Says I, “Old man, your horse will die”;
Says he, “If he dies I’ll tan his skin,
And if he lives I’ll ride him agin.”
It fits the Irish temper, North and South, pleasant enough to travel
amongst, but bad, I should think, to live with.
“Panem et Circenses”, Rome, 21 st April 1895.
I have been asking myself at least a dozen times a day during the
last fortnight, why Rome should be (to me, at any rate) the city of
surprises, far more than Athens or Constantine, for instance, or
any other city or scene of world-wide interest in Europe or America.
Jerusalem and the Nile cities I have never seen (and fear I never shall
now). Surely, to what I take to be the majority of your readers, who
have gone through, as I have, the orthodox educational mill--public
school and college--precisely the contrary should be true. We spent no
small part of from six to ten years of the most impressionable time of
our lives in studying the story of the Mistress of the Old World, from
Romulus and Remus to the Anto-nines. Even the idlest and most careless
of us could scarcely have passed his “greats” without knowing his
geography well enough to point out on the map the position of each of
the seven hills, the Forum, the Janiculum, the Appian Way, the Arch of
Titus, the Colosseum, etc., and must have formed some kind of notion
in his own mind of what each of them looked like. At any rate, I had
no excuse for not knowing my ancient Rome better than I knew any modern
city, both as to its geography and the politics, beliefs, and habits
of its citizens; for I was for two years in the pupil-room of a teacher
(Bishop Cotton) who spared no pains, not only on the texts of Livy,
Horace, Sallust, and Juvenal, and the geography, but in making the Rome
of the last years of the Republic and the first Caesars live again for
us. For instance, he would collect for us all the best engravings then
to be had (it was before the days of photographs) of Rome, and show us
what remained of the old buildings and monuments, and where the Papal
city had encroached and superseded them; and again, would take infinite
pains to explain the changes in the ordinary life of the Roman citizen,
which had been creeping on since the end of the third Punic war, when
her last formidable rival went down, and the struggle between patrician
and plebeian had time and opportunity to develop and work itself out,
till it ended in the Augustan age, when the will of the Cæsar remained
the sole ultimate law, in Rome, and over the whole Empire. Of course the
explanation of the phrase “Panem et circenses,” and the growth of
the system, in the shape of public feastings, shows, baths, and other
entertainments, with which each successful Tribune or General, as he
came to the front, and the Cæsars after them, tried to bribe and sway
the mob of the Forum, formed no small part of this instruction. One item
of the list will best illustrate my text--that of public baths--which
came most directly home to me, as I was devoted to swimming in those
days, and so had great sympathy with the poor citizen of Imperial Rome
who desired to have baths in the best form and without payment.
I do not know that there is any trustworthy evidence as to the public
baths of Rome before Imperial times, but we can estimate pretty
accurately how the case stood for the poor Roman in the first and second
centuries A.D. The best preserved of these are the Baths of Caracalla,
in which sixteen hundred bathers could be accommodated at once.
The enclosed area was 360 yards square, or considerably larger than
Lincoln’s Inn Fields; but this included a course for foot-races, in
which, I suppose, the younger bathers contended when fresh from the
delights of hot and cold baths, while their elders looked on from the
porticoes adjoining. The bathing establishment proper, however, was 240
yards in length, by 124 yards in width, in which the divisions of
the “tepidaria,” “calidaria,” and “frigidaria,” are still confidently
pointed out in Baedeker, and attested by guides if you like to hire
them. But the part which interested me most, apart from the huge masses
of wall still standing, was the depression in the floor, which is said
to have been the swimming-bath, and which is at least twice as large as
those of the Holborn and Lambeth baths, the two largest in London in my
time, put together.
The remains of the walls are just astounding, eight feet and ten feet
thick, and (I should say) in several places fifty feet high; the thin
Roman bricks, and the mortar in which they are built, as hard as they
were in the second century. I wish I could feel any confidence that any
of our London brickwork would show as well even a century hence. When
the floors were all covered with mosaic pavement, of which small pieces
now carefully preserved still remain, and the brickwork of the walls
was faced with marble, and the statues which have been found here and
removed to museums, still stood round the central fountain and in the
courts, my imagination quite fails to picture what the baths must have
looked like. But the Baths of Caracalla, though best preserved, are
not by any means the largest. Those of Diocletian, on the Quirinal and
partly facing the railway station, were almost twice as big, for the
circumference of the bath buildings was about 2000 yards, or half as
large again as the Baths of Caracalla, while they would accommodate (it
is said) three thousand bathers at once. It is even more impossible,
however, to reconstruct these baths in one’s fancy than those of
Caracalla, for the church of St. Bernardo occupies one domed corner of
the area, and a prison another corner; while a convent, with the Church
of St. Maria degli Angeli attached--built by Michael Angelo by order
of Pius IV.--stands over what was the “tepidarium.” There is still,
however, space enough left for the large square, as big as Bedford
Square, and surrounded by cloisters said to be also the work of Michael
Angelo, in which stand a number of the most interesting statues and
busts, and architectural fragments lately exhumed.
I have by no means exhausted the opportunities enjoyed by the Roman
citizen under the Antonines for getting a satisfactory, not to say a
luxurious, wash in the Roman summer, but must turn aside for a minute to
tell you of an interesting little scene which I saw outside on leaving
the Baths of Diocletian. Along the bottom of the old ruined wall still
standing, and looking as firm as that of Caracalla, for about fifty
yards, earth and rubbish has been allowed to accumulate to the height of
twelve or fourteen feet. This dirt-heap covers some twenty feet of the
open space between the old wall and the footway, and, the face of it
having been trampled hard, forms a steep slope, of which the Roman
urchin of to-day seems to have taken possession, and thereon thoroughly
to enjoy himself after his own fashion. This is a very different way
from that of our street-boys, if I may judge by what I saw in passing. A
group of some dozen little ragged urchins--four with bare feet--were
at high jinks as I came up; and this was their pastime. The biggest of
them, a sturdy boy of (perhaps) eleven or twelve, stood at the bottom of
the steep slope, facing the wall, with his feet firmly set, and his arms
wide open. The rest, who were at the top of the slope, against the wall,
ran down one after another and threw themselves into his arms, clasping
him round the neck, and getting a good hug before he dropped them. The
object seemed to be (so far as I could see) to throw him over backwards,
but he stood his ground firmly, only staggering a little once or twice
during the two rounds which I was able to watch. I was obliged then to
leave, wondering, and debating in my mind what would be the result of
such a game if tried by our street boys in a London suburb.
To go back to the Baths, there are remains of three more which must have
been no unworthy rivals of Caracalla’s and Diocletian’s--viz. those of
Constantine, Agrippa, and Titus. The first were also on the Quirinal,
and are said to have occupied the greater part of the present Piazza del
Quirinale, including the site of the Royal Palace. But as all that is
left of them is a fragment of the old boundary-wall here and there, one
can form no notion of their size or shape. One may, however, judge
of their character by magnificent colossal marble statues of the
“Horse-tamers,” which are known to have stood one on each side of the
principal entrance, and are believed to remain almost in the place where
they stand to-day. The Baths of Agrippa lay behind the Pantheon, but
a fluted column and ruined dome are all that remain of them in the
neighbouring streets, “Pumbella” and “Cumbella.” Lastly, there were
the Baths of Titus, begun by him in A.D. 80, on the Esquiline, which
included the sites of Mæcenas’ Villa and the Golden Palace of Nero,
which (I suppose) he must have demolished to make room for them; but the
tradition as to these ruins seems even more vague than that of any of
the other baths. I think you must allow that so far I have proved my
case, that Rome is the city of surprises.
Ever since my “Roman baths’ round,” the contrast of Imperial Rome and
our London has been popping up. Why have not we, at any rate, one or two
public baths on something like the old Roman scale? Did they really let
any Roman citizen bathe free of charge? Could we possibly do that?
and how? Well, after all, it only wants a Cæsar to work the “panem et
circenses” trick astutely. And have not we got at last our equivalent
for Nero or Titus in our County Council? True, our many-headed Cæsar has
not the tribute of a conquered world to draw on, or an unlimited supply
of prisoners of war, slaves, and poor Christians to set to the work. But
has not he the rates of London at his mercy--not a bad equivalent--and
the Collectivist Trade-Unionist, who may possibly be relied on to do as
fair a day’s work at the scale-wages as the unpaid slave or
Christian did for Titus? Well, I do not know that I should protest
vigorously--only I am no longer a London ratepayer.