[Illustration: 21 SEPULCHRE OF ROMULUS, FORUM]
My visit to the Roman Forum when the Genius Loci verified to my
ignorance and the intelligence of my companions the well-conjectured
site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator was not the first nor yet the
second visit I had paid the place. There had been intermediate mornings
when I met two friends there, indefinitely more instructed, with whom I
sauntered from point to point, preying upon their knowledge for my
emotion concerning each. Information is an excellent thing--in others;
and but for these friends I should not now be able to say that this
mouldering heap of brickwork, rather than that, was Julius Caesar's
house; or just where it was that Antony made his oration over the waxen
effigy which served him for Caesar's body. They helped me realize how
the business life and largely the social life of Rome centred in the
Forum, but spared me so much detail that my fancy could play about among
its vanished edifices without inconvenience from the clutter of shops
and courts and monuments which were ultimately to hem it in and finally
to stifle it. They knew their Forum so well that they could not only
gratify any curiosity I had, but could supply me with curiosity when I
had none. For the moment I was aware that this spot or that, though it
looked so improbable, was the scene of deeds which will reverberate
forever; they taught me to be tolerant of what I had too lightly
supposed fables as serious traditions closely verging on facts. I
learned to believe again that the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus,
because she had her den no great way off on the Palatine, and that
Romulus himself had really lived, since he had died and was buried in
the Forum, where they showed me his tomb, or as much of it as I could
imagine in the sullen little cellar so called. They also showed me the
rostrum where the Roman orators addressed the mass-meetings of the
republican times, and they showed me the lake, or the puddle left of it,
into which Curtius (or one of three heroes of the name) leaped at an
earlier day as a specific for the pestilence which the medical science
of the period had failed to control. In our stroll about the place we
were joined by one of the several cats living in the Forum, which
offered us collectively its acquaintance, as if wishing to make us feel
at home. It joined us and it quitted us from time to time, as the whim
took it, but it did not abandon us wholly till we showed a disposition
to believe in that lake of Curtius, so called after those three
public-spirited heroes, the first being a foreigner. Then the cat, which
had more than once stretched itself as if bored, turned from us in
contempt and went and lay down in a sunny corner near the tomb of
Romulus, and fell asleep.
[Illustration: 22 TRAJAN'S FORUM AND COLUMN]
It is quite possible that my reader does not know, as lately I did not,
that the Roman Forum is but one of several forums connected with it by
ways long centuries since buried fathoms deep and built upon many
stories high. But I am now able to assure him that in the whole region
between the Roman Forum and the Forum of Trajan, which were formerly
opened into each other by the removal of a hill as tall as the top of
Trajan's Column, you pass over other forums hidden beneath your feet or
wheels. You cannot be stayed there, however, by the wonders which
archaeology will yet reveal in them (for archaeology has its relentless
eye upon every inch of the ground above them), but you will certainly
pause at the Forum of Trajan, where archaeology, as it is in
Commendatore Boni, has had its way already. In fact, until his work in
the Roman Forum is finished, the Forum of Trajan must remain his
greatest achievement, and the sculptured column of the great emperor
must serve equally as the archaeologist's monument. I do not remember
why in the old time I should have kept coming to look at that column and
study the sculptured history of Trajan's campaigns, toiling around it to
its top. I think one could then get close to its base, as now one
cannot, what with the deepening of the Forum to its antique level and
the enclosure of the whole space with an iron rail. The area below is
free only to a large company of those cats which seem to have their
dwelling among all the ruins and restorations of ancient Rome. People
come to feed the Trajan cats with the fish sold near by for the purpose,
and one morning, in pausing to view his column from the respectful
distance I had to keep, I counted no less than thirteen of his cats in
his forum. They were of every age and color, but much more respectable
in appearance than the cats of the Pantheon, which have no such sunny
expanse as that forum for their quarters, but only a very damp corner
beside the temple, and seem to have suffered in their looks and health
from the situation. It was afterward with dismay that I realized the
fatal number of the Trajan cats coming to their breakfast that morning
so unconscious of evil omen in the figure; but as there are probably no
statistics of mortality among the cats of Rome, I shall never know
whether any of the thirteen has rendered up one of their hundred and
seventeen lives.
However, if I allowed myself to go on about the cats of Rome, either
ancient or modern, there would be no end. For instance, in a statuary's
shop in the Via Sistina there is a large yellow cat, which I one day saw
dressing the hair of the statuary's boy. It performed this office with a
very motherly anxiety, seated on the top of a high rotary table where
ordinarily the statuary worked at his carving, and pausing from time to
time, as it licked the boy's thick, black locks, to get the effect of
its labors. On other days or at other hours it slept under the
table-top, unvexed by the hammering that went on over its head. Even in
Rome, where cats are so abundant, it was a notable cat.
If you visit the Roman Forum in the morning you are only too apt to be
hurried home by remembrance of the lunch-hour. That, at any rate, was my
case, but I was not so hungry that I would not pause on my way hotelward
at what used to be the Temple of Vesta in my earlier time, but which, is
now superseded by the more authentic temple in the Forum. I had long
revered the first in its former quality, and I now paid it the tribute
of unwilling renunciation. It is so nearly a perfect relic of ancient
Rome and so much more impressive, in its all but unbroken peristyle,
than the later but recumbent claimant to its identity that I am sure the
owners of the little bronze or alabaster copies of it scattered over the
world must share my pious reluctance. The custodian is still very proud
of it, and would have lectured me upon it much longer than I let him; as
it was, he kept me while he could cast a blazing copy of the _Popolo
Romano_ into the cavernous crypt under it, apparently to show me how
deep it was. He may have had other reasons; but in any case I urge the
traveller to allow him to do it, for it costs no additional fee, and it
seems to do him so much good. If it is not very near lunch-time, let the
traveller look well about him in the dusty little piazza there, for the
Temple of Fortune, with its bruised but beautiful facade, is hard by, as
much in the form that Servius Tullius gave it as could well be expected
after all this time.
Perhaps the Circus of Marcellus is on the traveller's way home to lunch;
but he will always be passing the segment of its arcaded wall, filled in
with mediaeval masonry; and he need not stop, especially if he has his
cab by the hour, for there is nothing more to be seen of the circus. A
glimpse, through overhanging foliage, of the steps to the Campidoglio,
with Castor and Pollux beside their horses at top, may be a fortunate
accident of his course. If this happens it will help to rehabilitate for
him the Rome of the paganism to which these divinities remained true
through all temptations to Judaize during the unnumbered centuries of
their sojourn, forgotten, in the Ghetto. It is hardly possible that his
glimpse will include even the top of Marcus Aurelius's head where he
sits his bronze charger--an extremely fat one--so majestically in the
piazza beyond those brothers, as if conscious of being the most noble
equestrian statue which has ridden down to us from antiquity.
A more purposed sight of all this will, of course, supply any defects of
chance, though I myself always liked chance encounters with the
monuments of the past. I had constantly cherished a remembrance of the
nobly beautiful facade which is all that is left of the Temple of
Neptune, and I meant deliberately to revisit it if I could find out
where it was. A kind fortuity befriended me when one day, driving
through the little piazza where it lurks behind the Piazza Co-lonna, I
looked up, and there, in awe-striking procession, stood the mighty
antique columns sustaining the entablature of mediaeval stucco with
their fluted marble. I could not say why their poor, defaced, immortal
grandeur should have always so affected me, for I do not know that my
veneration was due it more than many other fragments of the past; but no
arch or pillar of them all seems so impressive, so pathetic. To make the
reader the greatest possible confidence, I will own that I passed five
times through the Piazza Colonna to my tailor's in the next piazza (at
Rome your tailor wishes you to try on till you have almost worn your new
clothes out in the ordeal) before I realized that the Column of Marcus
Aurelius was not the more famous Column of Trajan. There is, in fact, a
strong family likeness between these columns, both being bandaged round
from bottom to top with the tale of the imperial achievements and having
a general effect in common; but there is no brother or cousin to the
dignity of that melancholy yet vigorous ruin of the Temple of Neptune,
or anything that resembles it in the whole of ancient Rome. It survives
having been a custom-house and being a stock-exchange without apparent
ignominy, while one feels an incongruity, to say the least, in the
Column of Marcus Aurelius looking down on the sign of the Mutual Life
Insurance Company of New York. Whether this is worse than for the
Palazzo di Venezia to confront the American Express Company where it is
housed on the other side of the piazza I cannot say. What I can say is
that I believe the Temple of Neptune would have been superior to either
fate; though I may be mistaken.
Ruin, nearly everywhere in Rome, has to be very patient of the
environment; and even the monuments of the past which are in
comparatively good repair have not always the keeping that the past
would probably have chosen for them. One that suffers as little as any,
if not the very least, is the Pantheon, on whose glorious porch you are
apt to come suddenly, either from a narrow street beside it or across
its piazza, beyond the fountain fringed with post-card boys and their
bargains. In spite of them, the sight of the temple does mightily lift
the heart; and though you may have had, as I had, forty-odd years to
believe in it, you must waver in doubt of its reality whenever you see
it. It seems too great to be true, standing there in its immortal
sublimity, the temple of all the gods by pagan creation, and all the
saints by Christian consecration, and challenging your veneration
equally as classic or catholic. It is worthy the honor ascribed to it in
the very latest edition of Murray's _Handbook_ as “the best-preserved
monument of ancient Rome”; worthy the praise of the fastidious and
difficult Hare as “the most perfect pagan building in the city”; worthy
whatever higher laud my unconsulted Baedeker bestows upon it. But I
speak of the outside; and let not the traveller grieve if he comes upon
it at the noon hour, as I did last, and finds its vast bronze doors
closing against him until three o'clock; there are many sadder things in
life than not seeing the interior of the Pantheon. The gods are all
gone, and the saints are gone or going, for the State has taken the
Pantheon from the Church and is making it a national mausoleum. Victor
Emmanuel the Great and Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise
the wide Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks
down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the
visitors' book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not suffice to
fill, and which the lingering side altars scarcely relieve.
I proved the fact by successive visits; but, after all my content with
the outside of the Pantheon, I came to think that what you want in Rome
is not the best-preserved monument, not the most perfect pagan building,
but the most ruinous ruin you can get. I am not sure that you get this
in the mouldering memorials of the past on the Palatine Hill, but you
get something more nearly like it than anything I can think of at the
moment. In that imperial and patrician and plutocratic residential
quarter you see, if you are of the moderately moneyed middle class, what
the pride of life must always come to when it has its way; and your
consolation is full if you pause to reflect how some day Fifth Avenue
and the two millionaire blocks eastward will be as the Palatine now is.
Riches and power are of the same make in every time, though they may
wear different faces from age to age; and it will be well for the very
wealthy members of our smart set to keep this fact in mind when they
visit that huge sepulchre of human vainglory.
But I will not pretend that I did so myself that matchless April morning
when I climbed over the ruins of the Palatine and found the sun rather
sickeningly hot there. That is to say, it was so in the open spaces
which were respectively called the house of this emperor and that, the
temple of this deity or that, whose divine honors half the Caesars
shared; in the Stadium, beside the Lupercal, and the like. The Lupercal
was really imaginable as the home of the patroness wolf of Rome, being a
wild knot of hill fitly overgrown with brambles and bushes, and looking
very probably the spot where Caesar would thrice have refused the crown
that Antony offered him. But for the rest, one ruin might very well pass
for another; a temple with a broken statue and the stumps of a few
columns could very easily deceive any one but an archaeologist.
Fortunately we had the charming companionship of one of the most amiable
of archaeologists, who was none the less learned for being a woman; and
she made even me dimly aware of identities which would else have been
lost upon me. To be sure, I think that without help I should have known
the Stadium when I came to it, because it seemed studied from that in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, though it was indefinitely more
dilapidated, was so obviously meant for the same sorts of games and
races. I do not know but it was larger than the Cambridge Stadium,
though I will not speak so confidently of its size as of that deathly
cold in the vaults and subterranean passages by which we found our way
to the burning upper air out of the foundations and basements of palaces
and temples and libraries and theatres that had ceased to be.
[Illustration: 23 THE ROSTRA IN THE FORUM]
One of the most comfortable of these galleries was that in which
Caligula was justly done to death, or, if not Caligula, it was some
other tyrant who deserved as little to live. But for our guide I should
not have remembered his slaughter there, and how much satisfaction it
had given me when I first read of it in Goldsmith's _History of Rome;_
and really you must not acquaint yourself too early with such facts, for
you forget them just when you could turn them to account. History is apt
to forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward; and
you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow to remind
you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not known. Suetonius,
Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad preparations for a visit
to the Palatine, but it is better to have read them yesterday than the
day before if you wish to draw suddenly upon them for associations with
any specific spot. If I were to go again to the Palatine, I would take
care to fortify myself with such structural facts from Hare's _Walks in
Rome,_ or from Murray, or even from Baedeker, as that it was the home of
Augustus and Tiberius, Domitian and Nero and Caligula and Septimius
Severus and Germanicus, and a very few of their next friends, and that
it radically differed from the Forum in being exclusively private and
personal to the residents, while that was inclusively public and common
to the whole world. I strongly urge the reader to fortify himself on
this point, for otherwise he will miss such significance as the place
may possibly have for him. Let him not trust to his impressions from
his general reading; there is nothing so treacherous; he may have
general reading enough to sink a ship, but unless he has a cargo taken
newly on board he will find himself tossing without ballast on those
billowy slopes of the Palatine, where he will vainly try for definite
anchorage.
The billowy effect of the Palatine, inconvenient to the explorer, is its
greatest charm from afar, in whatever morning or evening light, or sun
or rain, you get its soft, brownish, greenish, velvety masses. Distance
on it is best, and distance in time as well as space. If you can believe
the stucco reconstruction opposite the Forum gate, ruin has been even
kinder to the Palatine than to the Forum, with which it was equally ugly
when in repair, if taken in the altogether, however beautiful in detail.
As you see it in that reproduction, it is a horror, and a very vulgar
horror, such a horror as only unlimited wealth and uncontrolled power
can produce. If you will think of individualism gone mad, and each
successive personality crushing out and oversloughing some other,
without that regard for proportion and propriety which only the sense of
a superior collective right can inspire, you will imagine the Palatine.
Mount Morris, at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously
built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to
house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other,
would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have
been like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris, even allowing for
the natural growth of the landscape in two thousand years, could show no
such prospect twenty centuries hence as we got that morning from a bit
of wilding garden near the Convent of San Bonaventura, on the brow of
the Palatine. Some snowy tops pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon,
and across the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and
stumbled to their legs again. The Baths of Caracalla bulked up in
rugged, monstrous fragments, and then in the foreground, filling the
whole eye, the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome sank round it. The
Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling with the broken syllables of
its demolition to impart a sense of its past, and at our feet in that
bit of garden where the roses were blooming and the plum-trees were
blowing and the birds were singing, there stretched itself in the grass
a fallen pillar wreathed with the folds of a marble serpent, the emblem
of the oldest worship under the sun, as I was proud to remember without
present help. It was the same immemorial, universal faith which the
Mound Builders of our own West symbolized in the huge earthen serpents
they shaped uncounted ages before the red savages came to wonder at
them, and doubtless it had been welcomed by Rome in her large, loose,
cynical toleration, together with cults which, like that of Isis and
Osiris, were fads of yesterday beside it. Somehow it gave the humanest
touch in the complex impression of the overhistoried scene. It made one
feel very old, yet very young--old with the age and young with the youth
of the world--and very much at home.