Peter Bondanella - The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World

1987 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bondanella, Peter E., 1943-

The Eternal City: Roman images in the modern world.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Civilization, OccidentalRoman influences.

2. RenaissanceItaly. 3. ItalyIntellectual life.

I. Tide.

CB245.B64 1987 909.09821 86-30847

ISBN 0-8078-6511-7

On 8 October 1354 the citizens of Rome attacked the Capitoline Palace. They pushed past the guards and once inside the building, surrounded the ruler of the city, Cola di Rienzo. Only seven years earlier, this remarkable orator-charlatan, this demagogue whose rhetoric never failed to move his Roman audiences, had been swept to power in a coup dtat aimed, so Cola intended, at the reestablishment of the Roman republic as the capital of the world. Master showman that he was, Cola almost succeeded in eluding the angry mob by a clever disguise, but the splendor of the gold jewelry he wore belied his apparent lowly station. He was stabbed, his mangled body was dragged through the courtyard, hanged from a balcony, and eventually burned.

Six centuries later, another would-be dictator of a renascent Rome was warned by an old Socialist friend that his fate would be similar to Colas. But Benito Mussolini displayed his short, stubby fingers and laughingly replied that he wore no such gaudy jewelry. And yet in the end, when the Fascist regime he founded collapsed in 1945, his death occurred in much the same horrible fashion.

Cola and Mussolini were both destroyed by a myththe same myth that has shaped many, more benign, political philosophies. But the myths of ancient Rome, whether called forth in their republican or imperial guises, have shaped more than the outlines of political life for the last six hundred years. These myths have permeated our civilization as a whole, our art, music, drama, cinema, and even our notions of history itself.

The revival of classical antiquity began in Renaissance Italy, where for the first time in modern history, a people chose its own pastthat of ancient Romeas a guide for the future as well as the present. Through the ensuing centuries, in different eras and for different purposes, two diametrically opposed views of Roman antiquity were called forth: the virtuous republic of selfless citizen-soldiers and the corrupted empire of power-hungry and decadent tyrants. The power and sustained influence of these Roman images are second only to the images derived from Christianity in constructing our modern culture. From Petrarch in the fourteenth century to Fellini in the twentieth, by way of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Titian, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, George Washington, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Isaac Asimov, Robert Graves, and George Lucas, the enduring power of the Roman model has served as one of our civilizations greatest sources of inspiration.

To some classically minded viewers, the characters in Star Wars may seem familiarthe evil emperor, ruler of the corrupted galactic empire; Darth Vader, the leader of his Praetorian Guard; the Jedi Knights, defenders of moral values from the virtuous republic of old. If such heroes and villains recall a classical model, the resemblance is not coincidental. George Lucass galactic empires are direct descendants of Isaac Asimovs Foundation Trilogy, which is, as Asimov himself admits, based upon Edward Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From Gibbons work in the eighteenth century, the line of influence leads ever backward, to the fourteenth-century Renaissance rediscovery of the classical historians, and then backward once again to its origin in Livy, Tacitus, and their Latin contemporaries. The ancient world of the Romans is no mere dead history. It continues to live, as it has done for the past six hundred years, in our everyday, contemporary world.

The initial research for this book was carried out during 198081 in Italy with a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Subsequent work was supported in part by the Office of Research and Graduate Development of Indiana University. Without the initial enthusiasm of Willis Barnstone and Nick Bakalar, I should never have tackled such an imposing topic. Any book of the scope of The Eternal City necessarily owes a great deal to scholars in a wide variety of fields, and I trust I have accurately reflected their influence upon my own ideas in the footnotes accompanying the text.

Special thanks must go to those friends and colleagues who bravely read the entire manuscript or parts of it at various stages of development during the last six years: Bruce Cole, Evelyn Ehrlich, Heidi Gealt, Harry Geduld, George Kennedy, Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, Mark Musa, J. E. Rivers, and Denis Mack Smith. I trust they will find that I have taken their many suggestions and objections very seriously.

I must also acknowledge my sincere gratitude to Gino Cincotti of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Rome) for assistance in obtaining hard-to-locate prints of a number of films. Numerous museum directors and superintendents of museums or art galleries around the world generously granted me permisson to reprint the photographs employed to illustrate the book.

It would be difficult to imagine a more supportive editor than Lewis Bateman of the University of North Carolina Press. I should also like to express my gratitude to Sandra Eisdorfer, Charles S. Feigenoff, and the staff at the University of North Carolina Press for their superb, professional editorial assistance.

The Eternal City

The Eternal City has for centuries fired the Western imagination. Its prestige is unmatched. Not even Greece, Romes ancient rival for cultural hegemony in Western civilization, can boast such an extended, profound, and intense influence, largely because much of what we have inherited from the Greek or Christian traditions was bequeathed to us through Roman institutions or colored by Roman values. Surprisingly, this fundamental formative influence upon us has not derived primarily from a clear historical understanding of Rome itself. On the contrary, in literature, the arts, and social thought, the most original expressions of the myth of Rome have modified, changed, or even distorted historical fact. The power of this mythology has even at times changed the course of history. And the works of the great classical historians of the Eternal City ultimately furnish much of the mythical materials. It is their most profound expressions of this myth which modify history, and the Western tradition owes far more to this protean and inexhaustible myth of Rome than to sober scholarship, because Roman mythology and history is a vital, living part of our consciousness. The myth is not so much a relic to be venerated as it is a flexible and limitless source for self-expression, a common heritage which has met the needs of successive generations, influenced the styles of different periods, and inspired widely different forms of artistic expression. Something in the myth of Rome has helped us to understand our human condition, our world, and ourselves.

Of necessity, mythic expression, characterized by a willingness to suppress accuracy in order to explain higher truths, abbreviates history, compresses it, shapes it to diverse and sometimes contradictory purposes, and may even willfully distort it, as in the case of Neros legendary musical performance. The popular expression to fiddle while Rome burns, obvious evidence of Roman influence upon everyday language, may ultimately be traced back to