God's Gold (22 page)

Italy in spring is an absolute delight with its alluring sunshine, flowers in bloom, and lightly caressing winds—the scents of promise. As my plane banked over Rome's Ciampino airport in May 2005, a smattering of bloodred poppies stained motorway turnouts, quarry edges, and backyards, welcoming us to Arcadia. Rome's ancient agricultural ideals reverberate into the modern day in the form of giant circular haystacks lying idly between runways like giant organic column drums. Gypsies kicked a football across the ancient cornfields, where they had encamped close to a primary artery of communication. Their geography mirrored Rome's ancient foreigners, who lived along the southern banks of the River Tiber, the bustling “airport” of antiquity, where wooden ships served the same role as modern airplanes.

My plans for Rome were simple, but ambitious: to try to reconstruct the route of Vespasian and Titus's triumph in AD 71 (would any of the ancient landmarks even survive, I wondered?); to get a sense of the atmosphere, gravity, excitement, and sorrow of that fateful day; to find out what it was like to be a foreigner in ancient Rome, a society defined by its oppression of barbarians; and to locate the Temple of Peace, where the emperor Vespasian put Jerusalem's Temple treasure on show as war booty and an eternal expression of Rome's status as the global superpower. In truth, I was not especially confident. After all, no one had taken on this daunting task for nearly two thousand years.

The quest would succeed or sink on my ability to locate several key
monuments, major ancient highlights of the spectacular triumph described in Josephus's original text: the Temple of Isis; Octavian's Walks; the Gate of the Pomp; a cluster of theaters; the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and finally the Temple of Peace. Each ancient landmark illuminates a path to a subsequent clue. With my copy of Josephus's
Jewish War,
medieval and modern maps, and numerous photocopies of scholarly literature, I wasted no time before pounding the streets of Rome.

 

T
he triumph of the emperor Vespasian and his son, Titus, was the greatest of the 320 or so that Rome ever celebrated. The event was a meticulously planned theatrical affair deliberately staged around high moments of drama and spectacle steeped in symbolism. As I roamed the backstreets of Rome, piecing together the route of the triumph of AD 71, and as astonishing snapshots of the ancient Triumphal Way emerged from among the hybrid collage of Rome's architecture—the new recycling the old—I was bowled over by Rome's tight planning of the triumph. Timing, locations, scenery, and actors—nothing was left to chance.

Specific gods whose spirits hovered over the fourteen city quarters were courted in their temples of worship before celebrations could commence. Unlike the population of modern cities, who characterize various districts primarily by function (retail, residential, or municipal), the citizens of Rome also referred to its individual quarters according to the nature of their resident gods. When the triumph snaked boisterously across the Field of Mars, hugging the Capitoline Hill and then entering the Forum itself, the gods' local to each district had to be appeased by prayer and sacrifice. To neglect a god was to awaken and set loose harmful spirits. Similarly, the architects of the triumph selected historical landmarks for both their visual impact and their symbolic effect on the expectant hordes enjoying a Roman holiday at the emperor's expense.

Although Vespasian and Titus were each technically entitled to separate triumphs by decree of the Roman Senate, they chose to share the honor, cleverly realizing that this would double the sense of pomp and ceremony. The night before the momentous day, the formalities started.
Josephus claims the entire city turned out, so that within its walls “not one of the immense multitude was left.” The crowds had assembled over the course of the afternoon and early evening in the Field of Mars, ancient Rome's Region IX. This was the most appropriate setting for the event's first act, the starting point from which to set in motion the celebration of a famous military victory. Mars, of course, was Rome's god of war, who had so potently cast his spell over the scarred battlefields of Israel.

The Field of Mars (the Campus Martius) was a vast swathe of low-lying ground encompassing just over a mile from the Capitoline to the River Tiber. Despite being highly susceptible to flooding due to its low-lying terrain, some of Rome's greatest monuments and finest craftsmen were found close to the banks of the river.

A snapshot of its character was captured by the great historian, geographer, and philosopher Strabo (c. 64 BC to c. AD 24). Although to the Romans the term
strabo
generally described someone whose eyes were physically deformed, the scholar was actually a visionary, credited with compiling the first comprehensive geographical encyclopedia of the inhabited world. On the basis of personal travels as far and wide as Ethiopia and Egypt, he subsequently published his seventeen-volume
Geography
between AD 7 and 18.

The
Geography
paints a lively picture of early Roman life in the wide-open spaces of the Field of Mars:

The district was also studded with hot sulfurous springs, ponds, and lush wooded groves, all instilling a uniquely mystical atmosphere. With a dramatic and iconic background of such natural beauty and ancestry, it is no surprise that Vespasian chose the Field of Mars for the start of his triumph. Historically, religiously, and geographically simply nowhere else would do.

But where precisely in the Field of Mars did the celebrations start? Josephus oddly confirms that the night before the great day, Vespasian and Titus did not purify themselves at one of the great shrines of Rome, but at the place of worship of the mystery cult of Isis:

Strange. Why the Iseum? Wouldn't this have been a callous slap in the face of Rome's pantheon of established gods? The worship of Isis arrived up the Tiber in the first century BC on the ships of Alexandrian merchants eager to hang on to their tried and tested domestic gods. According to myth, the god Osiris had ruled over Egypt until his brother Seth severed him into dozens of pieces in a fit of jealousy at his sibling's power. A mourning wife, Isis, managed to recover Osiris's dissected body parts and carry them into her own body to give birth anew to her husband.

Even though the inner workings of this cult remain a mystery, new members certainly participated in initiation rites that replayed the ritual of death and rebirth. Isis was especially popular among slaves and freedmen through her virtue of resurrection, and she welcomed both female priests and the worship of women. The cult grew swiftly in Rome as Isis became a universal mother goddess. By the early fourth century AD
she was Christianity's main competition, and even today icons of the Virgin Mary bear more than a passing resemblance to Roman artistic depictions of Isis.

Mainstream acceptance was one thing, but imperial benediction during a Roman triumph? This mystery ate away at me as I passed the Monument of Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, who became the first king of a unified Italy in 1861. Earlier research had left me in little doubt that nothing still stands of Rome's Temple of Isis. So how do you find a building that was knocked down centuries ago and whose masonry was recycled century after century into medieval, baroque, and Renaissance buildings? Downhearted and not a little frustrated, I racked my brain and set up office on the steps of the Victor Emmanuel monument as statues personifying victory and the sea seemed to laugh at me from their comfortable perches above the city, smugly concealing their secrets.

Surrounded by paperwork, and with my laptop sparked into life, the realization began to dawn that even if the Temple of Isis is nothing more than a memory, its legacy lives on in a meandering trail of Egyptian sculpture. The first trace of this phantom temple is Madam Lucretia, the modern Italian name for the bust of a monumental Roman marble statue of a woman abandoned in a urine-infested corner of the Piazza San Marco. Cloaked in perpetual shadows, she surveys the daily flow of thousands of visitors gasping at the majestic sight of the Victor Emmanuel monument across the road.

Lucretia was moved to this spot around AD 1500 and, despite her high monetary and artistic value as a museum piece, she remains a modern icon. During festivals she is often painted and adorned with carrots, onions, garlands, and ribbons. She remains a much-respected figure of the community, a knowledgeable stone known to “speak” on important occasions. Thus, in 1799 she fell forward on her face to reveal a black ink inscription on her back that declared, “I can't stand it any longer.” Rather than her commentary on the degenerate nature of contemporary society, this exclamation actually reflected the political opinions of a failed attempt to oust the papacy and establish an independent repub
lican government. Ancient Lucretia, it would seem, is a modern medium for social commentary.

This marble madam shows many scars of life's adversities, including heavily eroded hair and facial features, and lead staples that surgically pin her fractured rib cage together. Today she is something of a “Renaissance woman,” a figure of unity standing directly next to the entrance of the United Nations building. Her dress, however, suggests an altogether different ancestry as the Egypt-inspired goddess of Isis, possibly the actual cult statue that adorned her Roman temple in the Field of Mars.

Three minutes' walk away from the Piazza San Marco I discovered that the Egyptian theme of this sector of the Field of Mars continued with the unlikely sight of an Egyptian obelisk carried on the back of a white marble elephant in the center of the Piazza della Minerva. The eighteen-foot-tall red granite obelisk came to light in 1665 in the cloister of the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, whose elegant facade casts a deep shadow across the piazza. Originally erected by the pharaoh Apries in the sixth century BC in Sais, a town of lower Egypt, the emperor Caligula shipped it back to Rome for installation in the Campus Martius's large temple dedicated to Isis and Serapis.

Soon after its discovery, Pope Alexander VII Chigi decided to display the obelisk publicly in the piazza in front of the church, entrusting the design of the monument in 1667 to the genius artist of the baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The elephant was considered an image of great strength, and so symbolized the divine wisdom of a strong mind. An inscription on the statue base cites the personal philosophy of Alexander VII: “A strong mind is necessary to support solid wisdom.” Over time this symbolism faded away, so that by the eighteenth century the elephant was more prosaically known as Minerva's Piglet due to a regrettable perceived resemblance to a pig.

In ancient Egypt obelisks, the Greek for “skewers,” were designed as physical manifestations of the sun god Atum-Ra. The apex represented the starting point of the sun's ray and the center of the sun's power, while the base signified the formless matter that the divine light of the
sun transforms into the cosmos. After being transported to Rome, their original religious function was lost as they became high-prestige artistic expressions of Rome's dominance over her provinces, its peoples, and their gods.

As is so common in Mediterranean cities, towns, and villages, the site of the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in front of Minerva's Piglet literally sits on ancient foundations, in this case the Temple of Isis itself. Nothing of the temple survives today other than the bits of masonry and sculpture that once adorned it and come to light from time to time during building work in the church's precinct. Using a former building as a stone quarry for a later building, of course, is efficient and perfectly logical. Ever since the fourth century AD, however, early Christianity has deliberately rooted thousands of churches over former Roman temples to deliberately seal over and imprison paganism's rampant power. This was the ulterior motive for the destruction of the Temple of Isis.

Walking around the perimeter of the former temple, I realized that the entire structure has indeed been completely devoured by the church, later baroque-period tenement blocks and souvenir stores. Particularly popular are open-fronted shops peddling
gelati—
Isis abandoned in favor of ices. On the far eastern flank of the Roman
insula,
the narrow Via delle Paste is a haven for motor scooter parking. Here the first two courses of masonry aboveground are distinctly Roman. Were the raucous Germans knocking back their drink in the dark lane outside the Bar Miscellanea aware this was once the southeast corner of the Iseum? Here waiters serve vast quantities of beer where the priests of Isis once chanted in mysterious tongues.

Just around the corner from the Piazza della Minerva the heavens opened and in a blinding flash of revelation the reason why Vespasian and Titus really spent the night before the triumph at this spot became blatantly obvious. Josephus, it seems, didn't do his research too well. True, there certainly was a Temple of Isis at this spot two thousand years ago, and as if to hammer home the point, yet another Egyptian obelisk stands in the middle of the Piazza della Rotonda, a needle pointing
heavenward. But Isis and obelisks, I now realized, were a complete red herring.