Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1
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Title: Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1
Author: F. Marion Crawford
Release date: April 26, 2009 [eBook #28614]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS, VOL. 1 ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS
STUDIES FROM THE CHRONICLES OF ROME
BY
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1899
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1898,
By The Macmillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1898. Reprinted November,
December, 1898.
_Norwood Press_
_J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith_
_Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME I
PAGE
THE MAKING OF THE CITY 1
THE EMPIRE 22
THE CITY OF AUGUSTUS 57
THE MIDDLE AGE 78
THE FOURTEEN REGIONS 100
REGION I MONTI 106
REGION II TREVI 155
REGION III COLONNA 190
REGION IV CAMPO MARZO 243
REGION V PONTE 274
REGION VI PARIONE 297
LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES
VOLUME I
Map of Rome _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Wall of Romulus 4
Palace of the Cæsars 30
The Campagna and Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct 50
Temple of Castor and Pollux 70
Basilica Constantine 90
Basilica of Saint John Lateran 114
Baths of Diocletian 140
Fountain of Trevi 158
Piazza Barberini 188
Porta San Lorenzo 214
Villa Borghese 230
Piazza del Popolo 256
Island in the Tiber 280
Palazzo Massimo alle Colonna 306
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
VOLUME I
PAGE
Palatine Hill and Mouth of the Cloaca Maxima 1
Ruins of the Servian Wall 8
Etruscan Bridge at Veii 16
Tombs on the Appian Way 22
Brass of Tiberius, showing the Temple of Concord 24
The Tarpeian Rock 28
Caius Julius Cæsar 36
Octavius Augustus Cæsar 45
Brass of Trajan, showing the Circus Maximus 56
Brass of Antoninus Pius, in Honour of Faustina, with
Reverse showing Vesta bearing the Palladium 57
Ponte Rotto, now destroyed 67
Atrium of Vesta 72
Brass of Gordian, showing the Colosseum 78
The Colosseum 87
Ruins of the Temple of Saturn 92
Brass of Gordian, showing Roman Games 99
Ruins of the Julian Basilica 100
Brass of Titus, showing the Colosseum 105
Region I Monti, Device of 106
Santa Francesca Romana 111
San Giovanni in Laterano 116
Piazza Colonna 119
Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano 126
Santa Maria Maggiore 134
Porta Maggiore, supporting the Channels of the Aqueduct
of Claudius and the Anio Novus 145
Interior of the Colosseum 152
Region II Trevi, Device of 155
Grand Hall of the Colonna Palace 162
Interior of the Mausoleum of Augustus 169
Forum of Trajan 171
Ruins of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli 180
Palazzo del Quirinale 185
Region III Colonna, Device of 190
Arch of Titus 191
Twin Churches at the Entrance of the Corso 197
San Lorenzo in Lucina 204
Palazzo Doria-Pamfili 208
Palazzo di Monte Citorio 223
Palazzo di Venezia 234
Region IV Campo Marzo, Device of 248
Piazza di Spagna 251
Trinità de Monti 257
Villa Medici 265
Region V Ponte 274
Bridge of Sant' Angelo 285
Villa Negroni 292
Region VI Parione, Device of 297
Piazza Navona 303
Ponte Sisto 307
The Cancelleria 316
WORKS CONSULTED
NOT INCLUDING CLASSIC WRITERS NOR ENCYCLOPÆDIAS
1. AMPÈRE--Histoire Romaine à Rome.
AMPÈRE--L'Empire Remain à Rome.
2. BARACCONI--I Rioni di Roma.
3. BOISSIER--Promenades Archéologiques.
4. BRYCE--The Holy Roman Empire.
5. CELLINI--Memoirs.
6. COPPI--Memoire Colonnesi.
7. FORTUNATO--Storia delle vite delle Imperatrici Romane.
8. GIBBON--Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
9. GNOLI--Vittoria Accoramboni.
10. GREGOROVIUS--Geschichte der Stadt Rom.
11. HARE--Walks in Rome.
12. JOSEPHUS--Life of.
13. LANCIANI--Ancient Rome.
14. LETI--Vita di Sisto V.
15. MURATORI--Scriptores Rerum Italicarum.
MURATORI--Annali d'Italia.
MURATORI--Antichità Italiane.
16. RAMSAY AND LANCIANI--A Manual of Roman Antiquities.
17. SCHNEIDER--Das Alte Rom.
18. SILVAGNI--La Corte e la Società Romana.
[Illustration: PALATINE HILL AND MOUTH OF THE CLOACA MAXIMA]
Ave Roma Immortalis
I
The story of Rome is the most splendid romance in all history. A few
shepherds tend their flocks among volcanic hills, listening by day and
night to the awful warnings of the subterranean voice,--born in danger,
reared in peril, living their lives under perpetual menace of
destruction, from generation to generation. Then, at last, the deep
voice swells to thunder, roaring up from the earth's heart, the
lightning shoots madly round the mountain top, the ground rocks, and the
air is darkened with ashes. The moment has come. One man is a leader,
but not all will follow him. He leads his small band swiftly down from
the heights, and they drive a flock and a little herd before them,
while each man carries his few belongings as best he can, and there are
few women in the company. The rest would not be saved, and they perish
among their huts before another day is over.
Down, always downwards, march the wanderers, rough, rugged, young with
the terrible youth of those days, and wise only with the wisdom of
nature. Down the steep mountain they go, down over the rich, rolling
land, down through the deep forests, unhewn of man, down at last to the
river, where seven low hills rise out of the wide plain. One of those
hills the leader chooses, rounded and grassy; there they encamp, and
they dig a trench and build huts. Pales, protectress of flocks, gives
her name to the Palatine Hill. Rumon, the flowing river, names the
village Rome, and Rome names the leader Romulus, the Man of the River,
the Man of the Village by the River; and to our own time the
twenty-first of April is kept and remembered, and even now honoured, for
the very day on which the shepherds began to dig their trench on the
Palatine, the date of the Foundation of Rome, from which seven hundred
and fifty-four years were reckoned to the birth of Christ.
And the shepherds called their leader King, though his kingship was over
but few men. Yet they were such men as begin history, and in the scant
company there were all the seeds of empire. First the profound faith of
natural mankind, unquestioning, immovable, inseparable from every daily
thought and action; then fierce strength, and courage, and love of life
and of possession; last, obedience to the chosen leader, in clear
liberty, when one should fail, to choose another. So the Romans began to
win the world, and won it in about six hundred years.
By their camp-fires, by their firesides in their little huts, they told
old tales of their race, and round the truth grew up romantic legend,
ever dear to the fighting man and to the husbandman alike, with strange
tales of their first leader's birth, fit for poets, and woven to stir
young hearts to daring, and young hands to smiting. Truth there was
under their stories, but how much of it no man can tell: how Amulius of
Alba Longa slew his sons, and slew also his daughter, loved of Mars,
mother of twin sons left to die in the forest, like Oedipus,
father-slayers, as Oedipus was, wolf-suckled, of whom one was born to
kill the other and be the first King, and be taken up to Jupiter in
storm and lightning at the last. The legend of wise Numa, next, taught
by Egeria; her stony image still weeps trickling tears for her royal
adept, and his earthen cup, jealously guarded, was worshipped for more
than a thousand years; legends of the first Arval brotherhood, dim as
the story of Melchisedec, King and priest, but lasting as Rome itself.
Tales of King Tullus, when the three Horatii fought for Rome against
the three Curiatii, who smote for Alba and lost the day--Tullus
Hostilius, grandson of that first Hostus who had fought against the
Sabines; and always more legend, and more, and more, sometimes misty,
sometimes clear and direct in action as a Greek tragedy. They hover upon
the threshold of history, with faces of beauty or of terror, sublime,
ridiculous, insignificant, some born of desperate, real deeds, many
another, perhaps, first told by some black-haired shepherd mother to her
wondering boys at evening, when the brazen pot simmered on the
smouldering fire, and the father had not yet come home.
But down beneath the legend lies the fact, in hewn stones already far in
the third thousand of their years. Digging for truth, searchers have
come here and there upon the first walls and gates of the Palatine
village, straight, strong and deeply founded. The men who made them
meant to hold their own, and their own was whatsoever they were able to
take from others by force. They built their walls round a four-sided
space, wide enough for them, scarcely big enough a thousand years later
for the houses of their children's rulers, the palaces of the Cæsars of
which so much still stands today.
Then came the man who built the first bridge across the river, of wooden
piles and beams, bolted with bronze, because the Romans had no iron yet,
and ever afterwards repaired with wood and bronze, for its sanctity, in
perpetual veneration of Ancus Martius, fourth King of Rome. That was the
bridge Horatius kept against Porsena of Clusium, while the fathers hewed
it down behind him.
[Illustration: WALL OF ROMULUS]
Tarquin the first came next, a stranger of Greek blood, chosen, perhaps,
because the factions in Rome could not agree. Then Servius, great and
good, built his tremendous fortification, and the King of Italy today,
driving through the streets in his carriage, may look upon the wall of
the King who reigned in Rome more than two thousand and four hundred
years ago.
Under those six rulers, from Romulus to Servius, from the man of the
River Village to the man of walls, Rome had grown from a sheepfold to a
town, from a town to a walled city, from a city to a little nation,
matched against all mankind, to win or die, inch by inch, sword in hand.
She was a kingdom now, and her men were subjects; and still the third
law of great races was strong and waking. Romans obeyed their leader so
long as he could lead them well--no longer. The twilight of the Kings
gathered suddenly, and their names were darkened, and their sun went
down in shame and hate. In the confusion, tragic legend rises to tell
the story. For the first time in Rome, a woman, famous in all history,
turned the scale. The King's son, passionate, terrible, false, steals
upon her in the dark. 'I am Sextus Tarquin, and there is a sword in my
hand.' Yet she yielded to no fear of steel, but to the horror of
unearned shame beyond death. On the next day, when she lay before her
husband and her father and the strong Brutus, her story told, her deed
done, splendidly dead by her own hand, they swore the oath in which the
Republic was born. While father, husband and friend were stunned with
grief, Brutus held up the dripping knife before their eyes. 'By this
most chaste blood, I swear--Gods be my witnesses--that I will hunt down
Tarquin the Proud, himself, his infamous wife and every child of his,
with fire and sword, and with all my might, and neither he nor any other
man shall ever again be King in Rome.' So they all swore, and bore the
dead woman out into the market-place, and called on all men to stand by
them.
They kept their word, and the tale tells how the Tarquins were driven
out to a perpetual exile, and by and by allied themselves with Porsena,
and marched on Rome, and were stopped only at the Sublician bridge by
brave Horatius.
Chaos next. Then all at once the Republic stands out, born full grown
and ready armed, stern, organized and grasping, but having already
within itself the quickened opposites that were to fight for power so
long and so fiercely,--the rich and the poor, the patrician and the
plebeian, the might and the right.
There is a wonder in that quick change from Kingdom to Commonwealth,
which nothing can make clear, except, perhaps, modern history. Say that
two thousand or more years hereafter men shall read of what our
grandfathers, our fathers and ourselves have seen done in France within
a hundred years, out of two or three old books founded mostly on
tradition; they may be confused by the sudden disappearance of kings, by
the chaos, the wild wars and the unforeseen birth of a lasting republic,
just as we are puzzled when we read of the same sequence in ancient
Rome. Men who come after us will have more documents, too. It is not
possible that all books and traces of written history should be
destroyed throughout the world, as the Gauls burned everything in Rome,
except the Capitol itself, held by the handful of men who had taken
refuge there.
So the Kingdom fell with a woman's death, and the Commonwealth was made
by her avengers. Take the story as you will, for truth or truth's
legend, it is for ever humanly true, and such deeds would rouse a nation
today as they did then and as they set Rome on fire once more nearly
sixty years later.
But all the time Rome was growing as if the very stones had life to put
out shoots and blossoms and bear fruit. Round about the city the great
Servian wall had wound like a vast finger, in and out, grasping the
seven hills, and taking in what would be a fair-sized city even in our
day. They were the last defences Rome built for herself, for nearly nine
hundred years.
Nothing can give a larger idea of Rome's greatness than that; not all
the temples, monuments, palaces, public buildings of later years can
tell half the certainty of her power expressed by that one fact--Rome
needed no walls when once she had won the world.
But it is very hard to guess at what the city was, in those grim times
of the early fight for life. We know the walls, and there were nineteen
gates in all, and there were paved roads; the wooden bridge, the Capitol
with its first temple and first fortress, the first Forum with the
Sacred Way, were all there, and the public fountain, called the
Tullianum, and a few other sites are certain. The rest must be imagined.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE SERVIAN WALL]
Rome was a brown city in those days, when there was no marble and little
stucco: a brown city teeming with men and women clothed mostly in grey
and brown and black woollen cloaks, like those the hill shepherds wear
today, caught up under one arm and thrown far over the shoulder in dark
folds. The low houses without any outer windows, entered by one rough
door, were built close together, and those near the Forum had shops
outside them, low-browed places, dark but not deep, where the cloaked
keeper sat behind a stone counter among his wares, waiting for custom,
watching all that happened in the market-place, gathering in gossip from
one buyer to exchange it for more with the next, altogether not unlike
the small Eastern merchant of today.
Yet during more than half the time, there were few young men, or men in
prime, in the streets of Rome. They were fighting more than half the
year, while their fathers and their children stayed behind with the
women. The women sat spinning and weaving wool in their little brown
houses; the boys played, fought, ran races naked in the streets; the
small girls had their quiet games and, surely, their dolls, made of
rags, stuffed with the soft wool waste from their mothers' spindles and
looms. The old men, scarred and seamed in the battles of an age when
fighting was all hand to hand, kept the shops, or sunned themselves in
the market-place, shelling and chewing lupins to pass the time, as the
Romans have always done, and telling old tales, or boasting to each
other of their half-grown grandchildren, and of their full-grown sons,
fighting far away in the hills and the plains that Rome might have more
possession. Meanwhile the maidens went in pairs to the springs to fetch
water, or down to the river in small companies to wash the woollen
clothes and dry them in the shade of the old wild trees, lest in the sun
they should shrink and thicken; black-haired, black-eyed, dark-skinned
maids, all of them, strong and light of foot, fit to be mothers of more
soldiers, to slay more enemies, and bring back more spoil. Then, as in
our own times, the flocks of goats were driven in from the pastures at
early morning and milked from door to door, for each household, and
driven out again to the grass before the sun was high. In the old wall
there was the Cattle Gate, the Porta Mugonia, named, as the learned say,
from the lowing of the herds. Then, as in the hill towns not long ago,
the serving women, who were slaves, sat cross-legged on the ground in
the narrow court within the house, with the hand-mill of two stones
between them, and ground the wheat to flour for the day's meal. There
have been wonderful survivals of the first age even to our own time.
But that which has not come down to us is the huge vitality of those men
and women. The world's holders have never risen suddenly in hordes; they
have always grown by degrees out of little nations, that could live
through more than their neighbours. Calling up the vision of the first
Rome, one must see, too, such human faces and figures of men as are
hardly to be found among us nowadays,--the big features, the great,
square, devouring jaws, the steadily bright eyes, the strongly built
brows, coarse, shagged hair, big bones, iron muscles and starting
sinews. There are savage countries that still breed such men. They may
have their turn next, when we are worn out. Browning has made John the
Smith a memorable type.
Rome was a clean city in those days. One of the Tarquins had built the
great arched drain which still stands unshaken and in use, and smaller
ones led to it, draining the Forum and all the low part of the town. The
people were clean, far beyond our ordinary idea of them, as is plain
enough from the contemptuous way in which the Latin authors use their
strong words for uncleanliness. A dirty man was an object of pity, and
men sometimes went about in soiled clothes to excite the public
sympathy, as beggars do today in all countries. Dirt meant abject
poverty, and in a grasping, getting race, poverty was the exception,
even while simplicity was the rule. For all was simple with them, their
dress, their homes, their lives, their motives, and if one could see the
Rome of Tarquin the Proud, this simplicity would be of all
characteristics the most striking, compared with what we know of later
Rome, and with what we see about us in our own times. Simplicity is not
strength, but the condition in which strength is least hampered in its
full action.
It was easy to live simply in such a place and in such a climate, under
a wise King. The check in the first straight run of Rome's history
brought the Romans suddenly face to face with the first great
complication of their career, which was the struggle between the rich
and the poor; and again the half truth rises up to explain the fact.
Men whose first instinct was to take and hold took from one another in
peace when they could not take from their enemies in war, since they
must needs be always taking from some one. So the few strong took all
from the many weak, till the weak banded themselves together to resist
the strong, and the struggle for life took a new direction.
The grim figure of Lucius Junius Brutus rises as the incarnation of that
character which, at great times, made history, but in peace made
trouble. The man who avenged Lucretia, who drove out the Tarquins, and
founded the Republic, is most often remembered as the father who sat
unmoved in judgment on his two traitor sons, and looked on with stony
eyes while they paid the price of their treason in torment and death.
That one deed stands out, and we forget how he himself fell fighting for
Rome's freedom.
But still the evil grew at home, and the hideous law of creditor and
debtor, which only fiercest avarice could have devised, ground the poor,
who were obliged to borrow to pay the tax-gatherer, and made slaves of
them almost to the ruin of the state.
Just then Etruria wakes, shadowy, half Greek, the central power of
Italy, between Rome and Gaul. Porsena, the Lar of Clusium, comes against
the city with a great host in gilded arms. Terror descends like a dark
mist over the young nation. The rich fear for their riches, the poor for
their lives. In haste the fathers gather great supplies of corn against
a siege; credit and debt are forgotten; patrician and plebeian join
hands as Porsena reaches Janiculum, and three heroic figures of romance
stand forth from a host of heroes. Horatius keeps the bridge, first with
two comrades, then, at the last, alone in the glory of single-handed
fight against an army, sure of immortality whether he live or die.
Scævola, sworn with the three hundred to slay the Lar, stabs the wrong
man, and burns his hand to the wrist to show what tortures he can bear
unmoved. Cloelia, the maiden hostage, rides her young steed at the
yellow torrent, and swims the raging flood back to the Palatine.
Cloelia and Horatius get statues in the Forum; Scævola is endowed with
great lands, which his race holds for centuries, and leaves a name so
great that two thousand years later, Sforza, greatest leader of the
Middle Age, coveting long ancestry, makes himself descend from the man
who burned off his own hand.
They are great figures, the two men and the noble girl, and real to us,
in a way, because we can stand on the very ground they trod, where
Horatius fought, where Scævola suffered and where Cloelia took the
river. They are nearer to us than Romulus, nearer even than Lucretia, as
each figure, following the city's quick life, has more of reality about
it, and not less of heroism.
For two hundred years the Romans strove with each other in law making;
the fathers for exclusive power and wealth, the plebeians for freedom,
first, and then for office in the state; a time of fighting abroad for
land, and of contention at home about its division. In fifty years the
poor had their Tribunes, but it took them nearly three times as long,
after that, to make themselves almost the fathers' equals in power.
Once they tried a new kind of government by a board of ten, and it held
for a while, till again a woman's life turned the tide of Roman history,
and fair young Virginia, stabbed by her father in the Forum, left a name
as lasting as any of that day.
Romance again, but the true romance, above doubt, at last; not at all
mythical, but full of fate's unanswerable logic, which makes dim stories
clear to living eyes. You may see the actors in the Forum, where it all
happened,--the lovely girl with frightened, wondering eyes; the father,
desperate, white-lipped, shaking with the thing not yet done; Appius
Claudius smiling among his friends and clients; the sullen crowd of
strong plebeians, and the something in the chill autumn air that was a
warning of fate and fateful change. Then the deed. A shriek at the edge
of the throng; a long, thin knife, high in air, trembling before a
thousand eyes; a harsh, heartbroken, vengeful voice; a confusion and a
swaying of the multitude, and then the rising yell of men overlaid,
ringing high in the air from the Capitol right across the Forum to the
Palatine, and echoing back the doom of the Ten.
The deed is vivid still, and then there is sudden darkness. One thinks
of how that man lived afterwards. Had Virginius a home, a wife, other
children to mourn the dead one? Or was he a lonely man, ten times alone
after that day, with the memory of one flashing moment always undimmed
in a bright horror? Who knows? Did anyone care? Rome's story changed its
course, turning aside at the river of Virginia's blood, and going on
swiftly in another way.
To defeat this time, straight to Rome's first and greatest humiliation;
to the coming of the Gauls, sweeping everything before them, Etruscans,
Italians, Romans, up to the gates of the city and over the great moat
and wall of Servius, burning, destroying, killing everything, to the
foot of the central rock; baffled at the last stronghold on a dark night
by a flock of cackling geese, but not caring for so small a thing when
they had swallowed up the rest, or not liking the Latin land, perhaps,
and so, taking ransom for peace and marching away northwards again
through the starved and harried hills and valleys of Etruria to their
own country. And six centuries passed away before an enemy entered Rome
again.
But the Gauls left wreck and ruin and scarcely one stone upon another in
the great desolation; they swept away all records of history, then and
there, and the general destruction was absolute, so that the Rome of the
Republic and of the Empire, the centre and capital of the world, began
to exist from that day. Unwillingly the people bore back Juno's image
from Veii, where they had taken refuge and would have stayed, and built
houses, and would have called that place Rome. But the nobles had their
own way, and the great construction began, of which there was to be no
end for many hundreds of years, in peace and war, mostly while hard
fighting was going on abroad.
[Illustration: ETRUSCAN BRIDGE AT VEII]
They built hurriedly at first, for shelter, and as best they could,
crowding their little houses in narrow streets with small care for
symmetry or adornment. The second Rome must have seemed but a poor
village compared with the solidly built city which the Gauls had burnt,
and it was long before the present could compare with the past. In haste
men seized on fragments of all sorts, blocks of stone, cracked and
defaced in the flames, charred beams that could still serve, a door
here, a window there, and such bits of metal as they could pick up. An
irregular, crowded town sprang up, and a few rough temples, no doubt as
pied and meanly pieced as many of those early churches built of odds and
ends of ruin, which stand to this day.
It is not impossible that the motley character of Rome, of which all
writers speak in one way or another, had its first cause in that second
building of the city. Rome without ruins would hardly seem Rome at all,
and all was ruined in that first inroad of the savage Gauls,--houses,
temples, public places. When the Romans came back from Veii they must
have found the Forum not altogether unlike what it is today, but
blackened with smoke, half choked with mouldering humanity, strewn with
charred timbers, broken roof tiles and the wreck of much household
furniture; a sorrowful confusion reeking with vapours of death, and
pestilential with decay. It was no wonder that the poor plebeians lost
heart and would have chosen to go back to the clear streets and cleaner
air of Veii. Their little houses were lost and untraceable in the
universal chaos. But the rich man's ruins stood out in bolder relief; he
had his lands still; he still had slaves; he could rebuild his home; and
he had his way.
But ever afterwards, though the Republic and the Empire spent the wealth
of nations in beautifying the city, the trace of that first defeat
remained. Dark and narrow lanes wound in and out, round the great
public squares, and within earshot of the broad white streets, and the
time-blackened houses of the poor stood huddled out of sight behind the
palaces of the rich, making perpetual contrast of wealth and poverty,
splendour and squalor, just as one may see today in Rome, in London, in
Paris, in Constantinople, in all the mistress cities of the world that
have long histories of triumph and defeat behind them.
The first Rome sprang from the ashes of the Alban volcano, the second
Rome rose from the ashes of herself, as she has risen again and again
since then. But the Gauls had done Rome a service, too. In crushing her
to the earth, they had crushed many of her enemies out of existence; and
when she stood up to face the world once more, she fought not to beat
the Æquians or the Etruscans at her gates, but to conquer Italy. And by
steady fighting she won it all, and brought home the spoils and divided
the lands; here and there a battle lost, as in the bloody Caudine pass,
but always more battles won, and more, and more, sternly relentless to
revolt. Brutus had seen his own sons' heads fall at his own word; should
Caius Pontius, the Samnite, be spared, because he was the bravest of the
brave? To her faithful friends Rome was just, and now and then
half-contemptuously generous.
The idle Greek fine gentlemen of Tarentum sat in their theatre one day,
overlooking the sea, shaded by dyed awnings from the afternoon sun,
listening entranced to some grand play,--the Oedipus King, perhaps, or
Alcestis, or Medea. Ten Roman trading ships came sailing round the
point; and the wind failed, and they lay there with drooping sails,
waiting for the land breeze that springs up at night. Perhaps some rough
Latin sailor, as is the way today in calm weather when there is no work
to be done, began to howl out one of those strange, endless songs which
have been sung down to us, from ear to ear, out of the primeval Aryan
darkness,--loud, long drawn out, exasperating in its unfinished cadence,
jarring on the refined Greek ear, discordant with the actor's finely
measured tones. In sudden rage at the noise--so it must have been--those
delicate idlers sprang up and ran down to the harbour, and took the
boats that lay there, and overwhelmed the unarmed Roman traders, slaying
many of them. Foolish, cruel, almost comic. So a sensitive musician,
driven half mad by a street organ, longs to rush out and break the thing
to pieces, and kill the poor grinder for his barbarous noise.
But when there was blood in the harbour of Tarentum, and some of the
ships had escaped on their oars, the Greeks were afraid; and when the
message of war came swiftly down to them from inexorable Rome, their
terror grew, and they sent to Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had set up to be a
conqueror, to come and conquer Rome for the sake of certain æsthetic
fine gentlemen who could not bear to be disturbed at a good play on a
spring afternoon. He came with all the pomp and splendour of Eastern
warfare; he won a battle, and a battle, and half a battle, and then the
Romans beat him at Beneventum, famous again and again, and utterly
destroyed his army, and took back with them his gold and his jewels, and
the tusks of his elephants, and the mastery of all Italy to boot, but
not yet beyond dispute.
Creeping down into Sicily, Rome met Carthage, both giants in those days,
and the greatest and last struggle began, with half the known world and
all the known sea for a battle-ground. Round and round the
Mediterranean, by water and land, they fought for a hundred and eighteen
years, through four generations of men, as we should reckon it, both
grasping and strong, both relentless, both sworn to win or perish for
ever, both doing great deeds that are remembered still. The mere name of
Regulus is a legion of legends in itself; the name of Hannibal is in
itself a history, that of Fabius Maximus a lesson; and while history
lasts, Cornelius Scipio and Scipio the African will not be forgotten. It
is the story of many and terrible defeats, from each of which Rome rose,
fiercely young, to win a dozen terrible little victories. It is strange
that we remember the lost days best; misty Thrasymene and Cannæ's
fearful slaughter rise first in the memory. Then all at once, within ten
years, the scale turns, and Caius Claudius Nero hurls Hasdrubal's
disfigured head high over ditch and palisade into his brother's camp,
right to his brother's feet. And five years later, the battle of Zama,
won almost at the gates of Carthage; and then, almost the end, as great
heartbroken Hannibal, defeated, ruined and exiled, drinks up the poison
and rests at last, some forty years after he led his first army to
victory. But he had been dead nearly forty years, when another Scipio at
last tore down the walls of Carthage, and utterly destroyed the city to
the foundations, for ever. And a dozen years later than that, Rome had
conquered all the civilized world round about the Mediterranean sea,
from Spain to Asia.
[Illustration: TOMBS ON THE APPIAN WAY]
II
There was a mother in Rome, not rich, but of great race, for she was
daughter to Scipio of Africa; and she called her sons her jewels when
other women showed their golden ornaments and their precious stones and
boasted of their husbands' wealth. Cornelia's two sons, Tiberius and
Caius, lost their lives successively in a struggle against the avarice
of the rich men who ruled Rome, Italy and the world; against that
grasping avarice which far surpassed the greed of any other race before
the Romans, or after them, and which had suddenly taken new growth as
the spoils of the East and South and West poured into the city. Yet the
vast booty men could see was but an earnest of the wide lands which had
fallen to Rome, called 'Public Lands' almost as if in derision, while
they fell into the power of the few and strong, by the hundred thousand
acres at a time.
Three hundred and fifty years before the Gracchi, when little conquests
still seemed great, Spurius Cassius had died in defence of his Agrarian
Law, at the hands of the savage rich who accused him of conspiring for a
crown. Tiberius Gracchus set up the rights of the people to the public
land, and perished.
He fell within a stone's throw of the spot on which the great tribune,
Nicholas Rienzi, died. The strong, small band of nobles, armed with
staves and clubs, and with that supremacy of contemptuous bearing that
cows the simple, plough their way through the rioting throng,
murderously clubbing to right and left. Tiberius, retreating, stumbles
against a corpse and his enemies are upon him; a stave swung high in
air, a dull blow, and all is finished for that day, save to throw the
body into the Tiber lest the people should make a revolution of its
funeral.
Next came Caius, a boy of six and twenty, fighting the same fight for a
few years. On his head the nobles set a price--its weight in gold. He
hides on the Aventine, and the Aventine is stormed. He escapes by the
Sublician bridge and the bridge is held behind him by one friend, almost
as Horatius held it against an army. Yet the nobles and their hired
Cretan bowmen force the way and pursue him into Furina's grove. There a
Greek slave ends him, and to get more gold fills the poor head with
metal--and is paid in full. Three hundred died with Tiberius, three
thousand were put to death for his brother's sake. With the goods of the
slain and the dowries of their wives, Opimius built the Temple of
Concord on the spot where the later one still stands in part, between
the Comitium and the Capitol. The poor of Rome, and Cornelia, and the
widows and children of the murdered men, knew what that 'Concord' meant.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TIBERIUS, SHOWING THE TEMPLE OF CONCORD]
Then followed revolution, war with runaway slaves, war with the
immediate allies, then civil war, while wealth and love of wealth grew
side by side, the one, insatiate, devouring the other.
First the slaves made for Sicily, wild, mountainous, half-governed then
as it is today, and they held much of it against their masters for five
years. Within short memory, almost yesterday, a handful of outlaws has
defied a powerful nation's best soldiers in the same mountains. It is
small wonder that many thousand men, fighting for liberty and life,
should have held out so long.
And meanwhile Jugurtha of Numidia had for long years bought every Roman
general sent against him, had come to Rome himself and bought the laws,
and had gone back to his country with contemptuous leave-taking--'Thou
city where all is sold!' And still he bought, till Caius Marius,
high-hearted plebeian and great soldier, brought him back to die in the
Mamertine prison.
Then against wealth arose the last and greatest power of Rome, her
terrible armies that set up whom they would, to have their will of
Senate and fathers and people. First Marius, then Sylla whom he had
taught to fight, and taught to beat him in the end, after Cinna had been
murdered for his sake at Ancona.
Marius and Sylla, the plebeian and the patrician, were matched at first
as leader and lieutenant, then both as conquerors, then as alternate
despots of Rome and mortal foes, till their long duel wrecked what had
been and opened ways for what was to be.
First, Sylla claims that he, and not Marius, took Jugurtha, when the
Numidian ally betrayed him, though the King and his two sons marched in
the train of the plebeian's triumph. Marius answers by a stupendous
victory over the Cimbrians and Teutons, slays a hundred thousand in one
battle, comes home, triumphs again, sets up his trophies in the city and
builds a temple to Honour and Courage. Next, in greed of popular power,
he perjures himself to support a pair of murderous demagogues, betrays
them in turn to the patricians, and Saturninus is pounded to death with
roof tiles in the Capitol. Then, being made leader in the war with the
allies, already old for fighting, he fails at the outset, and his rival
Sylla is General in his stead.
Then riot on riot in the Forum, violence after violence in the struggle
for the consulship, murder after murder, blood upon blood not yet dry.
Sylla gets the expedition against Mithridates; Marius, at home,
undermines his enemy's influence and forces the tribes to give him the
command, and sends out his lieutenants to the East. Sylla's soldiers
murder them, and Sylla marches back against Rome with six legions.
Marius is unprepared; Sylla breaks into the city, torch in hand, at the
head of his troops, burning and slaying; the rivals meet face to face in
the Esquiline market-place, Roman fights Roman, and the plebeian loses
the day and escapes to the sea.
The reign of terror begins, and a great slaying. Sylla declares his
rival an enemy of Rome, and Marius is found hiding in the marshes of
Minturnæ, is dragged out naked, covered with mud, a rope about his neck,
and led into a little house of the town to be slain by a slave. 'Darest
thou kill Caius Marius?' asks the old man with flashing eyes, and the
slave executioner trembles before the unarmed prisoner. They let him go.
He wanders to Africa and sits alone among the ruins of Carthage, while
Sylla fights victoriously in the East. Rome, momentarily free of both,
is torn by dissensions about the voting of the newly enfranchised.
Instead of the greater rivals, Cinna and Octavius are matched for plebs
and nobles. Knife-armed the parties fight it out in the Forum, the
bodies of citizens lie in heaps, and the gutters are gorged with free
blood, and again the patricians win the day. Cinna, fleeing from wrath,
is deposed from office. Marius sees his chance again. Unshaven and
unshorn since he left Rome last, he joins Cinna, leading six thousand
fugitives, seizes and plunders the towns about Rome, while Cinna encamps
beneath the walls. Together they enter Rome and nail Octavius' head to
the Rostra. Then the vengeance of wholesale slaying, in another reign of
terror, and Marius is despot of the city for a while, as Sylla had been
before, till spent with age, his life goes out amid drunkenness and
blood. The people tear down Sylla's house, burn his villa and drive out
his wife and his children. Back he comes after four years, victorious,
fighting his way right and left, against Lucanians and Samnites, back to
Rome still fighting them, almost loses the battle, is saved by Crassus
to take vengeance again, and again the long lists of the proscribed are
written out and hung up in the Forum, and the city runs blood in a third
Terror. Amid heaps of severed heads, Sylla sits before the temple of
Castor and sells the lands of his dead enemies; and Catiline is first
known to history as the executioner of Caius Gratidianus, whom he slices
to death, piecemeal, beyond the Tiber.
[Illustration: THE TARPEIAN ROCK]
Sylla, cold, aristocratic, sublimely ironical monster, was Rome's first
absolute and undisputed military lord. Tired of blood, he tried reform,
invented an aristocratic constitution, saw that it must fail, and then,
to the amazement of his friends and enemies, abdicated and withdrew to
private life, protected by a hundred thousand veterans of his army, and
many thousands of freedmen, to die at the last without violence.
Of the chaos he left behind him, Cæsar made the Roman Empire.
The Gracchi, champions of the people, were foully done to death. Marius
and Sylla, tearing the proud Republic to pieces for their own greatness,
both died in their beds, the one of old age, the other of disease. There
is no irony like that which often ended the lives of great Romans.
Marcus Manlius, who saved the Capitol from the Gauls, was hurled to his
death from the same rock, by the tribunes of the people, and Rome's
citadel and sanctuary was desecrated by the blood of its preserver.
Scipio of Africa breathed his last in exile, but Appius Claudius, the
Decemvir, died rich and honoured.
One asks, naturally enough, how Rome could hold the civilized nations in
subjection while she was fighting out a civil war that lasted fifty
years. We have but little idea of her great military organization, after
arms became a profession and a career. We can but call up scattered
pictures to show us rags and fragments of the immense host that
patrolled the world with measured tread and matchless precision of
serried rank, in tens and scores and hundreds of thousands, for
centuries, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank, learning its own
strength by degrees, till it suddenly grasped all power, gave it to one
man, and made Caius Julius Cæsar Dictator of the earth.
The greatest figure in all history suddenly springs out of the dim
chaos and shines in undying glory, the figure of a man so great that the
office he held means Empire, and the mere name he bore means Emperor
today in four empires,--Cæsar, Kaiser, Czar, Kaisár,--a man of so vast
power that the history of humanity for centuries after him was the
history of those who were chosen to fill his place--the history of
nearly half the twelve centuries foretold by the augur Attus, from
Romulus, first King, to Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor. He was a man
whose deeds and laws have marked out the life of the world even to this
far day. Before him and with him comes Pompey, with him and after him
Mark Antony, next to him in line and greatness, Augustus--all dwarfs
compared with him, while two of them were failures outright, and the
third could never have reached power but in his steps.
[Illustration: PALACE OF THE CÆSARS]
In that long tempest of parties wherein the Republic went down for ever,
it is hard to trace the truth, or number the slain, or reckon up account
of gain and loss. But when Cæsar rises in the centre of the storm the
end is sure and there can be no other, for he drives it before him like
a captive whirlwind, to do his bidding and clear the earth for his
coming. Other men, and great men, too, are overwhelmed by it, dashed
down and stunned out of all sense and judgment, to be lost and forgotten
like leaves in autumn, whirled away before the gale. Pompey, great
general and great statesman, conqueror in Spain, subduer of Spartacus
and the Gladiators, destroyer of pirates and final victor over
Mithridates, comes back and lives as a simple citizen. Noble of birth,
but not trusted by his peers, he joins with Cæsar, leader of all the
people, and with Crassus, for more power, and loses the world by giving
Cæsar an army, and Gaul to conquer. Crassus, brave general, too, is
slain in battle in far Parthia, and Pompey steals a march by getting a
long term in Spain. Cæsar demands as much and is refused by Pompey's
friends. Then the storm breaks and Cæsar comes back from Gaul to cross
the Rubicon, and take all Italy in sixty days. Pompey, ambitious,
ill-starred, fights losing battles everywhere. Murdered at last in
Egypt, he, too, is dead, and Cæsar stands alone, master of Rome and of
the world. One year he ruled, and then they slew him; but no one of them
that struck him died a natural death.
Creation presupposes chaos, and it is the divine prerogative of genius
to evolve order from confusion. Julius Cæsar found the world of his day
consisting of disordered elements of strength, all at strife with each
other in a central turmoil, skirted and surrounded by the relative peace
of an ancient and long undisturbed barbarism.
It was out of these elements that he created what has become modern
Europe, and the direction which he gave to the evolution of mankind has
never wholly changed since his day. Of all great conquerors he was the
least cruel, for he never sacrificed human life without the direct
intention of benefiting mankind by an increased social stability. Of all
great lawgivers, he was the most wise and just, and the truths he set
down in the Julian Code are the foundation of modern justice. Of all
great men who have leaped upon the world as upon an unbroken horse, who
have guided it with relentless hands, and ridden it breathless to the
goal of glory, Cæsar is the only one who turned the race into the track
of civilization and, dying, left mankind a future in the memory of his
past. He is the one great man of all, without whom it is impossible to
imagine history. We cannot take him away and yet leave anything of what
we have. The world could have been as it is without Alexander, without
Charlemagne, without Napoleon; it could not have been the world we know
without Caius Julius Cæsar.
That fact alone places him at the head of mankind.
In Cæsar's life there is the same matter for astonishment as in
Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and
climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous
magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the
impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, and
how the fashionable young spendthrift lawyer of Rome, dabbling in
politics and almost ignorant of warfare, rose in a quarter of a century
to be the world's conqueror, lawgiver and civilizer. The daily miracle
of genius is the incalculable speed at which it simultaneously thinks
and acts. Nothing is so logical as creation, and creation is the first
sign as well as the only proof that genius is present.
Hitherto the life of Cæsar has not been logically presented. His youth
appears almost always to be totally disconnected from his maturity. The
first success, the conquest of Gaul, comes as a surprise, because its
preparation is not described. After it everything seems natural, and
conquest follows victory as daylight follows dawn; but when we try to
think backwards from that first expedition, we either see nothing
clearly, or we find Cæsar an insignificant unit in a general disorder,
as hard to identify as an individual ant in a swarming ant-hill. In the
lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the
lives of the so-called 'great,'--those born, not to power, but in
power,--there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. It may be
called the Hour of Fate--the time when in the suddenly loosed play of
many circumstances, strained like springs and held back upon themselves,
a man who has been known to a few thousands finds himself the chief of
millions and the despot of a nation.
Things which are only steps to great men are magnified to attainments in
ordinary lives, and remembered with pride. The man of genius is sure of
the great result, if he can but get a fulcrum for his lever. What
strikes one most in the careers of such men as Cæsar and Napoleon is the
tremendous advance realized at the first step--the difference between
Napoleon's half-subordinate position before the first campaign in Italy
and his dominion of France immediately after it, or the distance which
separated Cæsar, the impeached Consul, from Cæsar, the conqueror of
Gaul.
It must not be forgotten that Cæsar came of a family that had held great
positions, and which, though impoverished, still had credit,
subsequently stretched by Cæsar to the extreme limit of its borrowing
power. At sixteen, an age when Bonaparte was still an unknown student,
Cæsar was Flamen Dialis, or high priest of Jupiter, and at one and
twenty, the 'ill-girt boy,' as Sylla called him from his way of wearing
his toga, was important enough to be driven from Rome, a fugitive. His
first attempt at a larger notoriety had failed, and Dolabella, whom he
had impeached, had been acquitted through the influence of friends. Yet
the young lawyer had found the opportunity of showing what he could do,
and it was not without reason that Sylla said of him, 'You will find
many a Marius in this one Cæsar.'
Twenty years passed before the prophecy began to be realized with the
commencement of Cæsar's career in Gaul, and more than once during that
time his life seemed a failure in his own eyes, and he said scornfully
and sadly of himself that he had done nothing to be remembered at an age
when Alexander had already conquered the world.
Those twenty years which, to the thoughtful man, are by far the most
interesting of all, appear in history as a confused and shapeless medley
of political, military and forensic activity, strongly coloured by
social scandals, which rested upon a foundation of truth, and darkened
by accusations of worse kind, for which there is no sort of evidence,
and which may be safely attributed to the jealousy of unscrupulous
adversaries.
The first account of him, which we have in the seventeenth year of his
age, evokes a picture of youthful beauty. The boy who is to win the
world is appointed high priest of Jove in Rome,--by what strong
influence we know not,--and we fancy the splendid youth with his tall
figure, full of elastic endurance, the brilliant face, the piercing,
bold, black eyes; we see him with the small mitre set back upon the dark
and curling locks that grow low on the forehead, as hair often does that
is to fall early, clad in the purple robe of his high office, summoning
all his young dignity to lend importance to his youthful grace as he
moves up to Jove's high altar to perform his first solemn sacrifice with
his young consort; for the high priesthood of Jove was held jointly by
man and wife, and if the wife died the husband lost his office.
He was about twenty when he cast his lot with the people, and within the
year he fled from Sylla's persecution. The life of sudden changes and
contrasts had begun. Straight from the sacred office, with all its
pomp, and splendour, and solemnity, Cæsar is a fugitive in the Sabine
hills, homeless, wifeless, fever-stricken, a price on his head. Such
quick chances of evil fell to many in the days of the great struggle
between Marius and Sylla, between the people and the nobles.
Then as Sylla yielded to the insistence of the young 'populist'
nobleman's many friends, the quick reverse is turned to us. Cæsar has a
military command, sees some fighting and much idleness by the shores of
the Bosphorus, in Bithynia--then in a fit of sudden energy, the
soldier's spirit rises; he dashes to the attack on Mytilene, and shows
himself a man.
[Illustration: CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR
After a statue in the Palazzo dei Conservatori]
One or two unimportant campaigns, as a subordinate officer, a civic
crown won for personal bravery, an unsuccessful action brought against a
citizen of high rank in the hope of forcing himself into notice, a trip
to Rhodes made to escape the disgrace of failure, and an adventure with
pirates--there, in a few words, is the story of Julius Cæsar's youth, as
history tells it. But then suddenly, when his projected studies in quiet
Rhodes were hardly begun, he crosses to the mainland, raises troops,
seizes cities, drives Mithridates' governor out of the province, returns
to Rome and is elected military tribune. The change is too quick, and
one does not understand it. Truth should tell that those early years had
been spent in the profound study of philosophy, history, biography,
languages and mankind, of the genesis of events from the germ to the
branching tree, of that chemistry of fate which brews effect out of
cause, and distils the imperishable essence of glory from the rougher
liquor of vulgar success.
What strikes one most in the lives of the very great is that every
action has a cumulative force beyond what it ever has in the existence
of ordinary men. Success moves onward, passing through events on the
same plane, as it were, and often losing brilliancy till it fades away,
leaving those who have had it to outlive it in sorrow and weakness.
Genius moves upward, treading events under its feet, scaling Olympus,
making a ladder of mankind, outlasting its own activity for ever in a
final and fixed glory more splendid than its own bright path. The really
great man gathers power in action, the average successful man expends
it.
And so it must be understood that Cæsar, in his early youth, was not
wasting his gifts in what seemed to be a half-voluptuous,
half-adventurous, wholly careless life, but was accumulating strength by
absorbing into himself the forces with which he came in contact,
exhausting the intelligence of his companions in order to stock his own,
learning everything simultaneously, forgetting nothing he learned till
he could use all he knew to the extreme limit of its value.
There is something mysterious in the almost unlimited credit which Cæsar
seems to have enjoyed when still a very young man; and if the control of
enormous sums of money by which he made himself beloved among the people
explains, in a measure, his rapid rise from office to office, it is, on
the other hand, hard to account for the trust which his creditors placed
in his promises, and to explain why, when he was taken by pirates, the
cities of Asia Minor should have voluntarily contributed money to make
up the ransom demanded, seeing that he had never served in Asia, except
as a subordinate. The only possible explanation is that while there, his
real energies were devoted to the attainment of the greatest possible
popularity in the shortest possible time, and that he was making himself
beloved by the Asiatic cities, while his enemies said of him that he was
wasting his time in idleness and dissipation.
In any case, it was the control of money that most helped him in
obtaining high offices in Rome, and from the very first he seems to have
acted on the principle that in great enterprises economy spells ruin,
and that to check expenditure is to trip up success. And this is
explained, if not justified, by his close association with the people,
from his very childhood. Until he was made Pontifex Maximus he seems to
have lived in a small house in the Suburra, in one of the most crowded
and least fashionable quarters of Rome; and as a mere boy, it was his
influence with the common people that roused Sylla's anxiety. To live
with the people, to take their part against the nobles, to give them of
all he had and of all he could borrow, were the chief rules of his
conduct, and the fact that he obtained such enormous loans proves that
there were rich lenders who were ready to risk fortunes upon his
success. And it was in dealing with the Roman plebeian that he learned
to command the Roman soldier, with the tact of a demagogue and the
firmness of an autocrat. He knew that a man must give largely, even
recklessly, to be beloved, and that in order to be respected he must be
able to refuse coldly and without condition, and that in all ages the
people are but as little children before genius, though they may rise
against talent like wild beasts and tear it to death.
He knew also that in youth ten failures are nothing compared with one
success, while in the full meridian of power one failure undoes a score
of victories; hence his recklessness at first, his magnificent caution
in his latter days; his daring resistance of Sylla's power before he was
twenty, and his mildness towards the ringleaders of popular
conspiracies against him when he was near his end; his violence upon the
son of King Juba, whom he seized by the beard in open court when he
himself was but a young lawyer, and his moderation in bearing the most
atrocious libels, to punish which might have only increased their force.
Cæsar's career divides itself not unnaturally into three periods,
corresponding with his youth, his manhood and his maturity; with the
absorption of force in gaining experience, the lavish expenditure of
force in conquest, the calm employment of force in final supremacy. The
man who never lost a battle in which he commanded in person, began life
by failing in everything he attempted, and ended it as the foremost man
of all humanity, past and to come, the greatest general, the greatest
speaker, the greatest lawgiver, the greatest writer of Latin prose whom
the great Roman people ever produced, and also the bravest man of his
day, as he was the kindest. In an age when torture was a legitimate part
of justice, he caused the pirates who had taken him, and whom he took in
turn, to be mercifully put to death before he crucified their dead
bodies for his oath's sake, and when his long-trusted servant tried to
poison him he would not allow the wretch to be hurt save by the sudden
stroke of instant death; nor ever in a long career of conquest did he
inflict unnecessary pain. Never was man loved of women as he was, and
his sins were many even for those days, yet in them we find no
unkindness, and when his own wife should have been condemned for her
love of Clodius, Cæsar would not testify against her. He divorced her,
he said, not because he knew anything, but because his family should be
above suspicion. He plundered the world, but he gave it back its gold in
splendid gifts and public works, keeping its glory alone for himself. He
was hated by the few because he was beloved by the many, and it was not
revenge, but envy, that slew the benefactor of mankind. The weaknesses
of the supreme conqueror were love of woman and trust of man, and as the
first Brutus made his name glorious by setting his people free, the
second disgraced it and blackened the name of friendship with a stain
that will outlast time, and by a deed second only in infamy to that of
Judas Iscariot. The last cry of the murdered master was the cry of a
broken heart--'And thou, too, Brutus, my son!' Alexander left chaos
behind him; Cæsar left Europe, and it may be truly said that the
crowning manifestation of his sublime wisdom was his choice of
Octavius--of the young Augustus--to complete the carving of a world
which he himself had sketched and blocked out in the rough.
The first period of his life ended with his election to the military
tribuneship on his return to Rome after his Asian adventures, and his
first acts were directed towards the reconstruction of what Sylla had
destroyed, by reëstablishing the authority of tribunes and recalling
some of Sylla's victims from their political exile. From that time
onward, in his second period, he was more or less continually in office.
Successively a tribune, a quæstor, governor of Farther Spain, ædile,
pontifex maximus, prætor, governor of Spain again, and consul with the
insignificant Bibulus, a man of so small importance that people used to
date documents, by way of a jest, 'in the Consulship of Julius and
Cæsar.' Then he obtained Gaul for his province, and lived the life of a
soldier for nine years, during which he created the army that gave him
at last the mastery of Rome. And in the tenth year Rome was afraid, and
his enemies tried to deprive him of his power and passed bills against
him, and drove out the tribunes of the people who took his part; and if
he had returned to Rome then, yielding up his province and his legions,
as he was called upon to do, he would have been judged and destroyed by
his enemies. But he knew that the people loved him, and he crossed the
Rubicon in arms.
This second period of his life closed with the last triumph decreed to
him for his victories in Spain. The third and final period had covered
but one year when his assassins cut it short.
Nothing demonstrates Cæsar's greatness so satisfactorily as this, that
at his death Rome relapsed at once into civil war and strife as violent
as that to which Cæsar had put an end, and that the man who brought
lasting peace and unity into the distracted state, was the man of
Cæsar's choice. But in endeavouring to realize his supreme wisdom,
nothing helps us more than the pettiness of the accusations brought
against him by such historians as Suetonius--that he once remained
seated to receive the whole body of Conscript fathers, that he had a
gilded chair in the Senate house, and appointed magistrates at his own
pleasure to hold office for terms of years, that he laughed at an
unfavourable omen and made himself dictator for life; and such things,
says the historian, 'are of so much more importance than all his good
qualities that he is considered to have abused his power and to have
been justly assassinated.' But it is the people, not the historian, who
make history, and when Caius Julius Cæsar was dead, the people called
him God.
Beardless Octavius, his sister's daughter's son, barely eighteen years
old, brings in by force the golden age of Rome. As Triumvir, with Antony
and Lepidus, he hunts down the murderers first, then his rebellious
colleagues, and wins the Empire back in thirteen years. He rules long
and well, and very simply, as commanding general of the army and by no
other power, taking all into his hands besides, the Senate, the chief
priesthood, and the Majesty of Rome over the whole earth, for which he
was called Augustus, the 'Majestic.' And his strength lay in this, that
by the army, he was master of Senate and people alike, so that they
could no longer strive with each other in perpetual bloodshed, and the
everlasting wars of Rome were fought against barbarians far away, while
Rome at home was prosperous and calm and peaceful. Then Virgil sang, and
Horace gave Latin life to Grecian verse, and smiled and laughed, and
wept and dallied with love, while Livy wrote the story of greatness for
us all to this day, and Ovid touched another note still unforgotten.
Then temple rose by temple, and grand basilicas reared their height by
the Sacred Way; the gold of the earth poured in and Art was queen and
mistress of the age. Julius Cæsar was master in Rome for one year.
Augustus ruled nearly half a century. Four and forty years he was sole
monarch after Antony's fall at Actium. About the thirtieth year of his
reign, Christ was born.
All men have an original claim to be judged by the standard of their own
time. Counting one by one the victims of the proscription proclaimed by
the triumvirate in which Augustus was the chief power, some historians
have brought down his greatness in quick declination to the level of a
cold-blooded and cruel selfishness; and they account for his subsequent
just and merciful conduct on the ground that he foresaw political
advantage in clemency, and extension of power in the exercise of
justice. The death of Cicero, sacrificed to Antony's not unreasonable
vengeance, is magnified into a crime that belittles the Augustan age.
Yet compared with the wholesale murders done by Marius and Sylla, and by
the patricians themselves in their struggles with the people, the few
political executions ordered by Augustus sink into comparative
insignificance, and it will generally be seen that those who most find
fault with him are ready to extol the murderers of Julius Cæsar as
devoted patriots, if not as glorious martyrs to the divine cause of
liberty.
[Illustration: OCTAVIUS AUGUSTUS CÆSAR
After a bust in the British Museum]
It is easier, perhaps, to describe the growth of Rome from the early
Kings to Augustus, than to account for the change from the Rome of the
Empire at the beginning of our era to the Rome of the Popes in the year
eight hundred. Probably the easiest and truest way of looking at the
transition is to regard it according to the periods of supremacy,
decadence and ultimate disappearance from Rome of the Roman Army. For
the Army made the Emperors, and the Emperors made the times. The great
military organization had in it the elements of long life, together with
all sudden and terrible possibilities. The Army made Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius and Nero, the Julian Emperors; then destroyed Nero and set up
Vespasian after one or two experiments. The Army chose such men as
Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, and such monsters as Domitian and Commodus;
the Army conquered the world, held the world and gave the world to
whomsoever it pleased. The Army and the Emperor, each the other's tool,
governed Rome for good and ill, for ill and good, by fear and bounty and
largely by amusement, but ultimately to their own and Rome's
destruction.
For all the time the two great adversaries of the Empire, the spiritual
and material, the Christian and the men of the North, were gaining
strength and unity. Under Augustus, Christ was born. Under Augustus,
Hermann the German chieftain destroyed Varus and his legions. By sheer
strength and endurance, the Army widened and broadened the Empire,
forcing back the Northmen upon themselves like a spring that gathers
force by tension. Unnoticed, at first, Christianity quietly grew to
power. Between Christians and Northmen, the Empire of Rome went down at
last, leaving the Empire of Constantinople behind it.
The great change was wrought in about five hundred years, by the Empire,
from the City of the Republic to what had become the City of the Middle
Age; between the reign of Augustus, first Emperor, and the deposition of
the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, by Odoacer, Rome's hired
Pomeranian general.
In that time Rome was transubstantiated in all its elements, in
population, in language, in religion and in customs. To all intents and
purposes, the original Latin race utterly disappeared, and the Latin
tongue became the broken dialect of a mixed people, out of which the
modern Italian speech was to grow, decadent in form, degenerate in
strength but renascent in a grace and beauty which the Latin never
possessed. First the vast population of slaves brought in their
civilized and their barbarous words--Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, or
Celtic, German and Slav; then came the Goth, and filled all Italy with
himself and his rough language for a hundred years. The Latin of the
Roman Mass is the Latin of slaves in Rome between the first and fifth
centuries, from the time of the Apostles to that of Pope Gelasius, whose
prayer for peace and rest is the last known addition to the Canon,
according to most authorities. Compare it with the Latin of Livy and
Tacitus; it is not the same language, for to read the one by no means
implies an understanding of the other.
Or take the dress. It is told of Augustus, as a strange and almost
unknown thing, that he wore breeches and stockings, or leg swathings,
because he suffered continually with cold. Men went barelegged and
wrapped themselves in the huge toga which came down to their feet. In
the days of Augustulus the toga was almost forgotten; men wore leggings,
tunics and the short Greek cloak.
In the change of religion, too, all customs were transformed, private
and public, in a way impossible to realize today. The Roman household,
with the father as absolute head, lord and despot, gradually gave way to
a sort of half-patriarchal, half-religious family life, resembling the
first in principle but absolutely different from it in details and
result, and which, in a measure, has survived in Italy to the present
time.
In the lives of men, the terror of one man, as each despot lost power,
began to give way to the fear of half-defined institutions, of the
distant government in Constantinople and of the Church as a secular
power, till the time came when the title of Emperor raised a smile,
whereas the name of the Pope--of the 'Father-Bishop'--was spoken with
reverence by Christians and with respect even by unbelievers. The time
came when the army that had made Emperors and unmade them at its
pleasure became a mere band of foreign mercenaries, who fought for wages
and plunder when they could be induced to fight for Rome at all.
So the change came. But in the long five hundred years of the Western
Empire Rome had filled the world with the results of her own life and
had founded modern Europe, from the Danube to England and from the Rhine
to Gibraltar; so that when the tide set towards the south again, the
Northmen brought back to Italy some of the spirit and some of the
institutions which Rome had carried northwards to them in the days of
conquest; and they came not altogether as strangers and barbarians, as
the Huns had come, to ravage and destroy, and be themselves destroyed
and scattered and forgotten, but, in a measure, as Europeans against
Europeans, hoping to grasp the remnants of a civilized power. Theodoric
tried to make a real kingdom, Totila and Teias fell fighting for one;
the Franks established one in Gaul, and at last it was a Frank who gave
the Empire life again, and conquests and laws, and was crowned by the
Christian Pontifex Maximus in Rome when Julius Cæsar had been dead more
than eight hundred years.
One of the greatest of the world's historians has told the story of the
change, calling it the 'Decline and Fall of the Empire,' and describing
it in some three thousand pages, of which scarcely one can be spared for
the understanding of the whole. Thereby its magnitude may be gauged, but
neither fairly judged nor accurately measured. The man who would grasp
the whole meaning of Rome's name, must spend a lifetime in study and
look forward to disappointment in the end. It was Ampère, I believe, who
told a young student that he might get a superficial impression of the
city in ten years, but that twenty would be necessary in order to know
anything about it worthy to be written. And perhaps the largest part of
the knowledge worth having lies in the change from the ancient capital
of the Empire to the mediæval seat of ecclesiastic domination.
And, indeed, nothing in all history is more extraordinary than the rise
of Rome's second power under the Popes. In the ordinary course of human
events, great nations appear to have had but one life. When that was
lived out, and when they had passed through the artistic period so often
coincident with early decadence, they were either swept away, or they
sank to the insignificance of mere commercial prosperity, thereafter
deriving their fashions, arts, tastes, and in fact almost everything
except their wealth, from nations far gone in decay.
[Illustration: THE CAMPAGNA
And Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct]
But in Rome it was otherwise. The growth of the faith which subjected
the civilized world was a matter of first importance to civilization,
and Rome was the centre of that growing. Moreover, that development and
that faith had one head, chosen by election, and the headship itself
became an object of the highest ambition, whereby the strength and
genius of individuals and families were constantly called into activity,
and both families and isolated individuals of foreign race were
attracted to Rome. It was no small thing to hold the kings of the earth
in spiritual subjection, to be the arbiter of the new Empire founded by
Charlemagne, the director of the kingdoms built up in France and
England, and, almost literally, the feudal lord over all other temporal
powers. The force of a predominant idea gave Rome new life, vivifying
new elements with the vitality of new ambitions. The theatre was the
same. The actors and the play had changed. The world was no longer
governed by one man as monarch; it was directed by one man, who was the
chief personage in the vast and intricate feudal system by which strong
men agreed to live, and to which they forced the weak to submit.
The Barons came into existence, and Rome was a city of fortresses and
towers, as well as churches. Orsini and Colonna, Caetani and
Vitelleschi, Savelli and Frangipani, fought with each other for
centuries among ruins, built strongholds of the stones of temples, and
burned the marble treasures of the world to make lime. And fiercely they
held their own. Nicholas Rienzi wanders amid the deserted places,
deciphers the broken inscriptions, gathers a little crowd of plebeians
about him and tells them of ancient Rome, and of the rights of the
people in old times. All at once he rises, a grand shadow of a Roman, a
true tribune, brave, impulsive, eloquent. A little while longer and he
is half mad with vanity and ambition, a public fool in a high place,
decking himself in silks and satins, and ornaments of gold, and the
angry nobles slay him on the steps of the Aracoeli, as other nobles
long ago slew Tiberius Gracchus, a greater and a better man, almost on
the same spot.
Meanwhile the great schism of the Church rages, before and after Rienzi.
The Empire and its Kingdoms join issue with each other and with the
Barons for the lordship of Christendom; there are two Popes, waging war
with nations on both sides, and Rome is reduced to a town of barely
twenty thousand souls. Then comes Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh,
friend of the Great Countess, humbler of the Emperor, a restorer of
things, the Julius Cæsar of the Church, and from his day there is
stability again, as Urban the Second follows, like an Augustus; Nicholas
the Fifth, the next great Pontiff, comes in with the Renascence. Last of
destroyers Charles, the wild Constable of Bourbon, marches in open
rebellion against King, State and Church, friend to the Emperor,
straight to his death at the walls, his work of destruction carried out
to the terrible end by revengeful Spaniards who spare only the churches
and the convents. Out of those ashes Rome rose again, for the last time,
the Rome of Sixtus the Fifth, which is, substantially, the Rome we see
today; less powerful in the world after that time, but more beautiful as
she grew more peaceful by degrees; flourishing in a strange, motley
way, like no other city in the world, as the Empire of the Hapsburgs and
the Kingdoms of Europe learned to live apart from her, and she was
concentrated again upon herself, still and always a factor among
nations, and ever to be. But even in latter days, Napoleon could not do
without her, and Francis the Second of Austria had to resign the Empire,
in order that Pius the Seventh might call the self-crowned Corsican
soldier, girt with Charlemagne's huge sword, the anointed Emperor of
Christendom.
Once more a new idea gives life to fragments hewn in pieces and
scattered in confusion. A dream of unity disturbs Italy's sleep. Never,
in truth, in all history, has Italy been united save by violence. By the
sword the Republic brought Latins, Samnites and Etruscans into
subjection; by sheer strength she crushed the rebellion of the slaves
and then forced the Italian allies to a second submission; by terror
Marius and Sylla ruled Rome and Italy; and it was the overwhelming power
of a paid army that held the Italians in check under the Empire, till
they broke away from each other as soon as the pressure was removed, to
live in separate kingdoms and principalities for thirteen or fourteen
hundred years, from Romulus Augustulus--or at least from Justinian--to
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, in whose veins ran not one drop of
Italian blood.
One asks whence came the idea of unity which has had such power to move
these Italians, in modern times. The answer is plain and simple. Unity
is the word; the interpretation of it is the name of Rome. The desire is
for all the romance and the legends and the visions of supreme greatness
which no other name can ever call up. What will be called hereafter the
madness of the Italian people took possession of them on the day when
Rome was theirs to do with as they pleased. Their financial ruin had its
origin at that moment, when they became masters of the legendary
Mistress of the world. What the end will be, no one can foretell, but
the Rome of old was not made great by dreams. Her walls were founded in
blood, and her temples were built with the wealth of conquered nations,
by captives and slaves of subject races.
The Rome we see today owes its mystery, its sadness and its charm to six
and twenty centuries of history, mostly filled with battle, murder and
sudden death, deeds horrible in that long-past present which we try to
call up, but alternately grand, fascinating and touching now, as we
shape our scant knowledge into visions and fill out our broken dreams
with the stuff of fancy. In most men's minds, perhaps, the charm lies in
that very confusion of suggestions, for few indeed know Rome so well as
to divide clearly the truth from the legend in her composition. Such
knowledge is perhaps altogether unattainable in any history; it is most
surely so here, where city is built on city, monument upon monument,
road upon road, from the heart of the soil upwards--the hardened lava
left by many eruptions of life; where the tablets of Clio have been
shattered again and again, where fire has eaten, and sword has hacked,
and hammer has bruised ages of records out of existence, where even the
race and type of humanity have changed and have been forgotten twice and
three times over.
Therefore, unless one have half a lifetime to spend in patient study and
deep research, it is better, if one come to Rome, to feel much than to
try and know a little, for in much feeling there is more human truth
than in that dangerous little knowledge which dulls the heart and
hampers the clear instincts of natural thought. Let him who comes hither
be satisfied with a little history and much legend, with rough warp of
fact and rich woof of old-time fancy, and not look too closely for the
perfect sum of all, where more than half the parts have perished for
ever.
It matters not much whether we know the exact site of Virgil's
Laurentum; it is more interesting to remember how Commodus, cruel,
cowardly and selfish, fled thither from the great plague, caring not at
all that his people perished by tens of thousands in the city, since he
himself was safe, with the famous Galen to take care of him. We can
leave the task of tracing the enclosures of Nero's golden house to
learned archælogists, and let our imagination find wonder and delight in
their accounts of its porticos three thousand feet long, its game park,
its baths, its thousands of columns with their gilded capitals, and its
walls encrusted with mother-of-pearl. And we may realize the depth of
Rome's abhorrence for the dead tyrant, as we think of how Vespasian and
his son Titus pulled down the enchanted palace for the people's sake,
and built the Colosseum where the artificial lake had been, and their
great baths on the very foundations of Nero's gorgeous dwelling.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TRAJAN, SHOWING THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS]
[Illustration: BRASS OF ANTONINUS PIUS, IN HONOUR OF FAUSTINA, WITH
REVERSE SHOWING VESTA BEARING THE PALLADIUM]
III
It is impossible to conceive of the Augustan age without Horace, nor to
imagine a possible Horace without Greece and Greek influence. At the
same time Horace is in many ways the prototype of the old-fashioned,
cultivated, gifted, idle, sarcastic, middle-class Roman official, making
the most of life on a small salary and the friendship of a great
personage; praising poverty, but making the most of the good things that
fell in his way; extolling pristine austerity of life and yielding with
a smile to every agreeable temptation; painting the idyllic life of a
small gentleman farmer as the highest state of happiness, but secretly
preferring the town; prudently avoiding marriage, but far too human to
care for an existence in which woman had no share; more sensible in
theory than in practice, and more religious in manner than in heart;
full of quaint superstitions, queer odds and ends of knowledge, amusing
anecdotes and pictures of personal experience; the whole compound
permeated with a sort of indolent sadness at the unfulfilled promises of
younger years, in which there had been more of impulse than of ambition,
and more of ambition than real strength. The early struggles for Italian
unity left many such half-disappointed patriots, and many less fortunate
in their subsequent lives than Horace.
Born in the far South, and the son of a freed slave, brought to Rome as
a boy and carefully taught, then sent to Athens to study Greek, he was
barely twenty years of age when he joined Brutus after Cæsar's death,
was with him in Asia, and, in the lack of educated officers perhaps,
found himself one day, still a mere boy, tribune of a Legion--or, as we
should say, in command of a brigade of six thousand men, fighting for
what he believed to be the liberty of Rome, in the disastrous battle of
Philippi. Brutus being dead, the dream of glory ended, after the
amnesty, in a scribe's office under one of the quæstors, and the
would-be liberator of his country became a humble clerk in the Treasury,
eking out his meagre salary with the sale of a few verses. Many an old
soldier of Garibaldi's early republican dreams has ended in much the
same way in our own times under the monarchy.
But Horace was born to other things. Chaucer was a clerk in the Custom
House, and found time to be the father of English poetry. Horace's daily
work did not hinder him from becoming a poet. His love of Greek,
acquired in Athens and Asia Minor, and the natural bent of his mind made
him the greatest imitator and adapter of foreign verses that ever lived;
and his character, by its eminently Italian combination of prim
respectability and elastic morality, gave him a two-sided view of men
and things that has left us representations of life in three dimensions
instead of the flat, though often violent, pictures which prejudice
loves best to paint.
In his admiration of Greek poetry, Horace was not a discoverer; he was
rather the highest expression of Rome's artistic want. If Scipio of
Africa had never conquered the Carthaginians at Zama, he would be
notable still as one of the first and most sincere lovers of Hellenic
literature, and as one of the earliest imitators of Athenian manners.
The great conqueror is remembered also as the first man in Rome who
shaved every day, more than a hundred and fifty years before Horace's
time. He was laughed at by some, despised by others and disliked by the
majority for his cultivated tastes and his refined manners.
The Romans had most gifts excepting those we call creative. Instead of
creating, therefore, Rome took her art whole, and by force, from the
most artistic nation the world ever produced. Sculptors, architects,
painters and even poets, such as there were, came captive to Rome in
gangs, were sold at auction as slaves, and became the property of the
rich, to work all their lives at their several arts for their master's
pleasure; and the State rifled Greece and Asia, and even the Greek Italy
of the south, and brought back the masterpieces of an age to adorn
Rome's public places. The Roman was the engineer, the maker of roads, of
aqueducts, of fortifications, the layer out of cities, and the planner
of harbours. In a word, the Roman made the solid and practical
foundation, and then set the Greek slave to beautify it. When he had
watched the slave at work for a century or two, he occasionally
attempted to imitate him. That was as far as Rome ever went in original
art.
But her love of the beautiful, though often indiscriminating and lacking
in taste, was profound and sincere. It does not appear that in all her
conquests her armies ever wantonly destroyed beautiful things. On the
contrary, her generals brought home all they could with uncommon care,
and the consequence was that in Horace's day the public places of the
city were vast open-air museums, and the great temples picture galleries
of which we have not the like now in the whole world. And with those
things came all the rest; the manners, the household life, the
necessaries and the fancies of a conquering and already decadent nation,
the thousands of slaves whose only duty was to amuse their owners and
the public; the countless men and women and girls and boys, whose souls
and bodies went to feed the corruption of the gorgeous capital, or to
minister to its enormous luxuries; the companies of flute-players and
dancing-girls, the sharp-tongued jesters, the coarse buffoons, the
play-actors and the singers. And then, the endless small commerce of an
idle and pleasure-seeking people, easily attracted by bright colours,
new fashions and new toys; the drug-sellers and distillers of perfumes,
the venders of Eastern silks and linens and lace, the barbers and
hairdressers, the jewellers and tailors, the pastry cooks and makers of
honey-sweetmeats; and everywhere the poor rabble of failures, like scum
in the wake of a great ship; the beggars everywhere, and the pickpockets
and the petty thieves. It is no wonder that Horace was fond of strolling
in Rome.
In contrast, the great and wonderful things of the Augustan city stand
out in high relief, above the varied crowd that fills the streets, with
all the dignity that centuries of power can lend. To the tawdry is
opposed the splendid, the Roman general in his chiselled corselet and
dyed mantle faces the Greek actor in his tinsel; the band of painted,
half-clad, bedizened dancing-girls falls back cowering in awestruck
silence as the noble Vestal passes by, high-browed, white-robed,
untainted, the incarnation of purity in an age of vice. And the old
Senator in his white cloak with its broad purple hem, his smooth-faced
clients at his elbows, his silent slaves before him and behind, meets
the low-chattering knot of Hebrew money-lenders, making the price of
short loans for the day, and discussing the assets of a famous
spendthrift, as their yellow-turbaned, bearded fathers had talked over
the chances of Julius Cæsar when he was as yet but a fashionable young
lawyer of doubtful fortune, with an unlimited gift of persuasion and an
equally unbounded talent for amusement.
Between the contrasts lived men of such position as Horace occupied, but
not many. For the great middle element of society is a growth of later
centuries, and even Horace himself, as time went on, became attached to
Mæcenas and then, more or less, to the person of the Emperor, by a
process of natural attraction, just as his butt, Tigellius, gravitated
to the common herd that mourned his death. The 'golden mean' of which
Horace wrote was a mere expression, taught him, perhaps, by his father,
a part of his stock of maxims. Where there were only great people on the
one side, and a rabble on the other, the man of genius necessarily rose
to the level of the high, by his own instinct and their liking. What was
best of Greek was for them, what was worst was for the populace.
But the Greek was everywhere, with his keen weak face, his sly look and
his skilful fingers. Scipio and Paulus Emilius had brought him, and he
stayed in Rome till the Goth came, and afterwards. Greek poetry, Greek
philosophy, Greek sculpture, Greek painting, Greek music everywhere--to
succeed at all in such society, Virgil and Horace and Ovid must needs
make Greek of Latin, and bend the stiff syllables to Alcaics and
Sapphics and Hexameters. The task looked easy enough, though it was
within the powers of so very few. Thousands tried it, no doubt, when the
three or four had set the fashion, and failed, as the second-rate fail,
with some little brief success in their own day, turned into the total
failure of complete disappearance when they had been dead awhile.
Supreme of them all, for his humanity, Horace remains. Epic Virgil,
appealing to the traditions of a living race of nobles and to the
carefully hidden, sober vanity of the world's absolute monarch, does not
appeal to modern man. The twilight of the gods has long deepened into
night, and Ovid's tales of them and their goddesses move us by their own
beauty rather than by our sympathy for them, though we feel the tender
touch of the exiled man whose life was more than half love, in the
marvellous Letters of Heroes' Sweethearts--in the complaint of Briseïs
to Achilles, in the passionately sad appeal of Hermione to Orestes.
Whoever has not read these things does not know the extreme limit of
man's understanding of woman. Yet Horace, with little or nothing of such
tenderness, has outdone Ovid and Virgil in this later age.
He strolled through life, and all life was a play of which he became
the easy-going but unforgetful critic. There was something good-natured
even in his occasional outbursts of contempt and hatred for the things
and the people he did not like. There was something at once caressing
and good-humouredly sceptical in his way of addressing the gods,
something charitable in his attacks on all that was ridiculous,--men,
manners and fashions.
He strolled wherever he would, alone; in the market, looking at
everything and asking the price of what he saw, of vegetables and grain
and the like; in the Forum, or the Circus, at evening, when 'society'
was dining, and the poor people and slaves thronged the open places for
rest and air, and there he used to listen to the fortune-tellers, and
among them, no doubt, was that old hag, Canidia, immortalized in the
huge joke of his comic resentment. He goes home to sup on lupins and
fritters and leeks,--or says so,--though his stomach abhorred garlic;
and his three slaves--the fewest a man could have--wait on him as he
lies before the clean white marble table, leaning on his elbow. He does
not forget the household gods, and pours a few drops upon the cement
floor in libation to them, out of the little earthen saucer filled from
the slim-necked bottle of Campanian earthenware. Then to sleep, careless
of getting up early or late, just as he might feel, to stay at home and
read or write, or to wander about the city, or to play the favourite
left-handed game of ball in the Campus Marius before his bath and his
light midday meal.
With a little change here and there, it is the life of the idle
middle-class Italian today, which will always be much the same, let the
world wag and change as it will, with all its extravagances, its
fashions and its madnesses. Now and then he exclaims that there is no
average common sense left in the world, no half-way stopping-place
between extremes. One man wears his tunic to his heels, another is girt
up as if for a race; Rufillus smells of perfumery, Gargonius of anything
but scent; and so on--and he cries out that when a fool tries to avoid a
mistake he will run to any length in the opposite direction. And Horace
had a most particular dislike for fools and bores, and has left us the
most famous description of the latter ever set down by an accomplished
observer.
By chance, he says, he was walking one morning along the Sacred Street
with one slave behind him, thinking of some trifle and altogether
absorbed in it, when a man whom he barely knew by name came up with him
in a great hurry and grasped his hand. 'How do you do, sweet friend?'
asks the Bore. 'Pretty well, as times go,' answers Horace, stopping
politely for a moment; and then beginning to move on, he sees to his
horror that the Bore walks by his side. 'Can I do anything for you?'
asks the poet, still civil, but hinting that he prefers his own
company. The Bore plunges into the important business of praising
himself, with a frankness not yet forgotten in his species, and Horace
tries to get rid of him, walking very fast, then very slowly, then
turning to whisper a word to his slave, and in his anxiety he feels the
perspiration breaking out all over him, while his Tormentor chatters on,
as they skirt the splendid Julian Basilica, gleaming in the morning sun.
Horace looks nervously and eagerly to right and left, hoping to catch
sight of a friend and deliverer. Not a friendly face was in sight, and
the Bore knew it, and was pitilessly frank. 'Oh, I know you would like
to get away from me!' he exclaimed. 'I shall not let you go so easily!
Where are you going?' 'Across the Tiber,' answered Horace, inventing a
distant visit. 'I am going to see someone who lives far off, in Cæsar's
gardens--a man you do not know. He is ill.' 'Very well,' said the other;
'I have nothing to do, and am far from lazy. I will go all the way with
you.' Horace hung his head, as a poor little Italian donkey does when a
heavy load is piled upon his back, for he was fairly caught, and he
thought of the long road before him, and he had moreover the unpleasant
consciousness that the Bore was laughing at his imaginary errand, since
they were walking in a direction exactly opposite from the Tiber, and
would have to go all the way round the Palatine by the Triumphal Road
and the Circus Maximus and then cross by the Sublician bridge, instead
of turning back towards the Velabrum, the Provision Market and the
Bridge of Æmilius, which we have known and crossed as the Ponte Rotto,
but of which only one arch is left now, in midstream.
[Illustration: PONTE ROTTO, NOW DESTROYED
After an engraving made about 1850]
Then, pressing his advantage, the Bore began again. 'If I am any judge
of myself,' he observed, 'you will make me one of your most intimate
friends. I am sure nobody can write such good verses as fast as I can.
As for my singing, I know it for a fact that Hermogenes is decidedly
jealous of me!' 'Have you a mother, Sir?' asked Horace, gravely. 'Have
you any relations to whom your safety is a matter of importance?' 'No,'
answered the other, 'no one. I have buried them all!' 'Lucky people!'
said the poet to himself, and he wished he were dead, too, at that
moment, and he thought of all the deaths he might have died. It was
evidently not written that he should die of poison nor in battle, nor of
a cough, nor of the liver, nor even of gout. He was to be slowly talked
to death by a bore. By this time they were before the temple of Castor
and Pollux, where the great Twin Brethren bathed their horses at
Juturna's spring. The temple of Vesta was before them, and the Sacred
Street turned at right angles to the left, crossing over between a row
of shops on one side and the Julian Rostra on the other, to the Courts
of Law. The Bore suddenly remembered that he was to appear in answer to
an action on that very morning, and as it was already nine o'clock, he
could not possibly walk all the way to Cæsar's gardens and be back
before noon, and if he was late, he must forfeit his bail, and the suit
would go against him by default. On the other hand, he had succeeded in
catching the great poet alone, after a hundred fruitless attempts, and
the action was not a very important one, after all. He stopped short.
'If you have the slightest regard for me,' he said, 'you will just go
across with me to the Courts for a moment.' Horace looked at him
curiously, seeing a chance of escape. 'You know where I am going,' he
answered with a smile; 'and as for law, I do not know the first thing
about it.' The Bore hesitated, considered what the loss of the suit must
cost him, and what he might gain by pushing his acquaintance with the
friend of Mæcenas and Augustus. 'I am not sure,' he said doubtfully,
'whether I had better give up your company, or my case,' 'My company, by
all means!' cried Horace, with alacrity. 'No!' answered the other,
looking at his victim thoughtfully, 'I think not!' And he began to move
on again by the Nova Via towards the House of the Vestals. Having made
up his mind to sacrifice his money, however, he lost no time before
trying to get an equivalent for it. 'How do you stand with Mæcenas?' he
asked suddenly, fixing his small eyes on Horace's weary profile, and
without waiting for an answer he ran on to praise the great man. 'He is
keen and sensible,' he continued, 'and has not many intimate friends. No
one knows how to take advantage of luck as he does. You would find me a
valuable ally, if you would introduce me. I believe you might drive
everybody else out of the field--with my help, of course.' 'You are
quite mistaken there!' answered Horace, rather indignantly. 'He is not
at all that kind of man! There is not a house in Rome where any sort of
intrigue would be more utterly useless!' 'Really, I can hardly believe
it!' 'It is a fact, nevertheless,' retorted Horace, stoutly. 'Well,'
said the Bore, 'if it is, I am of course all the more anxious to know
such a man!' Horace smiled quietly. 'You have only to wish it, my dear
Sir,' he answered, with the faintest modulation of polite irony in his
tone. 'With such gifts at your command, you will certainly charm him.
Why, the very reason of his keeping most people at arm's length is that
he knows how easily he yields!' 'In that case, I will show you what I
can do,' replied the Bore, delighted. 'I shall bribe the slaves; I will
not give it up, if I am not received at first! I will bide my time and
catch him in the street, and follow him about. One gets nothing in life
without taking trouble!' As the man was chattering on, Horace's quick
eyes caught sight of an old friend at last, coming towards him from the
corner of the Triumphal Road, for they had already almost passed the
Palatine. Aristius, sauntering along and enjoying the morning air, with
a couple of slaves at his heels, saw Horace's trouble in a moment, for
he knew the Bore well enough, and realized at once that if he delivered
his friend, he himself would be the next victim. He was far too clever
for that, and with a cold-blooded smile pretended not to understand
Horace's signals of distress. 'I forget what it was you wished to speak
about with me so particularly, my dear Aristius,' said the poet, in
despair. 'It was something very important, was it not?' 'Yes,' answered
the other, with another grin, 'I remember very well; but this is an
unlucky day, and I shall choose another time. Today is the thirtieth
Sabbath,' he continued, inventing a purely imaginary Hebrew feast, 'and
you surely would not risk a Jew's curse for a few moments of
conversation, would you?' 'I have no religion!' exclaimed Horace,
eagerly. 'No superstition! Nothing!' 'But I have,' retorted Aristius,
still smiling. 'My health is not good--perhaps you did not know? I will
tell you about it some other time.' And he turned on his heel, with a
laugh, leaving Horace to his awful fate. Even the sunshine looked black.
But salvation came suddenly in the shape of the man who had brought the
action against the Bore, and who, on his way to the Court, saw his
adversary going off in the opposite direction. 'Coward! Villain!' yelled
the man, springing forward and catching the poet's tormentor by his
cloak. 'Where are you going now? You are witness, Sir, that I am in my
right,' he added, turning to look for Horace. But Horace had disappeared
in the crowd that had collected to see the quarrel, and his gods had
saved him after all.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF CASTOR AND POLLUX]
A part of the life of the times is in the little story, and anyone may
stroll today along the Sacred Street, past the Basilica and the sharp
turn that leads to the block of old houses where the Court House stood,
between St. Adrian's and San Lorenzo in Miranda. Anyone may see just how
it happened, and many know exactly how Horace felt from the moment when
the Bore buttonholed him at the corner of the Julian Basilica till his
final deliverance near the corner of the Triumphal Road, which is now
the Via di San Gregorio.
[Illustration: ATRIUM OF VESTA]
There was much more resemblance to our modern life than one might think
at first sight. Perhaps, after his timely escape, Horace turned back
along the Sacred Street, followed by his single slave, and retraced his
steps, past the temple of Vesta, the temple of Julius Cæsar, skirting
the Roman Forum to the Golden Milestone at the foot of the ascent to the
Capitol, from which landmark all the distances in the Roman Empire were
reckoned, the very centre of the known world. Thence, perhaps, he turned
up towards the Argiletum, with something of that instinct which takes a
modern man of letters to his publisher's when he is in the
neighbourhood. There the 'Brothers Sosii' had their publishing
establishment, among many others of the same nature, and employed a
great staff of copyists in preparing volumes for sale. All the year
round the skilled scribes sat within in rows, with pen and ink, working
at the manufacture of books. The Sosii Brothers were rich, and probably
owned their workmen as slaves, both the writers and those who prepared
the delicate materials, the wonderful ink, of which we have not the like
today, the fine sheets of papyrus,--Pliny tells how they were sometimes
too rough, and how they sometimes soaked up the ink like a cloth, as
happens with our own paper,--and the carefully cut pens of Egyptian reed
on which so much of the neatness in writing depended, though Cicero says
somewhere that he could write with any pen he chanced to take up.
It was natural enough that Horace should look in to ask how his latest
book was selling, or more probably his first, for he had written but a
few Epodes and not many Satires at the time when he met the immortal
Bore. Later in his life, his books were published in editions of a
thousand, as is the modern custom in Paris, and were sold all over the
Empire, like those of other famous authors. The Satires did him little
credit, and probably brought him but little money at their first
publication. It seems certain that they have come down to us through a
single copy. The Greek form of the Odes pleased people better. Moreover,
some of the early Satires made distinguished people shy of his
acquaintance, and when he told the Bore that Mæcenas was difficult of
access he remembered that nine months had elapsed from the time of his
own introduction to the great man until he had received the latter's
first invitation to dinner. More than once he went almost too far in his
attacks on men and things and then tried to remove the disagreeable
impression he had produced, and wrote again of the same subject in a
different spirit--notably when he attacked the works of the dead poet
Lucilius and was afterwards obliged to explain himself.
No doubt he often idled away a whole morning at his publisher's, looking
over new books of other authors, and very probably borrowing them to
take home with him, because he was poor, and he assuredly must have
talked over with the Sosii the impression produced on the public by his
latest poems. He was undoubtedly a quæstor's scribe, but it is more than
doubtful whether he ever went near the Treasury or did any kind of
clerk's work. If he ever did, it is odd that he should never speak of
it, nor take anecdotes from such an occupation and from the clerks with
whom he must have been thrown, for he certainly used every other sort of
social material in the Satires. Among the few allusions to anything of
the kind in his works are his ridicule of the over-dressed prætor of the
town of Fundi, who had been a government clerk in Rome, and in the same
story, his jest at one of Mæcenas' parasites, a freedman, and nominally
a Treasury clerk, as Horace had been. In another Satire, the clerks in
a body wish him to be present at one of their meetings.
Perhaps what strikes one most in the study of Horace, which means the
study of the Augustan age, is the vivid contrast between the man who
composed the Carmen Sæculare, the sacred hymn sung on the Tenth
anniversary of Augustus' accession to the imperial power, besides many
odes that breathe a pristine reverence for the gods, and, on the other
hand, the writer of satirical, playfully sceptical verses, who comments
on the story of the incense melting without fire at the temple of
Egnatia, with the famous and often-quoted 'Credat Judæus'! The original
Romans had been a believing people, most careful in all ceremonies and
observances, visiting anything like sacrilege with a cool ferocity
worthy of the Christian religious wars in later days. Horace, at one
time or another, laughs at almost every god and goddess in the heathen
calendar, and publishes his jests, in editions of a thousand copies,
with perfect indifference and complete immunity from censorship, while
apparently bestowing a certain amount of care on household sacrifices
and the like.
The fact is that the Romans were a religious people, whereas the
Italians were not. It is a singular fact that Rome, when left long to
herself, has always shown a tendency to become systematically devout,
whereas most of the other Italian states have exhibited an equally
strong inclination to a scepticism not unfrequently mixed with the
grossest superstition. It must be left to more profound students of
humanity to decide whether certain places have a permanent influence in
one determined direction upon the successive races that inhabit them;
but it is quite undeniably true that the Romans of all ages have tended
to religion of some sort in the most marked manner. In Roman history
there is a succession of religious epochs not to be found in the annals
of any other city. First, the early faith of the Kings, interrupted by
the irruption of Greek influences which began approximately with Scipio
Africanus; next, the wild Bacchic worship that produced the secret
orgies on the Aventine, the discovery of which led to a religious
persecution and the execution of thousands of persons on religious
grounds; then the worship of the Egyptian deities, brought over to Rome
in a new fit of belief, and at the same time, or soon afterwards, the
mysterious adoration of the Persian Mithras, a gross and ignorant form
of mysticism which, nevertheless, took hold of the people, at a time
when other religions were almost reduced to a matter of form.
Then, as all these many faiths lost vitality, Christianity arose, the
terribly simple and earnest Christianity of the early centuries, sown
first under the Cæsars, in Rome's secure days, developing to a power
when Rome was left to herself by the transference of the Empire to the
East, culminating for the first time in the crowning of Charlemagne,
again in the Crusades, sinking under the revival of mythology and
Hellenism during the Renascence, rising again, by slow degrees, to the
extreme level of devotion under Pius the Ninth and the French
protectorate, sinking suddenly with the movement of Italian unity, and
the coming of the Italians in 1870, then rising again, as we see it now,
with undying energy, under Leo the Thirteenth, and showing itself in the
building of new churches, in the magnificent restoration of old ones,
and in the vast second growth of ecclesiastical institutions, which are
once more turning Rome into a clerical city, now that she is again at
peace with herself, under a constitutional monarchy, but threatened only
too plainly by an impending anarchic revolution. It would be hard to
find in the history of any other city a parallel to such periodical
recurrences of religious domination. Nor, in times when belief has been
at its lowest ebb, have outward religious practices anywhere continued
to hold so important a place in men's lives as they have always held in
Rome. Of all Rome's mad tyrants, Elagabalus alone dared to break into
the temple of Vesta and carry out the sacred Palladium. During more than
eleven hundred years, six Vestal Virgins guarded the sacred fire and the
Holy Things of Rome, in peace and war, through kingdom, republic,
revolution and empire. For fifteen hundred years since then, the bones
of Saint Peter have been respected by the Emperors, by Goths, by Kings,
revolutions and short-lived republics.
[Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM]
IV
There was a surprising strength in those early institutions of which the
fragmentary survival has made Rome what it is. Strongest of all,
perhaps, was the patriarchal mode of life which the shepherds of Alba
Longa brought with them when they fled from the volcano, and of which
the most distinct traces remain to the present day, while its origin
goes back to the original Aryan home. Upon that principle all the
household life ultimately turned in Rome's greatest times. The Senators
were Patres, conscript fathers, heads of strong houses; the Patricians
were those who had known 'fathers,' that is, a known and noble descent.
Horace called Senators simply 'Conscripts,' and the Roman nobles of
today call themselves the 'Conscript' families. The chain of tradition
is unbroken from Romulus to our own time, while everything else has
changed in greater or less degree.
It is hard for Anglo-Saxons to believe that, for more than a thousand
years, a Roman father possessed the absolute legal right to try, condemn
and execute any of his children, without witnesses, in his own house and
without consulting anyone. Yet nothing is more certain. 'From the most
remote ages,' says Professor Lanciani, the highest existing authority,
'the power of a Roman father over his children, including those by
adoption as well as by blood, was unlimited. A father might, without
violating any law, scourge or imprison his son, or sell him for a slave,
or put him to death, even after that son had risen to the highest
honours in the state.' During the life of the father, a child, no matter
of what age, could own no property independently, nor keep any private
accounts, nor dispose of any little belongings, no matter how
insignificant, without the father's consent, which was never anything
more than an act of favour, and was revocable at any moment, without
notice. If a son became a public magistrate, the power was suspended,
but was again in force as soon as the period of office terminated. A man
who had been Dictator of Rome became his father's slave and property
again, as soon as his dictatorship ended.
But if the son married with his father's consent, he was partly free,
and became a 'father' in his turn, and absolute despot of his own
household. So, if a daughter married, she passed from her father's
dominion to that of her husband. A Priest of Jupiter for life was free.
So was a Vestal Virgin. There was a complicated legal trick by which the
father could liberate his son if he wished to do so for any reason, but
he had no power to set any of his children free by a mere act of will,
without legal formality. The bare fact that the men of a people should
be not only trusted with such power, but that it should be forcibly
thrust upon them, gives an idea of the Roman character, and it is
natural enough that the condition of family life imposed by such laws
should have had pronounced effects that may still be felt. As the Romans
were a hardy race and long-lived, when they were not killed in battle,
the majority of men were under the absolute control of their fathers
till the age of forty or fifty years, unless they married with their
parents' consent, in which case they advanced one step towards liberty,
and at all events, could not be sold as slaves by their fathers, though
they still had no right to buy or sell property nor to make a will.
There are few instances of the law being abused, even in the most
ferocious times. Brutus had the right to execute his sons, who conspired
for the Tarquins, without any public trial. He preferred the latter.
Titus Manlius caused his son to be publicly beheaded for disobeying a
military order in challenging an enemy to single combat, slaying him,
and bringing back the spoils. He might have cut off his head in private,
so far as the law was concerned, for any reason whatsoever, great or
small.
As for the condition of real slaves, it was not so bad in early times as
it became later, but the master's power was absolute to inflict torture
and death in any shape. In slave-owning communities, barbarity has
always been, to some extent, restrained by the actual value of the
humanity in question, and slaves were not as cheap in Rome as might be
supposed. A perfectly ignorant labourer of sound body was worth from
eighty to a hundred dollars of our money, which meant much more in those
days, though in later times twice that sum was sometimes paid for a
single fine fish. The money value of the slave was, nevertheless, always
a sort of guarantee of safety to himself; but men who had right of life
and death over their own children, and who occasionally exercised it,
were probably not, as a rule, very considerate to creatures who were
bought and sold like cattle. Nevertheless, the number of slaves who were
freed and enriched by their masters is really surprising.
The point of all this, however, is that the head of a Roman family was,
under protection of all laws and traditions, an absolute tyrant over his
wife, his children, and his servants; and the Roman Senate was a chosen
association of such tyrants. It is astonishing that they should have
held so long to the forms of a republican government, and should never
have completely lost their republican traditions.
In this household tyranny, existing side by side with certain general
ideas of liberty and constitutional government, under the ultimate
domination of the Emperors' despotism as introduced by Augustus, is to
be found the keynote of Rome's subsequent social life. Without those
things, the condition of society in the Middle Age would be
inexplicable, and the feudal system could never have developed. The old
Roman principle that 'order should have precedence over order, not man
over man,' rules most of Europe at the present day, though in Rome and
Italy it is now completely eclipsed by a form of government which can
only be defined as a monarchic democracy.
The mere fact that under Augustus no man was eligible to the Senate who
possessed less than a sum equal to a quarter of a million dollars, shows
plainly enough what one of the most skilful despots who ever ruled
mankind wisely, thought of the institution. It was intended to balance,
by its solidity, the ever-unsettled instincts of the people, to prevent
as far as possible the unwise passage of laws by popular acclamation,
and, so to say, to regulate the pulse of the nation. It has been
imitated, in one way or another, by all the nations we call civilized.
But the father of the family was in his own person the despot, the
senate, the magistrate and the executive of the law; his wife, his
children and his slaves represented the people, constantly and eternally
in real or theoretical opposition, while he was protected by all the
force of the most ferocious laws. A father could behead his son with
impunity; but the son who killed his father was condemned to be all but
beaten to death, and then to be sewn up in a leathern sack and drowned.
The father could take everything from the son; but if the son took the
smallest thing from his father he was a common thief and malefactor, and
liable to be treated as one, at his father's pleasure. The conception of
justice in Rome never rested upon any equality, but always upon the
precedence of one order over another, from the highest to the lowest.
There were orders even among the slaves, and one who had been allowed to
save money out of his allowances could himself buy a slave to wait on
him, if he chose.
Hence the immediate origin of European caste, of different degrees of
nobility, of the relative standing of the liberal professions, of the
mediæval guilds of artisans and tradesmen, and of the numerous
subdivisions of the agricultural classes, of which traces survive all
over Europe. The tendency to caste is essentially and originally Aryan,
and will never be wholly eliminated from any branch of the Aryan race.
One may fairly compare the internal life of a great nation to a building
which rises from its foundations story by story until the lower part can
no longer carry the weight of the superstructure, and the first signs of
weakness begin to show themselves in the oldest and lowest portion of
the whole. Carefully repaired, when the weakness is noticed at all, it
can bear a little more, and again a little, but at last the breaking
strain is reached, the tall building totters, the highest pinnacles
topple over, then the upper story collapses, and the end comes either in
the crash of a great falling or, by degrees, in the irreparable ruin of
ages. But when all is over, and wind and weather and time have swept
away what they can, parts of the original foundation still stand up
rough and heavy, on which a younger and smaller people must build their
new dwelling, if they build at all.
The aptness of the simile is still more apparent when we confront the
material constructions of a nation with the degree of the nation's
development or decadence at the time when the work was done.
It is only by doing something of that sort that we can at all realize
the connection between the settlement of the shepherds, the Rome of the
Cæsars, and the desolate and scantily populated fighting ground of the
Barons, upon which, with the Renascence, the city of the later Popes
began to rise under Nicholas the Fifth. And lastly, without a little of
such general knowledge it would be utterly impossible to call up, even
faintly, the lives of Romans in successive ages. Read the earlier parts
of Livy's histories and try to picture the pristine simplicity of those
primeval times. Read Cæsar's Gallic War, the marvellously concise
reports of the greatest man that ever lived, during ten years of his
conquests. Read Horace, and attempt to see a little of what he describes
in his good-natured, easy way. Read the correspondence of the younger
Pliny when proconsul in Bithynia under Trajan, and follow the
extraordinary details of administration which, with ten thousand others,
the Spanish Emperor of Rome carried in his memory, and directed and
decided. Take Petronius Arbiter's 'novel' next, the Satyricon, if you be
not over-delicate in taste, and glance at the daily journal of a
dissolute wretch wandering from one scene of incredible vice to another.
And so on, through the later writers; and from among the vast annals of
the industrious Muratori pick out bits of Roman life at different
periods, and try to piece them together. At first sight it seems utterly
impossible that one and the same people should have passed through such
social changes and vicissitudes. Every educated man knows the main
points through which the chain ran. Scholars have spent their lives in
the attempt to restore even a few of the links and, for the most part,
have lost their way in the dry quicksands that have swallowed up so
much.
'I have raised a monument more enduring than bronze!' exclaimed Horace,
in one of his rare moments of pardonable vanity. The expression meant
much more then than it does now. The golden age of Rome was an age of
brazen statues apparently destined to last as long as history. Yet the
marble outlasted the gilded metal, and Horace's verse outlived both, and
the names of the artists of that day are mostly forgotten, while his is
a household word. In conquering races, literature has generally attained
higher excellence than painting or sculpture, or architecture, for the
arts are the expression of a people's tastes, often incomprehensible to
men who live a thousand years later; but literature, if it expresses
anything, either by poetry, history, or fiction, shows the feeling of
humanity; and the human being, as such, changes very little in twenty or
thirty centuries. Achilles, in his wrath at being robbed of the lovely
Briseïs, brings the age of Troy nearer to most men in its living
vitality than the matchless Hermes of Olympia can ever bring the century
of Greece's supremacy. One line of Catullus makes his time more alive
today than the huge mass of the Colosseum can ever make Titus seem. We
see the great stones piled up to heaven, but we do not see the men who
hewed them, and lifted them, and set them in place. The true poet gives
us the real man, and after all, men are more important than stones. Yet
the work of men's hands explains the working of men's hearts, telling us
not what they felt, but how the feelings which ever belong to all men
more particularly affected the actors at one time or another during the
action of the world's long play. Little things sometimes tell the
longest stories.
[Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM]
Pliny, suffering from sore eyes, going about in a closed carriage, or
lying in the darkened basement portico of his house, obliged to dictate
his letters, and unable to read, sends his thanks--by dictation--to his
friend and colleague, Cornutus, for a fowl sent him, and says that
although he is half blind, his eyes are sharp enough to see that it is a
very fat one. The touch of human nature makes the whole picture live.
Horace, journeying to Brindisi, and trying to sleep a little on a canal
boat, is kept awake by mosquitoes and croaking frogs, and by the
long-drawn-out, tipsy singing of a drunken sailor, who at last turns off
the towing mule to graze, and goes to sleep till daylight. It is easier
to see all this than to call up one instant of a chariot race in the
great circus, or one of the ten thousand fights in the Colosseum,
wherein gladiators fought and died, and left no word of themselves.
Yet, without the setting, the play is imperfect, and we must have some
of the one to understand the other. For human art is, in the first
place, a progressive commentary on human nature, and again, in quick
reaction, stimulates it with a suggestive force. Little as we really
know of the imperial times, we cannot conceive of Rome without the
Romans, nor of the Romans without Rome. They belonged together; when the
seat of Empire became cosmopolitan, the great dominion began to be
weakened; and when a homogeneous power dwelt in the city again, a new
domination had its beginning, and was built up on the ruins of the old.
Napoleon is believed to have said that the object of art is to create
and foster agreeable illusions. Admitting the general truth of the
definition, it appears perfectly natural that since the Romans had
little or no art of their own, they should have begun to import Greek
art just when they did, after the successful issue of the Second Punic
War. Up to that time the great struggle had lasted. When it was over,
the rest was almost a foregone conclusion. Rome and Carthage had made a
great part of the known world their fighting ground in the duel that
lasted a hundred and eighteen years; and the known world was the portion
of the victor. Spoil first, for spoil's sake, he brought home; then
spoil for the sake of art; then art for what itself could give him. In
the fight for Empire, as in each man's struggle for life, success means
leisure, and therefore civilization, which is the growth of people who
have time at their disposal--time to 'create and foster agreeable
illusions.' When the Romans conquered the Samnites they were the least
artistic people in the world; when Augustus Cæsar died, they possessed
and valued the greater part of the world's artistic treasures, many of
these already centuries old, and they owned literally, and as slaves, a
majority of the best living artists. Augustus had been educated in
Athens; he determined that Rome should be as Athens, magnified a hundred
times. Athens had her thousand statues, Rome should have her ten
thousand; Rome should have state libraries holding a score of volumes
for every one that Greece could boast; Rome's temples should be
galleries of rare paintings, ten for each that Athens had. Rome should
be so great, so rich, so gorgeous, that Greece should be as nothing
beside her; Egypt should dwindle to littleness, and the memory of
Babylon should be forgotten. Greece had her Homer, her Sophocles, her
Anacreon; Rome should have her immortals also.
Greatly Augustus laboured for his thought, and grandly he carried out
his plan. He became the greatest 'art-collector' in all history, and the
men of his time imitated him. Domitius Tullus, a Roman gentleman, had
collected so much, that he was able to adorn certain extensive gardens,
on the very day of the purchase, with an immense number of genuine
ancient statues, which had been lying, half neglected, in a barn--or, as
some read the passage, in other gardens of his.
[Illustration: BASILICA CONSTANTINE]
Augustus succeeded in one way. Possibly he was successful in his own
estimation. 'Have I not acted the play well?' they say he asked, just
before he died. The keynote is there, whether he spoke the words or not.
He did all from calculation, nothing from conviction. The artist, active
and creative or passive and appreciative, calculates nothing except the
means of expressing his conviction. And in the over-calculating of
effects by Augustus and his successors, one of the most singular
weaknesses of the Latin race was thrust forward; namely, that giantism
or megalomania, which has so often stamped the principal works of the
Latins in all ages--that effort to express greatness by size, which is
so conspicuously absent from all that the Greeks have left us. Agrippa
builds a threefold temple and Hadrian rears the Pantheon upon its
charred ruins; Constantine builds his Basilica; Michelangelo says, 'I
will set the Pantheon upon the Basilica of Constantine.' He does it, and
the result is Saint Peter's, which covers more ground than that other
piece of giantism, the Colosseum; in Rome's last and modern revival, the
Palazzo delle Finanze is built, the Treasury of the poorest of the
Powers, which, incredible as it may seem, fills a far greater area than
either the Colosseum or the Church of Saint Peter's. What else is such
constructive enormity but 'giantism'? For the great Cathedral of
Christendom, it may be said, at least, that it has more than once in
history been nearly filled by devout multitudes, numbering fifty or
sixty thousand people; in the days of public baths, nearly sixty-three
thousand Romans could bathe daily with every luxury of service; when
bread and games were free, a hundred thousand men and women often sat
down in the Flavian Amphitheatre to see men tear each other to pieces;
of the modern Ministry of Finance there is nothing to be said. The Roman
curses it for the millions it cost; but the stranger looks, smiles and
passes by a blank and hideous building three hundred yards long. There
is no reason why a nation should not wish to be great, but there is
every reason why a small nation should not try to look big; and the
enormous follies of modern Italy must be charitably attributed to a
defect of judgment which has existed in the Latin peoples from the
beginning, and has by no means disappeared today. The younger Gordian
began a portico which was to cover forty-four thousand square yards, and
intended to raise a statue of himself two hundred and nineteen feet
high. The modern Treasury building covers about thirty thousand square
yards, and goes far to rival the foolish Emperor's insane scheme.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE TEMPLE OF SATURN]
Great contrasts lie in the past, between his age and ours. One must
guess at them at least, if one have but little knowledge, in order to
understand at all the city of the Middle Age and the Rome we see today.
Imagine it at its greatest, a capital inhabited by more than two
millions of souls, filling all that is left to be seen within and
without the walls, and half the Campagna besides, spreading out in a
vast disc of seething life from the central Golden Milestone at the
corner of the temple of Saturn--the god of remote ages, and of earth's
dim beginning; see, if you can, the splendid roads, where to right and
left the ashes of the great rested in tombs gorgeous with marble and
gold and bronze; see the endless villas and gardens and terraces lining
both banks of the Tiber, with trees and flowers and marble palaces, from
Rome to Ostia and the sea, and both banks of the Anio, from Rome to
Tivoli in the hills; conceive of the vast commerce, even of the mere
business of supply to feed two millions of mouths; picture the great
harbour with its thousand vessels--and some of those that brought grain
from Egypt were four hundred feet long; remember its vast granaries and
store-barns and offices; think of the desolate Isola Sacra as a lovely
garden, of the ruins of Laurentum as an imperial palace and park; reckon
up roughly what all that meant of life, of power, of incalculable
wealth. Mark Antony squandered, in his short lifetime, eight hundred
millions of pounds sterling, four thousand millions of dollars. Guess,
if possible, at the myriad million details of the vast city.
Then let twelve hundred years pass in a dream, and look at the Rome of
Rienzi. Some twenty thousand souls, the remnant and the one hundredth
part of the two millions, dwell pitifully in the ruins of which the
strongest men have fortified bits here and there. The walls of Aurelian,
broken and war-worn and full of half-repaired breaches, enclose a
desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast straggling
heterogeneous mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and
decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by
time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern dark towers of
Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and
threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange small churches built of
odds and ends and remnants not too heavy for a few workmen to move;
broken-down aqueducts sticking up here and there in a city that had to
drink the muddy water of the Tiber because not a single channel remained
whole to feed a single fountain, from the distant springs that had once
filled baths for sixty thousand people every day. And round about all,
the waste Campagna, scratched here and there by fever-stricken peasants
to yield the little grain that so few men could need. The villas gone,
the trees burned or cut down, the terraces slipped away into the rivers,
the tombs of the Appian Way broken and falling to pieces, or transformed
into rude fortresses held by wild-looking men in rusty armour, who
sallied out to fight each other or, at rare intervals, to rob some train
of wretched merchants, riding horses as rough and wild as themselves.
Law gone, and order gone with it; wealth departed, and self-respect
forgotten in abject poverty; each man defending his little with his own
hand against the many who coveted it; Rome a den of robbers and thieves;
the Pope, when there was one,--there was none in the year of Rienzi's
birth,--either defended by one baron against another, or forced to fly
for his life. Men brawling in the streets, ill clad, savage, ready with
sword and knife and club for any imaginable violence. Women safe from
none but their own husbands and sons, and not always from them. Children
wild and untaught, growing up to be fierce and unlettered like their
fathers. And in the midst of such a city, Cola di Rienzi, with great
heart and scanty learning, labouring to decipher the inscriptions that
told of dead and ruined greatness, dreaming of a republic, of a
tribune's power, of the humiliation of the Barons, of a resurrection for
Italy and of her sudden return to the dominion of the world.
Rome, then, was like a field long fallow, of rich soil, but long
unploughed. Scarcely below the surface lay the treasures of ages,
undreamt of by the few descendants of those who had brought them
thither. Above ground, overgrown with wild creepers and flowers, there
still stood some such monuments of magnificence as we find it hard to
recall by mere words, not yet voluntarily destroyed, but already falling
to pieces under the slow destruction of grinding time, when violence had
spared them. Robert Guiscard had burned the city in 1084, but he had not
destroyed everything. The Emperors of the East had plundered Rome long
before that, carrying off works of art without end to adorn their city
of Constantinople. Builders had burned a thousand marble statues to lime
for their cement, for the statues were ready to hand and easily broken
up to be thrown into the kiln, so that it seemed a waste of time and
tools to quarry out the blocks from the temples. The Barbarians of
Genseric and the Jews of Trastevere had seized upon such of the four
thousand bronze statues as the Emperors had left, and had melted many of
them down for metal, often hiding them in strange places while waiting
for an opportunity of heating the furnace. And some have been found,
here and there, piled up in little vaults, most generally near the
Tiber, by which it was always easy to ship the metal away. Already
temples had been turned into churches, in a travesty only saved from the
ridiculous by the high solemnity of the Christian faith. Other temples
and buildings, here and there, had been partly stripped of columns and
marble facings to make other churches even more nondescript than the
first. Much of the old was still standing, but nothing of the old was
whole. The Colosseum had not yet been turned into a quarry. The
Septizonium of Septimius Severus, with its seven stories of columns and
its lofty terrace, nearly half as high as the dome of Saint Peter's,
though beginning to crumble, still crowned the south end of the
Palatine; Minerva's temple was almost entire, and its huge architrave
had not been taken to make the high altar of Saint Peter's; and the
triumphal arch of Marcus Aurelius was standing in what was perhaps not
yet called the Corso in those days, but the Via Lata--'Broad Street.'
The things that had not yet fallen, nor been torn down, were the more
sadly grand by contrast with the chaos around them. There was also the
difference between ruins then, and ruins now, which there is between a
king just dead in his greatness, in whose features lingers the smile of
a life so near that it seems ready to come back, and a dried mummy set
up in a museum and carefully dusted for critics to study.
In even stronger and rougher contrast, in the wreck of all that had
been, there was the fierce reality of the daily fight for life amid the
seething elements of the new things that were yet to be; the preparation
for another time of domination and splendour; the deadly wrestling of
men who meant to outlive one another by sheer strength and grim power of
killing; the dark ignorance, darkest just before the waking of new
thought, and art, and learning; the universal cruelty of all living
things to each other, that had grown out of the black past; and, with
all this, the undying belief in Rome's greatness, in Rome's future, in
Rome's latent power to rule the world again.
That was the beginning of the new story, for the old one was ended, the
race of men who had lived it was gone, and their works were following
them, to the universal dust. Out of the memories they left and the
departed glory of the places wherein they had dwelt, the magic of the
Middle Age was to weave another long romance, less grand but more
stirring, less glorious but infinitely more human.
Perhaps it is not altogether beyond the bounds of reason to say that
Rome was masculine from Romulus to the dark age, and that with the first
dawn of the Renascence she began to be feminine. As in old days the
Republic and the Empire fought for power and conquest and got both by
force, endurance and hardness of character, so, in her second life,
others fought for Rome, and courted her, and coveted her, and sometimes
oppressed her and treated her cruelly, and sometimes cherished her and
adorned her, and gave her all they had. In a way, too, the elder
patriots reverenced their city as a father, and those of after-times
loved her as a woman, with a tender and romantic love.
Be that as it may, for it matters little how we explain what we feel.
And assuredly we all feel that what we call the 'charm,' the feminine
charm, of Rome, proceeds first from that misty time between two
greatnesses, when her humanity was driven back upon itself, and simple
passions, good and evil, suddenly felt and violently expressed, made up
the whole life of a people that had ceased to rule by force, and had not
yet reached power by diplomacy.
It is fair, moreover, to dwell a little on that time, that we may not
judge too hardly the men who came afterwards. If we have any virtues
ourselves of which to boast, we owe them to a long growth of
civilization, as a child owes its manners to its mother; the men of the
Renascence had behind them chaos, the ruin of a slave-ridden,
Hun-harried, worm-eaten Empire, in which law and order had gone down
together, and the whole world seemed to the few good men who lived in it
to be but one degree better than hell itself. Much may be forgiven them,
and for what just things they did they should be honoured, for the
hardship of having done right at all against such odds.
[Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING ROMAN GAMES]
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE JULIAN BASILICA]
V
Here and there, in out-of-the-way places, overlooked in the modern rage
for improvement, little marble tablets are set into the walls of old
houses, bearing semi-heraldic devices such as a Crescent, a Column, a
Griffin, a Stag, a Wheel and the like. Italian heraldry has always been
eccentric, and has shown a tendency to display all sorts of strange
things, such as comets, trees, landscapes and buildings in the
escutcheon, and it would naturally occur to the stranger that the small
marble shields, still visible here and there at the corners of old
streets, must be the coats of arms of Roman families that held property
in that particular neighbourhood. But this is not the case. They are the
distinctive devices of the Fourteen Rioni, or wards, into which the
city was divided, with occasional modifications, from the time of
Augustus to the coming of Victor Emmanuel, and which with some further
changes survive to the present day. The tablets themselves were put up
by Pope Benedict the Fourteenth, who reigned from 1740 to 1758, and who
finally brought them up to the ancient number of fourteen; but from the
dark ages the devices themselves were borne upon flags on all public
occasions by the people of the different Regions. For 'Rione' is only a
corruption of the Latin 'Regio,' the same with our 'Region,' by which
English word it will be convenient to speak of these divisions that
played so large a part in the history of the city during many successive
centuries.
For the sake of clearness, it is as well to enumerate them in their
order and with the numbers that have always belonged to each. They are:
I. Monti,
II. Trevi,
III. Colonna,
IV. Campo Marzo,
V. Ponte
VI. Parione,
VII. Regola,
VIII. Sant' Eustachio,
IX. Pigna,
X. Campitelli,
XI. Sant' Angelo,
XII. Ripa,
XIII. Trastevere,
XIV. Borgo.
Five of these names, that is to say, Ponte, Parione, Regola, Pigna and
Sant' Angelo, indicate in a general way the part of the city designated
by each. Ponte, the Bridge, is the Region about the Bridge of Sant'
Angelo, on the left bank at the sharp bend of the river seen from that
point; but the original bridge which gave the name was the Pons
Triumphalis, of which the foundations are still sometimes visible a
little below the Ælian bridge leading to the Mausoleum of Hadrian.
Parione, the Sixth ward, is the next division to the preceding one,
towards the interior of the city, on both sides of the modern Corso
Vittorio Emmanuele, taking in the ancient palace of the Massimo family,
the Cancelleria, famous as the most consistent piece of architecture in
Rome, and the Piazza Navona. Regola is next, towards the river,
comprising the Theatre of Pompey and the Palazzo Farnese. Pigna takes in
the Pantheon, the Collegio Romano and the Palazzo di Venezia. Sant'
Angelo has nothing to do with the castle or the bridge, but takes its
name from the little church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and
includes the old Ghetto with some neighbouring streets. The rest explain
themselves well enough to anyone who has even a very slight acquaintance
with the city.
At first sight these more or less arbitrary divisions may seem of little
importance. It was, of course, necessary, even in early times, to divide
the population and classify it for political and municipal purposes.
There is no modern city in the world that is not thus managed by wards
and districts, and the consideration of such management and of its means
might appear to be a very flat and unprofitable study, tiresome alike
to the reader and to the writer. And so it would be, if it were not true
that the Fourteen Regions of Rome were fourteen elements of romance,
each playing its part in due season, while all were frequently the stage
at once, under the collective name of the people, in their ever-latent
opposition and in their occasional violent outbreaks against the nobles
and the popes, who alternately oppressed and spoiled them for private
and public ends. In other words, the Regions with their elected captains
under one chief captain were the survival of the Roman People, for ever
at odds with the Roman Senate. In times when there was no government, in
any reasonable sense of the word, the people tried to govern themselves,
or at least to protect themselves as best they could by a rough system
which was all that remained of the elaborate municipality of the Empire.
Without the Regions the struggles of the Barons would probably have
destroyed Rome altogether; nine out of the twenty-four Popes who reigned
in the tenth century would not have been murdered and otherwise done to
death; Peter the Prefect could not have dragged Pope John the Thirteenth
a prisoner through the streets; Stefaneschi could never have terrorized
the Barons, and half destroyed their castles in a week; Rienzi could not
have made himself dictator; Ludovico Migliorati could not have murdered
the eleven captains of Regions in his house and thrown their bodies to
the people from the windows, for which Giovanni Colonna drove out the
Pope and the cardinals, and sacked the Vatican; in a word, the
strangest, wildest, bloodiest scenes of mediæval Rome could not have
found a place in history. It is no wonder that to men born and bred in
the city the Regions seem even now to be an integral factor in its
existence.
There were two other elements of power, namely, the Pope and the Barons.
The three are almost perpetually at war, two on a side, against the
third. Philippe de Commines, ambassador of Lewis the Eleventh in Rome,
said that without the Orsini and the Colonna, the States of the Church
would be the happiest country in the world. He forgot the People, and
was doubtless too politic to speak of the Popes to his extremely devout
sovereign. Take away the three elements of discord, and there would
certainly have been peace in Rome, for there would have been no one to
disturb the bats and the owls, when everybody was gone.
The excellent advice of Ampère, already quoted, is by no means easy to
follow, since there are not many who have the time and the inclination
to acquire a 'superficial knowledge' of Rome by a ten years' visit. If,
therefore, we merely presuppose an average knowledge of history and a
guide-book acquaintance with the chief points in the city, the simplest
and most direct way of learning more about it is to take the Regions in
their ancient order, as the learned Baracconi has done in his
invaluable little work, and to try as far as possible to make past deeds
live again where they were done, with such description of the places
themselves as may serve the main purpose best. To follow any other plan
would be either to attempt a new history of the city of Rome, or to
piece together a new archæological manual. In either case, even
supposing that one could be successful where so much has already been
done by the most learned, the end aimed at would be defeated, for
romance would be stiffened to a record, and beauty would be dissected to
an anatomical preparation.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TITUS, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM]
[Illustration]
REGION I MONTI
'Monti' means 'The Hills,' and the device of the Region represents
three, figuring those enclosed within the boundaries of this district;
namely, the Quirinal, the Esquiline and the Coelian. The line encircling
them includes the most hilly part of the mediæval city; beginning at the
Porta Salaria, it runs through the new quarter, formerly Villa Ludovisi,
to the Piazza Barberini, thence by the Tritone to the Corso, by the Via
Marforio, skirting the eastern side of the Capitoline Hill and the
eastern side of the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, which it does not
include; on almost to the Lateran, back again, so as to include the
Basilica, by San Stefano Rotondo, and out by the Navicella to the now
closed Porta Metronia. The remainder of the circuit is completed by the
Aurelian wall, which is the present wall of the city, though the modern
Electoral Wards extend in some places beyond it. The modern gates
included in this portion are the Porta Salaria, the Porta Pia, the new
gate at the end of the Via Montebello, the next, an unnamed opening
through which passes the Viale Castro Pretorio, then the Porta
Tiburtina, the Porta San Lorenzo, the exit of the railway, Porta
Maggiore, and lastly the Porta San Giovanni.
The Region of the Hills takes in by far the largest area of the fourteen
districts, but also that portion which in later times has been the least
thickly populated, the wildest districts of mediæval and recent Rome,
great open spaces now partially covered by new though hardly inhabited
buildings, but which were very lately either fallow land or ploughed
fields, or cultivated vineyards, out of which huge masses of ruins rose
here and there in brown outline against the distant mountains, in the
midst of which towered the enormous basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore
and Saint John Lateran, the half-utilized, half-consecrated remains of
the Baths of Diocletian, the Baths of Titus, and over against the
latter, just beyond the southwestern boundary, the gloomy Colosseum, and
on the west the tall square tower of the Capitol with its deep-toned
bell, the 'Patarina,' which at last was sounded only when the Pope was
dead, and when Carnival was over on Shrove Tuesday night.
It must first be remembered that each Region had a small independent
existence, with night watchmen of its own, who dared not step beyond the
limits of their beat; defined by parishes, there were separate charities
for each Region, separate funds for giving dowries to poor girls,
separate 'Confraternite' or pious societies to which laymen belonged,
and, in a small way, a sort of distinct nationality. There was rivalry
between each Region and its neighbours, and when the one encroached upon
the other there was strife and bloodshed in the streets. In the public
races, of which the last survived in the running of riderless horses
through the Corso in Carnival, each Region had its colours, its right of
place, and its separate triumph if it won in the contest. There was all
that intricate opposition of small parties which arose in every mediæval
city, when children followed their fathers' trades from generation to
generation, and lived in their fathers' houses from one century to
another; and there was all the individuality and the local tradition
which never really hindered civilization, but were always an
insurmountable barrier against progress.
Some one has called democracy Rome's 'Original Sin.' It would be more
just and true to say that most of Rome's misfortunes, and Italy's too,
have been the result of the instinct to oppose all that is, whether good
or bad, as soon as it has existed for a while; in short, the original
sin of Italians is an original detestation of that unity of which the
empty name has been a fetish for ages. Rome, thrown back upon herself
in the dark times, when she was shorn of her possessions, was a true
picture of what Italy was before Rome's iron hand had bound the Italian
peoples together by force, of what she became again as soon as that
force was relaxed, of what she has grown to be once more, now that the
delight of revolution has disappeared in the dismal swamp of financial
disappointment, of what she will be to all time, because, from all time,
she has been populated by races of different descent, who hated each
other as only neighbours can.
The redeeming feature of a factional life has sometimes been found in a
readiness to unite against foreign oppression; it has often shown itself
in an equal willingness to submit to one foreign ruler in order to get
rid of another. Circumstances have made the result good or bad. In the
year 799, the Romans attacked and wounded Pope Leo the Third in a solemn
procession, almost killed him and drove him to flight, because he had
sent the keys of the city to Charles the Great, in self-protection
against the splendid, beautiful, gifted, black-hearted Irene, Empress of
the East, who had put out her own son's eyes and taken the throne by
force. Two years later the people of Rome shouted "Life and Victory to
Charles the Emperor," when the same Pope Leo, his scars still fresh,
crowned Charlemagne in Saint Peter's. One remembers, for that matter,
that Napoleon Bonaparte, crowned in French Paris by another Pope, girt
on the very sword of that same Frankish Charles, whose bones the French
had scattered to the elements at Aix. Savonarola, of more than doubtful
patriotism, to whom Saint Philip Neri prayed, but whom the English
historian, Roscoe, flatly calls a traitor, would have taken Florence
from the Italian Medici and given it to the French king. Dante was for
German Emperors against Italian Popes. Modern Italy has driven out
Bourbons and Austrians and given the crown of her Unity to a house of
Kings, brave and honourable, but in whose veins there is no drop of
Italian blood, any more than their old Dukedom of Savoy was ever Italian
in any sense. The glory of history is rarely the glory of any ideal; it
is more often the glory of success.
The Roman Republic was the result of internal opposition, and the
instinct to oppose power, often rightly, sometimes wrongly, will be the
last to survive in the Latin race. In the Middle Age, when Rome had
shrunk from the boundaries of civilization to the narrow limits of the
Aurelian walls, it produced the hatred between the Barons and the
people, and within the people themselves, the less harmful rivalry of
the Regions and their Captains.
[Illustration: SANTA FRANCESCA ROMANA]
These Captains held office for three months only. At the expiration of
the term, they and the people of their Region proceeded in procession,
all bearing olive branches, to the temple of Venus and Rome, of which a
part was early converted into the Church of Santa Maria Nuova, now known
as Santa Francesca Romana, between the Forum and the Colosseum, and just
within the limits of 'Monti.' Down from the hills on the one side the
crowd came; up from the regions of the Tiber, round the Capitol from
Colonna, and Trevi, and Campo Marzo, as ages before them the people had
thronged to the Comitium, only a few hundred yards away. There, before
the church in the ruins, each Region dropped the names of its own two
candidates into the ballot box, and chance decided which of the two
should be Captain next. In procession, then, all round the Capitol, they
went to Aracoeli, and the single Senator, the lone shadow of the
Conscript Fathers, ratified each choice. Lastly, among themselves, they
used to choose the Prior, or Chief Captain, until it became the custom
that the captain of the First Region, Monti, should of right be head of
all the rest, and in reality one of the principal powers in the city.
And the principal church of Monti also held preëminence over others. The
Basilica of Saint John Lateran was entitled 'Mother and Head of all
Churches of the City and of the World'; and it took its distinctive name
from a rich Roman family, whose splendid house stood on the same spot as
far back as the early days of the Empire. Even Juvenal speaks of it.
Overthrown by earthquake, erected again at once, twice burned and
immediately rebuilt, five times the seat of Councils of the Church,
enlarged even in our day at enormous cost, it seems destined to stand on
the same spot for ages, and to perpetuate the memory of the Laterans to
all time, playing monument to an obscure family of rich citizens, whose
name should have been almost lost, but can never be forgotten now.
Constantine, sentimental before he was great, and great before he was a
Christian, gave the house of the Roman gentleman to Pope Sylvester. He
bought it, or it fell to the crown at the extinction of the family, for
he was not the man to confiscate property for a whim; and within the
palace he made a church, which was called by more than one name, till
after nearly six hundred years it was finally dedicated to Saint John
the Baptist; until then it had been generally called the church 'in the
Lateran house,' and to this day it is San Giovanni in Laterano. Close by
it, in the palace of the Annii, Marcus Aurelius, last of the so-called
Antonines, and last of the great emperors, was born and educated; and in
his honour was made the famous statue of him on horseback, which now
stands in the square of the Capitol. The learned say that it was set up
before the house where he was born, and so found itself also before the
Lateran in later times, with the older Wolf, at the place of public
justice and execution.
In the wild days of the tenth century, when the world was boiling with
faction, and trembling at the prospect of the Last Judgment, clearly
predicted to overtake mankind in the thousandth year of the Christian
era, the whole Roman people, without sanction of the Emperor and without
precedent, chose John the Thirteenth to be their Pope. The Regions with
their Captains had their way, and the new Pontiff was enthroned by
their acclamation. Then came their disappointment, then their anger.
Pope John, strong, high-handed, a man of order in days of chaos, ruled
from the Lateran for one short year, with such wisdom as he possessed,
such law as he chanced to have learnt, and all the strength he had.
Neither Barons nor people wanted justice, much less learning. The Latin
chronicle is brief: 'At that time, Count Roffredo and Peter the
Prefect,'--he was the Prior of the Regions' Captains,--'with certain
other Romans, seized Pope John, and first threw him into the Castle of
Sant' Angelo, but at last drove him into exile in Campania for more than
ten months. But when the Count had been murdered by one of the
Crescenzi,'--in whose house Rienzi afterwards lived,--'the Pope was
released and returned to his See.'
Back came Otto the Great, Saxon Emperor, at Christmas time, as he came
more than once, to put down revolution with a strong hand and avenge the
wrongs of Pope John by executing all but one of the Captains of the
Regions. Twelve of them he hanged. Peter the Prefect, or Prior, was
bound naked upon an ass with an earthen jar over his head, flogged
through the city, and cruelly put to death; and at last his torn body
was hung by the hair to the head of the bronze horse whereon the stately
figure of Marcus Aurelius sat in triumph before the door of the Pope's
house, as it sits today on the Capitol before the Palace of the Senator.
And Otto caused the body of murdered Roffredo to be dragged from its
grave and quartered by the hangman and scattered abroad, a warning to
the Regions and their leaders. They left Pope John in peace after that,
and he lived five years and held a council in the Lateran, and died in
his bed. Possibly after his rough experience, his rule was more gentle,
and when he was dead he was spoken of as 'that most worthy Pontiff.' Who
Count Roffredo was no one can tell surely, but his name belongs to the
great house of Caetani.
[Illustration: BASILICA OF ST JOHN LATERAN]
It is hard to see past terror in present peace; it is not easy to fancy
the rough rabble of Rome in those days, strangely clad, more strangely
armed, far out in the waste fields about the Lateran, surging up like
demons in the lurid torchlight before the house of the Pope, pressing
upon the mailed Count's stout horse, and thronging upon the heels of the
Captains and the Prefect, pounding down the heavy doors with stones, and
with deep shouts for every heavy blow, while white-robed John and his
frightened priests cower together within, expecting death. Down goes the
oak with a crash like artillery, that booms along the empty corridors; a
moment's pause, and silence, and then the rush, headed by the Knight and
the leaders who mean no murder, but mean to have their way, once and for
ever, and buffet back their furious followers when they have reached the
Pope's room, lest he should be torn in pieces. Then, the subsidence of
the din, and the old man and his priests bound and dragged out and
forced to go on foot by all the long dark way through the city to the
black dungeons of Sant' Angelo beyond the rushing river.
[Illustration: SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO]
It seems far away. Yet we who have seen the Roman people rise, overlaid
with burdens and maddened by the news of a horrible defeat, can guess at
what it must have been. Those who saw the sea of murderous pale faces,
and heard the deep cry, 'Death to Crispi,' go howling and echoing
through the city can guess what that must have been a thousand years
ago, and many another night since then, when the Romans were roused and
there was a smell of blood in the air.
But today there is peace in the great Mother of Churches, with an
atmosphere of solemn rest that one may not breathe in Saint Peter's nor
perhaps anywhere else in Rome within consecrated walls. There is mystery
in the enormous pillars that answer back the softest whispered word from
niche to niche across the silent aisle; there is simplicity and dignity
of peace in the lofty nave, far down and out of jarring distance from
the over-gorgeous splendour of the modern transept. In Holy Week,
towards evening at the Tenebræ, the divine tenor voice of Padre
Giovanni, monk and singer, soft as a summer night, clear as a silver
bell, touching as sadness itself, used to float through the dim air with
a ring of Heaven in it, full of that strange fatefulness that followed
his short life, till he died, nearly twenty years ago, foully poisoned
by a layman singer in envy of a gift not matched in the memory of man.
Sometimes, if one wanders upward towards the Monti when the moon is
high, a far-off voice rings through the quiet air--one of those voices
which hardly ever find their way to the theatre nowadays, and which,
perhaps, would not satisfy the nervous taste of our Wagnerian times.
Perhaps it sounds better in the moonlight, in those lonely, echoing
streets, than it would on the stage. At all events, it is beautiful as
one hears it, clear, strong, natural, ringing. It belongs to the place
and hour, as the humming of honey bees to a field of flowers at noon, or
the desolate moaning of the tide to a lonely ocean coast at night. It is
not an exaggeration, nor a mere bit of ill nature, to say that there are
thousands of fastidiously cultivated people today who would think it all
theatrical in the extreme, and would be inclined to despise their own
taste if they felt a secret pleasure in the scene and the song. But in
Rome even such as they might condescend to the romantic for an hour,
because in Rome such deeds have been dared, such loves have been loved,
such deaths have been died, that any romance, no matter how wild, has
larger probability in the light of what has actually been the lot of
real men and women. So going alone through the winding moonlit ways
about Tor de' Conti, Santa Maria dei Monti and San Pietro in Vincoli, a
man need take no account of modern fashions in sensation; and if he will
but let himself be charmed, the enchantment will take hold of him and
lead him on through a city of dreams and visions, and memories strange
and great, without end. Ever since Rome began there must have been just
such silvery nights; just such a voice rang through the same air ages
ago; just as now the velvet shadows fell pall-like and unrolled
themselves along the grey pavement under the lofty columns of Mars the
Avenger and beneath the wall of the Forum of Augustus.
[Illustration: PIAZZA COLONNA]
Perhaps it is true that the impressions which Rome makes upon a
thoughtful man vary more according to the wind and the time of day than
those he feels in other cities. Perhaps, too, there is no capital in all
the world which has such contrasts to show within a mile of each
other--one might almost say within a dozen steps. One of the most
crowded thoroughfares of Rome, for instance, is the Via del Tritone,
which is the only passage through the valley between the Pincian and the
Quirinal hills, from the region of Piazza Colonna towards the railway
station and the new quarter. During the busy hours of the day a carriage
can rarely move through its narrower portions any faster than at a foot
pace, and the insufficient pavements are thronged with pedestrians. In a
measure, the Tritone in Rome corresponds to Galata bridge in
Constantinople. In the course of the week most of the population of the
city must have passed at least once through the crowded little street,
which somehow in the rain of millions that lasted for two years, did not
manage to attract to itself even the small sum which would have sufficed
to widen it by a few yards. It is as though the contents of Rome were
daily drawn through a keyhole. In the Tritone are to be seen magnificent
equipages, jammed in the line between milk carts, omnibuses and
dustmen's barrows, preceded by butcher's vans and followed by miserable
cabs, smart dogcarts and high-wheeled country vehicles driven by rough,
booted men wearing green-lined cloaks and looking like stage bandits;
even saddle horses are led sometimes that way to save time; and on each
side flow two streams of human beings of every type to be found between
Porta Angelica and Porta San Giovanni. A prince of the Holy Roman Empire
pushes past a troop of dirty school children, and is almost driven into
an open barrel of salt codfish, in the door of a poor shop, by a
black-faced charcoal man carrying a sack on his head more than half as
high as himself. A party of jolly young German tourists in loose
clothes, with red books in their hands, and their field-glasses hanging
by straps across their shoulders, try to rid themselves of the
flower-girls dressed in sham Sabine costumes, and utter exclamations of
astonishment and admiration when they themselves are almost run down by
a couple of the giant Royal Grenadiers, each six feet five or
thereabouts, besides nine inches, or so, of crested helmet aloft,
gorgeous, gigantic and spotless. Clerks by the dozen and liveried
messengers of the ministries struggle in the press; ladies gather their
skirts closely, and try to pick a dainty way where, indeed, there is
nothing 'dain' (a word which Doctor Johnson confesses that he could not
find in any dictionary, but which he thinks might be very useful);
servant girls, smart children with nurses and hoops going up to the
Pincio, black-browed washerwomen with big baskets of clothes on their
heads, stumpy little infantry soldiers in grey uniforms, priests,
friars, venders of boot-laces and thread, vegetable sellers pushing
hand-carts of green things in and out among the horses and vehicles with
amazing dexterity, and yelling their cries in super-humanly high
voices--there is no end to the multitude. If the day is showery, it is a
sight to see the confusion in the Tritone when umbrellas of every age,
material and colour are all opened at once, while the people who have
none crowd into the codfish shop and the liquor seller's and the
tobacconist's, with traditional 'con permesso' of excuse for entering
when they do not mean to buy anything; for the Romans are mostly civil
people and fairly good-natured. But rain or shine, at the busy hours,
the place is always crowded to overflowing with every description of
vehicle and every type of humanity.
Out of Babel--a horizontal Babel--you may turn into the little church,
dedicated to the 'Holy Guardian Angel.' It stands on the south side of
the Tritone, in that part which is broader, and which a little while ago
was still called the Via dell' Angelo Custode--Guardian Angel Street. It
is an altogether insignificant little church, and strangers scarcely
ever visit it. But going down the Tritone, when your ears are splitting,
and your eyes are confused with the kaleidoscopic figures of the
scurrying crowd, you may lift the heavy leathern curtain, and leave the
hurly-burly outside, and find yourself all alone in the quiet presence
of death, the end of all hurly-burly and confusion. It is quite possible
that under the high, still light in the round church, with its four
niche-like chapels, you may see, draped in black, that thing which no
one ever mistakes for anything else; and round about the coffin a dozen
tall wax candles may be burning with a steady yellow flame. Possibly, at
the sound of the leathern curtain slapping the stone door-posts, as it
falls behind you, a sad-looking sacristan may shuffle out of a dark
corner to see who has come in; possibly not. He may be asleep, or he may
be busy folding vestments in the sacristy. The dead need little
protection from the living, nor does a sacristan readily put himself out
for nothing. You may stand there undisturbed as long as you please, and
see what all the world's noise comes to in the end. Or it may be, if the
departed person belonged to a pious confraternity, that you chance upon
the brothers of the society--clad in dark hoods with only holes for
their eyes, and no man recognized by his neighbour--chanting penitential
psalms and hymns for the one whom they all know because he is dead, and
they are living.
Such contrasts are not lacking in Rome. There are plenty of them
everywhere in the world, perhaps, but they are more striking here, in
proportion as the outward forms of religious practice are more ancient,
unchanging and impressive. For there is nothing very impressive or
unchanging about the daily outside world, especially in Rome.
Rome, the worldly, is the capital of one of the smaller kingdoms of the
world, which those who rule it are anxious to force into the position of
a great power. One need not criticise their action too hardly; their
motives can hardly be anything but patriotic, considering the fearful
sacrifices they impose upon their country. But they are not the men who
brought about Italian unity. They are the successors of those men; they
are not satisfied with that unification, and they have dreamed a dream
of ambition, beside which, considering the means at their disposal, the
projects of Alexander, Cæsar and Napoleon sink into comparative
insignificance. At all events, the worldly, modern, outward Italian
Rome is very far behind the great European capitals in development, not
to say wealth and magnificence. 'Lay' Rome, if one may use the
expression, is not in the least a remarkable city. 'Ecclesiastic' Rome
is the stronghold of a most tremendous fact, from whatever point of view
Christianity may be considered. If one could, in imagination, detach the
head of the Catholic Church from the Church, one would be obliged to
admit that no single living man possesses the far-reaching and lasting
power which in each succeeding papal reign belongs to the Pope. Behind
the Pope stands the fact which confers, maintains and extends that power
from century to century; a power which is one of the hugest elements of
the world's moral activity, both in its own direct action and in the
counteraction and antagonism which it calls forth continually.
It is the all-pervading presence of this greatest fact in Christendom
which has carried on Rome's importance from the days of the Cæsars,
across the chasm of the dark ages, to the days of the modern popes; and
its really enormous importance continually throws forward into cruel
relief the puerilities and inanities of the daily outward world. It is
the consciousness of that importance which makes old Roman society what
it is, with its virtues, its vices, its prejudices and its strange,
old-fashioned, close-fisted kindliness; which makes the contrast between
the Saturnalia of Shrove Tuesday night and the cross signed with ashes
upon the forehead on Ash Wednesday morning, between the careless
laughter of the Roman beauty in Carnival, and the tragic earnestness of
the same lovely face when the great lady kneels in Lent, before the
confessional, to receive upon her bent head the light touch of the
penitentiary's wand, taking her turn, perhaps, with a score of women of
the people. It is the knowledge of an always present power, active
throughout the whole world, which throws deep, straight shadows, as it
were, through the Roman character, just as in certain ancient families
there is a secret that makes grave the lives of those who know it.
The Roman Forum and the land between it and the Colosseum, though
strictly within the limits of Monti, were in reality a neutral ground,
the chosen place for all struggles of rivalry between the Regions. The
final destruction of its monuments dates from the sacking of Rome by
Robert Guiscard with his Normans and Saracens in the year one thousand
and eighty-four, when the great Duke of Apulia came in arms to succour
Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh, against the Emperor Henry the
Fourth, smarting under the bitter humiliation of Canossa; and against
his Antipope Clement, more than a hundred years after Otto had come back
in anger to avenge Pope John. There is no more striking picture of the
fearful contest between the Church and the Empire.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DI SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO]
Alexis, Emperor of the East, had sent Henry, Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empire, one hundred and forty-four thousand pieces of gold, and one
hundred pieces of woven scarlet, as an inducement to make war upon the
Norman Duke, the Pope's friend. But the Romans feared Henry and sent
ambassadors to him, and on the twenty-first of March, being the Thursday
before Palm Sunday, the Lateran gate was opened for him to enter in
triumph. The city was divided against itself, the nobles were for
Hildebrand, the people were against him. The Emperor seized the Lateran
palace and all the bridges. The Pope fled to the Castle of Sant' Angelo,
an impregnable fortress in those times, ever ready and ever provisioned
for a siege. Of the nobles Henry required fifty hostages as earnest of
their neutrality. On the next day he threw his gold to the rabble and
they elected his Antipope Gilbert, who called himself Clement the Third,
and certain bishops from North Italy consecrated him in the Lateran on
Palm Sunday.
Meanwhile Hildebrand secretly sent swift riders to Apulia, calling on
Robert Guiscard for help, and still the nobles were faithful to him, and
though Henry held the bridges, they were strong in Trastevere and the
Borgo, which is the region between the Castle of Sant' Angelo and Saint
Peter's. So it turned out that when Henry tried to bring his Antipope in
solemn procession to enthrone him in the Pontifical chair, on Easter
day, he found mailed knights and footmen waiting for him, and had to
fight his way to the Vatican, and forty of his men were killed and
wounded in the fray, while the armed nobles lost not one. Yet he reached
the Vatican at last, and there he was crowned by the false Pope he had
made, with the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The chronicler apologizes
for calling him an emperor at all. Then he set to work to destroy the
dwellings of the faithful nobles, and laid siege to the wonderful
Septizonium of Severus, in which the true Pope's nephew had fortified
himself, and began to batter it down with catapults and battering-rams.
Presently came the message of vengeance, brought by one man outriding a
host, while the rabble were still building a great wall to encircle
Sant' Angelo and starve Hildebrand to death or submission, working day
and night like madmen, tearing down everything at hand to pile the great
stones one upon another. Swiftly came the terrible Norman from the
south, with his six thousand horse, Normans and Saracens, and thirty
thousand foot, forcing his march and hungry for the Emperor. But Henry
fled, making pretext of great affairs in Lombardy, promising great and
wonderful gifts to the Roman rabble, and entrusting to their care his
imperial city.
Like a destroying whirlwind of fire and steel Robert swept on to the
gates and into Rome, burning and slaying as he rode, and sparing neither
man, nor woman, nor child, till the red blood ran in rivers between
walls of yellow flame. And he took Hildebrand from Sant' Angelo, and
brought him back to the Lateran through the reeking ruins of the city in
grim and fearful triumph of carnage and destruction.
That was the end of the Roman Forum, and afterwards, when the
blood-soaked ashes and heaps of red-hot rubbish had sunk down and
hardened to a level surface, the place where the shepherd fathers of
Alba Longa had pastured their flocks was called the Campo Vaccino, the
Cattle Field, because it was turned into the market for beeves, and rows
of trees were planted, and on one side there was a walk where ropes were
made, even to our own time.
It became also the fighting ground of the Regions. Among the strangest
scenes in the story of the city are those regular encounters between the
Regions of Monti and Trastevere which for centuries took place on feast
days, by appointment, on the site of the Forum, or occasionally on the
wide ground before the Baths of Diocletian. They were battles fought
with stones, and far from bloodless. Monti was traditionally of the
Imperial or Ghibelline party; Trastevere was Guelph and for the Popes.
The enmity was natural and lasting, on a small scale, as it was
throughout Italy. The challenge to the fray was regularly sent out by
young boys as messengers, and the place and hour were named and the word
passed in secret from mouth to mouth. It was even determined by
agreement whether the stones were to be thrown by hand or whether the
more deadly sling was to be used.
At the appointed time, the combatants appear in the arena, sometimes as
many as a hundred on a side, and the tournament begins, as in Homeric
times, with taunts and abuse, which presently end in skirmishes between
the boys who have come to look on. Scouts are placed at distant points
to cry 'Fire' at the approach of the dreaded Bargello and his men, who
are the only representatives of order in the city and not, indeed,
anxious to face two hundred infuriated slingers for the sake of making
peace.
One boy throws a stone and runs away, followed by the rest, all
prudently retiring to a safe distance. The real combatants wrap their
long cloaks about their left arms, as the old Romans used their togas on
the same ground, to shield their heads from the blows; a sling whirls
half a dozen times like lightning, and a smooth round stone flies like a
bullet straight at an enemy's face, followed by a hundred more in a
deadly hail, thick and fast. Men fall, blood flows, short deep curses
ring through the sunny air, the fighters creep up to one another,
dodging behind trees and broken ruins, till they are at cruelly short
range; faster and faster fly the stones, and scores are lying prostrate,
bleeding, groaning and cursing. Strength, courage, fierce endurance and
luck have it at last, as in every battle. Down goes the leader of
Trastevere, half dead, with an eye gone, down goes the next man to him,
his teeth broken under his torn lips, down half a dozen more, dead or
wounded, and the day is lost. Trastevere flies towards the bridge,
pursued by Monti with hoots and yells and catcalls, and the thousands
who have seen the fight go howling after them, women and children
screaming, dogs racing and barking and biting at their heels. And far
behind on the deserted Campo Vaccino, as the sun goes down, women weep
and frightened children sob beside the young dead. But the next feast
day would come, and a counter-victory and vengeance.
That has always been the temper of the Romans; but few know how
fiercely it used to show itself in those days. It would have been
natural enough that men should meet in sudden anger and kill each other
with such weapons as they chanced to have or could pick up, clubs,
knives, stones, anything, when fighting was half the life of every grown
man. It is harder to understand the murderous stone throwing by
agreement and appointment. In principle, indeed, it approached the
tournament, and the combat of champions representing two parties is an
expression of the ancient instinct of the Latin peoples; so the Horatii
and Curiatii fought for Rome and Alba--so Francis the First of France
offered to fight the Emperor Charles the Fifth for settlement of all
quarrels between the Kingdom and the Empire--and so the modern Frenchman
and Italian are accustomed to settle their differences by an appeal to
what they still call 'arms,' for the sake of what modern society is
pleased to dignify by the name of 'honour.'
But in the stone-throwing combats of Campo Vaccino there was something
else. The games of the circus and the bloody shows of the amphitheatre
were not forgotten. As will be seen hereafter, bull-fighting was a
favourite sport in Rome as it is in Spain today, and the hand-to-hand
fights between champions of the Regions were as much more exciting and
delightful to the crowd as the blood of men is of more price than the
blood of beasts.
The habit of fighting for its own sake, with dangerous weapons, made the
Roman rabble terrible when the fray turned quite to earnest; the deadly
hail of stones, well aimed by sling and hand, was familiar to every
Roman from his childhood, and the sight of naked steel at arm's length
inspired no sudden, keen and unaccustomed terror, when men had little
but life to lose and set small value on that, throwing it into the
balance for a word, rising in arms for a name, doing deeds of blood and
flame for a handful of gold or a day of power.
Monti was both the battlefield of the Regions and also, in times early
and late, the scene of the most splendid pageants of Church and State.
There is a strange passage in the writings of Ammianus Marcellinus, a
pagan Roman of Greek birth, contemporary with Pope Damasus in the latter
part of the fourth century. Muratori quotes it, as showing what the
Bishopric of Rome meant even in those days. It is worth reading, for a
heathen's view of things under Valens and Valentinian, before the coming
of the Huns and the breaking up of the Roman Empire, and, indeed, before
the official disestablishment, as we should say, of the heathen
religion; while the High Priest of Jupiter still offered sacrifices on
the Capitol, and the six Vestal Virgins still guarded the Seven Holy
Things of Rome, and held their vast lands and dwelt in their splendid
palace in all freedom of high privilege, as of old.
'For my part,' says Ammianus, 'when I see the magnificence in which the
Bishops live in Rome, I am not surprised that those who covet the
dignity should use force and cunning to obtain it. For if they succeed,
they are sure of becoming enormously rich by the gifts of the devout
Roman matrons; they will drive about Rome in their carriages, as they
please, gorgeously dressed, and they will not only keep an abundant
table, but will give banquets so sumptuous as to outdo those of kings
and emperors. They do not see that they could be truly happy if instead
of making the greatness of Rome an excuse for their excesses, they would
live as some of the Bishops of the Provinces do, who are sparing and
frugal, poorly clad and modest, but who make the humility of their
manners and the purity of their lives at once acceptable to their God
and to their fellow worshippers.'
So much Ammianus says. And Saint Jerome tells how Prætextatus, Prefect
of the City, when Pope Damasus tried to convert him, answered with a
laugh, 'I will become a Christian if you will make me Bishop of Rome.'
Yet Damasus, famous for the good Latin and beautiful carving of the many
inscriptions he composed and set up, was undeniably also a good man in
the evil days which foreshadowed the great schism.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE]
And here, in the year 366, in the Region of Monti, in the church where
now stands Santa Maria Maggiore, a great and terrible name stands out
for the first time in history. Orsino, Deacon of the Holy Roman Catholic
and Apostolic Church, rouses a party of the people, declares the
election of Damasus invalid, proclaims himself Pope in his stead, and
officiates as Pontiff in the Basilica of Sicininus. Up from the deep
city comes the roaring crowd, furious and hungry for fight; the great
doors are closed and Orsino's followers gather round him as he stands on
the steps of the altar; but they are few, and those for Damasus are
many; down go the doors, burst inward with battering-rams, up shoot the
flames to the roof, and the short, wild fray lasts while one may count
five score, and is over. Orsino and a hundred and thirty-six of his men
lie dead on the pavement, the fire licks the rafters, the crowd press
outward, and the great roof falls crashing down into wide pools of
blood. And after that Damasus reigns eighteen years in peace and
splendour. No one knows whether the daring Deacon was of the race that
made and unmade popes afterwards, and held half Italy with its
fortresses, giving its daughters to kings and taking kings' daughters
for its sons, till Vittoria Accoramboni of bad memory began to bring
down a name that is yet great. But Orsino he was called, and he had in
him much of the lawless strength of those namesakes of his who outfought
all other barons but the Colonna, for centuries; and romance may well
make him one of them.
Three hundred years later, and a little nearer to us in the dim
perspective of the dark ages, another scene is enacted in the same
cathedral. Martin the First was afterwards canonized as Saint Martin for
the persecutions he suffered at the hands of Constans, who feared and
hated him and set up an antipope in his stead, and at last sent him
prisoner to die a miserable death in the Crimea. Olympius, Exarch of
Italy, was the chosen tool of the Emperor, sent again and again to Rome
to destroy the brave Bishop and make way for the impostor. At last, says
the greatest of Italian chroniclers, fearing the Roman people and their
soldiers, he attempted to murder the Pope foully, in hideous sacrilege.
To that end he pretended penitence, and begged to be allowed to receive
the Eucharist from the Pope himself at solemn high Mass, secretly
instructing one of his body-guards to stab the Bishop at the very moment
when he should present Olympius with the consecrated bread.
Up to the basilica they went, in grave and splendid procession. One may
guess the picture, with its deep colour, with the strong faces of those
men, the Eastern guards, the gorgeous robes, the gilded arms, the high
sunlight crossing the low nave and falling through the yellow clouds of
incense upon the venerable bearded head of the holy man whose death was
purposed in the sacred office. First, the measured tread of the Exarch's
band moving in order; then, the silence over all the kneeling throng,
and upon it the bursting unison of the 'Gloria in Excelsis' from the
choir. Chant upon chant as the Pontiff and his Ministers intone the
Epistle and the Gospel and are taken up by the singers in chorus at the
first words of the Creed. By and by, the Pope's voice alone, still clear
and brave in the Preface. 'Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and all
the company of Heaven,' he chants, and again the harmony of many voices
singing 'Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.' Silence then, at the
Consecration, and the dark-browed Exarch bowing to the pavement, beside
the paid murderer whose hand is already on his dagger's hilt. 'O Lamb of
God, that takest away the sins of the world,' sings the choir in its
sad, high chant, and Saint Martin bows, standing, over the altar,
himself communicating, while the Exarch holds his breath, and the slayer
fixes his small, keen eyes on the embroidered vestments and guesses how
they will look with a red splash upon them.
As the soldier looks, the sunlight falls more brightly on the gold, the
incense curls in mystic spiral wreaths, its strong perfume penetrates
and dims his senses; little by little, his thoughts wander till they are
strangely fixed on something far away, and he no longer sees Pope nor
altar nor altar-piece beyond, and is wrapped in a sort of waking sleep
that is blindness. Olympius kneels at the steps within the rail, and his
heart beats loud as the grand figure of the Bishop bends over him, and
the thin old hand with its strong blue veins offers the sacred bread to
his open lips. He trembles, and tries to glance sideways to his left
with downcast eyes, for the moment has come, and the blow must be struck
then or never. Not a breath, not a movement in the church, not the
faintest clink of all those gilded arms, as the Saint pronounces the few
solemn words, then gravely and slowly turns, with his deacons to right
and left of him, and ascends the altar steps once more, unhurt. A
miracle, says the chronicler. A miracle, says the amazed soldier, and
repeats it upon solemn oath. A miracle, says Olympius himself, penitent
and converted from error, and ready to save the Pope by all means he
has, as he was ready to slay him before. But he only, and the hired
assassin beside him, had known what was to be, and the people say that
the Exarch and the Pope were already reconciled and agreed against the
Emperor.
The vast church has had many names. It seems at one time to have been
known as the Basilica of Sicininus, for so Ammianus Marcellinus still
speaks of it. But just before that, there is the lovely legend of Pope
Liberius' dream. To him and to the Roman patrician, John, came the
Blessed Virgin in a dream, one night in high summer, commanding them to
build her a church wheresoever they should find snow on the morrow. And
together they found it, glistening in the morning sun, and they traced,
on the white, the plan of the foundation, and together built the first
church, calling it 'Our Lady of Snows,' for Damasus to burn when Orsino
seized it,--but the people spoke of it as the Basilica of Liberius. It
was called also 'Our Lady of the Manger,' from the relic held holy
there; and Sixtus the Third named it 'Our Lady, Mother of God'; and
under many popes it was rebuilt and grew, until at last, for its size,
it was called, as it is today, 'The Greater Saint Mary's.' At one time,
the popes lived near it, and in our own century, when the palace had
long been transferred to the Quirinal, a mile to northward of the
basilica, Papal Bulls were dated 'From Santa Maria Maggiore.'
It is too gorgeous now, too overladen, too rich; and yet it is imposing.
The first gold brought from South America gilds the profusely decorated
roof, the dark red polished porphyry pillars of the high altar gleam in
the warm haze of light, the endless marble columns rise in shining
ranks, all is gold, marble and colour.
Many dead lie there, great men and good; and one over whom a sort of
mystery hangs, for he was Bartolommeo Sacchi, Cardinal Platina,
historian of the Church, a chief member of the famous Roman Academy of
the fifteenth century, and a mediæval pagan, accused with Pomponius
Letus and others of worshipping false gods; tried, acquitted for lack of
evidence; dead in the odour of sanctity; proved at last ten times a
heathen, and a bad one, today, by inscriptions found in the remotest
part of the Catacombs, where he and his companions met in darkest secret
to perform their extravagant rites. He lies beneath the chapel of Sixtus
the Fifth, but the stone that marked the spot is gone.
Strange survivals of ideas and customs cling to some places like ghosts,
and will not be driven away. The Esquiline was long ago the haunt of
witches, who chanted their nightly incantations over the shallow graves
where slaves were buried, and under the hideous crosses whereon dead
malefactors had groaned away their last hours of life. Mæcenas cleared
the land and beautified it with gardens, but still the witches came by
stealth to their old haunts. The popes built churches and palaces on it,
but the dark memories never vanished in the light; and even in our own
days, on Saint John's Eve, which is the witches' night of the Latin
race, as the Eve of May-day is the Walpurgis of the Northmen, the people
went out in thousands, with torches and lights, and laughing tricks of
exorcism, to scare away the powers of evil for the year.
On that night the vast open spaces around the Lateran were thronged with
men and women and children; against the witches' dreaded influence they
carried each an onion, torn up by the roots with stalk and flower; all
about, on the outskirts of the place, were kitchen booths, set up with
boughs and bits of awnings, yellow with the glare of earthen and iron
oil lamps, where snails--great counter-charms against spells--were fried
and baked in oil, and sold with bread and wine, and eaten with more or
less appetite, according to the strength of men's stomachs. All night,
till the early summer dawn, the people came and went, and wandered round
and round, and in and out, in parties and by families, to go laughing
homeward at last, scarce knowing why they had gone there at all, unless
it were because their fathers and mothers had done as they did for
generations unnumbered.
[Illustration: BATHS OF DIOCLETIAN]
And the Lateran once had another half-heathen festival, on the Saturday
after Easter, in memory of the ancient Floralia of the Romans, which had
formerly been celebrated on the 28th of April. It was a most strange
festival, now long forgotten, in which Christianity and paganism were
blended together. Baracconi, from whom the following account is taken,
quotes three sober writers as authority for his description. Yet there
is a doubt about the very name of the feast, which is variously called
the 'Coromania' and the 'Cornomania.'
On the afternoon of the Saturday in Easter week, say these writers, the
priests of the eighteen principal 'deaconries'--an ecclesiastical
division of the city long ago abolished and now somewhat obscure--caused
the bells to be rung, and the people assembled at their parish churches,
where they were received by a 'mansionarius,'--probably meaning here 'a
visitor of houses,'--and a layman, who was arrayed in a tunic, and
crowned with the flowers of the cornel cherry. In his hand he carried a
concave musical instrument of copper, by which hung many little bells.
One of these mysterious personages, who evidently represented the pagan
element in the ceremony, preceded each parish procession, being followed
immediately by the parish priest, wearing the cope. From all parts of
the city they went up to the Lateran, and waited before the palace of
the Pope till all were assembled.
The Pope descended the steps to receive the homage of the people.
Immediately, those of each parish formed themselves into wide circles
round their respective 'visitors' and priests, and the strange rite
began. In the midst the priest stood still. Round and round him the lay
'visitor' moved in a solemn dance, striking his copper bells
rhythmically to his steps, while all the circle followed his gyrations,
chanting a barbarous invocation, half Latin and half Greek: 'Hail,
divinity of this spot! Receive our prayers in fortunate hour!' and many
verses more to the same purpose, and quite beyond being construed
grammatically.
The dance is over with the song. One of the parish priests mounts upon
an ass, backwards, facing the beast's tail, and a papal chamberlain
leads the animal, holding over its head a basin containing twenty pieces
of copper money. When they have passed three rows of benches--which
benches, by the bye?--the priest leans back, puts his hand behind him
into the basin, and pockets the coins.
Then all the priests lay garlands at the feet of the Pope. But the
priest of Santa Maria in Via Lata also lets a live fox out of a bag, and
the little creature suddenly let loose flies for its life, through the
parting crowd, out to the open country, seeking cover. It is like the
Hebrew scapegoat. In return each priest receives a golden coin from the
Pontiff's hand. The rite being finished, all return to their respective
parishes, the dancing 'visitor' still leading the procession. Each
priest is accompanied then by acolytes who bear holy water, branches of
laurel, and baskets of little rolls, or of those big, sweet wafers,
rolled into a cylinder and baked, which are called 'cialdoni,' and are
eaten to this day by Romans with ice cream. From house to house they go;
the priest blesses each dwelling, sprinkling water about with the
laurel, and then burning the branch on the hearth and giving some of the
rolls to the children. And all the time the dancer slowly dances and
chants the strange words made up of some Hebrew, a little Chaldean and a
leavening of nonsense.
Jaritan, jaritan, iarariasti
Raphaym, akrhoin, azariasti!
One may leave the interpretation of the jargon to curious scholars. As
for the rite itself, were it not attested by trustworthy writers, one
would be inclined to treat it as a mere invention, no more to be
believed than the legend of Pope Joan, who was supposed to have been
stoned to death near San Clemente, on the way to the Lateran.
An extraordinary number of traditions cling to the Region of Monti, and
considering that in later times a great part of this quarter was a
wilderness, the fact would seem strange. As for the 'Coromania' it seems
to have disappeared after the devastation of Monti by Robert Guiscard in
1084, and the general destruction of the city from the Lateran to the
Capitol is attributed to the Saracens who were with him. But a more
logical cause of depopulation is found in the disappearance of water
from the upper Region by the breaking of the aqueducts, from which alone
it was derived. The consequence of this, in the Middle Age, was that the
only obtainable water came from the river, and was naturally taken from
it up-stream, towards the Piazza del Popolo, in the neighbourhood of
which it was collected in tanks and kept until the mud sank to the
bottom and it was approximately fit to drink.
In Imperial times the greater number of the public baths were situated
in the Monti. The great Piazza di Termini, now re-named Piazza delle
Terme, before the railway station, took its name from the Baths of
Diocletian--'Thermæ,' 'Terme,' 'Termini.' The Baths of Titus, the Baths
of Constantine, of Philippus, Novatus and others were all in Monti,
supplied by the aqueduct of Claudius, the Anio Novus, the Aqua Marcia,
Tepula, Julia, Marcia Nova and Anio Vetus. No people in the world were
such bathers as the old Romans; yet few cities have ever suffered so
much or so long from lack of good water as Rome in the Middle Age. The
supply cut off, the whole use of the vast institutions was instantly
gone, and the huge halls and porticos and playgrounds fell to ruin and
base uses. Owing to their peculiar construction and being purposely made
easy of access on all sides, like the temples, the buildings could not
even be turned to account by the Barons for purposes of fortification,
except as quarries for material with which to build their towers and
bastions. The inner chambers became hiding-places for thieves, herdsmen
in winter penned their flocks in the shelter of the great halls, grooms
used the old playground as a track for breaking horses, and round and
about the ruins, on feast days, the men of Monti and Trastevere chased
one another in their murderous tournaments of stone throwing. A fanatic
Sicilian priest saved the great hall of Diocletian's Baths from
destruction in Michelangelo's time.
[Illustration: PORTA MAGGIORE, SUPPORTING THE CHANNELS OF THE AQUEDUCT
OF CLAUDIUS AND THE ANIO NOVUS]
The story is worth telling, for it is little known. In a little church
in Palermo, in which the humble priest Antonio Del Duca officiated, he
discovered under the wall-plaster a beautiful fresco or mosaic of the
Seven Archangels, with their names and attributes. Day after day he
looked at the fair figures till they took possession of his mind and
heart and soul, and inspired him with the apparently hopeless desire to
erect a church in Rome in their honour. To Rome he came, persuaded of
his righteous mission, to fail of course, after seven years of
indefatigable effort. Back to Palermo then, to the contemplation of his
beloved angels. And again they seemed to drive him to Rome. Scarcely h
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