Willem Nikolaas Du Rieu
Ostia, Rome's havenstad
De Gids 27, Leiden 1863
Excerpts from: part 1: pages 385-400 | part 2: pages 253-278 | part 3: pages 472-485
With a view to the reconstruction of Ostia, the papal government had begun the excavations of the ancient city; here too one had to remove a deep upper layer, which had gradually been formed by the silting up of the river on one side, the sand drifts from the beach, which had already made it difficult for the ancient Romans, on the other side, since they had stopped to interfere with the work of nature. One can easily check how many changes the terrain had undergone in this way; if one can trust the most recent calculation, made by the French engineer Rozet in 1852, the Mediterranean Sea would have washed ashore nearly 4 ell each year since 1662. You can safely call this statement too high; but it is certain that Tor Bovacciana, where the old port gate was, a large ruin on the westernmost corner, which, restored and fortified in the Middle Ages, was included in the fortifications, is now two miles from the sea, while the Tor San Michele built in the Middle Ages can now be found a whole mile inland. Heaps of sand have been covering the vast ruins of Ostia for years, so that the originally flat city extending into a segment of a circle whose chord, running from east to west, is formed by the left Tiberarm, has to be excavated from underneath those hills.
The city walls could barely be recognized in the raised terrain, and it was necessary to dig several feet deep to expose the old street, which, like the via Appia and the one at Pompeji, was occupied with grave monuments on both sides. It turned out that this road had been of normal width, with high edges, and that it was first adorned with graves on the left; for those on the other side, generally more beautiful, are of later date, although none of these monuments is younger than the second century. They found burial chambers with sarcophagi, basements with appropriate white and black inlaid floors, cenotaphs, adorned simply with an appropriate relief or with an inscription, and so-called columbaria or square large burial houses, as I may call them, in which the urns with the ashes are so regularly placed in niches that they could be named after the similarity with a dovecote. According to the latest research, such houses were built by a group of private individuals; one could then buy a meager place for his urn there, in which the ashes of the burned corpse were collected and locked away.
It appeared from these excavations that many sarcophagi had been searched earlier; who knows how many treasures have been retrieved, which have long adorned some museum, for example the great sarcophagus with the story of Alcestes, Museo Chiaramonti, No. 179, or the many busts of the family of Augustus, No. 417 and 418 of the same collection.
Following this street I came automatically to the gate of the city, of which only a few stones, which belonged to a later repair, had remained on each other. Not far from there, in the eastern corner of the city, was the theater, which, as I have noticed in most old theaters, was placed in such a way that the audience had the most beautiful view across the stage; the seats looked out on the river, and as a result it had been possible to take advantage of the already then hilly terrain. A few walls of this section are still standing with a few pillars that support the arches, which are largely broken, while the large pieces of the other collapsed vaults with their protruding points yield a picturesque scene.
In the middle of the old town, the salt warehouse of the government rises on the Tiber, close to the old landing place, which was maintained so well to that end. But the most important of the few remains is the temple, just 300 paces from the river, which has been one of the many showpieces that the beautiful Romans have built for their great gods; it may have been a Jupiter temple, as one believes without good reason, or a sanctuary dedicated to Neptune; for it is facing the sea, and of this sea god one found in Ostia that splendid head of Pentelian marble, which adorns the Vatican Museum (Chiaramonti, No. 606, A). A wall covered with marble encircled that temple, of whose interior only the four walls, the cella, still stand, made of pure baked bricks, while the flat roof had long since collapsed, and the marble slabs, which these walls must have once covered, disappeared. There are still unmistakable traces of that covering; the heavy marble cornice also bears witness to this, on which in a simple but powerful style, below a decorative border between garlands, the well-known 'bucrani' or carved skulls of sacrificed bulls shine. The massive marble cross-beam of the door, a neatly worked-up lump of Numidian marble 4 feet wide and 21 feet long, has been blocking the entrance for many years, and seems to have been too large for the many demolitioners, who for profit in the course of the centuries have been digging in that enigmatic ruin; he is still waiting for an opportunity to be used, just like that big lump of the tomb of Adrianus, that, after the renovation of Castel S. Angelo, was bricked inside the walls.
The floor of that holy of holies was composed of a multi-colored mosaic of slabs of different granite and porphyry, beautifully interspersed with the dark green serpentine stone. It may therefore be inferred from this information that this temple was built in later imperial times, in the days of the greatest opulence; the similarity of the retrieved capitals and columns with those of the Forum of Trajan in Rome, determines that period more accurately. There was a hidden staircase on the back wall of the cella leading to the room below the temple; and the image of the god must have covered the opening which, coming out into the hidden corridor, gives rise to the presumption that there was an oracle operated by the priests in the same manner as I remember having seen in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii and in a large temple ruin of the villa of Adrianus in Tivoli, which the tradition marks with the name of Serapeum. On this basis, I would be inclined to consider this ruin an Isis or Serapis temple, Egyptian deities mentioned in many inscriptions from Ostia.
The cell had two square niches on each of the two sides with a round one in between, and apparently the whole room only got its light through the door, which is large enough, for the posts are 18 feet high. The porch of this temple was decorated with 6 grooved white-marble Corinthian columns; one of the six capitals had been excavated for years and is displayed in the Galleria lapidaria of the Vatican; every day I may watch those gracefully arranged and neatly carved acanthus leaves on my way to the Library, and I can testify that many architects have drawn this showpiece of the old ones. Yes, Rome is and remains the school for good builders!
A broad staircase led from this colonnade to the Forum. All this had already been investigated for some thirty years and dug out by Cardinal Pacca, and now that I wanted to look at that temple ruin, I had to make my way between thorns and thistles along a barely accessible path among the wildly sprung branches of trees and shrubs that had re-seized the legacy of the ancestry.
The imperial palace lay between the river and the city wall, to the left of the Forum; but the remains of it seem to have been transportable and must have long since become the prey of the many marble sharpeners of the Eternal City, to be chopped or dragged for inlaid table tops and checker boards, or to be sold, made into crucifixes and ashtrays and to be spread all over the world. On the city wall, just diagonally opposite the landing place, but a little to the west, you can still see a building that appears to have been the sea gate. On the occasion of the aforementioned excavations under Pius VII, a round room was found, similarly with niches, and an altar of Mercury, with fairly well-preserved paintings on the walls. The four remarkable altars from the Capitoline Museum, which stood on the road to that port, come from the same excavations; the one was dedicated to Isis, Serapis, Silvanus, and the Lares by proconsul C. Pomponius Turpilianus, because of the safe return of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina with their children; the second was sanctified to the Victoria Augustorum; the third to the wife of Septimius Severus, Julia Augusta, as mater castrorum, and the fourth to Septimius Severus himself, in 194.
The Vatican Museum Pio Clementino is adorned in a similar way by the colossal busts of Adrianus, Trajan, Faustina and Marcus Aurelius found at that time, while in the Chiaramonti gallery are the large bust of Antoninus Pius and that of Juno.
This is actually all they knew about Ostia; for the many inscriptions, found there, do mention shrines of Juno. Vulcanus, Tiberinus, of Nymphs and of the here indispensable Castores and Neptunus, but so far no remains of those buildings had been found.
There was a chance that they would be uncovered now, and that is why half of the working people had been placed on the so-called grave street, and the second team had ventured a reclamation of one of the many mounds, which are closer to the sea, where the richer residents of Ostia had their palaces. With which happy result this work was awarded, I could see with my own eyes. Indeed, I was shown a house with a bath, brought out from under a debris layer of twenty feet. It was known from Julius Capitolinus and from an Inscription that Antoninus Pius had built a public bath at Ostia, and so it was only necessary to see if the consuls' names on the baked bricks corresponded with that, and this indeed proved to be the case. Niger and Camerinus were read on the stones, who in 138, the first year of Antoninus, held the consulate. So we know that this must have been the public bath; the size it is true is not very large, but the same is true of the three public baths dug up at Pompeii.
The wide corridor, which opens onto an open porch, was floored with a simple black mosaic border, à la Grecque, and plastered just like the corridors of our houses; however, infinitely more beautiful, because the ancients had fared much further in that art. Thus I saw white plastered walls in Pompeii that would be considered marble, that surface is so smooth and shimmering, and that although it has been exposed to merciless wind and weather for years. The edges of those columns and walls were covered with strips of alabaster, the remaining pieces of which, turned to lime, immediately revealed that this building had been destroyed by fire, a lot that it shared with many baths. As a result, the roof with part of the walls had collapsed, as a result of which the mosaic floor of the aula, with its gracefully inlaid, so colorfully intertwined stars of different marble, had become horribly battered; for the surface pierced with many holes looked like the waves of the sea. Therefore, it is only with great difficulty that Pio Nono's commendable order can be followed up to carry this floor to Rome, to restore it there, and like so many other mosaics that luster the gigantic collection of the Vatican, to decorate the floor of one of the rooms of that Museum.
I emphasize this; for I clearly remember that the Caporale dei Scavatori made that mosaic floor wet for me to bring out the decorative drawing even better, and that I was delighted by those arabesques and flowers assembled from all kinds of small pieces of marble, which for many carpet weavers would be a sought-after pattern. If they would leave that mosaic in its place, it would be there prey to the greed of the tourists, who do not usually content themselves with the consideration of the remains of antiquity, but rather give themselves the right to take them home in larger or smaller parts, and as a result, contribute their part to a further decline with a violating hand. They consider it a lawful business to steal those little chunks, to store them, as memories of a pleasant day, in their cupboard with knick-knacks, to liven up the made or forgotten diary; if they have not thrown that marble ballast overboard. Or why else in recent years had a finger from the façade groups of Attica not taken by Lord Elgin to suffer? What can be the importance to the owner of that in itself shapeless pieces? How low must the vain greed of such a decent tourist be?
Everything that belongs to the old bathing establishments I saw together there; to the left of the aula the apodyterium, where the bath guest took off his clothes; straight ahead (because a smaller cold bath was added later to the right), the cold bath in which he stepped with two steps, after he had first refreshed himself in the tepidarium, the lukewarm bath, or had the skin made to work to his heart's content in the sudatarium. How the Romans, so experienced at this point, heated their bath stoves was nowhere clear to me; the large square tubes of fired brick still stand there unscathed in the tight cement, and made me feel convinced that those arrangements must have served somewhat better than some of our so-called heaters.
The floors of these rooms are all made of white marble dice, in which the black stones form an appropriate representation; here a few athletes with gymnastic gestures, there a pair of swordsmen with a victor in proud attitude between them; in the room for a sea bath a sea monster, while in the adjoining room a juvenile water god rides on a dolphin, with a whip in the hand very gracefully drawn.
The room where the large piscina was must have been decorated with large marble statues; for there was found an excellent image of a woman there, which was excellently preserved: one only had to place the two pieces that made it up on top of each other and restore the head. The experts praised the simple but graceful drapery; the pure lines in which that garment fell so tastefully, partly so naturally absorbed by the hands that had wrapped themselves in the garment, were reminiscent of Polyhymnia or Mnemosyne, which are usually represented in this way; it is certainly a repetition of a great masterpiece. How beautiful must such images have appeared in that room in those 7 niches, in the middle of those marble walls; for in order that everything would not appear too white, the artist had colored the edges of the robe of the images, the outer garment with a red hue and the tunica bluish.
I would like, in response to this, to dwell on the custom of the ancients to color the white marble statues, and speak of the trials of the talented English sculptor Gibson and the savage Bonapartist Clesinger, seen by me in Rome, to re-introduce this custom; but I am not allowed to stray anymore.
I have yet to speak of a second image of a woman, found in the same room, which shared the fate of most old images, of having lost the head; who knows whether it has already been dug up in Ostia for several years and has been put on another body in one museum or another? Whatever the case, I later saw that beautiful statue in the Vatican Museum, Braccio Nuovo, No. 83, like a Ceres, in accordance with the reasoned explanation of Visconti, although other scientists hold her for a Juno, namely a repetition of the famous Juno Barberini, Museo Pio Clementino, No. 550, to which the pleats of the garment correspond; the missing head here means that the question must be decided by the size of the breast and the bosom, and in this the archaeologists believe they can point out a distinctive difference between Juno as a wife, Ceres as a mother and Venus as a virgin; a possibly shrewd distinction, the value of which I dare not judge.
A few days after I visited these excavations at Ostia, the Holy Father came to look at the successful enterprise. On this occasion His Holiness was offered a cameo on which one of the many excellent Roman engravers had carved the genius on the dolphin; so quickly are those experienced artists there to copy the newly found examples of their masters.
In March of the year 1860 they found a temple consecrated to the Eastern deity Mithras, which according to the consular inscriptions of 162 comes from the second century AD. According to Plutarch, the pirates who were conquered by Pompey must have carried this service to Ostia, from where she came to Rome. Various contributions to the Mithras service have been known so far, but from the mysterious rubble of Ostia has, thanks to the decisive decisions of the papal government, and in spite of its oppressive embarrassment, been withdrawn a whole Mithras sanctuary, which because of its size and pure preservation surpasses all others. It is said twice on the inlaid floor that L. Agrius Calendio dedicated this temple: "Soli Invicto Mithrae". The building is surrounded by stairs, at the foot of which several altars stand; in the back of the temple the apse rises above some steps that are covered with the most precious marble; in the middle of those stairs is the great altar with a well in front; this main altar was built by the priest Caius Caelius Hermaeros of beautiful cipollino marble, a grayish-green marble with circular flames, just like the circles of an onion from which it derives its name. Three statues of Mithras' servants were found here, one holding his torch upwards, the second holding his down, while the third is resting on the extinguished torch. This sanctuary must have been rich in ornaments; the ornaments are of a beautiful form and pure design, and are made of various marbles, two of which are among the rarest and most precious, since they were extracted from grooves which are either completely exhausted or at least now lost. This is what is said, but I dare here to suspect that this spokesman is not fully aware of what was discovered a few years ago about the marble quarries that people thought were lost.
Ostia's excavations yielded many important results for science, and also from a social point of view they deserve our attention; for they were executed by 40 'forzati', that is by criminals, who were sentenced to the galleys. To get a glimpse into the legal system of the papal state, I could not refrain - returned from the excavations - to start a conversation with those 'forzati', who were walking around freely in the open space of the old fort. This half-collapsed fortress, which is precisely what makes it so picturesque, is the favorite place for owls and birds of prey who live there peacefully with those galley slaves under the same roof; thus the proverb is confirmed: "kind seeks kind!" Of course the first question was for tobacco and cigars, which immediately opened their mouth to what I wanted to know from those gentlemen. They were all convicted of injury and shedding of blood; accidents that, under the southern sky with a hot-tempered people so susceptible to all impressions, occur more than we can imagine.
A few weeks after my visit to Ostia, the excavations had to be stopped; the 'galeotti' would therefore, after only having received the apostolic blessing and a reduction in punishment at the visit of the Holy Father, go to Rome; because from June to September Ostia is a deadly stay. The meager population of barely 100 souls then looks for safer places and leaves home and yard to the surveillance of a few, who, according to experience, are not susceptible to fever, yet look sickly and deplorable.
So we rush out of this inhospitable place, and rather accompany me through the beautiful forest of Ostia to the beach. The rubble road to it turned out to be constructed of shards of white marble; it is the Via Severiana, which leads along Castel Fusano past the villa of Pliny the Younger to Laurentum. One passes by the disastrous ponds, which, because their discharge into the sea is not properly maintained, become by their stagnant water the cause of fatal evaporations. A wide path of regular pieces of basalt, made in unknown time, leads me to the sea after I had first walked over the fairly high dunes. Furthermore, the beach is flat and thus offers the fishermen from Gaëta the desirable opportunity to set their barges on dry land.
Leiden, January 1862.
Dr. W.N. du Rieu.