On the Roman Basilica

I have to admit: I was under-impressed by the Coliseum. After a couple hours, most of the ruins of the Forum and Palantine Hill were indistinguishable to me. An imaginative person, I nevertheless am unable to imagine what a Roman city would have looked like in its heyday.

But the Basilica of Constantine - that stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps it's because I had never heard of it, and thus did not know what to expect. And it would be pretty hard to describe it in any way that would make anyone want to go see it (unlike, say, the Coliseum).

Only the lower portion of one transept of the basilica is still standing. But that's part of the point. Because even this partial ruin is huge - which means the actual building must have been monstrously big. And (at least in my imagination) back in the day when it was in use, it was for the most part empty. One would be entirely dwarfed inside it. And here's the other thing: it wasn't really a temple, definitely not a palace - it was a law court. Like, wow.

There are people in this picture - they're just dwarfed.

This got me thinking about the Roman basilica, an architectural phenomenon that I had never really thought about before. We were staying right next to the Pantheon, itself a minor basilica of sorts, and perhaps the only Roman temple/basilica still standing in its original form. What struck me about the Pantheon was how cold and corporate it felt inside: at first I thought it was just the victim of a bad makeover in the 1960s, but it turns out the main elements of the design - the concavities of the roof, the alternating marble of the floors, the niches and pillars - are all basically original.

The Pantheon: I'm reminded of
the 1990s' love of red marble

So first, that blows my mind. It's like stepping from the street backwards two thousand years.

But second, why is the Pantheon so unchanged by the intervening two thousand years? Because the early Church turned it into a memorial to Christian martyrs. Which was one of my main take-aways from my time in Rome: the great extent to which the Church appropriated Roman everything, and thus the great extent to which ancient Rome lives on today through the Church.

Of course this is a trite observation, but it really struck me in Rome. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of Constatine's Basilica and the Pantheon on Day 1 with St. Peter's Basilica on Day 2 - the line from Point A to Point B could not be straighter. And what's interesting is that St. Peter's feels like it serves exactly the same purpose that the Basilica of Constatine did: to impress and awe, first and foremost, and thereby to instill respect.

Quick: Roman or Catholic?

What I can't get over (being a lawyer and all) is how the Basilica of Constatine was built, more or less, to instill awestruck respect for the law. I guess St. Peter's is also about law (of the Godly variety), but there's something, in the case of the Roman basilica, about building such a massive monument to secular law that moved me very powerfully. Can you imagine if the Supreme Court sat in the midst of a St. Peter's equivalent? (Of course, the Justices don't need any more validation of their egos.)

As you might have realized by now, this post lacks a clearly defined point (other than the trite Ancient Rome/Roman Catholic connection), so I will end on a similarly random note. As much as setting foot in St. Peter's was, for me, high on my list of important lifetime achievements (it is, after all, St. Peter's), I was left oddly cold by it. I was reminded, by contrast, of the Dom in Siracusa (Syracuse), Sicily: a church built out of an ancient Greek temple to Athena. The pillars of the temple are still visible along the inside walls of the cathedral, and the ancient dampness that emanates from those stones fills the church with a quiet spirituality that was for me much more profound than anything I experienced in Vatican City (or among the Roman ruins).

Thus a last random musing: Would the world be different if Christianity had become the official religion of the Greek empire?