I
A few Frenchmen, united in friendship, who were spending the spring in
Rome, were wont to meet amid the ruins of the disinterred Forum. They
were Joséphin Leclerc, an Embassy Attaché on leave; M. Goubin, licencié
ès lettres, an annotator; Nicole Langelier, of the old Parisian family
of the Langeliers, printers and classical scholars; Jean Boilly, a
civil engineer, and Hippolyte Dufresne, a man of leisure, and a lover
of the fine arts.
Towards five o’clock of the afternoon of the first day of May, they
wended their way, as was their custom, through the northern door,
closed to the public, where Commendatore Boni, who superintended the
excavations, welcomed them with quiet amenity, and led them to the
threshold of his house of wood nestling in the shadow of laurel bushes,
privet hedges and cytisus, and rising above the vast trench, dug down
to the depth of the ancient Forum, in the cattle market of pontifical
Rome.
Here, they pause awhile, and look about them.
Facing them rise the truncated shafts of the Columnæ Honorariæ, and
where stood the Basilica of Julia, the eye rested on what bore the
semblance of a huge draughts-board and its draughts. Further south, the
three columns of the Temple of the Dioscuri cleave the azure of the
skies with their blue-tinted volutes. On their right, surmounting the
dilapidated Arch of Septimus Severus, the tall columns of the Temple
of Saturn, the dwellings of Christian Rome, and the Women’s Hospital
display in tiers, their facings yellower and muddier than the waters of
the Tiber. To their left stands the Palatine flanked by huge red arches
and crowned with evergreen oaks. At their feet, from hill to hill,
among the flagstones of the Via Sacra, narrow as a village street,
spring from the earth an agglomeration of brick walls and marble
foundations, the remains of buildings which dotted the Forum in the
days of Rome’s strength. Trefoil, oats, and the grasses of the field
which the wind has sown on their lowered tops, have covered them with
a rustic roof illumined by the crimson poppies. A mass of _débris_,
of crumbling entablatures, a multitude of pillars and altars, an
entanglement of steps and enclosing walls: all this indeed not stunted
but of a serried vastness and within limits.
Nicole Langelier was doubtless reviewing in his mind the host of
monuments confined in this famed space:
“These edifices of wise proportions and moderate dimensions,” he
remarked, “were separated from one another by narrow streets full of
shade. Here ran the _vicoli_ beloved in countries where the sun shines,
while the generous descendants of Remus, on their return from hearing
public speakers, found, along the walls of the temples, cool yet
foul-smelling corners, whence the rinds of water-melons and castaway
shells were never swept away, and where they could eat and enjoy their
siesta. The shops skirting the square must certainly have emitted the
pungent odour of onions, wine, fried meats, and cheese. The butchers’
stalls were laden with meats, to the delectation of the hardy citizens,
and it was from one of those butchers that Virginius snatched the knife
with which he killed his daughter. There also were doubtless jewellers
and vendors of little domestic tutelary deities, protectors of the
hearth, the ox-stall, and the garden. The citizens’ necessaries of life
were all centred in this spot. The market and the shops, the basilicas,
_i.e._, the commercial Exchanges and the civil tribunals; the Curia,
that municipal council which became the administrative power of the
universe; the prisons, whose vaults emitted their much dreaded and
fetid effluvia, and the temples, the altars, of the highest necessity
to the Italians who have ever some thing to beg of the celestial powers.
“Here it was, lastly, that during a long roll of centuries were
accomplished the vulgar or strange deeds, almost ever flat and dull,
oftentimes odious and ridiculous, at times generous, the agglomeration
of which constitutes the august life of a people.”
“What is it that one sees, in the centre of the square, fronting the
commemorative pedestals?” inquired M. Goubin, who, primed with an
eye-glass, had noticed a new feature in the ancient Forum, and was
thirsting for information concerning it.
Joséphin Leclerc obligingly answered him that they were the foundations
of the recently unearthed colossal statue of Domitian.
Thereupon he pointed out, one after the other, the monuments laid bare
by Giacomo Boni in the course of his five years’ fruitful excavations:
the fountain and the well of Juturna, under the Palatine Hill; the
altar erected on the site of Cæsar’s funeral pile, the base of which
spread itself at their feet, opposite the Rostra; the archaic stele and
the legendary tomb of Romulus over which lies the black marble slab of
the Comitium; and again, the Lacus Curtius.
The sun, which had set behind the Capitol, was striking with its
last shafts the triumphal arch of Titus on the towering Velia. The
heavens, where to the West the pearl-white moon floated, remained as
blue as at midday. An even, peaceful, and clear shadow spread itself
over the silent Forum. The bronzed navvies were delving this field of
stones, while, pursuing the work of the ancient Kings, their comrades
turned the crank of a well, for the purpose of drawing the water which
still forms the bed where slumbered, in the days of pious Numa, the
reed-fringed Velabrum.
They were performing their task methodically and with vigilance.
Hippolyte Dufresne, who had for several months been a witness of their
assiduous labour, of their intelligence and of their prompt obedience
to orders, inquired of the director of the excavations how it was that
he obtained such yeoman’s work from his labourers.
“By leading their life,” replied Giacomo Boni. “Together with them do I
turn over the soil; I impart to them what we are together seeking for,
and I impress on their minds the beauty of our common work. They feel
an interest in an enterprise the grandeur of which they apprehend but
vaguely. I have seen their faces pale with enthusiasm when unearthing
the tomb of Romulus. I am their everyday comrade, and if one of them
falls ill, I take a seat at his bedside. I place as great faith in them
as they do in me. And so it is that I boast of faithful workmen.”
“Boni, my dear Boni,” exclaimed Joséphin Leclerc, “you know full well
that I admire your labours, and that your grand discoveries fill me
with emotion, and yet, allow me to say so, I regret the days when
flocks grazed over the entombed Forum. A white ox, from whose massive
head branched horns widely apart, chewed the cud in the unploughed
field; a hind dozed at the foot of a tall column which sprang from the
sward, and one mused: Here was debated the fate of the world. The Forum
has been lost to poets and lovers from the day that it ceased to be the
Campo Formio.”
Jean Boilly dwelt on the value of these excavations, so methodically
carried out, as a contribution towards a knowledge of the past. Then,
the conversation having drifted towards the philosophy of the history
of Rome:
“The Latins,” he remarked, “displayed reason even in the matter of
their religion. Their gods were commonplace and vulgar, but full of
common sense and occasionally generous. If a comparison be drawn
between this Roman Pantheon composed of soldiers, magistrates, virgins,
and matrons and the deviltries painted on the walls of Etruscan tombs,
reason and madness will be found in juxtaposition. The infernal scenes
depicted in the mortuary chambers of Corneto represent the monstrous
creations of ignorance and fear. They seem to us as grotesque as
Orcagna’s _Day of Judgment_ in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, and the
_Dantesque Hell_ of the Campo Santo of Pisa, whereas the Latin Pantheon
reflects for ever the image of a well-organised society. The gods of
the Romans were like themselves, industrious and good citizens. They
were useful deities, each one having its proper function. The very
nymphs held civil and political offices.
“Look at Juturna, whose altar at the foot of the Palatine we have so
frequently contemplated. She did not seem fated by her birth, her
adventures, and her misfortunes to occupy a permanent post in the
city of Romulus. An incensed Rutula, beloved by Jupiter, who rewarded
her with immortality, when King Turnus fell by the hand of Æneas, as
decreed by the Fates, she flung herself into the Tiber, to escape thus
from the light of day, since it was denied her to perish with her royal
brother. Long did the shepherds of Latium tell the story of the living
nymph’s lamentations from the depths of the river. In later years, the
villagers of rural Rome, when looking down at night-time over the bank,
imagined that they could see her by the moon’s rays, lurking in her
glaucous garments among the rushes. The Romans, however, did not leave
her to the idle contemplation of her sorrows. They promptly conceived
the idea of allotting to her an important duty, and entrusted her
with the custody of their fountains, converting her into a municipal
goddess. And so it is with all their divinities. The Dioscuri, whose
temple lives in its beautiful ruins, the Dioscuri, the brothers of
Helen, the sparkling _Gemini_, were put to good use by the Romans, as
messengers of the State. The Dioscuri it was, who, mounted on a white
charger, brought to Rome the news of the victory of Lake Regillus.
“The Italians asked of their gods only temporal and substantial
benefits. In this respect, notwithstanding the Asiatic fears which have
invaded Europe, their religious sentiment has not changed. That which
they formally demanded from their gods and their genii, they nowadays
expect from the Madonna and the Saints. Every parish possesses its
Beatified patron, to whom requests are preferred just as in the case of
a Deputy. There are Saints for the vine, for cereals, for cattle, for
the colic, and for toothache. Latin imagination has repeopled Heaven
with a multitude of living bodies, and has converted Judaic monotheism
into a new polytheism. It has enlivened the Gospels with a copious
mythology; it has re-established a familiar intercourse between the
divine and the terrestrial worlds. The peasantry demand miracles of
their protecting Saints, and hurl invectives at them if the miracle is
slow of manifestation. The peasant who has in vain solicited a favour
of the Bambino, returns to the chapel, and addressing on this occasion
the Incoronata herself, exclaims:
“‘I am not speaking to you, you whoreson, but to your sainted mother.’
“The women make the Madre di Dio a confidant of their love affairs.
They believe with some show of reason that being a woman she
understands, and that there is no need to be on a footing of delicacy
with her. They have no fear of going too far--a proof of their piety.
Hence we must view with admiration the prayer which a fine lass of
the Genoese Riviera addressed to the Madonna: ‘Holy Mother of God,
who didst conceive without sin, grant me the grace of sinning without
conceiving.’”
Nicole Langelier here remarked that the religion of the Romans lent
itself to the evolution of Rome’s policy.
“Bearing the stamp of a distinctly national character,” he said, “it
was, for all that, capable of penetrating the minds of foreign nations,
and of winning them over by its sociable and tolerant spirit. It was an
administrative religion propagating itself without effort together with
the rest of the administration.”
“The Romans loved war,” said M. Goubin, who studiously avoided
paradoxes.
“They loved not war for itself,” was Jean Boilly’s rejoinder. “They
were far too reasonable for that. That military service was to them a
hardship is revealed by certain signs. Monsieur Michel Bréal tells you
that the word which primarily expressed the equipment of the soldier,
_ærumna_, subsequently assumed the general meaning of lassitude, need,
trouble, hardship, toil, pain, and distress. Those peasants were just
as other peasants. They entered the ranks merely because compelled and
forced thereto. Their very leaders, the wealthy proprietors, waged war
neither for pleasure nor for glory. Previous to entering on a campaign,
they consulted their interests twenty times over, and carefully
computed the chances.”
“True,” said M. Goubin, “but their circumstances and the state of the
world compelled them ever to be in arms. Thus it is that they carried
civilisation to the far ends of the known world. War is above all an
instrument of progress.”
“The Latins,” resumed Jean Boilly, “were agriculturists who waged
agriculturists’ wars. Their ambitions were ever agricultural. They
exacted of the vanquished, not money, but soil, the whole or part of
the territory of the subjugated confederation, generally speaking
one-third, out of friendship, as they said, and because they were
moderate in their desires. The farmer came and drove his plough over
the spot where the legionary had a short while ago planted his pike.
The tiller of the soil confirmed the soldier’s conquests. Admirable
soldiers, doubtless, well disciplined, patient, and brave, who fought
and who were sometimes beaten just like any others; yet still more
admirable peasants. If wonder is felt at their having conquered so many
lands, still more is it to be wondered at that they should have kept
them. The marvel of it is that in spite of the many battles they lost,
these stubborn peasants never yielded an acre of soil, so to speak.”
While this discussion was proceeding, Giacomo Boni was gazing with a
hostile eye at the tall brick house standing to the north of the Forum
on top of several layers of ancient substructures.
“We are about,” he said, “to explore the Curia Julia. We shall soon, I
hope, be in a position to break up the sordid building which covers its
remains. It will not cost the State much to purchase it for the spade’s
work. Buried under nine mètres of soil on which stands the Convent of
S. Adriano lie the flagstones of Diocletian, who restored the Curia
for the last time. We shall surely find among the rubbish a number
of the marble tables on which the laws were engraved. It is a matter
of interest to Rome, to Italy, nay to the whole world, that the last
vestiges of the Roman Senate should see the light of day.”
Thereupon he invited his friends into his hut, as hospitable and rustic
a one as that of Evander.
It constituted a single room wherein stood a deal table laden with
black potteries and shapeless fragments giving out an earthy smell.
“Prehistorical treasures!” sighed Joséphin Leclerc. “And so, my good
Giacomo Boni, not content with seeking in the Forum the monuments of
the Emperors, those of the Republic, and those of the Kings, you must
fain sink down into the soil which bore flora and fauna that have
vanished, drive your spade into the quaternary, and the tertiary,
penetrate the pliocene, the miocene, and the eocene; from Latin
archæology you wander to prehistoric archæology and to palæontology.
The salons are expressing alarm at the depths to which you are
venturing. Countess Pasolini would like to know where you intend to
stop, and you are represented in a little satirical sheet as coming out
at the Antipodes, breathing the words: _Adesso va bene!_”
Boni seemed not to have heard.
He was examining with deep attention a clay vessel still damp and
covered with ooze. His pale blue expressive eyes darkened while
critically examining this humble work of man for some unrevealed
trace of a mysterious past, but resumed their natural hue as the
Commendatore’s mind wandered off into a reverie.
“These remains which you have before you,” he presently remarked,
“these roughly hewn little wooden sarcophagi and these cinerary urns of
black pottery and of house-like shape containing calcined bones were
gathered under the Temple of Faustina, on the north-west side of the
Forum.
“Black urns containing ashes, and skeletons resting in their coffins
as if in a bed, are here to be met with side by side. The funeral
rites of the Greeks and the Romans included both those of burial and
of cremation. Over the whole of Europe, in prehistoric days, the two
customs were simultaneously observed, in the same city and in the same
tribe. Does this dual fashion of sepulture correspond with the ideals
of two races? I am inclined to believe so.”
Picking up, with reverential and almost ritual gesture, an urn shaped
like a dwelling and containing a small quantity of ashes, he went on:
“The men who in immemorial times gave this form to clay, believed that
the soul, being attached to the bones and the ashes, had need of a
dwelling, but that it did not require a very large house wherein to
live the abridged life of the dead. These men were of a noble race
which came from Asia. The one whose light ashes I now hold lived before
the days of Evander and of the shepherd Faustulus.”
Then, making use of the phraseology of the ancients, he added:
“Those were the days when King Vitulus, King Calf as we should say,
held peaceful sway over this country so pregnant with glory. Monotonous
pastoral times reigned over the Ausonian plain. These men were,
however, neither ignorant nor boorish. Much priceless knowledge had
come to them from their forefathers. Both the ship and the oar were
known to them. They practised the art of subjecting oxen to the yoke
and of harnessing them to the pole. They kindled at will the divine
flame. They gathered salt, wrought in gold, kneaded and baked vases
of clay. Probably too they began to till the soil. They do say that
the Latin shepherds became agricultural labourers in the fabled days
of the Calf. They cultivated millet, wheat, and spelt. They stitched
skins together with needles of bone. They wove and perchance made wool
false to its whiteness by dyeing it various colours. By the phases of
the moon did they measure time. They gazed upon the heavens but to
discover in them what was in the world below. They saw in them the
greyhound who watches for Diospiter the shepherd who tends the starry
flock. The prolific clouds were to them the Sun’s cattle, the cows
supplying milk to the cerulean countryside. They worshipped the heavens
as their Father, and the Earth as their Mother. At eventide, they heard
the chariots of the gods, like themselves migratory, roll along the
mountain roads with their ponderous wheels. They enjoyed the light of
day and pondered with sadness over the life of the souls in the Kingdom
of Shadows.
“We know that these massive-headed Aryans were fair, since their gods,
made to their own image, were fair. Indra had locks like ears of wheat
and a beard as tawny as the tiger’s coat. The Greeks conceived the
immortal gods with blue or glaucous eyes, and a head of golden hair.
The goddess Roma was _flava et candida_:
“Were it possible to make a whole out of these calcined bony fragments,
the result would be pure Aryan forms. In those massive and vigorous
skulls, in those heads as square as the primary Rome which their sons
were to build, you would recognise the ancestors of the patricians of
the Commonwealth, the long flourishing stock which produced tribunes
of the people, pontiffs, and consuls; you would be handling the
magnificent mould of the robust brains which constructed religion, the
family, the army, and the public laws of the most strongly organised
city that ever existed.”
Gently placing the bit of pottery on the rustic table, Giacomo Boni
bends over a coffin the size of a cradle, a coffin dug out of the trunk
of an oak, and similar in shape to the early canoes of man. He lifts up
the thin covering of bark and sap-wood forming the lid of that funeral
wherry, and brings to light bones as frail as a bird’s skeleton. Of
the body, there hardly remains the spinal column, and it would bear
resemblance to one of the lowest of vertebrata, such as a big saurian,
did not the fullness of the forehead reveal man. Coloured beads, which
have become detached from a necklace, are scattered over these bones
browned with age, washed by subterraneous waters, and exhumed from
clayey soil.
“Look!” says Boni, “at this little boy who was not given the honours of
cremation, but buried, and returned as a whole to the earth whence he
sprung. He is not a son of headmen, nor a noble inheritor of the traits
of a fair race. He belongs to the race indigenous to the Mediterranean,
the race which became the Roman _plebs_, and which supplies Italy to
the present day with subtile lawyers and calculating individuals. He
was born in the Palatine City of the Seven Hills, in days seen dimly
through the mist of heroic fables. It is a Romulean boy. In those
days, the Valley of the Seven Hills was a morass, and the slopes of
the Palatine were covered with reed-thatched huts only. A tiny lance
was placed on the coffin to show that the child was a male. He was
barely four years old when he fell asleep in death. Then his mother
clothed him with a beautiful tunic clasped at the neck, around which
she fastened a string of beads. The kinsmen did not begrudge him their
offerings. They deposited on his tomb, in urns of black earthenware,
milk, beans, and a bunch of grapes. I have collected these vessels and
I have fashioned similar ones out of the same clay by the heat of a
wood fire lit in the Forum at night. Previous to taking a last farewell
of him, they ate and drank together a portion of their offerings; this
funeral repast assuaged their sorrow. Child, thou who sleepest since
the days of the god Quirinus, an Empire has passed over thy agrestic
coffin, and the same stars which shone at thy birth are about to light
up the skies above us. The unfathomable space which separates the hours
of your life from those of our own constitutes but an imperceptible
moment in the life of the Universe.”
After a moment’s silence, Nicole Langelier remarked:
“It is as difficult to distinguish amid a people the races composing it
as to trace in the course of a river the streams which mingle with it.
What constitutes, moreover, a race? Do any human races really exist?
I see white men, red men, and black men. But, they do not constitute
races; they are merely varieties of the same race, of the same species,
which form together fruitful unions and intermingle without ceasing.
_A fortiori_, the man of learning knows not several yellow races or
several white races. Human beings invent, however, races in pursuance
of their vanity, their hatred, or their greed. In 1871, France became
dismembered by virtue of the rights of the Germanic race, and yet no
German race has an existence. The antiemites kindle the hatred of
Christian peoples against the Jews, and still there is no Jewish race.
“What I state on the subject, Boni, is purely speculative, and not with
the view of running counter to your ideas. How could one not believe
you! Conviction has its home on your lips. Moreover, you blend in your
thoughts the profound verities of poetry with the far-spreading truths
of science. As you truly state, the shepherds who came from Bactriana
peopled Greece and Italy. As you again say, they found there natives
of the soil. In ancient days, a belief shared in common by Italians
and Hellenes was that the first men who peopled their country were
like Erectheus, born of Mother Earth. Nor do I pretend, my dear Boni,
that you cannot trace through the centuries the antochthones of your
Ausonia, and the immigrants from the Pamir; the former, intelligent
and eloquent plebeians; the latter, patricians fully impregnated with
courage and faith. For, when all is said, if there are not, properly
speaking, several human races, and if still less so several white
races, our species assuredly comprises distinct varieties oftentimes
stamped with marked characteristics. Hence there is nothing to hinder
two or more of these varieties living for a long time side by side
without fusing, each one preserving its individual characteristics.
Nay, these differences may occasionally, in lieu of vanishing with the
course of time under the action of the plastic forces of nature, on
the contrary become accentuated more strongly through the empire of
immutable customs, and the stress of social institutions.”
“_E proprio vero_,” said Boni in a low tone, as he replaced the oaken
lid on the coffin of the Romulean child.
Then, begging his guests to be seated, he said to Nicole Langelier:
“I shall now hold you to your promise, and beg you to read to us that
story of Gallio, at which I have seen you at work in your little room
in the _Foro Traiano_. You make Romans speak in your script. This is
the spot to hear your narrative, here in a corner of the Forum, close
by the Via Sacra, between the Capitol and the Palatine. Tarry not with
your reading, so as not to be overtaken by the twilight, and lest your
voice be quickly drowned by the cries of the birds warning one another
of approaching night.”
The guests of Giacomo Boni welcomed the foregoing utterance with a
murmur of approval, and Nicole Langelier, without waiting for more
pressing entreaties, unrolled a manuscript and read aloud the following
narrative.