The Childhood of Rome :: THE PRIEST OF THE BRIDGE

THE PRIEST OF THE BRIDGE

In the customs of the people who founded the town by the river, there was no act of life which did not have some ancient rule or tradition connected with it. There was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. In all the important work of life, such as the care of the sheep and cattle, the sowing of the fields and the making of wine, certain elders among the men were chosen to take charge of the management, decide on what day the work was to commence and take care that all was done as it ought to be. In this new life in a strange place the colonists found that some kinds of work that used not to be very important became so because things were changed. This was the case with the priest who had charge of the public ways,—the gates, the roads and the walls. In their old home this was not a very important office, because the walls almost never needed anything done to them, and [pg 225]the roads were all made long ago. Tertius Calvo, who was the pontifex or roadmaker, was a quiet man and never had much to say, but in this place he had more to do than almost any other public officer in the city.

Calvo was a good mason and understood something of what we should call now civil engineering. He had judgment about the best place to lay out a road and the proper stone to choose for masonry. As the town grew, and the farming lands about it were cleared, and more and more persons became interested in the town by the river, Calvo, in his quiet way, was one of the busiest of men.

He got on very well with the miscellaneous laboring force that he could command, and partly by signs, partly in a mixture of the two languages, he learned to talk with the stonemason Canial quite comfortably. Gradually, as they were needed, roads were made in different directions over the plain, and always in much the same way. They were as straight as they could be without taking altogether more time and labor than could be given, and they were usually carried across streams and bogs instead of going around. Calvo enjoyed working out ways to do this. If the plain had been really boggy he might not have been able to do as much as he did, [pg 226]but it was not really a marsh. It was a more or less level area lying so little above the bed of the river that the rise of a foot or two in the waters changed its aspect until the Romans began draining it. The people were astonished to see how much more quickly they could reach the river over one of Calvo’s roads than they could over the old, winding, up-and-down paths. The road was built with a track in the middle higher than the edges, to let the water drain off, and this track was more solid than the edges and far more solid usually than the land on each side the road. There was no need for the highway to be very wide, for most of the travel was on foot. After a time people began to call the new roads the “laid” roads, because they were made by laying, or spreading, new material on the line of travel.

The new road was a “street” built up of strata.

There was never much trouble in getting men to work on these highways after they saw the convenience of them. They could not have built them for themselves, because they had not Calvo’s eye for the right place or his knowledge of every kind of stone and other road material. The roads led out from Rome like the spokes of a wheel, but Calvo did not build any roads from town to town. He said it was better not to.

[pg 227]

There came to be a proverb that all roads lead to Rome. Calvo’s object in roadmaking was to make it easy for outsiders to reach the city and return. He was not concerned about their visiting one another. The natural result was that Rome got all the trade of a growing country.

Another consequence of Calvo’s road-making system was that it would have been very difficult for the outlying settlements to join in any attack against Rome itself, because they could not reach their neighbors half as easily as they could reach Rome. Calvo saw—what most generals have to see if they are to have any success in fighting—that wars are won by the feet as well as the weapons of an army. The quicker they march and the less strength they have to expend on getting from one place to another, the better the soldiers will fight. It came to be almost second nature for any Roman to look out that the roads were in good condition, and a general on the march took care that he did not go too far into an unknown country without leaving a good road over which to come back.

In the course of their wandering about, before they found a place for their home, the colonists had not only learned the importance of good water but had found out where some of the springs and wells were. Here and there, as he [pg 228]discovered a good place for a camp, Calvo caused a rude shelter to be built, where any Roman could find a place to sleep and make a fire. On some of the roads he and Romulus took counsel together and planned the erection of a kind of barrack, so that if they sent a company of troops out that way there would be a place which they could occupy as a shelter, and if necessary hold against an enemy. They were not exactly houses, or forts; they were known as mansiones,—places where one might remain for a night or two. The practical use of these places proved so great that the plan was never given up, and mansiones were built at the end of each day’s march, in later ages, wherever the Roman army went. But in the beginning there was only a rough shelter like the khans of Eastern countries,—walls and roofs, to which men brought their own provisions and bedding, if they had any. People had these places of refuge long before there was any such thing as a tavern or hotel known in the world.

It began to be seen in course of time that the Priesthood of the Highways, or the bridges—for about half Calvo’s work here was bridge building—was one of the most necessary of all. Before he died he had four others to assist him, and was called the Pontifex Maximus, the high pontiff, and greatly revered for his wisdom. He [pg 229]had met and talked with and commanded so many different sorts of people, both intelligent and ignorant, and had solved so many different problems, for no two places where a highway is built are alike, that there were very few questions on which he did not have something worth saying. The standard he set was kept up. A road, when built, was built to last, and so was a bridge.

But the greatest work of Tertius Calvo, and the one which perhaps made more difference in the history of his people than any other, was an undertaking which he put through when he and most of the other fathers of the colony were quite old men. It was the bridge across the river.

At the point where the Seven Hills are situated, the river is about three hundred feet wide, but there is an island in it which makes a natural pier. Here Calvo suggested a bridge, to take the traffic from the other side of the river and bring it directly to Rome instead of letting it come across anywhere in boats. Such a bridge, moreover, would make it easier to hold the river, in case of war, against an enemy coming either up stream or down.

It seemed like a stupendous enterprise, and even those who had seen most of Calvo’s work did not see how he was going to do it. The river was twenty feet deep, and that was too deep for any [pg 230]pier building in those days. It would be a timber bridge.

More or less all the city took part in building that bridge. There were large trees to be cut down and their logs hauled from distant places, and shaped to fit into one another. There was stonework to be done at each end of the span, and on each side of the island. By the time this work was planned, the people were using iron more or less, and found it very convenient for many things; but Calvo set his foot down; not a bit of iron was to be used in his bridge. It was to be all wood, resting on stone foundations. Some of those who had worked with him remembered then that he never did use iron in such work. The younger men thought he must have reason to suppose that the gods were not pleased with iron.

Romulus had known Calvo for a great many years, although they had never been exactly intimate. As they stood together, watching the work go on, Romulus said in a tone that no one but Calvo could hear.

“There is no iron in this work?”

“None,” said Calvo.

“The gods do not approve it?”

“Apparently not,” said Calvo. “The fires of Jove burned two bridges for me before I found it out.

[pg 231]

“Also I have found that iron and water are bad friends, and in a bridge, which hangs above water, the bolts would rust. Finally, a thing which is all timber, put together without the use of anything else, does not grow shaky with time, but settles together and is firmer. There are some things a man does not learn until he has watched the ways of building for fifty years, and I have done that.”

If Calvo had been like some men of his day, he would have thought, when his bridges were burned, that the gods were angry with him for omitting some ceremony. But he was a man who noticed all that he saw and put two and two together; and he noticed in the course of time that lightning was much more likely to strike where iron was. He observed the path of it once when it did strike, and saw that it ripped the wood all to splinters and set it on fire trying to get at the iron, which it melted.

It is of course true that iron expands and shrinks with heat and cold, and when iron bolts are used in wood, the iron and the wood do not fit as well together after a few seasons, on this account. So Calvo planned his bridges without iron, and they were all made of dovetailed wooden timbers, as many old wooden bridges were which remain to this day. Calvo’s observa[pg 232]tions about his bridges tended to make others think as he did. No iron was ever used in any of the temples or sacred buildings of Rome, even long after it was in common use for weapons, tools and other things.

The way in which the bridge over the Tiber was built was much like the way in which CÆsar built bridges, hundreds of years later. It was so constructed that if necessary it could be removed at short notice. It was never struck by lightning or burned, and it remained until—long after Calvo was dead—another pontiff built a new and greater bridge, using all his knowledge and all else that had been learned in five generations.

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