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

Jason Moralee's book is a kaleidoscopic, non-linear, allusive, often speculative meditation on the Capitoline Hill and its crowning Capitol as topos: a real place, a literary construct, a figment of the collective imagination of local Romans and denizens of Rome's extended cultural sphere alike. It is erudite, delightfully readable, fascinating—and frustrating. There is something here for people of every disciplinary stripe and methodological proclivity to object to. Admirers of Andrea Augenti's stone-by-stone approach to the topographical evolution of the Palatine in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages will lament the impressionistic treatment of archaeological evidence and the illegibly tiny, outdated maps and plans of the Hill itself. Fans of Lisa Mignone's closely argued social history of the Republican-era Aventine will grasp in vain for ramified networks of identifiable actors who animated and experienced the Capitoline at any given moment. But there is also something here—much, in fact—to delight and enlighten anyone with even a passing interest in the city of Rome and its post-classical legacies.

Although he ranges from the dawn of the Republic in 509 bc to the present, Moralee concentrates roughly on the third through the seventh centuries ad, when the Capitoline ceased to be the premier locus of Roman state cult and imperial ceremony, while Rome shrank from imperial megalopolis to provincial Christian town on the Byzantine periphery. Moralee first approaches the Hill as a physical and topographical presence, a neighborhood deeply implicated in the living fabric of the city and the political and ceremonial agendas of its rulers (Part 1, "Lived-In Realities"), and then as a mental construct, an enduring symbol of the might of the pagan Roman Empire and, from a Christian perspective, the impiety of that Empire and the inevitable triumph of the true faith over ancient superstition (Part 2, "Dreamed-Of Realities").

Part 1 opens with a chapter on (emperors) "Climbing the Capitoline Hill." Moralee sides with those who, contra Eunapius of Sardis and Zosimus, think that Constantine never ascended the Capitoline to sacrifice before the Capitol, thus rupturing the age-old tradition whereby ceremonies of triumph, adventus, and coronation concluded at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. In either case (it makes less difference than many seem to think), what matters is that by Constantine's day, the Capitoline and its crowning temple were increasingly marginal, peripheral in cultic and ceremonial terms. Moralee assembles a wide range of ancient perspectives on the place of the Capitol (the temple) and the capitolium (the Hill) in state ceremonial to show that the "decentralization of Rome's symbolic topography" (42) was a long and gradual process with roots stretching back at least to Augustus, who created alternative ritual and ceremonial poles (his temple of Apollo on the Palatine, his forum) and made the triumph the exclusive appurtenance of emperorship. Moralee sensibly maintains that the third-century migration of emperors/imperial ceremony to the provinces, the ongoing proliferation of imperial showpieces in Rome (Caracalla's temple of Isis and Serapis, the Eliogabalium, Aurelian's temple of Sol), and the growing prominence of the Forum Romanum itself as Rome's main venue for imperial display, especially in the form it took after the fire of 283, all made imperial adventus, triumphs, and accessions conceivable without a culminating sacrifice in front of Rome's Capitol. Thereafter, Christian emperors naturally avoided it, preferring instead to appear in the Forum or at St. Peter's.

In the next two chapters, Moralee wonders what did happen on, and to, the Hill when emperors stopped ascending it. Chapter 2 seeks to show that the Capitoline, always a central place where Romans lived, worked, and worshipped, continued to function as such throughout Late Antiquity, albeit in evolving ways. Moralee reasonably presumes that people kept living on and around the Hill, and he stresses that officials and administrators probably continued to work...