They Did Not Widen the Via Appia

Rome’s famous road that goes by the name of Via Appia (Appian Way) averages only six meters in width.  The main road in the town of Baclayon lined by the old church and some old houses may be of a similar width on the average.

Outside Rome, the first few kilometers of the Via Appia are lined by a series of monuments, milestones, inscriptions, tombs, catacombs, funeral monuments and other antiquities and ruins.  Many are still standing.

Our own monuments may not go as far back.  Unlike the Romans, conquerors our ascendants were not.  Rather, those who conquered us knew that to ensure their conquest, they had to first erase a people’s past.

That leaves us with a national memory of a past, before the conquerors came, that teeters on a strange mixture of conjecture, common sense, science, and the patience of academics to fit together fragmentary pieces of evidence, and not much more.

We have no Angkor Wat or Taj Mahal or giant Buddha statues like those in Afghanistan that the Taliban had so mercilessly blown to smithereens.  But we have in our midst cathedrals and houses and a smattering of markers of a more recent past when our ancestors suffered and gloried, braver and more flexible than we could imagine or ever hope to be.

Appius Claudius Caecus built the Via Appia in 312 BC.  From the Servian Wall in Rome it stretched for 212 kilometers southward to Capua.  By 244 BC the road was extended another 370 kilometers southeastward to the port of Brindisi along the Adriatic Sea.

In our place and time, roads are built by those voted into public office, leaders who may as well be trusted to see to it that building for development is integrative.  There is the value of history, the environment, a people’s sensibilities, and foresight.  Most of our leaders have much of the latter.  While they may also be culturally competent, planning and implementation take more than foresight and funds.  Hindsight, too, is a virtue.

Hindsight comes a-plenty on the Via Appia.  It holds the memory of Spartacus.  On its stretch southward toward Naples, six thousand slaves captured in the final battle of the two-year-long Spartacus slave revolt were crucified in AD 71, on the orders of Crassus.  Spartacus himself was spared of crucifixion but his body was never found.

One travels on the Via Appia to see the catacombs, those subterranean cemeteries of galleries or passages with side recesses for tombs.  In one of these catacombs is the well-preserved tomb of Caecilia Metella, the wife of Crassus.  Another catacomb, the one under the Basilica of San Sebastiano, is reputed to have been the temporary resting place of the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul in the latter half of the 3rd century.

Classical writers like Horace and Statius have celebrated the Via Appia, expertly built such that centuries of use have proved its extraordinary durability.  No chariots, no centurions or praetorians on horseback, no Roman legions nor slaves pass through the Via Appia now.  Modern wheeled cars have taken over.  So has modern traffic.  And an endless stream of gawking tourists like us who come to see the antiquities that line the Via Appia, willing to suffer the traffic, not to lament the road’s width.

They did not widen the Via Appia.  If they did, there may not have been such places to see and revere.  Who knows if only a slice of the Basilica of San Sebastiano has been left standing, or that most of the catacombs now open to the public along with their wealth of history has been buried forever to become mere historical footnotes.

Roads are widened to accommodate an ever-increasing traffic.  Yet wide roads are no assurance that traffic jams can be tamed.  Jams will be there for as long as vehicles do not stop where they should or park where they must and adventurous drivers zigzag through different lanes to overtake.  And wider roads tempt speeding drivers, even on roads that cut through the very heart of towns where all vehicles ought to go slow at 30 kilometers an hour.
Some of Cebu’s widened roads tell tales.  There may not be some real, scientific study on the rate of accidents in relation to the width of a road, but residents along one widened road miss those days when theirs was still a two-lane street.  Traffic jams and violations are still the same, they say.  But when accidents happened before, when vehicles went by slowly because the road was narrower, the victims at least had a greater chance of survival.

We know, as we all must, that there is more to development than wide roads.  Baclayon’s old church and old houses lend character to the town that makes it an inviting stopover, not just a town that looks like any other that one passes through.  Take out the old belfry of the old church and we sever a fragile thread of our connection with the past.  Slice off parts of old houses that have withstood time and weather, and we silence the echoes of generations and diminish a family’s memory.

It matters not whether we know those families.  ‘I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me…’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘…my individualism is really an illusion.  I am part of the great whole and I can never escape.  But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment.  Then I am wretched.’

Historical footnotes that those giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan had become make those who blew them up forever remain in the world’s collective memory as the cause of one of humanity’s great losses.
We are the greater for having avoided such wretchedness.  So far.

(March 2005)