Rome Part 1

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 abolishing 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 worship 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 ship, 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 ship 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.

But when "new Rome" is condemned let us not forget that it has given us what the learning and the riches of the most munificent popes never compa.s.sed--an excavated Forum.

There is no Mayfair and no Seven Dials in Rome. The poor live, and have always lived, cheek by jowl with the rich: a palace in the Ghetto and a hovel in the Corso have each existed without offence. This brings us to another permanent feature of Roman life--the beggars.

Rome has always lived on the foreigner, and it has always had troops of beggars patrolling its streets, in the time of the Antonines as in that of Gregory the Great, or as in that of the latest of the sovereign pontiffs, Pius IX.; and the cheerful-faced beggar who was licensed by this pope to sit by the statue of Saint Peter lived to the closing years of the century and gave a dowry of 200,000 francs to his daughter on her marriage. The difficulties which met the Roman of the era of Gregory the Great when pest and the transition to the agricultural system of _coloni_ threw the serfs upon the streets, met the government of Italy when after September 1870 the whole motley crowd which had been the recipient of the Christian system of alms-giving was in its turn suddenly thrown upon the streets of the city. Those who remember the "seventies" or the "eighties" in Rome remember the menacing manner in which "alms" were "asked," how near together were blessing and cursing, and how unfrequented roads and hills were beset by st.u.r.dy beggars, lineal descendants of the brigand who placing his hat in the roadway levelled his gun at you as he proffered the request: "For the love of G.o.d put something in that hat."

Papal charity pauperised a whole people: notices in the streets on wet days announced the free distribution of bread in the Colosseum; doles of bread were given by all the parish clergy to the practising members of their congregations. The men women and children who had pa.s.sed their time doing odd jobs in churches, following viatic.u.m and funeral processions, and providing a church crowd on all occasions, were suddenly called upon to make some concession to the modern spirit--hawking a bunch of crumpled flowers, a box of matches or a couple of bootlaces up and down the streets, in and out of the restaurants, these latest recruits to the commercial spirit exchanged the atmosphere of the sacristy for the busy whirl of trade without ceasing to be what they had always been, beggars pure and simple.

Successful attempts are now being made to put down begging. The great and real distress which exists in the city is mainly due to the excessive rents and the terrible overcrowding--in the _San Lorenzo_ quarter the modern poor of Rome may be found herded together with five, six, and even seven families living _in one room_. The mania for building in the "eighties" led to the "building crisis"; streets of unfinished houses mock the houseless poor and the "improvements" of the city are gradually demolishing the poorer dwellings. Amidst this misery it is still the old Roman population which receives most help; they are known in their parishes, and the old established subsidies and dowries come their way.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE BASILICA JULIA IN THE FORUM

The Capitol is to the left. The temple is built at the foot of the Capitol hill. See pages 3, 13, 30, 91.]

The population of Rome has varied as much as its fortunes. The maximum was reached in the time of the Flavian emperors--2 millions, but even in the time of Augustus the inhabitants probably numbered 1,300,000. A period of three hundred and fifty years, which brings us to the date of the "Peace of the Church," sufficed to decrease this number by more than a million (A.D. 335). After a thousand years of Christian domination the population of the city had sunk to its minimum, 17,000 (A.D. 1377). Even in the reign of the magnificent Leo X. it was not more than 30 or 40 thousand. From the beginning of the seventeenth century when it exceeded 100,000, it steadily increased, till in 1800 the population numbered 153,000. But during the "empire," 1812, it fell to 118,000. Ten years after "the Italians" entered Rome it had increased by 79,000, to 305,000. The last census, 1900, shows a resident population of 450,000--not a third of its cla.s.sical total--and Naples is still the most densely populated city of Italy.

The Greek tradition in Rome seems summed in the Palatine, the hill of "Pallas"; but the Capitol, the hill of Saturn, sums Italy itself. The one represents the Roman Empire, the other the Roman Commune--those liberties and that self-government which began with the entry of the _gentes_ and the formation from among them of the Roman Senate, and which were never to be abolished. The Palatine has not been inhabited since the officials of the Exarchate abandoned it in the eighth century; but the life of the Capitol has never been intermitted; it has never ceased to represent all the moments in the life of the Roman people. This distinction is sharply drawn to-day: the Palatine is a hill of majestic ruins visited only by the tourist, the Capitol is still the seat of the munic.i.p.ality of Rome, ascended by every couple for the celebration of their marriage, and its registers signalise every young life born to the city.

The munic.i.p.al franchises of Italy have played a large part in her history, and that of Rome is no exception. Moreover the Senate of Rome, the heads of each _gens_ from among the original settlers, and the _Populus_, who be it remembered were the _gentes_ and were never synonymous with the _plebs_, represented two constant facts and factors--a free Senate and free munic.i.p.al government by the _Populus Roma.n.u.s_. These flourished in the middle ages as they had flourished in the cla.s.sical city, and it was thus easy for Cola di Rienzo to restore them when the popes had abandoned the city to its fate. Papal letters to Charlemagne's predecessors were indited in the name of the Senate and people of Rome--a custom which influenced the early government of the Roman Church herself, for her letters to other Christian Churches were written in the name of "the Roman Church,"

even when, as in the case of Clement's epistle, they were the actual handiwork of the then head of the Christian community. Again, when Pepin obliged the Lombard king to cede the exarchate of Ravenna not to the emperor but to Rome, the words employed were: "to the Holy Church and the Roman Republic." Even in the time of the proud Innocent III.

the city was still governed "by the Senate and people of Rome," and when the Romans again tired of their Senate--as tradition says they had done when they made Numa king--they created in its place a supreme magistrate who was designated "the Senator," one of whose duties was to maintain the pontiff in his See, and to provide conveniently for his safe conduct and that of the Sacred College when journeying within his jurisdiction. The extent of this jurisdiction is perhaps all that now remains of the power once held by the Senate and Roman people. The munic.i.p.ality of Rome is the largest in the world; it is conterminous with the whole Roman _agro_, so that its history is inseparably linked with that of the Roman boundaries as well as with the life of the Roman people.

The outward and visible sign of these primaeval Roman liberties is the tetragram S.P.Q.R.--_Senatus Populus Que Roma.n.u.s_ (the Roman Senate and People), which took the place of the earlier formula _Populus Roma.n.u.s et Quirites_, and it is of the Sabines, not of the humble conjunction, that that Q still reminds us. All down the centuries we may recognise those four letters--surmounted in imperial times by an eagle--crowning the standard of the Romans, carried far and wide not only through the streets of the city and to the uttermost ends of the earth, but in that religious perl.u.s.tration of the _ager_ when the ambarvalia rites were celebrated at the Cluilian Trench which separated Rome from Alba Longa, the site of the combat between the Alban Curatii and the Roman Horatii. One of the finest remains in the Forum is the marble relief which represents the _suovetaurilia_, the sow, sheep, and bull sacrificed on this occasion. That Roman greatness which came to be synonymous with confines as large as the known world, had risen with the recognition of these sacred limits, limits which still define the Roman munic.i.p.ality--the symbol of Roman liberties.

The Pragmatic Sanction and the world power of Rome! Can two things be more disparate? Yet the version which renders S.P.Q.R. into _Si Peu Que Rien_ must surely be laid at the door of "Gallicanism"--it points to an ecclesiastical not a political _diminutio capitis_. The tract of the city which we see from the terrace on the Pincian hill, looking towards the Janiculum, has been called the most historic plot of land in the world. Is it without reason that the furthest point of this unequalled panorama is the dome which Michael Angelo erected over the tomb of S. Peter? Three mighty civilisations--the Etruscan, the Roman, the Christian--resulted in the foundation of two world empires. Rome is now entering on a third existence, its existence as the capital of Italy, but has it suffered thereby no _diminutio capitis_? Is it not a fact that the cla.s.sical and the ecclesiastical represented her only world-wide destinies, the only life of Rome which penetrated as truly beyond the city as within its cla.s.sic confines? Has not the papacy, with all its faults, been the actual link connecting ancient and modern Rome, preserving unbroken the tradition which gave her, beyond her ritual boundaries, the government of the world without?

[Ill.u.s.tration: S. PETER'S AND CASTEL SANT' ANGELO FROM THE TIBER

See pages 16, 32, 239, 242.]

CHAPTER II

ROMAN BUILDING AND DECORATION

Shepherds' huts cl.u.s.tered upon a hill top whose base is washed by a swift yellow river rushing to the sea not far distant. This is the first faint foreshadowing of the existence of Rome which reaches us dimly across the centuries. These shepherd settlers had chosen a site propitious for the foundation of the great city which was to be raised upon those grouped hills by the skilful hands of their descendants, for the necessary building materials lay close at hand in lavish profusion. One of the neighbouring hills, known later as the Janiculum, and parts of another, the Pincian, yielded a fine yellow sand. Beneath the surface soil was volcanic rock, which, in a prehistoric age when the campagna was a sea-bed and waves lapped against Monte Cavo, had been poured out in great liquid streams from volcanoes amongst the Alban hills and at Bracciano. Close at hand in the plain lay immense beds of a chocolate-brown earth with which later builders were to manufacture cement.

The makers of Rome therefore had only to quarry their building stone on the very site of their city, and we can still recognise in the few fragments that have come down to us the rectangular blocks of brown tufa used in the first period of her history. These earliest monuments, the walls of Servius Tullius and the vaults of the Mamertine prisons, were the direct outcome of a period of Etruscan dominion, and one of the first great works undertaken in the growing city, the draining of the swamps of the Forum, Campus Martius and Velabrum, was due to Tarquinius Priscus, the immense _cloacae_ built for the purpose being still in use, and their masonry as strong as when they were constructed about 603 B.C. The two Etruscan kings, Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus, built the first triple shrine on the Capitol dedicated to the three Etruscan G.o.ds, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and the primitive Roman temples, consisting of a simple _cella_ with a peristyle, were doubtless Etruscan in character and were decorated with terra-cotta and bronze in the Etruscan manner.

The Romans were born builders and engineers, and in these branches they quickly outstripped their predecessors and instructors. If they were deficient in artistic originality, they evinced a readiness to imitate and a power of appreciating skill and proficiency in the arts wherever they met with them, and their practical and utilitarian spirit taught them how to adopt and improve upon experience and guided them in the choice of right materials.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE PORTICO OF THE DII CONSENTES

One of the earliest monuments of Rome; originally built in the reign of the last of the Tarquins or the first years of the Republic, but twice reconstructed during the Empire. It served as the Treasury of Rome. The granite columns with marble capitals are of the Ionic order. See pages 30, 181.]

A period when the influence of Greece predominated succeeded the first epoch in the building of Rome, and to this time must be ascribed the adoption of the Greek models for public buildings, for circuses, baths, and basilicas. Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric columns were imported into Rome, the latter undergoing some modification to suit the Romans' more florid taste. The temples became h.e.l.lenic in style.