Amateurs find subterranean ‘slave’ warren under Rome

UNDERBELLIES have charisma. The recent discovery, beneath the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, near Rome, of a subterranean jigsaw of tunnels and roads has scholars and tweeters alike aflutter.

The presence of paved, underground streets wide enough to accommodate two-way traffic of ox-drawn carts and passages so slim that only the merest slip of a slave girl might squeeze through posits the possibility of a pallid community of slaves in this sun-drenched region of Latium — condemned to a troglodyte existence, shifting supplies so their wine-swilling masters above could be served invisibly.

Another compelling narrative is the fact that this “discovery”— reported last week — was made by amateurs, Italian caving enthusiasts who crawl through the earth in search of the past.

Built to commemorate the emperor’s “boyfavourite” who drowned, or “sacrificed himself”, aged just 19, in the Nile, Tivoli (ancient name Tibur) mirrored the dreamlike perfection of the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

The Tivoli Villa has long been described as Hadrian’s “summer retreat”, as if the emperor flopped here from May to September, mopping his brow with violet-drenched tissues to escape that dreadful high-season Roman heat. Yet the Spanish-born Publius Aelius Hadrianus governed close on one-fifth of the earth from a purpose-built council chamber here.

When not in Tivoli, Hadrian restlessly prowled the limits of his empire. Tivoli became an architectural aide-mémoire of Hadrian’s strategic globe-trotting: canals and grottoes named after Egyptian sites, Greek caryatids lining up next to the North African Silenus Bes, and a copy of the Athenian bronze sculpture “the discus-thrower”— now in the British Museum.

The new discoveries at Tivoli tell us something not just about Hadrian’s ambition, but his psyche. A poet in his spare time, we know this emperor craved solitude; his personal apartments were protected by a moat.

But the desire to submerge his slaves runs deeper than a melancholic, architectural whim. Emperors seem to need to perpetuate the lie of their omnipotence — in Hadrian’s case, by keeping the slave engine of empire out of sight and out of mind. — ©