Esquiline Hill

• 1. Introduction

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  The Esquiline Hill sits at the heart of Rome, known in Latin as the Collis Esquilinus and in Italian as the Esquilino. It ranks among the Seven Hills of Rome, the ridges that gave the ancient city its earliest shape. Historians still disagree on where the name came from: a grove of oak trees, or Romans who saw its residents as outsiders. Roman kings, a political adviser fond of elaborate gardens, and an emperor who built one extravagant palace left their mark on this ground. Centuries later, a marble statue and a buried treasure would surface from its soil. The hill's name would even travel as far as a small hamlet in Honduras. What ties an oak grove, a king's palace, and a Central American village together starts with the ground itself.

• 2. Two Theories Of A Name

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  One explanation ties the name to Italian oaks, once abundant across the hill. Residents, in this view, simply named their home after that grove.

  A second explanation reaches back to Rome's infancy, when the Capitolium, the Palatinum, and the northern fringe of the Caelian held the city's densest population. Those residents counted as insiders. People who settled the hill's outer slopes, by contrast, were labeled exquilini, a word close to suburbanites. Historians have not resolved which explanation is correct. Three separate ridges within the hill even carried their own individual names.

• 3. A King's New Address

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  Three distinct ridges make up the Esquiline: the Cispian to the north, the Oppian to the south, and the Fagutal to the west. Rising above the valley where Romans would later build the Colosseum, this cluster of ridges grew into a fashionable residential district. According to the historian Livy, the settlement here expanded under Servius Tullius, traditionally counted as Rome's sixth king, sometime in the 6th century BC. Servius Tullius went further than expanding the neighborhood: he moved his own residence onto the hill, a move meant to raise its standing among Romans. A king's address, once fixed on this ground, set the Esquiline on a path that later drew some of Rome's wealthiest residents.

• 4. Gardens Palaces And Baths

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  The political adviser and art patron Maecenas (70-8 BC) built his gardens on the Esquiline. He laid them out over the old Servian Wall and the necropolis that had adjoined it. He modeled the grounds on Hellenistic-Persian garden design, the first gardens built in that style in Rome, and filled them with terraces and libraries.

  At the Oppian spur, Nero (37-68 AD) confiscated property to build his Golden House, an extravagant palace roughly a mile long. Trajan (53-117) later built a bath complex on the same ground; remains of both his baths and Nero's palace are visible today. A third-century cluster of gardens called the Horti Liciniani likely rose on the Esquiline too. It included a relatively well-preserved nymphaeum, once misidentified as the vanished Temple of Minerva Medica. Farther to the northeast, at the summit of the Cispian, stands the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. None of these structures, though, hint at the discus thrower waiting to be unearthed on a Roman family's property centuries later.

• 5. Treasures And A Namesake Abroad

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  In 1781, workers on the Villa Palombara, property of the Massimo family on the Esquiline, made a discovery. It was the first known copy of the Discobolus of Myron, a marble statue of a discus thrower. The Esquiline Treasure, a separate hoard unearthed on the same hill, now belongs to the collection of the British Museum.

  Far from Rome, a small hamlet in Honduras called El Esquilinchuche carries a name taken directly from this hill. It is the only place outside Italy known to bear it. The connection between the two places endures as simply a name, with no record of who made that choice or why.