From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' Third Series. London,
Macmillan & Co., 1879
The two great phenomena, then, of the general appearance of Rome, are
the utter abandonment of so large a part of the ancient city and the
general lack of buildings of the Middle Ages. Both of these facts are
fully accounted for by the peculiar history of Rome. It may be that
the sack and fire under Robert Wiscard--a sack and fire done in the
cause of a pope in warfare against an emperor--was the immediate cause
of the desolation of a large part of Rome; but if so, the destruction
which was then wrought only gave a helping hand to causes which were
at work both before and after. A city could not do otherwise than
dwindle away, in which neither emperor nor pope nor commonwealth could
keep up any lasting form of regular government; a city which had no
resources of its own, and which lived, as a place of pilgrimage, on
the shadow of its own greatness. Another idea which is sure to suggest
itself at Rome is rather a delusion. The amazing extent of ancient
ruins at Rome unavoidably fills us with the notion that an unusual
amount of destruction has gone on there. When we cannot walk without
seeing, besides the more perfect monuments, gigantic masses of ancient
wall on every side,--when we stumble at every step on fragments of
marble columns or on richly adorned tombs,--we are apt to think that
they must have perished in some special havoc unknown in other places.
The truth is really the other way. The abundance of ruins and
fragments--again setting aside the more perfect monuments--proves that
destruction has been much less thorough in Rome than in almost any
other Roman city. Elsewhere the ancient buildings have been utterly
swept away; at Rome they survive, though mainly in a state of ruin.
But by surviving in a state of ruin they remind us of their former
existence, which in other places we are inclined to forget. Certainly
Rome is, even in proportion to its greatness above all other Roman
cities, rich in ancient remains above all other Roman cities. Compare
those cities of the West which at one time or another supplanted Rome
as the dwelling-places of her own Caesars,--Milan, Ravenna, York, Trier
itself. York may be looked upon as lucky in having kept a tower and
some pieces of wall through the havoc of the English conquest. Trier
is rich above all the rest, and she has, in her _Porta Nigra_, one
monument of Roman power which Rome herself cannot outdo. But rich as
Trier--the second Rome--is, she is certainly not richer in proportion
than Rome herself. The Roman remains at Milan hardly extend beyond a
single range of columns, and it may be thought that that alone is
something, when we remember the overthrow of the city under Frederick
Barbarossa. But compare Rome and Ravenna: no city is richer than
Ravenna in monuments of its own special class,--Christian Roman,
Gothic, Byzantine, but of works of the days of heathen Rome there is
no trace--no walls, no gates, no triumphal arch, no temple, no
amphitheatre. The city of Placidia and Theodoric is there; but of the
city which Augustus made one of the two great maritime stations of
Italy there is hardly a trace. Verona, as never being an imperial
residence, was not on our list; but rich as Verona is, Rome is--even
proportionally--far richer. Provence is probably richer in Roman
remains than Italy herself; but even the Provencal cities are hardly
so full of Roman remains as Rome herself. The truth is, that there is
nothing so destructive to the antiquities of a city as its continued
prosperity. A city which has always gone on flourishing according to
the standard of each age, which has been always building and
rebuilding and spreading itself beyond its ancient bounds, works a
gradual destruction of its ancient remains beyond anything that the
havoc of any barbarians on earth can work. In such a city a few
special monuments may be kept in a perfect or nearly perfect state;
but it is impossible that large tracts of ground can be left covered
with ruins as they are at Rome. Now, it is the ruins, rather than the
perfect buildings, which form the most characteristic feature of Roman
scenery and topography, and they have been preserved by the decay of
the city; while in other cities they have been swept away by their
prosperity. As Rome became Christian, several ancient buildings,
temples and others, were turned into churches, and a greater number
were destroyed to employ their materials, especially their marble
columns, in the building of churches. But though this cause led to the
loss of a great many ancient buildings, it had very little to do with
the creation of the vast mass of the Roman ruins. The desolation of
the Flavian amphitheatre and of the baths of Antoninus Caracalla comes
from another cause. As the buildings became disused,--and if we
rejoice at the disuse of the amphitheatre, we must both mourn and
wonder at the disuse of the baths,--they were sometimes turned into
fortresses, sometimes used as quarries for the building of fortresses.
Every turbulent noble turned some fragment of the buildings of the
ancient city into a stronghold from which he might make war upon his
brother nobles, from which he might defy every power which had the
slightest shadow of lawful authority, be it emperor, pope, or senator.
Fresh havoc followed on every local struggle: destruction came
whenever a lawful government was overthrown and whenever a lawful
government was restored; for one form of revolution implied the
building, the other implied the pulling down, of these nests of
robbers. The damage which a lying prejudice attributes to Goths and
Vandals was really done by the Romans themselves, and in the Middle
Ages mainly by the Roman nobles. As for Goths and Vandals, Genseric
undoubtedly did some mischief in the way of carrying off precious
objects, but even he is not charged with the actual destruction of any
buildings. And it would be hard to show that any Goth, from Alaric to
Tovilas, ever did any mischief whatever to any of the monuments of
Rome, beyond what might happen through the unavoidable necessities and
accidents of warfare. Theodoric of course stands out among all the
ages as the great preserver and repairer of the monuments of Ancient
Rome. The few marble columns which Charles the Great carried away from
Rome, as well as from Ravenna, can have gone but a very little way
towards accounting for so vast a havoc. It was almost wholly by Roman
hands that buildings which might have defied time and the barbarian
were brought to the ruined state in which we now find them.
But the barons of mediaeval Rome, great and sad as was the destruction
which was wrought by them, were neither the most destructive nor the
basest of the enemies at whose hands the buildings of ancient Rome
have had to suffer. The mediaeval barons simply did according to their
kind. Their one notion of life was fighting, and they valued buildings
or anything else simply as they might be made use of for that one
purpose of life. There is something more revolting in the systematic
destruction, disfigurement, and robbery of the ancient monuments of
Rome, heathen and Christian, at the hands of her modern rulers and
their belongings. Bad as contending barons or invading Normans may
have been, both were outdone by the fouler brood of papal nephews.
Who that looks on the ruined Coliseum, who that looks on the palace
raised out of its ruins, can fail to think of the famous line--
"Quod non fecere barbari, fecere Barberini"?
And well-nigh every other obscure or infamous name in the roll-call of
the mushroom nobility of modern Rome has tried its hand at the same
evil work. Nothing can be so ancient, nothing so beautiful, nothing so
sacred, as to be safe against their destroying hands. The boasted age
of the _Renaissance_, the time when men turned away from all reverence
for their own forefathers and professed to recall the forms and the
feelings of ages which are forever gone, was the time of all times
when the monuments of those very ages were most brutally destroyed.
Barons and Normans and Saracens destroyed what they did not understand
or care for; the artistic men of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries destroyed the very things which they professed
to admire and imitate. And when they did not actually destroy, as in
the case of statues, sarcophagi, and the like, they did all they could
to efface their truest interest, their local and historical
association.
A museum or collection of any kind is a dreary place. For some kinds
of antiquities, for those which cannot be left in their own places,
and which need special scientific classification, such collections are
necessary. But surely a statue or a tomb should be left in the spot
where it is found, or in the nearest possible place to it. How far
nobler would be the associations of Pompey's statue, if the hero had
been set up in the nearest open space to his own theatre; even if he
had been set up with Marcus and the Great Twin Brethren on the
Capitol, instead of being stowed away in an unmeaning corner of a
private palace! It is sadder still to wind our way through the
recesses of the great Cornelian sepulchre, and to find that
sacrilegious hands have rifled the resting-place of the mighty dead;
that the real tombs, the real inscriptions, have been stolen away, and
that copies only are left in their places. Far more speaking, far more
instructive, would it have been to grope out the antique letters of
the first of Roman inscriptions, to spell out the name and deeds of
"Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaivod patre prognatus" by the
light of a flickering torch in the spot where his kinsfolk and
_gentiles_ laid him, than to read it in the full light of the Vatican,
numbered as if it stood in a shop to be sold, and bearing a fulsome
inscription recording the "munificentia" of the triple-crowned robber
who wrought the deed of selfish desecration. Scipio indeed was a
heathen; but Christian holy places, places which are the very homes of
ecclesiastical history or legend, are no safer than the monuments of
heathendom against the desolating fury of ecclesiastical destroyers.
Saddest of all it is to visit the sepulchral church of St.
Constantia--be her legend true or false, it makes no difference--to
trace out the series of mosaics, where the old emblems of Bacchanalian
worship, the vintage and the treading of the wine-press, are turned
about to teach a double lesson of Christian mysteries; and then to see
the place of the tomb empty, and to find that the tomb itself, the
central point of the building, with the series of images which is
begun in the pictures and continued in its sculpture, has been torn
away from the place where it had meaning and almost life, to stand as
number so-and-so among the curiosities of a dreary gallery. Such is
the reverence of modern pontiffs for the most sacred antiquities,
pagan and Christian, of the city where they have too long worked their
destroying will.
In one part however of the city, destruction has been, as in other
cities, the consequence of reviving prosperity on the part of the city
itself. One of the first lessons to be got by heart on a visit to Rome
is the way in which the city has shifted its site. The inhabited parts
of ancient and of modern Rome have but a very small space of ground in
common. While so large a space within the walls both of Aurelius and
of Servius lies desolate, the modern city has spread itself beyond
both. The Leonine city beyond the Tiber, the Sixtine city on the Field
of Mars--both of them beyond the wall of Servius, the Leonine city
largely beyond the wall of Aurelian--together make up the greater part
of modern Rome. Here, in a thickly inhabited modern city, there is no
space for the ruins which form the main features of the Palatine,
Coelian, and Aventine Hills. Such ancient buildings as have been
spared remain in a state far less pleasing than that of their ruined
fellows. The Pantheon was happily saved by its consecration as a
Christian church. But the degraded state in which we see the theatre
of Marcellus and the beautiful remains of the portico of Octavia;
above all, the still lower fate to which the mighty sepulchre of
Augustus has been brought down,--if they enable the moralist to point
a lesson, are far more offensive to the student of history than the
utter desolation of the Coliseum and the imperial palace. The mole of
Hadrian has undergone a somewhat different fate; its successive
transformations and disfigurements are a direct part, and a most
living and speaking part, of the history of Rome. Such a building, at
such a point, could not fail to become a fortress, long before the
days of contending Colonnas and Orsini; and if the statues which
adorned it were hurled down on the heads of Gothic besiegers, that is
a piece of destruction which can hardly be turned to the charge of the
Goths. It is in these parts of Rome that the causes which have been at
work have been more nearly the same as those which have been at work
in other cities. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is
only for a much shorter period that they have been fully at work. And
wretched as with one great exception is their state, it must be
allowed that the actual amount of ancient remains preserved in the
Leonine and Sixtine cities is certainly above the average amount of
such remains in Roman cities elsewhere.