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2.1 Romulus Founds Rome
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Roman Architecture
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De la lección
It Takes a City: The Founding of Rome and the Beginnings of Urbanism in Italy
Evolution of Roman architecture from the Iron Age through the Late Republic with emphasis on city planning, wall building, and early Roman temple architecture.
Conoce a los instructores
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
Last time, I introduced you to some of Rome's greatest buildings.
And I remind you of two of them here:
the Pantheon, on the left-hand side of the screen,
the temple to all the gods, and then, of
course, the Colosseum on the right-hand side of the screen.
These are two of the greatest masterworks of Roman architecture.
And we will gain momentum and work our way up to those in the
course of the semester, but it's not where we're going to begin.
We're not going to begin with these masterworks.
We're going to begin at the beginning.
And the beginning goes way, way back, in fact, all the
way to the Iron Age, indeed, to the eighth century BC.
And we know on precisely what day not only the
history of Rome, but the history of Roman architecture began.
And that was,
specifically, on the 21st of April in 753 BC.
Because it was on the 21st of April in 753 BC that,
according to legend, Romulus founded the city of Rome.
Romulus founded the city of Rome on one of Rome's seven hills, the Palatine Hill.
And I show you here a view of the Palatine Hill.
This is taken from Google Earth.
I urged you last time to make sure that you have Google Earth downloaded
on your computer, and to take advantage of using Google Earth in the course of
the semester, in order to really get to know the city of Rome and the,
the location of the various buildings that
we'll be talking about within the city fabric.
So I show you one of these views of the Palatine Hill
in Rome from Google Earth, and you can see the relationship of
that hill to the part of Rome in which it finds itself.
You're going to be able to pick all of these buildings out by yourselves in the
very near future, but let me just just do that for you here this morning.
You can see, of course, the Colosseum in the upper right corner.
You can see the Roman Forum lying in
front of it.
You can see the great, that modern street, that you
see right behind the Forum is the Via dei Fori Imperiali
commissioned by Mussolini, Il Duce.
We can also see, in this view the Capitoline Hill with the oval piazza
designed by Michelangelo, and down here the famous Circus
Maximus, as you can see, the great stadium, the greatest stadium of Rome.
It wasn't the only stadium of Rome, but it was the largest.
And you can see its hairpin shape right
down here.
The hill in question right now is the Palatine Hill,
and this is the Palatine Hill, all of this area here.
And as you look down on it, as you gaze down on
it, you will see the remains of a colossal structure which is actually
a late first century AD palace that was designed under the direction
of the Emperor of Rome at that particular time a very colorful character
that we'll talk about in some detail later in the term, by the name of Domitian.
This is Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill.
But that, that, discussion of that palace lies in the future.
What I want to say today is miraculously, the remains of Romulus's village on
the Palatine Hill, founded in the eighth
century BC, actually lies beneath the remains of
the Palace of Domitian in Rome.
And it's two of Romulus's huts on, on
the Palatine Hill that I want to turn to today.
Believe it or not, remains of those huts from the Iron Age are still there.
Now they don't look like much I'm showing
you [LAUGH] what remains of Romulus's huts right there.
And you're probably having a hard time
figuring out exactly what we're looking at.
But what were looking at,
the, the architects that were working for the designers
that were working for Romulus were very clever indeed.
And they realized that the best way to
create a foundation or pavement for their huts
was to use the natural rock of the
Palatine Hill, and that's exactly what they did.
What you're looking at here is the tufa,
tufa, the natural tufa rock of the Palatine Hill.
And what
they did, was they created a rectangular plan.
They gave it rounded corners, and they cut the stone
back about 20 inches down to create that rectangular shape.
They rounded the corners.
And then they put holes in the tufa rock. The holes were to
support wooden poles that serve to, to to support the
superstructure of the hut and also to support the walls of the hut.
So the pavement of the, the tufa rock of
the Palatine is the, is the floor of the hut.
And then these holes support the wooden
poles that supported, in turn, the superstructure.
I now show you a restored view on the left.
And you should all have your monument lists, and should be able to follow along
with the major monuments.
You won't see every image that we're, that I'm going to
be showing here, but you'll show, see a selection there of
the ones that you'll need to learn and be able to
talk about for the midterm the two midterm exams in this course.
But you'll see there this restored view of one of these Palatine huts,
as well as a view of the model that one can actually see in the archaeological
museum that's on the Palatine Hill today.
You can see, as you look at this restored view on the
left, you can see that rectangular plan that we talked about here.
You can see the rounded corners.
And you can see the wooden poles that were placed into
those holes to support the walls and the superstructure of the building.
You can see over here the same the wooden poles.
This gives you a better sense of what they looked
like in actuality, the wooden poles, and also the superstructure.
We also know what the walls were made out of.
They were made out of something and I, you know, I put some of
the key words that might be unfamiliar to you on the monument list as well.
They were made out of wattle and daub. Well, what is wattle and daub?
Wattle and daub is twigs and rods that
are covered and plastered with clay, twigs and rocks covered and plastered with clay.
Those, that served as the walls of the structure.
And then the sloping roof, as you see it here, was thatched.
Now, it's very hard; there are no huts that
look like this in Rome still today that I
can show you to give you a better sense
of what these would have looked like in antiquity.
But I'm sure you, like I, have seen huts like this
on your travels around the world.
And one example I can show you, and would,
would that we were all down there right now.
This is a view of a small village in the Maya
Riviera near Cancun where one sees, if you take the bus
or a car from Maya to Chichen Itza, which I hope
some of you have had a chance to do, if you haven't.
It's a great, great trip.
And you can see, all along the road, huts that
look very much like the huts of Romulus's village, made out
of wood and then with thatched roofs, as you can see here.
So this is the best I can do in terms of conjuring up for you Romulus's village.
We also have information with regard to
what these huts looked like in ancient Roman
times, or in, not in ancient Rome, in, in the Iron Age, as I mentioned before.
We have not only the pavement
stone that's still preserved but we also have these urns.
We call them hut urns, hut urns, because they're urns in the shape of huts.
And these hut urns were used for cremation when, in the eighth century BC.
These date also to the Iron Age and the cremated remains
of the individual was placed inside the door of the hut.
And if you look at this hut
urn you'll see that it looks very similar to
the huts of Romulus that we've already been talking about.
it, it is either sort of square or rectangular in shape.
It has rounded corners, as you can see here.
And the roof of the hut urn is sloping. So we do believe, we use this, along
with the surviving pavement, to restore what these hut urns what these
huts of Romulus looked like in the eighth century BC.
Let me also note, it's interesting just to see the status of
men and women in, in any given civilization at any given time.
There are essentially two kinds of hut urns from the eighth century BC.
There are, I mean there are two kinds of, excuse
me, two kinds of urns in the eighth century BC.
One of them is hut urns, and the other is helmet urns.
You can guess as
well as, as anyone as to who was buried in which.
The men were buried in the helmet urns, and
the women's remains were placed in the hut urns.
So men men's domain was considered the
battlefield women's domain was considered the house.
But this house, the houses are actually more more important in terms of giving
us a sense, again, of what Romulus's village looked like in the eighth century.
And if you take one of those huts, and you
combine it with another set of huts you, you can,
you can get a sense of what the village of
Romulus would have looked like in the eighth century BC.
This is a model that is on view
in the archaeological museum on the Palatine Hill today.
And it gives you a very good sense of the village of Romulus in the eighth century.
And of course it was from this village that the great
city of Rome grew, and of course there's a quite significant difference between Rome
as it is now, and Rome as it was in the eighth century BC.
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