God's Gold (25 page)

On the days when I pounded the route the Temple treasure of Jerusalem took during the triumph of AD 71, the passage beyond the Vicus Jugarius always left me uncomfortably numb. Immediately after exiting a landscape dedicated to blood and war, the Field of Mars, Rome forgave itself the estimated 1.1 million people Josephus alleges were killed in Judea. In an instant the solemn air of the ceremonial fell away, forgotten, and the carnival kicked in.

The road leading up the Vicus Jugarius to the southwestern entrance of the Forum and the Precinct of the Harmonious Gods is a pleasant landscape where birds sing from coniferous trees, despite the storm rumbling overhead that matched my mood. Taking a rest on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, built between 1583 and 1606 and polished to a shine by a million dedicated feet, vivid snapshots of the historical triumph flashed across my mind. I found that I could not forgive Rome and share her ferocious celebrations. Consolazione? The irony fell as thick as the downpour lashing the afternoon sky. What consolation would the Jews of Israel have felt, dragged in front of the gleaming chariot of the emperor Vespasian? The triumphal Gate was their personal Bridge of Sighs. Death or enslavement, at best, would be their prize.

Elegantly dressed Italians sauntered to church through the Piazza della Consolazione, located toward one end of the route of the ancient Triumphal Way, and a cacophony of joyous bells competed with the deep
drum of thunder over the Palatine. Rome's bedrock peered out from undeveloped parts of Capitoline Hill, gasping for air, and I gazed at where it met the Forum's ponderous black cobbled orderly streets. Here the law of nature ended and the cruel civilization of Roman rule began.

Illuminated by lightning, I took in the view of the short leg leading from the Triumphal Gate to the Forum and immediately doubted whether Vespasian would have chosen this corner-cutting processional option. Josephus emphatically described the route as marching through the theaters in the plural, and certainly meant the Circus Flaminius and the Theater of Marcellus. In view of the modest length and scarcity of monuments leading up the Vicus Jugarius, I was now convinced Josephus also alluded to the greatest entertainment facility of pre-Flavian Rome—the Circus Maximus. Why was I so confident?

First of all, this makes absolute sense geographically. Rather than winding up narrow streets toward the southwestern flank of the Forum, by continuing in a straight line parallel to the River Tiber, the triumph would have escaped the narrow roads to emerge into the wide Forum Boarium, Rome's cattle market. The triumph was thus structured to be a process of revelation, initially glimpsed in short sections by the dense crowd but, after the Field of Mars, appreciated in its full glory. Along the way, various Roman temples offered a perfectly theatrical backdrop before the most spectacular act: procession down the Circus Maximus itself, opposite the Palatine Hill and the imperial palace. By taking this route the triumph would have pursued Rome's logical topography and completed a perfect circular itinerary without ever cutting back on itself or compromising the maximum theatrical impact.

A further signpost of certainty is a second Arch of Titus that was built within the Circus Maximus itself in AD 80–81. Today it is completely destroyed, so the mouthwatering question of whether it, too, depicted scenes of the triumphal subjugation of the Jews—a very fair bet—remains a tantalizing enigma. As well as its depiction on the Severan-period marble map of Rome, a record of the bold wording written large on the Circus arch's facade inscription was preserved in the medieval period:

Even though Titus's claim was yet again a flagrant piece of Flavian spin—both Pompey the Great in 63 BC and Sosius, Roman governor of Syria, in 37 BC had subdued parts of Palestine—the emperor clearly plastered this piece of personal propaganda on the Circus arch as a memorial to the precise route of the triumph of AD 71.

Despite the storm, I was now committed to getting a soaking in exchange for some historical clarity. Springing down the steps of the Piazza della Consolazione, I moved fast through the tempest, cutting left down the Via Luigi Petroselli, and swiftly passed the Comune di Roma—City Hall—a great lump of fascist architecture. Posters demanded “Non Stop Per Cuba! Bush Vergogna” (Shame on George Bush for Sanctions Against Cuba), and two-tone faces of a black-and-white woman on a poster sponsored by the Ministry of Equal Opportunities invited victims of racial discrimination to call a toll-free telephone number. Beneath my feet, the city's manholes, commissioned by Benito Mussolini, were emblazoned with the letters SPQR. The abbreviation once proudly carried into war on top of legionary standards means
Senatus Populusque Romanus
(the Senate and People of Rome), and it would have been stamped on every piece of military kit amid the triumph of AD 71.

In the later part of the first century AD, this part of town, the Ripa district, was thick with wharves and warehouses. Here the triumph flirted with the rough-and-ready spectra of society, marching past the Temple of Portunus dedicated to the god of harbors and the circular Temple of Vesta of the sacred fire, who celebrated victory and successful commercial enterprise. Before heading uphill through the Via dei Cerchi, a giant eagle guarding the entrance to the old pasta factory on the Piazza Bocca della Verità (Square of the Mouth of Truth) watched my progress with beady eyes.

Today the Circus Maximus just looks like a pleasant park. Good folk lose themselves in books under shaded trees and dogs chase sticks across the long shadows cast by the grass incline where the Circus seating was once installed. Joggers pound the ground where immaculately polished horse chariots once raced. Oblivious, tramps sleep off the night's hangover on beds of newspapers. The scene today is nothing like the backdrop to AD 71, when the Temple treasure entered the lion's den of 250,000 deafening cheers reverberating across the stands.

The Circus Maximus is by far the oldest and largest of ancient Rome's entertainment facilities and was founded by the Etruscan king Tarquin the Elder (616–578 BC) in the Vallis Murcia for horse racing during the Consualia festivities held in honor of Consus, the god of counsel and protector of harvests, a very serious issue in the pre-pesticide age.

The Circus through which the Temple spoils of Jerusalem paraded in AD 71 owed its anatomy largely to Julius Caesar, the Jews' champion, who cemented its canonical shape with two long sides terminating at a semicircular end for his own triumph of 46 BC. Caesar's three-story Circus measured 2,037 feet long and had stands rising 92 feet above the racetrack. Colonnades swept along its edges; boisterous shops abutted the outside of the stands.

Entering the Circus from the northwest, the treasures of Jerusalem and captive Jews were frog-marched through the Circus, lambs to the slaughter. The sheer size of the Circus and the cacophony of the raucous mob would have been terrifying. Never before could these provincials have seen such artistic wonders: along the central
spina
barrier a statue of Magna Mater (the ultimate mother goddess) mounted on a rampant lion alongside a palm tree; Victoria with her chest puffed out; sculpted dolphins playing amid flowing water. High on their palatial crow's nest on the Palatine Hill, an audience podium jutting out over the center of the Circus, the imperial family would have cheered on Vespasian and Titus.

The Circus was all about promoting an inclusive feel-good factor for all of Rome's hierarchy of citizens from the imperial family to the plebs rubbing shoulders in the unsegregated arena. The unusual free
dom of seating earned the place a reputation as a great pickup joint. And if you weren't lucky, you could always buy sex. As Ammianus Marcellinus would complain in his history of AD 353–378, the plebs

The Circus Maximus was the people's palace, a surreal dreamland where they could watch a live form of reality television, a theater of dreams with a crowd capacity over three times greater than the New York Giants stadium. The social status of the drivers gave the Circus mass appeal. The charioteers were
infamis
of low standing, slaves or freedmen who were wholly dispensable. Yet fortunes could be won on the racetrack: the second-century AD Portugese immigrant Gaius Appuleius Diocles earned over 25 million sesterces in 4,257 races (about $23 million) over a twenty-four-year career. The likes of Diocles gave the masses dreams of wealth and celebrity, an escape from the gutter.

To this backdrop of thousands of faces, the stench of horse dung, and prostitutes making hay while the sun shone, I would like to think that the noise dwindled into amazed murmurs with the passing of the Temple treasure. Of all the great theater enjoyed that day, this was the crowning moment of ultimate acclaim for the emperor Vespasian and Titus. Again we are indebted to the meticulous mind of Josephus for capturing this moment in time:

After soaking up the adulation of the crowd in the Circus Maximus, the triumph turned left onto the modern Via di San Gregorio and passed the pink rosebushes flourishing today where Romulus and Remus were reared, according to Roman tradition. Opposite the Palatine Hill, the Church of San Gregorio Magno, named after Pope Gregory the Great (AD 590–604), stands on the spot where classical antiquity ended and the medieval age was born. The aqueduct supplying the imperial palace on the Palatine is today severed by a fast-flowing thoroughfare speeding up to the Colosseum.

In AD 71, the Colosseum, however, was still in the planning process, even though its funding—looted Jewish gold—was now secure. Once proclaimed emperor, Vespasian would have spared no time recutting the 115-foot-high gilded bronze Colossus of Nero commissioned from Zenodorus. Where the emperor playing god once looked down his monstrously huge nose at the citizens of Rome to the right of the Sacred Way, Vespasian refashioned the statue into the sun god Helios. Under the Flavians the sun would shine on Rome every day. The memory of Nero, the perpetual showman who ransacked the provinces of its finest art for personal pleasure and left the treasury deeply in debt, was officially damned.

For scale of town planning and monumental architecture, the Forum is breathtaking. Though amazed by the panoramic grandeur unfolding around me, and by my success in unraveling the route of the triumph of AD 71, after entering the heart of empire my heart wasn't in the chase anymore. The sixth sense of death and jostling crowds baying for Jewish blood were all too savage.

Soaked to its core by the storm overhead, the Forum was deserted. At the summit of the Sacred Way the triumph reached the high point
of the Forum and gazed down on the most powerful and elaborate urban artery of the civilized world. On this precise plateau in AD 80–81, Titus would immortalize the triumph with the best known of his three arches. Artistic reliefs would replicate the all-conquering royal commander, and later emperor, parading by chariot across this very spot, and capture the Temple treasure being carted in triumph on wooden stretchers through this monumental arch—the golden Table, the pair of silver trumpets, and the seven-branched candelabrum.

Under heavy skies I continued the pilgrimage down the Sacred Way. Its original black-cobbled path was now flooded, and a stream of water ran through my Timberlands. So much for Rome's legendary hydrology. The narrow lane of the Via Sacra would have strung out the triumph at this point, slowing its progress, which no doubt suited the patient and packed Forum. The Porticus (covered walkway) of Gaius and Lucius (the grandsons of the emperor Augustus) would have welcomed the head of the snake. The fear of the Jewish captives would have mounted as they gawked at statues of barbarians crafted from Numidian yellow marble and Phrygian purple foreshadowing the Jews' pending life of slavery. The Land of Israel can never have felt farther away.

I passed the Senate and Orators' Platform, the
rostra,
where Vespasian and Titus received the blessing of Rome that morning. By now emperor and son would have symbolically nailed the most important spolia opima to an oak tree within the city gates. Although most military spoils had to be burned outside the city precinct in the Field of Mars, the personal weapons of the enemy general were believed to still retain magical powers. An impressive public trophy and a symbol of conquest, the spoils also emitted positive energy for the possessor, in this case the city of Rome.