Today the world is looking again
towards high-rise living to deal with housing its burgeoning population.
The Romans got there first, writes Prof Andrew Wallace-Hadrill.
When
London's population reached the million mark in the early 19th Century,
it was the first city in Europe to do so since the collapse of Rome in
the 5th Century.
London enjoyed (or soon developed) many of the
advantages of the industrial revolution to support it - the steam engine
and the railway system, coal and gas power, Portland cement for
construction, and so on.
To cope with a rapidly growing
population, London spread over the countryside, and at the centre built
upwards, though it was not until the 20th Century that the high-rise
blocks so typical of the modern city were built. To control the
population, including growing numbers of poor and immigrants, Sir Robert
Peel invented the police force.
Rome in the imperial period, for 400 year from the
mid-1st Century BC, had to cope with a similar population, though
without most of the advantages of modern technology.
Rome
had no railways, but it was at the hub of a potent network of
communications. The roads radiating from the city received a major
upgrade from the first emperor, Augustus, who incidentally established a
postal system (at least for government communications) that spread
across the empire.
Supplies came in by road, but more importantly
by water, down the Tiber from central Italy, supplying bricks for
construction and a plethora of other items, and upstream from the ports
at the mouth of the Tiber.
Portus, the great artificial harbour
built by the emperors Claudius and Trajan, was a major engineering feat,
and allowed a steady supply of foodstuffs, grain from Egypt and Africa,
oil from Spain, luxury goods including pepper and spices from India.
A
substantial imperial bureaucracy organised the supply, and then oversaw
distribution within the city, with full citizens benefiting from a
monthly hand-out - by the 3rd Century, the hand-out included a generous
ration of pork.
As important as food was fresh water, the crucial
defence against disease in a crowded city. Rome developed aqueduct
technology, bringing water in for up to 100 miles away from the
limestone mountains of the Apennines. The arches of the aqueducts,
running by no coincidence parallel to the modern railway lines, still
impress visitors, though no less impressive but hidden from view are the
sections of the channels that run deep under the mountains. Some of
these still serve the modern water supply of Rome.
One of the many aqueducts which served ancient Rome
Housing was a major challenge, and to meet it the Romans learnt to build higher and stronger than anyone before.
The use of concrete, based on lime and volcanic sand, permitted the Romans to create new architectural forms, like the dome.
Speed
and reliability of construction was made possible by the use of
standardised material for the facing - first in a network of regular
blocks of volcanic tuff, then in bricks.
As Rome built higher,
brick production around the city boomed. The fact that the producers
frequently stamped the bricks with their names helps us to date such
construction closely.
Such multi-storey blocks, typically with
shops on the ground floor, and rental apartments on two or more floors
above, were called insulae or "islands" - they might occupy an entire
city block, with roads flowing around like the sea, though sometimes a
city block could contain several insulae.
They were typical of
the metropolis. Outside Rome, they are rare, and Pompeii has no
examples, although the one example from Herculaneum, built in the first
half of the 1st Century, shows the sophistication of construction, with
latrines and drainpipes even in upper apartments linking down to a great
sewer below ground.
The insula at the foot of the Capitoline Hill in Rome
The port city of Ostia has
numerous examples of such brick-and-concrete insulae, preserved to two
or three floors, and it is clear that some at least of the apartments
could be commodious and well-lit.
But it is Rome itself that
preserves the best examples, including the insula at the foot of the
Capitoline Hill which survives to five floors, and illustrates how
independent units could be packed into the available space.
Insula
living was a familiar feature of 1st Century Rome, and the satirists,
Martial and Juvenal, complain of the exertions necessary, and the
dangers run, if you lived on the top floor. (The penthouse suite only
became desirable after the modern invention of the elevator.)
All
sorts will have lived in such insulae - while the typical rich person
still had an independent houses (domus), most people, the comfortably
off as well as the poor, lived in apartments.
Nor was it
necessarily just one family per apartment - you might sublet rooms, and
the lawyers of the time explained the nightmare of trying to identify
who was legally liable, owner, tenant or sub-tenant, when a passer-by
was injured by a chamber pot carelessly thrown out of an upper window.
An apartment block in Ostia
Tens of thousands of such
apartment blocks were needed to house Rome's enormous and fluid
population - a listing of the buildings of the city puts them at more
than 44,000, although if this is right, some must have been rather
small.
Certainly, we can see their ubiquitous footprints on the
vast map of the city's streets that was incised on marble slabs under
the emperor Septimius Severus. Though only fragments survive, it is
truly impressive, the first known instance of a detailed map of the
streets and buildings of any city.
That fact underlines how
important it was to the city authorities to know their city and its
inhabitants in detail. It was Julius Caesar who as dictator first
surveyed the city, district by district and property by property. It
helped the government in many ways, not least to cut down on the list of
citizens claiming free hand-outs of food. Owners of properties were
responsible for reporting inhabitants to the city prefect.
The insularius's view - from inside the apartment
In these contexts, we meet the
figure of the insularius, the caretaker responsible for an insula. He
also had to ensure that his property was supplied with fire-fighting
equipment, buckets and axes. He was thus the point of intersection
between inhabitants and the forces of law and order, and under imperial
rule, such forces multiplied.
The military urban cohorts under
the city prefect, and the fireguard, the "vigiles" under the fire
prefect, had the power to enter premises and check all was in order.
At
7,000-strong, the ancient fireguard outnumbered the modern vigili del
fuoco, who see themselves as their descendants. And if they had no fire
engines, at least they had force-pumps called "siphons", built to a
design of Greek hydraulic engineering.
Modern technologies may be
different from those of ancient Rome, but in both cases, a vast
population produced massive challenges, which the Romans addressed in
ways scarcely less impressive than those today.
The British Museum's 2013 show of artefacts from the Roman cities of
Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in ash during an explosive eruption of
Mount Vesuvius, was a sell-out. But could even greater treasures -
including lost works of classical literature - still lie underground?
No comments:
Post a Comment