Ravenna, a Study Part 2

It is very difficult, in looking upon Ravenna as we see it to-day, to reconstruct it, even in the imagination, as it was when Augustus had done with it. To begin with, the sea has retreated several miles from the city, which is no longer within sight of it, while all that is left of Cla.s.sis, which is also now out of sight of the sea, is a single decayed and deserted church, S. Apollinare in Cla.s.se. Strabo, however, who wrote his _Geography_ a few years after Augustus had chosen Ravenna for his port upon the Adriatic, has left us a description both of it and the country in which it stood, from which must be drawn any picture we would possess of so changed a place. He speaks of it, as we have seen, as "a great city" situated in the marshes, built entirely upon piles, and traversed by ca.n.a.ls which were everywhere crossed by bridges or ferry-boats. While at the full tide he tells us it was swept by the sea and always by the river, and thus the sewage was carried off and the air purified, and this so thoroughly, that even before its establishment by Augustus the district was considered so healthy that the Roman governors had chosen it as a spot in which to train gladiators.[1] That river we know from Pliny[2] was called the Bedesis; and the same writer tells us that Augustus built a ca.n.a.l which brought the water of the Po to Ravenna.

[Footnote 1: Strabo, v. 7.]

[Footnote 2: Pliny, iii. 20.]

Tacitus in his _Annals_[1] merely tells us that Italy was guarded on both sides by fleets at Misenum and Ravenna, and in his _Histories_[2]

speaks of these places as the well known naval stations without stopping to describe them. While Suetonius,[3] though he mentions the great achievement of Augustus, does not emphasise it and does not attempt to tell us what these ports were like.

[Footnote 1: Tacitus, Ann. iv. 5.]

[Footnote 2: Tacitus, Hist. ii. 100; iii. 6, 40.]

[Footnote 3: Suetonius, _Augustus_.]

Perhaps the best description we have of Augustan Ravenna comes to us from a writer who certainly never saw the port in its great Roman days, but who probably followed a well established tradition in his description of it. This is Jornandes, who was born about A.D. 500 and was first a notary at the Ostrogothic court and later became a monk and finally bishop of Crotona. In his _De Getarum Origins et Rebus Gestis_ he thus describes Ravenna:

"This city (says he) between the marshes, the sea, and the Po is only accessible on one side. Situated beside the Ionian Sea it is surrounded and almost submerged by lagoons. On the east is the sea, on the west it is defended by marshes across which there remains a narrow pa.s.sage, a kind of gate. The city is encircled on the north by a branch of the Po, called the Fossa Asconis, and on the south by the Po itself, which is called the Erida.n.u.s, and which is there known as the King of Rivers. Augustus deepened its bed and made it larger; it flowed quite through the city, and its mouth formed an excellent port where once, as Dion reports [this pa.s.sage of Dion Ca.s.sius is lost], a fleet of 250 ships could be stationed in all security.... The city has three names with which she glorifies herself and she is divided into three parts to which they correspond; the first is Ravenna, the last Cla.s.sis, that in the midst is Caesarea between Ravenna and the sea.

Built on a sandy soil this quarter is easily approached and is commodiously situated for trade and transport."

We thus have a picture of Ravenna as a triune city, consisting of Ravenna proper, the port Cla.s.sis, and the long suburb between them, Caesarea, connected by a great causeway and everywhere watered by ca.n.a.ls, the greatest of which was the Fossa Augusta by which a part of the waters of the Po were carried to Ravenna and thence to Cla.s.sis and the sea; a city very much, we may suppose, what we know Venice to be, if we think of her in connection with the Riva, the great suburb of the Marina, and the Porto di Lido. At Cla.s.sis we must understand there was room for a fleet of two hundred and fifty ships and accommodation for a.r.s.enals, magazines, barracks, and so forth, while there is one other thing we know of this port, and that from Pliny,[1] who tells us that it had a Pharos like the famous one of Alexandria. "There is another building (says he) that is highly celebrated, the tower that was built by a king of Egypt on the island of Pharos at the entrance to the harbour of Alexandria.... At present there are similar fires lighted up in numerous places, Ostia and Ravenna for example. The only danger is that when these fires are thus kept burning without intermission they may be mistaken for stars."

[Footnote 1: Pliny x.x.x. vi. 18]

Such was the splendour of Ravenna in the time of Augustus. His achievement so far as Ravenna was concerned was to understand her importance not only in regard to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, an importance already discounted by the universal peace he had established, but in regard to the sea. He turned Ravenna into a first-cla.s.s naval port and based his eastern fleet upon her; and this was so wise an act that, so long as the empire remained strong and unhampered, Ravenna appears as the great base of its sea power in the East.

In that long peace which Italy enjoyed under the empire we hear little of Ravenna. We know Claudius built a great gate called Porta Aurea, which was only destroyed in 1582; and we know that the great sea port had one weakness, the scarcity of good water for drinking purposes.

Martial writes

"I'd rather at Ravenna have a cistern than a vine Since I could sell my water there much better than my wine,"

and again:

"That landlord at Ravenna is plainly but a cheat I paid for wine and water, but he served wine to me neat"[1]

[Footnote 1: Martial, _Fp_ iii. 56, 57. Trs Hodgkin]

This weakness would seem, however, to have been overcome by Trajan, who built an aqueduct nearly twenty miles long, which Theodoric restored, after the fall of the empire, in 524. This aqueduct, of which some arches remain in the bed of the Bedesis (Ronco), seems to have run, following the course of the river, from near Forli, where there still remains a village called S. Maria in Acquedotto, to Ravenna.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GREEK RELIEF FROM A TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE]

The great city-port thus became one of the most important and considerable of the cities of Italy, at a time when the whole of the West was rapidly increasing in wealth and population, and especially the old province of Cisapline Gaul, which had indeed become, during the _pax romana_, the richest part of the new Italy. Always an important military port it was often occupied by the emperors as their headquarters from which to watch and to oppose the advance of their enemies into Italy, and the possessor of it, for the reasons I have set forth, was always in a commanding position. Thus in A.D. 193 it was the surrender of Ravenna without resistance that gave the empire to Septimius Severus, when, scarcely allowing himself time for sleep or food, marching on foot and in complete armour, he crossed the Alps at the head of his columns to punish the wretched Didius Julia.n.u.s and to avenge Pertinax. It was there in 238 that Pupienus was busy a.s.sembling his army to oppose Maximin when he received the news of the death of his enemy before Aquileia.

And because it was impregnable and secluded it was often chosen too as a place of imprisonment for important prisoners.

It is true that we know very little, in detail, of the life of any city other than Rome during those years of the great Peace in which we see the empire change from a Pagan to a Christian state. Those centuries which saw Christendom slowly emerge, in which Europe was founded, still lack a modern historian, and the magnitude and splendour of their achievement are too generally misconceived or ignored. We are largely unaware still of what they were in themselves and of what we owe to them. By reason of the miserable collapse of Europe, of Christendom, in the sixteenth century and its appalling results both in thought and in politics, we are led, too often by prejudices, to regard those mighty years rather as the prelude to the decline and fall of the empire than as the great and indestructible foundations of all that is still worth having in the world.

For rightly understood those centuries gave us not only our culture, our civilisation, and our Faith, but ensured them to us that they should always endure. They established for ever the great lines upon which our art was to develop, to change, and yet not to suffer annihilation or barrenness. They established the supremacy of the idea, so that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, and that we might judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, defeat, nor decay. They, and they alone, established us in the secure possession of our own souls so that we alone in the world might develop from within, to change but never to die, and to be--yes, alone in the world--Christians.

The almost incredible strength and well being of those years must be seized also. There was not a town in Italy and the West that did not expand and increase in a fashion almost miraculous during that period.

It was then the rivers were embanked, the ca.n.a.ls made, the great roads planned and constructed, and our communications established for ever.

There was no industry that did not grow marvellously in strength, there is not a cla.s.s that did not increase in wealth and well-being beyond our dreams of progress. There is scarcely anything that is really fundamental in our lives that was not then created that it might endure. It was then our religion, the soul of Europe, was born.

Christianity, the Faith, which, little by little, absorbed the empire, till it became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is Europe, is thought to have been brought first to Ravenna by S.

Apollinaris, a disciple as we are told of S. Peter, who made him her first bishop. So at least his acts a.s.sert; and though little credence may, I fear, be placed in them, that he was the first bishop of Ravenna, and in the time of S. Peter, is not at variance with what we know of that age, is attested by the traditions of the city, and is supported by later authorities. S. Peter Chrysologus (_c_. 440), the most famous of his successors, for instance, a.s.sures us of it. This great churchman calls S. Apollinaris martyr, and in that there is nothing strange, but he a.s.serts that though he often spilt his blood for the Faith, yet G.o.d preserved him a long time, not less than twenty years, to his church, and that his persecution did not take away his life.[1]

[Footnote 1: His relics lay for many years in the church dedicated in his honour at Cla.s.sis; but in 549 they were removed from their great tomb and placed in a more secret spot in the same church. Cf.

Agnellus. _Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis_ (Ed. Holder--Egger in _Monumenta Germanicae Historica_) and S. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 128 in Migne.]

The empire which it had taken more than a millenium to build, which was the most n.o.ble and perhaps the most beneficient experiment in government that has ever been made, was in obvious economic and administrative decay by the middle of the fourth century. Christianity perhaps was already undermining the servile state, which in its effort of self-preservation adopted an economic system hopelessly at variance with the facts of the situation; while the weakness of its frontiers offered a military problem which the empire was unable to face.

Diocletian had attempted to solve it by dividing the empire, but the division he made was rather racial that strategic, for under it the two parts of the empire, East and West, met on the Danube. The eastern part, by force of geography, was inclined to an Asiatic point of view and to the neglect of the Danube; the western was by no means strong enough either financially or militarily to hold that tremendous line.

We read, in the letters of S. Ambrose among others, of the decay of the great cities of Cisalpine Gaul,[1] of the failure of agriculture in that rich countryside, of the poverty and misery that were everywhere falling upon that great state. It is possible that in the general weakening of administrative power even the roads, the ca.n.a.ls, the whole system of communications were allowed to become less perfect than they had been; everywhere there was a retreat. The frontiers were no longer inviolate, and it is probable that in the general decay the port of Cla.s.sis, the city of Ravenna, suffered not less than their neighbours.

[Footnote 1: See S. Ambrose, _Ep_. 39, written in 388, quoted by Muratori, _Dissertazioni_, vol. i. 21. "De Bonomensi veniens Urbe, a tergo Claternam, ipsam Bononiam, Mutinam, Regium derelinquebas; in dextera erat Brixillum; a fronte occurrebat Placentia.... Te igitur semirutarum Urbium cadavera, terrarumque sub eodem conspectu exposita funera non te admonent...."]

Indeed already in 306 it is rather as a refuge than as a great and active naval base that Ravenna appears to us, when Severus, dest.i.tute of force, "retired or rather fled" thither from the pursuit of Maximian. He flung himself into Ravenna because it was impregnable and because he expected reinforcements from Illyric.u.m and the East, but though he held the sea with a powerful fleet he made no use of it, and the emissaries of Maximian easily persuaded him to surrender. Already perhaps, a century later, when Honorius retired from Milan on the approach of Alaric and the first of those barbarian invasions which broke up the decaying western empire had penetrated into Cisalpine Gaul, the great works of Augustus and Trajan at Ravenna, the ca.n.a.ls, the mighty Fossa, and the port itself had fallen into a sort of decay which the fifth century was to complete, till that marvellous city, once the base of the eastern fleet and one of the great naval ports of the world, became just a decaying citadel engulfed in the marshes, impregnable it is true, but for barbarian reasons, lost in the fogs and the miasma of her shallow and undredged lagoons.

IV

THE RETREAT UPON RAVENNA

HONORIUS AND GALLA PLACIDIA

When Honorius left Milan on the approach of Alaric he went to Ravenna.

Why?

Gibbon, whom every writer since has followed without question, tells us, in one of his most scornful pa.s.sages, that "the emperor Honorius was distinguished, above his subjects, by the pre-eminence of fear, as well as of rank. The pride and luxury in which he was educated had not allowed him to suspect that there existed on the earth any power presumptuous enough to invade the repose of the successor of Augustus.

The acts of flattery concealed the impending danger till Alaric approached the palace of Milan. But when the sound of war had awakened the young emperor, instead of flying to arms with the spirit, or even the rashness, of his age, he eagerly listened to those timid counsellors who proposed to convey his sacred person and his faithful attendants to some secure and distant station in the provinces of Gaul.... The recent danger to which the person of the emperor had been exposed in the defenceless palace of Milan urged him to seek a retreat in some inaccessible fortress of Italy, where he might securely remain while the open country was covered by a deluge of barbarians."

No historian of Ravenna, and certainly no writer upon the fall of the empire, has cared to understand what Ravenna was. Gibbon complains that he lacks "a local antiquarian and a good topographical map;" yet it is not so much the lack of local knowledge that leads him unreservedly to censure Honorius for his retreat upon Ravenna, as the fact that he has not perhaps really grasped what Ravenna was, what was her relation to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, and especially how she stood to the sea, and what part that sea played in the geography and strategy of the empire.

For my part I shall maintain that, whatever may be the truth as to the private character of Honorius, which would indeed be difficult to defend, he was wisely advised by those counsellors who conceived his retreat from Milan to Ravenna; that this retreat was not a mere flight, but a consummate and well thought out strategical and political move, and that any other would have been for the worse and would probably have involved the West in an utter destruction.

Cisalpine Gaul, at this crisis, as always both before and since, was the great and proper defence of Italy; not the Alps nor the Apennines but Cisalpine Gaul broke the barbarians, and, in so far as it could be materially saved, saved Italy and our civilisation, of which Rome was the soul. There Stilicho met Alaric and broke his first and worst enthusiasm; there Leo the Great turned back Attila; there the fiercest terror of the Lombard tide spent itself.

Now, as we have seen, Cisalpine Gaul, in its relation to Italy, was best held and contained from Ravenna, which commanded, whenever it was in danger, the narrow pa.s.s between them. Therefore the retreat of Honorius upon Ravenna was a consummate strategical act, well advised and such as we might expect from "the successor of Augustus." Its results were momentous and entirely fortunate for Italy, and indeed, when the truth about Ravenna is once grasped, any other move would appear to have been craven and ridiculous.

But there is something more that is of an even greater importance.

The best hope of the West in its fight with the barbarian undoubtedly lay in its own virility and arms, but it had the right to expect that in such a fight it would not be unaided by the eastern empire and the great civilisation whose capital was that New Rome upon the Bosphorus.

If it was to receive such a.s.sistance, it must receive it at Ravenna, which held Cisalpine Gaul and was the gate of the eastern sea.

When Honorius then retreated upon Ravenna, he did so, not merely because Ravenna was impregnable, though that of course weighed too with his advisers, for the base of any virile and active defence must, or should, be itself secure; but also because it held the great pa.s.s and the great road into Italy, and as the eastern gate of the West would receive and thrust forward whatever help and reinforcement the empire in the East might care or be able to give.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SARCOPHAGUS OF THE EMPEROR HONORIUS]