God's Gold (26 page)

A hushed silence now fell over the Forum as the final bloody ritual approached, again reported in detail by our chief witness, Josephus:

For the sake of completion I did also track down the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus up the Clivus Capitolinus, or rather its foundations hidden beneath scaffolding used to restore the exterior of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. There, Vespasian and Titus awaited the screams of delight announcing the death of Simon the Jew.

Nearby, the Mamertine Prison—that “proper place” where Simon was killed—still exists in the peaceful Church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami; pigeons perched on the top steps washed themselves in puddles of rainwater. The prison is a foul, damp place into which spring water continuously dripped in antiquity. In 40 BC, the Roman writer Sallust described this cell as “a place called the Tullianum…about twelve feet deep, closed all round by strong walls and a stone vault. Its aspect is repugnant and fearsome from its neglect, darkness, and stench.” Go there if you must.

Emotionally exhausted, I made the personal decision not to enter Rome's subterranean death hole; instead I wondered what the leader of the Jews' last earthly sight might have been. Desperately looking over his shoulder as he was pushed into this evil hole, Simon ben Giora's gaze would have wandered across the Precinct of the Harmonious Gods and the Umbilicus Urbis, the Navel of the World and gateway to hell.

With the head of the Jewish uprising decapitated, and the triumph confined to collective memory as one of Rome's most glorious days, Vespasian planned a more enduring legacy of his Judean conquest.

What the emperor had in mind was something not just functional, but a visually stunning memorial that would endure for generations to come as a physical symbol of Rome's global power—military, political, economic, and cultural. The Temple of Peace, Templum Pacis, was designed to be that symbol, an eternal reminder of the death and destruction wreaked by the Jewish Revolt, and also, crucially, a monument to Vespasian's brilliance in forging universal peace between Rome and the peoples pulled within its borders. Thus Josephus informs us:

So the Temple treasure of Jerusalem, symbol of the spiritual heart of Judaism seized in the most bloody of circumstances, ended up “imprisoned” in yet another temple across the seas. The tranquil-sounding name of the new place of rest should not deceive us into assuming that Rome retained immense respect for the holy icons' religious significance. Rather, the heart of Judaism had been torn out of a living body and conspicuously displayed as the centerpiece of a public museum. The image of the Temple of Peace was both paradoxical and rhetorical. Although Vespasian packaged the temple complex as a memorial to the domestic peace he forged after the civil wars that followed the death of Nero and the repression of the Jewish rebellion, to Jews it symbolized public humiliation. The monument was a continual thorn in the flesh of Rome's Jewish population, a constant reminder of its precarious position in the empire.

But what did this Temple of Peace look like and how long did the Temple treasure remain there? To digest these heavyweight questions I took a breather to regain my momentum in the Angelino ai Fori pizzeria, whose prime location at the very top of the Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome, the modern road that dissects the ancient forum, offers panoramic views of the Eternal City of two thousand years ago.

Behind me rose the theatrical stage of the Colosseum, where every stone seat concealed a thousand tales. Directly in front, Trajan's Column recorded in picture-book relief the exploits of the emperor Trajan's conquest over the Germanic tribes. To my right stood the first-floor portico where, according to tradition, Nero wept as he watched his beloved Rome burn in the great fire of June AD 64.

Today we take architectural marvels in our urban jungles for granted and hardly blink at yet another Norman Foster architectural delight rising in London or the erection of the world's highest skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur. But imagine trying to break the design mold, as Rome did, in the absence of three-dimensional computer modeling programs? Ancient engineers had no computers, cranes, or bulldozers to rely on, only manpower and human sweat. An estimated 15 percent of Rome's adult population toiled in the building industry, manhandling some
195,000 cubic feet of marble quarried over the course of four hundred years for the Eternal City.

Wearily, I cast down my dusty maps and reams of written testimony transmitted down the centuries that would help me pinpoint the modern location of the Temple of Peace. Research back home in England had revealed that the monument once lay close by. As I oriented myself using maps, the realization dawned that by coincidence I was actually eating inside the walls of the Temple of Peace. Or rather, had the temple survived I would be sitting within its eastern corner. According to my research, Vespasian commissioned the Temple of Peace in AD 71 on a vacant plot of land northeast of the Forum of Nerva, formally used as the Republican cattle market, and celebrated its dedication four years later. So Josephus wasn't quite accurate about it being built in so short a time that was “beyond all human expectations.” It was quick, but not that quick. The term
temple
is also inappropriate because the Pacis Opera, as ancient texts initially called it, was a large precinct housing a suite of monuments and functions. Modern literature usually calls the complex the Forum of Peace.

The area certainly comprised a large assembly point similar to a forum, and was not just an elite monument standing in splendid isolation. The temple complex was square in shape—a typical Forum design—measuring some 354 feet along both sides, with a large altar recessed inside a semicircular exedra. The entire complex was surrounded by a lavish enclosed walkway supported by huge marble columns reaching 59 feet into the sky. The massive size of the temple, some ten times larger than Augustus's Altar of Peace, was a deliberate architectural expression of Vespasian's power. Size counted for everything in Rome, especially to the Flavian dynasty, which needed to camouflage its lack of an imperial birthright. The finished creation was considered by Pliny the Elder one of three most beautiful buildings ever to grace Rome.

Annexed to the temple were two intriguing structures, the Bibliotheca Pacis (Library of Peace) and a later addition of the Hall of the Marble Plan. Naturally, as the self-styled center of the civilized world, Rome took its libraries very seriously, but not in the modern sense.
Certainly logs of imperial accounts, military events, and taxation were systematically maintained alongside scrolls of literature and plays. But the earliest libraries were assembled as spoils of war.

By the time the emperor Augustus died in AD 14, Rome boasted three great libraries: Pollio's library next to the Forum, another at the Porticus of Octavia, and Augustus's library connected with the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill. Over time libraries even appeared inside Roman bathhouses to increase the recreational experience. However, we should not be misled. These institutions were not designed just as dusty centers of learning for educated bookworms, but were excellent excuses for the ostentatious display of the owner's wealth.

The name of the Bibliotheca Pacis is thus misleading because, although it would have held papyrus manuscripts, its main purpose was the conspicuous display of Vespasian's artistic masterpieces. As well as the Temple treasure, Pliny records how Vespasian returned to the public art originating in Greece and Asia Minor that Nero, his predecessor, had privately hoarded for personal gratification in his golden palace, the Domus Aurea. This included antique Greek statues such as the Galati group from Pergamon, the Ganymede of Leochares, and masterpieces by Pheidias and Polykleitos, as well as an anonymous Venus, goddess of love.

The largest recorded example of a statue crafted of Ethiopian
basanites,
a rock described by Pliny as of the same color and hardness as iron, also graced the Temple of Peace. This personification of the Nile in human form was surrounded by sixteen of the river god's children playing merrily, standing for the number of cubits reached by the river in flood at its highest desirable level for watering agricultural fields. The masterpiece was an expression of perfect harmony and prosperity. Alongside hung vast paintings, including Nicomachus's Scylla, and Ialysus, the mythical founder of Rhodes, immortalized by Protogenes of Caunus holding a palm tree. In other words this “library” was a very public and deliberate expression of its patron's wealth, taste, and munificence.

But where were the spoils and these other museum masterworks actually displayed? By a generous twist of fate, substantial evidence ex
ists for the anatomy of the Temple of Peace: a whole wall of it. The last structure to grace the temple, the Hall of the Marble Plan, was a brilliant example of cutting-edge art and design. This room was custom-built to accommodate the Forma Urbis Romae, or what is known more familiarly today as the Severan Marble Plan, a giant-sized map of ancient Rome displayed vertically on the southeastern wall of the Temple of Peace. The layout of the Eternal City between the River Tiber to the north and beyond the Colosseum to the south was incised between AD 203 and 211 at a scale of 1:240 on large rectangular slabs of white marble imported from quarries on the island of Proconessus in modern Turkey's Sea of Marmara.

The map was enormous, measuring about 59 by 42 feet, and covered one entire wall of the Temple of Peace. Whether a Roman citizen or foreigner, the observer would have never seen anything like it. To a backdrop of the most important art in the world—much antique and most looted—here Rome's rulers illustrated the very city that was responsible for its world domination. The Severan Marble Map was a flagrant form of self-publicity and imperial pride rather than an information point for lost tourists.

By virtue of early Christianity's respect for classical antiquity, the original Roman wall onto which the Severan Marble Map was fixed still stands as the outer wall of the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian built by Pope Felix IV in AD 527, complete with a Swiss cheese of holes that once held pegs bolted to the backs of the slabs of Proconessian marble. The map itself disappeared in the course of the early fifth-century Gothic invasions, to be cut up and reused in new building projects across the city; other fragments were thrown into limekilns, melting into historical obscurity.

Nevertheless, 1,186 fragments have cropped up in excavations across Rome since 1562. Even though the surviving “document” only equates to 10 to 15 percent of the original map, these fragments remain the single most important form of surviving evidence for reconstructing the ancient Roman ground plan of every architectural feature in the city.

By sheer luck, several surviving marbles show the Temple of Peace,
allowing its square shape with an eastern main hall to be reconstructed. Ongoing excavations around the edges of the Via dei Fori Imperiali are also exposing its key features, allowing Italian archaeologists to confirm that the monument was a vast square surrounded on three sides by an arcade built with pink Egyptian Aswan granite columns. A fifty-nine-foot-high outer wall slanted inward to create an internal arcaded walkway.

The monumental entrance leading into two rectangular halls, fronted by gigantic Aswan granite columns and multicolored marble revetment, was situated to the northwest, facing onto the Forum of Nerva. Long presumed destroyed by later development, especially Renaissance shops, in October 2005 the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma found the Temple of Peace's original spectacular floor surface beneath ten feet of smashed pottery and piles of horse bones. The fieldwork uncovered ritual libation basins adjacent to a raised
cella
reached by steps, and on it the five-foot-wide rectangular plinth where the statue of the divine being maintained law and order. The marble floor is a fitting architectural wonder, combining exotic imperial purple granite from Egypt's Mons Porphyrites with Libyan peachy
giallo antico
. Circular foundations for six colossal six-foot-wide columns remain in their original positions.

A final outstanding riddle about the Temple of Peace's design has long perplexed archaeologists: the purpose of twenty-four interconnected rectangular slots visible on the Severan Marble Plan. The new excavations have finally resolved this enigma by interpreting them as garden water features. Six five-foot-high walls proved to be brick installations with marble veneer and channels used for water drainage. The tank podiums are thought to have held exotic plants, probably the highly prized Gallic rose.

The main area of the Temple of Peace thus seems to have been dedicated to a serene garden filled with fragrant flowers, peaceful flowing water, and rolling gardens—a perfect backdrop for the artistic masterpieces that Vespasian positioned inside the temple. It was here, as the showpiece of a memorial to one of Rome's finest hours, that the Temple treasure of Jerusalem would be gazed at in wonder for more than 350 years.