched of their dwellings (abstulerat miseris tecta superbus ager). Where the Claudian colonnade unfolds its wide-spread shade, was the outermost part of the palace’s end. Rome has been restored to herself and, under your rule, Caesar, the pleasances that belonged to a master now belong to the people.Footnote 33
Although Nero’s palace was also condemned for reasons of its material opulence and the idea that it subverted the natural order by bringing the countryside into the city, the consistent criticism, present in all of the passages above, concerns its vast scale. So, too, Tacitus dryly notes that the rebuilding of Rome after the fire was carried out in ‘the districts spared by the palace’.Footnote 34 It is reasonably argued by scholars that the particular reason why the scale of the Domus Aurea was seen as so problematic was because it was a private building project – a tyrant’s personal indulgence, as is articulated most clearly in Martial’s words above. But focusing primarily on the palace being the nominal abode of one man as the reason its scale was so provocative risks overshadowing the more general issue of large-scale building projects being controversial in and of themselves, whether public or private.
The Domus Aurea was almost incomprehensibly large. Estimates range from its having occupied a space of 50 to 100 hectares, with most settling for a middle ground of some 70–80 hectares.Footnote 35 By comparison, the walled area of Pompeii is 66 hectares, making the ancient authors’ references to the palace as a city rather apt. While no public building project in ancient Rome was quite on the scale of the Domus Aurea, certain major undertakings did have a similarly massive impact on the cityscape. This is especially the case if we consider that much of the Domus Aurea included what was already imperial-owned property (the urban core that Nero newly acquired was substantially less than the full extent of the palace). The platform of the Baths of Caracalla took up over 10 hectares, the Baths of Diocletian slightly more, and the imperial forums collectively, including the Temple of Peace, about 12 hectares. These are enormous urban interventions and it is not unreasonable to think that Martial’s complaint about the wretched inhabitants (miseri) losing their roofs to the Domus Aurea – itself noteworthy because it shows a concern over such an issue – is just as relevant to large-scale public building projects.
The distinction, as noted above, is between structures that are nominally for the public benefit and those for personal indulgence, but on some level the actuality on the ground is the same – large areas of the urban environment being redeveloped and residential districts being replaced. The question of who actually benefited from extravagant public monuments is raised by Alex Scobie in his study on slums in the Roman World:
If an unskilled worker was by the very nature of his housing denied privacy for the most fundamental life functions, if he could never be sure of adequate food and clothing, and if he lacked resources to gain access to formal education and the protection of the law, what compensation would he be likely to derive from costly public buildings which reflected the maiestas imperii, or from a few public parks? […] Lavishly ornamented public baths, temples, and amphitheatres no doubt produced in the poor a momentary forgetfulness of fetid, cramped, living quarters, but could hardly be considered as genuine substitutes for what must justifiably be called slums.Footnote 36
Regardless of whether one fully agrees with Scobie’s characterization of the slum-like conditions for the urban poor in ancient Rome, his observation that not everyone benefited from benefaction is pertinent to the present discussion. If you are losing your home, does it matter if it is being replaced with a private or a nominally public building?
As already mentioned, from the archaeology alone it is very difficult to ascertain if the residences that are found underneath public buildings were sold willingly or not, and we should entertain the possibility that in some cases, for the reasons set out above, their demolition caused little controversy. But this is unlikely to be the full picture. Monuments such as the baths and the imperial forums cover a large area, and even if some people were happy to sell up it does not follow that all were.
Moreover, the owners of the properties were not necessarily the people who actually lived in them. Whereas landlords might have profited, tenants lost their homes and with no compensation. The number of renters dwarfed the number of property owners in imperial Rome. While in theory tenants enjoyed considerable legal protection on certain matters, this did not preclude landlords selling the property from under them (nor could the majority of renters probably afford to employ lawyers to fight their case anyway).Footnote 37 Ronald Newbold draws on nineteenth-century comparisons to suggest that the sudden decrease in available housing stock resulting from urban redevelopment in ancient Rome would have caused an increase in rents and overcrowding, as people continued to want to live as near as possible to their old neighbourhood.Footnote 38 Clearly, the potential effects of replacing houses with monuments extends beyond what is archaeologically visible, and it is to other evidence that we must look to detect traces of opposition.
Opposition and hostility
The Greek senator and historian Cassius Dio details how in 45 bc Julius Caesar began the construction of a monumental theatre:
[Caesar] laid the foundations [of the theatre], but did not finish it; it was Augustus who later completed it and named it for his nephew, Marcus Marcellus. But Caesar was blamed for tearing down the dwellings and temples on the site, and likewise because he burned up the statues, which were almost all of wood, and because on finding large hoards of money he appropriated them all.Footnote 39
Our understanding of the theatre as planned by Caesar is complicated. Suetonius, the only other source for Caesar having intended to construct a theatre, does not explicitly equate it to the one built by Augustus, which still stands today (Figure 4).Footnote 40 Suetonius also states that it was against the slope of the Capitoline Hill, yet the Theatre of Marcellus, as realized, is some 50 metres distant. Although scholars have often opted to follow Dio’s account that Augustus completed the Caesarian project, a convincing case has also been made that the Theatre of Caesar was an entirely separate structure, abandoned after his assassination.Footnote 41 It is plausible that Dio, writing over two centuries after the event, is here conflating accounts about two distinct projects and it would not be the only instance of him making this type of error.Footnote 42
The Theatre of Marcellus, built by the emperor Augustus (photograph by author).
In either case, conflation does not equal invention and there is no obvious reason to reject Dio’s assertion that Caesar was criticized for destroying houses and temples while clearing the site. The remarks about the burning of statues and the finding of hoards of money seem far-fetched, but are not out of place in the context of a hostile tradition, where rumours which reinforce perceived character flaws of the individual under attack (here Caesar’s impiety and avarice) become attached to actual events. The enormous political tensions that surrounded Caesar and his interventions in Rome’s urban fabric at the time the theatre was being constructed created conditions ripe for rumour and hostile exaggeration.Footnote 43 Therefore, despite the complications of this passage, it is reasonable to accept the core particulars – that houses and temples were demolished in order to build the theatre and that this action was criticized.
Even if the Theatre of Caesar did not correspond to the Theatre of Marcellus, certain details about the latter building are also relevant for our discussion. Firstly, we know from Pliny the Elder that the construction of the emperor Augustus’ theatre entailed the destruction of the Temple of Pietas.Footnote 44 While it might be seen that this is confirmation of Dio’s story about Caesar’s actions and, therefore, an indication that the two buildings are indeed the same, it is probable that building any theatre in the locations would have necessitated land clearances, and further underscores the basic point that all such projects had consequences for the existing fabric of cities.
Augustus’ comments about the theatre in his Res Gestae – an autobiographical list of achievements purposely published after his death – are also revealing:
On ground purchased for the most part from private owners (in solo magna ex parte a privatis empto) I built the theatre near the temple of Apollo which was to bear the name of my son-in-law Marcus Marcellus.Footnote 45
The qualification that ‘most’ of the land was purchased from individuals possibly indicates that other parts were public property (including, presumably, the aforementioned Temple of Pietas). Yet why did Augustus feel the need to include this detail in the Res Gestae in the first place? On the hand one it is an assertion about his generosity, consistent with other statements about how much he spent on civic improvements. But the specificity also perhaps reveals an anxiety to stress that he acquired the land in the proper fashion. Indeed, this concern is similarly present in the preceding statement of the Res Gestae about another of Augustus’ major projects.
On my own ground (in privato solo) I built the temple of Mars Ultor and the Augustan Forum from the spoils of war.Footnote 46
His need again to account for the land on which the structures were built can be read in light of a remark by Suetonius:
He made his forum narrower than he had planned, because he did not venture to eject the owners of the neighbouring houses.Footnote 47
It is an indication that the expropriation of land for such public works was potentially problematic. For although the comment comes amid a list of praiseworthy actions by Augustus and is presented as an example of his magnanimity and judiciousness, its very inclusion and noteworthiness implies that not only was Augustus keen to stress this fact, but that other builders had not been so considerate.
In physical terms, this detail has been used to explain the kink and constricted space in the northeastern section of the tuff firewall at the rear of the forum of Augustus (Figure 5).Footnote 48 Yet it is also worth considering that Augustus’ reluctance to force people to sell their property was a reason behind the inordinate length of time it took to build the forum. The Temple of Mars Ultor – the centrepiece of the forum – was vowed in 42 bc, but the complex was not officially inaugurated until 2 bc.Footnote 49 The Romans generally did not engage in ‘cathedral projects’ and even major undertakings were typically finished in years, not decades (Augustus’ frustration that the construction of the forum was dragging on is explicit in an anecdote recorded by Macrobius).Footnote 50 Whilst allowing for the periodic civil wars of the 30s bc, there is no material reason why the forum should have taken so long – a number of major and, collectively, equally grand buildings were constructed by Augustus in Rome between these dates and in a much shorter time, including the Temple of Apollo Palatinus, his Mausoleum, and the Theatre of Marcellus to name three.Footnote 51
The firewall of the forum of Augustus (exterior), showing the irregular angle at the northeastern end. (G. B. Piranesi, Veduta degli avanzi del Foro di Nerva, l’arcade et la muraille (1757). The Metropolitian Museum of Art [55.567.7], https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).
Instead, perhaps it was the difficulty in legally and unforcedly acquiring the land that held up the development. After much of London was reduced to charred ruins in the Great Fire of 1666, elaborate plans to rebuild the city could not be implemented partly because of private property law.Footnote 52 In 1930s Germany, Nazi plans for rebuilding the centre of Berlin were held up by the difficulty in purchasing properties that were to be demolished.Footnote 53 Even in a developing autocracy, as Augustan Rome was, the rule of law, particularly concerning property rights, can remain very powerful.
In the modern world we find instances of private owners refusing to sell in the face of development, such as the now iconic Spiegelhalter’s jewellery and clock shop in East London or the so-called ‘nail houses’ of twenty-first century China (Figure 6).Footnote 54 Suetonius’ comment above on the forum of Augustus indicates that there were also ‘holdouts’ in ancient Rome. In the 170s bc, an aqueduct to Rome planned by the censors Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior was even abandoned apparently when the senator Marcus Licinius Crassus refused to allow it to cross his land outside of the city.Footnote 55 Rabun Taylor has argued persuasively that the superfluously circuitous route taken by the Aqua Virgo (dedicated 19 bc) as it approaches Rome was possibly because of difficulties Marcus Agrippa had in acquiring land rights for a more direct route.Footnote 56
Spiegelhalter’s shop (white, centre) wedged between the neoclassical façade of the later Wickham’s department store. (Photograph by SilkTork (Wikimedia), reproduced under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GNU_Free_Documentation_License,_version_1.2).
The question of expropriation, compulsory purchase, or eminent domain – as the process is variously called today – is a vexed one in Roman law, and scholars disagree as to its existence outside of extraordinary circumstances (for example, the construction of city walls, seizure of property due to treason, civil war, and the breakdown of legal norms).Footnote 57 Even if it did exist, it appears to have been used sparingly, with patrons instead building monuments on land they already possessed or legally purchased, and which they then often gifted to the people when the project was complete.Footnote 58 Rome’s rulers were opportunistic urban planners: the Porticus of Livia, the Baths of Titus and Trajan, the Colosseum, the Temple of Venus and Rome, the Temple of Apollo Palatinus, among many other public buildings, were all constructed, at least partially, on their own property. Doing so was not only cheaper, but avoided drawn-out legal battles and the potential for appearing to engage in perceived tyrannical behaviour by pressuring people off their land.
This did not mean that houses were not expropriated in specific contexts. Civil wars were exceptional times and during the late Republic the ‘proscription’ of citizens entailed the seizure of property.Footnote 59 That Augustus had possibly acquired his house on the Palatine Hill through such means in the 40s bc might explain his later keenness to emphasize how he did not dispossess unwilling sellers in more normal times when building his forum.Footnote 60 Similarly, it is possible that the emphasis placed on the emperors having built the Baths of Diocletian on land they bought, as detailed in the monumental inscription, could have been in response to the probable compulsory expropriation of land around the city two decades earlier, when the enormous nineteen-kilometre circuit of defensive walls was hurriedly erected.Footnote 61 That said, even here it is notable how much was built on imperial-owned or ‘state’ property. Perhaps, too, the fact that the emperor Trajan (r. 98–117) highlighted how his new aqueduct was built on his own land, before he then donated it to the city, should be read in the context of his predecessor Domitian (r. 82–96) being reputedly rapacious in his acquisition and hoarding of others’ property.Footnote 62 As Pliny the Younger says of living under the emperor Domitian: ‘In those days it was fatal for anyone around the emperor to own a spacious house or attractive property.’ Stories of ‘bad’ emperors obtaining property by bringing jumped-up charges of treason (maiestas) against owners abound.Footnote 63 Yet it is important to note that, irrespective of the falsity of the accusations, the seizure was still carried out through a legal process whereby the condemned forfeited their land (potentially even bequeathing it to the emperor to avoid further persecution of their family) rather than it simply being taken at will.
In republican and imperial Rome, the law afforded property owners’ protections. Rome’s rulers could not simply build where they wanted, and formal mechanisms for expropriation in urban centres on the scale of those possessed by some modern states appear not to have existed. Of course, emperors and magistrates could draw on vast resources of money and lawyers to buy and pressure people out, and we should not think it was easy or even likely for people to hold out against an emperor’s agents. It is hard to imagine that projects such as the enormous bathing or forum complexes could be completed in full without some degree of incentives or coercion. For emperors, it was presumably possible to make someone an offer they could not refuse, but this does not appear to have been a conspicuous recourse. Perhaps more pertinent is the observation by Cicero in regard to rural property that ‘there is nothing which cannot be bought, if you will only give as much as the seller asks’.Footnote 64
Other consequences
Augustus might not have forced people to sell their property to make way for his forum, but he did build a thirty-metre-high wall next to their houses (Figure 5). The Temple of Mars Ultor was protected to its rear by an enormous tuff barrier intended to shield the expensive monuments within from any fires that broke out in the residential Subura district behind. But what of the inhabitants on the outside of the wall, now forced to live in the shadow of the monument?
Complaints about skyscrapers blocking light and obscuring views are commonplace in modern cities and it seems there were analogous gripes in ancient Rome, too. Light, sun, air, and views were central considerations in what constituted good architecture and good living.Footnote 65 In Pompeii, an inscription from the end of the first century bc records that compensation to the tune of 3,000 sesterces was paid by the duumvir magistrates for blocking off light to a property when making modifications to the adjacent Temple of Apollo.Footnote 66 Roman law, as found in the Institutes of Gaius and the Digest of Justinian, indicates that there was a right to light. As summarized by Olivia Robinson: ‘Literary and epigraphic texts make the same point, that life must be liveable, even if not comfortable.’Footnote 67
The wider point is that the construction of a public monument affects not only the area on which it is immediately sited, but also has a potentially detrimental impact on those who live around it. The imposition of a complex as large as a forum or bath disrupts neighbourhoods and breaks street networks. The construction of the Baths of Diocletian eliminated a substantial part of the road, the vicus Longus. Although a new route between the Alta Semita and vicus Collis Viminalis appears to have been laid to help mitigate any arising traffic or circulation issues, no doubt people living and working at either end of the now cut vicus Longus were adversely affected.Footnote 68 Likewise, the creation of the various imperial forums entailed not only the destruction of residential areas, but also the removal or rerouting of numerous pre-existing roads and streets.Footnote 69 For example, excavations in the early twentieth century revealed that the area of the Column of Trajan sits at an oblique angle directly over a paved road.Footnote 70 At Pompeii it is possible to see how the increasing monumentalization of the forum in the first century ad altered the existing access routes. Construction of the Temple of Genius Augusti blocked the street now called Vicolo degli Scheletri, as the Sanctuary of the Public Lares did the Vicolo del Balcone Pensile (Figure 7). Residents of these streets no longer had the prestige or convenience of proximity and access to the forum; businesses that were once on a through road were now in a dead-end alley. Custom for the bar on the corner of Vicolo del Balcone and Vicolo di Eumachia was surely affected, now having no immediate link to the busiest public space in the city.
Plan of Pompeii with the truncated Vicolo degli Scheletri and Vicolo del Balcone Pensile circled with dashed lines. (Map Data from OpenStreetMap, adapted by author and reproduced under the Open Database License (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright).
The issues might seem micro: what is one person’s bar compared to a temple which beautifies and divinely protects the city; what are a few families’ houses against equipping the populace with a new bathing complex? But these are not small matters for the individuals who were affected. NIMBYism is commonly employed as a pejorative term, but such movements often arise out of people’s genuine concern that urban development is going to make their lives worse – somebody loses out, and the aim of this investigation is to identify how people might have done so in ancient contexts, not to judge if it was justified in the cause of the greater good.
The full effects of urban redevelopment often go beyond either what can be discerned from the archaeological record or is revealed in ancient surviving texts, but comparative examples can aid our thinking. The work of Jane Jacobs is instructive for considering disruption to neighbourhoods, and in her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she quotes a New York Times article about the effect of ‘regeneration’ on communities:
Even a ghetto, after it has remained a ghetto for a period of time, builds up its social structure and this makes for more stability, more leadership, more agencies for helping the solution of public problems. But when slum clearance enters an area, it does not merely rip out slatternly houses. It uproots the people. It tears out the churches. It destroys the local businessman. It sends the neighbourhood lawyer to new offices downtown and it mangles the tight skein of community friendships and group relationships beyond repair. It drives old-timers from their broken-down flats or modest homes and forces them to find new and alien quarters. And it pours into a neighbourhood hundreds and thousands of new faces.Footnote 71
Reflecting on this, in the study of ancient cities, partly due to the limitations of our evidence, there is a tendency to talk about populations in general terms as ‘inhabitants’ and ‘the people’. Collective, abstract labels mask the fact that a city is made up of individuals who are differently affected by, and probably have differing opinions about, developments in the urban fabric. When attempting to understand perceptions of buildings in either the ancient or modern world it is relevant to keep this in mind, especially as our scarcity of source material for the ancient world allows us to slip too easily into assuming that there was a singular ‘Roman’ attitude to urban developments and not look for the absent voices or even acknowledge their possible existence. It is somewhat analogous to what James Scott saw as the way that twentieth- century state planners can invent ‘standardized citizens’ who have ‘for the purposes of planning exercise, no gender, no tastes, no history, no opinions or original ideas, no traditions, and no distinctive personalities […] They have none of the particular, situated, and contextual attributes that one would expect of any population and that we, as a matter of course, always attribute to elites’.Footnote 72
It is in the spirit of there being two or more sides to a story that we might consider Martial’s praise of the Flavian emperor Domitian for ‘improving’ the streets of Rome and his complaints about the vendors that crowded them:
The audacious retailers had appropriated the entire city; no threshold kept within its own bounds. You [Domitian] bade the narrow streets expand and what had lately been a track became a road. No column is girt with chained flagons, and the praetor is not forced to walk through the mud. The razor is not drawn blindly in a dense crowd, nor does the grimy cook shop monopolize the whole street. The barber, the taverner, the cook, the butcher keep to their own thresholds. Now it is Rome, it used to be a big shop.Footnote 73
Martial’s conclusion is noticeably similar to his assertion that under Nero all Rome was a single house before she was restored to herself by the Flavians. For Martial, Domitian’s clearing of the streets is a restoration of orderliness. But what of the vendors themselves? They presumably did not favour this action. Similarly, we might assume that some of the customers who frequented the establishments, and so necessitated their expansion into the streets in the first place, might have taken a different view of the situation from Martial and the authorities.
In modern Rome, during the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants and bars were given permission to expand seating areas into the streets and parking spaces outside of their premises, allowing more patrons to sit in the open air and lessen the risk of viral contagion. The constructions proved a positive effect for businesses and were popular with customers, enhancing the street life. Following the end of the crisis, however, some residents in some neighbourhoods wanted the public areas, particularly the car-parking spaces, returned (Figure 8). At the time of writing, heated debate about the merits and detriments of the outdoor seating areas continues and is unlikely to stop. Indeed, competing claims over the occupation of public space by businesses that themselves serve the public is nothing new nor limited to Rome. It cannot be easily or definitely resolved because the needs and wants of those who live on and use streets change over time and can also be a matter of perception. In the epigram above, Martial saw the street as unchecked chaos, but another person observing the same scene might have seen a vibrant and thriving city, only they did not write a poem about it, or at least not one that has come down to us.
An abandoned outdoor restaurant seating area, Rome 2023 (photo by author).
Conclusion and new directions
That some people lost out when buildings were put up in ancient Rome, including those buildings that are presented as nominally beneficial, is a simple proposition. The potentially detrimental consequences that urban redevelopment can have on individuals and communities is apparent in examples across the modern world. Nevertheless, it remains an under-considered phenomenon in certain historical contexts (particularly pre-modern). This article has sought to bring the subject to the fore and open up a new line of discussion in the study of ancient architecture and urbanism.
We can see how many of the public buildings of ancient Rome were constructed over earlier residences, streets, and districts. While noting that this does not always mean that those who once owned or occupied such buildings were necessarily forced out, there is evidence of opposition to such schemes, which was probably much more widespread than our limited surviving source material allows. This questions the generally accepted narrative of urban redevelopment being favourably received, as propagated by the ancient builders themselves and the surviving archaeological evidence encourages us to assume.
As stated previously, this research does not start from the proposition that public buildings were necessarily unwelcome or unpopular in ancient Rome; rather it recognizes the probability that there were some people who lost out when such projects were undertaken and would therefore have been hostile to them. Importantly, acknowledging this allows us to move away from thinking of the ancient audience or the Roman public as a single unit. Perceiving that a monument was not intended to be appreciated by everyone (and its construction might even be rejected by some), we can then ask who, more specifically, was it built for? Therefore, we might also refine our understanding of the motivations of the elite in their patronization of public buildings – rather than saying it’s done for the ‘people’ in a general sense, we should think more about target audiences.Footnote 74
At times, broad brush strokes have been used to paint the picture presented above. Little distinction has been made of the potentially important difference in political conditions between the Republican and autocratic Imperial eras. More work is needed to discern whether the situation changes over time and has variables in different locations. Likewise, there are other ways that people might have lost out to urban redevelopment than I have been able to address here. For example, the protracted and enormous amount of construction activity that occurred in Rome meant that parts of the city resembled a building site, and there is evidence for inhabitants complaining about this constant disruption.Footnote 75 Monuments also drained financial resources that could have been put to other uses, with costs in some cases spiralling out of control, and people questioning the wisdom of undertaking such works.Footnote 76 Finally, for inhabitants to lose out, it is not necessary for older structures to be demolished to make way for new buildings, as previously open areas might also be built on. The construction of monuments occupied and enclosed land that might be deemed common (even if only in a de facto rather than de jure sense) and informal activities that had previously taken place in these areas were displaced. While the presence of a new portico on Rome’s once grassy Campus Martius might have provided a pleasant and accessible recreational arena for meeting and walking, it was nevertheless a controlled space. Moreover, you can’t graze sheep on marble paving.Footnote 77
