Part 1 (1/2)
Rome.
by Mildred Anna Rosalie Tuker and Hope Malleson.
CHAPTER I
ROME
About seven hundred and fifty years before the Christian era some Latian settlers founded a town on the banks of the Tiber and became the Roman people. Where did they come from? Had they come across what was later to be known as the _ager roma.n.u.s_ from the Latin stronghold of Alba Longa, or were they a mixed people, partly composed of those men from Etruria who were already settled in the country round? In the confused pictures which tradition has handed down to us we see Latins in conflict with Etruscans, and Romulus relegating the latter to a special quarter of the city; but we also see one of the three tribes into which he divided the people bearing an Etruscan name, an Etruscan chief as his ally, and we know that while two at least of her six kings belonged to this race, the religion, the art, and the political inst.i.tutions of early Rome were borrowed from that Etruscan civilisation which was at this epoch the most advanced on Latin soil.
However this may be, four legends cling round the mighty founders of Rome--the Latian, the Aenean, the Arcadian, the Etruscan. The Arcadian Evander had brought with him a colony of the indigenous people of Greece, and founded a town at the foot of the Palatine sixty years before the Trojan war. But at Alba Longa there also reigned kings descended from Aeneas, who had come to Latium after the capture of Troy bringing with him the _Palladium_, the sacred image of Pallas.
His descendant, the vestal Rhea Silvia, becomes the mother of the twins Romulus and Remus by Mars. The babes of the guilty priestess are cast adrift, but their cradle is carried down the Tiber to the foot of the Palatine, where they are suckled by a wolf, and brought up by the shepherd community already established there.
In the dim twilight of origins we recognise that Romulus is the type of the Roman people, whom he symbolises, who are found fighting the Sabine, the Etruscan, even the Latin, for existence as a nation. In the dim twilight we see all Roman things coming down the Tiber to the foot of the Palatine--the original _Roma Quadrata_--and we see that the nucleus of the settlement there was the cave of Lupercus, the Italian shepherds' G.o.d, identified later with the Arcadian Pan. This cave was just above the site of the present church of Santa Anastasia; here grew the wild fig-tree in whose roots the cradle of Rhea Silvia's babes became entangled, and here was the hut of Faustulus their foster-father.
The Grotto of Lupercus is the oldest sanctuary of kingly Rome. For the people were shepherds. Other nations had risen under shepherd kings who led their people to war, but no other people had become world conquerors; no other people had been equally skilled in the arts of war and the arts of peace, the arts of the plough and the arts of the spear, in the self-discipline, the heroic devotion, the unity of purpose, of the men who once carried in their breast the destinies of the known world.
The story is aptly figured in the person of the G.o.d Mars, who was the reputed father of Romulus and Remus. The Roman G.o.d was at first an agricultural divinity--the ”spears of Mars” were the rods with which the shepherd owner marked his boundaries. When, under the influence of Greece, Mars became the G.o.d of battles, the boundary marker of the fields became his war weapons. But if the Roman knew how to beat his ploughshare into a sword, he also knew how to return from the sword to the plough. The one was never far from the other--they put him in possession of those two ways of inheriting the earth, multiplying and subduing, producing and combating. Thus the pastoral legend never died out from the land of Saturn, and in the proudest flush of victory, when the relics of the _hastae martis_ were shown to the triumphant followers of Mars, there was present to the soul of the Roman the image of the father of Romulus covering the land with gigantic strides to strike these same _hastae_ into the soil as a sign of possession, the emblem of primitive law.
Two hills in Central Italy and a swamp between them provided the theatre of perhaps the greatest millennium in human history. On the one hill were the Latins--or let us call them the Roman people--the site of _Roma Quadrata_ the foster-land of Romulus, the birthplace of Augustus, the hill which has given its name to the imperial palaces of the earth. On the other were the Quirites and the site of the Sabine arx, that _Capitolium_ so-called, says Montfaucon, ”because it was the head of the world, from which the consuls and senators governed the universe.” Whenever the marshy ground between them was pa.s.sable, the Latins and Sabines descended the steep declivities of their hills and transformed it into a battlefield. But even in these early days they felt the need of a _comitium_ where the rival chiefs could meet to decide upon terms; and in no long s.p.a.ce this battle-ground became the nucleus and pledge of the political greatness of Rome.
For the Forum symbolises all human civilisation. It is the symbol of the common meeting ground--the common sentiments and needs--of human beings, where rancours are laid aside for the business of life--its common but its n.o.blest business, civic, ”civilised,” pursuits. It is the symbol of human greatness also, for the Roman never suffered the common necessities to force upon him an ign.o.ble peace. The battle-ground became the centre of civic life, but only on condition that the interests for which men should combat were never sacrificed to the interests for which men should co-operate. Through the symbolic _trait d'union_ of the Forum, two fortresses of barbarians became the nucleus of the city which ruled the world, and their people the imperial people of history.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FORUM FROM THE ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS
In the left corner is the _lapis niger_, the traditional tomb of Romulus. Facing us is the Arch of t.i.tus, and to the right is the Palatine.]
The city on the Palatine had been extended so as to include the town of the Sabines or Quirites on the neighbouring Quirinal hill, before the first king, who was born in the Sabine country, was called to rule the Romans. The Capitol at this time was a spur of the Quirinal, and so remained until Trajan dug away a part of the latter to lay the foundations of his forum. The Etruscans lived on the Caelian and the two horns of the Esquiline hills; the former was incorporated in the primitive city, but the Esquiline and Viminal were not enclosed until the time of Servius Tullius when Rome first became ”the city on Seven Hills.” The Aventine where Remus had wished to build the city was colonised by the conquered Latin towns in the reign of Ancus Martius, and this isolated hill, overlooking the Tiber on one side and the campagna on the other, still haunts the imagination with its melancholy beauty, its pariah history, as though it embodied the undying protest of Remus, an unceasing claim upon Roman justice. The varied and interesting Christian memories here, which begin with the _t.i.tulus_ of Priscilla and Aquila, are continued in the Priory of the once international Order of the Knights of Malta, recording the n.o.blest effort of the lay world during the middle ages--the inst.i.tution of chivalry; and in the modern Benedictine house of Saint Anselm--our English Anselm.
The Janiculum, the site of a fortress built by Ancus Martius against the Etruscans, was not enclosed within the city walls till the time of Aurelian; the Vatican hill was only enclosed in the ninth century by Leo IV. All these hills were once steep defences against enemies in the surrounding country; now that there are no longer any enemies the Romans appear bent on abolis.h.i.+ng the hills, and the mania for planing and razing is carried to an extent which must seem nothing less than childish to the visitor. The Viminal has become almost indistinguishable since the Villa Ma.s.simo was pulled down, and only the name _Via Viminale_, which replaces the older Via Strozzi, indicates the hill which lay between the Quirinal and the Esquiline.
Some idea may be gained of the original steepness of the hills when we realise that in the memory of the Romans the road past Palazzo Aldobrandini--on a slope of the Quirinal--used to be at the level of the top of the high wall which now surrounds it. The Capitol was only approachable from the Forum, and was never connected with the city on the hither side until the construction of the historic steps of Ara Coeli, one of the rare works undertaken by the Romans during the absence of the popes in Avignon.
The Tiber is now but a narrow stream in the midst of its ancient bed.
The Romans had never embanked the swift-flowing river, and the enormous deposits of the yellow sand which give it its traditional colour, and which threaten to completely dam the river by the island of the Tiber, may afford the explanation. The inundations of 1900 in fact reached the same level as those of 1872, as we may see recorded in the neighbouring church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Few spots in Rome exceed in varied interest the _isola sacra_ which with its two historic bridges the _pons Fabricius_ and the _pons Cestius_ spans the Tiber at the heart of the city. Here was the temple to Aesculapius, whose wors.h.i.+p had been introduced into Rome during a time of pestilence in obedience to the Sibylline oracles. The island itself thereafter a.s.sumed the form of a huge stone s.h.i.+p, faced with travertine, the prow with the sculptured staff and serpent of the G.o.d being still clearly visible; and here Greece and Rome met a civilisation and an art still older than their own, for the mast of this great s.h.i.+p is formed by an Egyptian obelisk. Hard by is the district where the Romans, who had borrowed from them their G.o.ds and their cult, compelled the ”_turba impia_” (”the impious crowd”) of Etruscans to dwell; while the walled enclosure in which, from the eleventh century onwards, Christian Rome obliged the Jews to live, is approached by the Fabrician bridge, as we may gather from the inscription in Hebrew and Latin on the little church of San Giovanni Calibita, beneath a painting of the Crucifixion, which says: ”I have spread forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people, who walk in a way that is not good.”
In the early twelfth century Otho III. brought, as he believed, the body of the Hebrew apostle Saint Bartholomew to this island, as 1400 years earlier the cult of Aesculapius had been brought there from Greece. The city of Beneventum had, however, it is supposed, palmed off on the emperor the body of Saint Paulinus of Nola which rests in the church dedicated to the apostle by the side of that of Saint Adelbert the apostle of the Slavs. The Franciscans came to the _isola sacra_ in the sixteenth century, and one of the friars of Saint Bartholomew's is the popular dentist of the poor from all quarters.
Here, then, in the midst of the river which determined the site of the cosmopolitan city, is a spot to whose history Egypt, Greece, Etruria, Palestine have contributed--Aesculapius, ”one of the Twelve,” the Christian Slavs, the Saxon Otho, Francis of a.s.sisi. In Paulinus of Nola we are reminded of the earliest Western monasteries, and the Franciscan friars represent for us the thirteenth-century revival of the religious spirit in Italy. What more? In the red-gowned confraternity of the island we are put in touch with an inst.i.tution which seems to be as old as human history, with those burial guilds, sanctioned by Roman law, under shelter of which the first Christians obtained a legal footing for themselves and their cemeteries long before their religion was tolerated.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FORUM, LOOKING TOWARDS THE CAPITOL
The Palatine is to the left. See pages 4, 5, 61.]
The vicissitudes of the city have made certain features of its life as eternal as itself. Through the middle ages it was the sanctuary and since the renascence of cla.s.sical learning it has been the museum of Europe. Long before there were any kind of facilities for travelling every one came to Rome. A procession of people from every race under heaven, in every variety--every excess and defect--of costume, has pa.s.sed along the streets under the observant but unastonished eyes of the _blase_ Roman; and when a lay pilgrim in a brown tunic, hung with rosaries, and carrying a crucifix taller than himself, walked last year out of Saint Peter's among the Easter crowd, no one noticed him. The modern city in becoming the hostess of the other provinces of Italy is approximating in size to the Rome of the early empire; but the Rome of the popes made no sort of provision for the influx of Europe. The Inn of the Bear, in the street of that name leading to Ponte Sant' Angelo, provided the best accommodation; and here, it is said, Dante himself had lodged. It is but a hundred years ago that a pavement was placed for pedestrians, and then only one side of the Corso boasted a narrow footpath. The streets were enc.u.mbered with hucksters' stalls, with refuse, dirt, and stones; the nights were dark as pitch, and hygiene was only hinted at in the marble _affiches_ which may still be seen at certain old street corners announcing that _monsignore_ the way warden would visit with a fine of 25 _scudi_ and divers bodily pains the practice of emptying every kind of refuse into the side streets.
Now that the city is emerging from the chrysalis of the middle ages the cry of ”Vandals!” goes up on all sides. But Rome has always been destroyed. Not even her moral vicissitudes give her a greater right to be called ”the eternal city” than her survival of the material ruin to which she has over and over again been subjected. That Goth and Vandal have not wrought more havoc than emperors, people, and popes is recorded in the pasquinade on Urban VIII. (Barberini), who stripped the bronze off the Pantheon to adorn the baldacchino of Saint Peter's:--_Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecerunt Barberini_. It is a curious coincidence that the inscription commemorating the victories of Claudius in Britain, in which our kings are irreverently spoken of as ”barbarians,” should now grace the garden of the Barberini palace in Rome. _Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._
One factor only has been constant in the vicissitudes of Rome--barbarian invaders, rescuers of popes, foreign intruders, internecine brawlers, the flights and elections of popes, have each brought the opportunity for wholesale pillage. To the Roman love of destruction must be added the love of the large and superfluous: from the time of the emperors to the present hour when sites and buildings are doomed on all hands in order that the colossal monument of Victor Emmanuel II. may dominate the centre of the Roman tramway system--while the House of Augustus is unexcavated and his tomb is dishonoured--the Romans have proved themselves to be the sons of those who killed the prophets, by building or desecrating their sepulchres.