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eBook Category: History
eBook Description: Enjoy a walk through living, breathing ancient Rome during the rule of Diocletian. The smells, the sights, the sounds, all come to life in this final part of a two-part series filled with delightful detail and startling observation.

eBook Publisher: Clocktower Books and Far Sector SFFH (magazine), Published: Infonana, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2002

This eBook is part of the following series:

• John T. Cullen's Walk Near Rome 300 A.D. Series

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [84 KB], eReader (PDB) [39 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [22 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [20 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [79 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [95 KB], hiebook (KML) [68 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [68 KB], iSilo (PDB) [19 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [24 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [58 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [34 KB]
Words: 6400
Reading time: 18-25 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

We've come to the city of Rome as tourists in the year 300 C. E. We're here for one unique reason: to be tourists, to see what it looked and smelled and felt like. We're not after the standard list of emperors or pictures of rusted and mangled implements. We want to get the taste of everyday Rome in our teeth so we can say "I've been there!" just as if we'd been to modern Rome today.

So far, on this night in 300 C.E. (that's Current Era, just like A.D. but without the religious slant) we've traveled with our guides from a villa halfway between Rome and Ostia, to our present resting spot outside the world's greatest city. You are renting the body of Marcus, a healthy young 30-year-old man who works as a scribe in a grain warehouse in Ostia. It's his day off, and the boss assumes he's at the games in the city. As it is, we need to be wary of being noticed, particularly by the police and by bounty hunters who are always on the lookout for escaped slaves. Marcus is a free-born citizen with a ring on his finger to prove it, and he's not likely to be noticed much. That's just how we want it. We came to see, not to be seen.

Not far from here, on the Appian Road, which enters the city from the south, and is no doubt the empire's most famous street, there is a medieval chapel at a crossroads where tradition has it the Apostle Paul entered the city around 61 C.E. accompanied by disciples, and was met by excited Roman Christians who came out to meet him in what is today Trastevere west of the Tiber. But that's a different road, and a different trip-not on today's itinerary, and we mention it as one of a million ways that history is alive and breathing in Rome. We are on the Ostian Road, and that's where we pick up our story as dawn begins to break.

We've been sitting on a mossy stone wall on a little arching bridge over a stream. We're near a crossroads on the Via Ostiensis (Ostian Road, or Way), one of the main roads into the city. We're each having a little libation of watered down wine, rice, a little scrap of chicken, and a wedge of excellent bread torn from a fresh-baked round loaf. As with so many myths, we're not lying down to eat-that's just the wealthy at major meal celebrations. We're sitting around like picnickers of any era, eating leisurely from little baskets, while the traffic rumbles around us on the great highway and a young blond slave boy jumps about with a whisk, shooing flies away-a perk of eating at Molo's roadside stand, a real favorite among wagoneers here. Our guides, Fred and Asconius, look up at dawn which is graying on the eastern sky. They point to the rose-colored golden light gleaming on the tallest pillars, pediments, and domes. The traffic on the Ostian Road is changing-empty wagons are rolling outward, while lighter carts, horses, and pedestrians continue to flow into the city. Every once in a while we see a litter borned by slaves, accompanied by a detachment of private guards; or, if it's a state official, a cordon of soldiers with their distinctive uniforms including knobbed helmets, rectangular shields with lightning bolts, and long cloaks. It's time for us to move on, because we have only 24 hours, and we've already used up nearly one fourth of that time.

We start back on the road in our long open wagon where we sit on straw mats and lean against wooden back rests. The sky is beginning to gray, and we can see the city skyline now, a magnificent mass of gray shadows below where the first rosy fingers of dawn haven't penetrated yet, a riot of colors on the upper stories of tall buildings because one thing the Romans did not do was build things in that bleached white most people associate with ancient statues. Those statues have by our time sat out in the weather for millennia, fading in the sun and rain and wind, but today they look lifelike with eyes and clothing made of various types of marble and other precious stones. Aside from the common grayish travertine marble used as curb stones and facing on houses, any marble we see here is most likely polished to a deep glow in a riot of colors, from gray speckled with pink through green through onyx black gleaming with green and red speckles. The bulk of the buildings, however, are constructed of brick, tile, or nicely articulated stones.