More Roman than the Romans

It is not exactly news that there are plenty of monuments in Washington DC (where I am currently staying) that look back directly to the ancient world: think of the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial (a modern Parthenon), or Union Station (owing much of its aesthetics to the Arch of Constantine). The city itself has often been nicknamed “New Rome on the Potomac”.

But on the route between the apartment in which I am living and the place I am working (the National Gallery), there is a monument I had never really noticed before – but which would have made a Roman emperor’s eyes water, very much in their style. It is the US Navy Memorial, celebrating those who serve, or have served, in the various branches of the US Navy. It’s a circular plaza, surrounded by flags and fountains, and surveyed by a bronze statue of a “lone sailor”.

U.S. Navy Memorial | © English: NPS Photo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The Lone Sailor statue | © Bluesnote, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

So, what is so Roman about it?

For a start, it’s the world map that it incorporates on the floor of the plaza – the so-called “Granite Sea”. That seems very ordinary at first sight. But the crucial distinguishing feature is that the projection of this map ensures that the whole world seems to be centred on Washington DC. That is exactly the principle of the emperor Augustus’ “Golden Milestone” in the Roman Forum (which listed the distance of major cities in the Roman empire from the city of Rome). It is also the principle of the famous route map erected by Augustus’ henchman, Agrippa, in the Roman city centre; the original no longer survives, but its overall scheme is almost certainly reflected in a medieval version, known as the “Peutinger Table”. This displayed the main roads of the Roman world, all radiating from the city of Rome, which thus appeared literally as the geographical, as well as the political, centre of the empire. Here in Washington we find a modern version of just that.

Then there is the sculpture. I am not meaning the “lone sailor”, but the bronze reliefs set into the low perimeter wall. These depict sailors in action of all kinds, from navigation to parades. And, except for the fact that they aren’t arranged around a spiral, they are as close as you could imagine to the themes of the reliefs of Trajan’s column, where we see soldiers bridge-building, fighting, listening to the emperor and so on. The modern designers must have had these reliefs in mind, but they went one better, casting them in bronze rather than the marble of the column.

Bronze bas-relief in the US Navy Memorial | © cliff1066, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This memorial is as Roman as you could get, in other words. But the surprise for me was the date of it. There had been vague plans for a monument to the Navy in the centre of Washington already at the end of the eighteenth century, but they came to nothing. What we now see was not designed and built until the 1980s, first authorised by President Carter. Amazingly, Roman style (and traces of Roman ideology) was still going strong in this new Rome even then.

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