The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads

PREFACE

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes—with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other, says Billy Pilgrim.

—KURT VONNEGUT, JR., Slaughterhouse-Five

(on seeing in four dimensions)

The Roman poet Statius called the via Appia regina viarum, the Queen of Roads, late in the first century CE, when the title—despite sounding like chamber-of-commerce puffery—could make a decent claim to the truth. As for the other phrase in my subtitle, Ghost Road, that one came to me one afternoon as my wife and I walked along the road’s modern traces. For to travel the Appia today is to step in the tracks of countless ghosts.

No road in Europe has been so heavily traveled, by so many different people, with so many different aims, over so many generations. Standing in one spot, eyes shut, a traveler does not need much imagination to feel the ghosts brush by. A Roman soldier first, as the power of his city forced its way south and laid its weight upon the other tribes of the peninsula, who sometimes managed to push back. Then a craftsman, tradesman, or small farmer bringing his goods to one of the towns—Minturnae or Aeclanum or Venusia—that were the links in the civil life of a great empire. Now more soldiers, in wave after wave, first sweeping up from the south with the power of Constantinople at their backs, then down from the north—first the Lombards, later the Normans (and many others)—to settle in the strongholds of Beneventum, Melfi, and countless other hill towns where castles still punctuate the ridges. Pious travelers came this way, too, journeying to Jerusalem with stage-by-stage directions that we can still follow. Then closer to our own day, scholars and states-men, the one lot intent on reclaiming ancient bits of the road in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and on down to the present day), the other following the road on the way to a unified Italy. If we could take in the Appia with the eyes of Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, we would see a millipede shod at one end in the sandals of Appius Claudius Caecus—who conceived the road and gave it his name—and in the shoes of Garibaldi’s horse near the other end.

It’s a sense of this cultural richness that I’ve tried to convey in these essays, by telling the story of the road from my own perspective, that of a very imperfectly savvy traveler. Though my profession as a classicist allowed me to begin traveling along the Appia with a few advantages—chiefly, a fair knowledge of Latin and a reasonable sense of Roman history—the pockets of my ignorance were far deeper and more numerous. Traveling the Appia was an intense education, and a goad to learn more: the intensity and the excitement of learning are among the forces that drive this book.

Thanks by the carload are owed on several fronts. Susan Bielstein, editor of the Culture Trails series at the University of Chicago Press, suggested that I might contribute to the series, was instantly receptive when I proposed the Appia, and lavished her attention on the initial draft; the Press’s Anthony Burton has been helpful in ways technical and nontechnical alike; two readers helped me see where some improvements could be made; and Carol Saller was the perfect copyeditor. Of the two chances I’ve had to travel the route, the first and longer came during a sabbatical year provided by Princeton University and the University’s Humanities Council, which appointed me an Old Dominion Professor in 2008–2009; both trips were partly funded by the Dean of the Faculty and by the Magie Fund in Princeton’s Department of Classics, which has been repeatedly generous in its support of my work. Then there are the friendly critics who have done their best to keep me from appearing foolish in print: Yelena Baraz, Ted Champlin, Janet Downie, Elaine Fantham, Denis Feeney, Andrew Feldherr, Harriet Flower, Laura Kaster, Joshua Katz, Chris Kraus, Nino Luraghi, Adrienne Mayor, Brent Shaw, Chris Stray, Stefan Vranka, and Leah Whittington. If they have not wholly succeeded, the fault as always is entirely mine.

This is the second and a half book that I’ve dedicated to my wife, Laura. (She shared with my parents the dedication of my first: uncertain back then that I’d ever write another, I thought I’d better touch all the bases while I had the chance.) For forty-odd years she has nurtured everything I’ve written and cast a keen critical eye over much of it, but she has never before been the close collaborator that she was in the travels from which this little book has emerged. Without her, my experience of the Appia would have been thinner and poorer in more ways than I can count; without her, my life would be thinner and poorer in more ways than I can imagine.

I

QUEEN OF ROADS

Rome and the Appian Way

What the hell are we doing here?

The question formed in my mind as the umpteenth car whipped past, inches from my right kneecap, leaving a trail of noxious fumes in its wake. We were making our way back to the city walls of Rome, my wife and I, on a stretch of the ancient Appian Way, between the catacombs of San Sebastiano and San Callisto, where Christians of ancient Rome buried their dead. With about two miles to go, we walked single file, huddling against the walls that hemmed in the left side of the Appia, and flinching as each car went by.

We had begun the day at the spot where the Appia once began, the porta Capena, the main gate in the southeast quadrant of Rome’s most ancient walls. The walls—the Servian walls, according to legend built by king Servius Tullius in the mid-sixth century BCE—are long gone, and with them the gate. For that matter, the Appia is gone there too, replaced by one of the busiest intersections in modern Rome, where traffic streams to and from the Colosseum or past the broad expanse of the Circus Maximus. But a plaque on a clump of ancient brick ruins marks the inizio della via Appia, and it’s not hard to follow the path from there, across several lanes of traffic, that the road must have traced, to the point where it split off from the via Latina, which followed a more easterly course out to the hills where Roman grandees had their villas. About a half mile from that point, at the end of a gently rising grade, another gate—the ancient porta Appia, now the porta San Sebastiano—is set in another wall, the Aurelian, that is many lifetimes younger than the Servian but nonetheless eighteen centuries old today, and here still intact.

Figure 1. Via Appia, miles 1 to 6

Just beyond the porta San Sebastiano stood the first of hundreds of inscribed milestones:¹ a replica stands there today, roughly marking the spot where the modern archeological park begins. The scare quotes are well earned. For perhaps half a mile, from the milestone to the gate of the San Callisto catacombs, as the Appia descends to the bed of a small stream (the Almo), then arcs left to start back uphill, the road is merely ugly: after a tawdry commercial strip (a car dealership, an auto repair shop, storefronts), businesses are replaced by private homes and eight-to-ten-foot-high walls that form a blind, virtually unbroken barrier on both sides of the road. The next stretch, from the San Callisto gate to the San Sebastiano catacombs, is both ugly and terrifying. The road is still hemmed in by the high walls, but now anything like an adequate walkway is gone: a narrow pedestrian strip is distinguished from the driving surface by no more than a painted white line, which drivers feel no compulsion to observe as they gun their engines going in both directions, here and there producing three lanes of traffic (of course they have to pass each other) in a space that cannot be more than thirty feet wide wall to wall. So the question: what the hell were we doing there?

The literal answer was simple enough. Though teaching the language and literature of ancient Rome has been my life, I had spent little time in Italy, and virtually none in Rome itself, since the summer of 1973, when I endured several sweltering weeks in the Vatican Library as a graduate student doing research for my dissertation. That had not been a happy time: Laura, my wife, had just finished law school back home in Boston and was studying for the bar exam, and we were both lonely in our separate routines. But that was then. Now it was the spring of a sabbatical year, and we were carefree in Italy for a month, half of it to be spent traveling the Appian Way.

That was our mission: to explore the Appia for all it was worth. Our plan: to begin and end in the capital, first tramping over the nine miles of roadway that extend from the city, then changing perspective by picking up from where the Appia ended, at Brindisi (ancient Brundisium)² in the heel of Italy, and working our way back by car to Rome. The first stage would get the feel of the road under our feet and remembrances of Roman power in our imaginations. The second would take us through parts of Italy where we had never traveled and layers of Italian culture we had never seen.

We arrived in Rome on the Parilia—April 21, the city’s birthday, with 2,762 candles lit on the imaginary cake—and immediately got lucky, in a couple of ways. First, we discovered that we had scheduled our trip so that the first week coincided with the settimana della cultura—Culture Week, a national explosion of pride in Italy’s heritage, when special exhibitions and performances are laid on in towns and cities from the Alps to Calabria, and all the museums and archaeological sites are open free of charge. Second, and better still, I made a phone call.

Figure 2. Via Appia, mile 2

After getting to the hotel we had booked at the foot of the Spanish Steps, we decided to deal with the jet lag as we usually do, by keeping on keeping on until we dropped. I fished out the phone number of Marina Piranomonte, the friend of a friend and a senior member of the ministry in charge of the archaeological sites in Rome. We had arranged that I would call when we arrived. Now seemed as good a time as any, and Marina in fact had space on her calendar to see us. So we walked the half hour or so it takes to get from the Spanish Steps to the Roman Forum, where we were immersed right away in the consequences of Culture Week.

The place was alive with people, cascading through the entrances and flowing down the slope that sets the ancient site apart from the grade of the modern city. Ancient columns rose among the ruins, watching impassively as the human stream flowed past, and within the stream small patterns emerged. Knots of adults gathered here and there on the old paving stones, listening to their guides, while sinuous lines of schoolchildren