Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity by Jason Moralee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity by Jason Moralee Raymond Van Dam Jason Moralee. Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity. Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxv, 278. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-049227-4. The symbolic high point of ancient Rome was the Capitoline Hill, crowned with the great Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. In Vergil's Aeneid the hero had been granted a glimpse of the glorious future of the site, "once bristling with woodland thickets, but now golden." For centuries the hill and the temple would represent the power and the eternity of the Roman empire. Then, after the collapse of empire, the challenge of Christianity, and the incessant conflicts among medieval states, it became difficult to conjure up that shiny past. In the fifteenth century the antiquarian Poggio Bracciolini mourned the reversal of fortune for the hill and its monuments, "once golden, but now returned to thickets and brambles." In the past the hill had been a caput, the head of the empire; now, Poggio lamented, it had become, literally, the bottom, spattered with poop (12). Jason Moralee's book about the "Temple Mount" of Rome is another sterling contribution to the recent interest in memory studies among classicists and ancient historians. The coverage of his book stretches from the early Roman Republic to the Renaissance, with an emphasis on late antiquity. Part of his narrative is the physical transformation of the Capitoline Hill, with the construction and deconstruction of buildings, monuments, administrative offices, and residential neighborhoods. But his primary concern is the accompanying cognitive transformation. The hill was not simply a place, but also a hermeneutics, "a way of representing and critiquing the exercise of social power, the morality of rulers, the authority of divine forces, and the failures of the state" (121). The discussion of so many topics and themes is often split among various chapters and therefore sometimes a bit jumbled. One important topic is the significance of processions. In the Republic and the early empire, ascending the hill to sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter was the culmination of triumphal parades and [End Page 371] ceremonies of investiture: for a moment the victorious emperors were kings of the mountain. By the early fourth century, however, emperors stopped climbing the hill, and in the culture wars between Christians and pagans Constantine would be denounced for abandoning the Capitol. When Christian emperors visited, the routes of their public processions instead included the Church of St. Peter. Another important topic is the transition from temples to churches. In Moralee's evocative summation, "the old temples of the Roman world were like decommissioned nuclear power reactors: they were systematically closed, cleaned up of contaminants, and eventually demolished" (62). Christian apologists were only too happy to classify the earlier destructions of the Temple of Jupiter as examples of "the Christian God's righteous anger" (183). In late antiquity the agents of that divine wrath were barbarians and Greeks. In the mid-fifth century the king of the Vandals sailed away with half of the gilded roof tiles from the temple; in the later sixth century the first church was established on the hill, whose founder Moralee argues to have been Narses, Justinian's general in Italy. By then the Capitoline Hill was becoming a Christian heritage site (102). It was also incorporated into "a new Christian history of the Roman people" (140). According to this alternative perspective, for centuries the ancient gods had been asleep or ineffective. In 390 b.c. only the honking of a goose had saved the hill from being captured by the Gauls; in 410 a.d. the Goths had sacked the city. These disasters confirmed that the most reliable sanctuaries were now the shrines of the apostles Peter and Paul. In this "triumphalist Christian memory culture" (139) the only triumphs worth celebrating on the hill commemorated the victories of saints and martyrs. Already in antiquity remembering the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter was a powerful way of rewriting history, and Moralee's book is itself a splendid evocation of this Capitole imaginaire. Another...