Rome: City and Empire exhibition traces the growth of an epoch

This exhibition offers fascinating glimpses into the complex world of Roman culture, from portraits to coins, tools to tombstones.

Coins from the Hoxne Treasure Hoxne, England, late 4th – early 5th century CE. Objects this page from the British Museum’s Rome: City and Empire exhbition at the National Museum of Australia.

The title of this exhibition is unusually apposite, for the story of Rome is ­indeed one of a city that grew into an empire. The Greek world, which the Roman Empire eventually came to include, was inherently different in its social and historical structure: it was fundamentally decentralised, composed of a constellation of independent and competing city-states. There were patterns of alliance, ethnic affinities, links between mother city (metropolis) and colony, and the Athenians turned the Delian League into a virtual empire in the 5th century BC, but it was not until the conquests of Philip of Macedon in the following century that mainland Greece was united into a single state.

The Romans themselves had numerous stories about the foundation of their own city. The most familiar one, even today, is the legend of two boys abandoned in a wood and suckled by a she-wolf until they were discovered by a kindly shepherd: Romulus and Remus. Romulus later founded the city of Rome, while the ­Sienese claim that Remus established their city. Later, and in a more literate age, the tradition arose that the Romans were descended from Trojans fleeing the destruction of their city by the Greeks.

Bracelet from the Hoxne Treasure, Hoxne, England, late 4th–early 5th century AD.

This is the story told by Virgil in the Aeneid. His protagonist was already an important figure in The Iliad, although Homer did not imagine him as the founder of what was probably no more than a group of villages in his lifetime. But as the only leading Trojan to survive, and the son of Aphrodite, Aeneas was the most plausible choice for a Trojan founder. At the end of Virgil’s epic, Aeneas has established Lavinium, not Rome itself.

In due course the last member of his family line, Rhea Silvia, forced to become a Vestal ­Virgin by a wicked uncle intent on ensuring she has no heirs, is seduced by the god Mars and gives birth to the twins Romulus and Remus. And thus — in a complicated story that even the

Detail from a relief showing two female gladiators, Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum), Turkey, 1st–2nd century AD.

Romans sometimes found hard to follow — the city had divine origins in the gods of love and war, the archetypes of the masculine and the feminine. Indeed, although Rome’s connection with war is obvious, the relation to love was also very important. The name Roma, spelled backwards, is the Latin word amor, and in the 2nd century AD Hadrian embodied this conceit in the twin temples of Venus and Roma, with back-to-back apses.

By Hadrian’s time, Rome was the greatest and most magnificent city the world had seen; the Roman Empire was at its vastest ­extent, the whole of the Mediterranean was mare nostrum — our sea — and millions of people lived in peace and security under the ­empire’s authority. As Edward Gibbon wrote in his ­Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which was published in 1776: “If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”

By this time, Rome was almost 900 years old, based on the traditional founding date of 753BC, and for most of that time it had looked nothing like the later imperial city. Originally a village, Rome grew by joining with or conquering neighbouring peoples, first various Italian groups, then the Greeks who occupied the south of the peninsula, the Etruscans to their north and the Gauls beyond that. In 509BC, ­according to tradition, they expelled the kings and founded the republic.

In the 3rd century BC, at the height of Greek Hellenistic culture in the east, the ­Romans fought the first two great Punic wars against the Carthaginians who dominated the western Mediterranean. These were colossal struggles for the Roman people, who ­endured great losses but emerged as the new superpower of the ancient world and in the following century achieved hegemony over the Greek and Hellenised worlds as well.

Ring with sealstone depicting Mark Antony, probably Italy, 40–30 BC.

But the old republican institutions began to crack under the strain of ruling a vast empire; a series of strong men and dictators rose to power, the last and greatest of whom was Julius Caesar, assassinated in 44BC because he was suspected of wanting to make himself king. His adopted son, Octavian, after a series of civil wars, ­became the first of what we call the emperors, but because the republican constitution was never abrogated, the new system never had full legal legitimacy, nor was there a formal and legal procedure for succession; that is why there were so many periods when succession involved military coups or civil war.

Despite episodes of instability at the top, however, the administration of the empire generally worked surprisingly well. As Virgil had Anchises foretell the destiny of the Romans: “These shall be your arts, to impose the way of peace, to spare the conquered and to subdue the proud.” There has been much angst and guilt about the idea of empire since the postcolonial period but, historically speaking, empires have had more positive than negative effects, keeping the peace, enabling greater exchange between peoples and promoting technical development.

Horse-trappings from the Esquiline Treasure, Rome, 4th century AD.

And imperial powers can learn from those they conquer, as the Romans did from the more intellectually and aesthetically sophisticated Greeks, or the Arabs from the Greeks and Persians, the Turks from the Persians, and the Mongols from the Chinese. Modern Western civilisation itself owes its origins to the conquest of our rude and illiterate tribal ancestors by ­Romans schooled in Greek culture, so that in the course of the centuries Celtic and Germanic peoples became heirs to the great achievements of the ancients.

This exhibition offers many fascinating glimpses of the complex world of Roman culture, from portraits to coins, tools, items from everyday life and, at the end, sarcophaguses and tombstones. Portraits are perhaps the most striking of these, and we are met at the entrance by the full-length figure of a patrician in a toga. Although dating from the imperial period, this statue illustrates the way that republican traditions were nominally maintained even in the age of the emperors.

Portraits were very important to the ­Romans, who valued realism above all, ­especially in the republican period. Later, as we see, images of Augustus combined realism with a degree of idealisation borrowed from the Greeks. With the decline of the empire, the art of portraiture was effectively lost for a millennium, so it is not surprising that busts such as these made a profound impact on the imagination of the Renaissance artists: and we can still recognise here the heads of Augustus, Hadrian, Commodus or Caracalla, although we have no likenesses from the Middle Ages.

Coins were first developed by the Lydians in the 6th century BC and first fully exploited by the Greeks, who used them for trade and also to promote the identity and prestige of each city-state. It was the Hellenistic rulers who first put their own features on their coins — replacing earlier features of a divinity — a practice that persists to this day, but in Rome it was Caesar, as we see here, who first minted coins in his own effigy, not long before his murder.

A bust of Hadrian, Tivoli, Italy, about 125–130 CE.

Subsequently, the Romans used coinage as a tool of communication and propaganda, frequently minting coins to celebrate a victory; here, for example, there is a coin of Vespasian celebrating the conquest of Judea by Titus in AD70, when the last Temple in Jerusalem was burnt. New emperors and claimants to the throne almost always would mint coins as soon as possible and in periods of instability coins are sometimes the only hard evidence an individual was briefly ­acclaimed as emperor.

Coins, naturally, are found all over the ­empire, but so are certain other objects that testify to the extent of trading networks. Of special interest in this regard are two very fine ribbed glass bowls that most likely come from the same workshop in 1st century Italy, yet one of which was found in Bahrain and the other in England.

Religious belief, too, travelled freely around the empire. Greco-Roman religion was inherently elastic and incapable of fundamentalism; when the Romans encountered a new people their instinct was to identify the local gods with ones they already knew, a fusion that ­suited both parties. In Egypt, we find the new divinity Serapis formed as an amalgam of Jupiter and Osiris. The Persian Mithras, whose mystery cult was later superseded by Christianity, ­embodied elements of Zoroastrian belief and was particularly popular with the military.

It was only the Jews and Christians who were unwilling to join in this free-flowing syncretism, and it was their intolerance and refusal to show even token respect for the official gods of the state that led to episodes of conflict and repression. When Christianity was finally legalised as the empire began to crumble, the newly powerful religion did its best to suppress all other forms of belief and to destroy the cult images and places of worship of disbelievers. Gibbon considered, probably rightly, that the rise of Christianity helped to undermine the empire, yet in a supreme irony it was the church that eventually became, as the only surviving institution of the late empire, the custodian of classical culture in the centuries of chaos, violence and barbarian depredation that followed the collapse of Roman authority.

The exhibition ends, appropriately, with several sarcophaguses, ossuaries and funerary inscriptions, each revealing, directly and indirectly, important things about the culture of the time, from one in which a freed slave ­acknowledges his former master to another from Ephesus that, inscribed in Greek and Latin, reminds us of the bilingualism of the Roman world, and that the Greek-speaking east became the Byzantine Empire, enduring another millennium after the West had been overrun by Germanic barbarians.

Most impressive of these objects is a 2nd century sarcophagus with the wedding procession of Bacchus and Ariadne — Dionysiac subjects are common on sarcophaguses ­because of the connection of Dionysiac mysteries with the afterlife. By about 1585 this sarcophagus was installed in the gardens of Villa Montalto, the private home of the immensely dynamic Pope Sixtus V (reigned 1585-90), and it is presumably there that Annibale Carracci would have seen it, for as readers may recognise, it is recalled in the central panel (c. 1597-98) of Carracci’s magnificent ceiling in Palazzo Farnese, another example of the ubiquitous afterlife of the city of which it was said: Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet — how great Rome was, her very ruins teach us.

Rome: City and Empire

National Museum of Australia, Canberra, until February 3.