entrance into Rome, when he has brought him, with no ordinary
admiration, by the Baths, the Pantheon, the Capitol, and other noble
structures, as soon as ever he gives him a sight of the Forum of Trajan,
he puts him into an ecstacy, and cannot forbear making a harangue upon
the matter. We meet in the same place with a very smart repartee, which
Constantine received at the time from Ormisdas, a Persian prince. The
emperor, as he greatly admired everything belonging to this noble pile,
so he had a particular fancy for the statue of Trajan’s horse, which
stood on the top of it, and expressed his desire of doing as much for
his own beast. “Pray, sir,” says the prince, “before you talk of
getting such a horse, will you be pleased to build such a stable to put
him in?”
Besides these there was another. This was situated not in the city, but
in its neighbourhood. It was called the Forum Populi, which is
frequently mentioned in the history of the republic; and which interests
us as being the popular and commercial resort of a free people. At
stated periods, the Romans, and their friends and allies, used to meet
at that spot, and celebrate the Latinæ Feriæ; on which many holidays and
religious ceremonies were accompanied by renewals of treaties of amity,
by the interchange of commodities, and by manly sports and pastimes.
While the Roman citizens came from the Tiber, the free confederates
descended from their mountains, or wended their way from the fertile
plains beyond the river. Sir William Gell thinks he can fix this
interesting spot. The habitations around the temple of Jupiter Latialis,
on Mont Albano, are supposed to have constituted the village called
Forum Populi. It is probable that the meeting of the Latin confederates
upon the mountain, and the fair held there, led to its erection. Here
the consuls had a house where they sometimes lodged, which Dio Cassius
(lib. iii.) says was struck with lightning.
We now return to the Great Forum.
... It was once,
And long the centre of their universe,
The Forum,—whence a mandate, eagle-winged,
Went to the ends of the earth. Let us descend
Slowly. At every step much may be lost.
The very dust we tread stirs as with life;
And not a breath but from the ground sends up
Something of human grandeur.
... We are come:—
And now where once the mightiest spirits met
In terrible conflict; this, while Rome was free,
The noblest theatre on this side heaven!—ROGERS.
The Forum[152] was an entirely open space; it had public buildings in
it, as well as around it; we even read of streets passing through it.
The Curia, or Senate-house, stood near the foot of the Palatine hill, in
about the middle of the eastern side of the Forum. It was built
originally by Tullus Hostilius, the third king of Rome; and, after
having been repaired by Sylla, was destroyed by fire in the year 53 B.
C., when the body of Clodius, who had been murdered by Milo, was carried
into it by a tumultuous multitude, and there burnt on a funeral pile,
formed of benches of the senators, the tables, the archives, and such
other materials as the place afforded. Sylla’s son rebuilt it; but under
the false pretence of erecting a temple to “Felicity.” It was again
restored by Julius Cæsar.
Vitruvius says, that the Greek Forum was square, with ambulatories in
the upper story; the Roman was oblong, with porticos, and shops for
bankers, and with galleries in the upper floor, adapted for the
management of the public revenues. The Roman forum also included many
other edifices of a different nature; as the basilicæ, prison, curiæ,
and were enriched with colonnades and sculpture. That of Trajan was
entered by four triumphal arches, and had his magnificent column in the
centre of it.
A few words will describe the present state of this celebrated spot:—
Now all is changed! and here, as in the wild,
The day is silent, dreary as the night;
None stirring, save the herdsman and his herd,
Savage alike; or they that would explore,
Discuss and learnedly; or they that come
(And there are many who have crossed the earth)
That they may give the hours to meditation,
And wander, often saying to themselves,
“This was the Roman Forum.”
The list of edifices in the Forum would be tedious; nor could even
learned antiquaries now make it correct; but among them we may mention
the temple of the Penates, or household gods, the temple of Concord, the
temple of Jupiter Stator, the temple of Castor and Pollux[153], the
temple of Vesta, the temple of Victory, the temple of Julius Cæsar, and
the arches of Fabian, Tiberius, and Severus. All these, however, and in
most cases even the traces of them, have disappeared,—the few objects
remaining being a puzzle to such persons as take an interest in them,
and examine the matters on the spot.
“The glories of the Forum are now fled forever,” says Mr. Eustace. Its
temples are fallen; its sanctuaries are crumbled into dust; its
colonnades encumber pavements, now buried under their remains. The walls
of the rostra, stripped of their ornaments, and doomed to eternal
silence; a few shattered porticos, and here and there an insulated
column standing in the midst of broken shafts, vast fragments of marble
capitals and cornices heaped together in masses, remind the traveller
that the field which he now traverses was once the Roman forum[154]. It
is reduced, indeed, not to the pasture-ground for cattle, which Virgil
has described, but to the market-place for pigs, sheep, and oxen; being
now the Smithfield of Rome. The hills, the rivers, the roads and
bridges, in this mother of cities, mostly go by their ancient Latin
names, slightly altered in Italian, but the Forum has not even retained
its name; it is now called Campo Vaccino, or the Field of Cows!
This scene[155], though now so desolate and degraded, was once the great
centre of all the business, power, and splendour of Rome. Here, as long
as the Romans were a free people, all the affairs of the state were
debated in the most public manner; and from the rostra, elevated in the
midst of the square, and with their eyes fixed on the capitol, which
immediately faced them, and which was suited to fill their minds with
patriotism, whilst the Tarpeian rock reminded them of the fate reserved
for treason and corruption, the noblest of orators “wielded at will” the
fierce democracy, or filled the souls of gathered thousands with one
object, one wish, one passion—the freedom and glory of the Roman
race;—a freedom which would have been more enduring had the glory been
less.
“Yes; in yon field below,
A thousand years of silenced factions sleep—
The Forum, where the immortal accents glow,
And still the eloquent air breathes, burns, of Cicero!
“The field of freedom, faction, fame, and blood.
Here a proud people’s passions were exhaled,
From the first hour of empire in the bud,
To that when further worlds to conquer fail’d;
But long before had Freedom’s face been veil’d,
And Anarchy assumed her attributes;
Till every lawless soldier who assail’d
Trod on the trembling senate’s slavish mutes,
Or raised the venal voice of baser prostitutes.”
Here the orators of the people brought their accusations against public
men, or pronounced eulogies on such as had died for their country; and
here, also, were exhibited the bleeding heads or lifeless bodies of
traitors, or, as it but too often happened, of men unjustly deemed so by
an overbearing faction. The Forum was the court of justice, and in
homely days of the early republic, civil and criminal causes were tried
and decided by simple laws in the open air, or in very plain sheds built
in this square. The humble schools for the republican children (for even
these old Romans had places of public instruction for the poor people)
stood round the Forum, which seems to have been intermixed with shops,
shambles, stalls, lowly temples, and altars.
No object within the walls of Rome, according to Dr. Burton, is so
melancholy as the Forum. “We may lament,” says he, “the ruin of a temple
or a palace, but our interest in the remaining fragments is frequently
diminished by our either not knowing with certainty to what building
they belonged, or because history has not stamped them with any peculiar
recollections. But standing upon the hill of the Capitol, and looking
down upon the Forum, we contemplate a scene with which we fancy
ourselves familiar, and we seem suddenly to have quitted the habitations
of living men. Not only is its former grandeur utterly annihilated, but
the ground has not been applied to any other purpose. When we descend
into it, we find that many of the ancient buildings are buried under
irregular heaps of soil. A warm imagination might fancy that some spell
hung over the spot, forbidding it to be profaned by the ordinary
occupations of inhabited cities. What Virgil says of its appearance
before the Trojan settlers arrived, is singularly true at the present
moment:
“There oxen strolled where palaces are raised,
And bellowing herds in the proud Forum grazed[156].”
Where the Roman people saw temples erected to perpetuate their
exploits; and where the Roman nobles vied with each other in the
magnificence of their dwellings, we see now a few isolated pillars
standing amongst some broken arches. Or if the curiosity of foreigners
has investigated what the natives neither think nor care about, we may,
perhaps, see the remnant of a statue, or a column, extracted from the
rubbish. Where the Comitia were held, where Cicero harangued, and where
the triumphal processions passed, we have now no animated beings, except
strangers, attracted by curiosity; the convicts who are employed in
excavating, as a punishment, and those more harmless animals, who find a
scanty pasture, and a shelter from the sun under a grove of trees. If we
look to the boundaries of this desolation, the prospect is equally
mournful. At one end we have the hill of the Capitol; on the summit of
which, instead of the temple of Jupiter, the wonder of the world, we
have the palace of the solitary senator. If we wish to ascend this
eminence, we have, on one side, the most ancient structure in Rome, and
that a prison; on the other, the ruins of a temple, which seems to have
been amongst the finest in the city, and the name of which is not known.
If we turn from the capital, we have, on our right, the Palatine hill,
which once contained the whole Roman people, and which was afterwards
insufficient for the house of one emperor, and is now occupied by a few
gardens, and a convent. On the left, there is a range of churches,
formed out of ancient temples; and in front, we discover at a
considerable distance, through the branches of trees, and the ruins of
buildings, the mouldering arches of the Colosseum.
The Mausoleo Adriano was erected by Adrian, in the gardens of Domitian.
It is two stories high; the lower square, the upper round. It was
formerly covered with Parian marble, and encircled by a concentric
portico, and surmounted by a cupola. The Pons Ælius was the approach to
it; during the middle ages, it was used as a fortress; and the upper
works, of brick, were added to it by Alexander VI.; when it became the
citadel of Rome. This castle was of great service to Pope Clement VII.,
when the city was surprised (A. D. 1527) by the imperial army. The
castle was formerly the burial-place of the Roman emperors, which, after
Augustus’s mausoleum on the side of the Tiber was filled with arms,
Adrian built for himself and his successors; hence it acquired the name
of Moles Hadriani. The large round tower in the centre of the edifice
was formerly adorned with a considerable number of small pillars and
statues; but most of them were broken to pieces by the Romans
themselves, who made use of them to defend themselves against the Goths,
when they assaulted the city; as may be read at large in Procopius and
Baronius. On the top of it stood the Pigna, since in the Belvidere
Gardens. It received its name of St. Angelo, from the supposed
appearance of an angel, at the time of a pestilence, during the reign of
Gregory the Great. It was fortified by Pope Urban VII., with five
regular bastions, ramparts, moats, &c. The hall is adorned with
gildings, fine paintings, and Adrian’s statue, whose bust, with that of
Augustus, is to be seen on the castle wall.
The Mamertine prisons[157] are supposed to be the oldest monuments of
antiquity in Rome. Livy speaks of them as the work of Ancus Martius.
“The state having undergone a vast increase,” says the historian, “and
secret villanies being perpetrated, from the distinction between right
and wrong being confounded, in so great a multitude of men, a prison was
built in the middle of the city, overhanging the Forum, as a terror to
the increasing boldness. These prisons are supposed to be called after
their founder, Martius. They were enlarged by Servius Tullus; and the
part which he added bore the name of Tullian. The front of this prison
is open to the street; but above, and resting on it, is built the church
of San Giuseppe Falegnani. It has an appearance of great solidity, being
composed of immense masses of stone, put together without cement; almost
every one of the blocks is upwards of nine feet long, and in height
nearly three feet. The length of the front is forty-three feet; but its
height does not exceed seventeen; along the upper part runs an
inscription, intimating, that Caius Vibius Rufinus and Marcus Cocceius
Nerva (who were consuls in the year 23), by a decree of the senate,
repaired, enlarged, or did something to the prison. The traveller
descends, by the aid of stairs, into the upper cell. Nearly in the
middle of the vaulted roof he may perceive an aperture large enough to
admit the passage of a man’s body; and directly under it, in the floor
of the cell, he will see another opening of a similar character. This
affords a direct communication with the lower prison; but he descends at
another point by a second flight of steps, modern like the former. The
second cell is of much smaller dimensions than the other, being only
nineteen feet in length, by nine in breadth, and about six in height.”
“It is faced,” says the Rev. Mr. Burgess, “with the same material as the
upper one; and it is worthy of remark, as a proof of its high antiquity,
that the stones are not disposed with that regularity which the rules of
good masonry require; the joinings often coincide, or nearly so, instead
of reposing over the middle of the interior block respectively.”
Dr. Burton says, “that a more horrible place for the confinement of a
human being than these prisons, can scarcely be imagined. Their
condition in ancient times must have been still worse than it now is.
The expressions ‘cell of groans,’ ‘house of sadness,’ ‘black prison,’
‘cave of darkness,’ ‘place darkened with perpetual night;’ and many
others, which are to be met with in the pages of the later Latin
writers, sufficiently attest the character they bore in ancient times.”
Quintus Pleminius, who had done good service to the republic in the
second Punic war, but who afterwards had been sent in chains to Rome, on
account of the enormities which he had practised in the government of
the town of Locri, was incarcerated in this prison. In the year 194 B. C.
certain games were being performed in the city; and while the minds of
all were taken up with the sight of them, Quintus Pleminius procured
persons to agree to set the city on fire, at night, in several places at
once, so that in the consternation of a nocturnal tumult, the prison
might be broken open. The matter, however, was disclosed by persons
privy thereto, and communicated to the senate; and Pleminius was
immediately put to death in the lower cell. The accomplices of Catiline,
too, expiated their guilt in this prison. The celebrated African king,
Jugurtha, also, in the same place closed his last days. His melancholy
end is thus described by Plutarch:—
“Marius, bringing back his army from Africa into Italy, took possession
of the consulship the first day of January, and also entered Rome in
triumph, showing the Romans what they had never expected to see; this
was the king Jugurtha prisoner, who was a man so wary, and who knew so
well to accommodate himself to fortune, and who united so much courage
to his craft and cunning, that none of his enemies ever thought that
they would have him alive. When he had been led in the procession he
became deranged, as they say, in his understanding; and, after the
triumph, he was thrown into prison; when, as they were stripping him of
his tunic by force, and striving in eager haste to take from him his
golden ear-ring, they tore it off, together with the lower part of his
ear. Being then thrust naked into the deep cavern, he said, full of
trouble, and smiling bitterly, ‘Hercules! how cold is this bath of
yours!’ Having struggled, however, for six days, with hunger, waiting in
suspense till the last hour, from his passionate desire to live, he met
with the just rewards of his wicked deeds.” In this prison, also,
Perseus, the captive king of Macedonia, lingered many years in hopeless
misery; and in one of its cells, also, St. Peter was imprisoned nine
years.
Next to the Mamertine prisons, in point of antiquity, but greatly above
them as a work of labour and art, was the CLOACA MAXIMA. The first
sewers in Rome were constructed by Tarquinius Priscus. The Cloaca Maxima
was the work of Tarquin the Proud.
Pliny says that Agrippa, in his ædileship, made no less than seven
streams meet together underground in one main channel, with such a rapid
current as to carry all before them that they met with in their passage.
Sometimes when they are violently swoln with immoderate rains, they
beat with excessive fury against the paving at the bottom and the sides.
Sometimes in a flood the Tiber waters oppose them in their course; and
then the two streams encounter with great fury; and yet the works
preserve their ancient strength, without any sensible damage. Sometimes
huge pieces of stone and timber, or such-like materials, are carried
down the channel; and yet the fabric receives no detriment. Sometimes
the ruin of whole buildings, destroyed by fire or other casualties,
presses heavily upon the frame. Sometimes terrible earthquakes shake the
very foundations, and yet they still continue impregnable. Such is the
testimony of Pliny the Elder.
The Cloaca Maxima still exists. At its outlet in the Tiber, it is said
to be thirteen feet high, and as many in breadth. The ancients always
regarded this work as a great wonder. Livy speaks of it in terms of
admiration; and Pliny equally so; and Dionysius says that the sewers
having been once so greatly neglected that sufficient passage was not
afforded for the waters, it cost no less a sum than 225,000_l._ to put
them in repair.
The Pyramid of Cestius, one of the most ancient remains, is the only
specimen of a pyramid in Rome. It was erected daring the republic, to
the memory of Caius Cestius, one of the priests that provided feasts for
the gods. It is of great size, being ninety-seven feet in the base, and
one hundred and twenty-four in height; and was erected, according to the
inscription, in three hundred and thirty days.
This ancient monument remains entire[158]. It is formed, externally, of
white marble. At each corner on the outside was a pillar, once
surmounted with a statue. Its form is graceful, and its appearance very
picturesque; supported on either side by the ancient wall of Rome, with
their towers and galleries venerable in decay, half shaded by a few
scattered trees; and, looking down upon a hundred humble tents
interspersed in the neighbouring groves, it rises in lonely pomp, and
seems to preside over these fields of silence and mortality.
This structure was repaired by order of Pope Alexander VII. in 1663; it
having been greatly dilapidated; no less than fifteen feet of rubbish
have accumulated above the base. “It is curious,” says Simond, “to see
how Nature, disappointed of her usual means of destruction by the
pyramidal shape, goes to work another way. That very shape affording a
better hold for plants, their roots have penetrated between the stones,
and acting like wedges, have lifted and thrown wide large blocks, in
such a manner, as to threaten the disjoined assemblage with entire
destruction. In Egypt, the extreme heat and want of moisture, during a
certain part of the year, hinder the growth of plants in such
situations; and in Africa alone are pyramids eternal.”—Close to this is
the Protestant burial-ground. “When I am inclined to be serious,” says
Mr. Rogers, “I love to wander up and down before the tomb of Caius
Cestius. The Protestant burial-ground is there; and most of the little
monuments are erected to the young; young men of promise, cut off when
on their travels, full of enthusiasm, full of enjoyment; brides in the
bloom of their beauty, on their first journey; or children borne from
home in search of health. This stone was placed by his
fellow-travellers, young as himself, who will return to the house of his
parents without him; that by a husband or a father, now in his native
country. His heart is buried in that grave. It is a quiet and sheltered
nook, covered in the winter with violets; and the pyramid that
overshadows it gives a classical and singularly solemn air. You feel an
interest there, a sympathy you were not prepared for. You are yourself
in a foreign land; and they are for the most part your countrymen. They
call upon you in your mother tongue—in English—in words unknown to a
native; known only to yourselves: and the tomb of Cestius, that old
majestic pile has this also in common with them,—it is itself a
stranger among strangers. It has stood there till the language, spoken
round about it, has changed; and the shepherd, born at the foot, can
read its inscription no longer.”
There is a stern, round tower of other days,
Firm as a fortress, with its fence of stone,
Such as an army’s baffled strength decays,
Standing with half its battlements alone.
And with two thousand years of ivy grown,
The garland of eternity, where wave
The green leaves over all by Time o’erthrown;
What was this tower of strength? within its cave
What treasure lay so hid?—a Woman’s grave.
A little beyond the Circus of Caracalla[159] rises the mausoleum of
Cecilia Metella, a beautiful edifice, built by Crassus, in honour of his
wife. It is of considerable height and great thickness: in the centre is
a hollow space reaching from the pavement to the top of the building. In
the concavity was deposited the body in a marble sarcophagus, which in
the time of Paul III. was removed to the court of the Farnesian palace.
The solidity and simplicity of this monument are worthy of the
republican era in which it was erected, and have enabled it to resist
the incidents and survive the lapse of two thousand years.
“At the end of the Velabrum,” says Dupaty, “I found myself on the Appian
way, and walked along it for some time. I there found the tomb of
Cecilia Metella, the daughter of that Crassus whose wealth was a
counterpoise to the name of Pompey and the fortune of Cæsar. I entered
the tomb, and set myself down on the grass. The flowers which displayed
their brilliant colours in the corner of the tomb, and as I may say amid
the shades of death; the noise of a swarm of bees who were depositing
their honey between two rows of bricks, while the surrounding silence
rendered their pleasing humming more audible; the azure of the sky
forming over my head a magnificent dome, decorated alternately by flying
clouds of silver and of purple; the name Cecilia Metella, who perhaps
was beautiful, and possessed of the tenderest sensibility, and who most
certainly was unfortunate; the memory of Crassus; the image of a
distracted father who strives by piling up stones to immortalize his
sorrow; the soldiers, whom my imagination still behold combating from
the height of this tower;—all these and a thousand other impressions
gradually plunged my soul into a delicious reverie, and it was with
difficulty I could leave the place.”