He who goes steadily from Rome to Brindisi, seeing what comes in his
way by the easiest manner of going, will not come very much oftener
on the track of Horace and his friends than he to whom Brindisi is
the haven for Egypt or India, and who rushes thither as fast as he
can along the Italian side of the Hadriatic. The three routes will
of necessity coincide at Bari. To Bari the traveller who starts from
Rome must add Benevento, and he may, without much trouble, add Aricia.
But the sites that lie around the Alban mount, the Alban lake, and
its lesser fellow--the relics in short of so many volcanoes, wet and
dry, the possible place of Alba, the more certain relics of its child
Albano, the path by which the chariot of Marcellus climbed to the
temple of which the last Stewart swept away what time had left--all
these seem naturally to form a group and a subject by themselves. So
may the objects for which Velletri supplies the best centre,--the
hill, the walls, the temples of Cori, "Norba's ancient wall," with
neither an inhabitant nor an habitation within it--Ninfa's more modern
wall, equally without an inhabitant, but with ruined habitations,
ruined churches, in abundance--all these may be connected with an
_iter ad Brundisium_, but they hardly form an actual part of it. Let
our traveller design to start in modern fashion by railway--we were
going to say in prosaic modern fashion, only no way of going could
well be more prosaic than that followed by Horace; let him study his
time-tables, and he will find that he can, if so minded, visit Segni
and go back to Rome in a single day; he can hardly do so by Anagni.
Not that we should counsel such a way of dealing with the walks, the
gates, the temple-foundations, that crown the height of Signia. It
would most likely be found possible to sleep at Segni. Gsell-fels,
prince of guidebook-makers, recommends the _locanda_ there as "reinlich
und eidlich," and the second adjective does not mean that the traveller
will be in any danger of being sworn at. Still some may be more
inclined to go to Segni and back again from Velletri, where there is
no doubt as to living quite happily at the sign of the Cock. Anagni,
Anagnia of the Hernicans, is the beginning of something new. It is
the first point distinctly beyond the neighbourhood of Rome. It is
not unlikely then that such a traveller as we have supposed may make
Anagni his first halting-place. And at Anagni he may certainly rest
for the night, though his quarters may be a comedown not only from Rome
but from Velletri. But if, by any chance, he takes the earlier points
in some other course; above all, if he visits Segni by any course, he
will be all the more open to visit Anagni. The city of Boniface VIII.,
almost beckons to him to cross the valley and the stream. For it is
as the city of Boniface VIII., the place where he so strangely met
his end, the prisoner--not the last Pope who was fated so to be--of
a French ruler, that Anagni will most likely present itself to the
mind. In mediæval history Anagni is a thoroughly Papal city, and to
this day it keeps a Papal impress on its buildings, a Papal impress
meaning something different at Anagni from what it means at Rome.
Anagni did not remain a favourite Papal dwelling-place; it therefore
did not suffer at the hands of _Renaissance_ Popes as Rome lived to
suffer. But, even in the first glimpse of the hill-city, we may well
go back to much earlier times. We may remember that first Pyrrhos,
then Hannibal, halted thither, each on his vain march towards the Rome
which neither was to conquer. And when we have reached Hannibal and
Pyrrhos, we may go back to earlier ages. There is a point of view in
which Anagnia is, before all things, the head of the confederation
of the Hernicans. There is no people of ancient Italy of whom it is
harder to get any distinct idea than this stout hill folk. In treading
Old-Latin or Volscian ground we can, even without book, call up a few
personal names, a few personal figures, of particular Volscians or
Old-Latins; we cannot call up the name of a single Hernican, historical
or legendary. All that we know of them is their geographical position,
and the one great event in their political history; and those tell us
a great deal. They must have been a people of no small account whom
Spurius Cassius thought worthy to fill the third place in the great
Triple League along with Rome and Latium. And this, though, as having
neither one great city like Rome, nor a crowd of cities like Latium,
they hardly seem to form a power on the level with their two comrades.
But their geographical position gave them a special importance. Thrust
in as they were between Æquians and Volscians, no alliance could
be more precious than theirs to Rome and Latium. They were the most
exposed member of the League, the outpost of Latium, as Latium itself
was the outpost of Rome. Of all the three, the brunt of the struggle
must have fallen most fiercely upon them; the hills of Anagni must
have looked down on many a fierce struggle with the invading occupants
of the opposite range of mountains. The walls of Anagni must have
endured or yielded to many a fierce attack of their ever-threatening
neighbours. As we look out from one of the heights of this region to
another, we better understand the political relations of the endless
little communities which thus lived on in one another's sight. The
ally or the enemy was close at the door; there was not even any need
to climb up an akropolis to see what was coming in the way of attack
or deliverance. Rome and Veii could not see one another; between them
therefore there could be long periods of simple peace, without warfare
and without alliance. Rome and Tusculum could see one another; but
they were not, so to speak, ostentatiously thrust into one another's
sight. But look out from Segni, and your chief business is to look at
Anagni; look out from Anagni, and your chief business is to look either
at Segni or at Ferentino, according to which way you are looking. If
in some lights the long circuit of Segni on its mountain-top is less
clearly seen, the lesser hill of Gavignano shows itself in front as
its symbol or substitute. Cities standing in this relation to one
another could not fail to be either bitter enemies or close allies.
They must be always doing something to one another in the way either
of friendship or of enmity. It was then no small stroke of policy when
Spurius Cassius, of whom it has been so truly said that he was the
first Roman whose greatness is really historical, won the Hernican land
and its head Anagnia to the alliance of Rome and Latium. He did indeed
put a bit in the mouth of the advancing Volscian.
We come then to Hernican Anagnia, Papal Anagni, to a hill-city girded
in by mighty walls. The hill of Anagni is not, like the hills of Segni
and Norba, an actual piece of the mountain itself; it is a hill, an
isolated hill, a hill so large that, no less than at Segni and Norba,
the city is wholly on the height; the walls merely fence in the
hill-top. That hill-top is in some parts wonderfully narrow; in the
middle of the town there is hardly more than the width of the chief
street between the slopes on either side. And at its eastern end the
hill rises to form a truer akropolis, with a steeper path up to it,
than can be seen at Segni or Norba. Round the whole of this space,
allowing for some late patchings, run the ancient walls of Anagnia,
and a mighty and wonderful work they are. But who built them? We must
confess that we walked round about them and, as we thought, marked well
their bulwarks, in the full belief that we were studying the works
of the ancient Hernicans. Let no one fancy that we did not mark the
difference between the walls of Anagnia and the strange and mysterious
forms which may be seen at Cori and Segni. The walls of Anagni bring
us back within the ordinary range of wall-building as practised by
ordinary mortals. Hernican Anagnia did not come within either Lord
Macaulay's Latin or his Etruscan catalogue; but, had it done so, there
would have been no temptation to speak of its bulwarks as "no work of
earthly men," or as--
Reared by the hands of giants
For godlike kings of old.
The walls of Anagni are wonderful only as the great works of Rome
are wonderful. They are built by men to whom it was more natural to
put together rectangular stones with some kind of regularity than it
was to pile together huge polygons anyhow. They were built by men who
thoroughly understood the principle of the arch, and knew how to use
it with all boldness. They remain, in various degrees of preservation,
round the greater part of the circuit of the town. In some parts they
are broken down altogether; in some they are supplanted, in others
merely patched, by walls of later date; in short, they have gone
through all the casualties which a wall is likely to go through in the
course of two millenniums or so; but the wall of modern Anagni, as a
whole, is still the old wall of Anagnia. The construction differs a
good deal in different parts as to the size of the stones and as to
their nature, and as to the degree of rudeness or finish in the work.
In some parts the wall stands single; in others it is strengthened by
further defences, buttresses rather than towers--defences, by-the-way,
which must be carefully distinguished from the additions of later
times. But one general character reigns throughout. The stones,
greater and smaller, smoother and rougher, are always rectangular, and
always laid with some measure of regularity. In some cases ranges of
larger and smaller stones alternate; in one part of the wall stones
of two natures and colours almost alternate. The chief material is a
light-coloured stone exactly like the _puff-stone_ of Gloucestershire,
the material of Berkeley Castle and of not a few other buildings
in that neighbourhood. This is eked out here and there by the dark
volcanic _peperino_, which, towards the south-eastern part of the wall,
is used much more freely. The general effect, wherever the wall is at
all perfect, is stately and striking in the extreme, both in form and
colour.
Now was it only a dream when we tracked out these walls, and took a
certain pleasure in speaking of them as Hernican walls? We come back
to our library; we take down the _Dictionary of Geography_; we turn to
the article "Anagnia," and we find that by far the best contributor to
the series, Mr. E. H. Bunbury, has another tale to tell. Our feelings
are damped when he says, "The only remains extant there are of Roman
date and of little interest." As to the "little interest," we venture
to have our own opinion in any case; we should hold that so great
an extent of ancient wall still bounding an inhabited town was an
object of high interest, even if it could be shown to belong to the
latest days which could come under the definition of "Roman date."
But what is Roman date? Mr. Bunbury sends us to the correspondence of
the Emperor Marcus with Cornelius Fronto. We hope he does not ask us
to believe that the walls are later than the days of the philosophic
Emperor. For, if he will allow them to be as old as that, we can call
the Emperor himself to witness that they must be a good deal older. For
Marcus himself read an inscription over one of the gates, "_Flamen sume
samentum_." He did not know what "_samentum_" meant, and we cannot find
the word in our Latin dictionary. But a native explained to him its
meaning in the Hernican language; it meant the skin of the victim which
the _flamen_ put on his head when he entered the town. We do not want
to be unreasonable in our dates, if only we can let in our Hernicans
at some corner. When we looked at the walls, we saw at once that they
had no fellowship with the primæval works at Cori and at Segni; they
did seem to us to have fellowship with the works of the Tarquins at
Rome. We shall be quite happy if Mr. Bunbury will allow us to put the
walls as early as the year B.C. 307. The next year Anagnia sank from
a Hernican city, a free ally of Rome, into a town whose people were
burthened with Roman citizenship without the Roman franchise. If we may
carry back walls over whose gates Hernican inscriptions could be read
between four and five hundred years later, to a date as nearly as that,
we shall have done all that we could wish. They will be walls of the
days of Hernican independence, walls on which Hannibal and Pyrrhos have
looked.
One thing is plain, that the builders of the walls of Anagnia, like the
builders of the _cloaca_ at Rome, but most unlike the elder builders
of Cora and Signia, knew as well as any men how to turn arches. On
the highest point of the town, by the modern gate which looks out
towards Ferentino, within the circuit of the ancient _arx_, we may
still see, blocked, partly hidden by the modern gate, disguised
by the arrangements of the mediæval castle, the double gate of the
ancient wall. It is perfectly plain, but with arches thoroughly well
turned, with a double range of voussoirs. A smaller arch of the same
workmanship beside them looks almost as if it had been blocked from the
beginning. The _arx_ itself, it should be remembered, had its separate
wall within that of the city, a noble fragment of which, of exactly the
same character as the town wall, is still to be seen in a narrow street
a little lower down.
When we actually reach Anagni, there can be no doubt that the character
in which it chiefly strikes us is that of the city of the Hernican
walls, if Hernican walls we may call them. But historically Anagni is
so far more famous as the city of mediæval Popes that it is fitting
that it should have something to show in that character also. The
town is rich in mediæval fragments. The main street, in its winding
courses, displays long ranges of blocked arcades, round and pointed,
which, when open, must have given it, narrow and often dim as it is,
no small measure of stateliness. Not a few buildings stand out with
arches of vast height and boldness, suggesting, as it is fit that one
papal city should suggest to another, the mighty works of Rome's absent
Bishops at Avignon. Not remarkable for height, but most remarkable for
their span, are the exceedingly bold arches which support the communal
palace, once, it is said, the dwelling of the Popes, a building which,
on its northern side, shows a range of windows which savour of France
or England rather than of Italy. The houses with their staircases
often present highly picturesque shapes, which in one house in the
main street, where the outside staircase is sheltered by two arches
resting on a graceful column, grow into a form of genuine beauty. And
an elegant form of double window, two round arches divided by a slender
shaft, is characteristic of the architecture of Anagni. It is needless
to add that at Anagni, as everywhere else in Italy, most of these
relics of the skill of former times have been mercilessly disfigured
and mutilated.
In the ecclesiastical line the other churches supply a few good
fragments of the same character as those in the domestic building; but
the cathedral church within the _arx_ is the only one which has the
least claim to be looked on as a striking whole. It stands boldly on
the edge of the hill with its east end--that is, what would be east
according to northern rules, for it is in truth nearly west--rising
up nobly with its three apses in good Romanesque style, while a
stately bell-tower of the more massive sort, though sadly marred on
two sides, stands near the east end which should be west. The crypt is
in a somewhat ruder form of the same style. The whole outside of the
church is worth study; the inside is of an early and massive type of
the Italian Gothic, always, unless in the case of some unusual merit,
less satisfactory than Italian Romanesque. The sacristy contains
the vestments of Innocent III. and Boniface VIII., and a good many
other curious objects. The church is just now suffering restoration;
let us hope that nothing very dreadful will happen to it. There, at
least, seems no disposition to pull down the apse, after the pattern
of the church which Popes and Emperors alike have decreed to be the
mother-church of Rome and of the world.