Taking a break from the man-made ruins of Ancient Rome last week, I went looking for a piece of natural stone once notorious in that city: the Tarpeian Rock.
As classical scholars and many veterans of the Leaving Cert will know, this was where Romans used to execute their most notorious criminals, including traitors, flinging them off its precipice.
The rock is named for a vestal virgin, Tarpeia, who was supposedly merged with it in the eighth century BC. She had opened the gates of Rome to invading Sabines, only for the Sabines to kill her. So her body was then buried in the rock, earning her naming rights in perpetuity.
But it is thanks to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, based on the story of a general from a few centuries later, that I know of the place. A brilliant soldier persuaded to run for political office, Coriolanus had the fatal flaw in a politician of openly despising the common people, or “plebeians”.
The other marching season: Terminalia, the Roman festival of boundaries
Ode to a Grecian sojourn – the enduring mystique of islands
Lingering on the Lingo – In pursuit of Italian fluency, Frank McNally takes a roundabout route to Rome
Deer God – Frank McNally on the dramatic surge in popularity of the girl’s name Fiadh
In the play, this has him briefly threatened with execution by the mob – “To th’ Rock, to th’ rock, with him!” – before he is instead merely banished from Rome, allowing his tragedy to be dragged out for two more acts.
The rock's proximity to the Roman Forum – of whose ruins it now offers a dramatic view – gave rise to a Latin phrase translated as: "The Tarpeian Rock is close to the Capitol".
Apart from being a statement of the obvious, this served as a warning to all in political life, and still does, about how quickly disaster can follow triumph.
Having finally visited the scene, or near it, however, I am not entirely convinced of the rock’s efficacy in the task it once had. I didn’t make it to the actual ledge, if that’s still possible. But from where I was, it seemed a modest altitude – about 25 metres, I’m told. However hard prisoners were flung, that would seem to lack the certainty of outcome of, for example, the guillotine.
The other thing that struck me while ascending the path towards the rock were the signs in Italian for “weddings”.
There was a prosaic explanation for this. The same road leads to the Campidoglia Palace, Rome’s City Hall, where civic marriages take place. Even so, the juxtaposition must have a sobering effect on romantics.
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Back among the architectural ruins later, I passed an oddly familiar structure, partly obscured by hoardings. It was the Arch of Titus, built circa AD 81 by the Emperor Domitian and commemorating the many victories of his recently deceased brother, the former Emperor Titus (it was the least he could do, because he had probably poisoned him).
This is the model for many modern triumphal arches, including the enormous one in Paris. But being relatively small itself, the Roman original is immediately recognisable to Dubliners from the dinky little arch at Stephen’s Green, its near-replica in both size and style.
As well as a gateway between pavement and park, the Dublin arch now forms a sort of chronological gateway between two eras of Irish history. It was opened in 1907, the same year as the riots caused by a generation-defining play, about a young man overthrowing his tyrannical father.
In the shifting mood of the times, the arch would soon be decorated with bullet holes, when a few years later, the poets and playwrights who staged the Easter Rising made it one of their many backdrops.
But of course in the meantime, like all such arches, it was designed to commemorate officially approved military glories: in this case the Boer War, and the part played there by the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, whose dead of the conflict are named on its underside.
Even then there were mixed feelings about the worthiness of their sacrifice. For militant nationalists, the Irish granite of which the monument was built might as well have been Tarpeian Rock. Instead of Fusiliers Arch, the official name, it was derided as “Traitors Gate”.
Ironically it was on nearby Grafton Street that a former Boer War veteran John MacBride met Thomas MacDonagh on Easter Monday 1916.
Unlike the Fusiliers, MacBride had fought for the Boers, and would now bypass the arch in every sense, en route to Jacob’s, republican martyrdom, and the winning side of Irish history.
As for the monument itself, unlike many erected by the old regime, it has at least survived. The modest scale probably helps. Also, unlike most triumphal arches, it works for a living, serving as an actual gateway, complete with gate, into the Green.