CLASSICAL CORNER
295: ROMAN ROAD RAGE
Actually, the earliest episode is Greek, in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. As OEdipus tells it (vv800-14) to his wife, this is how it went:
When I came to the place where three roads meet, I met a herald followed by a horse-drawn carriage with a man inside. The leader rudely told me to get out of their way, and his lord and master arrogantly said the same. The driver pushed me aside. I struck him in a temper. Sticking his head from the carriage, the old man saw this, seized the driver’s two-pronged goad and cracked my head. I made him pay the price. Quick as a flash, I wielded the staff in my right hand, knocked him from the carriage and killed them all.
Nowadays, that staff would have been a baseball or cricket bat. This play is often dubbed the world’s first detective story; it was Aristotle’s favourite. Still, you might have thought that OEdipus, knowing he was prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother, might have hesitated before killing any man.
It is a safe bet that this scene was reflected often enough in real life.
The 64,000-dollar question: on which side of the road did Greeks and Romans drive? Down the middle, some think, many city streets in Pompeii and elsewhere being one-way – see S Tsujimara, ‘Ruts in Pompeii,’ Opuscula Pompeiana I. 58-9, and for a complete survey Cornelia van Tiburg, ‘Traffic Policy and Circulation in Roman Cities,’ Acta Classics 54 (2011), 149-71 (available online).
There seems general agreement that Egyptian, Greek, and Roman soldiers marched on the left. In 1998, archaeologists discovered a double-track leading to a quarry near Swindon, whose deep lefthand depressions suggested that side.
Julius Caesar passed a law banning traffic from Rome’s streets between dawn and dusk, apart from such common-sense exceptions as builders’ carts. Easy to imagine the night-time din (modern Rome has been dubbed ‘The Infernal City’) as a multitude of carts (no tyres, of course, to soften their rumblings) poured into and through the city’s unlighted streets. Muleteers were well known for their noisy cursing, understandable in these conditions: accidents and punch-ups both verbal and physical must have been common.
“Only the rich can sleep at night,” complained Juvenal in his Third Satire, a moan echoed by Martial (Epigrams bk9 no.68), who adds the extra racket beginning at dawn caused amongst others by bawling street-corner school-teachers – not work hours likely to be approved by the NUT.
Juvenal goes on with this graphic description of the jostling pedestrian crowds and a routine street accident: “Here’s the mighty fir-tree trunk swaying atop a waggon, and another cart behind, piled high with pine-logs looming over pedestrians’ heads. If an axle snaps and cascades a cartload of marble over them, what’s left of their bodies? Who could ID bits of anonymous flesh and bone?”
There’s no evidence of chariot commuter gridlocks. And, no evidence that anyone rode through Rome in carriages until the dignitary Plautianus (AD 205) who commandeered one when answering an urgent imperial summons. After that, they became a dangerous nuisance, laments historian Ammianus Marcellinus (bk14 ch6). Owners competed to have the biggest and best – my other carriage is a Porsche – and drove with both arms upraised to show off their latest flash clothes – nowadays, they’d be texting.
Different matter outside city limits. Juvenal in his First Satire (vv59-62) denounces a Roman Hell’s Angel doing a ton down the Flaminian Way (main road to Rimini, still used with same name) to impress his ‘moll’: “Just watch this lout lashing his steeds like Automedon, reins clutched in one hand, showing off to his squeeze who stands next to him draped in his riding-cloak.”
Automedon was an Homeric driver – older FT readers will think Stirling Moss.
Visitors to Italy will realise nothing has changed on the Autostrade...
Accidents were no respecters of persons. Emperor Vitellius had one thigh smashed when hit in his youth by a four-horse chariot (Suetonius, Life
ch17). Nero’s father (Suetonius, Life
ch5) deliberately speeded up on the Appian Way in order to knock down and kill a boy – how often have we seen this on a TV police drama?
Children were unsurprisingly often victims – for a full tally see C Laes, ‘Children and Accidents in Roman Antiquity,’ Ancient Society 34 (2004), 153-70. Several funerary inscriptions, prose and verse, record the young victims – texts and translations available online on the Petrified Muse website. One from Interamna tells how a nine-year-old rushed into the road to help his brother, stumbled, and was crushed by a wheel. Another records the death of lady Ummidia with 13-year-old slave boy Primigenius, both trampled by crowds on the Capitoline Hill. A third, from Ostia, preserves the memory of a little lad, out playing, whose careless parent let him wander into the road where the wheel-rim of a cart pulled by undisciplined oxen killed him – what a Twitter-storm that would cause...
A legal opinion in the Roman Digest
(bk9 2.52) deals with the case of a boy killed by a collision of two wagons, whose father sought advice on what to do, suggesting there were traffic laws of sorts and legal redress for accidents.
For finale, a puzzler. Mary Beard (TLS, 15 March – The Ides – 2015, drawing on G Daux, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique
94 (1970), 609-18, quotes a Greek epitaph from Roman Macedonia which laments the death of Choiros, killed by a wheel. This word means pig (also slang for vagina). Animals, of course, usually cats and dogs, are no strangers to such fates, along with rodent road-kill. However, lest too many tears be shed over this pulverised porker, some epigraphists think the victim may simply have been a person called Choiros – so someone may have made a pig’s ear out of this one...
All Roads Lead to Rome (Mediaeval Latin proverb, dating from 1175). When in Rome Do as the Romans Do (St Ambrose). Ponder these axioms as you blench at the horrific road accidents in Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967)...