Part 3 (1/2)
CHAPTER IV
ROMAN REGIONS AND GUILDS
The regions and the guilds of Rome ill.u.s.trate two contradictory tendencies running parallel throughout the administrative history of the city, the one towards division and separation as first principles of organisation, the other towards union and centralisation as measures of strength. These antagonistic elements which we find at the very dawn of Roman history were at once utilised as factors in the new commonwealth.
It is the tradition that King Numa organised nine guilds of handicrafts amongst the Roman people that they might sink their race animosities in an ident.i.ty of interests. Similarly one of the first great works for the young community, the city wall projected by Tarquinius Priscus and built by Servius Tullius, was intended to produce a fusion of the tribes which inhabited the seven hills he thus physically linked together, and which he had already united under a common government. Another enterprise, the draining of the marshes and pools which made impa.s.sable barriers of the valleys between the hills, had the same aim and result--it was a levelling process, moral as well as physical, to minimise the separation between hill and hill, race and race.
On the other hand, Servius' division of the city into four regions, and these again into six parishes or _vici_, laid the seeds of an internal disunion which lasted throughout the centuries. These four regions (1) the Suburra or Caelian, (2) the Esquiline and its spurs, (3) the Collina, comprising the Viminal and Quirinal, which were called _colles_ in distinction to the other hills, the _montes_, and (4) the Palatine, persisted until the reign of Augustus. By that time the city had grown beyond its primitive limits, a thickly populated region had sprung up on the Esquiline beyond the walls and Augustus found a new division necessary. He increased the original number of regions to fourteen, and each of these he subdivided as before into parishes, the number in each region varying from seven to twenty-eight, making 265 in all. A magistrate or curator with a set of officials under him presided over each region. Each parish had its magistrate, its officers, its chapel built upon the boundary road for the public wors.h.i.+p of the _lares compitales_, the protecting spirits of the district.
At this period the poorer quarters of the city--a network of narrow streets with high houses built of inflammable materials--had been again and again devastated by fire. At night the densest darkness descended upon the city, street lighting was unknown, shop doors were shut and barred, and it was unsafe to walk abroad; those who ventured carried lights, or were preceded by servants with staves and torches.
The ubiquitous beggars haunted the byways, and brigands raided the outskirts of the town.
As a remedy against these evils Augustus created a force of 7000 men who were to act both as police and firemen. The whole body he placed under the command of a prefect, who acted in conjunction with the curator of the regions in keeping order, and divided it into seven battalions or cohorts, each under a tribune, and so disposed in the city that one battalion watched over the safety of two regions. The cohorts were again subdivided into seven companies under a captain or centurion. The force was distributed over the town in seven different barracks, with outlying detached quarters or _excubitoria_.
The firemen's duty was to inspect public furnaces and private kitchens, the heating apparatus and the offices where the wardrobes were kept and warmed in the public baths. If a fire broke out in the town it was the subject of an official inquiry, just as it is to-day, and if arson or willful neglect were suspected, punishment was meted out by the proper authorities. Like the modern policeman in Rome, Augustus' _vigiles_ were not a popular force, and to make it more palatable he gradually increased its privileges. He built large and luxurious stations and _excubitoria_ which were beautifully decorated with precious marbles and statues. Members of the force were granted the coveted Roman citizens.h.i.+p, and the captains were permitted to serve _ex officio_ in the Praetorian guard.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FORUM OF NERVA
The picture represents a portion of the ornamental enclosure of the Forum built by Nerva, near Domitian's Temple of Pallas; she is represented on the entablature. This fragment is popularly known as _Le Colonacce_. See page 33.]
At a later period, perhaps sometime in the third century, the regions of Rome were reorganised on an ecclesiastical basis, and seven were formed out of the fourteen by the amalgamation of two into one, each being placed under one of the seven deacons of the city. It is not known at what precise date their number was again increased to fourteen, nor when they a.s.sumed their present names and distribution, but probably early in the middle ages. By the thirteenth century only thirteen regions are recorded, and it was not till the year 1586 that the conservators and senators of Rome and the captains of the regions consulted together and decided to include the Leonine city as a fourteenth region, granting it at the same time a captain, a standard, and an heraldic device of a lion upon a red field, his paw planted upon the three mounds of the coat of Sixtus V.
These fourteen regions do not correspond in position, name, or extent with those of Augustus except that the present thirteenth, Trastevere, is identical with the ancient fourteenth, Transtiburtina. The names that they bear to-day represent either their position or some characteristic feature within their limits. Thus the first and largest region, the _Monti_, formed from the union of the fifth and sixth of Augustus, the _Esquilina_ and the _Alta Semita_, is so called from the hills, the Esquilina Viminal and Caelian, within its boundaries; the second the _Trevi_, derives its name from the famous fountain in its midst; the third, _Colonna_, from the column of Marcus Aurelius; the fourth, _Campo Marzo_, covers this historic ground; the fifth, _Ponte_, is named from the old _Pons Triumphalis_, that united Rome with the Vatican region; the sixth or _Parione_ comprises the ground of which the Chiesa Nuova is the centre, and the name was derived from the ancient wall and tower which stood close to it; the seventh, _Regola_, inhabited by some of the most wretched of the population, is a corruption of Arenula, the drift sand of the river near which this region lies; the eighth, _S. Eustachio_, behind the university, takes its name from a parish church; the ninth, _Pigna_, from the bronze pine cone now at the Vatican and which was once supposed to adorn the Pantheon (this region corresponds to a certain extent with the ancient Via Lata); the tenth region, _Campitelli_, includes the Capitol and Palatine hills and the Forum; the eleventh, the _S. Angelo_ district, a region inhabited by the very poor, by tanners, and formerly the Jews' quarter, is named after the church of S. Angelo in Pescheria; the twelfth is the _Ripa_ or river bank; and the thirteenth and fourteenth, as we have seen, are _Trastevere_ beyond the river and the Leonine city or _Borgo_.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FOUNTAIN OF TREVI
One of the numberless fountains of the city; built by Clement XII.
in 1735. The red house is the _palazzo_ of the celebrated art jeweller Castellani. Visitors leaving Rome who throw a _sou_ into this fountain are sure to return to the eternal city. See pages 22, 55, 227.]
Each region became a little civic and social centre complete in itself. Each had its captain, its sub-officers, its religious organisations, its separate funds for charities and dowries, its separate police and militia recruits. And the importance that accrued to these regions lay in the fact that they represented the _plebs_, the democracy of Rome. With a people so incapable of co-operation for a common end as the Roman, the spark of their civic liberties would have been trodden out or have remained for ever dormant but for this administrative setting which kept it alive and through which, given the opportunity, it could become once more a living force.
The heads of the regions, the _caporioni_, heirs to the position of Augustus' tribunes but without their discipline, were the people's leaders and spokesmen, their representatives and the guardians of their liberties. They were elected by ballot and the ballot urn was carried in procession to the Capitol, where the chosen captains received their invest.i.ture at the hands of the Senate. In times of difficulty they a.s.sembled for consultation in that council chamber of the people, the church of Ara Coeli, but their counsels seldom led to measures of conciliation which were uncongenial to their fierce independence and to the arbitrary authority they a.s.sumed. In peace or in war, in sanguinary insurrections or in national rejoicings, the _caporioni_ were always to the front, their banners with the regional device upon a coloured field fluttering in the breeze. It was to them that Cola di Rienzo looked for a.s.sistance and support. When a royal visitor or one of the German Emperors of Rome entered the city in state, the _caporioni_ were amongst the officials who received them, their banners carried by their pages on horseback, and themselves clad in their gala tunics of crimson velvet, cloaks of cloth of gold, white stockings and shoes, and black bonnets jewelled and feathered. When Pope Gregory XI. returned to Rome, restoring the papacy to the land of its birth after an exile of seventy years, the _caporioni_ rode in procession to give him welcome, and at his death they hurried to the cardinals a.s.sembling in conclave at the Vatican to implore them at all costs to elect a Roman pope, and they emphasised their pet.i.tion with a fierce menace which would a.s.suredly have been carried through to its sanguinary end but for the intervention of the Colonna forces.
In the carnival processions of the fifteenth century which issued from the Capitol to perambulate the city, the _caporioni_, surrounded by fifty mounted grooms wearing their distinctive livery, preceded the Senators. Representatives from each region marched with them in the order of their precedence carrying halberds, banners, and lances, and s.h.i.+elds emblazoned with their arms, and escorted by grooms on horseback. In the same procession, in front of the regions, were delegates from all the handicraft and trade guilds in the city, shoe-makers, hatters, apothecaries, tavern keepers, and many others, each with their banners captains and sergeants; the guild of ironworkers alone numbered 300, in the midst of whom a team of horses were harnessed to a cannon of their own making. The procession was headed by munic.i.p.al officers and soldiers, and as an emblem of law and justice a wretched criminal was driven along with blows.
After the Renaissance the _caporioni_ degenerated into mere regional captains, retaining only a shadow of their former power and jurisdiction, and the present government has abolished the office altogether. The organisation and the spirit of the regions are, however, by no means dead.
[Ill.u.s.tration: COLUMN OF MARCUS AURELIUS, PIAZZA COLONNA
The only work of the time of the emperor-philosopher which has come down to us. The column is now crowned by a colossal bronze statue of S. Paul. See pages 32, 55.]
Until the racing of riderless horses down the Corso was forbidden, each region entered a horse for the race which was decked in the regional colour, and its success or failure aroused a perfect pa.s.sion of rivalry between region and region--an antagonism as old as the age of Plutarch, who relates that in the month of October chariot races were run in the Campus Martius; the victorious horse was sacrificed to the G.o.d Mars, but its head was borne in procession to the Forum, all the regions fighting for possession of the trophy until nothing was left of it, and the combatants themselves were wounded and disabled.
To this day, on occasions of popular rejoicing or in patriotic demonstrations, representatives from each region form into procession, the regional banner carried by _vigili_, who march surrounded by a group of the so-called _fedeli_, inhabitants of the little town of Viturcchino, who for good services rendered to Rome in the past have earned special consideration at the hands of the Roman munic.i.p.ality.
Such processions are headed by the standard of the Commune, S.P.Q.R.
upon a red and yellow ground, and immediately behind follows the banner of the Monti, the first region, three green hills on a white field.
The different devices of the regions, carved upon marble s.h.i.+elds, were affixed to house walls in many parts of the city to mark the boundaries, by order of Benedict XIV., and can still be seen in position. All those who know Rome at all are probably familiar with the Monti escutcheon upon the wall of the Aldobrandini palace, and with the Campo Marzo crescent on a house wall at Capo le Case.