The Memoirs of Herod Agrippa II

Chapter FOUR - Rome

Chapter FOUR - Rome

Then aboard again and on to Rome. Putting in on Italian soil is always an experience and the first time ever even more so. The approach to Ostia is impressive. Leaving the huge lighthouse to port, the boat passes under the impressive outer walls of the harbour of the Portus Augusti and then past another smaller light into the Portus Traiani Felicis. Here, as in all ports and, even more so, ports attached to major cities, you sail into a kind of organised chaos. Boats bobbing up and down close to the high harbour walls with much shouting and swearing, fighting for a decent berth to load or unload or standing further out crammed with merchandise waiting for smaller craft to take the cargo in a part at a time. Everyone trying to be heard over the noise of everyone else doing the same in almost every language of the empire. Along with the corn and foodstuffs mostly from Egypt, you could see stone which, on the road to Rome I later saw being hauled along on rollers, marble and even dull Egyptian bricks and whole barges full of rope and carefully stowed amphorae full of wine Some even full of livestock ready to be killed on a quayside abattoir. Even for me the heat was ever present, being moist and heavy at that time of year. We anchored out among a straggle of boats just beyond the huge harbour wall and I was handed down into a barge along with my small retinue. We weaved our way through the boats towards the main landing steps and thence up to the main concourse which ran all round the harbour. This, in comparison to the harbours of the eastern empire that I had seen, along the Judean seaboard or at Rhodes was huge.

But even so, I was eager to see Rome. Father had described it to me a hundred times. Everything radiated out from Rome and everything led towards it. On my first evening I saw little of the city. From the port you enter Rome along the Ostia Road passing the Aventine Hill on the left topped by its Temple to Diana and the circus Maximus then on past the Temple of Apollo and the Hippodrome and up the broad paved steps to the imperial palaces where I was going to lodge. The style I was used to and even the size. Judea had its share of Greek style buildings placed strategically for effect on hills. It was the expanse that impressed. There was so much of it. Not just one or two monuments but paved streets of them on all sides.

Rome was never a city of great charm. Even its most famous constructions were statements of power rather than of beauty. It was Augustus who had started the rebuilding of the city. He has put it about that he found it clay and left it marble but this is not true. Rome, although the centre of an empire named after it, was only a great city in certain parts. In those days it was changing from a ramshackle place of small houses built mostly of wood into a city which could be seen as the centre of empire but this was done only in parts. There were still many narrow streets, hardly any of them named, with houses built in no order. From the second story of these houses you could shake hands easily with someone over the street. None of the houses here were numbered and it was often quite impossible to find your way. But break out of this squalor and you came upon breathtaking squares. Up on the hills there were the mansions of the rich set in beautiful gardens and the temples and baths and stadia.

Our villa was built on the eastern slope of the Palatinus with the huge palace of Augustus which Tiberius had taken over and was now using, slightly above it and to its east. The building, was done all over in the best of Greek taste, overlooked the Coliseum and the eastern end of the Forum. Beyond were the palaces on the slightly lower hill of the Esquilinus. To the south we overlooked the Circus Maximus. Above us and to the west were the Imperial palaces and the temples of the Roman gods. I stood there on the veranda before retiring conscious of the household noises behind me, looking directly over the western end of the Forum stretched out ahead of me and overlooking the Basilica Julia. In the dusk the temples of white marble glowed. Even at that late hour, scattered with the light of torches and the suppressed sounds of people out late. I slept little that night, excited by thoughts of my new life just starting. After leaving Jerusalem at the age of eight,