“THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD”
Marius awoke early and passed curiously from room to room, noting for
more careful inspection by and by the rolls of manuscripts. Even
greater than his curiosity in gazing for the first time on this ancient
possession, was his eagerness to look out upon Rome itself, as he
pushed back curtain and shutter, and stepped forth in the fresh morning
upon one of the many balconies, with an oft-repeated dream realised at
last. He was certainly fortunate in the time of his coming to Rome.
That old pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached its
perfection in the things of poetry and art—a perfection which indicated
only too surely the eve of decline. As in some vast intellectual
museum, all its manifold products were intact and in their places, and
with custodians also still extant, duly qualified to appreciate and
explain them. And at no period of history had the material Rome itself
been better worth seeing—lying there not less consummate than that
world of pagan intellect which it represented in every phase of its
darkness and light. The various work of many ages fell here
harmoniously together, as yet untouched save by time, adding the final
grace of a rich softness to its complex expression. Much which spoke of
ages earlier than Nero, the great re-builder, lingered on, antique,
quaint, immeasurably venerable, like the relics of the medieval city in
the Paris of Lewis the Fourteenth: the work of Nero’s own time had come
to have that sort of old world and picturesque interest which the work
of Lewis has for ourselves; while without stretching a parallel too far
we might perhaps liken the architectural finesses of the archaic
Hadrian to the more excellent products of our own Gothic revival. The
temple of Antoninus and Faustina was still fresh in all the majesty of
its closely arrayed columns of cipollino; but, on the whole, little had
been added under the late and present emperors, and during fifty years
of public quiet, a sober brown and gray had grown apace on things. The
gilding on the roof of many a temple had lost its garishness: cornice
and capital of polished marble shone out with all the crisp freshness
of real flowers, amid the already mouldering travertine and brickwork,
though the birds had built freely among them. What Marius then saw was
in many respects, after all deduction of difference, more like the
modern Rome than the enumeration of particular losses might lead us to
suppose; the Renaissance, in its most ambitious mood and with amplest
resources, having resumed the ancient classical tradition there, with
no break or obstruction, as it had happened, in any very considerable
work of the middle age. Immediately before him, on the square, steep
height, where the earliest little old Rome had huddled itself together,
arose the palace of the Caesars. Half-veiling the vast substruction of
rough, brown stone—line upon line of successive ages of builders—the
trim, old-fashioned garden walks, under their closely-woven walls of
dark glossy foliage, test of long and careful cultivation, wound
gradually, among choice trees, statues and fountains, distinct and
sparkling in the full morning sunlight, to the richly tinted mass of
pavilions and corridors above, centering in the lofty, white-marble
dwelling-place of Apollo himself.
How often had Marius looked forward to that first, free wandering
through Rome, to which he now went forth with a heat in the town
sunshine (like a mist of fine gold-dust spread through the air) to the
height of his desire, making the dun coolness of the narrow streets
welcome enough at intervals. He almost feared, descending the stair
hastily, lest some unforeseen accident should snatch the little cup of
enjoyment from him ere he passed the door. In such morning rambles in
places new to him, life had always seemed to come at its fullest: it
was then he could feel his youth, that youth the days of which he had
already begun to count jealously, in entire possession. So the grave,
pensive figure, a figure, be it said nevertheless, fresher far than
often came across it now, moved through the old city towards the
lodgings of Cornelius, certainly not by the most direct course, however
eager to rejoin the friend of yesterday.
Bent as keenly on seeing as if his first day in Rome were to be also
his last, the two friends descended along the _Vicus Tuscus_, with its
rows of incense-stalls, into the _Via Nova_, where the fashionable
people were busy shopping; and Marius saw with much amusement the
frizzled heads, then _à la mode_. A glimpse of the _Marmorata_, the
haven at the river-side, where specimens of all the precious marbles of
the world were lying amid great white blocks from the quarries of Luna,
took his thoughts for a moment to his distant home. They visited the
flower-market, lingering where the _coronarii_ pressed on them the
newest species, and purchased zinias, now in blossom (like painted
flowers, thought Marius), to decorate the folds of their togas.
Loitering to the other side of the Forum, past the great Galen’s
drug-shop, after a glance at the announcements of new poems on sale
attached to the doorpost of a famous bookseller, they entered the
curious library of the Temple of Peace, then a favourite resort of
literary men, and read, fixed there for all to see, the _Diurnal_ or
Gazette of the day, which announced, together with births and deaths,
prodigies and accidents, and much mere matter of business, the date and
manner of the philosophic emperor’s joyful return to his people; and,
thereafter, with eminent names faintly disguised, what would carry that
day’s news, in many copies, over the provinces—a certain matter
concerning the great lady, known to be dear to him, whom he had left at
home. It was a story, with the development of which “society” had
indeed for some time past edified or amused itself, rallying
sufficiently from the panic of a year ago, not only to welcome back its
ruler, but also to relish a _chronique scandaleuse;_ and thus, when
soon after Marius saw the world’s wonder, he was already acquainted
with the suspicions which have ever since hung about her name. Twelve
o’clock was come before they left the Forum, waiting in a little crowd
to hear the _Accensus_, according to old custom, proclaim the hour of
noonday, at the moment when, from the steps of the Senate-house, the
sun could be seen standing between the _Rostra_ and the _Græcostasis_.
He exerted for this function a strength of voice, which confirmed in
Marius a judgment the modern visitor may share with him, that Roman
throats and Roman chests, namely, must, in some peculiar way, be
differently constructed from those of other people. Such judgment
indeed he had formed in part the evening before, noting, as a religious
procession passed him, how much noise a man and a boy could make,
though not without a great deal of real music, of which in truth the
Romans were then as ever passionately fond.
Hence the two friends took their way through the Via Flaminia, almost
along the line of the modern Corso, already bordered with handsome
villas, turning presently to the left, into the Field-of-Mars, still
the playground of Rome. But the vast public edifices were grown to be
almost continuous over the grassy expanse, represented now only by
occasional open spaces of verdure and wild-flowers. In one of these a
crowd was standing, to watch a party of athletes stripped for exercise.
Marius had been surprised at the luxurious variety of the litters borne
through Rome, where no carriage horses were allowed; and just then one
far more sumptuous than the rest, with dainty appointments of ivory and
gold, was carried by, all the town pressing with eagerness to get a
glimpse of its most beautiful woman, as she passed rapidly. Yes! there,
was the wonder of the world—the empress Faustina herself: Marius could
distinguish, could distinguish clearly, the well-known profile, between
the floating purple curtains.
For indeed all Rome was ready to burst into gaiety again, as it awaited
with much real affection, hopeful and animated, the return of its
emperor, for whose ovation various adornments were preparing along the
streets through which the imperial procession would pass. He had left
Rome just twelve months before, amid immense gloom. The alarm of a
barbarian insurrection along the whole line of the Danube had happened
at the moment when Rome was panic-stricken by the great pestilence.
In fifty years of peace, broken only by that conflict in the East from
which Lucius Verus, among other curiosities, brought back the plague,
war had come to seem a merely romantic, superannuated incident of
bygone history. And now it was almost upon Italian soil. Terrible were
the reports of the numbers and audacity of the assailants. Aurelius, as
yet untried in war, and understood by a few only in the whole scope of
a really great character, was known to the majority of his subjects as
but a careful administrator, though a student of philosophy, perhaps,
as we say, a dilettante. But he was also the visible centre of
government, towards whom the hearts of a whole people turned, grateful
for fifty years of public happiness—its good genius, its
“Antonine”—whose fragile person might be foreseen speedily giving way
under the trials of military life, with a disaster like that of the
slaughter of the legions by Arminius. Prophecies of the world’s
impending conflagration were easily credited: “the secular fire” would
descend from heaven: superstitious fear had even demanded the sacrifice
of a human victim.
Marcus Aurelius, always philosophically considerate of the humours of
other people, exercising also that devout appreciation of every
religious claim which was one of his characteristic habits, had
invoked, in aid of the commonwealth, not only all native gods, but all
foreign deities as well, however strange.—“Help! Help! in the ocean
space!” A multitude of foreign priests had been welcomed to Rome, with
their various peculiar religious rites. The sacrifices made on this
occasion were remembered for centuries; and the starving poor, at
least, found some satisfaction in the flesh of those herds of “white
bulls,” which came into the city, day after day, to yield the savour of
their blood to the gods.
In spite of all this, the legions had but followed their standards
despondently. But prestige, personal prestige, the name of “Emperor,”
still had its magic power over the nations. The mere approach of the
Roman army made an impression on the barbarians. Aurelius and his
colleague had scarcely reached Aquileia when a deputation arrived to
ask for peace. And now the two imperial “brothers” were returning home
at leisure; were waiting, indeed, at a villa outside the walls, till
the capital had made ready to receive them. But although Rome was thus
in genial reaction, with much relief, and hopefulness against the
winter, facing itself industriously in damask of red and gold, those
two enemies were still unmistakably extant: the barbarian army of the
Danube was but over-awed for a season; and the plague, as we saw when
Marius was on his way to Rome, was not to depart till it had done a
large part in the formation of the melancholy picturesque of modern
Italy—till it had made, or prepared for the making of the Roman
Campagna. The old, unaffected, really pagan, peace or gaiety, of
Antoninus Pius—that genuine though unconscious humanist—was gone for
ever. And again and again, throughout this day of varied observation,
Marius had been reminded, above all else, that he was not merely in
“the most religious city of the world,” as one had said, but that Rome
was become the romantic home of the wildest superstition. Such
superstition presented itself almost as religious mania in many an
incident of his long ramble,—incidents to which he gave his full
attention, though contending in some measure with a reluctance on the
part of his companion, the motive of which he did not understand till
long afterwards. Marius certainly did not allow this reluctance to
deter his own curiosity. Had he not come to Rome partly under poetic
vocation, to receive all those things, the very impress of life itself,
upon the visual, the imaginative, organ, as upon a mirror; to reflect
them; to transmute them into golden words? He must observe that strange
medley of superstition, that centuries’ growth, layer upon layer, of
the curiosities of religion (one faith jostling another out of place)
at least for its picturesque interest, and as an indifferent outsider
might, not too deeply concerned in the question which, if any of them,
was to be the survivor.
Superficially, at least, the Roman religion, allying itself with much
diplomatic economy to possible rivals, was in possession, as a vast and
complex system of usage, intertwining itself with every detail of
public and private life, attractively enough for those who had but “the
historic temper,” and a taste for the past, however much a Lucian might
depreciate it. Roman religion, as Marius knew, had, indeed, been always
something to be done, rather than something to be thought, or believed,
or loved; something to be done in minutely detailed manner, at a
particular time and place, correctness in which had long been a matter
of laborious learning with a whole school of ritualists—as also, now
and again, a matter of heroic sacrifice with certain exceptionally
devout souls, as when Caius Fabius Dorso, with his life in his hand,
succeeded in passing the sentinels of the invading Gauls to perform a
sacrifice on the Quirinal, and, thanks to the divine protection, had
returned in safety. So jealous was the distinction between sacred and
profane, that, in the matter of the “regarding of days,” it had made
more than half the year a holiday. Aurelius had, indeed, ordained that
there should be no more than a hundred and thirty-five festival days in
the year; but in other respects he had followed in the steps of his
predecessor, Antoninus Pius—commended especially for his “religion,”
his conspicuous devotion to its public ceremonies—and whose coins are
remarkable for their reference to the oldest and most hieratic types of
Roman mythology. Aurelius had succeeded in more than healing the old
feud between philosophy and religion, displaying himself, in singular
combination, as at once the most zealous of philosophers and the most
devout of polytheists, and lending himself, with an air of conviction,
to all the pageantries of public worship. To his pious recognition of
that one orderly spirit, which, according to the doctrine of the
Stoics, diffuses itself through the world, and animates it—a
recognition taking the form, with him, of a constant effort towards
inward likeness thereto, in the harmonious order of his own soul—he had
added a warm personal devotion towards the whole multitude of the old
national gods, and a great many new foreign ones besides, by him, at
least, not ignobly conceived. If the comparison may be reverently made,
there was something here of the method by which the catholic church has
added the cultus of the saints to its worship of the one Divine Being.
And to the view of the majority, though the emperor, as the personal
centre of religion, entertained the hope of converting his people to
philosophic faith, and had even pronounced certain public discourses
for their instruction in it, that polytheistic devotion was his most
striking feature. Philosophers, indeed, had, for the most part, thought
with Seneca, “that a man need not lift his hands to heaven, nor ask the
sacristan’s leave to put his mouth to the ear of an image, that his
prayers might be heard the better.”—Marcus Aurelius, “a master in
Israel,” knew all that well enough. Yet his outward devotion was much
more than a concession to popular sentiment, or a mere result of that
sense of fellow-citizenship with others, which had made him again and
again, under most difficult circumstances, an excellent comrade. Those
others, too!—amid all their ignorances, what were they but instruments
in the administration of the Divine Reason, “from end to end sweetly
and strongly disposing all things”? Meantime “Philosophy” itself had
assumed much of what we conceive to be the religious character. It had
even cultivated the habit, the power, of “spiritual direction”; the
troubled soul making recourse in its hour of destitution, or amid the
distractions of the world, to this or that director—philosopho suo—who
could really best understand it.
And it had been in vain that the old, grave and discreet religion of
Rome had set itself, according to its proper genius, to prevent or
subdue all trouble and disturbance in men’s souls. In religion, as in
other matters, plebeians, as such, had a taste for movement, for
revolution; and it had been ever in the most populous quarters that
religious changes began. To the apparatus of foreign religion, above
all, recourse had been made in times of public disquietude or sudden
terror; and in those great religious celebrations, before his
proceeding against the barbarians, Aurelius had even restored the
solemnities of Isis, prohibited in the capital since the time of
Augustus, making no secret of his worship of that goddess, though her
temple had been actually destroyed by authority in the reign of
Tiberius. Her singular and in many ways beautiful ritual was now
popular in Rome. And then—what the enthusiasm of the swarming plebeian
quarters had initiated, was sure to be adopted, sooner or later, by
women of fashion. A blending of all the religions of the ancient world
had been accomplished. The new gods had arrived, had been welcomed, and
found their places; though, certainly, with no real security, in any
adequate ideal of the divine nature itself in the background of men’s
minds, that the presence of the new-comer should be edifying, or even
refining. High and low addressed themselves to all deities alike
without scruple; confusing them together when they prayed, and in the
old, authorised, threefold veneration of their visible images, by
flowers, incense, and ceremonial lights—those beautiful usages, which
the church, in her way through the world, ever making spoil of the
world’s goods for the better uses of the human spirit, took up and
sanctified in her service.
And certainly “the most religious city in the world” took no care to
veil its devotion, however fantastic. The humblest house had its little
chapel or shrine, its image and lamp; while almost every one seemed to
exercise some religious function and responsibility. Colleges, composed
for the most part of slaves and of the poor, provided for the service
of the Compitalian Lares—the gods who presided, respectively, over the
several quarters of the city. In one street, Marius witnessed an
incident of the festival of the patron deity of that neighbourhood, the
way being strewn with box, the houses tricked out gaily in such poor
finery as they possessed, while the ancient idol was borne through it
in procession, arrayed in gaudy attire the worse for wear. Numerous
religious clubs had their stated anniversaries, on which the members
issued with much ceremony from their guild-hall, or schola, and
traversed the thoroughfares of Rome, preceded, like the confraternities
of the present day, by their sacred banners, to offer sacrifice before
some famous image. Black with the perpetual smoke of lamps and incense,
oftenest old and ugly, perhaps on that account the more likely to
listen to the desires of the suffering—had not those sacred effigies
sometimes given sensible tokens that they were aware? The image of the
Fortune of Women—Fortuna Muliebris, in the Latin Way, had spoken (not
once only) and declared; Bene me, Matronae! vidistis riteque
dedicastis! The Apollo of Cumae had wept during three whole nights and
days. The images in the temple of Juno Sospita had been seen to sweat.
Nay! there was blood—divine blood—in the hearts of some of them: the
images in the Grove of Feronia had sweated blood!
From one and all Cornelius had turned away: like the “atheist” of whom
Apuleius tells he had never once raised hand to lip in passing image or
sanctuary, and had parted from Marius finally when the latter
determined to enter the crowded doorway of a temple, on their return
into the Forum, below the Palatine hill, where the mothers were
pressing in, with a multitude of every sort of children, to touch the
lightning-struck image of the wolf-nurse of Romulus—so tender to little
ones!—just discernible in its dark shrine, amid a blaze of lights.
Marius gazed after his companion of the day, as he mounted the steps to
his lodging, singing to himself, as it seemed. Marius failed precisely
to catch the words.
And, as the rich, fresh evening came on, there was heard all over Rome,
far above a whisper, the whole town seeming hushed to catch it
distinctly, the lively, reckless call to “play,” from the sons and
daughters of foolishness, to those in whom their life was still
green—Donec virenti canities abest!—Donec virenti canities abest!+
Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have taken the call. And
as for himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation
with which he had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant
affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him.
NOTES
187. +Horace, Odes I.ix.17. Translation: “So long as youth is fresh and
age is far away.”