ROMAN YESTERDAYS
The Gods of the Roman World—Leaven of Christianity—Measures of
the Emperors Against the Christians—Nine General Persecutions—Mad
Extremes of Heliogabalus—Rescue of the Bodies of the
Apostles—Tragic History of the Appian Way—The Joys of Solitude—How
Marion Crawford Became the Master of San Niccola—A Solitude of
Relaxation and Quiet—A Secluded Garden on the River in Rome—The
Contrasts of Life and the Happiness in Hoping—An Artist’s
Festival—How a Roman Emperor Looked.
Few things in the records of the past are stranger than the variations
of attitude of the Roman Emperors (barring some hæmatomaniacs like
Nero) towards Christianity during the first three or four centuries
of our era, quite apart from the moral attributes of the Emperors
themselves. One feels, through the edicts, the bored irritation of the
rulers at having to trouble themselves at all about a few low-born
individuals led away, as was believed, by a crazy illusion about
another world, a life after this one, which they promised to all who
would renounce the real pleasures—those considered as such by the great
ones of the day and their followers—pride and power, riches, ambition,
the lust of the eyes, and the lust of the flesh. “Surely,” one seems to
hear authority exclaim, “human nature may be trusted to fight for its
own, against such fanatics! We have had our Stoics and their disciples,
and no one had to legislate against them. All they claimed was the
right to despise ease and pleasure, and to find their reward in the
admiration or notoriety that they gained in the process. Their very
uncomfortable doctrines were never the cause of great social upheavals!
What is behind this new teaching that men should be so excited about
it?”
Then little by little there creeps in the sign of an unexplained fear,
the sense of being confronted by a new mysterious power, great enough
to be menacing to the old order of things, which, after all, had served
well and should not be interfered with unnecessarily. Few of the upper
classes, except in times of great trouble, really relied much on the
protection of Rome’s inherited gods, but all felt that their worship
was a powerful weapon wherewith to control or drive the great mass
of the people. The common herd clung tenaciously to the belief that
prosperity followed on faithfulness to the old deities, and misfortune
on any affront offered them. These tiresome Christians went out of
their way to show their scorn of the very mixed crowd of gods and
goddesses whom Rome had enshrined on her altars, and it was imprudent
to seem to pass over such offences against the public taste. One ruler
tries to suppress the Christians with a high hand; another suggests a
compromise—he is willing to place the statue of Christ in the Capitol
if they will show equal respect for the earlier residents there. No?
Oh, well, let them be exterminated, then, since they are so bent on
destruction! The edicts are issued and fiercely followed up, till
even the persecutors weary of the diversion and stop as if for want
of breath. But the edicts are not repealed, and they lie there at the
disposal of bloody-minded governors or covetous informers, who desire
to annex some Christian’s estates or to possess themselves of beautiful
Christian maids. Nine official general persecutions we count in all,
spread over some three hundred years, but it must not be thought that
the Church had peace, except occasionally for very short intervals,
between. The reigning Emperor might be a monster like Nero or Domitian,
or a gentle-minded tolerant man like Alexander Severus, the streams of
blood were made to flow with awful continuity just the same, owing to
the enormous power placed in the hands of his deputies, the governors
of the cities and provinces that made up the unwieldy Empire.
These fluctuations account for the many transportations of the relics
of the chief martyrs to different hiding-places during those early
centuries. For some hundred and fifty years the bodies of the Apostles,
St. Peter and St. Paul, reposed in the tombs where they had been
first placed, and where they now lie, but soon after the accession
of Heliogabalus to the throne, the reigning Pope, St. Calixtus, found
it necessary to remove them to a distant and secret spot in order to
protect them from the most revolting sacrilege. Heliogabalus, the
maddest of all the mad Emperors, suddenly decreed that no god but
himself should be worshipped in Rome. He built a gorgeous temple to
himself on the Palatine, and as the pagan historian, Lampridius, tells
us, made arrangements to transfer to this temple not only all the
objects of worship most sacred in the eyes of the Romans, and regarded
by them as talismans upon the safeguarding of which the destinies
of the Empire depended—the fire of Vesta, the statue of Cybele,
the Palladium, the Ancilia—but also “the religions of the Jews and
Samaritans, and the Christian objects of devotion, in order that the
priests of Heliogabalus should hold the secrets of every worship.”
It was well known that the objects most dear to Christian devotion were
the bodies of the glorious Apostles, and a hundred and fifty years of
continuous pilgrimage to their tombs had marked the way fairly clearly
to those once secluded spots. St. Calixtus, it seems, was already
preparing to remove the bodies when a new whim of the maniac Emperor
caused him to do so with extreme haste. Heliogabalus issued orders for
a great exhibition of harnessed elephants on the Vatican plain, and, to
procure sufficient space for the show, commanded that all inequalities
should be levelled and all the sepulchres, pagan or Christian, should
be destroyed.
In fear and haste, St. Calixtus transported the holy remains to the
Appian Way, already by that time honey-combed with subterranean vaults
and passages. Above ground, the place was marked by the monuments of
the Cæcilii, whose illustrious daughter was soon to lie below; but St.
Calixtus feared that the existing vaults, now for the first time called
“Catacombs,” were already too widely known to offer complete protection
to the precious relics; so he caused a new chamber to be dug deep in
the rock, to the right of the way, disposing the only entrance to it
through a well; and there he laid the Apostles, each in a separate
tomb, to abide the hour of the triumph of the Church.
The Appian Way, with its miles of magnificent pagan monuments on the
surface, and its far-reaching secret sanctuaries below, has in the
course of time taken on something like a personality of its own. It is
like a ribbon of marble laid across a sea of beauty even now, when the
famous villas and gardens, overflowing with blooms gathered from every
clime and shaded by groves of ilex and cedar, of palm and sycamore and
cypress, have all been swept into the rich, soft mould; there you can
look across twenty miles of waving grasses and wild flowers, broken
only by some fragment still majestic in ruin and guarded by the dark,
slender watch-towers—memories of a later age, when the few scared
shepherds had to fly from Hun or Saracen—that rise at intervals all the
way to the sea. The solitude seems boundless, yet gentle and familiar;
little blind winds come wandering across from the south and lose their
way among the flowers; for the Via Appia leads due south, and one knows
that it goes on into the war-ploughed Kingdom of Naples, that “hothouse
of Saints and Sinners,” with its fierce suns burning down on castles
whose very stones cry tragedy, on scorching hillsides where the black
grapes ripen into fiery wine, on flats seething in the heat under the
man-high crops of maize. But near Rome, looking towards the soft green
outline of the Alban Hills, all _that_ seems illusion; this is reality,
this empty space, untroubled by past or future, this sweep of dun gold
and fading purple; its surrounding hills that all look towards Rome
have seen the place unpeopled, seen it swarming with life; have seen it
flaring with pomp and then submerged in blood; now they are guardians
of that which modern cataclysms have failed to rend—the peace of a
place whence even the memory of humanity is banished and Nature smiles
and broods alone over her lovely handiwork.
Often I have longed to withdraw for a time to one of those lonely
watch-towers to “think things out.” We Crawfords have never been able
to see a really solitary spot without wanting it for our own. A certain
empty tomb lost among the Umbrian hills, with the sun turning the red
rock to gold and the wild camomile swaying its yellow blossoms in the
breeze over the doorway, has been a haven of my spirit through many a
breathless, over-peopled hour. I could fly there in mind, for days at
a time, into an atmosphere of such still liberty as is only granted
to disembodied souls. My dear brother Marion could never resist the
call of fortressed solitudes. The story of how he became the master of
San Niccola in Calabria is too characteristic not to be told in this
connection. San Niccola is an Angevin castle, with walls twenty feet
thick in places, perched on the rocks over an inhospitable little bay
on the coast of Calabria, a bay too small and shallow to permit of
sailing vessels being anchored inside its natural breakwater of tumbled
stones. Marion often sailed thither, and, leaving the yacht outside,
would scramble on shore and linger for hours in the shade of the huge
pile, weaving new stories and calling up pictures of the days when the
cry would ring along the coast that a Saracen sail was in sight, and
the inhabitants, snatching up whatever they could carry, raced for the
nearest tower of refuge. San Niccola looks like a huge dark monolith,
wide at the base and tapering slightly towards its truncated summit. It
contained but two apartments, a vast square space, without windows, for
animals below, and one great hall, as sparsely windowed as possible,
above. In this it resembles most of its fellows along the coast, where
“Carlo d’Angiò,” still almost a living personality to the people,
planted them, at short distances from one another, for this very
purpose.
It was a roasting hot day in August; the felucca (this was before my
brother bought the _Alda_) was swinging at anchor in deep water, and
the “padroni,” Marion and my sister-in-law, were sitting on the rocks
in the shade, after lunch—the hour when most people go to sleep, but
always a particularly inspiring one to him and responsible for many of
his quaint whims. Suddenly he jumped up and announced that he needed
a walk—he would go to the town—a tiny hamlet some miles distant—and
buy—I forget what—fresh eggs for the morrow’s breakfast, I think. Would
Bessie like to come?
Bessie, dozing over a novel under the shelter of a huge pink parasol,
scarcely thought it necessary to reply audibly to such a crazy
proposition, but as Marion turned and walked away she signalled to the
faithful Luigi to follow and look after him, which Luigi—with what
groans one can imagine, just after the midday macaroni and in that
blazing heat—obediently did.
The day wore on, the sun began to sink, and the evening breeze ruffled
the water. The parasol had long been closed, the novel thrown aside,
and Bessie was beginning to look anxiously landward, when the truants
reappeared in the distance. As they drew nearer she could see that
Marion carried in his hand a huge iron key, while Luigi, directly
behind him, was flinging his arms up in the air in gestures of
despair. As they came close, the gestures became those of beseeching
deprecation, and she realised that he was trying to say, unbeknown to
the “padrone,” “It was not my fault, Signora mia, oh indeed, not my
fault!” while Marion, a little in doubt as to his reception, stopped
before her and held up the great rusty key, saying, “It’s mine, _mine_,
my dear, for the next thirty years!”
“What—this awful place? Oh, why did I let you go away without me?” she
wailed. “What on earth are you going to do with it?—and what have you
paid for it?”
He mentioned the sum—not a very large one, it is true—but Luigi,
hovering near, pale and scared, whispered, with every appearance of
sincere grief: “He could have had it for the hundredth part of that,
Signora! Alas, for the good money! But it was not my fault—there was
no holding the Signore, and those assassins at the Municipio took
advantage of him!”
To tell the truth, it was not the money side of the matter which
distressed my sister-in-law so much as the prospect of being required
to come and pass weeks at a time in this grim dungeon, without a single
convenience of life, twelve miles from a market town, and of course
lashed to the battlements by every Mediterranean storm. It took her
some days to reconcile herself to the new acquisition—poor girl—but
Marion had not made a mistake, after all. The family was not invited
to San Niccola till he had made several journeys thither himself,
with carpenters and materials, and when they did come they found that
the lonely keep had been transformed internally to a quite possible
dwelling—though certainly an inconveniently isolated one. Generally,
however, he went there alone, to rest from everything connected with
modern life, and he found it a fine, quiet place for writing in, at any
rate.
I fancy that people who take such keen delight as we do in sympathetic
and cheery society are probably the ones who most enjoy—and need—the
relaxation of seclusion and quiet. I remember a curious nook that my
sister and I discovered in Rome itself; we never told any one about it,
and used to go there day after day to think the “long, long thoughts”
of youth and make wonderful plans for the two or three hundred years we
must have expected to live if they were all to be carried out!
From the Via di Repetta, on the right bank of the Tiber, we had noticed
on the opposite side two or three very old little houses, with tiny
gardens formed on the projecting bastions of a fragment of ancient
wall which must have been built to protect the Via Lungara from the
periodical overflowing of the river. Over the low parapet of one of
them we could see a few flowers, a lemon tree, and an oleander bush in
bloom; the owners of the old dwelling were never visible, but we made
up our minds to bribe them to let us into their deserted and alluring
back yard. Once in the Lungara we had some little trouble in locating
the house, as nothing of the river was visible between the closely-set
buildings that faced the street, but after one or two wrong shots we
found it—in the possession of a good-natured young woman who could
not in the least understand why we should offer her a lira for the
privilege of passing through to her “loggia,” a place she evidently
despised since, to our joy, we found that she never even hung out the
clothes to dry there, preferring the lines which run from window to
window on the upper stories of most of the poor houses in Rome. She
led us across the brick-floored kitchen, opened a door and shut it
behind us as soon as we had passed through, and we found ourselves in
a tiny paradise of flowers and herbs interspersed with fragments of
sculptured marble—a frond of acanthus, a whorl of tracery—and provided
with a stone seat inside the parapet. The whole jutted far out into
the river, whose rushing water filled the air with drowsy sound. A few
jonquils were blooming white and yellow in the clear shade; the pot
of carnations—every Italian woman of the lower class has one, which
she cherishes jealously—was spilling over with huge red “garofoli,”
scenting the air with their spicy fragrance, and from the seat by the
wall we could look up and down the river for a long, long way. The
coolness, the unassailable privacy yet open-air sweetness of it all was
indescribably delightful; for years we used to fly there when we had
something to think out; and when the new works for keeping the Tiber
within bounds swept the little old houses and their wee gardens away we
felt as if we had been robbed of a bit of home.
My dear sister Annie was usually the pioneer of our discoveries and
expeditions; she was of a bolder spirit than I, and was ever on the
alert for material for her painting, which was not always done with the
brush. She shared in particular my love of things Etruscan. We used to
fancy that we had both lived among the mysterious, beauty-loving people
of Etruria some three thousand years earlier. Everything connected with
them had a haunting power over us, and sometimes we used to put words
to the scenes on the vases and act them out with much fidelity for our
own satisfaction. Only one friend was admitted to share these archaic
sympathies and diversions; if these lines ever fall under “Minnie’s”
eyes, will she remember one notable night when she and Annie acted
the parts of the devoted maidens, in clinging drapery and fillet-bound
hair, who rescued the beautiful young warrior—myself—from the hideous
fate decreed for him by the (necessarily) invisible hierophants of
the sacred fane in the wardrobe—the dressing table serving for the
altar upon which he was to have been sacrificed? We were all three so
overcome at the conclusion of the drama that we broke down and wept in
each other’s arms! “La gioventù è un fiore che non ritorna più!”
But those whose youth has been fed with colour and imagination and
beauty keep young in spite of the passing of years. In looking back,
those stand out as the real things—the prosaic grind of existence
falls away and shows itself as mere illusion. After all, what would
life be without contrasts? They are the chief elements of drama. They
furnish all its spice. The blackest shadows prove the existence of the
brightest sun. It is the people who have nothing to wish for who are
to be pitied. The very poorest can dream and hope for some lightening
of their lot; and when pleasures come to them—little tiny pleasures
even—they enjoy them intensely; whereas those to whom nothing has
been denied find life so atrociously dull that only a constant series
of fictitious excitements enables them to bear it at all. Two men I
know were walking down Fifth Avenue one day and paused to admire a
magnificent diamond necklace displayed in a jeweller’s window. One of
them said, with a sigh, “What wouldn’t I give to be able to buy that
for my wife!” The other, a poor multi-millionaire, turned to him with a
snarl of envious rage: “You lucky fellow! You have something still left
to wish for!”
The best—in the way of mere pleasure—that some of us could desire would
be to live some hours over again and see once more the pictures that
filled them. There used to be a day in May when all the artists in
Rome united to hold high festival out in the country, and—speaking of
pictures—one such day comes back to me and claims its record. Nobody
was allowed to know beforehand what the brotherhood was planning to
do, but it was sure to be something very picturesque—and no wonder,
considering the elements and facilities brought to bear on it!
All who could do so went out towards the appointed spot, the caves
of Cervara, that morning, and we passed so many vehicles on the road
that we decided to turn off and make for our point across the turf,
all unenclosed in that part of the plain. We almost forgot what we had
come to look for, in the pleasure of moving soundlessly over the short,
new grass which gave out a warm fragrance of mint and thyme as it was
pressed by the horses’ feet. The velvety undulations between which we
threaded our way, shut out everything but the blue overhead and some
glimpses of the Sabines, swimming like huge sapphires in a haze of
airy gold. Suddenly, on the sky-line of a low ridge just ahead of us,
a towering car moved into view, drawn by four white oxen, whose gilded
horns were hung with wreaths of roses. The heavy wheels were smothered
in roses too, scattering pink and white petals as they revolved over
the newly-sprung grass. The sides of the car were all of fretted gold,
catching the sun in a hundred lovely scrolls and arabesques; raised
high on a gold and ivory throne sate—a Roman Emperor, his white robes
covered with jewels, the laurel wreath on his brow, his smooth young
beauty facing the radiant morning with bland immobile insolence, his
dark eyes fixed on the horizon, as if seeing his empire stretching
away till its confines were lost in the unknown East. Behind him two
black slaves held huge fans of white feathers over his head to protect
him from the heat; at his feet, on a swirl of panther skins, sate his
favourite of the moment, a beautiful, lithe Greek woman, her golden
hair crowned with roses, her bare arms covered with bracelets and
gleaming like marble in the sun, while a score or more of lovely girls
in classical draperies leaned over the gilt balustrades that sank, tier
below tier, from the sides of the throne down to the upper ledge of
the rose-wreathed wheels. Black slaves in scarlet tunics led the oxen,
urging them on with pointed gilt wands, and behind the Emperor’s car,
as far as one could see, followed a long procession of others, nearly
as splendid as the first, crowded with all his attendants, gorgeous
in raiment, grouped to perfection—and all, saving the ox-drivers,
motionless as statues. It was a dream of Imperial times, too surprising
to be real, till, as the first car passed close to us, one of the girls
began to laugh and flung a handful of rose-petals in my face.
How those young artists had enjoyed themselves in planning and
producing the marvellous show! Painting pictures on canvas is all very
well, but fancy the delight of making them live, on such a background,
before people’s eyes—of handling all that superb material to embody
visions that had haunted one despairingly for years, crying out to
be used and shown! Upon my word, if I could start life over again and
choose my own vocation, I believe I would make it that of a theatrical
manager—an artist in flesh and blood!