ILLINC...

Here is the other side of Julius' view, according to Martial (4.64.18-24):

On the other side [ILLINC], the driver on the Flaminian and Salarian Way lies in plain sight, although the car is hushed, so its wheels don't disturb a sleep so tranquil that bosuns' calls and shouting barge-haulers could not rouse you from it -- no matter that the Milvian Bridge is so close by, and the shipping that scuds down holy Tiber...

From Monte Mario, there is a good view down to the Milvian Bridge. Calling it 'so close by' (tam prope) might be poetic licence:

-- but it's there, clear enough, off to the left. My old iPhone might make it look further than it is (or seems to the naked eye).

If Julius is on Monte Mario, ILLINC now looks to be a pretty narrow segment off to the left of the available field of view. HINC, though, takes in a much wider sweep. From the Alban Hills at the extreme right of the view, off in the south-eastern distance, HINC swivels through Rome's iconic heart ('the seven imperious hills'), takes in what's straight ahead of the belvedere terrace (Anna Perenna across the river) -- and continues northward, to the left, to Fidenae and Rubrae. These two ancient settlements straddle the modern GRA, Rome's orbital motorway: Fidenae on the Via Salaria just inside it (not far past the old city airport), Rubrae a little outside it on the Flaminia.

It's not simply that HINC and ILLINC get seriously unequal shares: HINC doesn't respect ILLINC's boundaries. Draw a sightline to Rubrae (modern Saxa Rubra) or Fidenae from Monte Mario and they are to the left of Ponte Milvio, which is supposed to be in ILLINC.

What's more, Martial's description makes it clear that Julius' hilltop villa captures a bird's-eye view over both of those roads. Its height insulates it from the rattle of the carts, he says, but visitors strolling on the villa's terrace can make out individual traffic: you can see the drivers. It's a stretch beyond poetic licence to imagine Martial sipping an aperitivo and spotting individual hauliers queuing for the Milvian Bridge on Via Flaminia. As for the Salaria, not a chance. That exits Rome further East.

JULIUS MARTIAL'S VIEW DOES NOT WORK FROM MONTE MARIO.

IT PROBABLY DOES NOT WORK FROM ANYWHERE.

Is this a problem?

Looking both ways

In the light of Sparsus' Janiculan pad, let's revisit that Monte Mario inscription again and see how it frames a selective vision of the content of the poem, and thereby of the view from Julius' alleged villa.  The five lines run:

HINC SEPTEM DOMINOS VIDERE MONTES
ET TOTAM LICET AESTIMARE ROMAM
ALBANOSQVE QVOQVE TVSCVULOSQVE COLLES
ET QVODCVMQVE IACET SVB VRBE FRIGOS
FIDENAS VETERES BREVESQVE RVBRAS

Which I translate,

From here, on the one side, you can see the seven imperious hills and take in all of Rome -- the Alban hills too, and the Tusculans, and every cool spot in the city's orbit; and ancient Fidenae, and little Rubrae,...

There is no "on the one side" in the Latin, just a "From here", a Hinc (line 11). But what the excerption of these five lines conceals, is a matching Illinc, "From there", seven lines later (line 18), right after the sexy-gory Anna Perenna bit that the inscribers must have felt was a bit too much for Sunday-morning strollers.

The construction is carefully balanced: each word -- hinc, illinc -- cues up a seven-line description of what the visitor can see that way.

From a commanding ridgeline, I think the easiest way to take hinc and illinc is as verbal gestures: Martial's text is spreading its arms and inviting us to take in both sides of a vista, left and right. I'd absolutely be open to other readings -- if you have a different point of view, please let me know -- but if I'm right, the Monte Mario snippet is only telling us half of Julius's view. What's the side it's leaving out?

From the Greek Anthology: a scribe hangs up his tools

Callimenes, a scribe retiring from employment, dedicates the tools of his trade to the Muses, patron goddesses of the literature he has spent his career copying out.

The first version is by Philip, who compiled a Garland of epigrams by recent and contemporary poets in the middle of the first century AD.

The second is by a friend of Agathias, who compiled a Cycle of contemporary epigrams in the sixth century AD. Paul was a 'Silentiary' (Usher), a palace official in Byzantium. Philip's epigram was a popular model for imitation at that time: book 6 of the Anthology has half a dozen versions like this one.

This pair of poems is a striking example of Greek epigram's remarkable resilience and continuity: they could have been written five minutes apart, but in fact are separated by half a millennium.

Philip's Garland and Agathias' Cycle were important sources for Constantine Cephalas when he collated the biggest-ever compilation of epigrams, the work we know as the Greek Anthology, in the tenth century.

6.62 

PHILIP OF THESSALONICA 

The disk of lead, that marked the column’s edge;
The penknife, notcher of his pointed reeds;
The guiding rule; dry pumice from the beach,
That porous sea-stone; these, Callimenes
Gives to the Muses. He has ceased from toil
Because his eye is clouded with old age.

6.66 

PAUL THE SILENTIARY 

Unwetted lead, that scribes the steadfast line
In which we root the letters’ harmony;
The ruler, helmsman of that rolling lead;
The porous, spongy stone; the well for ink,
Stained black; the ink-tipped pens, precise of line;
The sea-born sponge, soft flower of the deep; 
The knife, bronze carpenter of slender reeds:
These are the offerings of Callimenes
To laugher-loving Muses, since old age
Has spent in toil his eye and cunning hand.

A note on scribal tools: used with the ruler, the rotating lead disk drew a straight vertical margin. As it did so, it marked the papyrus or vellum with the regularly spaced intervals for the horizontal line guides (as in 6.66, immediately below). Scribes used pumice to smooth the surface prior to writing (cf. Catullus 1), and cut their pens from reeds; they could erase mistakes before the ink was dry by wiping with a sponge.

Rus in urbe, take 2: Sparsus

Julius Martial is not Martial's only rich friend with a fancy address. In epigram 12.57 we meet Sparsus, whose suburban place is definitely on the Janiculan proper -- making the poet killingly jealous. In the city proper, a stone's throw below, ordinary Romans are kept up day and night. Industry, commerce, cult rituals, beggars, and street vendors create a constant racket, but Sparsus is above it all,

in the spread you got off Petilius. Its ground floor looks down on the heights of the hills; it's a country estate, but in town -- your vineyard's worked by a Roman, and yet Falernian slopes don't yield a bigger vintage; a broad driveway for your runabout loops through your front porch; and at the heart of the place, you sleep in peace and quiet.

This villa's situation is strikingly similar to Julius Martial's place. Sparsus’ rus in urbe (21) closely echoes the description of Julius’ rus, seu potius domus — a slice of country living, complete with vineyard, but with all mod. cons. and the city’s amenities close at hand; again, the best of both worlds. Sparsus and Julius are both living the Janiculan dream.

This time the scene has to be the Janiculan as commonly understood, across from the historic centre. This second suburban estate is described as ‘Petilian’ (12.57.19). The Petillius family, an old plebeian gens that rose to equestrian status, had farmed there before Trastevere urbanised: Livy recounts the discovery in the early second century of a stone coffin on their land sub Ianiculo, bearing the name of King Numa (XL 29). None of that was fields anymore, and Martial places his wealthy friend’s villa higher, on the desirable ridge-line, looking out over its own orderly ranks of vines to the city far below.

As we've seen, some of the landmarks in Julius’ outlook seem like a better match to the view from Monte Mario, but no-one could call a Monte Mario property a domus, a townhouse, no matter how luxuriously appointed: it was simply too far out of town. An address on the Janiculan, the actual Janiculan, got the city/country balance just right.

There's also the problem that even from Monte Mario, Julius's view just won't add up.

Could Monte Mario be 'Janiculan'?

OK, so the Janiculan proper is too far south for a decent (or any) view of, say, the grove of Anna Perenna. Monte Mario is really well placed for that. But could Martial ever have called this much more northerly hill 'Janiculan'?

There's no way he knew it as Monte Mario; that name is much more recent. The proper name for it seems to have been Cinna's Rise, Clivus Cinnae. It appears from Cicero as though Romans saw it as part of the same range as, at least, its neighbour to the south: a letter to Atticus mentions the Vaticani Montes (XIII.33.4), the 'Vatican Range'. The question is whether this range was thought of as extending south as well as north of the Vatican hill (as we've seen, the gap between the Vatican and the Janiculan proper is pretty big).

Two isolated mentions -- one Latin, one Greek -- open up the possibility that the Janiculan name could sometimes extend up from the south to include the whole 'Vatican Range'.

Coming at the problem from the south side and in Latin, a compliment of Horace to Maecenas that the ‘echo of the Vatican Hill’ returned to him the praise he heard ‘in the theatre’ (Odes 1.20.3, 7-8) is sometimes interpreted to mean that the Janiculan could count as one of the Vaticani Montes. That would make it part of the same range as the Vatican and Monte Mario. However, Horace does not tell us which theatre he was inviting Maecenas to recall: Pompey’s (as yet Rome’s only permanent public theatre), which the Janiculan overlooks, or some temporary structure on the as yet undeveloped Campus Martius, across from the Vatican? And besides, he is flattering his patron: the further the hill that echoed it back, the louder the applause must have been.

On the Greek side and coming at the problem from the north, Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities (IX.14.8) has the army of Veii embarrassing the Romans by penetrating (in the Loeb translation) ‘as far as the river Tiber and Mount Janiculum, which is not twenty stades from Rome’. Twenty stades is a couple of our miles, making the hill we know as the Janiculan too close in: Monte Mario is further out and the Veiientes were coming from the north, so the fit is better. Dionysius’ usage is isolated but he lived in Rome for decades and must have known its surroundings well.

Conceivably then, Romans counted the Janiculan as part of a Vatican range — depending on Maecenas' theatre habits and what exactly Horace is trying to prove. It's Dionysius who really delivers, though. His account definitely implies that Monte Mario could count as ‘Janiculan’, at least from a certain point of view. Dionysius holds open the door of possibility for inscribing Martial's five lines on the Clivus Cinnae ...

at the other end of the Vatican Range ...

and always assuming the Janiculan even counted as being in the Janiculan range.

One other time at least, when Martial calls a villa Janiculan, HE MEANS JANICULAN.