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 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, 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.
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 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 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 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.
“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
observations 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.