Tiber

Eternal River of Rome

Bruce Ware Allen

• Publisher: ForeEdge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781512600377
• eBook ISBN: 9781512603347
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

In this rich history of Italy's Tiber River, Bruce Ware Allen charts the main currents, mythic headwaters, and hidden tributaries of one of the world's most renowned waterways. He considers life along the river, from its twin springs high in the Apennines all the way to its mouth at Ostia, and describes the people who lived along its banks and how they made the Tiber work for them. The Tiber has served as the realm of protomythic creatures and gods, a battleground for armies and navies, a livelihood for boatmen and fishermen, the subject matter of poets and painters, and the final resting place for criminals and martyrs. Tiber: Eternal River of Rome is a highly readable history and a go-to resource for information about Italy's most storied river.

1

GODS, KINGS, AND MEN

In which gods speak to men, Trojans found a empire, citizens expel a king and import alien gods, healthy people harvest salt, sick people get well, Cicero goes to law, and Cleopatra settles by the riverside.

Father Tiber

Rivers are constantly alive, sometimes resting, sometimes running, alternately cheerful, morose, angry, bored, dozy. In a good mood, gentle and playful, refreshing and invigorating. Sit next to a river for any length of time, and you can easily imagine it chattering and chuckling, mostly to itself, just this side of incomprehension. In a bad mood, water can be murderous. Rivers are stronger than any single man and more relentless; they fight back.

How can an observant person not be impressed? For early man, a running river was a constant reminder that, for good or for ill, in sickness and in health, the gods were living beside you, like the pre-creation universe, without shape or form, but palpable, as visible as the sun or moon but within reach and touchable, their power instantly apparent. Genesis declares that the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters; gentiles have noticed something similar.

Back in the golden days when men lived in peace under divine law, Rome’s river spirit went by the name Albula. Virgil writes about him: “Then kings arose, and fierce Thybris with giant bulk, from whose name we of Italy have since called our river Tiber; her true name ancient Albula has lost.”¹

Note the spelling—you will also find “Tybris” and “Tibris,” and scholarly explanations for all of them. The historian Livy claims the name comes from Tiberinus Silvius, a later king of Alba Longa, who fell into the river Albula and drowned, and was thereafter considered the godhead as well as the new namesake.² The philologist Varro acknowledged Livy’s story but suggests that the king in question was ruler of Veii.³ Or possibly the king got his name from the river, which in turn was named for its godhead Tiberinus, one of the three thousand sons of Oceanus and Tithys, all of them river deities.

There are more stories equally uncertain—take your pick. By the time of the Roman Empire, Albula has become Tiber Pater—Father Tiber—respected by and familiar to all Romans. Virgil gives the god a speaking part in the Aeneid, in which he favors our hero with a prophetic dream, giving him a glimpse of everything that his descendants in this part of the world will accomplish.

He takes on human form, as gods sometimes do when they need to talk to mortals directly. Virgil describes him:

Tiberinus, the old river god himself,

Lifted his head amid the poplar leaves

Draped in a fine, grey-linen mantle,

His hair crowned with shady reeds⁴

The poet Ovid called upon the god at one time on a point of scholarship, and to hear Ovid tell it, the god arose from the water in the form of a somewhat befuddled old man happy to talk about the old days, before Rome was founded, when, “if I recall correctly” (si memini), he went by the name of Albula.⁵ Ovid was never the most respectful of poets, and stressing an immortal’s age as if he were human was a bit of cheek. (Ovid himself was banished from Rome to the provincial reaches of the Black Sea for unspecified crimes against morality; possibly this kind of verse was a factor.)

Roman sculptors give the river god a human figure, dripping long hair and beard. The earliest, now in the Louvre, was discovered in 1512, acquired by the church, stolen by France in 1797, and would have been returned to Rome in 1815 had not the pope bequeathed it to the restored Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII in recognition of his Christian faith. A later copy can be seen in Rome on the Capitoline as one half of a flanking pair, the other half being Nile. He is reclining—it is hard to imagine a river god doing anything else—with one elbow resting on the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, and next to her are the twins themselves. He is also holding a cornucopia, a horn of plenty, suitable for a god whose element is required for growing food.

There is more to that story. The original horn belonged to the Greek river god Achelous. In that dry country, he could expect a good deal of respect. It was his misfortune to fall in love with the nymph Deianira. So had Hercules. Achelous counted on his watery ability to change shape to win her over. It was not enough, as she herself explains:

Acheloüs, who in triple form appeared

To sue my father Oeneus for my hand,

Now as a bull, now as a sinuous snake

With glittering coils, and now in bulk a man

with front of ox, while from his shaggy beard

Runnels of fountain-water spouted forth.⁶

The matter came to blows, as was so often the case with Hercules. Achelous entered the ring in the form of a bull, and in the ensuing struggle, Hercules tore off one of the horns. Achelous then morphed into a snake. Hercules just laughed. He was famous for having killed two vipers when he was still in his cradle. The river god gave in. Even years later he didn’t like to talk about the encounter (“It is a mournful task you have required, for who can wish to tell his own disgrace?”).⁷

Who indeed? As to how Father Tiber wound up with the cornucopia, that’s another story, now lost along with many other things dropped into the river.

Aeneas to Romulus and Remus

from the ship Aeneas sees a grove

And through its midst a pleasant river running,

The Tiber, yellow sand, and whirling eddy

Down to the sea. Around, above and over,

Fly the bright-colored birds, the water-haunters,

charming the air with song. The order given,

The Trojans turn their course to land; they enter

The channel and the shade.

Aeneid

So Virgil describes the arrival of Aeneas and his fellow Trojan refugees to their final destination.⁸

As we have seen, the newcomers had a cordial relationship with the river god, who favored these men over the indigenous Italians. Father Tiber goes so far as to bring the river’s flow to a standstill just long enough for the Trojans to row their boats upstream, as far as Pallantium (future Rome), then occupied by Greek wanderers under a King Evander of Pallene (Arcadia).

Good fortune, in that although Greek, these Greeks had left their own native lands some sixty years before the Trojan war and were without any anti-Trojan prejudice. Indeed, Evander and Aeneas could cite a common ancestor.

War would follow. The divine quarrels that had sparked the war back in Troy were not entirely burned out (Juno in particular was not done with punishing Trojans wherever she might find them, least of all Aeneas, the son of her rival Venus). But with help from Evander, Aeneas and his Trojans were able to defeat Turnus and other unwelcoming aborigines and set the foundations of Rome’s future greatness.

The gods, we are told, assured Aeneas, expelled from Troy, that he and his followers would settle Alba Longa and that their descendants would astonish the world, as indeed they did. Virgil’s epic, never finished to the author’s satisfaction (on his deathbed Virgil asked friends to burn it, a directive they ignored), stops in medias res, with Aeneas fighting his enemy Turnus to the death. The story was well enough known that the unwritten parts were, and are, superfluous. Aeneas ends his days quietly, full of years, in Lavinium, the city he founded, upstream from Pallantium, leaving descendants to build on what he had begun.

Everything up to now has been a prequel, for Rome, unusual among nations, has not one, but two foundation myths. Some years pass in Lavinium, ruled by Aeneas’s posterity, until there appears the bad seed in the person of the wicked and ambitious Amulius. Desirous of the throne held by his uncle Numitor, he killed Numitor’s sons and forced Numitor aside. The king’s daughter, Rhea Silva, he compelled to become a Vestal Virgin. She, however, had coincidentally been raped by the god Mars and given birth to the twins Romulus and Remus.

Amulius was in an awkward position, and given every other example of abandoning infants, his solution seemed predestined to fail. One can, however, see a kind of brutal logic to the order. If the mother was lying and the father was some anonymous rake, then the boys would likely die, like all unwanted and exposed infants. If, however, the two were in fact half divine and, worse, favored by the gods, then their safe passage was, if not assured, at least not Amulius’s problem.

Floating inconvenient but chosen infants on rivers to die, only to have them survive and go on to great things, is a familiar enough trope. Consider Moses of the Bible, Karna of the Mahabharata, Sargon of Akkad. Given Rome’s proximity to the Tiber, the surprise would have been a foundation myth that did not involve a water baby or two.⁹ In this story, if Mars was indeed the father, he appears to have had nothing further to do with the boys, leaving their fate to Tiberinus, who guided the basket to the bank where the she-wolf heard them crying and suckled them. While so engaged, they were found by Faustulus the shepherd, who gathered the twins and raised them with his wife Laurentia.

The boys grew up, somehow learned the truth of their background, and either from a sense of familial piety or sheer love of adventure, one day headed back upstream to Alba Longa, overthrew Amulius, and reinstated their grandfather Numitor as king.

We can only assume that the Alba Longa they liberated did not live up to the Alba Longa of their imagination. They had proved their gumption to anyone who might have doubted it, as well as their favor with the gods. Presumably they were heirs apparent to the throne of the now aging Numitor. Despite all this, the city apparently did not sit right with them. The next we hear of them, the twins had decamped and headed downstream and stopped at the bend in the river near Tiber Island. (What had happened to Pallantium the ancient sources leave unaddressed.)

Where to drop stakes? On the right bank there was the Janiculum Hill, relatively high and surrounded by fertile ground, defensible, close to Tiber Island. On the left were several hills surrounded by low swampy ground subject to flooding, difficult to cultivate. They chose to settle the left bank—Romulus the Palatine Hill, Remus the Aventine.

Which gets us to the second cliché in the twins foundation myth, that of siblings murdering sibling over property, or just out of pique. It’s an ancient trope—Cain killed Abel, Seth killed Osiris, Eteocles and Polynices kill each other, and Romulus killed Remus. It didn’t have to happen that way. Having arrived at the site of what would become Rome, they disagreed over whether to center on the Palatine Hill or the Aventine. Unable to agree or to settle both, they turned to auguries. Birds in this case. Remus saw six, Romulus saw twelve. Divinely approved or not, the decision did not go down well with Remus. Again, details on what happened next are sketchy. One story goes that Remus insulted Romulus by jumping over the as yet not too tall city wall. The insult led Romulus’s friend Celer to strike Remus, leading in turn to an all-out riot between the brothers and their respective partisans. Remus got the worst of it.

Or possibly not. Alternative stories from various ancient writers have all manner of extraneous and contradictory details, chiefly meant to whitewash fratricide.¹⁰ For those uncomfortable with morally repugnant outcomes, we can conclude this episode by including the version of Egnatius, who wrote that Remus was never killed but in fact lived on to a ripe old age, longer even than Romulus. Egnatius appears to be alone in this take on the story.¹¹

To cement the gods’ favor involved a second step.

Valerius Maximus would have us believe it was the Tiber itself that sealed Rome’s greatness, but that it had been a near thing. He writes that while Servius Tullius was king, a cow of exceptional size and beauty was born on a Sabine farm. Experts on oracles declared that this was a gift of the gods, and that whosoever sacrificed the animal at the temple of Diana on the Aventine, his people would rule the world. The cow’s owner immediately drove the animal to Rome, anxious to get the matter over with. The priest had his own agenda. He addressed the man with the full authority of a man of the cloth:

“Stranger, what can you be thinking of? Surely you do not mean to sacrifice to Diana without first performing the act of purification. You must bathe yourself, before the ceremony, in a living stream. Down there in the valley the Tiber flows.”¹²

The rebuked Sabine took the advice and wandered off. In his absence, the priest, a good Roman, carried out the sacrifice himself.¹³ “The end results o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Gods, Kings, and Men
• 2. River of Empire
• 3. Christian Tiber
• 4. Darkness and Light
• 5. Renaissance
• 6. Modern Times
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Illustrations