Like those proverbial buses, birthdays always seem to come in groups. This current eight-day period sees the birthdays of sixteen Facebook friends, five actual friends, my housemate, my sister, my mother, my godmother, my late grandfather and great-grandmother, and Iggy Pop. But it’s not all about me, and today is the grandest birthday of all: Rome.
Of course, it isn’t possible to know precisely when Rome was founded, settled, called Rome, or countless other matters that mark the beginning of its status as the most historically important city in Western Europe. So today’s commemoration becomes a bit like the Queen’s Official Birthday – her actual birthday, as if by magic, also being today. Nor is it possible to describe Rome’s colossal influence on the formation of medieval Europe, linguistic, cultural, religious, or poetic. The medievals themselves were well aware of this. Writings and artworks of the high and late Middle Ages explore Rome’s foundation myths, emulate the style of her histories and celebrate the spread of Christianity as it consumed Rome’s pagan practices and appropriated her artefacts.
Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 753 B.C.
It may be a surprise to read that Rome often overshadowed even Jerusalem, for whom centuries of wars were fought and where the holiest places of Europe’s dominant religion were recalled in countless itineraries. But overshadow it did. Alexander Neckam, the late-12th-century Augustinian academic and administrator, wrote of Rome,
Primitus Europae mea pagina serviet, in qua
Roma stat, orbis apex, gloria, gemma, decus.
[My page will first treat of Europe, where stands Rome, the pinnacle, glory, jewel and honour of the world.]
He creates a picture of a city filled with churches and inhabited by the ghosts of great men – from Caesar and Cicero to Peter and Paul – and beautiful, lost artworks. Earlier books on the marvels of Rome write of the changing ground of the city, where cathedrals grow from the rubble of demolished temples. The impressive and impressing power of the Roman church pervades these books, and others that depict the lives (or, more properly, deaths) of Christians in Rome before it was Christian. It’s all too much and too varied to cover in a career, let alone in something like this.
There is an interesting side-channel to this narrative of conquest and appropriation. The books of the Church and churchmen can be, surprisingly, tinged with regret at the beauty the Church destroyed. Now, regret is not an emotion for birthdays, and birthdays aren’t a concern of the medieval Church. If you intend, like I do, to celebrate Rome’s birthday, Titus Pullo is nearer the mark.
noon auctoritee 