The New Deal in Old Rome

CHAPTER I

BEGINNING AN ADVENTURE

IT was a drive with Mrs. Haskell over the Pont du Gard in southern France that led to the adventure of this little book. Here was a fine stone bridge surmounted by an aqueduct that crossed the River Gard near Avignon at an elevation of 165 feet above the bed of the stream. The aqueduct was built in the time of Augustus, nineteen hundred years ago. The soaring structure stands a monument to the architectural and artistic ability of Rome. Under its spell I began to consider what sort of civilization had produced it. Then the old problem recurred as to the reasons for the decay of the administrative and engineering genius that had been required to carry out such an achievement so far from the centre of the Roman world.

The journey that had taken us to Avignon continued through southern France and Italy, down the Dalmatian coast, back to Paris, across to England, and north to Hadrian’s Wall that had guarded the Imperial frontier in Britain. The effect was cumulative. I realized as never before that we live in the long shadow of a civilization outwardly as magnificent as that of the present age. This gave new interest to my discovery at the Pont du Gard that Rome had fallen. This phenomenon, I perfectly understood, had attracted the attention of writers from Gibbon down to the present time. But for me it assumed a fresh significance. Returning home full of my discovery, I was discussing it with friends in New York when Katharine Dayton, playwright, told of a talk with the eminent historian Professor James H. Breasted, shortly before his death. She had asked him whether he had discovered any New Deals in the ancient world. “Yes, my dear,” he had replied, “I’ve dug up at least a dozen.”

This observation opened a fascinating field. Old and familiar facts took on a new aspect. Of course, as civilization has advanced, every government has found it necessary to intervene in social and economic affairs; to undertake various collective services, to assume certain obligations to the unfortunate, to set the rules of the game in private enterprise. In the ancient empires, in China, in Egypt, in Greece, and especially in Rome, government through the years had adopted a series of economic policies, some of them strikingly like those of the New Deal. They could not be identified by their modern names by pre-depression historians. But there they were — the Farm Debt Conciliation Committee, Resettlement Administration, Public Works Administration, Food Relief, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Farm Credit Administration, Price-and-Wage Act — one after another of the much-discussed alphabetical agencies. These seemed worth examining to determine their background and development. In spite of profound differences between the Mediterranean world of Rome and the world today, there might be lessons from the experiences of the past.

For such a study, it seemed to me, the reader might find the best introduction in the sort of survey that had led to my own interest in the subject. What sort of civilization was it that rose and fell on the shores of the Mediterranean and through western Europe over a period of a thousand years? Even with the efflux of centuries, the hand of Rome is all over the place. In the Balkans as a boy I had seen stretches of the original Roman pavement of the great highway from Vienna to Constantinople. Now on the recent journey Mrs. Haskell and I inspected fragments of the Roman wall that had enclosed London and looked upon the timbers of a barge that had been part of the busy traffic of the Thames nearly two thousand years ago. Near St. Albans, a few miles north of London, we saw the remains of the ancient theatre of Verulamium, with its oyster bar where young bloods took their girl friends between acts for food and drink. Near by were the handsome mosaic floor and central heating system of a comfortable Romano-British town house.

Driving west from London a hundred miles to Bath, a famous watering-place in Roman times, we looked again at the great Roman bath, its floor still covered with sheets of lead, ten feet by five, from the Roman lead mines in the Mendips. Going by rail to Carlisle, a few miles south of the Scottish border, we drove east along Hadrian’s Wall to the fort and garrison town of Houseteads. The wall was built early in the second century under the direction of the Emperor Hadrian as the first line of defence for the province of Britain. It ran serpent-like over hill and dale more than seventy miles from the Solway on the west coast to the Tyne on the east. Long stretches of it remain. We stood within the foundation walls of the fort — a fort was built every four miles along the wall — and studied the remains of barracks, washroom, latrines, and granaries with elevated floors to keep the wheat off the ground. In Puck of Pook’s Hill Kipling wrote vivid chapters about a Romano-British centurion who was stationed on the wall. His family had lived in Britain for three hundred years or more. “Remember,” said the boy’s father, when the son was talking about his future career, “remember we are people of the Old Stock and our duty is to the Empire. . . . Your place is among the men on the wall.”

“Think of it,” the young officer told Kipling’s English children, describing the wall with its long line of forts and settlements that had grown up around them. “One roaring, rioting, cock-fighting, wolf-baiting, horse-racing town, from Ituna on the west to Segedunum on the cold eastern beach!”

There it had stood, the long frontier settlement, with the characteristics of all frontier settlements down to the rough cow towns of the Western American plains of the nineteenth century.

Britain was conquered by Rome in the middle of the first century and for a longer period than from Plymouth Rock to the New Deal was a Roman province. For nearly three hundred years of that time, from early in the second century to the latter part of the fourth, the country, except in the north, was as peaceful as it is today. A garrison and patrolling force of about nineteen thousand men was kept on the wall. If invaders broke through this first line they encountered troops from the numerous forts built along the north-south highways. The final defence lay in the great legion camps at York and Chester. A third legion camp at Caerleon on the north side of the Severn, not far from the present city of Cardiff, guarded the gate to Wales. All together some fifty-five thousand troops made a barrier from southwest to northeast to protect the civilized southeastern plains. So well was peace maintained that the farm estates off the great highways did not require the moats for defence that were common in the disorders of the Middle Ages. Fine country villas sprang up and the Romanized British squires lived in a comfort and security that were not equalled again until the eighteenth century. In the important matter of central heating modern Britain still lags behind the Roman province. The heating arrangements were destroyed in the barbarian invasions. The barbarians did such a thorough job that not even a memory of furnaces and hot-air pipes was left to warm the British imagination. Only in recent years have bold and adventuresome Englishmen here and there begun to rediscover central heating — what it is and how it works.

This far outpost of the Empire failed to develop a literature of its own and we have to depend largely upon the archæologists for our knowledge of the progress of Roman civilization. But there are occasional interesting references in contemporary writers. It is amazing that a Greek geographer, Strabo, writing nearly two thousand years ago, should have estimated Great Britain as five hundred and fifty miles long, which is not far wrong. “Most of the island,” he says, “is flat and overgrown with forests, although many of the districts are hilly.” Then, as now, the British specialized on hunting-dogs and fogs. “Even on clear days, fogs shut out the sun except for three or four hours at midday.” The modern name Eire, for Ireland, appears in Strabo as lerne, a word of three syllables with the accent on the second. Its inhabitants, he writes, are more savage than the Britons.

The climate impressed the historian Tacitus a century later. He remarks that it was “always damp with rains and overcast with clouds.” Because of the “constant moisture in the atmosphere and the dampness of the soil,” vegetation grew rapidly. It was too cold for olives and grapes, but produced wheat abundantly. The story is told in his biography of his able father-in-law, Agricola, who was sent to Britain to command the Twentieth Legion, stationed at Chester, and later to be governor of the province. The Twentieth was withdrawn, A.D. 401, after a continuous service overseas of 358 years. It would be hard to match this record in military history. In the long Roman period, Latin became the language of the upper classes and even spread through the workers in the cities. In the Guildhall museum in London is preserved a tile upon which a bricklayer had scratched in rather bad Latin a comment on the spree of a fellow worker: “Austalis has been wandering off on his own for the last fortnight.”

It is curious to find the same love of country life in Roman Britain that characterizes England today. The province never was urbanized. The well-to-do Romanized Briton preferred to live in the country, as does the modern Englishman. The remains of five hundred country houses have been found, the residences of the Romano-British squires of the second, third, and fourth centuries.

In Paris, visiting the Cluny Museum, we were shown the baths of a Roman emperor’s palace, one of them a room sixty-five feet long and fifty-nine feet high. Not far away French boys were playing basketball in the Arènes de Lutèce, the reconstructed Roman stadium built in the second century, when Paris was still the Roman Lutetia. Roman remains are conspicuous throughout France, especially in the southern part. At Nîmes pageants are still given in the Roman ampitheatre. A drive of a few miles north from Avignon took us to Orange, with its magnificent triple triumphal arch that has stood for nineteen hundred years, and its fine Roman theatre of the second century. Farther on, in Spain, Segovia is still supplied with water from the Roman aqueduct entering the city across a valley on a double tier of arches half a mile long. The traveller may cross the Tagus River at Alcantara on a massive Roman arched bridge. If he motors over the arid North African plains of Algeria he comes abruptly upon a lonely forest of pillars and a great triumphal arch, remote from settlements. These are the remains of the veterans’ colony of Timgad, established by the Emperor Trajan, A.D. 100.

Sailing down the Dalmatian coast across the Adriatic from Italy, we paused at Pola. Here is a large Roman stadium of the second century, its walls still intact, that would delight any American college athletic association. It would accommodate twenty-three thousand spectators. Farther down the coast we called on Diocletian at his immense country estate at Spalato, now given the atrocious name of Split. Here the Roman Emperor, the country boy who had gone to town and made good, retired early in the fourth century to raise cabbages near the scenes of his boyhood. Within its massive walls hundreds of families still live. Robert Adam, British architect and designer, visited the spectacular remains, was impressed with their magnificence, and returned to London to design Adelphi Terrace in the spirit of the Roman palace. Americans living in comfortable Georgian houses do not realize that their dwellings show the influence of Diocletian’s architects, transmitted through Robert Adam.

From Spalato the traveller may journey seven hundred miles to the east and near Smyrna find a great double-arched Roman aqueduct. Out in the Asiatic desert at Baalbek are the Roman ruins that stunned Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad. Looking at the impressive remains of the vast Temple of the Sun, built by a Roman emperor of the second century, he remarked that “a race of gods or giants must have inhabited Baalbek many a century ago.” Neither gods nor giants carried out the work, but engineers of a great race. What a sweep of empire! Speaking of the splendid cities that were built from Spain to Asia, from North Africa to the Rhine, M. Rostovtzeff says: “Never, not even in the nineteenth century, did men live in such a surrounding of beautiful buildings and monuments as in the first two centuries of the Roman era”.

At the centre of this tremendous human achievement stood the capital. Rome has long been a favourite objective of American tourists. It has become doubly interesting through the competent work of Italian archaeologists under the direction of Mussolini, who had a fine sense of historical values. In the old days the Forum and the Palatine hill were obscured by a rabbit warren of slums. Today we may pause before the huge mass of the Victor Emmanuel monument where the ancient Great North Road, now the Corso, enters the Piazza Venezia. It was the famous Flaminian Way, called within the city the Via Lata, or Broadway. To the southwest is the new Via del Mare, which connects with the motor road to the port of Ostia. To the southeast stretches the broad new Via dell’ Impero, which gives an unobstructed view of the Colosseum in the distance. On either side are the remains of the business district of old Rome, with important additions revealed through the Mussolini excavations. It must be borne in mind that the surface of Rome has risen a foot or more a century through the accumulation of dust and debris. This accumulation is being cleared away from famous buildings to give them their proper setting. Thus the massive tomb of Augustus, in which we attended a symphony concert a few years ago, has been freed from encrusting buildings, and the ground about it excavated to the old city level. Familiar to all tourists is the Pantheon, rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian. Its dome, 142 feet in diameter, is 142 feet above the pavement. Yet it stands with the concrete as perfect as when it was poured eighteen hundred years ago. The baths of Caracalla, built early in the third century, are now used for summer opera. Twenty-five hundred performers can be accommodated on the stage and there is seating capacity for more than twenty thousand spectators, all within the ancient walls. A bridge across the Tiber to the island, the Pons Fabricius, erected in 62 B.C., is still in use, as is the bridge that Hadrian threw across the river near his mausoleum, the Castel Sant’ Angelo, in the second century. Farther up the river we may cross the Mulvian bridge, built one hundred years before Christ. Here, near the monumental athletic field developed by Mussolini, Constantine fought the battle whose victorious outcome had been forecast by the cross in the sky.

Driving out of the city on the ancient Appian Way, we see the massive yet graceful arches of the Claudian aqueduct, opened A.D. 52, striding across the plain. It is uncertain how much water the eleven great Roman aqueducts could supply. The amount probably was between two hundred and three hundred million gallons daily. Three of these aqueducts still serve the city. Rome today is famous for its fountains. They were a feature of the ancient city as well. In the fourth century, the Gazetteer shows 856 baths, 11 great combination baths and athletic clubs, and several hundred swimming-pools. Two centuries later, 13,000 fountains were enumerated.

Julius Frontinus was appointed water commissioner of Rome near the end of the first century. His elaborate report of the water system and its history is still the delight of engineers. He tells of his annoyance at finding the government was supplying considerably more water than was being paid for. He deplores the dishonesty of “the watermen whom we have detected diverting water from the public conduits for private use. But a large number of landed proprietors also,” he adds, “past whose fields the aqueducts run, tap the conduits just to water their gardens.” Incidentally he discusses the use of settling-basins to purify the supply. The water department maintained a working staff of seven hundred slaves.

Visiting Rome in the year of the great Augustan exposition celebrating the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of the first Roman Emperor, we saw the Empire re-created before our eyes. Plaster reproductions in miniature had been assembled of important buildings, bridges, and aqueducts in every part of the Roman world. In imagination we travelled from Dover Castle in England to Leptis Magna in North Africa; from the baths of Trier, Germany, to the temples of Asia Minor. Spread before us was a model of Imperial Rome, with scores of magnificent public buildings on the scale of the newer buildings in Washington. We entered a reconstructed Roman house with indoor toilet flushed with running water. We saw modern surgical instruments, busts of Roman women with hair done in permanent waves; farm tools, field and heavy artillery. On a wall an ingenious electric map pictured with coloured lighting the growth of the Empire from the original Tiber settlement until it covered the Mediterranean basin and western Europe. As we entered the rotunda of the exposition building we looked down a long room through the gateway of the fine Augustan temple at Ancyra, the modern Ankara, capital of Turkey. Beyond the gateway, on a brilliantly lighted platform, stood a reproduction of the idealized statue of the Genius of Augustus, brooding over the wide empire which he had organized and to which he had brought the blessing of the Roman peace.

At its height Rome had a population probably in excess of a million. Then a decline set in. The capital of the Empire was removed to Constantinople — where was the Roman Chamber of Commerce to submit tamely to such an outrage? — and the city was repeatedly plundered by barbarians. Visitors in the early Middle Ages speak of its being “all but utterly in ruins,” like “a village of herdsmen: sheep and cows wandered in the city.” At the end of the fourteenth century its population was estimated at perhaps twenty thousand. The site of the Forum, originally pasture land, reverted to its ancient use. It was called the Campo Vaccino, the cow pasture, within the memory of men whose lives reached into the twentieth century.

In the light of this survey of the physical aspects of the ancient Empire the question recurs: How did it come that all this varied ability should finally have failed? Why should this magnificent civilization have gone down into the night of the dark ages — into what an indignant French historian, Ferdinand Lot, calls “an accursed period of history”?

We have been considering, however, only the externals of the Roman world. Before we come to the New Deal experiments we have still to reconstruct in imagination the sort of society that lived in these magnificent surroundings and to review briefly the course of its development.