Hills Above the Tiber

Come with me for a while, back across the long reach of time, to a stretch of land in the middle of the Italian peninsula where a river winds slowly toward the sea. There is no city here yet. There is only the country itself, the low hills and the wide valleys, the water moving among the reeds, and the sky that has watched over all of it for longer than anyone can measure. We are standing in a moment before the story begins, in the centuries the Romans themselves would one day look back upon with wonder, when the place that would hold their name was little more than grass and stone and open air.

The land lies along the western coast of Italy, in the region that would later be called Latium. It is a gentle country in many ways, neither the harsh mountains of the interior nor the flat marshes of the shore, but a middle ground of rolling ridges and fertile plains. Volcanic soil lies beneath much of it, dark and rich, left behind by fires that had cooled long ago. Grain grew well here. So did the vine and the olive, in the warmer seasons, and the grass rose thick enough to feed sheep and cattle through the slow turning of the year. The people who lived here spoke a language we now call Latin, though in those early days it was only one tongue among many that were spoken across the peninsula.

Through the heart of this country ran a river, and the river mattered a great deal. It was the Tiber, a broad and muddy waterway that gathered itself in the mountains to the north and carried its slow brown current down toward the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Tiber was not the largest river in the world, nor the clearest, but it had a quality that would prove more valuable than beauty. It was crossable. At a certain point along its length, where an island split the current into two shallower channels, the water could be forded on foot in the dry months, and a boat could carry travelers across even when the river ran high. Such a place was rare and precious in a land divided by water.

You might picture that river crossing as it was then, before anyone thought to build a bridge or raise a wall beside it. The island sat low in the stream, green with willow and reed, and the banks on either side rose gently toward higher ground. Anyone moving through this part of Italy, whether driving a herd of animals or carrying goods to trade, would find their path drawn toward this shallow place. Traders coming up from the salt flats near the coast, and those coming down from the interior, would meet here, at the ford, where the land let them pass. It was a natural gathering point, a knot in the web of old paths that laced the peninsula together.

Above the crossing, set back a little from the water, rose a cluster of hills. There were seven of them in the traditional counting, though the true shape of the ground was more tangled than any tidy number suggests. They were not grand mountains. They were modest heights, their tops flattened and broad, their sides dropping away in slopes that were easy to climb and easy to defend. Between them lay low ground, marshy in places, threaded with small streams that ran down toward the Tiber. In the ninth and eighth centuries before our own era, these hilltops were bare of any city. They held only grass, and scattered trees, and the huts of the people who had chosen to live upon them.

Those hills would one day carry names that echoed down the centuries. The Palatine, rising in the center, steep-sided and pleasant, catching the morning light. The Capitoline nearby, smaller but sharp and strong, a natural fortress. The Aventine to the south, the Caelian and the Esquiline to the east, the Quirinal and the Viminal to the north. In the beginning these were simply places where people settled, each hill a little world of its own, separated from its neighbors by the low wet ground between. A family or a clan might claim a hilltop, build their homes there, keep their animals on the slopes, and look across the valley to the smoke of their neighbors' fires.

The homes themselves were simple things. We know something of them because their traces have been found in the earth, the marks of post holes and hearths pressed into the ancient soil of the Palatine. They were round or oval huts, their walls made of wattle and daub, woven branches packed with clay, and their roofs thatched with straw or reeds cut from the riverbank. A single room held the life of a household, with a hearth at its center for warmth and cooking, and a hole in the roof to let the smoke drift out into the night. Around these dwellings lay small plots and pens, the ordinary furniture of a farming life. There were no temples yet, no marble, no paved streets. There was only earth, and thatch, and the patient work of living.

The people who dwelt in these huts were herders and farmers, and their year followed the turning of the seasons rather than the ambitions of any state. In the warm months they drove their sheep and goats to graze the higher pastures. In the cooler months they brought them down again to the sheltered valleys near the river. They planted grain in the dark soil, and tended their vines, and gathered what the land offered. They made pottery, rough and useful, and worked bronze and iron into tools and ornaments. Life was small in scale, bounded by the hills a person could see and the paths a person could walk in a day. Yet it was not poor in every sense. The land was generous, and the river brought trade, and a settlement placed upon these hills lacked for very little that the age could provide.

It is worth pausing to consider why this particular spot drew people to it, for the reasons run deeper than chance. The hills gave safety. Rising above the surrounding plain, they let a settlement watch the country for miles around, and their steep sides made them hard to storm. The marshy low ground between the hills, unhealthy as it was, formed a kind of natural moat, a wet barrier that slowed any approach. The river gave water and a road at once, for goods could travel by boat far more easily than by cart over rough tracks. The crossing gave commerce, drawing traders and travelers to the foot of the hills. And the plain gave food, its dark soil yielding grain and grass in abundance. Safety, water, trade, and food, all gathered in one place. It was, in the quiet arithmetic of survival, a very good place to live.

There was salt to consider as well, that humble mineral without which no ancient people could preserve their food or keep their herds in health. Near the mouth of the Tiber, where the river met the sea, lay flats where salt could be gathered from the drying pans along the shore. An old road ran up from those flats into the interior, following the line of the river, and it passed directly beneath the seven hills. Salt moved along this road in quantities that mattered, and whoever held the hills held a hand upon that traffic. In later ages the Romans would remember this road and give it a name, the Via Salaria, the Salt Road, and its name alone tells us how old and how important the trade in salt had always been.

So the settlements grew, slowly, on their separate hills. For a long stretch of years they remained apart, each community keeping to its own height, burying its dead in its own way, following its own small customs. The archaeology of the region shows two great traditions of burial in these centuries, one of cremation and one of inhumation, the burning of the dead and the laying of them whole into the earth, and this hints at more than one people mingling in this country. There were Latins here, and there were others nearby, kindred peoples of the plain, and to the north across the Tiber lay a different world altogether.

That world belonged to the Etruscans. North of the river, in the country that would later be called Tuscany, a remarkable civilization had taken shape, older and more sophisticated than anything the Latin herders had yet built. The Etruscans lived in true cities, walled and organized, ruled by kings and by wealthy families who traded across the sea. They worked metal with great skill, they painted the walls of their tombs with scenes of feasting and dancing, and they carried on a lively commerce with the Greeks who had planted colonies farther south along the Italian coast. From the Greeks, and through the Etruscans, new things flowed northward and southward across the peninsula, the alphabet among them, and the shapes of gods, and the fashions of a wider Mediterranean world.

The little settlements above the Tiber sat at the meeting place of these currents. To the south lay the Greek cities of the coast, bright with their temples and their harbors. To the north lay the Etruscan cities, rich and inventive. Between them ran the river and the salt road, and upon the hills at the crossing lived the Latin communities, absorbing what passed by. They took the alphabet and made it their own. They took forms of pottery and metalwork and building. They took ideas about the gods, and about how a people might organize itself, and they folded all of it slowly into their own way of living. A place at a crossroads is never truly isolated, however small it may be, and these hills were a crossroads from the very start.

The Romans of later centuries, looking back on these dim beginnings, did not tell the story quite as we have told it. They did not speak of gradual settlement and slow coalescence, of burial customs and salt roads and the patient logic of geography. They told instead a story of heroes and gods, a tale bright with drama, and it is a story worth hearing, not because it happened, but because they believed it, and because it shaped how they understood themselves.

In their telling, the origins of Rome reached back to the fall of a distant city, Troy, far across the sea in Asia Minor. A Trojan prince named Aeneas, so the story went, escaped the burning of his home and wandered for years across the Mediterranean before landing at last upon the shores of Italy. His descendants founded a line of kings in Latium, and from that line, generations later, came two infant brothers, twins, born to a princess and set adrift upon the Tiber to die. The river did not drown them. It carried their basket gently to the bank, and there, in the traditional tale, a she-wolf found the children and nursed them, and a shepherd took them in and raised them as his own. The twins were called Romulus and Remus.

When they had grown, so the story continued, the brothers resolved to found a city upon the hills where they had been saved, and here the tale turns quieter and sadder, as founding tales so often do. The brothers quarreled over which hill should hold the city and whose name it should bear. Romulus prevailed. He marked out the line of his walls upon the Palatine, and by the reckoning that later Romans came to accept, this happened in a year we would number 753 before the common era, on a spring day in April. From Romulus the city took its name. Rome. And the Romans, counting the years of their history, would sometimes date them from that founding, from the birth of the city itself.

We tell this story as the Romans told it, with the understanding that it is a story and not a record. No she-wolf nursed a pair of abandoned twins. No single founder traced a wall in a single morning to bring a great city into being. The truth was slower and less tidy, a matter of many families over many generations, of huts multiplying on the hilltops and communities drawing together by degrees. Yet the legend holds a kind of deeper truth of its own. It tells us that the Romans knew their city had a beginning, that it had not always been. It tells us they imagined that beginning as a joining, a bringing together of scattered things into one. And in that imagining, however wrapped in wonder, there is an echo of what genuinely happened upon those hills.

For the great turning point in the real story was indeed a joining. At some time in the eighth or seventh century before our era, the separate settlements on the hills began to act less like neighbors and more like a single people. The low ground between the Palatine and the Capitoline, the marshy hollow that had kept the communities apart, became instead the place where they met. It was drained, in time, and dried, and cleared of its water, and upon that reclaimed ground the people of the hills began to gather for trade and for talk, for markets and for the settling of disputes. That cleared valley floor would one day be paved and lined with temples and become the beating heart of the city. In the beginning it was simply common ground, a shared space where separate hills became one settlement.

Around this same slow turning, the first rough defenses appeared. The hilltops had always offered natural protection, but now the people began to shape the land more deliberately, to raise banks of earth and set up barriers of timber and stone along the vulnerable approaches. These were not the mighty walls of later centuries, the great stone circuits that would gird the imperial city. They were humbler works, the walls of a growing town rather than a capital, meant to keep out raiders and mark the edge of the settled place. Yet in raising them, the people were doing something new. They were declaring, in earth and stone, that this was a single place with a single boundary, a here that was separate from the there beyond.

To draw a boundary is to make a decision about the world. It says that what lies within belongs together, that the huts on the Palatine and the huts on the Esquiline and the huts on the Quirinal are no longer merely near one another but part of one another. It says that the people who dwell inside the line share something, a name, a market, a set of gods, a way of settling their quarrels without bloodshed. The rough walls that rose in those centuries were the physical sign of an idea taking hold, the idea of a unified place. And that idea, more than any wolf or wandering prince, was the true founding of Rome.

We should not imagine that this happened all at once, or that anyone living through it understood what was beginning. The people of the hills were not building an empire. They were draining a marsh so that they might trade more easily, and raising a bank of earth so that they might sleep more safely, and clearing a common ground so that they might gather without disputing over whose land it was. They were solving the ordinary problems of ordinary life, as people always have. The grandeur that we see when we look back upon these hills was invisible to them. They saw only their fields, their flocks, their river, and their neighbors on the next height over.

And yet the shape of what would come was already present in the land itself. The hills that gave safety would one day carry palaces and temples. The valley that they drained would become the Forum, where the business of a world would one day be conducted. The river that brought them salt and trade would carry the grain of distant provinces to feed a city of a million souls. The crossing that drew the herders and the traders would be spanned by bridges of stone, and the salt road would become one thread in a network of roads reaching to the edges of the known world. All of that lay far ahead, unimaginable to the people in their wattle huts. But the seed of it was here, in the geography, in the joining, in the first rough walls upon the hillside.

Let us stand for a last moment in that early time, before the city was truly a city, when it was still becoming one. Picture the seven hills in the light of a late afternoon, the grass moving in the wind that comes up from the sea. Smoke rises from the hearths of the huts, thin gray threads against the warm sky. Down in the drained valley, a few figures move among the market stalls, and the sound of their voices drifts up the slopes. The river gleams below, brown and patient, and the reeds stand still along the island where the water is shallow enough to cross. It is a quiet scene, and an ordinary one, and there is nothing in it to announce the thousand years that are coming.

The people finish their business in the valley as the light begins to fade. They climb the slopes toward their homes, driving their animals before them, and the hills settle into evening one by one. The first walls stand dark against the dusk, low and rough, marking the edge of the place that is becoming Rome. No one has drawn a plan for what will rise here. No one has spoken the word empire. There are only the huts, and the hearths, and the shared ground below, and the slow certainty that these hills now hold a single people.

Night comes gently over the seven hills. The fires burn low. The river runs on toward the sea, as it has always run, carrying nothing yet but water and starlight.

And on the dark slopes above the crossing, in the huts among the grass, a city lies sleeping before it has even learned its name…